Global South to the Rescue

Emerging Humanitarian Superpowers and Globalizing Rescue Industries

Paul Amar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415731188
• eBook ISBN: 9781135720353
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of an epochal shift in global order – the fact that global-south countries have taken up leadership roles in peacekeeping missions, humanitarian interventions, and transnational military industries: Brazil has taken charge of the UN military mission in Haiti; Nigeria has deployed peacekeeping troops throughout West Africa; Indonesians have assumed crucial roles in UN Afghanistan operations; Fijians, South Africans, and Chileans have became essential actors in global mercenary firms; Venezuela and its Bolivarian allies have established a framework for "revolutionary" humanitarian interventions; and Turkey, India, Kenya, and Egypt are asserting themselves in bold new ways on the global stage.

In this context, this collection sheds critical light on intersections between imperialism and humanitarianism, between neoliberal globalization and "rescue industry" transnationalism, and between patterns of geopolitical hegemony and trajectories of peacekeeping internationalism. These case studies are grouped into three clusters (I) Globalizing Peacekeeper Identities, (II) Assertive "Regional Internationalisms," and (III) Emergent Alternative Paradigms. Together, these articulate a new research agenda and offer significant contributions to fields of global studies, transnational gender and race studies, critical security studies and peace studies, comparative politics, police and military sociology, Third World diplomatic history, and international relations.

This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Introduction

Global South to the Rescue: Emerging Humanitarian Superpowers and Globalizing Rescue Industries

Paul Amar

University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

ABSTRACT The introductory essay offers a brief overview of current trends in critical globalization studies and international relations scholarship that shed light on three intersections: between imperialism and humanitarianism, between neoliberal globalization and “rescue industry” transnationalism, and between patterns of geopolitical hegemony and trajectories of peacekeeping internationalism. These research agendas have been generative and politically useful, but have tended to neglect the forms of humanitarian and peacekeeping agency emanating from the global south. In order to address this gap, this introduction lays out a new research agenda that combines interdisciplinary methods from global studies, gender and race studies, critical security studies, police and military sociology, Third World diplomatic history, and international relations. This introduction also theoretically situates the other contributions and case studies gathered here, providing a framework of analysis that groups them into three clusters: (I) Globalizing Peacekeeper Identities, (II) Assertive “Regional Internationalisms,” and (III) Emergent Alternative Paradigms.

On 28 March 2011, the Financial Times exclaimed “Libya, a last hurrah for the west?” (Rachman, 2011) and on 1 September, the Telegraph warned “Libya could be the last place where the West is allowed to intervene” (Joshi, 2011). Although the year 2011 offered a wealth of political-economic and diplomatic evidence that the foundations of global north/west hegemony were rapidly eroding, the period also featured an airstrike campaign against the Qaddhafi regime that seemed to prove, spectacularly, that Western geopolitical and military dominance was still secure. The UN Security Council authorized NATO to use “all necessary measures to protect civilians [in Libya] ... and provide full humanitarian access to those in need” (UN News Centre, 2011). This militarized humanitarian intervention took the form of a new kind of operation, “the first real test of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine since its formal adoption by the United Nations in 2005” (Politics & Polity, 2011). But from the perspective of many observers based in emerging global-south countries, these interventions seemed more like a return to the past. How could a colonial-era style bombardment of North African cities by French, Italian, and US air forces fit into an age of multipolarism and “liberal peace?” How could a Cold War-type “contra” insurgency supported by US covert intelligence operators reconcile itself with the early-twenty-first-century universe of non-violent uprisings and vibrant new media solidarities?

