Transnational Muslim Politics

Reimagining the Umma

Peter G. Mandaville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134540228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyzes Islam as a form of 'travelling theory' in the context of contemporary global transformations such as diasporic communities, transnational social movements, global cities and information technologies. Peter Mandaville examines how 'globalization' is manifested as lived experience through a discussion of debates over the meaning of Muslim identity, political community and the emergence of a 'critical Islam'.
This radical book argues that translocal forces are leading the emergence of a wider Muslim public sphere. Now available in paperback, it contains a new preface setting the debates in the context of September 11th.

1 Beyond disciplinary boundaries
International relations and translocal politics

If the social world… is not entirely defined in terms of repetitive, sedimented practices, it is because the social always overflows the institutionalised frameworks of ‘society’, and because social antagonisms show the inherent contingency of those frameworks. Thus a dimension of construction and creation is inherent in all social practice. The latter do not involve only repetition, but also reconstruction.

(Laclau, The Making of Political Identities)

It is necessary to ask how it has become so easy to believe that movements act ‘down there’ among the locales, among those forms of life that are contained within the grander structures ‘above’. Social movements that work entirely within the modern reification of spatiotemporal relations simply affirm the limits of their ambition.

(Walker, ‘Social Movements/World Politics’)

The aim of this first chapter is to construct the broad theoretical architecture of the book. I will begin by arguing that the conception of politics found in dominant strains of international relations (IR) theory - and neo-realism in particular - is incapable of accounting for forms of politics enabled by the current climate of rapid, global sociocultural change. By locating ‘the political’ within the state, conventional IR theory reproduces a set of political structures unsuited to circumstances in which political identities and processes configure themselves across and between bounded forms of political community. After reviewing some of the (infra)structural transformations which have been affecting world politics in an increasingly globalised - or ‘translocal’ - era, I go on to look at the progress which critical approaches to IR theory have made towards comprehending alternative notions of the political. I then suggest that IR has much to gain from engaging with debates going on within other disciplinary projects - namely post-colonial studies, cultural studies, and, especially, anthropology. These fields, I argue, have been better placed to anticipate these transformations and have consequently been able to provide considerably more sophisticated treatments of these issues. Transnational anthropology, in particular, has begun to develop various modes for theorising post-statist forms of politics. After a critical review of some of this thinking, I go on to develop a conception of translocality as an increasingly important form of political space. I see the translocal as an abstract category denoting sociopolitical interaction which falls between bounded communities; that is, translocality is primarily about the ways in which people flow through space rather than about how they exist in space. It is therefore a quality characterised in terms of movement. I will argue that the ‘travelling’ which takes place in translocality serves to enact forms of politics which challenge sedentary notions of community and identity.

International relations: a limited political imagination?

The majority of international relations theory is effectively blind to a great deal of political activity in the world today. The purpose of this first section is to explain why this is so and also to argue that IR’s limited imagination of the political prohibits its appreciation of important new forms of ‘international’ politics located outside the traditional realm of the state.

There is a strong sense in which IR has been going by the wrong name since its institutional inception in 1919. Whether styled ‘international relations’, ‘international politics’ or ‘international studies’, the implication has been the same, namely that what interests the scholars of these fields are relations between nations. A quick glance at the ‘classic texts’ of the discipline - and even the majority of current research in the field - reveals, however, that the IR envisaged by many of its most eminent students would have more properly been labelled ‘inter-state politics’. State-centrism, usually identified as a fetish of realist thought, actually predates the latter insofar as the state was already coded as the centre of gravity for international political life well before the disillusionment of the inter- war years that gave rise to what we recognise today as classic realism. The argument that state-centrism in IR is merely a by-product of realism therefore misses the point, for the nexus of state and politics has exercised hegemony over our political imaginations long before anyone thought to theorise IR as an autonomous sphere of activity. It was taken for granted that what we understood by ‘international relations’ were really relations between state governments which, according to the modern ideal of the nation-state, were supposedly representative of their constitutive nations.

Defining the nation has proved one of the most contentious tasks of the social sciences in recent years, and the present study will not attempt or pretend to make any contribution to this ongoing melee. It will be necessary, however, in developing the post-statist framework in which this book is situated, to make some comments as to the distinction between nation and state. As regards the nature of the nation, I am broadly sympathetic to Benedict Anderson’s notion of the ‘imagined community’.¹ By his use of the idiom ‘imagination’, Anderson is not trying to suggest that nations are fictional figments, or somehow ‘not real’. Rather, his is a much more complex argument about how people become cognisant of themselves as part of a social collective. In this sense, then, the construction of the nation is first and foremost about understanding the self as part of a greater whole, but one which possesses boundaries - a clear sense of inside and out. Indeed, if we examine the various sociohistorical contexts in which nations have been elaborated, we find many in which the act of creating a nation is as much about saying who one is not, as it is about saying who one is. It is therefore an inherently political process in the sense that it constructs boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Furthermore, the nation exists in more than just space, it also endures in time. It is a life-world which requires reproduction in order to survive. Insofar as the nation is a discursive formation (as opposed to a corporeal construct) it requires reiteration in order to sustain itself. The nation is a story of identity, memory and belonging which needs to be told and told again. It is this dimension of the nation which leads Homi Bhabha to speak of its ‘narration’.² The nation is hence a living thing: the reification of culture (language, morality, memory, experience, ‘forms of life’) into an exclusive community.

