Islam and International Relations

Fractured Worlds

Mustapha Kamal Pasha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138644434
• eBook ISBN: 9781317239062
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Islam and International Relations: Fractured Worlds reframes and radically disrupts perceived understanding of the nature and location of Islamic impulses in international relations. This collection of innovative essays written by Mustapha Kamal Pasha presents an alternative reading of contestation and entanglement between Islam and modernity.

Wide-ranging in scope, the volume illustrates the limits of Western political imagination, especially its liberal construction of presumed divergence between Islam and the West. Split into three parts, Pasha's articles cover Islamic exceptionalism, challenges and responses, and also look beyond Western international relations.

This volume will be of great interest to graduates and scholars of international relations, Islam, religion and politics, and political ideologies, globalization and democracy.

Part I

Challenge and response

1

Exception/exceptionalism

In Islam, it is all different.

(Gellner 1981: 62)

Introduction

Conventional post-9/11 accounts of global distempers offer a remarkable sense of déjà vu. The reappearance of old cartographies; the recovery of religious binaries; reliance on familiar tropes of exclusion – all underscore the deeply recursive character of the cultural encounter with Islam (Al-Azmeh 1996 [1993]: 161–184). From the perspective of international relations (IR), these recursive patterns reveal the stubbornness of received categories inhabiting the modern imaginary and its source in theologically coded Western metaphysics. More broadly, they illustrate the presence of serious impediments to transformation in the hegemonic apparatus of imagining the international. Perhaps less obviously, they show the aporias of moving understanding to terrains less hospitable to the settled problem of political identity and culture embedded in Westphalian notions of space-time (Walker 2006a). In this vein, the greater the inclination to offer simplified world pictures of heterodox social forces – flat world (Friedman 2005), Cosmopolis (Beck 2006), or some other frame – the greater is the tendency to avoid prickly questions about the cognitive hold of received conceptions (Walker 1993, 2009). The speed with which dualisms have returned in the jihad against terror, only illustrates how firmly the infrastructure of exclusions is entrenched in the collective imaginary; how the Other is conceived and how easily public discourse can be usurped by those terribles simplificateurs (Burckhardt 1955 [1889]: 220).

A key feature of the intellectual temper in the current global political climate is its simplicity. Commonplace utterances of an axial shift in the temper of world politics following the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York and the attack on the Pentagon swiftly merged into old axioms of the immutability of human nature and its dark contours legitimating imperial expeditions to fight Evil and to defend (Western) civilization (Ignatieff 2005). Familiar responses excavated from the armoury of imperial geography, colonizing mission or more religiously textured exorcisms against Evil typically accompany declarations of an epochal moment. The move from past verities to present formulae appears seamless (Cox 2004b). A crucial facet of hegemonic responses to the current political context is the alterity of Islam, neither localizable nor indeterminate – both deadly and menacing; a form of Otherness that is both distant and intimate. The Islamic cultural zones (ICZs) remain distant, modernizing perhaps, but not modern.

To contextualize, the ‘Islamic Other’ has been central to the formation of Western identity, as some scholars contend (Marr 2006; and Hurd 2003). On this view, despite centuries of contact with the West and its civilizing project, the ICZs have effectively failed to enter the cognitive and institutional zones of ‘pure’ modernity; in these regions modernity remains incomplete, distorted or mere imitation (Tibi 2002; Lewis 1988; Vatikiotis 1987). Conversely, Islam is remarkably intimate, as everything that needs to be known about it is already known. This sentiment structures orientalism, both as a corporate project and as an enabling frame (Said 1978). For the ideal-typical orientalist, the problem lies above all within the civilizational boundaries of a decadent, but modernity-resisting Islamic religion and the values and institutions associated with it. On the latter premise, there is nothing enigmatic or mysterious about Islam. Familiar tropes – patrimonialism, orientalist despotism, totalizing faith, resentment, envy, rage or patriarchy – provide a ready-made answer to any query. Taken together, the two interlinked frames – remoteness and intimacy – constitute Islamic exceptionalism (IE). To be certain, IE is not identical to orientalism, though it is heavily indebted to the latter. The core feature of IE is the notion of the exceptional character of Islam, either exoticized or demonized. Orientalism cannot do without either. Hence, it is not necessary to be an orientalist to portray the ICZs as exceptional in terms of assumed democratic deficit, technological retardation or general economic backwardness. Orientalism invariably rests on culturalist logic; IE can invoke political economy, sociological explanation or political analysis without relying on culture as the master variable to account for Islamic woes. The nucleus of IE is Islam’s inassimilable difference.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, IE has attained the status of a hegemonic project (Gramsci 1971 [1891–1937]). Rather than merely serve as an inert frame of capturing Islam, in the growing climate of global paranoia and unease, IE furnishes new grounds for exclusions, enclosures, securitization and global exception (GE). The language of GE broadly encompasses a series of practices that produce zones of indistinction; the suspension of normalized rules of governance including international law; new border controls; profiling of populations; surveillance and the arbitrary abrogation of rights under the umbrella of state security.

