“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking
as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly
contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings
are spread. This is how one perceives the angel of history.
His face is towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events,
he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay,
awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a
storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings
with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This
storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back
is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
This storm is what we call progress.”
Walter Benjamin
Theses on the Philosophy of History
The Paul Klee painting depicted on the cover of this issue evokes
the complex pressures of the current moment in Sri Lanka. Unable
to ‘make whole what has been smashed’, we nevertheless have to
grapple with how we mourn the dead and remake the possibilities
available to our present. In rethinking our received political
compass and creating alternative futures we need to experiment
with new avenues to expand and revitalize spaces for democratic
engagement; a proliferation of efforts addressing different constituencies
and agendas. This journal is one such experiment. As Sri Lanka,
caught in the storm ‘blowing from Paradise’, is pushed backwards
into the future, this journal seeks to engage with the political
spaces traversed and produced in that trajectory. These are the
political spaces of elections, parliamentary debates and peace
talks – but equally, these are conversations regarding contested
visions of multiculturalism, economic justice, feminisms, citizenship,
sexual pluralism, diasporic nationalism, and such.
The Terms Of Peace And The Terms Of War
As the peace process unfolds in Sri Lanka, cautious optimism about
the prospects of ending the war are intertwined with efforts to
situate peace within broader struggles towards decentralization
and democratization. Many voices in Sri Lankan civil society
have urged that a sustainable and just end to the war requires
that peace, constitutional re-ordering and democratization be
understood as fundamentally inter-dependent. Thus our vision
of the peace process needs to be expanded and enriched to be accountable
not only to the principal military combatants, but to the diverse
constituencies of Sri Lankan society, particularly those groups
and issues historically excluded or marginalized in the analyses
and implementation of peace talks. For instance, whereas gender
may be a central prism through which nationalist identity has
been constituted in both the Sinhala and Tamil nationalist movements,
the category of gender seldom penetrates dominant analysis of
peace talks. Whereas hill country Tamils constitute a third of
the Tamil population, their priorities and aspirations have seldom
been on the agenda of peace talks - although ostensibly such talks
are aimed at addressing the diverse interests of a pluralist polity.
While a vocal configuration of chauvanist forces may cling to
a military solution, it is clear that most Sri Lankans want peace
and are hoping that the current process will bear fruit. However,
simultaneously many also want to critically engage and improve
the terms of that peace such that, at the very least, it safeguards
minimal human rights standards – holding the principle actors
accountable for ongoing violations (where the LTTE seems particularly
culpable at the current moment), and the ongoing impact of past
violations (by both the LTTE and the SL government). Over the
last few months a variety of groups, Muslims, children’s rights
advocates and other citizens protesting extortion, forcible recruitment
and other repressive measures, have contested and challenged the
conditions of the current peace in ways that have productively
enhanced the terms of engagement for all of us. There is increasing
recognition that peace is not a static outcome, but a dynamic
ongoing process to be defined and redefined in social struggles
on a number of different axes. As the peace process helps wedge
the door open to democratic participation in the North and East,
we need to work to support efforts for a revitalized civil society
emerging from over a decade of paralysis.
The complex fault lines shaping competing understandings of peace
and violence also need to be situated in the dynamic of global
events and debates. The events of 9/11 and their aftermath need
to be situated in relation to disparate mass atrocities that preceded
and followed it – and cumulatively contributed to a precarious
landscape of hotly contested meanings regarding legitimacy and
terror. From Tel Aviv to Washington, D.C., New Delhi to Kathmandu,
anti-terrorism rhetoric has been mobilized and exploited to quell
political dissent, attack the most vulnerable sectors of society
and launch brutal military crusades. As the American government
and its allies continue to bomb an embattled population in Afghanistan
under the banner of anti-terrorism rhetoric, the tragedies of
New York that were caused by the brutal attacks of September 11th
, have now been compounded by tragedies in Afghanistan.
While non-state forces such as the FARC in Columbia may unleash
terror, state terror also proliferates the world over – over the
last few months the Israeli government has bulldozed its brand
of genocidal violence in the occupied territories. In a different
context, Robert Mugabe has suppressed his critics and trampled
on the democratic aspirations of the citizens of Zimbabwe. Closer
home, Muslims in Gujarat continue to suffer an ethnic cleansing
campaign fed by a Hindu chauvinist government, and an anti-Muslim
bigotry that has gained heightened currency in the post-cold war
global order. The terrain of language and violence that regulate
and produce the notion of terror maps onto local and global constellations
of identity and interest, power and privilege. In this fraught
terrain it becomes particularly important to unequivocally condemn
the vicious anti-civilian terror of the LTTE, without being complicit
in the loaded vocabulary of “terrorism” that has been exploited
historically by the government of Sri Lanka, to mask its own,
equally vile, legacy of state-terror.
“Alternative Pluralisms”
The question of intervening in a fraught political terrain becomes
particularly pertinent as negotiations regarding a cease-fire
slowly evolve into talks regarding a new constitutional order
in Sri Lanka. In approaching constitutional questions, we need
to resist sweeping entrenched hierarchies under the carpet through
a depoliticized prism of conflict management (as the UNP government
seems to want to do). Simultaneously however, we do not want
to blindly follow the post-independence script of the “national
question” of a homogenous “Sinhala” majority’s relationship to
a homogenous “Tamil” minority. This is an opportunity to revisit
dominant maps of identity and interest in Sri Lanka to enable
alternative, differentiated and dynamic configurations of our
solidaristic attachments and the constitutional form through which
we explore questions of justice and pluralism. Thus we view constitutionalism
not as an escape from violence, but as itself embedded in the
patterns of violence, persistent injustices, and structures of
power and privilege that shape how we understand and interpolate
ethnic identity and interest. Understood in this way, we displace
negotiations between the state and aspirants to state power, to
open our vision of constitutional politics to an uncharted and
contested terrain involving other actors in Sri Lankan society,
alternative modes of political engagement beyond law and ‘official’
politics, and a radically different vision of the agenda to include
issues ranging from sexuality to class, religion to citizenship,
ethnic identity to sustainable development, and so on.
