Actually, I am the Dean of the School for
Conflict Analysis and Resolution and
I want to welcome all of you here.
It's a pleasure and a privilege to
serve In a role like this at this time.
The school is getting stronger by the day.
And the liveliness of the experience
is tempered by the desire to
keep it together,
to keep it as a coherent whole that
doesn't constrain anybody
to preconceived structures.
But rather supports
the liberating inquiries
of many into the difficult
challenge of conflict.
As part of my role I need to introduce
some of my friends that are here.
And I want to start with
the advisory board.
So, I would like to ask all the members
of the advisory board to stand and
be recognized.
>> [APPLAUSE].
>> We have a wonderful board, and
we are definitely delighted that this
board is supporting us in so many ways.
We're also delighted to have Molly and
Bill here.
I'm not allowed to say their last name.
I was bound to a sort of a friendly
acknowledgment that they
will do something informal.
So, I'm not mentioning that,
but I just want to acknowledge that
I'm very happy to have them both here.
There is something about knowing somebody
the first time that is very good.
And there is something even better when
you notice somebody the second time.
Or the third time.
Or the fifth time.
There is something very good about
meeting people over and over again.
And I think that it's good for
us to be here tonight for a lecture
that is making possible for
us to be who we are.
So, let me elaborate for
30 seconds just on that idea.
How is it possible that
a lecture makes us something?
Well, the first observation is that
in many ways we are the words,
We say that we need to take
those words very seriously.
We are also the words we hear,
we listen, we cherish, we welcome.
And that so many of you being tonight
is a demonstration that many of you would
like to hear from a distinguished speaker.
About a certain topic at a certain time.
And that there is something about
nourishing ourself with words the same
way we nourish ourself with food.
We get our energy for our bodies from
the food we get but we definitely
get the energy for our mind and
our soul from the words that we receive.
That we cherish, that we keep.
So, I feel that in many ways
I would like to welcome all of you
tonight in a spirit of gratefulness.
Grateful to all those who made S CAR.
And the Lynch lecture possible
because I think that is
that contribution to the Philip lodge and
the potential are just incredible.
To give you a sense of the depth of
this involvement I would like you
to travel with me for a moment from.
For those who know the place,
point of view as a space to point
of view as a web of relationship.
From the Lynch lecture as a moment to
the Lynch lecture as an opportunity,
as a case, a word that is shared among us.
I think that we definitely see how
the occasion of the lecturer is bringing
us together we're not that together but
often this is actually very specific
things that happen only once a year and
is a good thing for the community to
be together was a great bus outside.
Everybody was speaking, everybody was
meeting, everybody was saying something.
And I will definitely give
the floor to Professor
soon to introduce the speaker tonight.
My role is here just to set the tone and
to welcome all of us.
And I would like to stress
that I raised an with said
after one lunch lecture in the past when
he said, this is when we come together.
Everything comes together.
I felt that that observation was astute.
Because indeed if we come together.
In words, that a commission
of the words shared together
make the community a community of inquiry,
a community of concern.
Especially as Kevin mentioned
recently on the faculty board,
what we share is actually a problem.
A concern about a problem.
A concern of a problem called
conflict that we all share.
So, it is with great pleasure that I'm
inviting you to welcome these words that
will be given tonight,
the speaker that will give them.
But also the tradition in which
these words are, in a way, located.
The same way we welcome something that
we do not know, we cannot control
is this invitation opening ourself,
not only to the gratitude of what happened
in the past, but what may happen next.
So, I was using this double-image
point of view in the lynch lecture.
And I must say that I was very proud when
I discovered from Professor Alan Mann that
the of the process is now a minister,
I believe sworn in today.
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> Tomorrow.
So what is point of view?
It plays where you make ministers or
human web in which ideas, words,
make possibilities credible,
meaningful, relevant to others that may or
may not have considered him.
A valuable candidate.
What I found curious, is that, the
appointment of that particular minister
is changing Professor is changing
point-of-view, is changing.
And so, I'm ready to be
changed by Professor tonight.
I'm ready to be changed by
Professor Chadli introduction happy to
be changed by all of you in this infinite
intonation of the words that we said.
I just want to stress how important,
as the Dean, this moment is for us.
Indeed, it is good to be together for
the Lynch lecture once a year for
a long time, thank you.
[SOUND]
>> Thank you, Andrea.
And welcome, folks!
This is a lovely that your here
as a testimony to how much
we are looking forward to
your comments this evening.
Most of you know who I am.
I'm Sandra Cheldelin, I'm the Vernon and
Minnie Lynch Professor.
