International Relations and States of Exception

Margins, Peripheries, and Excluded Bodies

Shampa Biswas, Sheila Nair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135251802
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Critically but sympathetically interrogating Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's analysis of the logic of sovereign power, this volume draws attention to the multiple zones of exclusion in and through which contemporary international politics constitutes itself.

Beginning from the margins and peripheries of world politics, this book emphasises the colonial processes through which contemporary "third world" spaces of exception have been shaped and particular bodies made susceptible to the conditions of "bare life". The authors contend that these bodies inhabit a variety of spaces or "zones of indistinction" that include political detainees, refugees, asylum-seekers, poor migrants, sweatshop workers, and unassimilated indigenous populations. These are the "expendable bodies" that the territorial and market-driven logic of current international relations simultaneously produces, polices and excludes. Focussing on the locally and socio-historically specific ways that sovereign power works, the individual chapters provide the volume with a wide geographical reach. Drawing on diverse approaches, this text constitutes an important intervention in critical international relations, providing grounded theory and sophisticated analyses of how contemporary international relations works through the production of 'exceptions'.

Bringing together a range of internationally-renowned scholars, International Relations and States of Exception will be of vital interest to students and scholars of International Relations, Critical Theory and Postcolonial Studies.

1
Uncivil zones

Terror and territoriality in the geopolitical shadowlands

Suvendrini Perera

there is an unexploded land mine heart in us
under every breast chest
waiting for breath
tears a moan
to crack the land open
and let the stories come walking
out of the scar

(“Landmine Heart,” Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha)

Scarred geographies

In February 2006, I read a line in a BBC news report that I have not been able to get out of my head. I came across the sentence while performing a set of actions that over more than a decade have become routinized in my everyday life. It goes something like this: I hear a line or two at the very tail end of a news report. Immediately I text my sister and my sister-in-law (in previous years it used be a phone call): Jst hd abt bmb. R u ok? Who I contact first depends on the location of the blast—if the newscast includes that detail. Often it doesn’t, and then I guess.

Most times I get a quick reply followed by a series of updates that tell me about other family and friends. If I don’t hear for some hours, I contact someone in that wider circle. When I can, during that day or night, I go to the BBC website to see what more information is out there. Sometimes I check out other sites, like Tamilnet. My movements can be understood as actualizing a certain kind of diasporic space, a relation that “connect[s] locations of violent conflict with people living in ‘peace’ elsewhere” (Giles 2003: 7). It was during such a late night trawl through BBC online, a site that enacts its own processes of spatialization between here and there, that I came across Ramesh’s story.

Ramesh is a man from the Jaffna peninsula in the north of Lanka, where my parents were born. The story doesn’t say how old he is, but I guess that he is quite young. In the report Ramesh itemizes the multiple displacements his family has endured in more than a quarter-century of war between the Lankan state and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Sometime in 1990, the family moved from their village to a refugee camp because of shelling by government troops. Later they moved into territory controlled by the LTTE—“uncleared areas” in government parlance, “liberated homeland” according to the separatists. After the 2002 ceasefire agreement, Ramesh’s family returned to their village. However, increasing violence by the LTTE against any form of perceived dissent means that they will need to move again. Each option is fraught with deadly consequences:

I am seriously considering moving to Vanni out of fear for my life. But if I suddenly disappear suspicion may be cast upon my family. If we all vacate our home, we will lose our income altogether. We cannot return to refugee camps because my mother is too ill. I feel like a prisoner. But I have to make up my mind … I don’t know what to think or do … Ihate myself for having been born in this part of the world.

Ramesh’s narrative shocked me when, from its mapping of a local and intimate geography of the war in the north—a village in Jaffna, the government base at Palaly, the refugee camps in the Vanni, the LTTE territory behind the lines—the final sentence makes a sudden leap. The microtopography of entrapment on the ground, a desperate shuttling between the sites of camp, village, and military base, arcs without warning into geopolitical space as the narrative turns, and trains a telescoping eye on “this part of the world.”

In attempting to situate the gaze that is brought to bear at the end of this passage, I draw on John Agnew’s theorization of “the modern geopolitical imagination” as first, “a system of visualizing the world” (2003: 6, original emphasis). Agnew elaborates: “the modern geopolitical imagination—[that is] the predominant ways world politics has been represented, talked about and acted on geographically,” begins with “the capacity to see the world as a whole.” This capacity to visualize space globally that “emerged at the outset of the European Age of Discovery” has been naturalized and “reproduced in the governing principles of geographic thought and through practices of statecraft.” It is defined by two main characteristics: “seeing the world-as-a-picture … [that] separates the self who is viewing from the world itself” and, contingently but not causally linked to it, the production of an implicit and unacknowledged “hierarchy of places” within that picture (ibid.: 3).

