Savage wars of peace
On 17 March 2011, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1973, authorising a no-fly zone over Libyan airspace. Passed by 10 votes in favour (five abstentions and none against), the resolution mandated UN member states to take ‘all necessary measures’ to protect civilians under the threat of attack from Libyan government forces. No sooner had the resolution been adopted than Western governments, principally Britain, France and the United States, acting under the aegis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), began a coordinated bombing attack on Libya a couple of days later. The immediate event which led to both the UN Security Council Resolution, and the resulting NATO action, was the production of social alarm in the media about an impending massacre of protesters and innocent civilians by Libyan government forces in especially the city of Benghazi, which had become the stronghold of opposition forces since anti-government protests broke out in Libya a month earlier, following a wave of popular uprisings in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt.
Quickly spreading across the country, these protests soon developed into full-blown armed insurgency when militants broke into Libyan government armouries in Benghazi and Misrata, among other places, and took up arms against the Libyan state. The response of the Libyan government fed into an already widely held perception, especially in the West, that it was an irrational authoritarian regime headed by a ruthless dictator with genocidal intentions. This social alarm thus generated a global moral outrage and helped to mobilise international public opinion against what was represented in mainstream media discourses as a repressive government bent on massacring its own citizens for demanding democratic and political reforms. This played perfectly into the hands of those Western governments which had long harboured ambitions of overthrowing Gaddafi and controlling the destiny of Libya, and they would use it to justify military intervention in the name of protecting human rights and bringing democracy and the rule of law to the North African state.
However, that which defined and legitimated itself as a noble humanitarian action to protect defenceless civilians under the threat of massacre by their own government soon revealed itself as a violent interventionist trope driven by larger geopolitical, economic and ideological impulses. This includes an agenda for regime change whereby a not-so-friendly government would be replaced by a pliant regime beholden to the West. Since overthrowing the Libyan monarchy in 1969, Muammar Gaddafi had espoused a radical (even if confused) socialist ideology that for over three decades put him in conflict with the West and made him one of the most hated Southern leaders in especially the United States. For this, the United States made several attempts to get rid of him, as the 1986 US bombings of Tripoli attest. With the protests, the opportunity for achieving the longstanding aim of eliminating the ‘menace’ of Gaddafi now appeared within grasp.
Although he appeared to have repaired relations with the West in the post-9/11 environment, Western suspicion of Gaddafi lingered: he was still too ‘dangerous’ and unpredictable to be trusted. For example, his vocal stance against the United States’ Africa Command (AFRICOM), the latest military front for projecting the power of the United States on the continent, made especially that state very uncomfortable, and confirmed to US officials that Gaddafi had not given up his old ways. Gaddafi's influence on the continent appeared to have, in part, put the future of the project in jeopardy, at least temporarily. As journalist Dan Glazebrook rightly notes in The Guardian:
Gaddafi ended his political life as a dedicated pan-Africanist and, whatever one thought of the man, it is clear that his vision for Africa was very different from that of the subordinate supplier of cheap labour and raw materials that Africom was created to maintain. He was not only the driving force behind the creation of the African Union in 2002, but had also served as its elected head, and made Libya its biggest financial donor. To the dismay of some of his African colleagues, he used his time as leader to push for a ‘United States of Africa,’ with a single currency, single army and single passport. More concretely, Gaddafi's Libya had an estimated $150bn worth of investment in Africa – often in social infrastructure and development projects, and this largesse bought him many friends, particularly in the smaller nations. As long as Gaddafi retained this level of influence in Africa, Africom was going to founder. (Glazebrook 2012)
Indeed, when AFRICOM was established by the Bush administration in 2007, it was headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, in part because no African state would openly accept hosting its bases. However, AFRICOM's plans have greatly advanced since the murder of Gaddafi and the overthrow of his regime. What is more, post-Gaddafi Libya was the first state on the continent to openly express interest in hosting AFRICOM's headquarters. In getting rid of Gaddafi, AFRICOM had succeeded in eliminating its most vocal critic and, perhaps, most formidable opponent on the continent. Libya became AFRICOM's first major intervention, as it were, and has proved to be a significant moment for that organisation and its drive to recolonise the continent, and impose an American peace on it. Going after Gaddafi was significant for another reason: it gave AFRICOM the perfect opportunity to test its operational capability by engaging in its first major military operation on the continent, which, ‘coincidentally’, was targeted at its biggest opponent.
But perhaps the greatest significance of the NATO action in Libya is that it allowed the US (and its allies) to deal with anxieties that the Arab Spring was causing for Western, especially US, hegemony in the Arab world. It was Libya, and going after Gaddafi, that made it possible for the West to partially negotiate what appeared as a crisis of hegemony in the Arab world. While anxieties about a region slipping out of its control have always dominated Western, especially US, policy, this uneasiness acquired a new sense of urgency when popular mass agitation for democracy began to threaten client regimes (such as in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan etc.) dependent on especially US patronage. Libya, however, was different: its leader, Muammar Gaddafi, was not exactly a Western client. While his longevity (having ruled Libya for over four decades) and authoritarian style of governing had won him many enemies, unlike Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak he could be targeted without threatening Western power in North Africa and the Middle East, where US-supported client regimes were struggling to hold on to power in the face of popular uprisings. If anything, going after him would allow the West to turn the tide, regain the initiative and gain control over a fluid situation which had arisen since stone-throwing youths took on the Tunisian state and won, and mass protests forced Egypt's Hosni Mubarak out of power. Supporting an uprising against a ‘dictator’ who was not exactly a Western client would achieve the long-term goal of regime change in Libya while presenting the West as champions of democracy and human rights in the region. Indeed, Libya presented an opportunity and became the moment that made it possible for the West to ‘credibly’ impose themselves on processes that had initially appeared beyond their control and position themselves, yet again, as defenders of human rights and democracy. Thus, that which had started as a counter-hegemonic moment of mass agitation for democratisation of social life in the region, and thus tended to threaten the hegemonic order of Western domination and the client regimes dependent on Western patronage, ended up becoming a moment for hegemonic articulation reinforcing that very order it was aimed at negating.