I understand the contemporary state, on the other hand, more as a technology of governance, a bureaucratic apparatus for the organisation of power and control. Like the nation, the contemporary state is also a historically-constituted, sociocultural construct. People (often in the guise of nations) produce and define state forms. The state is, however, the product of a particular political culture (European modernism) whose hegemony (in the sense of an historical particularity masquerading as the universal) has permitted its political imagination to assume tangible, institutional form. In this regard, the fact that we find a great deal of isomorphism within the modern state system is more a reflection of the history of power relations between its constituent members than a testament to the intrinsic durability of the European state model. And while the state is therefore a product of human - perhaps even of national - agency, it cannot however be denied that state hegemony has also served to structure and define the range of possibilities which we as political agents possess.

My major complaint about dominant theories of international relations such as neo-realism is that they persist in working with a relatively unproblematised understanding of the nation-state despite the veritable upheavals in citizenship, ethical capacity and sovereignty highlighted above. Where these transformations are recognised, they tend to be marginalised in favour of an image of IR which reproduces political realism’s ‘timeless wisdom’. More specifically, traditional modes of theorising IR see the nation-state as the focal point of international politics and, indeed, operate with an understanding of the political as something which only legitimately emanates from the state. In doing so, however, realism and its more recent incarnations effectively ignore the fact that there are many other layers and spaces of politics. Indeed, within the unproblematised nation-state that IR sees as central there are at least three complex political dynamics at work: (1) a politics of inclusion, exclusion and national narration; (2) a politics in which the state attempts to distil national identit(ies) into a (usually singular) ‘national interest’; and (3) a meta-politics which seeks to maintain the fusion of nation and state as the most effective logic by which to order the international system.

A critique of IR’s state-centric nature is, of course, nothing new. Realism has had its vociferous critics for many years.³ Other normative visions, from Burton’s ‘world society’ to the World Order Models Project (WOMP) have been voiced.⁴ Theorists of complex interdependence have sought to downplay state hegemony.⁵ Indeed, many IR theorists today would tell you that we have moved beyond our obsession with the state, citing important work being done in areas such as gender studies, ecology and international political economy in which the state, when present, tends to play the antagonist. The spectre of the state, however, is still very much with us. We tend to slip easily into realist-type language when asked to explain some aspect of contemporary world politics to someone outside the discipline. Indeed, part of IR’s problem - as I will argue later - is the image that those outside the discipline hold of it. It is expected that an international relations specialist will have something to say about what the United States is doing in the Balkans, or the intrigues of a vote in the UN Security Council. In short, it is expected that IR should be able to account for inter-state politics. And with good reason. The state is still a very important actor in world politics - one would, I think, be foolish to claim otherwise at the present time. My argument, however, is not simply that we need to ask questions about the existence of other actors in world politics (for I take this as given), but rather that we need to ask questions about the nature and location of the political within what we understand as world politics. By this I mean that theories of international relations have tended to assume that ‘proper’ politics is something involving particular forms of decision-making by particular actors within specific institutional spaces (e.g. diplomats voting on trade agreements in the GATT). I do not deny that these are important aspects of world politics. However, there are other forms of world politics to which IR theory is effectively blind because it has only been taught to recognise a limited range of shapes and colours as political. In this sense, the question of what IR can and cannot ‘see’ is central to this book. This line of inquiry becomes all the more important when we begin to realise that the world is undergoing transformations which threaten further alienation in the relationship between world politics and the ways we think about the nature and location of the political. Thus I wholeheartedly agree with Rob Walker when he writes:

My concern with the limits of the modern political imagination is informed both by a sense of the need for alternative forms of political practice under contemporary conditions and by a sense that fairly profound transformations are currently in progress. But it is also informed by a sense that our understanding of these transformations, and the contours of alternative political practices, remains caught within discursive horizons that express the spatiotemporal configurations of another era.⁶

