African modernities and the critical reappropriation of indigenous knowledges: Towards a polycentric global epistemology

ABSTRACT

While the African Union's New Partnership for Africa's Development (AU/NEPAD) strives for both plurilateralism and regionalism, there are ideological and practical conditions that challenge the feasibility of a fully fledged regional integration institution in Africa. This article examines the AU/NEPAD in relation to Africa's ideological back-loading, while it explores how the programme reconciles Western-dominated economic plurilateralism with Africa's developmental regionalism. It highlights the ideological changes that helped with the modernisation of Western countries and how these developments become a challenge to Africa's economic development efforts. Africa has always been an ideological back-loader and a delayed integrator into global interdependence. During the mid-20^th century, at the time Western countries (in particular Western European countries) were adopting regionalism, Africa was engaged in the same phenomenon for political and economic independence. While the economic crisis of the mid-20^th century following the Second World War (WW2) enabled the industrialised countries to adopt embedded liberalism for socioeconomic development, at decolonisation Africa sought to espouse what turned out to be the dependency paradigm as the economic development strategy for Africa. In the 21st century, developed regions are transcending regionalism and gearing towards plurilateralism while most African leaders remain fixated in traditional regional integration on the continent. As the neoliberal ideology dominates the contemporary international political economy of the 21^st century, albeit questionably, Africa's politico-socioeconomic realities are also premised on the same embedded liberalism. However, economic plurilateralism by industrialised countries with Africa challenges efforts towards regional integration on the continent. It would seem that the AU/NEPAD provides a viable compromise between developmental regionalism and economic plurilateralism on the continent.     

Notes and news

Russia and Asia have an ambiguous relationship. More than half of Russia is geographically in Asia and much of its history, too. Peter the Great switched Russia's main focus to Europe. But by the middle of the 19^th century the “Slavophiles” were contesting that “Westernising” view as the Russian Empire expanded. After World War II, the USSR played an important ideological role in Asia, until the failure of the invasion of Afghanistan. The ensuing collapse of the USSR resulted in a smaller, much more “European” Russia, which the West was nonetheless not eager to embrace. Today, the dynamic economies of Asia offer opportunities, not least as a market for Russia's energy exports. But the legacy of Peter the Great lives on.     

Unexplored regions of the Hadhramaut

Over the last few years publicly-expressed anti-British sentiment has been on the rise, tapping into a latent Anglophobia in Iranian political culture. Iran's relationship with the British goes back much further than the relationship with the Americans, who benefit from a curious indulgence. During the 19^th century, Iran was largely seen through the prism of British interests in India, yet Russia, which loomed large at that time, has also seemingly escaped responsibility for its role. Certainly the advent of oil changed British focus and the confrontation over Anglo-Iranian Oil came to define British-Iranian relations for the modern era. Yet paradoxically, there is, somewhere, a deeper and more complex relationship in which a degree of mutual respect remains.     

Pax Africana in the age of extremes

Agriculture in Asia was revolutionised in the latter part of the 20^th century through the creative use of new technologies and well‐targeted government intervention. Similar principles can be applied in Africa.     

Correspondence

Sir Tony Brenton, formerly British Ambassador to Moscow (2004-2008), considers in this article the Asian dimension of Russia. He considers the historical connections and importance of Asia (as opposed to Europe) in the development of Russia and the historical balance between Asian and European influence. This section pays particular attention to the development of Siberia and early encounters between Russia and China. He then examines shifting Russian attitudes towards Asia at significant moments in Russian history including the 19^th century (the Slavophile Movement), the Communist period, the post-Soviet 1990s and the current era under President Putin. The implications of the Ukraine crisis and the current relationship with China is studied. He concludes with a discussion of whether Russia is likely to see its future orientation as more towards China and Asia, and what implications Russia's deliberation about its future direction has for the western powers.     

Revisiting the national question and rethinking the political trajectory of Africa in the 21st century

Abstract

The national question in postcolonial Africa encapsulates the totality of national and social challenges that needs resolution. These include the burden of building postcolonial nations, reconstructing postcolonial states, promoting economic development, entrenching popular democracy, defending national sovereignty, consolidating political power, and eventually achieving regional integration and pan-African unity, as long term goals. To resolve these issues, founding fathers crafted different national projects as working ideological and political frameworks, aimed at resolving the national question. This article builds on the continuing concern about the national question, to carry out a critical historiographical study of the nature and conflicted agendas of national project(s), while at the same time providing substatiation for their resuscitation during the current age of failing capitalist neo-liberal project. The premise of the article is that the national question remains relevant beyond the 20^th century as it entails dealing with unresolved national and social questions including challenges of converting territorial nationalism into pan-Africanism as well as democratising global asymmetrical power politics in the 21^st century.     

