wayward clouds

Will work for cake

2010-12-08T19:42:00.005Z

I drew it for a t-shirt for someone who loves cake. I totally pilfered the lettering style from Caley Ratcliffe.

Haiku review of Elizabeth Costello

2010-09-23T09:34:00.009+01:00

Cerebral ramblings
of an old woman without
God. I stopped reading.

Eyeball tree #1

2010-09-10T23:39:00.002+01:00

The problem with liberalism: what me and Obama have in common

2009-06-17T16:19:00.008+01:00

When Malcolm X was 13 years old, he was sent to a detention home after getting expelled from school for bad behaviour. At that time, he had already been separated from his seven siblings while his mother was institutionalised, sent to the State Mental Hospital at Kalamazoo. Her health had steadily declined since Malcolm’s father was brutally killed by white supremacists five years earlier.

Malcolm Little, as he was then known, got on surprisingly well at the detention home. The white couple who ran it, Mr and Mrs Swerlin, liked Malcolm and treated him decently. They treated him well—but not quite as equals, he realised. He wasn’t about to change how they saw ‘niggers’.

“I remember one day when Mr Swerlin, nice as he was, came in from Lansing, where he had been through the Negro section, and said to Mrs Swerlin right in front of me, ‘I just can’t see how those niggers can be so happy and be so poor.’ He talked about how they lived in shacks, but had those big, shining cars out front.

“And Mrs Swerlin said, me standing right there, ‘Niggers are just that way…’ That scene always stayed with me.

“It was the same with the other white people, most of them local politicians, when they would come visiting the Swerlins. One of their favourite parlour topics was ‘niggers’. One of them was a close friend of the Swerlins. He would ask about me when he came, and they would call me in, and he would look me up and down, his expression approving, like he was examining a fine colt, or a pedigreed pup. I knew they must have told him how I acted and how I worked.”

Malcolm X was a ‘mascot’. The token ‘nigger’ of his class. He was liked and accepted by this white family because he behaved himself, he conformed. He set a shining example of what a young black boy in a racist America should be: non-aggressive, obedient, grateful. It was to his credit that he didn’t exhibit the delinquent qualities attributed to ‘niggers’ in general.

“What I am trying to say is that it just never dawned upon them that I could understand, that I wasn’t a pet, but a human being. They didn’t give me credit for having the same sensitivity, intellect, and understanding that they would have been ready and willing to recognize in a white boy in my position. But it has historically been the case with white people, in their regard for black people, that even though we might be with them, we weren’t considered of them. Even though they appeared to have opened the door, it was still closed. Thus they never did really see me.

“This is the sort of kindly condescension which I try to clarify today, to these integration-hungry Negroes, about their ‘liberal’ white friends, these so-called ‘good white people’ – most of them anyway. I don’t care how nice one is to you; the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.”

Among his detractors, Malcolm X came to be seen as brilliant but reckless, even dangerous. Mainstream white America couldn’t forgive him for failing to denounce violence. They pointed to less threatening civil rights activists like Martin Luther King, and asked why he couldn’t be like them. But what Malcolm X does—that more compromising figures don’t do—is turn the critical lens on liberal America.

He pours scorn both on white liberals and on black Americans’ efforts to ingratiate themselves with them. Black pride, as he saw it, could not exist as long as black Americans were trying to advance themselves within a system that wasn’t made for them; one that was in fact created out of their exploitation. Malcolm X was important because he demanded something more than just “crumbs from the white man’s table.”

Even Barack Obama himself recognises it! In Dreams from my father, he singles out Malcolm X from all the other classic authors on the black condition, saying, “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”

Obama surprised me. I know he’s awesome and everything, but he’s a politician, and politicians are never to be trusted. So yes, I was surprised to read the following passage in his book that not only speaks to the continuing problem of racism in America, but also spoke to other racisms in other places and times:

“I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules. If the principle, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, and distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self—the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass—had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.”

His words are strikingly reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s articulation of what it means to be a racialised subject. For Fanon, born in the French colony of Martinique, the shock of reaching Europe and realising that ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ didn’t apply to black people triggered an understanding of race and racism that remains incredibly influential.

It was not the crude racism of the day that so concerned Fanon. It was the promise of humanity, cruelly denied. It was being “overdetermined from without… fixed” by the inescapable blackness of his skin. Like Obama, Fanon discovers that his choices—rebellion, submission, anger, pride—are choices that have already been made for him, they have been presupposed. “And so,” he says, “it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.”

This problem now confronts Europe’s Muslims. Observers will have noted a dramatic difference in tone between the first ‘Islam vs. the West’ crisis (the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and subsequent fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini) and the second (9/11). During the former, the Western media was full of overtly Islamophobic and frankly ignorant commentary denouncing Islam as backward and barbaric.

By contrast, in the days after 9/11, the leaders of the Western world bent over backwards to stress, in public speeches anyway, the essentially peaceful nature of the Muslim religion. They promoted a clear distinction between the peaceful Muslim majority worldwide and the excesses of a fanatical minority. Amongst Western populations there appeared to be a similar trend, with sales of the Qur’an and books on Islam soaring as people sought to inform themselves about the peaceful and tolerant ‘true’ Islam.

Now, I’m a peaceful Muslim, no doubt about it. But something began to happen as more and more people bought into this idea of a ‘true’ Islam corrupted by violent fanatics, something which I found alarming and uncomfortable. A binary took hold, and permeated the public consciousness, taking on the status of a self-evident truth. It was the difference between a Good Muslim and a Bad Muslim. The set of oppositions looks roughly like this:

secular --------------------- religious
liberal ---------------------- illiberal
democracy ----------------- authoritarianism
freedom -------------------- control
decency --------------------- corruption
education ------------------- indoctrination
progress --------------------- stasis/regression
universalist ----------------- parochial
Westernised/integrated --- traditional
religion as faith/culture --- religion as political
peace ------------------------- jihad
clean-shaven ---------------- bearded
rational ---------------------- irrational

Crucially, it’s not the far right who are responsible for this latest manifestation of racism. The BNP think all Muslims are terrorists; by now, everyone knows these guys are loopy. No, it’s precisely the liberal desire to see the best in Islam, the “disgustingly patronizing liberal respect for the Other’s spiritual depth” coming from “people eager to give Islam a chance, to get a feel for it, to experience it from the inside, and thus to redeem it,” as Žižek puts it, that is so dangerous.

Because what it says to Muslims—what it says to me—is that you can be a Muslim, no problem, but you’ve got to be our kind of Muslim. As a Muslim, the invitation to take up my fully human status is extended to me with conditions attached. Do I condemn violence? Check. Do I tolerate other faiths? Check. Do I believe in equality? Check. In other words, to be a Good Muslim I must be a liberal subject first and a Muslim second. Islam is reduced to a lifestyle choice.

And so I lament, with Fanon, that “it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.” And like Obama, I know that to refuse my defeat, my powerlessness to define my own identity, desires and ambitions, is only to invite those alternative pre-defined identities. Militant. Violent. Extremist. Terrorist.

Hey, it's ok... to be a moron

2009-06-13T10:00:00.002+01:00

This is why I love women's magazines. They go our of their way to make you feel better about yourself. The latest issue of Glamour tells us, "Hey, it's ok to have a 'what happens on holiday stays on holiday' policy - especially if what happened involved a pool and no clothes... it's ok to order the only wine you can pronounce... to spend your entire Boxercise class fantasising about the burger you're going to inhale afterwards... to secretly enjoy a construction worker's wolf-whistle, but give him the death stare anyway... to internally chant, 'Please God, please God, please God,' when you're using your cash card in a shop the day before pay day... to make the same mistake twice. Or even three times. But not if it involves John Mayer."

Thank you, Glamour! Now I can be totally reckless with my finances, act like a drunk teenager abroad, undermine my own efforts to keep fit and healthy, and internalise my own sexual objectification. Oh, plus I can bitch about the relationships of people I will never meet. And I can do all this completely safe in the knowledge that, as it turns out, all women do just the same.

Sleeping tree

2009-04-14T15:43:00.002+01:00

Arm and pigeon

2009-04-10T18:51:00.003+01:00

Human rights and lame ducks

2009-04-01T07:34:00.001+01:00

It was announced last week that ASEAN will launch its human rights body in October this year, after a high-level panel has finished preparing the terms of reference setting out its mandate and responsibilities.

Human rights NGOs have been pressurising ASEAN leaders to give this human rights body—the first of its kind in the Asian region—real powers to protect human rights defenders. A regional mechanism mandated to investigate individual complaints of human rights violations would be hugely significant, even if it took many years for it to become effective and properly fulfill its mandate.

But according to Ambassador Rosario Manalo, head of the high-level panel, the ASEAN human rights body will not initially possess any investigative power though she hopes that it will “evolve” such capabilities. “You don't change societies in the wink of an eye,” she said. “We are still grappling with what 'human rights' really is.”

This much is true, and the struggle for an effective regional human rights mechanism was never going to be easy. After living in Singapore and Bangkok, it became clear to me that ‘human rights’ do not mean exactly the same as what they mean in a British context. I understand human rights as the outcome of a particular worldview; one that asserts that humans are humans first, and everything else second. We are born equal, and differences of religion, class, nationality or gender do not change that fact.

However, ‘human rights’ in many Asian societies are the outcome of different worldviews and societal developments. They are more likely to be understood as a useful tool in the struggle against authoritarian leaders and oppressive governments. They may also be used to challenge harmful patriarchal traditions, to fight against dispossession caused by mining or logging, or to assert the desire to determine one’s own sexual identity.

What tends to surprise the western observer is the disconnect between these different struggles. It’s quite common, as one colleague noted, to find a human rights defender risking his life protesting against the Burmese military regime, but at the same time having nothing progressive to say on LGBT rights.

A more subtle example can be found in my Thai co-worker, a fellow intern in the Human Rights Defenders programme. He told me that in Thailand, it is commonly believed that people are born gay or transgender because they committed ‘sexual sins’ in a past life. I was somewhat taken aback by this: to me, the idea that any kind of LGBT identity is a punishment for former wrongdoing goes against the premise of equality underlying human rights. Well, he said, we don’t deny them their right to be gay—since they are born that way, we accept it.

It is true that this attitude prevents the ‘corrective’ kind of approach taken by some of the more loony Christian organisations, and does promote a general acceptance of diversity. But it is an acceptance premised on inequality, so that while the result appears the same, the root is very different. Acceptance of sexual rights in Britain or the US is grounded in a conception of all humans as equal; acceptance of sexual rights in Thailand is based on the perception that hierarchy is inevitable.

It is the ‘universal’ aspect of universal human rights that is missing here. This has the effect of weakening all specific claims made in the name of human rights by presenting them as the sole property of certain special interest groups. If human rights defenders themselves use human rights selectively—utilising the language to achieve goals that are specific to each local context or group—then demands for an ASEAN human rights body that embodies the notion of universal human rights are undermined.

Given this disconnect, it is easy to see why those like Manalo argue that ASEAN countries are simply not ready for a strong regional human rights body. But is a lame duck of a mechanism really preferable to a strong one that takes time and effort to fulfill its potential?

After all, what is being proposed is really little more than a watchdog focusing on human rights promotion and education rather than protection. Increasing awareness of human rights issues within ASEAN countries is supposed to lead eventually to these countries “internalizing” humanist values, in turn creating the necessary pressure for more substantial reform.

But in fact, it just lets authoritarian regimes and military juntas off the hook. No leaders will be losing sleep over such an anaemic institution. When Manalo says there is no political will to create an ASEAN human rights body with teeth, she undermines the political will of the hundreds of organisations and individuals across the region already crying out for precisely that. And without greater attention to regional NGOs and regional inter-governmental institutions, the universalisation of human rights as a worldview in itself will continue to be stymied.

SUKHUMVIT

2009-03-31T13:14:00.003+01:00

I look down on them
from the bus
window open
red light
looking
The taxi driver
I see his face and
he sees mine
looks away
Four brown legs
one brown, slim back
and shoulders, one young
chest, breasts
pushed up,
One paunch in a checked shirt.
His fair arm
fat and foreign.
fat hand reaches, creeps
up one brown leg.
I am still looking
down on them
Green light and
Taxi moves
Bus takes me
home.

God and the Government

2009-03-30T14:34:00.005+01:00

Last week the Malaysian Minister of Islamic Affairs warned the Malaysian Bar Council against conducting an online poll to determine whether lawyers and members of the public agree with the government’s ban preventing non-Muslim publications from using the word ‘Allah’.

The warning follows a dispute in January this year, when the Interior Ministry prohibited the Catholic Herald newspaper from printing its Malay language edition after it was found to contravene a 2007 ban on using the word ‘Allah’ to refer to the Christian god.

It later softened its position, allowing the word to be used as long as it is explicitly stated that the material is not for intended for Muslims. To prevent hapless Muslims becoming confused and accidentally converting to a different faith, the Herald was compelled to print ‘For Christianity’ on its cover.

It is worrying that the Malaysian government does not appear to be aware that the Arabic word ‘Allah’ predates Islam, that it is the only available translation for ‘god’ in the Malay language, and that the god worshipped by Christians is, in fact, the same god that Muslims worship.

More worrying, however, are the government’s continued efforts to politicise religion. In Malaysia’s highly racialised political system, religion was bound to get caught up in the whole thing to a certain extent, particularly given that ‘the Malay race’ is defined as unequivocally Muslim.

But recent years have seen a creeping conservatism gaining strength throughout Malaysia. When my mum was growing up in the sixties and seventies, hardly anyone wore the tudung (headscarf). Now it is commonplace, even among teenagers and twenty-somethings.

On a more sinister note, anger directed at the state of Israel is translating into a weird anti-Semitism expressed mainly by people who have never knowingly encountered a Jewish person in their lives. My own uncle, who almost certainly falls into that category, spent a good three or four days trying to get me to read that infamous forgery The Protocols of Zion. Malays routinely equate “Jew” and “Israeli”—an unsurprising conflation given that Malay Malaysians’ national identity is bound to static notions of race and religion, but one that makes me wince nonetheless.

In addition to this shift among the Muslim population, which may well be attributable to global political developments like the war on terror and the belief that Muslims are increasingly targets of victimisation, particularly in the Middle East, there appears to be a growing willingness by the Malaysian authorities to assert Muslim supremacy in the country and take an intolerant approach to the rights of non-Muslims.

In 2007 we heard about the Malaysian woman born to Muslim parents but raised as a Hindu, who asked to be officially registered as a Hindu. As a result she was detained for months in an ‘Islamic Rehabilitation Centre’, where she was forced to pray as a Muslim, wear a tudung and eat beef. In 2005, a Hindu Malaysian was buried in a Muslim cemetery under Muslim burial rites after a Sharia court ruled that he had converted to Islam just before his death, against the evidence of his friends and family. And now we have the government stipulating what non-Muslims are allowed to call the god they worship.

What's next?

White black people

2009-03-25T15:30:00.008Z

You need to be careful about creating imagery of sub-Saharan African societies for British audiences. People tend to generalise about the region and often don’t understand the differences between different African cultures, and even different African countries. During my first year at university, I discovered that around half of my housemates were unaware that Africa is a continent, and not a country.

Lazy journalists and television appeals, for their part, routinely refer to Africa as if it were one homogenous society—poor, disease-ridden, unstable, corrupt and undeveloped—with little internal differentiation save for ‘warring tribes’ and rebel armies. Our ignorance is not only embarrassing; it perpetuates stereotypes that are dangerous for those they (mis)represent.

Photographers and filmmakers also have to be sensitive to the centuries of racist representations of Africans produced by Europe and the ‘developed’ world, of which Resident Evil 5 is just the latest manifestation. Treating black Africans as part of the backdrop for a storyline centred around a white, male, protagonist has a history going back at least as far as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and undermines efforts to bring about social change based on an understanding of Africans as just as human as Europeans.

A series of photographs centred on Tanzanians suffering from albinism—the congenital condition of being born without the melanin pigment that protects our skin from the sun’s UV rays—therefore has a heavy burden of responsibility to bear. And, arresting as these images by Jackie Dewe Mathews undoubtedly are, I’m not sure they fully acknowledge this responsibility.
(http://www.jackiedewemathews.com/stories/zeru_zeru/zeru_zeru.html)

There are two main problems. Firstly, while it is the job of the images to tell the story, the captions do play their part in explaining certain information. Who are these people? Where are they? Why is this happening to them? If information is omitted, it can change the way we consume the story.

Explaining these images, the photographer barely mentions the context or the history behind them. She refers superficially to ‘ingrained prejudice’, giving us the impression that this prejudice is something inherent to Tanzanian society. She briefly mentions ‘the killings that have ravaged Tanzania’ as if they were a tornado or some other natural disaster. In fact, the images and their accompanying information provoke more questions than they answer—and not in a good way.

It is true that albinos are stigmatised throughout many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, often being shunned by their communities and relatives, having to drop out of school because of sight problems, and suffering discrimination when they seek employment. They also face a greatly increased risk of cancer and other health problems because their skin lacks the pigmentation that protects against sun damage.

However, Tanzania has become far more dangerous in recent years after Tanzanian witch doctors have increased trade in albino skin, bones, genitals and hair. These are supposed to possess magical powers and bestow luck upon others. This belief has created a demand for albino body parts, and at least 45 Tanzanian men, women and children suffering from albinism have been killed and mutilated since the beginning of 2008. According to Tanzanian police officials, the violence is worst in rural areas where people tend to be more superstitious. Fishermen reportedly weave albino hairs into their nets, hoping that they will catch more fish.

One healer in northern Tanzania denied that albino body parts form part of the witch doctor tradition in the area, saying, “Yes, I’ve heard of it. But that’s not real witchcraft. It’s the work of con men.” Indeed, it is now commonplace to hear albinos referred to as ‘deals’ because of how lucrative trading their body parts can be. Albinos in Tanzania say they are being hunted and fear for the safety of their families. Already more than 90 people, including four police officers, have been arrested on suspicion of murdering albinos.

The cause of this recent resurgence of superstition is unknown, but authorities have blamed everything from Nigerian films to rising food prices. The killings have even spread over the border into neighbouring Burundi, where at least 10 albinos have been killed and dismembered, their body parts then smuggled into Tanzania.

Government spokesman Salvator Rweyemamu has said that the killings of albinos perpetuate “perceptions of Africa that we’re trying to run away from,” pointing to the positive developments taking place in the country that the government is keen to promote.

Of course, I am not advocating that photographers seek to support government propaganda. But statements like this point to another story that is not being told: a story about uneven economic development and education; about the invention of superstition and the point at which it begins to legitimise acts of great violence. According to 49 year old Samuel Mluge, secretary-general of the grossly under-funded Tanzanian Albino Society, the recent killings are a relatively new development. While albinos in his country have long been targets of discrimination, he said, “we have never feared like we do today.”

There is another story to be told here: a story about the way people deal with physical abnormality, about how we deal with it in Britain and have dealt with it in the past, and how we consume imagery of people we find fascinating and a little frightening. This is the second problem. There isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with looking at pictures of Tanzanians with albinism. But you really need to be presented with the context. Often context is all that stands between insightful commentary and pure voyeurism, as this photo essay clearly shows.

I’d like to think that the photographer’s aim was noble; that she was concerned by the stigmatisation of those born with albinism and wanted to convey this to a wider audience. Indeed, this may well have been her motivation. But somehow, I don’t think it was.

We are drawn to the weird and grotesque; the persistence of freak shows is evidence of that. Fascination with disease, deformity and physical abnormality has a history, certainly, but it also has a psychology and a politics. To be able to gaze upon the image of a person deformed by a genetic condition excites the viewer, while conferring upon him or her the peculiar privileges of distance and detachment.

These photographs are beautiful: expertly composed and thoughtfully lit. But the incredible visual appeal of the photographs actually enhances the objectification of their subjects. Tanzanians suffering from albinism are placed under the spotlight, positioned before our curious eyes while we gawp at their condition, simultaneously enthralled and repelled by the pale pinkness of their skin, mottled with sun damage, set against the healthy brown skin of those around them.

We stare, horrified, at the tumours, scabs and sores erupting on their bodies, and without the self-conscious need to politely look away we would experience in a real-life encounter. We stare unapologetically at the strange beauty contained within these images, feeling pity and concern. We probably do not feel guilty.

The photographer’s brief was to cover a story based somewhere else—not in the UK, not in the homeland of the Royal Photographic Society and the Guardian newspaper sponsoring the endeavour—and it was supposed to be a story that suggested connections between British audiences and the wider world. The winning story certainly suggests a connection, but I’m not sure that it’s the kind of connection originally envisaged.

The connection making the greatest impression on me is the connection with our racist colonial heritage; the one where we treat difference as a spectacle and see Africans as objects. I don’t doubt for a moment that this entirely contradicts the stated aims of the photographer, but I want to challenge the idea that we should be forgiven for our ignorance.

To portray people in Africa—anywhere in Africa—you have to recognise the burden of responsibility that your images will bear. At best, a series of photographs like this will tell an incomplete story. At worst, they will reinforce a dangerous and outdated way of looking at the world, gratifying our most base instincts and objectifying the very people the photographer wished to defend.

Free Speech and freedom to abuse

2008-09-30T13:25:00.003+01:00

Poor old Free Speech is on the ropes again, it would seem.

A couple of months ago Italian comedian Sabina Guzzanti made some hilarious quips about Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, his equal opportunities minister (and former topless model) Mara Carfagna, and finally the Pope. Despite getting away with mocking the two politicians – Carfagna threatened to sue, but didn’t dare carry out the threat – the Pope has proved a little more prickly.

Before a large rally in Rome, she joked that in twenty years time teachers in Italy would be selected by the Vatican, before saying “but then, within twenty years the Pope will be where he ought to be — in Hell, tormented by great big poofter devils, and very active ones, not passive ones.”

This month she was almost charged with ‘contempt of the Pope’. Prosecutors wanted to invoke a 79-year old law originally introduced through a treaty between the papacy and fascist dictator Mussolini.

Dismissing the validity of the charge, Guzzanti said, “I believe that in a democracy there is no right not to be offended. I think that anyone ought to be free to say whatever he or she likes at any moment.

“If someone says things that are offensive, gratuitous and stupid, one has to assume that there will be others to demonstrate that what you said was offensive, gratuitous and stupid.”

There are two points I think we can draw from this story. Firstly, the way that the Free-Speech-In-Europe debate is usually framed, as a conflict between European civilisational values and Muslims, is flawed and – dare I say it? – more than a little racist. This Italian example demonstrates that stifling debate and criticism is a trait of certain aspects of Christian culture as well.

It is also a feature of secular democracies. Berlusconi’s own historically inaccurate assertion that Western civilisation is “superior” to Islamic cultures by virtue of its tolerant and democratic ethos is pretty laughable considering that he basically controls the country’s television broadcasting and silences critics by trying to sue them.

Secondly, the preposterousness of the attempt to prosecute a comedian for ridiculing the Pope can unfortunately lead to a rather overzealous reassertion of the right to free speech. Even Guzzanti falls into the trap: when asked by a journalist whether there should be any limitations on free speech in the context of Holocaust denial or the infamous Danish cartoons, she simply falls back on the free speech mantra.

This can be dangerous because it obscures the difference between poking fun at authority – religious or otherwise – and poking fun at minority communities. In Britain, we have the right to mock the Prime Minister, the Queen, or the Archbishop of Canterbury. We also have the right to mock Muslims, black people, or children with disabilities. So why does former feel ok, whilst the latter feels somehow wrong?

To take part in satirising, criticising and ridiculing someone else, you have to acknowledge that it makes a difference who you are, who the subject of your criticism is, and your respective roles in society. Directing your scorn at a person who has intentionally placed him or herself in the public eye, or who is a figure of authority and should therefore be held accountable to the people, is fine. Directing it at a member of a minority group – such as Muslims in Denmark or Jews in Europe – is less acceptable because these subjects are often already marginalised or discriminated against in some way by the state.

Guzzanti assumes that in a democracy, stupid and offensive comments are permissable because there will always be others there to counter them. This gives society a little too much credit in my opinion. When a well-known British author like Martin Amis makes racist remarks about British Muslims, there are plenty who will stand up and decry his comments. However, they may be less prominent voices, and are easily drowned out by stronger and louder popular discourses reinforcing the flawed association between violence, intolerance and Islam. These spokespeople present themselves as responding to a threat – but in reality they are little more than bullies.

In theory, there should be no limits on Free Speech. In practice, however, the way we use it reveals a great deal about our own positions in society, and how we relate to those we subject to ridicule.

Dodgy dealings

2008-09-29T17:55:00.001+01:00

Your help is URGENTLY needed

2008-09-28T17:02:00.007+01:00

An emergency appeal
The world of finance has taken a blow over the last few weeks – and we’ve all witnessed the consequences. Newspapers and TV were full of heartrending images of Lehman Brothers employees, folornly carrying boxes out of their offices, clutching their precious belongings as others looked on in bewilderment. Further casualties are expected throughout the sector, and no-one in finance can be 100 per cent sure that they’ll emerge from the crisis unscathed.

Now, here’s your chance to make a difference. SPEW (Society for the Protection of Enormous Wealth) is dedicated to rehabilitating those worst affected by the financial crisis. You can make a one-off gift or sign up to make regular donations, but please, give what you can.

Why not Adopt-a-Banker? For the small sum of just £6,000 a month (minimum donation), you can help to bail out your own banker, providing him with the food, clothes and expensive London accommodation he needs to survive. By signing up to this scheme you’ll receive monthly updates (with photos) on your adopted banker – letting you know how much of a difference your contribution is making.

One grateful recipient of the Adopt-a-Banker scheme is Edouard d'Archimbaud, from Paris. Aged just twenty-four, Edouard was due to start his job as a trader with the now disgraced Lehman Brothers on a salary of £45,000. But even before he could reach his desk on his first day of work, he was told that he’d been fired. He had just taken out a six-month lease on a flat, and didn’t know how he would pay for it.

Thanks to generous donations from people like you, Edouard was able to rebuild his life. The help we provided paid for the lease on his lovely new flat, as well as setting him up with several expensive new suits for him to wear to job interviews. Extra funds went towards leisure activities, gym membership at an exclusive sports club, a short holiday abroad, and various other things to help him recover from the shock he suffered. He is now back on his feet, having landed a brilliant position with a leading investment bank – and he couldn’t have done it without the generosity of our donors.

All we ask of you is a small contribution of several thousand pounds a month – and you too could change someone’s life.

Review: Turtles Can Fly | Times and Winds

2008-09-28T16:45:00.003+01:00

If you’re going to make a film about children, you need to make sure that the children are, well, childlike. This is the downfall of Times and Winds, an almost charming story set in the picturesque hills of northern Turkey. Young Omer, its central character, resents his upstanding father and spends his hours devising ways to kill him. I suppose it’s an achievement in itself that these efforts come across as quirky rather than psychotic, but nevertheless, the film is let down by its child actors. They all have the slightly wooden manner that makes you think there’s an adult just out of the frame, telling them what to do. Numerous issues are covered: sibling jealousy, the pain of feeling unloved by a parent, the realisation of sex, the heartbreaking imperfection of our parents, humiliation, inadequacy, desire, taboo. But the film itself jars; it is sometimes badly pieced together, or sometimes badly acted, or both. As you stumble out of the cinema, blinking, you’d be forgiven for imagining that you had accidentally wandered into an exhibition of beautiful landscape stills, only they happened to be moving.