The NATO military action in Libya was a significant event. However, it was neither new nor was it an accident. It was only perhaps the most visible and high-profile of the now increasing Western military interventionism on the continent. Incarnating the spirit of an imperial globalism that normalises warfare as the primary instrument for pursuing ethical and political agendas, it conforms to a now familiar pattern of the heightened militarisation of world politics, and advances the processes of rendering warfare banal, globalising violent interventions and normalising the processes of displacing violence to the South, especially Africa. It temporalises a state of emergency and state of exception (Agamben 2005), while conflating the political and moral registers of contemporary world politics by which concerns over ‘human rights’ and ‘humanitarian’ disasters are mobilised as alibis for pursuing parochial national interests and imperialistic vocations (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010). Operating through a violent totalitarian logic and its militaristic logics through which global relations are regulated, this oppressive imperial globalism and its regimes of violence that authorised the intervention in Libya have turned Africa into a major constitutive site for the production of its modalities, the enacting of its colonial fantasies and the furthering of its imperial vocations.
Indeed, coinciding with the NATO campaign in Libya was a contemporaneous French military action in Côte d'Ivoire that would remove the sitting president, Laurent Gbagbo, from power following disputed presidential elections. The controversies over the results of the 2010 presidential elections provided the pretext for France to pursue its agenda of regime change in Côte d'Ivoire, taking sides in a civil war and militarising an electoral dispute that was rooted in real and imagined political contestations over the state of Côte d'Ivoire by multiple competing claimants. At the heart are questions about citizenship and membership of the Ivorian political community (Ivoirité); that is, who qualifies as Ivorian and therefore has rights to participate in politics in that state and who does not. This struggle itself results in part from the structural legacies of colonialism, the failures of the postcolonial state to create viable structures that unite its multiple constituent populations, and the realities of French neocolonial machinations that have since independence cast a suffocating shadow over its former colonies in the region. Indeed, this complex political and socio-historical reality was lost in the brazenly simplistic and problematic representations that fashioned a banal and all-too-familiar discourse about a typical power-hungry African ‘strongman’ refusing to relinquish power after losing an election, and thus subverting the democratic will of the people who have rejected him at the polls. Again, as in Libya, the protection of human rights and promotion of democracy provided a pretext for defining a violent interventionist impulse, orchestrated principally by France, in altruistic and humanitarian terms.
This interventionist pattern would repeat itself in Mali, where France led a military intervention ostensibly to rid that country of Al-Qaeda-linked Islamists who had seized control of the north of the country. As in Libya and Côte d'Ivoire, its legitimating frame was partially mobilising the moral registers of rescuing Mali from violent and irrational Islamists driven by hatred for modern civilisation and harkening to primordial instincts of murderous villainy, as demonstrated by the wanton killing of innocent civilians and the pillaging of the library in Timbuktu housing valuable ancient and medieval manuscripts. While the Malian crisis, like that of Côte d'Ivoire, is rooted in the structural legacies of colonialism and the inability of the postcolonial state to manage conflicts around social identity and the everyday banality of existence in a state with limited resources claimed by multiple competing social groups, it also is both a blowback to the NATO action in Libya, which has destabilised the Sahel region and washed it with arms and armaments that Tuareg rebels and their Islamist allies would use to wage the latest phase of their rebellion in Mali, and the consequence of the activities of AFRICOM, which had trained and armed some of the officers of the Malian army that would overthrow the legitimate government as the Tuareg rebellion raged in the north of the country. But the UN-backed French intervention in Mali was important for another reason: it illustrates a fundamental shift to the African continent as the new theatre of the so-called global war on terror, as well as ‘the spatial-military logics’ (Escobar 2004, 209) of the contemporary liberal imperium, its oppressive power, regimes of violence, and drive to recolonise the continent. It thus points to a reality more insidious than is being acknowledged in studies purporting to explain the spike in ‘humanitarian’ interventions on the continent.
What Libya, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, the Central African Republic (CAR) and, before them, Somalia, Sierra Leone and Liberia, among others, represent is a significant attempt at transforming and reconstituting world order, and this can be seen in the increasing militarisation of global politics, the banalisation of war, the routinisation of intervention and their celebration as instruments for pursing ‘ethical’ goals. Above all, they indicate the centrality of Africa to that violent and militaristic order, its power-political inclinations, and overall strategic and geopolitical concerns and impulses. This paper is an attempt to think through these violent and interventionist dispositions and what they mean for Africa.
