BRIIFS Abstracts vol.3 no.2, 2001

The process of globalization involves the transnationalization of production and capital, which gives rise to global trade. This transformation from international to transnational capital signifies an “epochal shift” in the world economy that has a fundamental impact upon the nation-state. The paper discusses the role that the state plays in advancing globalization and how that role has metamorphosed since the previous epoch of the world economy, which was primarily characterized by the dominance of the multinational corporation. An examination of public policy reveals the power relations and dominant groups in society as well as the manner in which public policy has been globalized by the state. Hawaii is selected as a case-study to demonstrate this hypothesis. Hawaii’s case is noteworthy since it is part of the United States, yet exhibits some of the characteristics of a developing country due to its location in the Pacific basin. This dual identity indicates the complicated nature of public policy as the state machinery tries to compete to secure a solid beachhead for Hawaii within the global economy. But the state’s actions have a price: the alienation of large sectors of society, which have been harmed by this transformation and which demand decision-making powers in devising public policy. This expression of globalization in the social arena and its implications for political power are central points in the study of these global/transnational processes.

Mohammed A. Bamyeh

Postnationalism

This essay agues that the reduction in the cultural space occupied by the nation- state due to forces of globalization opens up hitherto less used spaces for expressions of solidarity and in ways that do not correspond to the old national mapping of the world. The new solidarities may be identified in terms of four central human values: i) interests (which give rise to material solidarities); ii) universality (which gives rise to humanist solidarities); iii) freedom (which gives rise to life-emancipatory solidarities); and iv) deep meaning (which gives rise to spiritual solidarities). The central argument is that, while nationalist ideology has claimed to provide for all such values and thus furnish a comprehensive existential outlook, globalization has fragmented this vision and led gradually to the creation of social networks clustering around one or another of these central values. The paper begins by giving a brief synopsis of the historical trajectory of postnationalism in Europe, moves on to outline different possible political reactions to globalization that may impede the progress of postnationalism and then charts out fundamental differences between nationalism and postnationalism (the latter accepting conceptual fragmentation of values, not insisting on being coterminous with state ideology and is oriented toward acquired, rather than given, identity).

Stephen Castles

LABOUR MIGRATION, TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITIES

AND STATE STRATEGIES IN EAST ASIA

This paper looks at conceptual and comparative dimensions of the emergence of transnational communities and discusses the applicability of theories largely developed in Western contexts for the Asia Pacific region, where the nation-state as a dominant political form is quite recent and often still in the process of formation. Young post-colonial states (albeit often with roots in antiquity) are trying to define national belonging and identity in a context not experienced by older nation-states in their period of formation: the context of globalization, mobile populations and the erosion of national boundaries. The paper starts by examining dominant attitudes concerning migration and settlement in the region and then looks at the way constructions of the nation-state are changing. The next section deals with the evolution of ideas and policies on controlling ethnic difference and goes on to discuss transnationalism and its consequences for the future of migration and the nation-state. A central argument of the paper is that the proliferation of transnational communities makes traditional nation-state strategies for controlling difference ineffective. Transnational theory is therefore of great importance for understanding contemporary developments in international migration, settlement and community formation. However, the forms of such developments in the Asia Pacific region differ from Western experiences due to specific historical and cultural contexts. Transnational processes are poorly understood by policy-makers in Asia, so that current migration policies are often ill-conceived, may fail to achieve their objectives and may, indeed, have negative consequences.

Ger Duijzings

‘ANCIENT ETHNIC HATREDS’ OR ‘A VERY MODERN WAR’?

ETHNIC UNMIXING IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA UNDER THE
AEGIS OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

In dominant Western perceptions of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the violence there has often been described as ‘archaic’ and ‘irrational,’ as the result of deeply-rooted ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ that have resurfaced after forty years of communism. In this paper, I argue that the violence has had profoundly rational dimensions and has been primarily ‘European’ in origin: it is a European ideal, that of the nation-state, which has been the objective of most of this violence, of ethnic cleansing and of other forms of ethno-demographic engineering. The violence served to homogenize populations by establishing clear boundaries, undivided loyalties and unambiguous identities out of a situation of mixture that nationalists perceived as one of ‘impurity’ and ‘contamination.’ In spite of supporting ideas of a multicultural society, the West has actually helped to facilitate the process of ethnic unmixing in the region, by perceiving the wars exclusively in ethnic terms (that is, in terms of perpetual conflict between fixed and stable ethnic groups) and by acting and intervening accordingly. This case shows that, in this era of globalization and transnational contact, the modernist project of creating nation-states is still a very important force.

