"THEORIZING THE POSTCOLONIAL STATE AND ITS INSTABILITIES,"
A PANEL SUBMITTED FOR THE ANNUAL MEETING OF AAA,
WASHINGTON, D.C., NOVEMBER 28 TO DECEMBER 2nd
Organizers: Aletta Biersack (Oregon) and
David Lipset (Minnesota)
PANEL ABSTRACT
One of the upshots of the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism is a renewed interest in the state and its processes. Some scholars take as their starting point the ascendancy of neoliberalism in the last two decades. Neoliberalism uses the state to establish the conditions of maximum market penetration. The state is not rendered impotent, but its powers are rechanneled away from the promotion of the general welfare and toward the facilitation of free enterprise, which materially benefits the state. The neoliberal state's complicity with capitalism severely compromises it as issues of legitimacy inevitably arise. In this context, civil society increasingly opposes the state as it establishes alliances with external agencies devoted to mitigating the ills of capitalism. In the event, the state is no longer besieged no long from "below" but more menacingly in the global arena, as national actors network with international actors in an effort to curb the negative consequences of the free enterprise the state promotes. Neoliberalism, it could be argued, inevitably globalizes state-society conflicts, rendering the state vulnerable in new and devastating ways. It has also been argued that transnational migration weakens states. As nationals disperse across the face of the earth, the link between territory and people, although not broken, is attenuated as emerging hyphenated, hybrid identities and cosmopolitan subjectivities complicate any sense of peoplehood. Migrants may become exposed to a different (more democratic and bureaucratic, less hierarchical) political culture, and they may garner new (nonaristocratic) marks of distinction, alienating them from homeland elites. To the extent that migrants promote change in the homeland, the subversive potential of their radicalism will be realized. Neoliberalism and extensive transnational migration are relatively recent.
This panel targets postcolonial states, and these have for the most part emerged out of a much deeper history, one set in motion by discovery, colonization, and colonial rule. Understanding the instabilities of particular postcolonial states may require examining the entire history of colonialism and eventual independence. How extensive was the reach of the colonial regime, and what residual or emergent renegade micropowers and microsovereignties existed in its margins as a counterweight to that regime? What ideology governed the design of the postcolonial state? Did this ideology fit the precolonial ideology, and, if not, what contradictions and dissonances did this incongruity engender? What problems in state-society relations did the postcolonial nature of the postcolonial state cause? Are there traces of these problems in today's perturbations? What was the political economy of the postcolonial state at its point of inception, and what did that political economy become?
To pose the question of the postcolonial state and its instabilities is to set aside structural, ostensibly universalist but actually Eurocentric understandings of the state and to take culture, history, and practice seriously. The panel as a whole uses ethnographic and historical approaches to states within and without the Pacific basin for the purpose of contributing to the new and comparative anthropology of the state.
PANEL PROGRAM
INTRODUCTION
BIERSACK, Aletta (Oregon), and LIPSET, David (Minnesota)
PAPERS (order of presentation)
KAPFERER, Bruce (Bergen) "Civil Strife and War and the Crisis of the State in an era of Global Reconfiguration"
A major argument that is currently being posited is that the era of the nation-state is at an end and that the nature of sovereignty is undergoing radical shifts and becoming effectively disconnected from centered control. Sovereignty, once the soul of the modern state, as Foucault observes, is increasing devolved across a number of agencies and organizations that vie with the state in their influence, often constitutive, over social life and daily existence. They create new possibilities of sovereignty and give shape to new modalities of violence, often very distinct from those in the circumstance of the nation-state. The overall aim of the presentation will be to discuss such changes and the appearance in postcolonial regions of a sharpening contradiction between, on the one hand, persisting nation-state forms of state power and, on the other hand, more distributed or fragmented forms of political sovereignty often grounded on processes that nation-state orders tended to suppress. One argument that will be explored is that many current situations of civil turmoil and intra- or cross-state war are propelled in such a contradiction. The paper will examine various situations in Africa and Asia in the development of the thesis.
DINNEN, Sinclair (Australian National University) "External Intervention and the Challenges of State-building in Solomon Islands"
The Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) was deployed in mid-2003 in response to a request from the SI government for assistance in restoring order in the aftermath of a low-level ethnic conflict, as well as helping to rebuild the institutions of government in this independent Pacific Islands country. RAMSI provides the first manifestation in the Pacific Islands region of the current international spate of state-building interventions aimed at strengthening weak and failed states. Significant resources and personnel have been committed by Australia, New Zealand, and, to a lesser extent, by other member states of the Pacific Islands Forum. After achieving considerable success in its initial phase, major difficulties and tensions began to emerge in 2006. Following serious unrest in the national capital, Honiara, in April 2006, a new government was elected and the past year has been marked by an increasingly acerbic struggle between the Solomon Islands and Australian governments over the control and future of the regional mission. The ongoing tussle has also inadvertently drawn in several other Melanesian countries, notably PNG, and has damaged Australia's relations with a number of its nearest neighbors. This paper will examine the broader crisis of the post-colonial state in Solomon Islands prior to looking at the shortcomings of RAMSI as a proposed solution to the problems faced by what some analysts have identified as the Pacific Islands first failing state.