Two images of contemporary world order
In Global Governance and New Wars (2001), British political scientist Mark Duffield tells the story of how, as a result of conflicts in the 1990s, and concerns in the West about their implications for global peace and security, a major political project was formulated, the expressed aim of which was to impose what he calls a ‘liberal peace’ on the areas in the South affected by incidents of political unrest, civil wars and armed conflicts. This liberal peace project, Duffield tells us, is produced and exerted through a strategic complex of actors and achieved through a set of practices among which is the radicalisation of development and the incorporation of conflicts and security in development discourse and practice. Discursively, underdevelopment, which was once understood as an economic condition, has now been redefined as a dangerous political condition that not only causes conflict, but also engenders a vicious circle of self-perpetrating and mutually reinforcing violence and impoverishment (38). As a result, a new politics of developmentalism, of which humanitarian interventionism is an integral part, has resulted from a fundamental shift in official aid policy towards both conflict resolution and the reconstruction and transformation of conflict societies along contemporary liberal ideologies of governance favoured by the West. The transformational aims of these policy prescriptions are thus embodied in this new global politics of development and humanitarian interventionism legislated and promoted by the major Western governments and their aid agencies, the United Nations and its specialised agencies, the International Financial Institutions, donor and aid organisations, international NGOs and so forth.
Rather than merely being a technical system of support for Southern societies affected by political unrest, civil wars, armed conflicts, humanitarian disasters or ‘state failure’, these arrangements, Duffield tells us, are part of a larger system of global governance, the transformational aims of which are to pacify Southern societies and impose a liberal peace on their disorderly terrains. That is, a new politics of ‘humanitarianism that lays emphasis on such things as conflict resolution and prevention, reconstructing social networks, strengthening civil and representative institutions, promoting the rule of law, and security sector reform in the context of a functioning market economy’ (2001, 11). From this perspective, ‘liberal peace’ is an altruistic political project born out of the West's desire to pacify the world by dealing with conflicts and humanitarian disasters which are now thought to not only constitute a development and humanitarian challenge for the societies in which they occur, but also constitute a security threat and challenge for the West.
One would have expected that a scholar who has the good sense to recognise these processes along the lines he specifies would, at least, be alarmed by their political implications, if not critical of their ethos and the types of power relations they are embedded in and make possible. However, Duffield does not seem to be bothered by this liberal interventionist project. He defines it as a ‘shared system of moral responsibility’ (2001, 260) even though he argues that this new ethico-political reality represents a ‘moral rearming of the West’. He dismisses those, such as Noam Chomsky (1999) and Frank Furedi (1994) among others, who have drawn attention to the fact that this enhanced ability of the West to intervene and impose its will on Southern societies is a function of a new ideology of imperialism, as harking back to an outmoded thinking that is incapable of coming to terms with a form of power and authority that is radically different from imperialism. To Duffield, the new politics of humanitarian interventionism, and the system of global governance that potentiates it, does not represent ‘an unchanging reality’ or the reworking of old imperialist formulas. Rather it is based on ‘liberal power’, not ‘imperial power’ (which assumes that liberal power cannot in fact also be imperial power). He writes:
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 of avoiding 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 juridical and bureaucratic means of authority. The imperial power dealt with opposition using physical and juridical forms of pacification, sometimes 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. As a result, liberal strategic complexes are usually averse to the long-term costs and responsibilities that controlling territory implies. (Duffield 2001, 34)
The implication of this argument is that the current militarisation of Africa through Western interventions in places such as Côte d'Ivoire, Libya, Mali, CAR, among others, should be seen as attempts by the West at pacifying a turbulent continent given to internecine conflicts, and establishing a liberal peace on the disorderly terrains of its ‘illiberal spaces’. They are not imperialistic because they do not thrive on direct territorial control, and other forms of juridical, bureaucratic and militaristic forms of rule exerted from an imperial centre of authority. What this means in turn is that, for Duffield (2001), a system of domination can only be imperialistic if it is based on a territorial acquisitive logic that imposes or seeks to impose its rule spatially through physical, juridical and bureaucratic forms of power and control.
This characterisation of contemporary world order converges with that of Hardt and Negri (2000), who have suggested the passage of global power from an order based on the ascendancy of the nation-state to another based on the structural irrelevance of the nation-state. They write:
The boundaries defined by the modern system of nation-states were fundamental to European colonial and economic expansion: the territorial boundaries of the nation delimited the centre of power from which rule was exerted over external foreign territories through a system of channels and barriers that alternately facilitated and obstructed the flows of production and circulation. Imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries. Eventually nearly all the world's territories could be parcelled out and the entire world map could be coded in European colours: red for British territory, blue for French, green for Portuguese, and so forth. Wherever modern sovereignty took root, it constructed a Leviathan that overarched its social domain and imposed hierarchical territorial boundaries, both to police the purity of its own identity and to exclude all that was other. (xii)
In contrast to imperialism is what Hardt and Negri call Empire, which they posit as the new order that has, since the end of the Cold War, been effectively regulating global relations. Empire, they tell us, does not establish any territorial centre of power, nor does it rely on fixed boundaries or barriers in exerting its authority. Rather, it is ‘a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers’ (2000, xii, emphasis in original). A geocentric order ‘composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule’, Empire is the political project that effectively regulates global exchanges and the new global sovereign power that governs the realm of global economic and social relations (Ibid.).
The reluctance of many theorists to recognise these major shifts in global power, Hardt and Negri contend, owes largely to the fact that ‘they see that the dominant capitalist nation-states have continued to exercise imperialist domination over the other nations and regions of the globe’. While not underestimating ‘these real and important lines of continuity’, it is important, they counter, ‘that what used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers has in important respects been replaced by the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right’ (2000, 9). The power thus involved is fundamentally new and therefore not merely a simple reformulation and perfecting of old imperialist practices, as most theorists of contemporary world order believe. It is ‘a new notion of right … a new inscription of authority and a new design of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts’ (7). In this sense, Empire ‘marks a paradigm shift’ in global politics (Hardt and Negri 2000, 8, emphasis in original).
