'Relating Global Tensions: Modern Tribalism and Postmodern Nationalism' (2001)

Globalization and Violence, Vol. 3: Globalizing War and Intervention (2006)

2006

The first set of volumes in the 'Central Currents in Globalization' series takes a particularly pressing manifestation of human relations-violence-and explores its changing nature in relation to the various processes of globalization. It is organized across the four volumes beginning with the historically-deep practice of empire-building Volume 1, Globalizing Empires: old and New. Imperial extension contributed to the processes of globalization to the extent that states sought to claim military and political control over extended reaches of territories-other places and peoples-that they imagined in terms of a 'world-space'. This was the case whether we talk of the Roman Empire in the first century or the British Empire in the nineteenth century, even though they are very different polities. The first volume covers the theme of empire right through to contemporary debates about globalization and Pax Americana. Volume 2, Colonial and Postcolonial Globalizations, takes up that same story, but examines the process from the perspective of the periphery rather than from the centre. It begins with Second Expansion of Europe and colonization in the mid-nineteenth century. It takes in the violence of decolonization across the world in the period through to the 1960s, and it considers the question of contemporary postcolonial violence-not just military, but broader questions of structural violence today. Volume 3, Globalizing War and Intervention, examines the changing nature of military intervention, including the remarkable shift in the form of violence across the globe from interstate violence to intrastate conflict in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. This volume includes a section on one of the most dramatic instances of global violence in our time-terrorism and the War on Terror. The emphasis here is on 'violence from above', as it were-violence that is in some way institutionalized or directed with the power of sovereign body. Finally, Volume 4, Transnational Conflict, complements the third volume by examining the different forms of transnational and intra-state violence in the world today, what might be called 'violence from below'. In all of the volumes we are concerned to understand both the globalizing processes and the more general effects of empire in world history.

Violence and social change. The new routes of sovereignty in the globalised world

2020

Violence, far from being a residual or marginal element of social life, remains one of its endogenous factors whose logic is still partly to be investigated. Its forms are various and yet recognizable. The moving geography of the global world is still dotted with this force which operates not only based on identity(religious, ethnic) and gender but also on a technical and systemic basis (economic, financial, technological and communicative). Indeed, modernity and globalization not only did not erase "ancient" violence (for example, violence connected to borders or directed against women, children, indigenous people, infidels), but they also contributed to producing new forms of violence on a technical-procedural and global basis. In the global world, both the "renewed" forms of traditional violence and the forms "new" and unexplored violence that cross other territories than those traditionally regulated by law and politics are manifested. The aim of this essay is to identify the common content between the different forms of violence and the new faces of violence that are unfolding in the global world.

Rethinking Insecurity, War and Violence: Beyond Savage Globalization? (2009)

2009

"Rethinking Insecurity, War and Violence: Beyond savage globalization? is a collection of essays by scholars intent on rethinking the mainstream security paradigms. Overall, this collection is intended to provide a broad and systematic analysis of the long-term sources of political, military and cultural insecurity from the local to the global. The book provides a stronger basis for under-standing the causes of conflict and violence in the world today, one that adds adifferent dimension to the dominant focus on finding proximate causes and making quick responses. Too often the arenas of violence have been represented as if they have been triggered by reassertions of traditional and tribal forms of identity, primordial and irrational assertions of politics. Such ideas about the sources of insecurity have become entrenched in a wide variety of media sources, and have framed both government policies and academic arguments. Rather than treating the sources of insecurity as a retreat from modernity, this book complicates the patterns of global insecurity to a degree that takes the debates simply beyond assumptions that we are witnessing a savage return to a bloody and tribalized world."

