The Situated Politics of Belonging 2006920654

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The Situated Politics of Belonging

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SAGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL SOCIOLOGY Editor Julia Evetts, University of Nottingham, UK

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The Situated Politics of Belonging Edited by

Nira Yuval-Davis, Kalpana Kannabiran and Ulrike Vieten

SAGE Studies in International Sociology 55 Sponsored by the International Sociological Association/ISA

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© Introduction and editorial arrangement by Nira Yuval-Davis, Kalpana Kannabiran and Ulrike Vieten, 2006 First published 2006 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B-42, Panchsheel Enclave Post Box 4109 New Delhi 110 017 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-10 1 4129 2101 5 ISBN-13 978 1 4129 2101 5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2006920654 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd, Chennai Printed and bound in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead Printed on paper from sustainable resources

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Contents Preface Biographical Notes Introduction

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Section One: Multiculturalism, Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Politics of Belonging 1 Belongings in a Globalising and Unequal World: Rethinking Translocations Floya Anthias

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2 Culture, Identity and Rights: Challenging Contemporary Discourses of Belonging Gurminder K. Bhambra

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3 Domestic Cosmopolitanism and Structures of Feeling: the Specificity of London Mica Nava

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4 A Cartography of Resistance: the National Federation of Dalit Women Kalpana Kannabiran

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Section Two: Racisms, Sexisms and Contemporary Politics of Belonging 5 Im/possible Inhabitations Nirmal Puwar

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6 An Inhospitable Port in the Storm: Recent Clandestine West African Migrants and the Quest for Diasporic Recognition Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe

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7 Alterity and Belonging in Diaspora Space: Changing Irish Identities and ‘Race’-Making in the ‘Age of Migration’ Alice Feldman

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8 Recognition, Respect and Rights: Refugees Living on Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) in Australia Louise Humpage and Greg Marston

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9 Gender and Caste Conflicts in Rural Bihar: Dalit Women as Arm Bearers Suruchi Thapar-Björkert

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Section Three: Human Rights, Military Interventions and Contemporary Politics of Belonging 10 The Judgement of Evil and Contemporary Politics of Belonging Robert Fine

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11 National Interests, National Identity and ‘Ethical Foreign Policy’ David Chandler

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12 Australians in Guantanamo Bay: Gradations of Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging Zlatko Skrbim

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13 ‘The Enemy of My Enemy is Not My Friend’: Women’ s Rights, Occupation and ‘Reconstruction’ in Iraq Nadje Al-Ali

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14 Legislating Utopia? Violence against Women: Identities and Interventions Gita Sahgal

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Index

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Preface This volume, The Situating Contemporary Politics of Belonging, is an outcome of an international conference that took place in London on the 25–27 August 2004. Together with its sister publication, the special issue of the journal Patterns of Prejudice on Boundaries, Identities and Belonging, this volume includes chapters developed out of the presentations during the conference. The conference was organised as a combined interim conference of two research committees of the International Sociological Association – RC 05 on Ethnic, Race and Minority Relations and RC32 on Women in Society. The presidents of the two RCs, Prof. Nira Yuval-Davis and Prof. Kalpana Kannabiran respectively are two of the editors of the volume. The third editor, Ulrike M. Vieten, a PhD student of Nira Yuval-Davis, also played a major role in organising the conference. Our thanks go to the International Sociological Association Publications Committee and Sage Publications that enabled us to produce this volume. However, this would not have been possible without the support of the University of East London, Asmita Resource Centre for Women, Secunderabad, India and the British Sociological Association, which provided the necessary support and made the conference possible.

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Biographical Notes Dr Nadje Al-Ali is a senior lecturer in social anthropology at the Institute of Arab & Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. Her research interests range from women’s movements and civil society in the Middle East to issues related to Muslim migrants and refugees. Her recent research revolves around gender, transnational activism and political transition in Iraq. Her publications include Gender, Secularism and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women’s Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and New Approaches to Migration: Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home (edited volume with Khalid Koser, Routledge, 2002). Her forthcoming book is A Modern History of Iraqi Women (Zed, 2007). She is a member of Women in Black, UK and a founding member of Act Together: Women’s Action on Iraq. Floya Anthias is Professor of Sociology at Oxford Brookes University. Her work spans the study of racism, ethnicity, class, gender and migration. Recent research includes exclusion and identity, self-employment amongst women and minorities and the life chances of the children of ethnic entrepreneurs. As well as numerous articles in refereed journals, she has published many books. Her latest books are Gender and Migration in Southern Europe (co-edited, Berg, 2000) and Rethinking Antiracisms: From Theory to Practice (co-edited, Routledge, 2002). Dr Gurminder K. Bhambra is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Social and Political Thought programme in the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex. Her research focuses on social explanation, postcolonial theory and history, and the politics of knowledge production. David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. His books include: Constructing Global Civil Society: Morality and Power in International Relations (Palgrave, 2004); From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention (Pluto, 2002); and Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (Pluto, 2000). Dr Alice Feldman lectures in the School of Sociology at University College Dublin. She co-directs the Migration & Citizenship Research Initiative and is a co-founder of the Identity, Diversity & Citizenship Research Programme, both based in the Geary Institute at UCD (www.ucd.ie/geary). Her research addresses the dynamics of ethnic diversification and social change in European societies. In addition to work on Irish identities and subjectivities, current projects examine the development of migrant-led civil society organisations and the implications of

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‘intercultural capital’ for integration, anti-racism and social inclusion policies and practices. This work will be published in a forthcoming book, AlieNation: Migration, Belonging and Social Change in Ireland. Other research has centred on religious discrimination in England and Wales, and on post-colonialism, indigenous peoples’ movements and self-determination rights. Robert Fine is Chair of the Department of Sociology and convenor of the MA in Social and Political Thought in Warwick University. His books include Democracy and the Rule of Law (republished in 2002) and Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (2001). Among others, he has co-edited People, Nation and State (1999). He is currently engaged in research on cosmopolitan social theory and has an ESRC funded project on humanitarian military intervention. Dr Louise Humpage is a Lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Having recently returned from Australia, her research interests in the areas of refugees, indigenous peoples and social policy are now based in both Australia and New Zealand. Dr Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe was formerly Reader in Anthropology at the University of East London (UK) and is currently a visiting scholar in the Cultural Anthropology Department at Duke University (USA). Her research interests include comparative ‘mixed race’ theories and identities politics, feminist, (post)colonial and transnational genealogies of the African Diaspora and the discrepant management of public memories in cultural and heritage tourism. She has conducted ethnographic research in the US, the UK and most recently in South Africa, where she deployed visual and ethnographic methodologies to explore the interface between nation-narratives and tourist-tales in emergent cultural and heritage tourism industries in Cape Town. She has published widely on these issues. Among her most recent publications are Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of ‘Race’, Nation and Gender (Routledge, 1999) and the edited ‘Mixed Race’ Studies: A Reader (Routledge, 2004). At the moment, she is working on a new book project entitled Out of Africa (‘By Any Means Necessary’): Recent Clandestine West African Migrants and the Gendered Politics of Survival. She was recently elected to the Executive Board of ASWAD (Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora). Kalpana Kannabiran is Professor of Sociology at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, India and founder member of a women’s collective, Asmita Resource Centre for Women. She is the current President of RC32 (Women In Society) of the International Sociological Association. Her areas of specialisation are Sociology of Law, Jurisprudence and Gender Studies. She has co-authored a volume of essays, De-Eroticizing Assault: Essays on Modesty, Honour and Power (Stree, Calcutta 2002), co-edited Muvalur Ramamirthammal’s Web of Deceit: Devadasi Reform in Colonial India (Kali for Women, New Delhi, 2003) and edited The Violence of Normal Times: Essays on Women’s Lived Realities, (New Delhi: Women Unlimited in association with Kali for Women, 2005).

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Dr Greg Marston is a Lecturer in the School of Social Work and Applied Human Sciences, University of Queensland, Australia. Greg is undertaking research in the areas of income support, employment services and refugee policy. Mica Nava is Professor of Cultural Studies at the School of Social Science, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London, UK. Her publications include Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism and Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity. She is currently completing the work Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference, due to be published by Berg in 2007. Dr Nirmal Puwar is a Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has published widely on the dynamics of space and bodies in relation to ‘universal’ speaking positions and the somatic norm. Her works include Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (Berg, 2004), South Asian Women in the Diaspora co-edited with P. Raghuram (Berg, 2003) and a special issue of Fashion Theory on Orientalism with N. Bhatia (Berg, 2003). She is currently working on methodology, memory and materials. Gita Sahgal is the head of the Gender unit in Amnesty International. She has been a long-term broadcaster, a director of prize-winning documentary films and a journalist. She has written on issues of feminisms, racism and fundamentalisms. Among others, she has co-edited with Nira Yuval-Davis Refusing Holy Orders: Women and Fundamentalism in Britain (Virago, 1992; WLUML, 2002). Dr Zlatko Skrbim teaches Sociology at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. His publications include Long-distance Nationalism (1999) and Constructing Singapore (with Michael Barr, forthcoming 2006) and papers on diaspora politics, nationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalisation. He is vicepresident of the Australian Sociological Association, and vice-president of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Ethnic, Race and Minority Relations. Dr Suruchi Thapar-Björkert currently holds a lectureship at the University of Bristol in the Department of Sociology. She has previously held teaching and research positions at the Development Studies and Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research falls in three specific areas: Gendered Discourses of Colonialism and Nationalism, Gendered Violence in India and Qualitative Research Methodologies. She has published widely in refereed journals such as Feminist Review, Women’s Studies International Forum, Journal of Gender Studies, Women’s History Review and Oral History Journal. She has made several media presentations to Radio Feminist ATTAC, BBC Radio Bristol and BBC. She was a visiting research fellow with ACSIS and Tema Ethnicity, Linkoping University from October 2004 till January 2005. Her monograph, Women in the Indian Nationalist Movement: Unseen Faces and Unheard voices, 1930–1942 has recently been published with Sage, New Delhi.

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Ulrike M. Vieten is currently writing her PhD thesis (‘Situating Cosmopolitanisms’), supervised at the School of Culture, Social Science and Media Studies, University of East London, UK. Her teaching experiences include undergraduate seminars at the University of East London as well as workshops on ‘Romani and Sinti history and culture in Europe’ and ‘strategies of equality implementation’ (Hanover, Germany). She received her Master’s degree in Gender and Ethnic Studies from the University of Greenwich (UK). She also holds a Master’s degree in Social Science and has studied Labour and European Law in Germany. She co-published and contributed to the legal commentary on the Federal Gender Equality Legislation (Schiek, D. et al. (2002), Frauengleichstellungsgesetze des Bundes und der Länder, Frankfurt am Main: Bund Verlag). Nira Yuval-Davis is a Professor and Graduate Course Director in Gender, Sexualities and Ethnic Studies at the School of Social Science, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London. She is the current President of the Research Committee 05 (on Ethnic, Race and Minority Relations) of the International Sociological Association. Nira Yuval-Davis has written extensively on theoretical and empirical aspects of nationalism, racism, fundamentalism, citizenship and gender relations in Britain and Europe, Israel and other Settler Societies. Among her written and edited books are Woman – Nation – State (Macmillan, 1989), Racialized Boundaries (Routledge, 1992), Refusing Holy Orders: Women and Fundamentalism in Britain (Virago, 1992), The Gulf War and the New World Order (Zed Books, 1992), Unsettling Settler Societies (Sage, 1995), Crossfires: Nationalism, Racism and Gender in Europe (Pluto, 1995), Women, Citizenship & Difference (Zed Books, 1999) and Warning Signs of Fundamentalisms (WLUML, 2004). Her book Gender and Nation (Sage, 1997) has been translated by now to seven different languages. She is currently working on a monograph on Nationalism, Identity and the Politics of Belonging as well as on an ESRC research project on Identity, Performance and Social Action: The Use of Community Theatre among Refugees.

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Introduction Situating Contemporary Politics of Belonging By Nira Yuval-Davis, Kalpana Kannabiran and Ulrike M. Vieten We are undoubtedly in a global crisis situation which encompasses a variety of social, political, economic and moral dimensions, often enmeshed in ideological constructions which naturalise, essentialise and fixate collectivity boundaries, ‘civilisations’ and power hierarchies. These fixities are used in order both to defend and to promote privileged positions of power as well as personal and communal defence mechanisms of the many who feel threatened and deprived by the same processes. These dynamics dominate many local political scenarios around issues of racism, immigration and ethnic and national militarised conflicts as well as global international relations constructed in terms of ‘the clash of civilisations’, ‘axes of evil’ and the ‘global war on terrorism’. Human rights and human security discourses are affected and sometimes constructed by these discourses, with special racialised exclusionary effects which operate on a variety of levels, from pogroms and wars to immigration policies and law – domestic and international. At the same time, constructions of gender, sexuality and family relations play central roles in justifying these policies and have a high symbolic value with a direct effect on the lives of women and sexual minorities in very many places. Part of this process is also the fluidity and constant expansion of classes that are excluded, the creation of new minorities and the drastic shrinking of democratic spaces, nationally and internationally. This is the overall context in which we would like this book on the situated politics of belonging to be read. One of the main arguments of the book is that it is impossible to understand the ways individual people and groupings relate to and are being treated by both state and society these days just by being related to as either citizens and/or having specific ethnic, national or racial identities. Politics of belonging encompass and relate both citizenship and identity, adding an emotional dimension which is central to notions of belonging. The infamous (at least in Britain) ‘cricket test’ by Norman Tebbit illustrates this well. Tebbit, a secretary of state in Margaret Thatcher’s government during the 1980s, claimed that if British citizens applaud a national team other than the British one in an international cricket match,1 they don’t really belong to the British nation. Before Tebbit, people like Enoch Powell – who was thrown out of the Conservative party because of his racist views – argued that people, even if they were born in Britain and had a British citizenship, do not belong to the nation

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because of their racial origin: ‘the West Indian does not by being born in England, become an Englishman’ (quoted in Gilroy 1987: 46). Tebbit’s statement was the first time support of a specific sports team had been used in Britain in this racialised way and it was vehemently rejected by most British people and vocally by the Labour party, then in opposition. Today, after eight years of Labour government and in the midst of ‘the global war on terrorism’, such a discourse is anything but exceptional. Admittedly, the lectures of David Blunkett (former Labour home secretary) and his white paper on citizenship, national cohesion and belonging are full of examples from the football field rather than cricket, but the message is the same. Of course, after it was found that some of the suicide bombers in London in July 2005 were British citizens, born and raised in Britain, new laws are being added to the British legislation which formalise such rhetoric. Not only is it becoming a criminal offence to ‘glorify acts of terrorism’, which is also going to be possible grounds for deporting people from Britain and even cancelling their citizenship,2 but a heckler in the Labour Party conference in September 2005 who vocally opposed British involvement in the Iraq occupation was arrested for a few hours by the police using the anti-terrorism legislation. This is a situation which is by no means unique to Britain. In the United States, the notion of academic freedom is being reinterpreted in an Orwellian ‘doublethink’ way in order to prevent any radical discourse; in France the majoritarian public sphere is being ‘cleansed’ of religious modes of dress, while in India, antiterrorist legislation has for a long time systematically targeted religious minorities. We will return to a more detailed discussion of all this, but it is necessary to delineate at this point how we define citizenship, identity and belonging. Our definition of citizenship, following that of Marshall (1950; 1981), is ‘full membership in a community with all its rights and obligations’. The advantage of such a definition, as Hall and Held (1989) and Yuval-Davis (1991; 1997) have argued, is that it does not limit citizenship to states and the right to carry a passport, but to membership in all kinds of polities from local to global in which people participate in a multi-layered way (Yuval-Davis 1999; 2004, Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999). This is important not only because historically – and therefore presumably also in the future – citizenship has not always been related to a nation-state (Cohen 1999), but also because people’s citizenships in other polities directly affect and often mediate the nature of their citizenship in a particular state, even when it is not organised on a federal or a communal basis.3 If citizenship relates to the participatory dimension of belonging, identity relates to the ways in which people define themselves and each other. As Martin (1995) defines it, identities are narratives, stories that people tell about themselves and each other. These narratives are contested, fluid and constantly changing but are clustered around some hegemonic constructions of boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’ and between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and are closely related to political processes. Belonging is about emotional attachment, about feeling ‘at home’ and – as Michael Ignatieff points out (2001) – about feeling ‘safe’. In the days of the

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‘global war on terrorism’ such a definition gets a new poignancy. Belonging tends to be naturalised and becomes articulated and politicised only when it is threatened in some way. The politics of belonging comprises specific political projects aimed at constructing belonging to a particular collectivity or collectivities which themselves are being constructed in these projects in very specific ways. Citizenships and identities, as well as ‘cultures and traditions’ – in fact all signifiers of borders and boundaries play central roles in discourses of the politics of belonging. The talk of culture, Mamdani argues, explains politics as the consequence of the defining essence of culture. Culture talk after 9/11, for instance, he says, explains the practice of terror as ‘Islamic’ – ‘Islamic terrorism’ then becoming both the description and explanation of the events of 9/11 (Mamdani 2005: 17–18). The other attributes of culture talk fit into this mould. There is a fundamental opposition between modern and pre-modern people: the premoderns may be either those who are merely lagging behind (‘tribalist Africans’) or those who resist and oppose modernity (‘fundamentalist Muslims’); they have either no creative ability or an infinite propensity to destroy. Culture is now said to be a matter of life and death. This kind of thinking is deeply reminiscent of tracts from the history of modern colonization. This history stigmatizes those shut out of modernity as antimodern because they resist being shut out. It assumes that people’s public behavior, particularly their political behavior, can be read from their habits and customs, whether religious or traditional. But could it be that a person who takes his or her religion literally is a potential terrorist? And that someone who thinks of a religious text as metaphorical or figurative is better suited to civic life and the tolerance it calls for? How, one may ask, does the literal reading of sacred texts translate into hijacking, murder, and terrorism? (Mamdani 2005: 19–20)

The phenomenon of radicalised young European Muslim men willing to engage in terrorism and murdering fellow Muslims and other randomly chosen nonMuslim civilians has to be approached sociologically as well as politically in ways that should reflect the actuality of failed cultural, economic and political inclusion in hegemonic Christian secular societies. The continuities between this racialised expression of belonging in Europe and the United Kingdom and the communalisation of consciousness in India that similarly poses an opposition between Hindu majoritarian ‘secular’ discourses and Muslim minority ‘communalised’ consciousness are striking. Violence is central to projects of belonging. Mamdani (2004) observes that the discourse on violence antithetical to progress is discussed in two ways in the contemporary world. Cultural explanations attribute political violence to the absence of modernity – the clash of civilisations when it is global (i.e. when the United States is drawn into the circle), communal or ethnic conflict when it ‘does not cross the boundary between the west and the rest’ (Mamdani 2004: 4). It is necessary to reflect on the closure of both institutionally measured and largely ignored multicultural existences in different countries across the world which were and continue to be encompassed by a disputed though not abandoned neo-liberal ideology. It is, among other things, the effort of the globally competing national/regional markets and the deregulated social welfare and employment

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standards that structurally marginalise those individuals and communities who do not fit into the mainstream profile of the well-educated, secular, mobile and flexible manager and consumer of his/her modern life style. The Canadian journalist Naomi Klein (2001: 23) anticipated that there might be a connection between the fading public infrastructure in both rich and poor countries and the forceful indoctrination of Taliban leaders in Islamic seminars in Pakistan. The emergence of socially disentangled individuals, particularly the gendered dimension of these processes of disentanglement, indicates a new scale of urban violence and consecutive militant group actions. Clearly, crime and violence vary with respect to the scale of targeted victims as they do in their gendered, racialised profiles when we are looking, for example, at gun culture, gang rapes and hooliganism, white racist attacks on the one hand and terrorist threats and organised mass killing on the other hand. None the less, we are confronted with a socially rather than culturally and religiously framed crisis of masculinity that does suggest that the hegemonic, white, Protestant masculinity is trapped in a crisis of legitimacy too.4 In spite of the fact that the personal profile of two of the suicide bombers in London suggests a fairly well-adjusted civil life, the social background of the other men and attempted murder suspects could lead to a different interpretation: the BBC and Channel 4 television news, for example, screened poor housing estates in Leeds and in London; it was mentioned that the men lived on social welfare. Hence, the overall atmosphere of cultural and social isolation refers to broader signals and sociological data indicating that there is a link between school failures, material and symbolic exclusion and male chauvinistic attitudes. Obviously, the Western idea of social regulation and social emancipation which appeared to be balanced historically by diverse models of reformist or revolutionary collective struggles is now pushed away by militant trans-subjects out of control. And where does the politics of belonging, or rather the modern infirmity of non-belonging, come into play? The notion of belonging refers to patterns of trust and confidence and raises fundamental concerns about the relation of Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) (Tönnies 1887; 1935; 1969).Within this frame we have to think about the shifting meaning of identity, family, the influence of spatial (migration) and existential (material) displacement and, further, the actually confused (and diffused) longing for stable emotional attachments as they are articulated in national, ethnic, cultural and religious affiliations. Currently, cosmopolitanism proposes an alternative ideological cluster to the de-legitimised containers of the modern nation-state that historically combine some forms of secularism with an idealistically tamed though often out-of-control nationalism. The question that arises is, who needs cosmopolitanisms and where do cosmopolitanisms and multiculturalisms blend? In its long history, cosmopolitanism has meant universalism, tolerance, world citizenship, worldwide community of human beings and global culture and has been used as an instrument in political struggle. However, the unconditional inclusiveness of its abstract formulation can also be used to pursue the exclusionary interests of a particular social group. Calhoun (2003) criticises cosmopolitan

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liberals for failing to ‘recognize the social conditions of their own discourse, presenting it as freedom from social belonging rather than a special sort of belonging, a view from nowhere or everywhere rather than from particular social spaces’ (Calhoun 2003: 532). As Pollock et al. (2002), Yuval-Davis (2005) and Vieten (2006, forthcoming 2007) point out, various cosmopolitan standpoints have to be contextualised and situated articulating intersected positions in terms of class, ethnicity, gender and so on. Otherwise, they would, even if not intentionally, recognise and legitimise only majoritarian discourse, which is usually West-centric, heterosexist and middle class in nature, and would render invisible the standpoint and interest of excluded minorities. Situating cosmopolitanism could mean that the metropolitan city represents the classic image of a modern cosmopolitan space. The stress and excitement of living in London, for example, with its multi-faith, transnational inhabitants and its image of a cosmopolitan location, however, is confronted with new racialising strategies as a result of the 7 July 2005 terrorist murders and some of the governmental responses to them. The symbolical acknowledgement of 7 July underlines its special memorising in contrast to other non-Western places of terror blasts and mass crime. This kind of identifying speech verifies that these privileged locations matter in a different, namely, West-centric and Eurocentric way, so that it is immediately different from more or less vague imaginaries of becoming a victim in other ‘nondescriptive, mutually indistinguishable’ places and spaces. This kind of naming also obscures the more pervasive practices of state terror and renders invisible the experience of the victim–survivor in those other contexts. Naming is also critical to this exercise of terror by states – rather, the pseudonaming of these acts confers a legitimacy that immediately sets them apart from the ‘terrorist’ attacks. In a pre-militaristic response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, President Bush set up a new Western civilisation mission declaring the global war against terrorism. Clearly, the mass murder of thousands of civilians must be regarded as an awful hate crime; nevertheless, these terrorist attacks on US soil were strategically hitting the symbols of capitalism and US governance and thus signalled an anti-imperialist political fight. Osama bin-Laden was introduced as the public face of Al Quaeda, the most prominent international terrorist network, and is constantly labelled the leader of this new kind of global guerrilla war against the Western post-industrial societies and their satellite nations across the world. Yet, Barth (2000) in his analysis of the situation of fundamentalist movements in Middle Eastern countries underscores the fact that even the highest Muslim leadership does not possess this kind of central authority that allows one to speak on behalf of the entire community across the world. This highlights the desperate translation of the realities of terrorism by the superpowers into familiar hierarchical structures, the core question they seem to ask being, what kind of institutional logic mediates between individually misled fanatic commitments to Muslim faith and the religion itself? As Yeatman has pointed out (1992: 4), ‘It becomes clear that the liberal conception of the group requires the group to assume an authoritarian character: there has to be a headship of the group which represents its

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homogeneity of purpose by speaking with the one, authoritative voice.’ As in many other cases, the construction of Al Quaeda, let alone ‘global terrorism’ in such a way might prove to be a dead end if not worse. Clearly, the notion of individual cosmopolitan performances has to be differentiated from collective organising strategies: a cosmopolitan habit, for example, being understood as an open-minded stance towards Otherness, and thus, eventually, promising the capacity to integrate conflicting values and experiences smoothly, can be very supportive to a multi-dimensional dynamic (capitalist) culture. Interpreted in an optimistic way, it also proposes conductive spaces within environments of hostility. However, politically speaking, ideologies matter where cosmopolitan habit, citizen/human rights and multi-dimensional culture engage with each other. Multiculturalism, reduced to an administrative tool aiming to regulate collective diversity for cohesion and nation-state purposes, misses the point: structurally, a hegemonic community constructs itself in taken-for-granted terms of customs, modes and rights; cosmopolitan individualism and multicultural minority collectivism are supposed to challenge these assumptions, but they do not replace them. As Stuart Hall reminds us, the ‘multicultural question’ concerns all people and communities – locally, nationally-internationally and globally. We therefore accept Hall’s important differentiation between the multi-culturalism that many of us have been critical of (e.g. Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992, Yuval-Davis 1997, May 1999) and ‘the multicultural question’. To quote Hall, There are many multiculturalist strategies that have been adopted in different societies with varying degrees of success. I am not interested in the many ‘isms’ because I think they are all addressing the same emergent problem of this historical moment, which I call the multicultural question. The multicultural question is whether it is possible for groups of people from different cultural, religious, linguistic, historical backgrounds, to occupy the same social space, whether that is a city or a nation or a region – applied by circumstances. What are the terms on which they can live with one another without either one group [the less powerful group] having to become the imitative version of the dominant one – ie an assimilationism, or on the other hand, the two groups hating one another, or projecting images of degradation. In other words, how can people live together in difference? It is the underlying question of globalisation. Let’s say it is the question that globalisation has unconsciously produced. It is not what globalisation is intending to produce. But the impact of globalisation has been to drive people from their homes, wherever they are, into other people’s territory, to send them away. I mean they are moving people away. People are on the move, for one reason or another. Ethnic violence, poverty, unemployment, hunger, ecological degradation, no matter what, but people are on the move from their settled place of residence and their cultures and their histories and so on. So this is a world of movement, of interchange, of confrontation, etc. What are the terms in which people come to some settlement? Which terms would allow them to be different in themselves and at the same time to recognize their common responsibilities to people who are not themselves? We need to develop a toolbox to be able to deal with these questions.5

The meaning of tolerance, increasingly used as a ‘good democracy shield’, has to be accessed analytically and confronted with some of the negative outcomes of such an approach. As Wemyss (2006) argues, tolerance is essentially connected to power and thus significantly shaped by hierarchy. Those at the top of a society or at the highest rank of nation-states can grant or withhold tolerance.

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As the call for global rights, global peace and global intervention is merging into a Western-style image of democracy and global governance, we feel it is particularly important to rethink notions of human rights, to reflect critically on current racialising politics and to encourage engagement in alternative concepts of collective liberation. We would like to argue that the increased alienation and deprivation enshrined in global capitalisms place us increasingly in direct confrontation with the broader phenomenon of social fascism. As the Portuguese sociologist (and legal scholar) Boaventura De Sousa Santos suggests, In all its forms, social fascism is a regime characterized by social relations and life experiences under extremely unequal power relations and exchanges which lead to particularly severe and potentially irreversible forms of exclusion. Such forms of social exclusion exist both within national societies (the interior South) and in the relations among countries (the global South). (2002: 456)6

Social exclusion continues to throw societies into serious crisis, the resolutions coming powerfully through literature and political praxis and rarely through law. Ironically, these continue to be ‘illegitimate’ in the absence of legal recognition of these categories. Social existence is defined by the contradictory logics of popular consensus and legal [il]legitimacy. The era of globalisation has marked a radical shift in the politics of organising of groups that have been subject to systematic discrimination especially through new social movements. While resistance has spread and has found progressively new articulations drawing in larger and larger constituencies, change itself is contingent on older, deeply entrenched structures that are resistant to change, for instance the law – jurisprudence and practice. The fairly established proportions of the three main circles of inclusion in late modern Western society are shifting in fundamental ways. Whereas the ‘intimate society’, referring to individuals and social groups who enjoy high levels of social inclusion, is shrinking, the ‘uncivil civil society’, filled up with people excluded from citizenship and rights, mostly socially invisible and constructed as outsiders in the public mind, is expanding greatly. In between those fractions live people with lives that present grey inclusionary–exclusionary realities (‘strange social society’) who are on the brink of the ‘uncivil’ sphere (de Sousa Santos 2002: 457). The politics of belonging can be viewed as situated in three different – but complementary – ways (Yuval-Davis 2006). First, they are situated temporally. There are particular issues, related to historical, technological, economic and political developments, specific to our times which construct contemporary politics of belonging in certain ways. Second, they are situated spatially. Although certain global historical developments, such as the globalisation of neo-liberal markets, affect all parts of the world, these effects are not homogeneous, and different states and societies are affected in different ways. Third, they are situated intersectionally. Even at the same time and in the same place, not all people affect and are affected by specific politics of belonging in the same ways. Intersecting and intermeshing social locations along different power grids in society – such as along class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality,

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(dis)ability, stage in the life cycle and so on – although unstable in themselves, shifting and contested as they are, have crucial effects on the ways different political projects of belonging construct and represent them, the access they have to any decision-making power or any other resources associated with these projects and even the extent to which they are allowed to be included in them at all. John Crowley (1999) has argued that the politics of belonging is all about ‘the dirty work of boundary maintenance’ (Crowley 1999: 30), but some work harder than others, some get dirtier than others, and the boundaries can be more or less permeable and different people can find themselves on different sides of these boundaries. This basic understanding of the politics of belonging is common to all the contributors to the book. However, different contributors have taken upon themselves different, related tasks; these varying foci are clustered in three different sections. The first section ‘Multiculturalism, Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Politics of Belonging’, examines some central issues of contemporary politics of belonging from a critical feminist and postcolonial theoretical perspective. It explores questions of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism in terms of their potential to frame inclusiveness considering complex networks of global human relationships as well as the particular constructions of politics of belonging in postcolonial divided societies. Floya Anthias in her chapter ‘Belongings in a Globalising and Unequal World: Rethinking Translocations’ attempts to strengthen the study of new and more complex forms of belonging. Within the context of various forms of translocation related to transnational processes, multiculturality and different types of population movement and their perception, Anthias focuses on the variety of ways in which the experience of translocation from one social place to another and the phenomena involved can be understood. She argues that notions of diaspora or hybrid identity generally have been inadequate to grasp the phenomenon of trans-locationality inscribed as a social position by intersectionalities of gender, class, ethnicity and ‘race’. She proposes the concept of translocational positionality as a way of moving the debate forward, abandoning the ‘dominant lens of identity and culture’. Gurminder K. Bhambra reflects in her chapter, ‘Culture, Identity and Rights: Challenging Contemporary Discourses of Belonging’ on the ideological constructions and terminology of inclusion in the West. She puts forward arguments to challenge the Western notion of inclusion in which the conditions are pre-set in terms of ideas of the rule of law, tolerance, human rights, science and objectivity. While deconstructing some core terms, she argues that there is no corresponding acknowledgement that the norms of the present order are themselves established on historical inequities in the production and construction of knowledge and values. Further, by understanding inclusion simply in terms of bringing people into pre-existing forms of organisation, one fails to consider that active participation by those who have previously been excluded from such endeavours may entail a transformation of those very forms. Thus, although issues of race and gender have been acknowledged as important within the social sciences generally, there is still a marked failure to address their constitutive character at deeper levels of understanding: a failure to recognise that an adequate

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consideration of these concepts would entail a radical re-conceptualisation of disciplines, and of the contemporary politics of belonging. In the third chapter ‘Domestic Cosmopolitanism and Structures of Feeling: the Specificity of London’, Mica Nava highlights the fact that in spite of racism and xenophobia in Britain, there has also been ‘another more benevolent history of hospitality, sympathy and desire for cultural and racial “others” ’. The complementary dimensions of what Nava calls ‘domestic cosmopolitanism’ raise different issues in relation to contemporary politics of belonging. Taking into consideration the fact that theoretical considerations of cosmopolitanism tend to focus on issues of citizenship or reflexivity in travel and migration, Nava argues that approaches to cosmopolitanism ignore the impact of feelings when discussing disposition; the focus on travel and mobility excludes the domestic and, as a result, fails to consider the overall meaning of the specificity of gender or gendered experience. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this kind of vernacular cosmopolitanism has become a rather normalised aspect of everyday London life. The visual presence of difference in terms of the variety of individuals and communities contributes to its special metropolitan identity. Thus, the chapter explores some of the specific socio-cultural, historical and geopolitical features of the contemporary state of being and belonging in London. In the final chapter of the first section, ‘A Cartography of Resistance: The National Federation of Dalit Women’, Kalpana Kannabiran proposes to alter the frame of politics of belonging to what she calls ‘politics of becoming’. Kannabiran explores the politics of becoming through an examination of the ways in which social exclusion is resisted, not by demanding inclusion alone, but also through a particular form of political mobilisation by Dalit groups in India. National governments have been unwilling to open social orders up for scrutiny in these new terms – the most marked resistance being that of the Indian government on the issue of caste as race at the Durban conference, a stand that was validated by leading sociologists in the country declaring that caste cannot be seen in the same terms as race. Today we see a marked shift in the articulation of the problem of caste, evident especially around the time of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, a shift that demanded a reformulation of the legal category of caste (consequently the sociological category too), bringing it within the meaning of racism. The politics of becoming, then, transforms the Dalit subject (more specifically the Dalit woman subject) into the more expansive community of people of colour, more specifically, the Indian of African lineage who shares the memories of pain and suffering, of slavery, racism and apartheid and copes with the entrenchment of these systems in postcolonial societies. The second section ‘Racisms, Sexisms and Contemporary Politics of Belonging’, looks at some of the tensions that emerge out of the complexity of contemporary local and diasporic belongings and at what social and political strategies emanate out of them. It focuses on particular case studies spanning West European countries, Australia and India. Some of the racialised and gendered exclusionary effects of forced migration and the impact of immigration on the negotiations of local identities are explored. The section also discusses the

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lack of adequate economic and political participation, which is central to certain local caste and gender politics of belonging. In her chapter ‘Im/possible Inhabitations’, Nirmal Puwar takes a provocative look at the symbolic representation of ‘the nation’ in public spaces. She contemplates some of the implications of the politics of belonging which are involved in tourists gazing at the statue of David in Florence on the one hand and at various sculptures in London’s Trafalgar Square on the other hand. As Puwar argues, these places are, at different moments of the day and of the week, inhabited both by established business and by marginalised traders. We might be aware of the former, but less aware of the latter; the flexible and multiple jobs at the margins are rarely recognised. In Puwar’s view ‘the proximity of the outside of the inside’ is visualising for us ‘differentiated degrees of inclusion (belonging) that we operate with in our contradictory moment’. Puwar analyses both concrete people and representations of people in art as connected embodiments of social spaces. She looks at the ways social meaning is shifting according to contested ideas of national belonging, true-life inclusion and artistic representation. In her contribution, ‘An Inhospitable Port in the Storm: Recent Clandestine West African Migrants and the Quest for Diasporic Recognition’, Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe looks at the recent smuggling of West Africans via Morocco across the Straits of Gibraltar to southern Spain. Using the clandestine movement of people across multinational borders as a paradigm, she theorises about the ways in which gendered processes of transnationalism and globalisation have reconfigured continental African migration routes to Europe. As agents and victims, ‘unofficial’ migrants today deploy strategies which exemplify both the limits of individual agency and the exigencies of survival. In the traditional European migration literature, these contemporary dispersals are frequently situated within more general asylum and immigration discourses, but Ifekwunigwe argues for their gendered and racialised recognition as ‘new’ African diasporas. In doing so, she proposes ‘a reassessment of what constitutes volition and victimhood as defined by the locus classicus African diaspora of transatlantic slavery’. Alice Feldman in her chapter, ‘Alterity and Belonging in Diaspora Space: Changing Irish Identities and “Race”-Making in the “Age of Migration” ’ departs from mainstream approaches while focusing on the complex and overlapping aspects of whiteness and Irishness in a global migration context. She argues that scholarship concerning identity and difference in Ireland has tended to focus primarily on the dynamics of Irish racism or issues relating to the traditional ethnonational Catholic/Protestant divide. She argues that such approaches are limited in their ability to capture the complexities of single personhoods, lived experiences and identifications in the context of the ethnic diversification currently taking place throughout Europe. Through an analysis of three majority ethnic Irish women’s life narratives, Feldman examines how Self construction is related to the constitution of the racialised social orders in which individual lives take place. In their chapter, ‘Recognition, Respect and Rights: Refugees Living on Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) in Australia’, Louise Humpage and Greg Marston look at the precarious situation of refugees granted a temporary protection visa (TPV) in Australia. They argue that the politics of belonging in the context

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of refugee integration is far more complex and multi-faceted a phenomenon than typically represented in the refugee literature. In the literature on resettlement, a distinction is often made between the economic needs and the cultural and social aspects of refugee integration. Although maintaining that the two are intimately connected, Humpage and Marston focus on the social integration of refugees, which incorporates a sense of social belonging that, they argue, is highly dependent on socio-cultural recognition and respect. Using Nancy Fraser’s (1997) analytical distinction between injustices of redistribution and recognition as a starting point, they discuss an innovative community-based organisation in Melbourne that has engaged refugees on TPVs within relational networks that facilitate ‘belonging’ at the local level. This organisation supported an active involvement of refugees in associations based on cultural or legal categories that provide a forum for resisting and challenging the continued lack of recognition faced at the level of public discourse. As the authors propose, politics of ‘belonging’ consists of sets of overlapping and interconnected processes that take place differently in various sub-sectors and spheres of host societies and have various outcomes. The critical deconstruction of traditional notions of belonging exposes far more complex meanings of belonging than are usually recommended by refugee resettlement policies and programmes. In her chapter, ‘Gender and Caste Conflicts in Rural Bihar: Dalit Women as Arm Bearers?’, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert attempts to contextualise the new dimensions of gendered violence in north India. While analysing the connections between gendered caste violence and the politics of the Indian state she argues that Dalit women have been systematically excluded from socio-economic processes of development and governance. Socio-economic exclusion and structural political marginalisation have to be interrelated when approaching the cause of the Dalits, who took recourse to violence. In addition, the particular vulnerability of Dalit women as targets of sexual violence also means that ‘taking up arms’ expresses an active choice to protect them. The third section of the book, ‘Human Rights, Military Interventions and Contemporary Politics of Belonging’, investigates the stream of politics of belonging which underlies contemporary militaristic agendas, gendered violence and the language of racialised representation of ‘the enemy/Other’. What are the implications to these politics of the moralisation of international relations discourse, especially in relation to the central role of the term ‘evil’, with all its religious history of a polarised monotheistic worldview of heaven and hell? Closely related to this is the moral discourse of ‘human rights’ and the paradoxical effects it generates when it transforms itself from an emancipatory discourse of the marginalised into a mode of legitimation of military interventions by superpowers. These issues are investigated more closely by looking at the dynamics of the use of the term ‘evil’, by examining the effects of mass media representations of ‘terrorist suspects’ in terms of hegemonic national belonging and by describing their particular implications for contemporary feminist politics in general and women in Iraq in particular. In his chapter, ‘The Judgement of Evil and Contemporary Politics of Belonging’, Robert Fine challenges the demagogically used term ‘evil’, which frequently

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demarcates the good civilisation in opposition to either ‘evil rough states’ or ‘terrorist murderers’ and typifies a global discourse of contemporary politics of belonging. Sometimes, as in the phrase ‘axis of evil’, it refers to certain states deemed to be the enemies of civilisation; more commonly, as in the phrase ‘evil ones’, it refers to certain non-state or even anti-state actors seen as committed to terrorism. The question Fine is raising concerns the tension between the mutual scepticism of political thought towards the concept of evil on the one hand and our mutual though rather moral understanding of its existence. He argues that the ‘important point is to maintain our sense of astonishment in the face of human atrocity, that tone and emotion of astonishment we find in those authors who seriously sought to understand and resist totalitarianism: Arendt, Camus, Koestler, Orwell, Rousset, CLR James’. David Chandler employs in his chapter, ‘National Interests, National Identity and “Ethical Foreign Policy” ’, an ‘inside/outside’ approach to the context of ‘value-led’ or ‘ethical’ foreign policy. He argues that the shift away from the articulation of national interests through international intervention has to be analysed as a response to the crisis of national identity. The loss of national coherence in Western nationstates has to be related to what is captured ideologically in the phenomenon of international ‘culture wars’. As Chandler argues, ‘the drive behind ethical foreign policy is located in the attempt to resolve the political crisis of Western national identity, reflecting the lack of a shared framework of meaning and a sense of socio-political purpose’. Thus, the twentieth century’s political connection of domestic and international politics can be seen as eroded, posing new contextual questions to the constraints of contemporary (international) politics of belonging, too. Zlatko Skrbim, ‘Australians in Guantanamo Bay: Gradations of Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging’, analyses the hegemonic construction of national belonging regarding media coverage of two Australian prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: Mamdouh Habib, a naturalised Australian citizen who was arrested as a civilian on the Afgani–Pakistani border in October 2001 and David Hicks, an Australian-born Muslim convert who was captured in December 2001 while fighting for the Taliban forces in Afganistan. As Skrbim’ findings suggest, despite their having much in common during the period of captivity, (gender, a rather problematical legal predicament, citizenship, religion, and country of residence), the discrepancies in the media’s treatment of Habib and Hicks were obvious. Hicks received the treatment of an adventurer – an image which according to Skrbim ‘fits the construction of daring Australian masculinity in popular culture’. In contrast, Habib was constructed as ‘primordially attracted to the appeal of fundamentalist transgressions’. Skrbim interrogates a discourse that accepts and reproduces structurally such differential treatments. He suggests that the ‘differential symbolic treatment is reflecting contested representations of Australian identity, masculinity, and the politics of ethnicity and citizenship mirroring complex hierarchies of belonging to an Australian community’. In her chapter, ‘The Enemy of My Enemy Is Not My Friend: Women’s Rights, Occupation and “Reconstruction” in Iraq’, Nadje Al-Ali explores the various strategies and dilemmas for Iraqi women’s rights activists caught between

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nationalist sentiments, hatred for the occupiers, Islamist constituencies, Western governments, Western feminists and Iraqi women’s own fears, hopes and politics of belonging. She argues that it is essential for any meaningful analysis and discussion of the current dilemmas and obstacles to contextualise historically systemic structures. Thus, she looks at the various impacts military intervention and wider human rights abuses, dictatorship, economic sanctions and social conflict have on women’s rights and gender relations in Iraq. She highlights the broader historical–contextual framework while looking at the changing context affecting women and gender relations in Iraq since the 1970s. In the final chapter, ‘Legislating Utopia? Violence against Women: Identities and Interventions’, Gita Sahgal approaches the complexities surrounding the notion of violence as an identifying category of belonging. As she differentiates violence ‘as determinant of the politics of identity’ from merely being a component of identity, she focuses on the contradictory power of narratives of violence. Although ‘agency’ and self-empowerment play an important role among feminists and sexual rights activists, the fact that ‘victimhood’ and politics limit empowerment and often cast women as victims has also to be acknowledged. Sahgal raises thoughtfully the paradoxical dimension of legal protection. In spite of a propagandist misuse of the state or the media, it is also the means of legislation and intervention that helped women to develop secular spaces. Together, this collection of essays aims to examine some of the racialised and gendered effects of contemporary politics of belonging through analyses of the issues, causes and effects of processes which we believe are at the heart of contemporary political and social lives, encompassing questions of identity and citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, emotional attachments, violent conflicts and local and global relationships.

Notes 1 The assumption being that these people would applaud the teams of the countries from which they, or their parents, immigrated. 2 As long as they also have another citizenship so as to comply with human rights legislation which is still part of British legislation. This may be part of the reason there is already a discussion on the possible need to remove this legislation, just five years after its incorporation into the law. 3 The fact that these days, in more and more states, state citizenship can actually be taken away from people with more than one state passport is just one example of this. 4 This is not to say that Catholic Christianity does not contain structural misogyny; certainly, quite the opposite. However, the current imperial shape of Western politics is rather pushed by a certain fundamentalist form of Protestant Christianity. Remarkably, the Catholic ‘Liberation theology’ of Central America and the way it influences visionary socialist political agendas in Latin and South America is underrepresented in our contemporary media and academic discourses in the North-West. 5 Excerpt from the opening address of the conference ‘Racisms, Sexisms and Contemporary Politics of Belonging’. The address was in the form of an interview which Hall titled ‘Rethinking Multiculturalisms’. Nira Yuval-Davis conducted the interview for the opening address. 6 See also Held (2004) for details about ‘globalization, stratification and inequality’.

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References Anthias, Floya and Yuval-Davis, Nira (1992) Racialized Boundaries, London: Routledge. Barth, Fredrik (2000) Are Islamists nationalists or internationalists?, in Kjell Goldmann, Ulf Hannerz and Charles Westin (eds) Nationalism and Internationalism in the Post-Cold War Era, London: Routledge: 51–64. Calhoun, Craig (2003) ‘ “Belonging” in the cosmopolitan imaginary’, Ethnicities 3(4): 531–68. Cohen, Jean. L. (1999) ‘Changing paradigms of citizenship and the exclusiveness of the demos’, International Sociology, 14(3): 245–68. Crowley, John (1999) The politics of belonging: some theoretical consideration, in A. Geddes and A. Favell (eds), The Politics of Belonging: Migrants and Minorities in Contemporary Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate: 15–41. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura (2002) Can law be emancipatory? in Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Toward a New Legal Common Sense, London, Edinburgh: Butterworths LexisNexis, 2 edition, ch. 9: 439–96 or (http://www.geocities.com/relaju/souzasantos.htm) Fraser, Nancy (1997) Justice Interruptus, New York: Routledge. Gilroy, Paul (1987) There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack, London: Hutchinson. Hall, Stuart and Held, David (1989), Citizens and citizenship, in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), New Times, London: Lawrence and Wishart 173–190. Held, David (2004) Global Covenant – The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus, Cambridge: Polity Press. Ignatief, Michael (2001) Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Klein, Naomi (2001) ‘Getting to the heart of the worlds problems’, Guardian Weekly, November (1–7) 23. Mamdani, Mahmood (2005) Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: Islam, the USA, and the Global War Against Terror, Delhi: Permanent Black. Marshall, T.H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, T.H. (1981) The Right to Welfare and other Essays, London: Heinemann Educational Books. Martin, Denis-Constant (1995) ‘The choices of identity’, Social Identities, 1(1): 5–16. May, Stephen (1999) Critical Multiculturalism, London: Routledge. Pollock, Sheldon, Bhabha, Homi K., Breckenbridge, Carol A. and Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2002) Cosmopolitanisms, in A. Carol Breckenbridge, Sheldon Pollock, K. Homi Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds) Cosmopolitanism, Durham, London: Duke University Press: 1–14. Tönnies, F. (1887, 1935, 1969) Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft – Grundbegriffe Der Reinen Soziologie, Nachdruck der letzten und 8. Auflage (1935), Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Vieten, Ulrike M. (2006) ‘Out in the Blue of Europe’ – Modernist Cosmopolitan Identity and the De-terrtorialization of Belonging, in Patterns or Prejudice, special issue ‘Identities, Boundaries and Belonging’, vol. 40, no. 3 July 2006. Vieten, Ulrike M. (forthcoming 2007) Situating Cosmopolitanisms: The Notion of ‘the Other’ in Contemporary Discourses on Cosmopolitanism in Britain and Germany (Thesis, PhD), University of East London. Wemyss, Georgie (2006) The power to tolerate: contests over Britishness and Belonging in East London, in Patterns of Prejudice, special issue on Boundaries, Identities and Belonging. Yeatman, Anna (1992) ‘Minorities and the politics of difference’, Political Theory Newsletter, 4(1): 1–11. Yuval-Davis, Nira (1991) ‘The citizenship debate: women, ethnic processes and the state’, Feminist Review, 39: 58–68. Yuval-Davis, Nira (1997) Gender & Nation, London: Sage. Yuval-Davis, Nira (1999) ‘Multi-layered citizenship in the age of “glocalization” ’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1(1), 119–37. Yuval-Davis, Nira (2004) Citizenship, identity and belonging, in S. May, T. Modood and J. Squires (eds), Nationalism, Ethnicity and Minority Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 214–30. Yuval-Davis, Nira (2005) ‘Racism, cosmopolitanism and contemporary politics of belonging’, Soundings, summer 2005, no. 30, 166–78. Yuval-Davis, Nira (2006) Belonging and the politics of belonging, in Patterns of Prejudice, special issue ‘Identities, Boundaries and Belonging’. Yuval-Davis, Nira and Werbner, Pnina (1999) (eds) Women, Citizenship and Difference, London: Zed Books.

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Section One

Multiculturalism, Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Politics of Belonging

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1 Belongings in a Globalising and Unequal World: Rethinking Translocations By Floya Anthias Introduction Displacement has become the most powerful imagery for the modern world. Displacement already presupposes its opposite, which can be thought of as being ‘in place’. Stuart Hall (2000) has argued (in his interview with Nira Yuval-Davis quoted in the introduction of this volume) that the multicultural question is the most important question facing the world today. This is defined as the problem of how people with very different cultural traditions, ways of life and understandings can live together. I believe that this is, of course, important. But we could usefully turn this question on its head and ask instead: under what conditions do people with different languages, cultures and ways of life fail to live in harmony? And I think turning the question on its head brings more clearly into focus the structural and political conditions involved and acts to contextualise the new ‘multicultural question’ historically and structurally (although such an analysis will take us in a different direction and this chapter is concerned with another set of issues). Current debates around borders, security and social cohesion have reinforced the importance of engaging critically with the notion of belonging and its centrality to people’s lives as well as political practice (Yuval-Davis et al. 2005). They have also reinforced, however, the need to move beyond the politics of belonging and relate to the continuing importance of unequal social resources (which are increasingly, and I believe problematically, being discussed using the notion of social capital) and to think in what have been termed ‘intersectional ways’. I want to contribute to this debate by trying to avoid the problems of a thoroughgoing deconstruction, where the only thing we are left with is the idea of a multiplicity of identities when discussing issues of belonging. In this chapter, I will signpost a number of related issues – a kind of state of play – drawing out their implications in terms of finding a way forward. I will move towards developing an intersectionality approach that is tied to the idea of translocational positionality (see Anthias 2001; 2005).

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Global Power: Refusing to Focus on ‘Groups’ First, I would like to propose that the realities of global power require rethinking processes of exclusion away from the focus on ‘groups’. In the context of globalisation and the consolidation of hierarchical relations worldwide, new forms of migration, exclusion and racialisation, and new forms of violence and boundary making, it is no longer possible to clearly differentiate between ethnic and racist phenomena as phenomena relating to groups which are to be regarded as ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’. I believe that, alternatively, there is a need to highlight different forms of exclusion and violence. These are not so much enacted or experienced with reference to population categories with particular characteristics. Rather, we should look at the range of attributions that are constructed in the wake of different political strategies such as the war against terror, economic interest, fear for European or Western interests, values and culture and so on. In this sense we need to focus on processes and strategies involved in the political and economic projects of powerful social actors as well as the strategies and processes involved in dealing with these by people on the receiving end. Such social actors may be either non-person actors such as financial or government institutions, or person actors. Person actors cannot be conceptualised purely in terms of their affiliation to a specific group as such, given that group membership is always multiple and indeed cross-cutting. We are confronted today with many different forms of ethnic and racist violence. Widespread ethnic conflict has been one of the most significant developments since the end of the 1980s, and it has had an impact both on ideas and practices of racism and on the flows of people fleeing violence and persecution in many parts of the world; in the process, the asylum seeker victimisation syndrome has re-emerged. This involves characterising asylum seekers only and persistently in terms of the act of flight from a ‘home’, and in terms of their orientation to ‘return’ even when they have settled in a new place and have made it a new ‘home’. We have also seen the growth of riots and racist groupings in many large European cities, the growth of anti-Muslim racism and racial attacks and the racialisation of refugees and asylum seekers. These phenomena have helped to correct the tendency in the past to differentiate between ethnic and race categories, showing that forms of violence based on different constructions of group boundaries (via culture, religion, ethnic heritage, supposed racial lineage etc.) share many characteristics. The enemy within, hatred towards particular categories of the population, and practices of dehumanisation and violence cannot be easily pigeonholed into issues of race on the one hand, stemming from race differentiations and ‘otherness’, and issues of ethnicity on the other (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; 2002). The recent racialisation of ‘Muslim’ is a good example of the shifting nature of the boundaries used for pursuing particular political agendas. Although ethnic and racist violence manifests itself at local levels and in specific sites, we cannot ignore the transnational and global dimensions involved in terms of policies, practices and identities. Transnationalism itself, by definition, involves the crossing and challenging of borders. However, it is often accompanied

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by increased expressions of inequality, uncertainty, ethnic conflict and hostility (Bulmer and Solomos 1998). It is not, therefore, the case that the dismantling of national or ethnic borders of particular types leads to the dismantling of all borders. A good example is that of Europe and Islam. New borders achieve prominence in particular constellations of political and economic practice. New enemies emerge or may be resurrected in new ways. The ways the violence or hatred is expressed may also be reconfigured. These processes of globalisation involve the growing imperialism of Western cultural forms that have become consumables on an ever-growing market avid for their commodities of plenty, often in nations where poverty and exploitation by the major Western countries continue to grow. In what the British and US governments refer to as the post 9/11 world, we live in a time when the war against terror is used as a way ideologically to pursue often racist and exclusionary policies and practices. Globalised networks now characterise modern societies at all social levels, including the cultural and the economic. Although this does not minimise the importance of ethnic and cultural ties, it does mean that these ties operate increasingly at a transnational rather than merely national level. Groups involved are also at the leading edge of the emergence of hybrid cultural forms, on the one hand, and communication flows around racist hatred and insularity, on the other. One of the difficulties of thinking only about groups can be illustrated by pointing to the many ways in which concepts like ‘global’ or, as in the example below, ‘transnational’ function. Whilst transnationalism refers to processes that transcend or cross nation-state borders, it is possible to differentiate a number of objects of reference that it can be attached to: ● ● ●

● ●

an ethnic group (e.g. diasporic groups); a category (e.g. sex workers); a person (e.g. a person who commutes across borders, or a person with homes in more than one country); an orientation (although not necessarily ‘cosmopolitan’); processes (e.g. trading rules, or juridical human rights).

Transethnic connections, on the other hand, can exist both within national borders and also transnationally. It could be argued that the two concepts militate against each other in the sense that transethnic bonds involve connections between people from different ethnic categories whereas many transnational connections are also essentially co-ethnic, certainly in terms of solidary formations or social networks. Identity and Belonging in Relation to Exclusion and Inclusion Belonging and identity are words overused and under-theorised in the context of population movements and translocation. A sense of collective identity and a feeling of belonging to the country you reside in are neither necessarily coterminous nor mutually exclusive. You may identify but not feel that you ‘belong’ in the sense of being accepted or being a full member. Alternatively, you may feel that

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you are accepted and ‘belong’ but may not fully identify, or your allegiances may be split. Here it is useful to bring up the issue of multiple identities (in a later section I will refer to the idea of hybrid identities). Multiple identities may exist in a number of ways, such as in the sense of co-existence of different identities within one person (e.g. being both British and Asian, or a member of an ethnic group and a member of a particular social class or gender). In addition, the notion of a multiplicity of identities can refer to the situationally salient nature of identity (say, I am British in the classroom but Cypriot at home). However, identities cannot be thought of as cloaks to put on at will or to discard when they not longer fit or please. This is because they are more than agency-driven labels or subjectively constituted. They are empowered by their very relationality within intersubjective contexts (you need to be acknowledged (or otherwise) as having a particular identity). Moreover, the idea of multiple or multilayered identities, or their recognition, does not resolve the problem of the notion of identity. This is because the notion of identity, in its most conventionally accepted sense, has assumed that it is a stable marker of sameness or difference: with multiple identities, therefore, the question is where is the ‘identity’ to be located within the idea of multiplicity (see Brubaker and Cooper 2000, Anthias 2002b for different critiques of the concept of identity). A concern with multiple and fragmented identities still suggests that identity might be a possessive property of individuals rather than a process. To problematise the epistemological and ontological status of the concept of identity, and critique the forms of politics based upon this, does not mean that identity cannot be treated as a socially meaningful concept. Such a position enables attention to be paid to spatial and contextual dimensions, treating the issues involved in terms of processes rather than possessive properties of individuals (as in ‘who are you’ being replaced by ‘what and how have you’). Displacing the concern with identity, by focusing on location and positionality, enables a complete abandonment of the residual elements of essentialisation retained even within the idea of fragmented and multiple identities so favoured by critics of unitary notions of identity (e.g. Hall 1996). It is increasingly important to think of a sense of belonging in terms of preconditions for quality of life, and not purely in terms of cultural initiation or cultural identity. This includes a focus on the range of experiences of enablement in society, as well as experiences of hurdles. In other words, there has been a tendency to focus too much on the cultural predispositions of newcomers or ‘others’, and this has turned attention away from societal mechanisms involved in the production of socially salient narratives and practices of ‘identity’ and belonging (Anthias 2002b). The emphasis on integration and social cohesion in current debates can be seen as a new form of assimilationism (Rattansi 2004). However, unlike assimilationism, the edict for social cohesion involves a respect for group boundaries and the acknowledgement of ‘difference’. This is accompanied by additional requirements from ‘others’ about learning and conforming to the central cultural and value systems of mainstream hegemonic Englishness (Yuval-Davis et al. 2005). This includes currently, in the United Kingdom, learning the language and

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pledging allegiance to the throne and state as a precondition of citizenship. However, the differences of economy and power are not attended to and managed equally, and hence the ideal of integration is in danger of being undeliverable. From discussions of identity politics to discussions of the modern self, the issue of identity sticks out as one of the most important in modern-day life. And it is precisely when we feel destabilised, when we seek for answers to the quandaries of uncertainty, disconnection, alienation and invisibility that we become more obsessed with finding, even fixing, a social place that we feel at home in, or at least more at home with; where we seek for our imagined roots, for the secure haven of our group, our family, our nation writ large. Asking ‘where do I belong?’ may be prompted by a feeling that there are a range of spaces, places, locales and identities that we feel we do not, and cannot, belong to. Belonging, therefore, involves an important affective dimension relating to social bonds and ties. However, the collective places constructed by imaginings of belonging gloss over the fissures, the losses, the absences and the borders within them. The notion of ‘imagining’ also refers to the ways in which constructions of belonging serve to naturalise socially produced, situational and contextual relations, converting them to taken-for-granted, absolute and fixed structures of social and personal life. Such constructions produce a ‘natural’ community of people and function as exclusionary borders of otherness. Belonging has a number of dimensions. There is the dimension of how we feel about our location in the social world. This is generated partly through experiences of exclusion rather than being about inclusion per se; a sense of, or concern with, belonging becomes activated most strongly when there is a sense of exclusion. The relational nature of belonging is important here. Belonging in this sense is about both formal and informal experiences of belonging. Belonging is not only about membership, rights and duties (as in the case of citizenship), or merely about forms of identification with groups, or with other people. It is also about the social places constructed by such identifications and memberships, and the ways in which social place has resonances with stability of the self, or with feelings of being part of a larger whole and with the emotional and social bonds that are related to such places. Belonging and social inclusion (rather than cohesion), are closely connected, although this does not mean that belonging itself brings about social inclusion (or cohesion). It is, however, through practices and experiences of social inclusion that a sense of a stake and acceptance in a society is created and maintained. Belonging is in this sense centrally related to experiences of inclusion and exclusion and old enemies needs differentiating from the notion of ‘identity’. Here, to belong is to be accepted as part of a community, to feel safe within it and to have a stake in the future of such a community of membership. To belong is to share values, networks and practices and it is not just a question of identification. Belonging is about experiences of being part of the social fabric and should not be thought of in exclusively ethnic terms. You cannot belong to any collectivity if you do not conform to the gender norms of this collectivity. It is important to relate the notion of belonging, therefore, to the different locations and contexts from which belongings are imagined and narrated, in terms of a range of social

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positions and social divisions/identities such as gender, class, stage in the life cycle and so on. Belonging is also about rights and obligations related to citizenship, although being more than this (as suggested earlier). However, such rights and obligations are about meeting the criteria of inclusion and there is differential inclusion and exclusion of so-called citizens along the lines of gender, ethnicity, class, age and so on. Belonging is about boundaries but it is also about hierarchies which exist both within and across boundaries (Anthias 1998a; 2001). Moreover, there is much evidence that belonging is a gendered process and that gender itself is central to the boundary formation which characterises ethnic, national and state formation and transformation. As early as 1989, Nira YuvalDavis and I presented a developed argument (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989) about women and gender processes in nation making. In this we argued that women carried the burden of the reproduction of national discourse, imagery and practice in particular ways, with men taking a different role. Women were important in the reproduction of the ideology and culture of the nation, and in producing nationalised subjects through the transmission of national ideologies and practices (as well as ethnic ones); they were symbolic of the nation (which was often represented as a woman, particularly when appealing for reinstatement of rights) and played specific roles in institutional and other arrangements of the nation-state such as labour markets and the military. Boundaries of identity and exclusion are of many kinds and the difficulty is in trying to think through the complex interweaving and contradictions involved. As we know, this poses challenges for feminists and anti-racists, whose political projects often channel them into prioritising the boundaries and identities which are the focus of gendered, and feminist and anti-racist struggles. Boundaries are shifting and changing; some are more a product of external constraints, such as political, legal and national rules relating to membership. Others are inscribed in the body through the stigmata of absence, and notions of incapacity/deformity via gender or disability. They may also be inscribed through body style (such as in class relations) or through colour physiognomy and the bodily and personal style/gait associated with ethnic difference (Anthias 2002a: 277). But boundaries are never fixed and they are forms of political practice. Constructions of boundaries of difference homogenise those within and pay no attention to differences, for example, of class, gender, age, political persuasion and religion. Such identities always cross-cut each other, and people simultaneously hold different ones and belong therefore to different categorisations depending on context, situation and meaning. Such a recognition problematises the very notion of identity. Celebrating Cultural Diversity Claiming difference and celebrating it has been one way of fighting racism, particularly in various forms of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is currently under attack from both the left and the right. It is now being pitched as the opposite of social cohesion, as that which has prevented it, within the new integrationist

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politics. The problem still remains, however, of a balance between valorising difference and the cherished traditions of people from different backgrounds or different values, and finding a common space of civic participation and agreement on core social aims. This is far from easy, particularly where there are divisions in terms of economic and other material resources and a different commitment to dominant structures. There is also the debate on the twin aspects of the representational needs of people defining themselves in terms of different group boundaries (religious, ethnic or territorial, amongst others) and the pursuit of a politics of redistribution of resources. In this connection, these become pitched against each other only on the assumption that they are indeed alternatives and therefore not inextricably linked. The pursuit of representation can, however, also be seen as the pursuit of a form of social capital in its broadest sense and therefore may also enter into the pursuit of redistribution of a range of cultural, symbolic and material resources (Fraser 2000, Anthias 2002a). When debates on resources are given prominence, it becomes clear that forms of representation, as indeed ethnicity is in its mobilised form, are a resource (e.g. see Barth 1969). However, resource distribution and social capital could usefully be distinguished. One can possess resources that cannot be mobilised or do not translate easily into valuable social capital. Examples include resources such as minority languages that are not widely used or ethnic resources that are negatively perceived. Other examples include social networks that are attributed negative valuation, as is the case for the social networks of stigmatised or excluded groupings. Similarly, resources such as money which cannot be accessed or taken out of a bank or used to create more value may be thought of as lying outside the definition of capital, let alone social capital. From this point of view, non-material forms of capital entail those resources – cultural, social, symbolic, representational or political – which can be mobilised or are being mobilised (cf. Bourdieu 1986, Portes 1998). On the other hand, Bourdieu emphasises the importance of the translatability of non-economic forms of capital into economic resources. This is overly reliant on the retention of the idea of materiality in terms of the traditional Marxist conception of the economic as a feature of social life, and as superordinate in defining place and position in the social hierarchy. Whilst culture is a social resource and may be mobilisable as a form of social capital, the validation of the cultural difference of migrant populations and their descendants, which has been pursued for many years by multiculturalist policies, has had the effect of producing modes of struggle that focus on culture and identity, repeating for themselves the static and ahistorical nature of racialised definitions. Recent critiques of multiculturalism (e.g. Trevor Phillips 2004) and those embodied perfectly in David Edgar’s play at the National Theatre, Playing with Fire, have pinpointed the unintended consequences of segregating communities on the basis of cultural needs and cultural commonalities. This strategy of paying attention to cultural needs is not only about unambiguously respecting the wishes of communities, for it has resonances with segregationist politics, where it has led to separation of culturally or ethnically defined groups.

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Multiculturalist policies have also tended to fail to acknowledge the genderspecific, and indeed at times sexist, elements of ethnic culture or the ways in which both ethnic and race boundaries are exclusionary. Critiques of identity politics, too, are very powerful in this regard (e.g. MacLaren and Torres 1999). The project of maintaining culture potentially creates a notion of a static and totalising culture. Whilst public validation of different ways of life is important, who are to be the voices for defining this? There is much evidence that it is often the traditional male voices that are given the role of acting to represent the cultural needs of groups. Moreover, uncovering the hidden ethnicity of the dominant groups is as important as validating the ethnicity of minority groups and welcome attention is now being paid to this (e.g. in Gabriel 1998). A liberal multiculturalist framework means that the dominant group within the state is able to set the terms of the agenda for participation by minority ethnic groups and involves a bounded dialogue where the premises themselves may not be open to negotiation. This is one reason there has been increasing debate around critical multiculturalism (Parekh 2000b). Multiculturality or critical/reflexive multiculturalism, unlike liberal multiculturalism, is concerned with the removal of barriers to the legitimacy of different ways of being and is compatible with transnational and transethnic identities as well as those that have been discussed using the notion of hybridity. As such, the identification of the fault lines of multiculturalist policies should mean a reframing of the agenda and not ditching it in the name of a spurious notion of social cohesion (see Yuval-Davis et al. 2005). A starting point in debates on critical multiculturalism must be a move away from the idea of one dominant culture that sets out the frame of reference, and that sees the issue as a question of tolerance towards other cultures. In other words, tolerance must go hand in hand with dialogue and effective voice to different social groups. A view of citizenship must be maintained where the boundaries of citizenship are not coterminous with belonging to a community in the singular. The idea of a ‘community of communities’ is offered by the Parekh report on MultiEthnic Britain, published by the Runnymeade Trust (2000a). Whilst this may be a recognition of what exists in the aftermath of multiculturalism and racism, it cannot be a way forward. Such communities themselves are not homogeneous in any case, nor do they have members who agree on the forms of participation best for them in society.

Diasporic Connections and Imaginations The concepts used to understand population movements and identity formations such as diaspora, hybridity, transculturalism and cosmopolitanism provide different ways by which culture and ethnic identity are seen to be affected by translocation processes or population movements. Such concepts are not attentive on the whole to the intersectionalities of social position and positioning. I would propose that it is difficult to encapsulate the processes relating to translocation through the terms available today (for a critique of diaspora see Anthias 1998b). Migrants and their descendants have complex relationships to

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different locales. These include social networks involving social, symbolic and material ties between homelands and destinations and relations between destinations. Many nation-states wish to retain the ethnic identity of their diaspora populations and encourage their reproduction as well as their return to the homeland (unrecognisable for those who were born outside it; a home no longer ‘a home’ or a place where they may feel ‘at home’). All these present us with a multiplex reality and a shifting landscape of belonging and identity. Critiques of notions of ethnicity and identity that are fixed, stable, monolithic and exclusionary have led scholars and activists to embrace new ideas of hybridity and diaspora. Hybridity and diaspora (Anthias 1998b) are used to counter the essentialism found in many traditional approaches to ethnicity and racism (Bhabha 1994). To what extent do they potentially create a space to challenge the fixity of boundaries that characterise racist practice, culture and identities? Hybridity and diaspora postulate shifting and potentially transnational and transethnic cultural formations and identities. These new identities are seen to be tied to a globalised and transnational social fabric rather than one bounded by the nation-state form. If one of the most virulent forms of racism is to be found in the very nature of modern exclusivist ethnicity with its culture of fixed boundaries, then we might envisage that progress can be made with forms of cultural identity that are more fluid and synthetic, such as those that have been characterised as hybrid and diasporic. One issue, however, is the need to be cautious in espousing concepts such as hybridity and diaspora as unproblematic. Today, globalisation involves a growth in the amount of movement, which both intensifies strangeness and normalises it. The condition of ‘overall strangeness’ becomes the condition par excellence of global society. The importance of ‘asymmetry’, together with hegemonic cultural discourses in this process, needs to be considered by the new approaches to interculturality found in the idea of cultural hybridities and diasporic imaginations. Why is the problem of the concepts of diaspora and hybridity important and what are the limitations and usefulness of these concepts? Partly this relates to the importance such depictions give to our desire for a fixed place of origin where we are treated as social actors (when we are described as belonging to a particular diaspora by name, for example, Cypriot, Turkish, Asian, African, Eritrean) in terms of this origin. To think of diasporas in this way is to fail to problematise the processes at work and to create little boxes into which we fit. Many writers emphasise the importance of transnational bonds within communities of origin and see these as positive and useful in undermining ethnic and national divisions. However, such bonds may weaken transethnic bonds with other groups which share a more local or national context of contestation and struggle. Trans-ethnic, as opposed to transnational, commonalities and processes are pushed to the background. We must be careful not to treat hybridity outside the parameters of unequal power relations that exist between and within cultures. Diasporic groups have been thought of as particularly adaptable to a globalised economic system (Cohen 1997). It is important to consider such groupings neither as essentially constituted in this way nor as undifferentiated. It is also important to continue examining the

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more violent, dislocating and ‘othering’ practices that they are subjected to. The existence of group boundaries and the ways we think about our belonging are crucial elements in these practices but the forms they take are products of positionalities and contexts that do not themselves originate from these identity formations. We must be careful that the focus on belongings in terms of diasporic attachments does not foreclose a concern with differences of gender, class and generation within diasporic groups.

