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11. The Imperial Peace in Colonial Africa and Africa's Underdevelopment

Author:
Robert H. Bates
Publication Date:
12-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
When praised at all, imperialism is most often commended for the peace it bestowed. By demobilizing armies, deposing marauding princes and subduing war-like states, European powers fashioned a half-century of political order. The question nonetheless arises: Should they be lauded for that? In this chapter, I view Africa's history through the lens of comparative history and argue that the imperial peace may have retarded Africa's development.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Imperialism, Post Colonialism, and Natural Resources
Political Geography:
Africa and Europe

12. Diplomacy as Impression Management: Strategic Face-Work and Post-Colonial Embarassment

Author:
Rebecca Adler-Nissen
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for International Peace and Security Studies
Abstract:
This paper proposes to understand diplomacy as a form of impression management. Drawing on Erving Goffman's dramaturgy, I show how diplomats seek to repair sudden cracks in the fragile international order. I analyse Greenland's and the Faroes' puzzling ability to continue controversial seal and whale hunting despite massive international regulation and criticism. In diplomatic negotiations, the two former Danish colonies use post-colonial embarrassment and irony to push Denmark into negotiating an exemption to the EU's ban on seal products in 2009 and defend pilot whale hunting in the Faroes. Analysing diplomacy as impression management implies, first, that diplomacy cannot be seen as a one-to-one reflection of the relative capabilities or identities of the involved states. Rather, diplomacy should be understood as a social world of its own, abiding to its own rules, norms and codes of conduct. Its inhabitants may represent national interests but they also defend particular views of cosmos and they are saving face. Second, a focus on face-work and social order may help explain both the "conformist" bias of diplomacy and the way it may enable contestation of hierarchies.
Topic:
Diplomacy and Post Colonialism
Political Geography:
Europe, Denmark, and Greenland

13. How the West can get on the right side of history in the re-awakening Arab world

Author:
David Gardner
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Norwegian Centre for Conflict Resolution
Abstract:
The reign of Arab strongmen supported by the West is drawing to an end. Europe has the duty and the opportunity to get on the right side of history, and to assist in reform and reconstruction, if and when requested. The economic dimension is about more than aid and trade, and will turn importantly on ideas and debate. Policy should be driven by a blatant bias towards democracy and its defenders, the support of competitive politics and open societies, education and the building of institutions, law-based regimes and the empowerment of women – everything many Arabs still find attractive about Western society.
Topic:
Post Colonialism, Regime Change, and Insurgency
Political Geography:
Europe, Middle East, and Arabia

14. New Research on Transitional Justice

Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Participants: Aryeh Neier (Founder, Human Rights Watch and President, Open Society Institute), Monika Nalepa (Political Science Department, Notre Dame University), Lara Nettelfield (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Harriman Institute, Columbia University), Tina Rosenberg (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Haunted Land: Facing Europe\'s Ghosts after Communism), Ruti Teitel (Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, and Associate Director, Center for International Law, New York Law School, and Visiting Professor, London School of Economics), and Leslie Vinjamuri (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London). This event is part of the "Human Rights in the Post-Communist World: Strategies and Outcomes " series (Harriman Core Project 2010-2011).
Topic:
Human Rights, Human Welfare, International Law, Post Colonialism, and Law
Political Geography:
Africa, New York, and Europe

15. Decolonization by Europeanization? The Early EEC and the Transformation of French-African Relations

Author:
Martin Rempe
Publication Date:
05-2011
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Kolleg-Forschergruppe (KFG)
Abstract:
“Françafrique”, “Francophonie”, “l'état franco-africain” and “Mafiafrique” – all these terms are commonly used if one comes to talk about French-African relations after the severing of colonial ties in 1960. Even though they bear slightly different meanings, they share the notion of a very close, stable, and continuous if not to say colonially-styled relationship. According to the relevant literature, the European Economic Community (EEC) acted thereby as a stabilizing instrument. Against this backdrop, the paper tries to present new perspectives on the complex relationship between the EEC, France and its former African colonies associated to the community since 1958. The paper explores to what extent France's belonging to the EEC triggered Europeanization processes that directly affected French-African relations and eventually acted in favor of decolonization of metropolitan France. I will argue that in the course of the 1960s, emulation of community procedures as well as supranational legal coercion to a certain extent transformed French development co-operation and trade relations with the Francophone African states and in the end fostered France's regional reconfiguration towards Europe.
Topic:
Development, Post Colonialism, and Foreign Aid
Political Geography:
Africa, Europe, and France

16. The Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between Italy and Libya: New Prospects for Cooperation in the Mediterranean?

