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Pursuing the Political: A Postcolonial Rethinking of Relations International

Phillip Darby Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2004 33: 1 DOI: 10.1177/03058298040330010101 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mil.sagepub.com/content/33/1/1

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Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volume 33 Number 1 2004

Pursuing the Political: A Postcolonial Rethinking of Relations International Phillip Darby Building an IR Theory with Japanese Characteristics: Nishida Kitar and Emptiness Graham Gerard Ong Hegemony and the Unfashionable Problematic of Primitive Accumulation Robbie Shilliam Writing War, Against Good Conscience Maja Zehfuss Discussion The Good, the Bad, and the Righteous: Understanding the Bush Vision of a New NATO Partnership Edward Rhodes Exchange The Empire Writes Back (to Michael Ignatieff) Rahul Rao Editorial Note List of Books Reviewed Book Reviews

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59 91

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145 167 169 173

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Pursuing the Political: A Postcolonial Rethinking of Relations International

Phillip Darby
Taking its bearings from postcolonial studies, this article probes the meaning of the political in contemporary international life and how it works to block systemic change in North-South relations. The paper begins by attempting to reposition postcolonial criticism, contending that it needs to engage more directly with the politics of global relations today. It then examines the present world order arguing that the political is so constituted as to proscribe dissent. I go on to argue for a politics of difference, paying particular attention to the campaign for democratisation. I further argue that there is a need to take account of everyday life which can represent a politics in the making. The paper concludes by suggesting that the political as it is currently understood works to underwrite the existing order and that what is threatening is relegated to the sphere of the non-political.

There is a widespread perceptionor at least there was until very recentlythat politics is not where things are happening. Whereas for many the political kingdom once held prospects for change, it has come to be associated with closure. Nowhere is this more evident than in the sphere of the international. Looking at some of the most influential discourses positioned in international studies, it seems that each has had its own reasons for shying away from any sustained engagement with the political. Overwhelmingly, globalisation has been understood as the outgrowth of economic and/or cultural processes that are at once systemic and teleological. In this scheme of things, human choice and desired ends do not much figure and politics becomes a second order
____________________ It is a pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness to Devika Goonewardene, Edgar Ng and Simon Obendorf, all of whom are closely involved with the Institute of Postcolonial Studies in Melbourne. Devika and Simon helped with the revision of this article which was undertaken in India in January and February 2004. I regret that Edgar had to stay in Melbourne to keep the Institute running. I am also grateful to the editors of Millennium for their wise counsel and for the suggestions of the two anonymous reviewers.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2004. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol.33, No.1, pp. 1-32

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Millennium concern. Postcolonial theory has transformed our understanding of the colonial past, and especially in relation to knowledge and culture it has developed practices and perspectives of wider and continuing relevance. But, as I will go on to argue, its reluctance to reach out and engage with established bodies of thought in international studies has inhibited attempts to develop a critical politics of contemporary relations international. For development studies, the growth and professionalisation of aid bureaucracies, with their dependence on government grants and private donations, has encouraged a humanitarian orientation at the expense of taking a stand on certain kinds of political issues. It also seems that the prospects for a politics of engagement were cut short by developments in the world economy since the 1970s, which led to the belief that capitalism, far from being inherently expansionist, moved selectively and that whole regions of the world and large segments of society had become expendable. In the case of International Relations (IR), its disciplinary enclosures and processes of internal contestation have worked against a politics of change. Not since the decolonisation strugglesand probably not even thenhave those who wish to recast the North/South relationship derived much hope from mainstream thought. Faced by such apparent blockages across a range of different fronts, it is understandable that people have been drawn to look for politics in different guises, or to suspend the pursuit of the political until alternative possibilities have taken firmer shape. Recent calls for reengaging with the political are a sign that the mood is changing.1 There is now a greater recognition of the need to take stock of the meaning of the political in the context of the far-reaching changes in the nature of international processes over the past few decades and the proliferation of new discursive fields and approaches. There is also a need to confront the politics of our own criticism. How far are colonial legacies and anticolonial strategies relevant today? Does the North-South divide have a place in an increasingly globalised world? Is it any longer possible to shape approaches to contemporary politics by reference to ideas and hopes about alternative Third World2 futures? How might

____________________ 1. See for instance R.B.J. Walker, Editorial Note: Re-engaging with the Political, Alternatives 25 (2000): 1-2 and Michi Ebata and Beverly Neufeld, eds., Confronting the Political in International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan in association with Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2000). 2. I employ the term Third World and use it interchangeably with the South. Both are problematic but so are the alternatives. In an earlier publication, I suggested that while it is easy to argue against the category of the Third World,

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Pursuing the Political account be taken of the lived world of ordinary people? What can be done to give critical practices more political purchase? Such questions, cutting across disciplinary boundaries bearing upon how we approach so many facets of contemporary international life, will need to be debated over time and in different registers. My hope here is relatively modest: to situate different aspects of the search for a new politics in relation to each other and to clarify the terms of engagement. I wish to pursue the issues from a postcolonial perspective, foregrounding the situation of the Third World. It is my contention that the construction of the political in contemporary Western discourse marginalises the struggle of non-European peoples for economic justice and racial equality and discounts their historical experience of dispossession. Not to put too fine a point on it, established conceptions of the political underwrite Western dominance. Recognising that a critic in the West cannot write for the non-West, attention is primarily directed to the role of criticism within Western societies which might help clear a space for non-Western peoples to pursue agendas of their own. At the risk of tediousness, it may help situate my enquiry if I set down some of the understandings and assumptions that inform it. In shaping the essay, I have chosen to angle it towards students of IR, despite my belief that the discipline itself is only one articulation of international life; catching some of the forces that bind together culture, power and history but missing others. For some years I have argued that the discipline cannot afford to insulate itself from postcolonial theory and refuse to confront its Eurocentrism, its silence about race and its erasure of colonial violence and dispossession.3 The case for an engagement is all the more compelling now that we are becoming increasingly aware both of the part played by Europes relationship with its outside in the making of modern sovereignty4 and of the inadequacy of the explanatory capacity of the discipline to account for global change

____________________ it is hard to do without it. My view then was that it provided a conceptual tripwire against the colonising tendencies of much dominant discourse. I see no reason to change my thinking at this point. Phillip Darby, ed., At the Edge of International Relations: Postcolonialism, Gender and Dependency (London and New York: Pinter, 1997), 4. I return to the issue of this nomenclature in the last paragraph of this article. 3. For an early instance see Phillip Darby and A. J. Paolini, Bridging International Relations and Postcolonialism, Alternatives 19 (1994): 371-397. 4. The key reference is Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, Retrieving the Imperial: Empire and International Relations, Millennium 31, no. 1 (2002): 109-127.

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Millennium at the turn of the millennium. There is also an evident need to take account of the powerful normative arguments that are an integral part of postcolonial thought. In short, both the theory and the politics of postcolonialism matter to students of IR. Accordingly, in developing my arguments, I have drawn on material that falls within an IR agenda or at least is adjacent to it. However, the concerns I wish to highlight could as effectively be elaborated by reference to material usually encompassed in other discourses of the international. Development theory and practice is a prime case. I have tied my analyses to the relationship between North and Southwhich for me is the great divide in global politics. It is evident that elements of this divide are reproduced within both the North and the South themselves; that an examination of asymmetries and inequalities in one context will inform understanding in others. The article begins by attempting to redeploy postcolonial criticism so that it addresses more effectively the politics of the international. In the next two sections, postcolonialism is brought into engagement with IR in an analysis of the contemporary world order and its recurrent crises. I then turn to ask about the significance of difference in recasting approaches to global politics, taking democratisation as a case in point. Difference is also manifested in the politics of the everyday. This is pursued in the two sections that follow, both by developing what it might mean to articulate an understanding of resistance in a postcolonial frame and by examining two specific studies of popular culture in India and Jamaica. A short concluding section draws together the threads of argument. Repositioning postcolonial criticism It is an irony of our contemporary situation that although there is much wider recognition than before that knowledge cannot be separated from politics, there is less sense of how it might productively be deployed in the interests of global change. Despite the resistance or scepticism of many in established disciplinary formations, the revelation that knowledge is power has had a far-reaching influence within the academy and even outside it. Over the past two decades it has been made clear how deeply science and medicine were implicated in the expansion of Western power; disciplines such as English and geography have in part regrouped to become sites for attempting to reverse historical processes in which they earlier participated; whole new fieldscultural studies, gender and sexuality, the bodyhave come into being to explore the ways in which established knowledge disciplines subjects and is inscribed in ordinary life. Nonetheless, the yield from all this re-thinking at what we have customarily regarded as the hub of politics has been modest.