Intersectionality and the Concept of Translocational Positionality This discussion leads me to a reflection on intersectionality prompted by the recognition that we all occupy positions in a range of categories of difference and location such as ethnicity, racialisation and social class. Here I would like to discuss some of the problems and some of the potential to be found in bringing together the analysis of the different forms of oppression on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity and class. The metaphors of intersectionality, crossroads and intermeshing have been used to denote the complex relationships of social identities and divisions (HillCollins 1993, Crenshaw 1994). However, it is important not to focus on the intersections in terms of constructing people as belonging to fixed and permanent groups which then all enter, in a pluralist fashion, into determining their lives. One view of intersectionality (e.g. around human rights; for a discussion see Anthias 2005, Yuval-Davis 2003, and forthcoming) is that categories of discrimination overlap and individuals suffer exclusions on the basis of race and gender or some other combination. One can see the usefulness of this approach, even though it merely scrapes the surface in terms of the issue of belonging we are concerned with here (for a discussion see Anthias 2005). The sexual trafficking of young Albanian women in Greece, for example, cannot be seen merely as either a gender problem or a race problem (e.g. concerning the position of Albanians in Greek society). One aspect of this is the production of data which cross-reference the divisions within formulated groups. However, the very act of already presupposing the groups per se as useful classificatory instruments as opposed to groups who are positioned in a particular relation to the state (e.g. focusing on Albanians rather than working class or poor migrants who are located in Greek society in a particular way) risks placing too much emphasis on the origin of the migrant and not enough on a shared terrain of disadvantage across country-of-origin-based lines (or those of religion and so on). If belonging is constructed in an intersectional way in relation to a range of boundaries such as those of class, gender and so on, the contradictory processes are as important as the symmetries experienced. Since we all belong to different constructions of boundaries and hierarchies involved in the different categories of difference and identity, it is important that belonging in relation to a person’s position and positioning is seen as multiply experienced (bearing in mind the critique

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made earlier about the idea of ‘multiple identities’). This means that it is difficult to construct persons in a uniform or unitary way in relation to different dimensions of social inclusion and belonging. We need to move away from the concept of intersectionality as an interplay in terms of people’s group identities in terms of class, gender, ethnicity, racialisation and so on, and towards seeing intersectionality as a process. Intersectionality is a social process related to practices and arrangements, giving rise to particular forms of positionality for social actors. I have introduced the term ‘translocation’ to capture a number of aspects of our modern world, partly as a contrast to the idea of diasporic identity as hybridity which has so dominated the field and partly as an accompaniment to the notion of intersectionality. Social locations can be thought of as social spaces defined by boundaries on the one hand and hierarchies on the other hand. Therefore, when we think of our social locations we are forced to think of them in relation to each other, and also in terms of some of the contradictions we live in through our differential location within the boundaries in terms of hierarchies. The notion of ‘location’ recognises the importance of context, the situated nature of claims and attributions and their production in complex and shifting locales. Positionality combines a reference to social position (as a set of effectivities, or as outcome) and social positioning (as a set of practices, actions and meanings: as process) (Anthias 2001: 634). That is, positionality is the space at the intersection of structure (social position/social effects) and agency (social positioning/ meaning and practice) (Anthias 2001: 635). It also recognises variability, with some processes leading to more complex, contradictory and at times dialogical positionalities than others; this is what is meant by the term ‘translocational’. The latter refers to the ‘complex nature of positionality faced by those who are at the interplay of a range of locations and dislocations in relation to gender, ethnicity, national belonging, class and racialisation’ (Anthias 2001: 634). Positionality is about more than identification; it is also about the lived practices in which identification is practised/performed as well as the intersubjective, organisational and representational conditions for their existence (Anthias 2001: 635). The major advantage of this conceptual framework is that it takes us beyond the theoretical and political impasse of post-structuralist and cultural feminist theorising, and beyond the fragmentation of identity politics. It does so in a number of ways: First, difference and inequality are conceptualised as a set of processes, and not possessive characteristics of individuals. The concept of translocational positionality, and all the processes that are involved, allow us to develop radical conceptualisations of difference and inequality which are non-essentialist and therefore dynamic and changeable. Second, the term signals a refusal to think of issues of population movement and settlement in terms of culture and identity; instead, they are thought of in terms of social inequality and transformation and in relation to the cross-cutting social divisions of gender, ethnicity and class difference and stratification. Third, it signals a refusal to think of diaspora as merely a process of dislocation and relocation. For dislocation assumes a fixed and given location from which we become dislodged. Although this may appear in our imaginations to be the case, our

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locations are multiple and span a number of terrains, such as those of gender and class as well as ethnicity and nation, political and value systems. To be dislocated at the level of nation is not necessarily a dislocation in other terms if we find we still exist within the boundaries of our social class and our gender. Nevertheless, it will transform our social place and the way we experience this. Hence the interconnections and intersections involved here are important. From this point of view, to think of translocations opens up thinking not only of relocations but also of the connections between the past, the present and the future. Fourth, the term helps us to think of lives as located and therefore of our identities as always relational to our location both situationally and in terms of the intersections of gender, ethnicity and class and other important social boundaries and hierarchies. For example, we might be white working-class men or women or black middle-class men or women. We might occupy a disadvantaged or subordinate position within one boundary: for example, as a woman I occupy a generally subordinate role vis-a-vis men. I occupy a more advantaged position in class terms. Moreover, it helps explain why the intersections of social relations can be both mutually reinforcing (e.g. minority working class women live in the worst social space, in many different political, economic and cultural contexts) and contradictory (e.g. a working class poor man is in a relation of subordination at work, but in a relation of domination in his relations with women). In the first case, social divisions articulate to produce a coherent set of practices of subordination, while in the second, social divisions lead to highly contradictory processes in terms of positionality and identity. This opens up the possibility of more reflexive forms of political struggle and avenues to greater dialogue and collaboration between groups organising around particular kinds of struggles rather than particular kinds of identities.

Concluding Remarks A society dedicated to social inclusion and cohesion (despite the problems involved in these conceptions politically), in the sense of acknowledging diversities and fostering multiculturality whilst pursuing a more just and equal society with enhanced quality of life, must involve a concerted attack against those constructions of difference and identity that exclude and devalourise. It also requires a concerted effort against all those social practices that construct identities and differences in naturalised, collectivised and binary ways and in terms of hierarchical otherness, unequal resource allocation and modes of inferiorisation (see Anthias 1998a). I believe that these strategies must be tied to a new imaginary of social transformation at the economic, political and cultural level and involve working on a number of fronts, but particularly in the redistributive sphere. Our theoretical and political work must attempt in every possible way to denaturalise difference and identity by showing the ways they are located historically and as social constructs. Concretely, this means acting at all levels, for example, being aware of and problematising our own positionality as well as refusing the idea that our positionality is determined by any singular social

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location (e.g. as women, or as members of an ethnic group), for this fails to acknowledge our tranlocational positionalities (i.e. that positionalities are complexly tied to situation, meaning and the interplay of our social locations). At the intersubjective level in our roles as friends, political activists, citizens and workers, we can challenge each other to construct narratives of belonging that break with processes of differentiation and stratification. We need to question the underlying assumptions and mechanisms of accountability of legal and political systems, the unequal resource distribution (of various institutions) across various social categories and the violence inherent in our social system. I believe we also need to once again attend to a more radical conception of our social arrangements, of the ways we work and produce, of the ways we live in families, of our primary social bonds and of the ways we care for ourselves and others. This is not to provide a blueprint but to pursue more rigorously a dialogue about the kinds of societies and lives we want to have. This involves thinking about ways which validate and respect differences of location and positionality (as well as the validity of the collective imaginings that inform people’s valued and cherished beliefs, cultural practices and selfidentities) without neglecting the important issue of equality for individuals and groups. Attempts to bridge universes of meaning and develop alternative ways of thinking cannot be successful without the fight for equality. We need to attack the enabling conditions which allow all types of subordinating and oppressing social/cultural practices. This involves attacking not just those very practices but the structural and contextual relations which support and reproduce them. The role of agency and organisation on the basis of struggles rather than identities is crucial here. Identities exist only inasmuch as individuals are placed in different constructed identities in context, and in relation to particular facets of social participation (e.g. as women, as members of ethnic groups, as classes and so on). I have referred to this elsewhere in terms of the grid of social divisions as boundaries and hierarchies (Anthias 1998a). If this is the case, organisation on the basis of identities appears problematic, whilst organisation on the basis of struggles and solidary formation appears more useful. This includes engagement at a political level around the following: Naturalisation: a denaturalisation of difference and identity by showing the ways in which they are located historically and as social constructs. This involves not only culture contact but a concern with addressing all those institutional ways in which such naturalisation is constructed, from the assumptions made in the legal and political systems to unequal resource distribution across various social categories. Collective attributions: a recognition of differences within individuals in terms of the interaction between ways in which they are constructed and in which they construct themselves situationally and contextually; therefore an emphasis also on gender, class and other forms of categorisations. This is a refusal to construct people or selves in terms of singular identities. Whilst identity is the narrative where one is constructed as a person with agency, this needs to be mitigated by

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a recognition of the importance of location and positionality in terms of opportunities and constraints for the effective articulation (even at the necessary fictive level) of its performance or accomplishment. Hierarchical cultures: the development of legal and other state mechanisms which embody the principle of multiculturality where it does not conflict with basic human rights, and where the collective claims of groups allow individuals to choose the legal and cultural framework within which they are embedded (e.g. education or legal pluralism) as long as this does not violate rules of human rights of individuals. Racial and ethnic categories: to be disassociated from the space of political voice at the overall societal level but not in terms of the construction of internal communities with their own rights to culture and ways of life as long as they do not conflict with principles of human rights. Rights and responsibilities: human rights also to be ways in which ethical principles are pursued whereby we acknowledge the other and our responsibilities for the other’s human rights. Mechanisms of accountability within institutional frameworks: scrutiny of procedures in terms of outcomes as well as intentions and rules, so that racialised sexist and class-unequal outcomes are made prominent even where no intentionalities are found, and are redressed through corrective and sustainable procedures such as positive action frameworks. If we turn Stuart Hall’s question on its head, we will find that it is precisely in societies where the enabling conditions for xenophobia, racism, unequal valorisation and distributive inequality are rampant that we find the most difficult question of our time: how can we change a world where the bloody stains of cultural difference are emblazoned as indelible markers on our lives? Bibliography Anthias, F. (1998a) ‘Rethinking social divisions: some notes towards a theoretical framework’, Sociological Review, 46(3): 506–35. Anthias, F. (1998b) ‘Evaluating diaspora: beyond ethnicity?’ Sociology, 32(3): 557–80. Anthias, F. (2001) ‘New hybridities, old concepts: the limits of culture’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24(4): 619–641. Anthias, F. (2002a) ‘Beyond feminism and multiculturalism: locating difference and the politics of location’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 25(3): 275–394. Anthias, F. (2002b) ‘Where do I belong? Narrating collective identity and translocational positionality’, Ethnicities, 2(4): 491–515. Anthias, F. (2005) Social stratification and social inequality: models of intersectionality and identity, in R. Crompton, F. Devine, J. Scott and M.Savage (eds) Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities, and Lifestyle, London and Basingstoke: Palgrave: 24–45. Anthias, F. and Yuval-Davis, N. (1989), Introduction, in N. Yuval-Davis and F. Anthias (eds) Woman, Nation, State, Basingstoke: Macmillan: 1–16.

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Anthias, F. and Yuval-Davis, N. (1992) Racialised Boundaries – Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle, London: Routledge. Barth, F. (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, New York: Little, Brown and Co. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1986) The forms of capital, in J. Richardson (ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood Press: 241–258. Brubaker, R. and Cooper, F. (2000) ‘Beyond “identity” ’, Theory and Society, 29: 1–47. Bulmer, M. and Solomos, J. (1998) ‘Introduction: rethinking ethnic and racial studies’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21(5): 819–37. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: UCL Press. Crenshaw, K. (1994) Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color, in M.A. Fineman and R. Mykitiuk (eds) The Public Nature of Private Violence, New York: Routledge: 93–118. Fraser, N. (2000) ‘Rethinking recognition’, New Left Review, May-June: 107–20. Gabriel, J. (1998) Whitewash: Racialized Politics and the Media, London: Routledge. Hall, S. (1996) Who needs ‘Identity’? in S. Hall and P. de Gay (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage: 1–18. Hall, S. (2000) The multi-cultural question in Barnor Hesse (ed.) Un/Settled Multiculturalisms, London: Zed Books: 209–41. Hill-Collins, P. (1993) ‘Toward a new vision: race, class and gender as categories of analysis and connection’, Race, Sex and Class, 1(1): 25–45. MacLaren, Peter and Torres, Rodolfo (1999) Racism and multicultural education: rethinking ‘race’ and ‘whiteness’ in late capitalism, in Stephen May (ed.) Critical Multiculturalism, London: Falmer Press: 42–77. Parekh, Bhikhu (ed.) (2000a) Multi-Ethnic Britain, London: The Runneymede Trust. Parekh, Bhikhu (2000b) Rethinking Multiculturalism, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Phillips, T. (2004) Interview in The Times, London, 3 April 2004. Portes, A. (1998) ‘Social capital: its origins and applications in modern sociology’, Annual Review of Sociology, 24: 1–24. Rattansi, A. (2004) ‘Dialogues on difference: cosmopolitans, locals and “others” in a post-national age’, Sociology, 38: 613–21. Somers, R.M. (1994) ‘The narrative constitution of identity: A relational and network approach’, Theory and Society, 23: 605–49. Yuval-Davis, N. (2003) ‘Intersectionality and Gender Mainstreaming’ special issue on Intersectionality of the Swedish Journal of Gender Studies (Swedish). Yuval-Davis, N. (forthcoming) ‘Intersectionality and feminist politics’, special issue on Intersectionality of the European Journal of Women’s Studies. Yuval-Davis, N., Anthias, F. and Kofman, E. (2005) ‘Secure borders and safe haven and the gendered politics of belonging: beyond social cohesion’ Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28(3), May 2005: 513–35.

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2 Culture, Identity and Rights: Challenging Contemporary Discourses of Belonging* By Gurminder K. Bhambra Within contemporary debates on globalisation, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, questions of rights are increasingly framed in terms of culture and identity.1 These debates address historical processes of inclusion and exclusion in the formulation of narratives of belonging (e.g. narratives of nationhood, ethnicity, or other ‘community’) and locate associated privileges (such as rights) accordingly. In this chapter, I shall criticise this ‘cultural turn’ in the understanding of rights and, in the course of doing so, question the dominant theoretical interpretations of culture and identity that underpin these debates. An integral aspect of this endeavour is examining the politics of knowledge production – in particular, the West’s self-definition as the producer of universal rights – for, it is only by doing so that there can be an adequate critique of the contemporary framing of the politics of rights in terms of culture and belonging. For many, what appears to be excluded from the universalistic discourse of rights is the particularity of different ‘others’. Difference, however, then comes to be seen simply in cultural terms and rights are associated with the right to be different and to have that difference recognised and respected. Contesting this cultural turn in the politics of rights is, in itself, not sufficient; once deconstructed, what then? The chapter will end with an examination of possible alternatives to the cultural politics of identity and belonging and discuss how ‘the other’ could be integrated into what are widely regarded as universalising discourses without losing its particularity as ‘other’ and as subject. This integration, I shall argue, would not be complete with a simple ‘adding to’, but is one that requires a reconsideration of the theoretical framework that established the binaries of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in its first instance. Culture, Identity and Social Theory Culture is frequently framed in terms of the totality of social systems and their related practices of signification, representation and symbolism (for a discussion see Benhabib 2002). In this formulation, identities are seen as cognitive boundaries based on an exclusive sense of belonging in which one either belongs or does not belong (Van Ham 2001). Identities, then, correspond to particular cultures and it is through the processes of defining and maintaining the boundaries of the groups to which individuals belong that cultural identities are

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constructed. This idea of cultural identity being based on an understanding of a stable internal identity coupled with a desire to maintain difference against the ‘other’ is also strongly articulated by theorists such as Stuart Hall. Hall (1990: 223, 225) argues that there are at least two ways of thinking about cultural identity: one is in terms of a shared culture ‘which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common’; and the other is in terms of difference, which may include a future ‘becoming’ as well as a past- based ‘being’. In both understandings, however, there is deemed to be something ‘internal’ which binds people together in terms of a shared identity and then something ‘external’ against which a sense of that internal identity is strengthened. Even where culture/identity is seen in terms of ‘difference’ it is a difference posited against an already constituted entity, itself based on an understanding of past similarities. Both forms, then, presume cultures to be bounded entities with an integrity internal to their existence thus denying the possibility of ‘escape’ or ‘change’ from the ascribed identity, even where identity is argued to include some aspect of becoming. This is a problem that defines both standard social theory and its recently articulated postmodern alternatives. Whilst standard social theory has struggled with the diversity of traditions and identities in its attempt to subject them to conformity and uniformity it could be argued that postmodern social theory has simply inverted the parameters of the debate (for a discussion see Holmwood 1996). It has done this by arguing for a relativity of cultures and identities where communication would be facilitated between groups by interpreters who would, in the words of Bauman (1987: 5), translate ‘statements made within one communally based tradition so that they can be understood within the system of knowledge based on another tradition’. Modernism traditionally dealt with issues of difference by subjecting all variations to its universal schema and urged ‘them’ to be more like ‘us’ through its varieties of modernisation theory and theories of development. Although postmodernism claims to deconstruct the (meta) framework of modernism, it continues to deal with difference within a similar framework by accepting those differences as given and believing that ‘they’ are ‘other’ and that ‘they’ should remain as ‘other’. While postmodernism can be seen as attempting to understand the ‘other’, or at the very least to give it space, it does so in the context of a thematic field that continues to perpetuate the self/other binary of modernism thereby failing to do any more than simply saying that elsewhere things are different (to here). In both understandings, then, differences are either to be assimilated into a pre-existing framework (modernism), or located according to the premises of that framework (postmodernism). In neither understanding is there space for ‘the other’ to be anything other than ‘the other’, that is, to contribute to the identity identified as modern (or postmodern). Similar issues arise in discussions of race, ethnicity and culture.2 Where, historically, ideas of race had been used to establish differences between societal groups, the categorisation of human beings now more often goes under the terminology of ethnicity(ies) and culture(s). All these notions presuppose a world of human differences where those differences are conceptualised as a diversity of separate societies and individuated cultural entities that are intrinsically

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discontinuous (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Such entities are frequently taken as internally coherent systems of meanings which are then deemed to require description and analysis as integrated totalities. It has to be recognised, however, that identity-making always ‘involves a construction, rather than merely a discovery, of difference’ and should be understood not as something owned or possessed by individual or collective actors but rather as ‘a mobile, often unstable relation of difference’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 13 italics added). Ideas of race, ethnicity, and culture have all, at different times, been used to stabilise this mobility and to fix it in space and across time. As Malkki (1997) argues, some of the strongest metaphors within our thinking on identity are those of roots, origins, ancestries and lineage. These, together with our sedentarist assumptions about essential attachments to particular places, naturalise difference and, at the same time, make it an issue to be explained in the context of a past that was ‘pure’. Gupta and Ferguson (1997: 7) suggest that it is only by disentangling the spatial and temporal metaphors that root understandings of identity in naturalised conceptions of community that we, as scholars, can ‘proceed without succumbing to a nostalgia for origins’. Gilroy (1990), for his part, is similarly opposed to an interpretation of culture as delineated along ethnic lines and argues instead for it to be seen as something which is intrinsically fluid, changing and dynamic. Further, in an attempt to move away from earlier, discredited notions of race and ethnicity founded on biological explanations, Gilroy (1990: 266) delineates culture as a relational field in which social groups ‘encounter one another and live out social, historical relationships’. Definitions of culture based on socio-historical understandings of origin do not, however, escape many of the problems attributed to earlier notions of race and ethnicity. Discussions of ‘belonging’ based on ideas of culture and cultural characteristics, for example, often emphasise the incompatibility of cultural traditions where different communities are said to have different values and ways of life over any recognition of how these values emerged in relation to others. Further, the very ideas of lineage and heritage with which culture is closely associated suggest a natural and eternal fixity to those cultures through the inheritance of characteristics and traditions through time. Thus, as Miles (1993: 66) argues, ‘it is but a short step from the idea of inheritance then to utilise notions such as “breeding” and “blood” to sustain a conception of inviolable difference expressed through history’. Whilst it is accepted that culture has always played an important part in social life, recent claims for legal recognition of cultural rights and the allocation of resources from the state to be made on such a basis are held to be relatively new phenomena (see Soysal 1994, Benhabib 2002). Prior to the 1990s, questions of ethnicity and culture were deemed by political theorists to be marginal phenomena that would disappear with modernisation. Culture understood in terms of primordial loyalties and particularistic forms of belonging would cede ground to the universalistic understandings of citizenship organised within the nation-state. Recently, however, as Kymlicka (2001) argues, the question of the rights of ethnocultural groups has moved to the forefront of Western political theory.3

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The Politics of Cultural Identity With culture being seen as the unique expression of (a) people’s individuality and nation-states becoming increasingly ‘multicultural’, Kymlicka (1996) argues that there is a need to rethink questions of politics from this basis. His work on multicultural citizenship is a case in point where he discusses the relationship between protecting the rights of minority cultures whilst at the same time maintaining a cohesive framework of liberal justice and democratic practice. He argues, in a later work, that unless democracies work to accommodate ethnocultural diversity within their nation-building strategies, this diversity will remain a powerful source of conflict and tension, potentially destabilising these very democracies. What is needed, according to Kymlicka (2001), is the public expression and institutionalisation of ethnocultural diversity within the democratic structures of liberal nation-states. Thus, questions of identity and belonging are located within a framework that politicises culture in a way that it had not previously been: and, with the politicisation of culture, the idea of culture itself can be said to have changed. As Benhabib (2002: 3) puts it, contemporary understandings of culture are now seen to be constituted by ‘an odd mixture of the anthropological view of the democratic equality of all cultural forms of expression and the Romantic, Herderian emphasis on each form’s irreducible uniqueness’. The two sit together uneasily in debates about the political consequences of culture. Soysal (1994), for her part, attempts to draw a distinction between an older idea of culture as essential and group based and a new form of cultural identity seen as individual and politicised. Cultural identity, she argues, can be expressed in the language of rights once it is recognised that its organising and legitimating principles are based on understandings of universal personhood rather than ideas of national belonging. For example, where migrants had previously been thought of in terms of being temporary residents whose primary concerns centred on practical issues such as housing and language training, these issues are now considered secondary to the negotiation of their belonging as individual citizens (Soysal 1994). The rights that accrue to individuals, however, accrue within states and within national polities and the contestation of those rights occurs increasingly within a distinct cultural realm that gives substance to the political entity as a nation(al) state. Further, the calls for cultural rights within the human rights discourse underline the focus on the ‘right to be different’ and to foster ‘one’s own culture’ thus framing questions of universal rights in terms of particularistic group characteristics that, in turn, are based on ideas of difference and otherness – ideas which must then undercut the claim to universality. This would seem to refute the general argument made by Soysal (1994) that the call for minority rights based on universalist definitions of rights is in any way different to the justifications behind modern nationalisms that connect cultures and identities to specific places. With cultural identity not being seen to be simply about the past but also to reside in an understanding of ‘becoming’, that is, a politics oriented to the future, the use of the universalist language of rights is more likely to be strategic than to reflect a real shift in conceptualisations of identity and belonging: and where those forms of belonging continue to rest on ideas of ‘culture’ they continue to be

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problematic in the terms previously attributed to essentialist definitions. One of the key problems in understanding identity formation from the perspective of studying groups with primordial or historical loyalties is that this ossifies those groups and misses the dynamism constitutive of all group formation and reformation. As Benhabib (2002: 60, 65) argues, any human society ‘at any point in time, is composed of multiple material and symbolic practices with a history’; not recognising this complexity ‘flattens out the contradictions and antagonisms that surround group experiences’. The invocation of culture as the basis for the development of ideas of multiculturalism and the establishment of minority rights – ostensibly for the empowerment of cultural communities within the state – can also have the effect of restricting possibilities of identity and group construction other than those associated with cultural identities. By privileging a particular identity, that of culture, other identities that could be argued to be as important, such as those based around understandings of gender, sexual orientation and labour relations, are excluded. And with culture often being associated with tradition and history and ‘the way things were’, there is the very real danger of instituting and perpetuating a conservative politics through the sedimentation of undemocratic relations internal to the group (see Volpp 1996, Kapur 2005). The problem with most understandings of culture that inform political debates, then, is that they are generally conceived of along absolutist lines and, as such, fix identities and people in space and time. In other words, people are presumed to have particular cultures and not other ones and those cultures are understood to be mutually distinct. Indeed, in discussions of culture within ‘modern’ politics, culture is generally regarded as an attribute of ‘minorities’ – the dominant group is universalised as the norm and difference is measured in relation to them. This sets up a ‘worry’ within liberal discourse around the need to recognise minority rights at the same time as producing a concern about a debilitating relativism that requires some degree of universalism to counter it. The dichotomy of the universal versus the particular, or universalism versus essentialism, turns on a failure to recognise the universal as itself being a particular form and a misunderstanding of essentialism as an attribute of ‘other’ cultures. It is my contention that the universal is nothing other than a particular that has been universalised – the false generalisation of the West as Benhabib (2002) states – and that it is a particular that has been universalised without taking into account the ‘complex, global dialogue’ within which it is located. As Pollock and others (2000: 583) have argued, universals are rarely universal at all, ‘but rather interpretations devised for particular historical and conceptual situations’. However, the Western experience has predominantly been taken both as the basis for the construction of the default category of the universal and, at the same time, that category is argued to have a validity that transcends the Western experience. This frame casts the Western experience as the norm and everything else is subsumed to its terms. With a particular culture being universalised as the norm, all others then remain locked in a peripheral, marginal existence that, however much it may be understood, is only ever discussed in terms of its distance from the centre, and thereby the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is perpetuated.

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If we start from the premise of a world originally constituted by culturally separate and distinct entities and which has become multicultural over time then liberal pluralism with its attempts to ‘manage’ diversity can be seen as a progressive intervention in the current climate of rapid, unsettling change, mistrust and strangeness. If, however, as Gupta and Ferguson (1992: 17) suggest ‘it is acknowledged that cultural difference is produced and maintained in a world always already spatially interconnected’ then attempts to ‘manage’ ethnocultural diversity can be seen for what they really are: ‘one of the main means through which the disempowered are kept that way.’ Increasingly, cultures have come to be seen not only in terms of the similarity of the individuals that constitute them, or the differences between this group of individuals and that group, but, more precisely, through the processes of establishing similarities and differences. Gupta and Ferguson (1997) argue that notions of community and belonging can no longer be thought of simply in terms of understandings of cultural similarity or social contiguity, and neither can they just be distinguished on the basis of perceived difference. But, rather, notions of community and belonging have to be understood as categorical identities brought into being through the processes of exclusion, inclusion and constructions of otherness. Yet, we see that, in the main, social theory has addressed issues of cultural difference, heterogeneity and otherness by assuming difference to pre-exist the processes by which it is produced. The point now is to re-imagine theory from the perspective of initial interconnection as opposed to separation and as a consequence of the processes of differentiation.

Reconsidering Culture and Identity The world we inhabit (previously no less than today) is the product of historical flows of people, goods and ideas that have always connected the world globally and yet, as Trouillot (2003: 34) argues, ‘the history of the world is rarely told in those terms’. Acknowledging these flows requires us also to reconsider the theoretical paradigms that have permitted the extrapolation of universal significance from a partial history. For example, Ahmad (1992: 103) argues that one could start from a radically different premise to that which is commonly held today: ‘namely, the proposition that we live not in three worlds but in one’. Further, Ahmad (1992) suggests that we also need to dissolve the understanding that sets up an absolute difference between the First World and the Third whilst at the same time submerging the cultural heterogeneity of each within singular identities. The binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that is implicit in the self-image of the West is replicated by many forms of Third-World discourse that simply inverts the logic of the West: what needs to be recognised is that there is no singular ‘other’ to our ‘self’ and that our ‘self’ is also the ‘other’ to other ‘others’. As such, the question of cultural difference is not best addressed through attempts to establish relations between societies and cultures but, rather, by problematising ‘the unity of the “us” and the otherness of the “other” ’ that produces these differences in an interconnected and interdependent world (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 14). As

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Benhabib (2002: 25) argues, cultural practices and traditions, across the world, have developed out of a complex global dialogue that requires us to recognise ‘the radical hybridity and polyvocality of all cultures.’ Any overlap between solidarity and ethnocentrism, she continues, is more contingent than necessary, and suggests that ‘true’ nations, ‘pure’ linguistic groups, and ‘unsullied’ ethnicities are truly ‘imagined’ communities: what is important today, is for us to understand who we consider ourselves to be and how we constitute those ‘imagined’ communities. Understanding culture in the terms outlined above takes us beyond the reductionist essentialism that is prevalent in the work of many theorists – whether modernist or postmodernist – and provides a valuable alternative with which to begin thinking through alternative conceptions of belonging. It further allows the space for the recognition of heterogeneity and cross-cutting identities then to work towards the reconstruction of initial understandings of essentialism and purity. The meaning of culture, in Bhabha’s (1994) terms, emerges in the inter-, the in-between spaces, of cultures; it exists not in the diversity of cultures but in the articulations of culture’s hybridity – its always, already existing hybridity. As Bhabha states, hybridity is not a term that resolves the tension between cultures, rather, it allows for the cultural to be seen as the effect of practices of differentiation. In contesting ‘grand narratives’ and binary oppositions, Bhabha asks us to rethink the terms of cultural contestation and to think culture through the affective experiences of social marginality as opposed to pre-given differences. Consideration of such issues would entail a radical rethinking of the canonisation of particular historical trajectories and would require us to recognise how the foundation of discourses had occurred upon parochial understandings. To this end, the use of global archives, geographies and practices would allow us to see that the theories and ideas in current circulation are not created by cultures diffused from a particular centre but rather that ‘centres are everywhere and circumferences nowhere’ (Pollock et al. 2000: 588). As Said (1989: 225) argues, ‘to see Others not as ontologically given but as historically constituted would be to erode the exclusivist biases we so often ascribe to cultures, our own not least’. Deconstructing the modernist culture of inquiry, then, would require seeing ‘others’ as ‘other’ and as ‘subjects’ engaged in dialogue leading to the reconstruction of histories and understandings. Whereas modernist thought is based on conceptual abstractions and ideas of a scientific history that exists outside of particular histories and thus is seen to transcend location, postmodernism projects location as relativism and uses ‘others’ to deconstruct modernism’s categories. In both, however, ‘others’ are either known in the terms of the discourse (modernism) or used as tools of deconstruction (post-modernism). In neither is knowledge of the ‘other’ seen as the basis for the reconstruction of received knowledge and traditions; and it is this that I am arguing for here (for further discussion see Holmwood 1996). At present, the only way into debates around belonging and identity for those ‘others’ who are not acknowledged as ‘universal’ is by standing on ‘their’ traditions or in the new differences they can make from their locations4 – their voice is all about adding content, or colour, to what is already known, not about refiguring the parameters of what is known.

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Claims for these ‘others’ to represent a ‘place’ or a ‘people’ is a form of essentialism that has as its corollary, ideas of a discourse which has a centre. In order to avoid essentialising, and thereby marginalising, it is necessary to see all identities as local and to understand the relations between knowledge communities as dialogues in which there is neither external reference point nor essential standpoint. Dialogue, then, can only occur in the absence of a centre, of universals, and thus, through the deconstruction of the centre and the universals that are posited. Focussing on a politics of belonging can never get away from questions of inclusion and exclusion and this will inevitably turn on the binary oppositions of self and other which, as I have discussed, are fundamentally problematic. As Bhabha (1994: 31) argues, however critical ‘critical theory’ has been, or however well it claims to know other cultures, it continues to locate that knowledge as the ‘exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of articulation’. The knowledge gained is used either ‘to universalise . . . meaning within its own cultural and academic discourse, or to sharpen its internal critique of the Western logocentric sign’; it is always kept within the boundaries of the knowledge systems as they are known and exists as ‘the docile body of difference that reproduces a relation of domination’ (Bhabha 1994: 31). In other words, knowledge of the ‘other’ is that which allows us to recognise difference – usually, their difference from us – it does not require us to think differently about ourselves and even, perhaps, redefine who we consider ‘ourselves’ to be. Their knowledge always stands in distinction to ‘us’ and is rarely recognised as constituting any wider ‘us’. It is in the construction of ‘others’ as subjects, then, that postcolonial theory, in particular, has facilitated an intervention in the representation of difference. This has further enabled the articulation of diverse subjects of differentiation where difference is not seen in terms of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits but as sites of negotiation. The premises of discontinuity and radical difference that have sustained the fiction of cultures as discrete phenomena occupying discrete spaces are gradually ceding ground. Questions of difference and identity are beginning to be rethought through understandings of connection and relation. Recognising the complexity of the world in which we live is, I suggest, the first step to thinking politics beyond culture. The accumulation of ‘other’ voices in fields previously dominated by particular ‘Western’ or ‘Northern’ voices can only enhance the theories and policies that we then establish on the basis of this knowledge. In conclusion, then, I argue that the question of the ‘other’ is not solved by simply adding ‘them’ to ‘us’ – it has to be recognised that the ‘adding to’ fundamentally alters the initial paradigm in which there was an ‘us’ and an ‘other’. Cultural contestation, where ‘adding to’ does not ‘add up’, creates the possibility of establishing new forms of meaning and, in doing so, disrupts the implicit generalisation of knowledge and homogenisation of experience that has been shown to be constitutive of both modern and postmodern social theory. If it is already a given that people ‘have’ cultures and that those cultures are mutually distinct, then reflections on questions of belonging will always take us back to absolutist cultural identities and their associated problems. However, if we were to be ‘archivally cosmopolitan’5 and look at the world across time and space and examine how

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people have constructed communities across various identities we would encounter many more possibilities from which to base our politics. This politics could include rights being seen as the means of constructing new communities across current divisions rather than the reification of divisions that can occur when existing communities claim rights based on difference. Notes * I would like to thank John Holmwood and the editors of this book for their helpful comments on this chapter. I would also like to thank the ESRC for their financial support, through the Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme, during the period of writing. 1 See, for example, Appadurai (1996), Geddes and Favell (1999), Jodhka (2001) and Croucher (2004). 2 See, for example, the two Readers by Modood and Werbner (1997) and Werbner and Modood (1997). 3 See, for example, Donnelly (1989), Falk (1995), Howard (1995), McDonald (1995) and Joppke and Lukes (1999). 4 It is necessary to remain aware that claims to represent the essence of a place/people are little more than the temporary localisation of ideas from many places (Appadurai 1988: 46). 5 This formulation is adapted from Pollock et al. (2000).

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3 Domestic Cosmopolitanism and Structures of Feeling: the Specificity of London By Mica Nava Introduction The focus of this volume is predominantly on the complex injuries, provenance and practices of racism and xenophobia. In contrast, this article will explore a dialogically related yet more benevolent history of hospitality, sympathy and desire for cultural and racial ‘others’, which together form a cluster of contextually specific attributes that I am here calling ‘domestic cosmopolitanism’ and which raise different issues in relation to the politics of belonging. So in part the piece will engage with debates on cosmopolitanism. The emotions and imaginaries associated with cosmopolitanism as a structure of feeling have largely been neglected by cultural and social theorists concerned with the topic, who have tended to concentrate on cognitive and aesthetic reflexivity and the maintenance of psychic detachment, or alternatively on human rights discourse (Hannerz 1990, Urry 1995; see also Vertovec and Cohen 2002 and Skrbis et al. 2004). The specificity of gendered relations to elsewhere and otherness, whether racist or anti-racist, has likewise been paid little attention (Nava 2002); whilst the idea of a cosmopolitanism rooted in the host country, and played out locally through imaginaries of identification and desire, rather than associated with travel and migration to foreign territories, has barely been explored at all (though see Derrida 2001). By expanding these three neglected conceptual zones and drawing on a number of specific historical episodes, this chapter will make the case, in broad outline, for a viscerally experienced, domestically located and gendered cosmopolitanism in the imagined and geopolitical spaces of contemporary metropolitan England, particularly London. This is intended to expand existing debates, not replace them. A central assertion will be that cosmopolitanism of this kind has a wellestablished albeit uneven material history which has shifted over the course of the twentieth century from an oppositional culture of modernity to a mainstream aspect of contemporary everyday life and a core element in the identity of London as a (post)modern city, in which national and ‘racial’ differences have become ordinary. Cosmopolitanism viewed through this kind of lens must then always be understood as a historically contingent, geopolitically specific formation, as well

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as one which is to be distinguished conceptually from others with which it overlaps in some respects. These include, for instance, current political economy concerns with global citizenship or patterns of tourism and migration (e.g. Mouffe 2004). Perhaps more significant politically, and more difficult to unravel conceptually and empirically, is the distinction between ‘cosmopolitanism’ and twenty-first century urban ‘multiculturalism’, or co-existence with diversity of all kinds, including religion, in a sometimes diminishing public sphere. In this kind of multiculturalism, unlike cosmopolitanism, the ‘other’ is held at arm’s length and differences often consolidated rather than diffused (Hall 2002, Hesse 2002).1 Finally, it is also important to stress that the kind of cosmopolitanism posited here does not exist to the exclusion of a more traditional British xenophobia. On the contrary, the two moods, or discursive regimes, often co-exist in paradoxical and antagonistic tension with each other.

Histories When C.L.R James, the respected Trinidadian intellectual, first came to London in 1932, he wrote a series of letters home about his experiences and impressions which were published as articles in the Port of Spain Gazette. In one of them he describes the hospitality and warmth extended to him by the women he has met: The average English girl in London has little colour prejudice, and in fact, were it not for English men I doubt if she would have any at all . . . The girls, far from being prejudiced, are very much interested . . . But judging from the way they look and look and look, and from what many other coloured students have told me, it is the [English] men who are responsible for a great deal of the trouble. . . . I have met many instances of English women . . . of decent upbringing and education who have gone out of their way to help in everyway they could young men of colour in London. (James 2003: 102–03)

This, James goes on to say, is fuelled by ‘genuine good will, a desire to help the stranger in a foreign land’. But there is an erotic interest also, he says, and describes an incident in which a young woman sitting next to him in the cinema insisted on pressing her arm and thigh against his, despite the fact that her male escort was seated on her other side, and how therefore he felt obliged to make a hasty escape during ‘God Save the King’. Paul Robeson’s experience of London in the 1930s was not dissimilar. The celebrated American negro singer, movie star and actor who, at the end of the decade, was voted the most popular singer on British radio and ranked tenth on the Motion Picture Herald list of most popular film personalities by the British cinema-going public – which, significantly, was composed predominantly of women – also lived in London during the inter-war period because he found it consistently less racist than New York. According to his biographer, Robeson had several affairs with white English women (Duberman 1989). The warm welcome extended ten years after C.L.R James’s arrival by many white English women to black US servicemen while they were stationed in

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Britain during World War Two again echoes this mood and will certainly have been influenced by the public profile of Robeson (Nava 1999). Between 1942 and 1945 many thousands of English women and black GIs developed social and romantic relations with each other, to the consternation of the US army command which felt obliged to warn its own white troops, still deeply embedded in a segregationist US culture, about the different racial consciousness of the British, especially the women. As General Eisenhower put it, reflecting on his war-time experience in Europe: ‘The British girl would go to a movie or a dance with a Negro quite as readily as she would go with anyone else’ (Gardiner 1992: 155). Barbara Cartland, who was a moral welfare advisor to British women troops at the time, confirmed that it was ‘the white women who ran after black troops, not vice versa’ (Costello 1985: 319). These inter-race encounters were considered so subversive by the Americans that military censorship was imposed on all photos of black and white couples dancing and socialising. The relevant points here are first, that inter-race relations and the meaning of ‘race’ and epidermal difference were not the same in the United Kingdom as they were in the United States; and second, that in this context, as before the war, it was women (though not all women) who were most demonstrative and welcoming towards these ‘strangers’. Moreover, as C.L.R James noted, this welcome to men categorised as ‘other’ was extended by women from across the class range. Jews in the 1930s, in a climate of increasingly menacing anti-Semitism, in Britain as well as more notoriously in central Europe, were also coded as others and likewise embraced by certain groups in an empathetic gesture of social inclusion. Labour MP Dick Crossman made the point that during this period he and many of his middle-class socialist friends were ‘pro-Jew emotionally . . . as part of their “anti-Fascism” . . . instinctively standing up for the Jews whenever there was a chance to do so’ (Crossman 1946: 27).2 A number of them married Jews in part as an act of visceral political revolt against the racism and conservatism of the parental culture (among them Hugh Gaitskell, later leader of the Labour Party) (Nava 2006). Virginia Woolf was an earlier example who, according to her biographer, married Leonard in 1911 partly because of his ‘problematic Jewishness and the fact that this was the opposite of the sort of marriage which either of her parents could have countenanced’ (Lee 1996: 308). Nancy Cunard, heiress, political activist and editor of the celebrated 800-page anthology Negro, had a long relationship in the 1930s with African-American Henry Crowder out of a similar political and familial defiance (Chisholm 1981). During the post World War Two period of austerity, with the advent of new, predominantly male, migrants from the Commonwealth, particularly the Caribbean, the response of the indigenous population to outsiders shifted.3 Bill Schwarz makes the argument that this period saw a re-racialisation in Britain because of fears of miscegenation (Schwarz 1996). Yet although discrimination in housing and the workplace was pervasive, in the liminal spheres of social and sexual interaction, black migrants were often still made welcome. The Windrush film made by Mike and Trevor Phillips demonstrates this unintentionally.4 Interspersed among interviews with mostly male Caribbean migrants recalling their disappointment and humiliation at the exclusionary practices of the British in the early postwar years are archival clips of London clubs where, as young

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men, they danced and socialised with white women. Horace Ove, a Trinidadian film maker who came to Britain in the early 1950s, remembers that white women didn’t only fancy the newcomers: ‘They were curious, and despite pressure from their parents and friends they helped us by reaching out to us. They had understanding for us for some reason’ (quoted in Pilkington 1988: 65; see also contemporary Caribbean fiction e.g. Salkey 1960). Ras Makonnen (from Guyana), explains this empathy and some of its inherent contradictions by suggesting that the ‘dedication of some of the [white] girls to our cause was an expression of equal rights for women. One way of rejecting the oppression of men was to associate with blacks’ (quoted in Gilroy 1987: 163). 1960s white sociologist Sheila Patterson made a related point when she commented (in her case disapprovingly) that some white women had relationships with ‘coloured’ men as a ‘deliberate political gesture’ or ‘pour épater les bourgeois’ as she put it: to flout convention (Patterson 1965: 254). Today at the beginning of the twenty-first century, convention is no longer flouted by mixed relations. Miscegenation and domestic social interaction (to be distinguished from ‘multiculturalism’ or co-existence in the public sphere) are now normal, especially in London. In 1994, more than 50% of young British males of Afro-Caribbean origin and 35% of females were estimated to have white partners (Modood 1997). The latest UK data (2000) suggest that an astonishing 90% of ‘black’ men aged twenty and in a relationship, are with partners who are not black (though how ‘black’ is defined here is not clear) and that 40% of children with one ‘black’ (mixed?) parent also have a white parent. These changes are not confined to people of Afro-Caribbean origin: the Indian and Chinese populations in the United Kingdom are heading in the same direction albeit at a slower rate (least likely to marry out are Muslims of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin) (Berthoud cited in Parker and Song 2001: 2). These high figures of black–white relations in the United Kingdom compare to the very low estimated percentage – 3.6% only – of African-American males married to white partners in the United States (Small 2001). Interracial relationships in Britain are also estimated to be ten times higher than the European average (Parker and Song 2001) (though it is not clear how Europe is defined here). All these figures are inevitably open to interpretation, but what is nevertheless clear is that ‘mixed-raceness’, which in the London context is an appellation more likely to indicate complex historical and geographical trajectories than essential racial origins, has become commonplace; it exists alongside and is fused with the plurality of contemporary British physiognomies. Moreover, this racial and cultural blurring operates across social class categories: Diana was not the only one in royal circles to choose a partner who was visibly from somewhere else; one of the Queen’s cousins is married to a Nigerian and another has an Indian live-in boyfriend. Widespread miscegenation and domestic interaction of this kind are not the only signs of cosmopolitanism in contemporary London, nor, importantly, are they inevitably a sign, but they are all the same emblematic of a reconfigured modern metropolitan identity. Richard Sennett distinguishes between alterity in the city, which is about the provoking quality of the unknown, unclassifiable other, and mere difference (Sennett 2002). In contemporary London, difference – and in particular epidermal difference – has become ‘mere

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difference’, it has become ordinary. As one young man, a mixture of African, Portuguese, Jewish and Australian descent put it: ‘I’m passionately a Londoner, this is where I belong. In my view being a Londoner means being half of this and half of that’, or in his case, indeterminate quarters. This apparently unstoppable trend towards fusion exists at the same time as, and in contrast to, increasingly entrenched late-modern religious and cultural differentiation. What needs to be explained therefore is why Londoners seem to be relatively unique in their propensity to merge. What is it that distinguishes London from other postcolonial or settler societies in the West? What are the historical, geopolitical and unconscious determinants of this kind of modern domestic and emotional cosmopolitanism? What is the conceptual specificity of this visceral, local and gendered cosmopolitanism? Theories A decade ago there was almost no theoretical literature on cosmopolitanism. In recent years it has been taken up across a range of disciplines and has come to refer to a disparate cluster of philosophies, subjectivities, aspirations and practices: from global citizenship and the transnational identifications of migrants to embedded US journalists in the Iraq war.5 So care is needed with its use. I came across some unexpected references to the term by chance while working in the Selfridges archive: Gordon Selfridge, founder of the department store, was an enthusiastic advocate of cosmopolitanism (as he also was of feminism) and wrote about it frequently in his daily press column during the first decades of the twentieth century, at the height of the Empire. He was so pleased, he often stated, that London was losing her insularity and becoming really cosmopolitan (e.g. Selfridge 1911). These optimistic aspirations prompted my subsequent research on the history of cosmopolitanism in commercial and entertainment cultures and, because women were so significant in these spheres as consumers, on the specificity of women’s fascination with abroad and otherness. One of the concerns in that work on the early twentieth century was to unravel the distinctions between aspirant cosmopolitanism as part of an engagement with the new – as a feature of modernity – and Edward Said’s ‘orientalism’ (Said 1978, Nava 1998). The purpose of this piece, in an intellectual climate in which the deployment of ‘cosmopolitanism’ has now become commonplace, is to sharpen and clarify some of the neglected theoretical possibilities of the concept and to highlight absences in current debates. The historical narratives and texts I have already referred to suggest three interlinked analytical zones which have been excluded or narrowly interpreted in the literature. These are disposition, gender and the domestic. Discussions of disposition have tended to exclude feeling. Gender has been excluded from all aspects of the debate. Cosmopolitanism at home rather than abroad – local cosmopolitanism – has also barely been addressed. Gender, although foregrounded in one of these zones, is in fact is an element which traverses all three. Indeed this common presence may well be the factor which has led to their relative marginalisation across the board. Yet, as I hope to demonstrate,

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the conceptual relevance of all three zones to the broader discursive regime of cosmopolitanism is compelling. Disposition Disposition, which refers to an attitude or mode of engaging with the world, is the least neglected of the three. It is one of the ‘perspectives’ identified by Vertovec and Cohen (2002) and is discussed at some length and perceptively by Tomlinson (1999) and also by Urry (1995).6 All build on the work of Hannerz who, in his seminal essay, describes cosmopolitanism as ‘an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness towards divergent cultural experiences’ (1990: 239). The cosmopolitan in this framework (whom Hannerz implies is normally a western male) has reflexive and cognitive competencies which enable him to travel around the world while remaining culturally and emotionally detached. Although useful in opening up the debate, the various accounts about the cognitive skills of travellers and migrants fail to take into account the non-rational, visceral, reactive and unconscious elements that are complexly at play in the production of the cosmopolitan imagination; that are manifested in feelings of empathy, attraction and hospitality towards others and the foreign and that emerge so strikingly in the episodes I described earlier. These more complexly charged emotions and imaginaries, which I insist should be considered as an additional integral feature of cosmopolitanism, are also connected to what Stanley Cohen (in an attempt to explain why some people did help Jews in occupied Europe, despite the risk to themselves) has called ‘instinctive extensivity’: this is a kind of intuitive and spontaneous ‘sense of self as part of a common humanity’, a semi-conscious not-easily-explained disregard for borders demarcating family, ‘race’ and nation (Cohen 2001: 265). The origins of these feelings of inclusivity and of a sense of an imagined community which extends beyond the boundaries of the local are not easily explained and have been neglected even within the field of psychoanalysis whose remit precisely is to make sense of the genesis of such recurring, semi-conscious yet idiosyncratic responses. The main point to emphasise here is that the most common ways of understanding cosmopolitan disposition do not include the non-rational often passionate commitment to a more inclusive community of strangers (though see Kristeva 1993, Nava 2006). Nor do they attempt to trace its genealogy. But genealogies – of historical and geopolitical formations as well as disposition – cannot be neglected if current political–ethical differences in intellectual thought are to be understood. Too often it is assumed that there are no salient differences between racial signifiers in the west, that US codifications and theories apply also in the United Kingdom. But this is not the case. Imaginative disregard for borders and feelings of inclusivity – here referred to as the cosmopolitan disposition – are differently interpreted and valued in different contexts, as a recent piece by Kimberly Chabot Davis reveals. In it she reviews some of the scathing moral criticisms levelled by white American anti-racists against other whites and what they perceive as ‘sentimental’, ‘self-serving’ and ‘facile sympathy’ for racial others which is ‘inherently colonising’ and a ‘substitute for political action’ rather than a political unsettling of the status quo. These observations

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are made in the context of an analysis of white women readers’ empathetic responses to fiction by black women on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show in the United States (Chabot Davis 2003; 2004). Although Chabot Davis concludes against the grain of these other US critics by arguing that affective reading experiences can disrupt ideologies of racial hierarchy and could galvanise support for anti-racist public policy in America, and therefore offers a more nuanced analysis, it is interesting to note that she does not address what might be specific about the responses she describes in either national or gender terms. Gender In contrast, I make the claim that there are a number of reasons – social and psychodynamic – why gender is significant and why women in Britain have figured more prominently than men in the history of twentieth-century cosmopolitanism as recounted here. These include historical and geopolitical factors, among them the demographic consequences of two world wars, which seriously reduced the numbers of available men; and also the gendered patterns of migration to Britain over the course of the twentieth century which meant that indigenous women were the first to have intimate relations with the predominantly male visitors and travellers from elsewhere. Women were also distinctively located in relation to the new social formations of popular modernity. In their capacity as the main shoppers, readers and cinema goers, they were more likely to encounter the proliferating cultural and commercial narratives about the allure of abroad and difference, (see for example Selfridges’ promotion of the tango in the years before World War One; desert romance movies like The Sheik in the 1920s; US dance and movie cultures in the 1930s; and more recently, television; Nava 1998; 1999). Also to be taken into account was the precariousness of English masculinity, which, particularly during the early part of the twentieth century, was often described in literary and biographical accounts, by men as well as women, as uncommunicative and sexually repressed – in sum as disappointing. In this context, women’s fantasies of ‘other’ lovers flourished. But there are other factors as well, as the stories recounted earlier indicate: some English women also identified with ‘others’, who like themselves, were marginalised and contingently denied power in the unstable and overlapping regimes of white and male superiority. So their alliances with racial others and the socially repudiated can be understood, as Makonnen recognised, as a form of proto-feminism: these acts constituted a revolt against the constraints of family and ‘femininity’ as well as Englishness. Finally (and contentiously) there may well be embedded unconscious factors as well which make women (not all women) more inclined to feel empathy for strangers, to be inclusive, and politically to be pacifists (as they certainly were in the inter-war and again have been since 9/11). Freud, in his Civilization and its Discontents, used the phrase ‘the narcissism of minor differences’ to describe the enduring hostility between ethnic and racial neighbours, predominantly men, which he argued was rooted in the son’s rivalry with the father, and therefore inherently masculine (Freud 1930). Conversely, Bracha Ettinger, a Lacanian theorist and artist, has argued in a

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complex recent piece that women’s greater empathy for others can be linked to what she has called the ‘matrixial’. This is the symbolic effect in the imaginary of having a womb which produces a feminine subjectivity more about conjoining than difference, one in which borders between people are less sharply defined and in which the other may be valued more highly than the self (Boyne 2004, Ettinger 2004). The possibility of women’s distinctive mode of intersubjective relations and unconscious identification with difference is advanced by others also, though there is no space for the debate to be developed here (Benjamin 1998, Wyatt 2004). What does seem to be the case however is that these socio-historical and psychodynamic factors have combined to produce some specific and unexpected cultural outcomes. As has already been noted, relationships between white women and ‘other’ men in the historical context of colonial and postcolonial Britain have contributed to the destabilisation of both race and gender hierarchies, in contrast to those between white men and black women – the dominant pattern in the United States historically – which have tended to confirm them. The consequences of this asymmetry have been far reaching and are relevant for the discussion here, but have not been much explored. The mixed children of indigenous white mothers in the UK context, even if still highly visible, are more likely to be absorbed, albeit unevenly, into the dominant white culture and hence to transform it into something more fluid – more cosmopolitan – and to make its national and epidermal borders more permeable. This is in contrast to the US pattern in which mixed children have historically been more likely to be categorised as ‘black’, leaving cultural boundaries and the racial ‘purity’ of whites intact.7 Cultural merger and mongrelisation therefore are more likely to be the outcomes (in the context of predominantly white societies) where white women are the point of social, emotional and sexual contact with ‘elsewhere’. The Domestic Gender differences are also central to the third zone, the domestic. This topographical trope refers to both a territory of the imagination and, in the context of this chapter, to the more material historical transformations specific to London’s geopolitics. Both contribute to the way domestic cosmopolitanism is being conceptualised here. The domestic generates a range of discursive connotations. It evokes the spatial, the dualities of inside–outside, private–public, home and abroad, the domesticated and of course the feminine. In the context of this discussion it signals a cosmopolitanism that takes place at home, in the family, in our home town, in the interior territories of the mind and body. As such, it suggests a structure of feeling – a stance of openness to others and other cultural practices – that exists independently of travel to foreign countries or knowledge of foreign languages; this is a cosmopolitanism that emerges from engagement with otherness and elsewhere in the local zones – the micro publics – of the city: the street, the school, the baby clinic, the gym, the dance floor, the shopping centre and the cultural terrains of urban sounds and appearance (Amin 2002, Sandercock 2003). In the same way, the intimate albeit mediated form of TV must also be included here insofar as, cumulatively, it

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generates, in the familiar domesticscape of the living room, an increasing deterritorialisation of the globe by normalising difference in the spheres of music, fashion, even politics, although often against the message of individual programmes. But it would be a mistake to assume that these quotidian experiences of interaction are simple replays on home territory of the travels abroad undertaken by Hannerz’s cosmopolitan, for whom the foreign tends to be made up of observed entities usually maintained at arm’s length. The everyday domestic cultures that have developed in many of London’s neighbourhoods over the last few decades are closer to the vernacular cosmopolitanism referred to (all too briefly) by postcolonial theorists like Hall and Bhabha in that they signal the increasingly undifferentiated, hybrid, post-multicultural, lived transformations which are the outcome of diasporic cultural mixing and indeterminacy rather than plurality and coexistence (Bhabha 1996, Hall 2000, Benedictus 2005). So the continuity not only of co-residence but of interaction, of mutual acknowledgement and desire is what marks out domestic and vernacular cosmopolitanism, and, importantly, does so not only for the one-in-four Londoners born abroad (Kyambi 2005) or for the many more whose parents were, but also for the several million native British subjects who inhabit the metropolis and take pleasure in its cultural mix. To point this out is not to deny the forcefulness of parallel and sometimes complexly interwoven xenophobia and anti-immigrant feeling which at opportune moments is ratcheted up and used for political purposes. The claim here is that alongside and imbricated with such exclusivity and pandering to popular (often rural) anxiety is a more generous hospitable engagement with people from elsewhere, a commitment to an imagined inclusive transnational community of disparate Londoners. These imaginative connections and cultural transformations arise in part from specific factors in London’s geopolitical history: London is not only unlike New York or Chicago in respect of its cultural-racial mixing, but also unlike Paris, despite a similar history of postcolonial relations. Eric Hobsbawm makes the point that over the last thirty years or so, the centre of Paris has been transformed into a ‘gigantic gentrified bourgeois ghetto’ from which the poor and immigrants have been extruded to housing projects on the city’s suburban periphery (Hobsbawm 2002: 332).8 Although London also has its gentrified areas, war-time bombing damage and the resultant almost random scattering of municipal housing across the city has meant that the middle and working classes, foreigners and natives, have lived and been schooled in much more intimate proximity to each other (although inequalities persist). So although some migrant groups settled close to people from their own background while others were dispersed across the city, most were schooled in a highly mixed environment, alongside both the ‘gentrifying’, professional, often left-wing, middle classes who had moved into some of the neglected sectors of the city, and a mobile, indigenous working class that was decreasingly cohesive as it in turn moved to the outer urban fringes because of postwar slum clearance or the desire to live in the more salubrious respectable suburbs. Such familiarity between groups is one of the factors that have shifted the axis of belonging in much of contemporary London. Yet Ash Amin has stressed that residential proximity on its own is not enough to transform consciousness: what is required is interdependence and habitual participation in the everyday projects and spaces of the city (Amin 2002). Modood points out that ‘political mobilisation and

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participation, especially protest and contestation’ are themselves a means of ‘integrating’, and that this is a factor which distinguishes British patterns of migration from those in other parts of Europe (Modood 2005: 69). Richard Sennett’s related argument about mutual respect and the expressive work of acknowledging others – about the importance of performing ‘mutuality’ – although made about another context, is also useful in thinking through the conditions for the viable operation of cosmopolitanism (Sennett 2004: 59).

Conclusion Domestic, local and political practices of this kind, boosted by the emotional and libidinal economies of identification and desire, are, I would argue, the foundational elements of twenty-first century urban cosmopolitan imaginaries and more inclusive experiences of belonging. So although the domestic cosmopolitanism of London may be confined predominantly to the geographical limits of the metropolis, imaginatively and visually it has extended the borders of what it means to be a Londoner, and indeed British. It is increasingly clear moreover, that in relation to cosmopolitanism, as was also the case with second wave feminism, the domestic and the personal are not politically insignificant. On the contrary, affective cultures are deeply implicated in political resistance and transformation, in antiracism as much as racism. Gender and structures of feeling – the micro-narratives and encounters of the emotional, gendered and domestic everyday – must be taken into account if we are to understand the specificity of the contemporary context. Theorists of cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism and racial difference who neglect these factors diminish the conceptual and political reach of their own argument. The relevance, both conceptual and political, of the analysis of cosmopolitanism offered here is visible in the sequence of iconic events which so transformed the consciousness and global image of London in the first week of July 2005.9 The successful bid for the Olympics was in part a consequence of the deliberate promotion of London as a global city and Londoners as the most culturally diverse population in the world. The brief moment of euphoria and metropolitan pride generated by the award was followed only hours later by the darkness of the bombs of 7/7 which, in mutilating and killing people from a wide range of national origins, again transmitted to the world an image of London’s cultural diversity, and at the same time was constitutive of a new awareness of commonality and interdependence among Londoners themselves. Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, when interviewed immediately after the event, put it (approximately) thus: ‘among those who died were Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, young, old, black and white, people from all over the world who live here in harmony because of the freedoms of the city. This disaster will unite Londoners, not divide them’. Pessimists might say his words were an attempt to diffuse tension. They may in part have been. Nevertheless, the poignant and intimate sharing of fortune and misfortune by the residents of London over these few dramatic days is indicative of the extent of the mutuality of this quotidian, local, twenty-first century cosmopolitanism.

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Notes 1 See for instance in separate ‘faith schools’ which are a growing but contested phenomenon in the United Kingdom. 2 Crossman was later to become an anti-Zionist and distanced himself from the Jewish architects of the state of Israel (1946). 3 The new migrants also included large numbers of Polish ex-servicemen and refugees from displaced people camps in continental Europe. 4 Made for BBC2 and broadcast in June 1998. 5 It was used in this way by Carol Stabile at 2003 Cultural Studies Association (US) annual conference in Pittsburgh. See Vertovec and Cohen (2002) for a helpful discussion of existing approaches. 6 John Tomlinson is the most interesting of these (1999); see also Nava (2002). 7 The legacy of slavery and particular way of conceptualising race – one-drop rule – persist. Interracial marriage was illegal in half the states of the US until the 1960s. Lynching was commonplace in the south until the 1930s (Allen et al. 2004). Even today restrictions are imposed by US record companies, in contrast to those in Britain, on the representation of black and white couples in music videos, according to director Jake Nava. 8 See e.g. the film La Haine, directed Mathieu Kissovitz (1995). The suburbs in US and UK mythology evoke security and respectability, whereas those of Paris suggest deprivation and menace. The condition and mood of the Paris suburbs were on display during the extended disturbances of October and November 2005. 9 This final section was written as the events and their sad aftermath unfolded.

References Allen, James, Als, Hilton, Lewis, John and Litwack, Leon (2004) Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, New Mexico: Twin Palms Publishers. Amin, Ash (2002) Ethnicity and the Multicultural City, Durham: University of Durham Press. Benedictus, Leo (2005) ‘London: the world in one city’, Guardian G2 special issue, 21 January: 1–7. Benjamin, Jessica (1998) Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis, New York and London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi (1996) ‘Unsatisfied: notes on Vernacular cosmopolitanism’, in Laura Garcia-Moreno and Peter Pfeiffer (eds) Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, Columbia, SC: Camden House: 191–207. Boyne, Roy (2004) ‘Uterine self-understanding and the Indispensable Other: editorial reflections on the work of Bracha Ettinger’, Theory, Culture & Society, 21(1): 1–3. Chabot Davis, Kimberly (2003) ‘An ethnography of political identification: the Birmingham school meets psychoanalytic theory’, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 8(1): 3–11. Chabot Davis, Kimberly (2004) ‘Oprah’s book club and the politics of cross-racial empathy’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(4): 399–419. Chisholm, Anne (1981) Nancy Cunard, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cohen, Stanley(2001) States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, Cambridge: Polity. Costello, John (1985) Love, Sex and War, London: Collins. Crossman, Richard (1946) Palestine Mission: A Personal Record, London: Hamish Hamilton. Derrida, Jacques (2001) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, London and New York: Routledge: Duberman, Martin (1989) Paul Robeson, London: Bodley Head. Ettinger, Bracha L. (2004) ‘Weaving a woman artist with-in the matrixial encounter-event’, Theory, Culture & Society, (1): 69–93. Freud, Sigmund (1930) Civilization and its Discontents, London: Hogarth Press. Gardiner, Juliet (1992) ‘Over Here’: The GIs in Wartime Britain, London: Collins and Brown. Gilroy, Paul (1987) There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, London: Hutchinson. Hall, Stuart (2000) ‘Conclusion: the multi-cultural question’, in Barnor Hesse (ed.) Un/Settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, London and New York: Zed Books: 209–41.

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Hannerz, Ulf (1990) ‘Cosmopolitans and locals in world culture’, Theory, Culture & Society, 7(2–3): 237–51. Hesse, Barnor (2000) ‘Introduction: Un/Settled multiculturalisms’, in Barnor Hesse (ed.) Un/Settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, London and New York: Zed Books: 1–30. Hobsbawm, Eric (2002) Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, London:Abacus. James, C.L.R. (2003) [1932] ‘The women’, in Nicholas Laughlin (ed.) Letters from London: Seven Essays by C.L.R. James, Oxford: Signal Books: 93–107. Kristeva, Julia (1993) Nations Without Nationalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Kyambi, Sarah (2005) Beyond Black and White: Mapping New Immigrant Communities, London: Institute for Public Policy Research. Lee, Hermione (1996) Virginia Woolf, London: Chatto & Windus. Modood, Tariq (1997) Ethnic Minorities in Britain: The Fourth National Survey, London: Policy Studies Institute. Modood, Tariq (2005) ‘A defence of multiculturalism’, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 29: 62–71. Mouffe, Chantal (2004) ‘Cosmopolitan democracy or multipolar world order’, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 28: 62–74. Nava, Mica (1998) ‘The cosmopolitanism of commerce and the allure of difference: Selfridges, the Russian Ballet and the Tango 1911–1914’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1(2): 163–96. Nava, Mica (1999) ‘Wider horizons and modern desire: the contradictions of America and racial difference in London 1935–45’, New Formations, 37: 71–91. Nava, Mica (2002) ‘Cosmopolitan modernity: everyday imaginaries and the register of difference’ Theory, Culture & Society, 19 (1–2): 81–99. Nava, Mica (2006) ‘The unconscious and others: rescue, inclusivity and the eroticisation of difference in 1930s Vienna’, in Caroline Bainbridge, Susannah Radstone, Michael Rustin and Candace Yates (eds) Culture and the Unconscious, London: Palgrave. (In press.) Parker, David and Song, Miri (2001) ‘Introduction’, in David Parker and Miri Song (eds) Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’, London: Pluto Press: 1–22. Patterson, Sheila (1965) Dark Strangers: A Study of West Indians in London, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pilkington, Edward (1988) Beyond the Mother Country: West Indians and the Notting Hill White Riots, London: IB Tauris. Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Salkey, Andrew (1960) Escape to Autumn Pavement, London: Hutchinson. Sandercock, Leonie (2003) Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century, London and New York: Continuum. Schwarz, Bill (1996) ‘Black metropolis, white England’, in Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (eds) Modern Times: A Century of English Modernity, London: Routledge: 176–207. Selfridge & Co. Ltd. (Editorial Rooms) (1911) ‘A London Rendez-Vous’, 5 September. Sennett, Richard (2002) ‘Cosmopolitanism and the social experience of cities’, in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (eds) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 42–7. Sennett, Richard (2004) Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality, London: Penguin Books. Skrbis, Zlatko, Gavin Kendall and Ian Woodward (2004) ‘Locating cosmopolitanism: between humanist ideal and grounded social category’, Theory, Culture & Society, 21(6): 115–36. Small, Stephen (2001) ‘Colour, culture and class: interrogating interracial marriage and people of mixed racial descent in USA’, in David Parker and Miri Song (eds) Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’, London: Pluto Press: 117–33. Tomlinson, John (1999) Globalization and Culture, Cambridge: Polity. Urry, John (1995) Consuming Places, London: Routledge. Vertovec, Steven and Cohen, Robin (eds) (2002) ‘Introduction’, in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (eds) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice’, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1–22. Wyatt, Jean (2004) Risking Difference: Identification, Race and Community, New York: State University of New York Press.