Beyond State vs. Market: Alternative Trajectories For The
Economy
While pluralism is a crucial entry point for re-charting democratic
possibilities in Sri Lanka, questions of economic justice have
to be focused on simultaneously. While national mobilization
around ethnicity and economic justice have been bifurcated into
different trajectories of social mobilization, that bifurcation
has itself impaired our understanding of the issues at stake and
the terms of our policy debates. At a point when peace talks
are dominating the public sphere, there has been little collective
debate about the fact that the government is embracing a free
market strategy that will radically heighten the vulnerability
of the vast majority of Sri Lankans to global actors who are not
accountable to them. Given that talks regarding Sri Lanka’s fundamental
political compact are ostensibly on the broader parameters of
democratic accountability, decentralization and participation,
we should critical scrutinize such enormous changes in people’s
control over their socio-economic well being rather than zone
economic decision making as a question of technocratic expertise.
Unfortunately, the contingent and problematic sealing off of a
vast area of economic decision making from our understanding of
decentralization, participation and pluralism has been naturalized
and entrenched by both the state and its most prominent
critics. Ironically, this has itself exacerbated ethnic tensions
and reproduced patterns of economic power and privilege in truncating
our understanding of pluralism and economic justice by zoning
the agendas furthering each of those into alternative spheres.
In their different ways, recent events in Argentina and Venezuela,
confirmed the importance of understanding questions of democratic
accountability to be at the heart of our choices regarding economic
trajectories.
In Sri Lanka, neither the welfare state nor the liberalized economic
policy that partially replaced it in 1977, allowed for a participatory
model of economic decision-making. While the former empowered
the state and state functionaries, and engendered economic passivity,
the latter empowers global actors with even less accountability
to the population most affected by their actions. Although state
welfarism that held full sway until 1977 offered a safety network
to the vast numbers of people and elevated the quality of life
of the population at large with limited resources, it failed to
offer commensurate opportunities and social mobility. However
the system of liberalized economics that the current government
is seeking to extend and entrench even more radically, has deepened
inequalities and traded off the safety network that many depended
on for limited opportunities for those who can access the market.
Limiting our debates on economic trajectories to these two unnecessarily
polarized alternatives has failed to deliver economic justice
or a radical imagination for equitable growth. As a range of
contemporary critical theorists have suggested, we need to reconfigure
existing policy alternatives so as to encourage institutional
innovation and contest the reproduction of received hierarchies
and entrenched inequalities – ultimately, this entails expanding
our critical imagination to remake the possibilities open to us.
The Spaces For Critical Imagination
Concerns with claiming a space for dissent and critical imagination
have risen to prominence in global civil society in recent years.
Protests against the international system’s blinders regarding
Israel’s genocide against Palestinians have brought these issues
to the fore with heightened urgency in recent weeks. However,
even priori to that, the anti-globalization protests, from Seattle
to Porto Allegro, have birthed a new space for solidaristic association
in the international public sphere; there are not necessarily
opponents of globalization per say but different social groups
opposed to the dominant forms and impacts of globalization for
a range of different reasons, from concerns with distributive
justice to concerns regarding environmental policy to opposition
to the war in Afghanistan. Undoubtedly anti-globalization protesters
are internally diverse and pursue disparate and even contradictory
goals. However, reclaiming the space for a critical imagination
has emerged as a key nodal point for these divergent forces just
when the Washington consensus appeared to have sealed out dissent
in a uni-polar post-cold war world.
The political vocabularies and structural dynamics of struggles
in Sri Lanka are also shaped by the intersections of these local
and global forces; the stakes of struggle in Sri Lanka and the
expatriate community may need to be conceptualized on a plurality
of scales, local to global. Thus it may be instructive to attend
to the continuities and discontinuities between the anti-war efforts
in Sri Lanka and anti-war efforts directed against the imperial
militarism of the US and its allies in Afghanistan (and its possible
expansion to Iraq). In the face of a stunningly uniform acquiescence
with American unilateralism by most governments, it is disparate
informal networks of global civil society that have constituted
the principal sources of critical scrutiny, debate and opposition
regarding “the war on terror” in Afghanistan and the USA. As
with the international public sphere, in Sri Lanka too this may
be a moment where claiming and invigorating the space for dissent
has itself emerged as a high priority for activists and civil
society at large in engaging with the terms of peace. Against
a backdrop where forces such as the LTTE and Sinhala Urumaya may
seek to monopolize collective protest by mass engineering events
such as Pongu Thamil and the anti-MOU demonstrations in the South,
we need to navigate both delicately and forcefully to claim an
independent space.
As we navigate through our political engagements, developments
in Sri Lanka over the last few months have opened new possibilities
for alternative futures. Anxiously embracing the promise of those
alternatives, we are also confronted with a resilient dynamic
of terror – another pile of wreckage is being hurled at our feet.
Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the metaphor that we began with,
suggests that the storm from Paradise both drives and disrupts
the political spaces from which we engage the wreckage at our
feet. We can never just turn away from the debris and fly forward
into progress - it is in tentative experiments, experiments shaped
by the enabling disruptions of the storm from Paradise, that we
claim a space for a critical imagination to contest the pile of
debris growing skyward.
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