Author:
Natalino Ronzitti
Publication Date:
05-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:
On August 30 2008, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi flew to Benghazi to sign the Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between Italy and Libya, concluding the long negotiating process that began under previous Italian governments and was accelerated by the current administration. The Treaty was meant to put an end to the dispute between the two countries and Libya's claims relating to Italian colonialism. In greeting Colonel Muammar Gheddafi, Berlusconi expressed his regret for the colonial period in very strong terms.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Post Colonialism, and Treaties and Agreements
Political Geography:
Europe, Libya, North Africa, and Italy

17. The European Union Report on Jerusalem: Distortions and Omissions

Author:
Nadav Shragai
Publication Date:
04-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Abstract:
An imbalanced EU position paper on Jerusalem written in December 2008, and recently leaked to the media, completely ignores Israel's historical and legal rights to its capital. The EU attack refers primarily to the City of David, located just beyond Jerusalem's Old City walls, an area identified by archaeologists and historians as the location of King David's capital some 3,000 years ago. Archaeological excavations took place there during Ottoman rule, as well as under the ensuing British Mandatory rule, and they have continued under Israeli rule as well. About 20 years ago a wave of new, illegal construction by Palestinians began on the site, causing significant and sometimes irreversible damage to the antiquities there. The Jerusalem municipality intends to offer the delinquent residents generous compensation and alternative land in the city. Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority for the last 150 years - at least since 1864. Israel's position in Jerusalem under international law derives from the Palestine Mandate, where the League of Nations recognized "the historical tie between the Jewish people and Palestine," and called "for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine." The 1949 Armistice Agreement between Israel and Jordan did not fix the final boundaries between the parties, but only the lines of military separation at the close of the 1948 war. At the demand of the Arab side, the Armistice Agreement stipulated that it did not serve to predetermine the rights of any party in the final resolution of conflict. In other words, upon the outbreak of the Six-Day War, the 1967 lines enjoyed no diplomatic status. In 1967, Israel agreed to allow the Muslim Waqf to manage the Temple Mount area, with a view toward preventing inter-religious conflict at one of the world's most sensitive sites. This was a huge concession on Israel's part that has never been properly recognized. By doing so, Israel has underscored its intention to assure freedom of access to members of all faiths at all of the holy sites in Jerusalem.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution and Post Colonialism
Political Geography:
Europe, Middle East, Israel, and Jerusalem

18. Russia in Central Asia: Old History, New Challenges?

Author:
Marlène Laruelle
Publication Date:
09-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS)
Abstract:
Russia is a power unlike others in Central Asia, given its role as the region's former coloniser, which started in the 19th century and even in the 18th for some of the northern parts of Kazakhstan. This legacy has its positive and negative aspects: it has been positive insofar as it has involved a long period of Russo–Central Asian cohabitation that has given rise to a common feeling of belonging to the same 'civilisation'; it has been negative insofar as it has accrued all the political resentment and cultural misinterpretations of the coloniser–colonised relationship. Russian–Central Asian relations are therefore complex, with each of the actors having a highly emotional perception of its relation to the other.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, and Post Colonialism
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Central Asia, Kazakhstan, and Asia

19. Politiques du moment colonial.Historicités indigènes et rapports vernaculaires au politique en « situation coloniale »

Author:
Romain Bertrand
Publication Date:
10-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI)
Abstract:
The field of colonial studies has gone through tremendous theoretical upheavals in the past three decades. Yet something is still too often missing in the study of 17th, 18th and 19th century situations of colonial or imperial "encounter", namely this vernacular domain of thought and actions that was kept out of reach of the colonizer's power and knowledge tools, and that was not geared toward the (whether coerced or not) commercial, political or military interaction with the Europeans. Nevertheless, it is only by focusing on this vernacular (rather than "native" or "indigenous") hors-champ of the colonial situation that one can achieve a better understanding of the multi-layered historicity of extraeuropean societies. This perspective indeed allows us to make sense of the "colonial moment" of these societies with regards not only to their encounter with Europe, but also to their own long-term ideological and political trajectories (trajectories that began long before the arrival of the Europeans and that never can be wholly equated with the effects and consequences of the latter). This research agenda moreover helps us to get back to a more nuanced and historically accurate view of the initial precariousness and "leopard-skin" style dissemination of European colonial power. Lastly, it enables us to get beyond the now dominant paradigm of the "indigenous appropriation of colonial/European modernity" and its old-fashioned utilitarian language of "native agency" by investigating the local, vernacular visions of the self and of history that were put to use in the tactical engagement with, or avoidance of, colonial rule.
Topic:
Post Colonialism
Political Geography:
Europe

20. L'invention de l'aide française au développement. Discours, instruments et pratiques d'une dynamique hégémonique

Author:
Julien Meimon
Publication Date:
04-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI)
Abstract:
In the turbulent international context of the late 1950s, the French 5th Republic and its leaders orchestrated the end of the colonial system, i.e. all of its emblematic institutions: the French “Overseas” ministry and minister, the administrative corps of colonial functionaries and standard recruitment path (the École nationale de la France d'outremer ) disappeared, setting the stage for a new, fairly complex system labeled “ Coopération.” The ministry of the same name was to play a major role up until the end of the 20th century. This new system, which came about as a result of the breakup of the colonial empire, is closely related to the issue of development aid and relies essentially on civil servants having received their training in the colonial institutions and seeking for redeployment. This study analyzes the paradox of a “new policy” embodied by officials infused with a colonial culture, focusing on their reconversion in terms of deeds and discourse. This will point up one of the initial weaknesses of France's African policy and one of the reasons that it has slowly crumble.
Topic:
Development and Post Colonialism
Political Geography:
Africa, Europe, and France