The transformation of Turkey’s Islamic media and its marriage with neo-liberalism

ABSTRACT

The Islamic press in Turkey started at the beginning of the 20^th century as a reaction to the secularist Young Turks’ revolution of 1908. In the Republican period, Sufi orders and other religious communities maintained internal communication via periodicals despite being interrupted by the 1960, 1971 and 1980 coup d’etats. In the 1990s, the first private Islamic TV channels were opened and soon were targeted by the Turkish Armed Forces through mainstream media in the run-up to the 1997 military memorandum. Only after Erdo?an came to power did the Islamic media find favourable conditions to flourish, lining up with Erdo?an’s AKP. However, there are still small dissident groups who struggle for an independent identity.     

Living in the Marikana world: The state,capital and society

Abstract

The ‘Marikana massacre’ that happened on 16 August 2012 at Lonmin mine near Rustenburg in the North-West province of South Africa, in which the South African police shot dead 34 mineworkers for protesting against low wages and other unbearable employment and/or living conditions, cannot be understood as merely an accidental event. It may therefore be useful to view the massacre as one of those tragedies that dramatises, in visible ways, the generally hellish conditions which the peoples of the non-Western world have come to endure ever since the advent of Western modernity. The ‘voyages of discovery’ undertaken by figures such as Christopher Columbus after 1492 marked the commencement of a world system characterised by a Western-centred modernity whose ‘darker side’ inflicted hellish conditions on the non-Western subject, while its ‘brighter side’ in the West saw positive developments – from the 16^th-century ‘rights of people’ to the 18^th-century ‘rights of man’, up to the late-20^th-century ‘human rights’. This article is a decolonial critique on the Marikana massacre and seeks to explain how the modern world system has, since its advent in 1492 as global power structure, been producing a series of ‘Marikana-like’ conditions and events on the part of the non-Western subject that underlies its hierarchical arrangement. The article's point of departure is that rather than understand the Marikana massacre as a unique event or accident, it can better be characterised as a sign of the non-Western subject's subjection to Western-centred modernity. The article explicates how the modern South African state and capital are part of the same ‘colonial power matrix’ (Quijano 2000a), hence the two were bound to be on the same side against labour during the Marikana massacre.     

“A DISMAL BUT PROFITABLE DITCH”: THE SUEZ CANAL THEN AND NOW

This article traces the history of the Suez Canal since its origins in the 19^th century to the present-day. It gives an outline not only of the antecedents of the Canal, but also looks at the August 2015 widening and deepening of the Canal with its effects of the Egyptian economy and international commerce.     

FROM CHAOS TO CHAOS: SOUTH YEMEN 50 YEARS AFTER THE BRITISH DEPARTURE

Fifty years after the British departure the future of South Arabia or South Yemen is just as uncertain as it was on 30 November 1967, when the People's Republic of South Yemen (PRSY) came into existence. The old order was swept away in the revolutionary tide of the mid- 20^th century to be replaced by a Marxist state. Yet, within less than 23 years the new order was undermined by unresolved issues inherited from South Arabia and led to an ill-prepared union with the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) in 1990. Today, after over two and half years of war, Yemen is fragmenting and one outcome might be the return of a southern state which will have to confront the same unresolved issues. Are southerners Yemenis or South Yemenis? Can institutions be created to overcome tribal and regional differences with the South? Can a viable economy be created in a country with so few natural resources? This article provides a history of the region and the conflicts of the last 50 years, along with a consideration of the present situation and a discussion of the enduring issues.     

The politics of remembering: Saint Petersburg's 300th anniversary

Abstract

With Leningrad abandoned, what are the stories told about St. Petersburg, the town named after Apostle Peter? In particular, how was the city's Tercentenary jubilee staged? Discarding images related to Lenin and the Soviet era could signal liberation. Tapping into alternative mnemonic resources could allow the city to free itself from a variety of constraints by utilizing the imperial heritage and the various linkages to Europeanness embedded therein. However, the effect could also be one of being trapped in time, with the city thereby also being unable to break outside the established territorial constraints. The stories told could restrain rather than liberate in being told in a manner that is inconsistent with the challenges that the city — and Russia at large — are currently facing both internally and in view of its rapidly changing external environment. This is the issue that we tackle by viewing the city's 300^th anniversary as a mnemonic battlefield.     

