Forms Of Militarism Research Articles

Protecting the Other: Considering the process and practice of cosmopolitanism

The War on Terror has posed a difficult challenge for proponents of cosmopolitanism, through its invocation of cosmopolitan-like discourse, focused on emancipation, democracy promotion and the protection of human rights, in support of the controversial practices of warfighting and counterinsurgency, which sit uneasily with a cosmopolitan ethical position. More recently, the 2011 intervention in Libya has again highlighted the persistence of this militarized form of cosmopolitan practice with very limited reflection on the congruence between rhetoric and appropriate practice. This article argues that these contradictions should not necessitate a rejection of cosmopolitanism, but rather a critical rethinking of how cosmopolitan-informed policies are played out in practice. Proponents of cosmopolitanism must be aware that they do not have a monopoly on the use of cosmopolitan discourse and that it can be, and has been, used to legitimate practices which have not reflected what cosmopolitan scholars may have envisaged in theory. To address this, the article advances an idea of practical cosmopolitanism, one which is self-reflective, critically attuned to the practice of cosmopolitanism and focused on the experience of cosmopolitan-informed policies by the intended beneficiaries.

Culture of Crisis

Almost two years ago, when the editorial board of Architectural Histories proposed its first thematic issue of the journal, the topic of ‘crisis’ seemed timely. It alluded to the mounting bankruptcies of financial systems in America, the deterioration of economies in Europe, the perpetual failures of G20 summits on climate change, the rapid overthrow of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and the new geopolitical reconfigurations all this caused. It called to mind the disparate but constant rise of religious fundamentalisms and the reincarnation of forms of militarism, within and without national boundaries. In the world that came after Lehman Brothers, Fukushima, Mubarak, and Greece’s near default, historical contemplations on ‘crisis’ promised to give important perspectives on current culture and architecture. In addition, architecture has not only been infused with the realities of crisis, but sustained by them. Crises that arise in the world have forced practitioners to reconceptualize their stances towards social or political turmoil, their responses to scientific and technological breakthroughs, their attitudes to economic adversity or their relationships with other modes of cultural production. The theme of ‘crisis’ also resonated, as indeed it still does, with the internal crises of architecture. The quest for legitimate historical models or modes of production; the competing definitions of the profession; or the historiographic critiques that repeatedly reconceptualized the relationships between history, theory and design: all these underline the constructive possibilities of crisis and give a worthy purpose to Architectural Histories’ thematic call. From global events to the discipline’s own history, it was obvious that ‘crisis’ was certain to preoccupy architectural history, theory and practice for the next several years. The discipline was already faced with serious dilemmas. What would be the role of architectural production in saturated built environments in need of less (not more) building? What can historic cities be if heritage is a ‘business’? How might architecture’s environmental responsibilities be contemplated if ecology became a brand? Simultaneously, new questions were emerging: What does architectural production mean in the midst of changing public spaces, either due to neoliberal policies or to the riots reacting to those policies? How could architectural pedagogy constructively react to the ups-and-downs of the construction industry? What are architecture’s and urbanism’s subversive possibilities in the midst of all the expositions of state or institutional corruption? And what of architectural history?