The United States might occupy a privileged position in this new global reconstitution of imperial authority, Hardt and Negri tell us, and this is partially explained by the continuity of its importance from being the principal figure in the struggle against international socialism and the Soviet Union to being the central figure in the newly unified imperial world order. However, it is not the centre of a new imperialism nor the new imperialist power. And, even though the power of Empire ‘is born through the global expansion of the internal US constitutional project’, the United States ‘does not, and indeed no nation can today form the centre of an imperialist project’ (2000, 182, xiv). Empire, thus, should be understood as imperial not imperialist, for in contrast with imperialism, which always seeks ‘to spread its power linearly in closed spaces and invade, destroy and subsume subject countries within its sovereignty’, Empire ‘is constructed on the model of rearticulating an open space and reinventing incessantly diverse and singular relations in networks across an unborn terrain’ (182). It therefore ‘can only be conceived as a universal republic, a network of powers and counterpowers structured in a boundless and inclusive architecture. This imperial expansion has nothing to do with imperialism, nor with those state organisms designed for conquest, pillage, genocide, colonisation, and slavery. Against such imperialisms, Empire expands and consolidates the model of network power’ (166). In this regard, those which were once ‘the distinct national colours of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow’ (xiii).
The relationship between Duffield's idea of liberal peace and Hardt and Negri's conception of Empire seems somewhat straightforward: liberal peace is a condition of Empire, which represents neither a new reality of imperialism nor a reworking of old imperialistic logic. What this in turn means is that for this, in fact any system to qualify as imperialistic, it would have to, inter alia, have a territorial acquisitive logic understood in terms of the annexation of territories and the exercise of direct political, juridical and administrative control over those acquired or annexed territories parcelled out within fixed boundaries and administered from an imperial centre of power.
Liberal peace, Empire or postcolonial imperialism?
It is not my intention to rehearse here the criticisms that have been levied against Duffield and, especially, Hardt and Negri, in part, because I believe that they offer compelling, even if ideologically ambivalent and depoliticised accounts of contemporary world order. What I want to do instead is call into question the problematic ways they have interpreted that order, the power which produces it, the system of domination it makes possible, and the logic that undergirds the ethos of its practice. Central to this is an origin-diffusion problem based on a ‘first in Europe then elsewhere’ structure of time (Chakrabarty 2000, 8); that is, a historicist evolutionist epistemology that posits the West as the only rational Hegelian historical subject capable of inscribing world-historical events and processes (Wai 2012). In this epistemological schema, and the Eurocentric accounts they construct, the non-west only features as areas or objects to be acted upon by a historically stalwart Western agency that for Duffield, is transforming the world in the quest for stability and thus is imposing a liberal peace on the illiberal spaces and turbulent terrain of the South; and for Hardt and Negri, has inscribed a transformational global system that originates in, and spreads outward from, the West to the rest, reconstituting world order and presiding over a number of transitions: from disciplinary society to society of control; from state-based sovereignty to geocentric sovereignty that has revealed the structural irrelevance of the nation-state, and from imperialism to Empire of capital. All of these processes are assumed to have their origins in the West, and then diffused outward to the rest of the World. Remaining faithful to epistemological schemas that construct hierarchies of power and knowledge and mobilise Eurocentric categories to colonise other ways of knowing and being, these analyses tell us very little about the role of the South, other than as areas acted upon by a historically dynamic Western agency. Coming from the dominant and dominating milieus, our authors' interpretations thus betray a fidelity to a positionality and privilege of location that is firmly ensconced in the traditions of their ethnos. This is, in part, what pushes them to theorise global processes from the certainty of Eurocentric perspectives that prevents them from seeing the form of power that the current liberal world order is: a violent and intrusive imperialistic power that hides its will to domination in tropes of altruism and facile concerns over human rights.
Linked to this is the hasty rush to judgement about the nature of an emerging world order in the immediate post-Cold War environment. The old, as Gramsci (1971) would say, was dying, but the new which was coming into being was not exactly known, so many began to speculate and, in some cases, rushed to hasty conclusions about the nature of political processes unfolding under concrete historical conditions. Disciplinary international relations scholars and globalisation theorists, for example, had a field day in trying to decipher this emerging global power-political landscape. In the ‘hysteria of naming’ (Stallybrass 1990) which followed, the race was on to coin the best phrase or come up with the best moniker and the next big idea to describe or capture the changing configurations in an emergent but still uncertain world order. Francis Fukuyama (1989), for example, inscribed his ‘end of history’ thesis on a vulgar Hegelian historicist ideological landscape (Roth 1995). In crude cultural essentialist language, Samuel Huntington (1993) warned of a ‘clash of civilisation’. An almost hysterical Robert Kaplan (1994) claimed to have detected ‘a coming anarchy’ in West Africa, a nightmarish scenario of criminal violence, bloody conflicts and state implosion, demographic stress, environmental degradation and resource scarcity that he posited as the fate of the rest of the world, depicting it in the crassest sensational journalistic language. Some of the other epithets used were ‘Jihad vs. McWorld’ (Barber 1992), ‘Clash of Fundamentalisms’ (Ali 2003), ‘Clash of Globalisations’ (Gill 2003) and, for our present purpose, ‘Empire’ (Hardt and Negri 2000) and ‘Liberal Peace’ (Duffield 2001).
