Scientific racism,race war and the global racial imaginary

Abstract

The premise of this paper is the elucidation of a different ontology of global politics and order of the nineteenth century. International relations theory takes for granted a largely ahistorical state-centric ontology, which reifies a specific Eurocentric state and state-system as the embodiment of global politics. Instead, I focus on an alternative ontology of race, racial hierarchy and racial difference as significant for defining the content of an imperial global politics and order. My paper places into context the emergence of scientific racism and social Darwinism as key intellectual elements in defining a political imaginary that influenced the politics of difference and violence. What I show is that this intellectual history reveals a global order that was fundamentally racialised and that global violence was understood and practiced as race wars.     

People,personal projects and the challenging of social structures: a contribution to the reflection on the challenges of teaching development studies

Abstract

This article makes a critique of using Post-Development as a tool in teaching an introductory course in development studies. Such a debate was initiated by Harcourt in a previous issue of Third World Quarterly as she reflected on her teaching experience in a European Institution. Harcourt concludes that the lack of engagement of some of the students in the course reflects the unwillingness of privileged middle-class pupils to challenge western lifestyles. I draw on a critical realist meta-theory about the process of learning in higher education to challenge the ontological support of that conclusion and invite her to reconsider her teaching strategy.     

Auschwitz's Finale: racism and holocausts

It is passing strange that the existence of Auschwitz has not lessened racism. In fact quite the reverse: it has unleashed surplus racism on the ‘Third world’ and its ‘natives’. As I contend here, this is the Auschwitz finale, its abject truth, the dialectical residue of the Holocaust. Jacob Neusner calls it the Holocaust ‘myth’ and ‘mythic theology’. It now constitutes the ruling narrative in the West. This article dissects the Auschwitz discourse and its denial of other holocausts. It critiques the claim that it was the only ‘real’ genocide. It advances a contrary thesis on colonialism, racism and holocausts in history. I clarify the affinity between colonialism and fascism and Israeli tactics in Occupied Palestine. It is undeniable that Auschwitz fuels anti-Arab anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism. In my conclusion I analyse Jewish criticism of the Auschwitz finale.     

Violence on Iraqi bodies: decolonising economic sanctions in security studies

Abstract

United Nations agencies report that by 1998, Iraqi infant mortality had risen from the pre-Gulf War rate of 3.7% to 12%. Insufficient food and medical supplies and deterioration of sewage and sanitation systems and electrical power systems reportedly caused an increase of 40,000 deaths annually of children under the age of 5 and of 50,000 deaths annually of older Iraqis. Why is this violence on Iraqis absent from analyses of sanctions in international relations and security studies? This paper is concerned with, first, situating sanctions against the Global South as violence by challenging the conventional theorisation of violence inflicted by the hegemon as a mechanism of ‘national security’. Second, we offer a decolonial reading of the sanctions imposed on Iraq by shifting the locus of enunciation from the state to Iraqi people’s suffering.     

Subaltern connections: Brazilian critical geographers,development and African decolonisation

Abstract

This article explores the relations to Africa and African decolonisation of three key figures in Brazilian critical geographies and development studies, Manuel Correia de Andrade (1922–2007), Josué de Castro (1908–1973) and Milton Santos (1926–2001). Based on an analysis of their works and unpublished archives, I argue the radical Third World perspectives these intellectuals expressed anticipated later critiques of development as a neocolonial device. Drawing upon current literature on decolonisation, international conferencing and anti-racist solidarity networks, I discuss these matters in relation to these authors’ interest in cultural diversity and internal colonialism. Crucially, they developed this sensitivity in the Brazilian Northeast, a region especially shaped by Afro–Brazilian and Indigenous cultural legacies. While supporting anti-imperialist nationalisms in the Third World, these Brazilian scholars fostered multilingual, internationalist and cosmopolitan activism and scholarship. This is revealed by the study of the transnational networks they developed during exile and the various persecutions that many of them suffered after the 1964 military coup. Finally, I argue these works can substantiate recent claims to ‘decolonise’ geography and development studies, on the condition that these fields of study take seriously their anti-imperial traditions and their ‘voices from the South’.     