Michael C. Hudson

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

AND THE POLITICAL CULTURE REVOLUTION

IN THE ARAB WORLD

The recent and accelerating implantation of satellite television, cellular telephony and the internet in the Arab world is revolutionizing the established patterns of identity and authority, and redistributing political power and influence. Driven by globalization and a new generation of élites and leaders, old categories of political identity and affiliation are eroding and new ones are emerging. Prophecies of an end of ideology or history, however, are dubious, as are predictions of political fragmentation and extremism. More likely is the development of multiple, cross-cutting, interest-based communities and enhanced governmental capacities. The full realization of these potentialities depends upon the attitudes of the new ‘information élites’ and the commitment of new leaders to the relegitimization of government through the expansion of meaningful participation.

Michael Humphrey and Maroun Kisirwani

IMPUNITY, NATIONALISM AND TRANSNATIONALISM: THE
RECOVERY OF THE ‘DISAPPEARED’ OF LEBANON

Transnationalism is generally juxtaposed to the national as a process in which the former grows at the expense of the latter. This paper explores the way in which transnational ethical and legal movements are being used to reconstitute, rather than undermine, the national. The focus of the paper is political amnesty, justice and the limits of national reconstruction in Lebanon after the 1975-90 civil war. The predicament of the ‘disappeared’ is used to measure the extent of national reconciliation and the lack of international interest in the individual/ human rights of Lebanese. The inability to redeem the casualties of the war, including the disappeared, is indicative of the cost of impunity and non-accountability for past as well as present crimes. The anthropological significance of recovering the disappeared as part of national reconstruction goes beyond the desire for a ritual socialization of individual death. It is an important medium for the social reconstitution of the individual citizen and the recovery of identity and law within the national community. The paper explores the role transnational human rights movements and legal prosecutions for ‘crimes against humanity’ have played in national reconciliation elsewhere and how they apply to the Lebanese case. It also points to the potential role of the transnational Lebanese diaspora in reconstituting Lebanese state sovereignty and citizenship.

Elizabeth Jelin

HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISM IN THE SOUTHERN CONE: FROM
NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY TO TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS

Grounded in the experience of military regimes and processes of transition in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil, this paper explores the way in which issues related to human rights violations have been redefined in the region during the last 25 years. Military dictatorships coordinated their repression at a regional level (Operation Condor), engaging in actions beyond the borders of each state. At the same time, human rights organizations acted in the context of ‘regional solidarity.’ During processes of transition to the rule of law and growing international attention to these issues, global and transnational institutionsŒincluding international and third-country systems of justiceŒhave taken the lead in addressing questions that were previously defined as ‘national.’ This shift implies a major redefinition of notions of sovereignty, ‘national security’ and internal versus international affairs. The paper discusses the implications of such redefinitions for nationalisms and national identities.

Bruce Kapferer

GLOBALIZATION, THE STATE AND CIVIL VIOLENCE IN SRI LANKA

The formation of the modern Sri Lankan state and the relationship between this formation and patterns of civilian and ethnic violence constitute the central themes of this paper. Within this context, the paper explores orientations to nationalism and the nature of the post-colonial state, forces of identity and violence. It takes issue with some conventional arguments concerning ethnic identity, arguing that the force of ethnicity is grounded in social relations and only secondarily in particular constructions of identity. It is through the historical processes of colonial and post-colonial state formation that ethnicity and its subjectivities have come to have the force that they do. This does not ignore the importance of how the state is imagined, ethnicity being an aspect of the state imaginary. The paper discusses the role of ritual and religion, particularly Buddhist revitalization, as well as the ancient chronicles of religious history, in the production of the imaginary of the state. The argument then moves to a discussion of state and anti-state terror and violence and describes how they are shaped in different kinds of political process, the violence of the state being distinct from that of the terrorist groups that confront it. Overall, the article explores the various social and ideological threads that weave through the long history of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. This history is one that passes from the era of the post-colonial nation-state to a contemporary globalized era of weakened post-colonial state forms. The discussion concludes with a brief consideration of the social and political circumstances that may lead to the resolution of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict or further inflame it.