Massacre of the Doves?: Interpreting Israel's 2003 Elections

This article argues that Israel's 2003 elections are best understood as a deeper embedding of neoliberalism in the Israeli polity. It is argued that the most accurate characterization of the elections is as an articulation of Polanyi's Phase I of the double-movement. The argument is developed in four stages. First, the Israeli elections are understood as a local reaction to the multilayered processes of globalization. The Israeli state and its elections are located in the neoliberal ideology which underwrites the phenomenon broadly defined as globalization. Second, the election results are reviewed. Third, the dominant interpretations of the elections are critically examined. Specifically, representations of the elections as a defeat of the parties of peace and as a rebuke of Sephardim/ultra-Orthodox influence in Israeli government are interrogated. Fourth, the coalition negotiations of February 2003, the constitution of Israel's 30^th government and some of the initiatives undertaken by Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are explicated through deployment of Polanyi's double-movement framework.     

THE PUNDITS: SURVEYING THE FRONTIERS OF INDIA IN THE GREAT GAME

This article provides an overview of the development of the exploration, mapping and surveying of the frontier territories of India in the 19^th century and the context of the Great Game with Russia. It pays particular attention to the Pundits, the native surveyors trained by British officers who made long surveying journeys into the borderlands of the Himalayas and Tibet. It gives an account of the explorations of pundits including Nain Singh, Kishen Singh, Sarat Chandra Das, Kintup, and Ugyen Gatso.     

THE SOCIETY'S 2010 TOUR OF GEORGIA AND ARMENIA

This is the report of the first ever visit by the Society to the Caucasus region, specifically to Georgia and then Armenia. The main historical focus was on their churches and monasteries and the development of Christianity, often against the odds, following its introduction to both countries in the 4^th c A.D. The 23 strong party went first to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia before making visits to a number of monasteries and towns including Gori, Stalin's birthplace, and Kasbegi. In Armenia the tour started at Lake Sevan, then visited several other destinations before finally reaching the capital Yerevan.     

Works on Islam in Russian

Islam v politichyeskoy dzhizni stran Sovryemyennogo Blidzhnyego i Sryednyego Vostoka, Islam in the Political Life of the Countries of the Contemporary Near and Middle East (Erevan: Academy of Sciences of Soviet Armenia, 1986; 230 pp.)

N. Oganyesyan's ‘Islamic Activism’ (pp.7–47)

Ye. A. Abgaryan's ‘The Religious and Political Organization of the Muslim Brethren in Egypt’ (pp.48–133)

P.A. Saradzhyan's ‘Activity of the Muslim Brethren in Syria, 1979–82’ (pp. 134–76)

R.P. Kondakchyan's ‘The Strengthening of the Islamic Factor and the Policy of the Military Authorities in Turkey in Religious Affairs After the 1980 Coup d'Etat’ (pp.177–209)

G.M. Yeganyan's ‘Mutual Relations Between Shah and Clergy, 1950–1960’ (pp.210–28).

Yu.M. Kobishchanov's Istoriya rasprostranyeniya Islama v Afrikye, The Spread of Islam in Africa (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1987; 220 pp.)

N.I. Voronchanina's Islam v obshchyestvyenno‐politichyeskoy dzhizni Tunisa, Islam in the Socio‐Political Life of Tunisia (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1986; 192 pp.).

L.V. Val'kova, is entitled Saudovskaya Araviya: nyeft’, islam, politika, Saudi Arabia: Oil, Islam, Politics (Moscow, Nauka Press, 1987; 256 pp.).

S.A. Kirillina's Islam v obshchyestvyennoy dzhizni Yegipta (vtoraya polovina XIX‐nachalo XX v.), Islam in Egypt's Social Life, Second Half of the 19th Century to the Beginning of the 20^th (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1989; 204 pp.).

A.V. Kudryavtsyev's Islamskiy mir i Palyestinskaya problyema, The Islamic World and the Palestinian Problem (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1990; 134 pp.)

V.N. Spol'nikov's Afganistan: Islamskaya oppozitsiya. Istoki i tsyeli, Afghanistan's Islamic Opposition: Sources and Objectives (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1990; 189 pp.)     

