AWA: Academic Writing at Auckland

Postcolonialism and Poststructuralism are closely related critical approaches, which challenge traditional Eurocentric International Relations (IR) perspectives of power. As both approaches were informed by resistance struggles against established and imperial power blocks (Campbell, 2007, p.213), Tunisia’s and Libya’s Arab Spring movements provide pertinent case studies. I intend to show that Michel Foucault’s ubiquitous network of performative power relations problematizes the naturalized conception of sovereign power, consequently destabilising the ontological assumption of authority the obedience/disobedience dichotomy supports. And I aim to show that Frantz Fanon’s related thesis of the inevitability of violently disordering traditional power structures is still relevant to understanding contemporary issues. I will first outline key concepts, then discuss relevant aspects of Foucault’s work and illustrate with the events of Tunisia’s Arab Spring movement. Then I will nominate and describe key aspects of Fanon’s contribution to Postcolonialist thinking, and illustrate against the Arab Spring movement in Libya.

In December 2010 a largely peaceful protest rapidly toppled Tunisia’s regime, inciting a series of uprisings across the region. Not all were peaceful or ultimately successful, but two of the region’s longest-standing and most repressive autocracies fell. The West was largely unprepared for these revolutions. People-power contradicted received Western understanding of the ‘Arab’ (Sadiki, 2012, pp.290-292) and was not readily explained by traditional IR theories. 

Like other critical theories, Postcolonialism grew out of dissatisfaction with positivist causal explanations of major events – especially ‘People Power’ (Sylvester, 2011, p.185). Postcolonialism is a set of approaches, all of which are concerned with contemporary manifestations of historic aspects of European colonialism (Manzo,  2014, p.331), especially empiricist ‘Truth’ claims. One of the major contributions to IR was to show that IR’s politics and relations were not the sole domain of states (Sylvester, 2011, p.185). Frantz Fanon was one early anti-colonialist, who challenged the moral supremacy of Western modernization. He proposed that the colonial model was violently exploitative and psychologically damaging to all involved (Sylvester, pp.186-187). Postcolonialism particularly influenced poststructuralists, who were similarly motivated by the emancipatory goal (Campbell, 2007, p.207) of empowering excluded or marginalized people or perspectives for a future world order more truly democratic and inclusive.

Michel Foucault (despite his reluctance to be labeled such) was highly influential in Postructuralist thinking. Foucault was particularly interested in the importance of discourse, identity, subjectivity and power (Campbell, 2007, p.203). Like Fanon, he sought to dispel the ‘commonsense’ of received norms and show that many foundationalist explanations were historically situated discursive strategies for disciplining interpretation and reaction to the world (Rouse, 2005, p.102, p.107).

In ‘Subject & Power’(Rabinow & Rose, 2003, pp.126-144), Foucault states that power ‘designates relationships between “partners”’ (p.135) and that it only exists when it is put into action by some on others. He rejects Hobbesian notions of ‘power’ as an absolute entity, which the community consents to have exercised upon it by the Sovereign (pp.137-139). By extension, Authority is revealed as a discursive strategy for the hegemonic authors of realist/neorealist IR. “Obedience/Disobedience” becomes irrelevant in the partner-only model. Perennial agonism between partners with freedom of agency is essential for power relationships. Partners’ actions attempt to govern (modify or direct) the actions of the co-constituted Other. As the struggle intensifies (p.140, pp.142-43), agents’ confrontation strategies aim to consistently push the Other further to their limits until one of their winning solutions prevails – either the status quo ruptures or the partner’s resistance is pushed to the point of extinction (p.143). Power relations are ‘located deep within the social network’ (p.140), permeating all social interactions and being dynamically modified by every modification (they are performative) (p.143). Critically, power originates from everywhere, not just top-down. Domination can be understood as a strategic situation, often normalized within a long-term confrontation – but it is crucially dependent upon the continued performativity of unstable supporting power relations across the entire network. Operations of power always take place within performative discourses (Campbell, 2007, pp.216-217). Foucault’s view extends power to act to those traditionally ignored by state-centric models.