The ability to visualize and enframe global space as if from outside it, Agnew and others have pointed out, can be historically located in the development of new technologies for conceptualizing, organizing, and viewing spatial relationships through practices such as painting, landscaping, and cartography in European modernity (Berger 1972). These ways of seeing converge in other projects that also aim to encapsulate the world, most notably in the nineteenth-century colonial exhibition (Mitchell 1988). Here, technologies of perspectivism, projection, and calculation privilege the individual viewer. At the same time, paradoxically, they occult the embodied and situated viewing subject by their emphasis on scientific processes of calculation, objectification, and distantiation that, in turn, depend on, and reproduce, a set of embedded hierarchies, categorizations, differentiations, and distinctions that order global space and the relationships between its constituent parts, for example, differentiations between near and far, larger and smaller, similar and different, known and unknown. Such differentiations map temporal meanings onto spatial ones as distance is signified through relations of lag, lapse, loss, and lack.

Ramesh’s adoption of an encapsulating global perspective demonstrates that the ability to view the world as a whole does not presuppose an unmarked or disembodied viewer. The “view from nowhere” is revealed as a ruse for a position constituted by spatial differentiations, scales of value, and zones of significance. Placed in a geopolitical frame, Ramesh’s lived geography of displacement contracts into the anonymous, disposable space of this part of the world. On the global map, this part of the world situates itself within the confines of what we know as the third world, a term inscribed by distinctions of value, priority and distance in both space and time. This part of the world is constituted by states of deformation and lack whose sovereignty appears both “distant and often more or less dubious” (Nancy 1993: 30). As Jean-Luc Nancy sums up: “War is necessarily the war of Sovereigns”: in the gaze of the “group of nations constituting the planetary pole of ‘order’, ‘law’ and development,’” this part of the world is exceptionalized by wretched, intractable conflicts and “aporias of sovereignty” that invariably fail to “attain the full symbolic dignity of war” (ibid.: 29–30).

The geopolitical order of sovereign states and lesser realms is not remote or irrelevant for Ramesh. Rather, it is experienced at the most immediate level of subjectivity. The geopolitical imaginary produces in Ramesh a disjunction between the I that sees and the I that is seen, between the eye that views the “world-as-a-picture” and the I that is caught in the toils of a constricting local geography. This disjunction produces an intolerable split. The geopolitical is internalized as it is also understood as a type of pathogenesis. Ramesh tells the BBC reporter, the representative of that other, prior and farther world: I hate myself for having been born in this part of the world.

Ramesh’s story is a starting point for my attempt to think through the diverse regimes of spatialization that locate the war in Lanka within multiple, intersecting as well as discontinuous, geographies. Taking as a point of departure Steve Pile’s reminder that “political struggles are not fought on the surface of geography but through its very fabric/ation” (2000: 263) the chapter attempts to tease apart some of the interweaving threads, the entangled and broken skeins, the ripped seams, and uneven sutures that make the fabric of the war in Lanka. Instead of being relegated to the category of the geopolitical basket case, this postcolonial war zone is understood as a scarred and knotted fabric/ation of bodies, topographies, and spatial regimes that connect to other spaces, circuits, distributions, and relations. At the same time, the chapter attends to the particularities of geographies of violence in a small place.

Threading the chapter together are the questions: how are obscure and obstinate wars in the world’s uncivil zones connected to the workings of sovereign power and territoriality? How are colonial and postcolonial geographies of violence enmeshed in the production of ethno-religious identities? What are the broader geopolitical and spatial processes that are constitutive of the postcolonial warzone at the localized levels of the city, the street, and the body? Ramesh’s story and the other fragments that I consider here emerge from the ground of protracted uncivil war, that is, a war located in the geopolitical shadowlands, a zone of indistinct sovereignties and scarred geographies. To adopt the powerful image of the Lankan-Canadian poet, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, cited in my epigraph, these are stories that walk out of landscapes mutilated by mines and bombs, from the debris of shattered buildings and the wreckage of eviscerated bodies. Drawn from folklore, urban myth, literary texts, autobiographical scraps, and the fractured narratives of survivors, the stories evoke disparate war zones in all their violent materiality, as they simultaneously outline the contours of a space of destructive fantasy, the delusion of a nation-space cleared of its others. Inflected by the particular geopolitical relations that constitute the postcolony, this deadly fantasy of nation connects to other spaces and stories: it is also about the spaces and cracks between then and now, here and there.

Sri Lanka and the fabric/ation of geography

Space, in Achille Mbembe’s powerful formulation, is “the raw material of colonial sovereignty” (Mbembe 2003: 26). Colonization writes new relations on colonized spaces through territorializing practices such as “the production of boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves; the subversion of existing property arrangements; the classification of people according to different categories; resource extraction; and, finally, the manufacturing of a large reservoir of cultural imaginaries” (ibid.: 25–26). In the (post)colony, spatial and ethno-racial categories are co-produced by practices of territorialization.

In what is now Sri Lanka, colonial territorializing practices aimed to level existing spatial boundaries while at the same time introducing new classificatory and administrative regimes that would rework multiple differences of language, class, religion, and region. These reordered colonial categories were enframed by a new totalizing geography: imperial sovereignty overwrote the boundaries of existing kingdoms to cohere the territoriality of the crown colony of Ceylon into a singular entity, an island. In time, the imaginary of the island as natural geo-body (Thongchai 1994) achieved a powerful purchase. Colluding with nationalist Buddhist mythologies of the “blessed isle,” it continues to underpin the entrenched statist orthodoxy of a unitary and indivisible Sri Lanka (on the island as “paradigmatic exemplar” of the territorial state, see Steinberg (2005: 259–60)).