The Ethiopian root of Thomas More’s Utopia

The classical utopian novels of early-modern Europe, such as Utopia, Christianopolis and City of the sun, are widely understood in mainstream academics as products of the writers’ inventive imaginations of better social organisations. Suggestions regarding the possibility that places with the social and administrative features depicted in the novels might actually have existed in medieval times, are often dismissed by Western scholars who argue that the role of non-European civilisations in the early-modern proliferation of utopian novels did not go beyond helping to inspire the writers’ creative mix of narrations. A disregard for the fact that medieval utopian novels could be modified and/or de-identified versions of earlier reports about 12^th- and 13^th-century Ethiopians (‘the Land of Prester John’) has severely distorted the mainstream understanding of utopianism and renaissance by African scholars. This article specifically focuses on More’s Utopia, to assert its Ethiopian root using historical and religious evidence.     

Soviet works on Middle Eastern political parties

Myedzhdunarodnoye kommunistichyeskoye dvidzhyeniye, The International Communist Movement (Moscow: MisP Press for the Academy of Social Sciences of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee, 1983; 334 pp.)

XIX s'yezd Kommunistichyeskoy partii Izrailya, The 19^th Congress of Israel's Communist Party (Moscow: Political Literature Press, 1982; 184 pp.)

Partii nauchnogo sotsializma v Azii i Afriki, The Parties of Scientific Socialism in Asia and Africa (Prague: Peace and Socialism International Publishing House, 1983; 192 pp.)

Partii v ryevolutsionniy protsyess v stranakh Azii i Afriki, Parties in the Revolutionary Process in the Countries of Asia and Africa (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1983; 254 pp.)

E. V. Pavlutskaya's Rabochiy klass i rabochyeye dvidzhyeniye v nyezavisimom Marokko, The Worker Class and Workers’ Movement in Independent Morocco (Moscow: Nauka Press for the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1987; 208 pp.)

D. I. Vdovichyenko's Bor'ba politichyeskikh partly v Turtsii (1944–1965 gg.), The Struggle of the Political Parties in Turkey, 1944–65 (Moscow: Nauka Press for the Institute of Oriental Languages at Moscow University, 1967; 308 pp.).

V. I. Maksimyenko's Politichyeskiye partii v pyeryekhodnom obshchyestve: Marokko, Aldzhir, Tunis 20–80ye godi XX v., Political Parties in A Transitional Society: Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, the 1920s to the 1980s (Moscow: Nauka Press for the Institute of Oriental Studies in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1985; 232 pp.).

Burdzhuazniye partii i politichyeskaya bor'ba v stranakh Vostoka, Bourgeois Parties and Political Struggle in the Lands of the East (Moscow: Nauka Press for the Institute of Oriental Studies in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1987; 245 pp.).     

Book reviews: South Asia

This policy essay examines the historical and policy evolution in Bhutan from the creation of Bhutan in the 1600s to 2014. An examination of the overarching policy intent of Gross National Happiness is reviewed as well as how modern political institutions in Bhutan implement Gross National Happiness. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the new Bhutanese state founded by the Shabrung Ngawang Namgyal established its political and institutional right and legitimacy to rule based on Mahayana Buddhism canonical tenets, including ensuring that Bhutanese citizens could obtain Enlightenment and happiness. A modern manifestation of this historical precedent for state and political institutional intervention to promote collective happiness is embodied in the policy of Gross National Happiness. This essay concludes by noting that modern Gross National Happiness is a holistic development approach based on a trend emanating from more ancient Mahayana Buddhist traditions Gross National Happiness balanced with modern economic, governmental, and social conditions with Mahayana Buddhist spiritual requirements embodied in Gross National Happiness.     

ASEAN at 40: Prospects for Community Building in Southeast Asia

In 2007, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations attempted to celebrate its 40^th founding anniversary with a bang as it was about to set another milestone, which is the signing of the ASEAN Charter. However, the celebration was overshadowed by the political crisis in Myanmar following the military's crackdown on protesting monks and their democratic supporters. The inability of ASEAN to influence events in that country became the focus of public attention in the region and the international community. Even the much-vaunted milestone of finally having an ASEAN Charter was a major disappointment for many in Southeast Asia as the final document signed by ASEAN leaders was everything but bold, forward-looking, and transformative. It became an object of criticism mainly by some think tanks and civil society groups in the region because it paled in comparison to the recommendations of the Eminent Persons Group that drafted the blueprint of what the ASEAN Charter should look like.

This article describes the major milestones and turning points of ASEAN's regionalism project over the last forty years. It also attempts to identify the major issues and challenges to ASEAN's community building efforts in the future. The main argument of this article is that ASEAN's continuing relevance to the people of the region can be ensured only if it seriously opens up to greater participatory regionalism. Only then can ASEAN be transformed into a truly people-centered organization.