‘One Island, One Team, One Mission’: Geopolitics, Sovereignty, ‘Race’ and Rendition

Abstract

This article interprets the strategies that have been associated with the war on terror against the backdrop of historical geographies of colonial violence and dispossession. It joins those who argue that wider anxieties about the sources of danger, criminality, violence and terror have become intertwined. These reveal as much about sensibilities of race, class and ‘security’ as they do objective dangers. Thus the article considers how, drawing on the British case, detentions and deportations marked by race are connected with and form part of an overlapping regime of ‘security’, ‘immigration’ and asylum. This is exemplified via an account of the trajectory British sovereign territory of Diego Garcia, leading to wider reflections on contemporary forms of sovereignty and the operation of ‘race’ in geopolitics.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Klaus Dodds, Alan Ingram, Robina Mohammad, David Newman and four anonymous referees for their constructive and very helpful comments on earlier drafts. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

1. <http://www.msc.navy.mil/mpstwo/garcia.htm>, accessed 2 Aug. 2008.

2. Cited in E. MacAskill and R. Evans, US Blocks Return Home for Exiled Islanders, The Guardian, 1 Sep., 2000, available at <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4057649,00.html>.

3. The article thus joins others who have focused on the implications of different aspects of the war on terror for configurations of sovereignty and territory; S. Elden, ‘Blair, Neoconservatism and the War on Territorial Integrity’, in K. Dodds, and A. Ingram (eds.), Spaces of Security and Insecurity: New Geographies of the War On Terror (Aldershot: Ashgate 2009) pp. 21–42; and S. Elden, ‘Contingent Sovereignty, Territorial Integrity and the Sanctity of Borders’, SAIS Review 26/1 (2006) pp. 11–24.

4. E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (Vintage: London 1994).

5. C. Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt 2004).

6. A. Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Mariner Books 1999).

7. M. Watts, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso 2002).

8. S. Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books 2006). See too W. Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (London: Zed 2003).

9. B. Anderson, ‘Petrus Dadi Ratu’, New Left Review 3 (2000) pp. 7–15.

10. For an account of this in the Indonesian case, see J. Roosa, ‘Review Essay. President Sukarno and the September 30^th Movement, Critical Asian Studies 40/1 (2008) pp. 143–159. More widely, see the many works of Noam Chomsky.

11. W. G. Weaver and Robert M Pallitto, ‘The Law: “Extraordinary Rendition” and Presidential Fiat’, Presidential Studies Quarterly 36/1 (2006) p. 103.

12. I. Cobain, ‘Torture: MPs Call for Inquiry into MI5 Role’ The Guardian, 15 July 2008, pp. 1–2.

13. J. D. Sidaway, ‘Intervention: The Dissemination of Banal Geopolitics. Webs of Extremism and Insecurity’. Antipode 40/1 (2008) pp. 2–8.

14. D. Gregory, ‘Vanishing Points. Law, Violence and Exception in the Global War Prison’, in D. Gregory and A. Pred (eds.), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence (London and New York: Routledge 2007) p. 208.

15. Ibid., pp. 229–230.

16. J. Conrad, The Heart of Darkness, (London and New York: Penguin 1999 [original 1899]) p. 8.

17. See K. P. Ewing, Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2008).

18. H. Aidi, ‘Jihadis in the Hood: Race, Urban Islam and the War on Terror’, Middle East Report 224 (2002) p. 36.

19. Ibid., p. 37.

20. See, inter alia, S. Gray, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (New York: St. Martin's Press 2006); A. C. Thompson and T. Paglen, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House 2006).

21. Sidaway, ‘Intervention’ (note 13).

22. I. Cobain and R. Norton-Taylor, ‘Claims of Secret CIA Jail for Terror Suspects on British Island to Be Investigated, The Guardian, 19 Oct. 2007, p. 24.

23. See J. Howard, ‘British Island Used by the US for Rendition’, The Observer, 2 March 2008, available at <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/02/ciarendition.unitednations>.

24. A. Zagorin, ‘Source: US Used UK Isle for Interrogations’, Time, 31 July 2008, available at <http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1828469,00.html>.

25. S. Jones, Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise (London: Little Brown 2007).

26. Initial compensation of £650,000 was paid in the 1970s. This was less than £500 per Ilois deportee. Further compensation of £4 million was paid in the early 1980s; around £2,000 per person. Further attempts to increase the amount of compensation have not been successful.

27. J. Madeley, Diego Garcia: A Contrast to the Falklands. The Minority Rights Group Report No. 54 (London: Minority Rights Group 1982).

