English – Page 3 – Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

Visit the Royal Institute for Interfaith Studies Website

🟡

Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

As tension mounts during the build-up to the Orange marching season, which occurs each summer in Northern Ireland, the streets of many cities and towns are festooned with flags. The proliferation of Union Jacks, Irish Tricolours, Ulster flags and paramilitary banners adorning the streets symbolize loyalty and serve as sectarian markers of territory. In July 2002, however, something unusual happened: republicans started hoisting the Palestinian flag alongside their Irish Tricolours while, in neighbouring loyalist areas, the Israeli flag fluttered alongside the Union Jack and paramilitary banners. This paper suggests some reasons for this by focusing upon the concept of ‘fear’ in the context of the peace processes in Northern Ireland and South Africa. It begins by offering some thoughts on the phenomenon of Israeli flags flying in Belfast before moving on to consider briefly how the psychological and sociological literature generally treat the concept of fear (and risk). This leads to the argument that fear and the use of fear are unrecognized variables in popular discourses surrounding political negotiations and processes such as truth commissions. The paper analyzes the role of fear in the political transition process, a subject seldom dealt with in the academic literature, and examines the way that the concept of fear–like the suffering of victims of political violence–is politicized and depoliticized. The paper then concludes by trying to apply some of the ideas that it presents to the South Africa and Northern Ireland contexts and, particularly, to approaches to political risk-taking.

The “war on terrorism’ in the name of national security and anxiety extends a discourse on risk that is already prevalent as an organizing principle in our globalizing world. In sociology, “”risk society’ refers to the social precariousness of contemporary institutionalized patterns of existence, in which future possibilities, rather than past lessons, increasingly determine decision-making. The ‘war on terrorism’ has used the idea of risk not merely as a strategy to defend values and institutions, but to bring about social and political transformation. Pre-emptive wars have been launched against failed states or collaborators with terrorists abroad and anti-terrorist legislation has been introduced to acquire emergency powers at home. Michael Ignatieff calls the project of fixing failed states through military intervention “Empire lite,” commenting that “to the extent that human rights justify the humanitarian use of military force, the new empire can claim that it serves the cause of moral universalism” (Ignatieff 2003, 110). In reality, human rights and democracy are being offered under a form of imperial dependency in Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq through ‘nationalist nation-building projects’ that are unlikely to succeed. Democracy entails self-rule and not just getting the right to vote. This paper argues that both the war on terrorism and humanitarian military intervention are shaped by risk, rather than justice, and are, therefore, more about containment than about realizing the aspirations of a moral universalism based upon rights and political participation.

Abstract: Recent titles discussed in this article include: Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and War, Routledge Encyclopedias of Religion and Society, no. 5 (Routledge, NY: Routledge, 2004), 530 PP., including 60 b&w photos, Hb. £90.00, ISBN 0 415 94246 2; F. E. Peters, The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition, Volume 1: The Peoples of God, Volume 2: The Words and Will of God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), Vol. 1: 328 PP., Hb. US$29.95, ISBN 0 691 11460 9, Vol. 2: 406 PP., Hb. US$29.95, ISBN 0 691 11461 7 , Vols. 1 and 2, Hb. US$49.50, ISBN 0 691 11561 3; Majid Tehranian and David W. Chappell, eds., Dialogue of Civilizations: A New Peace Agenda for a New Millennium, Human Security and Global Governance Series (London: I. B. Tauris in association with the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, 2002), 302 PP., Hb. £35.00, ISBN 1 86064 712 X. ‬

This essay agues that the reduction in the cultural space occupied by the nation-state due to forces of globalization opens up hitherto less used spaces for expressions of solidarity and in ways that do not correspond to the old national mapping of the world. The new solidarities may be identified in terms of four central human values: i) interests (which give rise to material solidarities); ii) universality (which gives rise to humanist solidarities); ii) freedom (which gives rise to life-emancipatory solidarities); and iv) deep meaning (which gives rise to spiritual solidarities). The central argument is that, while nationalist ideology has daimed to provide for all such ales ente this tustin a comprehensio to the creation of social networks clustering around one or another of these central values. The paper begins by giving a brief synopsis of the historical trajectory of postnationalism in Europe, moves on to outline different possible political reactions to globalization that may impede the progress of postnationalism and then charts out fundamental differences between nationalism and postnationalism (the latter accepting conceptual fragmentation of values, not insisting on being coterminous with state ideology and is oriented toward acquired, rather than given, identity).

As recently as 2000, J. Nye Jr., a noted scholar of international relations, reiterated the well-known truism that Japan was Asia’s first ‘globalizer.’ Less known or less comprehensible is the actual nature of the Meiji state, which was culturally transformed into what some have described as a hybrid form combining contemporaneous Japanese and Western norms. Other historians, such as F. Braudel, have described the state in terms of the “duality of the traditional, awe-inspiring Emperor’s power and the modern.” The hybrid or dual form of the Meiji state was a ‘cultural construct’ fabricated on the basis of governmental and national/local interaction with the study missions sent to the West during the late Tokugawa and early Meiji eras. These experiences may also be referred to as transnational/local interactions or, in the words of M. Bamyeh, as one of the “historical relatives of transnationalism” and perhaps the greatest such experiment in international history dealing with “culturally meaningful borders.” In this context, the paper attempts to analyze the processes involved in the cultural construction of the Meiji state by drawing upon the experiences of the Iwakura mission to America and Europe (1871-73), which had decisive consequences, both positive and negative, for Japan and its Asian neighbours.