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4 A Cartography of Resistance: the National Federation of Dalit Women* By Kalpana Kannabiran Introduction Caste has been central to debates around entitlements and constitutionalism in India for five decades. This period has also witnessed shifts in policy emphasis, jurisprudence, and politics around the issue of caste. Till the mid-1990s, however, the debate was located within a ‘national context’ and caste itself constructed in terms of its ‘peculiarity’ to Indian society. The World Conference against Racism held at Durban in 2001 and the process that led to the WCAR in India witnessed the ‘freeing’ of caste from the confines of India into a larger international arena that held out greater possibilities for public debate, alliance building and more powerful resistance. The participation of Dalits in large numbers at Durban generated an entire discourse in India on questions of funding, the ‘proper’ contexts of political resistance, the hierarchies of alliance building in resistance movements, and the theoretical/sociological validity of viewing caste through the prism of racism, among others. The question of violence is fundamental to any discussion on dalit politics in India. It is perhaps pertinent therefore to begin with questions. What is violence? How may we understand the playing out of ‘transgressive’ violence and ‘legitimate’ violence? In a society where some groups rhetorically and through the use of force (violence) occupy the ‘restful domain of reason and pacific order’ (the domain of passive dependence), the autonomous expression of belonging is by definition transgressive. Further, where it is generally argued that ‘[l]aw . . . must forever chase and mark itself against a transgressive violence,’(Foucault 1987: 34 cf. Fitzpatrick 2001: 292) what place do we accord to the marking of resistance against transgressive violence within the domain of the law – the court especially [but also the criminal justice system] being a signpost in that domain? How do communities deal with long-term suffering and exclusion that continues unabated despite protections in public law? At the core, how does suffering shape the politics of belonging? There is a need to look in different places for new and unexpected expressions of a new politics of belonging. Does this invocation of an alternative register of belonging then make for a ‘different’ governmentality, by re-mapping the possible field of action for others? This chapter essay focuses on the interpretation of caste as race by dalit groups, and the ‘different’ politics this process gave birth to.1 It will be divided into four

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sections. The first will attempt to set out a theoretical framework with the help of which the Durban process might be best understood; the second will attempt an analysis of caste, untouchability and resistance; the third will examine the debate on caste and race that was part of the Durban process; the fourth part will look at the specific articulations of caste as race by the National Federation of Dalit Women, that foreground the intersections between racism, sexism and the politics of becoming/belonging. The Politics of Becoming/Belonging The politics of becoming is immediately relevant to an understanding of the trajectory of Dalit politics in the context of Durban. And yet this politics is praxiologically inseparable from the politics of belonging. In putting in place the signposts for this argument, I am drawing on the work of Connolly (1996) and Minow (1996) on the one hand and Omi and Winant (2002) on the other. I could perhaps anticipate my argument by saying that the politics of belonging encapsulates within itself the politics of becoming. The politics of becoming occurs, in Connolly’s words, ‘when a culturally marked constituency, suffering under its current social constitution, strives to reconfigure itself by moving the cultural constellation of identity/difference then in place’ (Connolly 1996: 255–226. Emphasis added). It is a paradoxical politics by which ‘new cultural identities are formed out of old energies, injuries and differences’ (Connolly 1996: 261). While it is in motion, placing new identities on the cultural field, the politics of becoming also changes the shape and contour of established identities, thus bringing in its wake disturbance, distress and disruption, throwing in peril the stability of being through which dominant constituencies seek comfort. The politics of becoming in this moment of definition engages actively and comparatively with a number of different constituencies, shaping a regulative ideal in the process and never actually becoming completely conclusive or exclusive, or even completely synchronised with these other constituencies – the constitutive tension between suffering and cultural possibility opening out the field of public discourse in unimaginable ways (Connolly 1996: 274). Extending this argument somewhat, Minow (1996) suggests that the idea of the politics of becoming could be more usefully probed through a thematic exploration. Of the three themes she identifies, I find two – the first and the third, that is, the ‘we,’ and the place of ‘prior experience’ – particularly relevant. The politics of becoming clearly pre-supposes a community of belonging, a ‘we’. If the ‘we’ is constituted on the basis of suffering, as Connolly suggests, which suffering should be more worthy of response? That caused by the disruption of social order and dominant modes by subaltern groups or that caused by the suppression/subordination of resistance by dominant groups (Minow 1996: 280)? This question is fundamentally flawed, even while it evokes concerns ranging from caricaturing of resistance as ‘Oppression Olympics’ to ‘reverse discrimination’ caused by affirmative action – all of which are discussed in the context of the dalit experience later in this chapter. If it is conceded that domination is the source of

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pain and the cause of suffering, the uprooting of dominance – the removal of pain and suffering – can scarcely be described in the same terms as its infliction. In other words, there cannot, I would argue, be a theoretical equivalence posited between the uprooting of domination and the quashing of resistance to that domination, or a reinforcement of the status quo. Despite the fact of multiple identities, there is a solidarity of location in the context of social suffering that quite clearly separates the ‘we’ from the ‘not we’, so that even while re-inventing the ‘we,’ the politics of becoming keeps sight of location, of belonging. In this process, the building of the constituency of belonging shatters hitherto unquestioned foundations of location and puts in place un-imaginable ones. Since people build on what they know, Minow suggests that the crafting of prior experience in a way that enhances the possibility for responsiveness, collective redress and openness to difference may prove enabling in confronting suffering and transforming society (Minow 1996: 283). ‘What experiences can be planted’, she asks, ‘so that people relate new expressions of suffering to a pattern of responsiveness?’ ‘Why not cast for a broader we . . . ? Why not realise the idea that a society progresses when misfortune becomes viewed as an injustice?’ (Minow 1996: 284). But, Minow sees the ‘we’ and by extension the construction of prior experience as contained within a ‘collective, national experience’ (285). This does not allow for the possibility that the ‘collective’ experience could be other than – opposed even to – the ‘national’, that the national – to the extent that the term evokes sentiments of citizenship – is not necessarily co-terminus with territory, and could in its mildest expressions undermine fundamental notions of territoriality, and finally, that the casting of the broadest possible ‘we’ since it keeps sight of location and is mindful of memory, could shatter every received notion of belonging in a society, in particular national loyalty/patriotism/territorial integrity. Both Connolly (1996) and Minow (1996) proceed on the fundamental assumption that plurality provides a condition of possibility for the politics of becoming and move towards a position that the politics of becoming necessarily solidifies into another form of being – a better, more ethical, collectively responsive form of being. However, it is often the case, as I hope to demonstrate later in this chapter, that pluralism does not preclude practices that are exclusionary and violently hegemonic. On the other hand, plurality provides the coherence that threads different groups and their diverse experiences into a single coordinated system. Practices of dominance, hegemony and exclusion are tied to social location within this system and cohere through (and tend to be masked by) the prism of plurality. It is the exclusion and the consequent systemic and systematic violence that provides the condition of necessity for the politics of becoming. By definition then, this politics and the assertion of different axes of belonging, of which it is an intrinsic part, are distinct from being. In sharp contrast, being is solid, hegemonic, ascribed, seeming to disintegrate but constantly re-congealing in new forms – scholarship on caste is illustrative, as I hope to demonstrate – without fundamentally new content. This process of becoming in the Dalit context draws in critical notions of race and racial formation, to demarcate a new field for the politics of becoming and

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mapping the route from becoming to belonging. Drawing on Omi and Winant’s formulation of racial formation as ‘the socio-historical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed’ (2002: 124), I argue that the politics of becoming in the present context, is a project that attempts also to interpret, represent and explain racial dynamics, while simultaneously underscoring the need to reorganise and redistribute resources along racial lines (Omi and Winant 2002: 125). The politics of becoming is a self-conscious movement – a re-invention of the ‘we,’ to echo Minow (1996) – towards a goal of belonging better somewhere else, interrogating the foundations of culture and solidarity, transgressing every notion of territoriality and ‘integrity’, in order not to arrive at a different level of being in the same space at the same time in different yet recognisable ways but to cross the black waters (the ocean, kaala paani, crossing which would defile an upper caste hindu)2 to a different politics of belonging. What results is a politics of becoming/belonging as resistance to caste, patriarchy and the state and through that route resistance to all forms of descent-based discrimination/exclusion. This transgression of territoriality and integrity is extremely significant because it obstructs and fragments the re-solidification of being. The politics of becoming/belonging then, is an essentially enabling, fundamentally transformative process that forges a larger community of belonging beyond borders; that merges histories of oppression as also those of resistance, creating new measures of solidarity and shared citizenship, and forces on states a public accountability outside of the ‘internal’ space of the nation, rupturing old comfortable ways of thinking about ‘social evils’ by re-naming the problem: Caste is not merely a social evil. Caste is Race. Discrimination based on caste is racial discrimination. This idea is immediately relevant to an understanding of resistance to social exclusion in societies where ‘race’ is not a standard measure of difference.

Caste, Untouchability and Resistance Caste is the defining characteristic of Indian society. Views on caste vary. There are those that see it as a predominantly religious system, others who view it as merely social and economic and yet others who see in its elaboration the spiritual essence of the Hindu faith and view the aspect of discrimination as a mere aberration; several view it as the centrepoint of brahminical tyranny; some see it as the Indian equivalent of community. Dirks suggests that ‘caste, as we know it today, is not in fact some unchanged survival of ancient India, not some single system that reflects a core civilisational value, not a basic expression of Indian tradition. Rather . . . caste is a modern phenomenon, specifically the product of an historical encounter between India and Western colonial rule . . . [I]t was under the British that “caste” became a single term capable of expressing, organizing and above all “systematizing” India’s diverse forms of social identity, community, and organization’ (Dirks 2002: 5). To summarise the characteristics of caste (Kannabiran 2002), it is a hierarchical, hegemonic ranking of social groups found predominantly on the Indian

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sub-continent. A word of Portuguese and Spanish origin, the word ‘casta’ in the early sixteenth century embraced several meanings, one of which was ‘purity of blood’. By the eighteenth century, it was used to designate two levels of groups in the sub-continent: the jatis, roughly about 3000 or more are loosely grouped into four varnas, the latter finding systematic elaboration in the brahminical scriptural tradition of the Vedic period. In the Brahman/upper-caste construction, which is elaborated in the Hindu Dharmasastras, as part of a tradition of universal law, caste has its origin in the varna system, which was constituted by four orders: Brahman (priests), ksatriya (warriors), vaisya (traders), sudra (artisans, labourers, peasants, etc.). Of these, the first three were the dvija (twice born ‘clean’) castes, the men of which are entitled to initiation into Hinduism. A fifth order, the panchama or the untouchables, slaves who performed ‘menial chores’ (cleansing villages – in general engaged directly in production and connected closely to organic life), was included later. Dalits in early sociological and scriptural literature (a telling combination) referred to as panchamas, the ‘untouchable’ castes, have for centuries been confined in vadas (colonies), enslaved to the other four varnas in perpetual bondage.3 The use of the word asprsya (literally ‘untouchable’) was first used in the Visnusmrti, which prescribes death for any member of these castes who deliberately touches a member of a higher caste.4 The critique of caste has its origin in the work of Jotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule in Maharashtra in the nineteenth century, E.V. Ramaswami Naicker ‘Periyar’ in Tamil Nadu in the early twentieth century and B.R. Ambedkar in the twentieth century. Gandhi condemned social exclusion and practices of untouchability but did not extend this to a fundamental critique of Hinduism itself as these others did. And yet, the critique of untouchability itself hit at the base of the caste system eroding caste supremacist ideologies. Phule and his associates founded the Satyashodhak Samaj (Truth Seeking Society) in 1873. The overarching themes of Phule’s addresses at meetings of the Samaj were on the character and unity of the labouring classes, the unequal division of labour between women of different castes and the vital contribution of peasant women to production. He established the first school in all of India for shudratishudra (dalit today) girls in 1848, following it up with another school for girls of all castes in 1851 (Deshpande 2002: 3). His seminal work, Gulamgiri (Slavery), juxtaposes the situation of the sudratisudra with the Negro slave in America: ‘This system of slavery, to which the Brahmins reduced the lower classes is in no respects inferior to that which obtained a few years ago in America. In the days of rigid Brahmin dominancy . . . my Sudra brethren had even greater hardships and oppression practiced upon them than what even the slaves in America had to suffer . . . This is even true at the present time . . . the Sudra . . . is so far reconciled to the Brahmin yoke, that like the American slave he would resist any attempt that may be made for his deliverance and fight even against his benefactor’ (Phule [1873] 2002: 31–32). Tarabai Shinde’s Stree Purusha Tulana (A Comparison between Women and Men) ([1882] 1994) also part of the Satyashodhak tradition, confronts brahmnical patriarchy as well as patriarchy within non-Brahman castes.

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In mapping a non-Brahman worldview through the Self Respect Movement launched in 1925, Periyar stood the caste system on its head. The new social order, samadharma (equality) could emerge only through a radical transformation of structures of feeling and material conditions. This immediately freed women and Adi Dravidas (Dalits) from caste-bound traditions, created a moral ground in which women exercised choice and consent, both in matters of marriage and sexuality and eliminated the priesthood and the chanting of Vedic hymns in marriage solemnities (Geetha and Rajadurai 1998). Ambedkar, an intrepid advocate of formal rights for the untouchables, belonged to the untouchable Mahar caste. He coined the word ‘Dalit’ (literally ‘downtrodden’) to designate untouchables as a political entity and spoke of the caste system as one of graded inequality – a system of hierarchies built on notions of relative superiority and inferiority, with the Dalits occupying the last rung in the system and thus bearing the brunt of a cumulative domination by all the other castes. During the struggle for independence in the early part of the twentieth century, Ambedkar’s concerns centred on finding ways in which Independence could bring freedom to the oppressed. As an architect of the Indian Constitution, he instituted constitutional safeguards for the depressed classes against exclusion (social boycott) and active discrimination by majority upper-caste Hindus in Independent India. Significant among these provisions was the right to substantive equality through reservations in education and employment. In general, the early twentieth century witnessed the consolidation of resistance to the caste system in different parts of British India. At the time that the resistance to practices of caste was gaining ground, colonial ethnography had reached its peak in the subcontinent. Ideas about the racial dimension of caste derived from European interpretations of Indian society that began with William Jones in the eighteenth century. Bayly for instance points out that many pre-independence ethnographers from Britain ‘portrayed India as a composite social landscape in which only certain peoples, those of superior “Aryan” blood, had evolved historically in ways which left them “shackled” by a hierarchical, Brahmnically-defined ideology of “caste”. At the same time large numbers of other Indians – those identified in varying racial terms as Dravidians, as members of “servile” classes, aborigines, wild tribes, and those of so-called “mixed-racial origins – were portrayed as being ethnologically distinct from this so-called Aryan population, and were not all thought to belong to a ranked Brahmanical caste order” ’ (Bayly 1995: 170) Jaffrelot observes that the British administration gradually propagated these categories in society so that ‘[g]radually, Non-Brahminism and Dravidianism coincided and the low castes looked at themselves as forming an ethnic category’ (Jaffrelot 2003: 152). In contemporary India, the three themes that we find constantly recurring in the field of caste are untouchability,5 violence6 and affirmative action through reservations in education and employment.7 These are also the points at which the institution of caste comes in direct contact with the state. In the year 2001, Dalits from the Indian sub-continent stormed into the World Conference Against Racism at Durban, pushing debates on caste and untouchability out of the narrow confines of ‘insider debates’ within the subcontinent into an international forum

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that held possibilities for alliance building and international advocacy in unprecedented terms.8 This alliance building had a history. In 1873, Jotiba Phule had dedicated his work ‘Slavery’ to: the good people of the United States as a token of admiration for their sublime disinterested and selfsacrificing devotion in the cause of Negro Slavery; and with an earnest desire, that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide in the emancipation of their Sudra Brethren from the trammels of Brahmin thralldom’ (Phule [1873] 2002: 25)

It is was this legacy the Dalits drew upon in tracing their kinship along lines of race in the Durban process. Although this was not a legacy that was stated beyond invoking Phule as a forefather of the anti-caste movement, the influence of Phule’s writings on Dalit movements and anti-caste ideologies is so pervasive that this connection is self-evident. Racial Formation of Caste Apart from the provisions in favour of non-discrimination in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination adopted in 1965 defined racial discrimination as ‘any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference, based on race, colour, descent, national or ethnic which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise on an equal footing of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life’. In 1996, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination stated that the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination does not refer only to race, but that ‘the situation of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes falls within [its] scope’, further observing that despite legal safeguards provided to members of these groups, ‘the relative impunity of those who abuse them point to the limited effect of these measures’.9 The shift from race alone to descent and occupation-based discrimination, and the recognition that it was not the physical appearance or race, but their membership in ‘an endogamous social group that has been isolated socially and occupationally from other groups in the society’, led to the CERD General Recommendation: Reaffirmed that discrimination based on ‘descent’ includes discrimination against members of communities based on forms of stratification such as caste and analogous systems of inherited status which nullify or impair their equal enjoyment of human rights. To take measures against any dissemination of ideas of caste superiority and inferiority or which attempt to justify violence, hatred or discrimination against descent-based communities. To educate the general public on the importance of affirmative action programmes . . . 10

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The Indian government however persisted in its view that descent in the Convention referred specifically to racial descent and responded to the query with respect to untouchability by citing legislations as evidence of justice and non-discrimination on the ground, and has consistently refused the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism and Racial Discrimination permission to ‘evaluate the situation in cooperation with the government and the communities concerned.’11 The official position cited The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: ‘On balance, the evidence that the Indian caste system is racial in origin and that India is or was a racist society is unconvincing. Race and caste are mentioned separately in the Indian Constitution as prohibited grounds for discrimination. They are not considered to be interchangeable or synonymous. The principal architect of the Indian Constitution was Dr. Ambedkar, a Dalit. He certainly knew the distinction between race and caste. If the concept of caste was included in race, there was no reason to mention them separately.’12 Deliberation on the kinship between caste and race meant not just re-mapping the field of caste in the new context of race, but also investing other groups in similar social location in that context with the marks of caste, thus creating a multilayered field for deliberation – interest, relation and assertion attaining new and more effective possibilities both within the country and within the international arena of the WCAR (see Fitzpatrick 2001) Take for instance the following statement that represents the stand of the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights: the term Dalits refers to the people of South Asia who were outside the pale of the hierarchical caste system, and, therefore, deemed outcastes. Regarded as the most marginalized of the castes in society, they were and are still considered polluted and assigned the occupations deemed too defiling for other castes to do . . . Born into her or his caste, a Dalit could not hope to escape her or his low social status . . . Conceived more broadly, the term Dalit could be extended to communities, which suffer discrimination on the basis of descent and occupation. This would include such communities as the Burakumin in Japan, Osu in Nigeria, Roma-Shinti (gypsies) in Europe . . . Considered in this broad term, that is, those that suffer discrimination based on descent and occupation, would constitute the single largest discriminated community on the globe today. (Divakar and Ajai 2004)

Apart from theoretical frameworks to understand the modern history of caste, the focus on practices of forced labour akin to slavery – bonded labour, made the navigation on the argument of caste as race easier, but more importantly, this single issue bonded the dalit experience with the experience of peoples of African descent in slavery. The estimate of 1.25 million people in bonded labour in the state of Tamil Nadu alone in 1995, drawn up by the Commission on Bonded Labour appointed by the Supreme Court despite the legal prohibition of bonded labour by the Bonded Labour (Abolition) Act, 1976 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, was cited in the AntiSlavery International’s submission to the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery of the United Nations Economic and Social Council Commission on Human Rights in 2000 (Divakar and Ajai 2004). The contentious terrain of the deliberations around caste and race was not confined to the space of the WCAR alone. Caste in India has been a major

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sociological concern, straddling colonial and postcolonial academes. Like other realms of subcontinental realities (criminal law, for instance), scholarship on caste in postcolonial India drew on colonial scholarship in deeply problematic ways, informing state policy, pre-empting any rupture that might be caused by the deliberations in the Constituent Assembly or through pro-active legislations. There were as a result, two separate streams of governmentality on the caste question. The first related to the implementation of anti-untouchability provisions both as law and policy (a stream influenced considerably by the Ambedkarite formulation); the second related to the production of official knowledge regarding reasonable, theoretically tenable and legitimate articulations of caste (a stream influenced by ‘standpoint-free sociology’). The second stream, while discussing in great ethnographic detail the realities of micro systems of caste in different pockets of the country, or in different scriptures, leaves out of the reckoning any theorising of violence that this ethnography throws up. Dumont offers us the best example of this: The literature [of the dharma or religious law] . . . shows the transition from . . . occasional or temporary impurity to the permanent impurity of certain human groups. The laws of Manu say, ‘When he has touched a Candala, a menstruating woman, an outcaste, a woman who has just given birth, a corpse . . . he purifies himself by bathing’. Here the occasional impurities are identified with that of the ‘outcaste’ and Candala, who is none other than the old prototype of the Untouchable. There is another list in the same book . . . ‘A Candala, a domestic pig, a cock, a dog, a menstruating woman and a eunuch must not look on Brahmans while they are eating.’ . . . the animals mentioned feed on refuse and filth . . . the Candala is relegated to the cremation grounds and lives on men’s refuse . . . (Dumont 1970: 52)

For Phule, as we saw earlier, this same reality demonstrated the enslavement of the sudratisudra and women by the Brahmans. For anti-caste activists, this is a violent demonstration of social exclusion and the most vicious expression of apartheid/segregation. Further, postcolonial ethnographic accounts of caste focused on the microsystems of caste without mapping the microphysics of power that named social exclusion. These accounts also resisted any comparisons with race as being theoretically untenable. The genealogy of this resistance to caste-as-race formulations may be traced to the colonial ethnographic project, which was without doubt deeply problematic on questions of racial classification and enumeration. Beteille, writing in the context of the Durban process, argued that not only was the linking of caste to race ‘scientifically nonsensical’, (Beteille 2004b: 52) it was also ‘bound to give a new lease of life to the old and discredited notion of race current a hundred years ago’ (Beteille 2004b: 51). However, from the debates generated by dalit groups in the country, it is clear that they were tracing their genealogy not to European scholarship on caste/race but to the legacy of Phule, which stood in stark contrast. The second part of the resistance to the caste as race debate located it within North–South politics, making a clear distinction between ‘internal’ and international issues. Dipankar Gupta argued that by taking caste to the UN, Indians were merely ceding ‘knowledge advantage to the West on one front after another – beginning with the economic, then flowing on to the political and now we need

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tips on how to handle cultural discrimination as well . . . How do the enthusiasts who want to go to the Durban conference imagine that international agencies will help fight caste in India? Have they thought this through? Will the UN sanction a bombing raid on Delhi? An economic embargo? Or . . . provide intellectual and strategic direction, as if we haven’t had enough of that already’ (Gupta 2004a: 53–54. Emphasis added). Gupta then goes on to hold the government responsible for ‘washing a whole lot of dirty linen’ – poverty, leprosy, AIDS, Kashmir – in front of strangers so that it lost the right to argue that caste was an ‘internal’ matter. Beteille on the other hand has no objection to discussing things in the open, he himself having done so at numerous conferences, ‘[b]ut the discussion should be in good faith’ (Beteille 2004a: 65. Emphasis added). Radhakrishnan charged the Dalits with the ‘political appropriation of the caste system,’ arguing that ‘their existential problem cannot be isolated from that of the rest of society’ (2004: 60). The crux of the dalit intervention, which provided a counterpoint, was that social exclusion cannot any more be an ‘internal’ matter – it had to be settled and accounted for in full view of the world, drawing on the constitutional framework of the absolute non-negotiability of fundamental rights – especially to life and dignity. The third set of arguments related to affirmative action, reducing the demand for affirmative action to a ‘game of numbers and proportionate representation. It does not employ reservations to uproot caste identities in public life, but rather to perpetuate it’ (Gupta 2004b: 82). Interestingly, yet again, what gets demonstrated is the kinship of caste and race, in this instance through the prism of reactions against affirmative action, echoing the debates particularly in the United States. Finally, the question of the authentic voice is one that gets foregrounded in this debate. Gupta argues that it can only be victims of untouchability who can speak about it. Yet he also observes that having transcended the oppressions of caste through mobility, ‘ex-untouchables’ only want to move on, not continue to be identified as untouchables. Who will then speak? Those that espouse the cause of the Dalits – for the most part dalit intellectuals and activists – don’t ‘belong’ to that experience because they have tasted the fruits of liberalisation and economic success. They also don’t belong, by this argument, because essential to the fact of belonging for a dalit is mobility and amnesia – the compulsion to sanskritisation, Srinivas would say. Untouchability therefore cannot lead to ‘mandalism’ (a pejorative allusion to the unequivocal demand for affirmative action) – Dalits who press for proportionate reservation, in laying a claim to affirmative action in education, employment and politics, fall within the ranks of the ‘imposters’ (not the genuine sufferers) because they persist with caste identities. Claiming representation, this argument goes, entrenches caste rather than uproots it. And after all, caste is about belonging, not just for Dalits but those above them as well in the social hierarchy. The circle of the second stream of governmentality is complete. Violent exclusion is argued out of the theoretical scheme of caste through sociological acrobatics, a process that uncovers for us the collusions between the production of knowledge, processes of dominance and hegemony, and the conferment of legitimacy in governance.

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The counter production of knowledge becomes critical therefore to this process of destabilising hegemonic knowledge: ‘Untouchability produces repulsion in the minds of non-Dalits at the very sight, approach and touch of Dalits. The Dalit touch for them brings impurity and defilement. There being no biological differences either in terms of the skin colour or the body structure between Dalits and non-Dalits, the knowledge of caste identity becomes a pre-condition of discrimination.’13 Evidence of the violent exclusionary practices could be found in the experience of the Chakkiliyar caste, the members of which could only light a fire in their homes if there was a dead animal in the village. At all other times they had ‘to survive, much like slaves, on the crumbs that fell off the table of those who happened to be their masters.’14 The rationalisation of these practices – in stark contrast to the ‘spiritual’ brahminical frameworks – were located in the material conditions of village life – consuming carcasses being the way that dominant castes ensured removal of defilement and environmental pollution. The other aspect of the dalit experience is the question of segregation of entire villages consequent on untouchability – ‘hidden apartheid’.15 ‘ “Untouchables” may not cross the line dividing their part of the village from that occupied by higher castes. They may not use the same wells, visit the same temples, drink from the same cups in tea stalls, or lay claim to land that is legally theirs. Dalit children are frequently made to sit in the back of classrooms, and communities as a whole are made to perform degrading rituals in the name of caste’ (Human Rights Watch 2000). Caste for dalit people is what race is for peoples of African descent in the Americas and South Africa. Becoming is the route to belong where one belongs. Belonging is shaped by radical ideas of the ‘we’ that are based on historically established and documented ‘prior experience’ that forges an identity of interest through an identity of location – regardless of territorial citizenship. Caste, Gender and Race: the National Federation of Dalit Women To bounce like a ball that has been hit became my deepest desire, and not to curl up and collapse because of the blow. (Bama 2005: vii)

How does gender figure in this entire discourse around caste and race? While gender has been central to the constitution of the caste system, it was theorised only much after the major mainstream formulations were already in place. In the excerpts from Dumont cited above, there are very specific ways in which women’s experiences and bodies are structured into the caste order, indeed very specific ways in which bodies are gendered – reproductive capacities being central to that definition (the menstruating woman, the new mother and the widow being equally sources of pollution in the brahminical schema, as also the eunuch). Within this framework, women and slaves figure as subjects, women by nature fickle and unchaste, whose sexuality, bodies and minds must be reined in by the ‘dharma’, the Manusmriti epitomising this view. Evidence from the eighteenth

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century points to the vulnerability of all women, irrespective of jati, to enslavement for infringement of moral codes. In relation to women from the panchama groups (categorised broadly as asprsya or untouchable), which were tied in perpetual bondage, the additional implication for women of these castes was sexual slavery. However, this proscription on physical contact did not extend to sexual relations between upper caste men and Untouchable women, sexual labour being part of the physical labour provided by slave women and appropriated by the upper caste owner/master (Kannabiran 2004: 273–308). In modern India, gender within caste society is ‘defined and structured in such a manner that the “manhood” of the caste is defined both by the degree of control men exercise over women and the degree of passivity [and complicity] of the women of the caste. By the same argument, demonstrating control by humiliating women of another caste is a certain way of reducing the “manhood” of those castes’ (Kannabiran and Kannabiran 1991). Spaces – domestic and public – are similarly structured both along lines of caste and gender. The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, recognises the gendered nature of caste experience, especially for dalit women. In the definition of Atrocity therefore, it makes explicit mention of the kinds of violence that women may be subjected to – sexual assault, non-consensual contact using the position of dominance, stripping and parading naked, are acts which fall within the meaning of atrocity in the law. A critical part of the effort to re-articulate the issue of caste in the theoretical/ political context of anti-racism has been the mobilising of dalit feminist resistance by the National Federation of Dalit Women in India, which began its work in the year 1995. The manifesto of the NFDW sets it apart from autonomous women’s movement in India on the one side and the ‘male dominated secular and progressive movements’ including the dalit movement on the other side – underscoring the need for critical reflection on caste-based discrimination and the violence inflicted on dalit women (see also Thorat 2001). NFDW endeavours to seek and build alliances with all other progressive and democratic movements and forces, in particular the women’s movement and the wider Dalit movement at the national level. It thus aspires in a significant way to widen the democratic spaces while at the same time to create and preserve its identity and specificity. This framework will enable the Dalit women’s movement to seek the roots of its oppression, the diversities, the nature of changes, if any, in specific regions and historical contexts and in particular, perceive the varied levels of consciousness that exist within it.16

This project, while it got submerged in the larger dalit mobilisation in Durban, is one that must be examined in greater detail, raising as it does questions of the relationship between gender and racism as reflective of questions of intersectionality in feminist struggles, even while examining the specificities of the dalit woman’s question in India. Central to the question of belonging of course are questions of identity, diversity and power. How has feminism in India fashioned a new politics of identity and belonging that resists sexism and casteism–racism in very direct ways? Within the larger politics of becoming, dalit women attempted to combat both racism and sexism together, wresting space within the larger dalit mobilisation

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for a representation of interest and identity as women, and occupying space without – in opposition to other socially dominant groups within the country and the Indian state on the one hand, building solidarities with other groups suffering descent-based discrimination in different locales across the world on the other. The pivotal bridge was with women of African descent. The recognition of diversity and difference was set against the homogenising practices of majoritarian Hindu nationalism on the one side and the appropriating spaces of show-casing of ‘exotic’ dalit-bahujan cultures and their commoditisation by the state on the other. The deliberation on the dalit woman’s position therefore was based on notions of dignity of labour, cultural expression and democratic politics, the notion of belonging for dalit women situated firmly within an autonomous space that drew its strength from the resistance to appropriation and the building of alliances on equal terms.17 In terms of the delineation of issues, the NFDW focused on the specific interpretation of civil and political rights, the recognition of productive contribution to society in terms of equality, dignity, fair wages and popular perception, the guarantee of security of person and freedom from the threat of sexual and physical assault, right to freedom of religion in a context where conversion for a better life resulted in denial of protections and the right to leadership – a claim pitted against non-dalit men, dalit men and non-dalit women. Drawing on the definition of racial discrimination in Article 1 of the CERD, the NFDW asserted in the Durban process that discrimination based on caste is indeed a specific form of racism, intertwined with gender since Dalit women ‘face targeted violence from state actors and powerful members of dominant castes and community especially in the case of rape, mutilation and death; they face discrimination in the payment of unequal wages and gender violence at the workplace that includes fields [as agricultural labourers], on the streets [as manual scavengers and garbage pickers], in homes [as domestic workers], and through religious custom . . . ’.18 The NFDW argues that it is necessary to look at the intersectionality of gender, race and caste in order to appreciate dalit women’s location adequately. Dalit women are ‘Dalit among the Dalits’, because they are thrice alienated – on the basis of caste, class and gender. The oppression of Dalit women echoes issues of state violence, denial of land rights, social and legal discrimination, infringement of civil liberties, inferior status, dehumanising living and working conditions, total impoverishment, malnutrition, poor health conditions, the adverse effect of various contraceptives and new family-planning devices, social ostracism and untouchability.19 The role of dalit women, the NFDW argues, is critical, to dalit liberation and dalit identity – the dalit woman is by definition feminist, non-patriarchal, non-hierarchical and positively oriented towards ecology. The charter of rights of dalit women, formulated in 1999, and christened the Delhi Declaration sets out the guiding principles of dalit women’s rights.20 It declares that Dalits are one of the indigenous peoples of India, who as a people are sovereign, with a distinct identity, history, culture and religion. As the original inhabitants of the land, they have a right to the ownership of the knowledge resources of the country as well as the fruit of their labour. Further, the declaration states that the ancient history, culture and tradition of dalit people is one in

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which there is equality between men and women. In this context, dalit women build their identities on cultures of resistance against the homogenising hegemonic cultures of brahminical Hinduism and the caste system, and assert their right to free speech and expression and their right to dignity especially with reference to the ‘heinous practice of untouchability’. Significantly, dalit women in this charter declared ‘solidarity in the common cause of women’s rights in India and the world at large for the establishment of gender partnership in an egalitarian society’. This charter documents the process of transition from becoming into belonging. Finally, the charter sets out the measures that central and state governments must take in order to demonstrate due diligence in eliminating violence and discrimination against Dalits in general and dalit women in particular. The first of these measures is to recognise dalit women as a distinct social group, rather than masking them under the general category of women. Further, the charter demanded that all statutory commissions take note of the specific experience of dalit women; that land be distributed by the government to Dalits and that this land be registered in the name of dalit women in each household; that wage revision and gender parity committees be constituted to ensure equal agricultural wages for dalit women, alongside enacting a comprehensive Dalit Agricultural Workers Act; that mechanisms to monitor and check the commission of atrocities against dalit women be put in place; that a ban be imposed on private armies of dominant caste landlords and that the government ‘distribute weapons and train dalit women to handle them in self defence against the perpetrators of crimes and atrocities.’ The diversity and radicalism of this charter of demands is a demonstration of the fact that ‘[o]ppressed, ruled, and still being ruled by patriarchy, government, caste, and religion, Dalit women are forced to break all the strictures of society to live’ (Bama 2005: vii). In trying to break shackles, and propel themselves forward, Bama observes, Dalit women have had to roar their defiance and learn to mock the class that oppressed them, finding through this, the courage to revolt (Bama 2005: vii). The intersectional articulation of the dalit woman’s political position is most evident when the charter affirms that ‘Dalit women have the right to self protection in the face of dominant caste male and female aggression, of Dalit male aggression, and of aggression committed by law enforcing machineries of the State’. Bama presents to us the creative articulation of this political standpoint very powerfully in her novel Sangati (2005) where extreme forms of patriarchal violence within the family are matched by the intense vulnerability to sexual assault by the men of dominant castes and the economic oppression of dalit men and women by dominant caste landowners and factory owners. Dalit feminist resistance in this context is an everyday resistance against everyday casteism and exclusion – minute, persistent, cumulative and intense. The charter crystallises this resistance into a consolidated critique of state and society, forcing the state to grapple with the new measures of justice that this particular feminist praxis threw up. From being an oppressed class, thrice oppressed, dalit women declare sovereignty and occupy a moral high ground demonstrating the possibility of being democratic, egalitarian and humane on the one hand and reaching out to

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other movements of women’s rights in a spirit of solidarity on the other. This assertion of a distinct identity and simultaneous forging of a collective identity in several struggles at once marks the dalit women’s movement in very specific ways. The mapping of identity is superimposed on the mapping of the violence of the caste system and the specific ways in which that violence is gendered – the violence of denial, of degrading work, of religion, of atrocity, of aggression on the body of the dalit woman, of language and abuse.

Conclusion This chapter has attempted to explore the traditions of feminist resistance in India through the work of the National Federation of Dalit Women. In looking at this particular political formation, what has got immediately foregrounded is the convergence of protective legislations, claims to entitlements, social locations, contestations about those locations both by the state and in civil society and the forging of a larger kinship of belonging as a method of enforcing greater accountability and transparency on local forces that repress with impunity. What we witness is also a convergence between the everyday and political society. The use of international soft law mechanisms and parameters of intersectionality in race theory provide the theoretical framework within which the solidarities between race, caste and gender are forged at the local, national and international levels by Dalit women, through resistance and struggle. The disjuncture between justice and the law in this case is stark, with justice lying ever beyond the pale of law. It is impossible for women to belong any more without deliberation – responsible belongingness necessarily means active engagement in deliberation – the community providing commonality of interests and location but not justice. Women, dalit women in particular, constantly negotiate space for the insertion of justice into that common ground – marking its separation, difference and distance from the larger public domain in general and public law in particular, not easily conceded by the community of belonging, not standing on its own either, but seeking to govern in similar ways on different terms. The politics of becoming then shapes the politics of belonging and transforms the idea of community itself. The larger questions that are relevant to this debate have to do with the politics of masculinity and misogyny in civil society and women’s responses to it; the politics of gender within communities and the resistance to sexism from within; the resistance to sexism and xenophobia in the ‘national’ space by re-defining body politics; the demonstration of ‘better’ politics of belonging by moving back and forth between the political and the moral, rather from the political to the moral. Another useful way of looking at this question is to do so through the lens of social exclusion, tracing the paths of exclusion and thereby contextualising the struggles of resistance to exclusion. These are questions that are immediately relevant to an understanding of the ways in which dalit women have organised themselves over the past decade in India. Resisting pacific order for dalit women has been critical to survival, since

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order has for them specifically been based on foundational violence – within the family, in the larger multicaste communal space and in the terrain(s) of citizenship(s). The Dalit feminist standpoint, and more specifically the National Federation of Dalit Women, provide in very clear terms a cartography of governance that forces an official reckoning of a new way of seeing. Notes * My discussions with Ruth Manorama, Convenor of the National Federation of Dalit Women over the years has shaped my understanding of dalit feminist politics. I thank her for showing me ways of seeing. I am also grateful to her for her generosity with her personal archival resources. My sincere thanks to Nira Yuval-Davis, Ulrike M. Vieten and Peter Fitzpatrick for pointing me in directions I had left unexplored and for useful discussions on earlier drafts. 1 Martha Minow provides a rich analysis of difference. See Minow (1990). 2 The punishment of transportation under Section 53 of the Indian Penal Code (repealed in 1949), also known colloquially as kaala paani, had its genesis in this taboo. 3 Dalit is a noun and adjective that can be used equally in the masculine, feminine and neuter genders. It means burst, split, broken or torn asunder, scattered, crushed or destroyed. 4 Much later in the twentieth century, Dumont cites the instance of a Candala appearing before two kshatriya girls – the girls had to wash their eyes and the Candala beaten for such indiscreet appearance (Dumont 1970: 52). 5 Article 17 of the Indian Constitution. 6 The Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 and the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. 7 Article 16 of the Indian Constitution. 8 The Dalit question had been discussed in the UN’s Sub-Commission on Promotion and Protection of Human Rights since 1996. The proceedings were largely closed (Thorat and Umakant 2004: xiii–xxxv). 9 Cf. Ibid: vii. 10 R.K.W. Goonasekere, ‘Discrimination based on occupation and descent’, Working Paper of the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, presented at its 53rd session in 2001, cf. Thorat and Umakant, p. xx. 11 Report of the Special Rapporteur, E/CN.4/1998/79, paras 57–59. cf. Paul Divakar and Ajai M. (2004) ‘UN Bodies and the Dalits: a historical review of interventions, in Thorat and Umarkant (eds) Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat publications: 11. 12 The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, volume 15: 361. Cited in Soli Sorabjee (2004) ‘The Official Position’, in Thorat and Umakant (eds) Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 47. 13 Anon, ‘Dalit Women in India: a case of discrimination by birth’, published note, Readings for the First National Leadership Training Institute for Dalit Women: Enhancing Capacities and Building Leadership, organised by the NFDW, 24 November 2003–4 December 2003, Bangalore. Personal archives of Ruth Manorama. 14 Ibid. 15 Statement by the International Dalit Solidarity Network to the First Preparatory Committee for the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Geneva, 1–5 May 2000, published in Communalism Combat, May 2000: 10. 16 Transforming Pain into Power: The Manifesto of the National Federation of Dalit Women, nd. National Federation of Dalit Women, Reading Materials of the First National Leadership, Training Institute for Dalit Women, Bangalore, November–December 2003. Unpublished. Personal archives of Ruth Manorama. 17 Transforming Pain into Power: The Manifesto of the National Federation of Dalit Women, nd. National Federation of Dalit Women, Reading Materials of the First National Leadership Training

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Institute for Dalit Women, Bangalore, November–December 2003. Unpublished. Personal archives of Ruth Manorama. 18 National Federation of Dalit Women, NGO Declaration on Gender and Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, World Conference Against Racism, 28 August–7 September 2001, Durban, South Africa. National Federation of Dalit Women, Reading Materials prepared for the National Consultation on Gender and Racial Discrimination, New Delhi, February 2001. Unpublished. Personal archives of Ruth Manorama. 19 Transforming Pain into Power: The Manifesto of the National Federation of Dalit Women, nd. 20 Marching into the New Millennium: Delhi Declaration (Dalit Women Declare the Charter of Gender Rights and Demands), New Delhi, December 1999. Unpublished. National Federation of Dalit Women, Reading Materials prepared for the National Consultation on Gender and Racial Discrimination, New Delhi, February 2001. Unpublished.

References Bama (2005) Sangati (translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström), New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bayly, Susan (1995) Caste and race in the colonial ethnography of India, in Robb, P. (ed.) The Concept of Race in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Beteille, Andre (2004a) Caste consciousness: initiate an open discussion in Durban, in Thorat and Umakant (eds) Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 65–68. Beteille, Andre (2004b) Race and caste, reprinted in Thorat and Umakant (eds) Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications (first published in The Hindu in 2001): 49–52. Connolly, William, E. (1996) ‘Suffering, justice and the politics of becoming’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 20: 251–77. Reprinted in Connolly, William E. (1999) Why I am not a Secularist, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 47–71. Deshpande, G.P. (2002) Of hope and melancholy: reading Jotirao Phule in our times, in G.P. Deshpande (ed.) Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule, New Delhi: LeftWord Books: 1–21. Dirks, Nicholas (2002) Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Delhi: Permanent Black. Divakar, Paul, N. and Ajai, M. (2004) UN bodies and the dalits: a historical review of interventions, in Thorat and Umakant (eds), Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 3–30. Dumont, Louis (1970) Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, Delhi: Vikas Publishing House. Fitzpatrick, Peter (2001) Consolations of the law: jurisprudence and the constitution of deliberative politics, Ratio Juris, IV(3) September 2001: 281–97. Foucault, Michel (1987) Maurice Blanchot: The thought from outside, in Michel Foucault and Maurice Balnchot (eds), Foucault/Blanchot. Translated by Brian Massumi, New York: Zone Books. Geetha, V. and Rajadurai, S.V. (1998). Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar, Calcutta: Samya. Gupta, Dipankar (2004a) Caste is not race: but let’s go to the UN forum anyway. Reprinted in Thorat and Umakant (eds), Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 53–56. Gupta, Dipankar (2004b) Caste, race politics, in Thorat and Umakant (eds). Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 69–84. Human Rights Watch (2000) Violence against and Exploitation of ‘Untouchable’ Women in India, Report prepared for the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, 20 January. Jaffrelot, Christophe (2003) India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Low Castes in North Indian Politics, Delhi: Permanent Black.

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Kannabiran, Kalpana (2002) Caste, in Routledge International Encyclopedia on Women, Volume 1, New York: Routledge: 142–44. Kannabiran, Kalpana (2004) Voices of dissent: changing gender values in Hinduism, in Robin Rinehart, (ed.), Contemporary Hinduism: Ritual, Culture, and Practice, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO: 273–308. Kannabiran, Kalpana and Kannabiran, Vasanth (1991) ‘Caste and gender: understanding the dynamic of power and violence’, Economic and Political Weekly, 14 September: 2130–33. Minow, Martha (1990) Making All the Difference: Inclusion and Exclusion in American Law, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Minow, Martha (1996) Comments on ‘Suffering, justice and the politics of becoming, by William E. Connolly, Presented as the Roger Allan Moore Lecture, 11 May 1995. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 20: 279–86. National Federation of Dalit Women, Reading Materials prepared for the National Consultation on Gender and Racial Discrimination, New Delhi, February 2001. Unpublished. National Federation of Dalit Women, Reading Materials of the First National Leadership Training Institute for Dalit Women, Bangalore, November–December 2003. Unpublished. Omi, Michael and Winant, Howard (2002), Racial formation, in Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (eds), Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers: 123–45. Phule, Jotirao (1873; 2002) Slavery, in G.P Deshpande (ed.), Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule, New Delhi: LeftWord Books. Radhakrishnan, P. (2004) Dalits and Durban, in Thorat and Umakant (eds), Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 57–64. Sorabjee, Soli (2004) The official position, in Thorat and Umarkant (eds), Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 43–47. Shinde, Tarabai (1882; 1994) A Comparison between Women and Men, translated and edited by Rosalind O’Hanlon, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Thorat, Sukhadeo and Umakant (2004) Introduction, in Thorat and Umakant (eds), Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: xiii–xxxv. Thorat, Vimal (2001) Dalit women have been left behind by the Dalit movement and the women’s movement, Communalism Combat, May 2001: 12.

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Section Two

Racisms, Sexisms and Contemporary Politics of Belonging

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5 Im/possible Inhabitations By Nirmal Puwar Elizabeth Grosz notes that there is the ‘ongoing possibility of a different inhabitation.’ (2001: 9) For Henri Lefevbre, each living body ‘produces itself in space and it also produces that space.’ (2002: 170)

Co-Existing Rhythms The exit of Holborn tube station in Central London is a nodal point. University College London University and Bloomsbury are to the north of the station, towards Euston. The British Museum is at a close forty-five degree right angle towards Tottenham Court Road. The Law Courts, just behind the station, lead to Chancery Lane and the financial headquarters of the City. LSE, the BBC World Service at Bush House and the Indian High Commission are a swift walk down Kingsway, south of Holborn, towards the river. As I passed through the ticket barriers at Holborn, the distant sound of drums beating could be heard. The sound moved between buildings defined by commerce and governments to demand attention. It called for close listening, to pinpoint the exact direction of the sound. This was a bright Saturday morning on 20 March 2004. During the week, the sight of suits and briefcases dealing with legal, governmental and financial business dominates this area. The constant hum of heavy traffic and shiny shoes with clicking heels, that defines the rhythm of this part of the city, was absent. Due to the pending demonstration there was no traffic on the roads and quite an altered rhythm embraced the area, making one realise that it was possible to belong to these streets and buildings with a different strum. I turned left out of the station and walked towards LSE, a little disoriented from not being able to identify which of the several meeting points of the anti-war protestors the sound was coming from. I wondered if it was from Euston, Tottenham Court Road or Aldwych. Moving further down Kingsway towards Aldwych Circus, the sound became louder and closer as it met my body. The tarmac of the pavement I walked on had acoustic properties that I was until then unaware of. A different ring hung in the atmosphere of the environment. One that rather eerily, for at least a day, bracketed out the normal weight that came to bear on this locale. At the end of the road in the circular junction – between LSE, the

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law courts and Bush House – two men danced dressed in suits with a belt of bullets across their chests. Their faces carried exaggerated comic masks of Tony Blair and George Bush in wide grins. They waved their hands, steering the gathering that was slowly building to dance and clap to the sound of anti-war protest that belted out between the heavy stonewalls of Australia House, the Indian High Commission and the centre of BBC World Service. The sound of the Samba Band beat the ground beneath the dancing feet and rose to the sky above our heads to meet circling police helicopters. The drumbeats stirred through the high concrete arches on Aldwych Circus through to Somerset House and Kings College towards the waters of the Thames. Clearly we live and move in space as bodies in relation to other bodies (Grosz 1995: 92). Here in between the meeting of stone and sound we found each other as protesting bodies through the musical resonance and the carnivalesque spectacle of the two leaders that personified invasion. With a centre of the city transformed it was possible to get a lived sense of how the space could be occupied differently and of how there were other possibilities. A new set of rhythms could be released into these highly sedimented and consecrated spaces that would enable us to belong to the city differently. There was a shared realisation that the walls, arches and streets were indeed open to the possibility of a different habitation. Our cities, including the centres, are inhabited within multiple criss-crossing levels. In the week, there is also of course a different rhythm to the dominant one; of the cleaners and service staff who start the day at the crack of dawn (five or six O’clock in the morning). The rhythm of these lived bodies in the same space is invisible (Allen 2003). Their presence is banished under the dirt that builds up beneath the heels that dominate our imagination of Holborn and the City. There is no denying that our global cities (as well as the rural enclaves) rely on an unacknowledged source of service and industrial labour, much of which, due to the force of the denial, continues to be illegal (O’Connell-Davidson 1998, Anderson 2000, Pai 2004). Tourist centres are inhabited right under our very noses very differently (Sassen 1999). Yet there continues to be a disavowal of the hitherto outside on the inside. How we inhabit and belong in space as flesh and stone (cf. Sennett 2003) in the interplay with the political imagination of leadership, nation and telos defines the parameters of this chapter. The square in Florence where David (Michelangelo’s depiction of the biblical hero who braved Goliath) was first placed in 1504 – the Piazza Della Signoria Square – in front of the Palazzo Vecchio (the Town Hall) today bears a copy of the original. In this expansive square you will also find street traders, from Africa, China and Eastern Europe, selling insects made of grass, tattoos, replica prints, including those of David himself, small toy trains with individual pieces made of letters to spell out a child’s name. While these figures undoubtedly inhabit the square, they of course occupy it rather differently, on precarious grounds of citizenship and labour (Andall 2000; 2003, Mezzadra 2005). The 4 metres and 10 centimetres symbol of masculine passionate strength and wrath was taken in, to protect him from the elements, to the Galleria dell’Accademia in 1873. David got his first wash since 1873 in 2002. In 2004 the gallery celebrated his five hundredth birthday. To do this they invited five international contemporary artists

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to work on David (Forme per il David ). One of these commissions included a two-screen film installation, aptly titled ‘Birthday Boy’ by Robert Morris. As two wine-swilling lecturers – one female, the other male – ask us in an animated deadpan manner why we worship and clean up David to keep him young and white, on one side of the screen David metamorphoses into a black woman and on the other side he becomes an old man. Morris invites the audience to think about the young heroic white masculinity that David personifies. At the very least this installation de-mythologises the heroic figure of leadership or what we could call the somatic norm. If we take these scenes in Florence altogether, there is an interesting juxtaposition of inhabitation where newly arrived migrants wheel and deal whatever is possible, including replicas of David, while we continue to admire the washed David in the brightly lit space of the gallery. Yet, at the same time we undergo a deconstruction of what he represents in the same space that applauds him. This is a perfect example of the proximity of the outside of the inside and a pointer to the differentiated degrees of inclusion (belonging) that we operate with. Our squares bear pasts that are repeated and sedimented as well as contested. Amidst the contestation of David, however much we de-mythologise him, it is this figures’ space we walk into when we attempt to take up positions of leadership, when we take up the universal speaking position. David, in one sense, is the yardstick that we are measured by when we take up the platform in whichever institution – in law, in art, in academia, in politics. This is especially the case for consecrated spaces.

Forms of Inclusion I would now like to come back to the place where we started from – London, and turn to this city’s most famous square – Trafalgar Square. Most political demonstrations in London end in Trafalgar Square. This is a site from where the nation is produced but also contested. Imperial victories are celebrated in stone – hence Lord Havelock and Lord Nelson on that phallic column that looks towards Westminster and Whitehall (Gilbert and Driver 1999). At the same time though, this square has been a place from where new constituencies have been forged as they have come together, however momentarily, to speak of those concerns and people who have in the normal course of political play been delegated to being a noise and a nuisance. While the volatility of this square is undeniable, the contradictory nature of space means that just as much as it is open to change, it is also subject to homogenising tendencies (Puwar 2004). It is the story of another statue that brings me to Trafalgar Square. This statue is struggling to get installed in Trafalgar Square. There is a legal battle over it. It is a nine-foot bronze statue, fully clothed, unlike David, of Nelson Mandela. Objections to the position and the posture of the statue have been raised. The Nelson Mandela Statue Fund backed by the Lord Mayor of London has been at the centre of numerous objections from both English Heritage and Westminster Council. While Ken Livingstone has emphasised that the arrival of Nelson

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Mandela alongside the other (imperial) Nelson, on the column, will mark the shift in Britain being an imperial country to a multicultural society, Westminster Council objects both to the artistic aesthetics of the statue – most especially the size of the hands – as well as the actual location of the statue in the square. The council has argued that a statue of Mandela is more suited to being placed outside the South African embassy, in the outer edges of the square, rather than the north terrace of the square right in front of the National Gallery. Livingstone has argued that it is this spot that is most suitable and not the one outside the embassy because it is the precise location from where protestors called on the South African government in London to end the apartheid regime. Charge and contestation ensue. In the mean time, the statue of Mandela firmly remains out of the square altogether. A stark reminder, if we needed one, of how a multicultural society does not automatically become a multicultural nation (Gilroy 1987; 1999). The question of who has the right to represent the nation as well as international leadership – in stone and or flesh – is entangled with who has the right to belong to the nation and the universal somatic norm (Pateman 1995, Gatens 1996, Mills 1997). Even when you are included, it is always complicated by how you are included (McClintock 1995, Yuval-Davis 1997). There are, for instance, numerous statues of women representing the nation in the vicinity of Trafalgar Square. They belong in stone to the nation as courageous carers and protectors of the good of the nation and usually not without imperial context (Nash 1994, Sharp 1996, Warner 1996). Incidentally, the only women in this square are the mermaids in the fountain, which was actually an afterthought to the Square in 1845. Recently, a new temporary statue did manage to take up a platform in the Square. Its temporary status no doubt made it a much easier inclusion than Mandela, though the type of femininity and bodily comportment it embodied did not fail to challenge the normatively placed male inhabitants in one sort of uniform or another. A 12 ft (3.6 m) marble statute of a naked, pregnant woman with no arms – titled Alison Lapper Pregnant – was installed. Alison Lapper was born a ‘thalidomide’ baby without arms and legs. She sat for the artist Marc Quinn, when she was eight months pregnant, for whom it represents a new model of female heroism to those that usually embody the nation in stone. The statute sits on the fourth plinth, which was intended for a statue of King William IV, but was left empty for years due to a lack of funds. Due to battles over what the permanent fixture might be, in the early 1990s it was decided that an ever changing display of art works would take up the plinth. The arrival of Alison Lapper Pregnant has raised a considerable amount of debate and even outrage. Nonetheless, regardless of whether people think this type of human (femininity) belongs or does not belong in this national space, she will at least temporarily adorn the plinth until April 2007. Other temporary sculptures that have taken up the plinth have included Rachel Whiteread’s ‘Monument’. This was a transparent resin cast of the inside of the plinth itself, placed upside-down on the stone plinth in order to invite a pause, a quite moment in space to think about what belongs to the space of a monument and what we do with monuments. We need to pause and think about how we are seeing a form of inclusion, diversity and multiculturalism where hitherto excluded bodies are invited to the platform to reflect on arrival and belonging. There is in fact what Gayatri Spivak

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has called a ‘multicultural hunger’ in operation today. Looking at her own situation as diasporic Indian first-class travelling academic situated in North America, she also says – I am invited to speak today for the precise reason I wasn’t in the past (1996: 194). Her words invite us to interrogate as to what kind of speaking position is made available. What is she expected to speak about? What is she not expected to speak of? On whose behalf is she expected to speak? How is she invited to belong? How is she not expected to belong? There is a ready-made audience that expects her to speak of the Third World, Third World women, to be confessional, to be autobiographical and to be anthropological (2001: 21–22). But she is a disappointment if she speaks on Derrida, whom she translated at an extremely young age. And even if she does speak of Derrida or Marx, will she be heard? There are ethnic and gendered slots within the public domain that strait jacket belonging to specific formations. So while ‘newcomers’ enter the public domain, they are still not the somatic norm. They arrive and take up space but the occupation of space is still rather contradictory and tenuous. Not being the somatic norm they are thought not to quite belong. Being out of place, these bodies endure processes of invisibility and visibility. It is possible to identify a number of processes entailed in belonging/not belonging. Elsewhere I have identified these as disorientation, infantalisation, super surveillance, amplification, the burden of doubt, the burden of representation, performative rites, imperial/legitimate language and the process of becoming insiders (for more details see Puwar 2004). Being in positions they are not expected to be, as lawyers, writers, artists and public speakers, their very presence generates a sense of unease. People do a ‘double take’. It throws them. When racialised and feminised bodies are in places where they are seen to not quite belong, they are prone to infantalisation. They are judged to be a lot more junior and a lot less skilled than they actually are. Thus their capacities are, at least initially, doubted. They exist under a burden of doubt where they have to prove themselves. While they are in this sense invisible, in another sense they are hypervisible. They exist under a sort of super-surveillance, where the most minor of mistakes are amplified and seen to be evidence of this body being not quite belonging. Women are also visible as sexualised bodies. When for instance the racialised female body is known through a pre-fabricated lens as cleaner, a victim, downtrodden or as an exotic, dark dusky beauty, she is not expected to be an MP or a keynote speaker. And when she does take up these positions, she becomes an object of fascination and intrigue. This in turn makes her conspicuous. Another process follows on from super-surveillance that can be termed amplification. Any errors they make are noticed and amplified as a sign of authority misplaced. Because they are not the somatic norm, one or two bodies also become amplified in imagination as four or five, especially if they work together. Then they can indeed incite organisational terror as they become seen as a potential troublemaking bloc.

The Material of Political Imaginations When we think of race and gender, we do not do ourselves any favours if we use the language of straightforward exclusion or marginality. If we keep saying that

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people or women of colour are marginal, we don’t actually look at how they are often both outsiders and insiders. We don’t look at the complexity of subject positions and fail to understand the likes of Condoleeza Rice as well as less dramatic and more mundane existences in the everyday life of institutions. Moreover, there is a danger that we will romanticise marginality and blind ourselves to seeing differential forms of inclusion and ‘ontological complicity’ (cf. Bourdieu 1990, Puwar 2004: 119–140). It calls for an analysis that actually aims to understand the substance of what is too easily stated as intersections. Moreover there is a need for an analysis that does not remain loyally locked into schematically dissecting the impact of these intersections. There is in fact a need to think beyond the categorical limits of the intersections framework. After all, people are not simply defined by each and every one of these axes of differentiation. They are more than these. They are not for instance, as noted by Stuart Hall in his work on post-war settlement, simply defined by racism (1984). It has been widely accepted that while race, gender, sexuality, class (of course the list can go on) clearly intersect in our lived realities, they don’t generate neat alliances either within, between or across these different categorical groups. We need to keep in mind Stuart Hall’s remark that there are ‘no guarantees’ that the experience of racism will be experienced in the same way or that it will generate the same politics (1983). Or as June Jordan once stated (in conversation with Pratibha Parmar 1990) – so what if you are ‘black’, a woman, a lesbian and disabled like me, this does not mean that we automatically share a perception or indeed a politics together. Thus we need to open up of our neat categories and our neat alliances. We always try to ‘clobber’ anything new into our existing categories of knowledge (cf. Bhabha 1994). This applies to the analytical task entailed in thinking of belonging within institutions, consecrated spaces as well as those ranks of invisible and hidden labour. Today, the ‘other’, or people from different parts of the world are increasingly in our streets, in institutions and some are even entering consecrated places. The work of Anthony Gormley can be useful for shedding some light on the consequences of this proximity and inhabitation. Gormley (1996) has created Fields in Mexico, the Amazon Basin, Sweden, Britain and most recently in China (which is the biggest Field project to date, consisting of 190,000 pieces). For each of these, Gormley works with local communities to create thousands of figures. Each participant is instructed to mould a ball of clay to comfortably fit his or her (the participant could be a child or an adult). They are instructed to shape it into a figure that has two holes for eyes and stands up. These figures are then baked in a kiln to different temperatures, which affects the colouring. In the display, they densely pack the floor of a whole room, which often consists of nothing else but white walls and lighting. The figures have taken up temporary residences in consecrated places like the British Museum as well as old churches. Importantly, all the figures, each less than a foot high, face the entrance to the room, the point from which the audience views them. The viewer is blocked from inspecting the gallery space by the presence of the figures whose gaze, through the two holes in the head, look upon us rather quizzically. Gormley argues that in one sense these figures are the world in our front rooms and it makes us feel uncomfortable.

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Their gaze looks back at us, questioning our positioning, questioning our right to look and our right to occupy the space of the gallery. Thus the object becomes the subject and we the spectators become the objects of the gaze (1996). War, famine, civil wars and the increased gap between the global rich and poor makes movement and migration the condition of our times. Experienced inequitably, while some ‘jog trot’ (Balibar 2002: 83) through borders, others risk their lives as they hang on to the insides of planes and lorries or avoid the nets that act as patrols within water crossings. Layers build up as floating bodies sediment in waters whose edges they fail to reach or in lands where they lie rotting and forgotten between buildings and debris. Within all of this ‘waste’ (Bauman 2003) we ask – How is the political imagination of escape from the world we find ourselves in premised upon the speaking position we delegate to these subjects? In the film Motorcycle Diaries based on Che Guevara’s diaries of travel as a young student through South America, there is one striking scene. In one part of his journey, he meets a man and a woman who are walking across the desert who ask Che and his friend why they are walking. When they reply that they are travelling, the man and woman look at each other bemused and say we walk in order to survive, to look for work, not to just travel. In the diaries Che notes that these two figures haunted him and brought him back to South America in later years as a revolutionary. If we go back to David and the Piazza Della Signoria in Florence, as tourists, the trading figures on the streets haunt our memory of Florence as does the monument of David. While these faces haunt us, we must not make them our teleological delivery boys and girls, men and women, by projecting our desires and politics on to them. The left have over time changed their figure of teleological deliverance – that is the figure who will take us into the future – from the working class manual worker to the post-colonial subject (cf. Keith 2000). But how much of this is a projection of our own desires and fantasies? And how much is derived from real engagement. What kind of space do we inhabit through the kind of looking out and looking for we activate (Puwar 2003a)? I would like to end with the work of the artist Mohini Chandra (2001). In a work titled Album Pacifica Chandra has chosen images from her family album with photographs of her family including her mother. As we approach these photographs we notice that they are displayed turned around. So we only see the back of the photographs and not the faces. Instead we see signatures, oil marks, stamps – traces of the photograph’s journey. This type of looking invites us to look again, to bring a different approach to the object, the object we reach towards and peer at. It does not allow for an easy looking and in fact it almost pushes the question back at us – what are you looking for?

Conclusion Who is able to ‘dominate’ space (Lefevbre 2002) – in stone, ritual and flesh – even while it is daily lived otherwise points to the importance of rhythms and figures in our considerations of belonging. An altered inhabitation of space does not automatically translate into straightforward belonging. Residency and arrival

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can be a tenuous and precarious place, even if one takes up the most consecrated of spaces. Indeed the teleological phantasy of the ideal figure of leadership, personified in David, impinges on the contours of the somatic norm. Inclusion thus remains contradictory in the face of this yardstick. Nonetheless, this does not mean that one should immediately turn to the language of marginality, which can indeed itself come at a price. That is the price of categorical reductionism, even within all the complexities the languages of intersections lend themselves to. But also the price of escape, of a somewhat reversed telos, can engender the migrant and refugee as the teleological figure of deliverance. Herein is the risky fuel of a political imagination driven by a tautological set of phantasies and projections. This does not of course preclude the possibility of our bodies generating new senses of belonging as we find each other in the movement towards other possibilities even as the faces of inequities of the present, as well as the past, haunts us. Bibliography Allen, J. (2003) Lost Geographies of Power, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Andall, J. (2000) Gender, Migration and Domestic Service: The Politics of Black Women in Italy, Aldershot: Ashgate. Andall, J. (2003) ‘Hierarchy and interdependence: the emergence of a service caste in Europe’, in J. Andall (ed.) Gender & Ethnicity in Contemporary Europe, Oxford: Berg Publishers: 39–60. Anderson, B. (2000) Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour, London: Zed Press. Balibar, E. (2002) Politics and the Other Scene, London and New York: Verso. Bauman, Z. (2003) Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bhabha, H. (1994) ‘Dissemination: time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation’, in Homi Bhabha (ed.) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge: 139–70. Bourdieu, P. (1990) Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press. Chandra, M. (2001) Album Pacifica, London: Autograph. Gatens, M. (1996) Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, London: Routledge. Gilbert, D. and Driver, F. (1999) Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gilroy, P. (1987) Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: the cultural politics of race and nation, London: Hutchinson. Gilroy, P. (1999) Joined-up Politics and Post-colonial Melancholia, London: ICA. Gormley, A. (1996) Field for the British Isles, Llandudno, Wales: Oriel Mostyn. Grosz, E. (1995) Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, London: Routledge. Grosz, E. (2001) Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hall, S. (1983) ‘The Problem of Ideology – Marxism without Guarantees’, in B. Matthews (ed.) Marx 100 years On, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S. (1984) ‘Reconstruction Work’, Ten 8, no. 16, Birmingham. Keith, M. (2000) ‘Identity and the Spaces of Authenticity’, in Les Back and John Solomos (eds) Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, London: Routledge: 521–38. Lefebvre, H. (2002, re-print) The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial Leather, London: Routledge. Mezzadra, S. (2005) Taking Care: Migration and the Political Economy of Affective Labour, Goldsmiths College, University of London, Centre for the Study of Social Invention and Process (CSISP), 16 March 2005. Mills, C. (1997) The Racial Contract, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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The Motorcycle Diaries (2004, Directed by Walter Salles). Nash, C. (1994) ‘Re-mapping the body land: new cartographies of identity, gender and landscape in Ireland’, in A. Blunt and G. Rose (eds) Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, New York: Guildford Press: 227–50. O’Connell-Davidson, J. (1998) Prostitution, Power and Freedom, Cambridge: Polity. Pai, Hsiao-Hung (2004) ‘An ethnography of global labour migration’, Feminist Review, 77: 129–36. Parmar, P. (1990) ‘Black feminism and the politics of articulation’, in J. Rutherford (ed.) Identity: Community, Culture and Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart: 101–26. Pateman, C. (1995) The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity. Puwar, N. (2003a) ‘Global speaking positions’, DeriveApprodi, Special Issue on Post-Colonial Theory. (Trans.Italian), No. 23. Puwar, N. (2003b) ‘Melodramatic postures and constructions’, in N. Puwar and P. Raghuram (eds) South Asian Women in the Diaspora, Oxford: Berg: 19–42. Puwar, N. (2004) Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out Of Place, Oxford: Berg Publishers. Sassen, S. (1999) Guests and Aliens, New York: New Press. Sennett, R. (2003) Flesh and Stone: the Body and the City in Western Civilization, London: Penguin. Sharp, J.P. (1996) ‘Gendering nationhood’, in N. Duncan (ed.) Body Space, London: Routledge: 170–93. Spivak, G.C. (1996) The Spivak Reader, Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean (eds) Great Britain: Routledge. Spivak, G.C. (2001) ‘Mapping the present’: Interview with M. Yegenoglu and M. Mutman, New Formations, 45: 9–23. Warner, N. (1996) Monuments and Maidens, London: Vintage. Yuval-Davis, N. (1997) Gender and Nation, London: Sage.

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6 An Inhospitable Port in the Storm: Recent Clandestine West African Migrants and the Quest for Diasporic Recognition* By Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe At the heart of diaspora is the image of [a] journey . . . The circumstances of leaving determine not only the experiences on these journeys, but also the circumstances of arrival and settling down. (Uguris 2001: 1)

Introduction: Contesting the African Diaspora Although the etymological root of ‘diaspora’ is particular (from the Greek, to scatter and sow), its contemporary applications are now many and varied (Cohen 1997). In the latest phase of transnationalism and globalisation, diaspora has become what Phil Cohen describes as ‘the master trope of migration and settlement’ (1998: 3). The term is deployed indiscriminately to describe travellers and cosmopolitan elites as well as political refugees, economic migrants and guest workers: ‘In these ways, the dispersed diasporas of old have become today’s “transnational communities” sustained by a range of modes of social organisation, mobility and community’ (Vertovec 1999: 448). With such apparent elasticity and fluidity, what constitutes the criteria for ‘authentic’ diaspora inclusion is highly contested: ‘Focusing peculiarly on the ethnic axis of homelands and abroad, theories of diaspora overlook the transgressions of the national and lose sight of the new dynamics and topography of membership’ (Soysal 2000: 1). Nowhere is this problematic more apparent than in classical versus contemporary conceptualisations of the African diaspora (Hanchard 2004). That is, much theorising on and periodising of the African diaspora either privileges the narrative of transatlantic slavery (roots) or addresses the social and historical processes of imperialism and (post)colonialism (routes) (Hall 1990, Gilroy 1993). These earlier circuits of trade, processes of settlement, and political economic regimes did create similar and different points of reference for ‘older’ African diasporic constituents in the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe (Okpewho 1999, Palmer 2000). However, in the twenty-first century, there are ‘newer’ African diasporas, whose origin narratives are interwoven with but not exclusively defined by either ‘The Middle Passage’ or Empire and their aftermath (Koser 2003).

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Borrowing from the seminal essay ‘Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World’, co-authored by historians Patterson and Kelley (2000), I refer to these contemporary African diasporas not simply as political spaces but also as processes and conditions. That is, first, contemporary African diasporic processes extend the links of the migration chains which originated in the historical moments of the transatlantic slave trade and the rise of European Empires, wherein two adages pervade the collective consciousness of these older African diasporas: ‘We are here because you brought us here’ or ‘We are here because you were there.’ Second, contemporary African diasporas are spatially constituted wherever African (post)colonial and transnational constituents find themselves, be that conventionally in the Caribbean, North and Latin Americas, or Europe (Green 1997, Modood and Werbner 1997, Torres and Whitten 1998). Their spatial and ‘racial’ locations as both gendered African diasporic agents and former Black colonial, tribal and island subjects inscribe sameness as they mobilise and politicise (Obichere 1975, Bousquet and Douglas 1991, Adi 2000, Gilroy 2000a). Finally, African diasporic conditions persist and are transformed by the interface of transnational African diasporic traditions of resistance, protest and cultural innovation with global economic, politically gendered and racialised hierarchical structures which exclude as they appropriate and commodify (Campbell 1985, Rose 1994, Chuck, D. 1997). In other words, local and dynamic diasporic spaces, processes and conditions intersect with and in fact are produced by transnational identities, translated cultural commodities and global political strategies (Lipsitz 1994, Browning 1998, Brown 2005). In the following discussion, I will demonstrate the ways in which new cartographies of the African diaspora contribute to a reconfiguration of gendered and racialised situated politics of belonging in Fortress Europe, where immigration control remains an issue that polarises political debates and public opinions. As such, I suggest that for clandestine West African migrants enroute to Spain via Morocco, a contingent state of (un)belonging is fabricated in response to both their legal and social exclusion. From a legal standpoint, most taking these treacherous journeys do not meet the criteria for refugee status outlined by the 1951 UN Convention (Fargues et al. 2005). Socially, the popular folk concept of ‘race’ (Ifekwunigwe 2003) as it pertains to local Spanish and Moroccan constructions of ‘Blackness’ and ‘non-Blackness’ inform and impede the collective and personal projects of these ‘new’ African diasporic agents (Calavita 1999, Daly 2001, Sage 2005). The popular folk concept of ‘race’ is a potent dynamic social and cultural imaginary, the naturalisation of which attaches symbolic meanings to real or manufactured physical differences. Along with other hierarchically positioned signifiers such as gender, generation, ethnicity, religion and social class, these create, explain, justify and maintain social inequalities and injustices and perpetuate differential access to privilege, prestige, power and ultimately belonging. In my analysis, I will illustrate the complexities and politics of new African diasporic processes in the latest globalising age, wherein borders remain permeable for the transnational flow of capital and information but not people.

