Violence and the Third World in International Relations

Randolph B. Persaud, Narendran Kumarakulasingam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367370114
• eBook ISBN: 9781000708516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Violence and the Third World in International Relations is intended as a contribution to the decolonization of international relations, and especially of international security studies, much of which is dominated by a self-sustaining Eurocentrism.

Rather than focusing on the motivations of violence, this volume is concerned with the devastating and debilitating consequences of war against the Third World. Contributors delve into the violent structuring of Third World societies during colonialism, the Cold War, and globalization. A wide range of topics are systematically examined, including, but not restricted to, the role of racism in the construction of the international system; evangelical universalism and colonial conquest in Africa; American civilizational security as Grand Strategy in Asia; the colonial roots of guerrilla war in India; the widespread suffering and death inflicted on Iraqis through sanctions; violence against indigenous peoples in Colombia related to 'war capitalism'; the complicated legacies of genocide in Cambodia; the Saudi-led, (US and UK backed) war against Yemen; the relationalities between violence in the US and the Third World during Obama's presidency; the structural location of gang violence in Central America in the aftermath of foreign intervention; and a broader understanding of security and insecurity in the Caribbean.

Violence and the Third World in International Relations will be of particular interest to scholars of postcolonial and decolonial international relations, international security studies, and race and international relations.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Violence and ordering of the Third World: an introduction

Randolph B. Persaud and Narendran Kumarakulasingam

ABSTRACT
The decisive role violence has played in the ordering of the Third World cannot be ignored or consigned to the past. Accordingly, we argue for a more systematic and determined attention to the connections between the devastation unleashed by colonialism, imperialism, and other forms of large-scale violence in the post-independence periods. In contradistinction to situating violence in and against the Third World as a backdrop of incomplete modernization, we recognize that its proper location is in the larger dynamics of racialized and colonial international relations. The articles in this volume address these dynamics of violence.

Introduction

Violence has been a definitive and structurally constitutive factor in the contact between the rest and the West. This has been the case from the very early period of conquest, through the long centuries of colonisation and occupation, and very much so since independence, much of it plagued by imperialism and new constructions such as ‘humanitarian intervention’. This violence has taken multiple forms, ranging from the everyday rituals of extracting submission for labour exploitation, to outright, total war. These regimes of violence include but are not limited to everyday disciplinary punishment to maintain ‘order’ (especially in slavery and indentureship), massacres (Morant Bay, Jamaica – 1865, Wounded Knee – 1890, Amritsar – 1919, No Gun Ri – 1950, My Lai – 1968, Haditha, Iraq – 2005), saturation bombing of peoples and landscapes (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos), genocide (Belgian Congo, German South West Africa) and near extermination (indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, the Americas and Australia).

Astoundingly, hegemonic discourses of international relations (IR) have been silent about this.¹ This silence is neither passive nor innocent, but a form of active forgetting resulting from the discipline’s ‘fetishization of abstraction’.² Moreover, Susan Buck-Morss’ contention that well-established disciplines tend to consolidate their borders by expelling ‘counterevidence’³ is an apt way of describing established IR’s relationship with the problems under consideration here. Violence in, and against, the Third World is generally treated either as purely internal and cultural, or as a dimension of a larger narrative of historical progress, this latter in the Hegelian sense of the dialectic of History. The task of ‘dissenters and insurgents’⁴ is not to merely prosecute what we see as the methodological negligence of hegemonic IR, but to embark on the necessary and unremitting work of finding, and showing, the violent and profoundly racialised interconnectedness of the West and its Others. Some of the critiques of hegemonic IR have also, and already, been applied to some branches of Marxian/World Systems Theory,⁵ neo-Gramscian theory⁶ and Foucauldian security studies.⁷

Two important moves are necessary for challenging this silencing. The first calls for a major methodological shift in the production of knowledges, a shift from the positivist and nomothetic to the grounded and historical. Or, as Siba Grovogui puts it, we need to go beyond ‘racial clichés and oversimplified notions of culture’.⁸ The second challenge is for scholars to investigate, describe and situate violence in the making and reproduction of forms of state/societies and successive world orders. This special issue takes up this task by examining violence in and against the Third World in various forms/modalities and in different historical situations as well as their interconnectedness.

Colonial acts of physical destruction and the expropriation of resources during conquest constitute what Achille Mbembe calls ‘founding violence’.⁹ This founding violence was not simply an effect of racialised ideologies or of great power geopolitical contestations but, instead, worked to ‘create the space over which it was exercised’.¹⁰ This founding violence did not work in isolation but in turn enabled a host of regimes and infrastructures of rights for the coloniser and the denial of the same for the colonised. The second form of violence was constitutive in ‘authorizing authority’,¹¹ that is to say, in embedding frameworks of legitimation needed to exercise the hierarchy of rights (and privileges) associated with what Anibal Quijano¹² has called the coloniality of power. Thirdly, and as a continuation of the second form, Mbembe sees violence as techniques of reproduction, through the construction of cultural ‘imaginaries. This form of violence is banal ‘crystallized, through a gradual accumulation of numerous acts and rituals’.¹³