The problem though was that the theories and concepts used were less suggestive of an emerging global power structure and more indicative of a supposedly definitive and extant world order; they were less speculative and more depictive of reality imagined as actually existing, as if the new landscape of global power were not a formative process forged out of multiple conjunctural agonistics, but one that had come into being fully formed and already crystallised into the world order imagined or speculated about. It is within this general atmosphere that Empire and Global Governance and New Wars emerged. Hardt and Negri, for example, admit to locating the conception of their project at the midpoint between the Persian Gulf War (1991) and the war in Kosovo (1999), which they understand as signal events in the construction of Empire (2000, xvii). The fact that the ‘world’ (through the United Nations) appeared to have acted in concert to militarily evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1990–91, and Western states, under the banner of NATO, intervened against Serbian forces in Kosovo in 1999, seemed to have signalled the emergence of a world order based on a single network of power that they would go on to theorise as Empire. Conveniently forgetting the numerous other cases even during this period (Bosnia, East Timor, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia etc.) that tended to suggest a world in flux, this rush to judgement about processes unfolding under concrete historical conditions now came to highlight the inadequacy of a theoretical enterprise which had been predicated on the rejection of imperialism as a reality of contemporary world order, once an angry United States began to explicitly reassert its power and tried to redefine the world in its image in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Imperialism that Hardt and Negri had told us was over now stood stark and manifested itself rather forcefully, as the US and its allies grappled with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing reality of world order, and sought to gain control over it.
The second issue relates to our authors’ problematic and (even static) conception of imperialism, which they see primarily as a territorial acquisitive phenomenon. For Duffield as well as Hardt and Negri, and this has already been mentioned earlier, a system of domination only qualifies as imperialistic if it has a territorial acquisitive logic. Imperialism, however, is not, and has never been, a static and unchanging reality of power and domination. It does not have to function, and has never really functioned, only through a single logic of rule or method of operation. It does not have to be a territorial acquisitive phenomenon for it to be imperialist; and though it usually does, it does not even necessarily have to have an overtly economic logic for it to be imperialist. As Edward Said (1993) often reminded us, imperialism is more than an economic or territorial acquisitive phenomenon. A system of domination, it is more than simple acts of accumulation and acquisition for it occurs on and ‘beyond the level of economic laws and political decisions’ to conquer, to annex, to dominate and to exploit. Rather, it also is an ideational phenomenon, usually ‘supported, and perhaps even impelled, by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination’ (9). These impressive ideological formations constitute a ‘structure of feeling’ about ‘empire’, which, in the words of Sherene Razack, designates a ‘deeply held belief in the need and the right to dominate others for their own good’ (2004, 10). It is this structure of feeling that defines the self-conceptions of individuals living within the imperial centres ‘believing deeply in the “illusion of benevolence” and requiring, as before, grateful natives’ (Ibid.).
Imperialism is a complex and multi-faceted reality of power. It covers, as Robert Young (2001) reminds us, ‘a range of relationships of domination and dependence that can be characterised according to historical and theoretical or organisational differences’ (26). Originally used to designate ‘a political system of actual conquest and occupation’, and increasingly coming to be associated with the Marxist conception ‘as a general system of economic domination, with direct political domination being a possible but not necessary adjunct’ (Ibid.), imperialism today plays itself out more as a set of relationships (both formal and informal, direct and indirect) which involves the processes, policies and practices by which empire is established and maintained, and by which a state or group of states controls or seeks to control the effective political destinies of other states and societies, and this can be achieved by force of arms, political persuasion and collaboration, economic, social or cultural imposition, coercion and dependence (Doyle 1986, 45). It also involves ‘the practice, the theory and attitude of a dominating metropolitan centre in relation to the distant territories and peoples’ it directly or indirectly controls, dominates and exploits (Said 1993, 9). It thus can function perfectly without any formal colonisation or acquisition of territories. In fact, it can even also function against its own economic interests (Young 2001).
From the preceding, I contend that that which has been conceptualised as Empire and liberal peace is in fact a neo-imperialist posture potentiated by a Western will to power and domination. It is a desire or an attempt at restructuring global power and imposing an imperial order on the world. However, this desire does not transform the violent and hierarchical form of power it is constitutive of into a decentred and deterritorialised phenomenon. Neither does it represent a disinterested reality of global do-goodism and benevolence, as is usually suggested in studies purporting to explain the current imperial moment we live in. Rather, it is a hierarchical notion of power that re-territorialises and re-centres global relations within blocks of power through spatial displacement and the redefinition of traditional notions of sovereignty, while reworking, and even perfecting, the violent and exploitative logics of imperial power that have historically violated the integrity of non-Western societies and still stand in the way of especially African self-determination into diffused networks of power and privilege. Empire and liberal peace are manifestations of this neo-imperialistic posture: a reality of imperial globality; imperialism without empire, or colonialism without colonies; in other words, postcolonial imperialism. Obviously, these relations of domination are not static and unchanging, neither are they unchallenged and haplessly absorbed, but constantly mutate and are reconstituted through hierarchical modes of power as well as through appropriating the concerns of anti-colonial forces aimed at the negation of such imperialistic orders.