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Roots and Routes: Rehistoricising, Retracing, and Replacing Points of Origins, Multiple Trajectories, and Endless Termina This chapter represents one facet of a broader ongoing theoretical project, which, using the transnational circulation of people as a paradigm, rethinks the gendered relationship between continental Africa and the African diaspora. Rather than treating contemporary processes of continental African migration as separate entities outside the diaspora paradigm, I outline a theoretical formulation which assumes their interconnectedness and demonstrates their dynamism. In ‘Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic,’ historian Zeleza provides a useful typology of ‘contemporary diasporas’ as those which formed since the late nineteenth century and distinguishes them on the basis of three waves: the diasporas of colonization, decolonization and the era of structural adjustment, which emerged out of the disruptions and dispositions of colonial conquest, the struggles for independence, and structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), respectively . . . the diasporas of structural adjustment have been formed since the 1980s, out of the migrations engendered by economic, political and social crises and the destabilizations of SAPs. (2005: 55)

With an emphasis on ‘diasporas of structural adjustment’, I theorise about the ways in which gendered processes of transnationalism and globalisation have reconfigured continental African migration routes to Europe, which I conceptualise not as faux diasporas (‘economic migrations’), but as new epistemologies of the African diaspora (Kim Butler 2001). These transnational migratory processes include the smuggling of West African (and North African) women and men via Morocco to Southern Spain – the Gateway to Fortress Europe – (Harding 2000b) and the trafficking in West African (in particular Nigerian) women to Italy as part of the global sex trade (International Organization of migration 1996, Aghatise 2002, Ifekwunigwe 2004). These exemplify clandestine movements ‘by any means necessary’ of the unwanted and the impoverished (as opposed to the ‘brain drain’ elites) from structurally (mal)adjusted West African urban centres to economically and demographically restructured Western and Southern European metropoles (Harding 2000a). What motivates West African migrants is the promise of European Union (EU) wages ‘10–15 times higher than in Africa . . . .[given] the [GDP] gap between the EU and the less-developed non-EU Mediterranean [and Sub-Saharan] countries’ (Gold 2000: 133). At every stage of the migration process, strategies are highly gendered (L. Morris 2002). That is, West African clandestine migrant women and men may share a similar destination, but by virtue of their glocalised structural positions, their destinies will be very different (Westwood and Phizacklea 2000). Sassen’s (2003) dialectical configuration of global cities and survival circuits demonstrates the extent to which migrant women, who are over-represented in the service sector labouring as nannies, domestics or sex workers, are integral to the growth of economies in both ‘the North’ and ‘the South’.

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Conventionally, these contemporary continental African dispersals have been analysed either utilising traditional tropes of ‘push/pull’ migration or within the broader contexts of European asylum and immigration discourses (Sadiqi 2005). Here, I argue for the reassessment of recent clandestine West African migrations as culturally specific, differentially gendered and similarly racialised new African diasporas, which are situated within not outside the latest political economic circuits of global capitalism (Bashi 2004, Akyeampong 2005). Placing clandestine West-African migrant women and men at the centre, it is my intention to provoke a rethinking of what constitutes volition, agency and victimhood in theorising about the African diaspora in particular and diaspora in general (Anthias 1998, Braziel and Mannur 2003). As agents and victims, these ‘unofficial’ migrants deploy strategies which exemplify both the limits of individual agency and the exigencies of survival. By (re)imagining ‘new’ temporal and spatial dimensions of the African diaspora, within which there are compound and multiple forms, I seek to demonstrate the ways in which the historical ideas, economic processes and political projects of continental Africa and the African diaspora are (and always have been) mutually constituted (Zeleza 2005). As an example of this continental/diasporic African interface, my discussion will focus on clandestine movements from West Africa to Europe via Morocco and southern Spain. With reachable roots on the continent, these contemporary African ‘irregular’ migrants speak from multiple locations as transported and transplanted daughters and sons of ‘over-lapping’ diasporas (Lewis 1999). Lewis (1999) is specifically addressing the American–African diaspora in a North Atlanticist frame. However, the dynamics of over-lap and intersection in new temporal, spatial and experiential configurations of African diasporas also resonate in very interesting ways in the context of the migrations about which I am writing. As such, this blurred complexity forces a rethinking of the dynamics of diasporic and transnational activities at what Yeoh, Willis and Fakhri (2003) call ‘the edges’. That is, enroute to southern Europe, West Africans frequently traverse former colonial French African territories, pass through the contested Spanish/North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, and then make their way to Maghreb/Arab spaces, where they cross the Mediterranean in order to enter Iberia. The borders crossed are not just physical but also symbolic, economic and political: Migration has gained momentum in all Mediterranean countries of the Middle East and North Africa (Med-MENA). Not only are the number of migrants sizeable, but their rate of growth largely exceeds that of total populations. Med-MENA remains a major region of emigration, and at the same time it receives significant flows of immigration, whether destined for the region itself or in transit to Europe. The circulation of people has long been a key component – maybe even more important than trade – of the relations between countries, within the region and with the outside world. (Fargues et al. 2005: 5)

At the same time, the nation-state is both extraneous to transnational identities formation and integral to the everyday policing, surveillance, management and containment of racialised and gendered African diasporic bodies (Richmond 2002).

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So Many African Lamentations are Buried in the Sahara and Drowned in the Straits There are a lot of bodies in that [Saharan] desert . . . Sometimes you see bones by the roadside. They are all Africans heading for Europe. (Ken Umoli (a Nigerian migrant) cited in P. Harris 2001)

On 14 November 2000, in the United Kingdom, as part of the ‘Who Will Save Africa?’ series, a Channel Four documentary aired which challenged conventional perceptions of contemporary African migration routes to Europe. Using relevant cinematic excerpts from this piece as a lens, I intend to ground and contextualise my undoing of the notion of African diasporic home-making as leaving and then staying put. In other words, appropriating Bauman (1998: 93), I interrogate the ‘vagabond’ dimensions of this new African diaspora. This critical reading of ‘Exodus’, which was produced and directed by Sorious Samura (2000), an award-winning film-maker from Sierra Leone, serves as a point of departure for my subsequent discussion of the politics of asylum and immigration in Fortress Europe. The film opens with an image of the southern Spanish coastline wherein several coast guards are tending to a dead African male body that has washed up on the shore. This un-named migrant is one of the countless Nigerians, Ghanaians, Sierra Leoneans, Malians, Senegalese as well as Moroccans who will not complete the arduous journey which begins in their natal countries and ends in southern Spain – the hallowed portal to the rest of Europe. The migrants traverse multiple national borders. Their journeys may entail protracted stays in particular locations or staging posts: Clandestine migration is becoming a serious problem with multiple consequences, since Morocco is no longer a transit destination but sometimes a forced destination. Whilst Morocco is not becoming an intended destination country for irregular migrants seeking employment, it is becoming a de facto destination country because Europe or other destinations are closed to irregular migrants. (Emphases in original, text, Sadiqi 2005: 227)

Their passages are frequently orchestrated and facilitated by ‘carriers’ or ‘fixers’, who, capitalising on desperation and misery, run a lucrative trade in human cargo. These North and West African carriers are part of but not necessarily connected to a global, highly organised and sophisticated communication system for the transportation of undocumented migrants (Morrison and Crosland 2001). According to Harding (2000a), there are two northern routes for West Africans on their way to Europe. The ‘right side’ traverses Niger and Libya with the final leg involving a bid by sea via Turkish or Lebanese coasts. The ‘left side,’ which is the focus of this chapter, entails travelling along the road to Mali, turning left at Algeria and then staging dashes across the Straits of Gibraltar from Tangier in Morocco. With stepped up border control of the Straits, new Spanish routes have opened up, in particular via the Canary Islands (Arango and Martin 2005). In the global cartography of smuggling and trafficking routes, this is part of the ‘blue route,’ which ‘crosses the Mediterranean bringing people from Africa and

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Asia through North Africa to Europe via Greece, Italy, Spain (and more recently) Portugal’ (Morrison and Crosland 2001: 4). There are numerous transit stops along the way such as Bamako in Mali, where Samura interviews two groups of his fellow country men and women. In the first group, one of the Sierra Leonean women describes the ways in which some turn to prostitution, others to begging, not only to raise the necessary funds to continue the journey but merely to survive. The second group is comprised entirely of young men who lost their families during the political unrest in Sierra Leone. Constructing an imaginary England devoid of any awareness of the exclusionary and racist practices which make it impossible for anyone who is not socially designated White to be conceived of as English, one of them declares: ‘I’m an Englishman. That’s why I decide to go to Europe.’ Celebrating the twin Western spirits of individualism and capitalism, another demonstrating his football skills for the camera exclaims: ‘Why should I not make money out of this football?’ Though these sojourners may have specific destinations in mind, ‘Europe’ is configured as a monolith in much the same way ‘Africa’ was and is imagined by Europeans (Hammond and Jablow 1992). If one is able to raise the funds to travel on from Mali, another natural barrier must be transgressed – that of the Sahara Desert, which is 5,000 miles across and 700 miles from top to bottom. Says Samura: ‘The Desert is a gigantic filter except for the young, strong and those who can pay well’ (Samura 2000). The human smugglers have an important role to play at this stage. Those who can afford to pay them are transported like cattle in open trucks. When there is a shortage of hard cash, women’s bodies are used as sexual currency, which highlights what Sassen (2003) refers to as the strategic nexus of gender within not outside globalisation processes. Fuelled by the local media, it is the popular Spanish belief that African women have strategically had themselves impregnated enroute in order to acquire residency, which they are granted if their child is born on Spanish soil (personal communication, Huelva, Spain, 9 May, 2001). Albeit potentially challenging, the full extent of clandestine migrant women’s empowerment ‘strategies’ as opposed to their victimisation is an under-explored area which would benefit from situated and grounded ethnographic research in these transit milieux. The less fortunate attempt the journey on foot. From the Desert, ‘the first of the great barriers the refugees face’, the lucky reach the northern tip of the continent, Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in northern Morocco – ‘the First World dropped tantalizingly into the Third’ (Gold 2000, Samura 2000). As the Spanish have paid millions fortifying Ceuta’s border so that it is virtually impregnable, ‘the Comrades’, as the sojourners call themselves, now travel west to Tangier, the centre for the ‘connection men’ who act as intermediaries between the Africans and the Moroccan, Algerian and Spanish ‘fixers’. Here, where the Moroccan coastline almost seems to embrace the coast of Spain for a 100 kilometres, the ‘fixers’ arrange the short but potentially fatal passage across the Mediterranean in Zodiacs, inflatable boats crammed to capacity with political refugees and economic migrants, who have each paid at least $1,500. When the sea is calm the coast guards patrol the waters in helicopters looking for African Boat People. Not

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everyone completes the crossing. Many boats, too overloaded with human cargo, capsize. Osas Osamede, a certified accountant from Benin City, Nigeria (and a repeat migrant having previously emigrated to Sweden), recounts his miraculous journey: On 24 August [2000], at midnight, thirty five passengers crammed into a tiny boat set off into the dark sea. No one could see in the dark that the boat was old and patched in places. Only one hour into our crossing, we began to sink. Within minutes the inflatable boat was flat and we were in the water. From 1am till 7:30am we trod water and then, finally, a Spanish fishing boat rescued us. They called the Spanish Guardia Civil, who took us to Tarifa Port and then on to Algecira. After staying the night in a detention cell, we were taken to the police. The police got us to complete paperwork and then allowed us to leave. Unless there is an agreement between countries, it is difficult to deport people – and there is no agreement between Spain and Nigeria. (Samura 2000)

Osas, who now stays in Malaga, spent a month sleeping on the streets in a cardboard box before being offered accommodation by a Non-Governmental Organisation. When asked by Samura whether his ‘new Western home’ was worth the arduous passage he replied: ‘Anyway, be it in our homelands or not, we know we are nobodies, nobody is prepared to give us a chance. We are as good as dead. Who cares if we die on our way. Not even you, so why can’t we take the risk and die now?’ This is not the first time Africans have been crammed like sardines into vessels and transported across hostile waters. The seeds of these contemporary African migrations were sown as part of the same economic imperatives of transatlantic slavery and mercantile imperialism. From Garvey’s ‘Back to Africa’ Movement, to Rastafari, to the modern-day pilgrimages of middle class African–American and African–Caribbean roots tourists, the ‘Mama Africa’ to which so many descendants of slaves yearn to return in spirit if not in body, is not the same Africa that contemporary African migrants are leaving behind (Chabal 1996). Living Africa is vast, heterogeneous, complex and contradictory and thus can be partially defined by but not reduced to the lowest common denominators of AIDS, corruption, tribalism, wars, ethnic cleansing, poverty, famine and political violence. High theories and on the ground analyses of contemporary Africa and her most recent diasporas must continue to acknowledge and include the unsettling impact of under-development of which inequalities in the distribution of the fruits of global capitalism are just the latest manifestations. At the same time, the retelling of histories of victimisation and exploitation would be incomplete without the dominant counter-narratives of resistance, rebellion, liberation, innovation and ultimately survival.

Parting Words: Destination Fortress Europe, Destiny Diaspora The distinction between ‘refugees’, ‘asylum seekers’, and ‘economic migrants’ is becoming harder to sustain. All are seeking shelter against violence, whether political or economic. The woman who dies in childbirth for want of basic medical care, a child who perishes from avoidable sickness, are no less dead

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than someone persecuted for belonging to a minority ethnic group or for holding the wrong political opinions. (Seabrook 2000: 34)

What I have addressed is the applicability of the diaspora concept to contemporary flows of undocumented West (and North) African migrants who arrive by boat on southern Spanish shores. Though there is nothing particularly novel about these movements, what is new is the increased role transnational crime syndicates play in the smuggling of both illegal migrant workers and refugees (Morrison and Crosland 2001). In spite of the narrow UN Convention definition of a refugee, making motivational distinctions between political and economic refugees is becoming exceedingly difficult (Ogata 1995). The designation ‘bogus asylum seeker’ has entered the popular and political lexicon precisely because of the managed tightening of European immigration control regimes (Neumayer 2005). The only ‘legitimate’ means of entry is via the asylum route (Gilbert 2004). In other words, there is a direct correlation between the management of refugee flows and increased border controls and the growth in the people smuggling trade (Nadig 2002). Protection itself is a form of persecution (Pittaway 2002). Yet, if we examine the root causes of global migratory flows from South to North, such as (post)colonial underdevelopment, environmental decay, and globalisation, then not only are European nation-states culpable but their international responsibilities transcend the limited definition of a refugee outlined by the UN Convention: ‘It is indeed a tragic irony that Third World immigrants are refused entry by a Europe whose imperialism has created the conditions which have led to the acceleration and increase of international migration in this century’ (M. Martin 1999: 834). A political designation thrust into the realm of the economic (Pittaway 2002, Sesay 2002). As a magnet and the common point of entry for many unauthorised immigrants, nowhere in Europe is this political economic debate more pressing than in southern Spain, where new African diasporic history is unfolding every day. Coastlines have become frontlines and may soon be transformed into war zones. At the EU Summit in Seville in June 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair unsuccessfully lobbied for battleships to patrol the Straits. However, after six Moroccan soldiers reclaimed the tiny and uninhabited ‘Parsley’ Island (or Perejil in Spanish and Leila in Arabic) on 11 July 2002, six days later, Spain fought back with an armada of five gunboats and two fighter jets. The purpose of the occupation was, among other disputes, to force Spanish engagement with the ‘human problem’ of people smuggling across the Straits, the interface between Africa and the developed world (Tremlett 2002). As recently as September/October 2005, another battle was waged over illegal immigration at the contested borders to Ceuta and Melilla – ‘the stepping stones to Europe’. This time the combatants were ‘sub-Saharan African’ clandestine migrants and the Spanish Guardia Civil: At least eight Africans have been killed in increasingly desperate attempts to reach Melilla and Ceuta . . . over the past six weeks. On most nights since early summer they have sought to clamber over three-metre-high border fences in groups of several hundred at a time, using ladders made from pine branches held together with strings or rags of clothing. (Sage 2005: 15)

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In the countless European, African and American media accounts I read of these recent desperate insurrections, rarely was gender mentioned in a differentiated fashion. Moreover, the accompanying dramatic press photographs, which depicted the pan-African border-warriors as exclusively male, contributed to the relative invisibility of clandestine West African female migrants in popular media reports of these encounters. Yet, the true extent of the differential gendered politics of survival as manifest in the specific challenges facing clandestine migrant women of childbearing age was highlighted by Xavier Casero, a Medecins Sans Frontieres doctor, who had been administering to those making a bid for Europe via Ceuta and Melilla: I’ve seen a lot of women give birth in the forest. About 10% of the immigrants are women and around a quarter of these women are pregnant. (Another quarter have small babies.) In a month and a half, I saw six deliveries in the middle of the forest with no medical help apart from us, but often we arrived too late to help with the birth . . . The immigrants won’t go to the hospital because the police are around – they prefer to stay in the forest, hidden from the security services. (BBC News 14 October 2005)

In the past decade, it is estimated that at least 3,000 African Boat People or Pateras as they are known in Spain, have drowned attempting the passage across the Straits, described as ‘the largest mass grave in Europe’ (Tremlett 2001b). Pateras are rickety wooden fishing boats frequently used to transport migrants. Spain is the third-most popular holiday destination in the world. Therefore, Spanish tourism officials have begun to complain about the bodies which periodically wash up on Spanish beaches fearing the frequency of their appearance may begin to damage tourism (Tremlett 2001a). Since January 2001, 10,000 Africans have been detained by Spanish authorities after making the treacherous journey across the Straits of Gibraltar, the 14-kilometre or 8.7-mile stretch of water separating the tip of Morocco and the southern Spanish coastline (Harris 2001). If the waters are calm, the crossing only takes 35 minutes. Two-thirds of those intercepted are North African, Moroccan in particular, the remaining one-third is sub-Saharan Africans from Senegal, Mali, the Gambia, Cote D’ Ivoire, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone (Tremlett 2001a). There is a deportation agreement between Morocco and Spain which means Moroccans are deported within 24 hours (White 1999, Corkhill 2001). There is no such agreement between Spain and sub-Saharan African countries. Sub-Saharan Africans are generally served with a 15-day expulsion order which is erratically enforced (Lennon 2000). Many of the latter ‘disappear’ (Katherine Butler 2001). The lucky ones make their way to other European destinations, where there is no language barrier and/or where they have established social networks for the provision of shelter, employment and other essential resources (Crisp 1999). Others remain in Spain hoping they will obtain legal residence permits which will allow them to work. The unlucky eke out livings as best they can which may entail sex work, drug dealing or agricultural labor (Bales 1999, Corkhill 2001). The sending of remittances is the transnational glue binding all recent arrivals to their communities of origin, facilitating the future passage of other family members (Crisp 1999, S.Martin 2001) or enhancing one’s status in one’s community of origin (Portes 1999, Al-Ali et al. 2001). There is a lived tension between the migrants’

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desire for eventual repatriation back ‘home’ (with elevated status and a bulging bank balance) and the harsh social realities for undocumented smuggled migrants. This dialectic is emblematic of the African/diasporic nexus. Their vulnerable status as illegal immigrants deprives them of the rights and entitlements afforded citizens and designated refugees (Daniel 2002). Although there have been ‘regularisation’ processes, which grant amnesty to illegal immigrants who are able to ‘prove’ that they have been working in the country for two years, there are considerable disparities in the success of different immigrant groups (Corkhill 2001: 840). The obvious contradiction of such a policy is the difficulty of proving residency if one is illegal, leading to the growth of a black market in false documentation (Corkhill 2001). Moreover, in January 2001, a law was passed which made a distinction between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ immigrants, thereby making it easier to forcibly expel the latter and penalise employers who hire illegals (Corkhill 2001). This marginalisation is compounded by everyday racism and threats of violence. Daily survival dictates that migrants create support systems, pool resources (i.e. share housing and information), maintain transnational links (i.e. send remittances and correspondence to family in their natal communities) and renegotiate meanings of community and belonging: The cosmopolitanism of migrants has entailed the proliferation of illegal or clandestine spaces. This can be seen in the existence of genuine unofficial towns constituted by so-called illegal immigrants. It can also be seen in the flexible practices adopted by illegal immigrants in the country of reception, and in the xenophobia which contributes to confining them to legal obscurity. In these spheres of illegality, marginality might favor the reconstruction of complex forms of community life. (Mbembe 2001: 11)

These survival strategies exemplify the intersectionality of ‘new’ African diasporic identity politics with the exclusionary immigration policies and practices of Fortress Europe (Yuval-Davis et al. 2005). Yet, as Soysal argues, immigrants’ demands for civic recognition and inclusion are frequently predicated on universalist ‘claims’ which transcend nationalist and in certain instances diasporic discourses: ‘Individuals and collective groups set their agenda for realization of rights through particularistic identities, which are embedded in, and driven by, universalistic and homogenizing discourses of personhood and human rights’ (2000: 12). This turn to particularistic universalism is illustrated beautifully by Osas Osamede’s ‘World Without Borders’ response to Sorious Samura’s suggestion that some might view his path of entry as a form of trespassing: ‘The whole world is for us all’ (Samura 2000). A shrinking and ageing population as well as an economic boom suggest that Spain will need 12 million immigrants over the next 30 years (Carroll 2000). At the same time, Spain has completed the installation of a $120 million radar system that forms a 550 km electronic wall across the Mediterranean (Carroll 2000). The system can detect boats at distances of up to 11 kilometres. Never the less, it will be virtually impossible to ‘stem the tide’ of desperation and determination, simply by sealing borders. Such drastic measures only act as temporary deterrents, for as soon as one entrance is sealed another is made porous. By 2015, it is estimated that between 15 and 20 million migrants will have made a bid for Western Europe via Spanish territory (Harding 2000b). I refer to

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this as the paradoxical and racialised politics of exigency and exclusion. In order to cope with labor shortfalls, European countries such as Spain distinguish between the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ sort of immigrant. That is, the gates are thrown wide open for skilled workers. Whereas, the doors are slammed shut for unskilled workers from developing countries. Unless of course, the latter have cheap labor to sell. Thousands of British and northern European expatriates retire to Spain every year without difficulty (O’Reilly 2000). Eastern European immigrants are welcomed and in certain instances actively recruited. On the other hand, North African, West African and Latin American illegals experience racial discrimination and hostility from the indigenous Spanish population who have reinvented themselves as ‘White’: the ‘legal construction of illegality consigns these immigrants to the margins of the economy..racial “otherness,” exclusion and economic function are mutally exclusive’ (Calavita 1999: 529). While not discounting the importance of the traditional refugee regime and its concomitant human rights agenda of aid and protection, one could argue that ‘refugee’ discourses and policies in fact provoke polarised public expressions of either liberal paternalism or right-wing xenophobia, particularly about social integration and the role of the welfare-state (Geddes 2002). Immigration policies are reproduced as popular narratives of nationalism (Hier and Greenberg 2002). As border-crossers, African Boat People have violated the sanctity of sovereign borders, which are not just territorialised but also gendered and racialised. Anthias defines this transgression as the politics of ‘translocational positionality’ . . . . ‘the social relations of “othering” on the one hand, and resource struggles on the other’ (2001: 633). For example, a 50-page guide was published in Spanish, English, French and Arabic by a regional government’s health council advising immigrants, many of them Muslim with their own ablution rituals, on hygiene matters, on how to bathe (Daly 2001). In the Spanish national imaginary with selective amnesia about its Moorish inheritances, Moroccans and Sub-Saharan Africans are marked not just as racially different but also dangerous and ‘dirty’. Social and cultural relations between Catholic Spain and Muslim Morocco stretch back fourteen centuries (Chandler 1992, Pimienta-Bey 1992). In this new unsettled age, the Spanish are once again demanding ‘Moors out of here’ (Myers 2000). Four years ago, while in southern Spain presenting a keynote address at a conference on ‘Gendered Spaces’, I asked some of my Spanish colleagues whether ‘Moorish’ anxiety was related to the fact that from a racialised standpoint, Moroccans are much harder to keep under surveillance and thus contain than their Black African counterparts. To which they responded too quickly and too emphatically ‘no’. (Personal communication, Huelva, Spain, 9 May 2001). A Spanish exchange student at the British university where I used to teach was more honest when she admitted: ‘We do not mind the Africans. They are helping strengthen our economy, since they will take the jobs we do not want. It is the Moroccans we do not like. They are responsible for the crime’. (Personal communication, London, United Kingdom, 14 December 2000). Although based on the different ethnographic context of internal African diasporic movements from West to South Africa, Morris’ suggestion that visible alterity can

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lead to the scapegoating of black African migrants is pertinent: ‘because of their physical features, their bearing, their clothing style and their inability to speak one of the indigenous languages, they are in general clearly distinct’ (A. Morris 1998: 1123). To conclude, the ‘worlding’ of Africans as a ‘state of being “cast out” into the world’ has happened before (Simone 2001: 17). Though these journeys are as treacherous as the Middle Passage, the difference is that these Africans are (un)wanted. The sifting of the ‘(un)wanted’ is not unique to Spain. Most European countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and now Ireland, are grappling with ‘the asylum and immigration problem’. When I have presented this work in the United States, colleagues have drawn parallels with the migrations of both Haitian and Cuban Boat People. Nor are these migratory processes uniquely African. For examples, similar dramas are playing themselves out in Australia with Afghan and Iraqi refugees, in Canada and the United Kingdom with Chinese migrants, and with Mexican and Central American migrants on the US border with Mexico. Once they land, their vulnerable status as illegal immigrants deprives them of rights and entitlements afforded citizens and designated refugees. My contention is that these aforementioned contemporary emigrants, most of whom have not been granted political asylum by Spain on the grounds of refugee status, should be recognised as the latest transnational manifestation of older African diasporic processes (Mazrui 1990, Sefa Dei 1998, Mazrui 1999, Koser 2003). In European (and North American) metropolitan destinations, the new migrant cosmopolitanism (Mbembe 2001) that is manufactured also demands that we come to terms with the heterogeneous dialectics of Africanness and Blackness in different diasporic frames (Stoller 2002, Koser 2003). Their consciousness of home as both continental African and diasporic is multi-sited and imagined but not imaginary and territorialised as well as both de-territorialised and re-territorialised. When we witness these more recent dispersals, we must name them as part of a historical continuum within not outside the African diaspora – the latest layers. More recent migrants and refugees from continental Africa have different, shared narratives of home, community, longing and belonging than do their predecessors. The ‘myth of return’ is to a place they recently knew rather than to a place they can only imagine. Such a repositioning forces a rethinking of the constitutive dimensions of persecution and victimhood, which have been integral criteria for ‘classical’ diasporic membership. Such a paradigm shift politically empowers African economic (and political) refugees and relocates their struggles within a broader Pan-African diasporic framework. The persistence of globalised, racialised and gendered inequities as manifest in the legal and social exclusion of clandestine West African migrant women and men enroute to Europe affirms the importance of viewing African/diasporic formations as dynamic and historically contextualised and thus cyclical rather than static and ahistorical. The harsh economic, social and political realities of this situated (un)belonging remind us that spanning five centuries and still unfolding, the unique history of the African diaspora is also in part both a history of continental Africa and Fortress Europe.

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Notes * This chapter has been enhanced by many stimulating exchanges with colleagues at countless invited seminars, symposia and conferences in Europe and North America. I am grateful to all who provided insightful feedback and engaged so enthusiastically with my work. Special thanks to Nira Yuval-Davis, Kalpana Kannabiran and Ulrike M. Vieten for shrewd editorial assistance and collegiality as well as for inviting me to contribute to the plenary panel on ‘Racisms, Sexisms and Contemporary Politics of Belonging’ at the conference of the same name, which provided the impetus for this exciting and important volume.

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Cohen, Phil (1998) ‘Welcome to the diasporama’, Centre for New Ethnicities Research, University of East London newsletter, 3 (Spring/Summer): 3–10. Cohen, Robin (1997) Global Diasporas, London: UCL Press. Corkhill, David (2001) ‘Economic migrants and the labour market in Spain and Portugal’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24 (5): 828–44. Crisp, Jeff (1999) ‘Policy challenges of the new diasporas: migrant networks and their impact on asylum flows and regimes’, New Issues in Refugee Research, Working Paper Number 7, UN High Commission for Refugees, Geneva. Daly, Emma (2001) ‘ “Dirty” Africans ordered to wash’, Observer, January 14. Daniel, Valentine, E. (2002) The refugee: a discourse on displacement, in Jeremy MacClancy (ed.) Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Frontlines, London: University of Chicago: 270–86. Fargues, Philippe, Cassarino, Jean–Pierre, and Latreche, Abdelkader (2005) Mediterranean migration: an overview, in Phiippe Fargues (ed.) Mediterranean Migration 2005 Report (Cooperation Project on the Social Integration of Immigrants, Migration and the Movement of Persons) Brussels: The European Commission–MEDA Programme: 5–31. Floya, Anthias (1998) ‘Evaluationg diaspora: beyond ethnicity’, Sociology 32 (3): 557–80. Geddes, Andrew (2002) ‘The borders of absurdity and fear’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, May 24. Gilbert, Geoff (2004) ‘Is Europe living up to its obligation to refugees?’, The European Journal of International Law 15 (5): 963–87. Gilroy, Paul (1993) The Black Atlantic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilroy, Paul (2000a) Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. Gilroy, Paul (2000b) ‘Black fascism’, Transition. 1/2 (81/82): 70–91. Gold, Peter (2000) Europe or Africa?: A Contemporary Study of the Spanish North African Enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Green, Charles (ed.) (1997) Globalization and Survival in the Black Diaspora, Albany, NY: State University of New York. Hall, Stuart (1990) Cultural identity and diaspora, in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.) Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart: 222–37. Hammond, Dorothy and Alta Jablow (1992) The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing About Africa, Revised Edition. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Hanchard, Michael (2004) ‘Black transnationalism, Africana studies and the 21st Century’, Journal of Black Studies 35 (2): 139–53. Harding, Jeremy (2000a) The Uninvited: Refugees at the Rich Man’s Gate, London: Profile Books with the London Review of Books. Harding, Jeremy (2000b) ‘Welcome the wandering tribes’, Observer, May 7. Harris, Paul (2001) ‘Thousand–mile trek for better life ends in death on the beach’, Observer, April 15. Hier, Sean P. and Joshua, Greenberg, L. (2002) ‘Constructing a discursive crisis: risk, problematization and illegal Chinese in Canada’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25 (3): 490–513. Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O. (2003) Scattered belongings: reconfiguring the ‘African’ in the English– African Diaspora, in Khalid Koser (ed.) New African Diasporas, London: Routledge: 56–70. Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O. (2004) ‘Recasting ‘Black Venus’ in the new African diaspora’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 27: 397–412. International Organization for Migration (1996) Trafficking in Women to Italy for Sexual Exploitation, Brussels: International Organization for Migration. Koser, Khalid (ed.) (2003) New African Diasporas, London: Routledge. Lennon, Peter (2000) ‘Sun, sea, sand and corpses’, The Guardian, December 13. Lewis, Earl (1999) To turn as on a pivot: writing African Americans into a history of overlapping diasporas, in Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod (eds) Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora,Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 3–32. Lipsitz, George (1994) Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place, London: Verso. Martin, Michael T. (1999) ‘ “Fortress Europe” and Third World immigration in the post–Cold War global context’, Third World Quarterly, 20(4): 821–37.

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Martin, Susan F. (2001) ‘Global migration trends and asylum’, New Issues in Refugee Research, Working Paper Number 41, UN High Commission for Refugees, Geneva. Mazrui, Ali (1990) ‘Modern Africa: forward to the past’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 7 (2): 56–60. Mazrui, Ali (1999) ‘Globalization and cross–cultural values: the politics of identity and judgement’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 21 (3): 97–110. Mbembe, Achille (2001) ‘Ways of seeing: beyond the new nativism: introduction’, African Studies Review, 44 (2): 1–14. Modood, Tariq and Pnina Werbner (eds) (1997) The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe: Racism, Identity and Community, London: Zed. Morris, Alan (1998) ‘ “Our fellow Africans make our lives hell”: the lives of Congolese and Nigerians in Johannesburg’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21 (6): 1116–137. Morris, Lydia (2002) Managing Migration: Civic Stratification and Migrants’ Rights, London: Routledge. Morrison, John and Beth Crossland (2001) ‘The trafficking and smuggling of refugees; the end game in European asylum policy?’ New Issues in Refugee Research Working Paper Number 39, UN High Commission for Refugees, Geneva. Myers, Bill (2000) ‘“Moors out of here”’, U.S. News and World Report 128 (7): 37–39. Nadig, Aninia (2002) ‘Human smuggling, national security and refugee protection’, Journal of Refugee Studies 15 (1): 1–25. Neumayer, Eric (2005) ‘Bogus refugees? The determinants of asylum migration to Western Europe’, International Studies Quarterly, 49: 389–409. Obichere, Boniface (1975) Afro–Americans in Africa: recent experiences, in Jacob Drachler (ed.) Black Homeland/Black Diaspora, Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press: 15–42.. Ogata, Sadako (1995) ‘Mixed migration: a strategy for refugees and economic migrants’, Harvard International Review, 17 (2): 30–33. Okpewho, Isidore (1999) Introduction, in Isidore Okphewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali Mazrui (eds) The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press: xi–xxviii.. O’Reilly, Karen (2000) The British on the Costa Del Sol: Transnational Identities and Local Communities, London: Routledge. Palmer, Colin (2000) ‘The African diaspora’, Black Scholar, 30 (3/4): 56–59. Patterson, Tiffany Ruby and Kelley, Robin D.G. (2000) ‘Unfinished migrations: reflections on the African diaspora and the making of the modern world’, African Studies Review, 43 (1): 11–46. Pimienta–Bey, José (1992) Moorish Spain: academic source and foundation for the rise and success of Western European universities in the Middle Ages, in Ivan Van Sertima (ed.) Golden Age of the Moor, London: Transaction Publishers: 182–248. Pittaway, Eileen (2002) ‘Refugees in the twenty-first century: a humanitarian challenge’, Mots Pluriels, Special Issue on The Refugee Convention Where to from Here? 21 (May): http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP2102edito1.html Portes, Alejandro (1999) ‘Conclusion; toward a new world – the origins and effects of transnational activities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2): 463–77. Richmond, Anthony (2002) ‘Globalization: implications for immigrants and refugees’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25 (5): 707–27. Rose, Tricia (1994) Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Wesleyan, MA: Wesleyan University Press. Sadiqi, Fatima (2005) ‘Morocco: the political and social dimension of migration’, in Phiippe Fargues (ed.) Mediterranean Migration 2005 Report (Cooperation Project on the Social Integration of Immigrants, Migration and the Movement of Persons), Brussels: The European Commission– MEDA Programme: 225–30. Sage, Adam (2005) ‘Desperation at Europe’s back gate’, New Statesman, 134 (4761): 15–16. Samura, Sorious (2000) ‘Sorious Samura’s Africa: exodus, London: Insight News. Sassen, Saskia (2003) Global cities and survival circuits, in Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild (eds) Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers, London: Granta Books: 254–74. Seabrook, Jeremy (2000) ‘The migrant in the mirror’, New Internationalist, 377: 34–5.

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Sefa Dei, George (1998) ‘Interrogating “African Development” and the diasporan reality’, Journal of Black Studies, 29 (2): 141–54. Sesay, Fatama Lovetta (2002) ‘The root causes of refugee flows in global context’, Mots Pluriels, Special Issue on The Refugee Convention Where to from Here? 21 May: http: //www.arts.uwa. edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP2102fls.html Simone, AbdouMaliq (2001) ‘On the worlding of African cities’, African Studies Review, 44 (2): 15–42. Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu (2000) ‘Citizenship and identity: living in diaspora in post-war Europe’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23 (1): 1–15. Stoller, Paul (2002) Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Torres, Arlene and Norman Whitten (eds) (1998) Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, Volume Two, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tremlett, Giles (2001a) ‘Africans drown as migrant boat sinks off the Canaries’, The Guardian, June 1. Tremlett, Giles (2001b) ‘59 illegal migrants feared drowned off Spain’, The Guardian, September 10. Tremlett, Giles (2002) ‘A new route to asylum’, The Guardian, June 7. Uguris, Tijen (2001) ‘Diaspora and citizenship: Kurdish women in London’, paper presented at the East London Refugee conference, ‘Crossing Borders and Boundaries’, London, UK, June 25. Vertovec, Steven (1999) ‘Conceiving and researching transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2): 447–62. Westwood, Sallie and Phizacklea, Anne (2000) Trans-nationalism and the politics of belonging, London: Routledge. White, Gregory (1999) ‘Encouraging unwanted immigration: a political economy of Europe’s efforts to discourage North African mmigration’, Third World Quarterly, 20 (4): 839–954. Yeoh, Brenda, Willis, Katie and Fakhri Khader, Abdul (2003) ‘Introduction: transnationalism and its edges’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 26 (2): 207–17. Yuval-Davis, Nira, Anthias, Floya and Kofman, Eleonore (2005) ‘Secure borders and safe haven and the gendered politics of belonging: beyond social cohesion’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28 (3): 513–35. Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe (2005) ‘Rewriting the African diaspora: beyond the Black Atlantic’, African Affairs, 104 (414): 35–68.

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7 Alterity and Belonging in Diaspora Space: Changing Irish Identities and ‘Race’-Making in the ‘Age of Migration’1 By Alice Feldman Introduction The past decade has been a time of significant transformation in Irish society. One of the most notable catalysts of change has been the recent and rapid shift from being a country of emigration to one of immigration, inaugurating an extraordinary process of ethnic diversification within what has long been considered a ‘monocultural’ society. Migration has thus served as an important measure as well as driver of change, reflecting Ireland’s immersion in the global arena and initiating pervasive changes, socially and institutionally. Scholarship concerning such issues as identity, diversity and social change in Ireland has yet to catch up with these changes, and until very recently, has been limited primarily to the areas of ethno-nationalism and racism. Work on ethnonational identity has proven unduly narrow as a result of the legacy of ‘Orthodox nationalist scholarship’ and a preoccupation with the conflict in Northern Ireland. The former’s concern with nation-building and constructions of a unified, homogenous ‘Irish people’ (Connelly 2003: 174) and the latter’s exclusive focus on Catholic-Protestant relations have rendered other minority ethnic communities virtually invisible in national political and intellectual landscapes (Hainsworth 1998, Feldman 2003). Research is increasingly addressing the meanings of Irishness (Murphy 1991, O’Toole 1998, Graham 2001) and some specific aspects of identity (Fagan 1995, Kockel 1995, Cronin 1999), but this has been predominantly quantitative in nature, with little in-depth qualitative exploration of how people see and understand themselves in relation to gender, age, class, sexuality, locality, art and so on.2 Attention to minority ethnic communities in Ireland has evolved largely under the rubrics of racism and immigration. A notable amount of research has been devoted to a wide range of policy issues relating to Travellers and refugees and asylum seekers,3 and recent scholarship has centred primarily upon the dynamics and deepening of social and institutional racism in Ireland (Hainsworth 1998, Fanning 2002, Lentin and McVeigh 2002, Garner 2004), with a substantial amount of work based on attitudinal surveys and social psychological analyses (MacGreil 1996, MacLaughlin and O’Connell 2000, Garner and White 2002).

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The sustained focus on racism, academically and with respect to activism, has been critically important; however, there are limitations to its capacity to capture the complex transformations currently taking place. The resulting ghettoisation of these issues and communities of interest within what is often constructed as ‘special’ policy areas (or even as ‘social problems’) and ‘target groups’ removes them from wider considerations of social and economic development of Irish society as a whole. It also contributes to the reification of ‘ethnic-Others’ and ‘aliens’ as perpetual outsiders of the ‘legitimate’(although now multi-ethnic) populace (Feldman et al. 2005). On the ground, it contributes to burnout among the victims of racism as a result of being over-researched and generates backlash among segments of society stigmatised as racist. Much criticism of this imbalance has been advanced by race critical scholars and in ‘critical white studies’. They argue that it has led to the de-racialisation of majority ethnic identities and over-racialisation of ‘visible’ ethnic minorities, reinforcing a simplistic black/white dualism, and essentialising Others’ alterity (Brah 1996, Frankenberg 1999, Nayak 2003). This in turn circumvents crucial opportunities to excavate the various forms of otherness within white communities – the ‘crisis in the dominant forms of Anglo-ethnicity’ (Brah 1996: 2) – and develop greater insights into the foundations of all racial and cultural positionings (Frankenberg 1999). As such, this imbalance has generated ‘the striking contradiction . . . that we now seem to know far less about the racialised identities of the ethnic majority . . . who they are in the present post-imperial moment . . . and who they may yet “become” ’ (Nayak 2003: 139). Increasingly, communities are no longer formed over successive generations and based on traditional forms of work (Nayak 2003), and it is more common for ‘neighbours’ to be ‘strangers’ from distant places, and ‘security’ to be based on the priorities of transnational corporations (Papastergiadis 2000) or government-led policies of border control. It is in this interface between people and their own crises of existence and the regimes managing their lives, that private and public notions of racial and ethnic identity are staked out and negotiated. It is here that we confront, contest and collude in, publicly calibrated notions of who we are in racial or ethnic terms. (Knowles 2003: 46)

The work underpinning this chapter moves beyond essentialising constructions of white-Irish-racist and the Immigrant-as-always/only-negative projection of Self and Nation. It draws upon scholarship emphasising the exploration of belonging in the increasingly fluid and multiple constitutions of ethno-national identities (Castles and Davidson 2000, Hedetoft and Hjort 2002, Christiansen and Hedetoft 2004), particularly in the local contexts of everyday life. Thompson et al. argue, for example, that much of the construction of ideas of national identity takes place at local level, as people engage in drawing boundaries – real and symbolic – around their particular communities. These everyday conceptualisations of identity are far removed from the ‘purified’ and often stereotyped versions which eventually come to form part of more explicitly nationalist ideologies . . . The local tells about the production of the nation as a public, about the project of producing the ‘people’. (1999: 54)

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Through the analysis of three majority ethnic Irish women’s life narratives, this chapter examines how self-construction is ‘implicated in the constitution of the racialised social orders in which individual lives are cast’ (Knowles 2003: 47). It employs the conceptual resources provided by Brah’s (1996) notion of ‘diaspora space’ – the common, intersecting fields of engagement between indigenes and migrants – to gain greater insight into the mutually transforming border crossings and cultural translations, displacements and deterritorialisations endemic to migration (Papastergiadis 2000). Constituting Self and Other in the Diaspora Nation: Life Narratives and Identity Work For Brah, diaspora space is the nexus constituted by the confluence of journeys and narratives re-produced through individual and collective re-memory, which are re-lived through mulitiple modalities of gender, race, class, language and generation, among different diasporic communities relationally positioned among multiple others (Brah 1996: 183–184). In this sense, Ireland is the ultimate ‘diaspora nation’ so to speak, in terms of the extent to which fluidity and movement of people are defining features of the nation, from the early arrival of Vikings and Normans (the latter known for becoming ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’) to the unprecedented increase in immigration during the past decade. In the time between this legend past and extraordinary present, the country’s national story has been punctuated by the multiple modes and machinations of colonialism (Kiberd 1996, Lloyd 1999, Howe 2000, Graham 2001) and a pervasive entanglement and pre-occupation with emigration – both for those who stayed and those who left (Hickman 2002, Gray 2004). Irish collective memory is thus underpinned by the trauma and loss as well as opportunities and successes brought about through these multiple migrations, both forced and otherwise (Gray 2002; 2004). The constructions of national identity are thus peppered with contestations, reinventions and reconfigurations of Irishness and debates about authenticity, recognition, acceptance and so on. ‘Post-nationalist’ scholarship and the recent advent of Irish diaspora studies are foregrounding the multiple identities and positionalities of an inherently diverse populace – comprised of people living/not living, born/not born, citizens/non-citizens on the island – within and against the mythic script of an imagined, homogenous national community. Within the national story, the scripts of racialised/ethnic identities are especially contradictory. Irish people have been both the targets of invasion as well as participating agents of oppression within the apparatus of British colonial administration, but also have been religious missionaries and teachers who built their lives and livelihoods across the developing world. Irish people have also been both victims and perpetrators of racism in the constitution of complex racial hierarchies in destination countries, the dynamics of which have been ‘repatriated’ and ultimately reproduced in the project of nation building following independence, particularly with respect to Travellers, Black Irish, Jews and Northern

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Protestants (McVeigh 1992, Ignatiev 1995, Rolston and Shannon 2000, Lentin and McVeigh 2002). Irish communities, diasporas and identities thus constitute powerful heuristic resources for conceptualising these dynamics beyond racialised binaries of black and white (Mac an Ghaill 2002). Mac an Ghaill (2002: 100) observes that Ireland ‘seems to have found it relatively easy to move from a closed to an open, global economy, while maintaining a closed society’, one which is characterised by the ‘normalisation and regulation of . . . a new racialised common sense’. But it is now a society that is experiencing massive change from within – from new residents, new communities who are transforming the country through their home-making and civic habitation (Feldman et al. 2005). The study of diaspora space in Ireland as conceptualised by Brah (1996) – including both immigrant and emigrant diasporas – promises fresh insights into ‘Irishness’, the Irish ‘people’/‘nation’, along with the dynamics of racialisation and multiple forms of racial exclusion. It has long been argued that narrative is the primary form through which human experience is made meaningful, and increasingly is seen as the foundation upon which self-identity is achieved and expressed (Polkinghorne 1988, Holloway and Jefferson 2000, Hinchman and Hinchman 2001, Reissman 2003). Through her examinations of the relationships between personal biographies, the invented collective text of ethnicity and the process of ‘race’-making, Knowles argues that, when people make themselves the subjects of their own biographies, they simultaneously create the racialised social orders through which their own lives are cast (Knowles 2003). Life stories, ‘critical moments’ and other forms of identity narratives are ultimately important ‘sites’ for analysing ‘the relations between theory and lived experiences of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ (Gunaratnam 2003: 110). Yet despite this importance of narrative, the difficulties in getting people to reflect and talk (in the contexts of an interview) about who they are and how they see themselves in the world are legendary and instructive. In the research discussed here, outside of highly politicised contexts or the use of directive probes, rarely did people articulate their ‘identities’ per se, at least using the language that academics use or would like them to use. Beyond some common stereotypes (e.g. Irish people characterised as witty, drinkers, outgoing etc.), people seemed rarely able to say what ‘being Irish’ meant for them personally or in their daily lives. The goal in relation to the present analysis was to work with the texts and tellings of self-understanding in the ways interviewees told them, to then ‘sew’ together patchworks of identity narratives and tales of not/belonging to re-present the ‘psychic maps’ according to which the Other is navigated and scripted. The interview transcripts were coded according to Brah’s (1996) four modalities of difference, which created a valuable conceptual and methodological framework for this analysis, including the following: Experience: symbolic and narrative constructions in struggles over material conditions and meanings. Social relations: contexts of dialogic constitution through systematic relations mediated by institutional discourses and practices.

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Subjectivity: self-construal, the site of self-in-the-world sense making. Identity: manifestation of subjectivity as coherent, continuous, stable, having an inherent core. Thus while interviewees might not have talked distinctly about ‘identity’ writ large, it was still possible to map and analyse key experiences, interactions and processes that form the basis for how they see themselves and construct Others.

Self-Making and ‘Race’-Making: Three Irish Cases This section draws from research undertaken as part of a project, Changing Irish Identities, which examines the impacts of global, regional, institutional and everyday life influences on how people construct and act upon their identities in contemporary Ireland.4 While the scope of the project precluded completely open-ended biographical methods, the interviews were as participant-led as possible in terms of taking direction from respondents’ narratives for the purposes of probing in greater depth the issues they raised (and prompting about issues that were conspicuously absent). Each of the three vignettes discussed here are constructed through narrative articulations reflecting Brah’s four modalities as they relate to the three women’s orientations towards immigration and increasing ethnic diversification in Irish society.

Mary Mary (forty-eight years) began by talking about how her family owned a local shop and what it was like growing up in that environment. She recalled someone likening the shop to a ‘community centre’: it was a scene both of entertainment and intimacy, particularly during hard times for local customers. As a result, their lives were very public and their home was ‘chaotic’. But while it was clean, it did not have all the ‘niceties of the little sitting room in the front’ like the other homes, which she prized and for which the community was known. Because of this, Mary reported feeling quite different from the rest of the community, even ‘ashamed’ at the time, and attributes to this her longstanding ‘affinity for underdogs’, including members of the Traveller community, children who are considered ‘bold’ and so on (as well as her chosen career of teaching in these various contexts). She observes: ‘I am a great believer that you . . . come into this world and you meet with people from who you have something to learn and they have something to learn from you’. When asked a question about whether she would ever consider relocating, she articulated a depiction of Irish identity that is unique in its strength and depth of insight among the entire sample of fifty people from that area. Mary noted that her sister had emigrated but that she could not, stating emphatically that I love Ireland, I have to tell you I am a dyed in the wool Irish and I absolutely love it and I love everything about Ireland, I love even the fact that we are so insincere at times, and the way we’re sentimental, but we would walk across you if we needed to, you know, all these things.

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She later elaborates, when discussing Ireland being part of the EU and its implications for having a European identity, by saying: I tell you they say . . . you could go down to the depths of hell and you can pull out an Irish man and open his heart and you would find his heart is a lamb. So if they were doing something that we didn’t particularly like in Ireland, I would say we would drop our European mantle and I could probably do that very easily.

When asked more specifically about increasing ethnic diversity and being part of Irish society, Mary noted broadly the shift from great poverty in her teenage years in the 1970s, to better times in the 1980s and the incredible boom of the1990s, which she said did not affect her very much directly. She was very involved with immigrant solidarity and awareness-raising work, and believes that ‘these are very exciting times for Ireland and a big change’. Observing that the boom ‘brought out a bit of the greediness and corruptness and begrudgery that might be there’ along with the cliquishness common to Irish people, she states that ‘There is a need for generosity and acceptance. There is great generosity in the Irish, although it’s not showing itself at the moment’. She feels that awareness raising and welcoming are important: ‘I think it will be very good. I hate this theory that my sister-in-law says that we should look after our own first, because we didn’t look after our own’. Sara Sara (fifty-five years) began her story by saying she is from a ‘dysfunctional family’ and was reared in an orphanage after her mother was institutionalised. She spoke of getting a job in the civil service and also receiving her qualifications in community development and social justice issues, which gave her a language with which to be critical. Eventually she left an abusive marriage. She has a diverse group of friends and affinity groups, particularly ‘non-conformists’, ‘outsiders here who aren’t the mommies staying home minding the kids . . . ’, an array of ‘characters’, ‘from loonies to intellectuals’. An outgrowth of her tumultuous life history is that she is a uniquely enterprising woman and free spirit: ‘I always had questions . . . I have to question everything ‘cause that’s my social referral. I thought I was dead normal. But seeing me come from an institution, now that I’ve learnt [that] . . . I’ve no role so I’ve no base . . . ’ – in other words, there was nothing passed down from her mother about how things are, how to know who you are, and she has nothing to pass on to her son as a result. The ways in which this sense of rootlessness shapes her sense of national identity emerged when probed about what it means to ‘feel Irish’: Sara: Well I suppose being brought up in an institution, I wouldn’t have as strong nationalistic outlook as other people but I was very limited. I mean you could count how many black men were living in Dublin when I was growing up, you know, that rare. The most you’d see would be Italians in chippers and Chinese in Chinese [take-aways]. There was no system of all these other cultures. I would still have difficulty, lovely people but I would have difficulty in locating them as Irish. I mean when you hear, what’s that footballer . . . that did the anti-racism thing and said I’m Irish. You know he’s black . . .

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2nd woman in the room: Like Samantha Mumba5. You’re looking at her and you think ‘American, American’ and then she opens up her mouth and you’re like ‘no, Dublin’. TOK: So you don’t think those people are Irish or you just have trouble – Sara: It’s culture shock. Yeah it’s a culture shock is what it is . . . While Sara has a strong sense of social justice and critique of power relations stemming from her rebelliousness and community development training it is limited, however, when it comes to new immigrant communities. On the one hand she talks in depth about her concern regarding the exploitation of and lack of protection for migrant workers (and recalls how Irish workers were exploited in the same fashion), and she laments the mé féin [‘me myself’] syndrome. She discusses her memories of what she described as the dark years of emigration, the representations of impoverished Africans from the Black Babies campaign6, and how this negative image was transferred to her encounters with the foreign doctors and nurses in the Health Service, ‘you know telling me what to do’. This then carries over towards recent immigrants, even though she knows that ‘refugee doesn’t mean poverty’, but she cannot help being resentful if someone is here one day and has a Mercedes and I have a Punto – it’s the same thing with jobs – a Black taxi driver – how’d he get that job when so many can’t get work? . . . Logically, I’d argue as much for the other person, but me heart because I know the people in [the town] that’s unemployed. All the building going on in town, there’s absolutely no [town] people either at the top or the bottom . . . Down on the quays, they’re all Latvians.

These contradictions are reflected in Sara’s description of what an Irish ‘ethos’ would entail, which reflects a common tendency to link changes affecting Irish people and society with in-migration: To understand our culture, our history, our love of people. For me the experience of being Irish is being inclusive of people – everyone, you know, characters are as important as the hierarchy, for the want of a better word. There’s no place now, conformity is the name of the game . . . it’s a culture shock for me to see all these little yuppies going around with their briefcase, same hair, same coat . . . I’ve no problem with change and change is good. Now I was trying to figure this out because there’s a big argument on Joe Duffy7 about the migrant workers coming in . . . but what’s happened in my job and what I can witness in the community is, as the song, said the Celtic Tiger never reached us and now, suddenly, if you go down for rent allowance you might be the only white person there. Everyone else is Black . . .

In a final twist, during a discussion of the Troubles in the North at the end of the interview, she reports that, See I didn’t tell you Nelson Mandella and Martin Luther King would have been my visionaries. So I mean it was followed very shortly, well you know coming from Martin Luther King, so you would have equated with the blacks very quickly . . . at least that together people can get it.

The interview ends with her stating (in response to a question about world events that changed her life) that it was the release of Mandela which gave her the confidence to go into community work.

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Liz Liz (thirty years) comes from a close family and has a strong sense of her local community. She sees being ‘honest’, ‘helpful’ and ‘true to herself’ as some of the most important things about her: ‘I suppose if I’m not comfortable with myself other people wouldn’t be either, wouldn’t be comfortable with me . . . ’ Sport, especially football, is important at many levels, and football fans are a group that she most closely identifies with: Watching a football match in a pub and then you know talking about it afterwards like. I can actually sit there and talk about the football match amongst other fellas. I’d know what I’m talking about. I wouldn’t be just saying it’s good or bad. I’d know the players you know . . .

And, although fitting in holds great importance for her, she is also sensitive to the circumstances in which people operate, their different experiences (whether class differences reflected in occupational choices or the differences between people from urban and rural communities) rather than inherent traits that make people ‘different’. Despite her preoccupation with belonging, Liz’s boundaries with regard to ethno-national identity are rather fluid: Just because I live in Ireland . . . there’s nothing mad Irish about me. You know it’s just [a place] where you were born. There’s nothing that makes me Irish like. . . . My brother is moving to Australia – I would kind of think of him as half and half . . . He’d have parts of their culture in him and their accent . . . I think it’s just the culture like you know. That’s what I’d associate with really the nationality that you are like.

She even expresses some scepticism in this regard: Where your mother gave birth doesn’t make . . . I don’t even know where your, what nationality is . . . settling, contributing to the community – you’d be Irish unless you wanted to say you were something else . . . It must be really important but like to the government ‘cause every form you fill out asks your nationality, place of birth [even if you’re buying a car or getting new job] I’m kind of like ‘is this a trick question?’.

Even with respect to differences between British versus Irish nationalities, she notes that: ‘Sure it’s only a passport. There’s no difference.’ With regard to increasing diversity in Ireland, Liz also recounts her memories of the Black Babies campaign and her father’s negative views about immigrants. She is well travelled, has had good experiences in a variety of different cultural contexts, is open-minded and seeks out engagement with people from different cultures, whether on holiday or at work. Yet despite this, Liz most captures the anxiety currently being expressed by many Irish people about the difficulties in finding common ground with newly arrived asylum seekers and migrants: But I suppose I wouldn’t be as inclined to go over and approach somebody that was coloured because I don’t know enough about them that way. I don’t know, I’d just be a lot more weary . . . Just ‘cause I think they’d have a different kind of background, they’d have a different culture . . . I’d probably end up just asking them like ‘. . . . what was their terrible life like’. . . . I‘d start asking them silly questions you know that way.

While she would ‘probably feel that we [herself and Americans/Canadians] went through the same thing’ she would be ‘holding back a bit’ from engaging

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with refugees because of this insecurity. She then accounts for the response of the community at large: See they’re [others in community] probably afraid to talk to other people [migrants] you know. There’s probably that kind of, you know people are set in their ways and they’re probably saying ‘I don’t want to disturb them . . . I don’t want to enforce myself on them.’ So they don’t go out and talk to people, so then people don’t go out and talk to them. That’s probably what happens . . . I’d say a lot of coloured people feel that they’re in their way, that they don’t want to be bothering people that were here which is quite sad like. I think . . . in smaller proportions then people would have accepted it more, but it was just like [deep sigh], there’s just so many people coming in. . . . it’s more evident when they take the houses and stuff like . . . that’s when it kind of got to people . . .

She agrees with the view that immigrants open Ireland up to new ideas, ‘but sometimes it’s a lot of pressure’, and she illustrates this when talking about the transformation of a long-established market on Dublin’s Moore Street: And now it’s all different oriental food stores and where you get plaits done in your hair and stuff like that. That kind of thing is like ‘okay, it’s good but not on that street.’ It’s good somewhere but not there . . . ‘cause it’s the heart of Dublin, the heart of when you think of Ireland and the Irish tradition . . . It’s a place tourists would go, you know Moore Street, to see the vegetables, to see all the stalls. They wouldn’t see that now like . . . The whole street used to be full of them and that kind of thing is like, that would annoy people I would think. It kind of annoys . . . me like ‘cause it is something that has always been there and then all of a sudden it’s gone like and there’s no trace of the way it used to be. So it’s okay like in small quantities . . . but not the whole street ‘cause it’s just taking over the street and that’s kind of when pressure, the tensions increase when you see stuff like that.

In addition to the observations unique to their individual biographies, all three of the participants discussed here (as well as others interviewed) included mention of many of the same aspects or events relating to Ireland/Irish society across the full range of cultural, economic, political and psychic domains: the central role of locality and small communities, the Catholic Church and clergy, nationalistic education, emigration and travel, the famine, poverty, economic boom and welfare state and the Black Babies campaign.

Alterity, Mobility and Home/Belonging in the Constitution of Racialised Identities Knowles observes that ‘race’ is an immense concept – ‘a lens through which other forms of alterity are refracted’ and deployed in the making of any range of social differences (Knowles 1999: 125). She argues that because it is a category of social and political analysis rather than a form of human action or behaviour, ‘race’ must be broken down into elements that are salient in the sense-making contexts of peoples’ lives. From her interviews with black/ethnic minority immigrants and transnationals in Britain – individuals she identifies as having ‘acquired’ racialised identities – she derives three dimensions that underpin the dialectic relationships between people, regimes and global forces at play in the process of ‘race’-making: alterity, mobility and home/belonging.

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The present work employs these dimensions in an expanded form so they may be applied to the full complement of diaspora space inhabitants (indigenes as well as migrants). It does so on the assumption that they are defining features of all lives, and that all identities are ultimately racialised and therefore implicated in the process of ‘race’-making. As used here, alterity emcompasses the array of Brah’s (1996) ‘axes of differentiation’ (class, gender, etc.) that shape interviewees’ sense of difference, outsiderness and alienation from the ‘majority’ of which they are identified as being part. Mobility is used to capture their personal and material capacity to access and move among and between different communities, positionalities and institutions. Home/belonging refers to the struggle to cultivate a sense of place within a rapidly changing nation. As such, this triad assists analysis of the impacts of the diverse understandings among members of the ‘mainstream’ of their ‘place’ within their society, their freedom and ability to be themselves, move comfortably and effectively across symbolic and material boundaries, and access resources and capital necessary to exercise their free choice. As discussed below, all of these factors figure prominently in what Mary, Sara and Liz bring to their encounters with Others, the conditions that move them to become cultural interlocutors (or not) and their roles in the racialised social order they co-create. Mary’s sense of alterity arises in a local context of lifestyle and association, but seems normalised through a strong sense of family and community belonging. This culminates in the cultivation of a strong ‘other-orientation’, which is both reflected and reinforced by her fluid mobility, personally and professionally, across a wide range of communities and sectors. For Mary, ‘home’ can include lots of different people. This sensibility illuminates the roots of her pluralist, reflexive and generous view towards ‘underdogs’, and communities who are marginalised despite acknowledgement of an avowed fair-weather self-interest that underpins her account of both her own constitution as an Irish person and Irishness as a whole. In contrast, Sara’s strong sense of difference and otherness stems from her location on the margins of society writ large, and is fed by her inability to foster a sense of place or role in the world. While this has contributed to her becoming an enterprising free spirit who is extremely fluid in terms of mobility across personal and professional boundaries, her orientation towards Others appears somewhat inconsistent and conditional, underpinned perhaps by the hierarchised social order against which she herself has been struggling. Immigrants are placed at the bottom of this hierarchy and are subject to a distorted application of her critical consciousness to the circumstances and power relations surrounding them. Whereas Mary and Sara may embrace their sense of alterity as central to who they are – and build a home around it – Liz seeks refuge in familiar affinity groups. This is possibly to reduce or avoid the discomfort that a sense of difference brings with it, and is reflected in her emphasis on sociability and the capacity for successful face work as central components of Irish subjectivity/identity. And while her strong sense of home/belonging does create an openness with regard to cross-cultural boundaries and abstract expressions of ethno-national

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identity, it also creates a clear ‘line’, gauged by the level of anxiety generated by the ‘unfamiliar’ or that which threatens to subvert the familiar. Thus, for all three women, alterity is an issue of central concern and struggle, regardless of their various positionalities, personal constitutions or life circumstances. But it is not necessarily the deciding factor in relation to their constitution of racialised Others. The material consequences and manifestations of that difference – in terms of successful mobility – provide important clues to the social and institutional factors that shape the lens through which people ‘see’ Others from their own locations within the social order. Whilst the three dimensions overlap to a considerable extent, it appears that a positive sense of home/belonging provides a foundation of subjective continuity and security. It provides a comfort zone of self-assurance, which in turn serves as a transcultural threshold for their construction of and response to ‘newcomers’ and ‘new’ communities – who are themselves seeking to achieve the same sense of home and belonging through negotiations of their own alterity and mobility.

Conclusions Ireland, for much of its history, has been located on the social and economic margins of Europe. It is a notably globally oriented country whose very populace is characterised by a marked sense of fluidity and movement, as emigrants and world travellers, yet ultimately quite parochial in terms of ‘worldliness’, wellknown for clique-ishness, insularity and conservatism. While many are newly empowered and confident in the wake of the Celtic Tiger, seeking to engage the world on their own terms, they are still fraught by the rapidly changing times. The idea of ‘culture shock’, both generally and as articulated by both Sara and Liz, constitutes a compelling metaphor for the current national era. Increasing numbers of Filipino nurses, Chinese bar staff, the new daily bus service from Warsaw, Irish-speaking Muslims and elected officials of African origin are everyday reminders of the realities of an increasingly multi-ethnic Irish society. The work presented in this chapter illuminates the ways majority ethnic Irish people cultivate their subjectivities and – in dialogue with and resistance to the parameters of a mythic unified, homogenous national culture and social order – shape their orientations towards the Immigrant Other, whose stories, lives and biographies are, in turn, reconfiguring their own. It demonstrates the value and necessity of moving beyond the static, essentialising categories of ethnicity, nationalism and citizenship associated with modernity and nation building, to a focus on ‘belonging as an act and a process . . . [in order] to capture the richness, nuance and variety of the social and political conditions under which people commit and entrust their loyalty to larger communities’ (Christensen and Hedetoft 2004: 2). Work that locates examination of these dynamics within the vastly heterogeneous communities of ‘mainstream’ majority as well as ‘new’ minority ethnic populace will play a crucial role in charting the building blocks of new forms of identities, and the social relations and institutional structures within which they are embedded and reproduced. Such approaches resituate these

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debates within the wider field of global transformations of which im/migration is only one dimension, but in which ‘race’-making continues to be central. Notes 1 This chapter draws on research from the ‘Changing Irish Identities’ project, funded by the Irish Higher Education Authority and the project, ‘Diversity, Civil Society and Social Change in Ireland’, funded by an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Government of Ireland Research Fellowship. 2 A conference jointly organised in 2005 by the English Departments at University College Dublin and NUI Maynooth, ‘Double Vision: Liminal Irish Identities’, brought together a groundbreaking transdisciplinary collection of new work in identities in Ireland (see www.ucd.ie/english/ doublevision/index.htm) 3 For an overview of research in the area see Cotter (2004). 4 Part of the project is located in the Identity, Diversity and Citizenship Research Programme at UCD’s Geary Institute (see www.ucd.ie/geary/research/IDCReasearch.html). The interviews were conducted by Dr Theresa O’Keefe. 5 A Black Irish pop singer. 6 This campaign involved soliciting donations to alleviate famine and poverty in Africa, using the phrase ‘[give] a penny for the Black babies’. 7 Presenter of an Irish radio chat show, Liveline.

References Brah, A. (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora, London, Routledge. Castles, S. and Davidson, A. (2000) Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Christensen, F. and Hedetoft, U. (eds) (2004) Introduction in F. Christensen and U. Hedetoft (eds) The Politics of Multiple Belonging, Aldershot: Ashgate: 1–22. Connelly, L. (2003) ‘Theorizing “Ireland”? Social theory and the politics of identity’, Sociology, 37(1): 173–82. Cotter, G. (2004) A Guide to Published Research on Refugees, Asylum-Seekers and Immigrants in Ireland, Dublin: Integrating Ireland. Cronin, M. (1999) Sport and Nationalism in Ireland: Gaelic Games, Soccer and Irish Identity Since 1884, Dublin: Four Courts Press. Fagan, G. (1995) Culture, Politics, and Irish School Dropouts: Constructing Political Identities, London: Bergin & Garvey. Fanning, B. (2002) Racism and Social Change in Ireland, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Feldman, A. (2003) ‘Beyond the catholic-protestant divide: religious and ethnic diversity in the north and south of Ireland’, Working Paper Series, Institute for British-Irish Studies, UCD, Dublin. Feldman, A. Ndakengerwa, D., Nolan, A. and Frese, C. (2005) Diversity, Civil Society and Social Change in Ireland: A North-South Comparison of the Role of Immigrant/’New’Minority Ethnic-Led Organisations, Dublin: Migration & Citizenship Research Initiative, UCD. Frankenberg, R. (1999) Introduction: local whitenesses, localizing whiteness, in R. Frankenberg (ed.) Displacing Whiteness, North Carolina: Duke University Press: 1–34. Garner, S. (2004) Racism in Ireland, London: Pluto Press. Garner, S. and White, A. (2002) Racist Attitudes in Ireland: Baseline Research for the Anti Racism Public Awareness Programme, Dublin: Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. Graham, C. (2001) Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gray, B. (2002) ‘The Irish diaspora: globalised belonging(s)’, Irish Journal of Sociology, 11(2): 123–44.

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Gray, B. (2004) ‘Remembering a “multicultural” future through a history of emigration: towards a feminist politics of solidarity across difference’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 27(4): 413–29. Gunaratnam, Y. (2003) Researching ‘Race’ and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge and Power, London: Sage Publications. Hainsworth, P. (ed.) (1998) Divided Society: Ethnic Minorities and Racism in Northern Ireland, London: Pluto Press. Hedetoft, U. and Hjort, M. (eds) (2002) The Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Hickman, M. (2002) ‘ “Locating” the Irish diaspora’, Irish Journal of Sociology, 11(2): 8–26. Hinchman, L. and Hinchman, S. (eds) (2001) Memory, Identity, Community, Albany: State University of New York Press. Holloway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2000) Doing Qualitative Research Differently, London: Sage Publications. Howe, S. (2000) Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ignatiev, N. (1995) How the Irish Became White: New York: Routledge. Kiberd, D. (1996) Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, London: Vintage. Knowles, C. (1999) ‘Race, identities and lives’, Sociological Review, 47(1): 110–35. Knowles, C. (2003) Race and Social Analysis, London: Sage Publications. Kockel, U. (ed.) 1995, Landscape, Heritage and Identity: Case Studies in Irish Ethnography, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Lentin, R. and McVeigh, R. (eds) (2002) Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland, Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications. Lloyd, D. (1999) Ireland After History, Cork: Cork University Press. Mac an Ghaill, M. (2002) ‘Beyond a “black – white dualism: racialisation and racism in the republic of Ireland and the Irish diaspora experience” ’, Irish Journal of Sociology, 11(2): 99–122. MacLachlan, M. and O’Connell, M. (eds) (2001) Cultivating Pluralism: Psychological, Social and Cultural Perspectives on a Changing Ireland, Dublin: Oak Tree Press. MacGreil, M. (1996) Prejudice in Ireland Revisited, Maynooth: Survey and Research Unit, St. Patrick’s College. McVeigh, R. (1992) ‘The specificity of Irish racism’, Race and Class, 33(4): 31–45. Murphy, J. (1991) ‘Ireland: identity and relationships, in B. Crick (ed) National Identities: the constitution of the UK, Oxford: Blackwell. Nayak, A. (2003) Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World, Oxford: Berg. O’Toole, F. (1998) The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities, Dublin: New Island Books. Papastergiadis, N. (2000) The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Cambridge: Polity. Polkinghorne, D. (1988) Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences, New York: Albany State University Press. Reissman, C. (2003) Analysis of ‘personal narratives’ in J. Holstein and J. Gubruim (eds) Inside Interviewing, London: Sage Publications Ltd. Rolston, B. and Shannon, M. (2000) Encounters: How Racism Came to Ireland, Belfast: Beyond the Pale. Thompson, A., Day, G. and Adamson, D. (1999) Bringing the ‘local’ back in: the production of Welsh identities, in A. Brah, M. Hickman and M. Mac an Ghaill, M. (eds) Thinking Identities: Ethnicity, Racism and Culture, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd.