And in that role,
over the past several years,
I have had the pleasure of organizing
our annual lecture series.
The lecture series has been going on for
almost 25 years, this is the 24th
Annual Lynch Lecture today.
So in the tradition of what Andreio
talked about, I'm gonna actually talk
a little bit about the lecture series and
why we think you're here.
And why this is such an important event.
It's a series actually in honor as a pay
back to an absolutely wonderful and
now extended family.
Kind to our school over
the years they've funded
my of multiple people have been in this
endowed chair as we rotate them around.
They've given us this stunning piece
of property called point of view that
Andrea just mentioned.
That was their name and now it's our
name for that piece of property.
On Mace and Nick.
They believed in our mission.
They believed in
thinking that we could find a way
to make this a more peaceful world.
They really believed that.
Isn't that precious,
nowadays and they had a vision.
And their vision was to help us to
continue broaden our knowledge about
conflict theory, conflict research, and
conflict practice within our school,
with our faculty and
our students in this community right now,
in the university community at large,
and in the field that large.
The lecture series.
Was our small gift given back to
rich families to say thank you.
It's an array of very interesting
thinkers over the years for
identify a few of them
starting to depart too.
A childhood friend of our friend Carlos
was part of his Argentinian clan.
Luis Moreno Ocampo.
You may recognize his name.
He was the first, and
most recently the first retired,
Chief Prosecutor of
the International Criminal Court.
We had a fascinating evening considering
the issues Involved with the ICC.
All of the lessons informed
from the field and
challenges, in terms of how we think
about human rights and social justice.
Andrew Mack, the next year,
the director of Human Security Report
Project, dazzled us with more research and
more research data than we could
adequately take in, in one evening.
And engage us in a very lively discussion
about the impact of organizations
such as the UN regarding conflict
intervention and prevention.
US house representative for
nearly four decades, Lee Hamilton,
vice chair of the 911 commission and
president of the Woodrow Wilson
center of scholars spoke to
us about post 911 issues.
In particular, and what do we do when
we've framed others as unacceptable?
Another giant in the field,
this time with a focus on diplomacy,
was the honorable Ambassador Jan Eliasson.
The US Amabassador from Sweden, and
the President of the 60th session
of the UN General Assembly.
[COUGH] And then the special
envoy representative to Darfur.
He challenged us to consider essential
agenda and alliance for the US and Europe.
Using only a small amount of its
resources, let's say 100 billion,
to bring clean water to
every human being on earth.
To end world literacy, by developing
literacy education for girls.
To take on organized crime syndicates and
illegal activities, sex,
drug trafficking, and through research
solve global health problems.
Tropical diseases, as well as our own.
Diabetes, and obesity, and heart disease.
And he said to have an essential
transatlantic alliance
in conflict zones with
policies on peacekeeping.
Two years were were honored with
our own Andrea Bartoli, our Dean.
Though he could easily have informed
us of his extraordinary work,
internationally renowned
work in genocide prevention.
He spoke instead about practice,
about traditioning innovation.
Challenging us to make innovation
our way of doing business not to
be complacent with old practices.
His work with dynamical systems and
conflict offered an alternative model for
thinking about conflict escalation.
When he thinks about the escalation
conflict it's usually an uphill frame.
He flip it.
The model allows us to think
about falling into conflict.
Getting into the gully of it and
what we do with that.
Last year was an interesting experiment.
The summer of 2011 a small delegation
from Eschar went to China and
met, Madam Yan Junqi.
Madam Yen is the Vice Chair
of the Standing Committee
of the National's People Congress of China
and the Chair of the China Association for
Providing Democracy.
It was in her capacity, too, as the Chair
of the China's People Association for
Peace and Disarmament called CPAPD,
took me a while to learn that one.
We thought she would be
an extraordinarily provocative
person on how does a country like China
think about peace and conflict resolution.
Well we certainly learned
about the complexity and
the enormous difficulty
of a China in transition.
And how to cope with
issues of transparency and
public dialogue regarding these
kinds of protected paradigms.
So, in keeping with our
provocative charge,
we're delighted this year
to welcome Vivian Jabree.
Let me tell you about her background and
then I'll get out of the way so
you'll have time To listen to her remarks,
and we'll have a time to
have a discussion with her.
Following her lecture, you'll notice
there are some chairs up here.
We've asked three students and
another faculty member to join in
opening a discussion with Vivian.
We will then open up the microphones
to the audience at large.
Vivian Dupree is a Professor
of International Politics.
Well, actually, she's one of us.
