Democracy has multiple lineages beyond that of the European Enlightenment, lineages which include collective practices of accountability and ethics of indigenous groups and subalterns past and present. As globalization and the War on Terror spread their destruction across the globe, democratic collectivities have come under siege in many ways, and are responding with their survival at stake. Those in the global north may learn from these responses about forms of democracy that have much to teach the world about possible futures for democracy.
Subaltern ways of surviving under the War on Terror have gone virtually without mention in news reporting, despite the claim to protect rural and urban women and those with little formal education by the nations behind the World War Without End. Indigenous governance areas are at the center of the War on Terror, from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan to indigenous struggles over sovereignty in the Trans-Sahel region of North Africa. At the same time the claims to democratic governance in territory conquered by invasion, such as Hamid Karzai’s administration in Afghanistan, have only very tentative relations to full-fledged representative structures of classic European political analysis.
Indigenous group responses to globalization are often founded in democratic governance, like the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Karen of Thailand, the Republic of Lakotah in the United States and the Noongar in Australia. As a spokesperson for the Zapatista movement put it, “Collective work, democratic thinking, and subjection to the decisions of the majority are more than just traditions in indigenous zones. They have been the only means of survival, resistance, dignity, and defiance.” Yet their democratic practices may take forms that our European-derived notions of democracy would not recognize as legitimate or useful; rethinking the limits and politics of that recognition is one main goal of this blog.
At Democracies 2 Come we take seriously the possibility that subalterns living under the War on Terror and globalization may have something to contribute to the global understanding of democracy and freedom, dignity and justice. By taking them seriously as agents capable of intelligent analyses and democratically organized constructive responses to the War on Terror and globalization, we may move beyond seeing them only in terms of the status of victims needing rescue by foreign nations, multinational organizations like the IMF and the United Nations, micro-lending development schemes, and NGOs. Rural women and men with little schooling have much to say about economics and the War and its democratic claims in its many, many conflict zones, from Afghanistan to Yemen and regions beyond centralized national control.
Subalterns speak about the world they see all the time, just like network news speaks about the world it sees constantly. But the speech act of the subaltern famously evades the terms and logics of our understanding. How might we learn from below to hear when the subaltern speaks about the ongoing world wars without end? The commentaries in this blog do not represent the subaltern, do not speak for the subaltern. They are necessarily incomplete attempts to complete the always already available speech of the subaltern by hearing what they are saying everyday.
Subaltern affairs are profoundly shaped by local historical specificity, but they hold global implications as well. Their specificity is known as singularity, that highly specific historical particularity that makes universalized generalizations impossible. So the global meaning of the subaltern takes some getting used to, some willingness to operate under different terms and logics and forms than what you find in the modern newspaper or classroom, the courtroom or the boardroom. These terms and logics allow us to see the politics of what those under the grip of modern discursive regime take for granted, and coming to recognize our limits and blind spots.
Subaltern ways of surviving under the War on Terror have gone virtually without mention in news reporting, despite the claim to protect rural and urban women and those with little formal education by the nations behind the World War Without End. Indigenous governance areas are at the center of the War on Terror, from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan to indigenous struggles over sovereignty in the Trans-Sahel region of North Africa. At the same time the claims to democratic governance in territory conquered by invasion, such as Hamid Karzai’s administration in Afghanistan, have only very tentative relations to full-fledged representative structures of classic European political analysis.
Indigenous group responses to globalization are often founded in democratic governance, like the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Karen of Thailand, the Republic of Lakotah in the United States and the Noongar in Australia. As a spokesperson for the Zapatista movement put it, “Collective work, democratic thinking, and subjection to the decisions of the majority are more than just traditions in indigenous zones. They have been the only means of survival, resistance, dignity, and defiance.” Yet their democratic practices may take forms that our European-derived notions of democracy would not recognize as legitimate or useful; rethinking the limits and politics of that recognition is one main goal of this blog.
At Democracies 2 Come we take seriously the possibility that subalterns living under the War on Terror and globalization may have something to contribute to the global understanding of democracy and freedom, dignity and justice. By taking them seriously as agents capable of intelligent analyses and democratically organized constructive responses to the War on Terror and globalization, we may move beyond seeing them only in terms of the status of victims needing rescue by foreign nations, multinational organizations like the IMF and the United Nations, micro-lending development schemes, and NGOs. Rural women and men with little schooling have much to say about economics and the War and its democratic claims in its many, many conflict zones, from Afghanistan to Yemen and regions beyond centralized national control.
Subalterns speak about the world they see all the time, just like network news speaks about the world it sees constantly. But the speech act of the subaltern famously evades the terms and logics of our understanding. How might we learn from below to hear when the subaltern speaks about the ongoing world wars without end? The commentaries in this blog do not represent the subaltern, do not speak for the subaltern. They are necessarily incomplete attempts to complete the always already available speech of the subaltern by hearing what they are saying everyday.
Subaltern affairs are profoundly shaped by local historical specificity, but they hold global implications as well. Their specificity is known as singularity, that highly specific historical particularity that makes universalized generalizations impossible. So the global meaning of the subaltern takes some getting used to, some willingness to operate under different terms and logics and forms than what you find in the modern newspaper or classroom, the courtroom or the boardroom. These terms and logics allow us to see the politics of what those under the grip of modern discursive regime take for granted, and coming to recognize our limits and blind spots.
Those blind spots carry out what Gayatri Spivak once called epistemic violence, a type of violence supported by the violence of the War on Terror and Fourth World War, and a violence that can end through painstaking, highly specific localized forms of resistance and retooling. Once it occurs to us that those blind spots and attendant violence might keep us from hearing what the subaltern is speaking about, new horizons open for knowing and living.
These new horizons are already subject to widespread debate and experimentation. From urban Argentina to suburban Peru to rural Mexico, Phillipines, and India, those whose lives have been devastated by globalization have already begun to develop new democracies at the intersections of long-standing local practices with resistance to transnational corporations and their government supporters. The mass movements of the 2011 Arab Spring have put to shame the claims to democracy not only of so-called elected governments of Egypt and Iraq, but also of Europe and its settler colonies. Out of these multiple locations have come reconsiderations of the limits of democracy from commentators ranging from those close to the rural global south like Raùl Zibechi, Vandana Shiva, John Holloway, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to high theorists of the metropolitan north, such as Chantal Mouffe, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Alan Keenan, and Giorgio Agamben. Here we may find points of intersection and practice between the rural and urban, the subaltern and the formally educated, the metropolitan and the rural in coming to recognize democratic practices beyond the limits and blind spots of the modern.
The future holds that recognition-to-come, just as it holds other unknown futures already at work in histories and societies outside the range of modern intelligibility. These possibilities are learnable from below, and the bourgeois among us have our work cut out in finding how to recognize that which is absolutely other to our familiars, to our terms and hierarchies and assumptions, our epistemes and our reason, to our embodied, everyday practices. That future holds the possibility of ethics and a new democratic politics for us moderns in the form of responsibility to our unknown others, however incomplete our efforts may inevitably be.
The future holds that recognition-to-come, just as it holds other unknown futures already at work in histories and societies outside the range of modern intelligibility. These possibilities are learnable from below, and the bourgeois among us have our work cut out in finding how to recognize that which is absolutely other to our familiars, to our terms and hierarchies and assumptions, our epistemes and our reason, to our embodied, everyday practices. That future holds the possibility of ethics and a new democratic politics for us moderns in the form of responsibility to our unknown others, however incomplete our efforts may inevitably be.
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