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Pursuing the Political There are at least three reasons for this lacuna. First, the rejection of foundationalism by postmodern and postcolonial critics has had an inhibiting effect on new forms of political engagement within these formations of knowledge. It is almost as if the end of the grand narrative is the end of criticism, and it has bred a deep suspicion of anything that might be taken to lead to closure, singularity, centrism or ways of approach that might come to be seen as of general application or anchored in some common purpose. Second, in many parts of the world, most particularly the Third World, there appears to be a growing cynicism about what can be accomplished through the practices and institutions of politics. This has led to an upsurge of interest in exploring other sites of changenotably the culture and everyday lifein the belief that politics, as conventionally understood, can be redirected from the outside. Third, at the centre of the centre there appears to be something of a consensus that the fundamental issues of politics have been settled and that what remains is their implementation in those regions of the world that history has left behind. Yet the hold of such thinking lies not so much in its politics as in its economic underpinning. Let us pursue these issues as they relate to strategies of political struggle and the role of criticism. In one of the few studies concerned to reposition postcolonial criticism, David Scott argues that the pioneering intellectual work of postcoloniality operated through a certain suspension or deferral of the political. It is his view, however, that the problem-space has now changed and so calls for a different kind of criticism. In short, the time has come to turn away from the politics of representation and to take up the challenge of reconceptualizing contemporary politics in the hope of addressing alternative Third World futures.5 I am very much in support of his basic argumentexcept with respect to one area to which I will turn shortly. We have had a surfeit of studies of literary representations of the other, of the way Third World peoples and cultures were displayed at exhibitions and otherwise objectified. The need for an engagement with the issues and practices of the present is glaringly apparent. Many of us would agree that postcolonial theory has an obvious relevance, for instance, to decolonisation and democratisation in East Timor or to the administrative and physical violence inflicted on illegal immigrants all over the world, but what kind of prescriptive intervention, if any, could be invoked in its name is likely to be moot. The point of addressing such issues is not necessarily to strive for a common position but to identify nodes of relevance.
____________________ 5. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 14.

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Millennium Where I differ from Scott is whether, across the whole register, the interrogation of representations and the role of the discursive can be put behind us. If criticism is to rise to the challenge of its new problem-space, these long-standing concerns still need to be pursued where the colonial takes on different guises and goes under another namethe international. The decolonisation of the international has barely begun. Little of the mountain of intellectual work done on the colonial relationship has found its way into international studies and, until the last couple of years, practically none into IR.6 Habits of mind with respect to the workings of the international system, the nature of power, and on how North and South are constituted reveal a structural Eurocentrism.7 The result is both to strengthen the authority of the centre and to confuse the field of action for those who wish to challenge the established order. This is not to license a romanticisation of the discursive: telling it differently may obfuscate the issue just as much as assuming an unchanging relationship between Occident and Orient. In this respect, it should not pass without notice that one of the key landmarks in Scotts reading of the international is the moment of the Bandung Conference in April 1955 which he presents as the birth of a great project of antiimperialist solidarity and liberationalist Third Worldism.8 Yet the disunity of the conference and the deference paid to established governments, which cut short any critique of imperialist policies, might better be taken to presage the end of such hopes. It should also be said that it was Bandung, more than any other single episode, which laid to rest the idea that race might challenge the dominant international order.9
____________________ 6. For the case of IR, see Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair, eds., Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading race, gender and class (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). It is now at least possible to envisage a postcolonial IR. The Department of International Relations at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, and the Institute of Postcolonial Studies in Melbourne have embarked on a collaborative project to consider what this might look like and whether it would be a good thing. Note Sankaran Krishnas recent comment that, from one viewpoint, postcolonial IR is an oxymoron - a contradiction in terms. Sankaran Krishna, Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations, Alternatives 26 (2001): 407. 7. I have argued this more fully in Reconfiguring the International: Knowledge Machines, Boundaries and Exclusions, Alternatives 28, no. 1 (2003): 141-166. I also advance arguments, which I do not wish to repeat here, as to why criticism by feminist scholars and others at the margins of IR has had limited impact upon mainstream thinking in the discipline. See also, Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 8. Scott, Refashioning Futures, 9, 14 and 221-2. In arguing thus, Scott follows Edward Said. See Said, Orientalism (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 104. 9. For a stinging critique of the significance of Bandung, see Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 293-304.

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Pursuing the Political The status of Bandung is a matter of some historiographical importance and bears on how we might approach the political today. Writing in 2001, Robert Young declared that it could be said to represent a foundational moment for postcolonialism. Bandung in many ways marked the beginning of the production of the postcolonial.10 This debate has yet to be engaged. In its fullness, this will involve a reappraisal of key episodes in the history of North-South relations to which Bandung was the precursor. I am thinking here of the rise of the non-aligned movement and the Group of 77, the conflicts over Third World resources and reparations for colonial dispossession, and the quasi-parliamentary diplomacy for a more equitable international economic order. Simply put, the issue is the challenge of the Third World discursive versus the dominant First World narrative of power in interstate relations. The potential significance of working along these lines could be two-fold. First, postcolonial discourse might be shown to connect much more directly with the politics of anticolonialism than has usually been understood. Until now, the disillusionment with decolonisationplus the cultural studies turnhave worked to distance the postcolonial narrative from the attempt of Third World states to change the workings of the international political and economic system during the period of the cold war. At the same time, criticism has been deflected from the task of interrogating the making of a supposedly post-imperial order.11 Second, it can be expected to confirm that IR has been complicit in shoring-up an hegemonic world order by naturalising the terms of reference. Through its reading of power the discipline ridiculedand helped derailThird World attempts to expose the influence of race and resources on thinking about the expansion of international society, and thereby to change the currency of debate. The politics of contemporary globalism What stands out about contemporary conceptions of global order is their oneness. Observe the way particular doctrines, each with its own constituency and lineage, come together to outline a larger project. Simply to name the discourses tells a story: neoliberalism,

____________________ 10. Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 191. 11. In addition to Young, ibid., see Siba N. Grovogui, Postcolonial criticism: international reality and modes of enquiry, in Power, Postcolonialism, eds. Chowdhury and Nair, ch. 2. It is significant that each of these writers has been heavily influenced by the experience of anticolonialism in the former French empire in Africa.

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Millennium democratisation and good governance, civil society, the role of the third sector and the internationalisation of philanthropy, social development and the conditionalities of aid, humanitarian intervention in complex emergencies. A grand narrative if ever there was. It holds out the prospect of global management along with the promise of popular ratings: elements of a blueprint, yet humanised and often appealing to immediate need. There is also a oneness in another respect: that of one world. The vision is of peoples everywhere, linked together, bound for a single destination. Its evangelical appeal meshes neatly with the reassertion of Western leadership. If the images projected look to the future, they also resonate with the past. In many respects there is a correspondence with the imperial project, most particularly the British version. There is the marvel of the market economy, the Great Commercial Republic of the World as a zone of order as well as prosperity, the missionary impulse, military aid in support of the civil power, above all the optimism about progress. I do not wish to strain the analogy, but in terms of a spirit of boundless possibilities, the parallel with empire seems more apt than a comparison with other 20th century international systems where the divisions between the powers and the fear of conflict produced a statist world view. In their provocative study of the new global form of sovereign power that governs the world, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri make a clear distinction between the contemporary orderwhich they entitle Empireand the earlier imperial order. The emerging system, they argue, is decentralised and deterritorialising whereas imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries.12 I do not accept their larger argument. Even with respect to centralisation and territoriality, the contrast between the two systems is more about the way they are constituted than how they actually work. For all the differences over time and between the various colonial enterprises, the limitations of centralised rule were well recognised by the European states and there is a large literature on the influence of the person on the spot, the expansionism of colonies and overseas elitesthe subimperialism of India being the classic caseand the practices of indirect rule.13 Certainly imperialism proceeded on the basis of territorial enclosure, but it was in fact
____________________ 12. Michael Hardt and Anonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2000), xii. 13. Indirect rule was most fully developed by the British, but it was relied upon, in varying degrees, by all the European empires. It formed part of the architecture of British rule in India, and from there it was carried to other parts of the world. For its most influential articulation, see F. D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1923).

