Imperial Practices Research Articles

Producing ‘responsible’ self-governance: counterinsurgency and the violence of neoliberal rule

ABSTRACTThis article analyses western counterinsurgency as a neoliberal assemblage of war, police and government ‘at a distance’. It will show that based on so-called lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, western counterinsurgency has increasingly shifted towards ‘intervention at-a distance’ aimed at enabling local powerbrokers to become more capable of fighting insurgents, of policing their population and of governing more responsibly. This bears a strong similarity to the old imperial practice of indirect rule. And, just like indirect rule, intervention at a distance rarely if ever succeeds in promoting responsible self-governance. In fact, counterinsurgency-type interventions frequently end up exacerbating the very irresponsible and illiberal types of governance that lead to instability in the first place. The article shows that the coercion and violence of counterinsurgency operations flows directly from its attempts to promote responsible self-governance and from the very likely failure of these attempts. This also has implications for neoliberal rule in general. The conclusion will thus consider whether a critical reading of neoliberal counterinsurgency may also lead to an insurgent reading of neoliberal rule in general.

The Cry for Human Rights: Violence, Transition, and the Egyptian Revolution

This paper interrogates moments in which American corporate media, the U.S. government, and U.S. academic discourses have relied upon what we call a liberal-Orientalist “cry for human rights” to represent the Egyptian revolution. We focus on U.S. public discussions regarding: 1) the process of transition following the Egyptian revolution, and 2) violence—specifically, gendered sexual violence and torture in Egypt. We are particularly concerned with how this framing of human rights both relies upon and reinforces global neoliberalism and its attendant forms of violence. We argue that analyses framed as a “cry for human rights” fail to account for the complex and dynamic historical and political contexts in which violence and transition take place, and the multiple, interconnected structures of power that impact revolutionary change. Far from questioning the value of protecting women’s rights or human rights, our goals are to examine the limitations inherent to liberal-Orientalist epistemological frameworks and highlight the connections between interpersonal violence, Egyptian state violence, and U.S.-led imperial practices in Egypt.

Imperial Practice and the Making of Modern Japan's Territory: Towards a Reconsideration of Empire’s Boundaries

A renewed focus on the notion of empire has prompted an interest in questions of modern Japanese imperialism after the Meiji Restoration, both in Japan and abroad. It has also focused attention on the issue of comparing empires across Eurasia during the early modern period, under the rubric of ‘global history’. Japan has not really been incorporated into this latter discussion. This article begins by examining the reasons for this lack of incorporation, before moving on to discuss the value of considering early modern Japan as an imperial formation. The lens it adopts is one of cartography, that quintessentially imperial practice that has featured heavily in discussions of a Eurasian early modernity. The article examines the cartographic incorporation of Japan’s northern region of the Yezo into Japan itself, culminating in the area being newly designated as Hokkaido in the early Meiji period, the newest circuit within Imperial Japan’s administrative map. This political outcome was the result of varied practices that found reflection across the Tokugawa–Meiji divide. Yet this intense variety of practices, constantly shifting in response to contingency, served to form the state-effect, through which the land of Yezo was granted its unity and represented on the map. The territory on the map provided the visual, graphic representation of the demarcation of authority of the state that authorized the practice of its own mapping. In this manner, the state mapped itself into Hokkaido and from this perspective, the division between the early modern and modern eras is far less significant than is frequently assumed.

