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Western State Terrorism
Full text linkStates use terror to achieve political ends, by employing violence to ensure compliance and to coerce populations away from dissent. Moreover, despite popular understandings of terrorism as a ‘strategy of the weak’ used against liberal democracies, an examination of the history of Western foreign policy shows that democracies have often returned to the use of state terror in order to cement their regional or global dominance. This chapter explores the use of state terror by the West, and seeks to provide an understanding of its underlying purposes. We argue that Western state terror is one of a number of coercive tools used to secure and maintain access to resources and markets, whether in colonial times, during periods of imperial decline, or as an adjunct to the more recent roll-out of neoliberal forms of globalisation
Dirty Hands, Clean Conscience? The CIA Inspector General’s Investigation of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” in the War on Terror and the Torture Debate
Full text linkThe War on Terror has generated fierce debate on torture as a means of thwarting terrorist
threats. The argument is polarized between those who take a utilitarian position
and those who seek to uphold the absolute prohibition on torture. Within the utilitarian
camp, there are those who argue that torture, while immoral, should be legalized for
use in the fight against terrorism, so that it can be better controlled and regulated. This
article will provide new insights through its analysis of the CIA Inspector General’s
2004 Special Review of Counterterrorism, Detention and Interrogation Activities, declassified
in 2009. This offers important evidence that counters the key assumptions of
contemporary torture apologists. Specifically, the Inspector General’s findings reinforce
the argument that torture is not effective, that efforts to legalize its use under controlled
conditions are futile, and that, even where torture is permitted by higher authorities,
recriminations against the perpetrators are still likely to ensue. Furthermore, torture
tends not to be aimed at thwarting imminent threats. Its use by the CIA in the War on
Terror is no exception. In any case it has yielded little evidence that could not have been
obtained through legitimate means
Why Torture?
Full text linkI develop a framework to account for torture, which I argue should be understood with reference to international relations. I show that torture is intended as a tool to ensure the security, stability and legitimacy of elites, often transnationally, but there is often a disjuncture between its intended and actual outcomes. Despite dominant claims that torture is used to defeat security threats, most torture is intended to deter political opposition and secure legitimacy for elites. I conclude that torture should be renounced, both on moral grounds, and because it is not necessary for the functions it is intended to serve
Preventing Rendition and Torture by Mapping the Global System of Rendition and Proxy Detention
Full text linkThis paper seeks to explain the development and operation of a now global system of rendition and secret detention. Rendition involves the kidnap of suspects and their illicit transfer to another state and frequently involves torture. It is generally assumed that rendition was very much a phenomenon of the Bush administration. In fact, it has continued since Obama took office, despite his early executive orders which ruled out some of the other nefarious practices of the Bush administration, such as torture. Situating rendition within the wider framework of US neo-imperial practices, particularly the quest for US hegemony within the global military-industrial complex, the paper provides a detailed account of the development and evolution of the global system of rendition. It analyses the ways in which key moments in US and international politics have impacted on rendition practices, and also shows how rendition constitutes the latest iteration of international state terrorism
Prefigurative Politics: Perils and Promise
Full text linkMany recent social movements have been characterised by their commitment to direct democratic decision-making procedures and leaderless, non-hierarchic organizational structures. This political tendency also implies the search for autonomy from existing political institutions and practises. Movements seek instead to embody in the political action itself the social relations, ways of collective decision-making and values that are ultimately desired for the whole society. This prefigurative approach to social change is often criticized for being naiive or marginal. This thesis argues first that this is not the case, but that prefigurative politics is misunderstood due to its differing view on questions of strategy, organisation and ultimately the possibility of fundamental societal change. The dissertation first outlines the often implicit strategy or vision of change underpinning prefigurative politics. It then identifies as the key challenge for prefigurative movements their ability to avoid reproducing oppressive forms of power, ‘power-over.’ This understudied aspect is investigated through extensive ethnographic field research with the unemployed workers movement, MTD Lanús in Buenos Aires, and the Zapatista movement in Mexico. The thesis concludes that it seems impossible to completely avoid reproducing old forms of power. Often key individuals in the movements end up in a paradoxical position whereby, in an effort to ensure the group’s prefigurative nature, these individuals enjoy non-prefigurative influence. The findings imply that the state and corresponding political forms and practise are not the only source of hierarchic pressures. As such, it would be more useful to view prefigurative political action as desirable, yet impossible
Inter-state terrorism in the 21st Century: Mapping the Evolution of the Global Rendition System