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Pursuing the Political accompanied by processes of deterritorialisation such as commodification and the movement of people and ideas and values. As such, it set in train the globalisation of the Third World. Above all, consider the significance of the movement of migrant labour between different colonial territoriesa feature which in its contemporary manifestation Hardt and Negri see as potentially liberating.14 Positioning the two systems in relation to each other also enables us better to see, shades of empire,15 that the public face of the world order at the approach of the millennium was relatively benign. That is to say, inducement loomed larger than force. The new international had transcended the old politics. States had less visibility. Enemies were being replaced by problems. In time, the South would join the North. Such notions floated more easily on the surface of public consciousness because the processes of sanctions and reward which link different peoples and regions appeared much less sharply defined than before. The exercise of power, it was widely observed, had become diffuse, opaque, spectral, illegible.16 The old ways of reading how domination is secured seemed less persuasive; the points of vulnerability more obscure. Clearly there had been transformations, most evidently those relating to speed and mobility, but there were also important continuities which should not be overlooked. It was Adam Smith after all who wrote about the invisible hand of capitalism, and there is now a large literature on the significance of colonial subjectivity and its construction through textual and other representations. What this underlines, it seems to me, is the strategic role to be played by discursive criticism in revealing the power relations embedded in knowledge and discourse. This cannot be done solely by interrogating international doctrines and practices; such work must be partnered by research into the ways our construction of what is local or domestic shield from view the processes through which the international comes to reside within societies. The most powerful lock on opening-up these processes is deeply ingrained understandings of the space of the nation. Thus, to give just one illustration, we naturally
____________________ 14. Significantly, Empires treatment of the imperial system and its aftermath is thin. It is a book written in the tradition of social theory, which draws insightfully from European classical philosophy and Euro-American cultural and literary theory. It is also informed by a close understanding of European history. The authors seldom, however, take their cue from non-European thought. 15. Ashis Nandy has written that the imperial order appeared to many, both in Europe and the East, as the first step towards a more just and equitable world. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), ix. 16. See, for instance, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming, Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 305.

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Millennium think of cities as coming within the national sphere and mostly study them accordingly. Yet most Third World metropolises were colonial creations, secular hubs for a foreign administrationoften replacing older religious centres such as Benin or Benaresand conduits for trade and alternative conceptions of social life. From earliest days, they served to connect the external world to African and Asian everyday life. Very often in the process they created new divisions within societies or exacerbated old ones, and they continue to do so today. They cannot therefore be excised from an understanding of the global order.17 Nor in attempting to develop a politics of change can there be any spatial either/or about targeting the global and the local. It is not as if the one can be put on the side of domination and the other on the side of resistance. While it may be true that new technologies for reaching across space are more easily exploited by global forces, they can also be used to promote resistance. Most importantly, modern communications and the mass media can internationalise internal dissent and local protest.18 Think, for example, of how media coverage of Aung San Suu Kyis treatment by the military junta in Myanmar has galvanised world opinion and resulted in international initiatives in support of local resistance. A parallel case is the role of overseas protest and regional diplomacy in securing East Timorese independence, but this also serves as a warning that the process of internationalisation may work to stifle radical change within the successor state or regime. Similarly, there is an openness about the politics of place. In the literature on globalisation the local is mostly celebrated as a site of resistance.19 However, there is no reason to equate the local with progressive politics and often it will be nothing of the kind. Yet, given the interpenetration of the local and global, how are we to place the rise of ethnic or communal identification and the turn to violence? In dominant international discourse such ugly eruptions tend to be profiled as manifestations of the local, the assumption being that their roots lie in the malfunctioning of traditional societies, stretching far back in time. What is conveniently passed over is the role of external involvementimperial and globalin reconfiguring
____________________ 17. Given the way the global now manifests itself within societies one might go so far as to argue that international relations as a discrete zone has become a fiction, a metaphysic that wishes away the complications of human geography. 18. Compare Hardt and Negris assertion that in our much celebrated age of communication, struggles have become all but incommunicable. Empire, 54, emphasis in original. 19. See, for example, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Global/local: cultural production and the transnational imaginary (Durham: Duke University of Press, 1996) and Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).

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Pursuing the Political local identities and introducing new axes of difference, such as between the secular and the religious, or history and traditional ways of remembering. Having thus settled for a selective history, local disorder serves to legitimise contemporary external intervention in the name of humanitarian relief, good governance or stamping out terrorism.20 Overall, it would seem that unless a movement for social change is embedded locally the prospects of success will be slim. Effectively what this means is that resistance cannot be left to float in the ether of the global. Despite postmodernist impatience to break with the past, a postcolonial politics involves working away within the space of the nation even as it attempts to free itself from the shackles of the nation. As Sankaran Krishna has put it, there must be a simultaneous engagement within and against modernity [which] can serve as an agonistic encounter with postmodernism.21 Openings for this kind of critique arise especially in crisessuch as the war on terrorism or the handling of asylum seekerswhich appear to have become characteristic of our era. While presaging the emergence of a different kind of international system, such episodes also bring to the surface an older and more familiar politics. The Increasing Resort to Coercion Just as imperialism showed a more bellicose face when other methods failed, so contemporary global power reveals itself in a different light when the limits of co-option are reached. States are once again in the foreground. Hard interests appear to be the name of the game. Power is being exercised openly, indeed flagrantly. Take the anti-terrorist campaign. What is immediately striking is the contrast between the dreadful novelty of the 9/11 terrorist attack and the familiarity of Americas response. The terrorist attacks were strikes against civilisation; the war was being fought in defence of freedom. The way the issues were presented brought to mind over one hundred years of writing on the belief in American exceptionalism, and the commitment to a crusade to make the world just like America. There was the refusal to engage with many of the fundamental issues of Americas role in the world and the response it elicits. It was almost as
____________________ 20. David Harvey has argued similarly, though he is specifically concerned with different kinds of geographical regimes of knowledge and the uses to which they are put. See Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils, Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 546 and 556. 21. Sankaran Krishna, Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka and the Question of Nationhood Borderlines series, vol. 15 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), xxviii. In arguing thus, Krishna follows Anthony Appiah.

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Millennium if the duty of the patriot was to try not to understand, to refuse to put terrorism in a broader context. The publics role was to act as cheerleaders. And, for a time, the public appeared happy to accept that role. The other side of the story is that, through processes of globalisation, this distinctively American approach, the projection of an evangelical culture of dominance, was internationalised in a way that stands in substantial contrast to its reception during the cold war. Then McCarthyism won little support overseas, and even Americas allies retained a strong sense of their own interests and historical legacies, most of all with respect to the Third World. In the contemporary process of universalising Americas world-view, the mediaand especially television and its style of representationhas played a crucial role. In this regard, Michael Ignatieff makes the telling point that TV now mediates the moral relations between strangers.22 There are also echoes of the past in the militarisation of American policy; in the way that violence, its role now extended to pre-emption, has taken the place of politics. I am reminded of what Bernard Brodie once called the wish for total solutions23 referring to the search for a strategic doctrine that enabled policy-makers to escape from the messy business of engaging with other peoples politics. Hence massive retaliation, first proclaimed by John Foster Dulles in January 1954, which carried forward something of the legacy of isolationism: the hope was that if the U.S. could no longer have isolationist ends then it could at least have isolationist means. This was an approach that dovetailed neatly with the Pentagons long-standing preoccupation with means at the expense of endsa mindset so clearly brought out in The Pentagon Papers. Carrying the story through to its Iraqi phasethe war and reconstructionAmericas leadership and that of its allies has had much more difficulty in calling the tune. As opposition mounted, the issues became less settled and increasingly entangled with other concerns both between and within states. What was happening in Iraq had reverberations for alliance relationships; it affected capital movements and investment opportunities; it impinged directly on electoral prospects at home. To many of us it seemed, in large part, that the politics of Iraq had become submerged by the interests of outside states. In this situation, it is perhaps too much to hope that the wishes of the Iraqi people will prevail.