Introduction: Jeff Guy and Norman Etherington

Introduction:Jeff Guy and Norman Etherington Gerhard Maré (bio) Jeff Guy died in December 2014. He was on his way back to Durban, South Africa, from the UK, after speaking at a conference commemorating the life of bishop John Colenso. Guy’s biographic study, The Heretic, recounted Colenso’s life and work. The bishop had been a thorn in the flesh of colonial Natal and supporter of black people in Natal as well as the Zulu kingdom, during the nineteenth century. Colenso’s daughter, Harriette, became an avid anti-imperialist in her own right and was the topic of Guy’s book, The View Across the River. Another, and quite different, prominent personality of colonial Natal occupied the last seven years of Jeff Guy’s life. That book, Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal: African autonomy and settler colonialism in the making of traditional authority was published in 2013. The editors of Transformation asked historian Norman Etherington, based in Perth, to review this important book. It was an appropriate choice: Etherington is among the most important scholars of nineteenth century Natal and Zulu history. Like Jeff, he has exposed essential aspects of settler-colonial society and influenced many students and scholars. Yet, as sometimes happens with researchers who exercise dedication and who deeply care about their work, events around this request proved painful to both Jeff and Norman. The review became an exchange, one in which both parties expressed disappointment about an endangered friendship and collegiality, and even anger. Yet the exchange was far from merely ‘personal’. It also raised very important issues of historiography, methodology, interpretation and analysis, and thus itself offers an engaging contribution to researching and understanding repertoires of colonial rule, both in Natal and further afield, and its various legacies. The review Norman submitted was very long, an essay more than a review, [End Page 49] raising a number of sharp issues with many detailed examples. The editors decided that it could not be published as a usual review: meanwhile, as often happens in small circles, Jeff got wind of the review and asked to be allowed to respond and that both pieces appear together. The editors, worried about setting a precedent, initially rejected this idea, and considered that another journal might be a better forum for both pieces, where they could be run together as a debate. Yet, the journal in question then ceased to publish and Jeff’s unexpected death created a sense of further unease about how to proceed. In July 2015 I spoke to Norman at the Southern African Historical Society conference. I put to him that the debate should appear. At first we thought it should be possibly as an edited and slightly revised version from him and careful and sensitive edit of Jeff’s response–ensuring that the core issues remain for access by a wider readership. Yet, upon later reflection, it seemed important to leave the pieces as they were originally written–to allow the exchange to appear in these pages as the passionate and indeed caustic battle that it is. What are the core issues? The first, and probably most important, is that it showcases the seriousness of two scholars operating in the same field, both willing to respond to each other in terms set by disciplined scholarship and research, drawing on their own deep familiarity with sources, events, and personalities. Second, both are quite aware of the wider implications and legacies, for understanding the local as well as the wider implications of their analysis and arguments to British imperial practice. Third, it illustrates how methods and methodological approaches hold enormous implications for how arguments are constructed, and how the wider political relevance of history is at stake in how sources are interpreted. And, finally, South, southern, and African historiography more generally can only benefit from these interchanges–no matter the personal dimensions. It is also in remembrance of Jeff Guy as friend and colleague that we publish the pieces below, in the belief that those affected by him, as scholars themselves, will appreciate ‘hearing’ his voice once again. And we appreciate that Norman took his task seriously and then allowed us still to run his contribution...

Armenia: Nation-Building, Imperial Practices and Ethnic Nationalism as Means of Survival

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of hybrid political space of post-Soviet Armenia, combining institutions of the nation state and the imperial practices. In the article, the author analyzes the experience of building a modern state in Armenia on the basis of security concerns and as an actor in international politics. In this context the hybrid political space, allow to face foreign and domestic challenges. However, such a hybrid system leads to the erosion of state and the expansion of traditional (pre-modern) practices.

The Imperial Visual Archive: Images, Evidence, and Knowledge in the Early Modern Hispanic World

This article examines the role of images as evidence and sources of knowledge in the early modern Hispanic world, arguing for the continued importance of visual epistemology as a technique for producing and circulating knowledge from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Visual materials played a central role in the production of knowledge, scientific and imperial, and served as key instruments for addressing the considerable challenges of distance and place posed by the geographical expanse of the empire. Historiographically, the article highlights the active generation of scientific knowledge in the Hispanic world and connects it to imperial and administrative practices; it highlights trans-regional channels of circulation, demonstrating the connected histories of the viceroyalties and peninsula and the multidirectional trajectories in which information and knowledge moved; and it points out deep connections between earlier and later colonial periods. Methodologically, the essay explores the potential of images as historical sources, suggesting that the high status of images in the early modern Hispanic world led to the creation of an enormous pictorial archive that deserves the same level of scholarly attention and rigor that has been lavished on the textual archive.