A part of our community,
kind of the middle of the sandwich
of three generations.
When she was doing her master's
program at King's College
with folks like John Burton.
She attended a guest lecture
from a fellow from city college.
His name was Christopher Mitchell.
She said, I knew he was the one
I wanted to do my work with.
And so,
she did her doctorate at city college and
he was her chair of her dissertation.
Now didn't we all have that experience
when we first met Chris Mitchell?
I wanna work with that guy.
She completed her Doctorate Program
at City and Chris was her chair and
then she took the turn, her turn.
She was the chair of her
own Peter Mandeville,
who's the Director of the Center for
Global Studies, and
most recently co-Director of the Center
for Middle East and Islamic Studies.
Small world, isn't it?
So anyway, as I was saying, Dr. Jabri is
the professor of international politics
and coordinator of the Center for
the Study of Political Community
in the Department of War Studies
at King's College in London.
Prior to joining that faculty,
in 2003, she had lectured at St.
Andrews and the University of Kent.
Her speech this evening, Human Rights,
Sovereign Rights, and the Potential for
Conflict Resolution, is likely to be
informed by her own research on critical
and post-structural social and political
theory to investigate the intersections of
international politics, conflict,
war, and security practices.
Dr. Jabri has conducted collaborative
research on the implications of
the nexus of these for
liberties and human rights.
She's a prolific scholar
Widely published six books,
many chapters, lots of journal articles,
many of you in the room right now
are reading her work this semester.
Her latest book is The Postcolonial
Subject Claiming Politics Governing Others
in Late Modernity.
Some titles of her chapters and articles
gives us a sense of her passion and
her scope.
Cosmopolitan politics security,
political subjectivity,
transformation of war, perspectives
from international political sociology,
security multiculturalism in cosmopolis.
Michel Foucault's Analytics of War, the
Social, the International and the Racial.
And Shock and Awe,
Power in the Resistance of Art.
So please, please join me with
the warm welcome for Vivienne Jabri.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you very much for
a most generous welcome and
indeed very generous words from everybody.
It's really great to be
here because as Sandy says,
I do have a long association with George
Mason even though this is actually my
first visit to the University and
especially to S-CAR.
I think you're in a wonderful place,
the research that goes on here
is really very important in
the field of conflict and
peace research and I would say for
international politics actually.
So I'm very much looking forward
to our interactions this evening.
What I want to do is to try not to be so
theoretical this evening.
But nevertheless,
you'll see that the theory and
the conceptualizations that I work with
are very much there in the journey
that I'm going to take you through.
Now what is that journey?
As you know and as you've seen from
the publicity for this lecture, the title
is Human Rights, Sovereign Rights, and
the Potentials of Conflict Resolution.
In a sense, I see a challenge that's being
presented to us now in the 21st century.
And that challenge is that
there are indeed, and
we are witnessing the extremes of
violence going on across the world.
And so the challenge is how do we
respond intellectually as well as,
if you like praxeologically,
how do we respond?
And so
the journey I want to take you through,
in a sense, starts from Syria,
present day Syria.
I'll not say much about what is going on,
we all know what's going on,
we're all witnessing
what is going on there.
So the journey takes us from Syria or
at least it starts from Syria, and
ends in a little place called Sant'Egidio,
which is just outside of Rome.
However that journey takes us
via a rather complex route and
I'm hesitant to tell you
what this complex route is.
But I'm afraid you're going to have to sit
there and listen to this complex route.
Because it's very important and it's
at the heart of what I'm going to say.
The route takes us via Immanuel Kant,
it takes us via Jurgen Habermas,
and finally it takes us
via Michel Foucault.
Because these three characters, and
I apologize to my feminist sisters for
the fact that there aren't
many men mentioned here.
But as you'll see at the end of my talk,
a very valiant and
important woman comes through
in the conceptualization and
theorization that I'm providing here,
namely Hannah Arendt.
Because Arendt is most significant here,
as you'll see.
So that's the journey that
I'll be talking you through.
Now I can't remember how long I've
been given because my students say
I do have this tendency to go on and on.
And I sort of have this tendency to forget
that they might have questions and so on.
So I'd better time myself,
and I'm assuming I have?
>> 40 minutes.
>> 40 minutes, excellent.
So I'll try and
confine my comments to 40 minutes.
Even though it is,
I think it's 1 o'clock or
even 2 o'clock now, AM, my time, right?
So you must excuse me if I sound hoarse or
anything like that, or
if I lose the track on this journey.
So from Syria to Sant'Egidio via Kant,
Habermas and
Michel Foucault, and then ending
up with Hannah Arendt as I say.
