Institute for Policy Studies [IPS] shifts to the right

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

[This appeared on PEN-L. IPS is a very prominent left-liberal thinktank
that shares founding sources and big-name experts with the Nation Magazine.]

 --- Original Message ---
From: clowe@xxxxxxx (Chris Lowe)
To: tom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: 1/14/02 5:53:25 PM

[P.S. to those on the cc list, this is a letter to the editor of a new
newsletter from Foreign Policy in Focus, a joint project of the
Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies. I
wrote it and am cc'ing it because I am concerned about what the newsletter
may portend about a shift in "progressive" approaches to Africa policy in
the context of "the war on terrorism." If you don't know what this is about
but would like to, I will forward the newsletter in question. If it's not
of interest, sorry for the spam. CL]

Dear Tom Barry,

A few years ago, I think while I was still at the African Studies Center at
Boston University, we had some correspondence about FPIF.

I saw today's (inaugural?) issue of Self-Determination Conflict Watch
through a distribution on the NuAfrica listserv. I am considering whether
to subscribe.

However, I have to say that I was surprised and troubled by the content of
SDCW. Nearly all of the pieces placed heavy uncritical reliance on the
concept of "failed state." This recent political science term of art in my
view often is a code word for "we don't know what the hell is happening."
It is also a term with a great deal of potential, in its inexactness, for
providing justifications for virtually any sort of intervention, as well as
virtually any sort of refusal to intervene, and for blaming any bad
consequences of either actions or inactions on those who are "failing," to
the exclusion of great power (and especially U.S. as global quasi-hegemon)
responsibility for their own actions or inactions, or indeed the "failure."

Likewise I was troubled by the fact that nearly the only explanatory
factors expressed overtly for African conflicts were either personal
ambitions of leaders, or ethnic conflicts. The only one which inched beyond
that was the piece on "warlordism." Its argument that key parties in
various conflicts may have a stake in perpetuating conflict is an important
one for progressives to grapple with. But as written, the piece's main
implications seemed to be that the U.S. should wash its hands of such such
conflicts, could in fact do so, and that the question of any historical
U.S. responsibility should be ignored.

As a more minor point on the same piece, unqualified "increased trade
liberalization" is not a "cherished goal" for me when it comes to Africa,
and I would not have thought for FPIF -- are you changing your views on
this? The laundry-list of stated U.S. policy goals is exactly the sort of
thing I normally look to FPIF to disaggregate and analyze for its internal
contradictions. What does that absence of such critical analysis portend
for your future?

Frankly the pieces I saw in this issue did not strike me as "progressive."
They seemed to me to be pieces that could have been published comfortably
in the New Republic. They advanced points that could be comfortably
cherry-picked by Tom Friedman for opportunistic neoliberal purposes, by
William Safire or others in support of narrow nationalist interventionist
U.S. policies, or by Pat Buchanan and others for narrow national chauvinist
isolationist purposes. In other words, they exhibit the same uncritical
conceptual incoherence as the "policy" debates allowed in the op-ed
sections of the quasi-official mainstream U.S. media.

If the authors are in fact progressive, I urge you to encourage them to
write more incisively critical pieces. Or give them space to express more
complex ideas, if that is the problem. Or I urge you to find other writers,
if these pieces do accurately reflect their approaches. Unless FPIF is
changing direction. If that is so, please say so.

I was surprised not to find more analysis of how it is that "warlords" in
"failed states" manage to benefit from those conflicts. Where is mention,
never mind analysis, of the open, black and gray markets in items such as
weapons, conflict diamonds, oil and so on? Where is mention, never mind
analysis, of the internal relationships of patronage, clientelism and
exclusion/exploitation that draw or force peasants, workers, migrant
peasant workers, and those utterly dispossessed by war to seek crumbs and
protection in groupings articulated either through ethnic representations
or personalistic "ideological" loyalties or both?

And thus, by extension, where is analysis of how "failed states" articulate
with the international state system and more particularly with global
markets (especiallys since we are told that one of the features of
so-called globalization is the decline of states and the autonomy of market
actors/ corporations)? Why are ethnicity and personalistic politics treated
as "natural" givens not requiring explanation, rather than dynamics that
can be analyzed?

Given the absence of those things, I was not surprised by the absence of
any reflection on policy options that would address such problems, such as
reining in the arms traffic, sanctioning transnational economic entities
that deal with "warlords," seeking ways to structure aid so as to undermine
ethnic chauvinism and personalistic clientelism, and so on. Nor was I
surprised by lack of attention to the parallelisms and possible
interactions between "warlord" interest in continued conflict and
neoliberal interest in continued debt, blind-eye attitudes toward
corruption, limited development and acceptance of social suffering in poor
countries.

Perhaps these absences are indicative of where SDCW is going. If so, again
I urge you to say so openly.

If they are not, I would like to ask you for address, over time, to at
least a couple of key issues. First, please provide critical examination of
the concept of "failed state," its potential abuses, its function in
mainstream op-ed "policy" discourses, and its inadequacy for accounting for
the differences among the societies lumped under that rubric. Second,
please seek writers who can think concretely and creatively about policy
options that would enable engagement with the vast numbers of people who
are being killed, hurt, battered, crushed, dispossessed, maimed, starved,
raped, terrorized, impoverished and so on by what you describe.

It is true enough that there are interests in the persistence of conflicts
-- although I missed analysis of those elements of those interests which
lie "at home" in the U.S. and the North/West, and in "the international
community." But there is also a huge interest, if usually a highly
disrupted, disorganized and disspirited interest, among those being harmed,
in ending the conflicts.

The real basis of any progressive policy has got to be to find ways to
connect with the popular interest in ending conflict, to support people's
self-organization in that interest, and to provide them resources
sufficient to allow that interest to overcome the interest of blood profits.

On that basis, this first issue was a great disappointment. It also is a
matter of concern if it signals that FPIF, IRC and IPS are going to move
into greater acceptance of mainstream academic/journalistic U.S.
international relations jargons and thereby of the limits of conventional
IR analytical discourses, given the extant paucity of critical resources
even without such a shift.

Chris Lowe (independent Africa scholar, Portland, OR Ph.D. African history,
Yale University)


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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