State, Sovereignty, War: Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities 9780857458629

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State, Sovereignty, War

Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND GLOBAL CRISIS Critical Perspectives Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 2

GLOBALIZATION Critical Issues Edited by Allen Chun Volume 3

CORPORATE SCANDAL Global Corporatism against Society Edited by John Gledhill Volume 4

EXPERT KNOWLEDGE First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology Edited by Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin Volume 5

STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WAR Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities Edited by Bruce Kapferer

State, Sovereignty, War Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities

 Edited by Bruce Kapferer

Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD

www.berghahnbooks.com

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Paperback edition published in 2004 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2004, 2009 Berghahn Books Reprinted in 2009 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-84545-022-9 Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

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Contents  Introduction: Old Permutations, New Formations? War, State, and Global Transgression Bruce Kapferer 1

Deterritorialized Wars of Public Safety Allen Feldman 16

Where’s Jessica? Myth, Nation, and War in America’s Heartland Charles W. Brown 29

Wars, Europe, and Visions of the World Yngve Lithman 37

Invisible Empires Carolyn Nordstrom 46

Market Forces, Political Violence, and War: The End of Nation-States, the Rise of Ethnic and Global Sovereignties? Caroline Ifeka 56

Reflections on War and State and the Sudan Leif Manger 75

Militarized Democracies: The Neoliberal Mexican State and the Chiapas Uprising Heidi Moksnes 89

Muthanga: A Spark of Hope K. Ravi Raman 107

Kings or Presidents? War and the State in Pre- and Post-Genocidal Rwanda Christopher C. Taylor 125

Chaos, Conspiracy, and Spectacle: The Russian War against Chechnya Jakob Rigi 137

About a Wall Glenn Bowman 147

Paramilitaries of the Empire: Guatemala, Colombia, and Israel Staffan Löfving 159

Notes on Contributors 167

INTRODUCTION Old Permutations, New Formations? War, State, and Global Transgression

 Bruce Kapferer

The very institution of the state is widely conceived of as inseparable from war. If it constitutes peace within the borders or order of its sovereignty, this very peace may be the condition for its potential for war with those other states and social formations outside it. Indeed, in different state systems their very internal order depended on predation beyond their borders. The one was the function of the other. Since ancient times it has been observed that the distribution of wealth within states, even the creation of what the Greeks recognized as democracy, was critically related to the perpetration of war. Hobbes’s royalist vision of the state within the context of England and Europe is consistent with that founding paradox of the state that I have outlined here. This is so despite his famous legitimation of the state as necessary for the overcoming of conflict and vio-

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lence that was inherent in human being and especially in social processes otherwise not mediated through the institutions of the state. In other words, for Hobbes the state is an extension of fundamental human nature. The state is peace-making by virtue of its appropriation and monopolization of the wherewithal for violence. But this direction toward peace is a protective function organized to the benefit of the citizens of the state who surrender their capacity for violence to the state. Clausewitz’s celebrated recognition of war as an extension of politics expands on Hobbes making more explicit the paradox of the state. This paradox arises from the monopolization of violence, for it can lead to excessive violence demanding political constraint. What generations of later social and political philosophers and theorists (especially anarchists and Marxists) criticized in Hobbes was his reductionism. They argue contra Hobbes that his “warre of all against all” was itself a creation of state formation and not essential in the human condition. War was no more natural or less unnatural than the social peace that the existence of the state guaranteed. Such a critique of Hobbes (and its implications of individualist, psychological and essentialist reduction—the starting point of Leviathan) is central to that work which is critical of state orders and their effects. The anti-Hobbes position locates war firmly within the structure of social formations, both those constituted by the state and those that are outside state orders. Much of the critique of the state has concentrated on the state as an organization for war and violence, refusing the grounds for its legitimation as an ordering or a peacemaking agency within the territories of its control, let alone beyond its borders. Of late there has been a celebration of the demise of the state, most particularly the nation-state. It became conventionally seen as the instrument of the social ills of modernism. The end of the nation-state, possibly a premature vision, was hailed as a liberating advance

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establishing the circumstance for the emergence of Empire (with the U.S. as its heart), a force instrumental in the destruction or diminution of a global order founded on the nation-state (exemplified in the U.S. subversion of the UN in the progress toward the war against Iraq). A major ideological instrument (which does not deny a certain—if ironic—factuality) of U.S. global reconfiguration is the corruption of the nation-state and of the UN. This Empire, the new imperialist force of vital impact in the diverse structuring of global socio-economic realities, might be seen as the transmogrification of previous state forms, a New Leviathan extending from the nation-state but not reducible to it in its distinct socio-economic and political formation. In some contemporary postmodernist terms it is Leviathan’s last blow, indeed a kind of end of history. Thus, it is conceived of as generating the conditions for a new beginning indicating the emergence of original social formations that will ultimately free human beings of the shackles of the state: in effect, the start of a new era of human history (see Hardt and Negri 2000 and Negri 2003 for the major development of such a perspective; also, for one criticism, see Kapferer 2002). The New Leviathan, since September 11, has of course ideologically legitimated itself as an agent of peace and universal democracy. War is justified as a means in the last instance for creating peace within the horizons of the imperial reach of Empire, which in the understanding advanced by Hardt and Negri is globally all-encompassing. Effectively, the United States under Bush has expanded the notion of the state as a domain of peace. Furthermore, it has ideologically resolved the paradox of the democratic state as realized in ancient times (that democracy within the state may necessitate war beyond it) by expanding its aims of democratization to all those within the global region of its influence. In this orientation democratization and Human Rights may be seen as ideological instruments

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for the perpetration of war and ideological methods for the legitimate incorporation of other states and societies within a “new global order” of Empire. The argument of Hobbes could be seen to have been innovatively reissued with the exception that this state order is not necessarily based on one commanding ‘monarchical’ center. As Hardt and Negri argue, developing on Foucault, this postmodern Empire distributes a highly differentiated power (political, financial, and media) across a number of different centers. I note here that the formation of the state in what was to become the U.S. was constituted in conscious rejection of European models. De Tocqueville is one significant early commentator on this fact. The U.S. was already postmodern from the early days of its conception and development. It was constituted in conscious opposition to European monarchical forms and ideally sought to distribute governmental power to its citizenry. The Behemoth of the state was a submerged and distributed force. In many respects, the political and social theories that have emerged apace in recent years from within its borders might be seen as ideologically internal to its postmodern imperial interests. This is so for even many otherwise positive dimensions of a largely North American postmodern anti-nation-state attitude (the language of Rumsfeld’s war-speak during the Iraq conquest was scattered with postmodern cultural studieslike phraseology). The emergence to relatively undisputed dominance of the U.S. (perhaps only momentary, for as Arrighi (1994) and others suggest the current situation may express a new crisis in the organization of capital which may place an ultimate limitation on U.S. hegemony) and other global social economic extra state forces (e.g., the emergence to sovereign power of corporations, but nonetheless dependent on state regulatory controls, particularly those centered in the U.S.) are major factors in subverting the sovereign power of other states. I hasten to add that the U.S. is far

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from the only factor. The postcolonial independence of many nation-states was often a superficial phenomenon disguising their continued colonial dependence by other economic and political means. Within the colonial field there was a diasporization of elites into colonial centers and these often reproduced their local national domination through vital extra national links established in the colonial era and further propelled in postcolonial times. Particular wars have been fuelled in the relatively abstract ideological commitments not only of persons exiled as an immediate consequence of civil war but by expatriates more voluntarily absorbed into dominant political and economic metropolitan worlds. (The circumstances surrounding the enduring ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka are one example.) Local oligarchies formed in colonial times or systemically replaced in the formation of postcolonial revolutions and dictatorial coups often expanded their powers (and external involvements) in the inter-Imperium years. These contributed to the collapse of states or their fragmentation in civil, often ethnic, strife, both the rapaciousness of local oligarchies and the general failure in economic and social mechanisms of redistribution being further factors. But to return to an earlier point. The widespread failure of states or the intensifying autocracy of their ruling oligarchies (and, as well, the patterns of ethnic and religious resistance as aspects of state failure) are not to be seen as some kind of Hobbesian reduction, least of all an essentializing that sees violence as psychologically intrinsic and endemic to human kind. Their internal wars most often follow structural fault lines constructed in and through modern state formation. These on occasion are fuelled by ideologies, sometimes related to earlier state formation or other preceding social orders, reinvented or given new significance in contemporary state fragmentation and in attempts to renew modern state hegemonies. Such ideolo-

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gies—reinvented as they may be—give form and destructive passionate direction and shape to the human destructiveness. This is exemplified in numerous devastating events of human destruction such as Stalinist pogroms, the Holocaust, and more recent Cambodian, Yugoslavian and Rwandan genocidal atrocities. Nonetheless, Hobbes still lingers. For most arguments see the internal state, civilian focused wars of current realities as largely a function of states in decline or in threatened or weakened condition. The violence of the state against armed civilian populations (enabled by a global arms trade often facilitated from dominant centers) is, in Weberianstyle, a struggle for the legitimate control over the machineries of violence. States, furthermore, are engaged in strife concerning their sovereignty vis-à-vis their civilian populations. Conceived as sovereign wars the destruction itself displays the character of the sovereign, hidden in a Hobbesian orientation, but integral within a great variety of state formations.

Wild Sovereignties Agamben (1998) has most recently been concerned with the issue of sovereignty, exploring its history from ancient times to the present. Similar to numerous other approaches in anthropology the sovereign is an externality, an outside, a constitutive force outside the orders, and their moralities, that are sovereignly constituted. The sovereign is a wild power, often the vital dimension of its divinity (numerous Roman emperors might be examples), which defines itself in its free unconstrained capacity to act independently of the rules it institutes. This sovereign power is conventionally exercised against persons defined as themselves outside the sovereign order. Sovereignty in other

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words is that externality which asserts itself unconstrainedly against another externality.1 (This externality, like the sovereign, is defined as an asocial, amoral being— in Agamben’s analysis, “bare life” and beyond the protection of the sovereign order, open to being killed with legal and moral impunity.) The process of asserting sovereignty, of becoming sovereign, and perhaps especially in situations when sovereignty is in dispute, gives rise to its destructive, wild potency, and, most importantly, the creation of a domain of bare life upon which sovereign powers or their agents can demonstrate their sovereign power—that instituting, originating power which is outside all constraint (the constitutive force of the sovereign). Foucault operates a similar argument in his discussion of the regicide which marks the historical disjunction between centralized power and the emergence of the distributed, diversified power of modernity. Agamben argues for a stronger continuity in the wildness of the sovereign, of sovereignty (a continuity in difference, somewhat akin to a Deleuzian perspective and evident also in Foucault) demonstrating its marked reemergence in modernity. The examples are legion: the situation of Jews up to and including the Holocaust, of Romanies even today, of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, of Tutsi and various other African populations, the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, and those in refugee camps in Australia, Europe, and elsewhere. The War on Terror has created the space of Islam not merely as a domain of threat but as a region vital to the demonstration of the emergence of a new constituting global sovereign power: spaces of legitimate human destruction. All of these domains mentioned may be conceived as regions of bare life (what Agamben describes as the “homo sacer” of Roman conception), whom the law does not protect and who become the subjects of unconstrained sovereign power.

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The resurgence of wild sovereignty (or what otherwise is disguised in the ordinary, even benign and protective, appearance of sovereign power) is most apparent in its contestation or dispute or in moments of the transformation or transmutations in the orders of power, for example, in the emergence to virtually absolute global domination of a relatively new political economic formation such as the Empire centered on the U.S. The rejection of the general international authority of the UN and especially of the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague is a refusal of the subjection of sovereignty to the authority of the law, sovereignty constrained which is the negation of sovereignty. Something similar might be detected in the maneuverings of Blair and Bush around attempts to limit and subordinate sovereign power to the rule of law. I refer to the attempt to reinsist Nuremberg and constrain the danger of the sovereign power of nation-states to the encompassing authority of the law. In effect to negate a vital possibility of sovereignty which both Bush and Blair have gone to great lengths to reassert. The power of the state, reconfigured in the emergence into Empire, reasserts a wild sovereignty as integral to the process of establishing a different constellation of control, order and morality.

Distributed and Deterritorialized Sovereignties Of course, the global situation is a context of distributed sovereignties. Corporations are in many respects state-like structures. This was apparent in earlier colonial times (e.g., the East India Company) but contemporary transnational, deterritorialized, cyber-linked, corporations are increasingly asserting a sovereignty independent of state orders. Their wildness (manifested in corporate scandals) is being constrained within the rule of law acting in the interest of

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state sovereignty, but increasingly the law relating to the sovereignty of the imperial center rather than states in dependent or subordinate position to the power of Empire. I am suggesting that corporate power is interestingly distinct (if not separate) from state power, though on the surface sharing some similarity (therefore state-like and often having what Trouillot 2001 calls state effects). Corporations have the character of war machines in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). That is, they are rhizomic, spreading laterally through a number of nodal points. These points operating quasi autonomously, themselves providing new centers that may cross-cut into other organizations. The intersections and spread are often so complexly interwoven (as in the distribution of board members through a number of apparently distinct companies) as to yield a politics and structure of responsibility that is often more opaque than it is transparent. Overall the political dynamics of corporations are to be separated from that of states no matter how much neoliberal programs appear to be transforming states into a more corporate (managerial rather than bureaucratic) form as in the privatization of state bureaucratic function into NGOs or QUANGOs. (Wedel 2001 describes as a “flexi system” that evolving NGO pattern of the same personages to hold position in different organizations often with competing interests.) I note that states continue to be territorially based (even if moving beyond national/ethnic definition) and confronted with the problematic of popular legitimacy which in dominant metropolitan regions appears to be resolved once more at the ideological level: for example, in a fetishism of democracy and individual rights coupled with an intensification of technologies of control and surveillance—indeed ultimately an anti-democratic move. The emergence of corporate sovereignty, the wildness of this particular kind of sovereignty, is most evident at the peripheries of powerful state orders or at the increasingly

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controlled ‘inner defenses’ of Empire (including the expanding European Community). Here the capacity of corporations to subvert state orders and institute their own regimes of war and violence is most apparent (e.g., in various parts of the ex-Soviet Union, in East and West Africa, etc.). Paramilitary organizations usually outside any state control are increasingly the organizational-form-for-war that is closely tied to an expansion of corporate sovereignty. While I have drawn a distinction between state and corporation it should be stressed that the latter is often, as in the past, a key force in state or imperial expansion. Corporations are agencies in economically dependent areas in subverting local state controls and frequently drawing subject populations into violent confrontation with state agencies (the overtly responsible bodies which may have little regulatory power over corporate bodies). There is a growing pattern of corporate atrocity against subject populations (as well as state violation). This is manifest in increasing ecological and environmental destruction (affecting the routine livelihood of already impoverished populations and causing mass death, e.g., Bhopal) as well as corporate involvement in action that is directly in contravention of Human Rights. One further effect of this is the corporate undermining of the sovereign power of states which in turn gives rise to the unleashing of the wildness of state sovereignty. Additionally such subversion contributes toward a form of structured chaos at the peripheries. This opens the way both for greater corporate intervention as well as creating domains for apparently legitimate imperial military intervention. A contrast can be usefully made between current imperialist moves, on the one hand, and that of earlier colonialism coming out of the European imperial expansion, on the other hand. The present imperialism does not involve the resettlement of populations from the center to the

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periphery, rather an acceleration of a reverse movement of populations from the periphery to dominant metropolitan centers. This is generally not of the poor and the depressed (often enslaved or indentured) needed for labor exploitation at industrial centers, as was the case in earlier centuries, but instead a movement of members of local elites and the educated and technically trained to service the managerial and scientific/ technical postindustrial establishments of the dominant orders. Such a migration characterizes the postmodern, postcolonial era; has weakened peripheral or dependent states; and is further contributing to their crises and formations of violence. However, of possibly greater significance is a change in the nature of imperial control. Joxe (2002) notes a shift away from a doctrine of ordered, pacified colonial or imperial territories (Pax Romana, Pax Britannica) to an imperialism that has no such direction. Indeed, he suggests that the strategy of control in the outer regions of imperial interest is one of low intensity warfare rather than peace. This involves little expense (such as in the establishment of a long-term colonial administration), and deflects local resentments onto puppet regimes (as in Afghanistan and probably in Iraq). If and when these high tensional local regions uncontrollably flare-up, they can be reregulated or made submissive once more by limited, and short-term interventions by small well-trained and technically equipped forces controlled by the agents of Empire (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Haiti, the Solomons, etc.). In other words, the new form of imperial rule is a major factor in the perpetration of war and violence as its very means of control. Peace is no more the ultimate objective of order. Order and chaos are functionally intertwined.

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The Essays The overall aim has been to include a diversity of material from different analytical standpoints and positionings within global processes. They open with Allen Feldman’s exploration of new strategies for the reproduction of American sovereignty, shifts in policing, and especially innovations in surveillance. This contribution and Brown’s, on the further development of the American ideology of the family as state discourse having major implications for a global politics of aggression, are visions from the inside. Lithman presents a European perspective concentrating on the internal divisions within Europe exacerbated as a function of the Iraq war. He discusses, with specific reference to the EU, the historically developed contradictions in Europe connecting the state to war and the effort to transcend them. Nordstrom examines the diverse practices of what might be called mafia economies, which are increasingly becoming the social-economic formation integral within Empire and in many ways informing both a politics of domination and giving form to patterns of resistance and new forms of statelike potencies connected to what Rigi terms “chaotic domination.” Ifeka, concentrating on West African materials, explores corporate involvement and especially the role of the oil companies in escalating violence, government crime, and ethnic war. Similar themes are present in the contributions that follow. Leif Manger focuses his concern on the longdrawn out war in the Sudan and the move to a precarious peace. He concentrates on the particular nature of the state itself in the circumstance of Empire and the role of new bureaucratic/managerial institutions in complicating the process toward peace, even playing a role in its subversion. Manger demonstrates the importance of examining the complication of the integration of particular states within

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large extra-state networks and how in the Sudan case this might militate against a successful peace. Moksnes and Raman examine the situation of minorities in the circumstances of neoliberal economics. They demonstrate for different groups (the Chiapas resistance in Mexico and the adivasi resistance in Kerala) how global forces acting to transform the state bring dominant powers within the state into violent confrontation with depressed groups. Taylor presents an important argument on the dreadful human destruction in Rwanda. Like Moksnes’s, his is a culturally sensitive argument too easily ignored in those modernist/postmodernist invention-of-tradition perspectives. Taylor demonstrates the force of cultural metaphors, the significance of the cosmological embeddedness of modern nationalist politics, in the formation of the postcolonial Rwandan state and its move to genocide and beyond genocide. The final contributions (Rigi, Bowman, and Lofving) concentrate on the effects of new imperial formations. Rigi explores the situation of Chechnya and the chaotic order of its processes and the Russian state against who it is aligned. Here are new forms of wild sovereignty. Bowman and Lofving examine the relative uniqueness of the Israeli state whose sovereignty is of a distinctive territorial/deterritorialized kind. Paradoxically the boundaries it erects are boundaries that deny the sovereign claims of others, particularly Palestinians. Israel, of course, has struggled to achieve its recognition and this struggle has often involved its intervention in the sovereign struggles of others. This it has often done in covert paramilitary fashion an issue which Lofving explores. All the contributions are intended to extend toward further discussion and demand consideration of the many directions state and other political forms are taking in contemporary realities and the development of new formations of war and violence.

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NOTES 1. Agamben’s argument has many other parallels. I note especially its similarity to Louis Dumont’s (1980) argument concerning the caste hierarchy of India, whose order is sustained by the relation between two externalities, Brahmin and untouchable. Effectively, the Brahmin gives sovereign impunity to those within the order constituted by the Brahmin to act, often violently and without redress, against untouchables. But others have argued along similar lines and are especially relevant in relation to my discussion of ‘wild sovereignty.’ I refer, for example, to the excellent discussion of the wild sovereign in Luc de Heusch’s The Drunken King or the Origin of the State (1982). Much other scholarly work in anthropology is relevant also, such as that of Hocart and, most recently, Sahlins, to mention only two. A general import of such perspectives that should be noted is the move away from the position of Rene Girard, whose study of sacrifice and violence is set very powerfully within a dominant Christian cosmological ethos of the king being a victim (the bearer of communal violence) rather than its progenitor. I comment that the king or state as victim is very much the tenor of current ideological legitimizations for war expressed in U.S. and U.K. state-ideological discourse.

REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso. de Heusch, Luc. 1982 [1976]. The Drunken King, or, The Origin of the State. Trans. Roy Willis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dumont, Louis. 1980 [1966]. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications. Trans. Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulati. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Joxe, Alain. 2002. Empire of Disorder. Trans. Ames Hodges, ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e). Kapferer, Bruce. 2002. “Foundation and Empire (with apologies to Isaac Asimov): A Consideration of Hardt and Negri's Empire.” Social Analysis 46, no. 1: 167–179. Negri, Antonio. 2003. Time for Revolution. Trans. Matteo Mandarini. London: Continuum. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2001. “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind.” Current Anthropology 42, no. 1:125–138. Wedel, Janine R. 2001. Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe. New York: Palgrave.

DETERRITORIALIZED WARS OF PUBLIC SAFETY  Allen Feldman

New strategies for the reproduction of American state sovereignty have emerged in the last decade or so which can be characterized as deterritorialized campaigns of public safety. These wars are not exclusively focused on territorial conquest, or on an easily locatable or identifiable enemy with its own respective goals of territorial conquest. Rather, they are focused on countering imputed territorial contamination and transgression—‘terrorist,’ demographic and biological infiltration. These campaigns are not structured by time-limited political goals but are temporally open-ended. They are not solely geostrategic instruments—a means to a political end but function as cultural imaginaries. Deterritorialized wars of public safety are geopolitical cultural forms that can achieve a specific internal hegemony within the American public sphere through the symbiosis of

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internalized fear and other-directed aggression. Indicative of this are, obviously, post–September 11 campaigns against terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq and the response to recent bioterrorism and quasi-naturally occurring viral scares as mad cow disease and SARS to the degree it stigmatizes the Asian Diaspora. These public safety wars, however, were presaged by earlier campaigns against drugs, economic refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants, in addition to, police campaigns against quality of life crimes that disproportionately targeted inner city communities of color. Unlike the classic global and guerrilla wars of the twentieth century, these public safety wars are not wars of utopia, but wars of dystopia that assume that ‘perfected’ liberal democracies are threatened by an invisible, infiltrating menace. Thus, post–September 11 political fantasy promoted the ahistorical polarities of civilization/barbarism, or the equally ahistorical liberal rationalist notion of ‘wars of civilizations.’ Indicative of this was the rapid nationalization of the World Trade Center (WTC) dead by the state and by the media. The WTC was eulogized as a violated utopian space of Americanized labor, symbolic capital, and the inclusive production of wealth. This image was belied by the number of previously and still invisible undocumented foreign workers who vanished in the buildings’ collapse in comparison to the nationalized dead who achieved a supra-American citizenship. Deterritorialized war promotes an ideology of paranoid space and is an aggressive response to the depolarization of the post–Cold War period and more recently to the cultural-economic vertigo of globalization. Thus, the new wars of public safety target an iconography of demonized border-crossing figures and forces including drug dealers, terrorists, asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants, and even microbes. Accompanying these new war imaginaries are strategically positioned structures of displacement,

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projection, and arbitrary object-choice and object substitution. We are now subjected to a new super-structure of war fantasy in which the targets of warfare, and the enemies of public safety are as malleable and as arbitrary as a dream image. In this essay I will outline several characteristics of the emerging forms of warfare and sovereignty: the ‘police concept of history’; the emerging ‘treatment state’; and the new visual culture of warfare.1

‘Police Concept of History’ This new ideological environment promotes a ‘police concept of history,’ that is, the reframing of historical process into the eminently visual dichotomy of ideal safe space and duplicitous, dystopic and risk-laden space. In this paradigm, visible spaces of order are undermined by invisible yet impinging spaces of disorder. This concept of history advances the normative sociology and visual culture of the profile: who belongs to, and who is out of, place (Ranciere 1992). The ‘police concept of history’ is also commensurate with the new globalized economy: it promotes the normative notion of transnational systems as orderly spaces of economic circulation in which bodies and persons fulfill proper functions and occupy proper positions. Improper or transgressive circulation, symbolized in icons of circulatory biosocial pollution such as HIV/AIDS, mad cow disease, SARS migration, the drug trade, and illegal immigrants, is feared and attacked. The infiltrating terrorist is thus both an instance of and a catchment concept for the idea of improper circulation. And cognate transgressors from drug misusers to undocumented immigrants partake in the illicit substance of the terrorist. Policing as an ideology of history focused on ordered/disordered circulation is about the visible distribution of func-

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tions and position within a society and between societies; it stands opposed to the emergence of new subjecthoods who resist the norms of circulation and/or who practice illicit forms of circulation. This form of policing emerges with the disappearance of enforceable physical national borders and compensates for the loss of tangible borders by creating new boundary systems that are virtual, mediatized such as electronic, bio-metric, and digital surveillance nets. The virtual border is matched by the virtual or ghostly transgressor; in the last two years we have accumulated a growing number of such ghosts, so one can locate the ever-missing Bin Laden and the once absent Saddam Hussein, the current Iraqi resistance movement against American occupation, and the Islamic clerics/double agents at the Guantánamo prisoner of war camp within the same spectrum as the covert carrier of infection, genetically altered comestibles, demented livestock, and undocumented immigrants. The stoppage or interruption of the moral economy of circulation is then characterized as a dystopic ‘risk-event,’ a disruption of the imputed smooth functioning of the circulation apparatus in which nothing is meant to happen. ‘Normalcy’ is the non-event, which in effect means the proper distribution of functions, the proper occupation of designated positions, and the maintenance of appropriate social profiles. However, circulation is bivalent; it is the visual structure of social surfaces, the armature of everyday life, the insignia of modernity and yet it betrays and harbors dangerous and infecting alterity. The social logic of circulation, which exceeds comprehension and explicit control is mimetically handled and secured through the management of image flows: it is through the sympathetic or mimetic management of image circulation that the new governmentality seeks to construct the rationality of the total system of material-informational circulation. Hence, wars of public safety take the form of mediatized mechanisms and are ordered as massive intrusions into the

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sphere of visual culture, which is conflated with, and substitutes for, the actual materiality of the public sphere. The police project, according to Jacques Ranciére, is less concerned with repression than with a more basic function: that of constituting the politically visible. Policing is a mediatization of society through the symbolic constitution of the politically visible, as made up of groups with specific, identifiable ways of operating or profiles, and these forms of performativity are themselves spatially circumscribed identities (Feldman 1997). Thus, the ‘police concept of history’ is the spatialization of the historical: it is an appropriate postimperial technology for a globalized economy that is both feared and fantasized as made up of mobile flows and floods—economic, ideological and microbiological fluidity. Ranciére opposes the police enforcement of the continuum of circulation to ‘politics,’ which is the manifestation of subjecthood through the stepping outside of designated positions and functions, and spatial habitats (insofar as occupying of, and confinement to, a spatial habitus, such as a social function, or pathologized space such as the ‘ghetto’ or the Third World, or the periphery is the holding to a proper position, the assumption of a correct profile). The ‘police concept of history’ is an ocular centration on managing social surfaces and their possible clandestine subversion, as well as an investment in managing the public visualization of ‘events’ or risk intrusions. Thus, it is no coincidence that the two governing tropes of recent public safety warfare have been the technological onslaught of ‘shock and awe’ and the excuse rationality of collateral damage; both forms of violence are invested in regulating the circulation of images. ‘Shock and awe’ and collateral damage visually distribute death and destruction into domains of the event and the non-event. The sterility of the terrorist response to this ideological apparatus is the counter-dissemination of image events, such as the drama-

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turgy of suicide bombing. But the terrorist image-event has no deeper purchase on historical transformation than the police enforcement of normative profiles. The mutual cathexis of the politically visible is an expression of historical paralysis. Both the ‘police concept of history’ and the terrorist disruption of circulation structures are incapable of effecting structural transformation. They are modalities of formulaic and ultimately retrospective memorialization: the homeostatic normalcy ex post facto socialized by the tomb of September 11; the revolution as the utopian monument of the martyred and sacrificed dead. Historical consciousness is currently entombed in the monumentalism of formalized public bereavement or fragmented in privatized grief—again this is the dichotomy of event and non-event, of shock/awe versus collateral damage.