NatioNs, Neighbours, aNd humaNity: destroyed aNd recovered iN War aNd violeNce 1

Remembered experiences of violence, humiliation, and loss suffered in the 1971 war of Bangladesh provide potent material for rethinking a new narrative bonding victim and perpetrator communities in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Taking the war as my entry point and using the method of oral history, I explore perpetrators' memories, in order to understand how love for nation and hatred toward enemies provide justifications for violence. Violence was done in the name of nationalism. Today, the states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh refuse to acknowledge the 'disastrous' memories of the war in their national histories. The silencing of the experiences of violence, however, does not mean that victims and perpetrators can forget them. Rather, they are haunted by the 'hidden' memories of violence. More than four decades later, the personal, remembered memories lead perpetrators to question their actions and search for meaning of 'sacrifice' made on behalf of nation. As well, they grapple with the issue of ethical responsibility to victims, which they failed to uphold during the war. This leads to the emergence of an awareness of the loss of insāniyat (humanity) in violence. The humanistic turn of memories of perpetrators enables the recuperation of the capacity to see the Other and take responsibility of the violence. The reassembling of insāniyat is a way forward for making connections and creating connectivity beyond divisive nationalism. This way of thinking announces a decolonial narrative in contemporary South Asia. The possibility of a free human community in South Asia is aspirational, as perpetrators testify.

‘Global’ norms and ‘local’ agency: frictional peacebuilding in Kosovo

Journal of International Relations and Development, 2015

This article explores how the 'liberal democratic peace package' is received in post-conflict spaces. As such, it is part of a critical peace research agenda that raises critical questions concerning the quality of peace in many post-conflict societies. A close reading of the peace-building process in post-conflict Kosovo provides the backdrop for the theoretical discussion that identifies friction in norm diffusion processes and the different agencies that are generated through encounters between global norms and local practices. We unpack the interplay between the 'global' and the 'local' in peacebuilding and, through the lens of friction, we reveal the diverse and unequal encounters that produce new power relations. By foregrounding agency, we theorise different agentive subjects in the post-conflict setting, and map local agency from various segments of society that may localise, co-opt or reject global norms pertaining to the liberal democratic peace.

Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization

This article explores the links between globalization and ethnic violence in comparative perspective. By looking at ethnographic material from Central Africa, Europe, India and China, the paper suggests that bodily violence between social intimates may be viewed as a form of vivisection, and as an eort to resolve unacceptable levels of uncertainty through bodily deconstruction. This approach may cast light on the surplus of rage displayed in many recent episodes of inter-group violence. At the same time, the study suggests that the conditions for such extreme and intimate violence may partly lie in the deformation of national and local spaces of everyday life by the physical and moral pressures of globalization.

Challenging the ‘Liberal Peace’: The emergence and transformation of the Kosovo ‘Parallel State’

The ‘Liberal Peace’ is the predominant framework within which the post-Cold war world order is conceptualized. This ideological amalgam of neo-liberal notions of democracy, market sovereignty, and conflict resolution characterizes and guides contemporary intervention and peacebuilding strategies through the creation of a self-sustaining peace. Within this framework, the world is implicitly understood as moving naturally towards liberal democracy and development. Yet, this course is sometimes abnormally disrupted due to internal wars that occasionally erupt, which are usually of identity character, extremely violent, and cause complete state and social breakdown. However, this way of conceptualizing contemporary world order and wars has been criticized for generating an inadequate understanding of the post-Cold war advancements and the new wars. Moreover, it has been argued that the strategies that are employed under the auspices of ‘Liberal Peace’, aim at maintaining the international stability and liberal order by attempting to cure the symptoms, rather than the structurally embedded sources of instability, which are deliberately ignored. In this respect, an alternative theoretical framework for understanding the post-Cold war world order and the new wars, and re-conceptualizing contemporary intervention and peacebuilding operations, is put forward. It is argued that contemporary world is transforming into a complex form of feudalism. The internal wars that occasionally erupt within this context are understood in terms of emergence of new political projects and political economies, some elements of which are able to adapt to post-war environments and coexist with peacebuilding operations. Under this perspective, contemporary intervention strategies are re-conceptualized as a form of global liberal governance. This theoretical framework is then applied on the case of Kosovo in order to explain the emergence of the ‘Parallel State’ in the early 1990s and its transformation during and after the war. Finally, a re-conceptualization of ‘humanitarian interventionism’ in relation to Kosovo is presented.