Cilas Kemedjio

REMEMBERING GLOBALIZATION: FRAGMENTED STATES, THE
DEFERRED GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE GLOBALIZED
‘HUMANITARIAN MISUNDERSTANDING’

Historical fatality may be defined as an historical factor or ensemble of historical factors that act as a defining element in a people’s existence. History, through its invasive, permanent and enslaving influence, assumes the face of the powers of destiny. Postcolonial thinkers write the history of this disoriented and disorderly reaction to the colonial act and, in exploring the mechanisms of historical fatality, seek to master it. For African peoples, accounts of globalizations have thus far taken on the cast of a perpetual historic fatality. This paper represents a counter-discourse that finds its theoretical home in the tradition of postcolonial thinking, that is, in the intellectual enterprise that challenges the ‘colonizer’s truth’ by considering the ‘truth of the colonized.’ It offers an exploration of the ‘humanitarian misunderstanding’ that underlies the postcolonial state’s structural impossibility, weakens it and, indeed, leads to its ultimate disintegration. This study further considers how the financial dependence of postcolonial civil society risks reproducing the model of dependence that has made it impossible for the postcolonial state to establish its credibility. Finally, it also discusses the two competing models for the reconfiguration of the global village: the normative economic model and the voluntarist model of global civil society.

Ann Mosely Lesch

THE INTENSIFICATION OF INTERNAL CULTURAL

CONTRADICTIONS IN AN ERA OF GLOBALIZATION:

THE CASE OF THE SUDAN

The ruling élite in the Sudan defines the Sudanese nation in its own image: Arab and Muslim. This ethnically-based concept of nation is rejected by the African half of the population, many of whom adhere to traditional religions or Christianity rather than Islam. As the élite has entrenched itself, the politicization of religio-ethnic identity has increased and polarization has hardened. The concept of a common citizenry based upon ‘Sudanness’ has receded, despite sporadic efforts to assert that trans-ethnic concept. The intensification of sub-national identities has fragmented the country. Northern Muslims who are not Arab (for example, Nuba, Beja) reassert their identity in reaction to the narrow Islamizing project of the current regime. Within the south, internal tensions and social dislocations set indigenous peoples against each other as well as against the central government. Two key cultural and economic components of globalization that affect the Sudan have exacerbated internal tensions: first, the rise of a transnational Islamist movement, which has enhanced the political aspirations of the Islamist élite and, second, the search for oil, which has hardened the ruling élite’s insistence upon controlling the oilfields in the south and displacing indigenous African peoples from those areas. These globalizing forces have intensified internal cultural and political contradictions in the Sudan.

Leif Manger

HADRAMIS IN SINGAPORE: MAKING MUSLIM SPACE

IN A GLOBAL CITY

This paper deals with the migration of people from Hadramaut, in Yemen, to Singapore, looking both at the historical circumstances that led to their early success in the city and also at the contemporary ones that constrain the maintenance of Hadrami identities and the community’s continued involvement in its traditional adaptations to the Singaporean environment. The paper discusses transnational movement, the character of the nation-state and the nature of contemporary globalization as frameworks for the various ways in which different groups of Hadramis define themselves within a global city such as Singapore. It also examines internal Hadrami ways of organizing themselves. Traditional factors, such as kinship and marriage, are central, as are associations like the Tariqa al-Alawiyya, a network based partly upon the bonds of kinship and partly upon the organizational principles found among Muslim Sufi groups. More modern cultural organizations, such as the Arab Association, are contemporary adaptations for the maintenance of identity and for the promotion of links to the Middle East and to the Yemeni homeland, links through which commercial interests can be pursued. By way of these discussions, the paper tries to deal with issues of importance to the further development of an historically-oriented anthropology.

Kazuhiko Okuda

TRANSNATIONALISM AND THE MEIJI STATE: ON THE QUESTION

OF CULTURAL BORROWING

As recently as 2000, J. Nye Jr., a noted scholar of international relations, reiterated the well-known truism that Japan was Asia’s first ‘globalizer.’ Less known or less comprehensible is the actual nature of the Meiji state, which was culturally transformed into what some have described as a hybrid form combining contemporaneous Japanese and Western norms. Other historians, such as F. Braudel, have described the state in terms of the “duality of the traditional, awe-inspiring Emperor’s power and the modern.” The hybrid or dual form of the Meiji state was a ‘cultural construct’ fabricated on the basis of governmental and national/local interaction with the study missions sent to the West during the late Tokugawa and early Meiji eras. These experiences may also be referred to as transnational/local interactions or, in the words of M. Bamyeh, as one of the “historical relatives of transnationalism” and perhaps the greatest such experiment in international history dealing with “culturally meaningful borders.” In this context, the paper attempts to analyze the processes involved in the cultural construction of the Meiji state by drawing upon the experiences of the Iwakura mission to America and Europe (1871-73), which had decisive consequences, both positive and negative, for Japan and its Asian neighbours.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse

FAULT LINES OF TRANSNATIONALISM:

BORDERS MATTER

Examining transnationalism requires combining long-term and holistic views. The long-term view questions the newness of transnationalism. The holistic view signals that increasing transnationalism in communication, production, consumption and travel accompanies the emergence of new borders (as in rising restrictions on migration) and new politics of risk containment (as in relation to conflict areas). As some boundaries fade, others emerge that are new and/or internal; moreover, the advantages of the erasure of boundaries are by no means evenly distributed. In this complex assessment of transnationalism, the enlargement of economic and political influence and the containment of risk go together. Several accounts refer to the breaking down of bo undaries, but the present day is, in fact, a time in which borders are being redrawn and redefined.

