This state of independence shall be: Africa, the West, and the responsibility to protect

Este texto corresponde a la conferencia de clausura del Octavo Congreso Ibérico de Estudios Africanos (CIEA8), organizado por el Grupo de Estudios Africanos y celebrado en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid del 14 al 16 de junio de 2012; traducida y publicada con la autorización del autorHoy en día se dice que los estados africanos respaldaron el principio de la responsabilidad de proteger y la creación de la Corte Penal Internacional (CPI) solo para invertir la tendencia y conseguir mayorías igualmente grandes en el momento de su implementación. Este supuesto giro, especialmente en torno al procesamiento de Omar al Bashir en Sudán y la intervención de Libia, ha sido una sorpresa para los grupos de derechos humanos y aquellos que supuestamente se implican en la acción humanitaria. Estos últimos esperaban que las poblaciones y las élites africanas abrazaran de manera uniforme la Corte Penal Internacional y la responsabilidad de proteger como desarrollos normativos saludables para un continente acosado por guerras civiles y violaciones de derechos humanos. Las reacciones al supuesto giro africano son, en el mejor de los casos, erróneas. La mayoría de los africanos no se opone a la normativa que sustenta los nuevos regímenes humanitarios. Lo que vengo a sostener es que, generalmente, los africanos se oponen a las lagunas que se desarrollan entre, por un lado, los discursos y las doctrinas de seguridad humana, intervención humanitaria y responsabilidad de proteger y, por el otro, las prácticas de intervención bajo el humanitarismo. Estas lagunas no son mera casualidad. Para las sensibilidades poscoloniales, son el resultado de tradiciones occidentales de larga duración en las que el derecho imperial de intervención se ha mezclado perfectamente con predicados morales de intervención humanitaria, y ahora con la responsabilidad de proteger. En mi opinión, las posiciones africanas a este respecto ilustran una lucha continua por la descolonización del derecho y de la moralidad internacional en la medida en que estén relacionados con la subjetividad política, democracia global, justicia y existencia o vida internacional. Como advertencia, me gustaría indicar que no pretendo hablar de un África y/o de todas las entidades africanas como algo definido de manera uniforme. Así como tampoco quiero mezclar el Occidente oficial y las decisiones autoritarias tomadas por líderes occidentales, con los sentimientos y las tradiciones de todos los electores de lo que podría llamarse OccidenteIt is argued today that African states largely endorsed the principle of the responsibility to protect and the establishment of the international criminal court (ICC) only to reverse course in equally great majorities at the moment of implementation. This supposed reversal —particularly around the indictment of Sudan’s Omar al Bashir and the intervention in Libya, has surprised human rights groups and wouldbe humanitarians. The latter entities had expected African populations and elites to uniformly embrace the ICC and the responsibility to protect as salutary normative developments for a continent beset by civil wars and human rights violations. The reactions to the supposed African “reversal” are misguided at best. The majority of Africans do not object to the normative underpinning of the new humanitarian regimes. It is my contention that Africans generally object to evolving gaps between, on the one hand, the discourses and doctrines of human security, humanitarian intervention, and the responsibility to protect and, on the other, the practices of intervention under humanitarianism. These gaps are not merely happenstance. To postcolonial sensibilities, they are the result of long Western traditions in which the imperial right of intervention has blended seamlessly with moral predicates of humanitarian intervention —and now the responsibility to protect. To me, the African positions in these regards illustrate a continuing struggle for decolonization of international law and morality as they pertain to political subjectivity, global democracy, justice, and international existence or life. As a note of caution, I wish to indicate that I do not intend to speak for a uniformly-defined Africa and/or for all African entities. Nor do I wish to conflate the official West and authoritative decisions made by Western leaders with the sentiments and traditions of all constituencies of what might be called The Wes

To the Orphaned, Dispossessed, and Illegitimate Children: Human Rights Beyond Republican and Liberal Traditions