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8 Recognition, Respect and Rights: Refugees Living on Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) in Australia By Louise Humpage and Greg Marston Introduction: Recognition, Respect and Belonging Government policy regarding refugees is inextricably linked to debates about citizenship and the politics of national identity, with refugees vulnerable to the goodwill of the receiving country (McMaster 2002). In recent times, Australia has showed very little goodwill to refugees arriving on its shores. The policies of mandatory detention and temporary protection visas (TPVs) are based on the principle of deterrence, rather than acceptance. The focus of this chapter is on the effects that temporary protection visas have had on the resettlement experiences of refugees in Australia and what this policy means for the politics of belonging more generally. Refugees on TPVs are legally, politically and morally positioned as conditional citizens in Australia. Having already spent considerable time in hazardous transit, refugees issued a TPV are forced into a continued state of limbo as a consequence of their visa status. Once finally released into the Australian community after spending months and sometimes years in mandatory detention, the visa status of refugees on TPVs provides few settlement services and even fewer rights. In addition, refugees on TPVs have been targeted by a media and political discourse that depicts asylum seekers as ‘illegals’ or ‘queue-jumpers’ (Mares 2002). A qualitative research study (Marston 2003) conducted in Victoria, Australia suggests that this policy regime has promoted deep uncertainty, lack of control, loss of hope and internalised shame amongst refugees on TPVs, affecting their sense of belonging in Australian society. However, this is not the whole picture. A further study (Humpage 2004) in the same Australian state suggests that a sense of belonging has been facilitated at the local level and, importantly, this has provided a basis from which to contest – albeit incompletely – the continued lack of recognition faced by TPV refugees within a nationalistic public discourse. In attempting to explain the ambiguous resettlement experiences of refugees granted a TPV and living in the state of Victoria, we argue that the politics of belonging in the context of refugee integration is a far more complex and multifaceted phenomena than is typically represented in the refugee literature. In the literature on resettlement, a distinction is often made between the economic needs and the cultural and social aspects of refugee integration (see Berry et al. 1988,

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Heipel 1991, Korac 2003). Although maintaining that the two are intimately connected, we are particularly interested in the social integration of refugees, which incorporates a sense of social belonging that we argue hinges upon socio-cultural recognition and respect. In making this assertion, we take Nancy Fraser’s (1997) analytical distinction between injustices of redistribution and recognition as a starting point. She argues that socio-economic injustices, founded in the political–economic structure of society and manifested by economic marginalisation or deprivation, are dialectically related to injustices that are cultural or symbolic. Rooted in patterns of representation, interpretation and communication, the latter include: cultural domination (being subjected to patterns of interpretation and communication that are associated with another culture and are alien/and or hostile to one’s own), non-recognition (being rendered invisible by means of the authoritative, representational, communicative, and interpretative practices of one’s culture); and disrespect (being routinely maligned or disparaged in stereotypic public cultural representations and/or in everyday life interactions). Fraser argues that as cultural injustices are entwined and support those of a socio-economic nature, redistributive remedies should include a conception of recognition and vice versa. We believe that Fraser’s concept of recognition is particularly pertinent in understanding refugee integration, especially given that many refugees leave their home countries due to a combination of factors, which at one level include non-recognition and acceptance of religious, political, cultural or ethnic differences. The Afghanis and Iraqis that constitute the largest number of refugees on TPVs in Australia, for example, are mainly Shi’a Muslims that have long experienced the effects of nonrecognition and indeed outright persecution by the Sunni-led Taliban and Saddam Hussein regimes as a result of their religious/cultural beliefs. In these circumstances, one of the major incentives to leave one’s home country is to reclaim certain freedoms, which include the ability to claim an identity that has been refused. As Charles Taylor (1994: 76) elaborates, misrecognition: ‘can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need’. Indeed, the process of being granted refugee status might be regarded as the ultimate act of ‘recognition’, in that it demonstrates that a refugee’s claims of non-recognition and disrespect have been validated. We argue that refugees on TPVs in Australia have not, however, received this recognition and respect despite the fact that they have been officially recognised as ‘genuine refugees’. Bihi (1999) highlights that many traditional models of refugee integration focus predominantly on psychological interpretations of displacement. This can lead to the misunderstanding that refugees are unable to adjust because of previous suffering, when policy and programme failure may be a major contributor to their ill-adjustment. Believing the latter to be true in the Australian case, the first section of the chapter maps out the political context in which temporary protection policies were introduced, as well as the specific entitlements and restrictions that accompany the TPV. In particular, we draw attention to the way in which dominant public discourse has portrayed refugees on TPVs as ‘illegals’. As the second section of the chapter demonstrates, this form of ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu 1991) has had the effect of silencing and ‘othering’ refugees on TPVs. However, this finding is tempered by evidence presented in the third section,

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which suggests that many refugees on TPVs are gaining (if incompletely) a sense of belonging within the local communities in which they live. To help us understand this apparent contradiction, we have drawn upon Calhoun’s (1999) discussion of the different modes of social belonging that represent citizenship. Calhoun argues that there has been a lack of attention paid to distinctions between three different modes of social belonging. First, belonging exists at the level of ‘communities’, which consist of relatively small groups that are primarily constituted through informal, directly interpersonal relationships rather than formal political–legal institutions. ‘Categories’, on the other hand, are commonly comprised of large numbers of people who are not knit by the dense interpersonal relationships that constitute communities, but develop a sense of belonging around their shared culture or legal status. Calhoun suggests that the rhetorics of culture and community are problematic ones by which to grasp political rights. He thus argues that we need to recognise ‘publics’ as a third distinctive mode of social belonging. These are quasi-groups constituted by mutual engagement in discourse aimed at determining the nature of social institutions, including nation-states. Here, belonging is not based on dense webs of common understandings or shared, taken-for-granted social relations but, as Calhoun (1994: 219) has noted elsewhere, on ‘socially sustained discourses about who it is possible or appropriate or valuable to be’. This can lead to problems of recognition for those who do not match dominant discourses regarding valued social identities. Calhoun’s (1999) intention in making distinctions between the three modes of social belonging is to highlight theoretical weaknesses in current approaches to citizenship, particularly the way in which discourses of political community are deeply shaped by nationalism. He argues that this has resulted our using the term ‘community’ as though there is no problem in making it refer to local, face-to-face networks at the same time as whole nations conceived of categories of culturally similar persons. Yet: Membership in a society is an issue of social solidarity and cultural identity as well as legally constructed state citizenship. This is all the more important to recognize in an era shaped by new cultural diversities and new challenges to the abilities of states to maintain sharp and socially effective borders. (Calhoun 1999: 219)

We believe that the distinction between belonging in terms of relational networks, cultural or legal categories and discursive publics is extremely valuable for understanding the ambiguous resettlement process experienced by refugees on TPVs in Australia. In indicating both the catalysts for, and obstacles to, their sense of belonging, we demonstrate the utility of making analytical distinctions between modes of social belonging when theorising a politics of belonging in the context of refugee integration. Public Discourses around Temporary Protection Australia has historically enjoyed a positive international reputation for its interpretation of the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and 1967 Protocol. Certainly, an estimated 650,000 refugees have been

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accepted as permanent residents since 1945 and 13,000 places are currently set aside each year for the humanitarian component of its permanent immigration programme, with 6,000 reserved for the Refugee category (Refugee Council of Australia 2005). Yet, Australia has long demonstrated a preoccupation with controlling its borders to prevent entry of others. The most obvious example is the ‘White Australia’ sentiment that dominated policy from 1901 to the early 1970s. The White Australia policy effectively excluded most Asian immigrants until its demise in 1973 (see Jupp 2002). Although such explicitly racist policy has officially been abandoned, Australia continues to be a nation that demonstrates hostility towards its immigrant foundations. This has certainly been the case with the controversial policies on mandatory detention, border protection and TPVs. The effect of these policies has been to establish a moral distinction between ‘good’ refugees and ‘bad’ refugees. The former are selected from refugee camps overseas, usually after referral from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and enter Australia with a visa that entitles them to permanent residency (and to apply for citizenship after the prescribed waiting period). ‘Bad’ refugees, on the other hand, are asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat or plane without ‘authorisation’; that is, a visa and/or a valid passport. This distinction was established in 1989 when the Australian government began automatically detaining unauthorised arrivals, a practice formalised by the Migration Amendment Act 1992 (Betts 2003). However, the temporary protection visa introduced by the Howard Liberal-National government in October 1999 further entrenched the division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ refugees. It also marked a shift towards dealing with asylum seekers in terms of border protection policy, rather than human rights protection under the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol. From this time, those found to be refugees after arriving unauthorised on Australia’s shores were granted TPVs for a period of three years (in some cases, five years). The TPV replaced the permanent protection visas (PPVs) which were formerly offered to unauthorised arrivals and continue to be granted to those recognised as refugees before landing in Australia. Although refugees granted a TPV were initially eligible to apply for a PPV (which would grant them Australian residency status) when their TPV expired, in September 2001 the Australian government aimed to further deter asylum seekers. It removed the right of unauthorised refugees arriving after that date to ever seek permanent protection in Australia if, since leaving their home country, they resided for at least seven days in a country where they could have sought and obtained effective protection. Given the long journey required to get to Australia, via Indonesia, this change affected the majority of unauthorised refugees arriving from 2001 onwards. Australia’s TPV regime was founded on political concerns about the increasing misuse of Australia’s onshore protection arrangements by organised people smugglers and owes its continuing existence to the political belief that it discourages the illegal entry of asylum seekers into Australia (see Einfeld 2000, Catholic Commission for Justice, Development and Peace 2001). Its introduction coincided with, and has manipulated, an existing public discourse representing asylum

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seekers as queue-jumpers who offend the Australian sense of ‘fair play’. With the weight of the Australian Government behind it, this discourse has overwhelmed counter stories indicating that the selection of refugees for resettlement is more like a lottery than an orderly queue process (Mares 2002) and that making a formal application is neither practical nor possible for most refugees (see Refugee Council of Australia 2003). This was certainly the case for most of the 8,860 refugees who had been granted a TPV in Australia by October 2003. For instance, 3,658 were from Afghanistan and 4,254 from Iraq, both troubled nations where formal refugee applications were impossible to make (Grattan 2003). Importantly, the majority of refugees on TPVs are also single males or married men who left their families at home or in another country and are practicing Muslims. These ethnic, gender and religious characteristics have worked against refugees on TPVs as together they have been portrayed as representing a ‘threat’ to Australia’s social cohesion. Marr and Wilkinson conclude that the Australian Government’s border protection policy combines a crude racism with genuine concern for the security of the country that is best described as ‘race wrapped in the flag’ (Marr and Wilkinson 2003: 176). This racism builds on existing understandings of ‘Australian Muslims’ and ‘mainstream Australians’, which Nebhan (1999) suggests are positioned along different sides of an imaginary border that separates two seemingly totalised ‘cultures’. The events of 9/11 did nothing to either discourage such beliefs or improve the image of refugees, who have been branded as a sinister transnational threat to national security even though none of the 9/11 terrorists were actually refugees or asylum seekers (Castles 2003). Indeed, this attack on the United States of America appeared to support the Australian Government’s depiction of refugees seeking asylum as unable to leave conflict at home behind, even when opposition to what Prime Minister John Howard (2001) calls ‘evil and terrorism’ was a key factor in their departure. Minister for Defence, Peter Reith (cited in Marr and Wilkinson 2003: 214) explicitly implied that terrorists might be lurking amongst ‘boat people’. Meanwhile, Minister for Immigration, Phillip Ruddock (cited in Mares 2002: 16), characterised asylum seekers arriving by boat as ‘those who have the money, those who are prepared to break the law, those who are prepared to deal with people smugglers and criminals’. The ‘children overboard’ incident nonetheless provides the most striking demonstration of the way in which ‘bad’ refugees have been represented as lacking the required (yet ill-defined) values Howard’s government wishes to muster and affirm. Referring to what were found to be false claims that asylum seekers on a boat intercepted by the Australian Navy in October 2001 had begun to throw their children in the water to avoid their boat being escorted out of Australian waters, Howard (cited in Marr and Wilkinson 2003: 189) stated: ‘I don’t want people like that in Australia. Genuine refugees don’t do that . . . They hang onto their children’. Political concern about national security and integrity has fuelled a public discourse which casts unauthorised refugee arrivals as a ‘metaphor of terror’ (Lakoff 2004), a ‘deviant’ problem that should be expelled from Australia’s national borders. This category of refugee is constructed as being incapable of possessing the qualities a person must have in order to be considered a ‘real’ citizen (see Harris and Williams 2003). This has had repercussions not only for

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the recognition of asylum seekers as refugees but also for the resettlement of those deemed to meet these criteria. While refugees granted a PPV are able to begin their resettlement process immediately and have access to a variety of resettlement programmes and services, those arriving without official documents are sent to one of several detention centres around the country. Mandatory detention may have helped alleviate growing social and political pressures caused by Australia’s fear of being ‘swamped’ by newcomers (see Korac 2003). But there is evidence to suggest that the poor conditions and prison-like nature of mandatory detention in Australia has detrimental effects upon the physical, social and psychological health of refugees on TPVs (see Brotherhood of St Lawrence 2002, Mansouri and Bagdas 2002, Mares 2002, Marston 2003). After being released from detention, refugees on TPVs continue to be treated as ‘second-class citizens’ in terms of access to settlement services. Table 8.1, which is a simplified version of one produced by Brotherhood of St Lawrence (2002: 3), provides a snapshot of the different entitlements that refugees on TPVs are able to access in comparison to refugees granted a permanent protection visa. In Australia, there are literally thousands of such ‘temporary citizens’ whose lives are curtailed by their limited access to basic rights and services, as well as the more fundamental personal freedoms detailed above. In the next section, we argue that this status represents an act of misrecognition and disrespect, as reflected in the continuing uncertainty, shame and lack of control that result from the negative discursive representations that dominate the public arena. Nonetheless, many refugees on TPVs are also beginning to integrate and belong at the local level, suggesting that the politics and practice of belonging is far from one dimensional.

Table 8.1 Entitlements associated with temporary compared to permanent protection visas Type of Visa

Temporary Protection

Permanent Protection

Means of arrival

‘Unauthorised’ – arrived onshore without a visa and or valid passport

Legal

Temporary residency (usually 3 years)

Permanent residency

status

No right to leave the country

Right to leave the country

No right to family reunion

Right to family union

No right to permanent protection (and thus Australian citizenship) if resided 7 days or more in a country where could have sought and obtained effective protection (since September 2001)

Right to Australian citizenship

Mandatory detention, then resettlement in the community

Immediate resettlement in the community

Right to work, Medicare and limited income support

Full access to all resettlement services and social security benefits

Resettlement entitlements

‘Authorised’ – arrived after being selected offshore through refugee programme

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Misrecognition and Disrespect: The Effects of a Public Discourse An analytical distinction between modes of belonging at the levels of community, cultural or legal categories and discursive publics has been established to draw attention to the complexity of social integration. This section, drawing upon an action research project (Marston 2003) conducted in 2002–03, highlights the continuing and negative impact that the dominant public discourse surrounding the TPV regime has had on refugees due to its prevailing themes of misrecognition and disrespect. Given the link between what Fraser (1997) refers to as redistributive and recognitive injustice, it comes as no surprise that refugees on TPVs faced material hardships and these were an important theme in the research study, which involved in-depth interviews with 51 refugees on TPVs and 15 service providers living in Melbourne or regional centres of Victoria. The majority of the TPV refugees survived on very limited incomes, lived in insecure housing, had ongoing health problems and were restricted in their access to educational opportunities. These issues, although common to other refugees, were discovered to be profoundly connected with their legal and rhetorical positioning in the dominant public discourse. Labour market participation, for example, was inhibited by the temporary nature of the protection offered by the TPV. Refugees told of direct discrimination by employers, who frequently mistook the TPV to be a form of tourist visa (which does not allow employment) or were wary of employing someone granted only temporary status. A participant in a regional group interview proclaimed: ‘I can’t get a job around here. They look at my visa and they say no straightaway. The boss says no!’ Others spoke of the indirect effects of holding a TPV. These included the inability to gain proficiency in English (due to federally funded English-as-aSecond Language providers being restricted from enrolling refugees on TPVs) or to receive assistance in gaining domestic work experience and having their qualifications recognised (due to limited access to Job Network services). These obstacles established by Australian Government policy hindered the desire of many TPV holders to participate in and contribute to society to a degree far greater than their limited visa status allows. For example, an Iraqi expressed his wish: ‘Just to be able to do something, to work, to contribute to this society, to feel that I’m doing something and not on Special Benefit.’ Yet, the poverty traps and work disincentives associated with the Special Benefit, a discretionary payment for those in severe financial need due to circumstances outside their control, resulted in reported Centrelink debts for about a quarter of the fifty-one refugees interviewed. This raises fundamental policy questions about whether the Special Benefit is the right payment for people who are living in Australia for at least three years and who are both keen to work and highly motivated to gain greater financial independence. These kinds of experiences also draw attention to the way in which belonging is not just about host country reception but also about the capacity to be involved in activities publicly valued by the host country, such as paid work.

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It is telling that refugee participants considered their most significant barrier to resettlement to be the ongoing psychological uncertainty and distress caused by the TPV and mandatory detention regimes. The participants indicated that the limited freedom and sense of isolation associated with the legal conditions of their visa far outweighed material concerns about access to resettlement services. All of the refugees interviewed for the study made a direct connection between their temporary visa status and their feelings of stress, anxiety, uncertainty and disconnection from the host country: ‘I feel like I’m not normal, like others here in this community. Sometimes I try and hide my identity as a TPV because I feel ashamed.’ This quote from a young Iranian refugee gives a clear indication of the effect that the TPV policy has on integration and belonging. Given the devalued legal, moral and political status of TPV holders in the community, it is not all that surprising that members of this group feels they have little capacity to contribute to what Calhoun (1999) refers to as ‘discursive publics’, the mode of social belonging where citizens shape the meaning of social institutions as valued citizens. In contrast, the political discourse in Australia positions TPV holders as conditional citizens who should instead feel grateful for what little they receive in the way of rights and respect. The deep uncertainty associated with the TPV severely restricts the capacity of refugees to recover from a traumatic past, as well as to dream and hope for a better future. ‘They said Australia was a free country. There is no freedom here’. Many described the TPV as a ‘secondary form of punishment’. While the emotional, spiritual and mental resilience among the refugee research participants was inspiring, the reality of living with a TPV on a day-to-day basis represented the final straw. Some held deep fears about forcibly being deported to the country they had fled: ‘Three years, and what’s next, deportation, back to detention centres, or back to our country to the serious death or jail?’. Given the links between recognition and security (see Taylor 1994), it comes as no surprise that the misrecognition and disrespect refugees on TPVs experienced in the public sphere also had a negative impact on their sense of self, as represented through the high incidence of mental illness among this population (Fernandez 2002). Not surprisingly, the pivotal hope for research participants centred on attaining permanent residency, which they believed would give them the psychological security and material stability needed to plan for a future free from political persecution, torture and trauma. They indicated that permanent protection would enable refugees on TPVs to regain a sense of control over their own lives, defined in terms of autonomy and agency in regard to securing residency, family reunion, employment, health, education and participation in cultural and public activities. Yet, the future of the refugees as permanent residents and everything that flows from this state of ontological and legal security is currently subject to an external decision of a governmental authority. The powerlessness felt by TPV holders as a result has been exacerbated by the way in which expiring TPVs have been replaced by an automatically-issued special three-year Class XC visa until immigration officials redetermine the refugee status of each visa holder. By the end of 2003, more than 90% of TPV holders had applied for further protection visas, but only 350 decisions had been made and

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342 were refused (Grattan 2003). A ‘freeze’ was placed on Iraqi applications, presumably until the situation in their homeland improved enough for them to be returned without an international outcry. As this situation has not eventuated, the freeze was lifted early in 2004. According to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (2005) in Victoria, only 59 of the 4,241 Iraqi refugees who applied for Permanent Protection since the Government unfroze their visas have so far received Permanent Protection Visas through the Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA). For the vast majority of TPV holders the uncertainty continues until they are able to have their application reassessed by the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT), usually some months later. RRT reassessments are increasingly over-turning DIMIA decisions, but the slow speed of its processes means that even successful claimants are waiting several further months before receiving their PPV. Despite these continuing conditions, there is evidence of a counter discourse that disrupts the officially sanctioned processes of exclusion and injustice. Paying attention to the local politics of belonging moves us away from the realm of national policy discourse to a space where the subjects of policy answer back. The next section examines the local spaces of community development practice where subjects are actively making up (individual and collective) identities with a specific set of cultural resources available to them. It is here that we can see how the politics of belonging is both an enabling and constraining force.

Recognition and Respect: the Effects of an Innovative Refugee Programme To focus on negative experiences of integration for refugees on TPVs (a situation Peter Mares (2002) accurately refers to as the ‘absent embrace’) would tell us only part of the story regarding the integration of refugees on TPVs in Australian society. According to Calhoun’s analysis, two other modes of social belonging sit beside that which develops at the level of discursive publics. Evidence from a further 2003 interview study (Humpage 2004) highlights the way in which an innovative community organisation has assisted refugees on TPVs to develop a sense of belonging at the community and category levels. This in turn has provided a basis for such refugees to contest the public discourse that both devalues and disrespects them. We concentrate first on belonging at the level of communities, which Calhoun defines in terms of informal, directly interpersonal relationships, because these have had an enormous effect on the integration process of refugees on TPVs. The refugee participants who spoke of uncertainty, shame and powerlessness in the last section also highlighted how they overcame some of the material barriers to their resettlement through access to a well-informed community advocate and supportive informal networks. For instance, many refugee participants told how they managed to overcome difficulties obtaining rental accommodation with the assistance of an advocate, or were able to learn English from local public housing tenants in exchange for cigarettes. These dimensions of reciprocity and belonging are missed by attention to formal policies and practices.

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To recognise these practices requires an ethnographic sensibility to the study of belonging, which includes a capacity to see how the boundaries between formal and informal forms of support can become blurred in the meaning of belonging. Some formal relationships, for example, turn into friendships. However, the artificial and temporary manner in which refugees and sponsors are matched, along with the pressing needs of newly arrived refugees, often result in such friendships being based largely around practical issues, such as finding and furnishing a house or providing an introduction to the health and welfare system. A community-based Neighbourhood House and Adult Learning Centre in Melbourne called the Fitzroy Learning Network has attempted to establish more ‘natural’ settings for friendships to develop, in addition to the considerable social welfare and material assistance provided by its paid staff. The Network offers a range of innovative social activities where past and present students, volunteers, staff and ‘friends’ of the Network can mingle informally. The most important of these are: weekly community lunches, social events to celebrate important dates (such as the end of the school term and the arrival of refugees long detained on Nauru), regular excursions (including weekend-long trips to rural Victoria) and theatrical productions developed to feature refugees and their survival stories. A research study involving focus groups with twenty-five refugees (some of whom participated in the earlier research conducted by Greg Marston) and interviews with volunteers and refugee support workers indicated that the Network’s activities have enabled some refugees on TPVs to develop a strong sense of belonging at the community level. Real friendships have emerged between refugees, as well as between refugees and Australian citizens. For instance, a small number of the men are in relationships with Australian women while others have found an ‘Australian Mum’. While the frequent use of the latter term suggests an infantilisation and paternalism in TPV/community worker relations, there is no doubt these friendships have been an important resource for refugees on TPVs. Most refugees are dislocated from their biological families and are denied the right to family reunion. A refugee on a TPV from Syria described what gaining a sense of ‘family’ has meant for him: The Fitzroy Learning Network has changed my life. Here I found my family, my friends, and my community; here I found my life. . . . I like to spend all my time at the Network because I feel very isolated in my flat. Here I talk to people, practice my English and ask them for help if I need something like using the Job Network or other services. Maybe I will never see my real family again but these people are here for me forever. (cited in Fitzroy Learning Network 2002)

Trust, a quality often difficult for refugees to regain, has been developed through such relationships. For example, having shared food and accommodation for several days on a Network camping holiday, refugees on TPVs – most of whom travelled to Australia on a leaky boat from Indonesia – found themselves able to participate in a yachting trip with the support of friends whom they trusted. Such trust is mainly at the local level, but is spreading because the relational networks in which refugees on TPVs have become embedded are spatially extensive. For instance, a recent weekend visit to the town of Daylesford saw locals billet the Network’s refugees. Members of the Rural Australians for

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Refugees have also organised other regional trips or visited the Network. As a result, refugees on TPVs in Melbourne now have friends in regional Victoria. This enhanced awareness of an alternative public discourse, one gradually gaining momentum as the thousands of Australians embarrassed by their government’s TPV and mandatory detention regimes begin to speak out, has encouraged a sense of hope and alleviated some of the shame felt by refugees on TPVs. In addition, the Network’s activities have enabled refugees on TPVs to forge alliances with sympathetic individuals in positions of political power, including members of parliament and policy makers, which are beginning to have important legal and political repercussions. This is illustrated by a friendship that developed between a retired Australian teacher and an Afghan refugee after they met at a Network social event. This friendship soon extended to the Afghan’s wife, child and brother, who were detained on the island of Nauru as part of the Australian Government’s ‘Pacific Solution’ policy, whereby asylum seekers from intercepted boats have been detained on the island-state of Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island in an effort to deny them access to the Australian legal system. The Australian acted as an important middle person between the refugee, lawyers and political advisors as they together fought for 9 women and 14 children on Nauru to be reunited with their husbands who had been granted a TPV in Australia. As a result of this collective effort, the Afghan, his family and several other families separated by the ‘Pacific Solution’ have now been reunited and are living as permanent residents in New Zealand. Others from Nauru have also been released into Australia on TPVs. In addition to developing social belonging at the community level, many refugees on TPVs have also established less dense and directly interpersonal ties between groups of people who share a cultural similarity or legal equivalence. This sense of belonging at the category level of Calhoun’s framework of belonging has been facilitated by several of the Network’s activities. For instance, two theatrical productions developed to feature refugee survival stories brought together refugees from a range of backgrounds to work as a team and acknowledge the experiences they share as a group. A refugee who took part noted: I always wanted to tell my story and speak with people but I was afraid. The play made me face my fears of communicating with the others and helped me out of my isolation . . . .We are all connected through our experiences despite our different backgrounds. (cited in Fitzroy Learning Network 2002: 12)

In addition, the Network has actively supported refugees on TPVs in establishing voluntary associations based on their shared cultural identities or their legal status. For example, organisations representing the Afghan and Iraqi communities have been founded. These include a separate Hazara Association which allows Afghans from this persecuted tribe to have their own voice in Australia, which was impossible in Afghanistan. Not necessarily reflecting a strong sense of community amongst refugee groups, such associations have created space for recognition at the category level in order to enter into dialogue with policy makers and politicians (Kelly 2003). The formation of the Al Amel TPV Holder’s Association is a classic example. ‘Al Amel’ means ‘hope’ in Arabic, a title reflecting the

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shared desire to cross cultural, national and linguistic boundaries to work towards a shared goal: the granting of permanent protection to all refugees on TPVs. In this role, Al Amel advocates for change in immigration law, liaises with other groups and assists with health, employment and legal issues. In the formation of this organisation, we see evidence of how the subjects of a punitive policy discourse speak back and challenge the disrespectful categories that have been used to justify the policy. In this sense, we can see how social differences emerge from the challenges to domination, exclusion and inequality and the struggle for selfdefined identities (Lewis 2003). In addition to responding to the sense of urgency and anxiety that surrounds the real threat of deportation for temporary citizens, such associations based on either cultural or legal categories have provided a vehicle for reclaiming and respecting the cultural and political identities of refugees. The considerable advocacy work conducted by refugees on TPVs with the Network’s encouragement has also achieved this end, as a Syrian TPV refugee said: Through the Network, I also started to volunteer as a speaker for refugees at protests and rallies, on the radio and newspapers. With my volunteer work, I am also able to speak at schools where I tell the truth for all those people in the camps who cannot and hope that the word will spread. (cited in Fitzroy Learning Network 2002: 18)

Here we see how truth claims are being contested by refugees on TPVs in their own voice. Most advocacy has been at the local level but some refugees have also been involved in direct political lobbying at the state and federal levels. For instance, several of the Network’s refugees stood alongside employers, regional and rural mayors and refugee supporters to tell their stories and call for a review of the TPV regime during a delegation to the Federal Parliament in November 2003. Importantly, the campaign was called ‘Refugees say THANK YOU to Australia’, emphasising their appreciation that many individuals and communities had made them feel welcome in the face of extremely unwelcoming government policy. Whether at the local, state or federal level, such activism has attempted to subvert dominant discursive representations by raising awareness about the TPV regime and countering the rhetoric that suggests that refugees on TPVs are not valid candidates for permanent citizenship. Given that public discourses are not static and identities may be created or changed in public interaction (Calhoun 1999), this challenge to their representation as ‘bad’ refugees has brought a sense of belonging to a disparate group of refugees whom government policy has tried to render powerless through an active policy of misrecognition and disrespect. Conclusion This chapter has emphasised the importance of deconstructing conventional notions of integration and situating recognition and respect as key elements of social belonging. A differentiation between relational networks, cultural or legal categories and discursive publics has assisted in explaining the ambiguous and

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ambivalent resettlement experiences of refugees on TPVs in Australia. These distinctions have helped explain how it has been possible for refugees on TPVs in Australia to show strong signs of social integration and belonging in terms of relational networks and cultural or legal categories, as well as active resistance to negative representations at the public level of official national policy. The public discourse surrounding the TPV policy regime affects all Australians (not just the new arrivals) because of the way in which immigration policies invoke a moral frame about who belongs and who does not belong within the borders of the host country. It goes without saying that there will always be ‘ideological dissidents’ who feel that this moral story does not reflect their attitude towards the newly arrived ‘other’. While the government claims public support for its policies, there are many Australians who have become disaffected by the government’s policies relating to onshore arrivals. Alongside the experience of TPV refugees, this political situation tells us that although misrecognition and disrespect continue at the level of official policy discourse, it does not offer the full story about integration and belonging. As the case study of refugees on TPVs illustrates, the politics of social belonging consists of sets of overlapping and interconnected processes that take place differently in various spheres of society (Koras 2003). In this respect, the politics of belonging is always unfinished business because the processes of inclusion and exclusion are social struggle where social identities and selves are being made and remade. References Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (2005) News: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~asrc/index.html [accessed online 26 September 2005]. Berry, J., Kim, U. and Boski, P. (1988) Psychological acculturation of immigrants, in Y.K. Kim and W. Gudykunst (eds) Cross-Cultural Adaptation: Current Approaches, Newbury Park: Sage: 62–89. Betts, K. (2003) ‘Immigration policy under the Howard government’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, 38(2): 169–92. Bihi, A. (1999) Cultural Identity: Adaptation and Well Being of Somali Refugees in New Zealand, MA Research Paper in Development Studies, Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington. Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Polity. Brotherhood of St Lawrence (2002) ‘Seeking asylum: living with fear, uncertainty and exclusion’, Changing Pressures Bulletin, 11 (November): 1–8. Calhoun, C. (1994) Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Oxford: Blackwell. Calhoun, C. (1999) ‘Nationalism, political community and the representation of society: or, why feeling at home is not a substitute for public place’, European Journal of Social Theory, 2(2): 217–31. Castles, S. (2003) ‘Towards a sociology of forced migration and social transformation’, Sociology, 37(1): 13–34. Catholic Commission for Justice, Development and Peace (2001) Forgotten People, Asylum in Australia, Occasional Paper No.10. Melbourne: Catholic Commission for Justice, Development and Peace. Einfeld, M. (2000) ‘Is there a role for compassion in refugee policy’, UNSW Law Journal, 23(3): 303–14. Fernandez, P. (2002) ‘Trauma strikes the soul: an attempt to explore and understand the impact of the temporary protection visa on clients in New South Wales’, Mots Pluriels, No 21: http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP2102pf.html [accessed online 30 August 2003]. Fitzroy Learning Network (2002) Opening Doors to Our Community: Annual Report 2002, Melbourne Fitzroy Learning Network.

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Fraser, N. (1997) Justice Interruptus: Critical reflections on the ‘Post-Socialist’ Condition, New York: Routledge. Grattan, M. (2003) ‘Fighting to let refugees stay’, The Age, November 12: 15. Harris, P. and Williams, V. (2003) ‘Social inclusion, national identity and the moral imagination’, The Drawing Board: An Australian Review of Public Affairs, 3: 3: 205–22. Heipel, R. (1991) Refugee resettlement in a Canadian city: an overview and assessment’, in H. Adelman (ed.) Refugee Resettlement and Wellbeing, Toronto: York Lanes Press: 344–55. Howard, J. (2001) ‘Strength through diversity’, address at Multicultural Policy Announcement, Adelaide, 16 October. Humpage, L. with Fitzroy Learning Network (2004) Opening Doors to Our Community: A Framework for Engaging Victoria’s Newest Residents – Refugees, Temporary Protection Visa Holders and Asylum Seekers, Melbourne: Centre for Applied Social Research. Jupp, J. (2002) From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, L. (2003) ‘Bosnian refugees in Britain: questioning community’, Sociology, 37(1): 35–49. Korac, M. (2003) ‘Integration and how we facilitate it: a comparative study of the settlement experiences of refugees in Italy and the Netherlands’, Sociology, 37(1): 51–68. Lakoff, G. (2004) Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, Melbourne: Scribe Publications. Lewis, G. (2003) ‘Difference’ and social policy, in N. Ellison and C. Pierson (eds) Developments in British Social Policy 2, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 90–106. McMaster, D. (2002) Asylum Seekers: Australia’s Response to Refugees, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Mansouri, F. and Bagdas, M. (2002) Politics of Social Exclusion: Refugees on Temporary Protection Visa in Victoria, Melbourne: Deakin University. Mares, P. (2002) Borderline, second Edition, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Marr, D. and Wilkinson, M. (2003) Dark Victory, Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin. Marston, G. (2003) Temporary Protection, Permanent Uncertainty: The Experiences of Refugees Living on Temporary Protection Visas, Melbourne: Centre for Applied Social Research. Nebhan, K. (1999) ‘Identifications: between nationalistic “cells” and an Australian Muslim Ummah’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, 34(4): 371–85. Refugee Council of Australia (2003) ‘Frequently asked questions’, http://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/ html/facts_and_stats/facts.html [accessed online 8 September 2005]. Refugee Council of Australia (2005) ‘Statistics’, http://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/html/ facts_and_stats/stats.html#humanit [accessed online 30 August 05]. Taylor, C. (1994) The politics of recognition, in D.T. Goldberg (ed.) Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, Cambridge: Blackwell: 75–106.

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9 Gender and Caste Conflicts in Rural Bihar: Dalit Women as Arm Bearers By Suruchi Thapar-Björkert On 31 August 1998, a popular political magazine of India, India Today carried an article, ‘Primed to Kill’, accompanied by a photograph of young Dalit women undergoing weapons training. The article states: The past of the region is drenched in blood and the present is inextricably linked with the past. The village is a mere 50 km from Lakshmanpur-Bathe where nearly sixty Dalits were gunned down by a hit squad of the Ranvir Sena, the private army of the landlords, last December. Eight months have passed but the carnage refuses to become a distant memory. Rather than becoming an easy prey to rampaging marauders, the women have decided to take the fight to the enemy camp. And learn to retaliate (Emphasis added: Desai 1998)

Since 1998, Dalit women in rural Bihar have taken up arms and have been undergoing regular arms training. This chapter contextualises the new dimensions of gendered violence that rural Bihar1, North India is witnessing, also referred to as the caste ‘wars’ or ‘genocide’. Though this chapter draws specifically on Bihar, the violence is not confined to Bihar but is also evident in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Gujarat (Austin and Anirudha 1990, also see news. bbc.co.uk, 12 March 2000). The chapter will explore the intersections between caste violence and the political economy of rural Bihar and the ways in which these intersections lead to the emergence of a new gendered politics of belonging. It will highlight the following issues: first, Dalit women (and men) in rural Bihar have been excluded from meaningful participation in socio-economic processes of development and political processes of governance. While the former has heightened their economic vulnerability and left most of the Dalits without land, food and water, the latter has not only led to their exclusion from political decision-making processes but also left them unprotected from the regulatory and disciplinary power of the state, the state understood in terms of both the pan-Indian state and the provincial state of Bihar. Second, the socio-economic and political exclusion of Dalits, (particularly women) in provinces such as Bihar, has further worsened due to ‘criminalisation of politics’. ‘Criminalisation of politics’ refers not only to the breakdown of the law and order machinery but more importantly to the political alliances in Bihar which are necessitated more through a need for ‘self-preservation’ or to fulfil personal agendas, than from any strong political desire for promoting democracy or secularism

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in the state. Also, in Bihar, currently under Presidents rule, caste affiliations govern electoral politics2. Unlike other states of North India (such as Uttar Pradesh), where Dalit assertion has remained within the confines of the Bahujan3 Samaj Party, in Bihar, the consolidation of Dalits in Bihar has taken place behind the Communist Party of India (ML) Liberation, also known as Liberation, particularly in Central Bihar4. The CPI (ML) liberation (formed by the ‘pro-Lin Piao group’ of Naxalites) constitutes the alternative politics in Bihar. Third, women’s exclusion from economic and political processes in Bihar and their sexual exploitation have led to the emergence of a new politics of belonging in which caste and gender are strategically used to achieve specific outcomes. In taking up arms, Dalit women have developed a framework of resistance to upper castes and new middle castes and foregrounded their identity as Dalits. They resist and retaliate as Dalits, (or on behalf of Dalits) as well as challenge the privileged position and power that upper castes uphold through caste violence. At the same time, in aligning with armed Dalit women, they expose the vulnerability and helplessness of their own men in protecting them from sexual and physical violation from primarily upper-caste men. The chapter will be structured in the following way: first, I will briefly identify the ways caste hierarchy is organised and understood in India. The second section will discuss how the state tried to resolve the structural inequalities inherent in the caste system. In particular, I will focus on post-independence land reforms. These reforms will be analysed in conjunction with the transitions in the political economy, particularly in relation to changing relations of labour and rise of Dalit political consciousness. Third, I will explore the dynamics of ongoing caste violence and the reasons that compel and facilitate Dalit women to arm themselves. The final section will analyse the response of the state to caste-based atrocities.

Understanding Caste In Contemporary India Caste is a contested and much debated conceptual category and like class and ethnicity is a significant dimension of inequality in Indian society and shapes gender relations in complex and unequal ways (Srinivas 1996, Sharma 1999, Agarwal 2000). Caste is an integral part of the organisation of Indian identity though one would hesitate to say that caste constitutes Hindu identity (or can be understood as a Hindu concept) because as an institution, caste ‘structures social relations irrespective of religious faith’ (Kannabiran and Kannabiran 1991: 2133). In a broad sense, ‘castes are occupationally based, autonomous and hierarchically graded groups dining, marrying and relating largely to their own members’, though the rigidity and restrictiveness of caste-based practices is not so prevalent (Parekh 1991:12). In the specific context of India, inequalities of status and economic power and social differentiation between communities can be explained through two indigenous concepts of varna and jati (see Sanghera 2003). Varna is still seen as an important framework for understanding the social organisation of caste though the classical distinctions have become blurred with the rapid upward mobility of men and women at the bottom of the social hierarchy

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(also see Sharma 1999). Varna can be understood as the hierarchical four-fold division of Indian society, the Brahmins (priests and holders of spiritual knowledge), the kshatriyas (warriors and protectors of the nation), vaishyas (traders) and the shudras (also referred to as Backward Castes or Other Backward Castes –OBC). The fourth major caste category occupies the bottom of the caste hierarchy. The ritual rank and occupational status of the shudras is above the ‘untouchables’ (Narula 1999). The shudras are also referred to as the ‘sanskritising castes’. Sanskritisation refers not only to ideological change but also to a change in political and economic status – reflecting the intersections between class, caste and ideology’. Srinivas defines this as ‘the process by which a low caste or tribe or other group takes over the customs, rituals, beliefs, ideology and style of life of a higher caste and in particular a twice born (dwija) caste’ (Srinivas 1989: 56–57). The Sanskritisation of a group usually has the Effect of improving its position in the caste hierarchy (Srinivas 1989: 56–57). Jati refers to hereditary, endogamous groups who often have a regional base, and is associated with traditional occupations such as landowners (for example thakurs), potters (for example Kumhars) and cattle grazers (for example Gujjars) to cite a few. Though one is born in a jati and traditionally jati determined the nature of occupation, in contemporary India, people can conduct occupations that may not conform to the work tasks traditionally associated with their jatis (also see Beteille 1996). While shudras are the lowest in the caste hierarchy, the ‘untouchables’ (also referred to as the Dalits or Harijans or Scheduled Castes) are ‘off the ladder completely’ (see McGirk 1997 and Berreman 1965). Though a majority of the shudras remain economically and socially marginalised, like the ‘untouchables’, they refuse to work for the Dalits or ‘untouchables’, since they see the latter as inferior (Guru 2000). The practice of untouchability has been historically entrenched and while there has been ‘status fluidity’ in the middle sections of lower castes, the ‘untouchables’ still remain on the margins of lower castes (Sharma 1999: 48). Dr Bhimji Ramji Ambedkar (born 1891) an ‘untouchable’ leader from the Raigad district of the Konkan region of Maharashtra, argued that the caste hierarchical system was economically exploitative and coercive. He also addressed both caste and gender oppression and in the Mahad Satyagraha (December 1927) led by him, the burning of the Manusmriti was a symbolic challenge to caste and gender oppression (also see Rege 1998). Ambedkar also firmly believed that if the Scheduled Castes aspired for equality, they could only achieve that if they asserted themselves separately. The relations between caste are governed, among other things, by the concept of purity and pollution, and women play a key role in maintaining the ‘sanctity and purity of the home’ (Dube in Srinivas 1996). Rituals of food and purity/pollution associated primarily around issues of marriage and sexuality delineate the hierarchies in the caste system though ‘the hierarchical language of purity and pollution is only one of the number of ways in which modern Indians express themselves about caste’ (Sharma 1999: 45). Women’s role in the reproduction of a hierarchical and politicised caste structure is important, in ways it positions them (and often provides privileges to them) as well as sustains or reconstructs,

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empowers or disempowers the identity of men within it, but it is not as rigid for the lower castes and Dalits as it is for the upper caste women. Caste as an institution still tends to meet the important needs of its ‘members’ ‘paradoxically created by the very processes of industrialization and democracy which were expected by the modernists to undermine them’ (Parekh 1991: 13, also see Gupta 2000a). Modernity may have influenced the ways people articulate their ‘public’ understanding of caste, for example, as Fuller argues ‘Indians are more likely to speak of caste in terms of cultural distinctiveness of individual castes rather than in terms of the moral rightness of any particular aspect of caste practice’ (Fuller 1996: 21, also see Fuller 2001). Cultural distinctiveness though could be another ‘coded way of referring to inequalities’ (Fuller 1996: 21). Overemphasis on cultural distinctiveness could also lead to a creation of a hierarchy of ‘cultures’ where ‘the erosion of the cultures of the downtrodden is a familiar charge that has been made by numerous Dalit cultural workers’ (Bharucha 2000: 71). In relation to a creation of a culture of denigration of caste groups, which are placed lower down the hierarchy, Kancha Ilaiah, a Dalit activist and a scholar, talks about his own childhood experiences. He highlights that at school, ‘textbook Telegu was Brahmin Telegu (and) our alienation from the Telegu Textbook was more or less the same as it was from the English textbook’ (Ilaiah 1996: 13): Dalit gods and goddesses (such as Pochamma, Maisamma, Maramma) are often denigrated in Hindu culture and Hindu Gods and Goddesses (for example, Krishna and Parvathi) are often given pre-eminence (also see Ilaiah 2003: 87). In the context of rural Bihar, cultural distinctiveness (and the culturally distinct ways of being) of the upper castes is used to facilitate oppressive practices and give legitimacy to violence or make violence justifiable (also see Galtung 1969; 1990; 1996). The next section will explore the impact of historic and contemporary changes in the political economy of Bihar and their impact on caste relations.

State Led Post-Independence Legislation and Land Reforms In its attempt to remove the structural barriers of caste, the Indian state formulated progressive legislation in the form of The Anti-Untouchability Act of 1955 (renamed as Protection of Civil Rights in 1979). In 1989, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Act (Prevention of Atrocities Act) was executed which was designed to prevent abuses against members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and punish those responsible. This Act was implemented in 1990 and was an addition to the previous Anti-Untouchability Act of 1955 (Thorat and Venkattesan 2004: 3). Its enactment represented an acknowledgement on the part of the government that abuses, in their most degrading and violent forms, were still perpetrated against Dalits, decades after independence (Narula 1999). Through these reforms, at least theoretically, the state promised a levelling of the playing field for its citizens to actualise their rights and freedom through constitutional guarantees (Mohanty 2004).

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These legislative changes initiated by the government were coupled with post-independence land legislation, which led to the appropriation of material and political power by the ‘upper’ backward castes. Big zamindars (landowners) were dispossessed of their land through land reforms, zamindari abolition and the ‘bhoodan movement’5. In caste terms, the principal losers in northern Indian states (such as Haryana and Bihar) were Rajput Thakurs and to a lesser extent Bania and Kayastha landlords (Jain 1996: 138). The land reforms led to a rise of medium sized owner-cultivators, many of whom belonged to the upper strata of backward castes. In Bihar, the principal beneficiaries were the Yadavs (Ahirs) and Kurmis, who turned from ‘cultivating castes’ into ‘landowning castes’ (Panini 1996: 32). These middle peasant groups who held more land than either the landless, small holders or large holders came to be known as ‘bullock capitalists/independent agricultural producers/backward castes’ (Jain 1996: 138). In an important study Rudolph and Rudolph have shown that by the 1970s the ‘bullock capitalists’ owned more land than other agrarian classes: the landless, small holders and large holders (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987). Coupled with the constitutional protection provided by the Indian State governments to backward castes and the right to vote for all, the backward castes (Yadavs and Kurmis in Bihar and Jats in Rajasthan and Haryana) realised their power and they slowly emerged as politically and economically affluent. In the rural areas, the developmental agenda of the state was thus subverted by the neo-rich backward-caste peasantry (also referred to as kulaks or agrarian bourgeoisie) and the upper-caste groups. The landless Dalit labourers or those with small plots of land, could not be the beneficiaries from the land reform legislations. These newly prosperous groups also block all subsequent attempts at reform designed for those who belonged to castes and groups further down the hierarchy. This is coupled with the ineffectiveness of the Bihar state government in translating and implementing rural development policies, particularly in relation to the agricultural sector and land revenue, into legislation6. For example, the Bihar Land Ceiling Act has fixed the ceiling area of land at fifteen acres per family. But ‘this act has remained only on paper and in reality many old and new landlords own more than the stipulated amount’ (Louis 2000a: 509). Moreover, landowners in Bihar retain their control over the common land known as Gair Mazarua land, which according to government legislation should have been distributed to Scheduled Caste families. In other instances, while the landowners gave ownership rights to the Scheduled Caste families, the land was still in their possession (Mishra 1999). The newly prosperous groups also build social networks among themselves to exclude the others, particularly the Dalits. Social networks of a caste often constitute the chief ‘social resource’ for its members (Panini 1996: 39). The gains from social ties and community networks, and the associated dynamics of belonging often come at the expense of others: the same ties that help members of a group often enable it to exclude others (Portes and Landolt 1996). Over the years, the ‘upper’ backward castes have also politically mobilised and increasingly ask for greater democratic participation in Indian politics (Jaffrelot 2003). The vast majority of people, mostly tribals and Dalits, who had suffered social and economic vulnerability, and were supposed beneficiaries

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of development, did not benefit from legislative changes. Instead, development added new dimensions of disadvantage to their already disadvantaged position. There is another form of dynamics, which has unfolded in rural Bihar between the upper castes and ‘upper’ backward castes. The latter are averse to any further redistribution of land, since their current economic power is itself a product of post-independence reforms. At the same time, the upper castes that lost some of their land to the ‘creamy layer’ of the backward castes due to post-independence redistribution, are averse to any more distribution of land, particularly to the landless Dalits. In rural Bihar, loss of land and associated economic capital also entails loss of a specific class status and cultural ideological supremacy. As class differences are being obliterated due to the emergence of a prosperous neo-rich peasantry, the upper castes are losing their economic clout. At the same time their ideological hegemony and supremacy is occasionally threatened by the ‘upper’ backward castes who also choose to emulate the rituals and ideological practices of the upper castes, and use that as a tool to control the Dalits. A Times of India, Lucknow, editorial ‘Criminalisation of Indian Polity’ states, ‘Shudras claim Khastriyahood and seek inspiration from the retrograde value systems of the past, which the Dwijas (twice born) have begun abandoning. Since the shudras have taken over rural India, they aspire for the Dwija-like dominance practiced centuries back’ (Times of India 2000: 5). This emulation has led to recriminations between upper castes and ‘upper’ backward castes, but in many instances, the upper castes have also banded together with the Yadavs, Kurmis and the Koiris, to suppress and exploit the Dalits, poor labourers and the tribals, whom the benefits of government reservations, land reform and panchayati raj have not yet reached. The poor and landless Dalits who are caught between the upper castes and the upwardly mobile newly rich backward castes are thus excluded from any material gains. These changes have to be understood in conjunction with the changes and transitions in the political economy of rural Bihar, which has enabled the Dalits to acquire a modicum of economic and political power. However, Dalit upward mobility threatens both the upper castes and the ‘upper’ backward castes, leading to cycles of violence and counter-violence. As Prakash Louis argues, ‘the heart of the matter is that Dalits and poor peasants no longer accept the existing oppressive feudal social system . . . . (and) fight for their izzat (dignity), “azadi” (freedom), proper wages and redistribution of land . . . . But the powerful upper caste landed gentry cannot tolerate this defiance by the Dalits and the poor peasants’ (Louis 2000b: 2207). Transitions in Political Economy of Labour The traditional political economy of labour on which caste reproduces is, first, now being challenged by the Dalits. Gopal Guru (2000) argues that the Dalits’ ‘pursuit of modernity’ saw them as accessing the ‘language of rights to equality, freedom, dignity and self-respect’ and rejecting the ‘language of obligation’, which in Dalits perception had confined them to ‘negative rights’ such as right over flesh (raw hide and flesh of dead cattle) and food (left over food of the upper

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castes). The Dalits refuse to perform these stigmatised tasks for the upper castes or to give in to the economic exploitation of their labour (See Narula 1999)7. This breaks the nurtured dependencies in an exploitative hierarchical political economy of labour, thus leaving the upper castes with no labour to carry out their ‘untouchable’ jobs, leading to recriminations. This issue has been taken up by human rights activists, who have raised dalit demands for dignity of life and labour as a ‘matter of global concern’ and define ‘dalit identity in terms of human rights’ (Rao 2003:12). Second, the change from traditional bonded labour to wage labour challenges the vetbigari system, which is based on exploitative ‘physical and mental’ labour (Guru 2000: 124). However, Dalit resistance for a fair wage along with ‘a fixed and regulated notion of time’ creates tensions and conflicts in agrarian relations between landowning thakurs/Rajputs, (and the newly prosperous ‘upper’ backward castes) and the non-landowning Dalits, and is a reason for violent action by landowning caste groups towards rural Dalits, their families and communities. The story heard from a Bhumihar villager from Jehanabad district is different: ‘We (Bhumihar Brahmins) are giving them (referring to Dalit labourers) three kilograms of rice a day and half a kilogram of food but they don’t want to work and they want to wear slippers and walk past our homes without lowering their heads’ (Jha 1999). Three ideas are interlinked in this statement. First, the landowners, who also own the produce of the land, would rather pay the Dalits in kind since it protects them from any market fluctuations in the price of their produce. Second, it is a more convenient way of paying the Dalits as the landowners don’t have to sell their land produce in order to pay in cash. Third, it enables the landowners to maintain an exploitative tradition of payment in kind whereas a cash economy would provide an opportunity for the Dalits to elevate their economic status. Maintaining surplus and profitability depends on intimidation, threats and violence by the upper castes and upwardly mobile castes. The brutal Belchi massacre of 1977 in rural Bihar, where a Kurmi landlord burnt Dalits alive, is an example of how opposition to landlords is addressed. It has been observed that while the upper castes and more recently the upwardly mobile castes have land, they cannot access Dalit labourers to cultivate that land. Infact, in some north Indian villages (such as Jaipur), the Jats work as labourers on land held by Dalits (Thapar 2000). Ironically, caste pollution through either touch or presence is completly discounted when it is a matter of extraction of labour. ‘When it comes to taking water from a hand pump, notions of ritual purity are invoked, when it comes to the extraction of labour in the field, it does not matter at all that the seed is planted, the crop tended and the grain harvested by the same untouchable’ (Malik 2003: 104). Third, the Dalits are making inroads in education and politics and this upward mobility also enables them to negotiate themselves out of ‘economic bondage’ with the ‘rural oligarchs’. Under constitutional provisions and protective discrimination, the state grants Dalits a certain number of privileges, including reservations (quotas) in educational institutions and government bodies. Kannabiran and Kannabiran argue that moving beyond the ‘essentialist and

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ahistorical frameworks’ one has to see how ‘Dalits have excelled in education – a strong upper caste preserve’, have representatives in the Congress party and have acquired more ‘bargaining power’ for themselves (Kannabiran and Kannabiran 1991: 2131). Dipankar Gupta suggests that ‘modernization has not only brought machines, but, more crucially, changed relations between people . . . arous(ing) great deal of opposition and resentment from the entrenched powerful castes’ (Gupta 2000b: 27). In the coastal districts of Guntur, and Krishna, west and east Godavari, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, the severity of assaults (by upper castes) on two untouchable castes, the Malas and Madigas, is explained because of their better education, achieved through entry to government jobs, primarily through government reservations. Or in Tsundur (Guntur district) most of the upper caste Reddis are small landowners and economically dominant, but the Dalits have moved far ahead in the field of education and most of them work outside Tsundur. Thus, the absolute exercise of power of upper castes, maintained through the use of force, in which grievance or dissent is not even articulated seems to be weakening (Kannabiran and Kannabiran 1991: 2131). Moreover, Dalit educational aspirations and achievements offer a challenge to entrenched beliefs in the laws of Manu (Manu Shastra) which states that ‘even by mistake if a lower caste person hears the Vedas (holy scriptures), molten lead should be poured in his ears and his tongue should be cut off if he recites the sacred verses (cited in Thekaekara 2005: 12). Though access to education and a small amount of political power has brought the Dalit agenda onto the mainstream politics, the atrocities against Dalit men and women have continued unabated in the countryside in Northern India. The severity of upper caste attacks against the Dalits for ideological and material transgressions is incomparable. The causes for armed violence are extremely complex. The violence is not ‘mindless’ and irrational as accounts by journalists in tabloids and broadsheets suggest (see Sahay, 1999 Rediff, Thapar, 2000, Times of India, Lucknow Barman, 2001, Guardian). Instead it has to be contexualised through the historic and changing relationships within the institution of caste and the emerging fragmentation of castes, as discussed in the previous sections.

Caste ‘Wars’8 The recriminations from the upper castes make ‘untouchable’ men and women the target of atrocious brutalities which range from their limbs being cut of, their eyes being gouged out, or being made to witness gang rapes of women of their households (Narula 1999). The National Crime Record Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs India, reported that there were 25,455 incidents of violent acts (rape, murder, arson) against Dalits in the year 2000, in the whole of India, and in Bihar alone there were 741 incidents recorded in the year 2000. The districts in Bihar that have seen ongoing violence are Jehanabad, Aurangabad, Bhojpur, Nawada, Gaya and Samastipur. For example, Jehanabad district in central Bihar, in a time frame of 22 years (1977–1999) has witnessed 35 killings, claiming the lives of mainly Dalit men and women (Sinha and Sinha 2001: 4096). The most shocking was the Laxmanpur Bathe (61 Dalits and landless labourers were killed)

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and Shankarbigha massacre (24 Dalits and landless labourers were killed) in 1997 and 1999 respectively, conducted by the ‘private army’ of landlords. Any opposition to break out of stipulated ideological structure or the ‘structural steel cage’ leads to further violence (Weber 1971, cited in Galtung 1990; 1996: 295). ‘Institutionalisation’ in a social system brings with it both punishment and reward (Galtung 1990). The reward of survival in the social fabric could be nontransgression of established norms and likewise any perceived transgressions have to be punished. A Dalit using an upper-caste well is not only about accessing material resources but also about challenging the ideological hegemony and higher social status of the upper castes. The upper castes can also perceive this action of the Dalits as not having any legitimacy over the resources, thus providing a condition on which violence is justified (Fenton 2003: 157). Also, ‘anxieties about a loss of economic status, readily translates into fears of emasculation’ (Basu 2000: 280).

Organising For Violence Against Dalits Bihar, and more specifically central Bihar, over the two decades has seen the formation of two types of ‘armed bands’. One is called the ‘Lathaiths’, which refers to a group of ‘musclemen’ who are employed by the landlords. The chief task of these men is to ensure that taxes and rents are paid regularly and to keep tenants and peasants ‘in their place’. The second type is the dominant caste senas or private caste militias. Literally sena means an ‘army’ but in the ‘semi-feudal’ structure of Bihar, sena also refers to ‘caste-based private gangs’ which are reactionary and counter-revolutionary (Louis 2000b: 2207). In ‘essence, the senas are non-party socio-political formation’ (Louis 2000b: 2207)9. Engaging in violence and creating a climate of fear are the chief weapons of these senas. The ‘private’ sena of Bhumihar Brahmins and Rajput landlords is the Ranveer Sena, officially outlawed by the Government of India10. Ranveer Sena, was founded in September 1994 in Belaur village, Bhojpur district, by Dharichan Chaudhury of Belaur (also see Sinha and Sinha 2001) and has been operating in Jehanabad since 1995. Unlike other previous organisations before its formation (such as Lorik Sena, Bhumi Sena and Sawarna Liberation Front), Ranveer Sena targets women as a ‘deliberate stratagem’ (Sinha and Sinha 2001: 4096). Though structural inequalities have positioned Dalit men and women as equally vulnerable and the hidden operations of structural and cultural violence affect everyone, Dalit women are in a specifically vulnerable position. The Sena cadres operate mostly underground while their leaders live in towns and come to the village only when a massacre has to be planned and executed. Ranveer Sena is also supported from the upper strata of the backward castes such as Yadavs, Kurmis, and Koeris, who, as argued earlier, gained the most from land reforms and are ‘ruthless towards the Dalits’11. In the 1998 Lok Sabha election campaign, the former Janata Dal Member of Parliament of Arrah constituency, Chandradev Verma, a Koeri, demanded the lifting of the ban imposed on Ranveer Sena (Louis 2000b: 2209).

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The Ranveer Mahila Sangh is the women’s wing of the Ranveer Sena and women have been trained to use arms for self-defence and are also engaged in welfare activities in their villages (Louis 2000b: 2210)12. In other instances, upper-caste women are known to come out and support their husbands in public demonstrations (The Indian Express, 13 November 1997. [This feature is not unique to rural Bihar only]. In 1989–1990, Tharu and Niranjana (1996) argue, upper-caste (middle-class Hindu) women took part in the anti-Mandal agitations to remove reservations for backward castes and Dalits. They ‘learned to claim deprivation and injustice, not as women but as citizens, for to ground the claim in gender would pit them against middle-class men. The claiming of citizenship rather than sisterhood now not only set them against Dalit men but also against lower-caste/class women (Tharu and Niranjan 1996: 241). Similarly, during the 1990s, upper middle class and upper caste women of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, the Hindu Right, not only participated in rallies and demonstrations but also in actual attacks against Muslims. ‘The complicity also involved an informed assent to such brutalities against Muslim women as gang rapes and the tearing open of pregnant wombs in Bhopal and Surat in December, 1992 and January, 1993’ (Sarkar 1995: 190). In these contexts, the struggle against gendered inequalities is mediated by other inequalities such as caste, religion and class, which puts gender on the back-burner. Women forsake patriarchal concerns for caste– community concerns. Thus some women’s empowerment comes at the cost of disempowerment of others, whether as Muslims (as in Hindutva movement) or as Dalit women (anti-Mandal or massacres in rural Bihar). Dalit Retaliation and Counter Violence In rural Bihar, violence and counter-violence (between Dalits, upper castes and upwardly mobile castes) are part of the same process. Ram Prit a Dalit labourer said ‘If you keep pouring water into a rat hole, the rats will come out fighting’ (Interview by McGirk 1997). The armed violence of Ranveer Sena is resisted by counter-violence from the ‘Naxalite’ ‘leftist’ ‘communist’ organisations (CPI (ML) – Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist)) of Bihar. In many villages in rural Bihar, anti-landlord, anti-upper-caste groups are supported by these ‘revolutionary groups’ (Balagopal 1991: 2405). They also train Dalit women to retaliate as well as defend themselves, to fight and use arms13. The Naxalite movement14, which started in the village of Mushahri, Muzaffarpur district of Bihar in 1967, has supported most of the retaliatory counter-violence against the Ranveer Sena. The Naxalite movement in Bihar is heavily factionalised. ‘Except for the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), all others were CPI (ML) groups’ (Bhatia 2005: 1536). The internal divisions are between the Marxist Co-ordination Centre (MCC) and CPI (ML) (Peoples’ War), both of which boycott participation in parliamentary elections, and between the MCC and CPI (ML) (Liberation) which has participated in electoral politics, under the title Liberation and has dismantled its armed squad (see Sinha and Sinha 2001: 4095, Bhatia 2005 ). Like the Liberation party, Ranveer Sena has also formed a ‘political front’ and calls itself Ranvir Kisan Maha Sangh (Louis 2000b: 2210). In 2004, Ranveer Kisan Mahasangh tried unsuccessfully to contest the elections.

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CPI (ML) (People’s War) believes in organising a struggle against the combatants and supporters of the Sena and not killing ‘innocent’ upper-caste men and women. ‘It does not believe in attacking upper caste people even if they have sympathy for the Sena on a caste/class basis’ (Sinha and Sinha 2001: 4097). It sees its struggle as a class struggle (and not just a caste struggle), against the oppressive socio-economic relations, and has a large number of agricultural laborers and peasant participants belonging to every caste and religion (Sinha and Sinha 2001). The MCC on the other hand argue that any supporter of the Sena should be killed and a reign of counter terror established for every killing. In May 1987, upper-caste landlords from the Bhumihar community in the villages of Dalelchak – Baghaura (Bihar) were massacred by ‘extremists’ from the MCC (Sahay 1999). The massacre was to avenge the killing of Dalits and agricultural labourers (as well as upper-backward-caste Yadavs) the previous month in the Chotaki and Chechani villages of Aurangabad district: ‘They pulled people one by one from their homes, cut them into pieces and threw them into the flames. The killers were shouting slogans like ‘we will avenge the killings of Chotaki: Long live MCC’ (Sunday, 21–31 October 1987, cited in Austin and Gupta 1990). In another incident in March 1999, the armed squad of MCC slashed the throats of thirty-four upper-caste Bhumihars in Senari village in Jehanabad (see Louis 2000b). Adhering to a different perspective, CPI (ML) Liberation supporters argue that the state law and order machinery has failed to protect the Dalits. Liberation also views Ranveer Sena, not as an organisation of bhumihars (thus not espousing a caste logic) but as a private army of landlords (adhering to a class logic), patronised by the state ruling parties. Thus CPI (ML) Liberation believes that its struggle would be incomplete without challenging the ruling parties (and their patronage to Ranveer Sena) through the electoral process.

Dalit Women As Arm Bearers15 A unique feature in the present-day conflicts in Bihar’s ‘lawless countryside’ is that Dalit women, in some villages, are the chief arm bearers. In fact, the widows of Shankarbhigha and Narainpur massacres of 1999, had openly asked local officials for arms for combating Ranveer Sena (Sinha and Sinha 2001: 4097). The army of the backward castes is the Dalit Sena army and it has its women’s wing. ‘Dalit Sena’, literally meaning an army of Dalits. They undergo a basic ‘rifle training’ to aim at human targets. An armed vigilante group has been trained in the use of guns and are stationed in a number of villages throughout Bihar (Kelkar 1997). The Sena started training women since 1994 and since then there has been a marked drop in atrocities towards women. Approximately 8,000 women in 500 villages in Bihar have been given the basic arms training_(Desai 1998). According to the report in India Today ‘Primed to Kill’, the ‘training builds the self-confidence of women. Because of the clandestine nature of the programme, the weapons training is held in desolate places’(Desai 1998). Since the time the report was published, training camps have been held in forty districts (Desai 1998). The activities of Dalit Sena are backed by the Dalit Samaj Party (DSP), the

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political wing of the Dalit Sena. The party is recognised as a ‘bonafide’ regional party by the electoral commission and strongly supports women’s arms training. Access and Participation in Violence Certain factors compel Dalit women to arm themselves for violence. First, it is for economic survival16. The economic impoverishment of Dalits and their limited access to economic resources such as land and water is well documented. As Prakash Louis states ‘from the Dalit perspective, since most other avenues are closed to them, the agricultural sector provides the only economically gainful occupation. This is not in terms of adding assets, but to just ensure survival’ (Louis 2001: 4). While for Dalits it a matter of survival, for the upper castes, economic capital enables them to maintain their ideological hegemony. The ‘ritual’ status of castes shares an interdependent relationship with control over resources/economic capital (land/water). Without one, the other would not be possible. Most of the conflicts between upper and lower castes, Dalits and tribals are about access to material resources such as land, water, cattle and crops. For example, in Mandadam in Guntur district (Andhra Pradesh) in 1989, the conflict was between various fishing communities, with traditional rights over fishing in tanks and canals, and government-designated contractors who buy those rights in auctions (Balagopal 1991: 2399). Compared with 58% of all male workers, 78% of all female workers (and 86% of rural female workers) are in agriculture and arable land is the most important form of property in rural India (Agarwal 2000: 45). Many rural women do not get economic independence through the inequitable labour markets and their absorption in the non-agricultural sector is also low. Thus, access to property provides a ‘much more direct and immediate route to economic independence, both within and outside the family’ (Agarwal 2000: 45). If a rural woman acquired ‘a field of her own’, it could prove to be an immediate source of income and economic security in both direct and indirect ways: direct production (growing crops, growing fodder for keeping animals), access to credit from institutional and private sources and non-farm earnings (Agarwal 2000: 47). ‘[T]he link of economic independence with ownership of property, especially with a productive asset such as land is therefore much more direct than say with education or the labour market’ (Agarwal 2000: 47). For example, you could be educated and still not find a job or be in an under-qualified profession. Second, for Dalit women, it is not only a question of preserving the material resources and their livelihoods but women and girl children are often the only members left in the household, when their husbands and sons are killed in the inter and intra-caste conflicts. Violence of any kind ‘violate (s) the principles that give order and meaning to the private domain’ (Basu 2000: 270). For example, often Dalit households are razed to the ground and their crops burned down (Narula 1999). As Julie Peteet (1997) has argued in her work on Palestine ‘the continuous violation of the home – the violent entries, searches and demolitions . . . quickly cast aside notions of the home as a space distant from conflict’ (Peteet 1997: 108).

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Also, some Dalit men after acquiring education have moved on to do jobs, sometimes in other cities, even though the jobs are not good and reproduce their old profession in some way, for example cleaning the toilets or washing utensils of middle class homes in the cities. As Gopal Guru argues, ‘The Indian state . . . could not offer more dignified alternative vocations for the Dalits. They (Dalits) found themselves limited to sanitary work, scavenging, tanning and lately ragpicking, occupations that are considered defiling and socially inferior by civil society with a “Hindu mindset’’’ (Guru 2000: 125). However, many Dalits find this better than their life in the villages. Dalit women it seems have not cornered these limited benefits and are often left behind in the rural homesteads and thus vulnerable to upper-caste violence. It is thus not surprising that women are given arms training by some ‘militant’ organisations as a back-up force to defend homes and villages when their menfolk are not there or are in hiding because of an impending attack. Third, social control and hegemonic masculinity of upper-caste men is asserted and maintained through defilement and appropriation of lower-caste and Dalit women’s sexuality. While control over labour and sexuality of upper-caste women is legitimised through purity/pollution concept, the economic and sexual labour of lower-caste women is made available for the consumption of upper castes. Ironically, this ideological construction of purity/pollution is conveniently forgotten when ‘pure’ upper-caste men are engaged in sexual encounters with ‘impure’ lower-caste women. Furthermore, the rampant sexual exploitation, largely born out of the work situation and power relations subtending their lives as agricultural labourers, underlines the inability of low-caste men (and Dalit men) to ‘protect’ their women (Chowdhry 1998: 347). For example, consider the infamous case of Bhukli Devi who was paraded naked by Bhumihar Brahmins on the charge of stealing four potatoes from a field in Samastipur district (central northern state of Bihar) in 1994. She was then raped and killed after her sari was inserted into her vagina. The insertion of a piece of cloth in her vagina can be understood as symbolic of the ‘impurity’ of the womb of the Dalit women and condemnation by the upper castes of the birth of any further progeny. It is important to mention that the perceptions on Dalit and upper-caste women’s sexuality is associated with the way they position themselves (and are sometimes forced to do so) in relation to the public and private spheres. Unlike upper-caste women, lower-caste and Dalit women are not confined to the domestic/private domain. Rural upper-caste women are referred to as grihalaxmies (goddesses of the home), the symbolic custodians of the domestic domain and purdah is observed in many castes (Kasturi and Majumdar 1994: 161, Rege 1996: 9). They have to abide and inculcate cultural practices, which sustain the distinctions and ‘ritual status’ in the caste hierarchy. (Dube 1996: 5–9). In fact the restrictions imposed on upper-caste women’s mobility ‘cuts down the interaction between men and women (but) also cuts down the interaction between ‘upper’ caste and Dalitbahujan women’ (Ilaiah 2003: 86). Dalit women who have armed themselves commented that ‘the feudal landowners, who view Dalit women as objects of desire are now scared to harass

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them’ (Desai 1998). ‘In one village in Bihar, a landlord has been forced to allow Dalits to use the same well as the upper castes – something previously forbidden. In another, the threat of action ensured a Dalit village got its share of a government hand-out of grain. In a third, women retook one hundred and fifty acres of communal land that they say landlords had grabbed in collusion with local authorities’ (Burke 1999). Indu Devi who leads the Sasaram (eighty miles from Samastipur district) cell of the Mahila Morcha Dalit Sena (Dalit Women’s Armed Front) comments: ‘our men are useless . . . the police are bandits and these Naxalites (the Marxist guerrillas) are the worst of the lot. Our menfolk don’t like what we do – but if they can’t defend us, they have no right to make a fuss’ (Burke 1999). These statements made by armed Dalit women alert us to the following ideas: first, the statements expose the vulnerability, the exploitation and gendered powerlessness of their men, particularly in the public domain. The incredible subservience of lower-caste and Dalit men is reflected in the awardwinning docu-drama, Bandit Queen. Second, these statements reflect the different subject positions that women can inhabit in specific contexts of violence – as victims (of upper-caste violence), as perpetrators (of violence against upper-caste men) and as witnesses (to atrocities on them, their men and children). Third, they point out to the problems of working with models of power which focus only on the ways in which women are made invisible or silenced, and which fail to conceptualise the ways in which women can also be active agents of violence. This is not to deny that the use of power by men within patriarchal societies, to privilege themselves over women, is at the core of male sexual violence. But in the phenomenology of violence, a perpetrator can also be a victim.