Exu is not Satan – the dialogics of memory and resistance among Afro-Brazilians

ABSTRACT

In 2000s Brazil, an unprecedented number of Brazilian afrodescendentes (Afro-Descendants) have been mobilizing to secure rights and resources for the Brazilian black population. From carnival parading in ‘cultural’ groups to electoral campaigning, from consciousness-raising education to antiracist community outreach, black activists have been aggressively taking a critical stance toward the discursive fabric of Brazilian race relations and national identity. Placing examples of their discursive struggles over Afro-Brazilian history and culture under the lens of intertextual and heteroglossic relations, I illustrate black activists’ efforts to dispute what they see as misconceptions about black people and blackness that have found their way into the dominant narrative conceptions of Brazilian society. In doing so, I argue, they are accomplishing something of broader social significance: They are revising not only the history and collective memory of race relations in Brazil but blackness itself.     

Indigenous food sovereignty in a captured state: the Garifuna in Honduras

Abstract

This study explores the emergence of the Afro-Indigenous food sovereignty movement in the context of a captured Honduran state and unequal political economy. In contrast with national-level research that has advocated a policy of food security in the context of non-indigenous campesino movements, this work explains how food sovereignty is more appropriate regarding Garifuna Hondurans. In a political economy that has precluded other options, and given the deep cultural relation that Garifuna activists have to land and autonomy, food sovereignty provides a possibility around which Indigenous development can be animated. It encapsulates a local ‘fight’ response to repression as an alternative to northern ‘flight’, often via migrant caravans, that many Garifuna have undertaken. This study shows how food sovereignty, more than being a technical policy set, is a discursive and material node through which dispossessed and especially indigenous populations can enhance decolonial power in the contestation of entrenched hegemonic and institutionalised power in a corrupt, unequal and colonised political economy.     

Overcoming the division bloc and its limitations: a Gramscian approach to South Korean social formation

Abstract

Colonialism affects post-colonial social formations in a variety of ways. Japanese colonial rule had a far-reaching influence on South Korean post-colonial social formation. Most legacies of colonialism diminished as time went by, but one legacy of colonialism continued or even increased its effects on the South Korean political economy from the 1960s – namely, the division of Korea. This article provides an alternative Gramscian approach to the analysis of the social formation of South Korea, with due consideration of the division of the peninsula. For that purpose, it introduces the concept of a division bloc, adapting Gramsci’s concept of a historical bloc to develop an analysis of a social formation that is unique to South Korea. Then, I explicate the two events that have been most damaging for the division bloc – the 1997 economic crisis and the 1998–2007 inter-Korean reconciliation – describing them as an organic crisis and a hegemonic project, respectively. Following this, I present reasons why the counter-hegemonic efforts of liberal nationalists to overcome the division bloc failed.     

ADMINISTRATIVE RESPONSES TO ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM

ABSTRACT

The environmental justice movement challenges public administrators to develop appropriate administrative and policy responses to environmental racism claims. Public administration scholarship has focused little attention on claims of environmental racism and the environmental justice movement, in part as a result of a too narrow conceptualization of racism. The theoretical and empirical literature on racism would be useful in guiding research on environmental racism and contribute to developing effective administrative responses by local, state and federal government.     

Violence and ordering of the Third World: an introduction

Abstract

The decisive role violence has played in the ordering of the Third World cannot be ignored or consigned to the past. Accordingly, we argue for a more systematic and determined attention to the connections between the devastation unleashed by colonialism, imperialism, and other forms of large-scale violence in the post-independence periods. In contradistinction to situating violence in and against the Third World as a backdrop of incomplete modernization, we recognize that its proper location is in the larger dynamics of racialized and colonial international relations. The articles in this volume address these dynamics of violence.     

Con-/divergences between postcolonial and critical peace education: towards pedagogies of decolonization in peace education

This paper focuses on the limitations of the Eurocentric modernist framework that undergirds Freirean theory and critical pedagogy in relation to critical peace education, highlighting in particular the contributions of post-colonial and decolonial thinking. The paper posits that critical approaches to peace education need to consider these limitations in pushing critical peace education to engage more postcolonial and decolonial thinking. A renewal of critical peace education that integrates the critiques of both decolonial and postcolonial perspectives will provide productive possibilities for revitalizing the transformative orientation within critical peace education and decolonizing the work of research and pedagogical praxis in peace education. This means to evoke discourses and practices that move away from the dominant categories of Eurocentric thought and engage explicitly with the ways in which understandings and pedagogies of peace education are implicated in modernity and coloniality.     