This imperial reality is both geopolitical, in that it aims to project the power and political, economic and ideological interests of the dominant states in the world through the production and domination of the global space; and geocentric, in projecting its power through the spatial politics of seeking to unite the entire global sphere under a single network of imperial authority. However, the fact that this notion of right is liberal, or that Western powers now broadly agree on how to approach their imperial politics of domination, does not make it post-imperialist. What this signifies instead is the intensification, or maybe even perfection, of an imperial politics of domination produced and impelled by a ‘liberal consensus’ in the West. By liberal consensus, I refer to the ideological convergence in the West about the need to remake the world and impose liberal governance mechanisms on global socio-economic and political relations (Harvey 2005). Just as nineteenth-century Europe used the occidental mantle of a ‘civilising mission’ to justify its imperial domination of the world, postcolonial imperialism has defined its political project on the basis of the need to pacify the world through the use of juridical and militaristic modes of interventions in order to structure the world in line with the ideological preferences of liberalism and Western ‘universal’ norms and cosmopolitan values. Among these are the trinity of democracy, human rights and good governance, and the imposition of neoliberal market mechanisms on global social relations: deregulation, liberalisation, privatisation and financialisation.
While the principal Western imperial powers in the nineteenth century acted more clearly as individuated national actors competing with each other, today they tend to approach their politics of domination as a collectivist enterprise, as a network of power and privilege. And though brief territorial occupation could be a necessary adjunct, postcolonial imperialism, unlike its nineteenth-century forbear, frowns on long-term territorial occupation, preferring instead a system of ‘global indirect rule’ by which pliant regimes amenable to Western influence are cultivated and implanted. This has freed it from the inconveniencies of formal colonial occupation that are likely to attract anti-colonial backlash. Indeed, nineteenth-century imperialism was an exacting and expensive affair. It exerted itself through actual conquest, a commitment to long-term colonial occupation and the exercise of direct juridical and bureaucratic forms of control. This required resources, boots on the ground, skilled hands to oversee the administrative processes, and regimes of force to deal effectively with dissent and keep subject populations under control. Because of this, it attracted the resentment of the societies subjected to colonial occupation, who saw colonialism as a violent and exploitative imposition, held it culpable for the problems and crises it created for the colonised societies, and did much to resist its exploitative and dehumanising violence. The anti-colonial struggles in Africa and elsewhere in the South were in part about this reality, and they succeeded in part because of it.
The authors of postcolonial imperialism know this. They are not only opposed to long-term territorial occupation because of the responsibilities it entails, but also because of the anti-colonial backlash it engenders. Not being in direct control of these states and societies, and not being in charge of their day-to-day administration, mean that they would not be held responsible for problems in these societies. This has in part helped in disguising the level of culpability and complicity of the West in generating crisis in Southern societies, which in turn has given them a leverage that direct control would not. This has allowed for the redefinition of Southern realities in ways that were, for example, not possible in the Cold War ideological climate. This in turn has allowed the West to reposition themselves as ‘strategic partners’ interested only in helping to find technical solutions to problems that are now defined as endogenously produced by the internal dysfunctions in these states and societies, problems that are now blamed solely on their corrupt and incompetent political classes. Changing the practice but not the logic of imperialism, thus, has a strategic ring to it: it has achieved outcomes similar to direct colonial control but without the exacting inconveniences and anti-colonial backlash. However, like past imperial projects, it is a specific imaginary of sovereignty, a system of power and domination, dependent on regimes of exploitation, violence and relations of force and coercion.
Postcolonial imperialism and the African condition
V.Y. Mudimbe (2013) recently posited that every system of domination requires violence to impose its will and exert its power, a legitimating frame to validate its logic, a politics to define its authority and an ethics to assure its credibility; ultimately, such a system ‘always falls back on its own basic principles that allow it to qualify conducts as right or wrong’, good or bad, and legal or illegal (186). The liberal imperial order perfectly fits this mould: it is the power that adjudicates its own legality which in turn provides the basis for reproducing and maintaining its power and authority. It functions on a violent totalitarian logic that frowns on alternative modes of life, and a disciplinary power that disciplines anything or anybody that stands in its way or seeks to challenge its logic, ideological formations, and hierarchies of power and privilege. An oppressive and totalitarian power, it claims the right to intervene in Southern societies in the name of its constructed ethico-political project and this has led to the increasing militarisation of world politics and the routinisation of war through the constitution of regimes of violence and intervention by the more powerful Western states to secure compliance and pursue political agendas.
This right of intervention combines two models. First, is the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) model of humanitarian intervention, which became a UN initiative in 2005. It emerged out of the report by the Canadian government-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), established in September 2000. The ICISS's 2001 report of the same name articulated the principle of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and led the campaign for the adoption of the R2P by the United Nations. The history of the R2P is however rooted in the triumphalism that developed in the immediate post-Cold War environment. President Bush had attempted to construct what he called a New World Order in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War (which suggested to many Western observers that the UN, which they previously thought was the bastion of Eastern political obstructionism and ideological rancour, could now finally get to work through consensus-building – part of the reason Hardt and Negri [2000] hastily conceptualised global power the way they did) and, as part of that new world order, led the UN mission in Somalia code-named ‘Operation Restore Hope’ in August 1992. About the same time, UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had released his Agenda for Peace (1992), his recommendation for dealing with conflicts in the post-Cold War environment.