What does Kant teach us?
What does he provide us?
He provides us with, in a sense,
the very beginnings of what we
might call today critical theory.
He teaches us that indeed he was
probably the first critical theorist.
Because he argued that human
beings have this capacity
to self legislate, to be self-reflexive,
to think about their enviroment and
to think about what they say.
So it was in that sence that
Michel Foucault pays tribute in his
what is enlightenment to Michel Foucault
as being the first critical theorist.
And so we're here today exactly to reflect
on what we have to say about conflict and
conflict resolution.
But Kant teaches us something else
much more important in life here.
He had a cosmopolitan imaginary,
and that's very important.
He was very concerned with the idea of
the human as being a rights bearer.
The human being as rights bearer,
for Immanuel Kant,
suggested that the human self is also or
can be also, a suffering self.
In other words, much harm can
be done to the human being, and
we know that to be the case.
So he was concerned with human rights,
and it was
his cosmopolitan imaginary that enabled
him to think about the distant other.
And he talks about hospitality to
the other as being a manifestation
of his cosmopolitan imaginary.
However, he also questioned himself,
exactly in relation to this imaginary.
In other words,
the question that he asked himself was,
what is it to have a political system or
an international system that is indeed
based on this cosmopolitan imaginary?
And he argued against a cosmopolitan
formation of the international.
For Immanuel Kant, this was the paradox.
To recognize the rights of the individual
self in a sense presented the opportunity
to transform relationships
internationally.
However, he argued against
the redefinition of what was an imaginary,
the cosmopolitan imaginary.
Into something much more, into something
positive, namely cosmopolitan law.
For Immanuel Kant,
law is the great pacifier.
Law pacifies the internal community of
the liberal republican
modern secular state.
However, to convert a cosmopolitanism
of rights into a legal system,
meant for Immanuel Kant the transformation
of the international into empire.
So here we have exactly that original
critical thinker, reflecting on his own
imaginary and the political
implications of his own imaginary.
So the paradox for
Immanuel Kant is that indeed he
recognizes the human
self as rights-bearer,
however, he limits the potentials
of cosmopolitanism.
He puts the brakes on what
cosmopolitanism can do.
And he wishes to retain the notion
of the sovereignty of the state.
But this was a paradox for Kant,
because the primary, if you like,
element in his philosophy is exactly
that autonomous being, right?
And this hails through from the dawn
of modernity to the present.
The enlightenment idea of the individual
self as being capable of self reflection.
Being capable of reflection upon their
cultural and phenomenal context.
But as I say,
Kant absolutely reiterates the limits
that should be placed
exactly on the ambitions,
if you like,
of the cosmopolitan imaginary.
Because ultimately, the ambitions
of the cosmopolitan imaginary
Is to extend that law and specifically
the force of law internationally.
So Kant presents us with this paradox.
And so in this journey,
Comes Jurgen Habermas.
And when he writes about developing
this Kantian perspective.
He talks about revising Immanuel Kant,
as he puts it, 200 years later.
The thing for Habermas, the challenge for
Habermas, and for the rest of us.
Is that we do live in a globalized world.
The conflicts we see
are transnational conflicts.
Conflict in late modernity is no
respecter of state boundaries,
so what do state boundaries mean
in this late modern context?
So for Habermas, the Kantian cosmopolitan
imaginary has to be given positive force.
In other words if we look to the two
elements of rights that I'm talking about,
human rights, sovereign rights,
Habermas argues that the later,
sovereign rights,
have to be trumped by human rights.
And I don't think any of us in this
room would disagree with that,
I don't think we would.
Hands up,
whoever disagrees with that statement.
You know, we would not
disagree with him on this one.
So how do we challenge
Habermas in his formulation.
What is he saying?
What perspective on peace
is Habermas providing
that Immanuel Kant does not provide and
does not help us with?
Remember that Immanuel Kant
in his pamphlet,
some would say rather angry pamphlet,
because he wrote it actually to show up
the Prussian king and his war-like regime.
For Emmanuel Kant, we could indeed
have a sort of perpetual peace.
And the internal constitution of
the state is very important for
Emmanuel Kant, right?
I'll come back and critique Kant as well.
Kant does not get away with
it that easily, you see.
But for
Habermas the notion of perpetual peace
is only possible by coming up and
designing a cosmopolitan arrangement.
And what he wants to see is exactly
the pacification of the sovereign state.
The pacification, and as he puts it,
the domestication of the international,
The international arena
is an anarchical context,
but it is in late modernity
increasing subject
to all sorts of regulations, right?