GE also offers the material elements for a radical restructuring of the ICZs through the projects of secularization and democratization. These projects take the exceptional character of Islam as the explanatory axis, both in showing how difficult it is to realize them, but also stressing their necessity. Unlike the civilizing zeal of modernization, a survivalist mentality dictates these projects; the cultural and political domestication of assumed illiberal forces in the ICZs would ward off the threat of terror, violence or Armageddon. The exoticized worlds of Otherness available for display in dominant versions of orientalism tend to wane; the demonic aspects of Otherness take hold of the semiotic and discursive fields. In this context, the problem-solving gaze (Cox 1981) inherent to extant thinking on Islam is singularly transparent.

The aim of this chapter is to explore the field of vision generated by IE; to draw out any possible connections between IE and a presumed globalizing culture of exception; and more generally, to delineate how IE speaks to the limits of IR’s engagement with the general political temper in the ICZs. It seeks to explore the nexus between GE and IE, stressing the need to situate GE as a recursive project with historical antecedents, to examine some constraints on the expansive reach of GE, but also to appreciate cultural mappings that nourish GE.

Globalizing exception

In sharp contrast to conventional responses, critical commentary sends a different and heterodox set of messages on the fate of the international, underscoring the contested nature of knowledge claims. Critical accounts question the assumption that theory stands apart from the world. It challenges the sovereign assurance that theory merely explains the world and plays no role in engendering it; these accounts reveal the frailty of positivist mappings nested in a fictitious distinction between value and fact: on a critical reading, the current constellation is inseparable from the enabling frameworks deployed to map it.

Critical commentary operates on two principal registers: reverberations of empire (in its various guises), and GE. In both instances, the invigoration of established modalities of new enclosures, borders and exclusions is apparent (Smith 2002a; Cox 2004a; Coward 2005). Hence, both the colonial present (Gregory 2004) as well as GE generate zones of cultural and political apartheid. Unlike previous claims of an inevitable clash of civilizations (Huntington 1996) – between Islam and the West – which appear vindicated to their proponents, critics of empire (Bhuta 2003) probe the underlying structure of the current Anglo-American design and its presumed neo-imperial ambitions. Implicit in critical discourses on empire is a rebuttal to those who advocate its indispensability, notwithstanding gestures of a kinder, gentler variant (Nye 2004), or support the project of an ‘enlightened’ imperialism (Lal 2004). On this view, apologists of ‘enlightened’ imperialism merely solicit new rationales for unilateralist intervention with facile and one-dimensional historical comparisons (Ferguson 2003). Empire’s ‘finer moments’ erase the underside of a spectacularly destructive and violent epoch in human history. A stark example of this thinking is captured in Ferguson’s self-affirming defence of empire:

To imagine the world without the Empire would be to expunge from the map the elegant boulevards of Williamsburg and old Philadelphia; to sweep into the sea the squat battlements of Port Royal, Jamaica; to return to the bush the glorious skyline of Sydney; to level the steamy seaside slum that is Freetown, Sierra Leone; to fill in the Big Hole at Kimberley; to demolish the mission at Kuruman; to send the town of Livingston hurtling over the Victoria Falls – which would of course revert to their original name of Mosioatunya. Without the British Empire, there would be no Calcutta; no Bombay; no Madras. Indians may rename them as many times as they like, but they remain cities founded and built by the British.

