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Summary Texts - Politics of Conflict

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Course
Politics of Conflict

Institution
Universiteit Gent (UGent)

Texts included: 1) Hannah Arendt A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence [1969] 2) Ann Stoler Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power [2010] 3) Mahmood Mamdani Making sense of political violence in post-colonial Africa [2003] 4) Achille Mbembe Necropolitics [2003] 5) Zygmunt B...

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politics of conflict
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Institution
Universiteit Gent (UGent)
Education
Conflict And Development
Course
Politics of Conflict

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1) Hannah Arendt
A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence [1969]

Power can no longer be measured with wealth; amount of violence no longer reliable indication of strength
Criticizes previous relation between war & politics and violence & power
Marx: aware of violence, but secondary role
New Left
- under Marx
- rules out use of violent means
- connected with the ‘weird suicidal development of modern weapons’
- against both Western representative democracies & Eastern one-party bureaucracies
- use Progress as described in the 19th C (A: not suitable for these new trends; critiques: )
- not simple one future of mankind, does not offer anything to the individual life
- burning desire for justice
- we must think about chronological unfairness
- Positive thing: serve as a guide for action in the future
 If history is a chronological process, violence is the only possible interruption, making true what preachers of violence claim (which in
reality, has shown to be wrong!)

Revulsion against violence: only extremists are yielding to a glorification of violence
Sorel: nothing more violent than the famous myth of the general strike (A: nonviolent politics)
Sartre: ‘violence is a cure-all for most of our ills’
Fanon: A: manages to stay closer to reality, has some significance
- We must not neglect the significance of revolutions & rebellions
- Those who are being violent dream of violence
Participatory democracy
= one thing A does support from these preachers of violence; the council democracy

Violence in the political realm

General belief: violence is nothing more than a manifestation of power
Rule by Nobody
= bureaucracy, neither the few nor the many can be held responsible
General belief: command-obedience relationship
Others: support of people granting institutions power

,Distinction of power & violence
- Power stands always in need of numbers
- Violence relies on instruments
- We must distinguish notions such as power, strength, force, might, authority, violence (if not: blindness to the reality they
correspond to)
- Power is not a matter of command and obedience, and thus no equation to violence

Revolution (to illustrate this difference)

Revolutions are not simply being ‘made’
- Obedience is not determined by commands but by opinion (armed uprisings don’t take place when unnecessary) + numbers of those
who share it
- E.g. French revolution: example of revolutionary situation that did not became a revolution because nobody wanted to seize power
Power
- Essence of all government
- Violence is not; it is instrumental
- Those with no power will never have enough power to use violence
- Peace is an absolute
- Power is inherent to the existence of political communities
- Power is always the primary and predominant factor when combined with violence
- Violence can always destroy power
- When power is being lost: rule by sheer violence
- Effectiveness of terror depends almost entirely upon degree of social atomization (=disappearance of organization opposition)
- Power and violence are the opposite: where once rules absolutely, the other is absent

Roots and causes of violence

Absence of rage and violence is a clear sign of de-humanization (e.g. concentration camps)
We only react with rage when our sense of justice is offended
Most effective violence, where there is no individualization
Death = most antipolitical experience there is
- Power & violence should not be interpreted in biological terms
- like Fanon does: necessary violent negotiation of everything that stands in the way of the will-to-live
Sick society
= riots are symptoms as fever is symptoms of disease, only promote violence in the end (=critique by A)

,Racism
Organic metaphors are even more dangerous here as it would mean it is fraught with violence
Violence is then the logical, rational consequence of racism = explicit ideological system: dangerous according to A.; whereby a racist
ideology is used to justify racism in the streets
Danger of violence
- practice of violence will always be a means that overwhelmed the end
- “ changes the world, but the most probably change is a more violent world
Bureaucratization of public life
- Where everyone is deprived of political freedom because of the rule of Nobody
What makes a man political: his faculty to act (= all properties of creativity ascribed to life)

 Every decrease of power is an open invitation to violence

, 2) Ann Stoler
Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power [2010]

Combining the anthropology of women in understanding colonial expansion & consequences for the colonized: imperial authority and racial
distinctions were fundamentally structured in gendered terms
Colonial elites aren’t simply a homogenous community of common interest

The regulation of sexual relations was central to the development of particular kinds of colonial settlements and the allocation of economic
activity within them:
- Implementation of concubinage (colonized women as the concubines of European men; instead of importing European women)
Straddled division of ruler and ruled because of mixed-bloods
- Impoverished Indo-European women living in situations where boundaries of companionship, concubinage and paid-for-sex are
blurred
- Replaced by prostitution or marriage between full-blooded Europeans

Restrictions on European women in the colonies
- Very little opportunity to marry with soldiers
- Men had to remain un-married up until the age of 35y

White prestige = basic feature of colonial thinking; gloss for different intensities of racist practice, gender-specific and culturally coded
Administrative strategies of social engineering, colliding or constraining people’s choices & private lives underlie the demographics & sex
ratios (not the other way around)

European women
- Initial role when imported: tighten ranks of white communities, clarify boundaries, mark out their social space
- Higher need for privacy resulting in new distinctions of race (unclear whether this demand came from male or female population) =
more distinguished spatial segregation
- Colonial discourses about them: highly contradictory: blaming them for not respecting racial distinctions ànd being too racist
- Charged with reshaping the face of colonial society; the bearers of redefined colonial morality (wrong assumption!)
What European women had little resonance and effect until their objectives coincided with a realignment in both racial & class
politics in which they were strategic
- “Black Peril”: the professed dangers of sexual assaults on white women by black men; highly sexualizing black men
- Very race-specific race laws (rape of black women/rape by white men were not classified as rape by the law)
- But in general: very little evidence of rapes that were committed
- Rape charges against colonized men were often based on perceived transgressions of social space (e.g. seeing a white woman that is

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