The terrorist as humanitarian

A global society has come into being, but as yet it possesses no political institutions proper to its name. I will make the case that new forms of militancy, like that of al-Qaeda, achieve meaning in this institutional vacuum while representing, in their own way, the search for a global politics. From environmentalism to pacifism, such a worldwide politics can only be one that takes humanity itself as its object. This article aims to show that militant practices are informed by the same search that animates humanitarianism, which has become the global aim and signature of all politics today. © Berghahn Journals

Landscapes of the jihad militancy, morality, modernity

The militant Islam represented by Al-Qaeda is often described as a global movement. Apart from the geographical range of its operations and support, little else is held to define it as ‘global’. Landscapes of the Jihad explores the features that Al-Qaeda and other strands of militant Islam share in common with global movements. These include a decentralised organisation and an emphasis on ethical rather than properly political action. Devji brings these and other characteristics of Al-Qaeda together in an analysis of the jihad that locates it squarely within the transformation of political thought after the Cold War. The jihad emerges from the breakdown of traditional as well as modern forms of authority in the Muslim world. It is neither dogmatic in an old-fashioned way nor ideological in the modern sense, and concerned neither with correct doctrinal practice in the present nor with some revolutionary utopia of the future. Instead it is fragmented, dispersed and highly individualistic.</p

Changing places: religion and minority in Pakistan

This postscript to a special section of South Asia titled ‘Religious Minorities in Pakistan: Identities, Citizenship and Social Belonging’ explores the different ways in which the demographic categories of minority and majority came to define identity in colonial India through religion but not through caste, ethnicity or region. It argues that the violence associated with these categories derives from their interchangeability and lack of integrity, and makes a case for recovering a negative history of identification in South Asia

MORALITY IN THE SHADOW OF POLITICS

Having put an end to his first great movement of non-cooperation following the First World War, Gandhi sat down to learn the lessons of this early experiment in mass politics. In 1926 he went on to impart these lessons to his fellow workers in the Sabarmati Ashram by way of a series of lectures on the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi was interested in exploring the relations between violence and non-violence, which he thought were so intimate that one could very easily turn into the other. Seeking out the Archimedean point that made such a turning possible, the Mahatma had occasion to criticize any ethics that would divide good from evil on the basis of a moral calculus. How, he asked, was an ethics possible that recognized the intractability of ignorance and compulsion? Any ethical system that relied upon knowledge and choice, he thought, was either deluded or true only for a very small elite. A common ethics, then, had to be one which recognized ignorance and compulsion not negatively, as posing limits to moral life, but rather in the form of positive virtues like duty and obedience. Gandhi's commentary on the Gita was therefore an attempt to think about moral action in the context of ignorance and compulsion, which he did by focusing on the integrity of the act itself divested of the idealism lent it by any moral calculus. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Global War on Terror as De-Militarization

This essay argues that the emergence of al-Qaeda as a new kind of enemy has resulted in the paradoxical de-militarization of the war waged against it. The much-publicized incidents of abuse at the U.S. detention centre of Abu Ghraib provide an example of the way in which the Global War on Terror has increasingly become a criminal rather than military operation. By reclassifying Iraqi prisoners into “criminal-like” enemies they became mere human beings rather than prisoner of war properly defined, which meant that their captors, too, were ironically defined merely as human beings and not as soldiers subject to a set of positive regulations

The turn to empire in Asia

As both a geographical and civilizational category, Asia is and remains a European creation. Its questioning is therefore part of the anti-colonial project in both India and China, where it is part of the sometimes fitful and contradictory way in which imperialism has been simultaneously inherited and repudiated. The economic and political emergence of both countries as global powers has made this inheritance relevant again, this time as a focus of identification, and their futures are bound up with how these states deal with the idea and reality of empire as their nationalisms begin to fragment