Director Bahman Ghobadi, by contrast, despite the unremitting grimness of Turtles Can Fly, manages to imbue each scene with a sense of hope that must be attributed to the spirit of the child non-actors who make up its cast. Set in a Kurdish refugee camp in northern Iraq just before the US invasion, the story revolves around Satellite, a young, intelligent and wonderfully manipulative natural leader, and three newcomers to the village: an armless boy who can tell the future, his sad and silent sister, and a kid who appears to be their little brother. They and the other children in the community, many of whom have suffered horrific injuries, spend their days plucking land mines out of the surrounding hills and selling them on. The situation is bleak, and so is the story, which makes the frequent humour and vitality exhibited by the kids really quite impressive. The only problem with the film is that it does kind of portray the US invasion as a good thing, which is almost certainly a nonsense. But since the story ends just after news of the invasion arrives, we can perhaps interpret this as a symbol of the hope that people felt about the change of regime, before they realised what an awful disaster it would prove to be. Perhaps.

On being a transnational oversoul, or, an awkward half-soul

2008-09-27T23:05:00.003+01:00

The following is an miniature chunk of dissertation (for the Sussex University course Landscape/Memory/Identity):

In the journal I had been keeping two summers ago whilst travelling in Malaysia, Thailand and Bali, I wrote, “Maybe I am half-not-English, half-not-Malay.” This nugget of angst reminded me of a poem I had quite uncharacteristically written, more recently, about my grandmother Mak Eng and her house in Sibu. In the poem I had supposed my sister and I to be “neither this nor that,” using the image of “other people’s bare brown feet” as a marker of those other people’s authenticity, a kind of obvious and embodied belonging which we were denied. Ranciére writes that the “process of identification is first of all a process of spatialization. The paradox of identity is that you must travel to disclose it… Spatialization presents by its own virtue the identity of the concept to its flesh”. I can’t really remember a time before I was able to observe the peculiar shift that took place as I moved between Hemel Hempstead, a new town just outside the M25 where I went to school, and Sibu, a town on the Rejang river in Sarawak where my mum was born. That movement effected a regular transformation in my sister and I: from feeling often very English in Malaysia to feeling quite foreign in England. I was born in Hemel, but when I am there people still ask me where I’m from. Here, I reply. Then they ask me awkwardly where I’m… you know… originally from. What’s my… erm… background? (Or, in other words, why is my skin brown?) When I’m in Sibu, people often refer to me as orang puteh (white person) and wonder what I’m doing with all these Malay people who are, in fact, my close family. Once, some children approached my sister and I and proceeded to inform us that I was “seventy per cent Melayu, thirty percent orang puteh” whilst my sister, whose skin and hair are a shade fairer than mine, was just “twenty percent Melayu, eighty per cent orang puteh.” They had exposed us; my sister promptly burst into tears.

*

The paradoxical position of belonging to multiple places and, consequently, to no single place entirely, tends to be associated with an uncomfortable privilege. Edward Said – whose autobiography, it should be noted, is entitled ‘Out of Place’ – has said that his various identities and the multiple ‘worlds’ to which he belongs have afforded him “an odd, not to say grotesque, double perspective”. It is this ambivalent position, paradoxically incorporating the privilege of distance with the affliction of never wholly belonging, to which Hollinshead refers in his discussion of diasporic identities. He characterises these as an uncertain, even schizophrenic way of being, somewhere between the richness of a “transnational oversoul” (a term he borrows from Wilson and Dissanayake) and an awkward, off-balance “half-soul”. His argument that such identities are “invariably protean” suggests both insecurity and an automatic worldliness not available to more stable, unambiguously territorial identities which tend to lend themselves to essentialised notions of land and belonging. Others have noted the potential in ‘diasporics’ for the realisation of radical political alternatives, advocating the deconstruction of the parochialism associated with nationalism and other politicisations of identity which bind it to particular territories. Comparisons may be drawn between the marginal space occupied by the diasporic, exiled or migrant, and the politically marginal and insecure “space of radical openness” associated with postmodern cultural politics. Would it be better, then, to resist that impulse towards an immediate and automatic localisation of identity? As Casey notes, ‘Where are you from?’ is the first thing we ask of a stranger. Instead, should we entertain that possibility of de-localisation contained in what Clifford calls the “intercultural identity question” of ‘where are you between?’

Wasted.

2008-09-23T21:38:00.001+01:00

Being a student in Brighton, you’re likely to come across a fair amount of recreational drug use even if you don’t happen to partake in such activity yourself. Ketamine, MDMA, pills, even cocaine; all may be notable presences at festivals and student parties. This alone is not particularly remarkable: they are used both responsibly and irresponsibly, and it would be rash to pronounce judgement on general drug use either way.

In fact, what infuriates many people is a particular kind of drug use – or rather, a particular kind of drug user. I am quite sure, this being the home of Sussex University and other institutions known for their tendency to produce opinionated activists, that this figure will be recognisable.

It is the figure of the politicised student, the green student, the anti-war or anti-capitalist campaigner who is concerned about all forms of social stratification, violence and oppression, and will happily take any opportunity to tell you so. It is the kind of student who is not content to work tirelessly for peace and justice and sustainability; no, they are determined to be a crusader for their particular cause, guilt-tripping all those who fail to meet their exacting standards.

Which is all well and good, of course. Until they tell you, with undeniable glee, about how they got wasted the night before.

It is no secret that cocaine, for example, finds its way onto our streets only through a whole host of exploitative and harmful practices in poor countries. The cocaine user is implicated in human trafficking, armed violence, increased substance abuse in the producer countries, and environmental degradation as coca plantations replace pristine forest. New problems are arising as stricter controls in North America and Europe force new routes to be forged through vulnerable West African countries like Guinea Bissau, which lack the resources and infrastructure to tackle drug smuggling and end up facing greater corruption and poverty.

And even once it reaches Britain, its use cannot be separated from its abuse in other contexts, and the damage that dealing and related crimes inflict on already deprived communities – communities that, incidentally, very few of those privileged enough to be attending university can claim to be familiar with.

Of course, coke is less widely used amongst students because it can be prohibitively expensive, but more commonly used synthetic drugs are not without their own serious social consequences. The procurement of ketamine within Europe, for example, often takes place through organised crime networks and dodgy pharmaceutical companies.

We also have to consider the costs of any illicit drug use to the wider society: the costs of acquisitive and associated crime, law enforcement and justice systems, property damage, hospitalisation and treatment, preventative efforts, unemployment and low productivity. For those concerned about inequality, it should be borne in mind that no drug trade is without its own hierarchy, and generally accentuates income disparities.

*

I believe that everyone has their causes, and if you’re passionate about something it’s only natural to try and convince others to share your passions – whether it’s nuclear disarmament, ecological sustainability, human rights or peace in the Middle East.

But for those who are serious about social justice in our so-called ‘globalised’ world, getting wasted is a wasted opportunity, stripping you of your socially conscious credentials. You can ignore the chain of exploitation that brings drugs like cocaine all the way from Colombia to your own pocket, but you do so at the expense of your credibility.

Unseen Scenes in Singapore

2008-09-22T14:56:00.005+01:00

by Pia Muzaffar and Olly Laughland

pictures by Alex Jimenez

This article was first published in Poda Poda in December 2007

‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’.

We wrench loose an MDF board covering the once grand entrance, before slipping inside, avoiding the rusty nails. Our feet crunch over broken glass as we peer into the gloom. The ticket booths, smashed to shit, still welcome Mastercard and Visa and still dispense mouldy, discoloured maps. Plastic statues slump, their plastic heads scattered on the floor. ‘I love sex’. ‘Get out’. ‘Bobby and Pris wuz here 99’. The ceiling is falling in, the lights exploded. The tropical undergrowth is slowly reclaiming this misguided business venture. The mosquitos have returned to these stagnant lakes. Giant pink paper horses and blue paper elephants, frozen mid-motion, aflame and collapsing in on themselves.

Perhaps this freakish fairytale was doomed to fail from the start. A tourist attraction designed for Chinese tourism and themed around ancient Chinese imperial history, elaborately carved from plaster of paris and plywood, built in 1980s Singapore, now stands closed a decade later and erased from the national memory.

Like so many Singaporean transgressions, ‘Tang Dynasty City’ remains very much present, but obscured from public view. On the surface, this highly successful city-state embodies the image its government seeks to project: it is clean and clean-living, obedient, polite, orderly and well-planned. Gays, prostitutes, transvestites, the homeless, political dissidents, governmental corruption and national failures – all these get swept under the carpet of state-sanctioned discourse.

The same may be said of the higher education system. When we first started studying here, we were shocked and bemused by the attitudes of the Singaporean students. The learning culture is totally at odds with what we’ve come to expect from our experiences at a British university. In Singapore, we said to each other with a mixture of bemusement and reproach, the students just don’t question anything. They don’t question their lecturers and they don’t question the way the university is run. They don’t question the texts they read, and they shy away from questioning each other. They are excessively respectful of authority, they study way too hard and hardly ever go out, and they ‘strive for excellence’ rather than seeking to critically interrogate established modes of thinking. Dr Chee Soon Juan, a former neuropsychology lecturer at NUS, recalls his frustration with his students. On one occasion he came to class and told them that he was just going to stare at them. So he sat there, and stared. After fifteen minutes of uncomfortable silence, in which not one student challenged him or asked him to begin teaching, he simply got up and left.

Of course, having been in Singapore for over three months now, this characterisation of ‘the Singaporean Student’ – as compliant, submissive and unquestioning – has revealed itself to be somewhat simplistic. In the terminology of James Scott, there are definitely both ‘public transcripts’ and ‘hidden transcripts’ at work here, as there are in Singaporean society more broadly. In public, we think it’s fair to say that the majority of Singaporeans are passive and conformist. Decades of authoritarian rule combined with generally decent standards of living and state-controlled media will tend to do that to a society. But in private spaces, Singaporeans still think; they still feel discontent and have that nagging sensation that all is not quite as it appears. However, these hidden transcripts of dissent tend not to manifest themselves in immediately visible ways. Thus our new self-appointed task has been to delve under the carpet and search out this undercurrent of opposition.

Our clandestine visit to ‘Tang Dynasty City’ was just one stop on an alternative 24-hour tour of Singapore, run by a PhD student here who delights in showing both foreigners and young Singaporeans alike the ‘seedier’ sides of the city. Most of our activities were illegal. We spent a couple of hours in a gay club, snuck around a disused, haunted hospital, wandered through a Chinese burial ground, discovered the red-light district, and broke into an indestructible house with a mysterious curse hanging over it – all in the dead of night. Aside from being fun (and pretty scary at times), it opened our eyes to the kinds of alternative narratives hidden under Singapore’s carpet of orthodoxy. The gay bar was far more open and ‘mainstream’ than we had expected – considering homosexuality is illegal in Singapore – and the haunted houses we visited were clearly also frequented by local ghost-hunting enthusiasts and grafitti-spraying youth. We realised there is unorthodox activity going on here but it has its designated place, out of the sight of foreign visitors, and indeed, of many Singaporeans.

What we saw on the tour seemed an apt metaphor for Singaporean ‘resistance’. As we were shocked to discover upon our arrival here, public protest, spontaneous gatherings and political dissent are among those things illegal under Singaporean law. Furthermore, the government invests significant time and resources in manufacturing and maintaining a climate of fear, ensuring that all but a few dissenters are either too scared or too apathetic to voice their dissent. People are unhappy with how their government runs the country, but virtually no one is willing to speak up. We have been incredibly fortunate to meet with one of the few Singaporeans who does speak out, at great personal cost, whenever he can.

Dr Chee Soon Juan used to teach here at NUS. As soon as he became involved in opposition politics, however, he was fired on tenuous grounds. But this, after all, is the National University – the University where ex-Prime Minister (and now ‘Minister Mentor’, a position of authority without precedent in any other professed democracy) Lee Kuan Yew has an entire school named in his honour; where his son (and current Prime Minister) Lee Hsien Loong studied; and where his son in turn and countless other state officials studied. Criticism of the government has been erased from the curriculum. Since his dismissal, Dr Chee has not relented in his mission to make Singapore the functioning democracy its leaders claim it to be. His party, the Singapore Democratic Party, is marginalised from mainstream politics despite having considerable (though often covert) support; he has personally suffered the abrupt ending of his academic career, repeated imprisonment, bankruptcy and continued fines for his political activity, and total demonisation and ridicule by the state-controlled media. Through making such an example of one man (and similar persecution has been acted out on a number of other dissenters in other contexts), the Singaporean government is able to maintain its society in a state of fear.

Even more frightening than this, however, is that the generation who have grown up in Singapore during the last quarter of the twentieth century have no living memory of what society was like before. They don’t remember the 60s and 70s, when student rallies could number in their thousands and to question the government was natural rather than prohibited. One twenty-something Singaporean friend of ours recalls that her uncle was once involved in some kind of activism many years ago, before being getting arrested. She doesn’t know what happened to him whilst he was in custody, and he doesn’t really speak about it, but says he was “changed” after it happened. An atmosphere of fear, secrecy and restraint pervades many popular recollections of this period. Or, even more alarmingly, activism is seen as a joke. The leftist nationalist movements that undeniably played a part in Singapore’s formal independence are reduced to comedic asides in lectures.

By now, the focus of civil society has shifted – and education is a prime example. As Dr Chee noted, the point of education is to question. And yet students in Singapore are programmed from an early age to compete with each other in the quest for ‘excellence’, rather than question authority. This can lead to some paradoxical scenarios: in one of our lectures (a Political Science class no less), the lecturer at one point broke away from the topic to state: “I’m sorry to break it to you, but Singapore is another example of an authoritarian government.” Whilst this might not appear a particularly controversial claim, it is extremely unusual in Singapore to hear such a sentiment expressed by a person in a position of authority – especially at NUS. We were surprised, then, to find that the class spontaneously burst into applause. Clearly such political sentiments are widely-held, but can’t be expressed without first being sanctioned by a figure of authority.

The paradoxical character of dissent here demonstrates that when conventional protest is proscribed, most people seek other ways of expressing their politics. What might seem like a taxi driver merely bemoaning his lot, takes on new significance given the fact that thousands of taxi drivers have had to attend a government training course instructing them to have neat hair, no BO, and to not talk to customers about “sensitive issues” such as race or state policy. A sarcastic aside by an NUS lecturer carries great weight in an academic environment that stifles the free exchange of opinion. What might seem a slight matter, of whether or not to turn up to a peaceful vigil held outside the Burmese embassy in solidarity with the monks and civilians making a stand against a military regime, becomes a decision of great consequence, between silence and massive social transgression. Our experience in Singapore has made meaningful certain academic debates emphasising the myriad, everyday forms ‘resistance’ may take. Small acts may have enormous consequences, and the fact that much discontent is hidden does not mean it isn’t there. It only means you have to spend a bit of time unearthing and exposing it.

Review: Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan (No Harvest But A Thorn)

2008-09-22T14:34:00.005+01:00

This book review was written in December 2007 for the course Rice, Spice and Trees: Peasants in Southeast Asia at the National University of Singapore.

Ahmad’s classic post-independence era novel is an exposition of peasant struggle, a gruesome celebration of the rural Malay livelihood and its associated pitfalls. The story follows the family of Lahuma, a padi farmer in a northern Malaysian village, throughout one disastrous padi cycle. After encountering a snake in their field (an indisputable bad omen), Lahuma later pierces his foot on a nibong thorn and is unable to continue working after it becomes infected. His body gradually swells up with pus, and he dies an ignominious death. It is left to his wife, Jeha, and their seven daughters to work the padi field. But the physical and mental strain causes Jeha to slowly go mad, and she must eventually be imprisoned in a makeshift cage in their tiny home, lest she endangers her youngest children or the padi harvest itself. The novel ends with the eldest daughter contemplating her future working the fields, and Jeha, caged, “screaming through the night” (Ahmad 1991 [1966]:177). This simple plot is thickened through the detailed description of everyday life in this rural community: its social stratifications and behavioural norms; the place of women; the peasant as “existentially involved in cultivation” (Wolf 1969:xiv) and essentially connected to the soil; the constant toil and hardship of the farmer; his cosmology, his fears. Ahmad frequently narrates from the perspective of his central characters as well as taking on a more omniscient third-person style of prose, giving a very full, almost ethnographic depiction of peasant life.

Vulnerability and anxiety are entrenched in this portrayal. Lahuma worries constantly about the day-to-day work at the rice field, and about his family’s future subsistence as their small plot of land decreases in size. When he dies, this anxiety passes to Jeha; after she goes mad, it is their daughters who then shoulder the burden. The village as a whole is subject to the whims of nature: to its floods, its attacking birds, its infestations of crabs, its thorns, its snakes. The peasantry is also constrained by the limited agricultural land upon which ever greater demographic pressure is exerted, exemplified by Lahuma’s concern about the insufficiency of his plot of fourteen relongs. There are hints at the social stratifications leaving the family dependent on the help of the Tok Penghulu (the head of the village), as well as at the presence of Chinese to whom Lahuma is loth to relinquish any more land. The village seems to fit Wolf’s characterisation of the peasantry’s “basic dilemma” as a constant, conscious effort to maintain its “precarious balance” against forces threatening to undermine it (1966:16). It is this vulnerability that leaves the most enduring impression.

Prayer and perseverance: the peasant hero
The novel’s constant and deepening anxiety about the future and the struggle for subsistence is (paradoxically) combined with a total and unshakeable trust in divine providence. It starts by anchoring Lahuma’s existence firmly within the land in “both a liturgical and genealogical charter” (Aveling 2000:112). Lahuma (whose very name is significant: huma, as Ahmad has acknowledged (1991:473), means ‘field’) remembers his own grandfather in the earth and silently repeats the mantra: “Life and death, dearth and plenty, are in the hands of God. In the hands of Allah the almighty” (Ahmad 1991 [1966]:1). Evident here is the rhythmic, repetitious quality characteristic of the book as a whole, which serves to create the sense of timelessness and inevitablity exemplified in the following passage:

Lahuma’s struggle for the children’s survival – sheer survival – would not end. It was going to be carried on by Jeha. Carried on by Sanah. Carried on by Milah. Carried on by Jenab. Carried on by Semek. Carried on by Liah. Carried on by Lebar. Carried on by Kiah. They would survive with the rice. Or die with the rice.
(Ahmad 1991 [1966]:95)

Ahmad also uses repetition to convey the determination of his characters in the face of desperate circumstances, constructing them as archtypal hardworking “peasant heroes” (Tahir 1982):

I will go down to the rice field… I will not come up again until all the plots are completed. I will pull up the seedlings at the belukar when the time comes. I will carry the bundles of seedlings down to the rice-field. I will plant the seedlings row by row. I will replace and rice-stems that may break. I will pull up the weeds that vie with the rice-plants. I will chase away the tiaks when the rice turns gold. I will harvest the rice in gemals. I will cary the gemals into the rice-barn. I will thrash the rice until the stalks come off. I will sun the rice until it is dry. I will pound the rice until the husks come off. I will cook the rice into hot steaming food…
(Ahmad 1991 [1966]:49)

Whilst the novel is incredibly effective at communicating the hardship and labour involved in rice production, as the very notion of the ‘peasant hero’ might suggest, such characterisations of the Malay peasantry are not ideologically or morally neutral. It is a commonplace within studies of rural Malay societies that a simplistic, conservative Islam prevails, which is associated with “a simple series of truths… A good man was one who worked hard and was wary of strangers” (Banks 1983:28). Moral status is highly dependent on hard work and acceptance of one’s rezeki (what one has been alloted by God). Some commentators have interpreted Lahuma’s total subservience to the will of God as passive, even fatalistic (see for example Banks 1987:118), indeed reflecting many anthropological readings. Swift, for example, has observed that in the Malay peasant cosmology, “[i]f someone dies an untimely death, “their span was up”… [there is] a predisposition to explain everything in terms of luck, and to neglect trying to improve one’s position, for after all one has very little control over it” (2001:91). However, the seemingly paradoxical combination of trust in fate and commitment to hard work is reconciled both in Islamic theology (see for example Basri and Zarkashi 1992:399, 401), and in Ahmad’s characters, who do not once question God’s wisdom and purpose, yet at the same time do not cease in their toil. It seems as if Ahmad is seeking to present a model ‘peasant’ response to circumstances of great hardship and suffering; indeed, he is not shy of generalisations:

The yield of rice was very poor. And the people of Banggul Derdap were plunged in gloom. But their gloom was not confined to themselves. They did not connect it with Allah the Almighty. They did not curse God. It was their habit to accept with resignation the disasters which so often befell them. Such was their life. Never to know full satisfaction. And they accepted the disasters of crabs and tiaks with fresh determination and spirit; to plant rice again next year if Allah the Almighty willed that they should survive till then.
(Ahmad 1991 [1966]:171)

It is difficult to read this passage without noting the implicit moral approval.

The construction of the peasant
Seen in the historical context of a newly independent Malaysia and contemporaneous discourses around ‘modernisation’ and ‘underdevelopment’, the anxiety that characterises the novel’s tone takes on a broader significance. For Ahmad, the peasant lifestyle and subsistence is cyclical in nature – in addition to the constant use of repetition, the novel’s time frame is one rice cycle from beginning to end, and the final chapter is entitled “The Cycle Continues” – denoting a certain stability, an enduring quality. This stability is reinforced by constant reference to elements of ‘tradition’. For example, the position of women is deemed unchanged by the possiblity of secular education: as Jeha says, “Girls needn’t know how to read. Doesn’t change the market value. I never even went to school” (Ahmad 1991 [1966]:18). Given that the area of peninsular Malaysia in which the novel is set has in the twentieth century “been transformed from an isolated and largely self-sufficient region into an administrative unit of a modern nation-state, and its residents are tied into the cash economy of rubber production” (Bailey 1983:8), we can ascribe a clear intent to Ahmad’s insistence on tradition; on the unchanging aspects of the peasant cosmology. He has made clear elsewhere his belief that wage labour, rubber tapping for the cash economy and collecting jungle products are not real farming, and that most Malays in the village of Banggul Derdap were “not real farmers” (cited in Aveling 2000:53); Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan, then, articulates the traditional ‘real farmer’.

Yet this representation obscures a great deal. Firstly, the very notion of a ‘real farmer’ or ‘authentic peasant’ tradition must be interrogated. Ahmad’s unsubtle rendering of Lahuma and family as existentially connected with the soil cannot be separated from its ideological buttressing of Malaysian society’s explicitly racialised division of labour. Twentieth century anthropologists such as Swift have also uncritically employed this form of social categorisation: “To know a person’s race is to know that he will probably perform one of a few economic functions. The Malay is primarily a peasant” (2001:88). This essentialises historically contingent social permutations, obfuscating the constructedness of the ‘Malay peasant’ (1) and how the peasantry initially came to work the land in such a way, as migrants, pioneers and settlers (2). Ahmad’s undeniably grim portrayal also obscures the wry humour that has been noticeably present in every kampung I’ve ever visited, unwittingly denying one of the ways in which the subordinated peasant may express his interpretation of contemporary events – his “hidden transcript” or “partial transcript” that may well constitute a form of resistance (Scott 1985:284-6). For example, though the Islamic worldview of the Malay peasant is presented as both profound and profoundly uncritical, there is no mention of the cynicism with which local religious leaders are often received (3).

Modernist ambivalence: the “babble and roar”
However, beyond the role of the author or anthropologist in disciplining the rural population, Ahmad’s reification of the Malay peasantry is also indicative of a broader anxiety – a “babble and roar about what Malay life style should be” (Nash 1974:65) – that characterised the Malay population during the postwar period and its associated social upheavals. ‘Modernity’ and later ‘development’ was seen as something external, foreign; both desired and feared (Johnson 2007:13). Nash also cites the rural expression, that if we don’t change we’ll be driven to hanging from the trees, which “sums up the poignancy of a peasantry who are the lagging members of a modernizing nation” (1974:67). This conception of the peasant is not mere paranoia; key anthropologists have also encouraged such a view (4). Other commentators have also noted the rapid de-kampung-isation of the Malays (see for example Sardar 2004). Viewed in social-historical context both the anxiety which is so intrinsic to the novel, and the simple, steadfast souls who inhabit its cyclical peasant universe, can be seen as symbolic of the endemic ambivalence of the period. Ahmad, at one point the national laureate of Malaysia, attempts to discursively ‘fix’ the peasant in his traditional lifestyle, asserting a permanence to Malay peasant culture in the face of existential threat. As Foucault (1970:290) argues, “if language expresses, it does so not in so far as it is an imitation and duplication of things, but in so far as it manifests… the fundamental will of those who speak it”.

Though Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan certainly provides a meticulous and moving depiction of peasant life, preserving it somewhat in the context of large-scale social change; ultimately its value must be seen in its exemplary construction (and simultaneous obfuscation) of ‘the Malay peasant’, and the reification of tradition in response to the perceived threat of ‘development’.

(1) The Malayan colonial economy was structured according to (and dependent on) this racialised division of labour; when Malays began to sell their land to Chinese, Indian and European buyers, threatening the organisation of the rural Malay population in their kampungs (villages), colonial administrators adopted a paternalistic discourse of protection. To prevent the “extinction” of Malay “tradition” – seen as “a race of yeoman-peasantry… deluded by visions of present but transitory wealth” (cited in Ong 1987:19-20) – they actively prevented such sales from taking place, whilst also restricting Malays who wanted to cultivate cash crops instead of food (1987:21). Clearly the essentialisation of peasant identity can be seen as a strategy of “containment” (Kearney 1996:60). During the period in which the novel was written there are further ideological implications of constructing the Malay as ‘native’ to and hence bound to the land itself, considering the political motives behind state and legal discourses according certain rights to bumiputera (lit. ‘sons of the soil’).
(2) (see also Walker 2001 and Tan 2000 for examples from Thai and Vietnamese contexts respectively).
(3) For example, Nash (1974:60) recounts one common anecdote in the village in which his research was based: “A man catches a strange fish. He brings it to a Tok Guru asking if it is halal (lawful) to eat. The Tok Guru hesitates in replying. The fisherman says it would be a shame to throw it away since he wanted to give the Tok Guru half of it. The Tok Guru immediately says that the fish is of course halal.”
(4) Wolf, for example, places the peasantry “midway between the primitive tribe and industrial society… They are important historically, because industrial society is built upon the ruins of peasant society. They are important contemporaneously, because they inhabit that “underdeveloped” part of the world whose continued presence constitutes both a threat and a responsibility for those countries which have thrown off the shackles of backwardness” (1966:vii). He clearly understands the peasant existence as both threatened and threatening in equal measures – and additionally, as a social permutation whose ultimate decline and replacement by modern industrial society is inevitable (and even desirable).

Bibliography
Ahmad, S. 1991 [1966]. No Harvest But A Thorn [Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan], trans. A. Amin (Petaling Jaya: Fajar Bakti)

Ahmad, S. 1991. Sastera Sebagai Seismograf Kelidupan (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka)

Aveling, H. 2000. Shahnon Ahmad: Islam, Power and Gender (Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia)

Bailey, C. 1983. The Sociology of Production in Rural Malay Society (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press)

Banks, D. J. 1983. Malay Kinship (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues)

Banks, D. J. 1987. From Class to Culture: Social Conscience in Malay Novels Since Independence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies)

Basri, G. and Zarkashi, M. P. 1992. ‘Islam and Rural Development in Malaysia with Special Reference to Malaysian Fisherman’ in King, V. T. and N. M. Jali (eds.) Issues in Rural Development in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka)

Foucault, M. 1970. The Order Of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House)

Johnson, D. 2007. ‘Malay Representations of Modernity, the Present and the Future’, Paper presented at the ICAS5 Conference: Shaping a Future in Asia. Kuala Lumpur, 2-5 August

Kearney, M. 1996. Reconceptualizing the peasantry : anthropology in global perspective (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press)

Nash, M. 1974. Peasant Citizens: Politics, Religion and, and Modernization in Kelantan, Malaysia (Ohio: Center for International Studies)

Ong, A. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (Albany: State University of New York Press)

Sardar, Z. 2004. The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur (London: Reaktion Books)

Scott, J. C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press)

Swift, M. G. 2001. ‘Malay Peasants’ in Baharuddin, S. A. (ed.) Social Anthropology of the Malays: Collected Essays of M. G. Swift (Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia)

Tahir, U. M. M. 1982. ‘Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan: The Story of a Peasant Hero’, in Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, 16 (1): 26-47.