Full text linkThis paper seeks to explain the development and operation of a now global system of rendition and secret detention in the ‘War on Terror’. The paper offers two corrections to current understandings of rendition. Firstly, while existing scholarship has emphasised the use of rendition as a counter-terrorism tool during the Reagan and Clinton administrations, there has been no analysis of the role played by rendition in the much longer history of the efforts at the heart of US foreign policy to insulate US hegemony. The paper will show that rendition is the most recent in a long line of tools that have been developed by US intelligence and defence officials to carve out extra-legal spaces to deal with perceived threats. Secondly, the paper seeks to show that the global rendition system is a system in flux. Various pressures beyond the US government’s control have forced the US Executive and intelligence and defence services to make major changes to the global rendition system in desperate attempts to maintain that extra-legal space that it believes it needs to thwart threats to its interests
The Political Communication of Hugo Chávez: The Evolution of Aló Presidente
Full text linkAló Presidente was a weekly television programme anchored and produced by Hugo Chávez during his presidency in Venezuela. The show, a version of a phone-in, was broadcast live on national television at 11am on Sundays and lasted on average six hours. It followed the presidential agenda to a new location every week, where Hugo Chávez would inaugurate factories, read Latin American poetry, interview Fidel Castro, and sing llanero songs. This thesis investigates the role that Aló Presidente played in the making of the “Bolivarian Revolution”, Hugo Chávez’s political project. Through a critical reading of the transcripts of the show, it explores the 378 episodes, or 1656 hours, that aired between 1999 and 2012. Aló Presidente was the cornerstone of Chávez’s political communication, replacing press conferences and interviews. Chávez was known for his continuous presence on radio and television and his daily presidential addresses. However, only on the Sunday show could the audience phone the president and share their ideas, emotions and everyday life concerns. This thesis reviews the narratives that underlined the relationship between the audience/electorate and the host/president on Aló Presidente. It is argued that Aló Presidente played a fundamental role in articulating the identity of a public that shared the values and ideas of Chávez’s hegemonic project. Moreover, it is argued that the show Aló Presidente and the ideological process called the “Bolivarian Revolution” can be read as two co-related arms of a same project, and that they informed and defined each other throughout Chávez’s presidency. In this context, this thesis assesses the evolution of the programme in light of the political events taking place in Venezuela during that time. Aló Presidente is thus seen as a repository, or “black box”, of the discourses that articulated the Bolivarian identity and constructed the legitimacy of Hugo Chávez as the leader of a populist movement in Venezuela. Finally, the core of this thesis is that the co-relation between the show and the hegemonic project evolved over time to strengthen the authoritarian tendencies of Hugo Chávez’s regime. Following the activities of Aló Presidente over 13 years, the investigation charts that evolution in three different stages: 1) participation, 2) education, and 3) obedience, arguing that what started as a seemingly participatory space, progressively became a platform that presented Hugo Chávez’s figure as the ideologue of a populist movement, and ultimately secured his position as the indisputable leader and sole authority of Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution”
Reconstituting hegemony: US power and the New Left in Latin America
Full text linkIn the first decade of the twenty-first century, and in stark contrast to the immediate postCold War period, Latin American politics was defined by the ascendency of leftist and centre-left forces. The emergence and consolidation of the 'New Latin Left', as this thesis terms these governments, signalled a profound challenge to the longstanding hegemony of . the United States in the Western hemisphere. In their foreign and domestic policies, the countries of the region began distancing themselves from Washington's geopolitical and economic agenda. This thesis examines the ways in which US foreign policy responded to the counter-hegemony manifested in the New Latin Left. Defining hegemony as an asymmetrical and dialectical relationship patterned by multiple and overlapping fOlIDS of power, it investigates US efforts to reconstitutJ its hegemonic position in the Americas. Building on Gramscian historical materialism, it Situates US hegemony alongside the political economy of the Post-Washington Consensus. The analysis utilises the taxonomy of power developed by Barnett and Duvall to examine the interplay of the different facets of US hegemony in Latin America, which, as the argument goes, are inextricably interlinked with on-going processes of neoliberalisation. Empirical chapters focus on: the coercive leverage of US compulsory power; as realised through. the Pentagon's resources and strategy in the region; the institutional power of the Organization of American States in relation to newly-created and Latin American-led mechanisms ofmuitilateral cooperation; the structural power of the US's multi-track free trade agenda; and the productive power expressed in the discursive construction of Latin American populisrri. By exploring the different facets of US power in the region, the thesis brings clarity to what remains an open and contested process of hegemonic reconstitution. In doing so, it contributes to critical International Relations/International Political Economy scholarship on US hegemony, US foreign policy and contemporary US-Latin American relations
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