Globalization is a process,
it's not some mad chaotic
process going on out there,
there's actually a lot of regulation.
But what Haberrmas wants to see is exactly
the pacification of sovereignty as such.
In other words, political sovereignty,
that diradical political
sovereignty of the state.
He wants human rights to trump
the sovereignty of the state.
And so if you ask Habermas,
how does he help out,
in relation to conflict, and
especially violent conflict?
For Habermas peace is the equivalent
of a respect for human rights.
That's his definition of peace.
So peace as pacification.
Peace that's the taming of sovereignty and
ultimately this taming and
this pacification in the service of
the right of the individual human self.
But what are the implications?
And you know what,
Habermas is not the only person,
he's in a huge company of people.
I'll mentions two of these, Kofi Annan.
Before Kofi Annan, Boutros Boutros-Ghali,
UN Secretary General.
During the 90s and into the 2000s,
both of these people
were arguing exactly for
that taming of the sovereign state.
because across the world,
the most extreme of violence is
perpetrated against populations
by their very own regimes.
Or by the factions of those regimes.
So we have to have a response in a sense.
So Kofi Annan and Boudro's Ghali were
exactly making the same argument,
let us trump state sovereignty
in the name of human rights.
And once again,
they have a conception of peace.
That's actually very Habermasian.
In other words, the idea of peace as
being the equivalent of human rights
and the positive force of human rights.
So peace building in a sense takes over.
It begins to take over from diplomacy and
conflict resolution, right?
Now the alarm bells need to start
going right now in all our heads okay?
Cuz in this room we're interested
in conflict resolution
and there's a good reason for that, right?
So peace building comes to take over
all sorts of interventionist practices,
involving the UN,
involving nongovernmental organizations,
involving individuals and so on and so on.
A kind of international civil
service at large, in and
out of countries,
peace building, state building,
institution building, governing, right?
So there's a backdrop to this.
The emergence of peace building as
an alternative to conflict resolution.
And it has been an alternative, and
conflict resolution,
in the meantime, has been undermined.
And there are reasons for that.
So for Habermas, cosmopolitan law,
actually we're seeing manifestations
of cosmopolitan law, we now have
an international criminal court.
And we've seen people like, well, Mladic,
is up in front of the criminal court.
I'd like to see many people
in front of that court.
Shall I name some?
>> [LAUGH]
>> I'd like to see Blair in front of
that court.
I haven't even mentioned a former
President of this country.
>> [LAUGH]
>> So in the Habermasian context,
his dream of a cosmopolitan law is indeed
coming to fruition gradually.
Because gradually things that
people do out there in other
people's countries,
can come back to to haunt in the future.
Milosevic, Mladic, Karadzic all
of these guys, Charles Taylor.
The people who perpetrated the Rwanda
genocide and so on and so on.
Right, so, there’s a process of
transformation going on juridically
in the international arena.
And this is transforming the international
into a kind of cosmopolitan space.
But it's not a cosmopolitan space in the
sense of cosmopolitanism as conviviality,
as the recognition of difference and
diversity.
Rather, it's very much a juridical
understanding of cosmopolitanism,
and this makes a difference.
Because it's underpinned by what Jacques
Derrida would call the force of law.
And so
let's start our critique of Habermas.
His heart is in the right place,
by the way, and one year many years ago my
students went to one of his lectures and
talked to him and
said can we have a photo with you,
you're always mentioned by our professor.
So he's a very nice man and
he was generous in that context.
So his heart's in the right place.
In Habermas law indeed
becomes the third force,
the great pacifier of nations.
So from the Kantian imaginary, we've now
moved in this journey to the force of law.
What are we talking about when
we talk about the force of law?
We are talking about violence as
being constitutive of that law.
For someone like Walter Benjamin, And
I'm sure you've all come
across Walter Benjamin?
For someone like Walter Benjamin,
and his specter hovers over us
as we talk about cosmopolitanism and
cosmopolitan law.
For Walter Benjamin,
law is indeed constituted by violence.
When Habermas supports the military
intervention in Kosovo,
he argues that every military intervention
that happens in the name of human rights,
is one further step in the
institutionalization of cosmopolitan law.
And so violence plays a part,
hence the force of law.
Every instance,
every instantiation of law,
that very first step of
law is a violent step.
A sovereign has to speak.
Every intervention is a decision made.
There is always a sovereign who speaks.
And in that speaking,
the law comes to be constituted as such,
including cosmopolitan law.
And so even in Habermas
there is violence at play.
So I've brought up the specter
of Walter Benjamin.
