The issue of Palestinian refugees is both an important and highly emotional matter in Middle-Eastern politics, representing one of the most divisive and enduring problems of 20th and 21st century Middle-Eastern affairs.
Scholars witnessed a ‘bulldozer revolution’ in Serbia in 2000, a ‘rose revolution’ in Georgia in 2003, an ‘orange revolution’ in Ukraine in December 2004 and then a ‘tulip’ revolution in Kyrgyzstan in early 2005. Although only the Orange color revolutions actually had a color as it symbolize this term, ‘color revolution’ has become a popular term for referring to the four revolutions that occurred among regional specialist and local politicians. Why?
In this essay I will investigate how racism functions as a metric for the biopolitics of security. I will begin by analysing the development of the counter-historical discourse, from its opposition to traditional sovereignty, through to the development of the ‘warring nations’ thesis, and it’s eventual reformulation as a discourse of the state.
Several new social movements found their expression in the Argentinian political and economic crisis of 2001, termed the ‘Argentinazo’. The event consisted of a popular revolt in which people took to the streets armed with pots and pans to express their dismay of the establishment. However, just a few years later their legacy was being questioned.
Eyal Weizman’s comprehensive account of the techniques of expansion and oppression deployed by the Israeli forces in the Occupied Territories provides a thorough and graphic exposé of a whole range of colonizing methods. In this essay I attempt to highlight a selection of Weizman’s observations and relate them to the arguments of Yiftachel and an updated understanding of Foucauldian population geography by Legg.
Due to the time that has elapsed since Huntington wrote his article it is easy to criticise any lack of foresight in terms of technological development. However, it is important to highlight the fundamentally erroneous assumptions of modern day diplomacy made in his article.
This essay draws on the work of Partha Chatterjee to argue that a distinction might be drawn between political and cultural nationalism. Whilst political nationalism sought to challenge the notion of ‘colonial difference’ in the outer realm, cultural nationalism sought to maintain it (albeit reformed and reshaped) in the inner realm. This contradictory process continues to have important consequences for Africa today.
In seeking to explain ‘tribalism’ and ‘state failure’ in Africa, academics often point towards the misalignment of the nation and the state: either the post-colonial state has failed to make the nation, or nations have descended into ‘tribalism’ in the process of carving out a state. What is common in these two presumptions, is that all African nations or states have the power to make their counterpart; by extension, the ‘failure ‘of such processes is rarely problematised beyond domestic politics and historical references to the impact of colonialism.
Recent months have seen inter-ethnic conflict in Kenya, exclusivist attacks aimed at immigrant populations in South Africa and continuing controversy surrounding the future of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Cases such as these expose serious societal tensions within some contemporary African states, including those traditionally considered the continent’s ‘success stories’. In light of this, it’s pertinent to ask about the achievements and limitations of nation-building in Africa.
Violence surrounding the recent election in Kenya has gained high-profile media coverage in Europe and North America. In this context, the dynamics of nationalism and ethnicity in Africa—and popular understandings of the role of ‘identity’—represents a pertinent subject for critical analysis.
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