Tan, S. B-H. 2000. ‘Coffee frontiers in the Central Highlands of Vietnam: networks of connectivity’ in Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 41 (1): 51-67

Walker, A. 2001. ‘The ‘Karen Consensus’, Ethnic Politics and Resource-Use Legitimacy in Northern Thailand’ in Asian Ethnicity, 2 (2): 145-162

Wolf, E. R. 1966. Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall)

Wolf, E. R. 1969. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row)

Compassion Fatigue and Palestinian Walks

2008-09-17T00:49:00.003+01:00

Here’s a phenomenon quite particular to our late-capitalist modernity: Compassion Fatigue, the unwanted offspring of middle-class postcolonial guilt. So significant that it even has its own wikipedia entry.

What is described by this phrase? I characterise it as the process by which our attentions are constantly drawn to – that is to say, by which we are made Aware of – a multitude of Issues about which we subsequently express Concern, and the eventual weariness that accompanies repetition.

This concept should not serve to veil a negative judgement on those whose compassion reserves become exhausted, nor should it be seen as a derisive retort to those who annoy us with (some would say) sanctimonious appeals to our goodwill.

No, we can say with confidence that people are genuinely Concerned about Issues and believe that raising Awareness can help in some small way. We are convinced, perhaps, that if everyone knew what atrocities and indignities were suffered daily by our fellow men and women, such suffering would surely have to cease.

And yet this is, of course, the central fallacy that is both exposed and sustained by Compassion Fatigue. We are in fact experiencing exposure to an overabundance of Issues; an Awareness glut. Through consuming newspapers and magazines, documentary and television, charity appeals and the advice of Concerned friends, we bear witness to an extraordinary exhibition of mistreatment, conflict and disaster – to the extent that whole regions or even continents can become identifiable by a single image of human misery.

Just as poverty, famine and malnutrition appear as native products of sub-Saharan Africa, so Israel/Palestine is imagined as a conflict zone and nothing more. We cannot permit such anomalies, such divergent interests as the Jerusalemite heavy-metaller or the love story between two young people from Jenin, or indeed, the lawyer from Ramallah who enjoys nothing more than a ramble in his homeland’s historic hills.

It’s harsh, but true: when you utter the words ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine’ – or worse, combine the two – and if your voice should betray the barest trace of self-righteousness, or even mere earnestness, the people you are trying to reach are fairly likely to just switch off.

Israel/Palestine is one of those Issues that both bores and divides, because people are either tired of hearing about a problem that appears so intractable, or they are pretty much fixed in their view on the situation. The task of recruiting new Concerned people, or shaking others out of their preconceptions and prejudices, can seem impossible.

Which is why a book like Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks deserves consideration. Structured around six walks in the hills of the West Bank undertaken by the author over a period of many years, this book provides an unorthodox route into Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, and may thus avoid the shortcomings of more overtly polemical, historical or legal accounts and their tendency to ‘preach to the converted’.

Shehadeh intersperses rather straightforward accounts of his journeys through the landscape with memories from his childhood, past conversations, details from legal cases in his professional work, autobiographical reflections and more random observations. These aren’t woven together by any means seamlessly, but the narrative’s sometime awkwardness is all the more charming for it. Its strength is the author’s flatly descriptive style which belies a kind of restraint, a reluctance to sermonise uncommon in other writings set in the same political geography.

The subtitle of the book is Notes on a vanishing landscape, and at a reading this week in Stratford’s St John’s Church, Shehadeh confirmed that his efforts may be understood as an attempt to chronicle a pastime that is becoming increasingly constricted in an environment that is ever more degraded and forcibly fragmented. The six walks – the six sarhat, an Arabic word connoting freedom and lack of restraint – map the shift that has taken place over the last twenty-five years as Israeli settlements have expanded, land appropriation has continued, military checkpoints have multiplied, and the Separation or Apartheid Wall has been built. It is a shift “from sarha to suffocation”, as the author puts it, away from “a land that was open and free” to one in which the simple urge to leave one’s house and walk into surrounding hills must be stifled. We need not speculate about the psychological effects of such physical confinement; they are manifest in the frustration, weariness and occasional auto-destructive violence exhibited by Palestinians living in the West Bank.

*

As an aside, Palestinian Walks is a particularly interesting text to read in conjunction with Meron Benvenisti’s Sacred Landscapes: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948. A central theme that emerges from Benvenisti’s book is the importance of the cult of ‘knowing the land’, knowing Eretz Yisrael. Its physical occupation through settlement is incomplete if there is not a simultaneous appropriation of the knowledge of that landscape; its symbols, its histories, its names. He describes the process by which the Palestinians’ local knowledge – which recognised every wadi, every stream and every tree – has been systematically erased as a key strategy in reducing the Palestinians’ claims to the land. First the Zionist cartographers renamed and Hebraeised these features of the landscape, and then the inhabitants of the land were increasingly denied access to it, through massacres, expulsions, or the physical strangulation that the checkpoints embody today.

In this context, Shehadeh’s attempt to record (in walks and words) a direct connection with precisely located, identifiable parts of the landscape, must be understood as an important political exercise, and one with considerable potential for empowerment. The youth at present have little memory of the relative freedom Shehadeh is able to remember, and cannot imagine the natural beauty that surrounds their towns and villages since they have such limited access to it – they are more accustomed to seeing the hills as a place of danger and insecurity. For Palestinians to retain their claim to the land, even as the population may be growing faster among the diaspora than within Palestine itself, it is this identification with the physical landscape that must be promoted and maintained if ‘Palestine’ is to be anything more than an ethnic marker or origin myth.

The Indisputable Non-Genius of Richard Dawkins

2008-08-12T11:11:00.005+01:00

Last night I caught a few nuggets of Richard Dawkins on Channel 4, waxing lyrical about The Genius of Charles Darwin. Dawkins, most well known for his books The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene, was intent on proving to us that kindness, charity and altruism should not be accepted for what they are; no, they have to be explained in terms of evolutionary theory. In other words, we're not nice to each other just because we're nice. We're nice because it confers upon us some evolutionary advantage. We are, as Dawkins so movingly put it, "survival machines".

I'm too weary of Dawkins to even begin deconstructing his loopy logic. What really struck me, more than his argument itself, was the obsessive manner in which he would try to put his beliefs across. He appears to be driven by a desire to prove that everything, all human and social phenomena, can be explained with recourse to evolutionary theory and genetics. That's fair enough, Dawkins. But other people have their own beliefs - just as valid as yours - about the foundations of human existence. By going around like some crazed televangelist, propelled by missionary zeal, you're really no better than the religious fanatic you so despise. Neither of you are able to accept that there are a million different belief systems, each as meaningful as the next. Neither of you can let go of your unshakeable faith in the singularity of your own Truth.

There was one part of the programme where Dawkins speaks to a woman working in a homeless shelter, dishing out hot soup while she explains that it's just the thing they need after a night out in the cold. He asks her where this charitable disposition comes from, and you can see his brain fizzing as he tries to comprehend it. This scene lent further support to my sneaking suspicion that Richard Dawkins is just not a particularly kind or empathetic individual, and last night's show may be better understood as his rather embarrassing attempt to grapple with the fact other people are, in fact, nice.

As for me, I'm quite happy to accept that altruism and compassion exist in our society, for whatever reason. The obsessive attempt to rationalise such behaviour probably tells us more about Dawkins' character than it demonstrates anything useful about our social existence.

The Dark Knight

2008-08-10T12:29:00.003+01:00

Why has The Dark Knight grossed such spectacular revenues? Comic book adaptations are certainly reliable box-office fodder these days, and there has been considerable hype surrounding Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in the context of his untimely demise.

But there’s more to it than this. There’s something about film that seems to ring true; something that makes sense, appears apt, that reflects something meaningful about our present condition.

Commentators have already pointed to the political implications of the film: some wondering whether Obama or McCain or Bush or Cheney can be better identified with the Dark Knight; others noting how there are ten minutes in the middle of the film during which the Joker is referred to as ‘a terrorist’ in speech accompanied by all the appropriate rhetoric – “do we want to give in to terrorists?” etc.

Yet on a less superficial level, what can the film’s central preoccupation (i.e. anarchy vs. society’s laws and norms) reveal about the nature of the anxieties gripping modern, liberal culture today?

Perhaps it’s because I worked on the bloody thing for four long months, but I can’t help seeing my dissertation in all this. In it, I tried to investigate the phenomenon of suicide bombing from an unorthodox perspective. Rather than seek to either condemn the practice wholeheartedly or empathise with the plight of the one who explodes him- or herself in most abject desperation, I was concerned with suicide bombing’s place in liberal modernity. How is it a product of the modern; and what does it reveal about our liberalism?

The reason suicide bombing is ensconced within such a polarising discourse, I argued, is that our liberal order operates through a kind of generosity; a gift that cannot be returned. Put very simply, it includes you, even if you don’t want to be included. Your identity is formed, it has a place within this order: it is rationalised.

If, however, you challenge your positioning – if, like the suicide bomber, you challenge the very preconditions of social existence – we will still find a way to rationalise your behaviour. We will call it evil, or illegitimate, or the product of indoctrination, or the result of oppression and injustice. We will insist that it fails, lest we admit to “giving in to terrorists”. We will cast you out, as our inhuman antithesis. (although, as my dissertation argues, this exclusion is simultaneously a kind of inclusion – just as the Joker insists that Batman needs his anarchic other)

In other words, we will understand you, in some form or another. Our biggest fear is that you will continue to defy our logic, our attempts to rationalise what you do. And this is precisely the fear that The Dark Knight articulates. Studies of suicide bombers show that they are very much human, despite the inhumanity of their actions. They are sons and daughters, students, employees, people with emotions and goals and prejudices. Their demonisation perhaps has its culmination in the character of the Joker: a caricature of irrationality and destruction. He cannot be persuaded or bribed, nor can his motivations be rationalised. He simply must be stopped. And yet the most difficult task is to stop the person who doesn’t share such mundane concerns as the preservation of life.

It’s possible to read all sorts of things into The Dark Knight, and I don’t know how much of it was intentional. But what’s clear to me is that whilst the ‘terrorist’ receives nothing more than an extreme caricature, the film reveals rather more about the specifically modern, liberal anxiety presently gripping American and European societies.

Tree in Wandsworth

2008-08-10T11:24:00.002+01:00

On travel; and the dangers of the non-place

2008-08-10T01:42:00.003+01:00

This article was first published in Poda Poda. I'm not sure I still agree with what I wrote...

It’s pretty much taken for granted that to travel is to enrich the mind and soul; to create a more sophisticated, more open-minded kind of person; and to enable a better understanding between people of diverse cultures.

Yet I fear that the reality of travel may be far more sinister than the individual traveller may have cause to suspect – and that the very developments which have brought human beings into greater contact with each other are in fact the symptoms of a supermodernity which will only i s o l a t e us further.

* My contention is this:
it is possible to travel – to Cairo, Siem Reap, Goa, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Santiago – all without once setting foot in a real place.

III

This requires some explanation. I use the word place in the anthropological sense, to denote an organically social space, existing in a historical and spatial context of its own. The proliferation of non-places, endemic in our time, is the inverse of this – the negation of place.

[For example, a grocer’s or local butcher in a small English town is a place; it naturally engenders social interaction, and possesses its own identity which is distinct from other shops in other small English towns. Regular customers come to recognise and know each other, as well as the staff and owner of the shop. A visit to a Tesco superstore, by contrast, seems to prohibit social contact by using text to instruct, direct, and attract the customer, and by using technology to mediate all monetary transactions. Customers become familiar not with the staff, who appear interchangeable, nor with the owner, which is some remote and impersonal entity. Rather the customer becomes familiar with logos, text, brands. The enforced solitude of this experience makes Tesco a non-place.]

These non-places exist as you stand passively before an ATM machine, as you insert your ticket passing through the barriers at a London Underground station, as you seek the symbols of instruction in an airport, and as you wait to board your plane. In each of these situations your identity has been reduced to simply one among many users of a particular service; the texts you see are addressed directly to you, and yet directly to all other potential users. Meaningful social interaction is discouraged.
Such space is the antithesis of place.

As the anthropologist Marc Augé suggests, “the traveller’s space may be the archetype of non-place”. Consider, if you will, the archetypal traveller of our time. He/she is invariably Western (Western being the paradigm of wealth and ‘development’, i.e. Japanese counts too), and will have selected their destination(s) based on a combination of personal ambition; the recommendations of others; and the prerequisite Rough Guide or Lonely Planet advice. His/her expedition is contextualised within specific life-circumstances: the well-spent gap year, the well-deserved holiday, etc. “Places” and events are recorded on camera, and completion of the itinerary is accompanied by a feeling of accomplishment, a satisfaction at knowing one more “place” which had previously meant no more to him/her than any other random name on a map. In other words: the experience is a manifestation of the traveller’s EGO, rather than being a meaningful, equal encounter with another culture. This relationship is one inevitable consequence of a skewed global tourist industry (how many Indian youths do you see backpacking around Devon, taking in the local sites of interest?). Our traveller is encouraged to avoid place.

Yet this is not an indictment of the individual traveller, who means well, who means to immerse himself in a strange civilisation not like his own. It’s not all his fault!!! It is hard for him to encounter the other on the other’s own terms.
The problem is partly structural.

Late-capitalist society has constructed a means (the international tourist INDUSTRY) by which people from Europe and North America pass through foreign spaces whilst transforming these spaces into spectacle, to be itemised, viewed, consumed, and discarded, like so many baked bean tins. [In extreme cases, foreign societies begin to construct themselves in accordance with Western conceptualisations, dictated by economic necessity. When we think of Thailand we probably conjure up images of temples, stunning island beaches and seedy red-light sex tourists, rather than the predominantly rural, 66 million-strong padi-growing population. Yet this fantasy, this imagined place, is gradually becoming more accurate as reality adapts to imagined reality.] The opportunities for travel, like the capital to do so, are concentrated in the hands of a few. This global framework denies us the mechanisms by which we can encounter the other on equal terms; it inhibits our capabilities to truly experience another place.

HOWEVER: the scenario described above is a horrible paradigm, and no traveller travels solely through non-place. It is easy to skip from airport to hotel to train station to bus station to church to temple to other “local sites of interest”. But organic, meaningful place has a habit of creating itself within non-place; when you get off the tour bus and befriend the noodle vendor because she reminds you of your mum; or when you discard your plans and end up smoking weed with a Balinese surfer boy on the floor of his one-room apartment…

Yes, we may be inhibited by the inequity of the global system, but WE ARE AGENTS within this structure – we can choose to reproduce it or to rebel against it. So go! Go away, but seek out place when you get there, make no plans, discard your EGO, and realign yourself to another rhythm.

Poda Poda spring/summer 2007

2008-08-09T19:35:00.017+01:00

"So, what's next?"

2008-08-09T19:33:00.001+01:00

“So, what’s next?”

The question that cannot be answered.

I don’t know what’s next. I wish people would stop asking me.
My recently completed degree, I have discovered, is nothing more than a stepping stone; a thing that will enable me to achieve greater and more substantive things. A Career. Bad news for a girl who shudders at the words graduate programme,vibrant and self-starter.

I know that someone is coming at education from a wildly different angle to mine when they ask: “Oh, International Relations. What can you do with that?” As if it were a bionic arm. In fact I studied International Relations not because, as some will immediately assume, I desire to become a diplomat. Nor did I become involved in any extra-curricular activities because, as many have commented, they “look good on your CV.”

No, I made my academic choices based on a commitment to understand inequality, a naïve desire to do good in the world, and a significant element of narcissistic self-reflexive interrogation. “I am an international relation!” I rather embarrassingly wrote in my UCAS statement. My two dissertations – the culmination of nearly three years of study – were essentially attempts to grapple with the contradictions of my own identity. (The first being an investigation into being Liberal and being Muslim; the second being ostensibly an examination of the power relationships implicit in travel from rich countries to poor, which ended up being an examination of my own personal crisis, or, How to be half English and half Malay, half rich and half poor, half guilty and half innocent.)

“So, what’s next?” Implicit in the question, of course, is the notion that each of our individual lives is a trajectory with its own telos. I am heading somewhere. In order to get there I must accumulate skills and qualifications to then list on my CV; a document that is really nothing more than a brochure with which I can sell myself to prospective employers.

“So, what’s next?” smacks of an underlying careerism that is not new, but certainly appears more potent at present than it was in the past. I see it as part of a broader trend towards the neoliberalisation of educational institutions and, concomitantly, of our understanding of education’s place in society. The development of universities, increasingly a process directed by those at the managerial level, has begun to take a more sinister turn. Resources are poured into income-generating departments (i.e. those that attract the most international students) at the expense of less profitable ones; and research becomes subject to a competitive logic that diminishes both academic autonomy and teaching quality.

At the level of individual students, tuition fees are recast as a reasonable ‘investment’ in one’s future, redefining education in the process. No longer a pursuit inspired by the noble spirit of academic enquiry; education is now understood in instrumentalist terms according to a logic of competition and profit. What will give the best returns on my original investment? Which degree is the most employable? Which will provide me with the most marketable skills?

“So, what’s next?”

I don’t know. And I’m keeping it that way.

Me with a beak

2008-08-09T19:15:00.003+01:00

Clock poem

2008-08-09T19:09:00.004+01:00

A clock in my kitchen

always kept the time

until one day

the clocks went back

and left my clock behind.

Neglected and ignored,

its numbers were inaccurate.

The family favoured the newer clock;

its timekeeping was immaculate.

Poor little clock

got a nasty shock -

it plum thought it was three

but this was not to be:

the other clocks said two

and my sad little clock found it quite the catastrophe.

If it had had a voice it would have shouted

"Jammy gits!"

If it had had a fist it would have smashed the new clock's bits.

But it didn't.

It just sat there feeling very small

and pretty soon we had forgotten

it was ever there

at all.

Kodak building, Hemel Hempstead

2008-08-09T19:05:00.002+01:00

Beachy Head

2008-08-09T19:00:00.002+01:00

Students, be vigilant!!! …There are fundamentalists among us, and they are dangerous…

2008-08-09T18:26:00.003+01:00

by Pia Muzaffar Dawson

this article was first published in The Pulse in 2007

Has anyone else noticed a creeping consensus taking root in our university? A certain sceptical chill in the air? Now, I know that there have been recent reports about campus staff at higher education institutions all over Britain being encouraged by the government to spy on Muslim and ‘Asian-looking’ (!!) students, but I’m advocating that we redirect our suspicions elsewhere. Muslims are too easy to spot; what’s more, they’ll readily admit their faith. No, what I’m talking about is a silent, far more sinister force that has steadily been gaining more and more adherents – but unlike many other cults they wear no visible indicators of their faith, and if you quiz them, chances are they’ll deny they believe anything at all. This stealthy self-denial has proved one of their most effective weapons against detection, and thus against contestation. Yet press them a little more, and you’ll reveal a wellspring of cultural supremacism and badly articulated racism. Yes indeed: these are the secular fundamentalists, and their propaganda is slowly seeping into our institutions, our media and our minds.

Right, what does that mean? Precisely this: despite what is currently propagated by our leaders, our media, our parents, our lecturers (both ‘rightwing’ and ‘liberal’ alike), the greatest cause of hatred and intolerance in fact derives from the secularist myth, and not from any dodgy interpretation of the Bible or Qur’an.

No, hang on, I must have got that wrong. Surely we’re living in an age of increasing threat from “Islamic fundamentalism”? Isn’t there a “clash of civilisations”? That’s right; our secular, modern existence is being jeopardised by people with outdated beliefs trying to drag us back into the Dark Ages! Women are attempting to cover up – god forbid! – their beautiful, liberated bodies. Irrational beliefs and redundant traditions just refuse to go away! What’s wrong with these people?? Don’t they know that we discarded the “God-delusion” decades ago? Aren’t they aware that we’re living in newer, better times, where you can live your life free from the oppressive dogmas of organised religions based on rigid interpretations of ancient texts??

Bollocks, I say. Contemporary Britain remains under the powerful spell of a centuries-old faith: the twin beliefs of rationalism and secularism. Contrary to popular opinion, we are not born atheists with a natural ability to rationally deduce the non-existence of God (or gods) from the assembled evidence until some silly superstitions come along to deceive and flummox us with their threats of eternal pain and promises of everlasting glory. No, we are born into a time and a place, and if that place is Britain and that time is now, the belief system that happens to pervade our social existence is the secularist myth. This myth is based on the notion that we no longer need to turn to religion to explain the fantastic complexity of the natural world; science privileges us with access to the Truth, and Truth need not be mediated by the priest, imam or rabbi. Neither do we need religion to provide us with hope of a better life, since life is better than ever before. We have fridges, for heavens sake!! We can fly to Spain for 99p! Religion has also ceased to be of spiritual use, since we can now fulfil our innermost desires to discern life’s meaning in a multitude of other ways. So we are not, in fact, living in a post-myth, post-religion, post-belief age at all; we have simply replaced the old myth with a new one. We’ve swapped faith in God for faith in ourselves, or in humankind, or music, poetry, surfing – whatever you want really. You get to decide.

Ok, all fine so far, so we’ve moved on from God, so we now believe in other things – where exactly is the harm in that? …This is where the ‘fundamental’ part of secular fundamentalism comes in. Because there’s nothing wrong with being an atheist, nor with believing in the division of church and state, nor with deriving your ethical values from experience and love rather than the Ten Commandments. I myself am a thoroughly secularised Muslim atheist; I see no contradiction there at all. The dodgy bit is when people start asserting that atheism and secular values are somehow… well, a bit more advanced than the old-fashioned religious ones. Though you may not always hear this view expressed in quite those terms, it is nevertheless implicit in more aspects of our daily lives than I, for one, am comfortable with.

For example: part of the myth of rational secularism involves the assertion that being secular is qualitatively different to being religious – that the denial of God permits a certain objectivity, a scientific impartiality not attainable for those who profess to believe in the invisible and unknowable. Hence our mainstream schools and universities are secular institutions, and religious affiliations are treated as special interests. Here at Sussex, as with many if not most other British universities, you can study International Relations, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Media, Politics, Anthropology, Philosophy, all the Sciences – but you can’t study religion. This systematic and institutionalised bias in favour of the secularist myth inculcates the identification of civilised modernity with secularism, reinforcing the linear conception of progressive human history with ‘us’ at the top, and believers a few rungs further down. This is a subtle kind of racism, of cultural arrogance, since it basically adheres to the view that our belief system is superior to all others, placing us in a unique position to observe and comment on everyone else.

In the media as well as in the university, the distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘rightwing’ is utterly meaningless with regard to the elevation of secularism to a higher moral plane. Even the Independent, which is hardly seen as a bastion of xenophobia and inter-cultural suspicion, recently published an interview with some “smart, articulate, beautifully dressed… brilliant, thoughtful… modern” Muslim women who, according to the writer, are far more representative of the wider “moderate, rational” Muslim community ignored by much of the media. These women all balked at the idea of wearing the veil, comparing it with “attracting attention in the wrong way, like a child." One woman said she finds it “bizarre that a woman who is educated or has a PhD finds it normal to be covered." OH MY GOD!! This article, though superficially a coherent and well-intentioned appeal to non-Muslims to recognise the happy face of Islam we don’t hear about too often, is in fact an appeal to our most basic prejudices – it’s saying: “Yes, there are a lot of basically backward traditions still in force in our society, but if you give these poor Muslims a decent education and teach them how to be rational like us, you’ll soon rid them of their silly attention-seeking habits. Look at these women here! You can’t even tell they’re Muslims, they’re so civilised and articulate!” But here’s a fun fact: you can wear a veil and be an intelligent, modern woman; the two things are not mutually exclusive as this writer would have us believe.

And this subtle prejudice is not only propagated in the media and promoted by the very structures of our education system; the secular fundamentalists are actively recruiting devotees on our very campus too. Just last year our university hosted a debate about the relative merits of religion and secularism at which the journalist Polly Toynbee (winner of the Islamic Human Rights Commission’s "Most Islamophobic media personality" award, 2004) propounded various provocative opinions which refused to engage in a meaningful debate with the other speaker, the Anglican Priest and Quaker Chaplain Paul Oestreicher, and basically amounted to a reinforcement of the mistaken belief that religion’s rightful place is in the past and secularism is synonymous with modernity and civilisation. (The fact that the whole debate took place in the Meeting House, which is both the university chaplaincy and the only place on campus providing the valuable service of coffee and tea for less than 50p – if that’s not contributing to our social wellbeing, I don’t know what is! – was probably lost on Toynbee) Once again, this view can only be described as cultural supremacism. If a fundamentalist is someone who cannot see or comprehend the alternative perspective, and expects to be able to subject all others to their own specific ideology, then ideologues like Toynbee are precisely that: the fundamentalist equivalents to the religious extremists they so despise.

Anyway, try not to get too alarmed by the frenzy of fear over ‘religious extremism’; instead be wary of the other fundamentalists in our midst. Secular superiority is a belief system like any other, and where an ideology claims objectivity there is all the more reason to treat it with suspicion.

Boring lecture

2008-08-09T18:23:00.003+01:00

Education/Islamophobia

2008-08-09T18:18:00.002+01:00

by Pia Muzaffar

this article was first published in The Badger 28/01/08, volume 18 issue 3

Many Muslims in Britain increasingly consider us an Islamophobic society – and our universities are by no means an exception.

Sussex Anthropology lecturer Filippo Osella was the first of three invited speakers to talk on Islamophobia to a crowded lecture theatre last week here at Sussex. Unlike recent outbursts demanding, as Martin Amis controversially did, that it is the Muslim community itself that needs to “get its house in order”, Osella redirected attention towards non-Muslim Britain.

He argued that although the current wave of Islamophobia is clearly unique in many ways, there is nevertheless a continuity in the way that the West has historically defined itself in opposition to its Islamic antithesis. Western civilisation projects onto a monolithic ‘Islam’ everything that it is not. Presently, this means that any form of political Islam is demonised as total anathema to secular society.

In this way, Osella pointed out, it is the secularists who get to define ‘proper’ spirituality. They define who is a ‘good Muslim’ (tolerant, apolitical, non-interfering), and who is a ‘bad Muslim’ (fundamentalist, traditional, political).

And this has crept into our educational institutions. It was only in 2006 that it was revealed that lecturers in Britain have been encouraged to spy on Muslim students. According to Osella, they are also being encouraged to run courses espousing a more ‘moderate’ Islam – ‘moderate’ being defined by the liberal establishment.

Academics have also been asked to conduct research on radicalism in specific Muslim communities which would involve supplying actual names and places to intelligence gathering agencies. And at Sussex, there was even talk of introducing an International Security programme. Though he was assured that such a study programme was in no way Islamophobic, upon enquiring as to what it might entail, Osella was told that a combination “with Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic” might be one possibility.