After the Helsinki Accords, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire, and the collapse of states in Africa and elsewhere, many in the West have come to envisage the enforcement of human rights as a practical matter. Human rights are thus incorporated in normative regimes under the rubrics of either the rule of law or the responsibility to protect to be held against the purveyors of violence. I do not discount the normative underpinnings of the related stands taken today by states and transnational and national civil society organizations. I wish to insist on the futility of envisaging human rights merely as legal standards and norms and on the need to revisit the question of the human on whom rights are bestowed. The present article is an exercise in historical and comparative analysis of what human rights meant to Haitian slaves in the eighteenth century when, as happened in France and the United States, notions of human rights emanated in a constitutional scheme intended to protect the newly freed slaves against violence from the prevailing post- Enlightenment political, economic, and ideological systems-all of which had been integral to the processes of enslavement. It is my contention that, like Haitian slaves, anti-colonialists and some postcolonial entities found liberal human rights schemes to be equally implicated in modern violence and therefore responded by proposing novel grounds for imagining human rights outside of the strictures of liberal constitutionalism. Human Rights and Legal Systems Across the Global South, Symposium, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Bloomington, Indiana. 9-10 April 2010

Teachers\u27 Evaluation of Usefulness of Professional Development Activities: Examining Roles of Teacher Collaboration and Administrative Support

Teachers\u27 Evaluation of Usefulness of Professional Development Activities: Examining Roles of Teacher Collaboration and Administrative Suppor

Sovereignty in Africa: Quasi-statehood and other myths in international theory

Este capítulo se centra en dos errores a menudo repetidos. El primero es la idea de que los estados poseen, de modo uniforme, una cierta coherencia orgánica generada por un ajuste resuelto entre estado y nación, un deseo legítimo del estado de mantener esta relación, una probada aptitud por su parte para crear y conservar un entorno seguro para la nación, así como una capacidad verosímil para defenderse frente a las entidades competidoras. El segundo es que la soberanía postcolonial constituya una desviación histórica del sistema westfaliano, tanto en lo relativo a la ficción jurídica como a la realidad empírica. [...] Para ilustrar mis argumentos, tendré en cuenta las formas de soberanía histórica que los hegemons occidentales previeron para Bélgica y Suiza por un lado, y para el Congo/Zaire por otro, durante los dos últimos siglosThis chapter focuses on two oft-repeated errors. One is the notion that Western states uniformly possess a certain organic coherence generated by a purposeful fit between state and nation, a legitimate state desire to maintain this relation, a proven state capacity to defend itself against competing entities. The other is that post-colonial sovereignty constitutes an historical deviation from Western norms, both as a juridical fiction and an empirical reality. [...] To illustrate my points, I will consider the historical forms of sovereignty that Western hegemons envisioned for Belgium and Switzerland, on the one hand, and Congo/Zaire, on the other, during the last two centuries

La soberanía en África: casi estados y otros mitos en la teoría internacional

Este capítulo se centra en dos errores a menudo repetidos. El primero es la idea de que los estados poseen, de modo uniforme, una cierta coherencia orgánica generada por un ajuste resuelto entre estado y nación, un deseo legítimo del estado de mantener esta relación, una probada aptitud por su parte para crear y conservar un entorno seguro para la nación, así como una capacidad verosímil para defenderse frente a las entidades competidoras. El segundo es que la soberanía postcolonial constituya una desviación histórica del sistema westfaliano, tanto en lo relativo a la ficción jurídica como a la realidad empírica. [...] Para ilustrar mis argumentos, tendré en cuenta las formas de soberanía histórica que los hegemons occidentales previeron para Bélgica y Suiza por un lado, y para el Congo/Zaire por otro, durante los dos últimos siglos

"Das dürfte in Europa eigentlich nicht passieren": Das Problem der Internationalen Beziehungen aus Sicht des Globalen Südens

