Dialogue as a Relational Act: Sorely Needed in South Asia

Abstract

The Politics of Dialogue: Living Under the Geopolitical Histories of War and Peace. By Ranabir Samaddar. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 396 pp., $109.95 (ISBN: 0-7546-3607-07). Geopolitics conditions the practice of dialogue. This is the thesis of Ranabir Samaddar's The Politics of Dialogue . It is developed through a detailed examination of the history of South Asia from the partition in 1947 to the present—a period filled with “wars, fragile peace, endemic and structural violence, and a pervasive condition of no war-no peace” (p. 1). In South Asia, according to Samaddar, the establishment of postcolonial political systems eclipsed the practices of dialogue that had been so important during the resistance to colonial rule. Instead of recognizing the power of relationships built through dialogue, the political class that assumed governmental power after independence reverted to the traditional practices of constitutional government, which often left large elements of the body politic out of the political process. That same phenomenon has characterized the transitions from authoritarian to democratic systems in East Central Europe and South America in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many of those transitions were the product of citizens outside government working in concert through dialogic practices. When the governments they targeted fell, they and the new elites understandably turned to the traditional machinery of constitutional democratic government. Both failed to recognize until the mid-1990s that the politically active citizenries that brought about the transitions would be essential to sustaining them. When democratically elected governments failed to produce solutions in the 1990s, political activists began asking: “How can we …