Such proposals are particularly resonant this week, after the Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell was reported on Tuesday as saying that there exists a “serious” threat of extremism on university campuses, with the younger generation being particularly “vulnerable” to radicalisation.

These claims have been tempered, however, by student groups and unions. A Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) spokesman pointed out that “no evidence” exists to suggests that students should become targets of suspicion. NUS President Gemma Tumelty, and the General Secretary of the University and College Union, Sally Hunt, both expressed concern that this government guidance could foster an atmosphere of mistrust between teaching staff and students.

One BSMS student present at the discussion on Islamophobia described how he, along with other Muslim students, had been singled out and warned against taking home any of the routinely used chemicals which could be used to manufacture explosives. He explained that they had been required to fill out reports detailing their use of such chemicals, and that their course coordinator had been visited and interviewed by two Special Branch intelligence officers.

Another student in attendance alleged that Sussex is one of the universities to have recently signed up to a government pilot scheme allowing certain students – particularly members of the Islamic Students Society – to be monitored for suspicious activities.

The second speaker, Assed Baig from the NUS Black Students Campaign, believed that such tactics would prove counterproductive. Turning the glare of the spotlight onto the Muslim community, he said, would not encourage integration. Instead it would create a feeling of victimisation. Drawing on the ‘good’ Muslim/ ‘bad’ Muslim polarisation, he also argued that the distinction currently rests on whether an individual agrees with the government line. “If I disagree with foreign policy, does that make me an extremist?”

This sense of victimisation was the subject elaborated upon by the third speaker, Seyfeddin Kara from the Islamic Human Rights Commission. He presented a recent study conducted by the IHRC on Muslim perceptions of media reporting in Britain. In addition to the fact that a significant majority of respondents believed much media to be Islamophobic or racist, the study also revealed that the more educated the respondent, the greater their perception of anti-Islamic discrimination.

This paralled Osella’s suggestion that the more sinister form of Islamophobia does not come from the typical ‘lay’ racism associated with tabloid hate-mongering, but rather from the liberal establishment. In these ‘higher’ circles, including academia, a consensus has appeared which unites both Left and Right in its assumptions about the conflict between Islam and modern, secular society.

It is undeniably paradoxical that institutions of higher learning, founded upon ideals of freedom of thought and expression, may be entering into suspect contracts with the government that would curtail these freedoms.

Kampung Dato, Sibu

2008-08-09T17:58:00.004+01:00

These pictures were taken by Carl in my mum's home town, Sibu, in Sarawak. Carl's pictures are really awesome, look at www.carlbigmore.co.uk

Mak Eng

2008-08-09T17:44:00.005+01:00

Tom in Burma after the cyclone

2008-08-09T17:37:00.004+01:00

Tom went to Burma during the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis with the intention of being of some assistance, particularly in the worst-hit rural areas. Being quite visibly English, he wasn't able to access those areas but spent some time working for a local NGO engaged in relief work in Rangoon. Here is his report, edited by me.

My first foray into Burma has been emotional, to say the least. Initially, I felt that life was ticking along normally; Rangoon seemed to be like many other third world cities, the streets alive with food stalls and child beggars, with rubbish cluttering the gutters. The desecrated landscape and rigid tree branches jutting from sidewalks were the only evidence of an environmental disaster. People in Rangoon were relaxed – to the point of appearing blasé – about the effects of Cyclone Nargis and the encroaching monsoon season. An early chat with a Burmese man revealed that when it rains through his decrepit roof he simply gets out of bed, sits on the floor and drinks hot tea under an umbrella. Perhaps, it seemed to me, people here should be more worried about sleep deprivation than the onslaught of a ‘second wave’ of disaster.

These perceptions have been proven to be grossly miscalculated. The suburbs of Rangoon reveal a darker picture, whilst the storm-affected regions are suffering from starvation and disease.

On a rickety bus ride through Rangoon I met Kyaw Aung Aung, an off-duty shipman heavily involved in aid work. On Friday I met with Aung very early, intending to proceed to a refugee camp to hand out supplies. This ended in disappointment for me. "No Foreigners" is the message drilled into the officers, so despite my cunning disguise in green longjee, a sarong worn by Burmese men for generations, I was politely sent packing along with the bureaucratic formalities.

Disappointed, but not downcast, we returned to Aung's house, from which he proceeded to show me around a neighbouring village in living abject poverty. The dividing line between these polarised habitats was so sudden that this village could conceivably have been someone’s bedraggled garden. Each household we went to delivered the same message: the government are corrupt, terrible human rights abusers and totally inept in this climate of disaster. People want to fight but have no provisions and no training. They are in limbo.

The worst news was painfully obvious to a trained eye. In the markets around downtown Rangoon there are inordinate amounts of warm weather clothing and ponchos, usually spread out over tarpaulins on the ground. These are exactly the same types of donated clothing I saw cluttering the corner of the Myanmar Buddhist Temple in Singapore, from where I flew to Burma. It has been explained to me that supplies sent from abroad have been surreptitiously stolen by soldiers to be sold on the black market. The aid is not reaching the needy. Moreover, corrugated iron sheets are not being administered properly. One small sheet is being sold for 5000 Kyats (five US dollars) a piece – utter corruption. Meanwhile, civilians are receiving only half a litre of water as their ration per day, queuing for hours to receive it. Funerals are further contaminating the water supply around the suburbs, as these traditionally take place in the rivers. All these factors illustrate one common necessity: deliver resources to the right people.

The good news is that local civil society groups, such as Aung's, are allowed to deliver supplies to their people. The other cars in our convoy went in without a problem – it was the foreigner’s vehicle that was held back! Aung says there are 7000 people in his group, but they are not a fully fledged NGO, as this would place them under the scope of the government, effectively making it a GO (Governmental Organisation). They have around 1000 monks on board, but, incidentally, monks are not allowed into the refugee camps. The government are afraid of the blurring of religious and political lines.

Saturday was quite a harrowing ride. My walk with Aung through the destitute village, where we handed water sterilising tablets to a local Red Cross branch, became deeply upsetting. Aung had had too many heartfelt conversations, the longest with some increasingly impassioned monks in a Buddhist monastery, and was clearly shaken by the end. Part of me dre not imagine how horrific conditions in the refugee camp would have been.

Unfortunately, so far as personal endeavours go, there is not much I can accomplish with Aung at the moment, since my foreigner status imposes inevitable limitations. To stay true to my commitment to helping these people, I now work as journalist/editor and website whipping-chief for Nargis Action Group, a local NGO in Rangoon, far from the cyclone-affected Ayeyarwady Delta but close to the present state of affairs. As I am the only native English speaker, my responsibilities have spanned to thank you letters, international requests and yesterday I helped an elderly gentleman down the stairs. It's all go, go, go!

Nargis Action Group has been a reliable presence in the Ayeyarwady Delta. We have a strong infrastructure in the field, with our own Regional Health Centre, clinics, temporary shelters and roaming medics. Swarms of yellow-emblazoned volunteers toil in Pyapon, Bogalay, Dedaye, Labutta and beyond, receiving and distributing supplies every day. Our registered volunteers are accompanied by countless other helpers who are crucial to the relief effort. They have a valuable knowledge of the area and a thirst for work, which we repay with cash-for-work.

The Delta regions are still in a dire state, while aid distribution has struggled to reach some of the remote villages. The news that foreign aid workers had finally been granted access to the disaster-hit areas was met with great enthusiasm (not least by me, as I have thus far been desk-bound), but also scepticism. The latter sentiment has since come to the fore, as General Than Shwe's promise has proved to be another bureaucratic hash-up, even affecting our efforts as a local organisation; the government checkpoints barricading the disaster-zones have become more stringent and time-consuming for our supply-laden trucks.

However, we are not a political organisation! Far from it: since the establishment of Nargis Action Group we have prized the benefits of staying on the right side of the intrusive military force. That is not to say we are pro-government here – no one is pro-government in Burma – but it makes sense to be mindful of our words in this time of urgency. I have had a sentence or two deleted on the grounds that they are too subtly provocative for our website. But I have learnt my lessons – I have to be more subtle! – and have concentrated on writing empathetic pieces to grapple with the conscience of potential donors, seduce their sympathy glands and encourage them to help.

The foreigners, computer geeks and businessmen (I stake a claim to all of these) man our headquarters in Rangoon; maintaining the website and accounts, contacting donors, etc. The office is always a hub of activity, with frequent donors coming by to drop off packages (ranging in size from teeny to titanic), funds, or simply to seek some further information on our organisation. My boss, a German lady named Kerstin, is lovely, brassy and tempestuous all at once. Just what is needed around here, as the Burmese are never shy of a tea break. Perhaps the same would go for me if the tea wasn't so god-awful.

It can be a saddening process at times, and not just because of bad tea. The number of heartbreaking stories that reach my ears and storm-ravaged pictures I must sift through can engender a sorrowful mood. In one instance, I had to choose the 'best' photograph from a whole folder of dead naked figures strewn across landscapes and on riverbanks, leaving me subdued and ponderous for the afternoon. My personality has taken a swift beating, and I have since become a bit of an emotional wreck.

Some of the tales from the night of the storm are nothing short of breathtaking. It is difficult not to enjoy such accounts of daring-do and resourcefulness, although, as with many of these things, they are not devoid of a sombre note. I relish (and simultaneously anguish over) the visual image of an entire village huddling together in a monastery, only to find the next morning that it is the only construction still standing. Meanwhile (I say meanwhile as this was not an isolated case), villagers in a brick nogg building, its roof blown clean off, stood up for almost twelve hours straight, covered up to the neck in water. As the water level rose rapidly in the building, these Burmese people summoned great initiative by placing their children in plastic buckets. The nippers bobbed incessantly through the night, only to emerge the following morning once the water had receded. This image is such a poignant one: babies bobbing in bright buckets around the heads of their grown-up saviours. And all this in the midst of a thunderous cyclone plundering through the sky.

We have had a good deal of success here in the offices of Nargis Action Group, initially with our relief aid distribution, and since with building and reconstruction. This latter initiative is a pressing concern, with both the rains and the postponed first day of school fast approaching. Are lessons to take place in temporary shelters or under individual umbrellas, with students sheltering from the monsoon downpours?

Schools must be rebuilt, especially as village schools in Burma serve many purposes besides education. To any new visitor, they might appear to function as a community hall, kindergarten and hotel all at once; children play, villagers congregate to have meetings, while guests even sleep and eat there in the right circumstances. Unsurprisingly, these villages are desperate to have their schools back, so, for now at least, we are looking to build temporary constructions to function as schools and housing whilst also planning for long-term buildings. We are aiming to construct cyclone shelters like, for example, the ones already existing in Bangladesh, built in the aftermath of their Cyclone Sidr. These would be constructed in areas close to the Bay of Bengal, as that is the area most prone to future storms and flooding.

As for aid relief, we have focused on food distribution, providing shelter materials and water purification measures, and medical care. Rice, noodles, potatoes and oil make up the culinary pongs currently wafting through the delta (Burmese cooking notoriously uses copious amounts of oil - good for killing bugs in the pan but a danger for romantic dinners..). For shelter, we distribute plastic tarpaulins and corrugated galvanised iron sheets to help build temporary shelters, while handing out blankets, candles, flip flops, mosquito nets, etc. Flip flops might seem a curious one, but the number of patients turning up at our clinics with wounded feet created the necessity, as it was further burdening the over-worked nurses and doctors who are busy with tetanus vaccinations, first aid and ad hoc psychological support. Meanwhile, our volunteers have been working with villagers to clean and clear water ponds (large tanks for harvesting rainwater) and also provide for a future chlorinated water supply. As most of the water had been contaminated by flooding and disease, the need for renovation of water purification procedures and a distribution of Aluminium Sulphate tablets was paramount.

A lot of our work in the delta focuses on needs assessment, since it is important to identify the most desperate villages whilst, as much as possible, helping everyone. Some of the more remote villages are extremely difficult to reach in the current climate of destruction so are in grave need of attention. Once our roaming volunteers have allocated a spot, they then determine to whom they should give the food and other supplies for distribution within the village; should it be a monk, the chief or a teacher? We then send out a monitor, who scurries from village to village, making sure that everything is being administered justly. What a lot to think about!

Frustratingly, although we have the most personnel in the delta, plus countless local volunteers, we lack sufficient funding for our substantial plans. We receive donations in kind at all times of the day, but, thus far, hard cash has been thin on the ground. UNICEF and Oxfam, among others, have since sent us supplies, while Action Aid, an international non-governmental fellowship programme, has channelled funds through us from the offset, providing their own volunteers to accompany ours in the field.

This has been a thoroughly interesting and enlightening experience for me so far. It illustrates the necessity of carefully researching where to send aid contributions. A case in point: the reconstruction of new schools is imperative in lieu of the destruction caused by Cyclone Nargis. The new term was due to begin on June 2nd but this has been postponed because most villages in the Ayeyarwady Delta lack temporary shelters, let alone school buildings, to conduct classes. Corrupt construction businesses have grasped a unique opportunity here, and are charging unreasonable prices for building works. The experienced local businessmen here scream, 'Foul Play!', and use their grassroots know-how and connections to seek out cheaper, but equally effectual, options. We have alerted other NGOs to more realistic prices and companies, while continuing our own initiatives.

The future for cyclone-affected families looks bleak. Millions of people have been displaced from their homes, squeezing under flailing plastic tarpaulins in alien villages, their possessions and loved ones nowhere to be found. Households and livelihoods have been shattered. While these people beg for food and plead for work to repair their lives, the desecration of their countryside is visible all around. Paddy fields and farm land are a mess, with contorted water lilies and decaying animal carcasses dotted around the landscape. Most of the Delta’s buffalos and cows were slaughtered by Cyclone Nargis, machinery damaged beyond repair, while stockpiles of seeds were cleared and scattered by the storm and flooding. Even if the resources were still available to toil the land, there would only be a fifty-fifty per cent chance of a decent harvest due to the contaminated, salted water supply. The circumstances look desperate; farmers could toil for months with sub-standard resources and eventually yield an unusable harvest of rice. Farmers have two weeks – the situation is urgent.

The international community seems to have forgotten about Burma. Cyclone Nargis is not news anymore, displaced in peoples’ consciousnesses by earthquakes, typhoons and European football, but it is still news out here. It is still big news. Money is needed, and needed fast, because we can help these people to survive and repair their lives.

See for yourself at www.nargisaction.org. (It's probably still under construction – some of these computer buffs have no appreciation of aesthetics – but if you read any flowery puff pieces with the occasional empathetic detail, it's most likely to be written by me.)

Peenee Potrix dresses up as a bee (& thus disproves God's existence)

2008-08-09T17:28:00.003+01:00

Critically evaluate Frantz Fanon’s contribution to our understanding of contemporary oppression, and to the politics of dissent and resistance

2008-08-09T17:06:00.003+01:00

this essay was written in 2008 for Life, Power, Resistance: Critical Perspectives on a Post-Westphalian Era, an International Relations course at Sussex University

Interpretations of Fanon’s writings are multifarious and frequently misleading. He has been variously cast as a violent revolutionary, a critical psychologist and a repressed homophobe, among other things, none of which can be addressed in the scope of this study. Rather, I take as central Fanon’s insight into the racialisation of oppression, briefly outlining what is meant by this concept before locating it within the colonial moment, in order to draw it into a broader discussion of the failings of European humanism. I argue for its continued relevance both in terms of its explanation of the utility of ‘othering’, and because of the parallel we can draw between the dehumanising humanism that Fanon attacks, and the logic of sovereignty that constitutes ‘Westphalian’ norms. I then go on to consider possible alternatives to accepting this racialised and universalised objectification, echoing Fanon’s suspicion of strategic cultural essentialisms and pointing instead to his advocacy of openness towards the other as a meaningful politics of resistance.

For Fanon, oppression means something more complex than the subjection to violence or the constraining of agency. Oppression is to be denied one’s own humanity: “A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence” (1986:139). It is to negate the claim to be a ‘Man’. In other words, though he tries to master his own humanity, a humanity which has both been promised to him and which he senses in the immensity and depth of his soul (1986:140), he finds instead:

I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors… I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.” (1986:112)

This resonates with Said’s analysis (1978) of the discursive construction of the Orient, itself clearly influenced by Fanon’s account of how the European “had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (1986:111). Fanon’s innovation was to show how this denial is racialised; how it is inscribed on the body. A process of self-composition becomes a construction of the black man according to “a racial epidermal schema,” a “uniform” from which he can never escape (1986:112, 114). The negative stereotypes attached to this epidermis may change, but ‘the fact of blackness’ remains. Fanon will continue to be “overdetermined from without… I am fixed” (1986:116).

Fanon’s work has been tremendously influential for later ‘neo-colonialism’ and Dependency Theory critiques, articulating the injustice of colonial rule and the hypocrisy of “native intellectuals” and post-independence leaders, whilst inspiring a revolutionary fervour in many Third World readers. His last book is a “bible of the decolonisation movement” (Stuart Hall, cited in Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, 1996). Of greater significance for this paper, however, is his characterisation of the colonial world as “a world cut in two”, as “a Manichaean world” (1990:29, 31). Again echoed by Said, Fanon describes how the native other is defined as lack, as being what we are not.

The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers… (1990:32)

This, argues Fanon, is central to the psychology of colonial rule that is internalised by the native. Disrupting this “mentally debilitating” ideology (Gibson 1999:109) is crucial for attaining real independence, hence Fanon’s scathing attacks on new leaders of the new nations, the “spoilt children of yesterday’s colonialism and of today’s national governments” who failed to mount a “real struggle for freedom” to effect the transfer of power (1990:37, 36).

It might be said that Fanon’s highly incisive critique of colonialism has now been rendered somewhat less potent within contemporary contexts. We no longer conceptualise oppression as a struggle between settler and native, and we may be apt to dismiss Fanon’s revolutionary zeal as a mere ‘apostle of violence’, as commentators frequently do (Pithouse 2003:2). However, this colonial Manichaean split has its present manifestations; a discriminatory denial of humanity once again taking a specifically racialised form. Taking just one example, representations of ‘Africa’ portray it as a place of famine, war, disease, genocide and hunger; these appear to be “‘native’ African products” (Taylor 1998:136). We have seen, consumed, and discarded countless black faces in the news, in Oxfam pamphlets, and in advertisements promising that you can ‘make a difference’ for just £2 per month. The accumulation of images of Africa construct a seemingly inconsequential realm of otherness, a reflection of the state of nature Europe is deemed to have long since transcended.

Those hordes of vital statistics, those hysterical masses, those faces bereft of all humanity, those distended bodies which are like nothing on earth, that mob without beginning or end, those children who seem to belong to nobody, that laziness stretched out in the sun, that vegetative rhythm of life – all this forms part of the colonial vocabulary. (Fanon 1990:33; emphasis added)

Of course, this vocabulary serves its purpose. It permits us to remain undisturbed by ongoing structural violence suffered by vast numbers of the world’s population; it enables us to celebrate military interventions, to keep silent at the erosion of civil liberties, to penetrate weak economies with our capital. This much should be clear. What Fanon’s analysis highlights, in fact, is the more contentious observation that this violent dehumanisation is not made up of piecemeal aberrations and individualised acts, but rather is constitutive of European humanism.

III

This is explicit during, though not limited to, the colonial period. The discrepancy between Western discourses on “human dignity”, and the “Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe” (1990:34, 251), is a discrepancy observable today – the most obvious example being calls for ‘democratisation’ and ‘freedom’ whilst deposing recalcitrant leaders or invading uncooperative states. Fanon exhibits a frustration that Europe continues to be held up as the exemplar, as “a paradise close at hand” (1990:41), when all he sees is the most terrible violence. The oppressed subject finds himself in a catch-22: invited to join the ranks of universally equal men whilst simultaneously discovering he has been rendered immobile by that same universality. It is the settler who “makes history and is conscious of making it” (1990:40); his is the plot whereby the native is constructed as the background.

Thus it is not the physical violence done to the native that results in his dehumanisation, nor is it merely the creation of an ideology that can legitimate such violence. For Fanon, it is the assumption of universality which necessitates the subsumption of the colonised subject into a pre-given understanding of humanity, with a pre-defined telos. As such, it may well be the liberal – perhaps even “colour-blind” or “anti-racist” – perspective which actually replicates this racist objectification, as argued by Schmitt (1996) and Lentin (2003). Like overt racism it simply stops at the racialised epidermis, declaring a “disavowal of difference… [a] political raciology, which constantly reinvokes the body while disavowing its primacy” (Ali 2005:166-167; emphasis added). Fanon laments this disavowal which is once again rooted in the invariability of his aspect: “When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my colour. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle” (1986:116). This refusal to engage with the other may be termed “the prejudice of equality”, stripping the other of his otherness (Rasch 2003:140), or what Schmitt calls ‘objectification’ – “a carefully orchestrated and systematic refusal of genuinely human relationships” (1996:36).

We can draw a parallel between this dehumanising humanity and the Westphalian logic of sovereignty. This too paradoxically combines universal equality with particularism, resulting in a system of containment which exercises the externalisation and repression of the Other in the name of “sameness” (Blaney & Inayatullah 2000:32). As Walker (1993) identifies, orthodox international relations theory actively constitutes this “inside/outside” or self/other demarcation insofar as it continues to insist on the primacy of state sovereignty. Sovereignty, like objectification, seems to say: “I am “my own man” and you are yours. We are separate. We do not share with each other; at best we do things alongside each other” (Schmitt 1996:44). And yet, significantly, this recognition rests upon a refusal to entertain challenges to the basic principle of liberal pluralism, namely “an overriding monism, the monism of humanity” (Rasch 2003:136). It denies “the existence of a human substance truly other” (Todorov 1984:42-3), a denial that there can be an Other both equal and different. Western humanism is inseparable from its simultaneous constitution of the inhuman – which takes the form of any such challenge – and therefore from the project of the ‘civilising mission’; the project of “correcting” those who fail to fulfil their human potential (Rasch 2003:137-138). Furthermore, this once again takes on a racialised character, being grounded in the inclusion of the New World as a bestial state-of-nature against which Europe could achieve a ‘bracketing of war’ (Schmitt 2003:142). The European pluriverse relied on externalising the hierarchical relation to extra-European territory (Rasch 2003:127).

What alternatives to this totalising, racialising metaphysics might be offered by Fanon’s work? One immediate counter to a dominating universalism is the reassertion of particularism, exemplified in the contemporary context by arguments for cultural relativism. These seem to challenge dominant actors to live up to the ideal of mutual recognition by refraining from imposing ‘Western’ norms on noncompliant societies. However, this strategy may result in an essentialised authenticity, reducing contestation to an identity politics whose only possible tactic is to demand “recognition” (Lentin 2006). Fanon’s initial seduction by Cesaire’s negritude – “From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me. Negro sculpture! I began to flush with pride. Was this our salvation?” (1986:123) – like contemporary identity politics, ultimately fails to address or indeed challenge the way in which the politicised ‘identity’ in question is itself called into being by a dominant conception of humanity. It reinforces the egocentrism of the European, allowing him to say “We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world… In a way, you reconcile us with ourselves” (Fanon 1986:132).

It also permits the voice of the oppressor to seize upon this strategic essentialism and sublimate it within another teleology, hijacking the self-representation of the oppressed. Fanon accuses Sartre of doing precisely this in his Black Orpheus (1948), denying Fanon the ability to define his own end: “And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me” (1986:134). A similar utilisation can be identified in the advocacy of many contemporary NGOs ‘on behalf’ of the marginalised groups they seek to represent. For example, activists and academics among the Karen hill tribes in Thailand have inadvertently produced what Walker (2001) labels “the Karen Consensus”, trapping the Karen in a fixed primordial identity (sustainable, egalitarian, non-commercial) in order to demand certain rights from the state – to the detriment of those Karen who wish to make other sorts of claims (for government schooling, televisions, trade).

It is this tendency which provokes Fanon to refuse outright any sort of transcendent ideal, to articulate instead a humanism based upon immanent power (Pithouse 2003:10-11).

In opposition to historical becoming, there had always been the unforeseeable… The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself… I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is. It is its own follower. (Fanon 1986:135)

Moulard-Leonard recasts Fanon within a Deleuzian non-dialectical becoming premised on the concept of “Difference-in-itself” and hence the possibility of “radically creative self-alteration” (2005:242-243). It is a transformation which does not necessitate a given end to the process of becoming.

Despite this, however, it is possible to discern in Fanon’s new humanism a latent telos framed by residual assumptions of European humanism, specifically the notions of history-making, progress and self-determination. He declares that to be human is to “introduc[e] invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself” (1990:229); that “no attempt must be made to encase a man, for it is his destiny to be set free” (1990:230). Yet we must historicise the idea that history-making is emancipatory, active, and self-consciously dynamic. Once again, the European encounter with the New World constitutes a formative moment, necessitating a progressivist hierarchy of human societies in which some are more advanced than others, a “dual modality of historical time… events as at once contemporaneous and noncontemporaneous” (Koselleck 1988:249). Furthermore, in the 18th century, Christian linear salvational teleology came together with secular rational prediction to produce the peculiarly modern concept of progress (1988:17); and the Calvinist emphasis on “good works” contributed to the idea that man makes his own history (Weber 1930:xiii). Such Eurocentric values clearly run right through many postcolonial and subalternist efforts which couple ‘agency’ and ‘subjectivity’ in the essentialist-liberal-humanist tradition (O’Hanlon 1988). There may not be space in this humanism for even more radically different conceptions of history-making.

This may be reconciled, however, by the fluidity of Fanon’s approach and his radical commitment to destabilising all fixed identities, and the fluidity of his approach to dialogic communication. He states clearly on the first page of his first book, “I do not come with timeless truths” (1986:9). Thus, rather than seeking to positively define The New Humanity, Fanon’s work permits a new humanity to arise out of every moment where there is a “genuine transcendence of the divisions and hierarchies that push us into unequal spaces and trap us in limited, reductive identities” (Pithouse 2003:18). Although he has often been mistaken for an uncritical advocate of violent revolution, as noted above, and certainly comes across as dismissive of the more incremental social changes or post-colonial (neo-colonial) structures that have characterised many ex-colonies, it would be unfair to characterise Fanon’s revolutionary zeal within a simplistic dichotomy between the evil coloniser and the struggling colonised, in which the principle objective is to destroy (and replace) colonial authority. His method of resisting colonial Manichaeanism is precisely to advocate an openness to the other – an openness echoed by Blaney and Inayatullah in their call for a “critical dialogue” (2004:219), or by a Levinasian “ethics of alterity” (Campbell 1994:477).

Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You? At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness. (Fanon 1986:231-232).

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Pithouse, R. 2003. ‘That the Tool Never Possess the Man: Taking Fanon’s Humanism Seriously’. Available at http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~janzb/afphil/docs/pithouse1.pdf. Accessed 8/2/08

Rasch, W. 2003. ‘Human Rights as Geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form of American Supremacy’ in Cultural Critique 54, 120-147

Said, E. 1978. Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul)

Sartre, J-P. 1948. ‘Orphée Noir’ in L. Senghor (ed.) L’Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France)

Schmitt, C. 2003 [1950]. The Nomos of the Earth in the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press)

Schmitt, R. 1996. ‘Racism and Objectification: Reflections on Themes from Fanon’ in L. R. Gordon, T. D. Sharpley-Whiting and R. T. White (eds.) Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell)

Taylor, J. 1998. Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press)

Todorov, T. 1984. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row)

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1996. Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask [film], directed by I. Julien

To what extent is the neoliberal paradigm limiting in the study of ‘offshore’?