The process of globalization involves the transnationalization of production and capital, which gives rise to global trade. This transformation from international to transnational capital signifies an “”epochal shift”” in the world economy that has a fundamental impact upon the nation-state. The paper discusses the role that the state plays in advancing globalization and how that role has metamorphosed since the previous epoch of the world economy, which was primarily characterized by the dominance of the multinational corporation. An examination of public policy reveals the power relations and dominant groups in society as well as the manner in which public policy has been globalized by the state. Hawaii is selected as a case-study to demonstrate this hypothesis. Hawaii’s case is noteworthy since it is part of the United States, yet exhibits some of the characteristics of a developing country due to its location in the Pacific basin. This dual identity indicates the complicated nature of public policy as the state machinery tries to compete to secure a solid beachhead for Hawaii within the global economy. But the state’s actions have a price: the alienation of large sectors of society, which have been harmed by this transformation and which demand decision-making powers in devising public policy. This expression of globalization in the social arena and its implications for political power are central points in the study of these global/transnational processes.

The formation of the modern Sri Lankan state and the relationship between this formation and patterns of civilian and ethnic violence constitute the central themes of this paper. Within this context, the paper explores orientations to nationalism and the nature of the post-colonial state, forces of identity and violence. It takes issue with some conventional arguments concerning ethnic identity, arguing that the force of ethnicity is grounded in social relations and only secondarily in particular constructions of identity. It is through the historical processes of colonial and post-colonial state formation that ethnicity and its subjectivities have come to have the force that they do. This does not ignore the importance of how the state is imagined, ethnicity being an aspect of the state imaginary. The paper discusses the role of ritual and religion, particularly Buddhist revitalization, as well as the ancient chronicles of religious history, in the production of the imaginary of the state. The argument then moves to a discussion of state and anti-state terror and violence and describes how they are shaped in different kinds of political process, the violence of the state being distinct from that of the terrorist groups that confront it. Overall, the article explores the various social and ideological threads that weave through the long history of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. This history is one that passes from the era of the post-colonial nation-state to a contemporary globalized era of weakened post-colonial state forms. The discussion concludes with a brief consideration of the social and political circumstances that may lead to the resolution of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict or further inflame it.

Transnationalism is generally juxtaposed to the national as a process in which the former grows at the expense of the latter. This paper explores the way in which transnational ethical and legal movements are being used to reconstitute, rather than undermine, the national. The focus of the paper is political amnesty, justice and the limits of national reconstruction in Lebanon after the 1975-90 civil war. The predicament of the ‘disappeared’ is used to measure the extent of national reconciliation and the lack of international interest in the individual/ human rights of Lebanese. The inability to redeem the casualties of the war, including the disappeared, is indicative of the cost of impunity and non-accountability for past as well as present crimes. The anthropological significance of recovering the disappeared as part of national reconstruction goes beyond the desire for a ritual socialization of individual death. It is an important medium for the social reconstitution of the individual citizen and the recovery of identity and law within the national community. The paper explores the role transnational human rights movements and legal prosecutions for ‘crimes against humanity’ have played in national reconciliation elsewhere and how they apply to the Lebanese case. It also points to the potential role of the transnational Lebanese diaspora in reconstituting Lebanese state sovereignty and citizenship.

This paper deals with the migration of people from Hadramaut, in Yemen, to Singapore, looking both at the historical circumstances that led to their early success in the city and also at the contemporary ones that constrain the maintenance of Hadrami identities and the community’s continued involvement in its traditional adaptations to the Singaporean environment. The paper discusses transnational movement, the character of the nation-state and the nature of contemporary globalization as frameworks for the various ways in which different groups of Hadramis define themselves within a global city such as Singapore. It also examines internal Hadrami ways of organizing themselves. Traditional factors, such as kinship and marriage, are central, as are associations like the Tariga al-Alawiyya, a network based partly upon the bonds of kinship and partly upon the organizational principles found among Muslim Sufi groups. More modern cultural organizations, such as the Arab Association, are contemporary adaptations for the maintenance of identity and for the promotion of links to the Middle East and to the Yemeni homeland, links through which commercial interests can be pursued. By way of these discussions, the paper tries to deal with issues of importance to the further development of an historically-oriented anthropology.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Uruguay experienced a dual process of denationalization that occurred when economic and political crisis culminated in a repressive military dictatorship. Denationalization involved actual flight from the country (exilio) or retreat into private worlds (insilio or ‘internal exile’). The oppressive coercion of the dictators stripped Uruguayans of their individual rights and put approximately one in six of them into prison, where many were tortured. The dictators not only abandoned the ideals that had united Uruguayans, but also the social welfare system that they had constructed. The return of democracy has not reversed the experience of denationalization. The economy has not recovered and many returning exiliados re-migrated when they were unable to find employment. Politically, individual rights have been circumscribed by amnesty laws that have given complete impunity to the former military and pontical élite. At present, insiliados and victims of state repression are collecting evidence to seek legal redress in third-country prosecutions, while human rights activists are pursuing transnational strategies to recover legal rights at home. From across national boundaries, the diaspora community has been instrumental in achieving this goal by providing the necessary links to international bodies. It remains to be seen whether this attempt to recover individual rights will help in the reconstruction of Uruguayan national citizenship and identity.