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Abstract
What is the Zeitgeist of resistance in the present moment—the age of empire? This paper examines key contemporary interventions that invoke international norms to temper and rein in intervention and occupation. Even as they signal dissent, the paper concludes that these interventions turn away from the historical, deny ideological conflict and fail a counter-hegemonic politics. They return to an ahistorical domain of international law and humanist ethics that stands outside time and is blind to that privilege. This is a stance that may contribute to the production of legitimacy for empire, even as it seeks to curb its excesses.
Notes
1 Some of the artists are still being investigated by the government; their homes have been searched and their art materials confiscated for investigation. For instance: ‘Steve Kurtz, a member of the artist collaborative Critical Art Ensemble, was brought to trial on charges of bioterrorism (now lessened to mail and wire fraud) after he called the police when he woke to find his wife had died of a heart attack’. See http://www.ncac.org/issues/events.html.
2 The cartoon wars raging today encapsulate the deranged, absurdist folly that describes our tragi-comic moment—‘carnival of stupidity’ to use Neil Acherson's term. See http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-europe_islam/cartoons_3242.jsp.
5 The information in this paragraph is taken from the report by Medacat, the British Medical ngo, Continuing Collateral Damage: The Health and Environmental Costs of the War on Iraq 2003, at http://www.medact.org/tbx/docs/Coll%20Dam%202.pdf.
8 As noted in media reports on the court martial case against Lynndie England, “The defence has always contended that Pte England and other soldiers were acting on orders of army intelligence officials, who wanted to soften up prisoners before they were interrogated.” See BBC news report “Woman soldier admits Iraq abuse”, 2 May 2005, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4504833.stm.
9 Michael Reissman, ‘Why regime change is (almost always) a bad idea’, American Journal of International Law, 98, 2004, pp 516 – 525.
10 Kofi Annan, quoted in ibid, p 517.
11 Reisman, ‘Why regime change is (almost always) a bad idea’, p 516.
12 Ibid, p 517.
13 Ibid, p 518.
14 Ibid, p 516.
15 Ibid, p 518.
16 Ibid, p 517.
17 Ibid, p 520.
18 Ibid, p 516.
19 Ibid, p 517.
20 Ibid, p 521.
21 Michael Reisman, ‘Assessing Claims to Revise the Laws of War’, American Journal of International Law, 97, 2003, p 90.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid, pp 90, 82.
24 Reisman, ‘Why regime change is (almost always) a bad idea’, p 517.
25 Ibid, p 520.
26 Neve Gordon, email note with reflections on the icj verdict, 9 July 2004.
27 Given the continuities and discontinuities between colonialism, the mandate system and neo-colonialism, this starting line provides an auspicious place to launch a critique of occupation. See Tony Anghie, Colonialism and the Birth of International Institutions: Sovereignty, Economy and the Mandate System of the League of Nations, New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, 34(3), pp 513 – 633, at http://www.nyu.edu/pubs/jilp/main/issues/34/pdf/34_3_k.pdf.
28 Seven months after receiving the request for its opinion, after written submissions by the Secretary General and 44 UN member states, including the Palestinian Authority, the icj issued its Opinion finding that Israel was in breach of international law, was to cease further construction, and dismantle the existing structure, and provide reparations for the damage caused so far. A near unanimous court passed the opinion, with Judge Buergenthal offering the only dissenting opinion.
29 Much of the court's opinion on human rights and humanitarian law violations reads like a laundry list of pro-forma arguments it wants to invoke to buttress its principle thrust against occupation. This is even noted by other members of the bench. For instance, in her separate opinion Judge Higgins notes that one would have expected that the ‘advisory opinion would have contained a detailed analysis, by reference to the texts, the voluminous academic literature and the facts’ (Paragraph 23) as to which provisions of humanitarian law were violated, particularly so given that there were some differences between the different court submissions on this subject.
30 David Bowie's lyrics regarding the wall dividing Europe seems to offer prescient advice to international law invocations of self-determination. Note his lyrics to ‘Heroes’: ‘We can be Heroes, We can be Heroes, We can be Heroes Just for one day. We can be Heroes, We're nothing, And nothing will help us, Maybe we're lying, Then you better not stay’.
31 Hardt & Negri, Multitude, New York: Penguin, 2004, p 29.
32 Pierre Bourdieu; ‘Social space and symbolic power’, Sociological Theory, 7, 1989, pp 14 – 25.
33 Hardt & Negri, Multitude, pp 28 – 29.
34 There is also the complementary but converse strategy of ‘scaling down’ to present the issues as merely a localised controversy. Working towards the same ends as the ‘scaling-up’ strategy, the ‘scaling-down’ strategy was also used in the course of the icj proceedings. The classification of territorial occupation has also been resisted through the argument that this is actually something much more modest—just a dispute between two parties. This doesn't implicate anything as grand as self-determination, or require the intervention of a body such as the icj; rather the parties just have to sit together and work it out in the peace process. To quote the written submissions of the UK again: ‘The issues are clearly part of a bilateral dispute between Israel and Palestine’ (para 3.32). In fact, it explicitly contrasts the decolonisation imperatives that gave rise to the issues at stake in the Western Sahara case to argue that: ‘By contrast, here the dispute over the wall has arisen out of the bilateral relationship between Israel and Palestine and the mutual recriminations between them over security issues’ (para 3.33). In fact, the UK states that transforming this bilateral issue into something larger will only distort and adversely impact the peace process between the two principal parties.
35 Hardt & Negri, Multitude, p 29.
36 Hardt & Negri, Multitude, p 29.
37 See Michel Foucault's reading of Immanuel Kant's essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Rainbow P (ed), Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Vol. 1 of the Essential Works of Michael Foucault 1954 – 1984, New York: The New Press, 1997, pp 309 – 319. Rather than seeing Kant as the messiah of modernity and the mother of all progress narratives, Foucault is interested in recuperating Kant as offering a history of the present and foregrounding the dominant preoccupation of modernity as persistent self-critique. Ibid, p 305.
38 Vasuki Nesiah, ‘From Berlin to Bonn: Militarization and Multilateral Decision-making’, Harvard Human Rights law Journal, Spring 2004.
39 John Kerry perhaps spoke for many advocates of empire when calling for a smarter war.
40 Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire, London: Routledge, 2002, p 299. It is in Empire that Hardt and Negri explicitly invoke the rhizome in their discussion of global information networks, as well as the possibilities of global democracy to which we will return later in this article.
41 Hardt & Negri, Multitude, p 207.
42 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: the tragedy of colonial enlightenment, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, p 1.