However, the outbreak of conflicts in especially Eastern Europe and Africa, and the failure of Operation Restore Hope, which eventually led to the humiliating withdrawal of US forces in Somalia in March 1994, defeated the triumphalist disposition which produced it. Following the publication of Kaplan's ‘The Coming Anarchy’ (1994), which tapped into Western anxieties about the intractability of Southern conflicts, the new barbarism and ethnic hatred thesis gained ascendancy and initially informed Western policy toward conflicts in Africa and Eastern Europe. It was not until the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia that this liberal will to power would find the avenue to credibly inscribe itself. Years of trial and error in working out the philosophical framework for responding to Southern conflicts and humanitarian disaster produced the R2P. The UN resolution adopting the R2P specifies four grounds for intervention: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. However, the elasticity and imprecisions of these concepts mean that they could be, and have in fact been, stretched and manipulated to justify parochial motives that have little to do with humanitarian agendas. Libya was the first time that the UN Security Council officially mandated the use of military force in the name of the R2P. But, as we now know, the NATO action in Libya was driven by much larger geopolitical, economic and ideological impulses. Indeed, concerns about human rights and humanitarian disasters have now become a disciplinary mechanism for the dominant and more powerful Western states to intervene in the affairs of Southern societies in order to pursue their own imperialistic agendas.
Second, is the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ model of pre-emptive war, which has globalised violence, banalised war and routinised intervention. An angry and paranoid United States had, in the aftermath of 9/11, used the attacks as an opportunity to embark on a destructive course of global militarism that has intensified mass surveillance, created a permanent state of siege and state of exception that suspends rights and freedoms (Agamben 2005) and increased racial profiling as certain bodies (especially male Muslim bodies deemed dangerous and expendable) are evicted from protection under Western law and marked for death (Razack 2008). In other words, unleashing the very terror it claims it intends to fight. The US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 initiated this moment; in 2003 it was complemented by the invasion of Iraq, where facile concerns over fictive weapons of mass destruction were used as an excuse for the invasion and occupation of a sovereign state by the United States and its allies. While both models constitute different moments in the rising militarisation of world politics, they are related and thus reinforce each other. Concerns about ‘terrorism’ have meant that conflicts and other forms of political unrest have come to be defined as a security challenge for the West. But these two models are not just responding to state failure or terrorism as it were, they are also responding to anxieties about a world slipping out of the control of the traditional centres of power. They therefore constitute a will to domination and narcissistic obsession with control over Southern societies. They also function as processes of appropriation and redefinition of anti-imperial articulations that aim to negate the very imperial order being recast through these models of intervention, and therefore function as key moments of hegemonic (re)articulation (Laclau and Mouffe 2001). Most of the recent interventions in Africa – Libya, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, CAR and so forth – combine both models.
Though protected by the armour of violence and coercion, the current liberal imperial order has also relied on the power-knowledge fields of Western intellectual production to fashion a discourse that justifies its will to domination. Indeed, no relations of power, certainly no imperial or hegemonic system, could thrive on the basis of force and coercion alone. Sooner or later, such systems will have to come to terms with the imperatives of the dominated groups or societies and their will to resist. Frantz Fanon shows in The Wretched of the Earth (1963) that every state of siege is also always a possible state of emergence, in that it always invites a response from forces articulating its negation, sometimes by militant action (Bhabha 1994). To blunt its negation, such a system must also be able to legitimate itself by defining its project as necessary in order to win the support of the dominated. This involves, as Gramsci (1971) notes, establishing a moral and ideological leadership, and presenting a definition of reality that speaks to, and thus is accepted by, the dominated groups or societies. This is not to suggest that there is a moral superiority of the ethico-political projects of imperial or hegemonic systems, but that systems of domination only really succeed insofar as they are able, in addition to their capacity for violence, to credibly present their definition or interpretation of reality as the accepted ‘truth’, thereby making sociality and politics unthinkable outside of their prescribed or preferred ideological parameters and normative systems (Gramsci 1971).
To the extent that Gramscian notions of hegemony could be stretched beyond their specific historical, national and class contexts, to include, as Fanon (1963) suggests in relation to Marxist categories, race and coloniality, one could, at least in the African case, argue that the liberal imperial system has been produced partially through the articulation of the definition of African realities by the West and the acceptance by the political and economic classes on the continent of the need for the West to intervene in African crises. This has involved recapturing and rearticulating anti-colonial sensibilities contesting imperial forces on the continent through a process of appropriation that redefines social and political reality in modes that absorb Western complicity, while holding internal conditions and, especially, the domestic political classes solely responsible for creating the conditions that liberal intervention purports to address. In other words, the West has, through the complicity of the African political and intellectual classes, been able to fashion a discourse that, in its stylised rendition, paradoxically casts itself as anti-imperial, while reinforcing its own will to domination. This discourse, which appeals to the African condition and the sensibilities of the African streets as well as its political and intellectual classes, defines social reality on the continent in terms of crisis and disorder endogenously produced by the internal dysfunction of African societies blamed solely on its corrupt political classes.
Reinforced by the fact that the global indirect rule which places pliant regimes beholden to external influence shields Western complicity in the crisis that liberal imperialism claims to respond to, these ideas have been successfully diffused and popularised so that they have become the way Africans have come to view themselves, as well as accept the implications of their practical conclusions. In many places on the continent, for example, questions about the impact of colonialism or contemporary imperialism do not carry much weight today. Indeed, there tends to be a widespread aversion to, if not outright rejection of, discourses that stress the relevance of colonialism and imperialism for the continent's present-day condition. The dominant discourses on and about Africa tend to, by omission or design, gloss over the impact of colonialism on the continent and its experience with violent and exploitative forms of imperial power that have historically violated the integrity of African societies, and stand in the way of their self-determination. Popular discourses on and about the continent prefer to talk mainly about incompetent, greedy, corrupt and despotic rulers, who have usurped the popular will of the people, criminalised the state, entrenched poverty, obstructed development, and engendered civil and political unrest, armed conflicts and state failure (the neopatrimonialist and state failure literature, for example, attests to this). In a similar vein, democracy, human rights and good governance are uncritically posited as the continent's saving graces, as if these are neutral and apolitical concepts. If the incompetent, greedy, corrupt and despotic rulers are responsible for the internal dysfunction in African societies, then the intervention of the external agency of the West would rescue Africans from these despotic rulers, and help them fight poverty, achieve economic growth and development, establish democratic regimes, and promote human rights and good governance.