The Treatment State Military apparatuses in political emergency zones increasingly function as both surveillance and ‘peace-keeping’ forces committed to regulating circulation in public space by imputed terrorist-ridden populations. Examples of this dual profile can be seen in the Balkans, West Africa, and in the custodial regulation of refugees, asylum seekers and the ‘prisoner of war’ detention centers in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay. Under public safety regimes humanitarian interventions are militarized and military interventions exploit the transnational discourse of human rights. The terrorist and the refugee are both the objects and the consequence of military interventions. The juridical personalities of the terrorist as an ‘unlawful combatant’ and of the refugee and asylum-seeker as an unlawful resident and worker are mutually marked by the denial of their citizenship rights in an existing nation state structure. They are

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both a-political entities to the degree that they are classified as existing outside of a recognized political community, and because their context and behaviors have been depoliticized and consequently criminalized. Related to the militarization of humanitarian aid is the ideological and practical fusion of the concentration camp and the refugee camp, where people who have lost their nation state citizenship can easily starve to death, or be subjected to military extermination and police and vigilante abuse. Simultaneously, they can be fed, clothed, housed, and receive medical assistance. The treatment state intermingles behavior modification techniques from sensory deprivation to therapeutic intervention. By illustration, the Guantánamo Bay prisoners of war camp, in which inmates are neither subject to American civil law nor to the Geneva Conventions, accords its detainees comprehensive health care and allows religious and dietary observances, together with a chronic schedule of coercive interrogation bordering on torture and intermittent sensory deprivation. Yet even this controlled space was not immune to illicit circulation practices or fantasies as investigations are currently being mounted against Muslim clerics investigated as double agents. Originally commissioned to enact religious humanitarianism, these ‘trickster’ clerics are now suspected of aiding and abetting the political mission of the captives. Object substitution in the public safety regime is endemic. Thus, ironically, the first trials to come out of the Guantánamo investigative/interrogation process will be these U.S. army personnel and American citizens suspected of conspiring with the terrorist other. The militarized state is also the ‘treatment state,’ a specialist apparatus in the psycho-social custodial control/care of anti-societal populations. Foucault’s prophecy about the postcarceral swarming of disciplinary mechanisms into the social nervous systems is rapidly being fulfilled. It may be comforting to some that the aforementioned military/disci-

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plinary technologies and media are being applied to so-called discrete populations of terrorists, refugees, the domestic homeless, undocumented workers, substance abusers and drug dealers, to name a few. But such comfort is illusionary in the face of the massive expansion of the concept of objective guilt as the structure of governmentality. The creation of a Homeland Security apparatus and its investment in ‘total information awareness’ type systems points to a structural mutation of the American public sphere and public personhood through the digitization of risk, and therefore, guilt. A new micrology of surveillance is scheduled for debut which will not only watch and wait, but diagnoses, preempts, and intervenes. Structures of everyday life and no-longer anonymous behaviors, consumption, communication and sociality patterns along with racial and ethnic affiliation are meant to dissect the social persona, abstracting minute behaviors toward an epidemiology of potential terrorist threat. Everyone under the digitized gaze becomes unknowingly complicit in the promotion of terrorist risk, the body is fragmented into event and non-event, into offending acts and gestures and the inoffensive. This new objective guilt is the digital removal of intentionality from the concept of the political or the criminal. For most crucially, digitized objective guilt is archived guilt; its full meaning and significance is reserved for a prospective diagnostic completion and new digital combinatory. Acts and gestures are spatialized in time in the building of a profile of licit or illicit circulation of personhood. The digital public safety biography or profile supplants the life cycle as the measure and portrait of citizenship. Total Information Awareness type systems construct a new form of citizenship and concomitant personhood. Spectatorship has been long recognized as the mediatized component of late modern citizenship and political agency, and as an extension of the person’s sensorial inscription into the perceptual systems of commodification. Beller has

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asserted that such spectatorship is a form of labor and produces visual and informational surplus value (Beller 1998). The new surveillance/public safety regime requires the labor of spectator-citizenship; for to the same degree that the commodified gaze reciprocally inscribes the spectator-citizen into a regime of visibility, the spectator’s praxis of gazing (at commodities, television, computer screens) and consequent acts of material consumption in our commodified culture resolves into being seen; to being subjected to behavioraloptical consumption by a variety of compulsory visibility regimes from market researchers to the state. Objective guilt, inscribed into the minute crevices of everyday life, is essential to the new warfare ideologies. For as in all policing ideologies, wars of public safety do not aim at the eradication of ‘the policed’ object, whether it be the terrorist, the undocumented immigrant or the drug abuser. Rather, these wars require the continued symbiotic presence of the policed object in order to justify the continuation and the new elaborations of state sovereignty. Indeed, the wars against drugs, economic refugees, and undocumented immigrants require the ongoing existence of national and transnational informal economies of scale, which may mutate but are unlikely to be policed or surveilled out of existence. The same can be said of transnational terrorist networks dependent on globalized systems of banking, credit, and fiscal accreditation rooted in an oral culture of contract. But beyond the persistence of transgressive informal economies of scale, there is simply the indeterminacy of nomenclature, a perpetual motion machine of ideology, in which the term terrorist can be used to cover a variety of floating objects and scenarios (Feldman 2001).

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Visual Culture of War I have already discussed the emerging visual modalities of the ‘treatment’ state in relation to zones and populations marked by objective guilt. The notion of objective guilt has contributed to the acceptability of the concept of collateral damage in that collateral damage is normal under political conditions in which guilt is deindividualized and proactively assigned. Further, the new visual culture of war enhances the ideology of collateral damage through image filtering. The televised visual sensationalism of ‘shock and awe,’ of smart bombs broadcasting their descent onto a building, filters out the sensations of pain, suffering and grief of the victims and their survivors. It creates spectatorship ideologies of inattention and distraction for the televisual witness. Anonymous victims of collateral damage stand in visual opposition to the sensational violence of ‘shock and awe,’ to the degree that collateral damage ideology combines with the visual centrality of ‘shock and awe’ to desensitize the viewing audience to the plight of ‘marginal,’ incidental and accidental victims, such as those in the Iraqi market-place bombing who died invisibly to the American media (Feldman 1994). The filtering of images ensured that such persons never achieved the visual urgency or commanded the visual attention of Saddam’s attempted decapitation and the destruction of Iraqi ‘command and control centers’ in the American media. Visualized violence here is a powerful system of naming and un-naming, the sheer act of targeting a topos, specifies a zone of objective guilt, and effectively ‘weaponizes’ entire communities turning them into zones of aggression and consequently deindividualizes the concept of victimage in the destruction of these spaces. The ‘command and control center’ that is the individual immersed in everyday life, who is the building block of democratization, is essentially disposable in the perceptual

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filters of the inattention that is at the heart of ideologies of collateral damage and excuse. ‘Shock and awe’ is the theatrical manufacture of technological events as history and the creation of non-events of invisible violence or collateral damage as the non-historical. ‘Shock and awe’ is more than a military tactic: it is simultaneously an exercise in war as visual culture for the consumption of the televisual audience and an ideology of American modernization. As Hegel noted in reference to Bonapartism, the march of an army across a national geography materializes the idea of progress to which that political geography is now coercively subjected. The progress of aerial bombing across a civilian terrain has much the same effect. In 1900, Georg Simmel identified sensory shock as the price of progressive modernity and urbanism; perceptual shock was the psychological medium in which the modern announced itself and refashioned new forms of personhood (Simmel 1971). Modernity’s shock was a conversion experience creating new social subjects amenable to emerging technological and commodity regimes and work disciplines The current ideology of ‘shock and awe’ fuses technological and theological norms, for it too is a form of accelerated conversion: the rapid Americanization of the Oriental Other through technological onslaught and subsequent postwar therapeutic treatment and rehabilitation.

Conclusion The current warfare ideologies of public safety share with their ‘terrorist adversary’ an epistemological and visual investment in actuarial retribution and the dramaturgy of sacrificial repetition. In search of a post–September 11 restoration of national and global symmetry, the Bush regime will not find ultimate satisfaction in a postwar

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Americanized Iraq, but will embark on the hunt for new transitional terrorist objects, perhaps in Syria, Iran, or Indonesia. Thus, we must ask ourselves if the new world order of public safety is in effect a new visual order of demonic visualization—a ghost-busting regime, committed to bringing invisible alterity to the social surface and thereby engrossed in personifying and theologizing the problematic vertigo of globalization in the form of emblematic evil. This dynamic conflates the policing of social surfaces with effective governance. American political culture now deploys the mass circulation of images of public safety enforcement, often materialized in concrete acts of military intervention abroad and scopic security regimes at home, as a mediatized palliative against the insecurities and dis-ease precipitated by uncontrollable circulatory flows and floods that now buffet a besieged American nationhood from all sides and from within. The increasing convergence of the digital visualization of warfare and wider American media/recreational culture—the mediatization of the military apparatus and the militarization of media—indicates the prospective social logic by which wars of public safety will be progressively normalized and rendered culturally acceptable. In the final analysis, such cultural/military symbiosis means that new wars will no longer require the increasingly distant goad of the burnt towers as they eventually fossilize into collateral damage of the new regimes of public safety.

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NOTES 1. In this essay, as in all of my publications on political violence, I distinguish ‘political terror’ as experiential reality and intentional tactic from ‘terrorism’ as an ideological construct. Indicative of this are those acts of political terror that are mobilized to counter ‘terrorism.’

REFERENCES Beller, Jonathan L. 1998. “Kino-I, Kino World: Notes on the Cinematic Mode of Production.” In The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge. Feldman, Allen. 1994. “From Desert Storm to Rodney King: On Cultural Anesthesia.” American Ethnologist 21 no. 2 (May): 404–416. ———. 1997. “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics, Aesthetics of Terror in Northern Ireland,” Public Culture 10, no. 1 (Fall): 25–60. ———. 2001. “Philoctetes Revisited: White Public Space and the Political Geography of Public Safety.” Social Text 68 19, no. 3: 57–90. Ranciere, Jacques. 1992. “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization.” October 61 (Summer): 78–82. Simmel, Georg. 1971. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Pp. 324–339 in Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, trans. and ed. Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

WHERE’S JESSICA? Myth, Nation, and War in America’s Heartland

 Charles W. Brown

Empire and Heroic Narrative On any day now when troops are returning from their invasion of Iraq, stories appearing in any local newspaper will show happy tears shed by wives, children hugging daddy (or mommy) squeaky clean in uniform, and commentators will pour words of praise over the heroes, sparing no breath in declaring the invasion a brave war against evil, the defense of freedom, another sacrifice played out in America’s long tradition of wars. They will be words drawn from America’s grand heroic narrative. God is thanked. Freedom becomes the guiding white light that shines in the ruddy faces of America’s new heroes. The U.S. invasion of Iraq and its Afghanistan sideshow hinges around geopolitics (especially the control of Central

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Asia with China as the ultimate prize) with its attached control of oil. But geopolitical strategies are not part of the cosmology that rallies the troops. War needs symbolic justification, a cognitive exoneration to inspire the troops in the field and the folks back home. U.S. President George W. Bush set the tone for how this narrative would take shape in October 2001. Turning the terrorist attack of September 2001 into an attack on freedom, he pronounces the role for the next generation in the U.S.’s history of seemingly endless wars, guided by none other than God: “Since September 11, an entire generation of young Americans has gained new understanding of the value of freedom and its cost and duty and its sacrifice. The battle is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail. Thank you. May God continue to bless America.” With God comes a rhetoric in which America’s home towns, boys and girls, families, its God, its belief that its freedom is unique, and that liberation and sacrifice are central guiding principles is a virtual treasure trove for anthropologists keen on searching out the ‘key symbols’ that make grown men and women kill. In legitimizing the invasion of Iraq for the home front, as if on cue, enter Jessica Lynch, literally pregnant with meaning among the universe of symbols that are part of the grand narrative.

Deconstructing Jessica “Thank you God 4 saving Jessica.” The sign was displayed in July 2003 by people of Palestine, West Virginia to welcome home Jessica Lynch from the invasion of Iraq. Like their idol, cute, blonde, and rosy cheeked, there is a naiveté in these words that for Americans reflects the question less of Appalachian powerlessness than of the inherent, natural goodness

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and sincerity of heart that is supposed to lie beneath the surface of their most bloodthirsty executioners. The official narrative on Jessica has been finely phrased by Stan Goff, an ex-special forces soldier: The pretty, plucky, white American female soldier fights off the degenerate, blood-drinking, cowardly (that is, feminized), sub-human Iraqis, emptying her magazine into several of the evil-doers until, multiply shot and stabbed, she is overwhelmed and taken prisoner. CENTCOM solemnly left the question of sexual assault open to let the public imagination run with it. Wicked Fedayeen interrogators reportedly cuffed her around in the hospital. Then, the epitome of moral American manhood, Special Operations, enters the set to rescue our heroine, fallen beneath the assaults of the unmanly Arabs, reaffirming the roles of male and female fully-human Americans, and the great chain of being is reconstituted in all its proper hierarchies. (Goff 2003)

Jessica is a real person—in fact, she is one who has distanced herself (somewhat) from the media hype. But it is not the person that has attained notoriety. It is the image that is produced around her, the part her image plays in the narrative that grows in the heartland of America that will be ensconced in the public domain no matter what actually happened to Jessica. This is an admonishment clearly stated by a local newspaper: Her rescue [April 2003] came at a time when the war in Iraq seemed stalled. Americans longed for some good news. The Lynch rescue provided it. Lynch and the troops who rescued her were cheered, not just in this country, but around the world. Sadly, in the weeks since, the revisionists have been hard at work, questioning accounts of what happened

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and even suggesting her rescue was fabricated. The cynics sneer at the idea of Lynch as a hero. … [But] the public knows what the cynics won’t acknowledge: Lynch indeed is a 100 percent American hero because she’s become a living symbol of every man and woman in uniform who answered their country’s call, and left family and friends to do their duty. (HeraldDispatch, 2003)

Revisionists? America’s standard for its recent invasions of foreign countries has been the war against Vietnam. ‘Kicking the Vietnam syndrome’ has been part of the discourse that restores military honor around the rebirth of World War II as ‘our finest hour,’ ridding the world of Hitler, epitome of evil. The discourse on Vietnam constructs the ‘support our troops’ mantra, continuing the long tradition of war that American culture has defined as this country’s defining moments in its global crusade for ‘freedom.’ These troops are the Jessicas complete with images of the family, ‘sons and daughters,’ your neighbor and high school team mates parable that fits so well with the myth of American singularity. This is the discourse of meaning through which perpetual war is made significant and which hones in on the inherent qualities of the idealized, hard-working, honest American and the sacrifices he or she makes for ‘freedom.’ Enter God, Jessica’s savior.

Thank You God 4 Saving Jessica Most Americans have been brought up with images such as the following from The Wallbuilder Report, a newsletter written by religious right proponent David Barton: “Over recent centuries, America has surpassed all other nations in educational, scientific, medical, and other achievements

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and discoveries … [A] signer of the Declaration [of Independence] … Benjamin Rush … noted: ‘I believe that the greatest discoveries of science have been made by Christian philosophers, and that there is the most knowledge in those countries where there is the most Christianity.’” Barton goes on to show how American athletes praise the Lord, and concludes: “Does anything suggest a possible spiritual connection between the American Olympians and their achievements? ‘Happy is that people whose God is the Lord.’ Psalm 144:15” (Barton 1996: 7). In related discourse, God made the white race and blessed America: The white people known as the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Scandinavian and kindred people who settled America in keeping with Bible prophecy … claimed Christ as their King and labored to establish His government. (Peters 1993: 6)

God gave Americans the Constitution and Freedom:

“None are as powerful as God,” declared Hughes [rightwing radio talk show host]. “God will empower the people … [because] this nation was founded on the Holy Bible.” At the core of the Christian Patriot’s crusade is the belief that our Christian forefathers received divine inspiration from God and the Bible when they created the U.S. Constitution. (Jorgensen 1996: 9)

God saved Jessica, and He speaks to Bush; Speaking of the war on terrorism that the United States launched after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush said: “Once again, history has called America to use our overwhelm-

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ing power in the defense of freedom. And we’ll do just that.” The flag-waving crowd chanted “USA, USA, USA” as Bush, who doffed his jacket and tie and rolled up his sleeves, strode onto a small stage and they enthusiastically recited the Pledge of Allegiance with him, shouting out the words “under God.” (Mohammed 2002)

Although the continuum from Barton to Bush may appear to be part of a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy,’ the idea that the U.S. is a ‘chosen nation’ is not only an American right-wing myth. It is the most salient discourse in the grand narrative in which American society is constructed. Conservatives and liberals alike share the same myth of American exceptionality that defines the core values of right-wing discourse combining the mythologization of the U.S. Constitution with various refinements of Christian white exclusionism. For Christian white supremacists the goal is White Living Space and their means to that end varies from all-out war to infiltration. But if they were not carrying AK-47s, as one former member of the Aryan Nations told me, the militant right would come across much better among mainstream white communities. A similar observation is made by Loretta Ross: “While many white Americans may share [right-wing] prejudices, very few are willing to act on them openly by carrying a Klan card or an Uzi. This situation demands a new strategy [for these groups] that combines old hatreds with new rhetoric” (Ross 1995: 167). In the grand narrative, God and America are woven together into the social fabric of an inherently racist order that rallies around social cleansing; “White supremacist beliefs, though largely invisible to the majority of the American public, regardless of race, are at the heart of the American experience. The persistence of these beliefs suggests that the racial myths and stereotypes common to

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white supremacy are integral to the maintenance of the US social order” (Ross 1995: 173). Thank you, God, for saving Jessica. You have also saved our narrative from the revisionists. You have condoned our latest war. You have reaffirmed and reconstituted America’s singularity. You have legitimized the freedom that is the guiding white light that shines in the ruddy faces of our new heroes.

State and War: Constituting the Enemy As a logical extension of the state, under certain conditions, an empire cannot be sustained without its myths, without the popular imprinting of an ideology in which it justifies its superiority and right to rule. By the same token, war, one of the most visual of empire’s means to power, needs symbolic justification, a cognitive exoneration to inspire the troops in the field and the folks back home. Ipso facto, the logical reverse of superiority is in the constitution of the enemy. For everything the idealized American is, there is a converse universe that provides the representation of the enemy. Once again, Loretta Ross (1995: 166): “In fact, the encroachment of white supremacist ideologies into the social fabric of our politics, our institutions, and our laws means that intolerance is becoming the rule of the day, and the overt violation of the persons and property of individuals and groups is not only easily accepted, but part of the status quo.” She observes that this trend has increased. In fact, “America has moved into a new era of white supremacy.” When translated onto the global stage, we are witnessing a new era of the supremacy that is both the logical extension of American society as well as a formal response to threats to that order. The symbolic manifold of American

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singularity (which in at least one case centers on the imagery of a Jessica Lynch of West Virginia) is chock full of items but can, for this reason, be legitimately defined as a challenging object of social analysis.

REFERENCES Barton, David. 1996. “Thanksgivings in America/Partial-Birth Abortions/Outstanding Achievements.” Wallbuilder Report (Fall). Goff, Stan. 2003. “The Use and Abuse of a Woman Soldier: Jessica Lynch, Plural.” http://www. freedomroad.org. Herald-Dispatch (Huntington, West Virginia). 2003. “Jessica Lynch Is 100 percent American Hero.” 20 July. http://www.heralddispatch.com/2003/July/20/OPlist1.htm. Mohammed, Arshad. 2002. “Bush Pledges to Defend Freedom in July 4 Speech” [Ripley, West Virginia]. Reuters, 4 July. Jorgensen, Leslie. 1996. “Preaching the Patriot Gospel.” Freedom Writer 13, no. 7:8–11. Peters, Peter J. 1993. “White Crime in America: Take Notice White Man.” Scriptures for America. LaPorte, Colo.: LaPorte Church of Christ. Ross, Loretta. 1995. “White Supremacy in the 1990s.” Pp. 166–181 in Eyes Right! Challenging the Right Wing Backlash, ed. Chip Berlet. Boston: South End Press.

WARS, EUROPE, AND VISIONS OF THE WORLD  Yngve Lithman

What continuities or transformations are taking place in Europe at this particular moment of time when conflicts and wars appear to be linked with new developments in the global political order and redefinitions of state systems? Is Europe, its nation-states or the European Union, in fact becoming subordinate or subaltern in U.S. global domination? Or is Europe embarked on a separate development, realizing other values? Are such questions even appropriate to ask when apparently global processes dismantle the transcendent power of the nation-state? To answer them, the broader relation of Europe to its history of war is important, for it points to Europe as being founded on a systemic contradiction of “the long term,” as Braudel (1979) would have put it. Such a contradiction relates to conflicts which take contested shape in relation to matters of sovereignty and state power. There is one vision of

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Europe where sovereignty in the last instance is lodged with nation-states, and where the EU instruments of free trade, free mobility, etc., are conditional covenants between sovereigns. There is another vision of a Europe literally designed to destroy any form of sovereignty capable of waging war. Deep-seated trends and conundrums in European history provide the texture for both these visions which continually manifest themselves, e.g., in the reactions to the Iraq War. England, to some extent Spain, and primarily some of the previous communist countries—what the U.S. hailed as the ‘New Europe’—supported the war. A bloc of countries led by Germany and France strongly opposed it. Throughout Europe, especially in Western Europe, there were major demonstrations against the war. In Spain, there have been ongoing anti-war demonstrations and the recent Madrid bombing, in the view of many, confirmed the point. The criticism of the Iraq War by Europeans has been ideologically dismissed as French anti-Americanism or German post–World War II suspicions of militarism, among other things. Such interpretations, often ideologically motivated, avoid important considerations of history within which Europe continues to take form.

Four Formative Wars The centrality of the state in any discussion of Europe has been evident since the 1648 Thirty Years War Westphalian peace accord. This established the states as sovereign and territorially defined, and in large measure created the present European map. The Napoleonic Wars, some 150 years later, drew on a vision of imperial power freed from the notion of the territorial sovereignty of the nation-state, the latter being seen

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as bound to a commitment to war. The result of the Napoleonic Wars had a hugely energizing effect on the European states, which embarked on a course of ideological nationalizing, with Germany in the lead. In this situation, the nation-state assumed the tasks of ideology production, and fate, in terms of past, present, and future history, became articulated within the nation-state. The states also became mediators in the conflict between capital and labor, and providers of all those services that the parties to the structuring conflict could not themselves produce, i.e., an educational system, health care, pensions, etc. (cf. Wacquant 1996). The states became totalizing entities. World War II and the Holocaust effectively put paid to the Westphalian/ nation-state system (Linklater 1998). It became imperative to prevent the horrors it could unleash. Some 70 million people dead in Europe during the previous century as the result of war and the grotesque horror of the Holocaust made leading postwar politicians—Monet, Schumann, Adenauer, Kreisky, and the list goes on—determined to create a structure in Europe whereby war was literally impossible. In searching for ways to do this, the two previous attempts at a unification of Europe served no purpose: first, the Napoleonic ambition to combine empire and modernity and, second, the Hitlerian attempt to create a thoroughly racialized European empire (the nation-state writ large). The emerging European Union was intended to overcome the inherent dangers of the nation-state system conceived of as being at the root of Europe’s devastating internal wars. The principal solution was to be the formation of a system of economic interdependence that effectively prevented the warring struggle over wealth and resources. There was, of course, another driving impetus behind the EU and this was the post–World War II final ascendancy of the U.S. and the threat of the Soviet Union. The EU was in many ways viewed as another alternative to

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that presented by these two powers, and this is still a factor, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union (see Joxe 2002). However, what should be stressed is the gathering contradiction within the European Union in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The attack on the nation-state idea explicit in the formation of the EU was counteracted by the revitalization of the nation-state form, especially at the borders of the EU. This was a direct result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, for nationalisms hitherto repressed in the Soviet Empire were now given expression. The situation in Yugoslavia especially appeared to be a return of the horrors of the past; once again, the nationstate and ethnic nationalism were the chief culprits. The institution of the Hague War Crimes Tribunal was both an immediate attempt to control the situation at the borders and to bring national sovereignty at the edge of the EU and within the EU itself to heel within the authority of the law. This major attempt at curtailing the dangers of sovereign national power was nonetheless counteracted to a degree by the expansion of the EU to include those states hitherto subordinated to the Soviet system. Their new-born nationalism was a contradictory force threatening many of the principles that saw the birth of the very idea of the EU. When Yugoslavia was destroyed in ethnic war, this was conceived as a failure of the new Europe and its vision of the European Union. However, the Yugoslavian conflagration gave renewed impetus to the establishment of an international justice system. The idea was to do away with victor’s tribunals or popular justice. The effort to serve justice on xenophobic warlords through a War Crimes Tribunal (of a different kind from that of Nuremberg) was intended not only to subordinate states to the rule of law but also to contain the dangers of their sovereignty—what Kapferer in the introduction to this Forum describes as “wild sovereignty”—and to define sovereignty as the rule

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of law, not a force that stands outside it. In this context, the resistance of the U.S. to an international body seeking to control sovereignty and insisting on its ethical nature—a sovereignty that is not “wild”—is remarkable. The idea of the United Nations is explicit in the European orientation and highlights the dangers of the United States’ antagonism toward the UN.

The Iraq War, Divisions in Europe, and the Future The Iraq War showed up the divisions in Europe. The paradox is that the New Europe (Poland, Bulgaria, etc.) has the potentiality of bringing forth the kind of European vision that hitherto dominant visions of the European community wish to reject. The countries now entering the European Union are post-imperial states that could possibly reassert old nation-state ideologies, which the ethnic destructions of Yugoslavia so tragically demonstrated. More immediately, those states continue the Westphalian idea of the just war based in national territorial integrity and nationally determined sovereignty. Germany and France effectively reject the Westphalian doctrine, which they conceive as being at the heart of the endless destructive wars of the Europe of the past. The Iraq War has thus brought to a head the paradox in contemporary European reformation and incorporation— on the one hand, the continuing forces of nationalism associated with the Westphalian system and reactivated in the collapse of the Soviet Union and, on the other hand, the concern, present in the ideology of the European Union, to overcome the nation-state system and to redefine the nature of sovereignty. Of course, the character of the paradox is not so clear-cut. There is much debate in

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Europe concerning possible directions, and there is considerable sympathy among European leaders toward what they regard to be the U.S. model. Many new leaders in Europe are U.S. expatriates with close ties to the U.S. It often appears that U.S. policy toward Europe, perhaps facilitated by its Iraq coalition with Great Britain, is oriented to exploit the uncertainties of direction in Europe and perhaps to accentuate the key paradox upon which it is based, in all likelihood in the interests of continuing U.S. hegemony. Overall, therefore, the arguments that developed in Europe in the context of the Iraq War are driven in a historical experience that is acutely conscious of the forces connecting the state with war and a concern in many quarters to create a new state form that is distanced from any necessary connection between state and war. As Joxe (2002) and others suggest, Europe is a terrain upon which ideas relating to the connection between war and the state are keenly contested and undoubtedly related to the enormous popular concern for the U.S. and Great Britain’s adventure in Iraq.

Europe—Nation-States, Empire, or a Third Way? The distinction between nation-states and empires is also the distinction between blood and might. The Westphalian system set the course wherein the blood doctrines of the aristocracy eventually served as a model for the development of the nation as bound by blood (Arendt 1967; cf. Linke 1999). The empire, by virtue of its might, sees in its might the justification of its ideological positions. What both state-forms have in common is a claim to represent a fundamental ideologically driven truth, either hierarchical (stressing birth and kinship) or individualist (egalitarian)

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essentialisms. The EU posits a third way, away from nationstate and empire, embarking on a process whereby the capacity for war is dissolved. As such, it does not represent the mise en scène of a fundamental ideological drama (modernity, truth, etc.). It retreats from that capacity of either the nation-state or empire to turn (individual) fate into (national) destiny and thus produce the faithful soldiers of the nation-state wars (cf. Anderson 1991). From an anthropological point of view, the dismantling of empire and nation also means abandoning these symbolic universes as guides for human existence—including their propensity to generate support for war. The construction of such a symbolic universe was the historical experience of Europe, and it could, indeed, be reappearing. Such a possibility is indicated in the rise of the ‘new right’ in countries such as, for example, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Austria, articulating a xenophobic attack on refugees and immigrants and reinvigorating nation-state paradigms of sovereignty. Will Europe end up as a collection of fundamentally sovereign nation-states, squabbling and instrumentally collaborating within the EU? Perhaps. Another potentiality is that Europe emerges as a super-nation-state. The Prodi ‘reflection group,’ intellectuals pondering the future of Europe, have advanced various schema in this direction, even in such details as how to make all Europeans proud of Europe’s rich architectural history.1 If these ambitions were realized, the EU would basically emerge as a reconstituted nation-state sovereignty. The EU was meant to be a project to stop history, to make a real break with the ability of state-forms—nationstates, empires—to make war. Treaties could not be trusted as long as someone could regard them as ‘just a piece of paper.’ State sovereignty rested on the power to make war. A new European order was to be created whereby the capacity of individual nation-states to make war was made

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virtually impossible. This is also the image of the future that countries such as France and Germany, and several others in Europe, attempt to project into the world arena. It is a vision that may yet fail.

