Criminology, Civilisation and the New World Order

Wayne Morrison

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135331115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Expertly authored by the co-editor of the best-selling text Cultural Criminology Unleashed, this book re-examines criminology in a global context. Wide-ranging and up-to-date, it covers the topics of colonialism and post-colonialism, genocide, state control, the impact of September 11th and the post-9/11 world.

Exploring the relationship between a modern discipline and modernity, it reworks the history and composition of criminology in light of September 11th and the prevalence of genocide in modernity. Analizing statistics, anthropology and the everyday assumptions of criminology's history, this text addresses the political and scholarly grip on the territorial state and the absence of a global criminology.

Rejecting the prevalent belief that September 11th and the responses it evoked were exceptions that either destroyed or revealed the absence of global legal order, the author argues that, in fact, they confirm the nature of the world order of modernity.

A compelling and topical volume, this is a must read for anyone interested or studying in the areas of criminology and criminal justice.

Chapter 1:
September 11, Sovereignty and
the Invasion of ‘Civilised Space’

The World Trade Center was the eye of a needle through which global capital flowed, the seat of an empire. However anonymous they appeared, the Twin Towers were never benign, never just architecture. (Sorkin and Zukin 2002a: xi)

A very tall building absorbs a plane and collapses after 105 defiant minutes, having watched its twin suffer the same fate. Everyone sees it. Again and again. It captures every eye and ear in stunned amazement. When the towers fell, the world shook. Nobody could accept what they saw. Such a vertical drop seemed impossible. And no amount of analysis of the mechanics of the collapse, the simple way the attack was carried out, or the strategic mission of the attackers can ease the incredulity. The event remains unbelievable, surprising even to those who initiated it. (Wigley 2002: 69)

With an extraordinary range of emotions, the world watched in disbelief as a power unanticipated pierced a power that thought itself invincible. (Smith 2002: 99)

By the standards of spectacle, September 11 had to be close to the greatest show on earth. (Harvey 2002: 64)

In purely military terms – as defined by U.S. strategy doctrine since at least as early as 1942 – the attacks were widely successful. (Ward Churchill 2003: 31, n. 92)

Prologue, the demands of surprise

There are many types of cave. A common image after September 11, 2001 was that of Osama bin Laden inhabiting a cave in Afghanistan, directing and influencing events in the outside word via a combination of primitive and technologically advanced modes of communication, or simply providing an ideological focal point. In response, the US military utilised an array of ‘cave busting’ bombs that were intended – unsuccessfully – to bring a deadly reality to him: the depth and extent of the cave complexes of Tora Bora became required reading.¹ Bin Laden slipped away and as of mid-2005 remained at large with the campaign he inspired very much alive and linked to ongoing and extensive insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq. Tora Bora was transformed into a symbol and a metaphor: revealing contrasting resources and military powers, yet also an ineffective reliance on high technology to achieve a result that required greater human interaction. While the US reliance on bombing, generally in Afghanistan (and later in Iraq), showed differing perceptions as to victim-hood; it also reflected a confusion of tactics stemming, partly at least, from defining bin Laden as a terrorist and downplaying his politics, rubbishing his appeal, ignoring his aims, refusing to acknowledge his support and misunderstanding his tactics. While for Western consumption he was successfully labelled a terrorist in charge of a terror group given refuge by a ‘rogue state’ that appeared as if it could be easily toppled and conquered, for all the protestations of victories and talk of spreading democracy in developing a new world order by the US and other governments (in particular the UK and Australia), the outcome of the ‘war on terror’ declared after September 11, 2001 looked in early 2006 dubious, both in terms of specific campaign objectives and wider effects on international rules and institutions, as well as attacks on civil liberties in Western countries.² What was Tora Bora: an act of war, a policing operation, an assassination attempt on a political opponent or the attempted removal of a terrorist? Who had the power to define these events and whose reality was at stake?

New York – temple of modernism, may have been a different kind of cave. The events of September 11, 2001, provided a spectacle that astonished; perhaps they should not have. Not only have a number of commentators in the last decades of the twentieth century been sketching out theses on the changing nature of war and security,³ but with hindsight many consider that American intelligence services had enough warnings to have prevented the actions,⁴ and had either downplayed them, or had not been listened to by their political masters (for the latter charge see Anonymous 2002 and 2004). Yet the overwhelming response to the events was bewilderment. They were quickly presented as a wholly exceptional event, a disruption to progress and stability, an eruption of irrationality and evil. They needed to be put in context for them to be understood, rendered safe; but there was a confusion of contexts, or rather the process of contextualising the events divided along social, political, religious and national grounds.⁵ An event rendered global by communication networks; understandings local and fragile.

