Rethinking Insecurity, War and Violence

Beyond Savage Globalization?

Damian Grenfell, Paul James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134082421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Rethinking Insecurity, War and Violence: Beyond Savage Globalization? is a collection of essays by scholars intent on rethinking the mainstream security paradigms.

Overall, this collection is intended to provide a broad and systematic analysis of the long-term sources of political, military and cultural insecurity from the local to the global. The book provides a stronger basis for understanding the causes of conflict and violence in the world today, one that adds a different dimension to the dominant focus on finding proximate causes and making quick responses

Too often the arenas of violence have been represented as if they have been triggered by reassertions of traditional and tribal forms of identity, primordial and irrational assertions of politics. Such ideas about the sources of insecurity have become entrenched in a wide variety of media sources, and have framed both government policies and academic arguments. Rather than treating the sources of insecurity as a retreat from modernity, this book complicates the patterns of global insecurity to a degree that takes the debates simply beyond assumptions that we are witnessing a savage return to a bloody and tribalized world.

It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of international relations, security studies, gender studies and globalization studies.

Part I
Globalizing insecurity

1 Debating insecurity in a globalizing world

An introduction

Damian Grenfell and Paul James

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization… In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

K. Marx and F. Engels (1848)

Reading Time Magazine recently, and glancing through its opening pages of worldly quirks before turning to the ostensibly more serious articles, a banner headline called “Numbers” stands out presenting an apparently ad hoc list of interesting facts. Under the heading “Congo” is the number 27,000. This we are told in the briefest of terms is the number of sexual assaults reported in one province in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006. The only other context given is that the “UN says sexual violence in the war-ravaged country is the worst in the world” (Time Magazine 2007: 12). The next listed fact, still under the heading of “Congo,” reads “60%,” which we are told is the percentage of “combatants in the Congo who are believed to be infected with HIV/AIDS.” The column then goes on to discuss the record number of Wikipedia entries made by Japanese government workers, and the number of contestants in a wife-carrying competition in the USA. And that is it. There is no other information on the Congo in the magazine, no other explanation, and one wonders if there is meant to be a connection between the number of sexual assaults and the percentage of HlV-infected combatants. This is the contemporary world of throwaway facts and implied presumptions about the globalizing states of violence

Violence is of course a complex social phenomenon, and for all the different ways in which it can be understood, asking basic questions is an important first step. Why do some theatres of violence attract such a high degree of sustained media attention while others can be reduced to numbers for our disturbing amusement? What if 27,000 US soldiers had been injured in one city in Iraq, or 27,000 school children sexually assaulted in one province of France? No-one would dare to place such news in a “numbers” column. In the case of the Congo, it is a combined effect of patriarchy and the persisting effects of colonialism that allow for such violence to be treated in a remarkably trivialized way. The Congo—darkest Africa, a place of blackness and hopelessness, of wild abuse and rampant disease, and of gender-based violence—is typically treated either without anything of the same seriousness as the most minor threats to “national security” in the West or, like the Sudan, Somalia, and Sri Lanka, thrown in the too-hard basket.

While the Congo represents a particularly powerful postcolonial imaginary of a place experiencing conflict, just as with the insurgency in Iraq, the Republican Army activities in Ireland, or the militia attacks in Timor-Leste, we are continuously presented with what appears to unexaminable violence in a “world on fire,” to borrow Amy Chua’s (2003) phrase. This world is presented as one of barbarity, clans, blood-ties, tribes, revenge, ritual, and savagery. Such violence, it is argued, stems from a global resurgence in tribal and traditional forms of identity, a view which has become entrenched in a wide variety of media sources and has framed both government policies and academic arguments. For example, the otherwise sophisticated documenter of conflict, William Shawcross, writes of “the chaos and the suffering caused by failed states, by tribalism, and by warlordism in the post-Cold War period” (Shawcross 2000: 12). Michael Ignatieff (2003: 21) writes of the “barbarian zones” into which extending imperial order becomes, for him, a necessary imperative. In this worldview, the hopes of an ordered Westphalian system is giving way in many zones of the world to the chaos and mayhem of identity politics based on ethno-political groupings, either emanating from within nation-states or cutting across them.