Although NATO launched the intervention in Libya after seeking not just a UNSC authorization but also the consent of the once radical Cairo-based Arab League and the collaboration of the solidly reactionary Saudi-centered Gulf Cooperation Council, these global-south security communities did not design or direct the intervention. When the airstrikes did succeed in bringing down Qaddhafi and ushering into power Libya’s rebel National Transitional Council in October 2011, NATO gloated and insisted that the new Council in Libya suspend the oil, trade, infrastructure, and industrial contracts won by Russia, Brazil, and South Africa who had not championed NATO’s intervention. Abdeljalil Mayouf, information manager at the Libyan rebel oil firm Agoco, told Reuters “we don’t have problems with Western countries like the Italians, French and UK companies. But we may have some political issues with Russia, China and Brazil” (RT News, 2011). These kinds of statement generated an enraged backlash and “very strong resistance” from these emerging global south powers including Brazil, South Africa, and India “which aspire to become permanent members of an expanded Security Council” (Charbonneau, 2011). The BRICS group promised either to never support another Security Council resolution of this kind or to control the character and terms of such humanitarian interventions, themselves, in the future. “Russia, China, Brazil, India and South Africa have repeatedly complained that the NATO intervention in Libya has gone far beyond the U.N. mandate approved by the council in March to protect civilians from violence by the government. They say they do not want the same thing to happen in Syria” (ibid). As an alternative, BRICS countries began pushing discussions for the scrapping of the UN authorization of force system and for a new set of mechanisms similar to those articulated by UN Rapporteur Richard Falk: “In the end, what becomes obvious is that such protective undertakings to achieve credibility in the future must be detached from geopolitics. The best mechanism for reaching such a goal would clearly involve the establishment of a UN Emergency Force that could be activated by a two-thirds vote in either the Security Council or General Assembly, and not be subject to the veto. Such UNEF would need to be funded independently, possibly by finally imposing some sort of UN revenue raising tax on international flights or currency transactions” (Falk, 2011).

Indeed, the massively militarized and global-north orchestrated humanitarian intervention in Libya (March-October 2011) interrupted a year of extraordinary shifts in patterns of globalization and international security that were pointing world order toward other horizons of possibility. The pro-democracy uprisings of the Arab Spring challenged neoliberal policies and deposed officials who had pushed radical forms of privatization and security policies that favored the West. The increasingly organized and influential African Union and South America’s revolutionary Bolivarian Alliance generated and aggressively advocated consensus- and global-south-based alternatives to Western and UN humanitarian militarism. And the rising economic and geopolitical powerhouses of Russia, China, India, and Brazil increased their degree of autonomy in and around the Security Council, IMF, and other UN commissions and agencies. The emerging influence of global-south powers that had been gaining momentum for a decade reached a tipping point in 2011, inverting essential pillars of global hierarchy. Via internationalist mechanisms and institutions, emerging powers began establishing a degree of sway over the same northern countries that had once been their colonial masters. In 2011, China and Brazil proposed to channel money through the IMF to prop up the Eurozone economy, demanding favorable trade concessions and currency rates in exchange for their aid (Childress, 2011; Reuters, 2011). And while the US and Eurozone continued to fret about what they referred to as the “global” financial crisis, the finances of most of the global south just kept getting better, as economic growth shot up and debt burdens fell in Brazil, China, and even in much of Africa.

In terms of the growth of global-south participation in and leadership of humanitarian and peacekeeping interventions during this tumultuous year, the NATO-in-Libya model seemed an outlier that strayed far from the trend line. Indeed, alternative models and evidence of new kinds of frameworks constituted by the global south came from every continent. Brazil redeployed its military peacekeepers (who had led the UN MINUSTAH operations) from Haiti to the narcotrafficker-occupied slum communities of Rio de Janeiro to “pacify” the city for the upcoming World Cup and Olympic Games. Ethiopian and Nigerian humanitarian troops poured into the new border between North and South Sudan, substituting for Western operations. Venezuela again provided affordable oil to impoverished and unemployed US and European households during the record-cold winters that bracketed the year and provided disaster relief and humanitarian aid in Africa and South Asia. And Turkey and Indonesia seemed to be the only powers able to establish stable peacekeeping and humanitarian operations in Afghanistan, with Ankara also leading international efforts to grapple with the humanitarian impact of civil strife in Syria, the nuclear program in Iran, and the devastating blockade of Gaza.