Tunisia’s revolution can be mapped to this account of a ubiquitous and performative network of power relations. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (Ben Ali) seized power in 1987. His increasingly autocratic rule was marked by intensified repression, cronyism and exploitation (Gelvin, 2015, pp.42-45) (‘normalising’ his strategic situation and testing his co-constitutive Others’ limits). As the economic gap widened between the regime’s elite minority and the vast majority of Tunisians, tensions and resistance grew (performative power relations modify the co-constitutive partners and discourses). Before Muhammad Bouazzi’s self-immolation on 17 December 2010, there were many protests against the regime’s increasingly repressive and impossible economic conditions (pp.46-50). However, they were not widely known. Bouazzi’s violent death was different because individuals acted differently (altering discourses of subjectivity), affecting performance across the power network. The news was carried by new technologies (social media allowed more agents to write different ‘texts’, interact and organize differently) and was broadcast beyond the region by mainstream media (pp.46-50; Khanfar). People organized themselves politically – spontaneous local responses by many ‘powerless’ individuals, swelled into a mass movement of peaceful protest. What began as a discourse of struggle against economic exploitation, was translated by the professionals and trade unionists into one of individual human rights. Moving the focus to a struggle against subjection was a ‘winning solution’ (Foucault, 2003, p.130). Brilliantly, this entitled individuals to assert themselves on the topic as much as their autocratic state. Moreover, it governed the likely response/action of the wider network (i.e. the Western ‘Other’), who could do little but respect the populist movement (consequentially their alter-ego). When the military refused to suppress the protests (Gelvin, 2015, p.48), their altered performance changed the social fabric again. Without internal support and little interest from erstwhile Western sponsors, Ben Ali’s regime toppled over. Ordinary people in oppressive conditions brought about the bloodless revolution of a Middle Eastern autocracy.

The movement changed the performance of the entire global network. Traditional IR theories cannot easily explain this without exposing the hegemon’s complicity in the regime’s longevity and the capitalist-expansionism agenda that necessitated it. Some might point to deep-state infrastructure as an inheritance of Western democracy that enabled the Arab Spring. Personally, Foucault’s explanation of ubiquitous power and agency seems to better explain the dramatic events of Tunisia’s bloodless revolution.

Frantz Fanon’s thesis in Wretched of the Earth (Wretched) (1963) is that modern colonialism, and hence decolonization, is inherently violent and has long-lasting psychological traumatic effect on the societies of both colonizer and colonized (Sylvester, 2011, pp.186-187). In Wretched he describes a process of hegemonic ideology being reified, internalized and perpetuated post-colonisation (Fanon, 1963, pp.121-140) in perverse mimicry. And ultimately violence is the only way to shuck off this subordinate-status psychology. Fanon regarded the West’s humanist claims as a dissembling of colonial violence (Grovogui, 2007, p.237).

One might understand the ‘White Man’s Burden’ to be perpetuated today under the auspices of universal human rights – which is the West’s duty to promote. This requires a committed psychological myopia that prevents the West from reconciling with the truth of the many atrocities visited upon the dissenting territories of the world (especially the Middle East today) all in the name of moral responsibility. Worse still, it prevents us from the possibility of all that we exclude – limiting our options for the future, engraining difference and disparity, fueling resentments and restricting the terms for cooperation.

Fanon believed that decolonisation requires a complete disordering of the world, it therefore requires social power be changed to bottom up (Fanon, 1963, p.29). He warns of the almost inevitable sequence of events and social/political catastrophes following the end of formal colonial rule (pp.121-150). Ultimately, these lead to a violent rupture when people finally take on their collective responsibility at the bottom to exercise their will, with the collegial responsibility of those at the ‘top’ (party members who role is to enable the people to express their authority and will) (pp.157-159). But before that can happen, people need to rid themselves of the inherited Western belief that the masses are too stupid to govern.

Libya’s ‘experiment with democracy’ in the 1950’s and 1960’s was terminated in 1969 by a Nasser-inspired military coup, led by Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi’s increasingly corrupt, despotic and oppressive reign (Sadaki, 2012, pp.296-300) followed the description Fanon provides in Wretched of post-colonial societies: Gaddafi dismantled representative institutions to cement his personal power; used the Revolutionary Committees Movement to control and oppress (terrorise opposition); and progressively hobbled any real chance of unity or nation building with his cronyism and encouragement of tribalism. However, Libyans were political, they ignored and resisted Gaddafi from within society – sometimes formally. Internal dissent and opposition grew, coming to a head when Fathi Terbil (the human rights lawyer for the families of “disappeared” opposition prisoners) was arrested for doing his job (Gelvin, 2015, p.100). Immediately, friends and family began to organize into protest, which was met by violence – ultimately the protesters beat the security forces, claiming the country’s second largest city and calling for regime change. It was as if the masses had come to the consciousness Fanon urged (1963, pp.158-159). Realising there would be no demiurge, they became their own saviour. To massively simplify, the people’s movement in Libya was violent and messy, and quickly spiraled into civil war. The international community, lead by France, elected to utilize their mandate ‘Responsibility to Act’ on humanitarian grounds (Sadaki, 2012, p.299). A NATO military intervention was mobilized to back the ‘revolutionaries’ fighting Gaddafi. This ultimately resulted in victory for the revolutionary forces and the violent death of Gaddafi.

The fractured political landscape of post-Gaddafi Libya is outside the current discussion, but would be interesting to examine further in terms of the belief that some have in the indispensability of violence for the cleansing for Gaddafi’s legacy. It would also be interesting to consider it from the perspective of the West’s virtual non-involvement since regime change occurred – is there a case that in a post-Cold War world, Gaddafi had outlived his usefulness and if Libya were to disintegrate it no longer impacts the hegemonic agenda significantly?