Beyond Conceptions of a Manichean World

Two influential authors who have framed the two sides of the mainstream explanation for contemporary localized transnational violence have been Samuel Huntington in his Clash of Civilizations (1998) and Benjamin Barber in Jihad vs McWorld (1996). As a conservative and left-liberal analysis respectively, both authors are rightly responding in criticism of Francis Fukuyama’s (1993) thesis that the end of the Cold War would result in an “end of history.” However, they end up by completely oversimplifying the conditions of contemporary conflict. Huntington argues that history was far from over and that conflict would occur along civilizational lines between sets of dominant and competing religious civilizations. He asserts that civilizations clash for various reasons, including where “the process of economic modernization and social change throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local identities,” and where religion “provides a basis for identity and commitment that transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations” (Huntington 1993: 26). He sees a kind of traditionalism or a given “soul of culture” flowing through each of the civilizational forms.

Barber’s Jihad vs McWorld tries to account for the same kind of disordering violence as Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, and moves beyond the notion of an essential continuity of cultures to draw a very different matrix of determinants. Barber delineates tribalism (Jihad) from modernism (McWorld) and sets them up as contradictory forces that share a common propensity for challenging what Barber calls “democracy.”

The first scenario rooted in race holds out the grim prospect of a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened balkanization of nation-states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe, a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and mutuality: against technology, against pop culture, and against integrated markets; against modernity itself as well as the future in which modernity issues. The second paints that future in shimmering pastels, a busy portrait of onrushing economic, technological, and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerise peoples everywhere with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—MTV, Macintosh, and McDonalds—pressing nations into one homogenous global theme park, one McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment, and commerce. Caught between Babel and Disneyland, the planet is falling precipitously apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.

(Barber 2001: 4)

For Barber, Jihad is found across many postcolonial settings—from the Congo to Indonesia and back to Afghanistan. “McWorld” can be understood as the end result of Marx’s bourgeoisie as “it creates a world after its own image.”

Both writers have drawn heated critiques, not least Huntington for his oversimplification of Islam and his failure to show how contemporary expressions of religion, including in Western civilization, have been shaped by modernizing trends including militarization, corruption, and bureaucratic state formation, as well as by modernizing ideologies ranging from Marxism and liberalism to nationalism (Salter 2002, Senghaas 2002, Ali 2003). Barber falls for a similar reductionism in that he separates out Jihad and McWorld as two distinct fields. At the same time, in realizing that Jihad and McWorld draw on interconnected processes—“Imagine bin Laden without modern media: He would be an unknown desert rat”—he tries to complicate the dichotomy by saying that Jihad and McWorld are not a clash, but a “dialectical expression of tensions” (Barber 2001: xvi). The expression is impressive, but it does not theoretically explain how two divided ways-of-being can be both Manichean opposites and dialectically engaged. For Barber, the dialectic just happens. Each side may see themselves as necessary and justified through the existence of the other, and Jihad may momentarily appropriate aspects of McWorld, such as terrorists using the internet. Barber however misses the sense in which both subjectivities are caricatures of the various responses to modernizing and postmodernizing processes, and how as cultural-political expressions these responses actually work to reconstitute one another, not least in terms of how violence is enacted. This perhaps explains how Barber turns to the banality of modern democracy to mediate his Manichean alternatives. It is not that democracy is a not worthwhile political system, especially if it were enacted in a thorough-going consistency concerning rule of the demos. However, as Michael Mann has brilliantly documented there is a darker side to existing democracy. Democratic liberal regimes are also deeply part of the problem:

Evil does not arrive from outside of our civilization, from a separate realm we are tempted to call “primitive.” Evil is generated by civilization itself…perpetrators of ethnic cleansing do not descend among us as a separate species of evil doers. They are created by conflicts central to modernity that involve unexpected escalations and frustrations during which individuals are forced into a series of moral choices.