In the wake of the changes witnessed by this tumultuous year of humanitarian interventions, global-south uprisings, and peacekeeping innovations, this collection asks: What new roles are emergent powers of the global south playing in shaping new globalizing security industries, humanitarian interventions, and internationalist “peace enforcement” practices today?

Reviewing Traditions of Scholarship

In the twenty-first century, globalizing development agendas have become inseparable from internationalized, militarized, “securitized” interventions: aid missions embed themselves in walled police compounds (Duffield, 2001, 2007), international financial organizations focus on quelling insurgencies (Fox, 2008; Higate and Henry, 2009; Jones, 2008; Rosenau, 2009), and private investments flood the humanitarian intervention and protection sector (Abrahamson and Williams, 2010; Mandel, 2002). Recent studies have argued that this merging of developmentalism and securitization has been legitimized by the blending of discourses of humanitarianism and human security with neo-colonial metaphors of tutelage and protection (Doty 1996; Mamdani, 2010, 2011; Orford, 2003, 2011). This kind of humanitarianism, at the nexus of globalizing development and military intervention, increasingly demands that international enforcement (rather than mechanisms of entitlement or redistribution, for example) be mobilized regardless of the consent of its “recipient” populations (Orford, 1999; Amar, 2012).

Before this critical scholarship emerged, traditions of research on humanitarian intervention in political science, international relations, socio-legal studies, and global sociology focused on delimiting the red lines that national sovereignty must not cross. This literature provided legal or technical expertise, proposing to get the balance right or assess the predicament or dilemma posed by the clash between international humanitarian imperatives and the sovereignty rights enjoyed by independent states in the international system (Ayoob, 1995). Constructivist accounts have mapped the origins of transformative dynamics emanating from below and outside state and legal institutions. The best of this important work grounds the emergence of interventionism in particular civil society mobilizations, class interests, cultural value flows, and elite actor networks (Hehir, 2008; Kaldor, 2007; Santos and Rodrigues-Garavito, 2005). Another productive set of debates has explored the nature of transnational norm-dissemination practices and patterns of ideological contestation (Adamson, 2005; Acharya, 2004). Historically oriented work has identified three ages of humanitarianism: the age of nineteenth century Abolition through the World War I age of minority protection and ethno-national self-determination (Brown, 2006; Rodogno, 2011); the age of World War II justice and post-War humanitarian law codifications (Aksar, 2004); and the post-Cold War era when militarized humanitarian interventions have proliferated (Barnett, 2005; Razack, 2004). Scholarly research on these three ages of humanitarian intervention have tended to focus on the agents and agendas of global-north powers and humanitarian social movements emanating from metropolitan capitals.

Since 2000, a new body of scholarship has revealed the imperialist dynamics behind the wave of new humanitarian interventions unleashed since the Cold War ended. One group has elaborated a critique of new appropriations of the Kantian doctrine of “liberal peace.” The contemporary version of this doctrine asserts that the protection of individual liberties and human rights trumps the traditional Realpolitik sanctification of state security and national sovereignty. This new wave of critical scholarship has argued that global-north powers since the end of the Cold War have used the doctrine of “liberal peace” to launch, paradoxically, an unending series of new wars. Despite the fact that they are labeled as humanitarian interventions, these deployments reveal the resurging imperial ambitions of US and European military powers (Barkawi and Laffey, 2006; Chandler, 2004; Falk, 1995, 1999; Lidén, 2009). Complementing these conversations, a group of more theoretically oriented scholars has explored the constitution of discourses and subjects of power around the “liberal peace” regime, drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and profiling the biopolitical, disciplinary, paternalistic, and “therapeutic” dimensions of new kinds of humanitarian militarism (Dillon and Reid, 2001; Esmeir, 2007; Pupavac, 2005). In parallel, another group of “globalization studies” researchers has analyzed the political-economic structures that have enabled these new kinds of humanitarianized globalization and domination (Harvey, 2003; Nederveen Pieterse, 2004). Related the scholarship on “the development/security nexus” has focused its critique on European or North American interventions, particularly in states occupied in times of war, or in so-called “failed states” that require “nation building” where national sovereignty is weak and imperial legacies are strong (Bilgin and Morton, 2002; Bøås and Jennings, 2007; Chesterman, 2005; Duffield, 2007; Fearon and Laitin, 2004; Krasner, 2004; Pouigny, 2005). Together, these sets of projects have provided useful correctives and cautions that offer powerful alternatives designed to counter the arguments of a highly visible and influential group of intervention cheerleaders. Since 2001, these intervention advocates have established a troubling space of consensus between prominent figures of the human-rights left and the neoconservative right (Hitchens et al., 2008; Ignatieff, 2003).