2008-08-09T11:51:00.004+01:00

this essay was written in 2007 for International Political Economy II, an International Relations course at Sussex University

Neoliberal economists typically ignore the existence and role of the offshore economy in their analysis. This is an extraordinary omission, which speaks volumes about their political values.
(Christensen 2007:216)

This essay first critically examines the construction of ‘offshore’ both within the parameters of a neoliberal analysis (1) and in light of some of its critiques, looking initially at the broader context of economic globalisation’s supposedly inexorable advance, and then at offshore understood as a competitive state strategy in natural response to the exigencies of the global market. I then explore moments of disjuncture that threaten the smooth functioning of the neoliberal narrative, arguing that a genealogical or more broadly poststructuralist/constructivist methodology is far more useful to the study of offshore than neoliberalism’s ideological postulations. I specifically interrogate the notions that offshore represents an outcome or phase of a linear teleology of global finance, and indeed that the phenomenon of offshore is a mechanistic, ‘automatic’ development taking place outside of human or political volition. Finally, I consider the role of the neoliberal framework in the process of offshore’s ‘moral dislocation’, concluding that neoliberalism seeks to frame highly political and morally-charged operations within a bland discourse that insists on the neutrality of the market. Thus it is necessarily flawed in its contribution to the study of offshore, because it attempts to disguise the invariably political and pragmatic functions of offshore in the contemporary global political economy.

[neoliberal narratives, and other stories]

The present preoccupation with the theme of ‘globalisation’ among IPE scholars and other contemporary discourses tends to construct offshore as something which reflects, or indeed exemplifies, the increasing pressures towards deregulation, the rise of finance, and the corresponding decline of the state (in other words, the increasing subservience of the once sovereign state to global capital). An observable demarcation is drawn: first, the postwar Bretton Woods international order of “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie 1982), characterised perhaps somewhat nostalgically as the era of regulation and the general ability of states to exert some form of control over capital; the Fordist ‘social-compromise’ in which state sovereignty could be used to secure certain obligations from business and finance. Second, the international order’s subsequent evolution from the late 1970s onwards to the present neoliberal or post-industrial era, in which global capital has thrown off its state-imposed shackles to become the “mastering force” (Helleiner 1993:20) in world politics. According to one prominent commentator, “[l]ike a phoenix risen from the ashes, global finance took flight and soared to new heights of power and influence in the affairs of nations” (Cohen 1996:268). This development is presented as a natural progression, in distinctly linear terms; from the local to the national to the transnational (for such an evolutionary narrative, see for example Martin 1994:255). It is something bound up with the inevitable advancement of humankind and its increasingly efficient and superior technologies of communication. Furthermore, to a great extent, globalisation is seen as something apolitical and beyond our control – either as individuals or as national governments.

[T]he evolution of the international financial system… characterized by the acceleration of international capital movements … [has] challenged the capacity of the state to provide effective governance not only of financial markets themselves, but also of economic affairs generally.
(Cerny 1994:332)

Within this broader structure, then, the presence of offshore centres and tax havens – characterised by low regulation and low taxation – is understood to exert a downward pressure on governments, compelling them to keep regulation and corporate taxation low (Johns and Le Marchant 1993). This naturally undermines the sovereign ability of the nation-state to make policy, wherever policy objectives conflict with the need to maintain conditions that attract investment. In business circles and neoliberal thought generally, this development is welcomed as global capital’s somewhat automatic response to the “myriad of taxes and regulations” it is forced to negotiate (Hampton and Abbott 1999:13), and as evidence of governments’ slow adaptation to the requirements of global business. Though it is not necessarily accurate to claim that neoliberal scholars and policy-makers ‘ignore’ the presence and role of offshore, it is certainly true that, as far as possible, offshore is incorporated into existing frameworks of analysis – it becomes “part of the neo-liberal ideology of ‘deregulation’” (Picciotto 1999:64) – rather than presenting a reason to revise those frameworks. For example, despite the obvious logical inconsistencies that arise from a simplistic analogy between the firm and the state, prominent neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman seek to apply unproblematically the notion of free ‘competition’, as a mechanism to maximise efficiency, to the state.

Competition among national governments in the public services they provide and in the taxes they impose, is every bit as productive as competition among individuals or enterprises in the goods and services they offer for sale and the prices which they offer.
(Friedman 2001)

Outside of neoliberal and business circles, such developments are often lamented rather than celebrated; however, significantly, even critical accounts tend to lapse into the same determinism exhibited in the analyses cited above. Global capital remains the prime mover, its internal dynamic propelling it further and further from any state control, rendering it increasingly able to “effectively to cast judgement on the fiscal and monetary policies of nation states themselves through the disciplinary fear of capital flight” (Hampton and Abbott 1999:2). This notion of the “capture of the state” (Christensen and Hampton 1999) or the “competition state” (Cerny 1997) resonates with Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, in which he treats ‘money’ as something essentially abstract and which can therefore manipulate human geographies and territorialities – it “has no definite relationship to space: it can exercise its effects upon the most remote areas” (1990:504). Offshore, Picciotto notes, is understood as “an expression of the limits that capital can impose on the forms and functions of the state” (1999:48).

The danger of such representations, however, is their tendency to dichotomise ‘state’ and ‘capital’ too simplistically, without serious investigation into the historicity and complexity of these two naturalised categories. They also seem to characterise the market, finance, or capital more broadly “as an autonomous powerful agency” (de Goede 2005:4) – in other words, as something separate from the human and collective subjectivities which produce and sustain it (see Roberts 1994:91). This is both ahistorical and disempowering, since it seeks to present as natural or ‘technical’ certain power practices which not only find their legitimation in human discursive practices, but also clearly benefit certain groups of people at the expense of others – as Scholte notes, “offshore finance has been largely reserved to large corporations and so-called high net worth individuals” (2005:21; see also Palan 2003:187). Any meaningful critique of this system, then, must interrogate not only the material practices of a system which appears unjust or amoral, but also the discursive practices which reinforce and legitimise it. Narratives of ‘globalisation’ and offshore finance lose their analytical value once they become ideologies or “legends”, identifiable because they run “far too smoothly” (Auerbach, cited in Shapiro 1993:56).

[the pertinence of poststructuralism]

International Political Economy remains one area of IR which has yet to embrace poststructuralist thinking wholeheartedly, or even engage with it in a serious way (de Goede 2003). Many IPE scholars do not recognise its value, arguing that postmodernist preoccupations with discourse and knowledge practices are of limited use to a discipline characterised and constrained by certain empirical and material realities (see, for example, Laffey 2000:441). As Campbell notes, power has become conceptualised in mainstream IPE as “a commodity to be wielded by agents” (1996:18), in contrast to poststructuralist theorisations which understand power as constitutive of social relationships and bound up with knowledge and discourse. Yet scholars who dismiss poststructuralist approaches on the grounds that they deal exclusively with discourse present a mistaken characterisation of one central tenet (2): namely that discourse is constitutive of material practices – “[t]o understand it simply as a discourse is to misunderstand discourse’s materiality” (Thrift 2001:430). For example, neoliberal narratives which posit the actuality (and inevitability) of the ‘globalisation’ process in fact materialise and legitimise that very process through the normalisation and repetition of otherwise banal concepts such as ‘going global’ or ‘global strategies’, therefore having a ‘real’ effect on actual processes and decisions made in business models, financial practices, law, and government. These discourses are then validated by a constructed ‘reality’ which, in circular fashion, then reinforces the validity of the discourse. The appearance of ‘truth’ thus “resides in the enhancement of the feeling of power” (Nietzsche 1967:290), which masks the utilitarian meanings of truths.

Orthodox approaches to historical phenomena – which construct such ‘legends’ as those described above – tend to first typologise a particular structure or reify a particular process or idea, before reading history backward in order to provide the teleological narrative to explain its realisation. This kind of approach “aims at dissolving the singular event into an ideal continuity… events are reduced to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning… We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities” (Foucault 1987:231). Genealogy, by contrast, (see Nietzsche 1998 [1886]; 1969 [1887]; and Foucault 1987) as a historical method developed by poststructuralist scholars, seeks out the suppressed alternatives; the historical contingencies; the discursive foundations for what is now perceived as natural or inevitable. Thus if ‘offshore’ can be revealed to be the production of conscious, deliberate and ongoing reconstructions of statehood, then uncritical narratives of globalisation and deregulation can be greatly undermined. Furthermore, this may enable a radical understanding of knowledge/power practices in the global political economy that invests criticism and discursive deconstruction with transformative potential.

Examples abound in which the simplistic neoliberal narrative is called into question or, alternatively, rendered entirely irrelevant. We can point, for instance, to Abbott’s (1999) investigation into the offshore financial centre Labuan, the “pet project” of Malaysia’s ex-prime minister Dr. Mahathir. He details how the Malaysian government poured resources into Labuan’s development, and yet how its central motivations are not primarily rational-economic; nor can they simply be attributed to a strategy of accommodation to global financial exigencies as implemented by the archetypal ‘competition state’. Rather, key ideological factors must be acknowledged, such as the fact that East Malaysia (where Labuan is located) is thought to lag behind the west of the country in terms of economic development, or more broadly the context of ‘Vision 2020’, Mahathir’s expressed intention to make Malaysia a fully ‘developed’, ‘modern’ and industrialised nation by the year 2020. Reputation also remains a primary concern – as one commentator put it, “if you’re not one of the top 200 banks in the world, they’re not interested” (cited in Abbott 1999:195) – and potential operators are subjected to strict criteria to establish their credentials. Further motivations include the development of Islamic banking and Islamic offshore finance, and also certain nationalistic or developmental concerns: namely, particular benefits generated for the Malaysian economy, such as the creation of a captive market and the improvement of Malaysia’s financial system more generally (1999:197-202). The significance of such factors is highlighted by the relatively negligible impact of Labuan’s OFC status for island employment, or by the (similarly negligible) proportional contribution of offshore finance to both Labuan’s economy and Malaysia’s economy on the whole. In turn, the motivations behind international banks’ decisions to commit to the Labuan OFC project should also not necessarily be viewed in purely economistic terms; in fact many were concerned to show visible support for the project in order to demonstrate political commitment to Malaysia’s (or Mahathir’s) overall developmental vision.

Indeed, any investigation committed to disturbing the too-smooth narratives of globalisation and deregulation will find that such pragmatic, non-economistic considerations are not, as the orthodox neoliberal might have you believe, an exception. Sovereignty is not necessarily being undermined; the state is not necessarily becoming subservient to the exigencies of global capital. In fact, as Palan (1998) argues, offshore exemplifies and makes explicit the palimpsest of pragmatic – and manifestly political – processes by which statehood and sovereignty are being continually reconstructed. ‘Sovereignty’ itself, which in contemporary discourses tends to be conceptualised as having a fixed (or fixable) meaning, is shown to have gone from representing a religious claim to the land, to embodying an independent, secular right over a certain territory. Later still it became bound up with emerging ideas about the ‘nation’ – the “imagined community” (Anderson 1981) – as agentive force, the symbol of national ‘self-determination’. And this was further combined with juridical capabilities, or ‘the right to write the law’. The present moment of ‘offshore’ marks yet another reconstruction of sovereignty, characterised by the “increasing use of sovereignty as a commercial asset” (Palan 1998:629-30). Palan introduces the notion of “sovereign bifurcation” (1998:627) to describe the strategy states employ in order to simultaneously pursue two contradictory objectives: the “traditional” forms and functions of statehood, and the “commitment to transnational capitalism” (2003:11) – without undermining state ‘sovereignty’ itself.

The very concept of abstracted (rather than literally geographical) ‘shores’ is also revealed to have developed over time in a piecemeal and instrumental fashion (Palan 1998:635-7). The principle of the Law of the Sea, which only became widely accepted around the beginning of the nineteenth century, was preceded for several centuries by actual claims and unilateral assertions over particular waters – thus, and for quite pragmatic reasons, the notion of sovereignty came to incorporate the important precedent of separation between literal, physical boundaries and juridical or ‘fictional’ boundaries. This also provided a model for the division, alteration, and limitation of ‘sovereignty’. A further example of particular import for the study of offshore is the concept of corporate ‘residence’, which originates in the fragmentary legal-pragmatic response to the proliferation of corporations towards the beginning of the twentieth century, and the need for the state (in this case, the UK) to demand taxes from companies conducting their “real business… where the central management and control actually abides” (Lord Loreburn [1906), cited in Picciotto 1999:49). However, such definitions are contestable from place to place, and the system has to be negotiated using a sort of trial-and-error methodology, in order to deal with flexible avoidance tactics of increasing complexity. “The tax authorities of the developed countries have done their best to combat each device as it became known… [but] they have hardly challenged the fertile minds and flexibility of the ‘tax planning’ industry” (Picciotto 1999:59). Significantly, the developments outlined above do not represent an evolutionary narrative; no latent telos underlies each progression. Rather offshore “took shape over time in bits and pieces and in a series of discrete policy decisions” (Palan 1998:640).

III

[offshore as moral dislocation]

Why, then, should neoliberal (and other) accounts present the construction of offshore as a natural development? Why intentionally relinquish control over a system of such manifest importance? The answers to these questions appear just as instrumental, pragmatic and discrete as those motivations which ultimately contributed to the very creation of the offshore world. It has already been noted that offshore finance is in practice almost exclusively reserved for the extremely wealthy; high net wealth individuals and successful corporations display a remarkable tendency to consider themselves somehow above, or external to, national or social (and, some would say, ‘moral’) obligations such as taxation (Christensen and Hampton 1999:170). One commentator (Baker 2005) estimates the ‘uphill’ flow of capital – that which flows from poor to rich countries through the activities of wealthy individuals and companies – at roughly US$500 billion every year, dwarfing the volume of aid flowing ‘downhill’. Another study (Boyce and Ndikumana 2005) asserts that sub-Saharan Africa is in fact a net creditor to the rest of the world, since “external assets (i.e. the stock of flight capital), exceed external liabilities (i.e. external debt)” (Christensen 2007:218-9). Christensen explains this apparent paradox by noting that whilst the assets are privatised, largely channeled through or existing within offshore finance and banking centres, the debts exist in the public realm, falling upon the public institutions of government. He further highlights how activities traditionally understood as ‘corrupt’ and ‘criminal’ account for approximately 35 per cent of transnational “dirty-money” flows from poorer states; and yet how ‘acceptable’ practices such as “illicit commercial activity, incorporating mispricing, abusive transfer pricing and fake and fraudulent transactions account for 65 per cent of such flows” (Christensen 2007:219). Clearly, what Thrift and Leyshon term the “regulatory dislocation” of offshore (1997:61) may aptly be called a ‘moral dislocation’ also. As Roberts notes, “[f]ast-paced and complex international financial practices can slide between something that may be illegal according to one jurisdiction’s laws but perfectly legal according to another’s” (1999:133).

The moral dislocation of offshore, however, goes beyond this relativism created by the inconsistencies between different jurisdictions. What characterises the neoliberal conception of offshore is its framing of the kinds of processes outlined above as non-moral, as governed and motivated by basic market logic, or the logic of capital. This logic is seen to be “fairer”, as Einaudi (1928:35-6) asserts, in reference to the example of tax havens exerting pressure on other jurisdictions to reduce tax levels to the lowest rate possible. “Tax is a cost of doing business so, naturally, a good manager will try to manage this cost and the risks associated with it. This is an essential part of good corporate governance” (P.J. Henehan, senior tax partner of Ernst & Young, cited in the Irish Times, 7/5/04). Indeed the whole discourse of offshore and global financial investment, despite being presented as rational, even mechanical, is couched in a particular ethic of rights and freedoms which transcend the nation-state and its particular jurisdiction. As Palan (2003:14) emphasises, highly ideological assumptions underlie presentations of natural ‘rights’: of human ‘rights’ (the absolute freedom of the investor); sovereign ‘rights’ (the freedom of states, even little ones, to make their own laws); and even corporate ‘rights’ (the freedom to move elsewhere to avoid what is deemed to be excessive regulation or taxation). The global political order becomes “premised upon the dominance of the investor and reinforcing the protection of his or her property rights. The mobile investor becomes the sovereign political subject” (Gill 1998:25). Tax becomes a “cost” rather than a fundamental social obligation.

It is to this depoliticisation of finance, necessitating not “some sort of lapse or mistake but an express operation of… technologization: a reduction to calculability” (Edkins 1999:1), and the willful disregard to the social and political implications of financial activity, that I refer when I speak of the ‘moral dislocation’ of offshore. The insistence that offshore represents the subordination of the state to financial markets is itself ideological: as with the very origins of modern accounting and bookkeeping, the materiality of offshore structures – and not just the knowledge about it – has been discursively constituted “through the reiteration of norms” (Butler 1993:10). In other words, these are performative discourses; they tend “to create what [they] purported to describe” (Poovey 1998:56; original emphasis). Attempts to present it otherwise, to dislocate material practices from discourse and morality, have a clear ideological motive:

offshore provides the perfect legitimization of the goals of neoliberalism in terms of pragmatic social aims, defined as “what we can reasonably expect under the circumstances,” conveniently forgetting that the realm of possibility is a socially constructed one.
(Palan 2003:15)

Rather than attributing the creation of offshore to a depersonalised dynamic – the transcendental power of capital – a poststructuralist approach demonstrates a constructivist insistence on human agency. This is crucial to any critical interpretation of offshore, since it necessitates a historicity which “means that global changes are not an inexorable economic process” (Picciotto 1999:43; emphasis added). To answer the question posed at the beginning of this section – why consciously seek to remove human agency and control from the global financial system? – it is clear that neoliberal discourses serve to obscure the pragmatic and manifestly political functions of offshore in the global political economy, whilst legitimising certain practices and ideological assumptions which they seek to present as natural and apolitical. As such, the neoliberal paradigm is not merely of limited use to the study of offshore; in fact, it must be decisively contested.

(1) In using the term ‘neoliberalism’ I refer only intermittently to individual ‘neoliberal’ writers: throughout the essay I use the expression more generally to denote certain elements of neoliberal doctrine of particular pertinence to this study, such as the belief in deregulation and minimal state intervention, the abstraction of finance from social or political volition, or the adamantly materialist approach to a system manifestly more “fictitious” than any before it (see for example Roberts 1991:91; Picciotto 1999:48). These of course influence and characterise other theoretical approaches that would be loth to find themselves under the ‘neoliberal’ banner; these may too come under criticism, though I refer to them as ‘orthodox’ or ‘mainstream’.
(2) Although ‘poststructuralism’ and ‘postmodernism’ are at best umbrella terms used to describe a broad range of theories and theorists (some of whom reject such labelling outright) and cannot therefore accurately be said to collectively present any coherent central “tenets”, it is possible to attribute certain key themes or preoccupations common generally to ‘poststructuralist’ IR and IPE. Namely, the notion that power and knowledge mutually produce one another, and the rejection of a universal or objective reality or truth – intellectual and other endeavours are held to be “battlefields of contending representations” (Devetak 1996:185). Thus dominant discursive ‘truths’ constitute material ‘realities’.

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To what extent is ‘crony capitalism’ a reasonable explanation for recent experiences of the East Asian ‘developmental state’?

2008-08-09T11:40:00.003+01:00

this essay was written in February 2007 for International Political Economy II, an International Relations course at Sussex University

The main problem in East Asia was not macroeconomic, but structural. Deep flaws afflicted the financial system. They include excessive leverage, and a banking system based excessively on directed lending, connected lending and other collusive personal relationships. Ten years ago, finance experts called it relationship banking, and thought it might help to minimize “problems of asymmetric information and incentive incompatibility;” today we call it “crony capitalism”… the rules of economics turn out to apply to East Asia similarly to elsewhere.
(Frankel 1998:2)

Despite being a view propagated by numerous official bodies such as the US Treasury and the IMF, as well as numerous neoliberal scholars, the notion that the 1997 crisis was all “the result of some politicians in Bangkok who got their hands caught in the cookie jar” (International Herald Tribune 14/08/98) is both empirically flawed and theoretically dubious. This essay first outlines the orthodox or neoclassical understanding of ‘cronyism’ and its pejorative connotations, before considering the ‘developmental state’ paradigm that emerged with East Asia’s ‘miracle’ growth. I then attempt to recast the concept of cronyism within its historical and cultural context, dispensing with neoclassical ideas of ‘correct’ economic practice and notions that crony capitalism itself represents either an explanation or a necessary outcome. In other words, this essay is not so much concerned with the extent to which such practices did or did not contribute both to the high growth rates in the region and later to the 1997 crisis; rather it asks how we should view cronyism – as a deviation from the ‘natural’ workings of the market system, or as somehow constitutive of particular variants of capitalist practice? I stress the value of a comprehensive institutionalist approach, as opposed to the neoclassical vs. developmental state inter-paradigmatic debate.

THE NEOCLASSICAL VIEW

[cronyism as deviance]

Like many neoliberals, Frankel (1998) concludes – somewhat triumphantly – that the East Asian crisis proved the Anglo-American economic model to be the most successful after all, which in turn demonstrates that the neoclassical ‘rules’ of economics do apply universally. From this perspective ‘crony capitalism’, a term used to describe a variety of practices including nepotism, preferential treatment, favouritism, or more generally “forms of trust violation that can occur whenever a state tries to manipulate incentives or, in other ways, alter market outcomes” (Johnson 1998:654), is perceived to be a deviation from liberal or neoclassical standards like transparency, regulatory frameworks, and competition policy. The dirigiste state represents not an alternative model of political economic conduct, but a failure to institutionalise these universally applicable norms (Hughes 1999). This ideology is premised on the separation of capital and state, on a system in which the free market provides the most efficient and fair allocation of resources. Thus cronyism is not only imbricated with ‘corruption’ – defined as the abuse or appropriation of public roles and resources for private benefit (Robinson 1998:4) – and therefore subject to all the moral associations of deviance and theft; it also exemplifies a model of capitalism characterised by the intermingling of the otherwise pristine spheres of public and private, by excessive state intervention in the economy with ‘market distorting’ structural consequences. There is assumed to be a negative correlation between economic and financial liberalisation, and the incidence of corruption (World Bank 1997), whilst cronyist practices are perceived as fundamentally unsustainable – the worm in the apple that would inevitably have undermined the Asian ‘miracle’ sooner or later.

THE ‘DEVELOPMENTAL STATE’ PARADIGM

[cronyism as ‘culture’, or a necessary evil]

An alternative view within mainstream discourses heralded the Asian ‘miracle’ as counterevidence to the dependentistas’ critiques of the capitalist world system, arguing that state-directed development was indeed possible – and thus there is some reluctance to dispense entirely with the notion of Asian economic success. Neumann admits that cronyism’s “impact has not always been benign as recent events persuasively showed”, but argues that nevertheless the vertical patron-client relationships which, for him, characterise the region can in fact be conducive to economic growth despite micro-economic ‘distortions’ – for example by maintaining conditions of political stability so that “insulated technocrats” are free to pursue conservative economic policies (2002:11). This kind of interpretation posits a very different idea about how the market should be organized in relation to the state, implying that East Asian economies, in “co-joining private ownership with state guidance” (Woo-Cumings 1999:2), have demonstrated that the public/private distinction fundamental to neoclassicism need not necessarily be upheld. Lee and Naya (cited in Moon and Prasad 1998:17-8) describe these Asian state/society or government/private enterprise networks as actually integrated into a “quasi-internal organization” characterised by “extended bounded rationality, reduced opportunism and uncertainty, reduced small-number indeterminacies, better information, and a group-oriented atmosphere” (Lee 1992:193). This exemplifies the ‘developmental state’ model, which emphasises endogenously generated growth created by, for example, state-directed interventionist or protectionist measures, in contrast to the neoclassical stress on orienting economies to the exogenous imperatives of the world market.

Within this paradigm there is a tendency to excuse cronyist or corrupt practices as somehow indigenous to Asian societies, and therefore permissible insofar as they continue to promote economic growth. There is an attempt to remove the pejorative connotations associated with such practices, pointing out the inappropriateness of applying neoclassical assumptions about the nature of motivation and exchange to societies generally characterized not by the atomistic individualism and horizontal relationship ties of Western post-industrial societies, but rather by a more collectivist model in which vertical patronage networks remain predominant. In these contexts, exchanges are not necessarily contractual, nor are they necessarily regulated by an impersonal rationalist-legal framework (Dean 1999). In this view

crony capitalism was not the intent but a by-product of the structural characteristics of the Asian-type economies. These structures include cartelization of the keiretsu-chaebol variety, bank-based systems of capital supply, mercantilism and protectionism vis-à-vis external economies, and rule by bureaucratic elites despite a pretence of democracy. The intent of these structures was to enrich the nations of East Asia, not to meet consumer demand, global efficiency, individual choice, or any of the other motives posited by neoclassical economics.
(Johnson 1998:655)

DIVERGENCE, OR DIFFERENCE?

[an institutionalist approach]

The problem, however, in the representation of cronyism according to both analytical perspectives outlined above, is that they possess severely limited explanatory value. Each remains preoccupied with notions of success and failure, seeking to account first for the East Asian states’ miraculous growth despite their apparent disregard for certain liberal fundamentals, and then for a crisis which in different ways threatened to undermine both perspectives. Indeed, “[i]ndicting crony capitalism for the crash of 1997 is like blaming the Roman empire for its fall: in that case, you should also praise it for its long success” (Godement 1999:55). Furthermore, each typologises a model or norm which necessitates too-broad generalisations and reinforces the state/market dichotomy. Thus ideological factors and normative concerns are here inseparable from theorising about the East Asian experience, and any such analyses thus tend to be incomplete. As Moon and Prasad argue, “we must realign the ontological foundations of the East Asian political economy” (1998:19), advocating a more broadly institutionalist approach. This methodology rejects more orthodox notions of universally applicable models through which to interpret state and market behaviour; insisting that political economy is inseparable from the social institutions in which it is embedded. It challenges not only the state/market dichotomy, but also the separation of culture, belief, legitimisation and ideology from the study of political economic processes. From this perspective cronyism must be viewed not as deviant behaviour from some established pattern, but rather as the crystallisation of different institutions, structures and practices which are continually interacting and synthesising (Clark and Chan 1998).

In fact, the very separation of state and market – i.e. of economic and political modes of authority – in Anglo-American and European societies, by which the state as a rational-legal authority combined with a bureaucratic administration took on its ostensibly public character (rationalising currency, taxation etc.), has been shown to be a process both historically and geographically specific (see for example Silberman 1993; Teschke 2003). And in fact the economic/political separation itself is highly dubious, since much recent historical materialist scholarship details how what is taken to be a natural or universal phenomenon is in fact a socially constructed distinction which serves to obscure the inherently political or power-based nature of economic or market transactions (1) (Wood 1995; Rosenberg 1994). Furthermore, and of greatest import for this study, in no sense can it necessarily be replicated elsewhere: as Hamilton-Hart (2002) points out, the gradual process of state-rationalisation in Southeast Asia (with the exception of Siam/Thailand perhaps) was a process bound up with the political, administrative-bureaucratic and cultural institutions of colonisation and the processes by which formal independence was achieved, in addition to the cultural and religious institutions that already existed.