Estela Valverde

THE EXPERIENCE OF EXILIO AND INSILIO IN RESHAPING

URUGUAYAN IDENTITY

In the 1970s and 1980s, Uruguay experienced a dual process of denationalization that occurred when economic and political crisis culminated in a repressive military dictatorship. Denationalization involved actual flight from the country (exilio) or retreat into private worlds (insilio or ‘internal exile’). The oppressive coercion of the dictators stripped Uruguayans of their individual rights and put approximately one in six of them into prison, where many were tortured. The dictators not only abandoned the ideals that had united Uruguayans, but also the social welfare system that they had constructed. The return of democracy has not reversed the experience of denationalization. The economy has not recovered and many returning exiliados re-migrated when they were unable to find employment. Politically, individual rights have been circumscribed by amnesty laws that have given complete impunity to the former military and political élite. At present, insiliados and victims of state repression are collecting evidence to seek legal redress in third-country prosecutions, while human rights activists are pursuing transnational strategies to recover legal rights at home. From across national boundaries, the diaspora community has been instrumental in achieving this goal by providing the necessary links to international bodies. It remains to be seen whether this attempt to recover individual rights will help in the reconstruction of Uruguayan national citizenship and identity.

Saskia Van Hoyweghen

MOBILITY, TERRITORIALITY AND SOVEREIGNTY IN

POST-COLONIAL TANZANIA

Growing hostility toward refugee populations in Tanzania (attitudes which are displayed both by local communities and by political authorities) is often explained by the fact that refugee numbers have dramatically increased over the last decade. In this type of analysis, an increased refugee presence is demonstrated to have a negative impact upon the economy and environment of the host region. However, changing attitudes toward (forced) migrants cannot be explained solely in terms of rising crime rates or deforestation statistics, since these are all relative; rather, a more critical analysis of changing refugee representations is necessary. Perceptions of social and political community in general are the objects of ongoing negotiations. This paper addresses the question of why the position of (forced) migrants has changed within Tanzania’s wider socio-political community from the 1970s to the 1990s; or, to phrase it in more general terms, how mobility relates to concepts of community, social identity and sovereignty. My focus in this paper is upon Tanzanian policy makers and their viewpoints concerning the relationship between the nation-state and mobility. While control over mobility was deemed necessary for national economic development in the 1970s, it began to become a security issue in the 1980s. However, there is a whole set of actors trying to claim the refugee as a subject for their policies and some of them are in a better position to do so than others.

Andrew Vincent

TRANSNATIONALISM ON CAMPUS: THE TEACHING OF MIDDLE
EAST POLITICS BY INTERACTIVE COMPUTER-BASED SIMULATIONS

This paper explores the internationalization of higher education through the teaching of political science over the internet using complex role-playing exercises involving two or more universities or sites. For several years, Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia has pioneered a method of teaching the politics of the Middle East through interactive computer-based simulations. These simulations have been showcased to the OECD as one of the four best examples of the internationalization of education in Australia. The paper examines the mechanics and implications of this innovative teaching method.

C. J. W.-L. Wee

BEYOND THE POTEMKIN METROPOLIS: CREATING AND FILMING
THE HOMOGENIZED SINGAPORE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Singapore is an Asian city-state in which the contradictions of becoming modern are seemingly resolved by state-directed technological or technocratic means. Its post-colonial urbanism represents a radical statist modernity that seems to be part of a now-lost world of liberal and Enlightenment confidence and that has been achieved in an illiberal political environment open to globalization. It is necessary to understand what it means when the ‘West’ becomes part of a self-administered and not neo-colonialist process of modernization, one in which cultural translation has effectively taken place. This statist modernization, though, is not one necessarily fully embraced by the city-state’s population. There are now assertions of the importance of ‘culture’ (only recently considered by the government to be a resource useful for economic development) which, in the case of recent films that try to reflect local identity, demand both a ‘Westernization’ and an ‘Asianization’ of depth, rather than of surfaces, to gain what might be described as ‘other experiences of the present’ apart from the dominant economism. The globalized ‘condition’ is a multi-layered one.

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