Other Sovereignties

Subaltern populations achieve autonomy in many ways under globalization and the War on Terror. Their sites of autonomy rarely come to global public awareness, but when they do they are shaped by the terms under which they make sense to largely bourgeois, news-viewing and academic readers and viewers.  What other terms and logics might be useful for understanding subaltern autonomy?

In the War on Terror we find autonomy being exercised by indigenous peoples of the Sahelo-Saharan area. The indigenous peoples of the region, the Tuareg, Toubous, Woodaabè, and others are not given rights under their rule following modern, European-derived boundaries of the nation-states of the region, Niger, Mali, Algeia, Lybia, Mauritania.  In order to oppose the work of the U.S. and U.K. to militarize their territories in the war on Terror (Bachman pdf), they have formed the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC) on the model of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations.  Foreign policy and state authorities refer to these groups as “tribes,” “ethnic minorities,” and other terms that emphasize their backwardness in terms of the modern society and their small size in demographic terms. These categories legitimate their disregard as entities exercising political, cultural, and social autonomy, yet they still have shown they will organize across differences and push for their vision of the world.

Autonomous regions managed and even governed by indigenous groups characterize not only the Sahel but other key areas in the War on Terror. These regions include the autonomous regions of northwest Pakistan, which have formal autonomy under the Pakistani state governance mechanisms, and the Kurdish region of Iraq. The former are known as “tribal” regions in the press and foreign policy analysis, and present considerable governance and military issues for both nation-states and the U.S.-led military counterinsurgency operations. The latter are well-known for the wide-spread destruction they suffered at the hands of the Iraq government in the 1980s and early 1990s, and for the support they have received under the U.S. occupation and rights they were able to extract in negotiations leading to the 2005 Iraqi constitution.  Both of these regions are characterized by a partial and incomplete appropriation of the ethnic groups into the mechanisms of modern centralized forms of “democracy,” shaped in its origins (both historically and in Iraq very recently) by Euro-American models and pressures.  So we see that indigenous autonomies may be found in the multiple regions exceeding the centralized control of the nation-state and of the presumptive global police force of the U.S. and the U.K. in the war on terror.

This past August 8, 2011, news reports of the Arab Spring events in Syria noted the armored column that Syria used to attack the city of Homs, which had “largely wrested itself from government control this summer.” (Hadid, NYT, A1, 8-8-11) This autonomy is understood in press reports and foreign policy and academic analysis as a threat to centralized state authority in terms of democratic movements opposed to dictatorships. Unlike Deir al-Zour, another city targeted in the Syrian state military response to the Arab Spring, Hama is not known as a hotbed of “tribal” clans.  The movement towards autonomy in the case of Homs is thereby reduced to the terms of democracy, erasing the ways in which resistance to capitalist development and to secular modes of “modern” governance (including the modern dictatorship) are always already present in these locales. 

Under globalization the best known examples of local autonomies are found in Mexico and Bolivia, which unlike most countries of the Arab Spring claim to be democracies.  The Zapatista movement went public on the first day of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, explicitly linking their indigenous struggle for dignity, autonomy, and justice with opposition to the travesty of freedom known as free trade. The indigenous and mixed-race resistance to free trade policies in Bolivia has been centered in Cochabamba and El Alto, where Raúl Zibechi and others have described the terms, logics, organizational structures, and goals.  The continuing success after fifteen years of the Zapatista autonomous zones and the defeat of Bechtel aligned with the nation-state in Bolivia under enormous pressure from modern national armies and transnational structures (WTO, IMF) demonstrate their power. These successes ask us to understand what is meant by the Zapatista saying of “Caminar preguntando” or “Walking while asking questions,” and how to develop local equivalents to the ayllu of El Alto in other regions and locales.

A model for subaltern autonomy may be found in the story, “Draupadi,” about indigenous resistance movements in India by the activist journalist Mahasweta Devi.  In the face of police violence and rape, Draupadi acts outside the social norms of her day, confronting the police commander with what seems to him to be incomprehensible behavior and ”indomitable laughter.” Gayatri Spivak in her introduction to the story’s translation has suggested that benevolent development NGOs, liberal activists, and academics like yours truly are like the police commander, and that we have something to learn from below before we will understand how to work with the subaltern in ethical ways. By coming to recognize the terms, logics, and laughter of the subaltern in her many global sites of local autonomy, we may see how resistance to globalization and the war on terror is linked with the Arab Spring, Zapatista democracy, and indigenous networks across difference.