And now I bring the very real
specter of Michel Foucault.
And he is not just spectral because we
engage with him very much in this context.
So what does Michel Foucault
do that others don't?
He enables us to ask the question,
where is sovereign power?
Now in the title of this talk,
there is the idea of human rights.
And sovereign rights.
And we might think of this combination in
terms of the human individual self as
against a sovereign state and its leaders.
Let's say the individual Syrian
citizen as opposed to Bashar
as the sovereign leader of
a sovereign independent state.
But I think a better way of dealing with
this notion of sovereignty, is exactly
to ask in our late modern times,
where does sovereign power actually lie?
And how does it articulate itself?
So where lies sovereign power,
in other words, who decides?
And it's this question of who
decides that muddies the waters
of the cosmopolitan imaginary.
We all want service the rights
of the individual self and
of political communities.
But we have to at the same time, in that
using our dialectical imagination,
we have to at the same time
have some awareness of the darker
side Of that cosmopolitan imaginary.
So where lies sovereign power?
For Michel Foucault power is
better understood in terms of a triptych.
And so he suggest that sovereign
power might be understood
in terms of the decision about
who may live and who may die.
It's a very powerful decision.
It's often a decision
that's publicly enforced.
In Michel Foucault's Discipline and
Punish he tells the story
of the public execution.
The sovereign has to
enact a public execution,
because he has to have an audience.
I use the term he advisedly.
He has to have an audience to actually
manifest and perform his sovereignty.
His sovereign power.
And so sovereign power is about that
decision who may live and who may die.
But the analysis of power that we find
in Michel Foucault doesn't simply there.
Time passes.
Liberal societies become more and
more sophisticated.
And so Michel Foucault writes
about disciplinary power.
Those minute moments of power where
the individual self comes to be that
element disciplined subject to
calculation, subject to shaping.
Keep this word shaping as
a foot note in your head,
cuz it's very important in this journey.
So disciplinary power seeks to in a sense
produce a particular kind of person.
In Michel Foucault we
end modern times from
the 18th century right up to the present.
We're shaped,
we are taught to be, in a sense,
free individuals, but
because we're subject to pedagogical
interventions of that sort,
we're not actually free.
We are forever subject to
surveillance practices.
We're forever,
through the surveillance practices,
subject to a kind of pacification
regime that goes on.
And so in the Foucauldian perspective,
isn't there such thing as
a sort of internal civic peace?
The kind of peace that Immanuel Kant and
Jürgen Habermas writes about.
There is no such thing.
He argues that there's a roar of battle
going on within society as these practices
of pacification and surveillance manifest
themselves upon the individual human self
And so, he highlights
the violence of these practices.
But there's a triptych
here in Michel Foucault.
And he argues that the most sophisticated
form of power is biopolitical power.
In other words, where populations
are the subject of that power,
So not the individual, but
populations as categories.
And so, in late modernity,
we're living in a biopolitical age.
But if we are living
in a biopolitical age,
where wars happen,
as Michel Foucault tells us.
Wars, when they do happen,
happen purportedly in the name
of humanity at large.
In the name of the human,
who is the enemy?
Who is excluded from that humanity?
What are the boundaries of that humanity?
If in that globalized context
The boundaries of political community,
the boundaries of the state,
are forever diminished and diminishing.
And if indeed we are talking
about a transnational
arena of human beings moving around,
muddying the waters, mucking about, right?
Where are the boundaries?
Who is outside?
Who is the abnormal,
in this condition, right?
So someone decides,
who remains outside of humanity.
When a war happens in
that biopolitical age,
it happens reportedly in the name of
the humanity that must be defended.
And for Michel Foucault,
when such wars happen,
they tend to be genocidal wars.
They can start with the little
massacres here and there and
they end up being genocidal wars.
And he mentions the colonial era,
he mentions the Holocaust.
But that Foucault's slight
move into the international.
Foucault spent his life writing
about liberal societies,
France, Britain especially.
All of his work is based
on these societies,
he ventured out when the Iranian
revolution happened.
I have a piece on that,
actually very critical of Michel Foucault,
[LAUGH], in that context.
So I wouldn't say much about that you
can ask me about it in the discussion.
So Michel Foucault himself does not say
much about the international context.
It's post-Foucault foucauldians who
do that for him, people like me.
So, I've seen it as my job
to ask myself the question,
what would happen if we
internationalized Michel Foucault?
What would happen in other words,
if we use his analytics of power,
but apply them internationally.
What would we come up with?
In this internationalizing of
Michel Foucault, we come up with
a transformation of sovereign power and
the location of political authority.
