Overcoming the Other America: José Martí's Immanent Critique of the Unionist Paradigm

This article offers a new interpretation of the Cuban intellectual José Martí's international political thought. It argues that Martí's analysis of early US imperialism and call for Spanish American unity are best understood as an immanent critique of the “unionist paradigm,” a tradition of international political thought that originated in the American independence movements. Martí recognized the impediments that racism had placed in the way of both US and Spanish American efforts to stabilize the hemisphere's republics by uniting them under regional institutions. He argued that, in his own time, Anglo-Saxon supremacism had deprived US-led Pan-Americanism of all legitimacy, causing a crisis of international political order in the Americas. In the context of this crisis, he developed a revised, antiracist unionism that, he argued, would free Spanish America's republics from imperial aggression and interstate conflicts, making the region a global model of stable and inclusive self-rule.

Fulani Herdsmen and Farmers Conflicts in Nigeria

This chapter explores the media coverage of violent conflicts and climate change issues in Nigeria from the perspective of human rights journalism. Nigeria has had a chequered history of violent conflicts, especially since it achieved self-rule from Britain in 1960. These conflicts have been wide-ranging and cross-cutting (political, ethnic, religious, communal, among others). The Nigerian media have equally had a long history of the coverage of these violent eruptions across the country. However, the mainstream media's approach to the coverage of these issues have tended to be on the physical coverage of the conflicts to, almost, neglect of some of the underlying causative factors, such as climate change. The phenomenon of climate change globally is significant, especially in developing countries, such as Nigeria. In recent times, the threats that are posed by climate change have been enormous. Some communities across the country have been sacked by its devastations, especially from the norther corridors of the country. This has therefore necessitated the forced migration of some of these communities, especially the Fulani herdsmen and their cattle to other parts of the country for greener pasture. This situation always resulted in conflict, which is often violent. This chapter argues that, although the federal government of Nigeria through its Ministry of Environment have come out with programs and policies/initiatives aimed at combating the menace of this phenomenon, and the media, apart from the fact that they have not fully keyed into these programs to step them down for the audience, there is the urgent need for them to review their approaches toward the coverage of these conflicts. This chapter advocates a human-rights-journalism-based approach to the coverage of these conflicts because of its diagnostic approach, which gives a critical reflection of the experiences of the victims of human rights violations in all its ramifications.

Contextualizing four-stage legal transitions in convergent evolution

Summary This article posits that both Roman and early Chinese states underwent four stages in their multiple-step transformations from local states to major empires during the classical period. For both states, at stage 2, one dominant state formed alliance with a group of smaller autonomous polities, and at stage 3 that dominant state deepened its regulation of the smaller polities whose autonomy was curtailed. There existed striking similarities between Rome and China (early Han Empire) at stages 2 and 3 regarding the constitutional rules enforced by the two central governments to control the newly-acquired subordinate territories, which were the Macedonian/Greek states for Rome and the vassal kingdoms in eastern territories for Han Empire. In particular, this article discusses: (i) why Macedonian/Greek states have been chosen for comparative studies; (ii) similar constitutional rules at stage 2 governing the two empires’ relationships with their subordinate polities; (iii) similar legal rules at stage 3 aiming at dividing up the territories of the subordinate polities and restraining their self-rule; (iv) similar stage-3 constitutional rules that preserved some autonomy for the subordinate polities; and (v) similar stage-3 legal rules that regulated certain economic activities of the subordinate polities. After analyzing Roman governance of Macedonia/Greece within the broader context of Roman institutions for territorial integration, the article explores the underlying trends and deeper mechanism that led to such convergent evolution of legal rules.

The “Fate of Minorities” in the Early Afro-Asian Struggle for Decolonization

This article explores the significance of minority rights to postcolonial internationalism by examining an emerging Afro-Asian collective at the United Nations in the late 1940s. As postcolonial nations became UN member-states, they fostered transnational solidarity through the Arab-Asian group, a predecessor of the Afro-Asian bloc, and constructed an anti-imperial project that directly engaged with the making of the new international human rights system. However, the Arab-Asian group did not advance minority rights in their struggle for decolonization at the UN. Instead, they favored a gradual path toward formal self-rule and the recognition of national self-determination that worked within the international order, most clearly expressed through the removal of a minority rights article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Democracy

Democracy is a term that is used to denote a variety of distinct objects and ideas. Democracy describes either a set of political institutions or an ideal of collective self-rule. Democracy can also be short for a normative principle of either legitimacy or justice. Finally, democracy might be used to denote an egalitarian attitude. These four uses of the term should be kept distinct and raises separate conceptual and normative issues. The value of democracy, whether democratic political institutions or democratic self-rule, is either instrumental, non-instrumental, or both. The non-instrumental value of democracy derives either from the alleged fairness of majority rule or from the value of the social relationships enabled by participation in democratic procedures. The instrumental value of democracy lends support from a growing body of empirical research. Yet, the claim that democracy has a positive causal effect on public goods is inconclusive with respect to the moral justification of democratic institutions. Normative reasons for democracy’s instrumental value must instead appeal to the fact that it contributes to equality, liberty, truth, or the realization of popular will. Democracy as a principle of either political legitimacy or justice is a normative view that evades concerns with the definition and value of democracy. Normative democracy is a claim about the conditions either for legitimacy or justice of either public authority or coercion. Debates in normative democracy are largely divorced from the conceptual and empirical concerns that inform studies of democracy elsewhere. The boundaries of the people entitled to participate in collective decisions is a question that applies to all four uses of democracy. The boundary question raises three distinct issues. The first is the extent of inclusion required among the members of the unit. The second is if membership in the unit is necessary for inclusion or if people that are not recognized as members are on certain conditions also entitled to participate. The third and final issue concerns the boundaries of the unit itself.

