Soenke Zehle on Sat, 26 Jul 2003 15:26:51 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> They Say Liberia is Our Past |
Taking in current images of intra-state conflict (Liberia, Congo), I have been wondering about the mutuality of conceptual approaches to state failure and the development of a corresponding visual idiom along a common - Hobbesian - vector that takes us - conceptually, historically, visually - 'back' to a presumeably anarchic state of nature, a visual idiom that supports the ideas of state failure as a 'regression' we are offered in political commentary(<http://www.globalpolicy.org/nations/sovereign/failed/2003/0725la w.htm>) and, as a 'side effect', strengthens our affective attachment to 'our' states at home. Zizek commented on a similar dynamic in the course of various conflicts across former Yugoslavia and, if I remember this correctly, linked the ahistorical analysis of 'ancient tribal hatreds' to the articulation of a future European identity. So now, it's back to Africa, and here again, I can't help think that the reporting we get of intra-state conflict somehow feeds back into processes of state and supra-state transformation. No conspiracy, just a coincidence of effects that will nonetheless have material consequences. My interest in this conceptual-visual intersection was actually triggered by an exhibit in Duesseldorf on representations of (state) sovereignty ("Visuelle Formierungen von staatlicher Macht", see <http://www.kunsthalle-duesseldorf.de>), but also a growing interest in state failure in general(<http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/stfail/index.htm>,<http://www.global policy.org/nations/sovereign/failedindex.htm>) as well as the ecopolitical dimensions of conflict (<http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/docs/minindx.htm>). The charge has often been made that analysis of the environmental dimension of conflict is really an economism in ecopolitical disguise, but the (implicit) Hobbesian of much commentary on the genealogy of conflict tends to 'naturalize' the state to such an extent that other dimensions, including resource issues, just don't get the attention they deserves. For some recent stuff on Liberia, for example, check <http://www.muckraker.org> - who would have thought that home improvement (timber) helps fund children's armies abroad. As the controversy over a certification system for 'conflict diamonds' shows, this dimension of conflict resolution - far below the threshold of military intervention, but also quite a bit more active than 'diplomatic interventions' - is far beyond what a consumer-political environmentalism could accomplish on its own. I think, for example, that this type of corporate brand campaign is much more difficult to organize than a campaign that addresses corporate misconduct - child labor, abuse of labor laws etc. - directly, and there's been some reflection on a new global mechanism to control these resource and profit flows (<http://www.globalpolicy.org/nations/sovereign/failed/2003/0725resources.ht m>), not sure what to think of it yet. But still, I guess there's more than the visual regression into a state of nature. Soenke # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net