Something that springs to mind straight away though is this quote from Mark Duffield's book Global Governance and the New Wars:
The current concern of global governance is to establish a liberal peace on its troubled borders: to resolve conflicts, reconstruct societies and establish functioning market economies as a way to avoid future wars. The ultimate goal of liberal peace is stability. In achieving this aim, liberal peace is different from imperial peace. The latter was based on, or at least aspired to, direct territorial control where populations were ruled through juridicial and bureaucratic means of authority. The imperial power dealt with opposition using physical and juridicial forms of pacification, somethimes in an extreme and violent manner. Liberal peace is different; it is a non-territorial, mutable and networked relation of governance. The aim of the strategic state-non-state complexes that embody global governance is not the direct control of territory. Ideally liberal power is based on the management and regulation of economic, political and social processes. It is power through the control and management of non-territorial systems and networks. [p. 34]
I'll read it when I get home.
Did you see the Weizman article I linked to earlier? I should have posted it in this thread, really.
Speaking as a mother...
It's an interesting quote, and I think it's largely correct, but what I'm thinking about is what happens when we collapse the distinction between liberal and authoritarian (replacing the dichotomy with a scale, if you like). Assume that the state really is organised crime: the difference between humanitarian intervention and imperialism vanish. Is this a reductio ad absurdum of Tilly's thesis? Possibly. But I think there's a seam here that can be mined to build a support for humanitarian intervention, neo-con recidivist that I am.
padraig -- I'm afraid that I am merely another smarmy dude. "Speaking as a mother" is Bill Bailey speak for "talking out of my arse".
It's an interesting quote, and I think it's largely correct, but what I'm thinking about is what happens when we collapse the distinction between liberal and authoritarian (replacing the dichotomy with a scale, if you like).
Assume that the state really is organised crime: the difference between humanitarian intervention and imperialism vanish. Is this a reductio ad absurdum of Tilly's thesis? Possibly. But I think there's a seam here that can be mined to build a case for humanitarian intervention, neo-con recidivist that I am.
this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.
...it seems to me that the PTC’s decision is, from a political perspective, the worst of all possible worlds. Sudan’s response to the arrest warrant will be no less draconian simply because Bashir escaped (for now) being charged with genocide. Yet I think we can expect the rest of the world to lose interest in Darfur (again) now that the PTC has said that the Sudanese government did not pursue a genocidal policy towards the Fur, Massalit, and Zaghawa.
And make no mistake about it: that is precisely what the PTC is saying. As I have pointed out before, Article 58 of the Rome Statute required the PTC to issue the arrest warrant if there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that Bashir was responsible for genocide. Not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Not clear and convincing evidence. Not even more probable than not. Just “reasonable grounds.” That is an extremely low standard of proof — and the PTC is saying that Moreno-Ocampo failed to meet it. That’s a very strong, and very shocking, conclusion. I disagree with those scholars who believe that Moreno-Ocampo would be unable to prove genocide at trial, such as Alex de Waal, but I readily admit that it’s a debatable point. I find it very difficult to believe, however, that the evidence of genocide — the murder of the male members of the tribes, the sexual violence and slow-death conditions in the IDP camps, etc. — doesn’t even establish reasonable grounds to believe that genocide occurred.
Are humanitarian NGOs to be conceptualised as an extension of 'Western' states? The level of funding they receive from donor govts certainly lends some credibility to this position. Furthermore the militarisation of humanitarianism also suggests that NGOs have been coopted to serve as a component of Western foreign policy.
If this is accepted and we conceptualise of states as organised crime then humanitarian intervention and imperialism become blurred -- both are the projection of power by criminal cartels with little legitimacy.
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If however, humanitarian NGOs are seen as representing a third sphere - separate from the state and the market - then a case for humanitarian interventions can be built on the basis that they serve to mitigate the worst effects of the organised crime networks (i.e. states) in the most "dysfunctional" parts of the world.
Is there a moral position that can hold the following simultaneously: the state is organised crime; humanitarian intervention is wrong?
Er, I don't think so -- I think that there is an answer, and that answer is no.