Dieser Beitrag soll ein Plädoyer von Eliten des globalen Südens, insbesondere von führenden Politiker:innen und Meinungsmacher:innen in Afrika, aufgreifen, um der Debatte über den russischen Einmarsch in der Ukraine im Rahmen größerer Fragen zur internationalen Ordnung und den damit verbundenen Sicherheitssystemen eine andere Wendung zu geben. Dementsprechend geht der Artikel den zeitgenössischen Artikulationsformen der afrikanischen Blockfreiheit nach, die die Frage der Rechte der Ukraine, die Anliegen Russlands und die Ambitionen der NATO als drei separate Fragen betrachten, welche nicht miteinander vermengt oder als moralisch und rechtlich untrennbar zusammengeworfen werden dürfen. Obwohl solche Ansichten mit internationalen Normen und dem Grundsatz eines auf Regeln basierenden internationalen Systems im Einklang stehen, haben sie europäische Analytiker:innen verwirrt und amerikanische Politiker:innen verärgert, die davon ausgehen, die Führung Europas und des Westens sei von globalem normativem Nutzen, wenn nicht gar ein wünschenswertes universelles Gut. Dies hat zum falschen Vorwurf afrikanischer Gleichgültigkeit gegenüber der Ukraine geführt, der wenn auch nicht ausdrücklich, sondern unterschwellig den Gegensatz zwischen einem zivilisierten, liberal-demokratischen Europa und einem Afrika wiederholt, welches die Bedeutung von internationaler Moral, Recht und Sicherheit noch nicht verstanden habe. Gegen dieses falsche Urteil versucht der Beitrag, die konkurrierenden Erinnerungen und Lehren der afrikanischen Eliten aus der Geschichte zu beleuchten, die weder Teil des europäischen/westlichen noch des russischen Common Sense sind.This paper aims to revisit a plea by global south elites, particularly leaders and opinion-makers in Africa, to recast the debate around the Russian invasion into Ukraine along the axis of larger questions about the international order and attendant security systems. Accordingly, the article traces contemporary articulations of African non-alignment, which have held the question of Ukraine rights, Russian concerns, and NATO ambitions as three separate questions that are not to be confused or confl ated as morally and legally indivisible. Though consistent with international norms and the principle of a rule-based international system, such views have confused European analysts and angered US policymakers opera ting on the predicate that the guidance of Europe and the West is of global normative utility, if not a desirable universal good. This has led to a false charge of African indiff erence toward Ukraine, exemplified in the repeated, if insinuated, contrast between a civilized liberal democratic Europe and an Africa that has yet to understand the stakes of international morality, law, and security. Against this misinformed judgement, the paper seeks to illuminate the competing memories and lessons of histories that African elites hold, which are neither part of the European/Western nor Russian commonsense

Intervention and the ordering of the modern world

I am lead editor of a special issue of the Review of International Studies, which is the house journal of the British International Studies Association. The special issue arose from a competitive process. I am scheduled to have two pieces in this issue.This introductory discussion establishes the notion of intervention as a ‘social practice’ and carves out the contextual and conceptual space for the special issue as a whole. The first move is to recontextualise intervention in terms of ‘modernity’ as distinct from the sovereign states system. This shift enables a better appreciation of the dynamic and evolutionary context that generates variation in the practice of intervention over time and space and which is more analytically sensitive to the economic and cultural (as well as Great Power) hierarchies that generate rationales for intervention. The second move is to reconceptualise intervention as a specific modality of coercion relatively well-suited to the regulation or mediation of conflict between territorially bounded political communities and transnational social forces. Third is to ‘historicise’ the practice of intervention through showing how it has changed in relation to a range of international orders’ that have defined the modern world and which are each characterised by a different notion of the relationship between social and territorial space. Fourth and finally is a brief consideration of the possibility of intervention’s demise as a social practice.ESRC funded seminar series, ‘Rethinking Intervention: Intervention in the Modern World’, grant reference RES-451-26-066