Before I go any further something needs to be said about the nature of the ‘political imagination’ which I am attributing to state-centric forms of IR theory. Up to this point I have been speaking of the state as the location of ‘the political’ and using terms such as politics, political identity and political community without explaining how I understand them. This is particularly important insofar as one of the primary objectives of this book is to explain how certain global transformations currently underway are forcing us to reassess how we think about ‘the political’. My major complaint is that the vast majority of international theory has allowed what it understands as ‘the political’ to be determined by where it sites the political. Rather than asking questions about the particular qualities of politics and political relationships (i.e. what makes them ‘political’), many theorists have equated politics with those activities which fall within the remit of state structures (i.e. politics = the state). When extra-statist relations are occasionally recognised as political in nature, they tend to be dismissed as insignificant. This is because the dominant discourse sees institutionalised procedures, offices and formal bureaucratic frameworks (e.g. elections, presidents and parliaments) as the only ‘real’ way to practice politics. In my understanding of the political, however, there are political aspects to countless other daily social practices (e.g. sexuality, employment and religion), and these are not politics which can simply be dismissed as irrelevant. Furthermore, I want to argue that the current globalising climate serves to amplify these practices by disrupting the disciplining mechanisms of state sovereignty (see below) and by opening up new public spaces in which alternative political views can be articulated. Before I get on with the task of theorising these changes in political space, let me first make a short but crucial detour and say something about what I understand the political to be.

Politics is first and foremost a social activity; it is about relationships between people(s). Not all relationships are inherently political, although non-political relationships can at times assume political qualities. So what is the particular quality of a political relationship - or, in other words, what makes it ‘political’? On my reading, the political can be characterised by two different sorts of claims: identity claims and ethical claims. I will deal with identity first. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I want to suggest that social antagonism is one possible root of the political. Antagonism refers to a condition in which the differentiation of identity - the split between us and them - begins to appear as something more than just difference. In an antagonistic situation, one identity (the ‘self’) comes to see the other as a force seeking to negate its identity. ‘From that moment on’, writes Mouffe, ‘any form of us/them relationship - whether it be religious, ethnic, economic or other - becomes political’.⁷ The example often employed by Laclau and Mouffe is that of the peasant whose use of the land is under threat from a landlord. If the identity of peasant is premised upon working the land, then any force which threatens to remove this capacity also threatens the very existence of peasant identity. Antagonism is therefore the product of a politics of identity. In this sense ‘the political’ is not a sharply demarcated sphere of activity unto itself, but rather it describes a mode of interaction - one characterised by the negotiation of identity. According to Mouffe:

Looking at the issue of identity in this way transforms the way we think of the political. The political can no longer be located as present only in a certain type of institution, as representative of a sphere or level of society. It should rather be understood as a dimension inherent in all human society which stems from our very ontological condition.⁸

The ontological dimension of the political is related to one’s assertion of a particular identity because that assertion is, in effect, a claim to ‘be’ - to exist according to one’s construction of a particular identity - and, furthermore, to have that existence recognised by the other. Antagonism arises when this recognition is withheld, or when the other attempts to force a discrepant identity. Without this constitutive recognition, an identity cannot survive, or, at the very least, will always fail to become social in the sense of allowing one to relate to the other in terms of that identity. In this sense the political is primarily a mode rather than a description of a specific practice. It is a form of social relationship characterised by contestation.

The second possible manifestation of the political involves ethical claims. Politics is often about the assertion of a particular vision of what constitutes ‘the good’ in the face of other competing claims. This is a conception of the political which focuses on its normative aspects, the ways in which different political practices reflect particular ethical agendas. Thus the political pertains not only to claims about who we are, but also to claims about what we think is right. That there is a close relationship between these two claims is self-evident. Identity claims will often overlap quite significantly with ethical claims, especially when particular identities are seen to be closely related to certain ethical projects. This emphasis on the ethical component of the political leads me to another important distinction that needs to be made between political identity and politicised identity. I need to elaborate this difference in order to point out that I am not simply conflating politics and political identity. On my reading, a political identity refers to a particular normative vision, a set of beliefs about the nature of ‘the good’ and how one should go about achieving it. A politicised identity, on the other hand, is a political identity which has been placed in a situation of antagonism such that its ethical claims are challenged by counter-claims from other political identities. Therefore (to employ an analogy from physics) political identity refers to ‘potential’ politics, while the politicisation of identity marks a conversion into ‘kinetic’ form, or the actuality of the political. It is important to make this semantic distinction so ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• A note on style and transliteration
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1: Beyond disciplinary boundaries: International relations and translocal politics
• 2: Before, during and after the West: ‘Islam’, Muslims and the umma
• 3: Modes of translocality: Travelling theory, hybridity, diaspora
• 4: Living Islam: politics and community in the Muslim diaspora
• 5: Transnational Public Spheres Information and communication technologies in the Muslim world
• 6: Reimagining the umma?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Glossary of Arabic/Islamic terms