Reflections from UC Davis: On Academic Freedom and Campus Militarization

The autumn of 2011 offered extraordinary images of police brutality against students (and not students alone) on University of California campuses. Two stand out, both seemingly following on from the national Occupy movement. On November 9, students attempting to 'occupy' a grassy area at the edge of Berkeley's famed Sproul Plaza, next to the Mario Savio Steps, were batoned by riot police summoned to campus by Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, first during the day, and then again that night when Occupy Cal returned. In no small part because a couple of professors were among the beaten, the event became a national news story. This would pale in comparison to events on the Davis campus nine days later, when a low-key tent occupation on the quad-Occupy UC Davis-was broken up by riot police summoned by Chancellor Linda Katehi from three jurisdictions. The images of one corpulent and distressingly nonchalant officer disbursing military-grade pepper spray to the faces of a couple dozen seated students would swiftly become one of the iconic images of the year, not just for the campus or the university but globally.In train, there has been considerable discussion of removing the Chancellors who either authorized such actions or were too incapable to command the situation adequately. There has also been a perhaps more consequential debate around the presence of police on college campuses, regarding either their presence per se (for those familiar with the internationally and historically common situation of police-free universities), or in terms of their increasingly militarized form. And these changes in campus dynamics- toward the heavy hand bearing advanced weaponry-have prompted concerns about the implications for the intellectual and academic pursuits of the university, and what we might expect to develop from here.I want to argue as directly as possible that grasping this new security regime as primarily pertinent to campus intellectual climate is misguided. While this line of inquiry is no trivial matter, it confuses and obscures core issues.The confusion comes from two entangled commonplaces regarding these dramatic events (and others like them in kind, if not in media saturation). The first is the assumption that we can identify in each case a two-part sequence of cause and effect, in which students protest and police overreact disastrously. The second (with evident implications for the question of academic freedom tout court), is that this to-and-fro is to be conceived exclusively as a freedom of speech issue.These assumptions form a unity. In this understanding, students first protest, as students are wont to do. The question arises as to the limits of protest, and to what extent certain actions-in this case, politicized camping- count as protected speech. 'Time, place, and manner' provisions are invoked; the police are summoned, heavy with tools. Orders to disperse are given, no dispersal is forthcoming, and then the intolerable thing happens, and everyone scrambles to understand and manage the aftermath.There can be no doubt that these 'overreactions' are judiciously calculated to produce a chilling effect on student struggle. As with the endless nuisance charges levied against student (and other) organizers, they are designed to exhaust resources, both inner and material. And further there can be no doubt that this chilling effect spills over to the entire campus. In this sense it is certainly reasonable to consider the implications of these actions for free thought and intellectual exploration.But there are also good reasons-better reasons, I believe-not to shiftthe debate onto the terrain of thought, ideas, expression, and so forth. It has suited all sides to allow that this drama revolves around First Amendment issues. Under considerable internal and external pressure, both Chancellors conceded that in these cases, the riot police may indeed have curtailed what really should be protected rights of speech and assembly. …

Iza Caparas: Painter of the Urban Life

The philosopher Paul Virilio believes that our life in the city is defined and determined by speed, which for him is a form of militarism combined with capitalism that structures our world in a constant state of crisis and an unending cold war of environmental and economic exploitation. Our alienation can be perfectly explained by our orientation to this speed that oftentimes leads to a proliferation of phantoms that obscure our perception of the world or to the saturation of images that deprives us of our energy. It is not surprising therefore that artists often depict the city in abstract forms, transparent, blurry, or glassy. It is as if these paintings try not just to present a space but also our attitude towards it, our way of seeing, including how we want to perceive or desire the city to be. This is the reason that painters and artists always endeavor positively to reinvent our vision of the world, and Iza Caparas’ Urban Life offers a different vista from what had been articulated already. And yet it adds to the whole discourse of city critique, and gladly leads us away from ruins, from the destruction of our milieu, and towards the ultimate acceptance of the other and of what is different.

The Liberal Party and the Navy League in Britain before the Great War

The decade preceding the outbreak of the First World War saw Great Britain engaged in a naval arms race of unprecedented expense against the German empire. The spiralling cost of armaments proved politically problematic for a Liberal ministry ostensibly committed to ‘Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform’. Outside the government, however, an organized navalist lobby agitated enthusiastically for ever greater levels of defence preparedness. Groups such as the Navy League have typically been regarded as bastions of the radical right. In fact, as this article demonstrates, Liberal engagement with and participation in the navalist lobby was far greater than historians have realized. Liberal MPs accounted for a significant portion of the Navy League’s support within Parliament, and Liberals held many leadership positions in the organization. These men were motivated by considerations of national defence, but they also identified their navalism as belonging to a coherent Liberal political tradition. The navy had long been associated with progressive political causes, above all with the maintenance of free trade, and was regarded as being free from the more regressive forms of militarism associated with standing armies. In this sense, navalism was not simply a phenomenon of the radical right; it also represented a distinctly Liberal form of militarism.

