Pdf Devji, Faisal (2008) the Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (New York: Columbia University Press)
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Notes Introduction 1. As is standard practice, IR refers to the discipline whereas the non-capitalized form indicates a statement about international relations ‘out there’. Or as Ole Wæver has it, ‘ir’ refers to observations of international politics, whereas capitalized ‘IR’ refers to observations of such observations of international relations. 2. Barry Buzan, for example, warns against ‘the severe loss of analytical leverage that results from bundling huge complexities into a single concept, whether it be globalization or god’ (2004: 229) and recommends maintaining the state as the theoretical anchor, albeit in a comprehensive theory of world politics. However, his is surely more a warning against having no distinctions than an argument in favour of specifically the inside–outside distinction of the state system model. 3. The British broadsheet The Daily Telegraph speculated that ‘Tony Blair, the new Middle East envoy, will be hard put to reconcile an Israeli government that continues to limp along and a dramatically split Palestinian polity’ (Daily Tele- graph, 5 July 2007). On the same day another newspaper referred to Belgium as ‘an already much devolved polity’ (The Guardian, 5 July 2007). The New York Times reported that the commentator David Ignatius thinks the attraction of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos ‘ultimately boils down to Davos’ consecration to the modern reality of an international, interconnected polity and business network’ (Defining the Alure of Davos, New York Times,26January 2010). 4. Although at times they also treat polities as a form of agency, for example defining a global polity as ‘a structure (defined by relations of power) that generates different and changing practices of political rule (defined as govern- mental rationality) and agencies (for example, polities)’ (Neumann & Sending 2007: 677, emphasis added). 5. ‘If we can follow Foucault in suggesting that liberal Western European states were constituted as liberal through the replacement of a mentality of sovereignty with a mentality of government, or “the art of govern- ment”, we may also be able to follow the argument that the international system is constituted by an international-system govern-mentality’ (Corry 2006a: 267). 1 Post-Internationalism and the Global Polity 1. Global polity writers are not alone in trying to move beyond the state sys- tem model but their idea is explored here as the most theoretically conscious attempt to go beyond the post-international perspective. 208 Notes 209 2. This criterion is absent from a working paper by Ougaard in 1999, but is added in the reworking of this text in Higgott & Ougaard (2002). 3. There are of course exceptions. For example, Claire Cutler analyses the role of international law as ‘a force in the constitution and reconstitution of social, political and economic practices’ (Cutler 2003: 3). Thus, non-state actors making and upholding law are conceived as part constitutive of the global political economy, rather than simply derived from the baseline of the state system. 4. We could further add to the confusion by mentioning similar broadly inter- pretative claims such as (d) the development of a world culture (Meyer 2001) or (e) the emergence of ‘global ethics’ (Küng 1997, Singer 2002). 5. Although these authors use the polity concept, for conceptual clarity I will refer to these as examples of global state theory, and reserve polity for the notion advanced later. 6. It has the theoretical weakness that a notion of the sum of the political rela- tions going on planet Earth would logically have existed at all times and therefore does not provide additional analytical leverage on what the lim- its of a global polity thus conceived were, or when one could be said to have emerged: one would always have been able to speak of a sum of political relations on Earth and analysed their relative integration or fragmentation. 7. This is inspired with Barnett and Duvall’s similar move in relation to the ques- tion of power in global governance where they revise the conventional ‘three faces of power’ debate in which positions also developed sequentially rather than analytically (2005: 8). 8. For example, one reviewer of Shaw’s Theory of a Global State – despite the ideational emphasis in the original – concludes that for Shaw ‘ “Globality” is the transformation of the economy, society and culture as relations that operate on world scale’ (Hirst 2001). 9. Perhaps the best examples of empirical studies of discourse-as-regulative come from agenda-setting and problem-definition literature that focus on how actors compete to put their pet issues of the agenda (Kingdon 1995, Cobb & Ross 1997, Jones & Baumgartner 2005). Issue-research looks into how prob- lems are framed and issues move up and down the agenda (Downs 1972, Vasquez & Mansbach 1983). But such research tends to take the basic frame- work for agenda-setting – namely the political actors and the basic framework of discourse and institutions determining what can and cannot legitimately be an issue – for granted. 