Ben-Hur and the Spectacle of Empire

Ben-Hur and the Spectacle of Empire Mark Storey (bio) For visitors to Manhattan in the last days of the nineteenth century, there could have been few more spectacular sights than the Dewey Arch. Occupying a prime spot in Madison Square, the eighty-five-foot-tall structure—flanked by six decorated columns and adorned in flamboyant beaux-arts sculpture—had been designed by Charles L. Lamb to commemorate Admiral George Dewey’s victory in the Battle of Manila Bay just a few months before. As crowds gathered on September 29, 1899 to witness the parade in Dewey’s honor (not far from another and now more famous triumphal arch, this one for George Washington), the symbolism of the Dewey structure could hardly have been more resonant. It had been partly modelled, like Washington’s, on the Arch of Titus in Rome; completed in 85CE by the Emperor Domitian to commemorate his brother Titus (and in particular Titus’s victory at Jerusalem in 70CE), it was, like most Roman triumphal arches, a confident testament to the irresistible might of Rome’s imperial reach. The Dewey Arch, in a similar vein, was built to celebrate a moment of military victory, a battle which had seen U.S. forces destroy the Spanish flotilla and all but secure the Philippines as an overseas territory. It was, in David Brody’s words, the “material manifestation of America’s newfound interest in displaying the vast possibilities of empire.”1 Much of the violent reality of the battle is naturally enough absent from the arch’s jingoistic and idealised sculptural adornments, representing what the National Sculpture Society called the “four patriotic steps”: patriotism, war, triumph, and peace.2 It is this absence, this imposing statement of apparently benevolent and progressive intervention, which makes the Dewey Arch a pertinent starting point here. By way of overt iconography as well as implied analogy, the arch brought the implications of Roman imperial history into the [End Page 85] center of modern America, and yet even as it did so it served to reinforce and perpetuate a long history of imperial denial. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. William H. Rau, Dewey Arch, New York City, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. This essay argues that one of the most phenomenally successful and widely-read novels of the nineteenth-century, Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), acted to naturalize and inscribe in narrative terms something the Dewey Arch was doing monumentally—namely, the role of spectacle in the public life of U.S. imperialism. The novel performs a significant social function, I suggest, not as a self-conscious allegory of imperialism as such but as an index to a recurring pattern of imperial logic, acting to displace the political present into a romance of a geographically-distant ancient past. In this way, Ben-Hur not only helped to domesticate an imperial structure of feeling that allied spectacle with denial, but in doing so it allows us to reconstitute the ways in which that structure ordered (or at least attempted to order) the discourses of everyday life. Situating the novel within its own moment whilst bringing to bear the much longer [End Page 86] imperial history it self-consciously engages with, I argue that Ben-Hur registers in its spectacular set pieces an abstract notion that is normally much harder to grasp: the ubiquity and invisibility of imperial ideology. What is more, I want to use Ben-Hur to raise some broader points about the place of the historical novel and historical analogy in the cultures of U.S. imperialism. The kind of popular romance that Wallace’s novel in many ways exemplifies, conventionally excluded from accounts of the period’s literary history,3 ask us to look again at our tendency to define the modernity of the Gilded Age as a social and technological transformation or as a decisive turn to a twentieth-century world yet to come. If the novel is “one of the chief cultural means of legitimating imperial practices,”4 and if the specifically historical novel is, as Lukács claimed, a product of emerging national consciousness...

Das Massaker von Paris

In the light of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, this essay seeks to analyse and understand the objective conditions and power relations within the capitalist world system as they have unfolded since the end of the Soviet Union. Its specific point is to understand the role of the leading strategies and practices of imperialism and of socalled „political Islam“within these conditions and power relations. The main strategies aim at fostering bonapartist, fascist and right-wing ideologies at home, in the dominant imperialist countries that is, and structurally reactionary/„Islamist“ ideologies in the periphery to, both, strengthen the leading factions of capital in the imperialist centres. The essay claims that the only viable option for the left is to remain independent of and in active opposition to the strategies of imperialism. Furthermore the left will have to take up the fight against creatures such as the Islamic State that were provided a fertile ground and nurtured by imperialism. It also concludes that the left has to defend and engage its own independent democratic and socialist perspective countering both the powers of imperialism in the centres and reaction in the periphery.