Bottom-up regime change is usually more effective than international military intervention (Fanon, 1963, p.133), because it follows people’s conscious realization that theirs is the power to change their world. Tunisian results are already more hopeful than their Libyan counterparts’. Post-revolution Libya is still struggling to incorporate all parties and reconcile the divisive tribal politics Gaddafi cultivated. Libya’s challenge is to unlearn all the colonial attitudes (divide and rule techniques) of the past. This ‘unlearning’ is at the heart of decolonization (Krishna, 2014, p.358).

The Tunisian Arab Spring movement usefully illustrates Foucault’s thesis of power as dynamic and constructive agonism, exercised by agents seeking to govern the actions of others. Power is everywhere, yet exists only as it is exercised across a dynamic network permeating every aspect of social life. The Tunisian example therefore disrupts traditional IR statism discourses of an absolute power vested in a Sovereign, whose authority must be obeyed. Similarly problematic for traditional IR, is the Fanon’s preoccupation with the need to ‘unlearn’ colonial structures of power and the promotion of a bottom-up world order. Libya’s civil disobedience was necessarily violent in the context of decolonization. Effectively, Fanon disproves Hobbesian claims of the social contract protecting from a brutish world. For him and other Postcolonialists, the cost of (unrequested and unconsented) inclusion in the western hegemon’s commonwealth is an exploitative and institutionalized violence without escape.

Traditional IR theories’ definitions of power delimit authority and sovereignty to the State, they render individual agency and subaltern perspectives meaningless, and valorize hegemonic agendas over all others. This limits the scope, conditions and terms for cooperation. And it means that the problems created by historically situated, empirical Truth claims are perpetuated rather than addressed by alternative political responses. Critical approaches offer new ways to understand the emergent causality of contemporary issues, and therefore new ways of responding to issues.

Based on the above arguments, I am inclined to find more transformative utility in Foucault’s conceptions around power (than Fanon’s). Firstly, because they open up entirely new possibilities for who can act and how we can conceive of our options for acting. Secondly, because it enables the imagining of a world without either King or Leviathan. And lastly, because (as illustrated in Tunisia) they prove that what has been forged in violence, can be removed in peace. However, both perspectives promote a consciousness that all members of humanity have political agency, which can be exercised for pragmatic results. Therefore, neither approach should readily be dismissed as too abstract for serious consideration.

References

Campbell, D. (2007). Poststructuralism. In T. Dunne, M. Kurki & S. Smith (Eds.), International Relations Theory: Discipline and Diversity (pp.203-228). New York: Oxford University Press.

Downing, Lisa, 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edkins, J. (2014), Why do we obey?. In J. Edkins & M. Zehfuss (Eds.), Global Politics: A New Introduction (2^nd ed.), (pp.132-153). New York: Routledge.

Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish . New York: Random House.

Foucault, M. (2003). The Subject and Power. In P. Rabinow & N. Rose (Eds.), The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984 (pp.126-144). New York: The New Press.

Gelvin, J. (2015). The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Grovogui, S. (2007). Postcolonialism. In T. Dunne, M. Kurki & S. Smith (Eds.), International Relations Theory: Discipline and Diversity (pp.229-245). New York: Oxford University Press.

Hansen, L. (2011). Poststructuralism. In J. Baylis, S. Smith & P. Owens (Eds.), The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations (5th ed.) (pp.169-183). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Khanfar, W. (2001, March). Wadah Khanfar: A historic moment in the Arab world [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/wadah_khanfar_a_historic_moment_in_the_arab_world?language=en

Krishna, S. (2014). How does colonialism work?. In J. Edkins & M. Zehfuss (Eds.), Global Politics: A New Introduction (2nd ed.), (pp.338-362). New York: Routledge.

Manzo, K. (2014). In J. Edkins & M. Zehfuss (Eds.), Global Politics: A New Introduction, (2nd ed), (pp.85-107). New York: Routledge.

Matin, K. (2011). Redeeming the universal: Postcolonialism and the inner life of Eurocentrism. European Journal of International Relations, 19(2), 353-377. doi: 10.1177/1354066111425263

Rouse, J. (2005). Power/Knowledge. In G. Gutting (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (pp.95-122). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sadiki, L. (2012). Libya’s Arab Spring: The Long Road from Revolution to Democracy. International Studies, 49(3&4), 285-314. doi: 10.1177/0020881714534035

Sylvester, C. (2011). Postcolonialism. In J. Baylis, S. Smith & P. Owens (Eds.), The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations (5th ed.), (pp.184-197). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wibben, A. (2014). Who do we think we are?. In J. Edkins & M. Zehfuss (Eds.), Global Politics: A New Introduction, (2nd ed), (pp.85-107). New York: Routledge.