____________________ 22. Michael Ignatieff, The Warriors Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), 10. 23. Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959),

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Pursuing the Political Nonetheless, the task must be to address how analyses and research might help clear a way for Iraqi and other subaltern peoples to escape from being pawns in games of power politics or forced to submit to living according to other peoples designs. Here is a challenge to postcolonial and IR theorists to pool their resources. It would involve, among other things, mapping the processing and laying bare the mindsets which over time circumscribe the possibilities of subordinated people choosing their own political course. This would mean revisiting earlier lines of scholarship in different areas such as the privileging of liberal and realist categories of thought about what is politics,24 the part played by development theory in charting the course of economic change,25 approaches to communal and ethnic violence in non-European societies that tie them to backwardness,26 and understandings of the role and nature of the state that proceed on the basis of Euro-American norms. Let us take the latter to illustrate how the story might be retold. One might begin with the way the idea of the strong Third World state was mauled by First World governments, scholars and the media because of the challenge mounted to the established international economic and political order by leaders such as Ben Bella, Nasser, Sukarno, Manley, Nkrumah and others. When the strong state was brought to its knees there was the writing on the failed state, much of which is open to challenge because of its selective use of history and its normative biases.27 Then, beginning with the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and running into the 1990s, account would

____________________ 24. As has been done, for instance, by Simon Philpott, Rethinking Indonesia: Postcolonial Theory, Authoritarianism and Identity (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000). 25. A good starting point for reading in this area is Christine Sylvester, Development Studies and Postcolonial Studies: Disparate Tales of the Third World, Third World Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1999): 703-721. 26. For one such account, in which the Third World is pictured as an immense slowly boiling cauldron, see Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real World Order (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1993). 27. As examples of such writing about the African state, see Robert Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Robert Jackson, Juridical Statehood in Sub-Saharan Africa, Journal of International Affairs 46, no. 1 (1992): 1-16. Much worse are those of Robert Kaplan: The Coming Anarchy The Atlantic Monthly 273, no. 2 (1994): 44-76; The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century, (London: Papermac, 1997); and The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War, (New York: Random House, 2000). For an insightful critique of such writing, see Siba NZatiouli Grovogui, Sovereignty in Africa: Quasi-Statehood and Other Myths in International Theory in Africas Challenge to International Relations Theory, eds. T. M. Shaw and K.C. Dunn (New York: Palgrave, 2001): 29-45.

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Millennium need to be taken of how state structures were overhauled at the instigation of Western states and international organizations to produce the compliant statethe state that would facilitate the entry of foreign capital, and, most recently, re-jig its security system to mesh with the new global strategic paradigms. I find the argument compelling that the failure of radical nationalism helped push politics underground. From this perspective, terrorism is in part an outgrowth of the Western commitment to process over politics. There is a similar need to uncover the layers of politics that lie beneath the continuing crises about asylum seekersand refugees generallymanifested as they are in people smuggling, detention centres and racist state policies. Scholars in many fields have been forthright in denouncing the conservative backlash in the West. Yet, partly no doubt because of the exigencies of immediate public debate in developed countries, much less regard has been paid to how exclusion is imbedded in the structure of the worlds territorial order. There is a case to be argued that the foundational importance of the Westphalian state in IR has meant that from very early days the discipline has taken fixity as the norm, whereas historically Europes relations with its outside, and now global relations generally, have been driven by movementthe movement of people, of capital and labour, of ideas and values. The role of spatiality in shaping the political order is fast becoming a significant area of research in the discipline and we are now much more aware of the way movement has fuelled identity politics.28 Still, I think it is true that we are only beginning to appreciate how spatiality in its various forms helps underpin global inequality. On the one side, the Third World as a more or less open site for resource utilisation, cheap labour (including outsourcing), and adventure and sex tourism; on the other, the way that regulatory regimes lock the great bulk of the worlds people in place. It is certain that the politics of movement will become more explosive because of the gap between the global imaginary and the fact that for most people in the Third World the actuality is beyond their reach. Consider the following extracts from a narrative borrowed from Simon Gikandi. They are taken from a letter left by two boys from Guinea whose dead bodies were found in the cargo hold of a plane to Brussels in August 1998:

____________________ 28. See, for instance, the Territories, Identities and Movement in International Relations special issue, Millennium 28, no. 3 (1999). More generally, account should be taken of the pioneering work of John Gerard Ruggie in the discipline, and the influence of geographers such as David Harvey and Saskia Sassen.

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Pursuing the Political Excellencies, gentlemen, and responsible citizens of Europe: It is our great honor and privilege to write to you about our trip and the suffering of the children and youth in Africa. We offer you our most affec-tionate and respectful salutations. In return, be our support and our help. It is because we suffer too much in Africa. We need your help in our struggle against poverty and war. Be mindful of us in Africa. There is no one else for us to turn to.29 Gikandi reads the letter in the tradition of an older narrative of poverty and death, and uses it to take issue with what he calls the postcolonial narrative that seems set on difference and hybridity. I want to use it simply to suggest that the situation of the asylum seeker and the refugee is more deeply embedded in the structure of world politics than most postcolonial critics have been prepared to countenance. The figure of the asylum seeker has captured the postcolonial imagination. This is in keeping with a tradition, pioneered by Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, of privileging exile as a category and the migrant or refugee as the marker of a different future. Most recently Hardt and Negri have joined the chorus. The real heroes of the liberation of the Third World today may really have been the emigrants and the flows of population that have destroyed old and new boundaries. Indeed, the postcolonial hero is the one who continually transgresses territorial and racial boundaries, who destroys particularisms and points toward a common civilization.30 But what of the great mass of people who stay behind in the Indian village or the African shanty town in worsening conditions with fewer opportunities? What is the relationship of the movement of people from the countryside to the city and the movement of people across national boundaries? What are we to make of the contradiction inscribed within contemporary globalism between the free movement of commodities and the capital and the barriers to the free movement of people we call economic refugees? And taking account of the demographic statistics and labour requirements of rich countries, is there not a further contradiction between the Wests dependence on young overseas workers and the proposals and policies to keep them out? In short, the need is to resituate the debate about asylum seekers and refugees and place it firmly in the context of rethinking the relationship between the world of the rich and the world of the poor.
____________________ 29. Simon Gikandi, Globalisation and the Claims of Postcoloniality, South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 3 (2001): 630. For another account of the letter and a somewhat different reading see James G Ferguson, Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the New World Society, Current Anthropology 17, no. 4 (2002): 551-569. 30. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 362-3.

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Millennium Dealing with Difference Notwithstanding the difficulties posed by the structure of international politics, the great barrier to any substantive engagement with the North/South divide lies, I believe, within the culture of the West. It is here that a postcolonial politics is likely to have most purchase. A sense of self-satisfaction, located in individual well-being, has permeated the political culture. This has been legitimised by conservative ideologymakers through their celebration of modernitya modernity which resides in the twin institutions of capitalism and democracy, and which effectively silences consideration of other possibilities, or hybrid formations. Rhetorical assertions that there are no alternatives to Western liberalism or clichs such as there is no outside to globalisation have stifled thought about ethicsand looking to the longer-term prudence as well. It is not that there are no alternatives or that globalisation must be left to follow its own course, but that market rationality has colonised the space of politics. What might have been the middle ground where corporate power and market ideology had to reckon with equity in a much differentiated world has all but been evacuated. One consequence of the diminution of politics is the rise of a new form of orientalism. Let me briefly flesh out my argument by reference to the evolution of the debate. In the decade and a half after the Second World War the idea took shape that utopian thought no longer informed politics.31 In his seminal text published in 1960, Daniel Bell proclaimed the end of ideology, arguing that the old political debates were exhausted and the period of radical experimentation was over.32 Bells contention that radicalism was a spent force appeared much less persuasive by the mid-1960s with the rise of cultural dissidence and the resistance to the Vietnam War. Politics, it appeared, was alive and well. But co-existing with the revival of ideology was a deep-seated conservatism rooted in the pursuit of personal satisfaction in times of affluence. This was taken up by the eminent economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Striking out on his own, he argued that increasing affluence meant that poverty was not seen and it disappeared from the political agenda. Wealth, Galbraith tartly declared, is the enemy of understanding.33 Writing in 1992, by which

____________________ 31. This paragraph and the next draw on collaborative work I am doing with Edgar Ng. I gladly acknowledge his input. 32. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Collier Books, 1962). 33. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969), 1.