If the colony is a place constituted by manifold forms of violence, these forms of violence continue to operate in Third World societies after new flags were raised. Apropos the postcolony, Mbembe notes: ‘Through the harshness of the exactions required, the redeployment of constraints and the new forms of subjection imposed on the most deprived segments of the population, this form of government forces features belonging to the realm of warfare and features proper to the conduct of civil policy to co-exist in a single dynamic’.¹⁴ At the same time, the postcolony does not exist in isolation but is also externally shaped by the imperatives of powerful states underwritten by the coloniality of power.¹⁵ Thus, there is a need to trace the specific modalities of violence and the precise ways in which they continue to structure global capitalism and world order.¹⁶

Violence, we realise, is a contested and complicated concept that is most often used to connote the unauthorised or unsanctioned use of force.¹⁷ Most commonly, it has been linked to naturalised or cultural conditions of aberrance and pathology. The papers in this volume do not subscribe to a singular understanding of violence but seek to historicise it by focusing on varying historical and contemporary instances such as anti-Black violence in contemporary USA, US conquest of the Philippines, the Global War on Terror, contemporary aerial bombardment of Yemen, counter-insurgency in India, gang violence in Central America and the war on drugs in Latin America. By so doing, they allow us to see the workings of various political, economic and psychological forces and disciplines (legal, religious) in the making and governance of Third World states and societies. It is our hope that this will spur closer examination of the multiple and massive material and other forms of devastation unleashed by colonialism and post-independence interventions.

Organisation of the volume

Alexander Barder makes the argument that world orders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were constituted as a global racial imaginary. Instead of focusing on state to state interactions within the inter-state system, Barder shows how the world could be made ‘intelligible’ by examining the ways in which civilizational factors influenced, and often directly pushed, economic policies and geo-strategic calculations. Social Darwinism and the associated cultural fall-out from eugenic science were pervasive to the point of common sense. The global racial imaginary found articulate expression in writers such as Robert Knox, Charles Hamilton Smith, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Charles Henry Pearson, Franklin Giddings, Lester Ward, Benjamin Kidd and Madison Grant. Barder goes beneath the surface of inert-state relations and shows how racial ideology profoundly infected strategic thinking and, ultimately, war itself.

In order to examine the impact of religion on First World–Third World interactions, Christopher Rhodes makes a heretofore unidentified connection between two truisms concerning European colonialism: the differing reputations for violence and brutality earned by British, French and German colonial states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the notion that European Christian actors – The Catholic Church, various Protestant denominations and movements, and missionary societies – significantly influenced colonial policies. Rhodes’ work draws upon different strands of the political economy of religion literature. In doing so, he takes seriously the impact that differences in religious doctrine – in this case, whether Christian evangelisation is meant to convert nonbelievers as individuals or to transform non-Christian societies on a macro level – have on religious actors’ preferences and strategies. Second, Rhodes identifies how a specific set of political outcomes, the level, nature and variability of organised violence conducted by Western States against the Others, are determined by the interaction between religious organisations’ doctrinally-based preferences and the mechanisms by which these organisations influence states to carry out actions consistent with these religious goals. During instances of high influence by Christian actors over colonial states and prevailing ideas of individual-level evangelisation, a situation that was significantly more characteristic of British colonialism than its French or German counterparts, colonial violence is relatively constrained.

Drawn in by critical attempts grappling with the excesses of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), Narendran Kumarakulasingam wonders about the efficacy of theorising violence as horror. Closely attending to the idea of horrorism proposed by the acclaimed philosopher Adriana Cavarero, he underscores horror’s emergence as a response to the events of September 11, 2001. His critique attempts to re-centre colonial violence as the rightful starting point for a discussion on violence as horror, and to not only indicate why the erasure of colonial violence is present in both mainstream and critical discourse, but also to understand why this tendency is so pervasive. Doing so leads him to argue that critical productions of horror end up producing a homecoming for the West, rather than illuminating the traumatic impact of the GWOT. Given this, he wonders if what is needed is not so much increasingly sophisticated modes of critical theorisation but rather the courage on the part of the West to submit itself to honest self-examination in the colonial mirror.

The profound impact of race on international relations is also explored by Randolph B. Persaud. His analysis is focused on the entry of the US into the business o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Violence and ordering of the Third World: an introduction
• 2. Scientific racism, race war and the global racial imaginary
• 3. Evangelical violence: Western Christianity and the use of force against the Third World
• 4. The horror of ‘horrorism’: laundering metropolitan killings
• 5. Killing the Third World: civilisational security as US grand strategy
• 6. Manhunt Presidency: Obama, race, and the Third World
• 7. A ‘synchronised attack’ on life: the Saudi-led coalition’s ‘hidden and holistic’ genocide in Yemen and the shared responsibility of the US and UK
• 8. Violence on Iraqi bodies: decolonising economic sanctions in security studies
• 9. Colonial legacies, armed revolts and state violence: the Maoist movement in India
• 10. Corporate power, US drug enforcement and the repression of indigenous peoples in Latin America
• 11. The violence work of transnational gangs in Central America
• 12. The coloniality of abridgment: afterlives of mass violence in Cambodia and the US
• 13. The nexus between vulnerabilities and violence in the Caribbean
• Index