2 Global Governmentality and the Domestic Analogy 1. Even (or especially) traditional ‘high politics’ issue areas such as security and war are being analysed in terms of their governmentalization (Tennberg 2000, Bigo 2002, Aradau 2004, Aradau & van Munster 2004, Amoore 2007, Dillon & Neal 2008, Heng & McDonagh 2008, Pouliot 2008). 2. Even Martin Shaw’s theory of the Global State (2000) only postulates a Western power-complex rather than a global sovereign. Alexander Wendt’s prediction of the inevitability of a global state (2003) is only that – a prediction. 210 Notes 3. I use the hyphenated form for the generic ‘any mentality of governing’– meaning and the non-hyphenated to refer to the neoliberal governmental form of power Foucault identified. 4. Hurd is referring to the power of norms, which Barnett and Duvall would include under the category of institutional power, but the point is nonetheless valid from a productive power point of view. 5. This idea of a single global (neo)liberal regime can also be found in another form in the Foucault-inspired neo-Marxist ‘manifesto’ Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri where they suggest ‘the construction of a new order that envelops the entire space of what it considers civilization, a boundless universal space’ (Hardt & Negri 2000: 11) which they think has created ‘a new logic of structure and rule – in short a new form of sovereignty’ (ibid.: xi) which ‘progressively incorporates the entire global realm’ (ibid.: xii). 6. This resembles Roland Robertson’s idea of globalization as not only shrink- age of distance but also a growing consciousness of the world as one place (Robertson 1992: 8) as mentioned, Martin Shaw echoes this: beyond world- wide interconnectedness, ‘to be Global now refers, maximally, to the self- consciously common framework of human society worldwide’ (Shaw 1999: 60). 4 What Is a (Global) Polity? 1. This is similar to the Copenhagen School securitization theory that theorizes securitized objects as socially constructed rather than objectively threatened or subjectively invented (see Buzan et al. 1998). 2. For example Alexander Wendt includes both (pre-social) corporate and (rela- tionally acquired) social identity (Wendt 1999: 182). 3. This is a hierarchy, that is, a state or in Rosenau’s wider terms a ‘Sphere of Authority’. 4. Although there are constructivist definitions of ‘institution’ circulating in IR that encompass the actors’ entire view of how the world works, including their own identities, Stephen Krasner’s narrower definition makes more sense in this context. Polity itself would be ‘an institution’ of the constitutive or foundational kind (see Onuf 2002). 5. To be sure, Robertson and Inglis argue that even the secular and empirical notion of global interconnectedness can be found in abundance in Greco- roman writing and this is therefore not a particularly modern invention. (Roland Robertson & David Inglis ‘The Global Animus. In the Tracks of World Consciousness’ pp. 33–47 in Barry Gills & William R. Thompson (eds) Global- ization and Global History. London: Routledge, 2006). It is unlikely, however, that this was an everyday perspective on the world. 6. See Göran Therborn (2000) for a survey of the rise of the term ‘global’ or Sabine Selchow (2008). 5 Governing Globality for Local Autonomy 1. Subcommandante Marcos says the same repeatedly, for instance in an inter- view with Gabriel Garcia Marquez: ‘We do not believe that the end justifies Notes 211 the means. Ultimately, we believe that the means are the end. We define our goal by the way we choose the means of struggling for it’ (Marcos 2001: 76). 6 Governing Globality for Market Freedom 1. This securitization of trade and the inclusion of religious and militant extrem- ism as a part of ‘anti-globalization’ is not reserved for the ideologues of libertarian think tanks. Robert Zoellick, then US trade representative, after 9/11 called for a project to ‘counter terror with trade’ (Washington Post, 20 September): ‘The terrorists deliberately chose the World Trade towers as their target. While their blow toppled the towers, it cannot and will not shake the foundation of world trade and freedom’ (WP 20 September 2001). President Bush chimed in that ‘we will defeat [the terrorists] by expanding and encouraging world trade’ (Christian Science Monitor, 6 November 2001). On the day of the 9/11 attacks, a US congressman Don Young of Alaska sug- gested that the attacks were perpetrated by antiglobalization protesters and Silvio Berlusconi, having just presided over the Genoa G8 summit, asserted that while Islam was attacking the West from the outside, anti-globalization protesters were attacking it from within (Woodin & Lucas 2004: 4). 2. Bhagwati is an exception, citing the ‘Wall-Street-Treasury Complex’ in terms of a Millsian ‘power elite’: ‘They wear similar suits, not just similar ties; they interact on boards and in clubs; they wind up sharing the same sentiments, reinforced by one another’s wisdom’ (2004: 206).