(Ferguson 2003, cited in Gregory 2004: 4–5)

Critics of received imperial commentary, by contrast, challenge triumphalist claims of the end of history (Fukuyama 1992), claims that justify without restraint or apology the return of Western imperialism under a new guise. Although enfeebled by the spectacle of global terrorism and suicide bombing, triumphalism has merely entered a momentary self-imposed state of hibernation without abandoning its faith in the (inevitable) march of Western Reason. The idea of civilizational superiority remains intact. Hence, Fukuyama reinforces his famous thesis:

We remain at the end of history because there is only one system that will continue to dominate world politics, that of the liberal-democratic west. This does not imply a world free from conflict, nor the disappearance of culture. But the struggle we face is not the clash of several distinct and equal cultures fighting amongst one another like the great powers of 19th-century Europe. The clash consists of a series of rearguard actions from societies whose traditional existence is indeed threatened by modernisation. The strength of the backlash reflects the severity of this threat. But time is on the side of modernity, and I see no lack of US will to prevail.

(Fukuyama 2001, emphasis added)

The discourse on GE is premised on the notion of ‘the state of exception’, an idea that has acquired common currency in discussions on the (political) constellation of our times. Although there are different permutations of the idea, Alain de Benoist offers a compelling description:

In a state of exception, a state finds itself abruptly confronted with an extreme peril, a mortal menace that it cannot face without having recourse to methods, which, following its own norms would be unjustifiable in normal times. The situation of urgency or the state of exception can be defined in other terms as the brutal occurrence of rare events or unpredictable situations, which, because of their menacing character, require immediate response with exceptional measures, such as restriction of liberties, martial law, state of siege, etc., considered as the only suitable responses to the situation.

(De Benoist 2007: 85)

A critique of liberalism in its originary state, the idea of the ‘exception’ speaks principally to highlight the paradoxes of sovereignty and the ambivalence inherent in the Western liberal political project, first noted by Carl Schmitt (2005 [1922], 1985 [1923]). Failing to reconcile the tension between normalcy and emergency, between law and executive decision, or between the claims of sovereign authority and (human) rights, the liberal order remains vulnerable to arbitrary rule or dictatorship. As de Benoist puts it, ‘[t]he state of exception is also important because it reveals the original non-normative character of the law. Moreover, it is not the law/right (Recht) which is suspended in the state of exception, but only the normative element of the law (Gesetz)’ (De Benoist 2007: 86).

The language of ‘exceptionalism’ produces, on Walker’s reading, ‘renewed distinctions between the saved and the damned in the so-called war on terror and the privileging of security over liberty in contemporary articulations of sovereign authority and the authorization of sovereign authority’ (Walker 2006a: 66). Exceptionalism presents a serious challenge to the liberal project:

Construct the other as enemy, as absolutely alien or absolutely threatening, and the way is open to the declaration of exceptions that affirm the suspension of liberties and the authorization of absolute authority. To exceptionalize at the limit horizontally, at the border of a territorial jurisdiction, is to risk exceptions at the limit vertically where liberal democracy gives way before invocations of sovereign necessity, to the privileging of national security over all other values.

(Walker 2006a: 76)

The question of whether a state of exception is inside or outside law remains a constant source of argumentation and controversy. The principal debate on this issue concerns Benjamin and Schmitt. ‘While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it – as pure violence – an existence outside the law’ (Agamben 2005: 59; for a commentary on the political ontology of Schmitt, see Prozorov 2006; Dean 2006. Prozorov 2005 offers his own variant of the exception). More recently, however, the idea of the exception has become the central diagnostic tool to pinpoint the fragility of the Western liberal order, and in some instances, challenges its plausibility, as captured in Agamben’s metaphor of the ‘camp’ (Agamben 1998), a condition where the exception becomes the rule. This sentiment echoes Benjamin’s classic statement:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of exception’ in which we live is the rule. We must attain to a concept of history that accords with this fact. Then we can clearly see that it is our task to bring about the real state of exception, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism.

(Benjamin, quoted in Agamben 2005: 57)

With the decay in the Europeanized ‘nomos of the earth’, the world has entered a precarious epoch in human affairs (Schmitt 2003 [1950]; also see Odysseos and Petito 2007). Ultimately, the idea of the ‘state of exception’ underscores the impracticality of relegating the political to the normative. Commenting on this Schmittian theme, de Benoist writes:

[For Schmitt] in suspending legal norms, the exception helps us to understand and appreciate the nature of the political, in the sense that it reveals to us the domain of the sovereign, meaning in this case the concrete capacity to make a decision in the face of an urgent or exceptional situation. The state of exception reveals both who is sovereign and also where sovereignty lies, in the very moment that it makes the decision appear (Entscheidung) in its ‘absolute purity’. In such conditions, one can see that the politically sovereign instance does not coincide automatically with the state … the suspension of legal norms in the case of the exception constitutes the ultimate manifestation of political sovereignty.