State, Caste and Violence: Redress and Response Legislation and land reforms enabled Dalit men and women to access a modicum of economic and political power but it has come at a huge cost. The growing violence against Dalits and Dalit retaliation as a response to that violence is the result of the ineffectiveness of the state, the state understood both in the form of the pan-Indian state and the provincial state of Bihar. Lack of adequate and appropriate state response makes marginalised sections more alienated from processes of governance. Moreover, the state institutions begin to lose legitimacy and people lose faith in the state. Even though the state may not be a formal agent of oppression, its ‘unwillingness or inability to stop some of its citizens from oppressing others on a systematic basis can make it a witting or unwitting partner to oppression’ (Spinner-Halev 2001: 87). Three pertinent issues need to be highlighted: first, the project to promote community development and local governance at the grass roots has failed to transform the social landscape. The establishment of democratic informal governance structures, understood as local self-government or panchayati raj have been unsuccessful in Bihar. The panchayati raj received constitutional status following the passage of the 73rd Constitutional Amendment in 1992. Local self-government or ‘democratic decentralisation’ was expected to ‘play a vital role in the process of political legitimation and offer a

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means for developing a sense of participation in the citizenry’ (Sharma 2002: 82). However, Bihar is the only state in India where elections to panchayats have not been held for the last twenty years, thus denying villages the right to elect representatives to the three-tiered panchayati raj: the gram panchayat (elected village council), panchayat samiti (block council) and zila parishad (district council)17. Moreover, one-third of the panchayat’s seats were reserved for women, with reservations for Scheduled Castes’s and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to their population in the village. The latter have remained an unrealised political conundrum in Bihar. In some other states where panchayati raj has been implemented, it has been a mixed political baggage. For example, in Madhya Pradesh, a Dalit woman sarpanch, of Pipra village, Baldeogarh block, argues that the resources are still controlled by the rich. She was also beaten up for doing her duty as a sarpanch. In another village near Pipra village, Kumni Devi, a Dalit sarpanch is controlled by the locally dominant Lodh community. Ironically, as a sarpanch, she sits on the floor while the men in her Basti occupy the charpoy (Misra 2000). Thus, neo-rich peasantry dominate the decision-making processes of democratic institutions like the Panchayati Raj, excluding the rest (also see Mishra 1986, Brass 1994). Second, the functionaries of state, such as politicians and policeman, who are positioned as ‘guarantors of rights to its citizens, (have) invariably emerged instead as a major perpetrator of injustices’ (Rajan 1993: 6). The breakdown of the ‘law and order’ machinery, the inability of the police to function as enforcer of law and the nexus between police and criminals entering into political power have all contributed in creating a situation where the resourceless Dalits, particularly Dalit women, became the targets of oppression perpetrated by upper-caste and neo-rich backward-caste ‘senas’. As Prakash Louis argues (2000b: 2207), the ‘sena phenomenon in central Bihar is a consequence of the powerful nexus between the landlords, politicians, administration, criminals and contractors’ (2000b: 2207). Often, ‘agents of state machinery’ such as government doctors, deputy superintendents of police, members of Legislative Assembly, medical jurists and magistrates ‘collude in using state apparatuses’ against victims of violence. The gang rape and subsequent trial of Bhanwari Bai in Bhateri village of Jaipur, state of Rajasthan in 1992 is illustrative of this collusion18. Paradoxically, Bhanwari was trained by the government state machinery to act as an agent of change in her capacity as a sathin (primary change agent) for the government-run Women’s Development Programme. Her primary role was to oversee the implementation of the campaign against child marriage that was launched by the Rajasthan state government. The gang rape was denied by the agents of the state. In the trial that unfolded on 15 November 1995, at the District and Sessions court in Jaipur, India, the judge acquitted all five men accused of raping a ‘lower-caste’ woman. The judicial system refused to believe that ‘respectable upper caste men could rape lower caste women’. Instead, the court cast aspersions on Bhanwari’s character by suggesting that she was an ‘adulteress’ (Times of India, Lucknow, 25 November 1995). In this pronouncement, the judge exposed caste, gender and class biases.

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As Taisha Abraham argues ‘rape, particularly in rural societies is compounded by caste-class violence. Women exist at the interface of these inequalities, which feed into and support gender inequalities. The hierarchised categories of caste and class regulate and reproduce patriarchal practices’ (Abraham 2002: 287). The paradox for feminists ‘with institutionalised pursuits of justice’ lies in the fact that even though women realise the patriarchal and coercive nature of the state and its machinery, they are still dependent on the state in their pursuit of more institutionalised forms of justice (Abraham 2002: 289). But non-accessibility of the formal legitimate governance forums for redress can compel women to take up arms. Third, as caste wars in the countryside have escalated and the ruling uppercaste Brahmin and Thakur leaders such as L.N. Mishra and Karpuri Thakur are replaced by backward-caste leaders like Laloo Prasad Yadav, caste has entered into the legitimate domain of mainstream politics. Laloo Prasad Yadav’s electoral base comprises what he calls the MY (Muslim–Yadav) combination19. He has made the backward-caste Yadavs ‘feel that they rule Bihar as a caste, (with) even the weakest Yadav flexing muscle physically and metaphorically’ (Das 2000: 506). Notoriously, some of these backward castes often form alliances with the Ranveer Sena. So when the private army of Ranveer Sena butchered Dalits in Shankarbigha in Jehanabad district in 1999, neither the police nor politicians invoked the protectionist role of the state. Moreover, there is a ‘casteist bias’ in the operations of the police, evident in the way they handled the Shankarbhiga massacre in 1999 (Louis 2000a: 508). The Assistant Superintendent of Police, a Rajput, prevented the ‘murderers’ from being shot. Interestingly, Binod Sharma, who masterminded the killing was not arrested ‘but when he was a member of the Naxalite organisation, it is alleged that his house was raided by the police . . . but now that he became a member of the Ranvir Sena, he is not even interrogated’ (see Louis 2000a). Even, when it comes to paying compensation to victims of caste violence, particularly widows, the state and local administration have been unsuccessful. In fact, compensatory schemes have been seen as a political tool to fuel the existing caste tensions. After the Shankarbigha massacre in January 1999, the Central government’s welfare departments decided to provide compensation to the Dalit households but refused to provide any help to the relatives of ‘lower’ backward castes who were also the victims. As one individual said: ‘this is how they divide and ruin us. If they really wanted to grant compensation for us, then they should have given the same amount to all the relatives of the victims, irrespective of the caste. Dividing us on the lines of caste is another ploy of the ruling class’ (Interview cited in Louis 2000b).

Conclusion In this chapter I have looked at the ways that the pan-Indian state and the provincial state of Bihar have failed the Dalits and more specifically Dalit women: first, by not being able to alleviate the material conditions of poverty and landlessness through

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their development policies and second, by not being able to democratise the social relationships through social justice, and instead, being complicit in the violence. In response to an inefficient state, Dalit women have taken up arms for selfdefence and retaliation. These new developments unfold the complex dynamics of politics of belonging. At one level, Dalit women act on behalf of Dalits for that is required to pitch their struggle against upper castes and upwardly mobile middle castes. At another level, they exercise their agency as women and align with other Dalit women since they see the inability of their own men to protect them. It is not prioritising the caste and community ties over gender identity, but their complex intersections, which informs the politics of belonging for Dalit women.

Notes 1 Bihar’s population according to the 2001 Census is 82,878,796. Approximately 87% of the population of Bihar resides in rural areas. In North Bihar, the rural population is higher than in South Bihar. According to the 2001 Census, the total literacy rate in Bihar is 28.5% and the female literacy rate is 15.6%. 2 During Presidents rule (and under Governor Bhuta Singh, a Congressman) elections were held in February, 2005. The National Democratic Alliance (consisting of Bhartiya Janata Party and Janata Dal (U) ) seems to be gaining hold. In the recent ‘exit’ polls (October 2005), the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) is losing its political hegemony to the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). 3 Bahujan refers to a broad spectrum of lower caste groups such as the ‘lower’ shudras and the Dalits. 4 CPI (ML) was the successor of the All-India Co-ordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR). Post-1977, they initiated local struggles, modelled after the Naxalbari uprising (West Bengal) (see Bhatia 2005: 1536; also see, Krishna Ananth 2005: 14). 5 A movement led by Acharya Vinobha Bhave whose aim was to give land to the landless. 6 Under the Indian constitution, state governments have exclusive authority of 66 items, such as public order, welfare, health education, local government, industry, agriculture and land revenue (Sharma 2002: 77–101). 7 Similarly, in the state of Tamil Nadu, the Dalits refuse to cremate the dead belonging to upper caste Thevars. 8 Though this paper will draw on examples of violence between upper castes and Dalits/ ‘untouchables’, interpersonal violence in rural Bihar is also between the ‘untouchables’ (depressed classes or scheduled castes or Dalits or broken people) and the backward castes (upper shudras). In some instances of the caste violence, the upper shudras have joined the upper castes against the Dalits. 9 For a full account of the reasons for the formation of Senas, see Prakash Louis (2000b). 10 The nomenclature Ranvir has been adapted from the mythical figure Ranvir Baba. As the legend goes, during the nineteenth century, Ranvir Baba, a retired military man and resident of Belaur village in Bhojpur district, protected the rights of the Bhumihars, the land-owning upper castes of the state. 11 For example, in the 1980s, the Yadavs formed the Lorik Sena and the Kurmis formed the Bhoomi Sena (Rai 2001, Louis 2000b: 2209). 12 Historically they have been engaged in oppressive activities. With specific reference to Oudh during the 1920s (present-day Uttar Pradesh), Kumar states: ‘At any given time we find a sizeable number of women taluqdars in districts of Oudh . . . The thakurain (Rajput woman land holder) of Amargarh estate . . . practiced all kinds of oppression on her tenants. In 1936, she even had the houses of her tenants looted’ (Kumar 1989: 343). 13 Some armed Dalit women are sceptical about the help that is given by Marxist revolutionary organisations (Burke, 1999).

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14 The Naxalite movement first sprang up to address issues concerning the poor peasantry and minimum wages for the agricultural labour. It began in a small village in the Darjeeling hills named Naxalbari (in West Bengal) and quickly spread to other rural and urban areas of West Bengal, including Calcutta, and later to Bihar, Kerala and parts of Andhra Pradesh (Banerjee 1980, Das Gupta 1974). 15 General statistics on the magnitude of caste violence in Bihar are available (see Rai 2001) but since Dalit women as arm bearers is a relatively under-researched and under-documented field, it will be difficult to provide any concrete statistics on the scale of violence or the number of Dalit women recruited for armed violence. 16 In the context of sub-Sharan Africa, Judy El-Bushra (2000) argues that economic survival is an important feature of conflict torn societies. 17 For an extremely detailed analysis see Sharma (2002). 18 Bhanwari Devi was a potter from Bhateri village in Rajasthan. On 5 May 1992 she informed the police who prevented the marriage of the child daughter of Ram Karan, a Gujjar, not very high in the overall caste hierarchy, but several rungs above Bhanwari’s caste. Those accused of raping Bhanwari also enjoyed political support. BJP leader Kanhaiya Lal Meena reportedly organised a rally in support of the accused (TOI 2 February 1996 and Narula 1999). 19 The alliance that Laloo Prasad built with the Muslims and Yadavs, was referred to as the MY factor. This alliance was most visible when the Congress was in the process of getting decimated and weak in Bihar. As a consequence, the Bhartiya Janata Party emerged and occupied the political space vacated by the Congress. ‘In social terms, while Lalu got to consolidate a social alliance against the upper castes, the BJP in Bihar came to be seen by the upper castes as their natural choice’ (Ananth 2005: 13).

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Mishra, B.B. (1986) Government and Bureaucracy in India, 1947–1976, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mishra, Sanjay (1999) ‘The caste war in Bihar’, The Hindu, 21 February. Mishra, Vandita (2000) ‘New paradigms for next century’, Times of India, 23 May, Lucknow. Mohanty, Ranjita (2004) ‘Citizenship and governance: state, civil Society and citizens: revisiting the relationship’, Innovations in Civil Society, 4(1): 1–3. Nanda, B.R (1995) Jawaharlal Nehru – Rebel and Statesman, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Narula, Smita (1999) Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s Untouchables, New York: Human Rights Watch. Pai, Sudha (1997) ‘Dalit assertion in UP: implications for politics’, Economic and Political Weekly, 32 (37), September 13–19: 2313–2315. Pai, Sudha (1998) The BSP in Uttar Pradesh, Seminar No.471, November. Panini (1996) The political economy of caste, in M.N. Srinivas (ed.) Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar, New Delhi: Penguin. Parekh, Bhikhu (1991) ‘Caste wars’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 15 (2.91): 13–14. Patnaik, Prabhat (1998) Some Indian debates on planning, in T. Byers (ed.) The Indian Economy: Major Debates Since Independence, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Peteet, Julie (1997) ‘Icons and militants: mothering in the danger zone’, Signs, 23(1): 103–29. Portes Alejandro and Patricia Landolt (1996) ‘The downside of social capital’, The American Prospect, 26: 18–22. Rai, Tripurari (2001) ‘Rising rural violence in Bihar: causes and remedies’, Violence Update, 3(2) December: 8. Rai, Tripurari (2001) ‘Rising rural violence in Bihar: causes and remedies, Violence Update, 3(2): 1–27. Rajan, Sunder Rajeshwari (1993) Real and Imagined Women, London and New York: Routledge. Rao, Anupama (ed.) (2003) Gender and Caste: Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism, Delhi: Kali for Women. Rege, Sharmila (1996) ‘Caste and gender: the violence against women in India’ EUI, Italy, Working Paper, RSC No.96/17: 1–18. Rege, Sharmila (1998) ‘Dalit women talk differently: a critique of difference and towards a dalit feminist standpoint position’, Economic and Political Weekly, 31 October: 39–46. Rudolph, L.I. and Rudolph, S.H. (1987) In Pursuit of Lakshmi : the Political Economy of the Indian State, Bombay: Orient Longman. Sahay, Shankar Tara (1999) ‘Mindless Bihar caste war cripples law and order’, Rediff, 4 December. Sanghera, Gurchathen Singh (2003) A social constructionist account of children’s rights under the conditions of globalization: the issue of child labour in India. Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford. Sarkar, Tanika (1995) Women and Right Wing Movements: Indian Experiences, London: Zed Books Sharma ,Ursula (1999) Caste, Buckingham: Open University Press. Sharma, Shalendra (2002) ‘Politics and governance in contemporary India: the paradox of democratic deepening’, Journal of International and Area Studies, 9(1): 77–101. Sinha, Arvind and Indu Sinha (2001) ‘Ranveeer Sena and “Massacre Widows” ’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27 October: 4095–4099. Spinner-Halev, J. (2001) ‘Feminism, multiculturalism, oppression and the state’, Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political and Legal Philosophy, 112: 84–113. Srinivas, M.N. (1989) The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization and Other Essays, Delhi: Penguin. Srinivas, M.N. (1996) Caste, Its Twentieth Century Avatar, Delhi: Penguin. Thapar, Vishal (2000) ‘On a high horse’, Times of India, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, 3. Tharu, Susie and Niranjana, Tejaswani (1996) Problems for a contemporary theory of gender, in Chakravarty Dipesh (ed.) Subaltern Studies IX, Writings on South Asian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Thekaekara, Mari Marcel (2005) ‘Combating caste’, New Internationalist, 380, July, 9–12. Thorat, Sukhadeo and Venkatesan, S. (2004) ‘Caste conflict, poverty and human development. Draft paper to the Wider conference on Making Peace Work, 4–5 June 2004, Helsinki, Finland. Weber, Hans Ruedi (1971) ‘The promise of the land, Biblical interpretation and the present situation in the Middle East’, Study Encounter, 7(4): 1–16.

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Human Rights, Military Interventions and Contemporary Politics of Belonging

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10 The Judgement of Evil and Contemporary Politics of Belonging1 By Robert Fine The history of freedom begins with evil, for it is the work of man (Kant 1991: 227)

Politics and the Language of Evil This chapter addresses itself to a common phenomenon: the use of the language of ‘evil’ within political discourse. I want to suggest that the language of evil gives rise to an awkward tension in political thought: on the one hand, it seems to diminish politics; on the other hand, it appears as the most essential element of modern political life, so much so that we would have to reinvent it if it did not exist. It would appear that in politics, we can’t live with the language of evil and we can’t live without it. My concern is with this nature of this difficulty and our response to it. The language of ‘evil’ induces within social and political thought a strong intuitive scepticism toward a term that appears immersed in old theological presuppositions and is deeply conducive to the exercise of violence. Evil, Nietzsche writes, is the picture of the enemy as the man of ressentiment conceives him: Here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived ‘the evil enemy’, ‘the evil one’, and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and dependant, a ‘good one’ – himself. (Nietzsche 1969: 39)

In its rush to judgement the language of evil is itself to be judged. It glosses over vital political distinctions. It fails to offer an understanding of the world or even to engage in the activity of understanding itself. It expresses indifference to what occurs in the head of the enemy. It exonerates us, the good, of all responsibility except that of destroying them, the others we label evil. It invokes an imaginary community of the good based not on our own intrinsic virtues but on ridding the world of evil once and for all. As a term of political rhetoric, the idea of ‘evil’ appears as a dangerously empty signifier: directed now against nation-states (as in ‘evil empire’ or ‘axis of evil’); now against groups opposed to the whole system of nation states (as in ‘the evil ones’ to refer to Al Qaeda and similar terrorist organisations); or, from the other side, against less tangible entities such as ‘global liberalism’, ‘American imperialism’ or ‘Zionism’. Evil is the language

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of conspiracy theories. It is the opposite of critique. If in traditional theodicies (dating from Leibniz) the occurrence of evil was an occasion for reflection on how human cruelty and misery could co-exist with a just God, today it sometimes seems that the language of evil is opposed to all reflection. It achieves only a closure of political deliberation and through its projections an opening to the exercise of violence. In place of thought, we are left merely with ‘an exultant face to face confrontation between Innocence and the Unspeakable Beast’ (Finkielkraut 1992: 60). This is one side of the picture. On the other side, the resurgent interest in evil in contemporary social and political thought indicates a peculiar willingness on our part to be persuaded that, in the shadow of Auschwitz and the Gulag, there is indeed a necessary place for the idea of evil in our political thinking (Bernstein 2002, Neiman 2002). The revival of the concept of ‘evil’ in political thought derives from the experience of human destruction in twentieth-century history. It expresses a need to enter the process of what Jürgen Habermas terms ‘learning from catastrophe’ (Habermas 2001: 45). The language of evil is an inducement to attend to ‘the gruesome features of a century that “invented” the gas chambers, total war, state-sponsored genocide, and extermination camps, brainwashing, state security apparatuses, and the panoptic surveillance of entire populations’. It impels us to acknowledge that the short twentieth-century ‘generated more victims, more dead soldiers, more murdered civilians, more displaced minorities, more torture, more dead from cold, from hunger, from maltreatment, more political prisoners and refugees, than could ever have been imagined’ and that ‘violence and barbarism mark the distinctive signature of the age’ (Habermas 2003). How else but through the language of evil are we to make sense of Hitler’s remark to Hermann Rauschning, author of The Revolution of Nihilism: ‘If you ask me what I mean by depopulation, I mean the removal of entire racial units. And that is what I intend to carry out’ (Virilio 2002: 18)? What other language is adequate to the advent of total war, where ‘annihilation takes as its “centre” not only the enemy army or the enemy state but the entire population and its economy’ and where violence becomes ‘an unlimited movement with no other aim than itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 118). Evil is an experience of the modern age. It is for good reason that Michael Mann opens his historical sociology of ‘murderous ethnic cleansing’ on this note. Since my previous work had neglected the extremes of human behaviour, I had not thought much about good and evil. Like most people, I had tended to keep them in entirely separate categories from each other as well as from ordinary life. Having studied ethnic cleansing, I am now not so sure. Though I am not attempting here to morally blur good and evil, in the real world they are connected. Evil does not arrive from outside our civilisation, from a separate realm we are tempted to call ‘primitive’. Evil is generated by civilisation itself. (Mann 2005: ix)

The extremes of human behaviour, such as murderous ethnic cleansing, belong to our own civilisation. They are the product of modernity. We can trace their history from the annihilation of indigenous peoples by imperialist and settler powers in the Americas, Australia and African colonies. We trace their history

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through the death camps of twentieth-century totalitarianism, through Mylai, the American war on Vietnam and Pol Pot’s extermination in Cambodia, to the genocidal massacres in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and today, right now, to the genocide some observers say is imminent among the African tribal populations of Darfur. (It would appear that in Darfur the new ‘Government of National Unity’ is deliberately escalating the level of violence and insecurity as a form of counter-insurgency warfare with the goal of accelerating human destruction in this region. There is little evidence, however, that the world is listening seriously. Neither the United States nor European countries nor other international actors seem intent on speaking out. The absence of an effective voice emerging from the Blair government is especially dismaying in light of British willingness to intervene in Iraq. In failing to respond, the world may be again witnessing – and acquiescing in – genocide. The shadows of Auschwitz, Srebrenica, Cambodia and Rwanda are falling heavily over Darfur (Reeves 2005).) If 1989 appeared at the time to mark the close of the ‘short twentieth century’, the era of catastrophe, this conclusion now appears radically premature. Today there is perhaps nothing more widespread in political thought than disenchantment with the idea of progress. Jean Baudrillard ties this sense of disenchantment speculatively to the emergent spirit of terrorism: We believe that the progress of Good, its advance in all fields (the sciences, technology, democracy, human rights), corresponds to a defeat of Evil. No one seems to have understood that Good and Evil advance together, as part of the same movement. The triumph of the one does not eclipse the other . . . Good does not conquer Evil, nor indeed does the reverse happen: they are at once both irreducible to each other and inextricably interrelated . . . In the traditional universe there was still a balance between Good and Evil . . . not unlike the way the confrontation of the two powers in the Cold War maintained the balance of terror. There was then no supremacy of the one over the other. As soon as there was a total extrapolation of the Good, Evil regained an invisible autonomy, henceforward developing exponentially. Relatively speaking, this is more or less what has happened in the political order with the eclipse of Communism and the global triumph of liberal power: it was at this point that a ghostly enemy emerged, infiltrating itself throughout the whole planet, slipping in everywhere like a virus, welling up from all the interstices of power . . . (Baudrillard 2002: 14)

The question of evil continues to arise politically not only when terrorism and mass murder recur but when there is no concept available to us to name this ‘thing’, this event that has just happened. It arises when we are on the edge of our understanding, when we feel that the event is resistant to our normal methods of comprehension. The Lisbon earthquake raised the question of evil in the mid-eighteenth century; the gas chambers of Auschwitz raised the same question in the mid-twentieth century. Today I think there are many who have this sense of astonishment when they see images of terrorism, such as the videoed beheading of hostages, which appear to have lost all connection with political instrumentality. In all these cases human life is destroyed – though genocide of course differs from the Lisbon earthquake in that it is man rather than god or nature who is in the dock – and in all these cases the systems of interpretation that allow people to explain the destruction of human life are themselves in question (Neiman 2002).

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Today the question of evil repeats itself every time we confront practices such as genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, terrorism against random civilians or the beheading of hostages. It arises when we find ourselves incapable of making sense of these forms of inhumanity and see ourselves faced with the threat of the worst still to come (Derrida 2003: 97). The question I am raising in this chapter concerns this difficult tension. On the one hand, we share in the scepticism of political thought towards the idea of evil; on the other, we sense the necessity of a language of evil if we are to give expression to our experience of the incomprehensibility of human atrocities. My concern here is not whether political thought is able to accommodate the concept of evil and to utilise it as a basis for a politics of belonging. I am not speaking of whether the term evil is useful for political actors, which it undoubtedly can be. My concern is whether, irrespective of the strategic utility of evil, there is something normatively compelling about the idea of evil. The important point, in my view, is whether the language of evil allows us to maintain our astonishment in the face of human atrocity, that same tone and emotion of astonishment we once found, for example, in authors who sought to understand and resist the phenomenon of totalitarian terror in the mid-twentieth century: Arendt, Camus, Koestler, Orwell, Rousset, C.L.R James.

Social Science and the Language of Evil The language of evil challenges key presuppositions of social science. In return, the social sciences are reluctant to admit the language of evil into their vocabulary. In the ears of social science the category of evil rings of theology rather than of science, of tradition rather than modernity, of absolute moral standards rather than cultural relativism, of dogma rather than critical reflection, of one church rather than a plurality of language games, of faith rather than enlightenment. Thus when social scientists address the question of evil, they place it within scare quotes: they write not of evil but of conceptions of ‘evil’ held by social actors and they treat even the conception of ‘evil’ as a mark of an unenlightened consciousness. The proclivity of social science is to subjectivise evil, to turn it into a belief or opinion concerning what is evil; it is to relativise evil, to see its meaning and application mutating from one culture to another; it is to technologise evil, that is, to locate it in terms of a utilitarian calculus of means and ends; and ultimately the aim of the social sciences is to dissolve evil – to eliminate it altogether from our vocabulary. The language of evil appears to have no place in the modern, plural, secular, post-metaphysical worldview that the social sciences espouse. The relation of the social sciences to evil may be compared perhaps with Aeschylus’s description of the relation of Athene to the Furies: the aim is to destroy its powers. The postmodern suspicion, however, cannot be evaded. It is that the exclusion of the language of good and evil from the social sciences may be less justified and less innocent than it first appears. The suspicion is that there is a certain affinity between the absence of evil in thought and the actuality of evil in deed.

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This conjunction may express little more than the unwillingness of social scientists to accept that from time to time mass political movements emerge, devoted to hatred and conspiracy theories, which get drunk on the idea of slaughter (Berman 2004: 149–53). As Hannah Arendt was quick to observe, it was moral relativism, not moral absolutism, that allowed Germans to move effortlessly first from Weimar democracy to Nazism and then back to democracy after the war. In a telling phrase Arendt wrote of moral standards in this context as if they were no more than a set of mores that ‘could be exchanged for another with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people’ (Arendt 1978: 5). The reduction of evil to a matter of subjective conviction means that any crime can be justified as long as it is committed with sincerity, out of a sense of moral duty and in good conscience. This connection, between the dissolution of evil in thought and the inability to confront evil in fact, has been addressed from within sociology. According to Zygmunt Bauman, for example, conventional or ‘modernist’ sociology tends either to dissolve the moral point of view into conformity with social norms regardless of substance, or to exclude the moral point of view altogether in the face of the ‘rational, planned, scientifically informed, expert, efficiently managed, co-ordinated mechanisms of modern technology’. Bauman illustrates this connection through the difficult relation sociology has to the Holocaust. Sociology has little to say about the Holocaust, Bauman argues, precisely because sociology promotes the same principles of ‘rational action’ as were to be found in the Holocaust – principles which make terms like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ sound out of place and which allow for the conclusion to be drawn that certain categories of people ‘cannot be incorporated into the rational order’ because they possess blemishes which ‘cannot be removed or rectified’ (Bauman 1990: 65). We do not have to endorse this perhaps excessively harsh judgement to acknowledge that the ‘technologisation’ of language disables social science in the face of human atrocity and suffering. For Arendt and Bauman, the conventional social sciences are deeply compromised by the mass societies they are purported to explain. Arendt referred to the sociological tradition of sine ira et studio, of dispassionate and objective analysis, which makes it impossible to understand a phenomenon such as the death camps. To describe the concentration camps sine ira et studio is not to be ‘objective’, but to condone them; and such condoning cannot be changed by condemnation which the author may feel duty bound to add but which remains unrelated to the description itself. When I used the image of hell, I did not mean this allegorically but literally . . . In this sense I think that a description of the camps as Hell on earth is more ‘objective’, that is, more adequate to their essence than statements of a purely sociological or psychological nature. (Arendt 1994a: 404)

Arendt might well have had in mind, as Peter Baehr suggests, a sociologist who wrote in the American Journal of Sociology in 1947 that the camps afforded a ‘remarkable opportunity for the study of social patterning and personality under a distinctive set of controlled circumstances’ and to see what happens ‘when modern man becomes stripped of his culture and is reduced to an animal state very closely approaching raw motivation’ (Baehr 2002: 807). As Baehr observes, the idea that the camps give us access to a primal state of human association is

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bizarre unless one imagines that there is such a thing as a state of nature and that it resembles a death camp. The problem is that of finding or creating a language to capture the sense of horror and madness that must be conveyed if one is to be true to the phenomenon. This is not easily done and the Marxist tradition has also had its own difficulties. In Marx’s critique of political economy, for example, there is no such language to be found. The categories of capital, surplus value, interest, profit, rent, tax, etc. serve very well to enable understanding of the economic injustices of modern capitalist society, including the economic aspects of the state, but they cannot substitute for the development of categories appropriate to understanding the moral and political life of modern society and especially forms of violence that surpass all economic utility. The categories of political economy simply bypass this issue. In the ideology that once passed for ‘official Marxism’, a moral myopia was produced out of the refusal to recognise any region of conscious human agency in the making of history. What official Marxism produced was the subordination of moral imagination to the numbing language of bureaucracy and party-speak. To be sure, this ‘Marxist’ orthodoxy inverted the spirit of Marx’s own critique of capitalist society: instead of confronting the inhumanity of a society that preaches the religion of economic determinism, it itself preached this doctrine. Yet Marx too could not resolve how to move from the study of the circuits of capital to the study of human violence (Fine 1994). To repair this one-sidedness a new questioning of what constitutes a human form of political community is needed, and a new questioning of what lies beyond its boundaries.

The Denial of Evil It seems to me that today the recurring search for a language of evil in social and political thought is a response to the perceived shortcomings of conventional social science and critical social theory to adequately confront the actuality of violence in social and political life. It is a response to the inadequacy, for instance, of explaining a phenomenon such as the concentration camp in functional terms as a means of political control, economic exploitation or military strategy, or as a more radical form of something already known, such as social processes of exclusion or confinement. The cost of all such explanations is that of not concerning ourselves with the substance of the phenomenon in question. The difficulty facing social science is itself addressed by social science. We are entering into the terrain of what the sociologist, Stanley Cohen, calls ‘states of denial’ in relation to human atrocities and suffering (Cohen 2001). Such denial is a familiar enough aspect of official state policy. In the preface of his book Cohen rehearses forms of denial practised by the Israeli state in response to allegations of torture against Palestinian prisoners by the human rights organisation, B’Ttselem. The official and mainstream response was venomous: outright denial (it doesn’t happen); discrediting (the organisation was biased, manipulated or gullible); renaming (yes, something does happen but it is not torture); and justification (anyway ‘it’ was morally justified). (Cohen 2001: xi)

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We could add silencing as when the voice of the victims is not to be heard and if it is heard, it is not to be believed. Cohen recounts the muted reaction of liberal public opinion in Israel to these official forms of denial: Liberals were uneasy and concerned. Yet there was no outrage. Soon a tone of acceptance began to be heard. Abuses were intrinsic to the situation; there was nothing to be done till a political solution was found; something like torture might even be necessary sometimes; anyway, we don’t want to keep being told about this all the time . . . There was something like an unspoken collusion to ignore (or pretend to ignore?) the whole subject. (Cohen 2001: xi)

As I read it, the point Cohen makes is not that Israel is uniquely horrible, nor that states of denial are the prerogative of the state, and certainly not that denial of atrocity is an inescapable aspect of social life. It is rather that we need a political language that is reflective of the problem of denial when faced with unwelcome knowledge. States of denial clearly take many forms and it is not always easy to recognise them when they arise. Some of these forms are very familiar. Consider, for example, the following. Historicism: Denial takes the form of a spurious dialectic based on the superstition that something good will come from evil or that evil will transmute into the good when viewed from a superior historical point of view. According to this logic certain events may appear terrible but such appearances are dissolved when the focus is placed on the progress made possible by their happening. Collective punishment: In this case denial takes the form of a supreme distrust of the victims of violence based on the conviction that they deserve their ‘punishment’. This may be because of their historical guilt for offences committed by their forebears or because of their membership of a larger collectivity which is seen as fundamentally illegitimate. Displacement: Denial takes the form of a refusal to acknowledge an atrocity because it may lead to unwelcome political consequences or because it is deemed to pale into insignificance when offset against other more important evils. People may say: ‘don’t speak to me of this evil when the bigger battle is with another evil that is larger and more originary. I am sure the reader can think of many other forms of denial, but let me offer one further example of what I take to be a case of denial on the part of the left, namely, destructive critiques of humanitarian military intervention and of international criminal courts for the prosecution of serious violations of humanitarian law. These critiques may focus on loss of national sovereignty (on the part of the intervened) or on the expansion of imperial power (on the part of the interveners), but they do not engage with the problems to which humanitarian international intervention and courts are a response: namely, the atrocities that occur when people are terrorised, expelled or slaughtered by their own rulers. It requires a particular form of moral blindness to say that the prosecution in a court of law of dictators, state officials and military bosses accused of authorising or conducting atrocities, is tantamount to the ‘re-legitimation of the right of the great powers to practise what violence they please’ or to ‘a return to the Westphalian system of

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open great power domination over states which are too weak to prevent external claims against them’ (Chandler 2003). Let me be clear about my argument here. I am seeking to make explicit what may already be well-trodden ground: that the overcoming of evil in thought, may not correspond with the overcoming of evil in fact. We do not have to be nostalgic for the lost language of evil to apprehend and be apprehensive of the effects of spiriting it away. My contention is that the exclusion of the idea of evil from our comprehension of the world has been at a cost: the dulling of our moral imagination. In any event, what normally happens is not the transcendence of good and evil, but the return of a language of evil in an unreflective and thoughtless form. There are of course lots of ways of speaking of evil without using the word itself, not only through synonyms (sin, wickedness, iniquity, vice, the demonic, etc.) but also through the rhetorical devices of metaphor, analogy, allegory and innuendo (‘a creature of the night’). In politics and social science we find many examples of the idea of evil asserting its presence behind a more or less convincing technological gloss. The more blatant of these are to be found in the language of ‘scientific’ racism and anti-Semitism, but even terms that have a real analytical purchase and historical foundation – liberalism, globalisation, American imperialism, Zionism, etc. – may be used in such a way as to bring them closer to the spirit of demonisation and rhetoric of evil than to the province of social scientific or historical understanding. Evil is the Work of Man We noted above that when Hannah Arendt explored the ‘peculiar unreality’ of the Nazi death camps, she wrote that they had ‘the appearance of radical evil’ and resembled ‘nothing so much as medieval pictures of Hell’ (Arendt 1976: 437–59). This use of almost biblical images comes as a shock in a text dedicated to a secular, political understanding of totalitarianism, but this was to my mind precisely her point: to shock the reader out of conventional ways of understanding violence. Arendt drew the term ‘radical evil’ from Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Reason in an effort to make sense of what was seemingly senseless. One of the characteristics of totalitarian terror was its lack of ‘humanly understandable sinful motives’ such as ‘self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power and cowardice’ (Arendt 1958: 241). The terror practised in the camps which involved the destruction of souls prior to the fabrication of corpses, contrasted sharply with the more conventional resentment and hatred visible in pogroms and mob violence against minorities (Neiman 2002: 266). Resentment and hatred may have been present in certain individuals running the camps but were strictly surplus to requirements. Arendt invoked the idea of radical evil in an attempt to capture ‘the senselessness of “punishing” completely innocent people, the failure to keep them in a condition so that profitable work might be extorted from them, the superfluousness of frightening a completely subdued population’ (Arendt 1994a: 233). The idea of radical evil serves to raise a difficulty of understanding: how to make sense of a social process based on the mass manufacture of corpses, in which ‘punishment is meted out without connection with crime . . . exploitation

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is practised without profit and . . . work is performed without product’ (Arendt 1976: 443). It shocks us out of the routines of our thinking. It functions to defy the power of codified abstractions and face up to the extraordinary fact that human beings constructed a space in which ‘the whole of life was thoroughly and systematically organised with a view to the greatest possible torment’ (Arendt 1976: 445). The language of evil was used sparingly by Arendt so that the impact of reality and shock of experience might still be felt. I think we should follow suit in the knowledge that the language of radical evil carries particular risks. It risks placing evil beyond or above historical investigation. Because we can find no rational explanation for the horror, we may be tempted to declare it beyond human understanding. We may be tempted to mystify what we dare not understand, perhaps because we fear it may be all too continuous with what we are – ‘human, all too human’ (Rose 1996: 41, Fine 2001a: 142). There is always the risk of ‘mythologising the horrible’, of endowing perpetrators with a ‘streak of satanic greatness’ they scarcely deserve, and of confounding the simulacrum of power for the real thing. Evil is never ‘radical’. . . . only extreme, and . . . possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension . . . It can lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface . . . Evil is thought-defying . . . thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality’. Only the good has depth and can be radical.’ (Arendt 1978: 250–51)

It was in the light of these risks that Arendt in her discussion of the Eichmann trial (Eichmann supervised the transportation of Jews to the death camps) stepped back from the idea of ‘radical evil’ and drew from Karl Jaspers another thought: that of the ‘banality of evil’. The ‘thoughtlessness’ she saw in Adolf Eichmann was exemplary. A human being conducted the extermination of Jews for no particular reason beyond a commitment to his career and desire to please his superiors. His deeds were monstrous but the doer was commonplace. He did not even appear to dislike Jews. His crimes were extraordinary but he was the most ordinary, banal, of men. The prosecution wanted to show that Eichmann was more brutal and knowledgeable than he made out; the defence wanted to show that he was only interested in his narrow duties. Neither addressed the central point: ‘the assumption current in all modern legal systems that intent to do wrong is necessary for the commission of a crime’ (Arendt 1994b: 277). Indeed, the conventional belief that evil actions require evil intentions allows murderous rulers to convince people that the atrocities in which they participated are justified because they are guided by ‘noble’ motives. Himmler’s exhortation to SS troops, that the difficulty of overcoming their natural reluctance to shoot women and children revealed the sublime nature of their work, was only the most notorious instance of this way of thinking. The individual is asked to inspect his soul to determine what is right at a time when the content of his soul is as meagre as it was for Eichmann. Radical evil, banality of evil – both these terms help to preserve our astonishment in the face of evil. Both shock us into addressing the difficulties of

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understanding the extremes of terror. They may also help us construct the elements of what might become in future a sociology of atrocity. Radical evil accentuates one aspect of the political reality of evil: what we might call the hypertrophy of the moral point of view. I mean by this the abstraction of a particular ‘moral’ point of view (‘the world would be a better place without Jews’) from any rational criteria – be they, economic, political or military. As Bataille puts it in Literature and Evil: ‘Evil . . . does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a “hypermorality” ’. The ‘banality of evil’ accentuates the other aspect: the atrophy of the moral point of view. This aspect, stressed within the literature of critical theory, refers to the total subordination of moral considerations to criteria of instrumental rationality (such as career building or the advantages of conformity). The former has to do with the formation of a reactive consciousness that converts certain ‘moral’ principles into absolute aims of political organisation; the latter has to do with the supremacy of global market forces over any and every moral sensibility. Each term expresses one side of a thoroughly modern diremption – on the one hand, the puffing up of the subject into the absolute; on the other, the vanishing of the subject into superfluousness (Fine 2001b). Evil is Janus-faced: it looks towards the atrophy and hypertrophy of morality. Extremes meet. The designation of evil is certainly used to instil a thoughtless sense of political belonging, a sense of thoughtless belonging. I label you evil to designate us as the good. I attempt to destroy you, the evil ones, so that we, the good, may triumph. We may be tempted to reverse this formulation in order to declare that the real evil lies in declaring others to be evil. All this reversal achieves, however, is a displacement of the objectivity of evil from the labelled to the labeller, but it says nothing about the determinate nature of the phenomenon in question. A more consistent anti-positivism would investigate both the evil in question and the process of its appropriation as ‘evil’. The exclusion of the concept of evil from social science has a rational basis but it also indicates the difficulty social science has in confronting the extremes of human behaviour. In the tradition of theodicy the occurrence of evil was an occasion for thought: how to reconcile the slaughter house of nature and history with the belief in a just and all-powerful God. Theodicy is now dead but its normative legacy should not be too quickly abandoned. The experience of evil can draw us out of our indifference and isolation; reconnect us to the suffering of others and lead us to the sources of atrocity in the modern world. It can shock us into an effort of understanding that goes beyond conventional frameworks and into a resistance that does not merely evaporate evil in theory but faces up to it in practice. It can make us attentive both to the extremes of violence that persist in our world and to the indifference to these extremes our language permits. And it can engender judgement and understanding which together constitute the preformative basis for humanising as well as resisting evil. After 9/11, Derrida wrote in his ‘dialogue’ with Habermas on Philosophy in a Time of Terror, The nuclear threat, the ‘total’ threat, no longer comes from a state but from anonymous forces that are absolutely unforeseeable and incalculable . . . It cannot be said that humanity is defenceless against the threat of this evil. But we must recognise that . . . all

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forms of what is called the ‘war on terrorism’ work to regenerate . . . the causes of the evil they claim to eradicate’ (Derrida 2003: 100)

The defences Derrida raises against the threat of this evil are in part legal, to make international law respected and effective, and in part political, to see that those called ‘terrorists’ are not in this context ‘others’ whom we as ‘Westerners’ can no longer understand. We must not forget that they were often recruited, trained, and even armed, and for a long time, in various Western ways by a Western world that itself . . . invented the word, the techniques and the politics of ‘terrorism’. (Derrida 2003: 115)

Derrida observes that our defence against the threat of ‘terrorism’ must involve both judgement and understanding. Judgement does not demonise the accused but holds them responsible; understanding does not justify the wrong but unearths its origins. Judgement and understanding are two sides of the same coin: they humanise evil; they give substance to Kant’s dictum that ‘evil is the work of man’. This seems to me to be a persuasively cosmopolitan starting point for the contemporary politics of belonging.

Notes 1 Thanks to Alison Diduck, Lydia Morris, William Smith, Rolando Vazquez and Nira Yuval Davis for their help with this paper. It is much appreciated though the defects are entirely mine.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah (1976) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harvest. Arendt, Hannah (1978) Jew as Pariah, New York: Grove Press. Arendt, Hannah (1994a) Essays in Understanding, New York: Harcourt Brace. Arendt, Hannah (1994b) Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Penguin. Arendt, Hannah (2003) Responsibility and Judgement, edited by Jerome Kohn, New York: Schocken. Baehr, Peter (2002) ‘Identifying the unprecedented: Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism and the critique of sociology’, American Sociological Review, 67, December: 804–31. Bataille, Georges (1990) Literature and Evil, London: Marion Boyers. Baudrillard, Jean (2002) The Spirit of Terrorism, translated by Chris Turner, London: Verso. Bauman, Zygmunt (1990) Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity. Berman, Paul (2004) Terror and Liberalism, New York: WW Norton and Company. Bernstein, Richard (2002) Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation, Oxford: Polity. Chandler, David (2003) ‘International Justice’, in Daniele Archibugi (ed.) Debating Cosmopolitics: London: Verso: 27–39. Cohen, Stanley (2001) States of Denial; Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, Cambridge: Polity. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1986) Nomadology: The War Machine, trans. Brian Massumi, Paris: Semiotext(e). Derrida, Jacques (2003) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, edited by Giovanna Borradori, Chicago: University of Chicago. Fine, Robert (1994) ‘The rule of law and Muggletonian marxism: the perplexities of Edward Thompson’, Journal of Law and Society, 21(2) June: 193–213.

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Fine, Robert (2001) ‘Understanding evil: Arendt and the final solution’, in Maria Pia Lara (ed.) Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives, Los Angeles: University of California Press: 131–50. Fine, Robert (2001a) Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt, London: Routledge. Finkielkraut, Alain (1992) Remembering in Vain, New York: Columbia University Press. Habermas, Jürgen (2001) The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, edited by Max Pensky, Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, Jürgen (2003) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, edited by Giovanna Borradori, Chicago: University of Chicago. Kant, Immanuel (1991) Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, Michael (2005) The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neiman, Susan (2002) Evil in Modern Thought: an Alternative History of Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1969) The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage. Reeves, Eric (2005) ‘Darfur in the deepening shadow of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda’, http://sudanreeves.org/index.php?name
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74 Rose, Gillian (1996) Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Jacqueline (2005) The Question of Zion, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taguieff, Pierre-André (2005) Preachers of Hatred: an Interview with Pierre-André Taguieff, http://liberoblog.com/2005/08/24/preachers-of-hatred-an-interview-with-pierre-andre-taguieff/ Virilio, Paul (2002) Ground Zero, translated by Chris Turner, London: Verso.

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11 National Interests, National Identity and ‘Ethical Foreign Policy’1 By David Chandler Introduction Today there is a consensus that the foreign policy of leading Western powers cannot be understood through considering nation-states as egoistic actors pursing narrow self-interest. Since the end of the Cold War, major states have increasingly stressed the importance of ethics and values in the shaping of international goals and have intervened internationally on the basis of ethical foreign policy concerns such as human rights and international justice. Many commentators have understood this shift to ‘value-led’ or ‘ethical’ foreign policy through an ‘outside/in’ approach to the question, viewing this value shift as a response to international pressures of globalisation and the creation of new cosmopolitan constituencies and new national identities. This paper instead employs an ‘inside/out’ approach which suggests that the shift away from the articulation of national interests and the drive to defend ethical ‘values’ through international intervention can be understood as products of and responses to the crisis of national identity highlighted by the domestic political malaise at the heart of Western politics, often referred to in the United States as an outcome of the ‘Culture Wars’, the response to the loss of cohering national values and shared goals resulting in ‘the loss of respect for authorities and institutions’ (Himmelfarb 1999: 20). National interests? The focus of interest here is not so much the cultural struggle itself, but rather the consequences of this well-documented concern that ‘there is no common purpose or common faith’. The drive behind ethical foreign policy is located in the attempt to resolve the political crisis of Western national identity, reflecting the lack of a shared framework of meaning and sense of socio-political purpose connecting Western states and their citizens (Bell 1975: 211). The inability to establish a shared socio-political vision of what ‘the nation’ stands for – the lack of a strong ‘idea of the state’ in Buzanian terms – has meant that Western powers find it difficult to formulate a clear foreign policy or to legitimise the projection of power abroad in terms of national interest (Buzan 1991). Today the key actor in international relations, the nation-state, appears to have lost the capacity or will to pursue its self-interest defined in terms of power. Commentators from a variety of theoretical perspectives argue that the most

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developed nation-states increasingly see themselves as having moral obligations to international society.2 The key theoretical framework for understanding the international sphere, that of state interest, not only central to realism but also to the rational choice perspective of neoliberal frameworks of international co-operation, appears to have lost its explanatory power. Rather than states and national interests shaping the direction of policy it appears that there is a new agenda set by non-state actors, whether it is the normative values and transnational concerns of the ‘principled-issue’ campaigners of global civil society or the threats to security from terrorist networks such as Al-Qaeda. The Constructivist approach rejects the ‘outside/in’ approach of understanding national interests as structured through the logic of anarchy, suggesting that national interests and identities are contingent and socially constructed. Nevertheless, these interests are still constructed in the international sphere itself, even if states do have the potential to make and to act on alternative identity ‘choices’ (Wendt 1992: 419). While the domestic political framework and institutional structures play an important role it is generally held to be a secondary one. It is transnationally operating non-state actors which are the active agents of change, diffusing ‘principled ideas’ and ‘international norms’ related to human rights and transnational justice (Risse and Sikkink 1999: 4). It is in response to this changed international context that states are generally understood to have been driven to reshape or redefine their national identities. The largely instrumental use of ‘principled ideas’ during the Cold War is held to have given way to the institutionalisation of new practices in the international sphere, sustained by the pressure of transnational human rights networks ‘from above’ and supported by civil society pressure ‘from below’ (Risse and Sikkink 1999: 34). Liberal internationalists argue that power is not exercised in the old way. Influential US liberal theorist Joseph Nye, for example, argues that the traditional distinction ‘between a foreign policy based on values and a foreign policy based on interests’ should be rejected (Nye 2002: 138). Nye writes that the challenges of the ‘global information age’ have required the redefinition of national interest (Nye 2002: 136). The Responsibility to Protect report, from the high-level International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, asserts the consensus view that nation-states are not forced ‘by systemic or structural factors’ to pursue narrow interests, but are free to make moral choices (ICISS 2001a: 129). It appears that critical theorists like Andrew Linklater and Ken Booth have successfully pre-empted developments in international relations theorising with their focus on a ‘bolder moral standpoint’ and desire to move away ‘from accumulating knowledge about ‘relations between states’ (what might be called the ‘dismal science’ of Cold War international relations) to thinking about ethics on a global scale’ (Booth 1995: 109–10). This view of the end of traditional national interests has attained a broad consensus from radical postmodernists and left-leaning academics to senior British diplomats. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for example, argue that Vietnam was the last attempt the United States made to play an imperial role, pursuing its national interests ‘with all the violence, brutality and barbarity befitting any European imperialist power’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 178). But the defeat in Vietnam marked a passage to a new regime of genuine internationalism. For these

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radical critics, the 1991 Gulf War illustrated that the United States had now become ‘the only power able to manage international justice, not as a function of its own national motives but in the name of global right’ [emphasis in original]. Sussex professor, Martin Shaw, argues that rather than the imperialism of national interest, the projection of Western power since the Cold War has been ‘post-imperial’ a moral response to crises provoked by non-Western powers which still seek to pursue territorial claims and the narrow interests of power (Shaw 2002). Leading EU and British government policy advisor Robert Cooper argues that leading Western powers are ‘postmodern’ imperialists, no longer asserting any national interests of their own: A large number of the most powerful states no longer want to fight or conquer. It is this that gives rise to both the pre-modern and postmodern worlds. Imperialism in the traditional sense is dead, at least among the Western powers. (Cooper 2002: 14)

Cooper writes that we now live in a ‘postmodern world, raison d’étate and the amorality of Machiavelli’s theories of statecraft, which defined international relations in the modern era, have been replaced by a moral consciousness’ (Cooper 2002: 13). If there is a ‘national’ interest that is seen as respectable today it is the ‘national interest in being, and being seen to be, a good international citizen . . . regularly willing to pitch into international tasks for motives that appear to be relatively selfless’ (ICISS 2001a: 72). The Radical Response In the face of the current consensus that national interests and national identities do not operate in the old way to shape international policy making, one response has been to defend a traditional ‘realist’ or rationalist approach. However, today it would appear that the few defenders of national interests or narrow rational instrumentality as a guide to understanding the international sphere are marginal critics from the Left. Alex Callinicos, for example, argues that the United States is still an imperialist power pursuing national interests and that international co-operation stems from the need to contain and structure the conflict and competition inherent in international capital (Callinicos 2002). Peter Gowan similarly asserts that behind the drive for economic globalisation lies traditional US imperialism (Gowan 1999). The ‘realist’ view of timeless competition for power appeals to commentators who wish to argue that the ending of the Cold War has made little difference to the operation of capitalism and the power inequalities implicit in the world market. For many critics on the Left, the talk of postmodern imperialism, human rights and cosmopolitan justice is merely the latest in a long line of moral justifications for national interests. For Noam Chomsky: ‘the new interventionism’ is replaying an old record. It is an updated variant of traditional practices that were impeded in a bipolar world system that allowed some space for nonalignment . . . With the Soviet deterrent in decline, the Cold War victors are more free to exercise their will under the cloak of good intentions but in pursuit of interests that have a very familiar ring outside the realm of enlightenment. (Chomsky 1999: 11)

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In the post-1945 retreat from Empire, non-Western states won the formal rights of political and legal equality and the new ‘constitution’ for international society, the UN Charter, guaranteed the collective rights of sovereignty and self-government against intervention from major powers. In this context, it is undoubtedly true that ethical internationalism has legitimised the rewriting of the rules of the international order, facilitating a return to Great Power intervention and the overturning of the political gains of the post-colonial period (see Chandler 2000). However, the collapse of the Cold War balance of power and shift to a unipolar world under US domination would suggest that the protections of the UN framework of 1945 would no longer have withstood the post-1989 realignment of power, regardless of how this was legitimised after the event.3 Rather than simply assert the existence of power-political competition, it would seem more challenging to ask a question rarely posed by the critics of ‘humanitarian’ wars and ‘postmodern imperialism’ – ‘Why is it that traditional national identities appear to have been so roundly rejected?’ Even in the ‘war against terrorism’ the United States has continually asserted non-traditional security concerns. For example, Bush promoted the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as acts of concern for ‘oppressed people’ rather than in purely traditional security terms as legitimate acts of self-defence. For example, over Afghanistan, rather than emphasising national interests, Bush stressed America’s humanitarian aims: As we strike military targets, we’ll also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan. The United States of America is a friend to the Afghan people, and we are the friends of almost a billion worldwide who practice the Islamic faith. (Bush 2001b)

Even the avowedly hawkish National Security Strategy, issued in September 2002, seems remarkably ‘soft’ in its humanitarian emphasis on nation-building with the assistance of NGOs. On the one hand the United States writes a blank cheque for the exercise of power in its declaration of a unilateral right to strike pre-emptively before threats materialise, yet on the other it pledges to ‘continue to work with international organizations such as the United Nations, as well as non-governmental organizations, and other countries to provide the humanitarian, political, economic, and security assistance necessary to rebuild Afghanistan’ (NSS 2002). The 2003 war on Iraq saw the codification of a Republican neo-Wilsonianism: the strident export of liberal values and democracy and rejection of the narrow realism of self-interest (see, for example, Bush’s second term inaugural speech, Bush 2005). The European Union has for some years worked towards a similar international projection of power based on liberal values rather than self-interest in the formulation of a European Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). For example, Javier Solana, the EU High Representative for the CFSP has argued that European states’ unique capacities to overcome national interests and cooperate peacefully through democratic institutions, give the EU a similar capacity to export freedom, democracy and good governance to the near (and not so near) abroad (Solana 2003). The critics take the national identities and the national interests behind foreign adventures as a given. This chapter suggests that there is more to the ‘postmodern’

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rejection of national interests and government declarations of ‘ethical foreign policy’ than PR spin. That, in fact, critics from the Left ignore a central facet of the post-Cold War world – the problem that Western powers have in articulating a clear sense of national identity or national interest. Rather than military interventions abroad being driven by traditional national interests of power competition, it would appear that they are motivated by the inability of leading Western states to cohere a clear national identity, an inclusive vision of their national interests. This study contends that the projection of power abroad is more a response to the difficulties of negotiating national goals and aims, than a straightforward projection of these pre-given interests.

Culture Wars and the Crisis of National Identity At the domestic level it appears that political power can no longer be exercised in the traditional way. Governments are increasingly seen to be less important or influential. There is increasing cynicism and doubt over government and politics, demonstrated by falling turn-outs at the polls, declining party memberships and lower viewing figures for the nightly news. Even General Election victories, the defining point of the domestic political process, no longer bring governments a sense of authority or legitimacy. This was clear in the contested victory of George W. Bush in the 2000 elections, which turned on the problem of the ‘hanging’ chad in Florida. However, the problem of deriving legitimacy from elections is a much broader one, not directly connected to concerns of manipulation or even to voter apathy. In the British elections, Tony Blair has achieved clear second and third term mandates, the government has little political opposition to speak of, either in the British parliament or in the country at large, yet there is no sense of a connection to the general public or of a political project which can engage society. No matter the size of the parliamentary majority, without a political project, which can give meaning to government actions and the passing of legislation, governments appear weak and ineffectual. Domestic policy decisions, whether in education, health, transport or policing, appear to be short-term or knee-jerk responses bereft of any long-term aims. Without an ideological context, policy is liable to be reversed or undermined at the first sign of funding difficulties or problems in implementation. Rather than ‘modern’ politics where the state had a political programme or project which promised to transcend the present, to take society forward, today governments are caught in a ‘postmodern’ malaise. There appears to be no vision or project which can give government a sense of mission or purpose. In this context, domestic policy-making is caught in the ‘everlasting present’ where legislation is passed to deal with crisis management and policy making is contingent on events rather than shaped by government as can be clearly seen, for example, in the ill-thought out anti-terror legislation and kneejerk responses to the multi-culturalism debate in the wake of the 7 July London bombings. Without a sense of purpose or mission, governments lack coherence and credibility. In this context, foreign policy can be a powerful mechanism for

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generating a sense of national identity, of shared political purpose and mission (see Chandler 2002: 53–88). While the end of the Cold War has highlighted the domestic political malaise which makes government coherence and political vision difficult, it is important to note that the problems are rooted in a lack of confidence of the Western political elite which has deeper historical roots. Hardt and Negri, for example, note that Vietnam marked the ‘point of passage’ away from the confident pursuit of US national interests (Hardt and Negri 2000: 178). After Vietnam, US power could no longer be projected with moral certainty. The American establishment no longer had a belief in their ‘manifest destiny’. However, the ‘postmodern’ state was born not in military humiliation in the Far East but in the disintegration of the moral certainty of US national identity at home. The lack of consensus over Vietnam reflected the lack of collective identification with US ‘national’ interests. Of the 2 million young men called up for the military draft, an unprecedented 139,000 refused to serve. As Christopher Coker astutely notes, it was not the failure of intervention in Vietnam in itself that made the assertion of US national interests problematic, but the domestic response to the war. Reflecting broader social trends of individualisation or, in Ulrich Beck’s terms ‘reflexive modernisation’, the decay of traditional social bonds and values meant that the nation-state could no longer be seen as an end in itself (Coker 2001: 154–55). The ‘postmodern’ shift was a product of a lack of confidence in the innate superiority of the American way of life. The US establishment’s defeat in the ‘Culture Wars’ of the late 1960s and 1970s corroded the old certainties about truth, justice and the American way. Everything about the past was called into question as American history was increasingly seen as tainted by racism and colonialism. Since Vietnam, dissent became respectable and there could no longer be a ‘grand narrative’ about US national identity or ‘national interest’. The Cold War framework served to minimise the postmodern domestic ‘crisis of meaning’, the lack of confidence of the American establishment in any great project. The end of moral certainty in the justness of the projection of US power meant that American intervention abroad could no longer find legitimacy in a ‘vision of the future’. Instead it was ‘reduced to managing the present’ (Coker 2001: 157). Rather than acting in national interests, the United States rejected any positive project for the claim to be a subject-less world policeman. The end of the Cold War and the removal of restrictions on an increasingly activist foreign policy created the possibility for the US establishment to use the international sphere to reverse the defeats of the Culture Wars, to lay to rest the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’. The attempt to regain a sense of mission was strengthened by the restored sense of national pride in the aftermath of ‘victory’ in the Cold War. This restoration of American mission was initially articulated in the moral language of human rights and humanitarian intervention. The language of Wilsonian internationalism appeared to restore a sense of America’s historic mission. Ethical concerns, such as the human rights of others, seemed to provide a moral framework which could project a sphere of agreement and consensus and point beyond the cultural relativism and pessimism of ‘postmodern’ times. The moral dualism of ‘us’ as upholders of human rights and ‘them’ as perpetrators of

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human wrongs has been the leitmotif of the post-Cold War shift to ethical foreign policy making. As Francesca Klug notes: ‘the post-Cold War search for new ideals and common bonds in an era of failed ideologies appears to have contributed to a growing appreciation of human rights as a set of values’ (Klug 2000: 147). Joseph Nye devotes a major section of his recent book, The Paradox of American Power, to ‘The Home Front’ and argues that while the impact of the Culture Wars has not been so great as to ‘inhibit our capacity to act collectively’ there is, nevertheless, a problem of articulating a common interest: The problem of the home front is less the feared prospects of social and political decay or economic stagnation than developing and popularising a vision of how the United States should define its national interest in a global information age. (Nye 2002: 136)

It would seem that rather than a response to international pressures and civil society mobilisation, this demand for a new ‘national identity’ or ‘national ideals’ has been generated by governing elites. In Britain, ‘ethical’ foreign policy was consciously seen as a key element in New Labour initiatives aimed at ‘rebranding’ Britain, creating a modern multi-cultural British identity (Brown 2001: 16). Opinion studies have consistently demonstrated that the idea that there is public pressure for a policy shift towards more ‘ethical’ concerns has been exaggerated. For example, in the mid-1990s, polls showed that only a minority of the American public backed human rights promotion as an important foreign policy goal, well behind stopping the flow of illegal drugs, protecting the jobs of American workers and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons (see Forsythe 2000: 143). This finding was illustrated by the fact that President Clinton had to explain where Kosovo was on the map, before attempting to promote military action in 1999, because there was so little public interest in the issue. Perhaps the most important example of the British and US governments attempting to create an ‘ethical’ interventionist agenda is the case of Iraq. For the last ten years US and British political leaders have used Iraq as an international cause which they can use to raise their status at home and emphasise their commitment to a moral mission abroad. The British and US publics have never been as enthusiastic as their governments in pursuing conflict with Saddam Hussein and the emphasis on Iraq in foreign policy initiatives has little to do with international lobbying or shifts in public opinion. For example, in July 2002 when George W. Bush and Tony Blair prepared the public for the coming military conquest of Iraq, polls showed that only a small, and declining, majority of American people were in favour (Tyson 2002). Opinion polls consistently demonstrate that the Western public tends to share a narrow view of foreign policy priorities, based on perceptions of personal interests, rather than the more ideological ‘crusading’ perspective often pushed by their government leaders (Schwarz 2000). The attention to the articulation of a political mission, beyond the directionlessness of domestic politics, through foreign policy activism abroad has been an important resource of authority and credibility for British and US political leaders. The ability to project or symbolise unifying ‘values’ has become a core leadership attribute. George W. Bush’s shaky start to the US presidency was transformed by

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his speech to Congress in the wake of the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks, in which he staked out his claim to represent and protect America’s ethical values against the terrorist ‘heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century’ (Bush 2001a). Tony Blair, similarly, was at his most presidential in the wake of the attacks, arguing that values were what distinguished the two sides of the coming conflict: ‘We are democratic. They are not. We have respect for human life. They do not. We hold essentially liberal values. They do not’ (Blair 2001a). The search for ethical or principled approaches emphasising the government’s moral authority has inexorably led to a domestic shift in priorities making international policy increasingly high profile in relation to other policy areas. The emphasis on ethical foreign policy commitments enables Western governments to declare an unequivocal moral stance, which helps to mitigate awkward questions of government mission and political coherence in the domestic sphere. The contrast between the moral certainty possible in selected areas of foreign policy and the uncertainties of domestic policy making was unintentionally highlighted when President George Bush congratulated Tony Blair on his willingness to take a stand over Afghanistan and Iraq: ‘The thing I admire about this Prime Minister is that he doesn’t need a poll or a focus group to convince him of the difference between right and wrong’ (Bush 2002). Tony Blair, like Bush himself, of course relies heavily on polls and focus groups for every domestic initiative. It is only in the sphere of foreign policy that it appears that there are opportunities for Western leaders to project a self-image of purpose, mission and political clarity. The debacle of intervention and occupation in Iraq has made little difference to the importance of the international sphere, namely the new centrality of Africa at inter-governmental forums and particularly the Blair/Brown leadership in the United Kingdom (see for example, the 2005 report of Blair’s Commission for Africa, CFA, 2005).

Humanitarian Intervention The problem with humanitarian intervention in the late 1990s, exemplified in the NATO-led war over Kosovo, was that while the doctrine could serve to facilitate the exercise of US power and to overcome the formal barriers posed by the existing framework of international politics and international law, it was unable to create any positive framework of legitimisation. Rather than resolving the domestic political malaise, foreign activism tended to export the problem to the international sphere. Coker argues that the reason for this is that the doctrine of humanitarianism offers no positive view of the future – there is no mission or political project that transcends the present. Humanitarian intervention is a doctrine of crisis management, which, lacking any historical perspective, becomes a slave of contingency, based on responding to emergency: ‘And emergency does not constitute the first stage of a project of meaning: it represents its active negation’ (Coker 2001: 157). The doctrine of humanitarian intervention enabled the United States to project its power internationally, but did not operate as a source of meaning. The dualism of ‘human rights and human wrongs’ had a strong negative pole but no positive

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substance (Badiou 2001). The prevention of conflict and the protection of victims of human rights abuses became an end in itself rather than part of a broader political or ideological project. David Rieff highlights the problem with taking the ideological vision out of international intervention and the projection of power: I think you can have just wars that don’t have a humanitarian basis. One of the ways the conception of humanitarianism is being bent completely out of shape, losing its specific gravity to use another image, is that suddenly we talk about everything in humanitarian terms. My friend Ronnie Brauman at MSF France says if Auschwitz happened today they would call it a humanitarian emergency. We can have a just war without there being a humanitarian emergency. Indeed the opposite is true. In this sense the Left is surely correct. Wars tend to exacerbate humanitarian crises not improve them, that’s the nature of war. So already it’s a fantasy. (Rieff 2002)

The project of exercising power abroad through ‘humanitarian intervention’ was shot through with contradictions. As Rieff suggests, the project of ‘ethical’ foreign policy was a fallacy; it was impossible to develop a coherent political strategy based purely on prevention. No matter how many countries were intervened against, there could be no victory or lasting success. The logic of a consistent ethical foreign policy would be an untenable ‘war without end’ and the breakdown of the mechanisms holding together international society. The ideal of preventing human rights abuse or conflict, like preventing domestic crime, cannot be achieved by policing and punishment. To cite Coker: Victory is no longer an objective. Postmodern societies do not fight wars to secure a final peace; they use war to manage insecurity . . . Wars are no longer wars, they are police actions. For there is no ‘peace’, no world order, no imperial mission, only the endless prospect, to quote President Clinton, of ‘a world in which the future will be threatened’. (Coker 2001: 163)

Rather than projecting power in a way which could reinstate a national vision, the predominant image of humanitarian intervention was one of weakness. The defining motifs are not ones of US strength and power – most manifest in the bombing of a major European capital, Belgrade – but weakness in failing to intervene in Rwanda and failing to act decisively in Bosnia until it was too late. The humanitarian framework made the aggressive assertion of US power appear contentless, without meaning and long-term justification. Even Kosovo, the leading example of intervention for moral values, is seen as a failure, merely encouraging, or being powerless to stop, the ‘reverse’ ethnic cleansing of the Serb minority. The problems of the Balkans appeared to remain the same; all that had changed was the pecking order. The most ardent advocates of humanitarian intervention, as symbolic of a new sense of Western political identity and moral vision, were caught in a bind. On the one hand they insisted that governments should be willing to sacrifice their own troops for a ‘just’ cause, on the other hand, they had no political framework to justify such a sacrifice. It was as if just acting in a morally committed manner could become a replacement for a grand mission. The key issue was the demonstration of social commitment and engagement rather than the exercise of power in itself.