Internally, colonial administration wrote over local spatial delineations and homogenized differentiations by incorporating them “into a single society and space,” premised on the central reference point of the compass—Central Province, Northern Province, Eastern Province (Wickramasinghe 2006: 29–30). This was a flattening geography that attempted to erase historical identities and prior relations between local places. At the same time, distinctive formations, most notably the plantation (ibid. 33–34), engendered new biopolitical, sociospatial, and economic arrangements that layered over previous identifications and remade relations between subjects—native vs. immigrant, free vs. indentured worker, Indian Tamil vs. Ceylon Tamil and, crucially, Tamil vs. Sinhala—while simultaneously establishing the bureaucratic systems that would administer and reinforce them.

The story of the ethnically divided postcolony of Lanka is the product of the layering and interlocking of indigenous and colonial systems of spatial and ethnoracial differentiation. In the decades leading up to independence, long established but fluctuating local distinctions between peoples (language, religion, caste, region) became inextricably entangled with and were folded into the grand categories of colonial raciology (Perera 1999b). In a key essay, Kumari Jayawardene tracks the way in which classifications based on the construct of an “Indo-Aryan” group of languages by William Jones and other orientalists were disastrously transposed into an ethnoracial register (Jayawardene 1983; see also Guneratne 2002). From the late nineteenth century onwards, the loose identifications Sinhala and Tamil were reordered and revalued to correspond with the loaded racial categories of Aryan and Dravidian, setting in train a long, painful history of ethno-racial consolidation, essentialization, and opposition.

Colonial forms of ethnic/racial accounting and biopolitics cemented these divides through the making of “enumerated communities” as race/ethnicity became the principal modality of governance (Appadurai 1993). Numerical representation, invariably linked to essentialized constructions of separate “communal,” “racial” or “ethnic” groups (all three terms have been operative in Sri Lanka over the decades) culminated in the identification of four seemingly distinct categories. Although riven with internal contradictions, these categories—“Sinhala,” “Tamil,” “Muslim,” and “Burger”—became naturalized as ethnicities, with the two largest, Sinhala and Tamil, gradually binarized into an adversarial relation (on the ethnicization of the “Muslim,” for example, see Ismail 1995).

By a series of predictable (though by no means inevitable) stages, numerical representation also became the chosen technology through which the decolonizing state sought to redress colonial injustices and fashion the new nation (Krishna 1999). In response, essentialized, regionally defined ethnic and religious identities and symbols—a south associated with a mythical Aryan, Sinhala “lion race,” a north associated with the Dravidian Tamil whose symbol was the tiger—increasingly animated oppositional movements. In time, these constructions almost completely overwhelmed the brief purchase of counter-narratives of internationalism, anti-communalism, and coexistence that had also emerged in the pre-independence and immediate post-independence period (Perera 1999b).

In ethnocracies such as Lanka (as also in Malaysia or Israel) language, religion, and ethnicity operate as both technologies of subjectification and as spatializing practices. For the first 30 years of the post-independence era (and especially since the election of a Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist government in 1956), the reinvention of ethnic identities was enmeshed with the postcolonial remapping of regional and urban space. Essentialized ethnic identities were re-projected onto the space of the new nation. These years were characterized by a relentless ethnicization of everyday life at the level of landscape, the built environment, and the soundscape. Time and space became inscribed with ethno-religious meanings: junctions and streets were claimed as sacred Sinhala Buddhist space when Bo trees (the tree under which the Buddha was believed to have attained Nirvana) were found growing on them. Post-independence renaming of streets and landmarks privileged ethno-religious rather than unifying national identities. A new calendar based on the Buddhist lunar cycle was introduced in the 1970s—under this regime, children might go to school for five days one week and six days the next; weekends might fall on any day of the week, varying from month to month. Such radical changes in the lived order of spatiotemporality, in subjects’ daily experiences of time and place, led to an acute heightening in the consciousness of ethnicity and religion, whether by intensifying a sense of ethno-religious pride and entitlement or by increasing fears of ethnic marginalization and persecution.

Simultaneously, the ethnicization of everyday life inscribed itself in new ways upon the surfaces of the body through an ever-increasing repertoire of signs and practices encompassing dress, speech, manners, and customs. Correspondingly, the business of performing, reproducing, and ascribing ethnicity, as well as a dissimulation of ethnic identity, pervaded daily activities. In the context of the state’s differential investm...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Uncivil zones
• 2 Geopolitical articulations
• 3 Dystopic geographies of empire
• 4 Sovereignty, security, and migrants
• 5 Imperceptible naked lives
• 6 Marginal life
• 7 Biopower as a supplement to sovereign power
• 8 Necro-(neo) colonizations and economies of blackness
• 9 Ec(h)o-tourism and the whisper of the state
• Bibliography
• Index