L’invention de l’Asie centrale. Histoire du concept de la Tartarie à l’Eurasie [Rayon historire de la librarie DROZ] by Svetlana Gorshenina (review)

Reviewed by: L’invention de l’Asie centrale. Histoire du concept de la Tartarie à l’Eurasie [Rayon historire de la librarie DROZ] by Svetlana Gorshenina Anna MATOCHKINA (bio) Svetlana Gorshenina, L’invention de l’Asie centrale. Histoire du concept de la Tartarie à l’Eurasie [Rayon historire de la librarie DROZ] (Geneva: DROZ, 2014). 704pp. ISBN: 978-2-600-01788-6. The Invention of Central Asia: The History of the Concept of Tartary in Eurasia continues the line of inquiry started by Svetlana Gorshenina in her doctoral thesis “From Tartary to Central Asia: The Heart of the Continent in the History of Ideas, Between Cartography and Geopolitics,” and continued in a study of the history of Turkestan from 1860 to 1936 Central Asia: The Invention of Borders and the Russo-Soviet Heritage.1 The new book by Gorshenina is an attempt to reconstruct a genealogy of a modern and purely analytical concept of Central Asia, which gained prominence in academic and then political discourse only in the nineteenth century (P. 21). This complex task required the author to turn to history, geography, and cartography in order to identify the spatial formations (both natural and political) that eventually gave shape to the notion of Central Asia, as well as the terms used throughout time to denote these formations. According to Gorshenina, one category of the regional spatial nomenclature had been inherited from antiquity (e.g., Aria, Bactriana, Sogdiana, Serika) or mythology (referring to the space inhabited by the people of Gog and Magog, or the Turan−Iran opposition). Others referred to linguistic groups of the population (Asia Turkic, Iranian, or Mongolian) and “tribal” (ethnic) territories (Scythia, Tartaria, and Turkestan). Later on, religious and cultural unity acquired a spatial dimension (e.g., the worlds of Muslims, Buddhists, Turks, Iranians, etc.), followed recently by economic notions (the Transcaspian region). Throughout the centuries, the lands of what we call Central Asia today have been conceptualized in geographical (Mawarannahr, Transoxiana, and Zhetysu) or metageographical terms (Middle Asia, Central Asia, Inner Asia, and Highland Asia). Finally, the space was delineated by political and administrative units (Bukhara, Afghan/Russian/Chinese Turkestan, Turkestan General-Governorship, Samarkand region, Uigur autonomous region or Hinjan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan). [End Page 580] Reconstructing the social construction of space, Gorshenina coordinates several levels of discourse: scientific vocabulary, philosophical views, geopolitical programs of political or military expansion, imperialist practices of European nations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and public misperceptions formed by the conventions of the time and “national traditions” (P. 33). The scope of the research design predetermined the vast variety of primary sources employed in the study: academic and general interest publications, maps, and documents in several languages from state and private archives in France, Italy, Uzbekistan, and Russia. The clearly structured book is illustrated with excellent cartographic material, which greatly helps readers to follow the author’s argument. The book opens with a survey of the first drawings of the lands of would-be “Central Asia” in the times of the Achaemenid dynasty and Greco-Roman authors, including ancient historians and geographers such as Hecataeus of Miletus, Herodotus, Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, and Ephorus. Of no less importance are the views of Arab and Persian geographers, as they greatly widened the knowledge of the region. On the mental map of Islam, the world is divided into dar al-Islam (the area of Islam) and dar al-Kufr (the area of faithlessness), so the spatial identification of a region starts from ascribing it to one of these categories. Under the Samanid dynasty, which recognized the authority of the Abbasid Caliphate and kept Turkic nomads in check, parts of modern-day Central Asia definitely belonged to the dar al-Islam of the Arab-Muslim world. (Regardless of their religious affiliation, the world of Turkic nomads was perceived as a kingdom of the unfaithful.) The epoch of the Sasanian dynasty was the time of the economic, scientific, and cultural revival, evidence of which can be found in the description of East Iranian regions by Arab writers. Their works used the geographic concept of Mawarannahr – “what (is) beyond the river,” which means the territories on the right bank of the Amu Darya River...