APTER, Andrew (UCLA) "Virtual Production, Nefarious Exchange: Notes on New Religious Movements in Nigeria"
Like much of the global "south" in the 1990s, Nigeria has experienced a dramatic rise of new religious movements associated with intolerant forms of Christianity and Islam. The growth of born-again revivals, outbreaks of religious and sectarian violence, the adoption of Sharia law in the north, as well as new attitudes toward the power of prayer represent a popular return to "fundamentals" throughout a nation racked by inflation, corruption, and chronic political instability. How can we account for the rise of these new religious movements in Nigeria, their fundamentalist orthodoxies and devotional forms? In this paper I relate these new religious movements to the instabilities of sign-value that emerged when the contradictions of the oil economy could no longer be sustained. Fueling a symbolic mode of production through nefarious spheres of exchange, oil produced an illusion of development that collapsed by the 1990s, precipitating a generalized condition of "semiotic suspension" associated with dissimulation, con-artistry and advance-fee fraud. When the state retreated and the currency collapsed, new religious movements sought to stabilize signs within sliding scales of truth-value and exchange-value. As the phenomenological ground of semiosis, the national body would be born again.
TIMMER, Jaap (The Van Vollenhoven Institute at Leiden University) and
WIDJOJO, Muridan (The Indonesian Institute of Sciences) " The State in Indonesian Papua"
In our paper we intend to map the complex territory of "the state" in Papua by focusing on the politics and discourses of the region's elite. While the national Indonesian politics of reformasi (reform and democratization) have seen inconsistent policies toward Papua, the reactions of Papuan elites are more than merely reactionary. The apparent endorsement of the Indonesian state by supporters for the establishment of new provinces and new regencies has provoked fundamental challenges to those elites who seek to maintain and consolidate their recent political gains under a Special Autonomy law written for a unified Papua. At the same time, the political specter of secession because of a failure of policy in Papua is continually reinforced in local and international forums. Our paper will explore the crisis of legitimacy of the state in Papua. Instead of focusing on the analytical divide between "state" and "society," we will look at how prominent Papuans obtain room to maneuver between the people, the bureaucracy, "Jakarta," and transnational connections. In general, we will identify and explain emerging political forms in Papua that are not easily defined as "local," "ethnic," "grassroots," "civil," or even "sub-national."
STEPPUTAT, Finn (Yale and Danish Institute for International Studies) "State, Land, and Sovereignty at the Frontiers of the Modern State"
Through the ethnographic exploration of a land conflict between returning refugees and former members of a civil defense patrol in the context of the ongoing peace process in Guatemala (1994-1995), the paper will discuss strategies for reconstructing state sovereignty in the wake of armed conflict. As Carl Schmitt has argued, the colonial appropriation, division, and naming of land was fundamental for the institution of law. But even after more than a century of post-colonial rule and liberal land reforms, the process seems to be ongoing rather than concluded, as suggested by the endemic nature of land conflict and the continued "primitive bureaucratic accumulation." In the case at hand, state sovereignty is challenged or modified by armed forces, communities, NGOs and the "international community," each propagating different moral claims to legitimacy. Finally, the case is an example of the paradox that (threats of) violence give non-state groups privileged access to negotiations over entitlements as the state seeks to monopolize means of violence.
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YOUNG LESLIE, Heather (Hawaii at Manoa) "A Peaceable Coup: Destabilizing the 'Last Polynesian Monarchy"
The Roman historian Tacitus noted that there are always singular and unpredicted events that surprise all astute observers. Benedict Anderson surmised Tacitus would say those surprises are only explained by chance and the peculiarities of certain persons involved in particular events at pivotal times. This paper documents one such pivot point, and the idiosyncrasies of key characters involved; during Tonga's general strike of 2005, civil servants lead a general strike that held their government, the country's elites, and major businesses hostage for 44 days. Remarkable for its mostly peaceful and Christian-inflected protests, massive marches and solidarity against state-sanctioned forms of elitism and incompetence, the general strike resulted in a clear, direct, and broadly-based call for electoral reform, democracy and a modified monarchy, which the Tongan government vowed to respect. However, as of 2007, the aftermath of Tonga's "marching season" and the international consultations throughout the Tongan diaspora which followed, has so far included, not greater democracy, but the burning of the capital Nuku'alofa, over 800 arrests, extended state emergency powers, and multiple ad hominem attacks of key figures, in public and electronic media. The historically surprising events that set Tonga, the Pacific's oldest Polynesian monarchy and most stable nation, on the road to democracy have also, perhaps, set Tonga toward membership in the infamous Pacific "arc of instability."
FRAENKEL, Jon (Australian National University) "The 'Good Governance'Coup of December 2007 and the Birth of Authoritarian Modernization in
Fiji"
The military takeover in Fiji in December 2006 differed in important respects from the 1987 and 2000 coups. Unlike previous coups, this one was backed by Labour Party leaders, Catholic social justice advocates and 'good governance' supporters. The military's "clean up" campaign was aimed at purging of the commanding heights of the state apparatus in a concerted effort to tackle corruption and ethno-nationalism. As after previous coups, it was accompanied by a protracted debate about the suitability of democracy for Fiji, but this time also about whether a stronger military hand was needed to transcend ethnic antagonisms, halt state mismanagement and modernize the economy. This paper looks at the causes and consequences of the 2006 coup and engages with the associated debates about the viability of democracy in Fiji.
KERNAGHAN, Richard (Yale) "Asphalt Trenches: Of First Roads, Local Topographiees and the Reversible Sense of Destruction in an Internal Margin of the Peruvian State"
My essay asks what the attempt by the Maoist Shining Path to devastate the Marginal Highway just east of the central Peruvian Andes can reveal about the material and allegorical force of first roads. It considers the inscriptive power of road-building in a hinterland region and its relationship to the ways states may impress order upon physical landscapes. If building a road could be said to embed a material code into the earth, one that orients distribution through space as it attaches protocols to movement,then first roads are massively powerful events. What to make then of their deliberate devastation? Expressed succinctly, my guiding question is, when might destroying a first road be a potent means of disrupting the spatial foundations of state rule?
DISCUSSANTS
CORONIL, Fernando (Michigan)
KAPLAN, Martha (Vassar)
FILER, Colin (Australian National University)
DISCUSSION