Zimbabwe's Long Agony

What mechanisms have ensured ZANU-PF’s enduring rule? This article identifies five: an ideological belief in a right to rule in perpetuity, a party machinery that penetrates the organs of state, a corrupted economy vested in the hands of party loyalists, an institutionalized role in policy making for military commanders, and a heavy reliance on violence, increasingly outsourced to auxiliary forces. Because the ZANU-PF regime—a militarized form of electoral authoritarianism—will outlast the Robert Mugabe’s political career or biological lifespan, it will affect the nature of any political transition and future prospects for democracy in Zimbabwe.

Dirty Democracy and State Terrorism: The Politics of the New Authoritarianism in the United States

ed from the ideal of public commitment, the new authoritarianism represents a political and economic practice and form of militarism that loosen the connections among substantive democracy, critical agency, and critical education. In opposition to the rising tide of authoritarianism, educators across the globe must make a case for linking learning to progressive social change while struggling to pluralize and critically engage the diverse sites where public pedagogy takes place. In part, this suggests forming alliances that can make sure every sphere of social life is recognized as an important site of the political, social, and cultural struggle that is so crucial to any attempt to forge the knowledge, identifi cations, effective investments, and social relations that constitute political subjects and social agents capable of energizing and spreading the basis for a substantive global democracy. Such circumstances require that pedagogy be embraced as a moral and political practice, one that is directive and not dogmatic, an outgrowth of struggles designed to resist the increasing depoliticization of political culture that is the hallmark of the current Bush revolution. Education is the terrain where consciousness is shaped, needs are constructed, and the capacity for individual self-refl ection and broad social change is nurtured and produced. Education has assumed an unparalleled signifi cance in shaping the language, values, and ideologies that legitimize the structures and organizations that support the imperatives of global capitalism. Efforts to reduce it to a technique or methodology set aside, education remains a crucial site for the production and struggle over those pedagogical and political conditions that provide the possibilities for people to develop forms of agency that enable them individually and collectively to intervene in the processes through which the material relations of power shape the meaning and practices of their everyday lives. Within the current historical context, struggles over power take on a symbolic and discursive as well as a material and institutional form. The struggle over education is about more than the struggle over meaning and identity; it is also about how meaning, knowledge, and values are produced, authorized, and made operational within economic and structural relations of power. Education is not at odds with politics; it is an important and crucial element in any defi nition of the political and offers not only the theoretical tools for a systematic critique of authoritarianism but also a language of possibility for creating actual movements for democratic social change and a new biopolitics that affi rms life rather than death, shared responsibility rather than shared fears, and engaged citizenship rather than the stripped-down values of consumerism. At stake here is combining symbolic forms and processes conducive to democratization with broader social contexts and the institutional formations of power itself. The key point here is to understand and engage educational and pedagogical practices from the point of view of how they are bound up with larger relations of power. Educators, students, and parents need to be clearer about how power works through and in texts, representations, and discourses, while at the same time recognizing that power cannot be limited to the study of representations and discourses, even at the level of public policy. Changing consciousness is not the same as altering the institutional basis of oppression; at the same time, institutional reform cannot take place without a change in consciousness capable of recognizing not only injustice but also the very possibility for reform, the capacity to reinvent the conditions 57. Maureen Dowd, “The Red Zone,” New York Times, 4 November 2004. 58. David Theo Goldberg, “The Sovereign Smirk,” Open Democracy, 3 November 2004, 3.

‘Guards and Guns’: Towards Privatised Militarism in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This article argues that contemporary South Africa is marked by the coexistence of both old and new forms of militarism. A shallow and uneven process of state demilitarisation was underway between 1990 to 1998 in the form of reductions in military expenditure, weapons holdings, force levels, employment in arms production and base closures. However, this has had contradictory consequences including providing an impetus to a ‘privatised militarism’ that is evident in three related processes: new forms of violence, the growth of private security firms and the proliferation of small arms. Since 1998 a process of re-militarisation is evident in the use of the military in foreign policy and a re-armament programme. Both trends illustrate how a restructured, but not transformed, post-apartheid army represents a powerful block of military interests.