Conquest’s Child: Gold, Contracts, and American Imperialism in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It?

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) illustrates how U.S. imperialism has all but rendered contractual relations between Mexicans and Anglo Americans an impossibility, thereby creating an untenable merger between a republic founded on consensual relations and an empire created through the abridgement of consent. This essay argues that Ruiz de Burton engages the postbellum discourses of gold, value, and race in order to address the deleterious consequences of racializing Mexicans for the purposes of plunder. The text illustrates how the nation’s imperialist practices were creating two systems of meaning—one contractual and the other imperial, which in turn has created a world of contradictions. To be both a republic and an empire means to be both white and Native American, businessman and plunderer, civilized and barbaric. These contradictions debase the value of whiteness and gold, values that only contractual relations can uphold.

CULTURE, PSYCHE AND STATE POWER

The discipline of anthropology has perhaps always been especially close to the exercise of state power, but, in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, the nature of both anthropology and state power changed dramatically. This was a period when many anthropologists distanced themselves from earlier evolutionist accounts that traced a generalized human development from “primitive” to “civilized.” This evolutionist anthropology, as many scholars have shown, reflected and justified a range of imperialist practices by presenting European conquest as bringing progress to societies existing in a noncontemporary present. Two of the most important variants of post-evolutionist anthropology are the cultural relativism associated with Franz Boas (1858–1942) and the sociological universalism associated with Emile Durkheim (1858–1917). The state power that evolutionist anthropology had once supported also changed radically over the same period. The forms of domination exercised by the global North over the global South gradually shifted from direct colonial rule to the combination of military intervention and economic control that characterizes the postcolonial period. Anthropology, Talal Asad has written, is “rooted in an unequal power encounter between the West and Third World . . . an encounter in which colonialism is merely one historical moment.” Internally, the social welfare state continued its remarkable growth but also, in the 1960s and 1970s, faced challenges from those who rejected the patriarchy and heteronormativity that it often presupposed and reinforced. The two books under review reveal how new types of anthropology in the United States and France came to serve these new forms of state power in the twentieth century. In both cases anthropology adapted to these new political conditions by incorporating psychoanalysis to posit an especially strong bond between individual and culture that produced what one contemporary called an “oversocialized conception of man.”

Liberalism and Empire

C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in Age of Liberalism and Empire.Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850-1920.These two volumes, among only a scattered handful of others in Ideas in Context series, examine responses of varied thinkers to moral and political issues posed by existence of empire and growth of modern imperialism. Bayly's, indeed, is very first among one hundred published volumes in series to move beyond European reflections on empire and give pride of place instead to intellectuals from colonized world. Together liberal ideals and imperial practice incontestably exist at heart of modern world. Why, then, have writings of Indian and other non-Western intellectuals, not to mention European theorists and critics of empire, received such cursory treatment in such an influential set of volumes? It is not possible to answer that question here, but fortunately rapid rise of scholarly interest in imperialism over last few years has spurred much new and exciting work on ideology of empire. This outpouring of studies has even generated a subfield called the new imperial devoted to exploring links joining colony and metropole.The works under consideration here are at once complementary-the one focused on Indian political thought, other on British-and comprehensive. Both volumes range very widely across time, and engage with an array of thinkers. Both authors also fulfill mandate of larger series by placing ideas firmly in context in which they took shape, and ask how they participated in intellectual discourse of their times. Bayly, in his first sentence, describes his task as examining the ideas, projects and sensibilities of those Indian intellectuals who broadly subscribed to international liberal consensus of nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 Claeys, for his part, proposes to assess . explanations of origin of British empire; justifications for its continuation; and criticisms of its consequences.2Sir Christopher Bayly-the first historian of British Empire, it might be noted, to be knighted since Sir John Seeley over one hundred years ago-has had a distinguished career as Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at Cambridge. Though he was never affiliated with any of major historiographical schools of last decades-the socalled Cambridge school of 1970s, Subaltern Studies Collective of 1980s, or postcolonial cultural turn of 1990s-Bayly's wideranging publications across Indian and Imperial history have stimulated scholarship throughout discipline and beyond, most notably among those many postgraduate students he has trained. So it is appropriate that Bayly should now add his own definitive account to on-going scholarly discussion of political theory of empire.Indian liberals have been maligned ever since they came into existence as a visible group of English-educated young in 1840s and '50s. During high colonial era of late nineteenth century they were disparaged by British as mere talkers, as self-interested job seekers, and as a minuscule coterie who sought to speak for a non-existent Indian nation, but in fact represented no one but themselves. Nationalist writers and political leaders, from 1890s onward, dismissed their liberal predecessors (and contemporaries) as ineffectual mendicants and bourgeois hangers-on of Raj. By Gandhian era, with two or three notable exceptions, among them Dadabhai Naoroji and G. K. Gokhale, India's Victorian liberals had disappeared altogether from canon of nation's heroes. Finally, in postcolonial era, scholars such as Homi Bhabha derided them as inauthentic mimic men who tried to be, but could never truly be, English.3 Indian liberalism, unlike its British counterpart, was thus, as Bayly correctly argues, embattled from beginning by powerful ideologies that largely rejected it. …

