Eclectic Grounds

Over the Christmas holidays, Samuel Huntington died at the age of 81. Huntington, political scientist and US foreign policy advisor, became widely popular with his “clash of civilizations’ thesis. Time to look at the influence Huntington had with his writing, 15 years after the publication of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’.

In a Foreign Affairs article in 1993 and in a subsequent book three years later, Huntington developed the idea that in the post-Cold War world, conflicts will be based on cultural and religious difference. The end of political ideology will not lead to the ‘end of history’, he believed, but rather to a return of age-old ethno-religious conflict. He wrote that:

Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

Especially after the 9/11 attacks on the US, Huntington was quoted time and again by political analysts, while some critics also regarded it as self-fulfilling prophecy. American neoconservatives as well as many radical Islamists quoted the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis at the time.

It is hard to judge what extent Huntington’s ideas predicted or influenced events like 9/11 or the Iraq war. Yet to me it seems undeniable that the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ subtly changed the way we perceive culture and the role it plays in world politics and conflict.

In the early 1990s, the time of ‘Great Power’ war was over at last. The idea that powerful states wage war with each other had dominated (Western) perspectives on international relations since since the Thirty Years War. In 1989, there was suddenly but one great power left. At the same time, civil wars plagued societies where post-colonial structures left a power vacuum.

It was tempting to believe in culture and religion to be the determinant of conflicts in the post-Cold War world. But what Huntington made of this idea was a more than questionable primordial view of culture and religion.

Huntington believed in culture and religion as something age-old and fixed. This primordial view stood against most analyses of ethnicity, culture and nationalism. It rejected the possibility that cultures and ‘civilizations’ are constructed by societies in the pursuit of unity, and it denies the option that certain aspects of individuals’ identities – be it religious, cultural, or other – can be emphasized or denied by leaders to rally people behind them or to exclude others.

Civilisations as depicted in Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’:

“The Clash of Civilizations” has entered popular wisdom and with it the belief that cultures and civilizations are static and it that sense irreconcilable. This belief led US neoconservatives into a war in Iraq, it guides Islamic fundamentalist and it informs what most white Europeans believe about Muslim immigrants: that they do not fit in because they are different and will always be.

Edward Said has formulated the most eloquent critique to Huntington in this regard in his essay “Clash of Definitions”. Here is a citation of parts of Said’s original text. It’s worth looking at it if you want to understand what Huntington is missing:

I would go so far as to say that what we today call the rhetoric of identity, by which a member of one ethnic or religious or national or cultural group puts that group at the centre of the world, derived from [ the] period of imperial competition at the end of the nineteenth century. And this in turn provokes the concept of “worlds at war” that quite obviously is at the heart of Huntington’s article. […]

In the related fields of political economy, geography, anthropology, and historiography, the theory that each “world” is self-enclosed, has its own boundaries and special territory, is applied to the world map, to the structure of civilizations, to the notion that each race has a special destiny, psychology, ethos, and so on. All these ideas, almost without exception, are based not on the harmony but on the conflict, or clash, between worlds. […]

At precisely the moment in the nineteenth century that a rhetoric of civilizational self-justification began to be widespread among the European and American powers, a responding rhetoric among the colonized peoples develops, one that speaks in terms of African or Asian unity, independence, self-determination. […]

In both the colonial and post-colonial context, therefore, […] civilizations are basically separated from each other. […] People like Huntington are products of that history, and are shaped in their writing by it. […]

Thus to build a conceptual framework around the notion of us-versus-them is in effect to pretend that the principal consideration is epistemological and natural – our civilization is known and accepted, theirs is different and strange – whereas in fact the framework separating us from them is belligerent, constructed and situational.

Said goes on describing how culture is defined within societies in a contest between authority and dissenting voices:

Defining a culture, saying what it is for members of the culture, is always a major, and even in undemocratic societies, a democratic contest. […] The official culture is that of priests, academics, and the state. It provides the definitions of patriotism, loyalty, boundaries, and what I have called belonging. […] In addition to the mainstream, official, or canonical culture, there are dissenting or alternative unorthodox, heterodox cultures that contain many anti-authoritarian strains that compete with the official culture. […] From the counter-culture comes the critique of authority and attacks on what is official and orthodox. […] No culture is understandable without some sense of this ever-present source of creative provocation from the unofficial to the official; to disregard this sense of restlessness within each culture, and to assume that there is complete homogeneity between culture and identity, is to miss what is vital and fecund.

