Boundarying, Geographic Thought and the Exceptional
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Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: a Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism
MAHMOOD MAMDANI Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism ABSTRACT The link between Islam and terrorism became a central media concern following September 11, resulting in new rounds of "culture talk. This talk has turned religious experience into a political category, differentiating 'good Muslims" from "bad Mus- lims, rather than terrorists from civilians. The implication is undisguised: Whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Islam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcized from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Muslims. This article suggests that we lift the quarantine and turn the cultural theory of politics on its head. Beyond the simple but radical suggestion that if there are good Muslims and bad Muslims, there must also be good Westerners and bad Westerners, I question the very tendency to read Islamist poli- tics as an effect of Islamic civilization—whether good or bad—and Western power as an effect of Western civilization. Both those poli- tics and that power are born of an encounter, and neither can be understood outside of the history of that encounter. Cultural explanations of political outcomes tend to avoid history and issues. Thinking of individuals from "traditional" cultures in authentic and original terms, culture talk dehistoricizes the construction of political identities. This article places the terror of September 11 in a his- torical and political context. Rather than a residue of a premodern culture in modern politics, terrorism is best understood as a modern construction. Even when it harnesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, the result is a modern ensemble at the service of a modern project. -
AC Vol 42 No 25
www.africa-confidential.com 21 December 2001 Vol 42 No 25 AFRICA CONFIDENTIAL RWANDA 2 RWANDA Donor diplomacy Finance Minister Donald Kaberuka Everything is risky wins high marks from donors for President Kagame prepares for national elections while his exiled his anti-poverty plan but there is military opponents regroup in Congo-Kinshasa still much carping about the Kigali government’s forays into Congo. ‘In our situation everything we do is risky...’ General Paul Kagame told Africa Confidential on 9 December in Kigali as he explained plans to open up the country’s politics ahead of national multi-party elections due in 2003. ‘We inherited a very complex situation, we cannot hope for soft solutions.’ GHANA 3 Kagame’s hard solution is to pack dozens of political and social reforms into two hectic years. His proclaimed reforms point to a national unity approach of the kind adopted by South Africa’s African No shine on gold National Congress and outgoing National Party in 1990: a power-sharing government liberalising President Kufuor’s election pledge Rwanda’s authoritarian politics and writing a new constitution in the run-up to free elections. It is no of a ‘golden age for business’ is coincidence that South Africa is the Kigali government’s strongest African supporter. now being tested. Dire public Reality on the ground is different. Political currents are now a mélange of the options suggested by finances give him little scope for improvements in health and the Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani.* 1. Israeli strategy: to create a separate political education. He is also being pushed community of Tutsi (some 14 per cent of Rwandans) beside another of Hutu. -
The Rwandan Genocide: Combating Stereotypes And
The Rwandan Genocide: Combating Stereotypes and Understanding the Origins Nicola Skakel Senior Honors Thesis Department of History April 9th 2018 Defense Committee: Dr. Susan K. Kent, Department of History, Primary Advisor Dr. Matthew Gerber, Department of History, Honors Council Representative Dr. Paul Shankman, Department of Anthropology, Advisor 1 Introduction On the 7th of April 1994, the small east African country of Rwanda erupted into one of the most deadly and intimate genocides the modern world had ever witnessed. Whilst the western world stood by and watched in just 100 days over 800,000 Rwandans out of a total population of 7 million, were systematically murdered in the most brutal and violent of ways. Those who were targeted made up the country’s minority ethnic group the Tutsis, and moderates from the majority group, the Hutus. For many, the legacy of Rwanda is a monstrous example of extreme pent up ethnic tensions that has its roots in European colonialism. In contrast, I will argue that the events not just of 1994 but also the unrest that proceeded it, arose from a highly complex culmination of long-standing historical tensions between ethnic groups that long pre-dated colonialism. In conjunction, a set of short-term triggers including foreign intervention, civil war, famine, state terrorism and ultimately the assassination of President Habyarimana also contributed to the outburst of genocide in 1994. Whilst it would be easy to place sole responsibility on European colonists for implementing a policy of divide and rule and therefore exacerbating ethnic tensions, it seems to me that genocide is never that cut and dried: it can never be explained by one factor. -