NOTES 1. The work of the reflection group can be followed, e.g., in the IWM Newsletter since 2003.

REFERENCES Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Books. Arendt, Hannah. 1967. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Harvest Books. Braudel, Fernand. 1979. Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme. XV ème–XVII ème siècle. Paris: Armand Colin. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Joxe, Alain. 2002. Empire of Disorder. Trans. Ames Hodges, ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e).

Wars, Europe, and Visions of the World

Linke, Uli. 1999. German Bodies: Race and Representation after Hitler. New York: Routledge. Linklater, Andrew. 1998. The Transformation of Political Community. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wacquant, Loïc. 1996. “The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Note on Its Nature and Implications.” Acta Sociologica 39, no. 20:121–139.

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INVISIBLE EMPIRES  Carolyn Nordstrom

Trillions of dollars move through the world’s markets illegally, and millions of people work in extra-state activities. They move everything from the dangerous (narcotics, toxic wastes, arms) through the luxurious (diamonds and art) to the necessary and the mundane (food, clothing, and electronics). Not only are fortunes made on these profits— empires are built. Empires that are, for various reasons, largely invisible. Illegal transactions are generally embedded in networks that span the globe. The most successful of these networks control finances and resources larger than many of the world’s countries. They can quite literally develop or cripple national emergent economies. These networks are not states, nor are they competing to become states. They thrive precisely because they constitute a different order of politics and economics than formal legal states (Nordstrom 2001). Illegal networks continuously intersect with states as they launder money into legality, move goods across the borders of il/legality, and turn cor-

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ruption into politics by another name. But it is the tension between state and extra-state that gives both their power. Perhaps as important as uncovering the dynamics of extra-legal networks is asking the question why so little data or discussion of the extra-state exists. Most people assume these data are available. But such assumptions are easy to challenge: How many university courses and texts address extra-state economies and their impact on global economies and politics? How can you calculate the impact of illicit gem and weapons flows on European stock markets; or of money laundering on inflation? What economic indices are available to predict—based on the intersections of formal and extra-legal transactions—where economic crashes such as that faced in Asia in the late 1990s and in the West after the September 11 attacks in the U.S. will occur? How can one calculate the entire economy of a country—a GDP that encompasses and delineates both the legal and extra-legal—and how this shapes a country’s relations with other states? In short, why does a vast sweep of international economic work ignore a vast sweep of international economic reality? There are several answers to this: from the machinations of power to the life of academics, and the ways these variously intersect. To begin with the life of academics: scholars, for the most part, are enmeshed in the world of the state. They work in institutions that are state-recognized, they receive legal wages with formal taxes taken out, they live in officially authorized housing, and buy lawful commodities. They do not tend to travel with six passports, run illegal commodities and laundering scams, do research with powerful people running extra-legal industries, buy hot vehicles, deal drugs, or act as kingpins (or even littlepins) of successful mafias. If they did, research on the state and its power might be different. Academics’ embeddedness in the state, however laudable, means that the state is, quite literally, the paramount

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site of power and privilege as they live these; and in turn, academics privilege the state. It becomes the foci, the definitive point, of research. Academics are as invested in the state as it is in them. A ‘state’ is a conceptual category and not an objective entity—it exists only by virtue of the fact that people believe in the laws, geographical designations and imagined communities that designate the flow and flux of humanity and space into discrete parts. A state is an abstract notion that is given substance by virtue of being recognized as substantive. A state needs academics to theorize it into being. From the vantage point of a state-centered perspective, anything outside the state is less substantive, less powerful, less dynamic. The state is posited as controlling non-state forces, and as the latter do not appear to dominate politics and economics, it would seem the state is successful, and therefore paramount. But if academics move to a different vantage point, one that does not privilege the state in primary research definitions, how do power, profit, and politics emerge? To answer this question, I conducted two years of field research on extra-legal economies and extra-state power in 2001–2002. In following the international connections that gird the extra-state, I began in one of the more remote locales: the front of the war in central Angola. From there, I followed the actors, goods, services, exchange routes, markets, and power politics that moved out from this locale through national to international unregulated economies (Nordstrom 2004). This took me from the frontlines to the political, economic, and military power brokers of Angola, to the borders and the smugglers that ply these routes, out to the larger African ports that bring goods from all continents, and finally to Europe and to Rotterdam, the world’s largest port. Along the way, I spoke with those who break laws, and those who seek to enforce them.

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During these two years in the field, I realized the state is not the preeminent contender for political, economic and social power in the world. To demonstrate this point, consider the flow of goods to and from the center of Angola to the global economy. Angola suffered a war that decimated the country’s infrastructure. At the end of the war in 2002, the United Nations and the country’s economists estimated that 90 percent of Angola’s economy took place along extra-state lines. The state is dwarfed by the non-state. Some of this is informal subsistence trade, but Angola’s considerable resource wealth—from diamonds and minerals through timber and seafood to oil—has produced financial and political empires (Hodges 2001). These are complex politico-financial systems that challenge all divisions of il/legality and morality. Some have grown rich and some have wrested power by exploiting resources for the hard currency to purchase military supplies internationally. Some merely seek to build up their own industrial bases and exploit all avenues, legal and otherwise, to profit. Some are dedicated to developing their countries, and exploit the extra-legal to bring core necessities to the population that are not available through legal channels. In this context, it is important to realize that in war-devastated economies, the means of getting even the most basic supplies—food, medicines, industrial supplies, energy sources—are often not legally available. Almost everyone in such conditions works with international networks moving goods across both national and legal borders.1 Research at national borders shows a world of extra-state commerce of global proportions. Billions of dollars worth of commodities and services from all corners of the globe move in largely unregulated (extra-legal) ways across Angola’s borders. In interviews with those who make up this world of cross-border trade at several of Angola’s border posts (both legal and unmarked)—commodity brokers, transport experts, warehousers, military, and the like—vir-

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tually all said the system works, and it works outside a fully legal arena. For example, commodity wholesale and transport groups from Angola cannot buy with local currency, which is not recognized in international markets. Dollars, diamonds— these are the recognized international currencies. No one trusts moving these through formal banks. Transactions worth many millions at a time are conducted outside of regulated channels. This is business as normal. Technically, it is smuggling. The people in charge of these commercial networks are at the top of the economic pyramid in their country. They generally run legitimate businesses, and do so successfully by careful negotiation of the il/legal divides in the world. The most successful have an international financial standing. Their children go to Oxford, they vacation on the Riviera, they sit on the boards of multinationals in Shanghai and New York. They can translate financial prowess into political power: standing for mayor, running for political office, sitting on policy councils, holding a seat with a UN body. Amidst all of this, they are unlikely to abandon their access to unregulated activities; it is one of the cornerstones upon which such businesspeople are able to succeed. Angola may stand out in considerations of the extra-state with an economy so dependent on the nonlegal. But it is not an aberration. I have noted that Angola’s economy is 90 percent extra-state. But industrialized states and countries at peace do not overcome extra-legal realities: one-half of Mozambique’s economy, 58 percent of Kenya’s, over half of Russia’s, 50 percent of Italy’s, 48 percent of Peru’s, and up to 30 percent of the U.S.’s economies are extra-state (Ayers 1996; Greif 1996). This takes us to the next level of my fieldwork: moving from the international borders of Angola to the large ports of the world, we find the extra-legal is as institutionalized as it is in the open frontiers of war-torn landscapes (Findlay 1999; Fiorentini and Peltzman 1995). Interviews from Africa to Europe with customs officials,

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police and intelligence agencies, harbor masters, and shipping companies that ‘work’ both sides of the law turned up the same high indices: anywhere from one-third to over two-thirds of shipments inspected break the law in some way. The head of International Assistance in Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise in the U.K. reflected a common sentiment when answering my question: “How many legal enterprises break the law in some way?” His answer: “100 percent, no question. Everyone somewhere somehow moves around what seem onerous taxes, duties, tariffs, shipping laws, sanctions, profit declaring, legalities.” Business as usual. For the (hundreds of) people I spoke with for this research, the state is ‘somewhat’ important. They look out on a world of state bodies and extra-state networks—variously disparate and intersecting as need dictates. Borders are unregulated opportunities as much as, and perhaps more than, regulated national institutions. The seas are a broad expanse of profit outside of sovereign rule. Transport routes are arteries of commodity flow; legality is a secondary consideration as the most controlled ports can inspect a maximum of five percent of the goods they are responsible for. Taxes and tariffs are obstacles, not obligations. My interviews consistently demonstrated that the vast majority of those who participate in the extra-legal do not think of themselves as criminals, as smugglers, as ‘really’ breaking the law. In their perspective, states, being only ‘somewhat’ important, are only somewhat noticed, somewhat respected. Vast extra-state economic networks are equally, and sometimes more, important. Multiple nodes of power. Multiple constructs of privilege. Each balancing the hegemony of the other in global realities. Yet in academic circles, the state is visible, and the extra-state less so. Why? Common wisdom holds that two things cannot exist in one place, and this myth is central to making the processes and profits of the extra-state invisible. This ‘wisdom’

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supports the convictions that the state is the predominate form of sociopolitical and economic relations defining the modern world. If the state reigns, it reigns supreme; if it falls, it will be replaced by something else (anarchy, to most theorists). Any other competing set of economic and political associations are by definition marginal. In fact, multiple competing regimes of power and accumulation exist, variously hindering and assisting one another (Hardt and Negri 2000; Heyman 1999; Strange 1996; Tilly 1985). The vast network of extra-state alliances represents not merely an ‘outlaw’ offshoot of the state, but a competing set of organized systems of accumulation, control, and action (Nordstrom 2000). These may at times benefit state structures and authorities; they may at times out-compete them. Should these extra-state networks become more adept at controlling resource extraction, capital accumulation, and a justification of violence than the state, they will supplant the latter in primary authority; if they prove less adept, they will wither and be supplanted by new and emergent forms of political and economic relations.2 A great deal of effort has gone into producing the idea that the state is the fulcrum of power and authority in the modern world (Enloe 2000). Yet the state too is just another invention, to echo Margaret Mead’s classic words on warfare. Just a more successful invention at a given point in history. So while crafting invisibilities around the unregulated hides some of the immense profits that people, industries, social groups, and states make from extra-state means, the invisibilities also hide the fact that the state is not the ultimate, the supreme, the unchallenged governing authority in the modern world. The sheer power carried in extra-state systems—the power to shape global economic and political realities—demonstrates the partial nature of state authority. And this demonstrates the state’s power is

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not preeminent, but a carefully crafted illusion that exists only because a population chooses to grant it believability. Perhaps, then, the illegal and the illicit are too important to discuss. Perhaps ignoring them is not a simple oversight, but the product of the governments, industries, and people who build empires through less than legal means. As Castells (1998: 178) notes, there is a “thin line between criminal traffic and government-inspired trade.” In this transitional era of globalization, who will be most effective at mobilizing economies and the force to protect them is as yet an unanswered question. Perhaps when people say it is too dangerous, or too difficult, to study the illicit, the more basic question is “dangerous to whom?” In truth, the divisions between non/formal and extra/state are far less distinct than classical theory and popular discourse would have. The danger might thus be to our very conceptions of power and economy; to our theories so carefully crafted about the nature of the relationship between state, individual, and authority.

NOTES 1. For a similar discussion for the Democratic Republic of Congo, see MacGaffey and Bazanguissa-Ganga (2000). 2. Reading Henrietta Moore’s work on the anthropology of governance (1996: 10–14) raised a new set of considerations for me, ones not directly addressed by Moore, but implicit in her ideas. She explores the place a “neo-Foucauldian” approach would have in contemporary anthropology, placing at its center the ways—the arts—by which practices of government control populations. Crucially, while this is a means to analyze the state, it is not state-

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centered. This notion of “governmentality,” says Moore, indicates “a certain mentality, a particular way of thinking about the sort of problems which can and should be addressed by particular authorities and through particular strategies” (1996: 12). The critical analysis of these forms of rationality, concludes Moore, would certainly be central to a modern anthropology. My explorations of the ways in which state and non-state actors alike benefit from the created invisibilities of extra-state networks touches on these issues of governmentality, and the systems of knowledge as power that undergird these.

REFERENCES Ayers, Ed. 1996. “The Expanding Shadow Economy.” World Watch 9, no. 4:11–23. Castells, Manuel. 1998. End of Millennium. Oxford: Blackwell. Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Maneuvers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Findlay, Mark. 1999. The Globalisation of Crime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fiorentini, Gianluca, and Sam Peltzman, eds. 1995. The Economics of Organized Crime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Greif, Avner. 1996. “Contracting, Enforcement, and Efficiency: Economics Beyond the Law.” Pp. 239–265 in Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 1996, ed. Michael Bruno and Boris Pleskovic. Washington D.C.: The World Bank. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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Heyman, Josiah, ed. 1999. States and Illegal Practices. Oxford: Berg. Hodges, Tony. 2001. Angola: From Afro-Stalinism to PetroDiamond Capitalism. Oxford: James Currey. MacGaffey, Janet, and Rémy Bazanguissa-Ganga. 2000. Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moore, Henrietta. 1996. The Future of Anthropological Knowledge. London: Routledge. Nordstrom, Carolyn. 2000. “Shadows and Sovereigns.” Theory, Culture and Society 17, no. 4 (August): 36–54. ———. 2001. “Out of the Shadows.” Pp. 216–239 in Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa, ed. Thomas M. Callaghy, Ronald Kassimir, and Robert Latham. Oxford: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the 21st Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strange, Susan. 1996. The Retreat of the State: The Diffusions of Power in the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” Pp. 169–191 in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans et al. Cambridge University Press.

MARKET FORCES, POLITICAL VIOLENCE, AND WAR The End of Nation-States, the Rise of Ethnic and Global Sovereignties?

 Caroline Ifeka

Introduction In the post–Cold War era, political violence associated with wars of gain is key to economic and political transformations across nation-states.1 Under the ‘Pax Americana’ multinational corporations interacting in ‘old boy’ networks of the global capitalist class control armaments, oil production, and cyberspace. Industrial and military multinationals as well as global financial institutions, are extending their decision-making structures while becoming more concentrated;2 there is a “hyperconcentration of (unregulated) economic and military power” predominantly Euro-American (Virilio 1997: 99). Global militarization

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legitimized in discourses of ‘protecting freedom’ secures world oil and gas resources for Euro-American and Sinic industrial use, promotes corporate profits, and supports the post-2000 Pax Americana. The Pax’s ‘command and control’ system seeks to checkmate Muslim control of 60 percent of world crude oil supplies by destroying ‘rogue’ regimes and investing in multinational corporations exploiting oil, diamonds, coltan, and other (finite) industrial resources in non-Muslim controlled African states (Meacher 2003). Preparation for total war is economic war. The capitalist class’s facilitation of wars in the European, African, South American and Asian semiperipheries has the potential to end all history, especially now this class includes large Asian multinational corporations acquiring the capacity to compete with the U.S. industrial-military complex—on earth and in cyberspace (Joxe 2002; Sklair and Robbins 2002). Political violence and endemic ‘small, cruel wars’ help sustain, and are sustained by, authoritarian political systems masquerading as ‘democracies’;3 socioeconomic inequalities, and widening poverty whose wounds global ‘development’ agencies soothe in discourses and practices of ‘participatory’ or ‘community development.’4 Yet the political violence, the suffering, and the decay of the nation-state’s capacity to protect what Hobbes calls every man’s “natural right of self preservation” (Tuck 1989: 68–69) and to deliver minimal justice and equitable assistance continue to grow. Cascading violence is especially visible at intersections of the global and local, where the disordering impact of industrial market forces is breaking down ‘law and order’ so people feel insecure, and withdraw their consent to the colonial derived nation-state in favor of the protection they believe their ethnic ‘nationality’ offers them. New ethnic formations are emerging, battling for sovereign (nationstate) jurisdiction over their ancestral resources, terrains, and kith and kin. And for rights in international law to deal with global oil sovereigns.

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The implications for nation-states of these market driven economic and military forces receive little attention from the social sciences, including anthropology. Notable exceptions are the exciting theoretical contributions of a few philosophers, political scientists, and military strategists based in France and the United States, a handful of anthropological analyses of civil wars and regimes of terror (Kapferer 1988; Nordstrom and Martin 1992). Equally important are the very detailed empirical reports by advocacy NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch, the Centre for Public Integrity, and CorpWatch, and radical international relations researchers on political violence integral to multinational and U.S. involvement in economic wars.5 I outline below elements of a new framework for exploring, critically, discourses and practices of political violence and state reformation in geopolitical locations dominated by extractive industries.6 In what follows I focus on a major philosophical, anthropological, and political issue—the origins of violence, its relationship to power and economy, and contribution to the contemporary formation of new states—in the context of armed struggles between multinational corporations, communities, and nation-states for control over oil at the point of intersection of the global and the local in the southern Sudan and the Niger Delta.

Power, Violence, and Fundamentalism Arendt (1970) and Girard (1977) stand out among scholars for their nonconventional, almost antithetical, interpretations of the role of violence in social formations. On the one hand, Arendt (1970: 45–49) argues that in functional EuroAmerican states, institutionalized power appears in the guise of authority demanding obedience and respect—this is the outward manifestation of society’s inner consent—

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with limited reliance on physically violent (legitimate) means of coercion.7 Power is “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert” with others so power belongs to a group as long as it keeps together; in its pure consensual condition power is an end in itself, therefore it needs not coercion and other violent means of control. Violence, though, is instrumental. It is a means to publicly legitimized ends and requires justification through the ends it pursues; it is very different from (consensual) power. Thus, Arendt (ibid.: 56) argues of totalitarian regimes: “[V]iolence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.” However, she admits that power and violence are often used in combination, as when the nation-state sends out its armed forces to protect citizens against foreign invasion or internal saboteurs. On the other hand, Girard (1977, 1987; see also Mack 1987) contends that culture commences in an act of collective murder; the violence enacted in sacrifice is key to the human condition; rivalry and competition between groups contribute to exclusionary practices, scapegoating, and the (murderous) sacrifice of surrogate victims. Girard argues that revenge killing cycles can end in one “final” killing that authorizes new social formations. Applying his argument to economic wars articulating the intersection of the global and local, is it that many ethnic players interpret violence as the basis of a new consensus (power) that legitimates their transformation into sovereignties with independent jurisdiction over their own peoples, terrains, and natural resources? I note that other theorists query violence’s putative social creativity, arguing with Baudrillard (2002: 8, 17–19) for its power to destroy all lives and systems. So, on the one hand, (pure consensual) power is portrayed as the origin of sociopolitical organization; on the other, violence is represented as a socially creative force as well as the war to end all wars.

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The latter view is echoed in local politico-economic fundamentalist discourses authorizing the violent practices of multinational corporations, nation-states, and ethnic communities in their oil wars.8 I shall argue that many features of religious fundamentalism also pertain to organizations engaging in economic wars at the intersection of the global and the local; consider, for example, the group’s insistence on strict adherence to basic principles of behavior that it believes distinguishes it from others competing for followers/markets, the group’s preoccupation with boundary maintenance in competition/rivalry with other faiths/ groups, its emphasis on members’ adherence to basic principles (Ali 2002; Boyer 2002), and, of course, its capacity for violence, even the mass killing of internal dissenters and external opponents, as in the Albigensian crusade and Spanish civil war (Borkenau 2000; Oldenbourg 2001). The inner violence of rivalry, I suggest, is an essential element in the structuring of religious fundamentalism, as well as its politico-economic variants. Rivalrous violence is the hallmark of the industrial military complex manifesting at the local level in the guise of corporations backed by national armed forces/private military firms. In the pursuit of profits, oil companies use any means, peaceful and violent, that they can get away with to conquer rival companies and subjugate communities who claim the rights of traditional owners over oil producing terrains and the right to resist oil spillages and forcible displacement by companies building roads and pipelines across their lands (HRW 1999: 56–70; 2003: 355). Consider another aspect of economic fundamentalism in structuring violent relations between corporations, communities, and nation-states. Competition for oil and revenues impels corporations, communities, and nation-states in the Niger Delta and southern Sudan to highlight perceptions of themselves as being absolutely in the right—they alone pos-

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sess the absolute truth that legitimizes violent action against competitors—with consequences terrifyingly documented:9 (a) Companies: we seek only to ‘do business in a peaceful environment’ by peaceful means, it is others (i.e., the communities) who are violent; we struggle daily against global competitors for ‘market survival’ and have to somehow ‘maintain our competitive edge’ (Ifeka 2001a). (b) Communities: our brothers have joined the liberation army/swamp guerrillas to protect our collective ancestral heritage, we are the legitimate owners of all oil lying under our soil, creeks, and off shore ocean, and have been cheated of our rights all of these years, we love our youth for their bravery in protecting us against enemies by standing up to companies and government forces, our boys give their lives for us to be free from suffering (Ifeka 2001b, 2002). (c) Central government: we are protecting the country’s financial ‘life blood.’ In the Niger Delta, as in southern Sudan, corporations, community guerrillas and state rulers interact through unending political violence—the Khartoum government hires mercenaries to destroy and displace thousands of nomads from their homelands (HRW, 2003a: 67–69)—but each type of organization also engages in more peace-loving activities, some as hired clients (informers) of company and government who seek to penetrate the ‘enemy’ to weaken their campaigns. The oil majors publish sanctimonious annual reports on monies expended on community development to bring peace; ethnic nationalities make self valedictory statements to the press regarding their (peaceful) commitment to full sovereignty and resource control; government stooges hire praise singers to eulogize the President’s commitment to ‘peace’ and ‘economic development’ (HRW 2003a: 81ff.; Ifeka 2002).

These discourses justify actions that solicit, respectively, oil company workers, guerrilla brothers/liberation army, and

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nation-state to approve and participate in the violence: each party strengthens its organizational boundaries with laudable logos at once ‘fraternal’ and tacitly threatening; each legitimizes recourse to violence by blaming (scapegoating) the other for nefarious deeds (Kemedi 2003). Each party to these three-cornered economic wars identifies strongly with their group’s beliefs—perceivedly unchanging sacred tenets are rigidly endorsed by all members, workers, and militants to protect their group against defectors and betrayal in war— and each group prepares its members to defend their beliefs and identities. At times when fundamentalist interactions are climaxing, each party adopts the structure’s preordained asymmetrical roles of (subordinate) victim or (superordinate) killer: the killer seeks to justify the violence of genocide and executions by invoking the enemy’s sins. And so with each violent exchange, the victim-killer structure is perpetuated, and political conflict diffuses everywhere. Thus, corporate fundamentalisms of the global, and ethnoreligious fundamentalisms of the local, are embedded in market-driven networks in swamp, ocean, and mine, where low-priced natural resources are extracted (violently) in exchange for high-priced manufactured goods. Popular support for nation-state personages and policies declines, as absolutist values flow forth into an increasingly unitary global circulation system: the political violence of impoverished peoples resisting oppression grows—and grows—as states crumble, and ethnic nationalities claim the sovereignty of statehood.

Toward a New Framework: Structure Making inductive inferences based on my fieldwork in Nigerian oil producing communities, I propose three sets of elements for an analysis of processes structuring discourses and practices of violence in extractive industry locations.

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(1) Divisions, intolerance, and double-dealing. Fundamentalist discourse in contemporary multinationals, ethnic community organizations, and nation-state political regimes feeds on divisions, making ethnic or religiocultural difference the basis of political reordering through bloodshed, that nourishes more intolerance to which increasing numbers consent (Apter 1997: 4–5). So, contrary to Arendt, in these economic wars in states less mature than the European regimes with which Arendt was familiar, violence transforms into consensual power— through sacrificial killings?—apparently supporting Girard’s theory of the capacity of violence to create/ regenerate social formations.10 Engagement in violence, however, does not exclude participation in ‘law and order’ activities of the nation-state. As indicated above companies, communities, and nation-states articulate discourse daily (with passion) about their peace-loving credentials, while simultaneously practicing violence; government and companies recruit (for pay) clients in the communities who play double roles—now part of a community guerrilla group or liberation army, now a community representative in peace talks with government or company—so situations at the intersection point of the global and local seem very confusing, lacking consistent patterns with disorder everywhere, while Pentagon and U.K. government contracts enable armament companies to chalk up remarkable growth in annual turnover, as they supply arms traffickers with the relatively cheap weapons that they sell to nationstates, some oil companies, and community guerrillas (ICIJ 2003: 10–21; Okonta and Douglas 2003: 137). (2) Violence and sacrifice. Each party to the threecornered struggle legitimizes violence so that at times dominant organizations (nation-states and multinationals) feel free to seek surrogates that they can sacrifice (kill), ostensibly to knock out rebellion in the communities, but actually, also, to vent their hatred of ethnicities continuing for

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decades to rebel against their lack of rights to ancestral terrain and resources. Anecdotal evidence suggests that sections of communities in the pay of national government and/or multinational companies are also complicit in selecting victims for a ‘final’ act of sacrificial killing. The selected victim must be recognized as a surrogate for the guilty party (or parties), be vulnerable, be unable to retaliate, and be seen as lacking champions who will have the courage and commitment to continue the vengeful violence (c.f. Mack 1987: 8). The Nigerian government’s execution in 1995 of the Ogoni leader Ken Saro Wiwa and his eight comrades fulfilled most of these criteria, but also flagged additional elements of ‘final’ sacrificial killings that rather than end actually reproduce the structural relationship victimkiller and thus ensure, contrary to Girard (1987), that the cycle of violence will continue.11 For example, sections of the Ogoni oil producing community in government pay and engaging in violent in-fighting with their principal leader, Ken Saro Wiwa, ensured through their fratricide and the documented connivance of Shell and Chevron that Saro Wiwa was ‘selected’ as the sacrificial offering to end the killing—once and for all (Okonta and Douglas 2003: 157ff.). Shell especially disliked Saro Wiwa, a former employee, who had punctured their mask on many occasions by revealing their commitment to violence against the Ogoni people. Shell held a ‘watching brief’ at the ‘trial’ of the Ogoni 8 and Saro Wiwa, and some people say the company connived with the Abacha dictatorship, which watched and videotaped the executions (Olorode et al. 1999: 277, 398, 400ff.). In this and similar cases in which oil multinationals hire mercenaries or security forces to attack, kill, or uproot communities ‘blocking the path’ where the oil pipeline must be laid—there is no alternative route—the company reveals its capacity for the absolutist thinking that creates and legitimizes discourses and practices of political violence (HRW 1999: 77–82; HRW 2003: 182–183, 191–209).

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A sacrificial killing is expected to end the violence (Mack 1987: 9), but in the struggles examined here, such killings failed to check the violence.12 Rather, political violence emanating from Ogoniland in the mid-1990s has extended to their Ijaw kith and kin. In 2001–2003, eight million Ijaw-speaking people occupying three states in the Niger Delta strengthened the Ijaw National Congress into a quasi-national assembly, nominated a governor general, and began to think of guerrilla groups hijacking oil personnel and occupying terminals as the Ijaw nation’s armed forces. In Ijawland today, political violence solicits widespread consent, so it is difficult to say where violence ends and pure (consensual) power begins. (3) Power and violence as ends in themselves. Each party to these three cornered battles claims that their organization’s continued existence, well-being and progress is an end in itself; implicitly they maintain that power is their organization’s essence, not violence. They ‘only’ resort to violence from necessity to achieve their objectives. Arendt supports this popular belief in her contention that violence is instrumental and requires justification through the political end it pursues (Arendt 1970: 49). Thus, she argues, power is primary in sustaining social formations; violence is secondary. Yet in these oil wars, each of the three parties is experiencing violence as primary. As argued above by Apter, Virilio, and Baudrillard, many people on all sides now feel violence is becoming an end in itself, as principle and interest reinforce the other, feeding fundamentalist belief that God-given (absolute) ethnoreligious difference sanctifies sovereignties, whether ethnic or theocratic. And that is why nation-states are decaying and new ethnic sovereignties are emerging, empowered to tackle corporate global sovereigns.