The Indian Freedom Struggle and the Kenyan Diaspora

The connections between the Indian Freedom movement and the Kenyan Indian diaspora after the First World War led to the involvement of the Indian National Congress and Gandhi in the struggle of the Kenyan Indians for equality and equal treatment with the British white settlers in Kenya. The Congress considered that the success of the equality struggle in Kenya would also lead to equal treatment of Indians in India itself. This was consistent with the prevailing political goal of the freedom movement in India in 1919, which was self-rule through Dominion Status under the British Crown. But when the struggle of the Kenya Indians failed and equality was denied to them by the famous Devonshire Declaration in 1923, there the Indian freedom movement realized that this signalled unequal status and a denial of self-rule to India itself. Historic consequences followed. This was the turning point and over the years immediately after the Kenyan decision (1923–1929), the Indian National Congress changed its political aim from Dominion Status to Full Independence as a Republic, realized over the 17 years to 1947.

Controlling the State in the Political Theory of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad

Existing scholarship has largely focused on the violence of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) when analyzing their response to the Oslo Agreement and the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (PA) in the 1990s. The Islamist opposition’s contribution to Palestinian political thought has largely been ignored, however, although the prospects of Palestinian self-rule confronted the two movements with fundamental questions about social organization, governance, and the permissibility of democracy. I offer an analysis of key Hamas and PIJ texts from this period to demonstrate that Hamas and PIJ fundamentally differ in their analysis of the state and the organization of just society. While Hamas outlines a state-centric approach to governance through which Islamic values are enforced from above, PIJ perceives the state to be the greatest threat to the just organization of society. This article consequently dispels the myth that the two Palestinian Islamist movements had no significant ideological differences in the 1990s.

The Sidama Quest for Self-Rule: The Referendum on Regional Statehood Under the Ethiopian Federation

The Sidama of southern Ethiopia has a long history of struggle to reclaim self-rule, which was lost with the forceful incorporation of their territory into the Ethiopian empire in 1893. With the fall of the military junta in 1991, the new government reconfigured the country into a multinational (ethnic) federation. Years of protests and turmoil led to the consolidation of a nationalist movement demanding the constitutional right to conduct a referendum on the establishment of a separate Sidama regional state under the federation. The process was marred by demonstrations and incidents of violence, but the vote itself was conducted peacefully with an overwhelming 97.7 per cent ‘yes’ vote. Sidama regional state was eventually formed, but the political leadership initially advocating for its establishment was marginalised due to the centralising policies of the federal government party restricting the principles of the constitutional multinational federalism.

A Toddler at 60? Nigerian’s Democracy and Development under Arabic Poetic Loupe

When, in 1960, Nigeria was granted independence from colonial rule, it was thought that the country was going to be a model of a brilliant experience in parliamentary democracy; but less than six years after the supposed license for self-rule, a military coup struck which lay to rest the dreams of most people. From that coup, the nation has gone through a civil war and several upheavals of varying dimensions while its potentials have nosedived and its people, despite the immense human and natural resources of the country, barely live above the poverty line. This sad situation has, for years, attracted several reactions from people of different social classes. One class that has often been ignored in the Nigerian socio-political conversation is the ever-growing horde of Arabic verse-smiths that use the Arabic language as their medium of registering their reactions to national challenges. Using Shaykh Ma’ruf Ahmad al-Ajahwi as a representational model, this study examines Shaykh’s poem “Naijīriyya fi ām al sittīn” (Nigeria at Sixty); it places his thoughts and sentiments within the general matrix of Nigerian socio-political discourse and posits that the poem indeed represents the true yearnings of the average Nigerian who daily suffers owing to bad policies of the government. It goes further to reflect on the challenge of democracy and development in their global context as well as the particularistic expressions of both concepts in a developing country like Nigeria and opines that the average Nigerian is more concerned about good governance and not necessarily the nomenclature given to a system of government.

Nonterritorial Autonomy in Northern Eurasia: Rooted or Alien?

The article examines the ideas and arrangements referred to as nonterritorial autonomy (NTA) in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet states. Many scholars regard NTA as a theoretical breakthrough and as a way to drastically rearrange diversity policies. The author seeks to clarify whether NTA had been a groundbreaking innovation and an area of political contestations. Two short periods of NTA-related initiatives after 1917 and in the late 1980s–1990s may look like attempts (albeit ineffective) to replace the earlier forms of diversity governance. The author shows that the ideas of group societal separateness, differential treatment of individuals, group agency, and cohesiveness, as well as a group’s running of its internal affairs, were present in varying degrees in imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet governments’ thoughts and practices. Academia and civil society were also appropriating and developing these views, and group self-rule on a nonterritorial basis was their logical extension. However, the practical implementation was, in most cases, on a top-down basis, and group agency and self-rule were affirmed mostly rhetorically. The continuity of discourses and practices demonstrates that NTA was an integral part of “normal” and broad ethnopolitical developments across the major historic divides in Northern Eurasia.