(Mann 2005:ix)

Violence in the Context of Modernizing and Postmodernizing Globalization

As Amartya Sen has written, “The reductionism of high theory can make a major contribution, often inadvertently, to the violence of low politics” (2006:xvi; see also Comaroff and Comaroff 2003). Against one-dimensional worldviews that posits clashes of civilizations or cultures, Rethinking Insecurity, War and Violence: Beyond Savage Globalization? is committed to rethinking the current dominant security paradigms and the mainstream patterned representations of violence. At the same time, against the tendency to reduce analysis to graphic descriptions of the various theatres of violence—and then to attribute the general causes of the horror to the proximate purveyors of that violence, the Serbs, the Taliban, Al-Qa’ida, religious fundamentalists, radical nationalists, tribal warlords—Rethinking Insecurity, War and Violence is based on the view that critical theory remains crucial in lifting us out of a media headline understanding of conflict and violence. The framing argument of this book is that the major causes of violence in the world today cannot be caste as part of a process of retribalization or Islamicization of the world. The expanding theatres of localized transnational violence and the turn to new kinds of fundamentalisms—including in the West—need to be understood in terms of the remaking and reconstitution of social relations across all modes of practice in a period of intense globalization. Scenes of “savagery from below” are not some testimony to a return to the past—that much is largely impossible in a world where even a subjective sense of tribalism is shaped by modernizing processes from state and nation formation through to hypermediatized globalization. Hence, it is not that tribal and traditional, modern and postmodern formations should be understood as laid out as two opposing cultures, civilizations, or worlds. Rather those various ontological formations are better seen as intersecting and overlaying each other in uneven configurations across changing local-global settings. It is despite, or more accurately because of, the dominance of the modern-postmodern, that these intersections throw up new tensions and contradictions. “Returns” to “traditional” identity politics, religious sectarianism, and reclamations of (neo)traditional truths, are in this sense the outcome of attempts to deal with a world that is fractured along cultural, economic, political, and ontological lines. Here the concept “ontological” is taken to refer to ways of “being in the world.”

The terms that we are using to make sense of these questions—tribalism, traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism—are difficult concepts, not the least because they carry an unfortunate and sometimes overwhelming baggage of ethnocentric and reductionist assumptions. In some hands they still evoke the classical dichotomies between the savage and the civilized, the backward and progressive, and the simple and complex. They also remind us of the older notion of a Great Divide between traditional (undeveloped) societies and modern (developed) ones, a division that was said to characterize the Global South versus the Global North, and was dominant in the development studies literature up until the 1980s. In the Global North we supposedly find industrial modern society with a few remnant tribal and traditional pockets, and in the Global South, by contrast, swathes of primordial peasantry surround pimples of overpopulated metropolitan chaos. The editors of the present volume and the writers included in the anthology all attempt in their different ways to account for the complex intermeshing of contemporary social formations. The world as they describe it is neither a homogenizing whole nor a thin set of plural differences, at least as understood in the liberal sense of “pluralism.”

However, this argument is not enough. As many of the chapters in this collection suggest, there is also a “savagery from above” where globalizing processes both radically reconstitute the zones of conflict (in some cases leading to extended periods of violence) and remake the avenues for legitimizing military intervention, particularly through the electronic media. Violence, both embodied and structural, is carried through the new possibilities for the extension of power across time and space, not only reshaping the kinds of violence that occur within localized struggles but making new patterns of violence possible. This is explained at times through the idea of empire, where empires are understood simply as states which extend relations of power across territorial spaces over which they have no prior or given legal sovereignty, and where, in one or more of the domains of economics, politics, and culture, they gain some measure of extensive hegemony over those spaces for the purpose of extracting or accruing value. Relating this to the theme of globalization, we can say that to the extent that these extensions of hegemony have, or are projected to have, the potential to command “world spaces” then empires tend to be globalizing formations of violence.

The implied relation here between globalization and violence also needs some defining. In mapping the links between the globalization and conflict, it is important to enter the discourse through a discussion of globalization in relation to issues as broad as human security, social change and cultural-political disruption. Our claim is that there is a generalized relation between globalization and conflict—including transnational conflict of the violent kind—based on the argument that cultural-political disruption is often associated with increasing tensions and conflict. We are not arguing that globalization directly causes transnational violence. Neither does this suggestion of a generalized relation imply that the descent from conflict into violence is a necessary outcome or a characteristic of globalization per se. Rather, we are interested in examining the way that the various processes of globalization contribute to unsettling existing life-worlds, accentuating past and present cleavages of identity politics, intensifying the communicative bases for making economic and social comparisons, increasing the objective divisions of wealth or disrupting both older authority structures and putting pressu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Globalizing insecurity
• PART II Reconceptualizing security
• PART III Rethinking localized transnational conflicts
• PART IV Renewal in the aftermath of violence