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Toward a New Framework: Process My Nigerian fieldwork data suggests four or five historical phases in the waning of colonially derived nation-states and the waxing of ethnic state power. Each phase reflects a progressive expansion in the consensual basis of violence, and in the community case, its much demanded transformation into (consensual) power, currently legitimized as the ethnic state. When a group/citizenry identify with perceived past frustrations, exploitation, and impoverishment, they move from an original phase (1) of innocent acceptance of domination by corporation and obedience to the nation-state, and in so doing create a transitional political opening (2) within the state; they call themselves marginalized, excluded, the poor majority, ordinary people resisting oppression, displacement, and even genocide by engaging in open (peaceful) protest. Then, after months or years, they move into phase (3), questioning rulers’ credentials (authority), declining to accept subjugation, and commencing rebellion by engaging in armed combat with government and multinational corporation security that can end in revolution (4). Then, the power that should be at the state’s core is no more. The nation-state collapses, and a large space of consensual power (5) opens up, wherein triumphant rebels assume control as ‘the people’s’ rightful political representatives of ethnic states legitimized as sovereign over the ethnicity’s terrains, arms, resources, and economy. Transforming themselves from ethnicity to nationality, the emerging state claims a jurisdictional power equivalent to the global sovereignty exercised de facto by unregulated global multinationals.

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Conclusion Preparation for total war, argues Virilio (1997: 160), is economic war. Indeed, my analysis has identified several elements for a new analysis of violent structures and processes in African locales, where oil multinationals articulate market forces in interaction with ethnoreligious fractures and colonially derived nation-states at the point of intersection between the global and the local. In summary, key elements in our conceptual framework for explaining the unending expansion of violence at the intersection point of the global and local are: (a) Sacrificial killing, the most emotional of ‘proofs’ that enemy organizations are ‘killers,’ the most arousing of passions in ‘victim’ communities supplying the sacrificial offering. I have argued that it is the primary process at work in the depths of social interaction, structuring relations between companies, communities, and nation-states in violence. (b) Governments’ and companies’ use of ‘divide and rule’ to keep communities fractured on ethnic, religious, and class lines. Double-dealings, dishonesty, and lack of trust in Phases 2 or 3—culminating in sacrificial killings—thus ensure that all parties rely on violent means to seek control of oil resources. (c) The transformation of violence into consensual power, as in Phases 3 or 4 of economic wars, when popular discourses of company, community, and state legitimize violence as pure (consensual) power. (d) The arrival of the ‘revolutionary moment,’ when company managers or state soldiers no longer obey commands, so the means of violence are of no use. Arendt (1970: 49) argues that victory depends in the longer term on superior (consensual) organization of power, not on superior means of coercion for

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“Everything depends on the power behind the violence.” Here, Arendt abandons her position that power and violence are diametrically opposed, implying that violence, too, can be creative. Thus, she moves closer to Cabral (1980: 257), Girard (1987), and Fanon (1967), who believe passionately in the capacity of revolutionary armed struggles against oppressive regimes to cleanse society, whereby the vast majority of ‘our people’ support the armed liberation struggle, their consent transforming violence into (consensual) power. In his analysis of political violence in Sri Lanka, Kapferer (1997: 164) argues that discursive practices are indeed constitutive. This analysis, too, has identified processes that structure the fundamentalist (killing) beliefs of global and emerging ethnic sovereignties, as the nationstate decays within. I have shown how economic wars articulate the brutal insertion of global market forces in the local, violent encounters that nourish corporate and ethnoreligious fundamentalisms, whose rigidities of thought and action structure the principal parties in the asymmetrical roles of victim and killer. Are companies, communities, and nation-states complicit in reproducing cycles of war on the periphery that serve the financial, military, and profit-centered interests of the global capitalist class and perpetuate the U.S.’s “Empire of Disorder”? (Joxe 2002: 189).

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NOTES 1. By ‘violence,’ I mean the exercise of physical, mental, or emotional force to effect harm, injuries, and destruction on others. By ‘war,’ I mean armed conflict between two or more opponents, nations, or states in which both seek to kill the other, destroy their assets, and reduce them to rubble. 2. Some multinational corporations generate annual revenues of over $250 billion from operations in more than 150 nation-states, are unregulated in the bulk of their activities, and dictate their terms of operation to governments and speak to the chief executive of the global hegemon (the U.S.) as equals (ICIJ 2003). On the U.K.-based armaments giant BAE, see Sasha Lilley, “BAE System’s Dirty Dealings,” http:// www.corpwatch.org/ issues/PRTjsp?articleid=9008. 11.11.03 The New World Order Files. The Seven Sisters. http.user.pa.net/~drivera/54sisters.htm. Also other reports by CorpWatch on the Internet. 3. By ‘authoritarian,’ I mean government by a small elite with wide (despotic, dictatorial, domineering) powers. 4. ‘Development’ agencies and personnel include those with a social conscience whose work in difficult and often dangerous conditions (e.g., Médecins Sans Frontières) ameliorates but, under present global conditions, cannot cure. 5. See works cited in the reference list, e.g., Apter (1997), Baudrillard (2002), Joxe (2002), Peluso and Watts (2001), Virilio (1997); also very detailed empirical reports on human rights abuses of oil companies by Human Rights Watch, the independent Centre for Public Integrity’s detailed documentation of linkages between financial, military, and industrial companies engaged in ‘the business of war,’ the U.K. advocacy NGO Corner House Briefings, etc. Stiglitz (2002), a former World Bank manager, has written an ‘insider’ study of the ‘management’ of globalization from the very top down. 6. Certain scholars argue, somewhat obscurely, for a ‘political ecology of violence’ (Peluso and Watts 2001: 26–28). Applying their argument, I find no significant association of type of discourses and practices of political violence with environmental context— e.g., that there is more sacrificial killing, divide and rule, and fundamentalism in the open lands of the Sudan compared to the more cramped terrain of the Niger Delta. Or that there are more

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revenge killings, more extreme and continuing forms of violence in the Sudan compared to the Delta. On the contrary, my analysis shows that, notwithstanding religiocultural and historical differences, basically similar structures and processes of political violence are at work in the two oil extracting locations. Violence is often combined with power, but for Arendt, the two are dissimilar. Power belongs to the state as long as opinion supports the decisions of officeholders; when lost, as in Africa’s crumbling regimes lacking authority (respect given without resort to coercion or suasion), the ruler’s strength or independence of public opinion wanes, so the nation-state’s capacity to impose even minimal ‘law and order’ vanishes (c.f. Arendt 1970: 45). Fundamentalism, in the sense of strict adherence to the basic principles of the belief system that leaders impose by peaceful and violent means with group consent (power), is more usually analyzed in relation to religious movements intending to purify societies of evil and devil worship, as in contemporary Islam and Christianity (c.f. Ali 2002; Boyer 2002). In the 1990s, under the Nigerian military, some oil companies allegedly hired their own armed security forces, but they upheld their company’s peaceful policies and insisted that they took ‘many risks,’ relying largely on mobile police, guards, and armed contingents (deployed by the federal government), whom they paid generously to protect company installations (HRW 1999: 115–116, 123ff.). In Sudan, in the late 1990s, the Khartoum government sought to impose ‘peace’ by carrying out massive destroy-and-displace raids against civilians, as well as by sending in troops to strengthen company security men around oil wells (HRW 2003: 244–270). But note how in regimes of terror gripping mature totalitarian states violence is destructive, engulfing all (Sudrez-Orozco 1992). In the late 1980s, Ken Saro Wiwa founded with colleagues the Ogoni-based Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni Peoples (MOSOP) that challenged Shell, the operator of many oil wells in Ogoniland, to cease oil pollution and gas flaring, to deal respectfully with the Ogoni people as the customary owners of the land and oil, and to recognize the Ogoni people’s right to determine whether Shell extracts oil or not from Ogoniland. Shell and the Nigerian military saw Saro Wiwa as a threat to ‘peace in the

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Niger Delta,’ a leader who must be stopped in his tracks before the Delta rebelled and seceded from the Nigerian federation (Olorode et al. 1999; Eshiet et al. n.d.). The regime may have remembered Isaac Boro, who proclaimed the independent ‘Niger Delta People’s Republic’ in 1962. See also a large literature on the Internet: viz. Two Day National Conference of Eminent Persons Meeting under the Ijaw National Congress, November 27–28, 2003.http://www.nigerdeltacongress.com/iarticles/ijaws%20 spout%20fire.htm. 12. Other sacrificial killings in the Niger Delta include those suffered by the Ijaw people, such as the ‘Twon Brass Three,’ when three youth insisting that they enter the Agip oil terminal at the head of a large following—despite company warnings to desist and warnings from some sections of the Brass community—were shot dead by troops in May 2000. The genocide of three thousand inhabitants of the village of Odi, Bayelsa state, was committed in 1999 by the Federal Nigerian Army. Similar massacres of many civilians by government troops are documented in the southern Sudan in the mid- to late 1990s (HRW 2003).

REFERENCES Ali, T. 2002. The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. London: Verso. Apter, D. E. 1997. “Political Violence in Analytical Perspective.” Pp. 1–32 in The Legitimization of Violence, ed. D. E. Apter. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd. Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Co. Baudrillard, J. 2002. The Spirit of Terrorism. London and New York: Verso.

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Borkenau, F. 2000. The Spanish Cockpit: An Eyewitness Account of the Spanish Civil War. London: Phoenix Press. Boyer, P. 2002. Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors. London: Vintage Books. Cabral, A. 1980. Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings. London: Heinemann. Eshiet, I. U., O. Okome, and Felix Akpan. N.d. Ken SaroWiwa and the Discourse of Ethnic Minority in Nigeria. Calabar: University of Calabar Press. Fanon, F. 1967. The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Girard, R. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. [First published as La violence et le sacre. Paris: Grasset, 1972.] ———. 1987. “Generative Scapegoating.” Pp. 73–145 in Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, Rene Girard and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killings and Cultural Formation, ed. R. G. Hamerton-Kelly. Stanford: Stanford University Press. HRW (Human Rights Watch). 1999. The Price of Oil. Corporate Responsibility and Human Rights Violations in Nigeria’s Oil Producing Communities. New York: Human Rights Watch. ———. 2003a. Sudan, Oil and Human Rights. Brussels: Human Rights Watch. ———. 2003b. “The Warri Crisis: Fuelling Violence.” Human Rights Watch 15, no. 18 (A) (December). Ifeka, Caroline. 2001a. “Field Notes on the Killing of Three Twon Brass Youth on May 29, 2000, in the Agip Oil Terminal, Bayelsa State.” Pp. 21–22. Notes made while carrying out work for Pro-Natura International (Nigeria) in Brass, Bayelsa State. ———. 2001b. “Oil, NGOs and Youth: Resource Control Struggles in the Niger Delta.” Review of African Political Economy, no. 84:27.

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———. 2002. “Field Notes on Oil Producing Communities.” Notes made while carrying out work for Pro-Natura International (Nigeria) in Eastern Obolo, Awka Ibom State. ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists). 2003. Making a Killing: The Business of War. Washington D.C.: Center for Public Integrity. Joxe, Alain. 2002. Empire of Disorder. Trans. Ames Hodges, ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e). Kapferer, Bruce. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. ———. 1997. “State and Insurrectionary Violence: Sri Lanka.” Pp. 159–188 in The Legitimization of Violence, ed. D. E. Apter. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd. Kemedi, D. V. 2003. Community Conflicts in the Niger Delta: Petro-Weapon or Policy Failure? Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics. Working Papers 03-12. Berkeley: University of California Institute of International Studies. Meacher, M. 2003. “This War on Terrorism Is Bogus.” The Guardian, 6 September. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/o,12956,10 36687,00.html. Nordstrom, Carolyn, and JoAnn Martin. 1992. “The Culture of Conflict: Field Reality and Theory.” Pp. 3–17 in The Paths to Domination, Resistance and Terror, ed. Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mack, B. 1987. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–70 in Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, Rene Girard and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killings and Cultural Formation, ed. R. G. Hamerton-Kelly. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Oldenbourg, Zoe. 2001. Massacre at Montsegur: A History of the Albigensian Crusade. London: Phoenix Press.

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Okonta, I., and O. Douglas. 2003. Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights and Oil. London: Verso. Olorode, O., W. Raji, J. Ogunye, and Tunde Oladunjoye, eds. 1999. Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crises of the Nigerian State. Lagos: A Committee for the Defence of Human Rights Special Publication. Peluso, N. L., and Michael Watts. 2001. “Violent Environments.” Pp. 3–38 in Violent Environments, ed. N. L. Peluso and Michael Watts. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sklair, L., and P. Robbins. 2002. “Global Capitalism and Major Corporations from the Third World.” Third World Quarterly 23, no. 1:81–100. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2002. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton. Sudrez-Orozco, M. 1992. “A Grammar of Terror: Psychocultural Responses to State Terrorism in Dirty War and Post–Dirty War Argentina.” Pp. 219–259 in The Paths to Domination, Resistance and Terror, ed. Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tuck, R. 1989. Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Virilio, Paul. 1997. Open Sky. Trans. Julie Rose. London: Verso.

REFLECTIONS ON WAR AND STATE AND THE SUDAN  Leif Manger

Baselines One characteristic of ‘the new wars’ is that they are often about identity politics, i.e., the quest for power is couched in terms of exclusion and inclusion of people in various groups. But although wars and violence can be explained with reference to ethnicity, i.e., cultural factors, it must also be taken as a language with which other things—economic, material, and political—are being addressed. First, ethnicity is a relational concept that explains such relationships as ethnic. But although it is imagined, it is real in terms of mobilizing individual people on the bases of a history of common origin that people take to be true. Secondly, ethnicities are not remnants of the past but entities continuously being re-created and shaped within con-

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temporary realities. Hence, colonialism helped pin down relationships, and thereby make them basis for continuous new elaborations about identities, and also ordering them in new systems of hierarchy, creating new elites based on ethnic belonging that play key roles in today’s developments. Thirdly, we should also note that in so-called ethnic wars, civilians are targeted because the aim is to clear areas of people who do not ‘belong.’ We see this clearing of areas used as a strategy, for instance, in order to control key strategic resources. And as the war economy is no longer controlled by a state alone, but rather is decentralized and based on exploiting specific resources through outright plunder, black market trade, and external support, even enemies are not what they used to be. In contemporary wars, enemies are found to collaborate because they share many of the same interests in this kind of predatory economy of war. In this kind of situation, the distinction between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ is also diminished, as is the difference between ‘soldier’ and ‘civilian.’ But— and here we arrive at a point that will be argued throughout the article—the result of this is not a state of anarchy, as argued by some commentators. The new identity politics, and the new wars are not a retreat to anarchy, nor to tribalism or historical tradition. The way that wars are developing is part of the dynamics of globalization. This makes them very modern phenomena, and we have to understand them in a wider context of how local communities are related to broader contexts of economy, politics, and culture. Certainly, local people are involved, with the militarization of local and regional elites engaging each other in mutual predatory action through which a local population is made to suffer. The failure of political elites has eroded confidence in politics, thus making people more inclined to listen to alternative people promising quick fixes for people within the group against people in a different group. Factors such as the emergence of new mar-

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kets, putting weapons within reach of private people, opening up smuggling as an increasingly important form of trade, with new groups of nouveaux riches becoming engaged both in the new economy and the new politics, also belong in this picture. In this the diaspora also plays a central role. The result is a privatization of the state and privatization of the violence. But within the war, the economy is going on with the warring parties controlling markets, prices and issuing ‘taxes.’ In the midst of ‘chaos,’ what we see is a structured game that certainly is different from what we saw a generation ago, but the game is structured none the less, and it is possible to analyse the way it is being structured. But we should not go astray in ‘global speak’ that tells us that everything is new under the sun, nor should we enter the field of unfounded geopolitical prophesies, be they ‘clashes of civilizations’ or ‘the end of history’ type. I would rather engage some ‘anthro-speak’ here. The actors, interests and networks involved can be studied as empirical phenomena, and we can make statements about interconnections—that is our job as anthropologists. Certainly, we need to look at the many places in which new systems of sovereignty are developing, be they warlords, drug cartels, or other sorts of mafia-type organizations combining wealth and power. But we should not forget the workings of the state either. On the one hand, state actors may belong to the group of actors just mentioned, running their own schemes to enrich themselves. Hence, the privatization of the state is certainly a major trend in many Third World areas. But in spite of all challenges to the nationstate in recent years, it is still given a privileged position in the global political order, a fact that might work both ways—it may lead to a strengthening of the state, or it may weaken it, through international sanctions. But we should not underestimate the ability of a nation-state, even a weak one, to engage its army, its bureaucracy, and its cap-

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ital to penetrate the communities over which it claims control. Nor should we underestimate its ability to influence the cultural aspects of society, through the categorization, regulation, and routinization of everyday life and encounters between subjects and state institutions. The state is certainly being challenged, there is no doubt about that. But the ways in which it is being challenged are not given, and require empirical studies. Therefore, let us now turn from generalities and try to pin down some of these interdependencies through an ethnographic case.

Creating a ‘New Sudan’ The Sudan has been bogged down in civil war since the early 1980s, a war that was more or less a continuation of the earlier phase of civil war from the 1950s to the Addis Abeba Accord in 1972. The case of the Sudan then, opens up a canvass of empirical situations that may serve as illustrations of how a war situation may develop. First, the ‘traditional’ civil war started as a challenge of the national government by a major rebel group that was initiated from within the national army, with clear aims among the rebels to reform the Sudanese state. This war between the Government in Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army in the south is still being fought, of course, and is now hopefully being settled through negotiations in Kenya. It might be added, though, that it is not so clear any more whether the aim of the SPLM/A is to reform the existing Sudanese state or whether it is to establish an independent Southern Sudanese state. But there are many other types of wars that also have emerged, some based on local warlordism, on local interests in trade, or on oil, often with the end result that civilian populations in certain regions have become to

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an increasing degree direct targets of the war. Others are represented by increased levels of tribal conflicts that are often spin-offs from other sorts of unrest in a particular area. Some of these wars take on a racial element, as they are interpreted as battles between ‘Arabs and Muslims’ against Africans and Christians, Africans and animists, and so on. This racialization has also, especially in the socalled transition zones between southern and northern Sudan, served as a legitimating ideology for enslaving members of the enemy and put them into slave-like positions. We should realize that the negotiations going on in Kenya might not bring an end to all warfare in the Sudan, simply because the negotiating partners do not control all of the forces that are engaged in these different types of unrest. In the Sudan, the state-controlling elites have been characterized by their historical bias toward Arabism and Islamism. In spite of a constitution recognizing the ethnic and religious plurality of the country and that such a plurality must form the base of its definition of citizenship, and in spite of political and administrative structures defined as ‘democratic,’ Arabism and Islamism have been key ideological forces that have defined what Foucault (1991) has termed the “governmentality” of the state. We see this when we look at the actual set-up of the state, with its patron-client structures, structures in which elite groups from areas along the Nile have been dominate and extend their economic, political, and ideological domination to peripheral areas such as the Nuba Mountains. A study of this system of governmentality will make clear that the Sudanese state cannot be reduced to Western notions of what a state is supposed to be and how it is expected to operate. It is not a ‘Western-type’ state, built on a neutral Weberean bureaucracy, with a nationalism built on horizontal ties of imagined communities standing in equal relationships to the state, nor is it possible to reduce its work-

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ing to simple dichotomies such as ‘modern-traditional,’ ‘developed-underdeveloped.’ Rather, the Sudan shows a situation in which there are many communities and tribes characterized by hierarchical ‘traditional’ cultural traditions, some of which have obtained state power, others not. And the battle for state power has also been a divisive force among the elite groups themselves, leading to periods of military coups and military regimes replacing weak parliamentary systems in different periods of the political history of independent Sudan. Rather than a linear development towards democratization and development, the Sudanese state is characterized by cyclical developments. Hence, the Islamist tendencies of the current regime have intensified longstanding and basic patterns in Sudanese state-building, and the state itself is a product of this type of basic ‘traditional’ set-up and ‘competition’ between different ethnic groups of Arab or non-Arab origin, Muslims of different sorts, from syncretistic Sufis to fundamentalist Islamists to non-Muslims, be they Christian or animist. Therefore, the civil war itself should be understood not as a result of a political rebellion in the narrow sense, but rather as a counter-hegemonic attack on this particular system of governmentality. But given this basic set-up of the Sudanese society, the problem is that the war and any removal of the old regime may not solve social difficulties. The issue is not who is controlling the state, but rather the set-up of the state itself. Therefore, the continuing problems are likely to create further conflicts. The violent developments in Darfur may serve as a reminder that even if the ‘main’ civil war is solved, the Sudan will not necessarily move in the direction of democracy and freedom. More authoritarianism might be expected. If we focus on the present regime of President Omar Bashir, this regime represents a rather typical example of the type of state-controlling regime in Sudanese history. What is special about the current regime in Khartoum is

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not its Islamism nor its position on key issues in Sudanese politics. We have known about these things for decades, expressed by the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which was the political basis for the regime at its take-over in 1989. What is special is that these political-religious positions have been allowed to be played out within the umbrella of Sudanese state power. Hence, the dynamic is not deriving from the religious field in itself, but rather in the peculiar way that religion and state power have been meshed together and employed to further the interests of a specific group of people. For instance, the terms for new administrative units, new administrators, etc., are taken from classical Islamic history (wilaya, wali, amir, etc.). The concept of dar al-islam and dar al-harb becomes the way to conceptualize ongoing events, and when Islam is under threat, jihad is the way to deal with the problem. Such jihad is of course directed toward infidels, but also against nominal Muslims who have left the right path. Hence, attacks on mosques also occur. In this process arises also the more intensified focus on racial issues in the Sudan. The regime has continued playing the card of the shari’a that was first set in motion by President Nimeiry in 1983. This regime has intensified this by introducing Shari’a-based hudud punishment in 1991. But the regime also makes alliances with local sufi families. Working through armed militias, they have purged the university system and attacked academicians, lawyers, and journalists. They have established a financial basis through Islamic banks. Administratively, they introduced their federal systems in the Sudan, dividing earlier provinces into smaller units, demanding more revenue to go into the bureaucratic administration, and making it more difficult to handle the reality of the people. The role of the People’s Defence Forces is crucial and is a key instrument for mobilizing local support. Apart from its Islamism, the general trend here, as it is in many other African countries, is for

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the government to become more exploitative. The political and administrative logic is to extract revenue from the areas, more than to promote development. The winners in these developments are civil servants, military people, politicians, and big traders who are in the political game and who can exploit their relations within the privatized state. So-called development inputs are not based on proper planning procedures but rather on the private interests of individual actors. Political representation is based on elections only to a limited degree; more and more we see that key officers are appointed, an appointment based on loyalties to the state rather than legitimacy from the people. Although these developments still to a certain extent have an ethnic dimension, the general development is toward a group of winners who are close to the state apparatus and an increasing group of losers who are not. Winners and losers are represented in most groups in the Sudan. These developments also have an international dimension and should be seen in light of the regional and international developments after the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf war, September 11, the Bin Laden factor, etc. September 11 dramatized several of these links to global processes. The Sudanese peace negotiations themselves, and the progress that they show, are to a large extent a product of the Khartoum regime trying to deal with the fact that the Sudan is a candidate for the ‘Axis of Evil’ as defined by Washington. In this context, the report made by President Bush to Congress about the state of affairs in the Sudan (The Sudan Peace Act) is an instrument that is of the greatest concern to Khartoum, as it is through this act that decisions about economic sanctions, military threats, etc., are being decided. With the ‘Alliance Against Terror,’ the attack on Iraq and the Sudan Peace Act, the Khartoum regime is constantly reminded of their precarious position in the new international order. The international regime of develop-

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ment assistance and the army of NGOs found around the country represent another link to global forces, but with a different result from the ‘September 11 effect.’ Such forces are there to provide ‘development,’ but given the scale of this, the same organizations also become part of the system of governmentality. After the international aid to Sudan was cut by 90 percent in the early 1990s, the NGOs have taken over as a major force. In many regions, such as the Nuba Mountains where I have worked myself, their influence justifies the term ‘NGO-istans.’ But the state is also part in this game. By controlling the areas such organizations could work in, the Khartoum regime is able to provide help to people on their side of the conflict, but has also helped to maintain law and order through the placement of refugees and destitutes in relief camps of different sorts. Such camps have also played a role in the disciplining of people and the development of new processes of classification and ‘subjectification.’ One argument is, for instance, that through various refugee camps, the international community contributes to the creation of de-ethnicized individuals, resonating with policies of deculturation (Duffield 2002). These developmental ideas about self-sufficiency articulate with commercial needs for cheap agricultural labor. In the past, development was combined with notions of modernization, driven by investments in technology and trade. In today’s liberal discourse, development belongs to those who can help themselves through the market. Those at the lowest economic level are to be, at best, cheap labor power, but may fall outside all systems and be left with humanitarian aid only. They are thus vulnerable to the shifts in humanitarian support that may come about by events and dynamics far from the daily reality of these groups. The power of categorization also works through statistical categories. Through bureaucratic means, people cease to be individual people and become ‘internally displaced people’ (IDPs), ‘households’ (HH), etc., thus abstracted into categories that

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further homogenize and dehumanize. Such statistical categories are often defined by economic disparities, and it is then assumed that such disparities can be redressed through development inputs. But as the problems addressed are political in their nature, they require political solutions. One example of this is the new call for a human rights-based approach to development. But the process has also brought ‘civil society’ organizations that try to obtain support from NGOs, thereby producing yet another link that helps create local effects of the global forces represented by NGOs. Relations in the economic field also show globalizing tendencies. The economic relations of the current regime, which includes, in part, external capital from places such as Southeast Asia, indicate that the regime is also following an Islamist line in its economic policies. And the existence of oil has brought Chinese, Russian, and Indian oil companies in alongside, and also replacing, those based in the West (U.S., Canada, Sweden). But these are not only relations of economic investments; the control of oilfields is a key factor in the war itself, and again, the oil companies appear as forces that help the Khartoum regime to obtain its goals. Finally, the new global diasporas is a phenomenon of importance to developments in the Sudan. We have already mentioned the link to the al-Qaida network, and we should also notice the central place held by Hassan Turabi in various transnational Islamic organizations during the 1990s. Sudan was therefore a player in the events that eventually exploded on September 11, events that also require an understanding of how structural processes, such as patterns of international labor migrations, the growth of Muslim communities in Western cities, and the various ways modern technology such as the Internet, have provided contexts for ever new interpretations of events in the global political arena. But the diaspora also opens up more parochial activities, for instance, by groups pushed out by war and economic problems in their home countries who

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then establish themselves as more ‘traditional’ migrants and refugees, with a focus on the homeland, sending remittances, and maintaining links back home. These are organizations that affect the happenings at home by supplying information to Western policymakers and by producing magazines and journals about local and regional culture and development. Such organizations also abound among the Sudanese.

Some Necessary Steps toward a Solution? Let us, finally, return to the possible peace settlement in the ongoing negotiations in Kenya. In one way, the negotiations must be seen as a beginning of the potential building of a ‘New Sudan.’ Central to this building of a new Sudan is the future development of the Sudanese state. In a possible period of peace settlement and reconstruction, the way in which the two systems of governance—as represented by the warring parties (GOS and SPLM/A)—are fitted together will be crucial, not only on the level of the state but also at a local level. Negotiators must work toward concrete improvement of the situation of local people as much as they negotiate various forms of power sharing at a national level. This does not mean that the macro level is unimportant. But there is more to power sharing than elites dividing spoils among themselves. Any solution must also involve the issue of legitimacy. It is impossible to base political dominance on power alone, and continuous competition among elites is likely to lead to further violence. Without some sort of legitimacy between ruler and ruled, no solution will last, and the process of ‘Balkanization’ will continue. Dividing territory into North Sudan and South Sudan, or into smaller political units still, represents solutions that seem more likely to produce new

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waves of refugees and create new minorities, rather than pointing at lasting solutions. We should also be realistic in our expectations to the warring parties themselves. Both the Government in Khartoum and the SPLM/A are given a privileged position through their involvement with the international community in the negotiating process in Kenya. In this negotiating context, it is important to realize that the parties signing a peace deal may have limited means to carry out what they have signed. Obviously, as warring parties they have a responsibility to end fighting and violence, but it is not certain that they have the capacity to provide peace. For that to happen, alternative political forces must also be included, not to establish structures of yesterday, but to start institution building based on contemporary realities. Again, a look toward the situation in Darfur indicates the gravity of the situation. Although the discussion indicates that some of the underlying causes of the Sudanese crisis are related to the field of identity politics, the wars in the Sudan cannot be solved within the context of identity politics itself. One needs to cut the links based on ethnic and nationalistic exclusiveness and forge new links between people, based on local realities. We have said that the issue at this level is how to compose a national identity in which not only Arabs and Muslims but also non-Arabs and non-Muslims feel at home. Reading the available literature on Sudanese history and society, it is easy to be struck by the extent to which the processes of Arabization and Islamization have been taken for granted in the history of the country. One basic assumption among Sudanese elites seems to be that this wave of sociocultural change is a natural process, and that it rolls, by historical necessity, from the ‘centers’ in the Nile Valley toward the ‘peripheries’ in eastern, western, and southern Sudan. It follows then that it is only a matter of time before the whole country is Arabized and

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Islamized. One tragic effect of such assumptions is that the political realities behind this spread of Arabism and Islam have not been dealt with in Sudanese politics. The problem is not one that can be isolated to the present regime and this civil war. The issue of defining and constructing a Sudanese identity will not go away with this regime, and unless it is resolved, the future for the Sudan looks bleak indeed.