In this light it becomes evident what really is the legacy of the “Clash of Civilizations” and how it has shaped our view of culture in the last decade: it leads us to believe in fault lines and values as essential, and makes us think that changing these fault lines is impossible. Dissent to established authority is no option, if we believe Huntington.

I came across an interesting article by Okwui Enwezor on the power of photography in Africa. Enzewor laments that our image of Africa is shaped by Western photography, which “seems often to evoke pathological images of disease, corruption and poverty”:

“No other cultural landscape has had a more problematic association with the photographic medium: its apparatus, various industries, orders of knowledge, and hierarchies of power. The act of photographing Africa has often been bound up with a certain conflict of vision: between how Africans see their world and how others see that world. In a way, this is a clash of lenses, a struggle to locate and represent Africa by two committed but disparate sensibilities — one intensely absorbed in its social and cultural world, the other passing through it, fleetingly, on one assignment or another.”

Okwui Enwezor is curator of “Snap Judgements”, an exhibition of contemporary African photography. It was presented in 2006 in Miami. Here is a slideshow of some of the photographs that are part of the exhibition.

The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung recently had an online photo gallery that presented the pity, infantilisation and paternalism Enwezor brings up. The gallery is juxtaposed with parts of Uzodinma Iweala’s essay “Stop trying to ’save’ Africa“. 

PS: Why this post on the image of Africa in photography? The IFA Gallery in Berlin currently displays a selection of the Bamako biennal “African Enounters of Photography”: Spot on … Bamako

Procrastinating with the latest Daily Show episodes, I saw this interview that made me quite curious. Matthew Alexander is a former US military who conducted and administered interrogations with detainees in Iraq and can claim to have collected the necessary information that led to the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

As bleak as this might sound, I was pleasantly surprised to hear the man speak.

These are his two main points:

First: Torture is counter-productive and doesn’t yield positive results. In the short run, they bring no reliable information. In the long run, the practice of torture leads to resistance against the US army. While this is not particularly new or daring a statement, it is refreshing to hear it from a US army staff.

Second (and this might seem more surprising): He had more success with a cooperative approach. Supporters of anti-US radicals in Iraq seem to be in the game for rather pragmatic reasons, and not because of a fundamentalist ideology. By finding common ground, he says, he could get detainees on his side.

I don’t yet know what to make of the author personally. Having supervised more than 2,000 interrogations in Iraq, it is hard for me to belief that he did not participate in the misconduct that seems to be common practice. If he did, my sincerest respect. 

But in any case, it’s worth listening to him. What he has to say challenges some beliefs the US and in the West in general holds about Al Qaeda and the supporters of radical Islamic violence. It shows that interpreting fundamentalism and anti-Western radicalism in the Middle East as clash of civilisations or a war of two irreconcilable cultures is fundamentally wrong.

I looked for more by Matthew Alexander and found among other things an opinion piece in the Washington Post and an interview with Anti War Radio, where he elaborates on his interrogations of Al Qaeda supporters.

His description does not at all fit with our idea of these people as fundamentalist Islamic radicals. According to him, supporters who actually believed in Al Qaeda ideology were a “very small minority”. Most most people joined the insurgency for economic reasons, for affiliation by clan or kinship, or for protection by the group from Shiite militant groups.

Most of the people he interrogated had reasons to join the fight that were understandable even to a US soldier. Interrogating Al Qaeda supporters in Iraq, Alexander says, was not much different from interrogating criminals in the US.

This realisation opens a whole new negotiation space based on common sense. Why, after all, would someone make a decision to use torture? Torture only makes sense if the person believes that there is no space for communication and for co-operation. Torture makes sense if there is other way to get information.  

This is the fallacy if we believe in a clash of irreconcilable world views. It removes our ability to communicate. It makes coercion the only possible strategy.

Alexander describes the transformation of his staff when they started to understand the motivations of their detainees. He describes how these beliefs were challenged:

“We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money.”

He calls his interrogation method one based on ingenuity. “It is not about converting, it is not about dominating, it is about negotiating and compromise.”

One might also call it common sense. It’s a “re-humanization” of an enemy who was dehumanized in the process of war, propaganda and ideology. It’s common sense because it is the attempt to understand another person; a person you were told you could not understand.

Once the “enemy” in a conflict is dehumanized, once communication is lost, once coercion is the only means of communication, the conflict gets protracted and violence intensifies.

According to Alexander, “it’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. ”