Human Rights, Sovereign Rights, & the Potentials of Conflict Resolution

Thank you very much for the most generous welcome and indeed the very generous words from everybody.  It is 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 are in a wonderful place.  You know 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 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 am going to take you through.

Now what is that journey?  As you know and as you have 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 we are witnessing the extremes of violence going on across the world.   The challenge is, how do we respond intellectually and, if you like, praxiologically?  How do we respond?

The journey I want to take you through starts from Syria, present day Syria.  I will not say much about what is going on.  We are 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 am hesitant to tell you what this complex route is but I’m afraid you are going to have to sit there and listen, because it’s very important and it’s at the heart of what I am going to say.

The route takes us via Immanuel Kant, Jurgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault, because these three characters, and I apologize to my feminist sisters for the fact that there aren’t many men [women] 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 from Syria to Sant’Egidio via Kant, Habermas, and Michel Foucault and then ending up with Hannah Arendt.

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 human beings have this capacity to self legislate, to be self-reflexive, to think about their environment and to think about what they say.  So it was in that sense that Michel Foucault pays tribute in his “What is Enlightenment” to Michel Foucault [Immanuel Kant] 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.

Kant teaches us something else much more important in my view.  He had a cosmopolitan imaginary and as such was concerned with the idea of the human being as rights bearer.  The human being as rights bearer for Immanuel Kant suggested that the human self is also or can also be a suffering self.  In other words, much harm can be done to the human being.  And we know that to be the case. Kant’s cosmopolitan imaginary enables him to think of the distant other and to reflect on the potentials of the cosmopolitan ideal in rethinking what we would refer to today as international relations. However, Kant’s cosmopolitan imaginary is confined to the extension of ‘hospitality’ to the stranger. However, if Kant was asked the question, “what is it to have a political system or an international system that is indeed based on this cosmopolitan imaginary?”, his answer would argue against a cosmopolitan formation of the international.

There is here a paradox for Kant. To recognize the rights of the individual self in a sense presented the opportunity to transform relationships internationally.  However, he argued against the translation of  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 Kant the transformation of the international into empire.

Here we have exactly that original critical thinker, reflecting on his own imaginary and the political implications of his imaginary.  So the paradox for Immanuel Kant, is that just as he recognizes the human self as rights bearer, he limits the potentials of cosmopolitanism.  He puts the breaks 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 if you like, the primary element in his philosophy is exactly that autonomous being, and the Enlightenment idea of the individual self as being capable of self-reflection, on 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 the law, and specifically the force of law, internationally.

And so in this journey we come to Jurgen Habermas.  When Habermas writes about developing this Kantian perspective, he talks about revising Immanuel Kant, as he puts it, ‘200 years later’.  The challenge for Habermas and 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?

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 am talking about: human rights, sovereign rights,Habermas argues that the latter, 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.  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?

For Habermas, the notion of ‘perpetual peace’ is only possible through the design of a cosmopolitan arrangement.   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 increasingly subject to all sorts of regulations Globalization as a process is not some mad, chaotic process going on out there.  There’s actually a lot of regulation.  But what Habermas wants to see is exactly the pacification of sovereignty as such.  In other words, political sovereignty,   the juridical, political sovereignty of the state.  He wants human rights to trump the sovereignty of the state.  And so, how does Habermas help out in relation to conflict, and especially violent conflict in an already globalised context?  For Habermas peace is the manifestation of a positive conception of human rights, rights that at once both tame and trump sovereignty.   Ultimately, this taming constitutes the pacification of sovereign power in the service of the rights of the individual human self.  Where Kant places limits on his cosmopolitan imaginary, Habermas confers it positive force, thereby translating the Kantian imaginary into the force of law, Cosmopolitan Law.

But what are the implications?  Habermas is not the only advocate of such a transformation of the international.  We might argue that Habermas’s philosophical discourse is articulated in policy circles by, for example, Kofi Annan, and before Annan, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, both  UN Secretaries General.  During the 90s and into the 2000s both were arguing exactly for that taming of the sovereign state on the grounds that, across the world, the most extreme forms of violence were being  perpetrated against populations by their very own regimes or by militarized factions of those regimes.

So Kofi Annan and Boutros-Ghali were expressing 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 peacebuilding comes to be a dominant form of response to conflict and begins to take over from diplomacy and conflict resolution.  Now the alarm bells need to start going right now in all our heads.  Because in this room we are interested in conflict resolution.  And there’s a good reason for that, right?

So peacebuilding comes to take over all sorts of interventionist practices involving the  UN non-governmental organizations, and states.  A kind of international civil service at large comes to constitute a peacebuilding apparatus that is mobilized in response to conflict situations.  In and out of countries, peacebuilding, state building, institution building, governing .  As peacebuilding comes to occupy a dominant position suggestive of a consensus, conflict resolution, or diplomacy, comes to be undermined.  I want to suggest that this shift from conflict resolution to peacebuilding might be read as a move away from Kantian limits and towards a Habermasian understanding of the cosmopolitan.