REFERENCES Blom Hansen, Thomas, and Finn Stepputat. 2001. “Introduction: States of Imagination.” Pp. 1–38 in States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial state, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat. Durham: Duke University Press. Duffield, Mark. 2002. “Aid and Complicity: The Case of WarDisplaced Southerners in the Northern Sudan.” Journal of Modern African Studies 40, no. 1:83–104. Foucault, Michel. 1991. “Governmentality.” Pp. 87–104 in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell et al. London: Harvester. Joxe, Alain. 2002. Empire of Disorder. Trans. Ames Hodges, ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e). Kaldor, Mary. 1999. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Swedish trans. Uddevalla: Daidalos. Manger, Leif. 2001–2002. “Religion, Identities and Politics: Defining Muslim Discourse in the Nuba Mountains in

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the Sudan.” Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, no. 4:132–152. ———. 2002. “Resource Management in Western Sudan: Beyond Territory and Scarcity?” Paper presented at the conference titled “Beyond Territory and Scarcity: Social, Cultural and Political Aspects of Conflicts on Natural Resource Management.” Departments of Anthropology and Geography, University of Copenhagen. 7–9 November. ———. 2003. “Civil War and the Politics of Subjectivity in the Nuba Mountains, Sudan.” Paper presented at the 15th ICAES Congress, “Humankind/Nature Interaction: Past, Present and Future,” in Florence. Workshop titled “Anthropology and Its Applications,” organized by F. de Beer. 5–12 July. Turton, David. 1997. “Introduction: War and Ethnicity.” Pp. 1–45 in War and Ethnicity: Global Connections and Local Violence, ed. D. Turton. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press. Warburg, Gabriel. 2003. Islam, Sectarianism and Politics in Sudan Since the Mahdiyya. London: Hurst Publishers.

MILITARIZED DEMOCRACIES The Neoliberal Mexican State and the Chiapas Uprising

 Heidi Moksnes

The neoliberal state, this article argues, displays structural contradictions between the need to create economic stability and the demand to display democratic structures where the human rights of the citizens are respected. As the discourse of human rights is increasingly used also by marginalized groups, the apparent convergence in human rights objectives may be a dangerous illusion. The last few decades, economic crises and the expansion of neoliberal market economy have transformed Latin American states from reasonably sovereign, authoritarian entities to ones highly dependent on international economic institutions and markets. Governments have become accountable not only, or perhaps even primarily, to their citizens, but to “economic global actors” that impose significant restrictions on their governance (Sassen 2003). The

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new role of the state, as argued by Turner (2003), is to facilitate the workings of these actors, eliminating market impediments and opening the public sector for privatization. This has often led to worsened economic conditions for the poor, thus breaking with former implicit “social contracts” between centralized, corporatist states and the national populations, which promised a certain extent of material security and well-being (Eckstein and WickhamCrowley 2003: 12– 13). The Zapatista uprising is perhaps the most famous example of popular protest against the new policies, and has been followed by more massive mobilizations in countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia. However, for states, such protests imply a threat to economic predictability and have frequently been countered by state repression. Thus, in many countries in Latin America, the last decades have involved “a continuation or even increase in the use of force by the police and the military” (Pereira and Davis 2000: 5). However, while states need to control political opposition, they should avoid methods that upset the international community. By the protagonists of neoliberal economy, market economy is regarded as codependent on democracy, legality and respect for human rights (Mendez 2002; Schild 1998). Thus, states have to create and maintain a reputation of liberal democracy and protection of human rights. In fact, the notion of universal human rights has become one of the globally most dominant political values, acknowledged, at least in theory, by NGOs and activist networks, corporations, governments, and intra-governmental bodies. Increasingly, marginalized poor, including indigenous peoples, are taking part of this discourse, and draw on transnational advocacy networks to mobilize support for their claims vis-à-vis governments, enterprises or international bodies such as the World Bank (Brysk 2000; Keck and Sikkink 1998). The use of the rights discourse delineates a

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new domain of political struggle and a changing relation between the state and the subaltern, where the latter present claims referring to “rights” instead of “needs” (Cowan et al. 2001: 1, 12). Significantly, it also implies certain expectations of governments to honor shared human rights standards, even if only through a ‘politics of shame’ by which they are pressured to comply in order to improve or protect their international image (cf. Niezen 2003). However, the maneuver room for governments may be highly restricted. Caught in a gridlock between the contradictory imperatives of fostering democracy and human rights while at the same time assuring political and economic stability, Latin American governments are highly aware that the second imperative is the strongest. In Mexico, the collision between the two exigencies is emblemized in the principal event that, besides the Zapatista uprising, has shaken the Mexican government and people during the last decade: the massacre in 1997 of unarmed indigenous villagers in the community of Acteal in Chiapas, in which state and federal governments are held to be directly or indirectly involved. In the massacre, not only did the government’s discourse on human rights collide with its economic precautions, it also, and more concretely, clashed with the appeal to human rights by those targeted in the massacre. This collision is the topic of this article.

Acteal and the Militarized Democracy of Mexico The transformation of the political and economic system in Mexico was initiated after the economic crises that began with the oil crises in the 1970s and culminated in 1982. Saved from economic collapse by huge emergency loans,

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the Mexican government became dependent on the articulate or indirect directives from IMF, the U.S. administration, and a series of private financial corporations (Sassen 2003: 75–76). The new politics that followed gradually dismantled most of the previous subsidies and price controls that were aimed at supporting the impoverished peasant population in the country, and removed agrarian reform from the national agenda (Collier 1994; Smith 1991). Responding to the increasing domestic pressure and demands of the debt collectors, the Mexican government also undertook a process of democratization, focused on electoral reform. It has also shown concern to display its efforts to protect the human rights of the citizens by instituting formal instruments of supervision, including the National Commission of Human Rights in 1990, followed by local state commissions (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 114). However, human rights violations did not diminish; on the contrary, they increased (see, e.g., Amnesty International 1997). Thus, as Brysk reports, there is “a mixed picture of increasing human rights violations combined with increased state accountability” (Brysk 2000: 265). There has also been a growing militarization of Mexican society, in response to the increasing political opposition to the structural adjustment policies (Collier and Collier 2003). An expression of this development is that military forces have come to participate directly with the police at the local and federal levels (Ferreyra and Segura 2000: 29; López-Montiel 2000). This “militarization of internal security” reflects the decreasing resources available to the government to control opposition through state clientelism (Gledhill 2000: 115–116). The contradiction between the demands for economic stability and the respect for human rights has become particularly blatant in the southern state of Chiapas since the uprising in 1994 of EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional). Initially, the government responded to the upris-

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ing with a massive military attack against the Zapatistas. However, the indigenous rebels, most of whom were impoverished and poorly armed peasants, gained international sympathy for their demands for improved living conditions and increased democracy. Thus, the government halted the attack after only ten days. However, the uprising caused unrest in the financing community since it was regarded as “a litmus test for Mexico’s stability” (Silverstein and Cockburn 1995). This added to an already emerging economic crisis, resulting in a devaluation of the peso at the end of 1994. The situation was of special concern to the eight so-called money center banks that had huge, outstanding loans in Mexico. One of these, the Chase Manhattan Bank, distributed a memo in January 1995, written by their senior political analyst on Mexico, Riordan Roett, which discussed the role of the Zapatista uprising in relation to economic solidity: “While Chiapas, in our opinion, does not pose a fundamental threat to Mexican political stability, it is perceived to be so by many in the investment community. The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy” (Roett 1995).1 The difficult task, thus, for the Mexican government was to quell the Zapatistas without using overt state violence. Since March 1995, successive governments appear to have opted for a heavy military presence combined with paramilitary violence to control political protest and marginalize the Zapatistas. Thus, Chiapas became the most militarized state in Mexico, with severe effects on indigenous communities (Nash 2001). Indigenous and human rights organizations hold that there have been up to seventy thousand soldiers stationed in the state, constituting one-third of the Mexican armed forces (SIPAZ 2001). In 1998, the federal government increased its military control of the conflict zone, strengthening the coordination of the Mexican Army, the Public

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Security Police and federal and state police. In 2000, there was a military presence in 58 of a total of 110 municipalities in Chiapas, involving 175 fixed positions, 24 permanent checkpoints, and 60 intermittent checkpoints (ibid.).2 This militarization has partly been possible through the support of the United States, which since 1994 has “granted unprecedented amounts of military aid … more than $60 million in equipment and at least 700 U.S.-trained Mexican officers” (Brysk 2000: 110). In addition, paramilitary groups have emerged throughout the state. There are reports of at least twelve paramilitary groups in Chiapas, which with varying degrees of governmental and military support persecute villagers and activists that oppose the government (CDHFBC 1998a). This line of counterinsurgency is said to have commenced in 1995. The same year, the Mexican Army published the “Manual of Irregular Warfare,” in which the use of militarized civilians is described as essential for destroying guerilla forces and their relation to the broader population. The author of the Manual is considered to be general Mario Renán Castillo who, like many other senior Mexican military officers, has received training at the infamous School of the Americas in the United States (Bellinghausen 2004;3 CDHFBC 1999). Renán was in February 1995 made the head of the military operations in Chiapas. The peak of escalating paramilitary violence in Chiapas was reached in December 1997 in the Maya municipality San Pedro Chenalhó. By then, government-loyal authorities had become marginalized in most indigenous municipalities, the state no longer being a stronghold for the ruling party. During the span of a few months in 1997, paramilitaries transformed Chenalhó into a war zone where proZapatista villagers were driven from their villages and their homes burned or looted. By the end of 1997, ten thousand people or a third of the total population were living as displaced persons, the majority in provisional camps inside

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the municipality. On 22 December, paramilitaries entered one of these camps in the village of Acteal, killing forty-five unarmed villagers. The massacre led to a severe crisis for the Mexican government, as it caused national and international alarm, and several members of the cabinet were dismissed. The violence was condemned by governments and human rights associations, raising questions about whether the paramilitary aggressions were protected and even orchestrated by higher-level state authorities. The blame for the violence, however, has been securely confined within the borders of the indigenous municipality. In a report released by the Attorney General’s Office, the paramilitary groups were called “security and vigilance committees,” and were said to “safeguard order and protect themselves because of the presence of EZLN supporters in the municipality” (PGR 1998: 76). Up to date, only Pedrano men have been sentenced for involvement in the massacre.

Acteal and Indigenous Appeals to Human Rights The victims of the massacre in Acteal were all members of the indigenous association Sociedad Civil Las Abejas based in Chenalhó, and formed part of the broad indigenous movement in Chiapas in opposition to the Mexican government. Most of the members of Las Abejas define themselves as Catholic, as they have joined the Bible reading groups emerging since the 1960s under the guidance of the Catholic diocese, and they are strongly influenced by the liberation theological line of the former bishop, Samuel Ruiz. After the Zapatista uprising, Las Abejas members saw their role as backing the Zapatista demands for politi-

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cal and economic change, and as trying to calm the conflict so that no more violence would take place (Moksnes 2003). Like many other Mayas in Chiapas, the members of Las Abejas stopped voting for the government in 1994, after the Zapatista uprising. Increasingly dissatisfied with the government’s reduction of programs geared toward the impoverished peasantry, they broke the patron-client relationship that had been established during the preceding decades of corporative, centralized rule (Eber 2003; Rus et al. 2003). Instead, they turned to a discourse on democracy, human rights, and the rights of indigenous peoples to contest their economic and political marginalization, seeking the support of national and international organizations in order to ensure respect for these rights. While human rights—whether as a concept or political objective—was little known in Chiapas before the 1980s, by 1994 there were at least thirteen nongovernmental human rights organizations active in the state (Collier 2001). Significantly, for Las Abejas, as for many other government oppositional indigenous organizations, one of the most important NGOs to which they today turn for support is the Human Rights Center “Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas,” which was founded by the Catholic diocese in 1989. The first widespread and systematic use of a rights language by Las Abejas members began in 1994, the year of the Zapatista uprising, when they formed an association that they called Sociedad Civil (Civil Society), which soon merged with Las Abejas. Its principal purpose was to offer protection against military attacks, for which villagers held a great fear. When I did fieldwork in Chenalhó from 1995 to 1996, I was repeatedly told by Las Abejas members that the United Nations had made regulations that delineated the protection of civil population during wartime and constrained the conduct of the Mexican government as well as their Zapatista adversaries.4 They had learned about these conventions from the diocese clergy and the Catholic

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Human Rights Center. One of the leaders explained to me: “Mexico has to comply with the law of Geneva since it has agreed with other nations to not kill civilians, only other militaries.” Another villager explained the content of the UN convention: It says who they can kill and who they cannot kill. Because every time when there is a war, there will be persons who belong to the civil society, people who are neutral, who are not with any party. These have rights, if they are of the civil society and not favoring any of the parties, they have the right to not be molested. When there will be war, they can separate themselves. They can show, present in the newspapers, on television, on the radio, that there is a territory somewhere, depending on the municipality, where people want to be part of the civil society and are not favoring any party. They should make known that in this region, all are civil society, so that the Mexican army and the Zapatista army know they can’t interfere there.

To signal their belonging to the unarmed and neutral civil society, the affiliated villagers put up poles with white flags on their houses and painted signs on the house walls that said “Civil Society, Peace, Neutral Zone.”5 These signs, I was continuously told by villagers, served as a protection against military attacks. Their association was said to have intimate ties with independent entities outside Chenalhó, and this was regarded as giving strength to their cause and assuring the application of law and justice. One of the leaders told the participants in a meeting: “We’re connected with the National Commission of Human Rights, with the foreign organization of Latin America6 and with the organization of the United Nations—that’s the very root. There’s no reason to be afraid. Wherever we’ll go, we’re not afraid.”

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For centuries, Maya peoples have had nowhere to turn outside their communities when exposed to abuse and violence, since judiciary and police structures have been controlled by the local oligarchy. When their lives have been threatened, people have instead escaped into the woods and mountains or moved to distant regions. The leaders of Las Abejas, however, maintain that flight is a strategy of the past. Instead, they encourage their members to place their trust in God and the rule of justice. This is a new form of defense among Mayas, using what perhaps could be called the ‘moral weapon’ of the weak. Increasingly, Las Abejas members have come to hold that there are universally shared values that define general human and specific indigenous rights. Joining workshops offered in the Tzotzil language by NGOs, the members have learned about the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and about rights articulated in the Mexican constitution. When municipal or state authorities have violated these rights, Las Abejas has sent commissions to the Catholic Human Rights Center, where they receive legal assistance to process the denunciations. Influenced by the broader indigenous movement, they also demand regional autonomy for indigenous peoples, referring to the ILO Convention no. 169, ratified by the Mexican government, and the San Andrés Peace Accords on indigenous rights and culture, signed by the EZLN and the Mexican government in 1996. When paramilitary groups were formed in Chenalhó during 1997, Las Abejas became the target, together with the local base groups of EZLN. During the escalating paramilitary persecutions, Las Abejas villagers opted to flee, in spite of their former decisions, acknowledging a superior danger. However, the displaced Zapatista and Las Abejas villagers continued to receive threats of renewed attacks. On 22 December 1997, learning that an attack was imminent, the displaced members of Las Abejas in the village of Acteal

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decided not to let themselves be driven away once more. They reiterated that they were unarmed civilians who should not suffer military aggressions. Led by the catechist Alonzo Vázquez Gómez, the converts shielded themselves only with the prayers to God, and the demand for respect of the UN convention on the protection of civilians in warfare. Around 11 A.M., sixty to eighty men, in uniforms borrowed from the Public Security Police, entered the village. When they began shooting, panic broke out and men, women, and children tried to escape, many stumbling down the steep hill toward the river. The attackers were not interrupted by the Public Security Police, who were stationed a few hundred meters down the road, and the shooting continued all day. When the last of the assailants left the village in the late afternoon, those who had hidden successfully found bodies littered everywhere. Twenty-one women were killed, fifteen children, and nine men. About twenty people were injured (CDHFBC 1998b; PGR 1998). In the narratives that have been formed among Las Abejas members about the massacre, one of the central accounts portrays the now almost mythical last words of catechist Vázquez. These words define the aggression as a violation both of the will of God and of international law, and manifest the Christian martyrdom and innocence of the victims. In the midst of the shooting, Vázquez is said to have run toward his wife, who was falling down to the ground with her baby. When he reached them, he saw that both were dead, and spun around toward the men in black uniforms, crying out: “Do not shoot, we are the civil society!” Seeing them raising their weapons toward him, he lifted his face and hands to the sky, and just before being shot, he exclaimed the words that echo those of the crucified Jesus: “Forgive them, Father, for they do not know what they are doing.”7

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The Politics of Martyrdom and Continued State Repression The choice by the members of Las Abejas to stay, despite the threat of violence, was an attempt to transform their unarmed and passive vulnerability into a moral demand for the right to remain unharmed. The failure of this shield to protect them has not caused the survivors to question its validity, but is seen to further prove the monstrosity of the aggression. The victims of the massacre are seen as martyrs, and Acteal is today called ‘The Sacred Land of the Martyrs of Acteal.’ Different forms of ceremonies commemorating the massacre have become central rituals in the cultivation of martyrdom that has developed after 1997. The martyrdom of those who were killed thus transforms the massacre from a senseless and devastating deed into what is seen as a verification of the dedicated and incessant fight of Las Abejas for human rights and justice, as well as a verification of the fear this brings to those in power. For the members, the forty-five martyrs are seen to provide faith and hope to the survivors and to all others engaged in this struggle. The religious reconceptualization of the massacre is consistent with the self-perception the Catholic members of Las Abejas developed also before the paramilitary violence began, influenced by their liberation theological perspective. Identifying themselves as ‘the suffering,’ the members regard their situation to be the result of poverty and discrimination imposed by the government and the rich. The paramilitary persecutions and the massacre have only further proved to the villagers that they are subject to oppression. They define their suffering as being against the will of God, who one day will bring them to Exodus and the end of suffering. Thus, God has become “the moral center of an immoral universe” (Lancaster 1988: 203). The various rights regulations by the UN and other international bodies are regarded as secular versions of these values and rules proclaimed by God.

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Since the massacre, the cult of martyrdom has also provided further moral weight for the political demands of Las Abejas, today one of the most outspoken indigenous organizations in Mexico. Las Abejas leaders repeatedly address UN officials for support and protection, denouncing persecution in Chenalhó and petitioning for support of the claims they direct at the Mexican government. The confidence of the members has been strengthened by the notion that they are backed by a global community, evidenced in the thousands of visitors who have come to Acteal over the years. For many Mexicans and foreigners, Las Abejas and the village of Acteal have become symbols of indigenous suffering and pacifist resistance, although not necessarily in a Christian perspective. In the meantime, the Mexican state has continued its process of electoral democratization. After the historic victory of the conservative opposition party PAN in the presidential elections in 2000, the international community has gained renewed trust in the development of Mexican society. However, the new government led by Vicente Fox has maintained the economic policy of its predecessors, and has inherited the structural contradictions in the demands from the international community. The military presence in Chiapas is still high, paramilitary groups continue to harass government oppositional villagers, and human rights reports describe a persistent pattern of violations (CIEPAC 2002; Human Rights Watch 2004). The Mexican state thus combines relatively free elections with sustained political oppression and economic marginalization of the poorest sections of the population. Rejecting this scenario, Las Abejas members maintain their ‘right to have rights,’ and to call upon God and a global civil society to enforce justice. There is little to indicate that these two political trajectories between state and people will be less conflicting in the future.

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NOTES 1. Although the Chase Bank later maintained that the report did not represent the Bank’s viewpoint, Roett’s memo had been distributed to business partners on Chase stationery as an official document without any reactions before the text became publicly known. Roett is also reported to have presented similar viewpoints with great acclaim in a seminar organized by the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies in January 1995 attended by hundreds of political and financial leaders (Silverstein and Cockburn 1995). 2. The SIPAZ document quotes the publication Siempre cerca, siempre lejos: Las Fuerzas Armadas en México, published by Global Exchange, CIEPAC, and CENCOS (2000). 3. Bellinghausen refers to a study by Jorge Luis Sierra (2003). 4. The relevant United Nations conventions are: “Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War,” of 12 August 1949, and “Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts (Protocol II),” of 8 June 1977. 5. The signs were written in Spanish: “Zona Neutral. Sociedad Civil de la Paz.” 6. He is probably referring to the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights, which on several occasions has criticized the Mexican government for violations of human rights in Chiapas. 7. Personal communication with Las Abejas representative Diego Pérez Jiménez, 16 September 2000, in Stockholm. I have seen similar versions in various reports containing interviews with Las Abejas members.

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REFERENCES Amnesty International. 1997. Annual Report. N.p.: Amnesty International. Bellinghausen, Herman. 2004. “En Chiapas, la mayor concentración de tropas en el país, confirma un estudio.” La Jornada, 12 January. Brysk, Alison. 2000. From Tribal Village to Global Village: Indian Rights and International Relations in Latin America. Stanford: Stanford University Press. CDHFBC (Centro de Derechos Humanos ‘Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas’). 1998a. “La legalidad de injusticia.” Informe Primer Semestre de 1998. San Cristóbal de Las Casas: CDHFBC. ———. 1998b. “Camino a la masacre.” Informe especial sobre Chenalhó. San Cristóbal de Las Casas: CDHFBC. ———. 1999. “La Guerra en Chiapas ¿Incidente en la Historia?” Informe Annual. San Cristóbal de Las Casas: CDHFBC. CIEPAC (Centro de Investigaciones Económicas y Politicas de Accion Comunitaria). 2002. “La coyuntura y el nuevo gobierno en Chiapas.” Boletin “Chiapas al dia,” no. 288 (April). Collier, George A. 1994. Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas. Oakland, Calif: The Institute for Food and Development Policy. ———. 2001. “Identidades emergentes en Chiapas, 1986–1993.” Pp. 245–270 in Costumbres, leyes y movimiento indio en Oaxaca y Chiapas, ed. L. de León Pasquel. Mexico City: CIESAS/Porrua. Collier, George A., and Jane F. Collier. 2003. “The Zapatista Rebellion in the Context of Globalization.” Pp. 242–252 in The Future of Revolutions: Rethinking Radical Change in the Age of Globalization, ed. John Foran. New York and London: Zed Books.

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Cowan, Jane K., Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, and Richard A. Wilson, eds. 2001. Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eber, Christine. 2003. “‘Buscando una nueva vida’: Liberation Through Autonomy in San Pedro Chenalhó, 1970–1998.” Pp. 135–160 in Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias: The Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas and the Zapatista Rebellion, ed. J. Rus et al. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Eckstein, Susan E., and Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley. 2003. “Struggles for Justice in Latin America.” Pp. 1–32 in What Justice? Whose Justice? Fighting for Fairness in Latin America, ed. Susan E. Eckstein and Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Ferreyra, Aleida, and Renata Segura. 2000. “Examining the Military in the Local Sphere: Colombia and Mexico.” Latin American Perspectives 27, no. 2 (March): 18–35. Gledhill, John. 2000 [1994]. Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics. London and Sterling, Va.: Pluto Press. Global Exchange, CIEPAC, and CENCOS. 2000. Siempre cerca, siempre lejos: Las Fuerzas Armadas en México. Mexico City: Global Exchange, CIEPAC, and CENCOS. Human Rights Watch. 2004. Human Rights Overview: Mexico. New York: Human Rights Watch. Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Lancaster, Roger N. 1998. Thanks to God and the Revolution: Popular Religion and Class Consciousness in the New Nicaragua. New York: Columbia University Press. López-Montiel, Angel Gustavo. 2000. “The Military, Political Power, and Police Relations in Mexico City.” Latin American Perspectives 27, no. 2 (March): 79–94.

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Mendez, Jennifer Bickham. 2002. “Gender and Citizenship in a Global Context: The Struggle for Maquila Workers’ Rights in Nicaragua.” Identities, no. 9:7–38. Moksnes, Heidi. 2003. “Mayan Suffering, Mayan Rights: Faith and Citizenship among Catholic Tzotziles in Highland Chiapas, Mexico.” Ph.D. diss., Göteborg University. Nash, June. 2001. Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization. New York: Routledge. Niezen, Ronald. 2003. The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pereira, Anthony W., and Diane E. Davis. 2000. “New Patterns of Militarized Violence and Coercion in the Americas.” Latin American Perspectives 27, no. 2 (March): 3–17. PGR (Procuraduría General de la República). 1998. White Paper on Acteal, Chiapas. Mexico City: PGR. Roett, Riordan. 1995. “Mexico-Political Update Chase.” Chase Manhattan’s Emerging Markets Group memo. 13 January. http://www.hartfordhwp.com/archives/46/027.html. Rus, Jan, Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, and Shannan L. Mattiace. 2003. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–26 in Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias: The Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas and the Zapatista Rebellion, ed. J. Rus et al. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Sassen, Saskia. 2003. “Economic Globalization and the Redrawing of Citizenship.” Pp. 67–86 in Globalization, the State, and Violence, ed. Jonathan Friedman. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press. Schild, Véronica. 1998. “New Subjects of Rights? Women’s Movements and the Construction of Citizenship in the ‘New Democracies.’” Pp. 93–117 in Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures, ed. S. E. Alvarez et al. Boulder: Westview Press.

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Sierra, Jorge Luis. 2003. El enemigo interno. Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés Editores. Silverstein, Ken, and Alex Cockburn. 1995. “Major U.S. Bank Urges Zapatista Wipe-Out: ‘A litmus test for Mexico’s stability.’” Counterpunch 2, no. 3 (February). SIPAZ (Servicio Internacional por la Paz). 2001. “The Mexican Army: A Key Factor in the Conflict in Chiapas.” Report 6, no. 1 (February). San Cristóbal de Las Casas: SIPAZ. Smith, Peter H. 1991. “Mexico since 1946: Dynamics of an Authoritarian Regime.” Pp. 321–396 in Mexico Since Independence, ed. L. Bethel. Cambridge and Sydney: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Terence. 2003. “Class Projects, Social Consciousness, and the Contradictions of ‘Globalization.’” Pp. 35–66 in Globalization, the State, and Violence, ed. Jonathan Friedman. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press.

