Connolly and the never-ending critiques of liberal peace: from the privilege of difference to vorarephilia

Over the last decade, a dominant critique of international interventions underlines the problem that interventionary strategies have denied the political, societal and cultural heterogeneity of conflict-affected societies, excluding the interests of the majority of their population. A deeper engagement with the everyday life of these societies is understood to expose the errors of international missions and animate an alternative way of thinking about peace: ‘hybrid peace’, which is formed contextually and from below. Engaging with William Connolly’s work on pluralism, this article clarifies the nature of this critique, which rests securely on the assumption that local alterity cannot be fully understood, respected or treated sensitively by international governance approaches. However, as much as this assumption enables the thinking of an emancipatory hybrid peace, it is in turn the source of its critique, as hybrid peace is also seen as reproducing binary schemas and thus considered incapable of caring for the societies intervened in. At the conclusion, the metaphor of vorarephilia—paraphilia where sexual arousal occurs in the idea of being eaten or eating another person—will be used to warn against the tragic direction that critiques seem to be travelling to: critical scholars would be increasingly tempted to welcome the inevitable failures of international interventions.     

The 1934 anti-Jewish Thrace riots: the Jewish exodus of Thrace through the lens of nationalism and collective violence

This article analyses the causes and the dynamic process of production of the 1934 anti-Jewish Thrace riots. The article, based on the US State Department Records, British Documents on Foreign Affairs and the Turkish Republic’s Prime Ministry Republican Archives as well as Turkish, US and British newspapers, argues that the 1934 anti-Jewish Thrace riots were not spontaneous occurrences caused by over-excited masses, but instead planned actions by some local state elite and Republican People’s Party (RPP) local officials as well as anti-Semitic Turkish ultra-nationalists. The article argues that it was not popular anti-Semitism, but the Turkish state establishment’s security concerns vis-à-vis the perceived Italian and Bulgarian threat that resulted in the riots. The local state elite and RPP local officials, who were uneasy about the economically well-off Jews, acted as ethno-nationalist entrepreneurs by allowing the ultra-nationalists to operate in the riot-prone Thrace, while the rioters mainly participated in the collective violence to receive economic gains as a result of the expulsion of the Jews.     

Ideological struggle during the formative years of the Turkish Republic

The meaning of republicanism in Turkish political thought is unclear. It has been viewed as a force for modernization and secularization that reached its apotheosis in the Republic founded by Mustafa Kemal. Another widely accepted scholarly view is that the Turkish Republic and its ideology, Kemalism, emerged abruptly in 1923 without any intellectually substantial foundation. This article challenges these views and demonstrates, by contrast, that it is a mistake to understand Turkish republicanism exclusively in Kemalist terms. In the formative period of the Republic (1922–24), its intellectual founders crushed all contesting and rival political viewpoints. The new state's foundational ideology was the sole victor among competing conceptions of Islamic and liberal republicanism. Modern-day Turkish republicanism represents the outcome of centuries of intellectual dispute between these conceptions.     

Ethnocultural nationalism and Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities during the early republican period

This article analyses the Turkish nationalist elite’s economic and demographic Turkification policies toward the non-Muslim minorities in the 1920s and 1930s, and argues that the nationalist elite pursued ethnocultural nationalism toward the country’s non-Muslim citizens, while applying civic-territorial nationalism toward Muslim Turks. The article maintains that the nationalist elite, like the Young Turk regime, aimed at forming a national Turkish Muslim businessmen class at the expense of the non-Muslim minorities by pursuing economic and demographic Turkification policies.     

From Promoting to De-emphasizing ‘Ethnicity’: Rethinking the Endless Supervision of Kosovo

International statebuilders’ strategy to achieve a peaceful and multi-ethnic Kosovo has shifted from the top-down institutionalization of a multi-ethnic society in the UNMIK period (1999-2008), to the neutral and technical administration of society, with a focus on the reduction of the ethnic divide (EULEX and ICO after 2008). However, despite this evolution in the understanding of statebuilding, this article identifies a dominant sentiment among practitioners of both periods, shared also by academic scholars: further international assistance is key to building a truly inclusive peace. It is argued that this shared assumption rests on the belief that the problems in Kosovo are caused by ethnic thinking—a psychosocial dysfunction. This psychosocial framing of the problem—no matter whether the solution is a process of promoting or de-emphasizing ‘ethnic’ differences—involves a constant and endless international management of Kosovo.     

Prevention From Afar: Gendering Resilience and Sustaining Hope in Post-UNMIL Liberia

ABSTRACT

This article argues that resilience programmes in conflict-affected areas of limited statehood could be understood as much as an effort to equip vulnerable populations with tools to mitigate the effects of poverty, discrimination, lack of opportunities and manage gender inequalities than as an opportunity for the international community to prolong their interventions, consolidate local partnerships and sustain hope. We demonstrate our argument through an examination of the implementation in post-UNMIL Liberia of the ‘Spotlight Initiative’, a new multi-year multi-million programme of the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN) focused on the complete elimination of harmful practices and violence against women.