My contention: September 11, 2001 – not an exception to the governing strategies of modernity, rather an event that reveals entrenched historical paradigms that have constrained understanding as much as they constituted them on the relationship of the local and the global, of pain and its distributions, of labelling ‘crime’ and its causality. Three images may illustrate: the first was presented by the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes in 1651 as the frontispiece of the Leviathan (Figure 1.1), the second is the image, or indeed the images of the events of September 11 themselves, which were broadcast live via the Internet and TV, as well as providing the front covers of newspapers, and magazines (such as The Economist for 15–21 September 2001, which simply stated The Day the World Changed) worldwide. That the paradigm may have changed is reflected in another Economist front cover of 30 November 2002 depicting the globe as a human skull: terror, it was said, was now global.

Hobbes’s paradigm of modernity: civilised space, territorial space …

Hobbes’s Leviathan is most often associated with the depiction of the natural condition of mankind as a state of ‘warre’ of all on all, where reason has little chance against the violent passions of man, and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Humanity is rescued from this condition by fear. Fear of death drives man to act rationally and combine, forming a strong, even

Figure 1.1 The frontispiece of the Leviathan. Herein we are presented with a visualisation of sovereignty and the territorial state – it concerns both protected (civilised) space and embodiment. Note that the body of the sovereign is composed of the bodies of the subjects and the reality of body limitation, of the vulnerability of all humans to pain and death, provides a key element in Hobbes’s narratives that legitimates men coming together and founding the sovereign body. ‘If we look at adult men and consider the fragility of the unity of the human body (whose ruin marks the end of every strength, vigour, and force) and the ease with which the weakest man can kill the strongest man, there is no reason for someone to trust in his strength and think himself superior to others by nature. Those who can do the same things to each other are equals. And those who can do the supreme thing – that is, kill – are by nature equal among themselves’ (Hobbes De cive, p. 93). Men are to be conceived as autonomous, relatively equal and competitive, a problematic situation which must be reconciled through some representation of commonality. The image reflects a process whereby the vulnerability which all human beings possess as embodied subjects is recast in terms of strength. One escapes the irrational chaos of the natural condition by combining through contract and agreeing on government, enforced by public power. Yet this is a spatially bounded strength, within the protected space civilising processes (creating civil society, political society) are at work; outside lies a chaotic realm which is a relationship whereby the security of the protected space (internal to the State) is dependent upon the State responsible for the space being more powerful than other ‘States’

totalitarian government, through accepting that power – might – lies at the heart of all social organisation and that whoever possesses power has both the ability and the right to dominate. That overly simplistic and reductionist reading obscures the radical and complex interpretation Hobbes offers for the human condition. It is, however, correct in two aspects: the extent to which he places the achievement of security – the pacification of violence – before all else and the extent to which performability (the power to enforce or to make a predictable, repeatable occurrence) is given a practical epistemic warrant.

Reading Hobbes today it is easy to gloss over how astonishingly secular his message was, even though he had officially presented it as a bargain between secular and ecclesiastical power.⁶ As the frontispiece illuminates, the Leviathan concerns the creation of civilised space, a realm of civil society where a civilised humanity can flourish beneath the watching gaze of the sovereign. At stake was the control of social violence, the widespread nature of which in the early seventeenth century could hardly even be described as the waging of ‘war’, and was justly termed by one later commentator simply as melee (Clark 1958). On the page an interlocking set of images give a visual presentation of the benefits of security and stability; in effect an existential world picture. For us of course this is a classical text: we cannot recreate the experience of encountering it in the times of its writing. We acknowledge that it was written at the time of the passing of the superordinate authority of the Christian church, where religious authority, instead of being a binding force, had itself become a major source of conflict in Europe. What should replace the claims to loyalty of religious brotherhood or localised relations? The Thirty Years’ War, the bitterest European campaign yet seen, had laid waste to much of central Europe and drastically reduced the German-speaking population. Few people thought globally as we mean it; but, using our current language, the major blocs of that time appear as a divided European Christendom, with the strongest other powers being the Chinese Empire, localised in its concerns, and the Islamic Ottoman Empire somewhat at odds with Islamic Persia. For centuries Islam, not Christian Europe, had been the place of learning: ‘a world civilization, polyethnic, multiracial, international, one might even say intercontinental’ (Lewis 2002: 6). But a grand European project was to change that world. Christian Spanish forces destroyed the last Muslim (Moorish) enclave – the Emirate of Granada – in 1492, in the aftermath of which Columbus was allowed to sail in search of a new route to India. From that time, the ships and military power of Europeans entered into the wider realms of the globe, overwhelming cultures and peoples that could not withstand the onslaught, creating new social and territorial relations in their image. Driving this world shift in power was an existential perspective on life itself. Hobbes postulated the basis of the social bond – in place of dynasties, religious tradition or feudal ties – as rational self-interest exercised by calculating individuals. As bearers of subjective rationality, individuals were depicted as forming the social order and giving their allegiance to a government, a sovereign, because it was in their rational self-interest to do so and the metaphor for the social bond was contractual, not traditional. The sovereign was now to have a particular territory, which many have rather loosely termed the ‘nation-state’⁷, wherein he was the representative of a people and was ultimately composed of the people who occupied that territory. To ensure security and maintain peace, Hobbes knew the sovereign must be well armed. The armaments he gave him were dual: the public sword and the weapons of the military; but there are also the weapons of metaphysical awe, the emblems of the church.