Remarks on Receipt of Honorary Doctorate at Addis Ababa University, 24 July 2010
Remarks on receipt of Honorary Doctorate at Addis Ababa University, 24 July 2010. Mahmood Mamdani Executive Director, Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University, Kampala I first heard of Addis Ababa University in 1973, the year I got my first teaching job at the University of Dar es Salaam. Addis, like Dar, was a university in ferment during those years. They were times when we were sure of ourselves: we knew what we were up against, and we knew where we were going. We were against monarchy, against dictatorship, against neo-colonialism, against imperialism. And we were for socialism, sometimes for democracy, but always for socialism. Socialism had become a language in which we spoke to one another. For some, it was a badge, for others it was a brand name. We were the first generation of post-independence African intellectuals. We thought in historical terms. We knew that history was moving, more or less like a train, heading to a known destination, and none of us had any doubt that we were on that train. We were certain that the future would be better than the past, much better. If there would be violence, it would be revolutionary, the violence of the poor against the rich, the oppressor against the oppressed. Good revolutionary violence would do away with bad counter-revolutionary violence. Two decades later, we found ourselves in a world for which we were least prepared. Not only was it a world drenched in blood, but the battle lines were hardly inspiring. There was little revolutionary about the violence around us: instead of the poor rising up against the rich, we could see poor pitted against poor, and rich against rich. -
The Geopolitics of ‘Hearts and Minds’: American Public Diplomacy in the War on Terrorism Era
UNIVERSITY OF OSLO FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Department of sociology and human geography The Geopolitics of ‘Hearts and Minds’: American Public Diplomacy in the War on Terrorism Era Master’s Thesis in Human Geography Spring 2008 Anja Sletteland Public diplomacy helped win the Cold War, and it has the potential to help win the war on terror. (Djerejian 2003, 13) ii CONTENTS List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………………………………......v List of Abbreviations ………………………………………………………………………………………….......v Acknowledgements……………………………….……………………………………………………………….vi 1 INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................................................7 1.1 RESEARCH QUESTION ..................................................................................................................................8 1.2 THE STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS ..................................................................................................................8 2 CONTEXTUAL FRAMEWORK...................................................................................................................10 2.1 WHAT IS PUBLIC DIPLOMACY?.................................................................................................................10 2.1.1 Public Diplomacy as Strategic Communication ................................................................................13 2.1.2 Perpetrators of US Public Diplomacy ................................................................................................16 -
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Shades of sovereignty: racialized power, the United States and the world Paul A. Kramer The segregated diners along Maryland’s Route 40 were always somebody’s problem – mothers packing sandwiches for a daytrip to the nation’s capital, Jim Crow on their minds – but they were not always John F. Kennedy’s problem. That changed in the early 1960s, when African diplomats began arriving to the United States to present their credentials to the United Nations and the White House. Between the high-modernist universalism of the former and the neo-classical, republican universalism of the latter, at just about the place where ambassadors got hungry, lay a scattering of gaudy, ramshackle restaurants straddling an otherwise bleak stretch of highway. As the motoring diplomats discovered to their shock, the diners excluded black people in ways that turned out to be global: whatever their importance to US foreign policy, African economic 1 ministers and cultural attaches received no diplomatic immunity. The incoming Kennedy administration soon confronted an international scandal, as the officials filed formal complaints and US and overseas editors ran with the story. “Human faces, black-skinned and white, angry words and a humdrum reach of U. S. highway,” read an article in Life, “these are the raw stuff of a conflict that reached far out from America in to the world.” Kennedy, reluctant to engage the black freedom struggle except where it intersected with Cold War concerns, established an Office of the Special Protocol Service to mediate: its staff caught flak, spoke to newspapers, and sat down with Route 40’s restaurateurs, diner by diner, making the case that serving black people was in the United States’ global interests. -
A Discourse Analysis of the Western-Led Intervention in Libya (2011)
UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS POLÍTICAS Y SOCIOLOGÍA DEPARTAMENTO DE CIENCIA POLÍTICA Y DE LA ADMINISTRACIÓN III TESIS DOCTORAL Human rights as performance: a discourse analysis of the Western-led intervention in Libya (2011) MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTOR PRESENTADA POR Matthew Robson DIRECTOR Heriberto Cairo Carou Madrid, 2018 © Matthew Robson, 2017 PHD THESIS HUMAN RIGHTS AS PERFORMANCE: A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE WESTERN-LED INTERVENTION IN LIBYA (2011) Matthew Robson Director de tesis: Heriberto Cairo Carou Departamento de Ciencia Política y de la Administración III (Teorías y Formas Políticas y Geografía Humana) Universidad Complutense de Madrid 1 Dedicated to Mum and Dad. 2 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 6 Transliteration 7 Abstract 8 Summary 9 Resúmen 13 INTRODUCTION 20 Objectives and elaboration of research questions 22 Literature review on the military intervention in Libya 26 -Concerning the legality of the NATO mission 28 -Ethical considerations 30 -The politics of Western intervention in Libya 33 Summary of Sections 48 PART 1 METHODOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL 40 FRAMEWORK CHAPTER 1 METHODOLOGY / RESEARCH DESIGN 41 1. 1 Making choices in post-structural discourse analysis 41 1. 2 Research design for the Western-led intervention in Libya 44 CHAPTER 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 53 2.1 The 'critical geopolitics' research project and 'imperiality' 53 2. 2 Questions of ontology and epistemology 62 3 2.3 Discourse, power and knowledge 69 2.4 Identity, performativity and intertextuality in foreign 77 policy discourse PART 2 LIBYA IN THE WESTERN GEOPOLITICAL 97 IMAGINATION CHAPTER 3 US AND UK RELATIONS WITH LIBYA 99 DURING THE COLD WAR 3. -
The African University As “Global” University
Trinity College Trinity College Digital Repository Faculty Scholarship 7-2014 The African University as “Global” University Isaac Kamola Trinity College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/facpub Part of the Higher Education Commons SYMPOSIUM The African University as “Global” University Isaac Kamola, Trinity College igher education is undergoing a period of pro- Rather than fetishizing “the global university,” many African found transformation. Universities around academics are interested in what constitutes the “African uni- the world are reconceptualizing themselves versity.” Acknowledging the university’s role in economic devel- as “global” institutions, closely connected opment, there remains the recognition that many universities to—and competing with—one another. Many in Africa are also the physical embodiment of Western colonial Hargue that “the globalization of higher education” makes the governance, initially designed to displace and devalue indige- “free movement of people and ideas…the norm,” having “enor- nous knowledges and expertise. Ajayi et al., for example, wrote mously positive consequences for individuals, for universities, that the “debate about what constitutes the African Univer- and for nations” (Wildavsky 2010, 7). Others express growing sity” is central to the question of “how do we adapt the Uni- concern that universities are increasingly corroded by their versity to African culture so it can provide African develop- relationship to “academic capitalism,” producing commercial ment, not westernization” (Ajayi et al. 1996, 1–3). Many eff orts knowledge and pragmatic job training at the expense of the to think “the African university” examine the long lineage general good (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). -
Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda
Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda Mahmood Mamdani Smior Ucturtr m Political Scimre, .lfaktrere L'niuni!v. Kampala, l./ganda HEI:\'EMA:\':'-i EDUCATIONAL BOOKS :-iAIROBI IBADAN LO:-IDON . ___.-- L-; Heinemann Educational Books Ltd 433 Contents 22 Bedford Square, London WCIB 3HH PMB 5205, lbadan · PO Box 45314, Nairobi J}j EDINBURGH MELBOURNE At.'CKLAND A/}3 List ofT abies HONG KONG SINGAPORE KUALA LUMPCR Acknm.. ·ledgcments NEW DELHI KINGSTO:"i PORT OF SPAIN ;913 Introduction © Mahmood Mamdani 1983 P:\RTONE: THE HISTORICAL BACKGROl'ND First published 1983 I Co/onia!imt and Anti-colonialism 5 . ( British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The Economics ofCulonialism 6 Mamdani, Mahmood The Politics nfColoni.tlism 8 Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda. 2 Tramition to ..\'eo-colonialism 17 l. Uganda-Politics and government A :'\t•o-collmial Indqwndc!H.T 19 2. Uganda-History \"("o-colonialism in Practicr 23 I. Title .-\n Imperialist Coup 29 967.6'104 DT433.262 PART TWO: NEO-COLO'IIIAL FASCISM 33 ISBN 1}...435-96503-4 3 The .4min Regime The Period of Tramitition: "Thr Economic War" and the Role ol Opportunists 37 4 The Fascist State 42 Fascism and the Economic Crise-s 46 Fascism and Socirt\ 52 The Search for a So~ial Base 55 PART THREE: l\'EO-COLO'IIIAL FASCISM Al\'D IMPERIALISM 59 5 cl Period ofTransition: 1971-73 61 Thr Break with Britain 65 6 The AT71!.r and the So~·iet Connection: 1973-78 68 Strained Relations and !he Angolan Crisis 72 Thr So\"iet.J ustiftcation 75 7 The State Research Bureau and the CS-UK Conntction 78 The Bnti~h Connection -
(2013) Geopolitics at the Margins? Reconsidering Genealogies of Critical Geopolitics
