Pluralism - Conference Programme Session 7

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Session 7: Global and Trans-National Politics
Chair: Richard Sigurdson

'We are the World': Cosmopolitanism, Neo-conservatism, and Global Humanity
Jeremy Moses
School of Political Science and Communications, Department of International Relations, University of Canterbury College of Arts, New Zealand

Since the end of the Cold War, the writings of prominent neoconservatives in the United States in response to humanitarian crises have shown remarkable overlap with those put forward by cosmopolitan thinkers and promoters of humanitarian intervention. Both groups have broadly espoused the principles put forward in the highly influential report of the International Committee on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), “The Responsibility to Protect”, which was published in 2001. In both approaches, ‘humanity’ is understood as a bounded and exclusive community which highly developed Western societies are given the ‘responsibility’ to police on a global scale. The cosmopolitan desire to transcend borders and generate a global community, in this context, has played directly into the hands of the most staunch advocates of the Iraq invasion, at least in a rhetorical sense. Given this confluence of arguments on the legitimacy of military interventions for human protection purposes, this paper will argue that neo-conservatism does not represent a radical departure from contemporary cosmopolitanism and liberal internationalism and that this raises a series of difficult questions that go to the heart of cosmopolitan theory, such as: to what extent is violence justified in order to bring peace and order to the world? Is the formation of a global political community possible, or even desirable? This paper will argue that while the relationship between cosmopolitanism and international violence has been amplified in the context of the war on terror, it is an issue with deeper theoretical roots that must be understood if we are serious about reducing the amount of violence in the world. In response, fresh consideration must be given to the terms of political inclusion and exclusion that have become normalised in discussions on global political change. It may be that the commitment to ‘humanity’ must be abandoned if humans are to be saved.

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Emasculating Violence: An Analysis of Women Perpetrators and Transitional Justice Mechanisms
Nontsasa Nako
Department of Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture at the State, University of New York in Binghamton, USA

This paper examines the cases of two women who were indicted as perpetrators of gross human violence by two separate transitional justice mechanisms in South Africa and Rwanda. I compare the case of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, who has the distinction of being the first woman to be charged with rape and genocide by the international tribune prosecuting those alleged to have participated in the Rwandan genocide, with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela whose 9-day testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation of South Africa in 1997 has been the subject of much debate and controversy both in South Africa and abroad. I look at where these two women, and their trials/tribunals, fit in the transitional justice mechanisms in post-conflict societies such as South Africa and Rwanda. I use their cases to investigate the role that gender, sexuality and race play in the construction of new national narratives and the relations those narratives have with notions of citizenship, nationalism and hegemony. Drawing on the TRC scholarship on the role of women in post-conflict societies, particularly Phumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s report entitled, “Women’s Contribution to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa” (2005) as well as Fiona Ross’s book, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (2003) I interrogate some of the popular assertions surrounding the TRC and the role of women in it. I problematize the construction of women as more humane than men, particularly in Gobodo-Madikizela’s above mentioned paper where at one level she seems to empower women, and charges them with moral responsibility for “creat[ing] and strengthen[ing] social bonds through their stories of pain and their understanding of the appropriate language required to engage with transitional institutions such as the commission.” (2005: viii).Yet on another level, she marginalizes women by positing their language as Other in South Africa’s constructions of post-apartheid national narrative. By foregrounding women’s role as perpetrators, I offer a much more nuanced and complex reading of the women’s role in both the conflict and post-conflict societies, and argue that only when women’s role as perpetrators, that is when violence is emasculated, can a picture of women’s participation in both conflict and peace situation emerge. I argue that Madikizela-Mandela’s refusal to participate in the commission’s discourses of confession, forgiveness and reconciliation, undermined the Commission’s historicizing project and revealed the problematic constructions of race, gender and sexuality embedded in the philosophy of ubuntu, (understood to be the commission’s guiding principle), and that Nyiramasuhuko’s blanket denial is another way of challenging the ability of both legal and judicial mechanisms to deal with “gendered narratives.”

The United Nations in a World of Increasing Complexity: Problems of State-Based Membership
Elizabeth Moore
National Intelligence Council , Washington, DC, USA

A key topic of the ongoing UN reform debate is the need to bring that body into line with 21st century geopolitical realities. This is frequently interpreted as acknowledgement of the growing demographic, political, and economic clout of the developing world. Equating a “modernized” UN with getting the right mix of nation-states onto various UN bodies, however, is missing a crucial point. In a world in which states are devolving into smaller and smaller units; where notions of identity, allegiance, governance, and culture are increasingly decoupled from territory; where there is a growing international tendency to tie collective security to the individual rather than to nation-states; and where “quasi states” such as Kosovo and Palestine are growing in numbers, the basic underlying assumption of the UN Charter – a relatively uniform international order based on nation-states – becomes itself at variance with reality.
What complicates matters even further is that the UN does not serve just one world, but three: the post-industrial, the industrial, and the marginalized, each of which possesses differing notions regarding the meaning and desirability of state sovereignty and tolerance for non-state players’ participation in UN forums. This raises the question of whether the UN can ever truly become the “UN of Peoples” espoused by former Secretary General Kofi Annan.
In my paper I will explore the continued feasibility of traditional state-based UN membership in the post-Cold War age, and to look at proposed ways of rectifying the seeming democratic deficit at the UN – for example, a UN Parliamentary Assembly. I will do this via brief scenarios that lay out alternative UN futures positing varying degrees of inclusiveness by UN forums.

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