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Pursuing the Political time neo-liberal economics had carried the day, Galbraith extended his critique by condemning what he called the culture of contentment.34 Galbraith acknowledged the achievements of capitalism, but detected grave flaws both in its economic workings and in its cover of democracy. And they were the more seriousand this is his point about democracybecause contentment had become the state of mind of the many, not just the few. But thinking, at least in the West, has moved on. Or in some ways it had circled back to the end of ideology theorists of the 1950s and early 1960s. The running was now being made by Francis Fukuyama and his end of history thesiswhich I take to mean the end of everyone elses history. Influenced primarily by international developments in the 1980smost significantly the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989the liberalcapitalist system had become the ideal. Now, Galbraith shares some common ground with Fukuyama. Both begin their analyses with the triumph of capitalism and both stress the discursive power of Western liberalism. Despite Galbraith being sharply critical and Fukuyama celebratory of the liberal polity, what they do agree about is that the range of permissible debate has enormously narrowed.35 And this is why Fukuyamas thesis had continuing currency while Galbraiths has slipped from view. Postcolonial studies is well placed to take up where Galbraith left off. The discourses concern with culture and with others resonates with Galbraiths. There is a congruence of understanding that the movement towards a politics of consensus cannot simply be laid at the door of power-brokers; account must be taken of the cast of mind and ways of life of people not directly concerned with the business of policymaking. Postcolonialism has not yet seriously engaged with political economy in the way that Galbraith has, but there is a strong case to be argued that this is well overdue. In short, the theoretical framework is already in place to challenge dominant paradigms and to stimulate rethinking at the intersection of the national and the international. Difference is, after all, fundamental to the discourse. While it is important not to fetishise difference, it needs to be shown how often it is masked by apparent similarity. On one reading, contemporary global power has taken up the cause of differenceand hence postmodernist and postcolonial theorists
____________________ 34. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment (Boston, New York and London: Houghton Mifflin Coy, 1992), 10. 35. For Francis Fukuyamas vision of the West resplendent see The End of History?, The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18 and The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: The Free Press, 1992).

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Millennium who advocate a politics of difference are pushing against an open door.36 Perhaps to some degree in some areas. Even then, the door could hardly be described as open: a good deal of shoving is invariably required. When it comes to the international economy, global powers openness to difference seems decidedly selective. Certainly capitalism has had no difficulty in coming to terms with the informal economy when it suits it, and there are innumerable examples of marketing to differenceas for instance Coca-Colas belated change of strategy from a single product to multi-brand drinks, most of which will have a strictly limited life-span. But difference between the worlds of the rich and the poor is another matter altogether. In so far as it figures, it does so on the basis of the dictum that whats good for the West is good for the rest. The same is true in the sphere of politics, and this is a point that needs to be developed at more length. The Case of Democratisation Although part of a world-wide process, the contraction of political choice in the Third World has its own trajectory and poses particular difficulties for Third World societies. Its roots can be traced to the imperial project and the assumptions that guided the approach to decolonisationthe promise of a more open polity, but one that required that political systems evolve along derivative lines. Under American leadership after the Cold War, the globalisation of ideas about governmentality has established international benchmarks to which all societies are expected to conform. The problem is that prescription from above pays little regard to practice on the ground. Taking account of the transposition of the Westminster system, models of civil society, and the distinction between the public and the private, the postcolonial contention is that politics works very differently in non-European societies even if it does so under the sign of universality. This needs to be brought to bear on the campaign for democratisation where unabashed one-worldism now prevails. In African studies there is a strong tradition of writing on the failure of Western political categories when applied in the continent. Advancing the thesis that African political systems operate through the instrumentalisation of disorder, Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz contend that the wholesale adoption of a political vocabulary issued from the Western democratic experience is eminently misleading: the
____________________ 36. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 138. 37. Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: International African Institute, James Curry, and Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 138.

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Pursuing the Political words do not correspond to the realities which they are supposed to embody.37 Achille Mbembe argues similarly. Western political models are seen as self-sufficient and timeless. Hence what Africans accept as reasons for acting is of little account. He goes on to develop the theme that the notion of civil society cannot be applied with any relevance to postcolonial Africa because of its historical embeddedness in the West.38 In his study of power in contemporary Africa, Mahmood Mamdani rehearses the obstacles to democratisation by revisiting the colonial experience. Reviewing recent reforms, he argues that democratisation has been used as a regime strategy to prevent the reappearance of the urban-rural link that characterised the independence struggle.39 The critical writing on the Asian experience is more variegated than the African literature but it similarly attests to the gap between Western democratic theory and cultural practice. In the case of India, it has been argued that the increasing incidence of caste and communal violence, the criminalisation of politics and the rise of ethnic communitarian parties all point to a crisis in the democratic state. Economic relations are reproduced through social and political forms of domination. The exercise of citizenship rights is circumscribed by the persistence of traditional forms of social control. As in Africa, extra-democratic sources of authority colonise and privatise state power.40 In Sri Lanka the liberal democratic project, and in particular the majoritarian principle, have been directly linked to the rise of ethnic politics and the resort to violence.41 Two recent volumes, both published under the aegis of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies in Colombo, establish the nexus between the problems of human security and
____________________ 38. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2001), see especially 7 and 38. 39. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton Studies in Culture/Powe/History (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, Capetown: David Philip, and London: James Currey, 1996), 187. 40. Patrick Heller, Degrees of Democracy: Some Comparative Lessons from India, World Politics 52 (July 2000): 484-519. For a more optimistic reading of the Indian experience, emphasising an emergent politics of mass aspirations and association, see Rajni Kothari, The Democratic Experiment, in Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State, ed. Partha Chatterjee (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998), ch. 2. 41. See Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, Ashis Nandy and Edmund Gomez, Ethnic Futures: The State and Identity Politics in Asia (New Delhi: Sage, 1999), introduction and ch. 3. Also Scott, Refashioning Futures, ch. 7. 42. P. R. Chari, ed., Security and Governance in South Asia (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, for the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, Colombo, 2001) and Abdul Rob Khan, ed., Globalization and Non-Traditional Security in South Asia (Dacca: Academic Press and Publisher Ltd., for the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, 2001).

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Millennium the crisis of governance throughout the south Asian region.42 Reviewing the material on the workings of state institutions, political parties and electoral politics, the discontents of minority communities and the role of violence and crime, the conclusion is inescapable that the presumptions that informed thinking about politics at the attainment of independence no longer hold. Given such a climate of criticism among those closest to the problems, an external response prescribing more of the same seems plainly misdirected. Easy assumptions about the transferability of liberal-democratic culture need to be called into question. The challenge is to rethink the issues of governmentality as they arise in different cultural contexts and to address how they might be negotiated in international politics.43 It may be that the extension of a democratic framework or the replication of the institutions of civil society will provide openings that would otherwise not exist for the emergence of new forms of subaltern agency or elements of a democratic culture along quite different lines from that held out in European political theory. Dipesh Chakrabarty has addressed such possibilities, arguing that new forms of democracy and different conceptions of the political are emerging on the basis of what people do rather than on what they learn. 44 He writes that notwithstanding the blockages to democracy in India on the part of the government, the state and the middle classes, on the day of the election itself, there is a street mobilisation of democracy and that people participate in the festival of democracy.45 This is a promising approach that needs to be pursued both theoretically and through empirical research.46
____________________ 43. On the question of democracy and difference, David Scott outlines a productive approach. Building on John Grays work on agonistic liberalism, Scott advocates moving away from constitutional First Principles and instead creating political spaces where the traditions of different groups can meet and arrive at settlements of a transitional kind. In his view, that is the postcolonial task. See Scott, Refashioning Futures, 182-189. For a suggestive discussion of how political activity can be facilitated across cultures see Christopher Hughes, Global Politics and the Problem of Culture: The Case of China, in Confronting the Political in International Relations, eds. Ebata and Neufeld, ch. 7. 44. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Keynote Address and Floor Discussion, WeAsians: Between Past and Present, A Millennium Regional Conference 21-23 February 2000 (Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society publication, 2000), 15-41 and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Globalisation, Democratisation and the Evacuation of History in At Home in Diaspora: South Asian Scholars and the West, eds. Jackie Assaag and Veronique Benei (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), ch. 9. 45. Chakrabarty, We Asians, 25. 46. It is noteworthy that Chakrabarty brings out the possibilities but not the problems.