MUTHANGA A Spark of Hope

 K. Ravi Raman

On 19 February 2003, the armed police of the currently rightwing government of the Indian state of Kerala descended on over one thousand adivasi1 families—men, women and children—who had peacefully settled on the fringes of the Muthanga range of the Wayanad Wild Life Sanctuary, driving them out in a most brutal fashion and even killing one of those women who resisted. The state had failed to give any prior warning of the police action, nor was any attempt made toward a mediated negotiation. The police unleashed a reign of terror in the region; physical molestation of women was also reported, the latter having been substantiated by the National Women’s Commission. Those who fell into the hands of the police were brutally manhandled en route to the police station; in a bizarre innovation, the activists were forced to beat one another. The movement had been launched by the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha—the

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Grand Assembly of Indigenous People—led by a tribal woman, C. K. Janu. The demands of the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha for land, food, shelter, the enforcement of constitutional provisions, reparation for losses incurred by the intervention of foreign companies in their environment, etc., are paralleled in indigenous movements elsewhere, e.g., the Zapatistas in Mexico (see Collier 1994; Gledhill 1997; Hellman 2000; Weinberg 2000; Womack 1999). However, unlike other indigenous movements, the situation in Kerala has received little world attention. Adivasis are the only ethnic minority in the state of Kerala, constituting 1.14 percent of its 31.8 million population. These indigenous people, belonging to different clans but of a common social origin, are spread over an adivasi belt that straddles the highlands of Wayanad, Palakkad, and Idukki districts. To understand the trajectories of the adivasis in Kerala2—largely their social exclusion and resistance—one has to briefly look into the genesis of their misfortunes. They were largely displaced from their traditional habitat. This displacement began from the early nineteenth century with the razing of forests of Malabar and Travancore for the British navy and, by the 1850s, for the colonial railways. The process of dispossession gained momentum from the second half of the century and was a result of land appropriation by European and local planters and also of development projects involving the construction of dams and irrigation systems. The hardships of the capitalist depression—starting in the 1930s and continuing through the 1940s—spawned the first waves of peasant migration into the forest areas of the adivasis.3 Much of the migration was encouraged in a parliamentary political process of legitimation whereby the adivasis were ultimately created as a powerless minority in their own ancestral lands. Once 90 percent of the population in the Attappadi region of the Palakkad District, by 1991 they had been reduced to 30 percent of the population. Deprived of land and fragmented

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in community identity, many became bonded laborers living in desperate, virtually subhuman conditions.

Promised Land: Politics of Procrastination? In 2001, the Kerala state government negotiated a historic settlement of the adivasi land issue. The state conceded the demands by landless families for land. Most importantly, it agreed to bring adivasi areas under Schedule V of the Indian Constitution. This implicitly protected adivasi land rights and indicated a move to granting them more autonomy.4 But the promised one to five acres of land per landless family has not been given; moreover, many of those lands that were handed over were found to have false deeds. This is fully in keeping with the record of past governments—both the Left and the Right; the adivasis of Kerala have been repeatedly victimized and betrayed by them from 1975 when the Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act was unanimously passed. The Act was intended to restore the lands alienated on or after 1 January 1960—a full ten years of alienation being calmly swept under the carpet. Another ten years elapsed before the rules and regulations governing the Act were finalized in 1986. It was decided that all transactions of ‘tribal’ lands to ‘nontribals’ made between 1960 and 1982 would be invalidated and the lands restored to the ‘tribals’ concerned. In turn, the latter were required to pay compensation, the same being provided by the Government in the form of loans. But the settler farmers, whose representatives themselves had supported the bill on the floor of the legislature, jeopardized the implementation of the legislation at the very outset. They even resorted to physical vio-

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lence in their bid to stall official proceedings. The Government on its part reacted by further procrastination. In the 1990s, the Left Government of Kerala attempted to push through certain amendments, which all but rewrote the parent bill to the extent of extinguishing all adivasi land rights. The 1996 amendment in itself raised a furor: the Palakkad District Collector was taken hostage for nine hours by four captors belonging to the Ayyankalippada, a Maoist group; the entry of non-adivasis into adivasi regions was blocked and the amended Bill was cremated in various adivasi belts amidst cultural rites;5 and angry adivasis led by C. K. Janu attempted to enter the Legislative Assembly by force. With the state showing little inclination toward settling the land question, the adivasis gradually moved toward everyday forms of resistance6 and “counter-hegemonic/ anti-systemic” movements (Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein 1989; Gramsci 1971; also see Guha 1983). Whenever the Kerala government attempted to restore alienated lands, powerful settler groups would take to violence to stop official proceedings. Such action prompted the High Court to ask: “Can a democratic state with the rule of law as its beacon light, bow to such illegal resistance to the implementation of a welfare legislation to benefit the oppressed classes? Clearly it cannot” (cited in Bijoy 1999; also see Ravi Raman 2002; Sreekumar and Parayil 2002). The Kerala government made no move to prevent settler violence; indeed, its agents often supported it. Thus, whenever the adivasis have tried to assert their land rights, they have been crushed—often by police action. This was the situation in Cheegeri in 1995, in Panavally in 1997, and now in Muthanga.7 In the face of the failure of the Kerala state offices to deal successfully with adivasis concerning land issues, public litigation has been no more successful. To date, the

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Supreme Court has not dealt with the adivasi land claims brought before it. The misery of the adivasis is not due to the lack of land alone. As elsewhere on the global peripheries, globalizing neoliberal reforms have had a crushing impact on the adivasis. The liberalization of the export-import policy of the Federal Government of India has created a crisis in the Kerala plantation industry, causing a crash in coffee and tea prices. This has led to the layoff of plantation workers, many of them adivasis.8 The introduction of new crops, such as vanilla, has further reduced employment opportunities. This has also exacerbated the adivasi situation because it encourages the long-term lease of lands, especially state-owned lands. This affects the potentiality for land redistribution while jeopardizing food production for the local population. The foregoing is exacerbated by the expansion of the tourist industry into the highlands, increasing processes of displacement and the further movement of adivasis into occupations of the economically depressed, such as prostitution. The Kerala Government has firmly opted for the neoliberal reforms of the Asian Development Bank. This is proving devastating for the socially and economically vulnerable, particularly the adivasis and dalits (Ravi Raman 2004).

March toward Muthanga With the land issue unresolved, and suffering from increased unemployment as a result of neoliberal policies, the adivasis were pushed to the point of starvation. More than a dozen deaths from starvation were reported between 2001 and 2002. Despairing, the adivasis began to rise in revolt: in one instance, a few women of the Ayyankalippada waylaid a civil supplies truck and distrib-

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uted its load of food to the starving adivasis. C. K. Janu took a different route, now with a wider support base of dalit groups and with able assistance from leaders such as M. Geethanandan. On 30 August 2001, while mainstream society was celebrating Onam, the harvest festival of Kerala signifying prosperity, nearly three hundred adivasi families, erected ‘refugee huts’ in front of the Chief Minister’s residence and the offices of the state Secretariat in the Kerala capital of Thiruvananthapuram. They demanded their right to livelihood and to land for the landless. In a complete break with the past, the adivasis now demanded a settlement outside the controversial amendments of the 1975 parent Act. After a 42-day long historic struggle (Ravi Raman 2002), the state conceded almost all their demands, including the bringing of the adivasi areas under Schedule V. The government also agreed to provide one to five acres of cultivable land depending on availability to all landless adivasi families—nearly forty-two thousand acres of land had been identified toward this end. It was agreed that every effort should be made to identify land for redistribution in the Wayanad District, the area in which most landless adivasi families are located. With the distribution of lands to be initiated from January 2002, adequate support measures would be provided for a period of five years until these lands would begin to yield income. The government also gave its word that it would implement the Supreme Court verdict as soon as it came; the ‘refugee huts’ were thus dismantled with ritual solemnity—now in a powerful signal of victory. However, when this agreement also fell through, the adivasis now took more direct action, but in a most democratic and nonviolent fashion, with support of other dalit groups. A ‘Tribal Court’ was constituted, the first of its kind in India, which virtually ratified the decision of the Adivasi Gothra Maha

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Sabha to march toward Muthanga and to occupy the degraded area. The adivasis occupied the fringes of Muthanga, which is not truly a forest area, although it was under the control of the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary. It was an area that had been cleared for eucalyptus cultivation to provide raw material for the rayon pulp factory owned by Birlas, the Indian multinational.9 The ‘self-rule’ that the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha declared was largely symbolic of what would have transpired had the state implemented the Constitutional provisions it had accepted earlier. The adivasis had first sought legislative protection to have their lands returned, but they had failed in this. They had then demanded a settlement outside the Legislative Acts which avoided a direct confrontation with those settler peasants whose interests were well-represented by ruling groups, whether Marxist or Congress. They had been willing for a compromise but this strategy too failed abysmally. Ultimately, they gave up on routine expressions of protest and decided on a nonviolent one, broadly in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution: to recover their ancestral domains. Their ancestral links with the region were later to be confirmed by the discovery of traditional shrines at the site at which their ancestors might have worshipped until they were displaced. Thus, on 4 January 2003, the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha marched into Muthanga to set up a Grama Sabha (village council) of its own. A settlement was built, rationing was introduced, a nursery school was opened, and a checkpoint was established (Bijoy and Ravi Raman 2003). Other adivasi organizations also had initiated similar attempts during the same period, as in the case of the state-owned Orange Farm at Nelliampathi. In fact, this show of resistance in Kerala was but a continuation of adivasi resistance in other parts of India—the ransacking of the World Bank office in New Delhi in 2003,10 and the ‘Enter the Forests’ operation of Nagar Hole National Park

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in Karnataka in 2005,11 to mention two. But the attempt at a peaceful occupation of Muthanga by the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha met with the most inhuman kind of retaliation ever; the horrendous images flashed by the media, braving the news embargo, spoke for themselves.

Fascist Overtones? But what rankles most in this entire episode is the smug fascism exhibited by the people’s representatives in the state legislature, including the Speaker of the State Assembly who considered gun-fire a fitting retribution to the adivasis’ attempt at ‘self-rule.’ Members of the State Human Rights Commission colluded in the state action illustrative of the “perversion of the idea of human rights into human rights imperialism.”12 The Chief Minister accused the adivasis of an “armed uprising.” Their action was associated with the armed violence of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka13 and the Peoples’ War Group.14 Although a policeman was killed in the encounter, such associations were hardly appropriate to a thoroughly subordinated population wielding little else than agricultural implements, symbols of their plight. The nature of adivasi action was deliberately misrepresented by the Government, further attested to by the official transfer (rather than prosecution) of forest personnel who were caught setting forest fires in order to criminalize the adivasis. The mainly nonviolent commitment of adivasi leaders to the pursuit of social justice is exemplified by their voluntary surrender to the police in order to spare their followers further police harassment. A People’s Judicial Commission, formed by former judge of the Supreme Court, V. R. Krishna Iyer, alleged that the police had resorted to firing without sufficiently warning the tribal agitators; nor had there been any

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attempt at a mediated settlement. Human rights activists and writers, such as Arundhati Roy, Vandana Shiva, and Medha Patkar, also condemned the state violence toward this long socially and politically oppressed people. The Catholic Priests Conference of Kerala demanded the resignation of the Government, stating that the adivasis have never harmed the forests, and that the state provides protection instead to those who plunder forests and penalizes those who fight for land that is truly theirs. The demand for a judicial probe voiced by the Opposition and nearly a dozen dalit groups and social forums was rejected outright by the Antony-led Congress Government in the state. As Kuldip Nayar, the noted Indian journalist and human rights activist, proclaimed after his meeting with Chief Minister A. K. Antony, “Antony has become Indira of Emergency.”15

Concluding Observations The lived life of indigenous peoples the world over is under threat: first, from the insidious effects of ‘modernization,’ and then from policies (e.g., sustainable development) established in the circumstances of postmodern globalization. Kerala is a state whose major policies of modernization and rationalism were directed to overcome gross inequalities but paradoxically such state intervention has, if anything, exacerbated the situation of the poor and the excluded. For the adivasis in the state, history is an unbroken chain of atrocities and servitude. The formation of the Kerala State in 1956 did little to break that chain. With the coming to power of the Communist Party in 1957, major reforms were initiated, aiming at social justice and facilitating political participation from most sectors of the population in effecting radical changes in social circumstances. Of great importance were changes in land ownership and

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distribution. But the egregiously disadvantaged—especially the adivasis and others, such as those in fishing communities—continued to suffer serious inequalities and exploitation.16 The adivasi situation was in some cases exacerbated by land reform. When tenancy and landlordism were abolished in 1970, the tenants were granted occupancy rights; but in the adivasi belts, it was the settler farmers who came to be considered ‘tenants,’ with the adivasis losing lands from their position as ‘landlords’ (Ravi Raman 2002; see also Raj and Tharakan 1983). Under duress, the Government confiscated nearly fifty thousand acres of surplus land from Tata-Tea, the world’s largest tea producer; but neither the landless plantation workers nor the starving indigenous people have benefited from it. Even as decentralized planning is being projected as a highly successful venture by the mainstream parties, the plight of the adivasis has given the lie to their claims. Much of the funds from the ‘Tribal Sub Plans’ are being drained by the bureaucracy and even being diverted into neoliberal projects that often prove deleterious to adivasi interests. With every successive rentier-coalition in the state, the welfare state is shown its way out, with market ideology reigning supreme, making adivasi life all the more insecure. In a travesty of the ‘Kerala model,’ the majority of the adivasis exist in a condition of abject want and deprivation; in a state that boasts of universal literacy, most of the adivasis remain wrapped in the darkness of ignorance. Unaware of their basic rights, they live outside the ambit of the law, harassed, beaten, and at times, even murdered. The situation of women appears to have worsened as indicated in the expanding numbers of unsupported single mothers. Instead of respecting the basic human rights of indigenous people, the state, unable to provide access to land and work, violently crushes their resistance. Kerala is one historical demonstration of the way processes of neoliberal reconstruction, often occasioned by

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pressures from global imperial centers in the West, largely dominated by U.S. interests, have been instrumental in continuing injustices—and sometimes expanding them— established in earlier colonial and postcolonial periods. The discourses of human rights and of liberalization far from counteracting oligarchical processes creating or maintaining exceptional inequalities have been the cloak for their perpetration and perpetuation. In some instances, such discourses have actually been engaged to violent, state-mediated acts against resistant and depressed groups. Of course, this situation is by no means unique to Kerala. The events of Muthanga are but one local instance of similar processes elsewhere, in which major redirections in global policies and political realities are forces in creating the agents and agencies of state in new relations of violence toward citizenry.

NOTES I am grateful to Bruce Kapferer for his valuable comments on an earlier draft. 1. Adivasi means the original inhabitants, the indigenous people, the colonial/postcolonial official category being the tribes. In this article, ‘the indigenous’ and adivasis are used interchangeably. The word ‘tribe’ is avoided other than in reference to governmental procedures. 2. A state that has traditionally been projected as a model of social development worth emulating with its universal literacy, high expectancy of life at birth, low maternal and child mortality and so on, see Dreze and Sen (1995), Franke and Chasin (2000),

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5. 6.

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Kannan (2000), Lieten (2002), Ramachandran (1997), Ratcliffe (1978), and Tornquist (2002). However, the adivasis barely exist on the fringes of these works just as they do in the larger development process of the state. For an elaboration of the issues involved see Ravi Raman (1998) and Tharakan (1978). The Indian Constitution provides for the protection of tribal interests through Schedule V and VI of Article 244. In the mid-1800s, the British colonial government in India had designated certain areas as nonregulated areas, which were renamed scheduled areas in the postindependent phase. These areas remained outside the ambit of normal legislative and political processes; the president of India could by order declare areas to be scheduled areas on the recommendations of the state government and the governor. The fifth schedule invests all executive and legislative power in the state governor, who could consult an appointed Tribal Advisory Council on these matters. In other words, the governor has the power to exclude scheduled areas from state legislation as well as to decree legislative provisions such as protection from outsiders. The central objective of this constitutional clause is to impose total prohibition of transfer of immovable property to any person other than to a tribal, for peace and proven good management of a tribal area and to protect the possession, rights, titles, and interests of the indigenous peoples. Scheduled areas have been notified in the states of Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Gujarat; but the tribal areas in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and West Bengal are yet to be scheduled despite suggestions put forward by the concerned committees. The VI schedule allows for the formation of autonomous councils and regions, and provides for self-government. For more details, see Thakur and Thakur (1994). In an attempt at securing greater protection and as a prelude to greater autonomy, the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha has requested that the tribal areas in Kerala also be brought under Schedule V. For an understanding of how ritual could constitute an important site of resistance and power, see Dirks (1994). The concept of everyday forms of resistance began to gain acceptance with the work by Scott (1986), which, however, is not free from limitations. See Brass (1999: 257–259).

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7. State violence against ethnic indigenous minorities is a worldwide phenomenon, whether it is in the Americas, Australia, Africa, or in other parts of Asia. In a recent report on racism and the administration of justice, Amnesty International (2001) pointed out that there are 300 million indigenous people worldwide who suffer at the hands of racist states, where the hunger for power denies basic human rights. 8. The impact of the WTO-inspired import policy of the federal government of India on the farm sector is largely parallel to that of NAFTA on the poor farmers of Mexico, where the Zapatista movement originated. 9. The Birlas were challenged in Kerala on many occasions, particularly for their anti-labor policy and for the environmental pollution they caused. They were finally forced to shut down the factory in the face of strong public criticism. For an earlier account, see Rammohan and Ravi Raman (1988, 1989). 10. More than three hundred adivasis from the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, representing all mass-based adivasi movements, ransacked the World Bank building on 24 November 2003 in protest against the World Bank-aided ecodevelopment projects in the state, which literally wreak more harm than good. They blocked the building, covering it with posters, graffiti, cow dung, and mud, singing slogans and traditional songs. 11. The Government of Karnataka has been systematically evicting the adivasis of the Nagar Hole National Park either labeling them as encroachers or in the name of protection of the biosphere; yet the state has also simultaneously engaged in a lease agreement with the Taj Group of Hotels, another Indian multinational, and with the World Bank on ecodevelopment projects. The adivasis successfully resisted this, both legally and through mass mobilization, which led the High Court to rule that the assignment of forestland to the Taj Group was in violation of the laws of conservation of nature and wildlife. 12. For details see Uwe-Jens Heuer and Schirmer (1998). Also see Chomsky and Herman (1979). 13. Founded in 1976, the LTTE is the most powerful Tamil group in multiethnic Sri Lanka which began its armed conflict with the Sri Lankan Government in 1983 and relies on guerrilla strategies for the creation of a separate state of Tamil Ealam covering the north and east provinces. There were many occasions in which the

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Government of India acted as mediator between the Sri Lankan Government and Tamil groups but in vain; currently LTTE is negotiating with the Sri Lankan Government for a peaceful settlement. 14. The Peoples’ War Group (PWG), formed in April 1980 under the leadership of Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, is one of the most influential groups of Maoist revolutionaries. Based in northwestern Andhra Pradesh, it engages in armed struggle and champions the cause of landless workers and tribals. The PWG operates in other states as well, such as Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, and Orissa. Generally, the members of the PWG are called Naxalites after the peasant uprising at Naxalbari in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal when a tribal youth, who had a judicial order to plow his land, was attacked by the local landlords in May 1967. There are many Maoist organizations in India that either predate the Communist Party of India or have emerged from the various factions of the CPI which split first in 1964, then in 1967 and also in the early 1970s after the death of Charu Majumdar who launched the Naxalite movement. With the Naxalites always having been a presence in Kerala and with some of the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha leaders themselves being former activists, the state government was quick to affix the Naxalite label to all adivasi strategies, in an attempt to legitimize its own objectionable actions and to gain popular approval. 15. Antony is usually seen to be a ‘soft’ and ‘democratic’ diplomat, but in this case he refused to permit a judicial enquiry into the police firing. He thus came to be compared with Smt. Indira Gandhi, the former Congress Prime Minister who had imposed emergency rule and suspended fundamental rights in the country in June 1975, and suffered an electoral defeat in 1977 for the same reason. 16. For the relative discrimination against dalits and fisherfolk in the Kerala model of development, see Omvedt (1998) and Kurien (1995). However, the backward communities like the ezhavas have realized a certain degree of social mobility (Osella and Osella 2000).

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REFERENCES Amnesty International. 2001. Racism and the Administration of Justice. New York: Amnesty International. Arrighi, Giovanni, K. Terrence Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1989. Antisystemic Movements. London: Verso. Bijoy, C. R. 1999. “Adivasis Betrayed: Adivasi Land Rights in Kerala.” Economic and Political Weekly, 29 May, 1329–1335. Bijoy, C. R., and K. Ravi Raman. 2003. “Muthanga: The Real Story—Adivasi Movement to Recover Land.” Economic and Political Weekly, 17 May, 975–982. Brass, Tom. 1999. Towards a Comparative Political Economy: Case Studies and Debates. London: Frank Cass. Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. 1979. The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. Boston: South End Press. Collier, A. George. 1994. Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas. Oakland, Calif.: Institute for Food and Development Policy. Dirks, Nicholas B. 1994. “Ritual and Resistance: Subversion as a Social Fact.” Pp. 483–503 in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dreze, Jean, and Amartya Sen. 1995. India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Franke, Richard W. and Barbara H. Chasin. 2000. “Is the Kerala Model Sustainable? Lessons from the Past, Prospects for the Future.” Pp. 16–39 in Kerala: The Development Experience, ed. Govindan Parayil. London: Zed Books. Gledhill, John. 1997. “Liberalism, Socio-Economic Rights and the Politics of Identity: From Moral Economy to

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Indigenous Rights.” Pp. 70–110 in Human Rights, Culture, and Context: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Richard Wilson. London: Pluto Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Guha, Ranajith. 1983. “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency.” Pp. 1–42 in Subaltern Studies 11, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hellman, Judith Adler. 2000. “Real and Virtual Chiapas: Magic Realism and the Left.” Socialist Register 2000, 161–186. Heuer, Uwe-Jens, and Gregor Schirmer. 1998. “Human Rights Imperialism.” Trans. Anita Mage. Monthly Review 49, no. 10 (March): 5–16. Kannan, K. P. 2000. “Poverty Alleviation as Advancing Basic Capabilities: Kerala’s Achievements Compared.” Pp. 40–65 in Kerala: The Development Experience, ed. Govindan Parayil. London: Zed Books. Kurien, John. 1995. “The Kerala Model: Its Central Tendency and the Outlier.” Social Scientist 23, nos. 1–3 (January–April): 70–90. Lieten, G. K. 2002. “The Human Development Puzzle in Kerala.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 32, no. 1:47–68. Omvedt, Gail. 1998. “Disturbing Aspects of Kerala Society.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 30, no. 3 (July–September): 31–33. Osella, Filippo, and Caroline Osella. 2000. Social Mobility in Kerala: Modernity and Identity in Conflict. London: Pluto Press. Raj, K. N., and Michael Tharakan. 1983. “Agrarian Reforms in Kerala and Its Impact on the Rural Economy: A Preliminary Assessment.” Pp. 31–90 in Agrarian Reforms in Contemporary Developing Countries, ed. Ghose Ajithkumar. London: Croomhelm. Ramachandran, V. K. 1997. “On Kerala’s Development Achievements.” Pp. 205–356 in Indian Development:

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Selected Regional Perspectives, ed. Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rammohan, K. T., and K. Ravi Raman. 1988. “Kerala Worker Rises against Indian Big Capital—a Report Unfinished on Rayon Workers Struggle.” Economic and Political Weekly, 2 July, 1359–1364. ———. 1989. “Mavoor Rayons Accord: Kerala Government on Its Knees.” Economic and Political Weekly, 7 January, 16–17. Ratcliffe, John. 1978. “Social Justice and Demographic Transition: Lessons from India’s Kerala State.” International Journal of Health Services 8, no. 1:123–144. Ravi Raman, K. 1998. “Intervention in the Western Ghats: An Inquiry into the Historical Processes of Loss of Biodiversity and Community Sources of Livelihood.” Pp. 525–544 in Conservation and Economic Evaluation of Biodiversity, ed. P. Pushpangadan et al. New Delhi: Oxford—IBH Publishing Co. ———. 2002. “Breaking New Ground: Adivasi Land Struggle in Kerala.” Economic and Political Weekly, 9 March, 916–918. ———. 2004. The Asian Development Bank Loan for Kerala (India): The Adverse Implications and Search for Alternatives. Working Paper no. 357. Centre for Development Studies, March. Scott, James. 1986. Weapons of the Weak. New Haven: Yale University. Sreekumar, T. T., and Govindan Parayil. 2002. “Democracy, Development and New Forms of Social Movements: A Case Study of Indigenous People's Struggle in Kerala.” Indian Journal of Labour Economics 45, no. 2:287–309. Thakur, Devendra, and K. N. Thakur. 1994. Tribal Life in India. Vol. 7: Tribal Law and Administration. New Delhi: Deep & Deep.

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Tharakan, Michael. 1978. “Dimensions and Characteristics of the Migration of Farmers from Travancore to Malabar, 1930–1950.” Journal of Kerala Studies 5 (June): 287–305. Tornquist, Olle. 2002. Popular Development and Democracy: Case Studies with Rural Dimensions in the Philippines, Indonesia and Kerala. Oslo: Centre for Development and the Environment. Weinberg, Bill. 2000. Homage to Chiapas. London: Verso. Womack, Jr., John, ed. 1999. Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader. New York: The New Press.

KINGS OR PRESIDENTS? War and the State in Pre- and Post-Genocidal Rwanda

 Christopher C. Taylor

For theorists of the state and war inspired by Michel Foucault, the central issue is power. For Foucault there is no individual subject constructed in the absence of power, and no social institution that does not bear the imprint of historical struggles over power (Foucault 1979). With power so pervasively infusing human experience, there appears to be little need of talking about anything else. Power is everywhere. History is the chronicle of the struggle for power among individuals and groups. Taken to its logical conclusion, this perspective on human social life ends up sounding very much like the Hobbesian “war of each against all” (cf. Sahlins 2000). Yet it could well be that this vision of things is a culturebound one, steeped in the individualistic ontology of Western capitalist society (cf. Kapferer 1988). One could

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pose the question of whether power covers all of the bases, whether it by itself tells us all that we need to know from social analysis. It is clear for an anthropologist like Pierre Clastres, that some peoples in the world refuse the organization of society on the sole basis of power. They refuse the division of society into those who command and those who obey. For these peoples what has perennially been viewed as an absence—the lack of a state—should be seen as a presence, the choice of a life where no human being rules over others. Although these societies certainly have politics, it is a politics inextricably rooted in the social. As Clastres terms it, these are societies against the state (Clastres 1974). If Clastres is correct, there must be in addition to societies who refuse the state, state societies that cannot be adequately understood solely through the eyes of a universalized ‘Homo politicus.’ I believe that the premodern state of Rwanda was such a society. If we wish to understand the cultural specifics of how it waged war, we need to understand not only the events of war, not only the political and economic calculus of interested parties, but also the ontological moorings of personhood as this was deployed in war. Where precolonial Rwanda is concerned, the institution of sacred kingship offers a means of access to this and, in turn, insight into the genocidal violence waged by the modern Rwandan state against its Tutsi citizens.

Theoretical Discussion When violence is conducted by the state, it spares no effort to legitimize this violence according to local moral perceptions that are in harmony with subjacent cultural codes. This means that the state’s organized violence is supported and institutionalized by ideologies that make destructive acts appear justified for the maintenance of collective

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well-being. Frequently, publicly performed rituals serve as the means by which these ideologies are communicated to the mass of the state’s citizens. However, these rituals also convey less immediately apprehensible desires and sentiments. These latter are less accessible to conscious apperception, more archetypal in nature, and less likely to be construed by social actors as having obvious and clear-cut ideological content. Following Aijmer’s discussion (2000), one could posit the existence of three dimensions to state violence and to the political rituals that serve to justify it. At the least apprehensible level is what Aijmer terms the “imaginary.” The imaginary consists of iconic symbols organized into diffuse cultural codes. These constitute the base of the social imagination in its envisioning of possible worlds. This material is only intuitively cognized by social actors and not readily translatable into a discursive idiom. It constitutes a body of tacit knowledge, and one which reflects the community’s profoundest fears and desires. This level is the least accessible to the social actors themselves and to their exegesis, yet it logically precedes and conditions everything that is more conscious in nature. The next level consists of what Aijmer terms the “discursive.” It is at this level that agentive phenomena are manifest, as social actors verbalize what their intentions are and act on these intentions in consonance with pragmatic ends. Material at this level takes the form of language, discourse, and narrative. People are able to identify and verbalize what the ideologies of their supporters and opponents are. This is where conflict and struggle are manifest. Finally, the most visible level of state violence is what Aijmer calls the “ethological.” Violence has very real biological and psychological effects upon the people against whom it is applied—suffering, pain, injury, and death. Yet even this level is dependent upon its interaction with the

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other two in order for violent acts to attain their full amplitude of social meanings.