(De Benoist 2007: 86)

Discussions of the ‘state of exception’ have been consistently linked to the so-called ‘war on terror’ (WOT), which supposedly institutionalized its permanency (Van Munster 2004). According to van Munster:

The state of exception is the non-localisable foundation of a political order: the US as the sovereign of the global order … [allows] the US to exempt itself from the (international) framework of law, demanding compliance by others … this production of American sovereignty is paralleled by reducing the life of (some) individuals to the bare life of homo sacer (life that can be killed without punishment). In the war on terrorism, the production of bare life is mainly brought about by bureaucratic techniques of risk management and surveillance, which reduces human life to biographic risk profiles.

(Van Munster 2004: 141)

Liberated from the burdens of international legality, the argument goes, the WOT cracked open the Westphalian settlement with its assumed deference for either norm or law. Unlike most states of emergency that seek temporal finitude, the WOT offered no such promises, hence its permanent installation. However, as Agamben notes, ‘while ignoring international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally’, sovereign authorization ‘still claims to be applying the law’ (Agamben 2005: 87).

The idea of GE presents an alternative reading of our times, gesturing towards the arrival of a new species of transnational peril unprecedented in content or scope. Insecurity appears unhinged from received vectors of traditional military power, now produced through asymmetrical geometries of networks, flows and mobile agency. A de-territorialized canvass of danger compels and necessitates enclosures on a global scale, superseding national borders. ‘At the same time’, Bigo suggests, ‘it (globalisation) makes obsolete the conventional distinction between the constellation of war, defence, international order and strategy, and another constellation of crime, internal security, public order and police investigations’ (Bigo 2006: 5). According to Bigo:

it is this convergence of defence and internal security into interconnected networks, or into a ‘field’ of professionals of management of unease that lies at the heart of the transformations concerning global policing.

(Bigo 2006: 6)

Bigo challenges the notion of the advent of a securitized globalized world or the arrival of an empire:

Even if we witness illiberal practices, and even if the temptation to use the argument of an exceptional moment correlated with the advent of transnational political violence of clandestine organisations, in order to justify violation of basic human rights and the extension of surveillance is very strong, we are still in liberal regimes.

(Bigo 2006: 6)

The discourse on GE recognizes that a post-Westphalian constellation now reinscribes security at the global level, producing new lines of demarcation between insiders and outsiders. At the same time, the reliance on old strategies of combating the enemy – as the twin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq generally demonstrated – has not diminished. Despite the easy circulation of the notion that the conventional divide between (domestic) political community and (external) anarchy has been redrawn, national imaginaries of (in)security persist. Within these imaginaries, however, some curious innovations to manage collective anxieties seem to be emerging to respond to the new challenges. A key implication of recent trends in securitization is the shift in the concept of security, ‘reduced to technologies of surveillance, extraction of information, coercion acting against societal and state vulnerabilities’. In this frame, ‘security is disconnected from human, legal and social guarantees and protection of individuals’ (Bigo 2006: 8).

The above discussion can be effectively condensed in taking the exception as:

[T]hat domain within jurisprudence in which decision-making ‘cannot be subsumed’ … by existing norms. It is that space in which such norms are held open to suspension or transformation, and where programs of norm-implementation and norm-compliance cease to govern action and decision-making. Accordingly, the exception is synonymous with the attempt to exercise momentarily decisive agency or, as Schmitt puts it, ‘principally unlimited authority’.

(Johns 2005: 619)

The theme of GE is both diagnostic and disturbing. In the current global political climate, it suggests that the ‘state of exception’ has transcended national confines to acquire a globalized character. Instantiated by an undeclared global state of emergency, GE disrupts and blurs the lines between international law and unilateral decision, undermining the foundations of the Westphalian settlement and the principle of territorially bounded sovereignty. GE is especially alarming as it removes any restraints – moral or legal – over the exercise of arbitrary power, including military power. As Žižek (2006) notes:

9 November 1989, announced the ‘Happy Nineties’ – the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Islamic exceptionalism
• PART II: Challenge and response
• PART III: Beyond Western IR
• Bibliography
• Index