The pervasiveness of these ideas and their diffusion even on the African streets mean that Western imperialism has succeeded in reinventing itself as an acceptable alternative to the crises and dysfunction it has helped in creating, but which are now blamed solely on brutal and corrupt dictators. Rather than something to run from, or something to resist and defeat, it has reinvented itself as something to embrace, for it has defined itself as the bulwark against corrupt and dictatorial governments and as the panacea to African problems since it stands for the promotion of democracy, good governance and development, and the protection of human rights. On the continent, the popular discourses which have emerged agree with this assessment: African problems are simple, they are reducible to a choice between despotic rulers and imperial domination, and the cards have come in favour of the latter. Never mind that these so-called despotic rulers are produced within the same systems that make the imperialist domination of the continent possible. In the late 1990s, during the height of the Sierra Leonean civil war, for example, there were popular calls for Britain to recolonise the country. So has the idea of US colonisation remained popular in Liberia. Indeed, this colonial nostalgia is widespread on the continent, as in the recent cases of Côte d'Ivoire and Mali, where the French intervention was actively supported by the intellectual and political classes.
In fact, the French action in Mali coincided with the ‘Colloquium on the Colonial Library’ organised by CODESRIA, the premier social research consortium on the continent, in Dakar in late January 2013. One would have expected that such a gathering of some of Africa's biggest intellectuals would be alarmed by the rising interventionism on the continent and therefore adopt a critical attitude towards the French action in Mali, especially in the context of a conference interrogating the ‘colonial library’ and the continued impact of colonialism on African societies. However, the position adopted by the conference – I was the lone dissenting voice – was in support of the French action and the language used was very similar to the tropes used by the Western media to justify the intervention. Here was what was supposed to be an anti-colonial moment reinscribing itself on the conceptualities of the very library it was supposed to be interrogating, and paradoxically reproducing and sanctioning the very practices constitutive of the modalities of the library. The West has thus fashioned a discourse on the African condition that has been largely accepted by both the African streets and its intellectual and political classes; a discourse that, in its stylised rendition, internalises the causes of crisis and normalises the politics through which the continent is produced as an object of Western colonial fantasy and imperial vocation.
Conclusion
Writing about the First World War, which he contends was driven by the central idea that war can be used to eliminate the condition of war and achieve or create the condition for peace, the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka (1976–77; 1996) draws our attention to the Janus face of peace. Though there is no factual objective sense of the world, Patočka tells us, the principal statesmen who orchestrated the carnage of the First World War believed that ‘men can within the circles accessible to them, impose such an order with force and power.’ The problem though is that the very spirit within which such an idea was conceived was from its very moment of conception confronted by a predicament, for, in the will to peace, war reigns supreme: ‘War cannot be eliminated without eliminating that form of the reign of peace, day, and life which excludes and ignores death’ (Patočka 1976–77, 117; 1996, 121). In other words, peace is compromised when it is inscribed on war and violence to bring it about. This idea, however, of using war to order the world and impose peace on it, is one that has continued to inform Western conceptions of peace and security: it informed the two World Wars, always lurked in the background of the Cold War, informed the triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War and has been the centrepiece of the global war on terror and its quest for Pax Americana. What this has done however is advance the cause of war and violence and this can be seen in the banalisation of war and interventionism.
What I have tried to do in this paper is show how this quest to restructure the world and impose a liberal peace on it incarnates a new imperial moment that has seen the intensification of militaristic modes of ‘pacification’ and control. Violence, both in its structuration and militaristic forms, is the property of this imperial present. Produced and managed through the strategic complexes of the liberal imperial order, the contradictions of this system are staggering for, while seeking to outlaw war, violence and conflict that it does not sanction or are not waged in the service of its ethos, it claims the right to intervene and wage wars in the interest of its agendas and to enforce its will and further its objectives. As well, in seeking to unite the world under a single imperial authority, the liberal world order is simultaneously fragmenting it in ways that are not only generating insecurities, misery and further violence for the majority of the world's populations, but are also threatening the very survival of the system that produces it.
Indeed, as this liberal world order attempts to monopolise the global sphere and concentrate power in what Jean Baudrillard (2002) calls ‘the technocratic machinery’ of violence and domination, and as it suffocates life through a totalitarian control that frowns on alternative modes of life, ways of being and forms of thought, and as it entrenches itself and attempts to concentrate its authority in a singular imperial network of power, it becomes vulnerable to its own violent and destructive inclinations. In part, because ‘every machinery of domination’, Baudrillard (2002) reminds us, always also secretes the counter-apparatus and agent of its own destruction. For the more this imperial order attempts to impose its totalitarian control of the world, the more the world escapes its grasp, fuelling further anxiety and violence. This anxiety about the world constantly slipping out of its grasp, and its narcissistic obsession with control over Southern, especially African, societies, are in turn what leads to the constant resort to violence as it seeks to impose its will in order to deal with that paranoia. It is in part the need to deal with the paranoia and the anxieties it produces that is at the heart of much of the insecurity in the world today. For the more this imperial order attempts to impose its totalitarian control of the world, the more the world escapes its grasp, fuelling further anxiety and violence.