Nations must be defended: public health, enmity and immunity in Katherine Mayo’s Mother India

This essay explores repressed hostility and punitive fantasies in the discourse of international health, using Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927). Multiple tendencies in interwar thinking converge in Mayo’s book, making it a veritable archive of major, minor and emergent forces, including those shaping the phenomenon of ‘international health’ post-Versailles. Mother India provides a unique opportunity to explore how progressive principles of international public health tend to obscure a ‘minor’ and forgettable yet disturbing truth: the discourse on life and health can ‘safely’ harbour an alternative politics and poetics of enmity. Spotlighting the way international health interventions, centrally shaped by USA, operated across multiple levels of governance, the essay locates the significant detail of Mayo’s representation of India as ‘world-menace’. Propelled by the logic of enmity, her shaming portrait of a dysgenic Hindu India justifying emergency international intervention resonates with a strand of interwar conservatism given theoretical expression in the writings of Mayo’s contemporary, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s animosity towards political liberalism helps identify Mother India’s vision of imperial sovereignty as a curious antiliberal, American iteration of the logic of enmity in extra-European space and in the ‘humane’ domain of health. Biologising the discourse of juridical-political maturity at a time when Indian nationalism’s organised challenge to Empire could not be gainsaid, Mother India urges a re-imagination of the political field as a battlefield where ‘the enemy’, construed as a problem of health, will kill. Building a case for continued imperial domination in the name of global health and immunity, the book’s humiliating representation of colonial bodily habits, habitations and contagions aimed to undermine liberal imperialism, internationalism and Indian nationalism, all increasingly vocal after World War I.

The humanitarian alibi: an overview and a redefinition

This paper explores and illustrates the diverse manifestations of the phenomenon of the ‘humanitarian alibi’, drawing upon historical and contemporary cases of violent conflict in order to identify substitutionary phenomena by governments and international actors. It affirms the existence of substitution process where humanitarian aid intervention substitutes for the prevention and resolution of violent conflict and the protection of civilian populations. The paper argues for expanding the humanitarian alibi, however, to take into account how international aid intervention compensates for both the systemic neglect of conflict related crises and for the systemic harm that exacerbates and perpetuates these crises. It also challenges the suggestion that the humanitarian alibi phenomenon is the product of a bygone era, and finds that the use of aid as a substitute for peacemaking can co-exist alongside the use of aid as a direct component of international intervention.

Resenha: Autesserre, Séverine. Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention. Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 2014

Resenha: Autesserre, Séverine. Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention. Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 2014

Introduction

The book’s Introduction situates the reader in recent decades of recurrent wars and failed peacemaking attempts in the Sudans, giving central focus to the reproduction of armed conflict during and after the negotiation of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The chapter introduces its central aims to prize open how contemporary peacemaking works and how it may go wrong, to understand why this might be inherent in peacemaking, and to open up ways to rethink peacemaking. The book’s touchstone for assessing peacemaking, ‘non-violent civil politics’, is explained and the book’s grounding in the political thought of Hannah Arendt is summarized. The book’s central arguments are introduced, notably that, tragically, the ends and means of making peace in civil wars often risks debilitating not fostering non-violent civil politics, in turn motivating violence and reinforcing its currency. Following this is a detailed chapter-by-chapter summary of the book, explaining its thematic, episodic and chronological structure. The chapter ends with a brief history, and foundational position, on war, politics and international intervention in the Sudans, helpful to those with less familiarity with these countries as well as accounting for the author’s interpretation of that history as an anchor to the study.

Unfounding

This chapter, ‘Unbounding’, illuminates the opposition between peace as a project of making and the founding or refounding of a political community through civil political action. The chapter examines how peacemaking was implicated in South Sudan’s violent failure as a new political community. Without diminishing domestic elite political responsibility for the destruction of order and civility, the chapter analyses how this collapse was possible within the context of a heavily internationalized peacemaking, statebuilding and peacebuilding effort. By ordaining a government-in-waiting that needed no further legitimacy from its people, and focusing on a technocratic and transactional mode of ‘building’ peace and state in southern Sudan after war, international intervention made a peace without politics in southern Sudan between 2005 and 2011. The new political beginning of independence, the founding of a new political community, became a mirage when overtaken by the memories and wounds of intra-southern violence, rekindled political rivalries and the militarized, corrupted and coercive logic of power to rule that quickly pulled South Sudan down into war.

Statebuilding, Security-Sector Reform, and the Rule of Law

Security-sector reform (SSR) and rule of law (ROL) approaches to international intervention have become a major element of the international community response to conflict since the 1990s. This international architecture that surrounds SSR and ROL privileges a particular form of knowledge that reflects a technocratic approach to security. This is reflected in the technocratic process of policy and also in the wider literature. Research into the literature itself shows that there are three core themes that dominate: state-centric approaches, technocratic approaches, and approaches to local ownership. These comprise a current, linear approach to SSR and ROL that ignores much of the critical literature on peacebuilding. Incorporating critical approaches could provide an alternative approach to SSR and ROL in terms of incorporating nonlinear underlying features, including a better understanding of institutional politics, an emphasis on process rather than structures, and analysis of the hidden politics of security and legal reform.

Power-Sharing in Divided Societies

Peacebuilding—in one form or another—is likely to persist for the duration of a liberal world order. Power-sharing models of government as a contribution to peacemaking have dominated constitutional design since the mid-1990s, but they remain highly contested. Consociational power-sharing offers a means to move beyond armed conflict acceptable to political actors, for whom a return to hegemonic majoritarianism is unacceptable and a hope of conflict transformation too distant. Critics claim that it locks in divided identities and prevents other options emerging. This chapter argues that the causal impact of power-sharing in cases such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, compared to other features of these conflicts, such as excessive canonization, is not clear-cut and that in other situations, such as Northern Ireland, the outcomes are more positive. Basing each cycle of power-sharing executive formation on the results of the previous election rather than historic balances of power or population can facilitate internal electoral competition within political communities and the emergence of new parties outside of the traditional political divisions. It could also facilitate other forms of representation, such as gender quotas. The external influences on power-sharing and international intervention are not well explored, and engaging with the “local turn” in peacemaking could allow a better understanding of the positive and negative factors in the interaction between external support and local agency.