CAN TEACHING BE SAVED?

ABSTRACT

Future generations of professors may be harder to recruit and to retain compared to the current generation of nearly-retired senior faculty. This is especially the case in public colleges and universities. The condition of academic life in public higher education at the beginning of the twenty-first century was not enviable. Decades of sacking and pillaging by external and internal forces have left the professoriat stranded in purgatory, overrun by larger numbers of under prepared students and evaluated by pseudo processes. The professoriat has also contributed to the demise of liberal learning by substituting escapism for scholarship and by rolling over for various forms of coercion and financial seduction.

This essay discusses one person's teaching experience in the context of evolving cultural norms about learning, of professional standards pertinent to teaching, and of the psycho-social consequences for college teachers of the secular anti-intellectual drift in post-literate society. Public college and university teaching in the last decade of the twentieth century, for most workaday faculty not heavily endowed with external research funds or not capable of manipulating endless leaves of absence, has been a voyage of uncertainty. The combined effects of triumphant managerialism, techno-idolatry, political correctness and bureaucratic rationalization have subverted public higher education, and the subversion has occurred with the willing collusion of many “insiders” in the academic establishment. Worse: so engrained is the system of incentives for self-preservation (on the part of administrators and faculty) and evasion of accountability (on the part of students) that the system is unable and unwilling to correct its own dysfunctions. The absence of complaint from the “consumers” of higher education, students and their parents, is not the result of good institutional performance. It is, unhappily, the result of tacit collusion in the willingness to certify mediocrity and call it excellence.

Many volumes would be required to diagnose and prescribe remedies for the entire matrix in which public higher education now finds itself. Space does not permit comprehensiveness here. Instead, I offer admittedly selective perceptions of my own teaching experiences of more than two decades, as related to the problems cited in the preceding paragraph. However, I doubt that it is a singular view. More than a personal cri de coeur, it represents the frustration of a generation of educators who have seen public higher education seduced and sacked by some of the same forces that might have been expected to nourish and protect it: including the educators themselves.

Of course, the cynical saying of one of my colleagues remains true: “Institutions never lose: individuals always do.” And he is right–higher education will endure and prosper, even if those who still remember what education is forare marginalized or driven into another line of work. No one can doubt that American colleges and universities have succeeded as organizationsand in the pursuit of organizational values over the past two or three decades: many are richer, larger, and as marketing savvy as the most endowed Fortune 500 corporation. Whether American higher education still has anything useful to say about American society and culture is another, and more arguable, matter. There is significant risk that institutional value distortion has pushed the critical faculties of students and teachers into a Phantom Zone of indifference or even hostility, relative to what “really” matters to the governing boards and administrations of many institutions of higher learning. The commingling of academic institutional and organizational–corporatist values has another side: it has betrayed many students by asking of them as little as possible, and many professors by rewarding them for their entertainment value.     

‘Occupied territory is occupied territory’: James Baldwin,Palestine and the possibilities of transnational solidarity

In his 1966 essay ‘A Report from Occupied Territory’, James Baldwin wrote that ‘occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered’. Though written 50 years ago, Baldwin’s observations continue to resonate, indicating historical trends across geographical experiences affected by the legacy of colonialism. A growing theme in development and peace building studies relates to a kind of boundary crossing that sees academics and activists drawing linkages across spatial and temporal divides. The situation in Palestine–Israel has taken an increasingly central role in mobilising transnational solidarities that cross such boundaries. By examining James Baldwin’s analysis of Harlem’s ‘occupation’ – as well as drawing from a range of voices such as Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Toni Morrison and Laleh Khalili – this paper will explore the shared experiences of racism, colonialism, military occupation and dispossession that separate and divide, and the possibilities for transnational solidarities that defy those separations.     

The Resource Curse - What Have We Learned from Two Decades of Intensive Research: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

There has been increasing interest in the so-called ‘resource curse’, that is the tendency of resource-rich countries to underperform in several development outcomes. This has generated a mountain of (often contradictory) evidence leaving many floundering in the flood of information. This special issue compiles eight papers from some of the most prominent contributors to this literature, combining original research with critical reflection on the current stock of knowledge. The studies collectively emphasise the complexities and conditionalities of the ‘curse’ – its presence/intensity is largely context-specific, depending on the type of resources, socio-political institutions and linkages with the rest of the economy.     