Over and above peacebuilding, we are seeing the manifestation of Habermasian visions of cosmopolitan law.  We now have an International Criminal Court and war crimes tribunals where individuals such as Mladic can be up in front of the criminal court.  I’d like to see many people in front of such court, for example Blair or the former president of this country.  Habermas considered the invasion of Iraq an illegal act.  So in the Habermasian context, you know 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 haunt them in the future.  Miolsevic.  Mladic.  Karadzic.  All of these guys.  Charles Taylor in Liberia is another example.  The people who perpetrated the Rwanda genocide another.  And so on and so on.

So there is 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 is 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.  He is also, by the way, very generous.  One year many years ago, my students went to one of his lectures and when he’d finished asked, “Can we have a photo with you?  You are always mentioned by our professor!”

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 specifically about the force of law?  We are talking about violence as being constitutive of that law.   The spectre of Walter Benjamin hovers over us as we talk about cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan law.  For Walter Benjamin, law is indeed constituted by violence.  When Habermas supports the intervention in Kosovo, the military intervention in Kosovo, he in effect 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’s 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 al-Asad 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.

For Michel Foucault power is better understood in terms of a triptych, sovereign power, disciplinary power and biopolitical power.   He suggests 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. He has to have an audience to actually manifest and perform his sovereignty.

But the analysis of power we find in Michel Foucault doesn’t simply stop there.   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 . the target of control;  disciplined, subject to calculation and to shaping, and redesign  So disciplinary power seeks to, in a sense, produce a particular kind of person.

In Michel Foucault, in 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 are subject to pedagogical interventions of that sort we are not actually free.  We are forever subject to surveillance practices.  We’re forever through those surveillance practices subject to a kind of pacification regime. In the Foucauldian perspective, there’s no such thing  as an internal, civic peace.  The kind of peace Immanuel Kant and Jurgen Habermas write about.  He argues that there is 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.

The third element of the triptych, the most sophisticated form of power, is biopolitical power.  In other words, where populations, and not simply individuals, are the subject of that power.  And so in late modernity we are living in a biopolitical age, one where the survival of humanity as such becomes the target of operations of power.  For Michel Foucault, when wars take place,  they do so purportedly in the name of humanity at large.  In the name of the human.  However, if biopolitical warfare takes place in the name of humanity, who is the enemy?  Who is excluded from that humanity?

Who is outside?  Who is the ‘abnormal’ in this condition?  For Michel Foucault, wars of a biopolitical age tend to be genocidal wars.  They can start with the little massacres here and there and they end up being genocidal wars.    He mentions the colonial era  and the Holocaust as examples, but this aspect of his writing is merely suggestive   However, what does this mean for the international?

Foucault spent his life writing about liberal societies.  France and  Britain especially.  All of his work is based on these societies.  He ventured out onto the international context when the Iranian Revolution happened.  I have a piece on that, actually very critical of Michel Foucault in that context.  I don’t intend to  say much on that in our particular context.  You can ask me about it in the discussion.  What is interesting though is that the ‘international’ as such does not particularly engage Foucault.  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 used his analytics of power, but applied 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 happening in some square in the middle of Paris?  The story that Michel Foucault tells in Discipline and Punish;   that sovereign power has to have an audience in order to be constituted as sovereign power.   I have suggested elsewhere that the very same 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 and practices variously on peacebuilding, statebuilding, and the government of populations.  Michel Foucault writes about liberalism as  as productive, through techniques of power, of self-government.  The production, in other words, through all sorts of matrices of power, of the liberal subject.

If we transform that idea  to the global setting what we come up with, indeed what we observe, are practices that can be understood in terms of Foucault’s triptych; sovereign decisions relating to intervention and the utilisation of violence in combination with a panoply of pedagogical and training exercises geared towards the re-shaping and re-design of other societies. Peacebuilding, in other words, as the government of ‘other’ societies.  This is where the problems lie.  Indeed, this is where our problems actually begin to happen.  I’ve already mentioned the violence that underpins that initial move.  This is why Immanuel Kant was so right to be hesitant, to actually be quite modest with his cosmopolitan imaginary, because Immanuel Kant foresaw the dangers that we see today.

So peacebuilding becomes the government of populations.  And guess what, it’s other people’s 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  apply to other societies   However, who decides?  Who is the sovereign in this context?  Michel Foucault writes about biopolitical war as being possible because of the racial divisions of populations.

Now in the present,  and in our globalized context,  some would argue that state boundaries are being diminished.  We can see that in many contexts.  However, we can also see that boundaries become manifest once again,  corporially, in the very bodies of the other targeted.  So the borders of populations come to be racially manifest in the racialisation of other peoples’ cultures, a racialisation that reproduces a hierarchical ordering of the world, the governing and the governed.

