“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.
Saturday, 9 August 2008
Clock poem
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.
Students, be vigilant!!! …There are fundamentalists among us, and they are dangerous…
by Pia Muzaffar Dawson
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.
this article was first published in The Pulse in 2007
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.
Education/Islamophobia
by Pia Muzaffar
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.
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
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
Tom in Burma after the cyclone
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.)
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.)
Critically evaluate Frantz Fanon’s contribution to our understanding of contemporary oppression, and to the politics of dissent and resistance
this essay was written in 2008 for Life, Power, Resistance: Critical Perspectives on a Post-Westphalian Era, an International Relations course at Sussex University
I
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.II
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).
IV
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.
V
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).
Bibliography
Ali, S. 2005. ‘Uses of the Exotic: Body, Narrative, Mixedness’ in C. Alexander and C. Knowles (eds.) Making Race Matter: Bodies, Space and Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan)
Bernasconi, R. ‘Casting the Slough: Fanon’s New Humanism for a New Humanity’ in L. R. Gordon, T. D. Sharpley-Whiting and R. T. White (eds.) Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell)
Blaney, D. L. and Inayatullah, N. 2000. ‘The Westphalian Deferral’ in International Studies Review 2 (2), 29-64
Blaney, D. L. and Inayatullah, N. 2004. International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London: Routledge)
Campbell, D. 1994. ‘The Deterritorialization of Responsibility: Levinas, Derrida and Ethics after the End of Philosophy’ in Alternatives, 19:4, 455-484
Fanon, F. 1986 [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press)
Fanon, F. 1990 [1961]. The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin)
Gibson, N. 1999. ‘Thoughts about Doing Fanonism in the 1990s’ in College Literature 26 (2), 96-117
Koselleck, R. 1988. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press)
Lentin, A. 2006. ‘De-authenticating Fanon: Self-organised anti-racism and the politics of experience’. Available at http://www.alanalentin.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=25. Accessed 16/02/08
Moulard-Leonard, V. 2005. ‘Revolutionary Becomings: Negritude’s Anti-Humanist Humanism’ in Human Studies 28, 231-249
O’Hanlon, R. 1988. ‘Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia’ in Modern Asian Studies, 22:1
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)
Walker, A. 2001. ‘The ‘Karen Consensus’, Ethnic Politics and Resource-Use Legitimacy in Northern Thailand’ in Asian Ethnicity, 2 (2), 145-162
Walker, R. B. J. 1993. Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Weber, M. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin)
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’?
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.
I
[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.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.
(Cerny 1994:332)
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.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).
(Friedman 2001)
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).
II
[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.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.
(Palan 2003:15)
(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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