However, what this cluster of research agendas have left relatively unexamined is the role of global-south states and “Third World”-originating transnational formations. Global-south actors are neglected as agents of innovation and are largely seen as the recipients or victims of Eurocentric agendas. Meanwhile, the great majority of new studies that have committed to highlighting the rise of the global south have focused overwhelmingly on general issues of economic growth and market expansion, especially on the BRICs’ (Brazil, Russian, India, and China and sometimes South Africa) state-coordinated development and trade policies. The few but important exceptions to this economistic trend have examined the rise of “middle powers” (Joordan, 2003), “global rebalancing” (Nederveen Pieterse, 2011), the return of historical patterns of global south power (Korany, 1994), and the rise of new emancipatory models of global governance coming from the south (Al Attar and Miller, 2010; Gill, 2008; Lidén et al., 2009). In order to build on this nascent set of conversations and to address these gaps in the literature on humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping, and the security/development nexus, we in this collection focus on emergent powers in the global south that are transforming and deploying distinct internationalist security and militarized humanitarian development models. This collection aims to introduce globalization studies to new trends in police and military studies, highlight the cultural and political complexities of the global south, and develop new frameworks that articulate the best of feminist, political-economic, international relations, and ethnographic perspectives.

Objects and Methodologies of Analysis

The studies grouped together here will highlight three units of analysis: Pivotal countries in the global south (India, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, Nigeria, etc.) that have developed an internationalist profile and are asserting themselves increasingly as humanitarian, peacekeeping, and “policekeeping” actors on the world stage in ways that also promote their own economic globalization agendas and shift transnational patterns of norms diffusion; global-south based transnational private networks of security-and-development contractors that bring together elites and subaltern personnel from sites which served as laboratories for anti-communism and extreme neoliberalism (Fiji, Iraq, Colombia, El Salvador); and community, paramilitary, and insurgent groupings in the global south (Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Indonesia) whose agency in engaging or resisting security-and-development missions has transformed the terms and aims of the international frameworks of humanitarianism as well as the globalizing “rescue industry.”

This collection showcases a group of scholars who have been shaped by extensive first-hand experience in the global south. This group is unusual because each member has worked within security-development missions and/or in international institutions and has done interviews and participatory fieldwork among community members, aid recipients, state actors, and international humanitarian officials. This multi-dimensional experience means that our work does not idealize the humanitarian aims of interventions, nor does it romanticize possibilities for resistance or agency on the part of the clients or targets of these missions. On the other hand, these studies also resist the urge to see these operations as reproducing, wholesale, any singular, imperial, global logic. In order to capture the complexity of structural forces and agency dynamics that make the rescue industry in the global south so interesting, many of these projects combine ethnography with political-economic or social-historical analysis, providing clearer understandings of transnational forms of class identity and domination, militarized masculinity and femininity, as well as fetishized ethnic and minority identities. Each piece of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction Global South to the Rescue: Emerging Humanitarian Superpowers and Globalizing Rescue Industries
• Globalizing Peacekeeper Identities
• Assertive “Regional Internationalisms”
• Emergent Alternative Paradigms
• Index