Premodern Rwanda Early Rwanda was characterized by both holism and hierarchy. According to Vansina (2001), social stratification already characterized many polities in the area prior to the seventeenth century C.E. This was certainly true of Rwanda at the time of Ruganzu Ndori’s conquest of it in the late seventeenth century. With the establishment of the Nyiginya kingdom under Ruganzu Ndori and its progressive absorption of neighboring areas, hierarchical tendencies became more rather than less apparent. Processes of differentiation within the Rwandan state produced three distinct ethnic groups with marked status differences among them. The most devalued group was the Twa, who were foragers and potters. The most privileged group was the Tutsi patron class. Low-level Tutsi herders and the mass of Hutu cultivators differed little in relative wealth, but Hutu from the nineteenth century on were substantially disfavored in terms of political privilege, as all were subject to a form of corvée labor, which required two days of their labor out of every four. However, many Rwandans attributed importance to the ritual efficacy of the kingship institution and to its effects on agricultural, bovine, and human fertility. Indeed, the king was charged with ritual responsibilities that made him more a captive of the institution than one who profited from it. Similarly to what Clastres has noted among other non-Western societies, politics in early Rwanda was deeply embedded in the social and cannot be seen apart from religion and cosmology.

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The Violent Imaginary in Precolonial Rwanda The Rwandan king brought death to the kingdom’s enemies both within and beyond its borders, but more importantly, his ritual actions were thought to control the rain bringing fertility to Rwanda’s land, cattle, and citizens. According to Rwandan cosmogonic notions, the king was responsible for assuring the descent of imaana, said to be a supreme being and a “diffuse fecundating fluid” (d’Hertefelt and Coupez 1964: 460). In the Rwandan imaginary the passage of imaana from sky to earth required the intermediary of the king’s body as a conduit. A legend which is sometimes recounted in regard to Rwanda’s first historical king, Ruganzu Ndori, illustrates this quite literally. Here fertility is restored to the earth by first passing through the king’s digestive tract: Ruganzu Ndori was living in exile in the kingdom of Ndorwa, a neighboring kingdom to the north of Rwanda. There he had taken refuge with his FZ (nyirasenge) who was married to a man from the region. In the meantime, because the Rwandan throne was occupied by an illegitimate usurper, Rwanda was experiencing numerous calamities. The crops were dying, the cows were not giving milk, and the women were becoming sterile. Ruganzu’s FZ encouraged him to return to Rwanda, retake the throne, and save his people from catastrophe. Ruganzu agreed, but before setting forth on his voyage, she gave him the seeds (imbuto) of several cultivated plants (sorghum, gourd, and others) to restart Rwandan cultures. While en route to Rwanda, Ruganzu Ndori came under attack. Fearing that the imbuto would be captured, he swallowed the seeds with a long drink of milk. Once he regained the Rwandan throne, he defecated the milk and seed mixture upon the ground and the land became productive once again. Since that time all Rwandan kings

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are said to be born clutching the seeds of the original imbuto in their hand.

Potency invested the king’s body, his bodily fluids, and his blood in particular, for the king was the kingdom’s sacrificial victim of last resort. A sacrificial king, or a substitute for him, was called an umutabazi (liberator). At times when the survival of the Rwandan polity was in peril, diviners would determine who, among the royal coterie, should sacrifice himself for the collective good. The first king to have died in sacrifice was Ruganzu Bwimba, who offered himself in place of his mother’s brother, Nkorokombe. Although diviners had chosen Nkorokombe, the latter feigned illness by taking the leaves of an irritating plant and inserting them into his anus, causing rectal prolapse. Because a sacrificial victim must be healthy and whole, Nkorokombe was disqualified (Coupez and Kamanzi 1962: 87–104).

The Modern Rwandan State and Its President When I first did fieldwork in Rwanda in 1983, I was struck by the cult of personality surrounding President Juvenal Habyarimana. Rwandan friends of mine even commented on the poetic aptness of their president’s name, which derives from the verb kubyara (to engender) and the noun imaana, which together could be translated as: “It is God who gives life.” Nothing could have been more appropriate in a Catholic, anti-abortion, and basically pro-natalist country, yet very few names could have resonated so well with the more ‘traditional’ themes of fertility, prosperity, and good luck, the “diffuse fecundating fluid.” Closely associating the country’s fertility with the person of the president was one, but not the only way in

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which we see the lingering influence of sacred kingship. Prior to the genocide, citizens could readily buy cheap political magazines published by Rwanda’s numerous political parties. Often, the subject of articles and cartoons was the country’s president or his party, the Mouvement Revolutionnaire pour le Développement (MRND), and sometimes journalists compared the president to the sacred kings of Rwanda’s past. In some cases, these allusions to kingship were intended to flatter the president; in other instances they were bitterly sarcastic. One cartoon shows the depths to which this sarcasm could go. Habyarimana is depicted naked, except for an MRND hat and a few banana leaves, and crouching over the country and its inhabitants while defecating. The headline of the cartoon in a 1992 issue of Umurangi, a Rwandan popular political magazine, reads: “In the MRND they shit and piss on the plate from which they eat and in the water from which they drink.” Much is condensed in this illustration. At an ideological level, Habyarimana and his followers are seen to prosper, while the mass of Rwanda’s citizens grow poor. Another message arising from what might be called the ‘manifest content’ is: ‘Habyarimana shits on us,’ for Habyarimana’s latrine in the picture is Rwanda and its hapless population. The spoon that we see him moving from beneath his anus and about to place in his mouth is labeled “taxes.” In other words, the Rwandan people’s tax money is swallowed by Habyarimana, excreted by Habyarimana, only to be swallowed by him again. Where the cartoon becomes less logical, however, is at this point: if Habyarimana excretes on Rwanda and its people, why then does he eat his own feces and drink his own urine? Coprophilia may make him disgusting, but if he eats his own excrement, the country and its inhabitants would be spared its filth. It is here that discursive logic begins to give way to something more profound and less subject to debate, nego-

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tiation, and the calculus of politics. For here Habyarimana’s body has become, like the kings of the past, a conduit. Just as the mythical Nkorokombe transformed his body into an infirm, malevolent body by stopping off his anus, and metaphorically became an unworthy alliance partner—one who retains but cannot pass on that which he receives—in like fashion, political opponents of Habyarimana commit a similar humiliation on his body when they show him, as in this cartoon, performing ‘closed circuit’ flow. Habyarimana subverts the implicit expectations of a leader operating in the context of a holistic and hierarchical ontology—protection in exchange for subordination— by reversing the flow of beneficence. Instead of it descending downward from the sky, passing through his body, then on to the earth and to the people, it moves from down to up, from people to ruler. Once there, most of it is continually recycled in a sterile ‘closed circuit’ within his body. At the discursive level, Habyarimana is a bad president because he is self-aggrandizing, revolting, and corrupt. At the imaginary level, one which joins the more implicit dimensions of Rwandan sacred kingship, a more profound message is being communicated: Habyarimana is a malevolent body, an inadequate vessel for and conduit of imaana, and thus a candidate for elimination. He is not like Ruganzu Ndori, a king who would never have allowed his bowels to selfishly retain the mystical powers of the original imbuto. He has become like the mythical Nkorokombe, someone who cannot pass on that which he has ingested. The cartoon seems to be saying and at a level beneath, yet more powerful than the ideological, ‘Habyarimana must be killed.’

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Conclusion When examining the modern Rwandan state, the presidential institution before the genocide of 1994, and the state’s way of performing war and violence, it is not sufficient to view this solely through the lens of power. Certainly there were discourses of power and discourses of resistance to it in advance of the genocide, but what made this state and its performance of war specifically Rwandan was the degree to which these discourses were subtended by a cultural imaginary wedded to an ontological base of holism and hierarchy. A specifically Rwandan way of imagining being and personhood has persisted at the level of the body and the body’s role in social process. In consonance with the symbolic imagery of sacred kingship, Rwandans continue to be preoccupied with the sociomoral personhood of their leaders and their leaders’ bodies, and whether these adequately embody imaana, catalyze its descent, and pass it on to others. Although they themselves may never express this preoccupation in explicit terms, a ‘blocked conduit’ continues to be perceived as an infertile and thus immoral conduit. ‘Closed circuit flows’ are sterile and egotistical. This level of the Rwandan imaginary is not accessible to analysis that confines itself to the conscious motivations of politically interested social actors. Habyarimana may have been killed by people who were politically motivated, but in the years that preceded his death, there were more profound cultural forces at work that were tarring him with the taint of ritual impurity. These forces were as much unconscious as they were conscious. Because of this, we can neither in the study of the Rwandan state, nor in the study of war, confine our arguments solely to the manifestations of power.

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Epilogue: The Rwandan Presidency after the Genocide Although my knowledge concerning the presidency after the genocide is less extensive, there are indications that, at least at the discursive level, President Kagame continues to be perceived by many Rwandans as a leader who acts much like a divine king. This may stem from his tendency toward autocracy and/or his ability to neutralize political opponents through apparently legal means. Kagame, a Tutsi and chief military leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)—the force that invaded Rwanda in 1990— assumed the presidency in 2000. Between 1994 and 2000, the presidency was held by a Hutu RPF member, Pasteur Bizimungu; Kagame was Vice President and Defense Minister. In 2000, Bizimungu was deposed and Kagame took his place. Shortly thereafter, Bizimungu was jailed on charges of fomenting ethnic division. Five years earlier, Rwanda’s first postgenocidal prime minister, Faustin Twagiramungu (a Hutu), left the country for exile because of disagreements with the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Later in 2002, the political party that had once been headed by Twagiramungu, the Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (MDR), was banned by the Rwandan Parliament for pursuing a “divisive ideology.” Human Rights Watch has since accused the RPF of seeking to stifle opposition prior to presidential and parliamentary elections, a charge which Rwandan government officials have vehemently denied. Later, and despite the tenuous position of dissidents in Rwanda, Twagiramungu ended his exile in Belgium and returned to Rwanda in 2003 to campaign as a candidate in the August presidential elections. Had he stayed in Belgium, Twagiramungu would likely have done as well, for Kagame claimed victory with over 95 percent of the vote, recalling the election of 1983 in

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which Habyarimana ran unopposed for the presidency, then claimed to have won close to 99 percent of the vote. Such claims may seem comic and transparently false to outsiders, but it must be recalled that they are only so to those who are not convinced of Kagame’s nor of Habyarimana’s divinity, and this is not the case for many of their epigones. Twagiramungu later accused his RPF opponent of fraud, and indeed European Union election observers reported widespread irregularities in the voting, but the Rwandan Supreme Court upheld Kagame’s victory and swore him in as Rwanda’s president in September. Much of the above concerns the discursive level in the postgenocidal Rwandan presidency and provides less insight into the dimension of the imaginary. Despite this, there are tantalizing indications that Rwandan journalists continue to show evidence of the imaginary processes outlined in the earlier portion of this paper. In February 2003, for example, Ismael Mbonigaba, the editor of a Kigali newspaper titled Umuseso, was jailed (later released) shortly after publishing an article entitled “Twagiramungu to oppose Kagame in elections.” Although this in itself might seem innocuous, the article was accompanied by a cartoon depicting Kagame as King Solomon holding a sword in one hand, and in the other, the hand of a baby representing the Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (Twagiramungu’s former party). Two other people in the cartoon are shown questioning Kagame about the MDR. The cartoon intimates that only King Kagame can determine the party’s future. Only further fieldwork will allow us to confirm what must remain for the moment, a working hypothesis: that Rwandan journalists and artists continue to imagine their present president according to the iconic imagery of sacred kingship described above.

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REFERENCES Aijmer, Goran. 2000. “Introduction: The Idiom of Violence in Imagery and Discourse.” Pp. 1–22 in Meanings of Violence, ed. Goran Aijmer and Jon Abbink. Oxford: Berg Press. Clastres, Pierre. 1974. La société contre l’Etat. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Coupez, André, and Théoneste Kamanzi. 1962. Récits historiques Rwanda. Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, Annales, Série in 8, Tervuren (Belgium), Sciences Humaines, no. 43. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. d’Hertefelt, Marcel, and André Coupez. 1964. La royauté sacrée de l’ancien Rwanda. Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, Annales, Série in 8, Tervuren (Belgium), Sciences Humaines, no. 52. Kapferer, Bruce. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 2000. Culture in Practice. New York: Zone Books. Vansina, Jan. 2001. Le Rwanda ancien: Le royaume nyiginya. Paris: Karthala.

CHAOS, CONSPIRACY, AND SPECTACLE The Russian War against Chechnya

 Jakob Rigi

During the winter of 1995, I spent time with Chechen and Russian activists jointly campaigning against the first Chechen war, which was then in full swing. They demanded the immediate end to the war as they held rallies and handed out leaflets in public squares, factories, and schools. What was striking in the Chechen activists’ analysis was that they considered the war to be one fought by bandits. In their conception, it was a war between the bandits in Moscow and the Chechen bandits, and they depicted both Yeltsin1 and Dudaev2 as godfathers. They argued that they and the Russians belonged to the same Soviet people and that Chechnya should enjoy autonomy within Russia. They said that plunder was the main motive for war on both sides, and that the war had created its own

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economy from which both sides benefited. Neither the Chechen fighters nor Yeltsin were motivated by concern for the welfare of their constituent publics. In fact, Yeltsin was simply trying to gain political popularity and divert people’s attention from the misery his neoliberal reforms had created in Russia. More striking was the absence of any enthusiasm for the war among the majority of Russians. The chauvinists were a considerable minority, and most Russians opposed the war. They considered the war to be a domestic tragedy that had been triggered by the opportunistic politics of Yeltsin. Journalists, who at that time could still report freely on the events in Chechnya, harshly criticized the incumbent government (Gall and de Waal 1998). During 1995–1996, as the war continued, I met Chechen refugees in Almaty who had come to work there. While most of them supported Dudaev against Yeltsin, they also believed him to be good for nothing but warmongering and provoking the Russian military. They blamed Dudaev for destroying the Chechen economy and society, while expressing strong nostalgia for the Soviet era. Although they hated Yeltsin for invading Chechnya, they still considered the Russians and themselves as belonging to the same Soviet people. In their stories, they spoke of Russian and Chechens as having been good neighbors and comrades working together in kalkhozes (collective farms) and factories. The war was not with the Russian people, but with Yeltsin and his gang. Similar attitudes were prevalent among Kazakhs and other peoples of the former Soviet Union. This common belief in the shared Soviet identity of Chechens and Russians, and their opposition to what they saw as a mafia war, stood in stark contrast to the view prevalent in the West, where the war was believed to be the result of the clash between the Chechens’ drive for independence and Russian imperial rule.

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There is no doubt that the Chechens’ fresh memories of the Soviet era and its grievances played a role in instigating the conflict. Nevertheless, I think that the analysis proffered by the people from the former Soviet Union is more accurate: the war was a war between gangs in Moscow and those in Grozny3 who had been expelled by the Russian troops. Although the causes of the conflict are many (Evangelista 2002), I argue that the main historical conditions which made the war possible are related to what I have termed elsewhere as “the chaotic mode of domination” (Nazpary 2002). The chaotic mode of domination has constituted the form of sovereignty in both Chechnya and Russia, as well as elsewhere in the former Soviet territory, since 1990. The core principle of the chaotic mode of domination is the personalization of power relations in combination with patronage networks. In such a mode of domination, political power is fragmented while patronage networks compete in a chaotic way with each other to plunder available resources. A crucial aspect of this mode of domination is the privileged position of high state officials in such networks, who act as supervisors and arbiters. Contacts (who knows whom), money (paying bribes, tributes, etc.), and coercion are the main levers of power of such networks. Of these three, coercion is the most effective. As the means of coercion are overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, concentrated in the hands of state officials, they have the final say in the negotiation of power relations. As a result, while governmental institutions continue to exist formally, and constitute the forums through which coercion is exercised, they become personal fiefdoms of the state officials, who use them to extract economic rent. With the ‘feudalization of the state apparatus’ the interests of various networks take precedence over the interests of the state and nation as a whole. In such a context, war occurs between networks rather than nations (though ethnic and national rhetoric is

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used). At the beginning of both wars (in 1994 and 1999), both Chechnya and Russia existed under the chaotic mode of domination. On the brink of the first war in 1994, Chechnya was a rogue republic. Various independent armed gangs roamed the land, and Dudaev’s militias had the upper hand. It was a criminal place, as black markets boomed. Chechnya was a base of operation for the Russian and Chechen mafias, which were based mainly in Moscow. It became an important place for the transfer of illegal money, contract killings, smuggling of gold, weapons, oil, and other goods. At the same time, state employees had not received their salaries for months, and during the harsh winter, many households and workplaces had no fuel supplies. The fabric of society and economy had collapsed and unemployment was over 40 percent (Gall and de Waal 1998: 103). The first Chechen war ended in 1996. Russian troops withdrew from Chechnya and a final decision on the status of Chechnya vis-à-vis the Russian Federation was postponed until 2000. As a result, Chechnya became de facto independent. It elected its own parliament with Aslan Maskhadov becoming president. Maskhadov was both secular and moderate in his policies toward Russia, while his rivals Iandabaev and Basyaev were both extremists who flirted with Islamists. By voting for Maskhadov in what observers described as free and fair elections, the Chechen people had voted for secularism. It was also a reconciliatory gesture toward Russia. But Maskhadov’s efforts to establish a working secular government were hampered by the Chechen warlords who had become notorious during the anti-Russian campaign. Chechnya fell under the worst kind of the chaotic mode of domination. The fragmentation between Chechen warlords who had been overcome temporarily in the face of a common enemy resurfaced. Warlords running their own gangs questioned Maskhadov’s authority.

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They started kidnapping Russians and Europeans for ransom money. The notorious oligarch Berezovsky4 paid them huge amounts of money for the release of several Russian and foreign hostages. Basayev, now joined by the notorious Khattab, had started an Islamic movement. His military gangs, not obeying Maskhadov, had carved a sphere of influence for themselves. Kidnappings, robberies, smuggling, and other criminal activities were rampant in Chechnya: everyone fought against everyone else. With their own militias, Basayev and Khattab made an incursion into Daghistan, a part of Russian territory outside Chechnya (August 1999). Their goal was to stage a spectacle in order to gain popularity in Chechnya and the Caucasus. The ruling network in Moscow used this opportunity to start a full-scale war in order to stage a spectacle of its own. While Chechens were drawn into both wars because of a lack of political strategy and internal divisions, the ruling network in Moscow started both wars cynically, seizing upon them as stages for political spectacles. Post-Soviet political spectacles were an integral part of post-Soviet chaotic mode of domination in Russia. Nationalism was in crisis in post-Soviet Russia, as the interests of the networks came to override the interests of state and nation. Moreover, the multinational nature of the Russian state made the use of national symbols problematic for constructing hegemony. The chaotic mode of domination was a response to a crisis of hegemony. The ruling elite used political spectacles staged through visual means, resorting to people’s fears and emotions, rather than their reason, in order to influence them. As we will see below, the two Chechen wars were two significant manifestations of such spectacles. The chaotic mode of domination created even greater political disorder in Russia. It established a predatory rule in which the networks of state officials, mafias, and businessmen violated and plundered the population.

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The chaotic mode of domination was also an instrument for the privatization of state property and the implementation of neoliberal reforms, which were carried out by coercive methods. With the approval of the West, in October 1993, Yeltsin gunned down the Russian parliament, which had opposed his neoliberal program that had been designed by the IMF and World Bank. With the parliament out of the way, Yeltsin then carried out the neoliberal reforms. On the brink of the first Chechen war, millions of workers were unemployed; those who did have jobs were not receiving their salaries, and the health care and education systems had collapsed. Russia had been transformed into a gangland in which state officials and the new mafiabusiness networks accumulated wealth, reducing the majority to dire poverty. This had led to a sharp decline in the popularity of Yeltsin and his gang. They needed ‘a small victorious war’ to restore his status. Yeltsin and his gang decided, ad hoc, to launch the war. The war started and proceeded in a chaotic manner: the army was not prepared, and half-starved conscripts were dispatched to Chechnya where they were slaughtered by the Chechen fighters. Experiencing heavy defeats, the humiliated Russian army targeted the civilian population. They bombed central Grozny to the ground, despite the fact that it was populated mainly by Russians. The war created its own industry. Extortion, plundering of resources, drug dealing, and control of weapons markets became means for the accumulation of wealth by the Russian military, mafias, and Chechen groups. By 1996, because of the war’s unpopularity, the Russian government and Chechen leaders signed a peace accord. Meanwhile, the chaotic mode of domination in Russia deepened. A group of financiers who had bankrolled Yeltsin’s election campaign in 1996 bought the best of Russian industries in exchange for the loans they had given the state. In the end, the gangs related to Yeltsin

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acquired the industries for nominal prices. The economic crash of 1998 ruined millions and exacerbated the chaos. The neoliberal reforms had succeeded in ‘Africanizing Russia.’ While a tiny elite in Moscow basked in their wealth and luxury, vast regions of Russia had collapsed, both socially and economically. People hated the Yeltsin regime and also felt betrayed by the West. They understood the neoliberal reforms to be an instrument of American imperialism. The wars in the former Yugoslavia and the expansion of NATO eastward furthered Russians’ suspicions of the West. They considered various elite networks to be a bunch of gangsters acting as agents of IMF and the World Bank. The surfacing of controversies about Yeltsin’s family’s financial operations in the media only fueled people’s outrage. Yeltsin, who was becoming more erratic, was locked in a ceaseless conflict with the Russian parliament, and fired prime minister after prime minister. A fierce struggle between two major networks unfolded in Moscow. One was centered around Yruri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, and the other was the network of businessmen and bureaucrats centered around Yeltsin’s family, commonly referred to as ‘the Family.’ Putin was the Family’s presidential candidate. As Yeltsin and his gang were fully discredited, and Putin was a political non-entity, everyone speculated that the Luzhkov camp candidate, Primakov, would win. But a new war in Chechnya changed the situation radically. When Basayev invaded Daghistan, Putin, who was then prime minister, flew into Daghistan to take charge of the anti-Basayev campaign. As a result, his popularity soared. People were exhausted from the chaos and yearning for order. Paradoxically, the two competing networks that were major agents of chaos seized upon this situation and presented themselves as the parties of order. Putin, by taking charge of the conflict personally and staging this orchestrated media spectacle, presented himself as a man who could wield the iron fist and reimpose order. As

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a result, Putin’s camp won a major victory in parliamentary elections on 19 December 1999, and Putin became president on 26 March 2000. After the elections, the spectacle of war was continually used in order to create fear, horror, and chauvinism in Russia. Putin used this situation to repress the freedom of the press and to launch an authoritarian rule. A series of bombs that exploded in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia between 31 August and 13 September killed several hundred Russian citizens and wounded more than one thousand. These bombings, which had been blamed on Chechens, although they denied responsibility, created a sense of panic and anger in Russia similar to what September 11 produced in the U.S. Putin’s camp used the state-controlled media to manipulate this panic and anger to wage their war against Chechnya as an antiterrorist spectacle.

Conclusions While the Chechen wars had multiple causes, the chaotic mode of domination and the concomitant politics of spectacle and conspiracies played the decisive roles in the unfolding the two wars. Although the Chechens’ historical memory of conflict with and repression by the tsarist and Soviet states played a role in their opposition to Moscow, the wars by no means could be explained by Chechens’ ethnic demands. A compromise could be reached if Yeltsin had opted for it. Directly before the war, two-thirds of the Chechen population were against Dudaev. Yeltsin could have negotiated a deal keeping Chechnya within Russia, but instead opted for war. Similarly, Putin repeatedly rejected Maskhadov’s demands for negotiations. This brief analysis locates the origins of conflict in the conspiracy of

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one of the major networks within the chaotic mode of domination, namely, that of the Family5 as it sought to preserve its hold on power in Russia. In their pursuits, they sacrificed both the interests of the Russian and Chechen people, inflicting on both peoples enormous pain, death, and injury. And Chechens played into the hands of the Family because of their own chaotic mode of domination. Conspiracy theory has been criticized for being simplistic. However, I suggest that under the chaotic mode of domination, conspiracies have become a major part of politics. There is a fragmentation of power, and various networks plot against each other. More importantly, the fact that the political spectacles are staged to compensate for the lack of hegemony gives a central place to conspiracy. What is a spectacle? A well thought-out plot brought to people’s homes through their televisions? And what is a conspiracy? A hidden plot? But a political spectacle can be successful only if its real motives are hidden. As I argue here, the chaotic mode of domination represents a crisis of sovereignty of the nation-state. Moreover, the conventional forms of hegemony are being partially replaced by a new form of governmentality in which conspiracy, spectacle, and violence are the means through which the dominant network imposes its power. It appears that the chaotic mode of domination and the concomitant strategies of violence, conspiracy, and spectacle are functioning in similar ways globally. The question of whether this is an emerging form of postmodern sovereignty or one manifestation of a global crisis of hegemony remains to be researched and theorized further. What is more, we could ask whether or not there is a necessary structural relation between the chaotic mode of domination, conspiracy, and spectacular forms of politics.

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NOTES 1. The Russian president. 2. The ousted Chechen president who led the military campaign against Russia. 3. The capital of Chechnya. 4. Berezovsky, then one of the richest men in Russia, was a businessman very close to Yeltsin and his family. He had become enormously wealthy through his connections with Yeltsin. He has been accused of being involved with the Chechen mafia, mediated by Rudaev. But Berezovsky himself claimed that he had negotiated the release of hostages. 5. The Family itself was split between different factions. Their differences resulted in a conflict between Putin and the major oligarch Berezovsky after Putin’s victory.

REFERENCES Evangelista, Mathew. 2002. The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. Gall, Carlotta, and Thomas de Waal. 1998. Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus. New York and London: The New York University Press. Nazpary, Joma. 2002. Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan. London: Pluto Press.