The orderly and ordered town and the countryside flourish in the protected realm of the sovereign. The rolling hills of the countryside are dotted with small villages, each with its church, while the town has neat rows of substantial houses and a cathedral, the spire of which is the highest building in the land.

This representation of inhabitable space, an ordered territory, I term civilised space. Beneath, Hobbes gives two columns in balance. On the one side is the imagery of war and military power that gives the territory secular security against attack from external forces: the castle, the crown, the cannon, the regimental flags and the confrontation of forces in battle. On the other, we have metaphysical security: the church, the bishops, the emblems of religious office and the clergy in service.

This paradigm of civilised space is also a duality. Within the civilised space granted by the power of the sovereign the necessary reference points for social intercourse – expectations, contracts and the truth of speech – are secured in a space of inclusion. Outside may lie a world of darkness. Beyond the reach of the sovereign’s guarantees, lies the land of the ‘other’ . But we do not see it. It is however, an invisible presence. Contained in fear, in dreams, in stories told by travellers, the realm of the other is there but unacknowledged. It is the source of danger, of possible intruders, of differences that can upset the balances of the civilised. It is to be mastered or kept at a safe distance.⁸

This short interpretation of the Leviathan – in which mankind is placed in the centre – is of course, completely ‘modern’. It ignores the range of religious issues that Hobbes’s small group of intended readers would have been concerned to find; and concerned they became. They were angry when they found a text that contained many of the standard references to church and God, but was written in a language where the grammar – the meaning – denoted something else.⁹ It was not just that Hobbes wrote in English, the vernacular language of a ‘national’ commonality and was concerned to communicate within that arena, rather than writing in Latin to preserve and acknowledge the traditions of the past and to communicate with pan-European elites. There were more unsettling features. All the standard tropes were there (including many contained in Latin phrases), but something was wrong … there was a difference. They seemed to be presented as instruments of human projects – along with demands for reasoned strategies – and always conscious of human desires, hopes and fears.

In its structure the text was still two realms; the Commonwealth was Civill and Ecclesiasticall, but in reality political theory had become secular; features immanent to the human condition provided the foundation to Hobbes’s ‘natural law’. He had given it away in the opening sentence of ‘The Introduction’ when he had put his reference to God in brackets: ‘Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and governs the World) is by the Ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: September 11, Sovereignty and the Invasion of ‘Civilised Space’
• Chapter 2: Relating Visions: Patterns of Integration and Absences
• Chapter 3: Criminal Statistics, Sovereignty and the Control of Death: Representations from Quetelet to Auschwitz
• Chapter 4: The Lombrosian Moment: Bridging the Visible and the Invisible, or Restricting the Gaze in the Name of Progress?
• Chapter 5: Civilising the Congo, Which Story, Whose Truth: Wherewith Criminology?
• Chapter 6: ‘A Living Lesson in the Museum of Order’: The Case of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Brussels
• Chapter 7: Contingencies of Encounter, Crime and Punishment: On the Purposeful Avoidance of ‘Global Criminology’
• Chapter 8: A Reflected Gaze of Humanity: Reflections on Vision, Memory and Genocide
• Chapter 9: Teaching the Significance of Genocide and Our Indifference: The Liberation War Museum, Dhaka, Bangladesh
• Chapter 10: Enlightenment, Wedding Guests and Terror: The Exceptional and the Normal Revisited
• Notes
• References
• Index