Chaos and Globalization in the Middle East

AbstractThis paper examines the role of economic and cultural globalization in the interaction between Muslim and European public spheres. Focusing on the dynamics of globalization at three levels — broadly, in the Muslim world and in Europe — I argue that globalization today is both more complicated and less broad than most of its proponents or critics assume. While most commentators assume that it is a primarily economic phenomenon (and so focus on the impact of supposedly increased global economic integration or technological innovation), these phenomena are concentrated largely within the mature G-8 economies and the most successful recent industrializers (such as the "Asian tigers"), leaving much of the developing world marginalized from the emerging "globalized" economy as defined in the mainstream literature. In this context it is culture that is the most powerful driver of contemporary globalization as it is experienced in the Muslims' majority world and in Muslim communities in Europe. This dynamic, in turn, has a powerful impact on how Muslim public spheres are shaped across Eurasia, particularly in the context of a transformation in the nature of globalization in the wake of September 11 towards a more militarized form of global economic interaction. An exploration of the dynamics of chaos as a defining feature of this emerging global system in the Middle East and North Africa, and Europe as well, along with a discussion of the role of anti-Semitism in contemporary discourses of globalization in the MENA and Europe, reveal the challenges to building more positive "Euro-Islamic" public spheres.

V. Late Nineteenth-Century Colonial Expansion and the Attack on the Theory of Economic Imperialism: A Case of Mistaken Identity?

The concept of imperialism which Hobson, Lenin and the combined force of the international socialist movement forged into anidée fixeof the twentieth century was roughly handled by Western scholars long before 1945. But since then the attack has grown more precise and its character has altered. Among the first of the post-war historians (writing in English) to attempt the dethronement of imperialism as the demi-urge of the period between 1870 and 1914 was Richard Koebner. He determined on a semantic approach and put the term's linguistic history to rigorous scrutiny. On the philosophical assumption that a term's meaning is to be defined by its actual use and provenance in the political discourse in which it arose, he found that the modern concept of economic imperialism sprang out of a limited, local controversy over the nature of the Boer War. He concluded that it had been illicitly mated with other forms of militarism and economic expansion to spawn a hybrid, mythical monster that had been allowed to sprawl its length over more than half a century of world history.1

The Future of German Finance

The unconditional surrender of Germany has brought the end of the Nazi military machine. In the socio-economic sense, however, it has marked the mere beginning of a lengthy and intricate process of wiping out the vestiges of a totalitarian militarism whose hold upon the German nation had been practically unchallenged over a period of twelve years. If one important aspect-the financial-of economic policies in post-Hitler Germany is singled out in the discussion which follows, then the purpose is certainly not to minimize the importance of other policies in and toward that country. Reparations settlement, industrial disarmament, territorial adjustments and, last but not least, the economic destruction of the Junkers and monopolistic industrial combines are all of equal or greater importance. Likewise, the discussion of financial and other controls over present-day Germany should not arouse the impression that that nation is considered hopelessly and irrevocably imbued with the spirit of evil while all the others have been free of any guilt. Theories of immutable racial traits in black or white should remain the sad privilege of Nazism, and it is the underlying assumption of this whole discussion that social controls and adjustments of a suitable type may result at some future date in a lasting success of peace-minded forces. For the time being, however, the effect of the Nazi poison appears to be far-reaching, especially in dulling the sense of responsibility in the average German. The Western Allies, on their part, have at first concentrated their efforts on technical aspects of control without always realizing the basic necessity of wiping out inexorably all vestiges of Nazism and other forms of militarism, while encouraging consciously whatever traces of democratic and peaceful sentiments can be found in Germany. These general considerations apply to financial policy as much as to other fields.