So, rather than seek to draw generalisable conclusions and prescriptions, we can note important differences in how ‘crony capitalism’ manifests itself in the experiences of different East Asian societies. For example, the Marcos and Suharto regimes in The Philippines and Indonesia respectively have been characterised as ‘client-pathological’ (Clark and Chan 1998:27;36), whereby a ‘weak’ state or government permits manipulation of the economy by powerful groups, as opposed to the ‘client-paternalistic’ state-society complex evident in countries such as Malaysia. Here a “constitutional bargain” between Malay political elites and Chinese business elites has been enshrined in policy and law, with elite-mass relations best described as ‘feudal’, patrimonial and authoritarian (Case 1998:153) – an innovative method of exercising control over a highly pluralistic society (2). In this very stable regime, “UMNO (3) elites, granting the state licences and contracts that sustained Chinese business, in turn received campaign contributions, “secret funds,” and memberships on the boards of Chinese-owned companies. Top Chinese business people, for their part, were given some political voice through the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) in the governing coalition” (Case 1998:151). Still more forms of what has been broadly characterised as Asian ‘crony capitalism’ are evident in the patriarchal Chinese Confucian models in Hong Kong and Taiwan, promoting strong familial ties, and in the more feudal Confucian traditions of Japan and South Korea, supporting large corporate cartelisations such as the keiretsu and chaebol (Clark and Chan 1998:31-2).

Clearly, then, the relationship between cronyism and economic growth must be wrenched away from its causationalist moorings, and interpreted with reference to factors such as religion, demography and colonial history, just as much as to individual policymakers and state strategies. ‘Crony capitalism’ represents a theoretically and empirically inadequate explanation for either the Asian miracle or the crisis, or indeed the specific natures of individual societies, and its continued, habitual usage tells us more about those employing the term than it accurately reflects a reality.

(1) And indeed, state-market relations in the US and Europe are by no means clean of the supposedly corrupting influences of cronyist practices (see for example Shorrock 2002 for a discussion on the Carlyle group, or more generally van der Pijl 1998), suggesting that cronyism and the overlapping of political and market spheres may in fact be a normal behavioural tendency under capitalism, and not a deviation. Given this, the stereotype of Asian ‘crony capitalists’ can only be viewed as a hypocritical and vaguely racist representation – as Dr Mahathir of Malaysia suggests, speculating on the prospect of Malaysia implementing IMF-advised policy reforms along neoliberal lines: “there will not be any giant Bumiputra [lit. ‘people of the earth’ – generally used to refer to the Malays, who benefit from favourable treatment under Malaysian economic policy] companies. And we will be happy as there will not be any more Bumiputra ‘billionaires’ and ‘millionaires’ with their Mercedes, private jets and luxury yachts. All those who are accused of being political leaders’ cronies will be got rid [of]… The foreign workers will earn high wages. They will in turn be the millionaires and billionaires with the Mercedes, private aircrafts and luxury boats” (Mahathir 1998:61).
(2) The Chinese ‘minority’ constitutes nearly a third of the total population.
(3) UMNO is the United Malay National Organisation – the Malay-dominated main political party.

Bibliography
Case, W. 1998. ‘Elite Strategy and Regime Type in Southeast Asia’ in S. Chan, C, Clark and D. Lam (eds.) Beyond the Developmental State: East Asia’s Political Economies Reconsidered (Houndmills: Macmillan)
Clark, C. and Chan, S. 1998. ‘Market, State, and Society in Asian Development’ in S. Chan, C, Clark and D. Lam (eds.) Beyond the Developmental State: East Asia’s Political Economies Reconsidered (Houndmills: Macmillan)
Dean, G. 1999. ‘East Asia and the Roots of the Economic Crisis’; accessed 24/02/07, available at http://www.okusi.net/garydean/works/eastasiancrisis.html
Frankel, J. 1998. ‘The Asian Model, The Miracle, The Crisis and the Fund', Paper delivered at the US International Trade Commission; accessed 24/02/07, available at http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~jfrankel/eacritc.pub.pdf
Godement, F. 1999. The Downsizing of Asia (London: Routledge)
Hamilton-Hart, N. 2002. Asian States, Asian Bankers: Central Banking in Southeast Asia (London: Cornell University Press)
Hughes, H. 1999. ‘Crony capitalism and the East Asian currency and financial ‘crises’’ in Policy, 15:3, 3-9
Johnson, C. 1998. ‘Economic crisis in East Asia: the clash of capitalisms’ in Cambridge Journal of Economics, 22, 653-61
Lee, C. 1992. ‘The Government, Financial System and Large Private Enterprises in the Economic Development of South Korea’ in World Development, 20, 187-97
Mahathir, M. 1998. Currency Turmoil (Petaling Jaya: Limkokwing Integrated)
Moon, C. and Prasad, R. 1998. ‘Networks, Politics, and Institutions’ in S. Chan, C, Clark and D. Lam (eds.) Beyond the Developmental State: East Asia’s Political Economies Reconsidered (Houndmills: Macmillan)
Neumann, F. 2002. ‘Curse or Blessing? Patronage and Economic Policy-Making in Southeast Asia’, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Working Paper (Washington: SAIS Working Paper Series)
Robinson, M. 1998. ‘Corruption and Development: An Introduction’ in M. Robinson (ed.) Corruption and Development (London: Frank Cass)
Rosenberg, J. 1994. The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso)
Silberman, B. 2002. Cages of Reason: The Rise of the Rational State in France, Japan, the United States, and Great Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press)
Teschke, B. 2003. The myth of 1648: class, geopolitics, and the making of modern international relations (London: Verso)
van der Pijl, K. 1998. Transnational Classes and International Relations (London: Routledge)
Woo-Cumings, M.1999. The Developmental State (London: Cornell University Press)
Wood, E. 1995. Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
World Bank. 1997. World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (New York: Oxford University Press)

Newspaper articles
International Herald Tribune 14/08/98. T. Fuller. ‘Asian Crisis: More Than Just Crony Capitalism’.
The Nation 14/03/02. T. Shorrock. ‘Crony Capitalism Goes Global’.

Is Marx relevant to international relations today?

2008-08-09T09:46:00.003+01:00

this essay was written in 2007 for Classical Political Theory and International Relations at Sussex University

Marx – and by implication, Marxism – is frequently disregarded, arguably needing “to be returned to the nineteenth century where many suspected he had always belonged” (Gamble 1999:128). This opposition comes not only from those who have an interest in perpetuating capitalist social relations, but also more recently from the Left, contending that the materialist premise of historical materialism makes it ill-equipped to conceptualise other forms of exploitation and domination. However, there is clearly no definitive Marxism, and there may not even be a definitive Marx. This essay focuses specifically on a ‘neo-Marxist’ theorisation of the capitalist manifestation of power, evaluating its implications for international relations. I first outline the capitalist redefinition of power, arguing that the economic/political divide constitutes a systemic continuity making Marx’s critique still highly relevant. I then assess the quite formidable implications for contemporary international relations, both as a critical interrogation of the norms of orthodox IR, and for the way we presently theorise the ‘international’, looking specifically at the ‘globalisation debate’. I conclude that one central problem remains regarding this Marxist theorisation of the international: namely that the normative concern of historical materialism can engender hostility towards contemporary ‘postmodern’ themes, which may ultimately prove an intractable obstacle to further intellectual enquiry.

Power depoliticised: the uniqueness of capitalism

Capitalism’s redefinition of the ‘political’ derives from a real shift in the nature of power, which formed a fundamental part of the historical transitions to capitalism in those European societies that were first to do so. Recent scholarship, using Marx’s understanding of the economic/political dichotomy as an artificial differentiation of capitalist power, has begun to theorise alternative accounts of the process of modern state-formation and its attendant concepts of ‘state’, ‘civil society’ and ‘market’, situating their construction within the historically specific development of the capitalist system. Teschke’s analysis emphasises the uniqueness of this manifestation of power, noting that in pre-capitalist Western Europe social relations of property were at once both ‘political’ and ‘economic’. Those who exercised direct control over production processes were part of a system of “vertical relations of subordination and horizontal relations of co-ordination” (2006:536) forming a highly complex power-system that was far more precarious than the later manifestation of capitalist power, since sovereignty was fragmented or “parcellised” (Anderson 1974) and authority was “personalised” or direct (Teschke 2006:538). The construction of the English state, the formative moment of which Teschke locates in the Glorious Revolution making ‘sovereign’ power conditional on parliamentary approval, embodied the exceptional conditions of the capitalist configuration of power relations – namely the economic/political or private/public split. It enabled a “de-personalization of public authority… as accumulation was prosecuted increasingly in the private sphere of production, whereas the British state assumed, if not overnight, the role of the general public guardian of a private property regime” (2006:539).

The state in capitalist society is therefore defined by its abstraction from ‘civil society’, from private property and the market, and from the processes of production and surplus extraction (Rosenberg 1994:123-8). Parallel to this, the uniqueness of capitalism is also constituted by civil society, as the state’s necessary counterpart, characterised by formally ‘free’ individuals engaging in exchange relations – in other words, the market. This appearance of freedom is caused by the shift in the nature of power from direct domination, which characterised pre-capitalist society, to the impersonal exigencies of the market – “the dissolution of these relations into a general form” (Marx 1973:164). Power is de-personalised, automated, abstracted to the market’s anarchic structure. Under this system, in which “the ‘moment’ of coercion is separate from the ‘moment’ of appropriation” (Wood 1995:30), subordinate individuals are far less able either to comprehend their domination, or to resist it. This differs clearly from comparatively precarious pre- or non-capitalist power structures. Thus it can be seen that the system’s unique strength derives from its depoliticisation of Economy, whereby “the totalizing logic and the coercive power of capitalism become invisible” (1995:245).

This historical transformation of the nature of power has been buttressed, of course, by an accompanying ideology. Yet the conceptual separation of Economic and Political not only constituted a basic assumption of classical political economy, but also continues to be accepted and reproduced in contemporary intellectual discourses, having taken on the appearance of a self-evident truth. This is certainly true of Neoliberal and Realist analyses, but also of many Marxist accounts, particularly ‘base/superstructure’ theories. Yet Marx in fact saw no such separation; he understood Economy as Political, both in terms of the power relation between capitalist and worker, and in the structuring of broader social relations (Wood 1995:20-1). The abstraction of ‘economics’ from processes of domination and exploitation divests economic exchanges of their political content, creating the appearance of a neutral, impersonal market. Furthermore, it necessitates a separate and specialised public realm in which ‘political’ practices are conducted, exemplified by the construction of the modern state as articulated above. Hence power becomes differentiated into the private (market) and the public (state), but “the differentiation of the economic is in fact a differentiation within the political sphere” (Wood 1995:31; emphasis added).

Marx challenged these assumptions of classical political economy in order to explain how these economic processes came to be understood “as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded” (Marx 1973:86), an observation which remains entirely applicable today. The absolute impunity with which actors in the ‘economic’ realm are permitted to carry out market transactions with serious social consequences – companies using sweatshop labour, or IMF ‘structural readjustment’ programmes, to give a few pertinent examples – can only be possible if this false dichotomy remains intact. Thus Wood’s emphasis on the systemic unity of capitalism is clearly justifiable, since this element of Marx’s analysis remains fundamental in explaining contemporary structures of domination. Despite capitalism’s unquestionable evolution and adaptation over time, certain defining elements, including the way in which the exercise of power is redefined and thus obscured (which Marx was first to identify and critique in such a way), continue to characterise social relations even now.

Implications: IR theory and the ‘international’

Thus the very idea of the ‘international’, and its widely accepted definition as a separate, externalised realm governed by a separate logic to ‘society’, is undermined. If, as this essay argues, ‘state’ and ‘society’ form a constructed (rather than natural) dichotomy; if power is revealed to reside elsewhere than merely the ‘political’: what is to be made of the conception of international relations as inter-state relations, or of the notion of national or state interest? Under this dominant paradigm how can we theorise, for example, the actions of multinational corporations, which exercise their power across ‘state’ boundaries whilst remaining chiefly within the apolitical realm of ‘civil society’ and its market imperatives? In short, we can’t. This theory constitutes a direct challenge to IR’s dominant Neorealist paradigm in which modern categories and social forms are often assumed to be natural, timeless, and universal. ‘Civil society’; ‘the state’; ‘natural law’; ‘individual freedom’: these concepts crumble (or at the very least, quaver alarmingly) under a critical analysis which locates their establishment firmly within the European capitalist experience.

Indeed, in opposition to the positivist assumptions that dominate the discipline in its present condition, orthodox IR theory can be better understood “as aspects of contemporary world politics that need to be explained [rather] than as explanations of contemporary world politics” (Walker 1995:6), being part of the institutionalisation and legitimisation of the particular norms and ideas which constitute the capitalist logic. Of course, this criticism of IR has already been made in reference to its establishment as an academic discipline, heavily determined by normative concerns surrounding security, diplomacy and inter-state conduct (Bierstecker 1999:3). It is also evident in contemporary practices whereby ‘political’ determinants limit the direction and scope of intellectual enquiry (Smith 2002). And yet even aside from any ethical concerns about the autonomy of research and education, a deeper problematic emerges. Namely that, as Teschke and Rosenberg demonstrate, the analytical constructs much mainstream IR theory unapologetically employs are revealed to be thoroughly embedded in, and constitutive of, the historical construction of capitalist relations. “Epistemologically, Neorealism’s survival is predicated on its move to cut off the political from the social” (Teschke 2003:274) and thus preserve a relationship which obscures social mechanisms of power, treating these as automatic, whilst maintaining a designated sphere within which IR theorists may theorise. Unfortunately any theory which reproduces existing structures of power ceases to be of explanatory value, and this may be said not only of Neorealism, but of Neoliberalism and a large proportion of political ‘Marxism’ too. Hence whilst these schools constitute the mainstream, the discipline will remain principally a “science of domination” (Teschke 2003:274). The relevance of Marx to international relations theory can therefore be understood primarily in terms of a critical interrogation of the most basic, underlying assumptions of the discipline – even the elemental internal/external analytic divide. By historicising the construction of these assumptions, it becomes possible to relativise and thus completely undermine the universalising claims of orthodox theories of the ‘international’.

How then, having established the critical value of this approach, can it be used constructively to contribute to contemporary debates in IR? According to Justin Rosenberg, it is the approach best equipped to conceptualise ‘globalisation’. For what distinguishes a Marxian analysis from, for example, the postmodernist approach to which Wood so disdainfully refers for its emphasis on fragmentation and heterogeneity (1995:1-4; 256-7) – or indeed from Neorealism’s backward projection of contemporary social forms – is Marx’s conception of capitalism as possessing a uniquely totalising or ‘globalising’ dynamic. “[F]rom the cosmopolitan assertion of the Communist Manifesto onwards… Marxism has seen world affairs confidently in terms of a single world process” (Halliday 1994:50). Building on Trotsky’s notion of ‘uneven and combined development’, Rosenberg (2007) argues that modern capitalism radically transformed the nature of world-history and historical change itself. Pre-capitalist interactive systems of social development should be characterised as ‘inter-societal’ rather than ‘global’ since they were episodic and not worldwide; only under capitalism is it actually possible to speak of the overall logic of a globalising process. The process does not produce equal results in different societies, but this ‘unevenness’ is characteristic of, not contradictory to, the structural unity of capitalist development. Rosenberg rephrases Thomson’s words from, “It happened one way in France, and another way here” (1978:269) to “‘it happened another way’ in France in part because it had already happened ‘here’” (2007:23).

This ‘globality’ is descriptive, certainly, being characterised by the gradual incorporation of every society into a worldwide division of labour, but more significantly it is also constitutive of a shift in the nature of inter-societal interaction – capitalism does not encounter other social systems in an external or superficial way; it penetrates, transforms and incorporates their productive foundations into itself (Rosenberg 2007:4-5). This implies a radical reformulation of the way we understand the processes of historical change. It is a clear improvement on much ‘globalisation theory’ (which Rosenberg distinguishes sharply from ‘theories of globalisation’; see 2000:4), which remains premised on the fallacious state/society analytical divide discussed above, treating the ‘global’ as external to the ‘social’ (Morton 2004:136). This misguided focus – generating such banalities as the observation that globalisation has “deepened and strengthened practices that enhance the state’s role as much as it has generated practices that bypass the state” (Migdal:142) – and preoccupation with the ‘public’ realm of power “obscures the fact that capitalist exchange relations have always been implicitly ‘supra-territorial’” (Rosenberg 2007:14), able to transcend the ‘political’ demarcations of state by marking out a separate space within which to operate the exercise of power. Thus a Marxian approach to the ‘globalisation debate’ can avoid making descriptive and circular claims about the character of inter-societal relations, instead providing an alternative basis for analysis centred on the capitalist dynamic as a uniquely globalising agent. Furthermore, as Wood argues, resistance – the normative premise of all Marxist analysis – is only possible from the perspective of capitalism as a totality, both in terms of the broad spectrum of power relations (rejecting the public/private divide) and in terms of a single, totalising historical process (1995: 1-4; 19-20).

III

Totalising knowledge vs. the rest of the world

The problem, however, is that the historical materialist understanding of capitalism as “the most totalizing system the world has ever known” (Wood 1995:2) can be interpreted as the approach’s principle strength, or indeed as its fundamental flaw. Certainly, the capitalist system is a globalising process and, as this essay has argued, its unique mechanism of obfuscating power relations by consigning them to a non-political sphere does constitute a rupture with patterns of social relations that had gone before. But the danger in this approach is the hostility it can engender to ‘postmodern’ themes of heterogeneity and fragmentation. Though the two schools are often believed to be diametrically opposed, by both historical materialists (see Wood 1995) as well as by postmodernists, who tend to conflate Marxism with economism and reproduce the misguided dichotomy of discourse/representation versus material reality (Laffey 2004: 460), it is worth considering whether each may in fact benefit considerably from engaging with the other. Reluctance to do so places major limitations on the scope of enquiry, denying Marxism the ability to theorise potential sites of resistance located in the encounter between the totalising dynamic of capitalism and the Other identities with which it is continuously interacting. Using Trotsky’s concept of ‘uneven and combined development’, Rosenberg certainly furthers the potential for theorising how the capitalist dynamic combines with indigenous forces in other societies. Yet even this, as Hobson notes, must be seen as Eurocentric since it includes the analysis of other societies only insofar as they encounter Western capitalism (Hobson 2005:378). After condemning Marx’s consistently Orientalist outlook (1) – an issue which many Marxists will concede as problematic – he outlines a historical account which traces the formative influences on Western capitalism to a “global economy” existing in the East as far back as the year 500 (2005:376-8). Rosenberg responds by charging Hobson with the mistaken conflation of the term ‘global’ with the merely ‘inter-societal’, re-emphasising the point that not until capitalist industrialisation in Western Europe could a uniquely ‘globalising’ process be identified (2007:8-11).

However, the problem with this insistence on historical uniqueness and systemic unity is that it justifies treating capitalism as a totality by virtue of the totalising nature of capitalist development itself. In this sense the argument is tautological, the consequence of which is that the approach is severely limiting. For when Wood stresses that “Marxist political economy and history are intended to challenge capitalism as a totality head-on”, she assumes that only by understanding capitalism as a totalising system can that system be effectively contested. Theories of fragmentation and heterogeneity “clos[e] off critical access to this totalizing power by denying its systemic unity and insisting on the impossibility of 'totalizing' knowledges” (Wood 1995:1-2). Yet the antithesis of capitalism is not an antithetical totality; it must surely be the antithesis of totality – in other words, fragmentation. It seems simplistic, therefore, to accuse identity politics, cultural studies and the like of attempting to skirt around the issue of capitalist globalisation, when what could better counter the totalising, universalising capitalist logic than an approach which renders that uniqueness highly visible by locating where and how capitalist social relations encounter Other epistemologies and alternative bases for organising society? If historical materialism refuses to engage with these ‘postmodern’ themes, it will not shake off its lingering Eurocentric heritage. Though, as this essay has shown, it remains an effective and consistent critique of orthodox theory and norms, a denial that Marxist theory itself is prone to Eurocentric, ‘totalising’ tendencies will limit its potential for theoretical innovation. As Morton notes, it is

crucial to reflect further on whether an account of the rise of capitalism and the modern state can avoid the perils of Eurocentrism. Or whether, by moving away from the genesis of capitalism in Europe, this would merely end up producing conclusions that are “tantamount to rejecting capitalism as a useful notion for analysing world historical social change”.
(2005: 517; citing Arrighi 2003:133)

The question, then, of whether Marx and historical materialism provide useful concepts for international relations today depends quite significantly on the extent to which it is willing (and able) to combine its normative emphasis on challenging capitalism, “the most totalizing system the world has ever known” (Wood 1995:2), with an approach it has hitherto resisted; an approach which attempts to locate both capitalism and Marxism within an Orientalist discourse, but one which may yet prove crucial in understanding – and resisting – capitalism itself.

(1) He defines Orientalism/Eurocentrism as “a discourse that places Europe at the centre of progressive world (dare I say ‘global’?) history” (Hobson 2005:374).

Bibliography
Anderson, P. 1974. Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso)
Arrighi, G. 2003. ‘The Rise of East Asia and the Withering Away of the Interstate System’ in N. Brenner, B. Jessop, M. Jones and G. Macleod (eds.) State/Space: A Reader (London: Blackwell)
Biersteker, T. J. 1999. ‘Eroding Boundaries, Contested Terrain’ in International Studies Review, 1:1, 3-9
Gamble, A. 1999. ‘Marxism after Communism: beyond Realism and Historicism’ in Review of International Studies, 25:5, 127-144
Halliday, F. 1994. ‘A Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73
Hobson, J. M. 2005. ‘Deconstructing Rosenberg’s ‘Contribution to the Critique of Global Political Economy’: A (re)view from a non-Eurocentric bridge of the world’ in International Politics, 42:3, 372-380
Laffey, M. 2004. ‘The red herring of economism: a reply to Marieke de Goede’ in Review of International Studies, 30:3, 459-468
Marx, M. 1973. [1857-58] Grundrisse, tr. M. Nicholaus (Penguin: Harmondsworth)
Migdal, J. S. 2001. State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Morton, A. D. 2004. ‘New follies on the state of globalisation debate’ in Review of International Studies, 30:1, 133-147
———— 2005. ‘The Age of Absolutism: capitalism, the modern states-system and international relations’ in Review of International Studies, 31, 495–517
Rosenberg, J. 1994. The Empire of Civil Society: a critique of the realist theory of international relations (London: Verso)
———— 2000. The Follies of Globalisation Theory (London: Verso)
———— 2007. ‘International Relations: the “Higher Bullshit”. (A Reply to the Globalization Theory Debate)’, forthcoming in International Politics, 44, at homepage.ntlworld.com/j.rosenberg/page7.html; accessed 03/01/07
Smith, S. 2002. ‘The United States and the Discipline of International Relations: "Hegemonic Country, Hegemonic Discipline"’ in International Studies Review, 4:2, 67-85
Teschke, B. 2003. The myth of 1648: class, geopolitics, and the making of modern international relations (London: Verso)
———— 2006. ‘Debating ‘The Myth of 1648’: State Formation, the Interstate System and the Emergence of Capitalism in Europe — A Rejoinder’ in International Politics, 43:5, 531-573
Thompson, E. P. 1978 [1965]. ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin)
Walker, R. B. J. 1995. Inside/outside: international relations as political theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Wood, E. M. 1995. Democracy Against Capitalism: renewing historical materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Can secularisation be universal?

2008-08-09T01:20:00.003+01:00

this essay was written in March 2007 for Social Change and Development, a Development Studies course at Sussex University

The Resurrection of Religiosity

It is a trite but commonplace observation that we are witnessing a resurgence in religion and religious fundamentalism; that the secularist progression envisaged by linear models of social development has not come to fruition. This essay seeks both to contest the notion that secularisation can be seen as a universal or absolute process and, further, to problematise certain critical approaches which understand ‘religion’ as a site of autonomy and resistance against these totalising discourses. Thus I first briefly outline the historically specific processes by which ‘secularism’ as a definitive social condition can be said to have arisen, in order to contextualise universalising claims. I then go on to argue that even certain ‘postmodern’ approaches can fail to move beyond Eurocentric assumptions about individual rights, social criticism and dissent, and the nature of ‘religion’ and its relationship to ‘society’; that in fact such analyses retain the telos implicit in liberal or Enlightenment conceptions of human development and social change.

Historical specificity and religious decline in the West

European secularisation has long been understood as the crystallisation of multiple material processes and ideological transformations taking place in the specific context of post-Reformation Western Europe. For Weber (1930), an important transformation in the conception of the individual/society relationship could be located in ascetic Protestantism’s rejection of the passion and ritual associated with Catholicism, and its construction of the individual as one who enjoys a personal and somewhat contractual relationship with God unmediated by church or clergy. And, as Marx recognised (1974, vol. I:83), this created conditions particularly conducive for the emergence of market capitalism, characterised by rational, formally free and equal individuals engaging in contractual relations without the socially binding obligations of feudalism. Turner, though differentiating between different strands of ‘individualism’ – namely, the “pessimistic” Calvinist kind and the more optimistic, rationalist kind characteristic of Enlightenment thought and early political economy – identifies in both a “critical and dissenting character… the dissent of Protestants from Catholicism and the dissent of the bourgeoisie from feudal relations of property” (1991:161;171). This liberal notion of public criticism as a right of the free individual relies, furthermore, on a particular conception of the state as a rational-legal sovereign sphere detached from the destabilising consequences of religious difference and conflict in the civil sphere, in which rational criticism in the form of belief and opinion can occur (Asad 1993:202-7).

The specificity of this experience is well illustrated by one example in which ‘secularisation’ and all it connotes is patently inappropriate in understanding the relationship between religion, society and the individual. In contemporary Saudi Arabia (commonly characterised as a highly traditionalist or fundamentalist society) there exists a well-established form of social criticism which is substantially different from the Kantian understanding of public dissent as an individual right and, significantly, as something essentially oppositional (Asad 1993:212-5). In the Saudi context, ‘civil society’ is not a neutral, value-free sphere but innately Islamic, and government is legitimate (shar‘iyya), but its legitimacy is bound up with certain implications of the concept of ash-shari‘a – specifically, with a notion of duty and “divinely sanctioned law-and-morality” (1993:212). The Muslim is not sovereign, but “an individual inhabiting the moral space shared by all who are bound together by God (the umma)” (1993:219): thus social criticism is better characterised as advice (nasiha), and is not so much a ‘right’ as a duty, one which is institutionalised and inherent in the government’s very existence.

Clearly, then, it was a unique configuration of factors including (though not limited to) the development of Enlightenment ideals, political liberalism and state rationalisation, and the advance of modern market capitalism, which together produced the particular conditions under which economy, politics and religion were separated into the pristine spheres we understand as constituting the secular society. ‘Religion’ took on its peculiarly modern definition as something private, characterised ultimately by belief, and the public domain of civil society became a neutral space, an overriding framework of secular, rational objectivity. “[M]edieval religion was a great cloak… Once it became an individual affair, it lost its all-embracing capacity and became one among other apparently equal considerations” (Dumont 1971:32). Furthermore, this separation of religion from politics made it possible to construct the former as a “transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon” (Asad 1993:28). This concept of ‘Natural Religion’, which could be clearly differentiated from the emerging knowledge structure of natural science (and thus be acceptable to it), permitted religion to be defined as consisting of a set of beliefs, ethics and practices and therefore something essentially comparable and common to all societies (1993:40-1) – a reductionist “lowest common denominator” (Sykes 1975:195) understanding of religion. Thus, despite the enormous flaws in a universalist conception of the secularisation process, religion itself was constructed as a monolithic category regardless of context (1). This then permits ethnocentric and reductionist explanations of contemporary social processes which define religiosity against what it is not – as nonmodern, non-Western, nonliberal, nonrational – and therefore the result of having ‘failed’ to implement conditions conducive to secularisation (2). Such ‘explanations’ demonstrate the “Europeans’ ability again and again to insinuate themselves into the preexisting political, religious, even psychic structures of the natives and to turn those structures to their advantage…” (Greenblatt 1980:227).

