Showing papers in "Foreign Affairs in 2018"

Citizen and subject : contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

Abstract: In analysing the obstacles to democratisation in post-independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy - a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organised local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant - apartheid - as exceptional This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralised despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicites, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa

The Myth of the Liberal Order

Abstract: Among the debates that have swept the U.S. foreign policy community since the beginning of the Trump administration, alarm about the fate of the liberal international rules-based order has emerged as one of the few fixed points. From the international relations scholar G. John Ikenberry’s [1] claim that “for seven decades the world has been dominated by a western liberal order” to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s call [2] in the final days of the Obama administration to “act urgently to defend the liberal international order,” this banner waves atop most discussions of the United States’ role in the world.

Against Identity Politics

Abstract: ing electricity, and scavenging in rubbish tips. Historical practices such as the celebrated quilombos show that dropping-out is a serious, and often successful, strategy for the most oppressed. James Scott’s work shows that peasants, slaves, and marginal groups use various tactics of exodus to minimise their subservience to elite power. Similarly, when highly oppressed groups become sufficiently angry, they often use the most militant forms of protest as we have seen in cases like Paris 2005, London 2011, Los Angeles 1992, and so on. Poor people also use all kinds of high-risk survival strategies, from undocumented border-crossing to involvement in the drug trade.There is also evidence that dropping-outworked to defeat aspects of capitalism in the 1970s (Shukaitis). Why, then, do IPs oppose exodus? I would hazard a guess that the real underlying objection is not that poor people cannot drop out, but that they should not: dropping-out contradicts the IP’s political agenda, resting on strong spectres and identities within the existing frame. Structural determinism precludes escape on principle. IPs celebrate their current blockages, internalise their cage, and insist that the cage is both inescapable and revolutionary. This is not a perspective of escape — it is a perspective of entrapment in the guise of solidarity. IPs’ emphasis on community really comes down to a fear of placelessness. Their ideological vision of society requires that everyone have definable positionalities: a conservative vision, but inverted.This requires that categories remain dominant over lines of flight, escape, and becoming. Hence the need to enforce a prohibition on exodus a prohibition which reveals their similarities with states and other hierarchical systems, which similarly prohibit the withdrawal of participation and restrict mobility. It is easy to see how the fear of the uncontrollable and unknowable and the parallel desire to order all of reality into a fixed schema lies beneath these discursive strategies. A lot of the objection to exodus comes down to a hatred of play. Drop-outs are accused of turning poverty into a game, of saying someone can be poor and have fun (Anon, Smack and White Boy Part Two). This may just as well be said of important strands of peasant resistance such as carnivalesque and folk culture. IPs flourish on a culture of deadly seriousness and urgency, tied up with a celebration of trauma. Real activism, after all, is hard work, sacrifice: I cant have fun, so you shouldn’t either. This entails denying pleasure to others whenever possible. Of course, dropping out does lead to a kind of privilege the person who has escaped clearly has a better life

Eastern Europe's Illiberal Revolution

Abstract: Why has democracy declared war on liberalism most openly in eastern Europe? As this chapter contends, the answer lies in the peculiar nature of the revolutions of 1989, when the states of eastern Europe freed themselves from the Soviet empire. Unlike previous revolutions, the ones in 1989 were concerned not with utopia but with the idea of normality—that is, the revolutionaries expressed a desire to lead the type of normal life already available to people in western Europe. Once the Berlin Wall fell, the most educated and liberal eastern Europeans became the first to leave their countries, provoking major demographic and identity crises in the region. And as the domestic constituencies for liberal democracy immigrated to the West, international actors such as the EU and the United States became the face of liberalism in eastern Europe, just as their own influence was waning. This set the stage for the nationalist revolt against liberalism seizing the region today.

How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Global Order

Abstract: The debate over the effects of artificial intelligence has been dominated by two themes. One is the fear of a singularity, an event in which an AI exceeds human intelligence and escapes human control, with possibly disastrous consequences. The other is the worry that a new industrial revolution will allow machines to disrupt and replace humans in every—or almost every—area of society, from transport to the military to healthcare.

Why Russia and China Are Strengthening Security Ties

Abstract: Early last week, Russia concluded Vostok-2018, its largest military exercise since the fall of the Soviet Union. It wasn’t just their size, however, that made the recent war games so groundbreaking. For the first time in history, 3,200 Chinese troops trained alongside some 300,000 Russians in eastern Siberia. Previously, the Kremlin had issued invitations to take part in such exercises only to formal military allies such as Belarus. Yet when asked at a press conference if the exercise made him worry about a possible Russian-Chinese military alliance, U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis was dismissive [1]. “I see little in the long term that aligns Russia and China,” he said.