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Loading ...Darfur entered into the Western public consciousness in 2004 with pedantic debates over whether the rising deaths in Sudan constituted a ‘genocide’. Today, Darfur features on university campuses and in full-spread magazine advertisements as a humanitarian crisis. Parallels are regularly drawn between Darfur and the Holocaust and Rwanda, evoking a sense of urgency about international intervention.
In an interesting piece in the London Review of Books, Mahmood Mamdani discusses the politics of naming among international activists about the Darfur crisis. In this article he questions whether Iraq may be a more suitable comparison to Darfur than Rwanda: the country is riven with civil war in which several sides are heavily implicated and the distinction between victim and perpetrator is not as clear as we might think. Identifying the situation as a humanitarian crisis and invoking the recently authored Responsibility to Protect doctrine creates great moral pressure for Western military intervention. Mamdani argues that this intervention would not be a clean and easy matter of defending good against evil. The simple moral pronouncements that follow upon ‘humanitarianism’ create deceptive scenarios of action in which the political dimensions of contemporary problems are sanitized.
Mamdani makes a convincing argument. How we name our world has profound implications for how we act upon it; we navigate by the labels we give to things. And as Hannah Arendt (herself a refugee of the Holocaust) argued, by failing to reflect upon the concepts and moral pronouncements of our society we lose our capacity for agency and ethical action. The discourse of humanitarianism and development often renders Africa as the object of our good deeds, rather than a terrifically complex continent hosting people with worldviews and histories quite different from our own. Thinking that the resolution of problems in Africa (or anywhere, for that matter) requires only the moral assertion of political and military authority is a comforting delusion, but this type of reasoning won’t get us far.
In fact, casting the distant problems of the world in binary moral terms often excuses us from engaging in meaningful social action. Paul Lample astutely clarifies the true meaning of justice in his book, Creating a New Mind:
“To work for justice does not entail parroting support for popular issues or the causes of the moment. Justice is not an excuse for the promotion of self-interest. It is not obtained by righteous indignation and loud demands made from a distance on behalf of an oppressed when one is cushioned by the comforts of privileged circumstances. It is promoted, instead, by patience and long-suffering, through persistent action and loving education.�
This is not to say that we should remain unconcerned with global issues, just that we should avoid investing in easy moral positions. A belief in the oneness of humanity does not require making daily proclamations of the horrors of injustice in Africa, nor does it consist of a quiet and facile hope that everything will eventually get better. As Shoghi Effendi wrote, the principle of the oneness of humanity “is applicable not only to the individual, but concerns itself primarily with the nature of those essential relationships that must bind all the states and nations as members of one human family. … It implies an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced.â€?
This is a task that clearly requires much more than simply putting boots on the ground in Darfur.
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“A belief in the oneness of humanity does not require making daily proclamations of the horrors of injustice in Africa,” - great line.
In full an excellent post, thank you, and I have several things to say, but I have neither the time nor the carbohydrates necessary to say them now. For the moment I shall content myself by affirming the comments about naming the world. I’m writing a report on counter-terrorism, and a constantly recurring critique is that, in calling current counter-terrorism efforts a “war on terror”, it polarises people and radicalises communities in a manner entirely avoidable if terrorism were thought of not as a warrior, but as a criminal.
Later I will add some thoughts on the contradictions of the political and spiritual varieties of activism. Geoff, as I think you’re already well aware, it is a significant problem for those of us doing the kinds of subjects and work we do. Studies and careers that involve political science and development are at danger of tricking us into thinking that those subjects, that work, is the actual answer. Of course, they are not, and there are some ways for spiritual activists (as opposed to political ones) to not lose sight of that.