Sovereign power comes to
be globally articulated.
Remember that public execution in
some square in the middle of Paris?
The story that Michel Foucault
tells in Disciple and
Punish, that it has to have an audience.
Well that very process is
now globally rendered.
We're all the audience.
The whole world is the audience to
the enactment of sovereign power,
wherever that sovereign
power manifests itself.
Then in relation to disciplinary power and
biopolitical power.
These have come to be manifest
exactly in the transformation
of our discourses on peace
into discourses peace building
Michel Foucault writes about the genius
of liberalism as being self government.
The production, in other words,
through all sorts of
matrices of power,
the production of the liberal subject,
We learn our subjectivity, right?
We have learned it in our societies,
in our liberal societies.
If we transform that idea, globally,
What we come up with is peace building
as the government of other societies.
This is where the problems lie.
[LAUGH] Indeed this is where all
problems actually begin to happen.
Right, I've already mentioned
actually other problems.
I've already mentioned
the violence that underpins
that initial move,
the cosmopolitan imaginary,
the Habermasian context, indeed challenge.
And why Immanuel Kant was so
right to be hesitant,
to be actually quite modest with
his cosmopolitan imaginary.
Because Immanuel Kant actually
foresaw the dangers that we see today.
So peace building becomes
the government of populations.
And guess what,
it's other people's populations.
Populations located in other countries.
So, what the societies that Michel
Foucault engages with, went through,
throughout the trajectory of modernity,
now we want to impose on them.
Who decides,
who is the sovereign in this context?
Michel Foucault writes
about biopolitical war
as being possible because of
the racial division of populations.
The examples, as I said before,
the examples that he provides, are
colonial wars as well as the Holocaust.
Now in the present those
boundaries I talked about,
the boundaries of states,
the boundaries of political community.
Within the globalized context,
these boundaries are being diminished,
we can see that.
But they become manifest once again,
corporeally in the very
bodies of the other targeted.
So the borders of populations
come to be racially manifest.
Other people's cultures
are increasingly racialized.
So from peace to peace building,
and the government of populations.
Peace building seeks to reshape and
redesign other populations, and in so
doing undermine processes
of actual recognition,
actual conflict resolution.
So in the last few minutes
I want to come back to this
potential that conflict
resolution might have.
I want to, in a sense,
reclaim a space in our thinking,
reclaim that conflict
resolutionary spirit,
if you like,
as well as that intellectual context.
So what are the choices for
conflict resolution then?
One choice we have is
to just seek to govern,
to redesign other societies.
So what's happened in Syria, Is,
This notion of being able to
govern the very process of
transformation that's taking place there.
To govern the imaginary of
the revolutionaries in that country.
The West has started arming the rebels.
With a view to potentially,
maybe in the future, or
even now,
governing that revolutionary process.
To shape its directionality,
in other words.
That's one choice.
And by the way it's already
been made that choice.
The other choice, is politics.
The first choice I've
just been going through,
Michel Foucault would label government.
The government of populations.
The shaping, that shaping and
redesigning of populations to
make them amenable if you like.
But the other choice is politics.
And the journey now takes us to.
That first choice, government,
is informed by colonial
rationality it has to be.
It's this idea that we can shape and
we design other societies.
The second choice politics, In a sense
takes us to a post colonial nationality.
Not cosmopolitanism of intervention but
a cosmopolitanism of recognition,
Of politics and
of choices relating to solidarity.
Whose side do we take?
If your recognize that there are actually
many sides, in this revolutionary process
that's going on in the Middle East if
you recognize that there are many sides.
The challenge, in a sense,
is to provide for
the recognition of all sides.
But at the same time to reflect on
the consequences of certain choices made.
It's a tough choice.
Life's business being the terrible choice.
As a certain Robert Burns put it.
That's the dilemma.
That's the paradox.
And so, what happened at Santa Egekio,
not so long ago,
A group of opposition spokespeople,
women and men,
were invited to Santa Egekio and
the Dean Andrea is involved
with that community.
And these opposition groupings,
the non-violent ones, put out a statement.
What did that statement say?
What was significant about that statement?
It was that there is diversity.
They do want respect for
human rights and democracy.
But they were opposed to a violent
expression of that, of their struggle.
They were also opposed to
intervention in Syria,
Because they valued the post-colonial
sovereignty of the Syrian state.
The suppose colonial populations.
They're constituted by
memories of the colonial era.
They know a colonial rationality
when it faces them like this
close up, And
personal as someone might say.
Or you guys might say.