Sharp, Joanne P. (2013) Geopolitics at the margins? Reconsidering genealogies of critical geopolitics. Political Geography, 37 . pp. 20-29. ISSN 0962-6298 Copyright © 2013 The Authors http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/80637/ Deposited on: 6 June 2013 Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk Political Geography 37 (2013) 20e29 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo Geopolitics at the margins? Reconsidering genealogies of critical geopoliticsq Joanne P. Sharp* School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, East Quadrangle, University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK abstract Keywords: Critical geopolitics has become one of the most vibrant parts of political geography. However it remains a Subaltern geopolitics particularly western way of knowing which has been much less attentive to other traditions of thinking. Pan-Africanism This paper engages with Pan-Africanism, and specifically the vision of the architect of post-colonial Critical geopolitics Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to explore this overlooked contribution to critical engagements with geopoli- Postcolonialism tics. Pan-Africanism sought to forge alternative post-colonial worlds to the binary geopolitics of the Cold War and the geopolitical economy of neo-colonialism. The academic division of labour has meant that these ideas have been consigned to African studies rather than being drawn into wider debates around the definitions of key disciplinary concepts. However Nyerere’s continental thinking can be seen as a form of geopolitical imagination that challenges dominant neo-realist projections, and which still has much to offer contemporary political geography. Ó 2013 The Authors. -
Download International Relations Theory: a Critical Introduction Free
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION DOWNLOAD FREE BOOK Cynthia Weber | 320 pages | 12 Dec 2013 | Taylor & Francis Ltd | 9780415713061 | English | London, United Kingdom Critical international relations theory Practice seduction and dead authorship. Unless there is, at the bottom of things, some conception of the good around which to base critique, then critical inquiry is reduced to aimless nay-saying. Topic 2 The uses of fear in IR theory. Carr Daniel Deudney Michael W. After all, Europe is a pertinent case here as it is the home of the European Union — a project that united the bulk of European states in a supranational, and relatively open-bordered, union in which all citizens are legally free to work and live wherever they please within the Union. London: C. Her supplementation of intensive reading with allegorical films also does much to challenge the pretension that extensive reading has some miraculous additional value. The common human condition aboard the ferry would stand for the night, but the following morning tourists would continue their tranquil journey home while refugees would have to improvise their way across Europe, begging for hospitality. New York: Routledge. Gregg International Relations on Film. I needed a textbook that was about IR Theory and that I could use to help develop my students analytical and critical skills. However, I was also often left International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction the distinct feeling that poststructuralist or postmodernist IR theorists, in particular, wish to develop an aura of sophistication by maintaining bizarre and unnecessary levels of abstraction, by creating new and esoteric terms, and by arguing through ever increasingly pretentious forms of analogy. -
Minority and Indigenous Trends 2019
Minority and Indigenous Trends 2019 | 2019 Trends Minority and Indigenous 1 Focus on climate justice Focus on climate Minority and Indigenous Trends 2019 Focus on climate justice Editor’s preface: minorities, indigenous peoples and the right to culture to minorities, indigenous peoples and the right preface: Editor’s 3 Minority and Indigenous Trends 2019 Focus on climate justice Cover: Martha Akal, a Turkana mother of three children, herds her goats in the village of Kache Imeri, Northern Kenya, in the midst of a severe drought. In the absence of safe drinking water and food, pastoralists are extremely vulnerable to disease and famine. Panos / Frederic Courbet. Inside front cover: An elderly Tibetan nomad tends to her yak. Panos / Kieran Dodds Inside back cover: Portrait of a local elderly Amazigh man at Assaiss market in Taliouine, Morocco. Alamy / Chris Griffiths Acknowledgements Support our work Minority Rights Group International Donate at (MRG) gratefully acknowledges the www.minorityrights.org/donate support of all organizations and MRG relies on the generous support individuals who gave financial and other of institutions and individuals to help assistance to this publication, including us secure the rights of minorities the European Union. and indigenous peoples around the world. All donations received © Minority Rights Group International, contribute directly to our projects with June 2019. All rights reserved. minorities and indigenous peoples. Material from this publication may be Read more of our reports at reproduced for teaching or other non- www.minorityrights.org/publications commercial purposes. No part of it may Our publications offer a compelling be reproduced in any form for commercial analysis of minority and indigenous purposes without the prior express issues and original research.