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Pursuing the Political What is certain is that enquiry should go forward in full awareness of the fixity of prevailing Euro-American thinking and the constraints to experimentation put in place by international processes. The family of doctrines that currently set the relationship between the political and the economic spheres is fast becoming international orthodoxy. In the present climate, the version of democracy on offer is strictly circumscribed by neo-liberal precepts. The scope for political change has been corralled by the minimalist role prescribed for the state, the movement to civil society and the ideological compulsions of privatisation. Put bluntly, the will of the people is expected to manifest itself within the parameters set by the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. In a review essay on the Report of the Commission on Global Governance, Upendra Baxi raises issues of general import. At times, he observes, governance is domination and it is regressive to accede to its conceptualisation in the iconic languages of corporate power. At the same time, the understanding of civil society is being changed to facilitate the influence of the business sector in global governance. Yet the privileging of transnational capital in governance does not appear to be accompanied by any notion of its accountability for violations of human rights. Baxi goes on to contrast the United States declaration of Iran as an outlaw state with its failure to declare the Union Carbide Corporation an outlaw corporation.47 To take stock of the position we have reached, if politics was once regarded as the sphere of the unsettled, in the developed world in recent years it has come to connote that which is settled. There are therefore dangers in working from Euro-American texts or development edicts, both because they do not speak to the different cultural and economic circumstances of non-European societies and because they leave no room for experimentation or alternative horizons. Taking heed of the global dominance of the West, imposing our politics on other people is likely to ensure that the world remains for us. Certainly this was what eventuated in imperial times once it was declared that the resources of the world were the inheritance of all mankind. It follows that enquiry must pursue a politics embedded in lived experience. The politics that should interest us will need to be extracted from the work people do, from the initiatives they take and the conventions they break on a range of fronts, from their relation to
____________________ 47. Upendra Baxi, Global Neighbourhood and the Universal Otherhood: Notes on the Report of the Commission on Global Governance, Alternatives 21 (1996); 525-549. For a recent review of the mismatch between the contemporary idea and institutions of global governance and development and human security see Caroline Thomas, Global governance, development and human security: exploring the links, Third World Quarterly 22, no. 2 (2001): 159-175.

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Millennium authority and within the family. This will mean shifting our focus to subordinated sections of society and paying more attention to the zone of the private and the personal than the public arena. In this way, new forms of the political may be discernedwhich, in time, might even speak back to the developed world about its own politics. Working through the Everyday In the course of my argument thus far, I have identified international processesdemocratisation, commodification, uneven development, the openings and barriers to cross-border movementthat help constitute one world and a plurality of other worlds. These processes should not, of course, be seen as detached from ordinary life, from the way people respond to and make sense of the impact of the international on their own lives. We now need to consider how approaching global issues from the perspective of peoples behaviour on the groundas consumers, voters, asylum seekersmight constitute or contribute to a politics of resistance. This section will sketch the changing context of resistance politics. The next will address the question of whether in the culture of the everyday we can discern a politics in the making. There is a large and growing literature on the personal and the everyday, much of it of a celebratory nature.48 Evolving from Marxist debates in the first half of the twentieth century about capitalist transformation and the prospects of a revolution from below, there is a poetic quality about contemporary everyday theory. Where opportunities for overt political opposition are heavily circumscribed, social practices such as rumour, verbal taunts, petty theft and subversive music or stories serve as nodes of resistance. Yet the recent literature is stronger on the form such practices take and on how they evade the techniques of control of the dominant, than on the content of resistance politics or on the effectiveness of the challenge they present to the established order. It also seems there are particular difficulties when it comes to change at the international level because of the elusiveness of contemporary global power and the way it reaches into daily life itself. One major problem is that few of the processes of global penetration evoke an unequivocal response. The signs are unmistakable that contemporary globalism is not simply imposed on people from above; in some respects it is actually embraced. This is so even in the
____________________ 48. The foundational texts of the contemporary literature would include Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, introduction, trans. J. Moore, (London: Verso, 1991); and James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

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Pursuing the Political Third World. Alongside the denunciation of the IMF and the World Bank or the food riots resulting from structural adjustment programmes must be set responses of a very different ilk. And in this respect the difference between elites and subalterns is not as great as often imagined. The calls for UN or Western military intervention on the part of leadership factions in Africa are replicated by pressure from local NGOs and it is reasonable to suppose they would be endorsed by sections of the populace were they able to speak internationally.49 In India the pandering to Bill Gates by the centre and many of the states is in line with the popular belief, especially among the young, that the computer is the symbol of an emergent India. The pull of the modern contributes to all manner of processes through which the global leaves its mark on the local: the journey to the city and the pace of urbanisation; the pursuit of education; the celebration at home of Non-Resident Indians; the mushrooming of fast food outlets (electronic rotisseries in Kampala, McDonalds in Beijing). Everywhere, the rise of consumerism over the past two to three decades has meant that daily life has been increasingly touched by the culture of globalism. In this story of an explosion of desire, corporations, frequently governments and invariably the media are cast as agents of change. In some measure ordinary people become collaborators through their wish to consume. In part the story is about the flow of overseas goods and motifs into national domains and the emergence of new signifiers of status which change established behavioural patterns. But more importantly it tells of the making of a new social order. By purchasing some ordinary commodity, not only may people be buying into the consumer society, they may be imagining a different kind of life. The act is both ordinary in the sense that it is of the everyday but it is also extraordinary in that it looks to the future and a different kind of world. Arguably, this connects with contemporary ideas about a global citizen movement and about the power of consumers to discipline corporate power through marketplace and shareholder activism. Building on campaigns such as those waged against Nike and Microsoft, the hope is that the logic of contemporary capitalism can be used against its propagators to create some kind of global market democracy.50 This new
____________________ 49. In the latter respect see Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (New York: Farrar Straus, 1998). 50. See for instance Lance Bennett, Branded Political Communication: Lifestyle Politics, Logo Campaigns, and the Rise of Global Citizenship, in Politics, Products, and Markets: Exploring Political Consumerism Past and Present, eds. Michele Micheletti, Andreas Follesdal, and Deitlind Stolle (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books, 2003) and Margaret Scammell, The Internet and Civic Engagement: The Age of the Citizen Consumer, Political Communication 17 (2000); 351-355.

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Millennium consumerism, of course, looks to a very different everyday from that of traditional theorists, and it is not one that, as yet, has made much headway in the South. Such is the allure of consumption that people are drawn to cross boundaries, to invent rebelliously, to turn to crime. Thus in contemporary China, it has been argued, even resistance works within its fold.51 Enter the figure of a marginal character who is always on the lookout for new ways and thing to market, consume, subvert, rebel against or steal.52 In the view of one critic, such a figure does not resolve the issue. We would need to know what, in fact, street capitalism is resisting.53 As it stands, the resort to theft and similar, this critic fears, can mean no more than a replication of the worst features of established capitalism and its law of uneven development.54 As the above quotation intimates, these processes which we now understand to be global are hardly new. They were, in fact, intrinsic to imperial domination from very early days. Commodification drew colonial peoples increasingly into the orbit of the metropoles. In Africa, for instance, there were the Kaffir trucks and hawkers bringing the consumption of foreign commodities into the domestic space of people in the villages. Government officials encouraged such commercial penetration because it helped to create new needsso long as the natives have no wants they will not and need not work.55 No surprise then that Victorian advertising played a crucial part in the making of a new cultural system. As Anne McClintock has observed, by trafficking across the threshold of the public and the private, advertising began to subvert the middle class distinctions was entrusted with upholding.56 Her conclusion: [m]ore than merely a symbol of imperial progress, the domestic commodity becomes the agent of history itself.57 The difference between then and now is essentially one of scale. Today many more people are trafficking with the dominant system and across a much broader front than before. It is also the case that the politics of the system are much less visibleno foreign flags or
____________________ 51. Michael Dutton, Streetlife China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 282. 52. Ibid. 53. Harry D. Harootunian, In the tigers lair: socialist everydayness enters post-Mao China, Postcolonial Studies 3, no. 3 (2000): 346. 54. Ibid., 347. 55. Quoted in Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (London: Leicester University Press and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 86. 56. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 209. 57. Ibid., 220.