Historical geography I

This report uses the First World War as a way to open up current debates into issues of bodies, selves, battlefields, memory and death in historical geography and beyond. Sweeping through a range of scales, from the global nature of imperialist practices to the intimate spaces of the psyche, this report highlights the contributions that historical geographers are making to these studies and the creative approaches taken. The aim is to expose the need for historical geography to engage with the darkest corners of human experience, in relation to conflict, so as to learn from the past in present insecure times.

Friendship, Imperial Violence and the Law of Nations: The Case of Late-Eighteenth Century British Oceania

This article examines the interrelationship of friendship and violence in European juristic traditions and in British scientific voyaging in Oceania. Drawing upon Roman texts and natural law treatises, it shows how friendship, meaning hospitality and trade, appeared as a right asserted by imperial nations, often with the backing of force. Moving from jurisprudence to imperial practice, this article examines the coercive elements of cross-cultural friendship in eighteenth-century British expansion into Oceania. It suggests that it was in the breach more than the observance that discourses of friendship came to the fore, specifically in resistance to first contact and in accusations of theft. Seen to be motivated by either violent or avaricious passions, theft and native resistance tore the bonds of human sociability asunder. I argue that the significance of friendship was twofold. First, in a context of inter-imperial rivalry, friendship signified native consent in claims of possession over land and thus ensured conformity to legal norms. Second, it promised a system of order governed by norms of affective restraint that could sublimate the passions of natives, voyagers and nations.

Notaries of Color in Colonial Panama: Limpieza de Sangre,Legislation, and Imperial Practices in the Administration of the Spanish Empire

On July 20, 1740, King Philip V of Spain was given paperwork regarding a dispute over the adjudication of a notarial office in Panama City and, as usual, he was expected to make a decision. The king also had in hand recommendations from the Cámara of the Consejo de Indias. The king would have handled the case in a relatively straightforward manner, but for one fact—the two notaries involved in the public bid were of African descent.

Neoclassical urban theory and the study of racism in geography

This article takes a biographical approach to analyse the intellectual roots of geographical studies of race and racism as they emerged from neoclassical urban geography. Race was not part of the science of space that dominated neoclassical urban geography of the 1960s and l970s. External and abstract truths were considered to be independent of those who discovered them, which helps to explain why Walter Christaller’s central place theory was elevated to one of the most important concepts in the history of the discipline, notwithstanding its adoption by the Nazi regime in Germany. Two opposing theoretical directions led the way from neoclassical urban theory to antiracism studies: (1) behavioral geography, which developed broadly positivist ideas to encompass discriminatory social processes; and (2) radical geographies that address racism as the historical result of imperialist practices. Both strands of thought are based on a belief in external structural determinants, and both are important in the development of poststructuralist critical race theory. Theories are always performed, however, and understanding the development of antiracism in geography is impossible without the work of black geographers who situated their work in the tradition of behavioral urban geography.