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Going to war was no longer enough to restore a sense of moral mission; the public had to be galvanised too. In Britain, strident interventionists like Mary Kaldor argued that military action was not enough to give a sense of meaning to humanitarian intervention. Rather than just focus on bombs, the government needed to work on the ‘home front’ to convince the public on the question ‘whether it is acceptable to sacrifice national lives for the sake of people far away’ (Kaldor 1999: 130). David Rieff emphasised the need for the US government to involve the public in ‘a truly democratic debate’ about the ‘kind of world the United States wants . . . and what it is willing to sacrifice . . . to achieve its goals’ (Rieff 1999). Rieff and others bemoaned ‘the indifference with which the American and Western European public lethargically assented to the Kosovo war, always providing, that is, that there were no casualties on our side’ (Rieff 2000). Perhaps the most trenchant criticism of the US government’s failure to use humanitarian intervention to forge a new national vision came from Michael Ignatieff. The title to his book on Kosovo, Virtual Wars, highlights the problem (Ignatieff 2000). Unlike wars of the past, Ignatieff argues, Kosovo failed to mobilise or cohere society and offer people ‘a moment of ecstatic moral communion with fellow citizens’ (Ignatieff 2000: 186). The public were alienated and uninvolved: [Citizens of NATO countries] were mobilised, not as combatants but as spectators. The war was a spectacle: it aroused emotions in the intense but shallow way that sports do. The events were as remote from their essential concerns as a football game . . . commitment is intense but also shallow. (Ignatieff 2000: 3–4)

While the pro-war advocates wanted the moral mission abroad to have an impact at home, their moralisation of conflict illustrated just how deep the problems were. Even though there was little domestic opposition to the principle of military intervention, the impact of the Culture Wars weighed heavily in the domestic focus on military strategy, on the methods and practices of the intervening forces. A moral debate that started with the ‘human wrongs’ committed by the Milomevi^ government was soon transformed into a critique of NATO strategy, the accidental or ‘collateral’ killing of civilians and the reluctance of the US government to commit ground troops, which it was held may have minimised the deaths of non-combatants. The argument that US and British lives could not be treated as if they were more valuable than those of Bosnian, Albanian or Rwandan people demonstrated the difficulty of exorcising the ghost of Vietnam – of asserting a new national interest or identity through the humanitarian framework. Rather than winning wars, the moral mission of humanitarian intervention was self-defeating in its inevitable questioning of any strident use of power. As the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty notes, traditional warfighting was no longer possible as ‘democratic societies that are sensitive to human rights and the rule of law will not long tolerate the pervasive use of overwhelming military power’ (ICISS 2001a: 62). While the cause was popular, governments themselves achieved little moral authority. It was the humanitarian NGOs who gained legitimacy from the militarisation of humanitarianism rather than the military. The British Army could gain little credibility as the ‘military wing of Oxfam’ when military means were now

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seen as ethically suspect (Norton-Taylor 2000). After Kosovo, the concept of fighting war for humanitarian reasons was increasingly treated with scepticism by both governments and humanitarian organisations.4 Rather than addressing the domestic malaise, through providing a framework for the coherent projection of power, the doctrine of humanitarian intervention proved only to have intensified it. The War on Terror It appeared as if the horrific events of 9/11 would rewrite the norms and practices of international society and provide the ‘defining paradigm’ missing from ‘the global order’ since the end of the Cold War (e.g., Booth and Dunne 2002: ix). The doctrine of humanitarian intervention had exposed the United States to accusations of double standards and given the moral high ground to aid agencies rather than military forces. In the wake of 9/11 the US government had the opportunity to regain the moral mantle. In a world of victim politics, the United States could at last claim to be a victim itself. In the words of Martin Shaw, the United States and Britain now had the ‘moral capital’ they needed to overcome the legacy of Empire and tackle the Culture Wars at home and abroad (Shaw 2001). Initially, Bush and Blair were upbeat about the possibilities for developing a new vision of the future. For the hawks in the US establishment, 9/11 provided the legitimacy to project US power in a more confident way and long-term plans for war on Iraq were already considered on that day (Goldenberg and Borger 2003). US Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, recognised from the beginning that the ‘war against terrorism’ was an opportunity to restore what America had lost in Vietnam. As Maureen Dowd noted in the New York Times: The administration isn’t targeting Iraq because of 9/11. It’s exploiting 9/11 to target Iraq. This new fight isn’t logical – it’s cultural. It is the latest chapter in the culture wars, the conservative dream of restoring America’s sense of Manifest Destiny . . . Extirpating Saddam is about proving how tough we are to a world that thinks we got soft when that last helicopter left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975. (Dowd 2002)

This confidence was most manifest in Tony Blair’s triumphant speech to the Labour Party conference in October 2001: The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause. This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us . . . (Blair 2001b)

While the United States and British establishments talked a good ‘war against terrorism’, they found it much more difficult to fight one in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Without a prior consensus on national purpose, or a strong ‘idea of the state’ (Buzan 1991) – a sense of what society stands for – foreign wars can do little to rejuvenate a collective sense of national identity. In fact, in this sense the ‘war on terror’ has clearly been counterproductive for the British government. In the

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aftermath of the 7/7 transport bombings in London, carried out by disaffected British subjects, the question of British identity and national cohesion has been even more sharply posed. Attempts to project military power abroad have revealed increasing divisions within the British and US establishments and highlighted that today even professional soldiers are often reluctant to make sacrifices without a national vision which they can find a collective meaning in (Josar 2003). This ‘postmodern’ malaise, the contrast between the vast material and military power of the US and UK governments and their inability to internally generate a strong sense of political legitimacy and a shared framework of identity and meaning, was most apparent in the US government’s orders that US soldiers should not raise the Stars and Stripes as they swept though Iraq (Grigg 2003, Watt 2003) and in the British government’s decision not to hold a ‘Victory Parade’ in the wake of the military success (White 2003, see also NYT 2003). Far from providing a sense of purpose, lacking in the domestic sphere, the ‘war on terror’ has heightened the domestic sense of uncertainty. With US and British society regularly disrupted by panics over the next potential terrorist 9/11 – which could include anything from hijacked planes being flown into nuclear plants to dirty bombs or releases of anthrax, botchulism, ricin, smallpox and other potential deadly toxins – governments increasingly appear unable to assert authority. Rather than creating a sense of mission, the ‘war on terror’ has fed society-wide views of vulnerability and powerlessness, as witnessed by regular public panics over everything from child obesity to avian flu. The inability to establish a political project which can cohere society at home has meant that the projection of power abroad can no longer be cast within a framework of national interest with states setting a clear agenda. It seems that the ‘war against terror’ has cast marginal fundamentalist terror groups in the role of agenda-setters in the same way as ‘humanitarian intervention’ gave an exaggerated importance to ‘principled issue’ NGOs. While it may appear that nation states are losing their capacity to assert their national interests and that non-state actors are in the driving seat, this chapter suggests that the level of appearances may well confuse cause with effect.

Conclusion The ‘war on terror’ clearly highlights the problems of articulating a national interest in international or domestic politics, even for the most powerful state in the world. The projection of power internationally by the United States and its allies appears to have no more connection to ‘narrowly defined’ national interests than the domestic exercise of power by leading Western governments. At the empirical level, it would seem that the advocates of ‘postmodern’ values and a new liberal internationalism have a valid point which critics of Great Power interests behind international intervention would be churlish to ignore. This paper has suggested, however, that the explanation for this shift away from the articulation of national interests cannot be found in the international sphere. If international intervention is in part driven by attempts to address the domestic

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political malaise, or Culture Wars in the United States, it would seem that it is important to analyse the international from the ‘inside/out’. Rather than international intervention illustrating a shift away from national interests, it is suggested here that the opposite relationship is in play. The international sphere has become the testing ground through which new attempts have been made to recreate a sense of a shared domestic political project. In this sense the Culture Wars would appear to have played an important role in shaping the projection of national power abroad. While the liberal internationalists aspired to create a new collective national identity based on cosmopolitan citizenship, the US hawks have attempted to ‘stomp on Saddam to exorcise the spectres of Vietnam and Watergate’ and restore a past sense of traditional moral authority (Dowd 2002). Whether the leaders of the Western world choose to wage war in favour of ethical relativism or against it, the search for a domestic vision through international intervention has consistently been a destabilising and destructive one. Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter appears in International Politics, 41, (2004). 2 This paper concerns the shift in government emphasis and public perceptions, As Chris Brown notes, foreign policy making has always been shaped by broader concerns than those of narrow selfinterest. The framework of international law and diplomacy, for example, depends on states upholding shared international norms and values (Brown, 2001: 24–26). 3 As Hedley Bull noted, international law and the system of the reciprocal rights of state sovereignty ‘assume a situation in which no one power is preponderant in strength’; otherwise international law and sovereign rights can be disregarded with impunity (Bull 1995: 112; see also Holbrook, 2000: 140). 4 The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty recommends rejecting the concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’ on the basis that success is easier to achieve if military action is legitimised for ‘protection’ rather than humanitarian purposes. Otherwise intervention can easily be discredited through the ‘tough choices’ and ‘short-and long-term trade offs’ which have to be made between effective military action and humanitarian assistance. See, for example, ICISS 2001a: 61and 2001b: 368, for an example of the disillusionment of humanitarian agencies see Vaux 2001: 202.

Bibliography Badiou, Alain (2001) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil , London: Verso. Bell, Daniel D. (1975) ‘The end of American exceptionalism’, The Public Interest,.41: 193–224. Blair, Tony (2001a) ‘Speech to the House of Commons’, 14 September. Available from: www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4257319,00.html Blair, Tony (2001b) ‘Speech to the Labour Party Conference’, 2 October. Available from: http:// politics.guardian.co.uk/labour2001/story/0,1414,562007,00.html Booth, Ken (1995) ‘Human wrongs and international relations’, International Affairs, 71 (1): 103–26. Booth, Ken and Dunne, Tim (2002) Preface, in Ken Booth and Tim Dunne (eds) Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of the Global Order, London: Palgrave. Brown, Chris (2001) Ethics, interests and foreign policy, in Karen E. Smith and Margot Light (eds) Ethics and Foreign Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 15–32. Bull, Hedley (1995) The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, second edition, London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Bush, George W. (2001a) ‘Speech to the US Congress’, 20 September. Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4261868,00.html

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Bush, George W. (2001b) ‘President Bush announces military strikes in Afghanistan’, 7 October. Available from: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2001/10/mil-011007usia01.htm Bush, George W. (2002) ‘PM meets President Bush for Talks’, Press Conference: Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George Bush, 6 April. Newsroom, 10 Downing Street. Available from: http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page4757.asp Bush, George W. (2005) ‘Inauguration Speech transcript: “No justice without freedom” ’, Washington, 20 January. Available at: http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/20/bush. transcript/ Buzan, Barry (1991) People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, second edition, London: Longman. Callinicos, Alex (2002) ‘The actuality of imperialism’, Millennium, 31 (2): 319–26. CFA (2005) Our Common Interest, Commission for Africa, 11 March. Available at: http://www.commissionforafrica.org/english/report/introduction.html Chandler, David (2000) ‘International justice’, New Left Review, 2 (6): 55–66. Chandler, David (2002) From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention, London: Pluto. Chomsky, Noam (1999) The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo, London: Pluto Press. Coker, Christopher (2001) The United States and the ethics of post-modern war, in Karen E. Smith and Margot Light (eds) Ethics and Foreign Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 147–166. Cooper, Robert (2002) The post-modern state, in Mark Leonard (ed.) Reordering the World, London: The Foreign Policy Centre: 11–20. Dowd, Maureen (2002) ‘Culture war with B-2s’, New York Times, 22 September. Forsythe, David P. (2000) Human Rights in International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldenberg, Suzanne and Borger, Julian (2003) ‘How Cheney’s revelation led to the point of no return’, Guardian, 17 January. Gowan, Peter (1999) The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance, London: Verso. Grigg, William N. (2003) ‘Rallying ‘Round What Flag?’, New American, 19(8) 21 April. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2000) Empire,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Himmelfarb, Gertrude (1999) One Nation, Two Cultures, New York: Knopf. Holbrook, Jon (2002) ‘Humanitarian intervention and the recasting of international law’, in David Chandler (ed.) Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics, London: Palgrave: 136–54. ICISS (2001a) International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect, Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. ICISS (2001b) International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect: Research, Bibliography, Background, Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. Ignatieff, Michael (2000) Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, London: Chatto & Windus. Josar, David (2003) ‘Voices on the ground’, Stars and Stripes, 15 October. Kaldor, Mary (1999) New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Cambridge: Polity Press. Klug, Francesca (2000) Values for a Godless Age: The Story of the UK’s New Bill of Rights, London: Penguin. Norton-Taylor, Richard (2000) ‘From killing to cuddling’, Guardian, 17 August. NSS (2002) The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Available from: http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss3.html Nye Joseph, S. (2002) The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone, New York: Oxford University Press. NYT (2003) ‘Pentagon’s heart not in New York’s ticker tape parade’, New York Times, 5 May. Rieff, David (1999) ‘A new hierarchy of values and interests’, World Policy Journal, 16 (3): 28–34. Rieff, David (2000) ‘The necessity of war’, Book Reviews, Los Angeles Times, 3 September. Rieff, David (2002) ‘David Rieff, Author of a Bed for the Night talks with Robert Birnbaum’. Posted 20 November. Available from: http://www.identitytheory.com/printme/rieffprint.html

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Risse, Thomas and Sikkink, Kathryn (1999) The socialization of international human rights norms into domestic practices: introduction, in Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp and Kathryn Sikkink (eds) The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1–38. Schwarz, Benjamin (2000) ‘Round Three: Concluding Remarks’. Roundtable: Picking a Good Fight, Atlantic, 14 April. Available from: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/roundtable/goodfight/ schwarz3 Shaw, Martin (2001) ‘Hard heads, soft liberals’, Letters, Guardian, 1 November. Shaw, Martin (2002) ‘Post-imperial and quasi-imperial: state and empire in the global era’, Millennium, 31 (2): 327–336. Solana, Javier (2003) ‘A Secure Europe in a Better World’, European Council, Thessaloniki, 20 June. Available at: http://ue.eu.int/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/EN/reports/76255.pdf Tyson, A. Scott (2002) ‘Invading Iraq: would the public go along’, Christian Science Monitor, 17 July.Vaux, Tony (2001) The Selfish Altruist: Relief Work in Famine and War, London: Earthscan. Watt, Nicholas (2003) ‘Americans raise hackles by flying stars and stripes in Iraq’, Guardian, 22 March. Wendt, Alexander (1992) ‘Anarchy is what states make of it: the social construction of power politics’, International Organization, 46 (2): 391–425. White, Michael (2003) ‘Downing Street rules out victory parade’, Guardian, 10 May.

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12 Australians in Guantanamo Bay: Gradations of Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging By Zlatko Skrbim Introduction Australia has been one of the key US allies in the war in Iraq. In this context, the Australian–US relationship has been the subject of heated debate and politicking, which range from accusations that Australia’s Prime Minister is ‘the lap dog of President Bush’ (Reynolds 2003) to President Bush’s semi-humourous, controversial call that Australia is the United States’ ‘deputy sheriff’ in the South East Asian region (Kelly 2003).1 For the Australian government, the War on Terror has been a major device through which Australia’s place in the world is imagined, and it has responded to the new geopolitical realities of the post-9/11 world by appealing to its citizenry to stay alert and report anything considered suspicious. Australian participation in the Coalition of the Willing and its connection with the War on Terror is multi-layered and extends from regular political exchanges with the United States at the highest levels, to Australian military involvement in Iraq. One of the side-products of the War on Terror is the US government’s use of the off-shore facility in Guantanamo Bay to process suspected terrorists. This paper concerns two Australian citizens, detained in Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on suspicion of terrorist activity.2 The first Australian prisoner in detention in Cuba was Mamdouh Habib, a naturalised Australian citizen, arrested on the Afghani–Pakistani border in October 2001 by the Pakistani police while reportedly seeking an appropriate school for his children (Kremmer 2002: 1). Following the alleged request of the US authorities (Special Broadcasting Service 2004), he was transferred to Egypt, his country of birth (but not citizenship), and then to Afghanistan before finally being officially handed over to the US Army a few months later. The news of his arrest was first published in the Australian media nearly three months later, on 19 January 2002. Habib has never been charged and was released on 28 January 2005. The second prisoner is Australian-born David Hicks, a Muslim convert who fought with Taliban in Afghanistan, until he was captured by the soldiers of the Northern Alliance on 9 December 2001. The news of his arrest broke out only four days later. Hicks has been in US detention at Guantanamo Bay since January 2002. In June 2004, the Pentagon charged Hicks with conspiracy, attempted

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murder by an unprivileged belligerent and aiding the enemy (Dalton and Wiese Bockmann 2004). The charges against him also include allegations that he met al-Qa’ida leader Osama bin Laden. Both Habib and Hicks have alleged being tortured at Guantanemo Bay, while Habib also claims to have been subjected to sexual humiliation on various occasions during his detention (Eccleston 2005: 17). These allegations are consistent with reports, denied by the US government, that the United States engages in ‘torture by proxy’, whereby suspected terrorists are transferred to countries that use torture as a means of interrogating prisoners (The Australian, 15 November 2005). This chapter does not concern the allegations of abuse, nor does it address the question of whether or not Habib and Hicks are guilty of suspected terrorist activities. Instead, this chapter explores ways in which the stories of these two Australians have been covered in the Australian media – particularly the print media.3 I became drawn to the media coverage of Habib and Hicks’ stories through my initial observation that the media tended, not only to report the case of the Australian-born Hicks more frequently, but also to present Hicks as the ‘public face’ of the Australian presence in Guantanamo Bay. The issue of Australians being detained at Guantanamo Bay was commonly reduced to the ‘Hicks problem’, and Hicks grabbed most of the headlines, while Habib tended to be rendered marginal, if not invisible.4 There were many other instances where Hicks’ name was used to symbolically represent the Australian presence at Guantanamo Bay. By mid-2004, this discrepancy in the treatment of Habib and Hicks become so obvious that the ABC journalist Nolan (2004) declared Mamdouh Habib to be ‘the forgotten Australian held in US custody at Guantanamo Bay’. The impression that Hicks was systematically given more media coverage than Habib was confirmed when I subjected the print media to a rather basic empirical test. I performed a ‘key word’ search of a selected number of Australian print media through the LexisNexis database. I sought to establish how often Habib’s and Hicks’ names appeared in the sections of the newspaper articles designed to flag the topic and capture the attention of the reader: the headline and lead paragraph. The preliminary results showed systematic under-representation of Habib (Skrbim 2003).5 Following Habib’s release from Guantanamo Bay on 28 January 2005, I repeated the analysis, covering the entire period between the first mention of their detention in the Australian media to the date of Habib’s release. This time I conducted a key word analysis by using the Factiva database, again limiting the exercise to a mixture of Australian newspapers and specified time periods. Consistent with my previous findings, the results showed a clear repetition of the trend detected in my initial analysis, indicating a systematic discrepancy in the media representation between Hicks and Habib. It transpired that in a twenty-fourmonth period since the news of their capture was published in the media, Habib received approximately one-third of the coverage allocated to Hicks (see Appendix 1). What is most noticeable is the large discrepancy of hits in the first six-month period in favour of Hicks. Furthermore, there has been much coverage of Habib’s case in the lead up to his release in January 2005 but this made no significant impact on the overall statistics.

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The Habib/Hicks comparison has some interesting parallels with the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch from a hospital in Nasiriyah, Iraq, in early 2003. After her ‘rescue’ and in a stage-managed fashion, Lynch was paraded in the media and came to embody the fighting spirit of the American army. She was presented as a dignified soldier who would make every American patriot proud. Lynch became an instant, although somewhat reluctant, media celebrity, complete with stickers, ‘America loves Jessica’ fridge magnets, T-shirts and mugs. She has her own biography, entitled I am a Soldier, Too (Bragg 2004), she is in much demand as a public speaker, she received a Glamour magazine award in 2003 and is keen to mix with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Britney Spears (Cock 2004). What is perhaps less known is that five other American soldiers were rescued along with Lynch. One of them was a 30-year old non-white, Specialist Shoshana Johnson. Johnson, despite similar injuries, service record and experience of captivity, remained in the shadows of Lynch, received fewer honours and a drastic 50% less recognition of disability (Douglas 2003a). The same gender, the same predicament, the same 507th Maintenance Company, similar injuries, yet different colour. Given the politics of race in the United States, it is perhaps not surprising that it was Lynch’s, not Johnson’s, image that was used to capture the imagination of the public (Douglas 2003b). One could similarly argue that there is little to separate Habib and Hicks. Clearly, they had much in common during the period of captivity: gender, a rather complicated legal predicament, citizenship, religion, and the country of residence. Yet, the discrepancies in the media treatment of Habib and Hicks were undeniable. This chapter is an attempt to interrogate a discourse that accepts and reproduces – often unintentionally – such differential treatments. The distinctions are often subliminal, but I suggest that they are revealing of the contested representations of Australian identity, masculinity and the politics of ethnicity and citizenship. Why was David Hicks used by the media as an example of the Australian presence in Guantanamo throughout the period under consideration in this chapter? Why did Habib, in comparison, occupy the margins? This differential symbolic appropriation reveals complex hierarchies of belonging to an Australian community, with notions of ethnicity, religion and citizenship all playing a part. Furthermore, the reasons for these differences are rooted in historically embedded notions of Australian identity that have preoccupied generations of scholars (Ward 1966, White 1981, Phillips and Smith 1992, Whitlock and Carter 1992). Additionally, and more importantly for the present analysis, one needs to take into account the most recent historical context which situates the stories of Habib and Hicks not only vis-à-vis the War on Terror but also in the specific social microclimate that frames contemporary Australian understandings of terrorism, Islam and Arabness. Providing this context is the task of the next section.

Situating Habib and Hicks Australia prides itself on its ethnic and cultural diversity and acceptance of difference. Its multiculturalism, although real at the level of basic policy principles

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and demographic fact, is commonly used for public displays of ethnic, cultural and religious harmony. The Sydney Olympic opening ceremony in 2000 displayed such multiculturalism, embedded as it were, in hegemonic white masculinities and working-class ethos (Hogan 2003). In practice, however, these idealised demonstrations of Australian identity and diversity are punctured with issues of historical injustice, dispossession, marginalisation and discrimination of its indigenous and ethnic minorities. At the time of the announcement of the War on Terror, which followed the events of 9/11, Australia was grappling with its own local set of issues related to the politics of diversity. The rise of Pauline Hanson and her populist One Nation Party in the late 1990s mobilised the right-wing vote by using an image of an essentialised Australian identity constructed as continuously threatened, Christian, fair and monocultural. More specifically, the Australia of her parlance was seen as being under siege from Asian and Muslim migrants who, in addition to Indigenous people, welfare recipients and the like, came to personify a threat to the very fabric of Australian society (Rapley 1998). Despite the rapid rise and fall of Pauline Hanson and her party, the populist sentiment that she embodied has gradually moved into the political mainstream, driven by a moral panic surrounding a number of issues that came to prominence in the period preceding, and immediately following, 9/11. Two events, discussed here briefly, have been particularly important in driving these sentiments: first, the fear of refugees invading our shores and, second, the moral panic surrounding incidents of purportedly systematic rape of Australian women by Lebanese gangs. The fear of aliens invading Australia’s shore is not new. In the post-World War Two period, the first Minister of Immigration, Arthur Calwell (1972), saw the possibility of invasion from the North as the main rationale for the project of peopling the Australian continent. This same fear resurfaced prominently in the 1970s when the first boats of Vietnamese refugee migrants landed on Australia’s shores (Viviani 1978). Approximately two decades later, in the second half of 1999, the media was full of inflated reports of a supposedly endless stream of asylum seekers, usually described as being of ‘Middle Eastern’ appearance (Poynting 2002). In August of 2001, in a highly publicised event, the MV Tampa, a Norwegian freighter, rescued a boatload of refugees from a sinking vessel. These refugees were later, on the insistence of the Australian government, sent to the island country of Nauru (Crock and Saul 2002). This practice draws on the US experience of off-shore processing in Guantanamo Bay and Panama (Pickering 2005: 119). Two months later, on 6 October 2001, an Australian military vessel came to the rescue of an unseaworthy boat with more than 200 refugees (Pickering 2005: 74–81). The video taken by navy personnel showed children in the water. The government bureaucrat, and later the Prime Minister and the Defence Minister, used these images as an indication of the immorality of the refugees, throwing their children into the water in order to prevent their boat being turned back. These assertions have since been proven false (Senate Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident 2002, quoted in Poynting 2002). These two incidents became known as the ‘Tampa crisis’ and the ‘children overboard’ affair respectively. In both cases, the boat people of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’

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(Collins et al. 2000) came to epitomise the threat to Australian stability, sovereignty and territorial integrity and were presented as morally corrupt and unworthy, not only of stepping onto Australian soil but also of being accepted into the Australian community. The second case relates to the incidence of several serious group sexual assaults in Sydney’s suburb of Bankstown – a suburb with a high proportion of Lebanese immigrants. The newspapers sensationalised the news of the rapes, with politicians, police representatives and the media blaming organised Lebanese gangs for these attacks against Caucasian women. This distinction between ‘ordinary’ and ‘racially motivated’ rape curiously resembles the moral panic surrounding the purportedly systematic raping of Serb women by Kosovo Albanian men before the break-up of Yugoslavia (Mepnari- 1994). Although the Australian media initially reported over 70 incidents of gang rape, the number was later downgraded to 15. The perpetrators were four young men of Lebanese background but born and educated in Australia (Manning 2004: 29). However deplorable, these incidents of rape have been used to hold a group, in the public eyes closely linked with religion and ethnicity, responsible for behaviour that was seen as distinctly un-Australian. In these cases, the focus was completely on ethnicity and religion rather than any other relevant factors, such as, for example class or unemployment. Furthermore, no consideration was given to the fact that ‘the recorded rate of sexual assault involving multiple offenders is not as high in Bankstown as it is in several other areas of the state’ (NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, reported in Manning 2004: 30–31). In both these cases, it was Muslims who were singled out and the events of 9/11 have only hardened anti-Muslim sentiments further: ‘Whatever tiny shred of goodwill that still existed in this country towards Muslim Australians’, wrote the newspaper commentator at the time, ‘probably disappeared at the same time the first hijacked passenger jet smashed into the World Trade Centre’ (Penberthy 2001). The stories of Habib and Hicks thus emerge against a background of discourse that collectively positioned terrorists, Muslims, Arabs and people of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’ as potentially dangerous, and harbouring resentment against everything decent, proper and ‘Australian’. Such sentiments have not always remained at the level of discourse, as they were paralleled with a steady increase in the number of racially motivated attacks on Arab and Muslim Australians (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 2004).

The Contested Notions of Australianness, Citizenship and Belonging: Constructing the Terrorist Transgression Although the commonalities that Habib and Hicks share are great – gender, citizenship and religion – they are, paradoxically, also the main sources of their differential treatment. I argue that their radically different construction in the media stems from specific and culture-laden appropriations of various elements of their Australianness. Australians are prone to continuously re-examine their national identity. As mentioned earlier, questions of Australian identity and ‘who’ and ‘what’ is an

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Australian have preoccupied many scholars, including historians, cultural studies specialists, literary critics and journalists. The image of a typical Australian is regularly constructed – ranging from White’s (1981) ‘practical man [sic!], rough and ready in his manners’ . . . a great improviser, ever willing ‘to have a go’ at anything . . . swears hard and consistently, gambles heavily and often, and drinks deeply on occasion’, to the ‘drinking, fighting, gambling’-prone Australian mate, described by Kapferer (1988: 178). There is much in the Australian literature to choose from on this topic. One of the more recent attempts to understand popular perceptions of ‘Australianness’ comes from two articles by Phillips and Smith (2000) and Smith and Phillips (2001), both based on focus group research involving various groups of Australians, divided by class, ethnicity and age.6 In the first article on ‘What is “Australian”?’ Phillips and Smith (2000: 221) found a surprising persistence of ‘traditional’ understandings about what constitutes Australianness across all groups of research participants. In contrast to claims that old and traditional elements and images of Australian national identity are gradually becoming obsolete, the ideas of mateship, a fair go, beach, casual lifestyle and barbecues, have been found to continually define the everyday sense of Australianness. Like ‘cricket, thongs and Vegemite’ – a combination of typical Australian notions – they represent a specific ‘Australian cultural accent’ (Fiske et al. 1987), as well as Australian suburbanism and mediocrity (Horne 1964). In an interesting inversion of this focus on positive carriers and symbols, the second article by Smith and Phillips (2001) looks at the notion of Australianness from the opposite angle, by attempting to understand which people, organisations, activities and events, places and values, beliefs and lifestyles are considered un-Australian. This is no place to reproduce the findings but participants in the research recognised ethnic clubs and migrant communities (including Muslim) and forms of ethnic and religious separatism as un-Australian. Among values, beliefs and lifestyles deemed un-Australian, extremism, racism and intolerance featured prominently. Interestingly, however, Pauline Hanson, a populist politician who made her career by promoting anti-immigration and anti-indigenous sentiments, featured prominently in a group of un-Australian people. How do these understandings of (un)Australianness help us to understand the differential treatment of Hicks and Habib? The focus groups that Phillips and Smith (2000) and Smith and Phillips (2001) are referring to were undertaken before 9/11, so it is not surprising that the notion of terrorism does not feature prominently. However, the negativity associated with the concepts of ‘extremism’, ‘fanaticism’ and ‘Muslim groups’ (Smith and Phillips 2001) shows that by the virtue of Hicks’ and Habib’s actions, they have positioned themselves as multiple transgressors against the accepted norms defining Australianness. This is precisely what Australian Foreign Minister Downer meant when he responded to allegations of abuse against Habib and Hicks that ‘we don’t want to see Australians abused.’ And then immediately added: ‘We don’t go out of our way to . . . put in a good word for people who have been participating in al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda related activities’ (Brown 2004). Although both Habib and Hicks are outcasts of a sort, they are experiencing this status in rather different ways, both culturally and institutionally. By virtue of

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his migrant status, Habib’s Australianness is more problematic and more easily questionable than Hicks’. Much of the media reporting, particularly in the early stages of his captivity, tended to evoke Habib’s dual nationality even though his Australian lawyer has been at pains to emphasise that his client in fact renounced his Egyptian citizenship when he took up the Australian one (Nolan 2004). The news breaking the story about Habib tended to be rather cautious on the topic of his Australianness; instead it focused on his dual citizenship, which was allegedly responsible for the failure of Australian authorities to gain access to him or to confirm information about his capture (Jackman 2002: 11). Habib’s dual citizenship was consistently used to set the tone for reporting which was also a strategy that, perhaps unintentionally, emphasised his cultural otherness. His implied ethnic difference is not of the kind celebrated in multicultural festivals, nor is it befitting an increasingly important sociocultural dimension of citizenship which entails ‘a right to full cultural participation’ and, most importantly, ‘undistorted representation’ (Pakulski 1997). Habib has been portrayed as somebody who can not productively interrogate the difference between ancestral and adopted cultures – a civic-cultural misfit, inherently capable of betrayal and transgression. This is not simply a framing of Habib as an individual, but rather as a Muslim – a commonplace situation in Australia where Arabs, Muslims and people of Middle-Eastern appearance are commonly stereotyped as prone to deviance, amorality and crime (Collins et al. 2000, Poynting 2002). This means that the media contestation of Habib’s citizenship does not take place exclusively at the level of formal citizenship. The problem with Habib’s Australian citizenship is not that it has been withdrawn, but because Habib’s Australian citizenship is a consequence of naturalisation rather than birth, it is easily symbolically contested and retracted. In the past, such contestation has been referred to as a ‘Laszlo Toth syndrome’, after an Australian geologist, Laszlo Toth, who hammered Michelangelo’s sculpture, Pietà, in 1972. While unequivocally recognised as ‘Australian’ prior to the incident, reports after the incident described him as a ‘Hungarian carrying an Australian passport’ (Stephens 1998). So what is at stake here is not so much the formal citizenship status of Habib. In his classical account on the topic, Marshall (1950) showed that formal citizenship represents only one of its dimensions. What is far more important, as YuvalDavis (1997: 70) emphasises, is the capacity of citizenship to generate a sense of belonging. At another level, Habib’s experience usefully illustrates Ghassan Hage’s (1998: 50) distinction between formal citizenship and the significance of its practical deployment. Hage argues that there is an ‘incompatibility between the state’s formal acceptance of new citizens and the dominant community’s everyday acceptance of such people’. The crucial tension here is between the ‘formal’ and, what I propose to call the ‘social’ status of citizenship. Formal citizenship is static, whereas its social status is charged with normative and ever-changing notions of what constitutes the acceptable attributes of citizenship and belonging. It is in the domain of social citizenship where the notions of ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘Australian’ and ‘un-Australian’ play a defining role. Clearly, the attributes associated with un-Australianness are incompatible with the positive deployment of social citizenship, but they have no effect on formal citizenship.

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In terms of what I defined here as social citizenship, Habib faces an uphill battle in comparison with Hicks. Despite his Taliban transgressions, Hicks’ Australianness is seldom questioned. David Hicks’ attributes are clearly compatible with the notion of Australianness. ‘Captured Aussie fought for Taliban’ announced one newspaper (Dunn 2001) when the news about his capture broke. A few days later, another newspaper declared about Hicks: ‘True-blue Taliban to Face Trial at home’ (Eccleston 2001). The reference in the title to ‘true-blue’ is a play on the expression ‘true-blue Aussie’, and clearly positions Hicks as white Australian, alluding to his out-of-placeness among the Taliban and al-Qa’ida supporters. In the true spirit of the Australian passion for adventure, stories of his adventurous spirit abound, including his stint in the Kosovo Liberation Army during the recent Balkan conflict. The point about his passion for adventure is also the driving motive behind the documentary film about his life, in which his father Terry re-traces his son’s steps leading to his capture (The President Versus David Hicks 2003). The story that led to his capture by the US Army is suggestive of his adventurism, filled with notions of the strange exoticism of the journey. In newspaper reports, Hicks is described variously as ‘adventurer and former poultry processing worker’ (Debelle 2001: 1), as a ‘street kid-cum-jackaroo, horse trainer, Kosovo Liberation Army volunteer, chicken factory worker, Taliban supporter and alleged al-Qa’ida fighter’ (Williams 2002: 6), as a ‘former meatpacker, shark-catcher and jackaroo’ (Eccleston 2004:12) or as ‘a popular chicken boner’ (Duffy 2001: 5). A sense of adventure and restlessness – so typical of young Australians – clearly comes through in such stories. Former fellow Guantanamo Bay inmate Shafiq Rasul explained to The Observer that Hicks is ‘just a little guy with a very deep voice’. And there is no doubt about his identity because ‘If you met him you’d think he was the typical kind of Aussie you might see drinking Foster’s in a bar’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 15 March 2004). The reference to beer drinking, pub and ultimately Foster’s, represent a string of things (Foster’s beer), places (pub) and pursuits (drinking) that are commonly recognised as quintessentially Australian (Rickard 1996). Kapferer (1988: 156–57), for example, presents drinking as a key defining element of Australian masculinity, egalitarianism and mateship. The same point is made by Fiske et al. (1987) when they argue that the ‘populists defend the pub as the location of the authentic Australian values of mateship and egalitarianism’. This reference to alcohol drinking subverts the notion of Hicks as a Muslim, and a radical Muslim at that. Hicks’ relationship with Islam, after his conversion in 1999, is ambiguous (Debelle 2001: 1) and sits uneasily with his otherwise thoroughly Australian attributes. As indicated in the recent interview with his former inmate, Hicks ‘renounced Islam more than a year ago, was now beardless and no longer answered the call to prayer’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 15 March 2004). His fateful conversion to Islam can now be interpreted as an error of judgment, rather than resulting from deep conviction. He was, after all, ‘a lonely man seduced by religious fanaticism’ (Frenkel and de Kretser 2001: 2), which again subtly draws the connection between Islam and his adventure. The ultimate construction of Hicks as the epitome of Australianness comes in a set of articles reporting on Hicks’ first contact with the non-prison world since

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his arrest. The story in the main Australian daily stated that: When Adelaide Lawyer Stephen Kenny enters David Hicks’s cage at Guantanamo Bay tomorrow, he will bear gifts, including a jar of Vegemite, a box of chocolates and a book on blue-water fishing in Australia. (diGirolamo and Eccleston 2003: 5)

The report appeared under the heading ‘Hicks to Receive Vegemite and Hope’. Vegemite, the Antipodean equivalent of the UK Marmite, epitomises Australianness (‘as Australian as Vegemite’, the Australian saying goes); considering it is an acquired taste, this implies a natural, almost primordial affinity with Australian identity. Another source reported the same event as follows: Hicks’ Australian lawyer Stephen Kenny cooked his client a steak, brought him McDonald’s, and gave him a jar of Vegemite, chocolates from an Adelaide confectioner and a book on Australian fishing. (Larkin 2003)

Two more important dimensions are added in this instance: McDonald’s and the cooking of a steak. On the whole, this quote is almost a direct anti-thesis of everything that Hicks as an Islamic warrior represents. We do not learn how Hicks reacted to his McDonald’s meal, but McDonald’s is imbued with meanings and used to communicate, and perhaps appeal to, the inherent Westernness in Hicks. The alleged cooking of a steak suggests the Australian tradition of mateship and the sharing of meat around the barbeque. It is an evocation of egalitarianism and building of bonds in the semantics of Australian masculinity. Hicks was clearly transformed from terrorist suspect into a quintessential Australian in this incident: when the lawyer reportedly greeted him with ‘G’day mate’ (Sales 2003), through the gifts and in the process of steak cooking. The horizontal bondedness between Hicks and his lawyer is testimony to Hicks’ Australianness, which is further asserted in the reports of his larrikinism, which include ‘catching and killing mice’ in jail in order to occupy time, published under the heading ‘Hicks – “typical Australian” ’ (The Daily Telegraph, 15 March 2004) and teaching other prisoners to greet guards with ‘g’day mate’ (Williams 2002). The only – albeit indirect – exception to these representations of the quintessential Australianness of Hicks were protests against the attendance of Hicks’ father Terry at the site of Eureka Stockade battle (1854) in Ballarat, Victoria (Madden 2004: 2). Terry’s presence, as a father of a terrorist suspect, was deemed inappropriate even though his great-great grandfather was a miner at Eureka and a participant in the bloody battle. Apart from this event, the representations of Hicks in the media help us to imagine him as somebody from Australian suburbia with all the peculiarities and intricacies that go with the Australian character. Habib’s story not only receives less coverage in the media but he is also positioned outside the discourse preoccupied with Australianness. He is represented as unfitting from the start, beginning with a rather prominently displayed citizenship otherness. The reporting on Habib was dominated by references to his troubled personality. He was portrayed as a ‘vocal supporter of all sorts of radical causes’ and as ‘an alienated man, increasingly uneasy with life in Australia, who romanticised the strident defiance of groups such as the Taliban’ (Kremmer 2002: 6).

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In some newspaper reports, Habib is presented as a parody of decency and masculinity: ‘He is a disturbed man and he has psychological problems . . . he came in to my centre with a ninja (outfit) and a ninja hat’, said Sheikh Mohammad Omran (Stewart and Harris 2004: 4). In a documentary screened on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2004), another representative from the Sydney Muslim community says that he is a ‘disturbed man’ with a ‘big mouth’ (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2004), confirming Habib’s alienation from the mainstream Islamic community in Sydney. There are also reports that the Defence Housing Authority with which Habib had a cleaning contract, took out an apprehended violence order against him (Stewart and Harris 2004: 4). Hicks is continuously humanised and Australianised. His father Terry has a commanding media presence and has initiated a number of public actions to draw attention to the plight of his son. Terry Hicks’ campaign ‘Fair Go For David’ includes a regularly updated website (http://www.fairgofordavid.org/), complete with a call for donations and fundraising events which partly, in addition to a public grant, made filming the documentary about David Hicks possible (The President versus David Hicks 2003). Whereas Hicks is both humanised and Australianised, Habib’s major lobbyist is his wife Maha, an articulate Muslim woman, who did her best to humanise her husband’s plight. She orchestrated visible campaigns in favour of her husband, including a protest supported by the Green Parliamentary party during the visit of President Bush to Australia in October 2003, and played a prominent role in a documentary screened on an Australian television channel in July 2004 (Special Broadcasting Service 2004). Unlike with Hicks’ case, there was no specific website for Habib and no public fundraising appeals. Importantly, however, her visibility was limited and unable to crack the code of broad public appeal, precisely because she cannot appeal to the discourse of Australianness.

Conclusion This paper begins by asserting that Habib and Hicks have much in common, and yet the commonalities they share are simultaneously also the sites for generating difference. This case study reminds us of the gradations of citizenship and the symbolic limits of belonging. Citizenship that is supposed to unite and build ties of solidarity could be seen as being whimsically offered and retracted, depending on an individual’s perceived authenticity of belonging. In contrast to Habib, who as a Muslim appears to be implicitly constructed as un-Australian, ‘primordially inclined’ and ‘naturally susceptible’ to the attractions of fundamentalist transgressions, Hicks receives the treatment of a slightly irresponsible adventurer who saw his involvement with Islam as part of a journey to find life’s meaning. Such a portrayal implicitly selects to extend emotions of solidarity to a person who is more easily co-opted into the community of Australianness, characterised by shared and recognisible codes and symbols. There is no doubt that in Habib and Hicks we are dealing with rather complex personalities, but the point is that they have been projected differently through the

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media. Hicks’ complexities are considerably softened by evoking his Australian traits that generate sympathetic responses. His unusual behaviour, such as the killing of the mice, may be seen as a form of violence, but it could easily be constructed as semi-legitimate and consistent with the Hicks image of a rough jackaroo, who exercises survival skills when necessary. Habib, on the other hand, cuts a lonely figure in his alleged ninja outfit, which strips him of the remaining attributes of appropriateness and decency. This paper reveals ways in which media discourses utilise and enforce the cultural codes that are broadly associated with Australianness. This case study takes us beyond these individual cases and encourages us to think about the broader context in which these discourses are being deployed. In the world of media semantics that thrives on elements from the gallery of Australian traditional identity, Habib appears to be completely outside the frame of Australian semantic references, unable to appeal or to strike a cord with the imaginary associated with the Australian tradition. While Hicks is constructed within the recognisable and familiar frame of Australianness, Habib’s portrayal is very much an integral part of the contemporary ways of imagining Muslim identity in Australia – as negative, dangerous, transgressive and unpredictable (Poynting et al., 2004). It is an integral part of looking at identity through the lense of stereotypical constructions of otherness. It took the Irish 150 years to be seen as white in the United States and it took Italians about 100 years to be seen as non-smoked Irish (cf. Ignatiev 1995). There is hope perhaps that the lenses of ethnic stereotypes and prejudice will wither away before it is too late. APPENDIX 1 Key word analysis of articles in selected Australian newspapers (Factiva database) Selected newspapers: The Advertiser The Age The Australian The Courier Mail Daily Telegraph The Sydney Morning Herald Sunday Telegraph Restriction: Headline and lead paragraph

FIRST 6 MONTHS David Hicks (first reported in Australian media 13 December 2001) Search term: ‘David Hicks’ Range: 13 December 2001–13 June 2002 (first six months) Search Criteria: Headline and lead paragraph Hits: 437 (irrelevant items excluded) Mamdouh Habib Search term: ‘Habib’ (first reported in Australian media 19 January 2001) Range: 19 January 2002–19 July 2002 (first six months) Search Criteria: Headline and lead paragraph Hits: 86 (irrelevant items excluded)

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FIRST 12 MONTHS David Hicks Search term: ‘David Hicks’ Range: 13 December 2001–13 December 2002 (first twelve months) Search Criteria: Headline and lead paragraph Hits: 493 (irrelevant items excluded) Mamdouh Habib Search term: ‘Habib’ Range: 19 January 2002–19 January 2003 (first twelve months) Search Criteria: Headline and lead paragraph Hits: 102 (irrelevant items excluded)

FIRST 24 MONTHS David Hicks Search term: ‘David Hicks’ Range: 13 December 2001–13 December 2003 (first twelve months) Search Criteria: Headline and lead paragraph Hits: 730 (irrelevant items excluded) Mamdouh Habib Search term: ‘Mamdouh Habib’ Range: 19 January 2002–19 January 2003 (first twelve months) Search Criteria: Headline and lead paragraph Hits: 169 (excluding irrelevant items)

COMPLETE PERIOD UNDER INVESTIGATION David Hicks Search term: ‘David Hicks’ Range: 13 December 2001–28 January 2005 Search Criteria: Headline and lead paragraph 1200

1000

800

600

Habib Hicks

400

200

0 6 months

24 months

Figure 12.1 The number of hits during complete period under investigation (Hicks: 13 December 2001–28 January 2005; Habib 19 January 2002 – 28 January 2005)

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Hits: 1097 (irrelevant items excluded) Mamdouh Habib Search term: ‘Habib’ Range: 19 January 2002–28 January 2005 Search Criteria: Headline and lead paragraph Hits: 420 (irrelevant items excluded) Comment: 114 hits between 1 January – 28 January 2005

Habib Hicks

6 months

12 months

24 months

Complete period

91 437

120 493

288 730

420 1097

Notes 1 I wish to thank Scott Poynting for his comments on an earlier version of the chapter. 2 According to the recent fact sheet issued by the United States Department of Defense (2005: 1), the US Government ‘maintains custody of approximately 550 enemy combatants in the Global War on Terrorism at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba’. 3 So far, the question of Australian Guantanamo Bay prisoners has received very little attention as a topic of social analysis. The only exception is a short commentary by Wilson et al. (2004) that is largely concerned with the secrecy and orchestration of public consent through stage management of the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay. 4 An illustration of the invisibility and marginality of Habib has been clearly signalled at the July 2004 joint press conference of the American President George Bush and the Australian Prime Minister John Howard. To a journalist’s question about the decision on when Australian Guantanamo Bay prisoners will face trial, he responded: ‘Yes. It is my understanding that Hicks – the Hicks case will be referred to the military shortly; and that the other case is proceeding, as well.’ (The Australian 4 July 2004; emphasis is added.) 5 In this pilot experiment the search was limited to the categories ‘general news’, a pre-selected option ‘major Australian papers’, newspaper ‘headline’, ‘past two years’ and ‘Hicks’ and ‘Habib’. The data search revealed that Hicks’ name was mentioned over fifty times while Habib’s only six times. I further expanded the search to include ‘headline and lead paragraph’. When limiting my search to ‘Hicks’ and ‘Habib’, there were over 280 hits for the former and 62 for the latter. I say ‘over 280’ because although most results identified David Hicks, they nevertheless included a small number of unrelated identical terms. As a corrective, I employed more stringent criteria and used the full name ‘David Hicks’. The search yielded 146 results, which is still considerably more than the number of hits generated for Habib. Regardless of what search terms (e.g. including ‘Guantanamo Bay’, ‘terrorist’), time frames and news categories were used, the fundamental discrepancies of representation have remained the same. 6 The groups included the following categories of the population: regional city, urban blue collar, urban white collar, rural blue collar, urban elderly and non-English speaking women.

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13 ‘The Enemy of My Enemy is Not My Friend’: Women’s Rights, Occupation and ‘Reconstruction’ in Iraq By Nadje Al-Ali Introduction For those of us living in London, the bombings in the British capital brought home the daily violence, the horror and fear of millions of people living in many places around the world. For the first time, it was our relatives in Iraq who anxiously called to inquire about our health and well-being, and not the other way around as it has been the case for so long. At the time of writing this chapter, in the summer of 2005, Iraq must have been the most acutely dangerous place in terms of both occupation forces as well as militant resistance. Yet people in many other cities around the world have to live with that daily fear: whether in Baghdad, Ramallah, Grozny, Kabul or Darfur, violence is a daily burden on everyone’s mind, if not an actual occurrence. Although many friends I have been politically involved with in the context of anti-sanctions and anti-war activism agree that the so-called ‘war on terror’ can not be fought with bombs, only few seem to acknowledge that neither can we fight US imperialism with violence. This is particularly the case where most of the victims of this violence are innocent civilians. In Iraq, for example, thousands of men, women and children have been killed just because they happened to be passing by, or waiting at a petrol station, a market, a mosque, in front of a police station or a street at the wrong time. Can we call the killing of Iraqi civilians, foreign humanitarian workers (and, I would also add, diplomats) resistance? For me, the idea of these killings being a necessary if regrettable ‘by-product’ of the fight against imperialism is as twisted and perverse as the infamous statement by Madeline Albright about ‘a price worth paying’ when speaking about the thousands of Iraqi children dying in the context of economic sanctions and the attempt to contain Saddam Hussein. To make it very clear: in my activism and writings, I have been anti-sanctions, anti-war and anti-occupation. But being against, never meant automatically being for someone or something. That held true for the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in the past as well as for those fighters terrorising the Iraqi population today. What I have found so disheartening and frustrating when participating in anti-war and anti-occupation events during the past months is the black and white depiction of the world and the lack of clarity where the Iraqi resistance is concerned. At the

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World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul in June 2005, for example, almost every speaker either began or finished his or her talk with a similar statement: ‘We have to support the Iraqi resistance!’ Many speakers added that this was not just a matter of fighting the occupation inside Iraq but part of a wider struggle against encroaching neo-colonialism, neo-liberalism and imperialism. But none of the speakers explained to the jury of conscience, the audience and their fellow speakers what they actually meant by ‘the resistance’. No one felt it was necessary to differentiate between, on the one hand, the right of self-defence and the patriotic attempt to resist foreign occupation and, on the other, the unlawful indiscriminate killings of non-combatants. Neither did anyone question the motivations and goals of many of the numerous groups, networks, individuals and gangs grouped all too casually under ‘the resistance’ – a term that through lack of clear definition has been used to encompass various forms of non-violent political oppositions, armed resistance, terrorism and mafia-type criminality. Again by failing to explicitly define and differentiate, proponents of the unconditional support slogan end up grouping together the large part of the Iraqi population opposing US occupation and engaging in everyday forms of resistance, with remnants of the previous regime, Iraqi-based Islamist militias, foreign jihadis, mercenaries and criminals. Views about armed resistance vary amongst the Iraqi population, reflecting the diversity of Iraqi society, not simply in terms of religious and ethnic backgrounds as many commentators would like us to believe, but diversity in terms of social class, place of residence, specific experiences with the previous regime and the ongoing occupation as well as political orientation. However, based on talks with friends and family inside as well as various opinion polls, I would argue that the majority of Iraqis do not translate their opposition to the occupation into support for militant insurgents killing Iraqis. I also find it hard to believe that the majority of Iraqis would actually support the kidnapping, torturing and killing of foreign workers whatever their occupation. Ironically, it is the lack of security on the streets of Iraqi cities today that persuades many people, who in principle want US and British forces out of their country, not to ask for an immediate withdrawal. Obviously the lack of security is an effect of the recent war and the ongoing occupation. The latter is without doubt a brutal continuation of an illegal war, having already killed and maimed thousands of civilians through numerous conventional and unconventional weapons. US and UK troops have been involved in the systematic torture of prisoners as well as other violations of international human rights conventions and humanitarian law. But the fact is that when an Iraqi leaves his or her house in the morning wondering whether he or she will see his or her loved ones again, it could either be a sniper or bomb from the occupation forces or a suicide bomb that could kill him or her. To abuse an old cliché, Iraqis are caught between many rocks and many hard places. For those of us concerned about the erosion of women’s rights inside Iraq, Islamist militants pose a particular danger. Many women’s organisations and activists inside Iraq have documented the increasing attacks on women, the pressure to conform to certain dress codes, the restrictions in movement and

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behaviour, incidents of acid thrown into women’s faces and even killings. It is extremely short-sighted for anyone not to condemn these types of attacks, but for women this becomes existential. The rising influence of Islamist movements, organisations and activists both with respect to the ‘resistance’ as well as within the transitional government is paralleled by an increase in social conservatism, further restrictions on women’s movements and freedoms but also greater resistance and opposition to a further closing down on women’s rights. This chapter explores the various strategies and dilemmas for Iraqi women’s rights activists caught between nationalist sentiments, hatred for the occupiers, Islamist constituencies, western governments, western feminists and Iraqi women’s own fears, hopes and politics of belonging. It has been one of my arguments when addressing the recent situation that any meaningful analysis and discussion of the current dilemmas and obstacles has to be historically contextualised. This chapter therefore explores the various ways military intervention and wider human rights abuses pertaining to dictatorship, economic sanctions and social conflict have impacted on women’s rights and gender relations in Iraq. I provide a brief historical background about the changing context affecting women and gender relations in Iraq since the 1970s, the initially secular modernist state project of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the militarisation of society during the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88), the Gulf Crisis and Gulf War (1990–91), the subsequent economic sanctions regime (1990–2003), before discussing the recent war and military intervention (2003), as well as the ongoing occupation and resistance.1

State Repression and ‘State Feminism’ Despite indisputable political repression in the 1970s and early 1980s, the majority of the Iraqi population enjoyed high living standards in the context of an economic boom and rapid development, which were a result of the rise of oil prices and the government’s developmental policies. These were the years of a flourishing economy and the emergence and expansion of a broad middle class. Stateinduced policies worked to eradicate illiteracy, educate women and incorporate them into the labour force. The initial period after the nationalisation of the Iraqi oil industry in 1972 was characterised by economic hardship and difficulties. But the oil embargo by OPEC countries of 1973, known as the ‘oil crisis,’ was followed by a period of boom and expansion. Oil prices shot up and oil-producing countries started to become aware of their bargaining power related to western countries’ dependence on oil. Policies of encouraging women to enter waged work cannot be explained in terms of egalitarian or even feminist principles, however, even though several women I interviewed did comment positively on the early Baathists’ policies of the social inclusion of women, the initial ideology of the Baath party – the ruling party of Iraq – was based on Arab nationalism and socialism. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore in detail the specific motivations and ideology of the Baathist regime with respect to women’s roles and positions. What can be said

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is that human power was scarce, and that, as the Gulf countries started to look for workers outside their national boundaries, the Iraqi government also tapped into the country’s own human resources. Subsequently, working outside the home became for women not only acceptable, but prestigious and the norm. Another factor to be taken into account was the state’s attempt to indoctrinate its citizens – whether male or female. A great number of party members were recruited through their work places. Obviously it was much easier to reach out to and recruit women when they were part of the so-called ‘public sphere’ and visible outside the confines of their homes. Whatever the government’s motivations, Iraqi women became among the most educated and professional in the whole region. How far this access to education and the labour market resulted in an improved status for women is a more complex question. As in many other places, conservative and patriarchal values did not automatically change because women started working. Furthermore, there were great differences between rural and urban women as well as between women from different class backgrounds.

Impact of Wars and Economic Sanctions During the years of the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88), women’s increased participation in the public sphere to replace male soldiers coincided with the further militarisation of society and a glorification of certain types of masculinity, that is, the fighter, the defender of the nation and the martyr. Women were simultaneously encouraged by the state to replace male workers and civil servants who were fighting at the front, and to ‘produce’ more Iraqi citizens and future soldiers. While Iraqi women were found in virtually all professions and government institutions, generous maternity leaves and state-subsidised baby food and equipment as well as state rhetoric stressed the importance of ‘motherhood’ for Iraqi women. The glorification of ‘the Iraqi mother’ coincided with the glorification of a militarised masculinity. For women of low-income classes in urban areas or poor women living in the countryside, sheer survival became the main aim of their lives in the aftermath of the invasion of Kuwait, the imposition of economic sanctions in August 1990 as well as the Gulf war in 1991. There is no doubt about the fact that it has been particularly mothers of low-income background whose children have become yet another statistic in the incredibly high child mortality rates or who have suffered from disease and malnutrition. Yet even for educated women who were part of the broad and well-off middle classes of Iraq, feeding their children became the major worry and focus. During the time of sanctions, about 60% of the population was dependent on the monthly food rations given out by the government and paid for by the oil for food programme.2 Sanctions and war led to a massive impoverishment and insecurity, which subjected women of various social backgrounds to considerable material strain. Household management in the context of electricity cuts and water shortages became time consuming, exhausting, and frustrating. Widespread

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unemployment, high inflation, and a virtual collapse of the economy affected most women in their daily lives. For a population that was used to plenty and abundance, scarcity came as a shock. Many women have had to revert to or learn homemaking skills practised by their grandmothers. Aside from the more obvious effects related to basic survival strategies and difficulties, the sanctions and war have also left their mark on the social and cultural fabric of Iraqi society. Without doubt, Iraqi women lost some of the achievements gained in the previous decades. They could no longer assert themselves through either education or waged employment, as both sectors deteriorated rapidly. The breakdown of the welfare state had a disproportionate effect on women, who had been its main beneficiaries. Women were pushed back into their homes and into the ‘traditional roles’ of being mothers and housewives. From being the highest in the region, estimated to be above 23% prior to 1991, women’s employment rate fell to only 10% in 1997, as reported by the UNDP in 2000. Monthly salaries in the public sector, which, since the Iran–Iraq war, had increasingly been staffed by women, dropped dramatically and did not keep pace with high inflation rates and the cost of living. Many women reported that they simply could not afford to work anymore. The state withdrew its free services, including childcare and transportation. There was also been a sharp decrease in access to all sectors of education for girls and young women due to the fact that many families were not been able to afford sending all children to school. Illiteracy, drastically reduced in the 1970s and 1980s, rose steadily after the Iran–Iraq war and grew between 1985 and 1995 from 8% to 45%. The drop-out rate for girls in primary education reached 35% according to the United Nations Development Fund for Women Report of 2004. According to UNICEF, 55% of women aged 15–49 years are illiterate. Higher education virtually collapsed and degrees became worthless in the context of widespread corruption and an uninterrupted exodus of university professors in the 1990s. Monthly salaries in the public sector, which had paradoxically become increasingly staffed by women, had dropped dramatically and did not correspond to high inflation rates and the cost of living. During the period of economic sanctions, even the few academics who were still employed were often not paid their salaries. Working women suffered from the collapse of their support systems. One previous support system, funded by the state, consisted of numerous nurseries and kindergartens, along with free public transportation to and from school and to the women’s work places. The other major support system was based on extended family ties and neighbourly relations, which helped in childcare. Ever since the sanctions regime, women became reluctant to leave their children with neighbours or other relatives because of the general sense of insecurity. The demographic cost of two wars, political repression and the forced economic migration of men triggered by the imposition of international sanctions account for the high number of widows and female-headed households. In Basra, up to 60% of all households were female headed in 2003, according to the October 2003 UNICEF report. The Human Relief Foundation estimates that there are approximately 250,000 widows in Iraq. A recent UNDP-commissioned study

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on widows in Baghdad found that, in one small district of Al-Sadr City (Hai‘our), almost every multi-family household had one widow. It is not only widows who find themselves without husbands, but also women whose husbands went abroad to escape the bleak conditions and find ways to support their families. Other men just abandoned their wives and children, being unable to cope with the inability to live up to the social expectations of being the provider. During the 1990s, female headed households, rural areas and poor households had the highest rates of infant and child mortality. Whilst those whose husbands were killed in battle received a small government pension, those whose husbands were killed by the former regime for political reasons have received no benefits and have been left to fend for themselves. Islamisation and Increased Conservatism Young Iraqi women frequently speak about changes related to socialising, family ties, and relations between neighbour and friends. Often a parent or older relative was quoted as stating how things were different from the past when socialising was a much bigger part of people’s lives. Zeinab, a fifteen-year-old young woman from Baghdad, spoke about the lack of trust between people. She suggested the following as an explanation for the change in dress code for women and the social restrictions she and her peers experience constantly: People have changed now because of the increasing economic and various other difficulties of life in Iraq. They have become very afraid of each other. I think because so many people have lost their jobs and businesses, they are having loads of time to speak about other people’s lives, and they often interfere in each other’s affairs. I also think that because so many families are so poor now that they cannot afford buying more than the daily basic food, it becomes so difficult for them to buy nice clothes and nice things and therefore, it is better to wear hijab. Most people are somewhat pressured to change their lives in order to protect themselves from the gossip of other people – especially talk about family honour.

In addition to increased responsibilities and time restrictions related to economic circumstances, teenage girls especially, complain about the increasing social restrictions and difficulties of movement. While the parents of the predominantly middle-class young females who were interviewed used to mingle relatively freely when they were the age of their children, today’s young Iraqis find it increasingly difficult to meet each other. Schools are often segregated between sexes, but even in co-educational schools interaction between boys and girls has become more limited. Girls are extremely worried about their reputation and often avoid situations in which they find themselves alone with a boy. These fears may have been aggravated by the not uncommon occurrence of so-called ‘honour killings’ during the past decade. Fathers and brothers of women who are known or often only suspected of having ‘violated’ the accepted codes of behaviour, especially with respect to keeping their virginity before marriage, may kill the women in order to restore the honour of the family. Although this phenomenon is mainly restricted to rural areas and uneducated Iraqis, knowledge about its existence works as a deterrent for many female teenagers. Others may be less

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worried about the most dramatic consequences of ‘losing one’s reputation.’ For educated middle-class women from urban areas it is not so much death they fear as diminished marriage prospects. Girls especially, suffer in a climate where patriarchal values have been strengthened and where the state abandoned its previous policies of social inclusion with respect to women. During the period of economic sanctions, economic hardships pushed a number of women into prostitution – a trend that is widely known and subject to much anguish in a society where a ‘woman’s honour’ is perceived to reflect the family’s honour. In the mid-1990s, the government condemned prostitution and engaged in violent campaigns to stop it. In a widely reported incident in Iraq in 2000, a group of young men linked to Saddam Hussein’s son Uday singled out about 300 female prostitutes and ‘pimps’ and beheaded them. Men often felt compelled to protect their female relatives from being the subject of gossip and from losing the family’s honour. The increasing social restrictions imposed on Iraqi women during the past 15 years have to be analysed in the context of wider social changes, particularly with respect to the economic crisis and rampant unemployment, the significant numbers of female-headed households, an increase in prostitution and the appropriation of Islamic symbols by the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, as well as the general religious revival within Iraqi society. In the current post-invasion period, the lack of security – looting, burglaries, kidnapping and violence including rape – as well as the new political landscape has dramatically worsened women’s freedom of movement and social standing within society.

Post-Invasion Developments Since 2003, Iraqi women have been pushed back even more into the background and into their homes. They are suffering both in terms of a worsening humanitarian situation and an ongoing lack of security on the streets. Aside from the fact that basic needs (including water, electricity, medical care, and food) as well as security are not addressed adequately, another long-term issue is the way women and women’s issues are being instrumentalised by all political parties and actors concerned. The current situation in Iraq is a sad and urgent reminder of the various ways identity politics and fundamentalist politics of belonging are gendered as well as gendering. Many Iraqi women complain that they have been forced to wear a headscarf or restrict their movements for fear of harassment from men. Female students at the University of Basra, for example, say that since the war ended a year ago, groups of men began stopping them at the university gates, shouting at them if their heads were not covered. These reports are symptomatic of wider conservative trends and various ways in which women are being used in Iraq – as in many other societies – to demarcate boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Islamisation here fulfils two objectives: a break with the previous secular regime of Saddam Hussein, and ‘resistance’ to the occupying forces.

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Processes related to Islamisation of society and Islamist politics are not only leading to increasing conservatism in gender relations, but are also dominating Iraqi political power struggles in the post-Saddam era. One of the first indications of the increased impact of Islamist tendencies was the attempt to scrap secular family laws in favour of sharia-based jurisdiction (Islamic Law) by the Iraqi Governing Council under the then chairman Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, in December 2003. The secular code established in 1959 and amended in 1977 was once considered the most progressive in the Middle East, making polygamy difficult and guaranteeing women’s custody rights in the case of divorce. Although unsuccessful in 2003, the attempt to change the law and the discussion around it reveals the current climate and the possible dangers lying ahead. This growing trend has become particularly evident in the ongoing negotiations about the Iraqi constitution. Islamist constituencies, mainly drawn from Shia political parties, have tried to change the wording of the previous Transitional Adminstrative Law (TAL) to describe Islamic law as ‘the main source of legislation’. The most recent compromise with more secular-oriented forces and politicians in the drafting committee stipulates that Islam will be ‘a main source of legislation’. Despite this compromise, it is clear that women will be most affected by the trend to replace more secular laws with sharia-based laws, especially in a social climate where interpretations of Islamic law will be unlikely to be progressive and based on egalitarian principles. Representing both the majority of the population as well as an increasingly vulnerable and marginalised group, it is of ultimate importance to support women’s rights and women’s political participation. However, due to the fact that women are at the core of contemporary politics of belonging in Iraq, any insensitive promotion of women’s right and women’s equalities as part and parcel of ‘liberation’ will strongly backfire in the current context of occupation as well as in the aftermath. Not only in Iraq, but in most other countries in the region and the Muslim world, feminism is negatively identified with the imposition of western values and the eradication of indigenous culture and morals. Any women’s rights initiatives and organisations promoted by the Occupation forces (however flawed and disingenuous to start out with) as well as international NGOs and women’s organisations, might not only be short-lived, but will also negatively impact on locally initiated women’s organisations and gender roles and ideologies more generally. Many Iraqis, who under different circumstances might have been sympathetic or even supportive of women’s rights, view women’s roles and laws revolving around women and gender relations as symbolic of their attempt to gain independence and autonomy from the occupying forces. At the same time, Islam and Islamic law are also perceived to grant a break with the previous dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, which despite its opportunistic ‘religious campaign’ in the 1990s is largely associated with secular policies and the oppression of religious expression and freedom, especially where the Shia majority is concerned. Despite this dilemma, Iraqi women have not been mere passive recipients and victims of contemporary politics of belonging and the encroachment on their

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civil, social and political rights. Before exploring the role of women and gender in the process of reconstruction and political transition, let me provide a brief historical background to women’s political participation.

Women’s Political Participation Although Iraqi women have a history of political participation and activism prior to Saddam Hussein’s regime3, their autonomous political participation came to an end in the 1970s. Women were encouraged to join the Ba’th party and to run for the rubber-stamp parliament. Scores of Iraqi women contested elections in 1980 and 16 won seats in the 250 members Council. In the second Ba’thist parliamentary elections in 1985, women won 33 Council seats (13%). But even this sponsored participation was reduced toward the end of Saddam’s regime, as evidenced by the decrease of successful women candidates to 8% of members elected to the parliament of 2003. The major vehicle for women’s participation was the General Federation of Iraqi Women (GFIW) founded in 1969. It had branches all over Iraq and it is estimated that about 1 million Iraqi women were members. Despite the fact that the Federation was a branch of the ruling party and lacked political independence, the government’s initial policies of social inclusion and mobilisation of human power, did facilitate a climate in which the Federation could play an implementation role in promoting women’s education, labour force participation and women’s health, as well as providing a presence in public life. The role of GFIW changed drastically in the 1990s when the state abandoned its policies of social inclusion and began to promote women’s traditional roles. The GFIW then concentrated on humanitarian aid and the provision of health care. At the same time as Iraqi women were loosing state support in terms of socioeconomic rights, semi-autonomy in Iraqi Kurdistan allowed women there to establish civil society associations and become involved in party politics. While only two of the 20 ministers in the Kurdistan Regional Government were women in 2003, women gained employment in the civil service. But it is also the case in the Kurdish areas that women’s initiatives and political participation have been opposed by conservative male political actors. Women activists campaigning against widespread honour killings in the North have been subject to harassment and a newly established women’s shelter for victims of domestic violence had to close down due to political opposition. Since April 2003, women’s organisations and initiatives have been mushrooming all over Iraq. Most of these organisations, like the National Council of Women (NWC), the Iraqi Women’s Higher Council (IWHC), the Iraqi Independent Women’s Group or the Society for Iraqi Women for the Future, for example, have been founded either by members of the Iraqi National Council (IGC) or prominent professional women with close ties to political parties. While mainly founded and represented by elite women, some of the organisations have a broad membership and have branches throughout the country. Their activities revolve

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around humanitarian and practical projects, such as income generation, legal advise, free health care and counseling and so on, as well as political advocacy. In terms of political advocacy, the three main issues that have mobilised women of mainly educated middle-class background throughout Iraq have been, first, the attempt to replace the relatively progressive personal status law governing marriage, divorce and child custody with a more conservative law (Article 137), and second, the issue of a women’s quota for political representation. Although women were unsuccessful in obtaining a 40% quota in the transitional constitution, they managed to negotiate a 25% quota. This was despite Ambassador Bremer’s opposition to such a quota. Thirdly and most recently, women activists have been mobilised to protest the draft constitution especially with respect to the role of sharia (Islamic Law) as well as the suggested abolition of the women’s quota in political parties and government institutions after the next elections.

Gendering Reconstruction Women often experience a backlash in post-war situations when traditional gender roles inside the home or outside are evoked. Violence against women is often endemic in post-war situations, partly due to the general state of anarchy and chaos but also as an element of heightened aggression and militarisation, and prevailing constructions of masculinity promoted during conflict. An extreme example of this situation is contemporary Iraq, which despite the official ending of military conflict is extremely violent and insecure. As a matter of fact, the level of every-day experienced violence is even greater now than during the period of formal military intervention. At the time of writing, the term ‘reconstruction’ does actually not appear to carry much significance as the security situation prevents most processes associated with reconstruction. For women, it often seems as if the challenges posed to traditional gender ideologies and roles during times of war become too great for patriarchal societies to accept in peace. Women often have less political space to challenge gender relations and to contribute to political processes in the aftermath of conflict. According to Pankhurst, The ideological rhetoric is often about ‘restoring’ or ‘returning’ to something associated with the status quo before the war, even if the change actually undermines women’s rights and places women in a situation that is even more disadvantageous than it was in the past. This is often accompanied by imagery of the culturally specific equivalent of the woman as ‘beautiful soul’, strongly associating women with cultural notions of ‘tradition’, motherhood, and peace. (2004: 19)

Historically, societies neither defend the spaces women create during struggle nor acknowledge the ingenious ways in which women bear new and additional responsibilities. In many post-conflict settings, women have been sidelined or marginalised from formal peace initiatives, political transitions and reconstruction efforts. Formal peace negotiations among warring parties and their mediators

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serve to define basic power relations and to identify priorities for immediate post-war political activity (Sorenson 1998). Traditional militarised gender regimes tend to endow men with the power in politics and locate women’s importance within the family (Cockburn 2002). However, women within conflict-ridden societies as well as within diasporic communities do find ways to work for peace and reconciliation through grass-roots activism. Despite UN Resolution 1325 passed in October 2000 stating the importance of the inclusion of women and mainstreaming gender into all aspects of post-conflict resolution and peace operations, the reality of post-conflict situations is often quite different. If at all, UN Resolution 1325 is frequently translated into adding a few women into governments and ministries. However, the mainstreaming of gender would involve the appointments of women to interim governments, ministries and committees dealing with systems of local and national governance, judiciary, policing, human rights, allocating funds, free media development and all economic processes. It also aims at encouraging independent women’s groups, NGOs and community-based organisations. In some post-conflict settings, especially with respect to Muslim societies, the stress on UN resolution 1325, is perceived to be part of a western plot to destroy a society’s traditional culture and values. This is particularly the case in contexts of US-led military intervention, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq. Paradoxically, people who might otherwise be sympathetic to issues pertaining to women’s rights and women’s equality could express strong opposition to women’s inclusion in post-conflict reconstruction if this is made one of the aims of the occupying powers. The political involvement or even return of diaspora women might evoke resentment and a backlash for local women’s rights activists. This trend has been particularly evident in the Iraqi context where the diaspora has played a disproportionate role in the new Iraqi leadership supported by the United States and the United Kingdom. Diaspora women have tried to put their mark on emerging women’s organisations within Iraq, but have frequently been perceived as patronising and being part of a western ploy.