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Pursuing the Political cantonments. As a result, clear lines of demarcation cannot easily be drawn between what consolidates the power of the centre and what might challenge it from within. Moreover, it is hard to get a sense of who might be protagonists or even whether the term makes sense since so many people are pulled in different directions.58 There are, of course, activists who operate more or less along traditional lines, such as the demonstrators against the World Bank and the IMF. But even here the issues are hardly cut and dried. For some, no doubt, the demonstrations would be understood in a tactical sense, as a way of publicising the inequalities of the world economic system and winning support for reform. For others, the hope might be to bring down the Bretton Woods institutions in the belief that they are the crux of the problem. But in what sense can the World Bank be regarded as the enemy when it is very largely an expression of Western interests and values? And were it to be brought down, would it not have to be reinvented to stabilise the volatile flows of private capital which now much exceed public and multilateral assistance? Reflecting more broadly, is it not the case that through our practices of consumption and connivance nearly all of us are participants in the processes which underwrite the contemporary global systemvolunteers of a kind? These questionsloaded as they areare intended to cast doubt on the utility of our established categories to unravel the processes of collaboration and resistance in contemporary global politics. Much the same story can be told drawing on other sources. Two decades back writing about Muslim responses to the Iranian revolution, V. S. Naipaul observed that for all the hatred of America it still held an attraction. But the attraction wasnt admitted; and in that attraction, too humiliating for an old and proud people to admit, there lay disturbance.59 Reflecting on his discussions with a newspaper editor who embraced the rule of Islam yet sent his sons to study in the United States, Naipaul identifies a deep division; with one part of his mind he was for the faith, with another he recognised the world outside as paramount. It was in that division of the mind that the Islamic revolution had begun in Iran. And it was there that it was ending.60 Sherry Ortner argues similarly in an essay

____________________ 58. Again it might be said that there are continuities here with the colonial experience. The distinction between collaboration and resistance was seldom as clear-cut as imperial historians liked to imagine. There were elements of one in the other and in any case understanding of the categories changed over time. The difference between the two systems is of degree not kind. 59. V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (London: Andre Deutsch, 1981), 17 60. Ibid., 398.

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Millennium emphasising the subjective ambivalence of acts of resistance for those who engage in them. In a relationship of power, she declares, the dominant often has something to offer, and sometimes a great deal.61 What all this suggests is that the binaries that have mostly shaped our thinking about dominance and resistance miss the ambiguity and mobility of the processes and parties involved in global interaction. Certainly we cannot restrict our understanding of the ways in which the personal and the everyday effect social change to the activities of those groups which fly the flag of resistance. Nor, it seems to me, is it enough to follow James Scott and widen our gaze just enough to include the hidden transcripts of those who intend to effect change.62 Intentionality is hardly well suited to capturing peoples responses to the claims and inducements of globalism, buried as they are in the life rituals of the everyday. Even leaving aside the hazards of deducing or imputing intention from what is said and done,63 there is a need to understand how change in one sphere can generate change in another, or how developments in a particular place can reverberate elsewhere. It must also be recognised that outcomes are not solely a consequence of willed action, and this is especially likely to be the case when dealing with systemic change. These considerations should not be taken to displace the human subject: their purpose is rather to situate the subject in relation to process over time. Bringing ordinary people into discourse about the international is a crucial move, but it needs to be supplemented by theorising about the relationship between different desires and the significance of day-to-day transactions. By this I mean working both inward and outward from life experiences to bring into play the subjective, on the one hand, and social processes, on the other. For these reasons among others, the recent literature has been increasingly attentive to difference in the politics and culture of resistance. Ortner puts it this way: there is never a single, unitary, subordinate.64 Hence, in a sporadic fashion, the word multitude entered the lexicon of resistance. It was, however, Hardt and Negri who spelt out its significance and brought it into general currency. As they see it, the concept of the multitude indicates the persistence of plurality
____________________ 61. Sherry B. Ortner, Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995): 175. 62. Scott uses the term infrapolitics to describe resistance that avoids any open declaration of its intention. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 220 and 200-201. 63. On this see Maurice Cowling, The Nature and Limits of Political Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 18-21. 64. Ortner, Resistance, 175.

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Pursuing the Political in the social field, and stands in contrast to the concept of the people, which historically has been tied to the rise of the nation-state and seen as possessing a single will.65 As is now becoming apparent, Hardt and Negris manifesto promises to resituate debate about resistance to the dominant order, about the kinds of people who are enfranchised and those who are not, and perhaps even about the relationship between the changing face of globalism and daily life. The issues are too large and it is still too early to say with any confidence what will emerge, but a few questions will indicate that there are problems with the concept of the multitude. In their fast-forward from an old Eurocentrism to a new freefloating-centrism, the fundamental issue for our purposes is whether Hardt and Negri have lost sight of the people who resist and the opportunities for resistance in the South. How far is their schema hospitable to difference at a structural level? One wonders whether the concept of the multitudeat least as adumbrated by Hardt and Negri is receptive to those non-Europeans who are neither on the move nor on the make. Equally, what commonality might be found in the resistance offered by those in the North, increasingly integrated into the global circuit and the resistance of those in the South, many of whom are increasingly marginalised? Nor is it by any means apparent that the quotidian no longer connects with the nation. Simon Gikandi in fact asserts that there is scant evidence in support of the marginalisation of the nation-state in the politics of everyday life for the majority of people in the ex-colonies.66 That may well be an over-statement, but the global unevenness of the place of the nation in the popular imaginary seems a fact of contemporary international life. There is also the problem of knowing what to make of a bold idea which is not fleshed out. One critic observes that it is odd that the multitude should appear so shorn of what we would recognise as culture.67 Another comments that what is strangely lacking is a toolbox of concepts needed to engage with the everyday activities of ordinary people.68 Provisionally, at least, we might infer that the concept of the multitude is situated at some distance from the lived worlds of those who resist.

____________________ 65. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 102-103. I have also drawn upon Michael Hardts review of Dipesh Chakrabartys Provincializing Europe, The Eurocentrism of History, Postcolonial Studies 4, no. 2 (2001): 249. 66. Simon Gikandi, Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality, 640. 67. Jon Beasley-Murray, Lenin in America, Rethinking Marxism 13, no. 3/4, special dossier on Empire (Fall/Winter 2001), 153. 68. Laurence Cox, Barbarian Resistance and Rebel Alliances: Social Movements and Empire, Ibid., 157.

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Millennium Other Viewpoints By way of contrast with Hardt and Negris approach, we might now consider two vignettes which attempt to capture something of the lived world of dissent and resistance in India and Jamaica. Both take their politics from popular music and both are concerned to enquire into the challenge of democracy understood in a performative sense. I read each of these fragments as offering a commentary on the nature of everyday resistance and its relationship with organised politics. In certain respects they run in parallel, most significantly in showing how categories such as class, age group and sub-culture mediate between the local and the global. But, when it comes to the efficacy of popular protest, they differand in ways that are themselves instructive. In an essay exploring the relationship between representative democracy, the urban experience and popular culture in India since independence, Sudipta Kaviraj reflects on the changing relationship between elites and lower classes and castes.69 Democracy, he says, lived in the city, which was where caste segregation broke down and ideas of romantic love flourished. The ideal of equality was carried forward not so much by political leaders as by the Hindi film industry.70 Kaviraj singles out a song about Bombay from a popular Hindi movie which catches the sense of freedom offered by the city but also warns of its difficulties and of the need to be wary.71 He recalls that growing up in a small religious town in Bengal, such popular ditties which expressed the life-world of the city competed with the pastoral tones of the traditional songs of worship of vaishnava culture. Even in our childhood, he adds, we sensed the attractiveness of this musicprecisely because of its strangely fascinating invitation of liberation and the subtle, enticing corruption of disobedience; much to the disapproval of the older generation.72 It is Kavirajs argument that the egalitarian challenge of democracy was cut short at the political level by the representative system which substantially limited, and rendered indirect, the potential power of the
____________________ 69. Sudipta Kaviraj, The Culture of Representative Democracy, in Wages of Freedom, ed. Chatterjee, ch. 7. 70. According to Kaviraj, left-wing writers, made redundant by the Communist Partys cultural sectarianism composed wonderfully knowing, sceptical and complex lyrics. Ibid., 152. 71. Here I am reminded of the feelings for the city of Mr. Kapur, a character in Rohinton Mistrys novel Family Matters (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). Mr. Kapur, who arrived in Bombay as a baby when his family had been forced to flee the Punjab in 1947, loved the city for its tolerance, acceptance and culture of sharing. Yet in later years he feared it was being destroyed by the Shiv Sena, in league with criminals and the police. 72. Kaviraj, Culture, 154.

