About The Workshop
SW 96-Political Theology and Holy War: Difference and Economic-Military Domination of the Global South
Convenors: Rashim Singh; Lucas Gontijo
Contact: alvarengagontijo@gmail.com
This special workshop proposes to analyse the logic of subjugation of the Global South to an international policy orchestrated to maintain the imbalance between countries that hold the means of production and technological dominance and those that provide cheap labour, commodities and consume industrialised goods. This economic domination operates in symbiosis with military domination, underpinning a permanent threat to the sovereignty of peripheral countries. This is the perpetuation of the original logic of empire and its colonies where the global South is ‘othered’, dehumanised and caricatured to facilitate the continuation of not only established mechanisms of economic exploitation but also to morally ease the Global North’s use of horrific violence to subjugate and dominate this ‘othered’ entity.
The hegemonic discourse of the self-styled “Democratic Western Countries” (Europe, North America, Oceania and Israel) constructs the rest of the world as underdeveloped and/or with a propensity towards anti-democratic regimes. However, underlying the discourse of these supposed “democratic countries” is the subsistence of a political theology, as described by Carl Schmitt: sovereignty as a state of exception and the identification of an existential threat/enemy that justifies and legitimises the suspension of normal legal order. Thus, we see a kind of holy war or crusade-logic underpinning the discourse of the core countries, which mobilises moral categories to justify interventions, often into situations which they themselves have created. These processes of interventions not only permit these countries of the so-called core to maintain their own perceptions of self-identity (good, civilised, liberal, democratic, peaceful, secular, rational) but also to perpetuate the identity they have constructed of the ‘other’/the Global South (evil, barbaric, uncivilised, illiberal, authoritarian, violent, religious, irrational).
In this context, the construction of a narrative of the fight against terrorism and against regimes unaligned with the tenets of liberal democracy has been systematically used as an excuse for the use of military force and for blockades and sanctions. Blockades operate as a form of economic and political coercion, and empirical evidence shows that they are a form of collective punishment given that they impact the civilian population far more than any government. Recent examples are the US intervention in Venezuela and the illegal kidnapping of the head of a sovereign state, as well as the long punitive blockade against Cuba. Such practices reveal a deeper mechanism of empire which is itself founded upon the creation of racial and religious cleavages through mechanisms of differentiation (Deleuze and Derrida) – differences that are not assumed as such, but rather disguised under the pretext of counter-terrorism or the invention against imminent threats as justifications for violence.
The workshop will also analyse war as an instrument of ideological reinforcement and identity alignment, allowing us to understand European tolerance of the massacre in Gaza and the world’s passivity in the face of the illegality of the war against Iran.