28. D. R. Stoddart and J. D. Taylor (eds.), Atoll Research Bulletin 149. Geography and Ecology of Diego Garcia Atoll, Chagos Archipelago (Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution 1971).

29. See J. D. Sidaway, ‘What is in a Gulf?: From the ‘Arc of Crisis’ to the Gulf War’, in S. Dalby and G. Ó Tuathail (eds.), Rethinking Geopolitics (London and New York: Routledge 1998) pp. 224–239. For material on life at the US base and some contextual background, see the material cited in note 31.

30. C. Nauvel, ‘A Return from Exile in Sight? The Chagossians and Their Struggle’, Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights 5/1 (2006) pp. 97–98.

31. In the spirit of work on the genealogy of camps in Europe during and after the Second World War for example or work on US bases elsewhere. However the remoteness and inaccessibility of the site mean that such work as there is on Diego Garcia has mostly been archival; though two landmark studies appeared in 2009:

P. H. Sand, United States and Britain in Diego Garcia: The Future of a Controversial Base (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2009); and D. Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2009).

On one occasion when I presented this paper in a seminar, a few US service personal who had served on the island shared anecdotes. A search on the internet also yields scattered firsthand accounts see for example, <http://www.zianet.com/tedmorris/dg/links.html#>, photographs and ‘blogs’, such as this: Total, I've probably spent 1 1/2 or 2 years living on Diego Garcia. It is a very small island owned by the UK, and I assume the US pays a certain amount to have personnel and aircraft stationed there. The British military police still control the island. Not that many people are stationed there anymore. It is mainly a stopping point for military personnel going to or coming from the desert. The harbor is staged with ships full of supplies and vehicles that can be called on if needed. Air Force bombers did indeed fly missions out of there and probably still do (last time I was there was 2007). There are no native people there – the civilian workers there are brought in from the PI and other island nations. The section of the island that people actually live on is smaller than most college campuses.' Available at <http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread514118/pg1>, accessed 11 Nov. 2009.

32. B. Schwarz, ‘‘The Only White Man in There’: The Re-Racialisation of England, 1956–1968’, Race and Class 88/1 (1996) p. 65.

33. See <http://www.barbedwirebritain.org.uk/> For an account of the mixture of immobility, confinement and mobility that accompany this (and some of their consequences), see N. Gill, ‘Governmental Mobility: The Power Effects of the Movement of Detained Asylum Seekers Around Britain's Detention Estate’, Political Geography 28 (2009) pp. 186–196; N. Gill, ‘New State-Theoretic Approaches to Asylum and Refugee Geographies’, Progress in Human Geography 34/5 (2010) pp. 626–645; and the collection of essays in N. De Genova and N. Peutz (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 2010).

34. The full report is currently available at <http://www.medicaljustice.org.uk/images/stories/reports/outsourcing%20abuse.pdf>.

There is a strong sense of déjà vu on seeing the stories and images; so reminiscent are they of those that have emerged from Abu Ghraib, Guantanámo and other sites.

35. D. Bigo, ‘Detention of Foreigners, States of Exception, and the Social Practices of Control of the Banopticon’, in P. K. Rajaram and C. Grundy-Warr (eds.), Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2008) p. 25.

36. A. Worthington, The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 759 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (London: Pluto Press 2007).

37. Symptomatic of the genre are M. Begg and V. Brittain, Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim's Journey to Guantanamo and Back (London: Free Press 2006); and M. Kurnaz, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2008). More of these accounts are appearing. Five minutes browsing on Amazon.com will yield details of the most recent. See too the testimonies on <http://www.cageprisoners.com>.

38. C. Dyer, ‘Briton Sues Over Deportation as Failed Asylum Seeker’, The Guardian, 7 June 2008, p. 13.

39. E. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (London: Vintage 1981).

40. R. Jackson, ‘Constructing Enemies: ‘Islamic Terrorism’ in Political and Academic Discourse’, Government and Opposition 42/3 (2007) p. 365.

41. Ibid., pp. 400–401.

42. See <http://www.dg.navy.mil/web/>.

43. P. Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and The Allure of Race (London: Penguin 2000) p. 48.

44. Though see T. Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2001). The journal Diplomatic History has also become an important forum for scholarship on these intersections; to cite for example, from a recent paper there:

Equally important, it revealed the paradoxes that emerged as the Cold War superpowers supplanted traditional European empires in the years after World War II. Political space emerged for the articulation of alternative visions of world order – visions rooted in themes of racial justice, national sovereignty, and human rights – but actual initiatives were compromised by the imperatives of national security ideology and world capitalism. R. M. Irwin ‘A Wind of Change? White Redoubt and the Postcolonial Moment, 1960–1963’, Diplomatic History 33/5 (2009) p. 925.