Refugees,Islam, and the State: The Role of Religion in Providing Sanctuary in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

Malaysia has a mixed track record in providing Muslims with refuge, yet it increasingly lays claim to being an Islamic country. This article charts a history of the refugee engagement Malaysia has had based mainly on a shared regional and/or shared religious affiliation (Sunni Islam). I argue that the recent Malaysian history of refugee treatment presents a case for Muslim solidarity, but one tempered by a prevalent racism in Malaysia against people from the Indian subcontinent. Nonetheless, Islam provides an alternative history for providing protection to people in need. The UNHCR has pursued this approach in Muslim majority countries that are not signatories to the refugee convention in the hope of carving out a complementary protection space based on Islamic law and practice. This article traces these attempts and situates them within the Malaysian sociopolitical terrain, drawing out the possibilities and limits to such an approach.     

The spectre of Haiti: structural antiblackness,the far-right backlash and the fear of a black majority in Brazil

Abstract

This article situates the far-right backlash in Brazil within the larger Latin American context, including its colonial legacy, leftist governments’ failure to deliver promises of inclusion, and the US–China geopolitical dispute over the region’s strategic natural resources. By situating Bolsonaro’s electoral victory within these dynamics, our analysis presents an alternative to two common perspectives. First, studies of the region’s political moment and of Brazilian society in particular do not pay enough attention to institutional and everyday racism, and instead focus mostly on comparative analysis of governmental policies and social class dynamics. Second, critical perspectives that take into account racial inequalities are often not attuned to structural dynamics of gendered antiblackness, and instead present racism as a broad set of practices that negatively affect non-white people in related manners. Our context-specific analysis of the electoral reemergence of the far right in Brazil aims at contributing to an understanding of persistent dynamics of racial inequality within the region as part of a long, enduring and foundational odium of Black people.     

A million little ways: racism and everyday performances of blackness in Buenos Aires

In spite of the reality of racism in Argentina, dominant Argentine society holds class as the most important factor in explaining social inequalities. I analyze everyday performances of blackness in Buenos Aires, Argentina and how these both corroborate with and contest dominant ideas about race. Even attitudes and behaviors that appear to uphold the racial hierarchy are, often upon deeper analysis, complex mechanisms of negotiation within a racist society. These performances range from very casual encounters on the street to literal interpretations including an audition for a TV commercial. I detail incidents of blacks who counter racist assumptions through their performance of identity as well as how racism influences and shapes these performances among Africans and Afro-descendants. The ethnographic evidence I gathered from my own exchanges as well as those of my research consultants challenges the notion of Argentina as a nation devoid of antiblack racism.     

The dancing body in peace education

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the potentials of the dancing body in peace education seen from a transrational perspective. The author explores how the multifaceted and creative body as worked with in the conscious dance and movement practice Open Floor can be tapped into and drawn upon to engage the multiple potentials of humans as contact boundaries at work. She reflects in this regard upon her own experiences as an Open Floor teacher. The article first discusses how the experience of dancing in Open Floor unfolds a creative process that is 1) both intrarelational and interrelational, and 2) always in transformation. Further, the article discusses how the dancing body is engaged as holistic, relational and dynamic through the Open Floor teaching tool 4 × 4, and how this dancing body supports a creative engagement with intra-inter dynamics in peace education.     

The Macroeconomics of Aid: Overview

Abstract

This Special Issue explores macroeconomic effects of aid from various perspectives through a blend of studies, both conceptual and empirical in nature. The overall aim is to enhance the understanding of the macroeconomic dimensions of aid in the policy and research communities, and to inspire further innovative work in this important area. This opening article provides a scene setting summary of five generations of aid research, with a particular focus on how the JDS has contributed to this literature, and ends with an overview of the papers included in this Issue.     

Manhunt Presidency: Obama,race, and the Third World

Abstract

President Obama’s commitment to a creedal narrative of American exceptionalism and his understanding of the Third World as a space of ontological deficit together made for a presidency that could neither mitigate the structural racism of the United States nor deflect a racist foreign policy premised on an unending war against terror. By examining the murders of two American teenagers – Trayvon Martin and Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki – this essay argues that the very self-fashioning narratives that propelled Obama to the presidency of the United States rendered him incapable of effecting any substantive changes in the racism than animates its domestic and foreign policies.