III

History making and historical time [a critique of the critique]

Within less mainstream discourses, of course, the notion that secularisation/ modernisation is universal or replicable is presently very unfashionable. Critical approaches emphasise the totalising force of Western, rationalist knowledge; of cultural imperialism, bound up with material domination and the globalising “modern juggernaut” (Sahlins 1988:4). It is claimed that the “postmodern condition” in which the world now finds itself, characterised by “widespread, destabilising change” (Haynes 1997:715;725), and its disillusionment with grand narratives like secularisation and myths of universal progress, is causing a resurgence of religion as a ‘local’ strategy of contestation, a rational reaction against ‘modernity’ and ‘Westernisation’. Postmodernism – and particularly postcolonialism – “encourages the rejection of centres and systems, engenders the growth of local identity, makes available information and thus teaches people to demand their rights… fosters ideas of freedom and eclecticism, [and] challenges the state” (Ahmed 1992:129). I want to argue, however, that these concerns, though well-intentioned, are ultimately misplaced. It is possible to expose in them a latent telos centred around assumptions about the relationship between society, religion and the individual, and about agency, progression, and the creation of history: assumptions which remain rooted in a highly ethnocentric and peculiarly universalising narrative of human development and social change.

A Nietzschean concept of genealogy (Foucault 1987), considering how truths are constructed and solidified through a gradual, dynamic process of inclusion and exclusion – producing ‘histories’ – is instructive here, since notions of secularisation and progress are rooted in specific understandings of history and historical time. “[H]ow, by way of what practices, are structures of history produced, differentiated, reified and transformed?” (Ashley 1987:409) Advocating ‘local’ discourses and ‘local’ autonomy merely reinforces the idea that Europe or the West constitutes the site where universal history is produced, and other (local) sites can either permit themselves to be incorporated – reproducing this discourse – or seek to ‘make their own histories’. The vacuity of this relativism belies a more subtle process by which one conception of history is translated onto another site: it is the very concept of history as progress which must be interrogated. Jahn (2000) locates a formative moment in the Europeans’ encounter with the Amerindians, whose utter Otherness presented Christian theology with a problem: how to reconcile the essential humanity of all men with the “state of nature” with which they were now confronted? This was solved, Jahn argues, by the creation of a progressivist hierarchy of human societies in which some were more advanced than others – a “dual modality of historical time… events as at once contemporaneous and noncontemporaneous” (Koselleck 1988:249). Furthermore, in the 18th century, Christian linear salvational teleology came together with secular rational prediction to produce the peculiarly modern concept of progress (Koselleck 1988:17); and the Calvinist emphasis on “good works” contributed to the idea that man makes his own history (Weber 1930:xiii).

This thread, though just as historically and culturally specific as the secularisation thesis, can be seen to run right through subalternist or poststructuralist efforts which couple ‘agency’ and ‘subjectivity’ in the essentialist-liberal-humanist tradition (O’Hanlon 1988), implying that agency – to act effectively in the world, to act purposively and autonomously, to ‘make one’s own history’ – necessitates a consciousness of the ‘self’ contra knowledge structures and systems (Asad 1993:15-6). Agency cannot produce stasis; history making is emancipatory, active, self-consciously dynamic. Religion is therefore a strategy by which to make one’s own history which, even if historical and contextualized (unlike characterisations discussed above), remains rooted in these particularist notions of history making and historical time. There is no space here for an alternative conception of history making. In Islam, however, the perfect moral/social/political foundation already exists; it has already been revealed. So this peculiar notion that humanity progresses, that man makes his own history, that men move further and further from the binds of material and cultural domination, “accelerating forward into an open future” (Asad 1993:18), that man owns himself, that he as an individual possesses certain rights – none of this can be meaningful to the Muslim whose self-consciousness is one not of self-ownership, nor one constituted by an individualistic opposition to the social structures in which she is embedded, but rather a consciousness of her status as ‘slave’ to God, as “indissolubly bound to God” (Asad 1993:221): the Muslim strives not to progress according to some external, lineal, rationalised model of development; but rather to engage in the continuing process of self-realisation. “Man is a ‘choice’, a struggle, a constant becoming. He is an infinite migration, a migration within himself, from clay to God; he is a migrant within his own soul” (Shariati 1979:93).

In summary, there is a clearly a need to relativise understandings of religion in different societies if we are to avoid ahistorical claims about the universality of secularisation and the singularity of ‘modernity’. However, many ostensibly critical – or ‘postmodern’ –approaches remain mired in thoroughly ‘modern’ conceptualisations of historical time, and therefore fail to divest themselves of the progressivist frameworks of a lingering Eurocentric heritage.

(1) For example: Marx famously understood religion as false consciousness or ideology and, similarly, for Geertz religion is a means by which rational beings can account for and give meaning to “irrationalities” such as “ignorance, pain and injustice” (1973:108). This ahistorical and functionalist view even prevails in contemporary accounts: Haynes (1997:713) asserts that “secularisation, involving social differentiation, societalisation and rationalisation, occurs except when religion finds or retains work to do other than relating people to the supernatural”. See also Keddie (1998).

(2) Note the disdain with which one writer refers to a characteristically ‘irrational’ and reactionary Islamicism: ‘Everything from the inflow of ever-larger quantities of Western consumer goods to changes in feminine dress and behaviour, often resented by traditionalist men, to Western films and TV is seen as part of a veritable plot to undermine local ways and products and to make of third world men and women consumers of the least useful and most degrading of Western imports and customs…’ (Keddie 1982:276; emphasis added)

Bibliography
Ahmed, A. 1992. Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise (London: Routledge)
Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (London: John Hopkins University Press)
Ashley, R. K. 1987. ‘The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space: Toward a Critical Social Theory of International Politics’ in Alternatives, 12, 403-34
Dumont, L. 1971. ‘Religion, Politics, and Society in the Individualistic Universe’, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute for 1970
Foucault, M. 1987. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ in M. Gibbons (ed.) Interpreting Politics (Oxford: Blackwell)
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books)
Greenblatt, S, 1980. Renaissance Self-fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
Haynes, J. 1997. ‘Religion, secularisation and politics: a postmodern conspectus’ in Third World Quarterly, 18:4, 709-28
Jahn, B. 2000. The cultural construction of international relations: the invention of the state of nature (Basingstoke: Macmillan)
Keddie, N. R. 1998. ‘The New Religious Politics: Where, When, and Why Do “Fundamentalisms” Appear?’ in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40:4, 696-723
Keddie, N. R. 1982. ‘Islamic Revival as Third Worldism’ in J. P. Digard (ed.) Le cuisiner et le philosophe: Hommage á Maxime Rodinson (Paris: Maisonneauve et Larose)
Koselleck, R. 1988. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press)
Marx, K. 1974. [1867] Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I (London: Lawrence & Wishart)
O’Hanlon, R. 1988. ‘Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia’ in Modern Asian Studies, 22:1
Sahlins, M, 1988. ‘Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of ‘The World System’’. Proceedings of the British Academy 74, 1-51
Shariati, A. 1979. On the Sociology of Islam (Berkeley, Ca.: Mizan Press)
Sykes, N. 1975. ‘The Religion of Protestants’ in S. L. Greenslade (ed.) The Cambridge History of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Turner, B. S. (1991). [1983] Religion and Social Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Sage)
Weber, M. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin)

How can an alternative interpretation of Hobbes’ ‘state of nature’ be of relevance to IR theory today?

2008-08-09T01:01:00.005+01:00

this essay was written in November 2006 for Classical Political Theory and International Relations at Sussex University

The average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies... The main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The anarchical Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ is a commonly used paradigm in IR theory, and yet alternative understandings of Hobbes’ work call into question the degree to which he himself could be accurately described as ‘Hobbesian’. This essay examines the reinterpretation of the state of nature concept as epistemic anarchy, arguing that this is in fact more faithful to Hobbes’ ideas than the concept’s appropriation by the Realist tradition, and that it generates an understanding of human nature and authority which is highly relevant to contemporary ideas about value pluralism and cultural relativism. It then explores this unresolved paradox in Hobbes’ work: namely the application of notions of equality and anarchy to the international realm, and how these can be reconciled with a stable and peaceful system in the absence of a global Leviathan. Finally, this essay considers the role of IR theory in developing and legitimising the dominant (Realist) conceptualisation in IR of other-as-enemy, arguing that IR theory is limited as an analytical discipline, given that its particularist worldview contradicts the idea of value pluralism present in Hobbes’ writings.

HOBBES AND THE STATE OF NATURE
In the Realist dogma Hobbes is used as an ideological cornerstone. Much has been made of his description of mankind’s natural condition as a “warre of every man against every man”, and the logical consequence of this being that “nothing can be unjust… Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall vertues” (Hobbes 1977: 90). He has thus been taken to describe the world as an anarchic system in which strength rules, and there exists no higher moral framework within which the struggle for power is played out. The Leviathan’s purpose is to provide stability, on the condition that citizens surrender to it their right to exercise power. This is used in Realism to justify the trinity of state, security and self-interest, and this position has come to be called ‘Hobbesian’. However this application of Hobbes’ writings to international relations theory is highly unsatisfactory. Without giving an exhaustive explanation of all the ways in which the Realist school takes Hobbes’ words entirely out of context, it is nevertheless quite clear that Hobbes was “attempting to create a new political understanding and with it, new political practices, not describe an existing state of affairs between Hobbesian Leviathans” (Williams 1996: 232; my emphasis). Therefore the use of his theory as a justification of power politics is not only to ignore the complexities of his characterisation of state and society, but also to fundamentally misinterpret the normative quality of his writings.

Furthermore, the Realist claims objectivity – he claims to know and represent the world as it ‘really’ is, however unpleasant to our moral sensibilities that may be. However, as Michael Williams and Richard Tuck argue, the influence of the Sceptical movement on Hobbes actually led him to regard as impossible such essentialistic assertions of objective knowledge. His was a certain nominalism – for example, in Leviathan he writes, “…these words of good, evil, and contemptibel are ever used with relation to the person that useth them, there being nothing simply and absolutely so” (cited in Williams 1996: 217). Certain natural conditions, such as his declaration of the fundamental equality of men (1977: 86), mean that no individual can legitimately claim authority over others. For Hobbes, there was no universal moral framework. In challenging the Realists’ exclusive rights to Hobbes, we can dispute the idea that this absence of natural moral authority creates a condition of literal anarchy, reinterpreting it as an “epistemic and ethical anarchy” (Williams 1996: 219) in which uncertainty is created by the potential for conflict. Indeed, Hobbes’ constant condition of war is manifested “not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto” (1977: 89).

This generates a significantly different characterisation of human nature. Unlike the conventional interpretation, which makes competition and security central to the individual’s motivation behind antagonistic behaviour, we can now see that Hobbes finds the root of such behaviour in this general condition of epistemic uncertainty. This removes the aggressive trait from Hobbes’ conception of human nature, instead locating it in “the social construction of action” (Williams 1996: 215). However, the observation that this disposition naturally derives from the problematic of man’s sociability is not to be treated as justification of aggression. Despite the absence of a higher, common notion of what is right and what is good, one qualitative distinction can be made: that which differentiates between those particular actions or judgements which contribute to the maintenance of peace, and those which do not. Peace is in the interest of the self-preservation of all – thus it is “Hobbes’ minimal moral consensus” (Lister 1998: 51).

For Hobbes, then, conflict arises not from the essentially competitive nature of human beings, but from the uncertain nature of a society in which different truths and different epistemologies compete for legitimacy. Conflict is rooted in the encounter with the Other. Thus the function of the sovereign power is to fix meanings, in the interest of maintaining periods of peace and epistemic stability. It is important to note that this conceives of state authority as a function, unlike the Realist characterisation of power as “an objective capability” (Williams 1996: 223). The absolute authority of Hobbes’ Leviathan – and by implication, the epistemic harmony it maintains – is undermined if ideologically challenged and, as Lister notes, it is therefore necessary for the Leviathan to regulate opinion (1998: 56). This does not necessarily justify totalitarianism and the repression of dissent; but rather is seen as a process of educating and creating acceptance and support among the population, in order “to legitimise and strengthen the political order of the state” (Williams 1996: 220). It is clear from this understanding that for Hobbes, epistemic stability and political stability are mutually constitutive and interdependent. Furthermore, there is evidently a strong normative emphasis to his work, in the interest of maintaining peace.

BEYOND HOBBES
The Leviathan, acting to provide ideological stability in a condition of uncertainty, is a mechanism of state or domestic authority. However Hobbes does not explicitly apply his model to the international realm. Yet we can see that Hobbes’ acceptance of diversity, and of the equality of different epistemologies and different claims to truth, reflect current debates around pluralism and cultural relativism. The problem occurs when we attempt to reconcile these concepts with a system of peaceful coexistence in the absence of common moral or ideological ground – and, as Lister notes, this contradiction is far from adequately resolved in Hobbes’ writings (Lister 1998: 58). The Leviathan model may present a domestic solution, but the degree of cultural difference between actors in the international sphere is such that “there will be no agreement about what should be done, and everyone will act on the basis of their own different assessments of the situation” (Tuck 1989: 64). The focus of analysis is therefore located in the encounter between self and Other.

Many Realist and neo-Realist explorations of this issue seem unable to escape the assumptions that interaction means competition, or that individual self-interest inevitably prevails (see for example Waltz 1959: 167-8). Contrastingly, many writers on the colonial encounter, as well as anthropologists concerned with the construction of community, understand the principle function of intercultural interaction to be its defining role in the conception of the Self. Todorov (1984: 42-3) uses Columbus as an example of the “double movement” – the double response to the Amerindian Other as either a human being with equal rights (the ‘noble savage’), or as an fundamentally different and inevitably inferior creature (the ‘dirty dog’). The important point is that in either case, the encounter is entirely egocentric, since it consists of a projection of culturally specific values onto the Other, a universalisation that denies “the existence of a human substance truly other” (1984: 42-3, my emphasis) – a denial that there can be an Other both equal and different. The paradox is identical to that present in Hobbes’ theorisation: how do we reconcile the fundamental equality of human beings, and of their different cultures/epistemologies/value systems, with the epistemic and ethical anarchy this principle necessarily creates? There has been no satisfactory solution to this paradox. We can see examples of Todorov’s ‘double movement’ all the way from Columbus to current discourses around ‘development’, ‘universal’ human rights, or the supposedly universal applicability of the Anglo-American liberal democratic model – all of which presume Other societies either to be comparable to the West in some earlier stage of its historical development, or capable and desirable of assimilation into a Western-led global system.

This seems reasonable grounds for a degree of pessimism about the prospects of resolving this paradox. However, Todorov also notes that certain Spaniards did oppose the colonising mission, either because as individuals they managed to understand the Amerindians as both equal and different, or because through spending time in these societies they grew to attain this understanding (1984: 188-9; 237-8). This suggests that there is no fixed or universal rule that determines the international/intercultural encounter as necessarily conflictual; rather, as agents it is possible for us to relativise our cultural parochialism through dialogue with the Other – “cultural interactions admit of growth, the creation of new structures of self-other relations” (Inayatullah and Blaney 1997: 80). Furthermore, as Ashis Nandy argues, the assertion of cultural relativism does not necessarily exclude the possibility of locating shared and therefore universalisable values, since many of man’s basic values “derive from man’s biological self and social experience” (1987: 17; 22; 54-5).

IR THEORY: FUNCTIONS AND FOUNDATIONS
Accepting, then, that this form of encounter may provide a different way of dealing with the problem of Other epistemologies and cultural relativism, we can make a case for normative IR theory to address this same concern. Unfortunately, the evaluative premise of normative theory presents us with another, related paradox: the norms and value systems of each state differ, and we must accept each as being valid as our own. In the context of this ‘value pluralism’ any interaction, if it fails to first identify truly common ground, “runs the danger of simply reflecting existing power structures” (Lensu 2000: xii) – and this can certainly be observed in IR theory. Mainstream IR is premised on the assumption of objectivity; however, as Robert Cox warns, where knowledge claims to be impartial “it is the more important to examine it as ideology, and to lay bare its concealed perspective” (1986: 207). In fact, our hegemonic IR theory does not suffer this examination well. The concept of the state of nature as a contemporary condition arose out of the European discourses that ultimately served to legitimise the actions of the Spaniards in their encounter with the Amerindians, by constructing a contemporary Other as both wholly external and qualitatively different. In Beate Jahn’s analysis this understanding of the international realm as the state of nature becomes “the defining claim of IR, its very raison d’ètre” (1999: 411) – since it provided an ideological foundation for the universalisation of European theory and European political models, for the justification of the Realist notion of ‘might is right’, and for the separation of domestic and external affairs (1999: 412-3). In this sense, IR theory can be seen as a product of the political and social developments taking place during the early modern period.

This has two important implications. Firstly, the state of nature paradigm under which IR theory operates was established as (and remains) an “ethos of survival”, in which the encounter with the Other is constructed as an encounter with the enemy (Odysseos 2002: 403). That this ethos is partly derived from Hobbes, and his impression of the need for sovereign authority, is paradoxical because his state of nature thesis (as this essay has demonstrated) can be interpreted in a way that necessitates a recognition of Other as equal and different. Secondly, IR theory is the universalisation of a profoundly Eurocentric methodology, which suggests that its function far outweighs its analytical value – indeed, Rob Walker argues that IR theory should be understood “as aspects of contemporary world politics that need to be explained [rather] than as explanations of contemporary world politics” (1995: 6). Walker, however, is sceptical about the prospect of a new paradigm that takes “humanity” as a meaningful political category (1995:6). Yet it is arguable, as Stephen Chan suggests, that there is hope for International Relations to become international in its methodology too – for a “meaningful project of rough compound universals, awkward syntheses” between different value systems and epistemologies (2000: 73) to be attempted, as already discussed. It is essential, however, first to reject the realist state of nature paradigm which frames the self/Other relationship as self/enemy; and second, to relativise IR theory acknowledging both the particularity of its world view and its historical and political function in defining the Other.

“Hobbes believed that peace required a substantial change in people’s self-understanding – a Hobbesian reformulation of the evaluative vocabularies in which individuals grasp the social world” (Lister 1998: 55). In attempting to overcome the unresolved paradoxes of ‘Hobbesianism’, namely the contradiction between understanding Other epistemologies as equally valid as one’s own and the ‘epistemic anarchy’ this understanding produces, I argue that a fundamental change is necessary both in the approach with which we engage in the international/intercultural encounter, and in the theorisation of such encounters. Such a change would be closer in spirit to Hobbes’ original prescription for society and, more importantly, it would revolutionise IR theory itself – a revolution which is absolutely crucial if IR is to properly make sense of the world in all its diversity, instead of merely making sense of hegemonic cultures and dominant paradigms.

Bibliography

Chan, S. 2000. ‘Aspirations and absent methodologies in universalism: towards a multicultural normative theory’ in Lensu, M. and Fritz, J. (eds.) Value Pluralism, Normative Theory and International Relations (London: MacMillan)
Cox, R. 1986. ‘Social forces, states and world orders: beyond International Relations theory’ in Keohane, R. O. (ed.) Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press)
Hobbes, T. 1977 [1651]. ‘CHAP. XIII. Of the NATURALL CONDITION of Mankind, as concerning their Felicity, and Misery’ in Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Jahn, B. 1999. ‘IR and the state of nature: the cultural origins of a ruling ideology’ in Review of International Studies, 25: 3, 411-434
Inayatullah, N. and Blaney, D. L. 1997. ‘Knowing Encounters: Beyond Parochialism in International Relations Theory’ in Lapid, Y. and Kratochwil, F. (eds.) The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (London: Lynne Rienner)
Lensu, M. 2000. ‘Introduction’ in Lensu, M. and Fritz, J. (eds.) Value Pluralism, Normative Theory and International Relations (London: MacMillan)
Lister, A. 1998. ‘Scepticism and Pluralism in Thomas Hobbes’s Political Thought’ in History of Political Thought, XIX: 1, 35–60
Odysseos, L. 2002. ‘Dangerous ontologies: the ethos of survival and ethical theorizing in International Relations’ in Review of International Studies, 28, 403–418
Nandy, A. 1987. Traditions, Tyranny and Utopia: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Todorov, T. 1984. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row)
Tuck, R. 1989. Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Walker, R. B. J. 1995. Inside/outside: international relations as political theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Waltz, K. N. 1959. Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia University Press)
Williams, M. C. 1996. ‘Hobbes and International Relations: A Reconsideration’ in International Organisation, 50, 213-236

the day we met many Israelis…

2008-08-09T00:52:00.004+01:00

this post was written for brightonpalestine.org during the April 2007 delegation to Palestine

The other day, having spent pretty much all our time in Palestine with Palestinians, we experienced “the other side” for the first time. It was a day of random conversations with random Jewish Israelis, and we somehow managed, quite by accident, to speak with a very diverse range of people with very different takes on the situation here.

First we went to the Dead Sea. The journey from our hostel to Jerusalem’s central bus station made us distinctly uneasy, since we were quite unused to the massive presence of soldiers - most of whom are younger than we are - among Israel’s civilian population. They milled around us, clutching their guns. Israeli society appears quite normalised to the latent threat of violence: all, of course, in the name of “security”…

So, at Ein Gedi [on the Dead Sea], after covering ourselves in black mud and floating for a while, we were drying off on a rock when a young lifeguard came to chat to us. I think he probably wishes he hadn’t. With the inevitable “Where are you from” and “What have you been doing in Israel” questions, we revealed that we had been spending time in the West Bank. He in turn revealed that he had been to the West Bank too - whilst serving in the army. We found him to be a very confused man. At first, he insisted that “the Palestinians are a wonderful people, very nice - really! I’m not being sarcastic! - they are very nice people”, and, since he was clearly making an effort to be nice himself, we were cordial back - asking him about his time in the army, what he thought of it, how he felt about some of the things he had to do, etc.. In fact, I was very interested to speak to an ex-soldier, and I told him so. We were very careful to be non-provocative and non-biased in the way we asked him questions.

The things he was saying, however, began to conflict with our own direct experiences over the last two weeks. For example, he told us that Palestinian schools teach children to hate and to kill Jews - there’s the propaganda working - and that maybe they should concentrate on teaching the skills they need to feed their families. So we told him how that was completely untrue (I mean, it seems obvious, but there you go), and we described the problems the Occupation has created for basic education in areas of the West Bank like al-Jifflik and Fasayil. We also tried to challenge (gently, since we wanted to keep the discussion on vaguely pleasant terms) his ridiculous stereotypes of Palestinians as terrorists-in-the-making, telling him how everywhere we went people did not speak a language of violence; but rather one of justice and peace.

As rational argument failed, however, he descended into blatant racism - he got really angry, shouting at us how we didn’t understand and how Palestinians should [and this is a direct quote] “stop teaching their kids to kill Jews and stop looking out for their own stinking asses”, and that maybe this would improve their situations. He said a lot of other stuff too, but it’s not necessary to reproduce it all here. The point is: underneath all his trying to say what he thought we wanted to hear, and indeed what he understood to be acceptable, lay an irrational but deeply rooted conception of Israeli society as eternal and vigilant victim and of Palestinian people as eternal aggressor and inferior - a conception of self and other based on [and constructed by] fear. All his direct experience of Palestinians came after he had become accustomed to dealing with them as an Enforcer of Occupation.

Saddest of all, I did not think his views were untypical in Israeli society, or even the most extreme. For example, last week I was eavesdropping on what I think were an American-Israeli settler family, walking along the wall of Jerusalem’s Old City from the more Jewish area to the Muslim quarter. As we walked, looking down through some railings at the Palestinian stalls and shoppers below, the kid [he looked about 8 or 9] was going on and on to his dad about all the violent ways they could attack Arabs from this vantage point, about pouring boiling water on them down through the railings [which has actually been used as a tactic in places like Hebron], and about [again, a direct quote] “kicking them all out - it’s our land now!!” That a child was saying this was quite unbelievable, for me.

The next encounter with an Israeli that day was far less depressing. In a taxi back in Jerusalem, we were speaking Arabic [badly] to our taxi driver, as we would usually do, when we realised we’d misunderstood him - we thought he said he was half-Jewish, half-Palestinian, but in fact he was completely Jewish. However, he had a lot to say about the “Jewish democratic state”. Pointing vigourously at Orthodox Jews walking past, he insisted “They hate peace! They HATE peace!!” He was obviously upset by the fact that the Israeli state claims to act to protect and serve the Jewish people, but in fact fails to represent the diversity of opinion and belief with the population, seeming instead to represent the most powerful, the most violent, and the most fundamentalist.

Even more diverse were the Israeli activists we met later that evening, who looked like they would not have been out of place at Sussex or in the Cowley Club. They represented the tiny proportion of Jewish Israeli citizens who were not only critical of their state, but also acting to protest against it. One guy we met, who was still serving in the army, spoke to us about the “evils” he had to do, and how all those checks and raids on Palestinians in the West Bank had very little to do with security and were in fact designed to annoy and intimidate the Palestinian population. He had given his testimony to an organisation called Breaking The Silence, who are concerned with revealing the truth of the Occupation from ordinary soldiers’ perspectives.

Another girl we met made a really interesting point about the role of internationals and the role of Israelis. She said [and I am inclined to agree] that she found it incredibly patronising when activists come from overseas and treat Israel and Israelis as one homogenous lump, lecturing them on the evils of Occupation (she was referring to one speaker in particular, but I think the problem is fairly widespread). As an activist engaged in criticism and resistance, I think she felt mis- or under-represented. It’s vital that we recognise these sectors of Israeli society and seek relationships and solidarity with them too - for change to happen, it is not enough to focus on pressuring governments and corporations, nor is it sufficient to seek lasting friendships with Palestinians only. In order to undermine a state which claims to represent the interests of a particular group, it is necessary to recognise and make explicit voices of dissent within that group.

And that’s my massive ramble about Israelis!!

Sussex-Palestine zine 2007

2008-08-08T22:27:00.020+01:00

This zine was published following the April 2007 delegation of Sussex students to the occupied West Bank.

Protest Singapore Style

2008-08-08T18:00:00.007+01:00

by Pia Muzaffar and Olly Laughland

‘Protest Singapore style,’ so the headline went.

‘9 protestors, 29 journalists, 2,500 police.’

We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.

Weeks of planning, secretive meetings, liaisons with the international media, personal struggle and strained friendships, family warnings and relationship crises – all to walk up a busy shopping street in red t-shirts and holding candles. Our quiet vigil in protest against the Burmese junta’s uncontested presence at the annual ASEAN Summit in Singapore caused something of a stir, to put it mildly.

Of course, we weren’t the only people greatly concerned about the situation. Since the violent crackdowns of Burmese civil society reported in October of last year, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have been involved in campaigning, calling for an end to the oppressive regime. But the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), currently chaired by what was our host country of Singapore, is crucial to either undermining or legitimising the Burmese junta. However, Singapore had so far failed to condemn the junta’s actions, its high-level business links with the regime proving far too important to jeopardise, to the great displeasure of Singapore’s 30,000-strong Burmese community.