So, we have a choice here
between two rationalities.
A colonial one that imagines
the liberal self extending
ever outwards,
seeing the world as their oyster.
Committing not just epistemic
violence to quote Gayatri Spivak,
but also actual, physical violence.
A violence directed at populations,
caring to kill is another
way of putting this.
This idea of the liberal self being
able to govern other societies and
determine and shape their futures.
This is a cosmopolitan imaginary.
It's actually a manifestation of
that other kind of sovereign power.
The power to decide who may live and
who may die.
But the choice for conflict
resolution is the political choice.
It's being able to provide for
that voice that speaks up, postcolonially.
In that, and in this postcolonial context.
Where the anti colonial struggles
of the past are very much
in the memories of those
target populations.
They might have celebrated Blair's arrival
in Kosovo,
the people of Iraq did not celebrate.
Lies a rival in Israel or
Bagdad, all right.
So the choice is there and that's why I
want to come back to
the problematic of Syria
because it's in essence imperative upon us
to reflect on what's going on out there.
But to give it force by
acknowledging that we're
not the first to think
about these issues but
actually we have these
powerful antecedents.
So lastly, and by no means finally,
I want to bring in Hannah Arendt.
For Hannah Arendt,
it's the political that matters.
But what understanding of the political
does she bring to our discourses here?
For Arendt politics means
the insertion of presence.
The insertion of self
into that public arena.
Thereby constituting that arena.
Arendt was very much an admirer of
the founding fathers of this country.
Very much an admirer of
the American Revolution.
She's very controversial in her writings.
Everything she wrote has been subject to
much controversy and deservedly so, right?
Any great philosopher has to be so subject
to controversy and debate and discourse.
For Arendt,
politics was not about basic human needs.
It was about that claim to politics.
The idea that we actually have a voice.
And indeed can have a voice.
So the political for Hannah Arendt is that
moment of insertion into the public arena.
That claim made to politics.
But the claim can easily be captured
by the forces that seek to govern.
She knew that, she recognized that danger.
The Arab spring that we've all
witnessed when it started and
when it was happening especially when
we were watching the Egyptians on
the streets at Harry's square.
These were joyous events for all of us.
My students were involved.
They were going out there and so on.
So the cosmopolitan imaginary
Was being played out,
exactly by those moments of solidarity.
The expression of solidarity
by my students extended
to the students who were out there
endangering their lives on Tahrir Square.
In an sense,
that was the moment of politics.
That was the revolutionary moment.
In the sense, the aspiration was
to then move to the second step.
It's not enough just to
be out there in revolt.
The second step was constitution-building.
In other words,
the building of a political community.
A political community that
enabled politics to take place.
But that moment somehow has
evaded the revolutionaries.
In my opinion, what's happened is that we
are back into the space of government,
governmentality, the expression
of power working its way.
And the idea, through the idea, that we
can even shape other people's revolutions.
That's what happened in Libya, and
this is what's happening right
now as we speak, in Syria.
So the moment of joy is now not so
joyous afterall.
This is not a pessimistic ending.
I have been accused of being a pessimist.
[LAUGH] I'm not a pessimist, but nor
am I an optimist.
I'm much more of a realist with a small r.
A realist with a small r in the sense.
An provides much that's to be celebrated.
But she writes a cautionary tale, and
I hope that what I've said
is a cautionary tail.
And I think in that tale, and
in this journey that I've highlighted,
I hope you can see that in a sense,
there's a need for conflict resolution,
and even good old-fashioned diplomacy
to come back into the frame.
Because it's good
old-fashioned diplomacy and
conflict resolution that provides
that moment for recognition.
The recognition of the other, and
the idea that we cannot shape,
ever, other societies.
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> All set?
>> Up there, right?
[LAUGH]
>> I have to take my lunch.
You see, I told you I go on for too long.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Well, thank you so much.
And now's an opportunity for
us to have a discussion with this
very provocative presentation.
And I'm gonna ask three students to
come up representing the undergraduate,
the masters and the doctorate program.
Undergraduate's Alex Paz,
Pace, I beg your pardon.
Master's students Stella Fruze,
Konicka Boiva.
I apologize if I butchered that name.
And Sarah Federman is our PhD student,
and Rich Rubenstein is our professor.
And I want to, at this moment,
acknowledge an appreciation to Rich,
for making the linkage to be sure
that we got Vivia and Jari today.
So they are going to start
with some questions.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> And then,
when I come back up to the mic,
that's a signal to our group that we wanna
open it up for open mics to the group.
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> Yeah, any place, mm-hm.