So from peace to peacebuilding and the government of populations.  Peacebuilding seeks to reshape and redesign other populations,  and in so doing, can undermine processes that underscore the recognition of conflict, grievance, and political agency; processes that define the practice of conflict resolution.  So in the last few minutes of my talk, I want to come back to this potential that conflict resolution might have.  I want to reclaim a space for conflict resolution as a response to conflict that is distinct from peacebuilding, that does not seek to govern others nor to depoliticize conflict in the name of ‘our’ security.

What are the choices for conflict resolution?  One choice  that does not fit the conflict resolution perspective is to  seek to govern, to redesign other societies.  So what’s happened in Syria suggests the assumption that we are  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 the revolutionary process in Syria and the rest of the Middle East.  To shape its directionality, in other words.  That’s one choice.  And by the way it’s already been made.  The shaping and redesigning of populations to make them amenable.

But the other choice is politics; the recognition of the conflict in Syria as a location of political contestation, not simply a conflict with the regime, but a complex internal conflict that is currently being articulated not just within Syria, but in the region, and internationally.   Here, the journey  takes us to Sant’Egidio.  That first choice, the government of populations, is informed by a colonial rationality.  It has to be.  It is   informed by the idea that we can shape and redesign other societies.  The second choice, politics, in a sense takes us to a post-colonial rationality.  Not a cosmopolitanism of intervention or of government, but a cosmopolitanism of recognition; of politics and of choices relating to solidarity.  What choice do we make?  And whose side do we take?

If you recognize that there are actually many sides in this revolutionary process that is going on in the Middle East;  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 Robert Burns puts it.  That’s the dilemma.  That’s the paradox.

And so what happened at Sant’Egidio?  Not so long ago a group of Syrian opposition spokespeople, women and men, were invited to Sant’Egidio [the Dean of S-CAR, Andrea [Bartoli] is involved with that community].  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 postcolonial sovereignty of the Syrian state.  These are postcolonial populations.  They’re constituted by memories of the colonial era.  They know a colonial rationality when it faces them like this.  They may call for political solidarity, but wish this solidarity to be in their own, independent, terms and not terms that govern their aspirations.

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 aimed at the government of populations, one that is often framed in terms of humanitarian rescue. Being framed in the language of human rights, this first choice might be seen as a product of the cosmopolitan imaginary, but one sees  the liberal self being able to govern other societies and determine and shape their futures.   We can interpret this first choice in terms of  the sovereign power to decide who may live and who may die.  But the second choice, that of conflict resolution, is the political choice.  It’s being able to provide for that voice that speaks up postcolonially, in that and in this post-colonial context;  where the anti-colonial struggles of the past are very much in the memories of those target populations.

So the choice is there and that’s why I want to come back to the problem of Syria, because in a sense, it is imperative upon us to reflect on what is going on there. however, the aim in this journey was to show that we’re not the first to think about these issues.  That we have  powerful historic and philosophical antecedents, voice of reflection that enable us to critique hegemonic and dominant discourses and practices related to responses to conflict.

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 the  public arena thereby constituting that arena as distinctly political.

Arendt was very much an admirer of the founding fathers of this country [the USA].  Very much an admirer of the American Revolution.  And she is very controversial in her writings.  Everything she wrote has been subject to much controversy, and deservedly so.  Any great philosopher has to be so subject to controversy, debate, and discourse.  For Arendt, politics was not about basic human needs, it was about the 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 streets, at Tahrir Square, these were joyous events for all of us. These were moments of solidarity with those who sought to claim politics, the right to politics. The extension of such solidarity, for example, by my students towards the students of Tahrir Square, was an articulation of a cosmopolitan imaginary, but not one that sought to govern.

In an Arendtian sense that was the moment of politics.  That was the revolutionary moment that could enable a space for the constitution of political community, one that would enable politics as such, but that moment has somehow evaded the revolutionaries.  In my opinion, what’s happened is that we are back into that space of governing.  ‘Governmentality,’ to use a Foucauldian term,  seeking to 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 after all.

This is not a pessimistic ending.  I have been accused of being a pessimist.  I’m not a pessimist, but nor am I an optimist.  I am much more of a realist with a small r.  A realist with a small r in the Arendtian sense.  Arendt provides much that is to be celebrated, but she writes a cautionary tale.  And I hope that what I’ve said is a cautionary tale.  In  that tale and in this journey that I’ve highlighted, I hope you can see that there is  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.

[*] This lecture was delivered at George Mason University’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution on October 24, 2012.  Michael D. English transcribed this lecture exclusively for Unrest Magazine.  Full video of the lecture including a question and answer session can be accessed here.