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Pursuing the Political masses. The rejection of privilege took deeper root in the culture, but here also its political returns were marginal because the upper castes and classes had the resources to refashion the structures of inequality and markers of difference. There has been an enormous change in the dislike people feel for their social superiors, giving rise to a culture of insubordination. But there are serious limits to what insubordination can achieve. Despite the immense satisfaction of the occasional act of defiance, it leaves the world as it found it.73 Writing of the culture of dancehall in Jamaica, David Scott is more open to the possibility that a new kind of politics might emerge from subaltern rejection of the established nationalist-democratic order.74 Many of the social trends that Kaviraj identifies in India appear in sharper form in Scotts depiction of the contemporary crisis in Jamaica. There is the contempt of the urban young for the respectable values of the nationalist middle class and their disenchantment with the culture of representative democracy. There is the anxiety of the middle class about the growth of a separatist popular culture and about the ability of the popular classes to insert themselves into the global economy in ways which circumvent the state. Scott attempts to probe the longer-term politics of these and other changes by examining the popular practices associated with dancehall. He takes the figure of ruud bwai (rude boy) as a prism through which the tensions and fears of the postcolonial state are refracted. As Scott sees it, the Fanonian account of ruud bwai which had some purchase in the 1960s and 1970s is no longer relevant. The idea that the aggression and violence of the danceand the culturewould find their release in revolution lost credibility with the collapse of the socialist-nationalist project. Nor will it do to settle for the conventional understanding of the late 1990s that ruud bwai is little more than the embodiment of a pure apolitical violencea criminality to be dealt with by the police and the prisons. Instead, Scott wants to read the gestures and movements of the ruud bwai body as the positive signs of a certain practice of self-formation.75 Following Foucaults writing on the way the self works upon the self, Scott wants to see ruud bwai self-fashioning as a practice of refusing to offer up a docile body to the existing order and instead taking hold of the bodys energies and imposing a new order.76 Thus understood, dancehall becomes a moral-political practice and pluralises the political field.77
____________________ 73. Ibid., 170. 74. Scott, Fanonian Futures?, in Refashioning Futures, ch. 8. 75. Ibid., 212. 76. Ibid, 214 77. Ibid., 217-18.

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Millennium Taking Stock However one responds to Kaviraj and Scotts reading of the possibilities of the popular political, I would submit that the world of Hindi film music and dancehall in Jamaica is not as far removed from contemporary global processes and politics as disciplinary theorists of the international might imagine. Subaltern consciousness stands alongside the silenced history of colonial appropriation and new forms of global racialisation as demanding inclusion in the narratives of international politics. Both Kaviraj and Scott turn to popular culture to get a reckoning on the Third World state, its domestic politics and the challenges it faces to its role as a connecting rod between the external and the internal, between the global imaginary and its discontents. They can therefore be read as offering a coda to part of the story that I have told in this essay of the continuities between the imperial and the present order, of the hopes placed in the new states, of their taming, of the process of rendering them compliant to neo-liberalism, and of the risk that, whatever the intentions, good governance will be yet another episode in the saga of shackling the people of the Third World to the interests of the First. I have attempted to indicate why, for the most part, IRs reading has been so different. Certain sites, principally the high politics at the centre, are privileged at the expense of others. Certain regimes of knowledge, invariably Western, are valorised while others are marginalised or not recognised as knowledge at all. Throughout, the argument has been that the patterning of discourse reflects in large measure the culture and economy of the developed. Despite temptation and training, I have resisted the notion that politics has some hard core or can be fixed in time and space. What is political is itself a matter of politics. There is much to suggest that once a sphere is designated as political it tends to be assimilated into the existing order. Very often, what is not taken up as politics is that which threatens most. This is the zone of the not-yet-political. Such has been the fate of culture, race and everyday life in international relations. Earlier, it was the same with many of those extraordinary figures who challenged the establishment and hold of the imperial system, only to be dismissed as deranged. Think, for instance, of the warrior-poet, Sayyid Mohamed Abdulle Hassan (known to the British as the mad mullah) in North Africa, or the woman associated with Kurtz in Conrads Heart of Darkness.

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Pursuing the Political This leads us back to the other part of the story I have been telling. A postcolonial politics cannot be read from the canon of Western political theory, much less from the archive of IR, hobbled as it is by its insistence on the primacy of the state, the privileging of the modern (meaning Western) and a circumscribed understanding of what constitutes the political. The politics that we seek must in the first instance be drawn from within non-European societies, tapping sources that give us glimpses of other life worlds. These glimpses will tell us something of how people come to terms with external influence and intervention, but they will also tell us much about other concerns, quite unrelated to imperialism and its aftermath. How far, if at all, some kind of accommodation might be reached between such a politics and that which informs the major discourses of the international we cannot yet say. What can be said is that there will be no easy fit and that much of the prevailing thought would need to be substantially reconfigured. At the same time, I have attempted to show that other life worlds are seldom entirely other and that there is more ambiguity and fluidity about the processes of domination and resistance than we often like to think. It follows that everyday life should be approached with a view to catching elements of social change rather than identifying positions of resistance about which there is likely to be more fixity of thought. To do so probably calls for something of the approach of the anthropologist or the ethnologist of a postcolonial cast of mind. The potential rewards are signalled by the work of scholars such as John and Jean Comaroff, E. Valentine Daniel, Veena Das and Ashis Nandy. Doing the postcolonial this way would address Sudipta Kavirajs recently expressed scepticism about the distinctiveness of postcolonial theory on the ground that its analyses are primarily of Western texts dealing with the West.78 Enriched with such insights, the discourse might be better enabled to see new sites and sources of change within developed societies as well. As Karena Shaw has written with respect to the inclusion of Indigenous peoples struggles in international discourse: [t]heir situations pose challenges that I take to be our challenges their situation is a condition of possibility of our own, historically as well as in present times.79 Finally, proceeding in this way carries the promise of going beyond the Third World as a category which, despite its tactical utility at this juncture, ultimately works to confine. Tracking back to our two
____________________ 78. Kaviraj writes that it is ironic to say the least to argue that the sign of breaking away from Western theory is to show greater proficiency in it. Sudipta Kaviraj, On the Advantages of Being a Barbarian in At Home in Diaspora, 161. 79. Karena Shaw, Indigeneity and the International, Millennium 31, no. 1 (2003): 59.

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Millennium vignettes, that in the end Kaviraj and Scott hold out different conceptions of the political underlines the possibilities of the everyday and suggests that the future is more open than often we think.

Phillip Darby is Reader in International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Melbourne and Director of the independent Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne.

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Department of International Relations

Alumni Group
The LSE IR Alumni group has been formed to work with our world wide community of 6,500 former students. The group was founded as part of the departments 75th anniversary celebrations.

24-25 September 2004

First LSE IR Alumni Conference Where now for EU-US Relations?

Celebratory reception and lecture at LSE on the evening of Friday 24 September Join the LSE International Relations Department as we discuss the future of transatlantic relations in the aftermath of the Iraq War. The conference is a unique opportunity to engage in debates about international affairs while also catchingup with old friends and teachers. Both LSE alumni and non-alumni are welcome to attend. Conference proceedings will take place at LSE on Saturday 25 September with a celebratory reception and lecture on the evening of Friday 24 September. For further details and registration for the conference, along with full details about the group and all other events please visit:

www.lse.ac.uk/depts/intrel/alumnigroup or email: iralumni@lse.ac.uk

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