The imperial legacy of international peacebuilding: the case of Francophone Africa

AbstractComparisons of peacebuilding with historic practices of imperialism are common, but these comparisons have sustained a hegemonic antagonism between humanitarian and imperialist interpretations of international peace intervention. This article argues that this common framing externalises the problem of intervention, romanticises local resistance, and forecloses to investigation the articulation between militarised peace practices and transnational capitalist relations. To do so, the article analyses the case of Francophone Africa, thus providing a context that has been left unexplored in peacebuilding debates. By bringing back in the historicity of particular Franco-African imperial experiences into peacebuilding research, the article reveals the militarisation of politics, transnational elite networks, and the dominant intellectual predispositions that work to reproduce the legitimacy of hegemonic practices of ‘peace’ interventionism. In the last section, the article analyses the debates over the UN-French 2011 intervention in Côte d'Ivoire to reveal the connections between the ethics of humanitarian interventions and the political economy of imperialism. The article concludes that the imperial legacy of peacebuilding is found in old capabilities, new organising logics, and specific practices and power relations and that to focus on the humanitarian-imperialist antagonism caricatures the relationships between ‘local’ and ‘international’ actors.

Reading Hobson through Feminist Lenses

In this article, I suggest ways in which feminist analysis would further enrich Hobson’s text. Questioning Hobson’s assumption that it is possible to create separate ‘metanarratives’ about Eurocentrism and patriarchy, I claim that patriarchy, imperialism and Eurocentrism were co-constituted through the practices of Western imperialism and the creation of modern Western knowledge. I then take up Hobson’s question that asks whether one is, or is not, Eurocentric is a more important question than whether or not one is a positivist. I argue that both these questions are important and interrelated. Whereas positivism aspires to tell one universal story, post-positivism acknowledges that all theories are constructed in the interest of someone. Therefore it offers us the opportunity to be reflective about our epistemological standpoints – whether or not they are Eurocentric. I then describe some methodological sensitivities concerning these issues that IR feminists have brought to their research. I conclude by reviewing some feminist post-colonial literature that reflects these sensitivities, thereby offering us some tools to overcome the Eurocentric trap.

Лаборатория империи: политическая арифметика, социальная инженерия и решение “Хайлендской проблемы” Великобритании в конце XVII – первой половине XVIII вв.

The article bridges the traditional differentiation between “overseas” and “contiguous” (landmass) empires by focusing on the typical “continental” imperial policies of the English and then British government toward the Highland region of Scotland. The author argues that many “overseas” British imperial practices were developed in the late seventeenth century through the first half of the eighteenth century in Scotland, under the direct influence of the continental political culture of Cameralism. Thus, an important instrument used toward solving the “Highland problem” (understood as the pacification and modernization of the region) was “political arithmetic”: elementary population statistics, a precursor to political economy. The author characterizes the entanglement of academic practices with pragmatics of imperial governance and colonization as conscious social engineering. This early instance of social engineering helps in understanding many aspects of British imperial policies and latter-day attempts at social engineering as part of overseas colonialism.

Thinking about Empire: The Administration of Ulysses S. Grant, Spanish Colonialism and the Ten Years' War in Cuba

This article examines the attitudes of leading policymakers in the United States toward the Spanish Empire in Cuba during the Ten Years' War (1868–78). It suggests that while many in the US objected to Spanish imperial practices, concerns about trade alongside ideological predispositions regarding nonintervention and race led the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, under the direction of Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, to develop a series of policies that in effect supported colonialism in Cuba while attempting to ensure that the US would benefit from any change in rule there. The article argues that despite an apparent desire for the US to remain neutral during the conflict, the Grant administration in fact formulated its responses based on a narrow conception of Spanish colonial control that demonstrated an increasing sense of moral superiority over both colonizer and colonized.