Conclusion The rather bleak picture I have sketched out only touches upon some aspects of the numerous ways wars, sanctions and occupation have affected women and gender relations as well as prevailing gender ideologies in contemporary Iraq. Initially, and despite the context of general political repression by the Baath regime of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi women were the symbols of a modern, secular developing nation. They were part of the labour force and visible and active on almost all levels of state institutions and bureaucracy. These days, however, women are prevented from leaving their houses due to fear and a great sense of the insecurity. Violent burglaries, mafia-like gangs that roam the cities at night, increased sexual violence including rape as well as militant resistance and US snipers have pushed women into the background. However, as I have tried to show in this chapter, the demise of women’s gains achieved during the 1970s and

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early 1980s was already evident prior to the war in 2003. Aside from most obvious effects related to the atrocious humanitarian situation, there have been changes in gender relations and ideologies in the context of wider social changes related to previous wars, sanctions and changing state policies. The ambivalence and differentiation of women’s positions and role in the context of a politics of belonging is evident in Iraq. Women as workers and educated professionals have been at the core of the modernist nation during the 1970s and the early 1980s. During the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88), they were simultaneously working in the public sphere to replace the men-folk at the front, while also symbolising roles as the mothers of martyrs and future soldiers. The symbolism changed yet again in the 1990s, in the aftermath of the Gulf war and in the context of a severe economic crisis triggered by a comprehensive sanctions regime (1990–2003). Women were pushed back home and became mothers, housewives but also potential prostitutes, thereby severely curtailing women’s rights and freedom of movement. Finally, in the post-Saddam Hussein period, women are once again squeezed between the rhetoric of liberation and human rights by the occupying forces on the one hand, and on the other, the rhetoric of authenticity, morality and difference, often, but not always, couched in religious terms. Trying to explore the social, economic, cultural and political contexts that have impacted on gender ideologies and relations in Iraq, my chapter reveals the very way women are used once again to delineate ‘otherness’, belonging and authenticity. Women and ‘women’s issues’ have, of course, been instrumentalised by the occupying forces themselves. Both Bush and Blair have tried to co-opt the language of democracy and human rights, especially women’s rights. But then instrumentalising women does not mean that we should condone or accept the way Islamist political parties and militants are, for their part, using women symbolically, and even attack them physically to express their resistance. The culture of violence and the underlying fascist ideology of many of the groups operating on Iraqi soil today are not viable alternatives to US imperialism. While we all know that Bush is not the epitome of freedom and democracy, it is obvious that the local and foreign suicide bombers in Iraq are no ‘freedom fighters’. I am not sure how long most of those unconditionally supporting the resistance today would last inside Iraq if the militant insurgents responsible for killing and kidnapping Iraqi civilians and foreigners would actually prevail. There is no doubt that the previous Coalition Provisional Authority and the various transitional governments have lacked credibility amongst the majority of the Iraqi population. Reconstruction has been incredibly slow and fraught with corruption and ill-management. Yet, the seeds for genuine political transformation, the rebuilding of physical and political spaces and a non-violent opposition to foreign occupation have been made more and more impossible by the increasing violence and instability caused by the insurgence. And there are non-violent ways of resisting: continuous images of hundred-thousands even millions of Iraqis – men, women and children of all ages and backgrounds – demonstrating peacefully on the streets of Iraq would send a very forceful message across the world: a message that could not be ignored by Washington and London, especially if Iraqis are joined by people all over the world taking to the streets in solidarity.

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At the same time Iraqis, lobbying their own government – as flawed as the process of election was – through civil society associations, city councils and various other institutions, can resist foreign encroachment and the imposition of outside political actors, values and economic systems. Iraqis at the grassroots level did start to group together, mobilise and resist non-violently, and they continue to do so. Women activists have been at the forefront of these actions and initiatives. Yet, the political spaces have been shrinking not simply as a function of ongoing occupation and the type of government in place, but also, and crucially, because of the lack of security caused by violent insurgents. It is high time to be much clearer about what we should support and what not. It is high time to abandon the unconditional support for terrorists and criminals responsible for the killing of Iraqi civilians. It is high time to acknowledge that Iraqis inside are divided along many different lines and that glossing over these differences does not help national unity in the long run. It is high time to seriously look for non-violent means of resistance to the occupation in Iraq and wider US imperialism. It is high time to recognise that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Notes 1 The empirical findings of this research are based on ongoing research on the changing role of women in Iraq since the 1950s, until today. Due to the security situation, most of my interviews and recording of life stories have taken place amongst Iraqi diaspora women in the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States and Jordan. However, some of the findings are based on visits to Iraq in 1988 and 1997 as well as interviews with Iraqi women visiting Amman in June/July 2005. 2 According to recent UNICEF figures, 100% of the Iraqi population are now dependent on food aid, which currently needs to be distributed by the occupying forces. 3 The Iraqi Women’s League, for example, founded in 1958 and closely associated with the Iraqi communist party, played a significant role prior to the Baath regime.

Bibliography Al-Ali, Nadje (2000) ‘Sanctions and women in Iraq’, in CASI – Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (2000) Sanctions on Iraq: background, consequences, strategies, Proceedings of the Conference hosted by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq, 13-14 November 1999, Cambridge. Cambridge: CASI. Al-Ali, Nadje (2003) ‘Women, gender relations, and sanctions in Iraq’, in Shams Inati, (ed.) Iraq: its History, People, and Politics, New York: Humanity Books: 233–250. Al-Ali, Nadje (2005) ‘Reconstructing gender: Iraqi women between dictatorship, war, sanctions and occupation’, Third World Quarterly, 26 (4–5): 739–758. Al-Ali, Nadje and Hussein, Yasmin (2003) Between dreams and sanctions: teenage lives in Iraq, in Akbar Mahdi (ed.) Teenagers in the Middle East, Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group. Belhachmi, Zakia (2004) ‘Contextualizing women in Iraqi governance: Al-Nassiriyah Model’, Report for Iraq Local Institutional Support and Development Program (Local Governance Program), USAID/RTI/Iraq, March 2004. CASI – Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (2000) Sanctions on Iraq: background, consequences, strategies. Proceedings of the Conference hosted by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq, 13–14 November 1999, Cambridge. Cambridge: CASI. Center for Economic and Social Rights (2003) ‘The human costs of war in Iraq’, March 2003.

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Cockburn, Cynthia (1999) ‘Background paper: gender, armed conflict and political violence’, World Bank Conference on Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Development, Washington D.C: 8. Cockburn, Cynthia (2002) ‘The postwar moment: militaries, masculinities and international peacekeeping’, in Cynthia Cockburn and Dubravka Zarkow (eds), London: Lawrence & Wishart. Garfield, Richard (1999) 2Mortality Changes in Iraq, 1990–1996: A Review of Evidence’, Occasional Paper, Fourth Freedom Forum. Garfield, Richard (2000) ‘Changes in health and well-being in Iraq during the 1990s: what do we know and how do we know it?’, in CASI – Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (2000) Sanctions on Iraq: background, consequences, strategies. Proceedings of the Conference hosted by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq, 13–14 November 1999, Cambridge. Cambridge: CASI. Human Rights Watch (2003) ‘Climate of fear: sexual violence and abduction of women and girls in Baghdad’, 15(8), July 2003. MedACT (2004) The health and environmental costs of war on Iraq, London: MedACT. Pankhurst, Donna (2004) ‘The “sex” war and other wars: towards a feminist approach to peace building’, in Haleh Afshar and Deborah Eade, (eds) Development, Women, and War: Feminist Perspectives, Oxford: Oxfam: 19. Sorensen, Brigitte (1998) Women and Post-Conflict Reconstruction: Issues and Sources. Geneva, UNRSID. UNICEF (2004) ‘Iraq: facts and figures’, accessed 22 April 2004, http://www.unicef.org/media/ media_9788.html UNICEF (2001) UNICEF Humanitarian Action: Iraq Donor Update. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (2004) ‘Iraq: focus on widows’, IRINNEWS.ORG, 23 April 2004, http://irinnews.org/ UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (2004) ‘Iraq: focus on disabled people’, IRINNEWS.ORG, 23 April 2004, http://irinnews.org/ Waite, Louise (2000) ‘How is household vulnerability gendered? Female-headed households in the collectives of Suleimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan’, Disasters, 24(2): 153–72.

Websites Homepage:Organization For Women’s Freedom in Iraq http://www.equalityiniraq.com/whowe.htm

IRINNEWS http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID
40560&SelectRegion
Iraq_Crisis&SelectCountry
IRAQ

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14 Legislating Utopia? Violence against Women: Identities and Interventions By Gita Sahgal* Introduction The best lack all conviction While the worst are full of passionate intensity. (WB Yeats)

Violence, suffering and oppression form the triad on which imagined communities of belonging are constructed, which then feed Utopian political projects. Narratives of victimisation accompany wars of aggression, as in former Yugoslavia or in Darfur. The aggressor casts himself as the victim, who, as in Gujarat, ‘recovers’ his masculinity through rape and murder. He is accompanied by the praise songs of his women supporters, such as the women who accompany the attacks of the Janjawid militias in Sudan. But while violence committed hundreds of years ago is used to justify violence today, narratives of violence are also part of the songs of survivors. They are part of the armoury of feminist struggles in local, national and international arenas. By naming and making visible the global problem of violence against women, against individuals and against women as a group, in war and in ‘peace’, feminists have achieved astonishing success over a very short historical period – about the last quarter of the twentieth century. The success of fundamentalist movements and political organisations across different religions may be measured by how widespread the dissemination of their particular narrative of violence has become. If it is used not only to recruit supporters but also to generate a much wider base of sympathy and support – to become part of the ‘commonsense’ of millions – they are on their way to success. This chapter is an attempt at understanding how discourses on violence and the actual experience of it contribute to ideas of belonging. How, in crucial ways, violence may become not a component of identity but one of the determinants of the politics of identity. Particular forms of violence may be named, valorised, sympathised with or silenced and ignored – usually in direct relation to the wider political project that is being served. This sense of victimisation creates a form of belonging that may extend well beyond the people who have actually experienced violence. But being a victim of violence may be the call to action that helps to create strategic anti-violence movements that are lead or informed not just by advocacy on behalf of victims but by victims themselves.

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Most of the cases discussed in this chapter will focus on Britain which has been the country in which I have resided, worked and been most politically engaged; in the black feminist movement of the 1980s and 1990s and in Women Against Fundamentalism, which was founded in 1989; though the examples I cite come mainly from this country, many contemporary British debates are being played out in international arenas as well, and they are informed by international networks, both feminist and fundamentalist. And, as any historian of social transformation understands, the roots of many of these arguments lie not in the post-World War Two human rights framework and its subsequent development, but in colonial histories and resistance movements. The complexity of the imperial tension echoes down the ages. Today, as in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the interests of feminists vary according to their politics and their social location. Those coming from the margins of their national collectivities may have a more jaundiced view of the state as an agent of transformation than those who are either closer to sources of power or simply imagine power differently.

Southall Black Sisters, WAF and Antinomian Feminism When Satan first the black bow bent And the Moral Law from the gospel rent He forged the law into a Sword And spilld the blood of mercys Lord (William Blake)

In Britain, for instance, the largely Asian group Southall Black Sisters, (along with many other similar black autonomous groups), saw themselves as simultaneously in and against the community: challenging immigration and asylum law aimed at controlling minorities while demanding protection for women facing violence from their husbands and families. In Clara Connolly’s phrase, Women Against Fundamentalism saw itself as ‘the other within’. For the purposes of this chapter, there are three important messages that WAF had begun to address in its first ten years of existence, messages that are even more urgent today. In contrast to human rights and victim discourses focusing on the suffering body, WAF asserted that fundamentalist movements were modern political projects which sought to control the minds as well as the bodies of women. WAF took over the anti-racist slogan ‘Here to fight, here to stay’ and transformed it to: Here to doubt, here to stay, Religious leaders won’t have their way.

Founded explicitly in the right to doubt – rather than in a demand for protection – WAF argued that however unsatisfactory existing secular states were, the separation of Church and state and formal secularism were necessary in the United Kingdom in the wake of the Rushdie affair. It was a deeply unfashionable appeal to universal values and a challenge to the politically disabling influence of the postmodernist and post-structuralist critique of the Enlightenment project. WAF was a liberatory project that situated itself against the politics of purity. It came from deep within the anti-violence movement, from women who were situated in

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multiple struggles, who spoke from within these struggles but who refused to limit themselves to a ‘community or a religious identity’, or to limit the possibilities of their search for emancipation.1 Although we would not have said so explicitly at the time, spiritual forbears for many WAF activists were the English Ranters, the Indian Bhakti movement or the Sufi traditions which challenged class, caste and scriptural authority by substituting for them faith and being. The spirit of dissent was fed as much by traditions of doubting and of questioning authority as was fed by much older traditions than Enlightenment rationalism. The lives of generation upon generation of active women have been marked as much by their being as their doing. As they struggle to negotiate often oppressive nationalist or socialist movements, or indeed the strait jackets of identity politics,2 their unconventional lives as well as their works offer an open resource, inspiration and a source of plunder that does not attempt to predict all outcomes. For example, women who have given up the marks of caste and status, women who are bringing up children on their own, women who lived together as honourable spinsters and educators, greatly respected in the communities they served; women who fall off the edges of sexual morality ending in jail or otherwise disowned; women who dared to express their desires and lived greedily for their pleasures. Both the ascetic and the bawd find room here for many political movements though they may limit the possibilities and also inevitably open up spaces where women may make themselves ridiculous to their conventional contemporaries. Many feminists, whose lives go beyond their demands, live their resistance in ways that refuse to predict the outcome of a dream of freedom. This is antinomian feminism. In its conventional form, antinomianism is a form of religious belief which rejects scriptural authority and organised religion and mocks ‘the moral law’. Every significant religious tradition has its antinomian underbelly that is by turn attacked and incorporated. The path to God is direct and generally unconcerned with the good works of more utilitarian social reformers. It is not my intention to propose here another way of reconciling faith and feminism – the antinomian path can lead to Al Qaeda as easily as it does to libertarianism. But to suggest that inspiration may be drawn from the lived experience of millions of women (many of whom would never call themselves feminist) around the world, whose lives as well as whose deeds bear witness to other ways of living, and whose main challenge is to orthodoxy from whatever source. As the English historian E.P. Thompson said, The moment of Blake’s greatest poetic achievement belonged exactly to this moment of extraordinary conjunction, at the time of the French Revolution, when that part of Enlightenment thought, represented by the blunt, humane, ultra-radicalism of Paine and Volney collided with an older antinomian tradition, co-existed fraternally in Blake’s heart and argued matters out in his head . . . Moreover the antinomian inheritance was not just some old baggage which could be discarded once he was enlightened. For it enabled Blake to question and to resist the simplicities of mechanical materialism and Lockeian epistemology, in which the revolutionary impulse was to founder. For in shedding the prohibitives of the Moral Law, Blake held fast to the affirmative: Thou Shalt Love. It is because this affirmative remains an essential need and quest of our own time that William Blake still speaks with such power to us. (1993)

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The Utopian Premise But the dream goes awry when the Utopian vision is not merely lived but imposed through legislation. And it is one of the attempts of this chapter to look at the legislative impulses in their more Utopian forms to banish degradation and evil through the instrument of the ‘moral law’. Morality laws – whether they are attempts to police sexuality by criminalising consenting sexual acts both heterosexual and homosexual or extend the definition of violence against women – have in common the Utopian premise that by legislating against behaviour that is disapproved of states can control evil at its source. Laws protecting ‘hurt to religious sentiment’ or blasphemy laws to prevent the sin of non-conformity or apostasy all have similar characteristics. They not only provide for sanctions when crimes are committed, but, by simply existing on the statute, they also lay down rules of behaviour to ‘protect’ society at large. E.P. Thompson suggests when examining the Utopian ideas of William Morris, the nineteenth century artist and revolutionary, that Morris’ Utopia had an ‘open, speculative quality far removed from diagrammatic model building’. By contrast Thompson criticises Marxism for its lack of moral vision and says that ‘one may not assimilate desire to knowledge and because the attempt to do so is to confuse two different operative principles of culture . . . Marxism requires less a re-ordering of its parts than a sense of humility towards those parts of culture that it can never order’ (Thompson 1976). Most Utopian legislation cannot accept this. Society must indeed be ordered. But to pass such legislation, the ‘people’ have to be constituted as a suffering subject in need of protection. The mobilisation of large numbers of British Muslims to demand a blasphemy law that protects Islam (only the Church of England is protected by law in Britain) from insult during the Rushdie affair, successfully created a British Muslim umma, a new sense of belonging, which had not previously been seen in Britain. The violence to Muslim sentiment caused by the publication of ‘The Satanic Verses’ was the rock on which the campaign to ban the book and extend the blasphemy law in Britain was founded. The rise in threats to, and attacks on Muslims following the anti-Rushdie campaign, fuelled the agitation. But the threats and violence by Muslim fundamentalists, from the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini to mass demonstrations, forced Rushdie into hiding and intimidated numerous others. Bombings targeting bookshops and attacks on Rushdie’s Japanese and Italian translators and Norwegian publisher, one of whom died, were all seen not as violence but as expressions of the strength of feeling among Muslims – of ‘hurt’ to their sentiments ( Bhatt 1997). One of the chief causes of ‘hurt’, usually not recognised by the media which by and large portrayed the struggle as a clash between Western Enlightenment values and medieval Islamic values, was that Rushdie recovered traditions in early Islam which both fundamentalists and the orthodox would rather bury (Bandung File February 1989). In the mid-1990s, I produced a programme called ‘The War Crimes File’ (Twenty Twenty Television 1995) on the role of members of the Jamaat-i-Islami in committing atrocities, in support of the Pakistani army, during the 1971 liberation

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struggle in Bangladesh. Men who had been active in that struggle were shown to be leading forces in the anti-Rushdie agitation, delivering petitions to the Prime Minister in Britain at 10 Downing Street. As Sara Hossain shows, the struggle to introduce blasphemy laws to Bangladesh) has been led by the Jamaat-i-Islami (along with other groups), who succeeded in introducing them to Pakistan during the military regime of General Zia ul Haq. They have also used secular laws on insulting religion and religious beliefs that exist in many ex-British colonial countries including India, to mount cases against secular opponents, such as writers and journalists, antinominian sects such as the Bauls of Bengal and minority Muslim sects such as Ahmadis (Hossain 2004). In addition to continuing to demand new blasphemy laws they have mounted intimidatory campaigns such as seeking a legal declaration that the Ahmadis are non-Muslims, as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have done – leaving them vulnerable to even higher levels of attack. Given this history, the support for new laws on religious intolerance in the United Kingdom is disturbing, particularly as it has gathered the support of prominent Muslim academics and feminists.

International Arenas During the 1990s, the use of the term ‘violence against women’ gained legal currency just as a variety of identity-based movements were challenging the hegemonic understanding of women as a unitary social category. Violence, or the more technical term, ‘gender-based violence’ was so universal and pervasive a phenomenon that it could still unite women across nation, race, class, religion and sexuality. Following the Tribunal on Violence against Women at the UN World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, a very diverse movement of global feminist advocates wrought immense change at the international level through over a decade of legal standard setting. The naming of violence against women as a human rights violation was situated clearly within a wider struggle to assert that ‘Women’s Rights are Human Rights’. The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, was passed unanimously at the UN General Assembly in 1994, and the post of Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women created. As the first Special Rapporteur on VAW, Radhika Coomaraswamy was instrumental, among other things, in producing reports that pointed to the role of non-state actors in committing gender-based violence and in seeking to find ways to hold them accountable. In the 1980s and 1990s Algerian women (among others) were denied refugee status because they were fleeing violence committed by fundamentalist groups, while fundamentalists connected to the FIS and its armed wing, the GIA, were given protection in the United States of America, France and Britain. Algerian secularists tried to raise this in international fora and to advocate that human rights protection should be extended to victims of non-state actors3 too. But the Refugee Convention was not interpreted to include gender-related persecution as a ground for refugee status and only persecution by the state was recognised. Secular advocates facing repression and violence found that they had a double battle – for

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protection of their lives and for political recognition from a human rights movement that was focussed on defending fundamentalists from state repression. Simultaneously, there was an international movement to hold states to account for failing to protect entire populations of women from widespread domestic violence, sexual harm and other forms of violence against women. Using the framework of ‘due diligence’, the movement insisted that even though states may not be directly responsible for violence, they could still be held accountable. States must ‘respect, protect and fulfil’ human rights, responding not just to violations committed by the state but also to those committed by third parties. States must also create an environment that enableds rights to be enjoyed. This was an enormous expansion of the narrow mandate of traditional human rights concerns which have focussed almost exclusively on the harm and persecution perpetrated by states or their agents. It was one of the major areas of preoccupation of the global women’s movement, best expressed through Recommendation 19 of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)4, which monitors the implementation of the Convention. In focussing on enabling conditions for rights to be fulfilled, Recommendation 19 looks at some of the underlying causes of violence and urges governments to implement a range of measures that go far beyond criminalising violence. These measures were lobbied for by victim advocates among others, who brought their experiences to bear on the gaps in the human rights framework. In 2002, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was ratified, providing another arena in which state and non-state actors could be brought to justice. The Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice had successfully lobbied for the inclusion of crimes of gender violence and persecution in the crimes that the recently established International Criminal Court had jurisdiction over – genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The crimes of rape, sexual slavery, enforced pregnancy, forced sterilisation and other crimes of sexual violence were enumerated as elements of some of the most serious crimes in international law. The crimes named in the Rome Statute could be ‘domesticated’ into national legislation to provide women with a gender-sensitive legal framework for trying both individual and collective crimes against women, while states could pass legislation on universal jurisdiction to enable trail of perpetrators who had committed serious crimes abroad to be tried wherever they were found. Some of the gaps that had been identified more than ten years earlier were slowly being closed. The definition of the term ‘gender’ was hard fought during the drafting of the Rome Statute that led to the establishment of the International Criminal Court. In the end, it was very narrowly defined, little different from a definition of ‘biological sex’. Delegates from a coalition including the Holy See, some of the Arab League and a number of North American groups which, according to the lawyer Rhonda Copelon, a leading player in the Caucus, were identifiable by their ‘anti-choice, anti-feminist, anti-gay and anti-UN stance’, ‘campaigned to eliminate all references to “gender”, to eliminate criminalisation of gender-based persecution, all references to gender violence, and all requirements of gender expertise’ (Rothschild 2005).

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The anti-feminist coalition that had first been identified at Cairo at the UN Conference on Population and Development in 1994, failed in its aims, but it was able to successfully limit language on abortion at Cairo and, bizarrely, to exclude references to forced abortion in the Rome Statute. It was to emerge again and again at various UN conferences challenging the clash of civilisation thesis by showing that the policies of a secular United States of America were driven by a Christian Evangelical lobby that worked in concert across religious and political divides with the Catholic Holy See, and the Organisation of Islamic States. The United States of America was, in fact, in frequent alliance with the ‘Axis of Evil’. At other times alliances built during the War on Terror with states such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were brought into play (Rothschild 2005).

Violence Against Women as an Organising Strategy They were imprisoned. Someone had committed a crime, though no-one knew what it was, or who had done it, or what authority sat in judgement (Philip Pullman)

As Alice Miller has argued, ‘Violence worked in progressive and regressive ways simultaneously. As Charlotte Bunch has asserted, VAW as a claim to rights worked because it embodied a horror that could not be ignored; and it also worked, as Ratna Kapur notes, because stories of the victim subject could enter the mainstream of representation and reaffirm the image of women (especially, Southern women) as without power and in need of protection’ (Miller 2004), When gender-related persecution began slowly to be recognised as a ground for refugee status, some women began to win claims for what was seen as persecution by their ‘culture’ rather than for instance, for their political belief in resisting the state (Visheswaran 2004), or for norms imposed by their local communities or a collusive combination of the two. Miller and Kapur both make powerful cases for approaches based more affirmatively on rights that centre on women’s agency and their capacity for choice (Kapur 2002). Both point to globalised forces – the market and transnational regimes of control – as having greater power over individual lives than many national states. Miller suggests that human rights offers an enabling framework for ensuring rights that moves away from what Terry McGovern has called ‘the pain and suffering narrative’ of the individual victim (CREA, TARSHI 2004). These are compelling arguments. But they come with some cautions attached. The most prominent of these is that proponents of sexual rights valorise ‘choice’ and ‘agency’ in the most brutal conditions of free market logic. Sexual harm may indeed not be the only form of harm that women face. The political economy of migration needs greater attention by feminists as WAF argued at the Cairo Conference on Population and Development (Yuval Davis 1995). But attention to and support for women’s capacity to make decisions should not obscure the grossly unequal and gendered power relations in which those decisions are made. The move by human rights advocates to insist on an enabling framework for human rights contains the promise of being able to address the underlying

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conditions in which violence occurs. But there is a risk too. It is the women’s movement that has insisted that the human rights framework begin to find ways of holding non-state actors accountable – whether they are individual family members, corporate bodies, religious organisations or fundamentalist groups and networks. The focus on non-state actors has been an important challenge to the ‘private’ sphere constructed by international human rights law. States were not held accountable in the international arena for crimes for which they were not directly responsible and that did not meet the threshold of a human rights violation or abuse.5 The movement had to name gender-based violence as a human rights abuse showing that it was widespread and based on systematic discrimination. But it was precisely this move which focussed attention on ‘culture’ and on what have been termed ‘harmful traditional practices’, rather than on state responsibility. While the human rights framework has incorporated a view of ‘culture’ and tradition as sources of discrimination, and the ‘community’ as a site of violations, religious bodies and particularly fundamentalist movements have seldom been explicitly held to account. Nor has the human rights movement found ways to analyse practices that are not traditional but in fact, modern practices that masquerade as revived traditions. The modern form of the hijab is perhaps the most prominent example of this as was the revival of ‘sati’ in India in the 1980s and 1990s. The public/private distinction has never really existed within national states. What exists instead is the permission to commit violence with impunity, a line which different states draw differently. The progress of a rightsbased political culture is the process by which that impunity is progressively limited as Tanika Sarkar has pointed out in discussing nineteenth-century Indian debates around child marriage and the age of consent (Sarkar 2001). But questions of agency and the capacity to make decisions recur in contemporary debates on criminalising violence against women. The questions that still need to be asked are: whose behaviour is being criminalised? What are the larger structures of power within which questions of violence, agency and capacity are defined? And are policies being constructed that are drawn from the experience and organised demands of women who are affected? For here is a paradox: there is no argument that representations of women’s suffering (and not only southern women) are often informed by stereotyping, colonial prejudice, racism and misplaced altruism.6 But the collapsing of complex struggles of women, precisely the struggle to limit impunity and to expose unequal gender relations with the representation of those struggles in the media or by academic commentators, and then a further flattening out of the state response to them (as represented in media discourse) suggests that certain struggles should perhaps not have been undertaken at all. The critique falls into the error that is being criticised. It ignores the conditions of the struggle – the terrain on which it occurred. It ignores the difficulty of getting women’s advocacy and rights implemented, and the near impossibility of affirming voice and agency through existing institutional structures, which feminists must continue to struggle against (even as they lobby them). It ignores those areas where the experience of violence has succeeded in pressing claims that would otherwise not be addressed, while, of course, rightly pointing out the dangers in existing activism and the unholy alliances that have been formed by fundamentalists and feminists.

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As Alice Miller points out, the framework of VAW gave wings to women’s human rights in the international arena in a way that foundational rights to equality and non-discrimination had failed to do (Miller 2004). Although the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (DEVAW) states that ‘States must not commit violence’, the focus on the state as the enabler of rights or the view that national sovereignty is now so compromised that states should no longer be a primary focus for human rights advocacy sometimes underplays the role of states themselves as actors in perpetrating genderbased violence and in undermining autonomy and sexual rights. State agents such as the police may perpetrate custodial violence, or they may take inappropriate ‘protective’ measures’ such as putting women who are witnesses to court cases in preventive detention in Bangladesh or putting women in prison for ‘running away’ in Afghanistan. They may put women in prison for years charged with breaches of morality laws such as the Hudood offences in Pakistan or anti-abortion laws in Nigeria. All over the world, women are regularly arrested (and frequently assaulted) for breaches of anti-prostitution laws. Human rights norms declare that states must not ‘condone or tolerate’ violence; but in spite of their traditional focus on the state, human rights mechanisms have barely begun to map the ways in which states deploy gender-based violence as a mechanism of control. It is precisely those states that afford most impunity for violence committed by family members which themselves are the most intrusive in policing sexual morality. Many states such as Jordan conduct virginity tests while the practice of anal examinations to determine homosexual behaviour is based on completely discredited nineteenth-century medical practice (Long 2004). Women who must prove their chastity (and men their lack of deviance) have no right to privacy but are subjected to violence, coercion and discrimination by the state. This tension – between using the state to regulate violence by others and forcing the state to withdraw from regulating consensual sexual behaviour and placing limits on freedom of expression – is one of central tensions between some forms of anti-violence advocacy and sexual rights advocacy. The focus on forcing states to address underlying conditions that cause violence has also opened the door to defining pornography and prostitution as intrinsically degrading to women and a form of violence against women. The coalitions that were developed to challenge gender advocacy, including sexual rights and reproductive rights, from the time of the Cairo Conference, are still attempting to limit more expansive understandings of human rights as battles on the definition of sexual rights show (Rothschild 2005), but the inclusion of pornography and prostitution per se, as forms of violence against women, is a battle that they are happy to join.

Forced Marriage and Trafficking To every story there is an anti-story (Salman Rushdie)

The British state has always been a decisive actor shaping the nature of the family. Its interventions in the family lives of minority communities has meant that it has controlled the construction of the family through immigration control,

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asking intimate questions of prospective partners, conducting virginity tests in the late 1970s and determining who constitutes a genuine family member and is therefore eligible for a visa. Feminist advocates, particularly those that operate from the margins of the national collectivity such as Asian secular feminist groups have always had to negotiate these tensions, even as they campaign for protection from domestic violence. The handling of both forced marriage and trafficking in Britain has common features and significant differences. Government action against both forced marriage and trafficking for sexual exploitation depends on ‘rescuing’ victims who have in effect been abducted, coerced and are being or are threatened with these two different forms of sexual slavery: the one into an unwanted marriage and the other into coerced, commercial sexual exploitation. Both deal with very neglected problems, one through implementation of a transnational crime control protocol, the other through changes in government policy brought about by sustained pressure from feminist and legal advocates. The issue of forced marriage has simultaneously been used as an instrument by the state in debates on ‘social cohesion’ at the same time as very real benefits were delivered to individual women. It has taken over twenty years of autonomous Asian women’s organising in Britain, to force the government to act. Careful attention to the use of existing legal remedies and building relationships with South Asian feminist and legal advocates were important building blocks to get government action on forced marriages in the United Kingdom. Around 2000, very useful policy changes were implemented that brought real and immediate relief to women (and men) caught up in forced marriages. The position of the government has fundamentally shifted since the state declared that it was helpless to do anything for British women of Asian origin who were abducted by their families and taken abroad because they were subject to dual nationality and had to abide by the laws of the country of origin.7 Underpinning government inaction was, of course, the policy of multiculturalism which justified leaving the cultural norms of the community untouched, when it suited the state to remain noninterventionist in respect of crimes committed within the family. Several legal and conceptual shifts had to be made in order to bring about a change in policy. One of the most fundamental was the use of the term ‘forced marriage’ which came into prominence in the 1990s. It immediately allowed for shifting the argument from a culturally particular form of marriage (arranged marriage) to examining the coercive elements in the arrangement. It was not threatening because of its difference from the majority ‘norm’, or its lack of adherence to ‘British values’, nor was it to be subjected to special protection as a minority practice. As Mike O’Brien, the then Minister of State for the Home Office said, ‘Multi-culturalism is no excuse for moral blindness’.8 It was the beginning of a ‘rights-based approach’ to forced marriage. Nevertheless, when the Foreign Office Minister Baroness Scotland announced the establishment of a Foreign Office desk to deal with forced marriage (later to become a Community Affairs Unit which arranged rescue operations), the multicultural approach was still evident in her speech. Making only glancing reference to the need to talk to NGOs, the only sign that feminist advocates had been

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instrumental in the policy changes, she said ‘I have no illusion that we, whether as organs of the Government or of the judicial process or of the caring services could march in to any community and tell them what is and is not a legitimate part of their culture. We have to be more sensitive than that’. Talking of children, she continued, ‘we need them to know that we do not class every case of parental pressure as forced marriage’. She ended by urging action with the community including religious leaders on ‘the more extreme cases which have nothing to do with grey areas and everything to do with abuse’9 (speech by Baroness Scotland 2000). The feminist case was built by a number of different service providers and lawyers who were far less squeamish about the feelings of the community. Nor did they concentrate on the ‘cultural’ aspects of the practice. Instead, Sara Hossain an advocate at the Supreme Court in Bangladesh and a Legal Officer at the human rights organisation Interrights, challenged the UK government’s case that it could not act in cases of dual nationality. She showed that there was no conflict in law between the British government’s position and the legal systems of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, which would uphold the rights of women to leave forced marriages. Hossain also showed that the use of habeas corpus petitions lodged by human rights lawyers working very carefully with women’s organisations and lawyers with local knowledge were successful in getting the victim to court and letting her make her wishes known.10 There was no pressure on the victim to lodge a criminal case against her family. She simply had to say that she did not wish to remain with her husband or her family. Today, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office deals with around 250 cases a year. Many are rescues while others are preventative measures as in some cases women contact FCO before they leave the country. By and large, the system has begun to work well as the FCO have learnt from some early, unsuccessful operations that they are unlikely to get an honest response if they turn up with masses of armed police and terrify the woman into silence. It is no surprise, then, that most of the leading advocates who have lobbied for years for the recognition of forced marriage are extremely sceptical about the value of legislation criminalising forced marriage specifically. Widespread unease has been expressed at consultations carried out by Asian women’s networks and a lobbying position paper by Southall Black Sisters11 argues that a new offence of ‘forced marriage’ should not be created ‘because it distracts from placing the issue within the wider legislative and policy framework on domestic violence’. They argue that rather than being seen as a gender issue, it will be seen as a ‘community’ issue or even as a ‘race’ or ‘religious’ issue. The framework expressed in the UN Declaration on Violence Against Women12 is still a useful starting point in working on gender-based violence, unlike later draft resolutions which listed various ‘traditional cultural practices’ ignoring for instance, custodial violence committed by state agents. A universalist view of violence that is located in ‘unequal power relations between men and women’ still remains a workable framework that holds both states and other actors to account. In 2004, five organisations working against trafficking, two of them based in Britain, issued a joint statement on a draft European Convention against trafficking

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in human beings drafted by the Council of Europe13 while nearly 170 organisations signed another.14 While the perspectives of many organisations on measures against trafficking in particular and their views on prostitution differed, there was widespread concern at the manner of the implementation of anti-trafficking laws which lead to further abuse of the rights of trafficked people. An international definition of trafficking was agreed upon in 2000 in the Palermo Protocol to a transnational crime control convention. The definition of a trafficked person who is identified as a victim is sharply contrasted with the definition of a smuggled migrant who has committed a crime against the state by making an illegal border crossing.15 Yet in practice, the two are hard to distinguish, with the result that figures on trafficking are often conflated with all illegal female migrants, all migrants in the sex industry or deportees. The ‘identification’ of trafficked persons is conducted during police raids so that very few women identify themselves as having been trafficked and many end up, in spite of the provisions of the Palermo Protocol, simply being deported to their country of origin. In order to avoid being deported, they must agree to co-operate with the authorities in prosecuting their trafficker. Eaves Housing, the only organisation offering a refuge to trafficked women in Britain, was forced by the terms of its funding to admit only those women who agree to co-operate with the authorities. Such conditions of funding would be unimaginable in secular Asian women’s refuges, which have always criticised immigration controls and refused to use deportation as a strategy – whether against violent Asian men or against forced marriages (Gupta 2003). Unlike the media which has generally seen the problem of forced marriage as one to be solved by stricter immigration controls, Southall Black Sisters has argued that restrictive immigration measures contribute to worsening the situation of women suffering in violent marriages. Other European countries have implemented even more restrictive immigration controls than Britain (Welchman and Hossain 2005). Anti-trafficking measures have enabled some funding to be targeted at those who are engaged with securing exit strategies for women. In fact, in Eastern Europe and Russia which are seen as ‘sending countries’ by West European government, some refuges have reported that they are under donor pressure to provide services for trafficked women rather than victims of domestic violence. Yet, because of the conditions of such services, women are reluctant to use them with the result that the refuges are often seriously under-utilised. Organisations that concentrate on the rights of sex workers, on the other hand, can at best hope for benign neglect from the authorities. The United States is using its funding of anti-trafficking initiatives and HIV/AIDS funding to require compliance with policies against prostitution in general. Recent legislation states that ‘No funds . . . may be used to promote or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution or sex trafficking.’ and in addition, ‘No funds . . . may be used to provide assistance to any group or organisation that does not have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking’.16 The devastating effects of this policy on a global scale are hard to comprehend. Many organisations have lost funding. Others as in the case of the organisations providing reproductive services which have been restricted by the Global Gag

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rule (prohibiting the use of abortion or even information about legal abortion services available elsewhere), have been forced to comply in order not to lose all their services. The HIV/AIDS pandemic had forced governments to develop better policies on service delivery to groups at risk, but now these are at risk of being completely undone.17 Although there is a long feminist and radical tradition of critique of the institution of marriage as a fundamental cornerstone of patriarchy, not least in antinomian religious traditions, there are no attempts to outlaw marriage which still remains globally the central apparatus to ensure sexual access and unpaid, reproductive labour. Comparisons of marriage to the institution of slavery are not inapt. But the legislative battle has consisted of trying to criminalise coercive and violent elements within marriage such as domestic violence, marital rape and forced marriage, as well as to change the nature of marriage itself by extending rights of marriage to same-sex partners and by making the dissolution of marriage easier.

Subduing Britain’s Muslims ‘And did those feet in ancient times Walk upon England’s mountains green’ (William Blake)

In Britain, the crisis of post-Empire identity identified since the Rushdie affair, has become acute since the London bombings in July 2005. The government, which has long developed twin-track approaches to minorities, particularly Muslims (Sahgal 2003) has chosen neither to increase democratic accountability nor to secularise the British state, thus failing to address the dynamics that contribute to the larger crisis of British identity (and the place in particular of English identity among the British nations) which underlie the anxieties that are being expressed in a debate that focuses instead on Muslims and multiculturalism. Instead, it has tried to divide ‘extremists’ from ‘moderates’ by asserting that the test to which they must adhere are to support ‘British values’ which remain undefined. Remarkably, the different strands of thinking expressed by both liberal and conservative commentators and the anti-war movement, which are locked in opposing positions about the war and anti-terror legislation in Britain, are arguing over a very narrow range of political and strategic possibilities when discussing the way forward for multicultural Britain. The idea of ‘Islamophobia ‘ animates a discourse in which Muslims are permanently viewed as constructed by and subjected to Orientalist and racist discourses on the one hand and Western injustice on the other. Even social disadvantage is now discussed as a factor pertaining to religious groups rather than situated in class, national origin or industrial decline. Violence within the Muslim ‘umma’ towards heterodox traditions within Islam, despised groups in the sexual hierarchy such as women and gays, and Sunni–Shia violence or the violence of states such as Saudi Arabia, Iran or Sudan towards their own citizens, is ignored, understated or significantly diminished by those who are sympathetic to this view of Muslims as a persecuted group and Islam as

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a persecuted religion. For instance, the litany of Muslim suffering includes Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya and Kashmir (all national struggles which have been Islamicised) but never Gujarat where Muslims were murdered in a concerted attack by Hindu fundamentalists or Darfur where Muslims are murdering other Muslims. The construction of ‘Muslim’ in Western countries as either inherently fundamentalist or a victim subjected to both discrimination and intense persecution (or indeed both simultaneously) has the effect of disabling critique of fundamentalist movements as political movements across large sections of the peace movement, anti-war movement and even within-government policy. Instead, in Britain, the government has imposed new security measures (measures which both create besieged communities and promote and actualise feelings of victimhood) and simultaneously proposed a law to outlaw ‘religious intolerance’, thus acceding to and ‘empowering’ the forces for intolerance that have emerged to police, shape and subdue diverse forms of Muslim identification. These forces are exemplified by two large networks: the Muslim Council of Britain, chief ally of the government, which energetically argues for laws criminalising forced marriage as well as laws on religious intolerance, and the Muslim Association of Britain, on the other hand, which is allied with the anti-war movement. Both represent the same political forces having close connections to fundamentalist political organisations such as Jamaat-i-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood. Their twin battle is against the Islamist groups that are more radical than them (who are critical of their engagement with the state) and the long tradition of secular organisations springing from many different movements both nationalist and radical in the countries of origin. The political project that is being engaged in both by the British state and these Muslim ‘leaders’ is the creation of a new managerial class which will create a new generation of religious community leadership as the voices of authority mediating between the state and the ‘community’. A Council of Imams is proposed, on the model of the Jewish Council of Deputies, which will complete the project of reconstructing twentyfirst century multiculturalism as arrangements made to accommodate religious rather than racial or national ‘difference’. As part of the government project, effort has also been spent on creating a Muslim women’s network – a top-down process unlike other Asian women’s networks which are independent of the state. Like the MCB, the network, asserting that Muslim needs are ‘different’ from those of other communities and therefore need separate provision, may also fulfil the useful function of acting as cheerleaders for proposed legislation on forced marriage which will ‘protect’ Muslim women. These developments, which were identified long before the London bombings of July 2005, have simply become more visible and more urgent. Meanwhile, although there are some moves by the government to accede to demands for extradition of suspects in bombings in France and the United States, Britain’s ‘covenant of security’ remains largely intact. Perpetrators of human rights violations abroad will not be held to account in Britain as long as they neither wage war against Britain nor engage in terrorism within Britain. As the government’s closest ally, religious fundamentalist political formations can rest assured that

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their attacks on Muslim minorities and their support for terrorism abroad, whether current or in the past, will never be examined by the British state. ‘British values’ it is becoming clearer, are expressed by ritual denunciations of heinous acts – whether they are the killing of British civilians ( but not Pakistanis or Bangladeshis or Israelis) or the practice of ‘honour’ crimes. But other practices such as the support for sharia laws including those which criminalise sexuality (including penalties such as whipping and stoning) may be supported in countries abroad. This is consistent with the view that the control of sexuality is the business of the state, rather than individuals or even religious or tribal bodies. It is the ‘modern’ or progressive face of fundamentalism which would centralise control of both the body and the mind.

Taming the Beast: The Sanskritisation of Islam The vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my vision’s greatest enemy Both read the Bible day and night, But thou readst black where I read white (William Blake)

In the forced marriage debate, the British government went out of its way to proclaim that Islam did not justify forced marriage. And various groups on the right as well as pluralist organisations like the Network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws,18 which are strongly opposed to religious fundamentalism, have used different interpretations of Muslim law to make their point. But here again, sometimes inadvertently, the politics of purity are reasserted. The legalistic approach can be profoundly deconstructionist – pointing to the plurality of law and tradition in the Muslim world. The double-edged project of subduing Islam through control and the creation of a politically quiescent clergy (always one of the key forms of rule of large empires as well as modern authoritarian states) and deconstructing it from within to provide for more alternative voices as feminists have done, feeds eventually from the same streams of rule-laden thought. In their preoccupation with law, feminist groups have referred to different traditions within Muslim laws, from radical reinterpretation of the verses of the Quran to recovering aspects of classical jurisprudence, that have been surpressed by the orthodox. But one of the main grounds of the attack is against ‘culture’ which is supposed to have degraded the purity of the original religious message. This has been the message most enthusiastically adopted by the British government – whether in its search for allies in the fight against terrorism or for women’s rights. While some feminists refer also to variations of custom and practice, Muslim thought in its most radical, arguably feminist and antinominan forms is absent from consideration as a source of inspiration. Unrecognised also are the plural syncretic traditions through which lived ‘Islam’ negotiates its relationship with other religions and cultures, both temporal and sacred. Both from the right and from the left, what the historian E.P. Thompson called ‘the polite culture’ is taking hold. In India, it would be recognised as the process of ‘sanskritisation’ by which

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the oppressed majority attempts upward social mobility and destroys its own more liberatory traditions (Illiah 1996). It is the avowedly secular movements of India that have not only referred to but expanded the spaces for the performances – traditional and modern drawn from both the classical and popular traditions across the Indian subcontinent. Sufi, Bhakti and other devotional traditions have been lovingly nurtured by Marxists, radical democrats and others trying to rebuild popular cultures inimical of the dominant fascism and newly constructed ‘purity’ traditions of the BJP.19

Conclusion Christ died as an Unbeliever (William Blake)

While many advocates had a realistic view of the limits of such legal achievements, the political moment that opened up in the 1990s appeared to promise a receptive international environment and more democratic national spaces in many parts of the world. The state, in short, was seen as a rational agent of change, one that was capable of delivering protection without compromising individual choice or using feminist struggles to promote its own repressive agenda. As we have seen through the forced marriage and trafficking debates, the record is very mixed. But the test of success cannot simply be the ‘discourse’ of the state or the media but the tangible gains that have been made by individual women and the opening up of secular spaces – including those that increase legislative protection for the autonomy of women and reduce impunity for violation. Some of the legislative action connected to trafficking is devastating – not simply because of its effects on the victims but on the autonomy and organisational capacity of thousands of organisations working with them on the political and social movements contending with the AIDS pandemic. This devastation is being wreaked not just on sexual rights advocates but also at the heart of the anti-violence movement. The fact remains, that the drive against illegal migration and the drive against terrorism – which Tony Blair promised would mark the United Kingdom’s term as holding the Presidency of the European Union – will continue unabated. While anti-trafficking legislation undoubtedly constructs women as victims, it also offers the only current possibility of a remedy which could potentially include settlement in the countries of their destination. Like the Refugee Convention, and the development of national jurisprudence which has also been criticised for its reification of cultural arguments (Visheswaran 2004) it is one of the very few international instruments that offer any form of protection. The task is to make those protections much stronger, and to argue simultaneously against the regimes that control migration and emphasise autonomy and selforganisation as well. For instance in Nepal, feminist advocates have won a victory to assert women’s right to free movement against government provisions that had responded to concerns around trafficking by trying to prevent women from travelling without the permission of a male relative. There can be no final answers, but only a set of contingent practices, which we assess and renew.

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While academic theorists have engaged in the task of deconstructing grand narratives and hegemonic visions, they have frequently failed to realise that the drive behind many social movements ‘from below’ is not simply the claim of the particular but the vision of the universal that informs it. Generations of anti-colonial leaderships were educated, sometimes inadvertently, in citizenship and democracy by their colonial masters. From the rising of slaves in San Domingo on hearing of the French revolution (James 1980) down through the anti-colonial struggles in India and later the bloody anti-settler rebellions of Algeria and Kenya, the ideas of both freedom and democracy drove antiimperialist struggles. Frequently, they were allied to milleniarian movements and other very local forms of knowledge and organisation. But like the languages of their rulers, they grabbed ideas that were not meant for them, used them as they pleased and made them triumphantly their own. This many-headedness is also the power of the imperial Bush project. It is not simply an attempt to control resources, but to re-order the world by use of purity laws and to re-order the political settlement in the Middle East by using democracy as a weapon of war. The singlest biggest success of the Bush project is to revive the moribund forces of pan-Arabism and achieve what had been hitherto impossible – the alliance of pan-Islamism with pan-Arabism. The merging of religion and nation has also been the aim of the transnationalism of the Hindutva political project. To oppose this, we have to revive the project of secularism as one that will give strength to multi-dimensional resistance movements – fighting anti-imperialism and anti-democratic and politically quietist trends from local to transnational movements. As Chetan Bhatt points out, the secular project has been very largely problematic but that does not prevent ‘commitment to a painstakingly meticulous, heterogenous, novel and visionary secular renewal’ (Bhatt 2001). It is also that vision, attenuated and subdued to be sure, that still leads so many activists from social movements to use the UN as an arena for their lobbying. That is why the UN is also the global arena for the attack on human rights and multilateralism. In other words, human rights are not being entirely dismantled or even ignored. Universality is not dead, but being reconfigured. It is in the interventions that mould these struggles that we can begin to understand how newer expressions of human rights that emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century begin to be reshaped again in the twenty-first century. The politics of identity and its effect on the public–private debate are key aspects of this struggle. This politics affects not only women’s advocacy but the advocacy of fundamentalist organisations such as evangelical anti-abortion, antiprostitution organisations who are moving through international and national arenas and their own localities cleansing the area, cleansing the body and finally cleansing the mind. While universality expressed through international human rights conventions demands both equality and non-discrimination and, in general, a tempering of state power which forces a retreat of the state from its interventions in the ‘private sphere’, the Utopian vision is driven by a vision of perfection in which the state delivers safety and protection, and where autonomy remains negotiable rather

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than guaranteed. But the Utopian vision goes further and insists on purity and an end to degradation and danger. To legislate this vision is to enable an attack on those values that are deemed to be inimical to it and to legislate for values rather than to rein in violations. It is not simply the ‘victim’ whose agency is denied or whose consent is irrelevant to determining actions taken in defence of her needs. Rather, she becomes the symbol but not the driving force of war, legislative action and social engineering. Different political projects define the violation quite differently. The category here of a victim-survivor is still necessary in assessing the type and nature of interventions that are apparently conducted on her behalf. The communities of belonging that nurture her, giving voice not just to her suffering but her demands, are also not to be set aside. But finally, the critique of the market of commodification, not least the commodification of desire may be carried out elsewhere than in legal arenas. In Thompson’s words, as he advised his old Marxist comrades to cease trying to always control, Marxism should ‘close down one counter in its universal pharmacy, and cease dispensing potions of analysis to cure the maladies of desire.’20 In 1989, Women Against Fundamentalism identified fundamentalist movements as political movements with control over the bodies and minds of women as central to their agenda. That agenda is also mirrored by those strains in all feminisms that want to guarantee outcomes, not create the conditions for release of potential. The fact is that we do not know what women will want to do with freedom when they have it. But in order to go on trying, we have to be alert to accidental magic, to our own ridiculousness and to the sense that the divine finds its own image, here and now, in our own imperfect humanity. Make your own decision. See for yourself while you live. Find your own place. Dead what house will you have? Creature you don’t see Your opportunity. In the end no-one belongs to you. Kabir says, it’s difficult, this wheel of time. (Kabir)

Notes * I dedicate this article to my mother, Nayantara Sahgal, who taught me while very young that left populism and right authoritarianism were not necessarily opposing forces but mirror images, who challenged autocratic dynastic rule and scandalised polite society by living out of wedlock, but who does not consider herself a feminist because, she says, ‘I have not stepped out enough’. Would that we could all step out so little. 1 http://waf.gn.apc.org/ 2 See Box 4.1 Prism’s Critique of Identity-based Politics in Jaya Sharma and Dipika Nath, Through the prism of intersectionality: same sex sexualities in India, in Geetanjali Misra and Radhika Chandiramani (eds) Sexuality, Gender and Rights: Exploring Theory and Practice in South and South East Asia, New Delhi: Sage. 3 Shadow Report of Algeria to CEDAW Committee (1999) edited by International Women’s Human Rights Clinic and Women Living Under Muslim Laws, http://www.wluml.org/english/ pubsfulltxt.shtml?cmd%5B87%5D
i-87-3008

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4 http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/recommendations/recomm.htm#recom19 5 Some human rights organisations make the distinction between violations committed by the state and abuses committed by non-state actors. 6 For a view on how Bandung File, a series on Afro-Caribbean and Asian current affairs, challenged this consensus see Sahgal, Gita (2001) Struggle not submission, in Shelia Rowbotham and Huw Beynon (eds) Looking at Class, Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain, London: Rivers Oram Press. 7 This position was contentious from the start. India, for instance does not permit dual nationality, but British women of Indian origin were offered no more active intervention than women of Pakistan or Bangladeshi origin. 8 See A Choice by Right, report of the working group on forced marriage, Home Office, London 2000 http://communities.homeoffice.gov.uk/raceandfaith/faith/forced-marriages/grp-forced-marriages 9 Speech by Baroness Scotland, launching the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Forced Marriage Unit, 2000. 10 See Gita Sahgal, Snatched Love: Forced Marriage and Multiculturalism, Faction Films 2002. 11 ‘Forced Marriage: A Criminal Offence? A Position Paper by Southall Black Sisters’, Southall Black Sisters, November 2005. 12 http://www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/A.RES.48.104.En?Opendocument 13 http://www.antislavery.org 14 http://untreaty.un.org/English/TreatyEvent2003/Texts/treaty2E.pdf: Protocol to Prevent, Surpress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime. 15 See http://www.seerights.org 16 See Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorisation Act of 2003 (PL 108–193) and HR1298 United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003. 17 http://www.genderhealth.org ‘Application of the Prostitution Loyalty Oath in US Global Aids Policy’. 18 See the website of WLUML for the range of materials that they publish, including a multicountry study on Muslim laws. http://www.wluml.org 19 See Bhatt, Chetan (2001) Hindu Nationalism, Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths, Oxford and New York, Berg for the complications of the Hindutva project which has also managed to spread its reach to the most marginalised communities of dalits and adivasis. 20 An example is the movement of newsagents to refuse to accept the package of magazines including pornography routinely imposed by dominant chains such as W.H. Smiths.

Bibliography Bhatt, Chetan (1997) Liberation and Purity; Race, New Religious Movements and the Ethics of Postmodernity, London: UCL Press. Bhatt, Chetan (2001) Hindu Nationalism, Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths, Berg, Oxford and New York. Building Alliances Globally to End Violence Against Women, the Global Dailogue Series, Working Paper 1, 2004 CREA, Delhi. Gupta, Rahilla (ed.) (2003) From Homebreakers to Jailbreakers, London and New York: Zed Books. Hossain, Sara (2004) ‘Apostates’, Ahmadis and advocates: use and abuse of offences against religion in Bangladesh, in Ayesha Imam, Jenny Morgan, Nira Yuval Davis (eds) Warning Signs of Fundamentalisms, 83–97, London: WLUML. Ilaiah, Kancha (1996) Why I am Not a Hindu, A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy, Calcutta: SAMYA. James, C.L.R. (1980) The Black Jacobins, London: Allison and Busby. Kapur, Ratna (2002) ‘The tragedy of victimization rhetoric: resurrecting the “native” subject in international/post-colonial feminist legal politics’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, 15 (Spring): 1–38. Long, Scott (2004) ‘When doctors torture: the anus and the state in Egypt and beyond’, Health and Human Rights, 7 (2): 115–40.

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Miller, Alice, M. (2004) ‘Sexuality, violence against women and human rights: women make demands and ladies get protection’, Health and Human Rights, 7(2): 17–47. Misra, Geetanjali and Chandiramani, Radhika (eds) (2005) Sexuality, Gender and Rights: Exploring Theory and Practice in South and South East Asia, New Delhi: Sage. Rothschild, Cynthia (2005) Written Out: How Sexuality is Used to Attack Women’s Organising. A Report by the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, New York. Rowbotham, Sheila and Beynon, Huw (2001) Looking at Class, Film Television and the Working Class in Britain, Rivers London: Oram Press. Sahgal, Gita (2002) ‘Blair’s jihad, Blunkett’s crusade: the battle for the hearts and minds of Britain’s Muslims’, Radical Philosophy, March/April, 112: 2–5. Sahgal, Gita (2004) Two cheers for multiculturalism, in Imam, Ayesha, Morgan, Jenny and YuvalDavis, Nira (eds) Warning Signs of Fundamentalisms, London: WLUML. Sahgal, Gita and Yuval-Davis, Nira (1992) Refusing Holy Orders, Women and Fundamentalism in Britain, London: Virago reprinted WLUML. Sarkar, Tanika (2001) Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation; Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, New Delhi: Permanent Black. Tax, Meredith (1995) Culture, Censorship, and Voice, Women’s World, New York. Thompson, E.P. (1976) William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary, New York: Pantheon Books. Thompson, E.P. (1993) Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Visheswaran, Kamla (2004) Gendered States: Rethinking Culture as a Site of South Asian Human Rights Work, Human Rights Quarterly, 26: 483–511. Welchman, Lynn and Hossain Sara (eds) (2005) ‘Honour’: Crimes, Paradigms and Violence Against Women, London: Zed Press. Yuval-Davis, Nira (1995) The Cairo Conference, women and transversal politics, Women Against Fundamentalism, Journal 6: 19–21, http://waf.gn.apc.org/

Filmography ‘Hullaballo Over Satanic Verses’, Bandung File February 1989, Channel 4 TV UK. Women Under Islam: Struggle or Submission, Bandung File, June 1989, Channel 4 TV UK. The War Crimes File, Twenty Twenty Television, Dispatches, 1995, Channel 4 TV UK.

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African diaspora cartographies of 85 roots and routes 86–93 classical versus contemporary conceptualizations 84 transnational communities 84, 86 vagabond dimensions of 88 See also West African migrants Al-Ali, Nadje 12 See also Iraqi women, dilemmas of Album Pacifica 81 Al Qaeda 5, 149, 162, 181, 207 American imperialism 149, 156, 191 Anthias, Floya 8 See also belonging, notion of; global power anti-Mandal agitations 136 Antinomian Feminism 207 See also Women against Fundamentalism (WAF) anti-Semitism 44 Anti-Untouchability Act of 1955 130 Arendt, Hannah 156–57 “Aryan” blood 59 asprsya 58 assimilationism 20 asylum seekers 18, 90, 116, 118 Australian Muslims 117 Australianness, concept of 181–85 beer drinking 183 and notion of terrorism 181 steak cooking 184 Australian–US relationship 176 ‘axis of evil’ 12 ‘Baathists’ policies, in Iraq ‘banality of evil’ 158 Baudrillard, Jean 151

193

becoming, politics of 55 route to belonging 56–57 Belchi massacre of 1977 133 belonging, notion of 4, 8, 17, 37 and citizenship 22 contested notions of 180–85 diasporic connections 24–25 dimensions of 21 Fine, Robert 11 as gendered process 22 hybridity, concept of 25–26 intersectionality 26 Kannabiran, Kalpana 9, 55 politics of 7, 11, 149–52 Puwar, Nirmal 10, 79 and quality of life 20 Sahgal, Gita 13 situated 7, 66, 85, 95 social 5 social inclusion 21 translocational positionality, concept of 27 Zlatko Skrbim 12 See also global power; Guantanamo Bay Bhambra, Gurminder H. 8 inclusion, terminology of 8 See also cultural identity; multiculturalism bhoodan-movement 131 Bihar Land Ceiling Act 131 binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’ 37 Black Babies campaign 107 blasphemy laws See morality laws, in Utopian context Bonded Labour (Abolition) Act 1976 61 brahminical Hinduism 67 British muslims 217–18 bullock capitalists 131

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226 candala 62, 69n casta See caste caste 57 in contemporary India 128–30 caste system 128–29 rituals 129 post-independence and land reforms 130–34 bhoodan-movement 131 educational achievements 134 political economy of labour, transitions of 132–34 racial formation of 60 wars 134 dalit retaliation 136–37 organized crime 135–36 Catholic Christianity 13n Catholic-Protestant relations 100 Chakkiliyar caste, violent exclusionary practices among 64 Chandler, David 12 ethical foreign policy 12 and humanitarian intervention 168–71 and national identity 12 as national interest 161–63 radical responses to 163–65 See also culture wars ‘children overboard’ 179 Chomsky, Noam 163 citizenship and identity 1 Blunkett, David 2 contested notions of 180–85 culture, role of 3 definition of 2 in France 2 Ignatieff, Michael 2 in India 2 in US 2 Zlatko Skrbim 12 See also global power; Guantanamo Bay Cold War balance of power 164 Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) recommendations 210 communal defence mechanisms 1 Communist Party of India 136 community, notions of 37

Index construction of otherness 37 social exclusion 7, 19, 37 social inclusion 37 cosmopolitanism 4–5, 8, 42 domestic 9, 42, 49–51 situating 5 theories 46 disposition 47–48 domestic 49–51 gender 48–49 See also racism CPI (ML) Liberation 136–37, 143 creamy layer, of backward castes 132 crime and violence 4 against women forced marriage and trafficking 213–17 in international arena 209 as organized strategy 211–13 social background 4 criminalisation of politics 127 crisis management See humanitarian intervention critical theory 39 cultivating castes 131 cultural identity 32, 55 definitions of 34 as primordial loyalties 34, 36 as rights 35 as socio-historical understandings 34 Hall, Stuart 33 politics of 35–37 reconsidering 37–40 See also multiculturalism culture wars 161, 165–68 and national identity crisis 165–68 of US 166 Cunard, Nancy 44 dalit-bahujan cultures 66 dalitbahujan women 139, 143 dalit group caste, views on 57–60 racial formation of 60–64 national federation of dalit women 64–68 charter of rights 66–67 definition of atrocity 65 political exclusions of, in India 127–28

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Index politics of belonging/becoming 55–57 route from becoming to belonging 56–57 self conscious movement 57 Dalit Samaj Party (DSP) 137 dalit sena 137 dalit women as arm bearers 137–38 redressal and response 140–42 Bhanwari Bai trial 141 violence against, in India 127, 134–36 access and participation 138–40 dalit retaliation 136–37 women exclusion 128 See also dalit group David, metamorphosis of 77 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women 209, 213 Derrida, Jacques 158–59 diaspora space 102 dravidianism 59 dvija 58 economic bondage 133 Eichmann trial 157 emotional attachments 4 English Ranters 207 essentialism 36, 38–39 ethnicity conflicts 1, 18 anti-Muslim racism 18 Powell, Enoch 1 Tebbit, Norman and cricket test 1 ethnocultural diversity 35 ethnocultural groups 34 European Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) 164 European Muslim men 3 ‘evil ones’ 12 evil, language of denial of 154–56 collective punishment 155 displacement 155 historicism 155 politics and 149–52 social science and 152–54 dissolve evil 152 relativise evil 152 subjectivise evil 152 technologise evil 152

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as work of man 156–59 ex-Untouchables 63 faith schools 52n feeling safe See citizenship and identity, Ignatieff, Michael Feldman, Alice 10 See also, Irish identities Fine, Robert See belonging, notion of; evil, language of Fitzroy Learning Network 122 fixate collectivity boundaries 1 Fraser, Nancy 114 fundamentalist Muslims 3 Gair Mazarua land 131 Gemeinschaft 4 General Federation of Iraqi Women (GFIW) 199 genocide 151 and African tribal populations, of Darfur 151 ‘genuine refugees’ 114 Gesellschaft 4 ‘gigantic gentrified bourgeois ghetto’ 50 global citizenship 43 global crisis situation 1 global culture 4 imperialism of western culture 19 global information age 162 globalisation 19 global liberalism 149 global power cultural diversity 22–24 ethnic conflicts 18 globalised networks 19 and group focusing 18 identity and belonging 19–22 person actors 18 See also belonging, notion of global terrorism Al Quaeda 5–6 London attack 2, 4 naming, concept of 5, 18 global war on terrorism 2–3, 5 global guerrilla war 5 London attack 2, 4

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Gormley, Anthony, project of 80 Guantanamo Bay terrorist suspect prisoners 176–78 and ethnicity 178–80 Habib, Mamdouh 176–78, 181–82, 185–88 Hicks, David 176–78, 181–88 Guevara, Che 81 Gulf War 1991 163 Hall, Stuart 6, 33, 80 multicultural question 17 Hannerz See cosmopolitanism, theories hidden apartheid 64 Hindu faith 57, 128–29 Ambedkar, B.R. 58–59, 61 brahminical Hinduism 67 caste system brahman 58 ksatriya 58 sudra 58 vaisya 58 Gandhi, M.K. 58 Gupta, Dipankar 62–63 Manu, laws of 62 Naicker, E.V. Ramaswami 58 Phule, Jotirao 58, 60 Phule, Savitribai 58 See also caste Hinduism See Hindu faith Hindu mindset 139 Hindu nationalism 66 Hitler, Adolf 150 racial, annihilation 150 Holocaust 153 Hossain, Sara 215 humanitarian intervention in Belgrade 169 in Bosnia 169–70 in NATO-led war over Kosovo 168 in Rwanda 169–70 Humpage, Louise 10 See also temporary protection visas hybridity 38 See also belonging, notion of Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O. 10 See also African diaspora; West African migrants

illegal immigrants See West African migrants, clandestine movements immigration 1 Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O. 10 policies 1, 97 social integration, of refugees 11 See also African diaspora; West African migrants Indian Bhakti movement 207 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 170, 173n intersectionality See belonging, notion of intimate society 7 Iraqi women, dilemmas of gendering reconstruction 200–01 impact of war and economic sanctions 194–96 on education 195 on lower income class 194 on support systems of working women 195 islamisation and conservatism 196 dress code 196 social restrictions 196 woman’s honour 197 political participation 199–200 post-invasion developments 197–99 new Islamic law 198 state repression and state feminism 193–94 Irish collective memory 102 Irish identities narratives Liz 107–09 Mary 104–05, 109 Sara 105–06, 109 Islam, sanskritisation of 219–20 Islamic terrorism 3 Islamophobia 217 Jamaat i Islami 218 James, C.L.R 43–44 jatis 58, 129 jihadis 192 Johnson, Shoshana 178 Jordan, June 80 kaala paani 69n Kannabiran, Kalpana

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Index See belonging, notion of; dalit group; Hindu faith; racism Klein, Naomi 4 landowning castes 131 lathaiths 135 ‘legitimate’ violence 54 liberal pluralism 37 Lynch, Private Jessica 178 Mahila Morcha Dalit Sena 140 mainstream Australians 117 Manu, laws of See manusmriti manusmriti 64, 129, 134 Marston, Greg 10 See also temporary protection visas matrixial 49 metaphor of terror’ 117 Migration Amendment Act 1992 116 minority rights and cultural identity 35–36 modernism 33 post 33 ‘monocultural’ society 100 morality laws, in Utopian context 208–09 blasphemy laws 208–09 multicultural citizenship 35 ‘multicultural hunger’ 79 multicultural question See Hall, Stuart multiculturalism 6, 8, 22, 43 Hall, Stuart 6 hierarchical cultures 30 liberal framework 24 naturalization 29 Trafalgar Square, London 77 Alison Lapper Pregnant’ statue 78 Monument statute Nelson Mandela statue, positioning of 77–78 See also cultural identity multiple identities 20 murderous ethnic cleansing 150 Muslim Australians 180 Muslim Brotherhood 218 MY (Muslim–Yadav) combination 142 Nava, Mica 9 See also cosmopolitanism

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naxalite movement 136 neo-liberal ideology 3 Network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws 219 non-brahminism 59 official Marxism 154 oil crisis 193 oppression olympics 55 Osas Osamede 89 panchamas See Hindu faith, caste system panchayati raj 132, 140–41 Pateras 92 permanent protection visas (PPVs) 116 personal defence mechanisms 1 Playing with Fire 23 political imaginations 79–81 political scenario, dynamics of 1 Protection of Civil Rights in 1979 130 Protestant Christianity 13n protestant masculinity 4 proto-feminism 48 psychic maps, modalities of 103–04 purity of blood See caste Puwar, Nirmal See belonging, notion of; social inclusion, forms of racial discrimination 57 International convention on the elimination of 60, 66 recommendations 60 racial identity, process of See racism racism 1 in Britain 9, 43–44 demographic data 45 Miscegenation and domestic social interaction 45 re-racialisation 44 and Irish people 102 Kannabiran, Kalpana 9 Patterson, Sheila 45 race making, process of alterity 108–09 home/belonging 108–09 mobility 108–09 and women 43–44

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Ranveer Sena 135, 143 Ranveer mahila sangh 136 Ranvir Kisan Maha Sangh 136 Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh 136 reflexive modernization 166 Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) 121 Refugees say THANK YOU to Australia campaign 124 Republican neo-Wilsonianism 164 reverse discrimination 55 rural oligarchs 133

social suffering 56 social theory 33, 37 somatic norm 78–79 Southall Black Sisters 215 See also Women against Fundamentalism (WAF) Status of Refugees and 1967 Protocol 115 Stree Purusha Tulana 58 Sub-Saharan Africans 92 symbolic violence’ 114

Saddam Hussein, dictatorship of 191 Sahgal, Gita 13 morality laws, in Utopian context 208–09 violence against women forced marriage and trafficking 213–17 in international arena 209 as organized strategy 211–13 Women against Fundamentalism (WAF) 206–07, 222 samadharma 59 sanskritisation 129 sati 212 Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989 61, 65, 69n scheduled castes 60 scheduled tribes 60 second-class citizens 118 self-empowerment 13 self respect movement 59 sexual slavery 64 sexual trafficking, of Albanian women 26 Shankarbigha massacre 142 sine ira et studio 153 social capital 23 social evils 57 social exclusion 7, 19, 85 social existence 7 social fascism 7 Santos, Boaventura De Sousa 7 social inclusion, forms of 77–79 Trafalgar Square, London 77 ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ statue 78 ‘Monument statute’ 78 ‘Nelson Mandela statue’, positioning of 77–78

Tampa crisis 179 temporary citizens 118 temporary protection visa (TPV) 10 as injustices of redistribution and recognition 114 innovative refugee programme 121–24 versus permanent protection 118 public discourses 115–18 effects of 119–21 social belonging 115 Thapar, Suruchi-Bjorkert 11 dalit women 11 gendered caste violence 11 See also caste; dalit women ‘the edges’ 87 theories of statecraft 163 The Sheik 48 third World-woman 79 Thompson, E.P., 207–08, 219 tolerance, concept of 6 torture by proxy 177 totalitarianism 12 ‘transgressive’ violence 54 Transitional Adminstrative Law (TAL) 198 translocational positionality, See belonging, notion of transnationalism 18 objects of reference 19 transethnic connections 19 tribalist Africans 3 unauthorized refugee arrivals uncivil civil society 7 universalism 36 UN Resolution 1325 201 untouchables 129 jobs of 133

117

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Index Women against Fundamentalism (WAF) 206–07, 222 Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice 210 Woolf, Virginia 44 World Conference against Racism, Durban 54, 61

varnas 58, 128 Vedic period See Hindu faith Vieten, Ulrike M. See cosmopolitanism, situating Vietnam Syndrome 166 Virtual Wars 170 war against terrorism 171–72, 176 7/7 transport bombings in London 9/11 US attack 172 West African migrants 86 clandestine movements 87–90 to Europe 90–95 Sahara desert, role of 89 vagabond dimensions 88 See also, African diaspora White Australia sentiment 116 White-Irish-racist 101 Wilsonian internationalism 166 Windrush 44

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xenophobia

9, 43, 68

172 Yuval-Davis, Nira See belonging, notion of, politics of; citizenship and identity zamindari system 131 zamindars 1312 Zionism See American imperialism Zlatko Skrbim See belonging, notion of; citizenship and identity

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