ABOUT A WALL  Glenn Bowman

In the summer of 2003, I spent several weeks in Beit Sahour, the town in which I’ve carried out fieldwork since the late 1980s, observing—amongst other things—the rapacious hunger with which Israel’s ‘Anti-Terrorist Fence’ (more commonly known as ‘the Wall’) consumed Palestinian lands and infrastructure, biting off roads, wells, housing projects, community centers, and other supports of Palestinian life on the West Bank.1 On the northern border of Beit Sahour the Wall was for the most part a bulldozed strip of between 20 and 40 meters in width, containing two 3-meter barbed-wire-topped fences, a ditch, another fence with electronic movement sensors, two raked sand ‘trace strips,’ and a paved patrol road. It meandered through the countryside in what appeared to be an aimless and extravagant manner (extravagant insofar as it costs on average $2,270,000 per kilometer), until I recognized that it ran right along the edge of the inhabited sectors of Beit Sahour and neighboring Bethlehem and Beit

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Jala, gathering behind it nearly all of the vineyards, the olive groves, the orchards, and other agricultural lands of the local people (according to the Applied Research Institute—Jerusalem walling in the Bethlehem district has resulted in the alienation of 70 square kilometers of the total 608 square kilometers that make up the district).2 The Wall, however, was not the only bit of caging being erected. Since September 2000, when the second Intifada erupted after Ariel Sharon’s armed ‘visit’ to the Haram esSharif, Bethlehem District had been ghettoized through the programmatic erection of fifty-seven barriers across its roads, 50 kilometers of ‘Anti-Terrorist Fence,’ and a tight bracket of ‘bypass roads’ which, to the 170,000 Palestinians trapped inside, were functionally indistinguishable from the rest of the Wall. To the east of Beit Sahour the Wall linked up with the ‘Za’tara Bypass Road’ (a militarily guarded ‘settler road’ between Jerusalem and Tequ’a that neither passes through nor allows access to or from Palestinian towns or villages), and to the West it sliced through residential and commercial areas of Bethlehem and Beit Jala (devastating them through its imposition of an emptied security zone stretching between 50 and 100 meters from the Wall into the Palestinian territory) before butting up against Route 60, a settlement ‘motorway’ running from Jerusalem south to Efrat and settlements beyond, which again cannot be accessed by vehicle from the Bethlehem townships. All roads out of Bethlehem district to the south had been cut, often by simply bulldozing up the roadbed and turning it into a 3-meter high wall of rubble. Armored fencing that separated the extensive settlement complexes of Tequ’a, Efrat, and Migdal Oz from nearby Palestinian villages was expanding into Palestinian lands at a rate exponentially related to the growth of the settlements themselves. There was only one road in and out of Bethlehem district and that, fiercely guarded at checkpoints by the Israeli Defense Force, could only be traversed by yellow-plated (i.e.,

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Israeli-licensed) vehicles bearing soldiers, settlers, and the occasional tourist. Palestinians who wanted, or needed, to get in or out of Bethlehem District went by foot, either, if they had ‘permissions,’ trudging through the long slow queues at the checkpoints or, if not, clambering illegally over the remains of their broken roadways so as to gain access to the busy traffic of everyday Israeli life. That said, what I saw last summer in Beit Sahour was far less dramatic than what I knew was happening in other regions of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Qalqilyah and Tulkarm, in the north of the West Bank, were being encircled by single-gated, 8-meter high stretches of concrete wall crowned with smoked-glass windowed watchtowers and protected by ditches, patrol roads, and supplementary fences. The ghettoization of these cities was not only preventing their inhabitants from working in either Israel or the West Bank (see Bornstein 2002 for an analysis of the fostered economic dependency of Tulkarm residents on Israel in the days before the Wall’s erection) but as well depriving those living in satellite villages of access to markets for selling their produce and labor and buying goods and to basic services such as medical care and education. There, where the ‘sealing’ was much more efficient, entry to and egress from the cities was only available to those willing, or able, to wait in long and faltering queues for bored Israeli soldiers to interrogate them—often involving public strip searching and other forms of humiliation— before deciding whether or not to let them, one by one, in or out. It seems obvious that the horrific grandiosity of the Wall’s ‘sealing off’ of Qalqilyah and Tulkarm serves to reassure a nervous Israeli electorate in the coastal cities so near to these West Bank conurbations that the ‘Arabs’ won’t be able to get to them. The ‘quieter’ rhetoric with which the section of ‘fence’ surrounding Bethlehem District speaks of Israel’s ‘security needs’ seems more appropriate to address-

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ing the foreign diplomats, journalists, and tourists more likely to be traveling in the vicinity of Jerusalem. Differences in appearance are, however, deceptive. Beneath these diverse visual rhetorics operates a unitary logic of what I call ‘encystation.’ Encystation is the process of enclosing within a cyst (a cyst is a “sac containing morbid matter, parasitic larvae, etc.; cell containing embryo, etc.,” Concise Oxford English Dictionary), and the encirclement of Palestinian communities within the territories over which Israel—in violation of the Geneva Convention and numerous United Nations resolutions—claims sovereignty is indisputably an act of quarantining ‘matter’ held to put the surrounding social body at risk (“it cannot be clearly stated that the Palestinians’ right to freedom of movement must take precedence over the right of Israelis to live”).3 It is also unclear whether or not there is a ‘goal’ at the end of this process. Arguments can convincingly be made that the walling is meant to bring about either or both the voluntary emigration and involuntary expulsion of Palestinians. Rates of emigration in Bethlehem and elsewhere in the Occupied Territories are currently at an all-time high, and the inclusion of the Moledat Party (which campaigns on a platform of the ‘population transfer’ of the Palestinians) in a ruling coalition led by Ariel Sharon, who has since the 1950s promoted the line that ‘Jordan is Palestine’ (see Shlaim 2000: 477 and passim), has done little to quiet fears that what Benny Morris called the “mistake” of the “non-completion of the transfer [in 1948]” (Shavit 2004) might be rectified in the not-too-distant future. Regardless of whether the ultimate motive for walling is making people leave or simply making them invisible to the Israeli population, it is indisputable that life within Palestinian ‘gated communities’ is being etiolated by an intentional crippling of the economy; the strangling of access to food, water, medicine, and education; and the imposition of a sense of isolation and political impotence. Palestinians, or

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at least those within these enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements and highways, are certainly not treated as part of what is popularly known as ‘the only democratic state in the Middle East.’ Nor, for the most part, do Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza want to be citizens of the state of Israel; they want their own state in the 17 percent of Mandate Palestine left under ‘Arab’ control (albeit by fiat that of Egypt and Jordan rather than of the local Palestinians) after Israel expropriated the rest in the war of 1948. Although the liberal European press has tended, since the summer of 2003, to condemn Israel’s building of the Wall, it has done so on the assumption that the Wall is intended to constitute the border between a nascent Palestinian state and a state of Israel in retreat from its current maximalist position. Liberals assume the Wall should run along the ‘Green Line,’ the internationally recognized armistice line established at the close of the 1967 war, which is 190 miles in length. They are outraged that current government plans project a total length for the Wall of between 360 and 435 miles. None of the circuitous wanderings of the existing wall take place on the Israeli side of the Green Line, and at a number of points it bulges dramatically into the West Bank to incorporate Israeli settlements. The Wall's ‘land grab’ threatens to expropriate up to 10 percent of the West Bank, and commentators feel this puts the viability of a Palestinian state at risk—especially in light of the fact that the most fertile lands and the largest aquifers are within the territory being consumed by the security fence. But is the Wall meant to be a border? It is important to note, in my descriptions of Bethlehem, Qalqilyah, and Tulkarm above, that the encircled towns are cut off as much from the West Bank as from Israel; Palestinians must cross through checkpoints to access other sectors of Palestine. Numerous other towns and villages will be ‘enclaved’ by supplementary fences built around them,

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while the effects of road cuttings and road blocks (as detailed above in Bethlehem district) on countless other Palestinian conurbations do not even show up on the detailed map of the Wall that the Palestine Land Development Information Systems drew up in 2003 on the basis of the Israeli Defense Force plans.4 Also not shown on that map is the fact that the city of Jenin, a considerable distance from the projected path of the fence, is currently being walled. Meanwhile, despite the outrage expressed by ‘outside’ critics of the Israeli state for its pushing of the Wall up to 3.5 miles into the West Bank so as to incorporate Israeli settlements such as Alfe Menashe, the projected path of the ‘western’ Wall (taking its bearings from the Green Line) will leave 98 percent of West Bank settlers on the east side of the Wall. This population (which holds Israeli citizenship despite being ‘extra-territorial’) can move without hindrance along its own roads and through road blocks designed only to stop Palestinians. Despite this freedom, long-term plans (announced by Ariel Sharon in March 2003) envisage another wall running down the entire length of the Jordan Valley’s western rim, effectively caging the entirety of the West Bank. Towns and villages left on the outside of the walls, either to the west or to the east of the ‘Palestinian territories,’ will be stranded in the midst of hostile territory, severed from other Palestinian communities. Palestinian communities ‘inside’ will be similarly quarantined, insofar as walling will divide the remaining territories into three discontinuous ‘cantons’ containing 45 to 50 percent of the West Bank’s current territory, three ‘depth barriers’ (fully encircled domains with single entry and exit points), and at least six further fenced enclaves (see Cook 2003). It is hard to imagine the borders of a Palestinian state comprised of a series of noncontiguous bandustans around, between and through which swarm armed settlers and the tanks, bulldozers, and personnel carriers of an antagonistic foreign military.

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The concept of ‘border’ has been both central to and multivalent in Israeli practice and discourse since the early days of the state, as Adriana Kemp has shown in her study of the role of the border and of military border violations in the shaping of Israeli identity. She contends that “the territorialist idiom of settlement, which presented the boundary as the ultimate symbol of state sovereignty, did not take root in the Israeli mind. The army gradually initiated practices which transferred activity to the other side of the border … [so that] the breaching of the border became a symbolic practice, a genuine territorial ritual, which had the effect of both trivialising the border and instilling a sense of lordship over the territories across the lines” (Kemp 1998: 89–90, 92). Kemp is talking of cross-border violations in the period when the West Bank was in Jordanian hands (although a favorite Israeli incursion in that period led to Petra, well beyond the Jordan River). But the ‘frontierist’ conception of borders that she claims characterizes Israeli attitudes toward state and sovereignty is still in play in Israeli state policies, not only toward Lebanon and Syria but also with regard to what international law claims is the illegally occupied territories of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip, where the state establishes settlements, builds roadways and other infrastructural ‘facts on the ground,’ and maintains the citizenship of ‘extraterritorial’ settlers. The duality of the concept of border in operation today in the Occupied Territories is analogous to its meaning in the period she discusses (1949–1957), when border crossings by the Israeli military were designed to punish Palestinian communities for allowing refugees (who, for the most part, were attempting to return to houses and properties from which they had been forced in the course of the 1948 war and subsequent ‘mopping up’ operations) to attempt to gain access to Israel: “[C]rossing of the lines by the Palestinians was portrayed as a ‘gross violation of

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the armistice agreements’ and was called ‘infiltration.’ However, when border-crossing became a habit of the Israeli army, even if unacknowledged, it was known as ‘routine security measures’ and depicted as part of the attempt to achieve ‘border discipline’” (Kemp 1998: 87). The fact that borders continue to be delineated as devices for encysting Palestinians is manifest in the contemporary operations of the ‘Border Police,’ a ‘police’ unit under the command of the military that is supposed to patrol borders as well as ports and airports. In practice, the Border Police go into operation wherever Palestinians confront Israelis in what the authorities perceive as a political manner. Thus, when Sharon’s ‘visit’ to the Haram es-Sharif sparked demonstrations in ‘Arab’ towns and cities within Israel’s 1949 borders, it was the Border Police that was sent into the Galilee to suppress the demonstrations, at the cost of thirteen ‘Israeli Arabs’ shot dead. Borders, whether those drawn by the Wall or those of ‘Closed Military Areas,’ which any officer can declare, pertain to Palestinians, and are erected wherever and whenever a Palestinian is seen to impinge upon or question Israeli sovereignty over ‘the land.’ If borders for Israelis exist in large part for what Kemp calls the “symbolic practice” of breaching them, how does one discern the limits of ‘the land of Israel’? This question concerns not only the legal rights of settlers to benefits accruing from Israeli citizenship which are refused their ‘Arab neighbors’ in the Occupied Territories. It also has ‘extraterritorial’ applications. Israel’s “Law of Return 57101950” promises that “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh [an immigrant],”5 which in practice has come to mean that any person claiming to be a Jew, either by descent or conversion, is granted automatic citizenship as well as guaranteed housing, full tuition for university education, and significant discounts on cars, appliances, and other aids to settlement.6 Beyond, however, easing aliyah

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(immigration), the Law of Return implies that, by virtue of being Jewish, Jews outside of Israel are in effect always already Israeli citizens (a parallel instance from former Yugoslavia is analyzed in Dimitrijevic 1993: 50–56). In line with the extension of Israeli state sovereignty this guarantee of automatic citizenship entails, Israel has, in the past few years, intervened in cases in which Jews were on trial for crimes committed outside of Israel, as though these were cases in which its own citizens were being tried by a foreign state. It has also, in Iran, Iraq, and Ethiopia, organized massive ‘rescue missions,’ taking Jewish citizens of other countries out of those countries and ‘resettling’ them in Israel. If Israeli sovereignty is extensible to anywhere Jews exist, then there are in effect no borders. Certainly, in terms of its violation of international borders in defense of its self-ascertained interests, Israel acts as though they do not exist. In several instances, dating from the earliest days of the state until the present, Israel has ignored extradition processes and kidnapped from foreign states persons it deemed criminals. Strikes against and invasions of Lebanese territory are virtually routine, and it is worth noting that Israel has laid claim to the following violations of other states’ sovereignty as expressions of its right of selfdefense: the 7 June 1981 bombing of the Osiraq nuclear power plant in Iraq; the April 1988 assassination in Tunis of Abu Jihad in a substantial military operation; and the bombing on 5 October 2003 of Ein Saheb refugee camp northwest of Damascus. If, within Israel and the Occupied Territories, every Palestinian has a border inscribed around him or her, in the global context Israeli sovereignty is extensible to everywhere Israeli-defined ‘Jewish’ interests can be discerned. I return, in closing, to the concept of ‘encystation.’ Like the concept of ‘border’ in Israeli discourse, ‘cyst’ has a double meaning; it is both a closed sac in which morbid matter is quarantined so as to protect the surrounding

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body, and a “cell containing an embryo” that provides a defensive membrane within which that fetal entity can develop until it has grown sufficiently strong to emerge into the world outside. It is in the latter sense that Israel, as a homeland for the Jewish people, was conceptualized by Herzl and the late-nineteenth-century Zionist pioneers, who saw the land as a place distant from Europe and its anti-Semitism where Jews, weakened by centuries of discrimination, could shelter while developing into what Herzl termed “real men” (Complete Diaries I: 19, cited in Kornberg 1993: 166; see also Bowman 2002: 456–463). Unsurprisingly, as a protected space within which a people could shelter and grow strong without encountering debilitating competition and challenges, Israel’s founders envisaged not only the need for strong defenses against an ‘outside’ but also means for ensuring that any internal challenge to the development of sovereignty would be contained, expelled, or destroyed (this position is elaborated in Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s 1923 “Iron Wall”; see Shlaim [2000: 11–16]). Modern-day Israel, which—with its massive army, its nuclear capabilities, and its high technology economy— certainly has entered forcefully into the global community of mature states, nonetheless still wants to pose itself as a protective womb for a fetal people. As a result, it encysts non-Jewish populations within the territory over which it imposes de facto sovereignty, refusing them even the semblance of self-determination (see Kimmerling 2003). It simultaneously extends its protective wall outwards so as to encompass and protect all of the members of a globally distributed ethnoreligious population that it sees as its ‘concern.’ Like the United States, which, with the demise of the Soviet Union, is able to celebrate its power to defend its citizens and its interests everywhere, Israel has, with its victories over the antagonisms against which it established itself, become unrestrained in its will to sovereign power both within and beyond its borders.

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NOTES 1. See my photographs on http://www.svf.uib.no/sfu/vitalmatters/. 2. See http://www.poica.org/casestudies/Checkpoint%2023-0204/index.htm). 3. See the Israeli government’s official Web site: http://securityfence.mfa.gov.il. 4. See www.pengon.org-wall-newmaps-poster.pdf. 5. See http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH00kp0. 6. See http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Judaism/whojew1.html.

REFERENCES Bornstein, Avram. 2002. Crossing the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel. The Ethnography of Political Violence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bowman, Glenn. 2002. “‘Migrant Labour’: Constructing Homeland in the Exilic Imagination.” Anthropological Theory 2, no. 4:447–468. Cook, Catherine. 2003. “Final Status in the Shape of a Wall.” Middle East Research Information Project (MERIP), 3 September. http://www.merip.org/mero/mero090303.html. Dimitrijevic, Vojin. 1993. “Ethnonationalism and the Constitutions: The Apotheosis of the Nation-State.” Journal of Area Studies, no. 3:50–56. Kemp, Adriana. 1998. “From Politics of Location to Politics of Signification: The Construction of Political Territory in Israel’s First Years.” Journal of Area Studies, no. 12:74–101.

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———. N.d. “From Politics of Location to Politics of Signification: The Construction of Political Territory in Israel’s First Years.” Unpublished manuscript. Kimmerling, Baruch. 2003. Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians. London: Verso. Kornberg, Jacques. 1993. Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism. Jewish Literature and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Shavit, Ari. 2004. “Survival of the Fittest.” Interview with Benny Morris. Haaretz Friday Magazine, no. 9 (January). http://www.counterpunch.org/shavit01162004.html. Shlaim, Avi. 2000. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. London: Allen Lane.

PARAMILITARIES OF THE EMPIRE Guatemala, Colombia, and Israel

 Staffan Löfving

Analysts of war and states construe paramilitary violence in terms of excessive responses to insurgencies too powerful to be quelled by means of conventional warfare (see, for example, Sluka 2000). But the case of the crumbling state of Colombia hints at a more complex relationship between the various practitioners of political violence; what used to be state-sanctioned rural militias are building their own political platform and claiming a place in the troubled negotiations between state and insurgency. This short essay grapples with the paramilitary function of state power in two Latin American countries that survived the Cold War, wounded but alive only to find their fate sealed by a new world order.

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Guatemala When General Lucas Garcia established the Civil Patrols in the rural areas of Guatemala in 1982, it was the beginning of an unprecedented militarization of the population. It divided communities and families, and also brought economic change as a result of the massive dislocation of the peasantry, who became unpaid labor for the army and also for the owners of the grand estates (Schirmer 1998). During my own anthropological fieldwork in highland Guatemala in the mid-1990s among people who had managed to resist such relocations, I discovered that the need for certainty seemed to grow in relation to the impossibility of being certain. A prominent feature in everyday narration was the expression, “Pues, así dicen”—well, that’s what they say. Occasionally, the narrative itself referred to knowledge whose source was anonymous and about which people were ambivalent concerning both import and veracity. The very day after the disarming of the guerrillas (the EGP or Guerrilla Army of the Poor) in 1997, assailants, dressed in the black uniforms of the army’s G2 unit, robbed and threatened people on the way to market in the village of Chel. The event was on everybody’s lips. Conversation was filled with the fear that military repression would continue despite the new peace accord. The details were various, as only one man had witnessed the actual event. I had been fortunate, for this man was my host, so I had a basis on which to compare his details with those that embellished the rumors concerning the event founded on his information. My host had been approaching Chel on horseback and had hidden when he spotted four assailants. He then warned others in the course of his three-hour ride home. Everyone except my host used the rhetorical device “Asi dicen,” the generalized third person, to support information that they had not directly experienced and perhaps were uncertain about, yet were anxious to tell.

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As Zˇizˇek (2002) has stressed, no knowledge can be more factual than that acquired through the experience of the Real. The power of the forgoing event rested in its clandestine nature, in its very hiddenness from the immediate experience of most, in the uncertainty that surrounds the information yet which achieves a certain veracity in the kind of rhetorical device to which I have referred (a device that unifies varied accounts). This point—the potency of the clandestine, of the hidden—may be expanded. Paramilitary violence establishes and perpetuates a state of fear through its clandestine nature and in the paradox of its uncertainty. Moreover, because paramilitary action occurs outside the law, or underneath the law, those responsible avoid the risk of being held accountable. Such action is prevalent in countries where it is the military that monopolizes the use of violence and where the police and the judicial system operate with impunity as a façade for the engagement of such violence. Furthermore, I suggest that in Latin America the delegation of acts of killing to semisecret military auxiliaries is a response of old power structures to the new transparency of the global system. This is so in the contemporary global context where human rights groups backed by powerful governments—and even market interests—can punish states for atrocities against humanity. The development of paramilitarism in both Colombia and Guatemala supports such a claim. From the 1960s, extra-judicial assassinations on a grand scale have hidden the responsibility of the state in the exercise of the killings from the gaze of the ‘international community.’ Returning to the event in the village of Chel, I stress its communicative character. It was addressed to the peasantry (the supporters of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor) who had hidden in the mountains of the area and who were now exposed to the threat of paramilitary action. The action communicated successfully to former rebels that the old politics was continuing but behind the façade of the

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new democracy. The action at Chel hid this fact from the international monitors, who were further blinded in their own enthusiasm at the appearance that the conflict was coming to an end.

Colombia The Colombian government, as part of the U.S. master plan (‘Plan Colombia’) is looking to the Guatemalan patrol system. This is conceived of as a model or ideal type of organization whereby out-of-control paramilitaries can be regrouped under the control of the army. Known as the AUC—the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia—this organization of paramilitaries, headed by Carlos Castaño, in many respects acts like a state. Thus, it relies on taxes that it collects from peasants, large landowners, small businesses, and even large multinational corporations (whose interests the AUC is sometimes hired to protect). The AUC is opposed to neoliberal reform that it understands works to weaken the Colombian nation.1 Anthropologist Michael Taussig’s recently published Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia (2003) tells the chilling story of how paramilitaries target everyone from alleged guerrillas to delinquents and corrupt officials. Human rights organizations report on the persecution of homosexuals, transvestites, and prostitutes. But to Taussig’s surprise, many locals welcomed paramilitary justice. They became protagonists in a locally restored hegemony that was made possible by the retreat of the institutions of the nation-state. The lack of a state order was filled by the emergence to power of the paramilitary state. The assertions of morality by agents of the paramilitary state are part of a process of legitimization. The development of this new, postmodern kind of state power is traceable from the clandestine violent practices of the early 1960s.

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In Colombia, the infamous Law 48 of 1968 legalized private militias throughout the country. While the law was abolished in 1989, the diverse para groups (ranging from paid assassins or sicarios, to private armies, to military organizations for self-defense) “have been subsumed by the organizational form that yields higher dividends, and that ends by imposing itself” (Cubides 2001: 131). Paradoxically, the loss of legal status gave rise to an organization, the AUC, that now officially controls a large territory and can openly recruit combatants. A clandestine system of paramilitary control is assuming an open state-like form. The levels of postwar violence in Guatemala should trouble any architect of peace. News reports over the past year tell the story of the resurfacing of paramilitaries claiming their right to a compensation from the state for services in the patrol system during the war. What happens when impunity for crimes committed during wartime prevails in peacetime and when poverty is not alleviated is that the grand expectations that energize peace processes turn into a potentially very violent disappointment. Taussig (1992), in a work on the magic of the state, explores the “power of state fetishism” whereby the state itself becomes an object of desire, magically holding out the promise of change. Begoña Aretaxaga (2000) describes the postmodern state, exemplified by post-Franco Spain, as manifesting the magicality of “democracy fetishism.” Something similar may be observed for Guatemala. The step forward achieved in the peace process and its fetishism of democracy may also be a step backward, allowing the continuity or more open emergence of anti-democratic forces. The rhetoric of democracy concentrating on memories and reconciliation (that may cover up social injustice) should perhaps give way to processes that more directly address matters of social and political inequity, such as poverty and education. It is these that should top the peace agendas and plans that the U.S. and Europe hold out for Colombia.

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Israel Perhaps the most poetic parts of AUC leader Carlos Castaño’s autobiography are written in praise of the country (Israel) that taught him both his military skills and his personal ethos (Aranguren Molina 2001). An entire chapter is devoted to his adventures in Israel. He was part of a program of counterinsurgency training for Colombian military personnel organized by the Israel Defense Force. For many in Latin America, especially the military, an identity is recognized between Latin American values of machismo and Israeli visions of manhood, often constructed by Latin Americans as representing an appealing organization of disciplined violence. The importance of the Israeli model has a long history, even predating the establishment of the independent state of Israel (Klich 1988). The Zionist struggle and its values became part of the imaginary of many in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s through the former’s concern to find allies in its fight for international recognition. This was to some extent influenced by the dependency of Latin American countries on the U.S. (see Jamail and Gutierrez 1988). However, it was not until Israel’s wars of defensive expansion in 1967 and 1973, and the subsequent political isolation of Israel, that there was a major intensification of Israel’s arms trade with Latin America and the involvement of Israel in military training, as well as the exchange of intelligence. Furthermore, in the 1960s, the Israel Ministry of Defense was influential in the development of paramilitary organizations in Central America—Israel’s Gadna paramilitary youth organization being a model (Jamail and Gutierrez 1988). The nature of the Latin America–Israel association is expressed in Israel’s strong support of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua and the later support by Israel for Reagan’s ‘freedom-fighting’ Contras. As Klich (1988)

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argues, such support is driven by pragmatic economic and security demands. But what I suggest, regardless of considerations of motivation, is that the Israel connection in Latin America draws attention to the paramilitary function of Israel in the interest of Empire dominated by the U.S. Israel is the supplier of the main weaponry—Galil assault rifles and Uzi submachine guns—of Latin American paramilitary organizations. The Galil and Uzi are the chief weapons of the Guatemalan and Colombian armies: “Israeli weaponry is crucial to clients such as Guatemala and the contras who are shunned—at least publicly—by more conventional suppliers” (Jamail and Gutierrez 1988: 16). The dynamics of power and the reproduction of orders in changing global circumstances are impelled in a clandestine drama of violence in which paramilitary organizations play a vital role. The U.S., as the engine of Empire, is influential in the sustaining of old processes under the cloak of liberalizing developments through the paramilitary function of covert and illegitimate violence, delegating to dependent states such as Israel a key role. What I have termed the paramilitary function of Empire is produced on several different but interconnected levels. Or, at least, that’s what they say.

NOTE 1. See its own Web site, www.colombialibre.org.

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REFERENCES Aranguren Molina, Mauricio. 2001. Mi confesión: Carlos Castaño revela sus secretos. Bogota: Editorial Oveja Negra. Aretxaga, Begoña. 2000. “A Fictional Reality: Paramilitary Death Squads and the Construction of State Terror in Spain.” Pp. 127–150 in Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror, ed. Jeffrey Sluka. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cubides C., Fernando. 2001. “From Private to Public Violence: The Paramilitaries.” Pp. 127– 150 in Violence in Colombia 1990–2000: Waging War and Negotiating Peace, ed. Charles Bergquist, Ricardo Peñaranda, and Gonzalo Sánchez G. Wilmington: SR Books. Jamail, Milton, and Margo Gutierrez. 1988. “The Israeli Connection: Guns and Money in Central America.” NACLA—Report on the Americas 21, no. 2:13–39. Klich, Ignacio. 1988. “Latin America, the United States and the Birth of Israel: The Case of Somoza’s Nicaragua.” Journal of Latin American Studies 20:389–432. Schirmer, Jennifer. 1998. The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sluka, Jeffrey. 2000. “State Terror and Anthropology.” Pp. 1–45 in Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror, ed. Jeffrey Sluka. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Taussig, Michael. 1992. The Nervous System. New York: Routledge. ———. 2003. Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia. New York: The New Press. Zˇizˇek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS  Glenn Bowman trained in social anthropology at Oxford. His doctoral fieldwork (1983–1985) focused on Jerusalem pilgrimage and led to his subsequent interest in Palestinian communities under occupation. As well as continuing field research in the Occupied Territories, he has worked in Yugoslavia on nationalist mobilization and the production and dissemination of contemporary art. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology Department of the University of Kent, where he convenes the MA program in the Anthropology of Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Identity. Charles W. Brown, an independent researcher, has a Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Lund University, Sweden. He has worked with cross-disciplinary theory and methodology, and has done fieldwork in India, Nepal, Malaysia, and Appalachia in the United States. His most recent studies have been in tiger conservation baseline work and applied work in Vietnam, as well as American right-wing issues. Allen Feldman is Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Communication, New York University, and a

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political/medical anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic field research in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and New York City. He is the author of Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (1997, 3rd printing) and numerous articles on political violence, including the forthcoming “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma Aesthetic” in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (Winter 2004). Caroline Ifeka is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. Since the early 1990s she has been based in the U.K. and Nigeria. Currently supported by a Leverhulme Trust grant, she is researching and writing on conflict, multinational corporations, and the state, and indigenous cosmologies, plants, and market forces in changing responses to Christianity on the Nigeria-Cameroon border. Bruce Kapferer, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, has held major teaching and research posts in Australia, England, Scandinavia, Holland, and the U.S. He currently heads a research group at the university (funded by the Norwegian Research Council) that is examining contemporary state and extra-state processes. He has published books and articles on the basis of his ethnographic field research in Zambia, Sri Lanka, and Australia. At present, he is engaged in a comparative study of modern state systems and their histories of transformation. Yngve Lithman received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Stockholm University in 1978. He is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Bergen, where he heads the research center on international migration and ethnic relations (IMER). He also heads an EU-funded research project related to minorities and migrants in Europe. He has written extensively on Canadian First Nations (Indians), post-

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war migration in Europe, second-generation issues, sports, and epistemological issues. Staffan Löfving is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Latin American Studies, Stockholm University. He has a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Uppsala University and is the author (with Charlotta Widmark) of Banners of Belonging: The Politics of Indigenous Identity in Bolivia and Guatemala (2002). Leif Manger is currently Professor of Social Anthropology and former head of the Department of Social Anthropology in Bergen. Manger’s main research has been related to the Sudan, and his research and publications include studies on household adaptations in oasis and mountain environments and savannah plains. His latest monograph is From the Mountains to the Plains: The Integration of the Lafofa Nuba in Sudanese Society (1994). Heidi Moksnes holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology and is Research Fellow at the Collegium of Development Studies, Uppsala University. In her research, she has focused on political participation among indigenous peoples, with a special focus on Mayas in Chiapas, Mexico. Her Ph.D. dissertation, “Mayan Suffering, Mayan Rights: Faith and Citizenship among Catholic Tzotziles in Highland Chiapas, Mexico” (2003), centered on the association Las Abejas in Chenalhó. Carolyn Nordstrom is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the 21st Century (2004), A Different Kind of War Story (1997), and Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Stories of Violence and Survival (1995). She has received grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur

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Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the United States Institute of Peace. K. Ravi Raman is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. Research areas include the political economy of development, minority studies, social history, and social movements. He has had numerous articles published, mostly in Economic and Political Weekly, and is currently finalizing a book project, Globalization and Its Consequences: Plantation Politics and Livelihood Struggles in Southwest Asia. Jakob Rigi received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from London University in 1999. He has done fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Russia in 1995–1996 and 2003, and is the author of Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan (2002). Currently, he is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. Christopher C. Taylor is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has done fieldwork in ethnomedicine and medical anthropology in Rwanda and in Côte d'Ivoire. He is the author of Milk, Honey, and Money: Changing Concepts in Rwandan Healing (1992) and Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (1999).