Crisis management in colonial states: Intelligence and counter-insurgency in Morocco and Syria after the First World War

This article addresses fundamental questions about power in colonial states by analysing the role and performance of intelligence agencies in response to internal rebellion. What was the relationship between intelligence agencies and the coercive instruments of imperial power? How far did intelligence-gathering help to maintain state authority? And what role did intelligence agencies play as architects of colonial state formation? These questions are discussed here with reference to two French overseas dependencies that proved especially turbulent in the 1920s: the Moroccan protectorate and the Syrian mandate. It will be suggested that colonial rule in these locations was so heavily dependent on intelligence-gathering that both could be termed ‘intelligence states’.     

The British experience with intelligence accountability

This article assesses the British experience with intelligence accountability through an analysis of the principal mechanism that exists to provide for it – the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. It discusses the context within which oversight proposals emerged, the debate surrounding the nature of the new oversight body, and assesses the performance of the Committee over the first decade of its existence. It concludes that while the Committee has secured some important advances with regard to the accountability of the intelligence and security services, there are nevertheless significant limitations and weaknesses, many of which were evident in the Committee's 2003 investigation and report into pre-war intelligence on Iraqi WMD. In this context, the debate as to whether the oversight body should have select committee status, discussed at length in the article, remains highly relevant.     

Against ‘creativity’: a ­philistine rant

The aspiration to be creative seems today to be more or less compulsory in an increasing number of areas of life. In psychological vocabularies, in economic life, in education and beyond, the values of creativity have taken on the force of a moral agenda. Yet creativity is a value which, though we may believe we choose it ourselves, may in fact make us complicit with what today might be seen as the most conservative of norms: compulsory individualism, compulsory ‘innovation’, compulsory per­formativity and productiveness, the compulsory valorization of the putatively new. This article suggests that, in order to escape the moralizing injunction to be creative, we need to cultivate a kind of ethical philistinism, albeit disaggregating such philistinism from the negativism of outright cynicism or fatuity. However, there is not much use in outlining an abstract model of philistinism. Instead, we take some ‘exemplars’ of a philistine attitude to creativity – Gilles Deleuze, F. R. Leavis, and Paul Cézanne – in order to show how such an ethos can be accomplished, on the one hand, with or without philosophy, and, on the other, with or without even the very idea of creativity itself, invoking instead the notions of ‘inventiveness’ and an ‘ethics of inertia’ as against creativity as such. The message should be that, rather than this or that theory, only exemplars – the bit-by-bit assembly of reminders – can help liberate us from the potentially moronic consequences of the doctrine of creativity.     

Liberalism,neo-liberalism and governmentality: introduction

This paper concerns the emergence of a specifically 'economic' way of governing poverty at the start of this century, an event which is to be accounted for, though by no means exhaustively, by the discovery of 'unemployment'. The latter will make it possible to relate the nineteenth-century 'problem of the unemployed' to an object domain that is primarily economic, rather than cultural or moral. A new object of regulation will emerge from this economic problematization of the 'social question': the labour market. The paper pays particular attention to the national labour exchange system, the political technology that will visibilize the labour market in new ways. Together with unemployment insurance, it will suggest new ways of governing poverty and a new course for social policy.     

Civil liberties and the left

Mzwanele Mayekiso, Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New South Africa. Monthly Review Press: New York. 1996. pp. 288. (foreword by Mel King)

Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, Edited by Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky. (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995)

Modernization and the Production of Power

Kevin A. Yelvington, Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 286 pp.

Milagros Pena, Theologies and Liberation in Peru: The Role of Ideas in Social Movements (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 222 pp.

Partha Chatterjee (ed), Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 220 pp.

Carol A. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in South Asia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 261 pp.

Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right‐Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States. (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995. pp. 445. $19.95.)     

The Gautrain project in South Africa: a cautionary tale

This article analyses the recently completed Gautrain Rapid Rail Project in the province of Gauteng, South Africa. The Gautrain is the continent's first high-speed rail project, and constitutes an important case in transportation megaproject planning. The article discusses the potential merits and limitations of the project, and ultimately argues that several key problems with the Gautrain should provide readers with a cautionary tale regarding such endeavours. Benefits to the project, such as reduced traffic congestion and job creation, must be weighed against the social and political implications of the project. Thus, the article discusses the following potential problems with the project: it may deepen mobility-related exclusion in the province; it prioritizes wealthy, as opposed to poor, citizens in the allocation of public funds; costs for the project have escalated considerably from initial estimates; and other options for a more effective and integrated transportation plan were not sufficiently considered. This case study conforms to what scholars call the megaprojects paradox in significant ways, and suggests that more rigorous and transparent debate should precede the approval of such projects.