When we found out that the Burmese generals themselves were to be welcomed with open arms into Singapore’s luxurious Shangri-La Hotel, we decided to take action. There were other events planned, including two forums organised by Overseas Burmese Patriots and SG Human Rights, but these were to be held indoors in diluted form after applications to protest outside were rejected. Singapore’s stringent protest laws and total ban on public assembly once again proved to be an effective way of containing and constraining civil society.

Raised on Millian notions of freedom of speech, a vocal student body at Sussex and general discontentment at elite political power, we decided to risk our student visas and bend the rules. Our plan was simple: to walk towards the ASEAN Summit in groups of three (theoretically remaining within the ban on public assemblies of more than four), wearing red t-shirts to mark our solidarity with the Burmese people, and holding candles (since any sort of banner or placard would require a permit).

An innocent statement, we thought, though loaded nonetheless with our disgust at the junta’s regime. But the authorities thought differently, and made this patently obvious in the days preceding our event.

First of all, an email told us, “You are requested to attend a chat with the Provost and the Dean of Students tomorrow morning.” We went along, and spent a good half hour politely deflecting their polite attempts to neuter our efforts. “We don’t want this descending into violence,” said the Provost, drawing on the standard Singaporean truism: speaking out equals violence and chaos; chaos equals a threat to the economy. He courteously passed us a copy of the Straits Times (the state-controlled newspaper), folded neatly to the front page which read, “Singapore will stick to its tough laws governing public protests”. The internet said the same – so did the television, so did the radio.

Chuckling to himself, he opened a large dossier containing page after page of our personal information gleaned from Facebook. Covered in annotations, it told a story of “potentially unlawful behaviour”. Little did we know a group of fellow students had seen our ‘Stand Up For Burma’ event on Facebook and reported us straight to the University authorities, probably in order to attain more all-important points for their own personal records. Nervous laughter followed. “You know we won’t be able to help you if you’re arrested. Student visas are an issue out of our control,” said the Provost (who is also, incidentally, the ex-Deputy Superintendent of the Singapore Police).

Though we hadn’t been explicitly threatened, we left the ‘chat’ somewhat perturbed. Had our plans taken on a life of their own? Were we interfering in areas that were not ours to meddle with?

It got weirder. The next day we were on our way to the forum organised by the Burmese expatriate community in Singapore, when we got a phone call from a friend who was also involved in organising the vigil. “Erm… guys, I’ll be a bit late for the forum,” he said in guarded tones. “There are couple of policemen in my bedroom. They want to have a word with me.” We felt a sudden jolt of anxiety. The police? The magnitude of what we were doing began to dawn on us. “Do you want us to come by your room?” we asked our friend. “Erm… yeah, that’d be good actually,” he replied, straining to conceal the panic in his voice.”

We rushed to his room, our hearts thudding. There we were greeted by two plainclothes police officers with clipboards. Like the university authorities, they warned us that our planned actions risked breaking Singaporean law. Getting arrested in Singapore is a major, major social transgression. Determined not to be dissuaded, we tried to thank them politely for their advice, but without capitulating. They left eventually, having realised that their words were falling on deaf ears. Yet their visit left us shaken, unsure of what measures the authorities would take to prevent our protest from going ahead.

After this failed attempt, the police force resorted to more insidious means. An undercover policeman was installed at our planning meetings. We each received anonymous text messages clearly concocted by a novice police officer trying to sound young and hip. “Yo heard fm law fac guy police gonna take realie tuff action 2day on asean protest… dude has gd frend in police who knows some higher ups.. better tell those goin 4 protest 2 b real careful… looks like the cops here ain’t jokin… laterz.” We got emails warning of “rising anti-foreigner sentiment” in Singapore, and links to internet forums full of posts condemning our plans. On the wall of our Facebook event, there was even a cleverly constructed anonymous attendee (creatively named ‘Nigel Chomsky’) who attempted to delegitimise our advocacy of non-violent protest by saying things like, “For once Singaporeans, DISSENT!!!!! Hell, we can f*ck the policing bastards.” His profile, again hastily invented by some novice policeman with no conception of what ‘anarchism’ actually means, had pictures of a burning car and a hooded demonstrator hurling a Molotov at riot police. His ‘About Me’ section said, “The system’s fucked up. So I set it right. I dissent.” Although in retrospect these efforts at surveillance and infiltration seem laughable, at the time they were enough to make us feel like our every move was being watched, as if we were in some kind of Orwellian dystopia.

As if these warnings from various authorities were not enough, we were also being chased up by story-hunting journalists who had got wind of our plans. Protest, sadly, is big news in Singapore. And the Singaporean web forums were buzzing with lively discussions about what we were proposing to do. “I think we should deport these ang-mos [local slang for ‘white people’],” one angry user said. Another countered, “NUS, good try, you have my support! NUS you are not wasting your time as you are brave to step out to do so. This is just the beginning, I hope to see more of such movement. Bravo, NUS! Keep it up!” Singaporean friends and strangers contacted us with messages of support. At the same time, a few members of our group were even contacted by lawyers and university authorities their our home countries, warning that participating in the protest would mean automatic expulsion from their degree programmes back home.

What had started as a simple idea, with which we’d become involved through a series of chance encounters, had now snowballed into an event of massive significance, in which an unprecedented number of different people seemed to have a stake. And this was not without effects on our personal wellbeing. We were double-locking our doors at night, unable to sleep. We were constantly looking over our shoulders, and trying to brush aside the threats and doubts that seemed to assail us from all angles. Within our group itself, the pressure was taking its toll. We became embroiled in heated arguments about the right thing to do – and even whether to go ahead with the protest at all – severely testing our friendships with each other. We were tense, scared and doubtful of our own capabilities. The claustrophobia proved too much for many.

The day came, our group whittled down to just nine. We approached the venue with trepidation, not knowing what awaited us at the top of the escalators as we emerged from the underground station onto the street. We were met by scores of journalists, photographers and film crews, far outnumbering our diminutive assembly. Upon sighting us they swarmed, cameras flashing, questions shouted, dictaphones thrust to our faces. “What would you say to the Burmese junta if you could be at the ASEAN summit today?” “Are you not scared of breaking Singapore’s strict anti-protest laws?” “Do your parents know you’re here?”

They followed us as we walked towards the venue of the summit. They were present when we encountered the police, and when we dispersed without incident. And so it was that the message of our simple, minimalist protest achieved a degree of publicity unthinkable in the UK, making the front page of Singapore’s national newspaper as well as countless other media channels throughout Asia. And the next day, emboldened by the fact that we were not arrested, a group of fifty Burmese residents in Singapore staged another anti-junta protest outside the Summit – an event of far greater political significance.

Our protest was controversial. It may have offended some. But in the following weeks, it became clear to us that our protest had not taken place for no reason. What may have begun as a basic attempt to publicly criticise the Burmese military regime, in an environment where it enjoyed an unacceptable level of impunity, quickly escalated into a question of how Singaporean society understands itself: how it is disciplined, how it relates to ‘external’ interference, and what its fundamental values are. It served to crystallise national debates around public dissent, legitimate authority, the treatment of minorities, and regional diplomacy. And from our point of view, the lengths to which the authorities went in order to try and stifle our political action really demonstrated to us how much we cherish those civil liberties we’ve always taken for granted in the UK, and which have been rapidly eroded under the Blair government. On a personal level, we ended up with sturdy friendships and a new awareness of what we were prepared to do for a cause we believed in.

this article was first published in The Pulse (Spring 2008, issue 1)

Confessions of a Cultural Relativist: ‘Asian Values’ and Activism in Singapore

2008-08-08T16:55:00.004+01:00

Development is imperialistic. It is inseparable from the totalising capitalist project, locking poor peripheral nations into an exploitative relationship with the multinationals and rich governments that make up the core. The notion of a singular development trajectory in which the Rest lags behind the West still doggedly persists in many institutional contexts, often resulting in misguided policy recommendations from Western agencies with disastrous results for developing countries. Well-intentioned grassroots organisations are often just as guilty, imposing inescapably Western norms on recalcitrant or merely unsuspecting populations. All these things we want to export to the rest of the world – women’s rights, free speech, secular education – they so often fail to take cultural difference into account.

Which is why, on my study abroad programme at the National University of Singapore, I had absolutely no intention of getting involved in any sort of activism.

It’s just not the Singaporean way, as we were repeatedly informed. Since Singapore’s independence in 1965, the government of this small city-state has progressively dismantled all the main channels through which real political dissent could be expressed, while fostering a civic culture of conservative conformism. The ban on chewing gum is well known; less often mentioned are the effective ban on public protest, the state-controlled national media, and the decimation of meaningful political opposition. All of which is justified, we are told, by the notion of ‘Asian Values’.

Popularised by the Singapore’s first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who continues to exercise a dominating influence in the Singaporean government through his self-created position as ‘Minister Mentor’ and the fact that his son is current PM, ‘Asian Values’ are held in contrast to Western liberal individualism and the sorts of rights and freedoms they imply. Asians, it is argued, are culturally and historically predisposed to a greater emphasis on family, discipline, and social stability.

Thus Singapore’s highly authoritarian government justifies its policies by positing adherence to Asian Values as the key ingredient to its stable social order and, more importantly, to its successful economic development. Amongst the Singaporeans I met, in various capacities, there was a clear consensus between many that whilst an overbearing government might not be to everyone’s taste, there could be no denying the fantastic wealth Singaporeans enjoy in comparison to the countries that surround it. Also frequently noted was the absence of violent and destructive civil unrest, to which all neighbouring states have been subject in varying degrees at some point over the last 50 years. The older generation of Singaporeans did take to the streets and protest, but at the moment the country is a peaceful and prosperous place to live.

There were things about Singapore I gradually became aware of and didn’t particularly like – the servile national media, the ‘free’ but unfair elections, the treatment of immigrants and labourers, the nepotistic government, the warm friendship with the Burmese military regime – but who was I to try and challenge them? If two and a half years of Development Studies have taught me anything, it’s that my personal beliefs in relation to direct political participation are at best culturally specific, and at worst totally unwelcome. It’s sheer arrogance to assume that I have the right to try and spread these ideologies elsewhere.

* * *

The problem, of course, is that Singapore can by no means be described in the simplistic terms outlined above. Economic growth, racial harmony and social stability constitute the idealised picture Singaporean elites are keen to project, and have certainly been internalised by the population to a significant degree. But the longer I stayed in Singapore, the more the cracks began to show.

Thanks to a chance encounter between a friend of mine and a Singaporean pro-democracy campaigner, I found myself in a planning meeting comprising a hotchpotch of different people: Singaporean human rights activists, Burmese residents in Singapore, a Swedish politician, an artist, other exchange students, and members of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), the politically marginalised opposition to the ruling People’s Action Party. There were two central points for discussion. The first point was how to respond to the forthcoming Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Singapore, given that the leaders of the Burmese military regime were to be in attendance and the news images of their bloody crackdown on monks and other protesters were still fresh in our minds. The second point was how to encourage and embolden ordinary Singaporeans to take an active interest in the political machinations of their government.

What became clear during this meeting is that ‘Western’ notions of liberal freedoms, democratic participation and human rights cannot, in fact, be easily dismissed on crude applications of cultural relativism. The ‘Asian Values’ espoused by certain elites are neither common to all of Asia, nor representative of a homogeneity of opinion in individual Asian countries. There are hundreds, even thousands of people in Singapore who desire a greater engagement with political processes, and a small number of those have sacrificed any semblance of a ‘normal’ life in order to pursue these rights for Singaporean civil society.

Such individuals do not have it easy. I met Chee Soon Juan, now the charismatic icon of the SDP. Once a lecturer at the same National University where I was undertaking my exchange programme, he was promptly fired on spurious grounds as soon as he became involved in opposition politics – a dismissal that other academics there still defend, even if privately acknowledging that there was no legitimate reason for it. Refusing to be deterred, Dr Chee has since become infamous for continuing to assert and act out the right to engage in non-violent protest against the government. As a result, he has been sued and bankrupted by PAP leaders, arrested and imprisoned numerous times, prevented from leaving the country, and consistently ridiculed in national media. The message is clear: Singaporeans attempting to make a stand face severe consequences. The result is a pervasive culture of fear throughout Singaporean society.

Like Dr Chee, I believe firmly in the right to protest and in the usefulness of direct action as a means to social change. Which is why, a few weeks later, I ended up walking with two other exchange students down Singapore’s premier shopping street holding candles and wearing red t-shirts saying, “We pursue peace, justice and democracy for Burma”, surrounded by over twenty international and local journalists and cameramen, and filmed by plainclothes police.

It was the day that the ASEAN Summit began in the exclusive Shangri-La Hotel, and we marched towards the venue to stage our protest against the actions of the Burmese junta and its friendly relationship with Singaporean leaders. In any other country, no one would have batted an eyelid. We had no placards (these being illegal without a permit), we shouted no slogans (to avoid anything giving the vaguest impression of that oft-repeated fear of civil action degenerating into chaos), and we were split up into groups of three (since a public assembly of more than four people is also illegal). When we finally were approached by three of the 2,500 armed police safeguarding the area, we peacefully dispersed. It was the most innocuous protest imaginable. And yet one student journalist later reported that we “did the unthinkable”. This is the extent of the depoliticisation of Singaporean society.

Admittedly, it had not been an easy decision to protest that day. We had been summoned and ‘advised against’ it by the university administration, warned against it by police knocking on our bedroom doors, sent mysterious emails and text messages warning of severe repercussions, and threatened with the possibility of expulsion from some of our home universities. The few Singaporean students who had wanted to participate were totally daunted, and with good reason. The Burmese students, faced with the possibility of deportation, were not about to take the risk either. In the end only nine of us, all foreign students, were able to conduct our vigil.

And, as we had hoped, it turned out pretty well. No arrests, no violence. The somewhat disproportionate media presence meant that our message achieved a degree of exposure quite unimaginable in other contexts, being reported on the front page of Singapore’s national paper and making the evening television news, as well as numerous other media channels throughout Asia. Most importantly of all, the fact that no harm befell us encouraged more people to attend a public rally organised the very next day by members of the Burmese expatriate community in Singapore. Forty to fifty Burmese residents stood close to the ASEAN Summit venue holding placards and posters that read: “ASEAN Act With Honour! Action on Burma Now!” and “Listen To Burma’s Desires. Don’t Follow Junta’s Order.” A protest of this size was unprecedented, and yet police simply stood back for fifteen minutes, after which they called on the protesters to peacefully disperse.

* * *

Academic discussions questioning the universality of human rights and democracy are crucial, but how can we do anything but vigorously assert them when members of other societies are risking their lives and livelihoods in campaigning for their realisation? Amartya Sen, author of Development As Freedom, has argued:

“The people whose political and other rights are involved in this debate are not citizens of the West, but of Asian countries. The fact that individual liberty may have been championed in Western writings, and even by some Western political leaders, can scarcely compromise the claim to liberty that people in Asia may otherwise possess.”

Whilst interrogating Western universalism, we can’t assume that a monolithic, homogenous alternative – ‘Asian Values’ – exists; nor should we imagine that various Asian leaders speak for their diverse populations. As recently as forty years ago, Singapore had a vibrant activist and trade unionist culture where rallies could number in the thousands. Right now, a small but growing group of Singaporeans are working on ways to revive something of that spirit. There’s nothing inherently un-Asian about expressing dissent.

And what’s more, we have to admit that those characteristically ‘Western’ liberal freedoms aren’t exclusively Western. A polarising discourse, which justifies oppression by pitting a falsely homogenous set of ‘Asian’ values against its Western antithesis, is just as dangerous as imposing one set of cultural norms onto the rest of the world.

I certainly don’t want to force my culturally contingent belief in things like free speech and civil disobedience onto a recalcitrant recipient. Yet equally, I have been forced to challenge vacuous and ahistorical formulations of cultural relativism, and ask what purpose they may be serving. Singapore has made me a reluctant sort of universalist.

written for U8 Magazine (forthcoming)
see http://www.u8development.com/default/index.php

Exclusive interview with student protestor

2008-08-08T16:51:00.004+01:00

By Michael Wan
Jan. 9 2008

from http://campus-observer.org/index.php/news/exclusive-interview-with-student-protestor.html

NUS exchange student Pia Muzaffar Dawson did the unthinkable last November.

Along with two exchange students, the 22-year-old took her chances with Singapore’s tough laws against public protests by marching down Orchard Road into an area guarded by about 1,000 armed police and soldiers.

Together with Daniel Babiak and Mark (who did not want to reveal his last name), Dawson entered the city area where the Association of South East Asian Nations leaders’ summit was being held.

The trio, dressed in red T-shirts and holding lighted candles, were protesting against Asean’s inaction toward Burma’s junta after the country’s bloody military crackdown on demonstrations led by Buddhist monks.  In an e-mail interview with The Observer on Jan. 08, Dawson spoke about her experience with the university administrators that called to warn her against protesting and about what she thinks of NUS students.   She has since completed her semester as an exchange student at NUS and returned to England, where she is studying international relations and development studies at the University of Sussex.

Campus Observer: Have you ever protested in England before? 
Dawson: Yes, but not very much. I don't have much history of activism. It's only recently that I've been inspired to participate in protests, specifically regarding education in the UK, anti-war, the occupation of Palestine, and the gradual erosion of our civil liberties in England.   

Campus Observer: What inspired you to protest that day? 
Dawson: First and foremost, the continuing political repression in Burma, the strong links between Singaporean elites and Burmese military rulers and drug barons, and the relative silence in Singaporean media on both these issues.   It would have been awful if the Burmese junta could be seen to just turn up in Singapore and not be held accountable for their actions -- especially given the recent violent crackdown on monks and others.   Secondly, the repressive environment in Singapore, which restricts free speech, free assembly and free press. With the government silent and civil society groups facing massive restrictions, we thought that we could use our status as international students to highlight this issue.   Thirdly - and I am speaking for myself here -- it is becoming increasingly clear to me that protest and political participation are vital to maintaining any semblance of democracy and political accountability. This is something that one generation of Singaporeans knew well, but has been stifled in contemporary Singapore. Knowing full well that a public assembly of more than four people does not necessarily degenerate into violence and chaos, we wanted to demonstrate this in Singapore.   

Campus Observer: It was reported that administrators from NUS called to warn you of Singapore's laws. What exactly did they tell you?  
Dawson: The provost and dean of students spoke to some of us. They had managed to print out our Facebook event details and explained that the wording of our appeal made it clear that there was intent to hold an assembly of more than four people, even if the protest was conducted in smaller groups.   They didn't want us to unwittingly break the law and were concerned that as foreign students we were not aware of local law. They even offered us the Central Forum as an alternative venue to stage a vigil.   

Campus Observer: Why did you still decide to go ahead with the protests?  
Dawson: Because our reasons for protesting remained the same, and we were concerned that this kind of muting of our plans would have much less of an impact and carry our message much less far.   We were also lucky because we knew that any sort of legal action or arrest would not affect us in the same way that it would affect a Singaporean student and their future career prospects (unless we want to work in Singapore, that is).   

Campus Observer: Were you afraid when security officials and the police stopped your group of protesters? 
Dawson: I wasn't afraid, because we had expected to encounter police in that area, and we knew that we hadn't broken any law. We also knew that the police would not mistreat us in the presence of so many international journalists. The main reason I wasn't afraid, however, was that a successful protest usually relies on good planning, and our group had collectively decided that we would not confront the police or try to defy their warnings. So when the moment came, we were all prepared to disperse peacefully.   

Campus Observer: I see that you were using your handphone in one of the photos. Who were you calling? 
Dawson: Journalists from all over the world had been calling me non-stop that day!   

Campus Observer: Were there any friends, well-meaning or otherwise, who tried to dissuade you from joining the protests? Could you recount one such experience? 
Dawson: Yes, one law-student friend tried to dissuade us and managed to dissuade some others. One other friend was not comfortable with the fact that we would have no control over how our protest would be represented in the media, and he was very worried that we would be cast as troublemakers, or that reporters would focus on us and not on the issues that we were trying to publicise. He didn't come, in the end. Luckily, his fears didn't come true.   However, I had no problem with the fact that some people didn't want to participate, because it's not right to do those things without being comfortable with your actions. Also, other people's criticisms were totally legitimate and meant we had many excellent discussions in the days before the protest, which ultimately prepared us much better for the day.   

Campus Observer: Daniel was quoted by Bloomberg: "A lot of people wanted to come, but they were afraid of the repercussions.” What were these people’s reactions after the protests?  
Dawson: They were relieved, I think, that no harm came to us. But I think their fears were totally valid, especially given the way the university, police and local media attempted to scare us out of participating. Hopefully, people will be more encouraged the next time such an opportunity arises.   

Campus Observer: What do you think has been the effect of the protests on Singapore's political scene? 
Dawson: I don't know. I think it's important to highlight that the next day, 40-50 Burmese residents of Singapore were able to stage a rally, even holding banners and placards. I hope this will encourage even more Singaporeans to become active in civil society. I know that there are many Singaporeans who feel disillusioned with politics, seeing it as a sphere outside and above their control. For me, politics is something everyday and ubiquitous, and I believe we can empower ourselves without the permission of those who are supposedly in authority.   

Campus Observer: Describe your opinion of NUS students in three words. 
Dawson: Overworked, competitive, and de-politicised!

Green means GO!

2008-08-08T16:47:00.002+01:00

Is harking back to the ‘golden age’ of Singaporean student activism just a futile nostalgia trip, or a call to arms to a passive student body in a culture of control?

Singapore confuses me. I have just about worked out how to get from one part of the labyrinthine Prince George’s Park Residences to another. I have somehow managed to successfully navigate the unfathomable complexity of module registration. Finding out where my lectures are taking place is another matter entirely, but I suppose after a couple more weeks I will have mastered this too.

It seems that NUS students have to concentrate so hard on working out where we are going and how to get there, that we don’t stop to think about the motivations behind the creation of such a bizarrely convoluted landscape. What purpose could such bafflement serve?

I cannot help but compare NUS with Sussex, my home university in Britain. There our students’ union, library, main lecture theatres, arts institution, IT centre, religious building, careers centre, union shop, bar and nightclub, all surround one central square. This square is thus the focal point for student campaigns and campus events.

At Sussex we occupied the library overnight to demand better resources and longer opening hours; held protests pressurising the university management to reverse their decision to close down our excellent chemistry department; marched against ‘top-up fees’ and the increasing marketisation of our education. We campaigned to twin with a university in Occupied Palestine, and banned Coca-Cola on campus.

But I wonder: if our university was designed like NUS, would such vibrant and successful student campaigns have been possible?

My NUS experience so far almost typifies the widely-held stereotype of Singapore as a highly obedient society. No jaywalking, no littering, no loitering, no chewing gum, no drugs, no public protest, no being gay. Heavy fines and severe penalties for transgression maintain a draconian social order.

And yet the stereotype doesn’t quite hold. There is dissent; but it appears too frequently to engender disillusionment and resignation rather than political action. In a 2001 poll of NUS students, 77% said they were not interested in political participation and 88% believed there were constraints preventing them from getting involved. This context is miles away from the 1960s and 70s when student rallies here could number in their thousands, and Singaporean students were prepared to launch boycotts, hunger strikes, sit-ins and marches in protest against government attempts to curtail their freedoms. By contrast, there now appears to be the general impression that politics is the realm of the elite, and that the results of any attempt at activism would be a foregone conclusion.

Whilst such attitudes are totally understandable given Singapore’s governmental style, they are also based on a misunderstanding of ‘politics’. Politics, after all, is about power. And power is not something possessed merely by the upper echelons of society; it is present in every social relationship. Consequently, so is resistance.

So whilst it may be too much to hope that NUS students might defy the stringent laws, and rally en masse making loud and long-overdue demands to the Singaporean government, we should remember we can still act in seemingly small ways to engage in resistance against the dominant social order.

this article was first published for NUS students in The Ridge, October 2007

HDB housing in Singapore

2008-08-08T16:37:00.006+01:00

taken October 2007

When Blair comes out to play the naughty kids are sent away

2008-08-08T16:29:00.003+01:00

by Olly Laughland and Pia Muzaffar Dawson

As far as we’re concerned, Blair’s Britain still exists. Forgive our ignorance, but we left the UK way back in early June when our right honourable leader committed to a so-called ‘gracious’ farewell tour of the country. Imagine our surprise, then, when an overenthusiastic friend of ours called last week, saying: ‘Guys you won’t believe this! Blair is coming to Singapore! He’s giving a special lecture here at NUS!’

My God, it was true. The website spoke of a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity!’ – an event ‘open to all NUS students!’ The Tony Blair lecture- the Crisis in Global Governance: Challenges and Solutions.

Naturally, we were excited. This was to be an opportunity we were unlikely to ever have in England. At last, a chance to demand answers from our warmongering, Thatcherite, imperialist ex-Prime Minister. A chance to say to him in person all that he could never hear from behind the safety of the TV screen. ‘Mr Blair, what would you deem a ‘crime against humanity’ and how do you defend yours?’ ‘Mr Blair, as a Christian, how do you reconcile your universalist faith with the xenophobic hatred that your policies have stirred up?’ ‘Mr Blair! We are ashamed to be British and a large part of that is your fault.’

We called the number on the screen, as instructed. Waited patiently. Placed on hold.
“Hello, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.”
“Hello! We’re calling about the Blair lecture. We’d like some tickets please.”
“Sorry. Deadline passed.”
And like a stinging slap to the face, there it was.
“But… we’re British… and we’re studying politics. We only found out he was coming ten minutes ago. Surely there’s something you can do?”
“You weren’t selected. You can’t apply.”
“But that can’t be right – it says on the website it’s open to all –”
“Thank you, goodbye.”
Click.
Right. In our excitement, we had momentarily forgotten where we were. The National University of Singapore is not known for its efforts to encourage the free exchange of opinion, and is totally uncritical of the government’s ban on protest. The last lecturer to venture into opposition politics was sacked. What were we expecting?

Upon further investigation, it turned out that ‘open to all NUS students’ in fact meant ‘open to a select few students who had to be specially nominated for invitation by their department heads’. And we were not included.

The day came. Blair arrived, accompanied by a fleet of police cars, an army of secret police, strategically-positioned snipers, warm handshakes and sycophantic smiles. Those select students in shirts and ties took their seats ahead of time, waited, and welcomed him onto the stage with enthusiastic applause. The whole event smacked of a well-oiled publicity stunt. The questions asked were vacuous; his responses slippery and vague. “You may be a reluctant globaliser,’ he said, ‘but you are a globaliser nonetheless.” “If we want to make it happen,” he said, “we need a global agenda and the global agenda only works if there is a unifying set of global values.” And everyone smiled and clapped.

And what was Blair charging to trot out this bullshit? Six thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven US dollars. Per minute. The entire hour-and-fifteen-minute Audience With Tony, otherwise known as The Giant Mutual Ego Massage, cost our host university half a million US dollars. Whoever said that being Prime Minister doesn’t pay well?

“Education, education, education,” he told us back in 1997. Pretty rich, coming from a man now accepting such an obscene amount from an institution of higher education. Surely the money would be better spent on library books, widening inclusion of students from poorer backgrounds, and paying its manual labourers a decent wage.

The irony, of course, is that if we wanted any sort of insight into current affairs, sitting in a lecture theatre listening to a jet-setting ex-Prime Minister so totally detached from reality is the last thing we would do. The everyday politics of Singapore’s taxi drivers and cleaners provide shrewder analyses. And indeed, these insights come without the frankly offensive fee.

this article was first published in The Badger 26/11/07 (issue 9 autumn term)