Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id760478865
you locate the founding of the modern nation-state not with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which emerged from the view that the sovereign-nation system is the best mitigator of conflict, but further back, with the forced conversion to Christianity, or otherwise the ethnic cleansing, of Jews and Muslims from Iberia.
id760478574
challenge the thesis that nationalism and colonialism are two separate things—that nationalism is the good side, colonialism the bad side; that nationalism came first, colonialism later, or vice versa. I wanted to show that they were twins joined at the hip.
id760478584
the nation-state project could not be achieved without ethnic cleansing and extreme violence. This could be seen in the expulsion of Jews and Muslims [from the Iberian Peninsula], and that soon led to a conflict between states, because each state had an official majority—the nation it claimed to represent—and its minority, or minorities. So this would have begun as an internal ethnic issue, and it turned into an interstate issue in the Thirty Years’ War [from 1618 to 1648], following on the heels of several religiously mobilized conflicts in Europe.
id760478846
the solution to it, theorized by John Locke in his “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” is a nonsolution. It’s a nonsolution because it assumes that every minority has a state somewhere else. Well, lo and behold, not everybody did. In Europe, the most outstanding example was the Jewish minority—it had no state anywhere else.
id760477110
The human rights paradigm focuses on the perpetrators of violence. It wants to identify them individually so that we can hold them individually accountable. It does not look for the beneficiaries of that violence. Beneficiaries are not necessarily perpetrators. To address beneficiaries, you need to identify the issues around which violence is mobilized. The word “beneficiary” is not even there in the vocabulary of human rights movements—they have only perpetrators and victims. You have to ask yourself: Will the problem go away if you identified the perpetrators and held them accountable? No—from my point of view, not at all. You can fill an unlimited number of jails [with] perpetrators, but it will not bring a solution to the problem unless you acknowledge that the problem is more political than criminal, and that when it comes to political conflicts and political violence, adversaries mobilize around issues. A political problem needs a political solution.
✏️ A very key distinction between perpetrators and beneficiaries. As always, you have to look at the agendas at play. Who’s gaining power? Who wants the violence to happen? And also, dealing with the perpetrator does not solve things. You have to deal with the systems and the people in charge. 🔗 View Highlight
id760478872
That was the South African lesson. The end of apartheid was not a court trial which identified individual perpetrators and punished or amnestied them. The solution was political: It reformed the state, from an apartheid to a democratic state.
id760479274
The Jewish immigrants to Israel [in the late 19th century] did not have a political project. The immigrant project was limited to finding space in the existing society, to live under the existing political umbrella, whatever it was. Conversely, the settler was defined by a political project, at the heart of which was to set up a settler state. It was this political project which sparked political violence, because it translated into removing Palestinians from that land.
id760479470
I am a child of immigrants to Africa. Contrast the immigrant with the settler: The Indian immigrant, the Indian dukawallah, the Indian small shop owner never carried a gun. Impossible. But I can’t imagine a white settler who did not carry a gun. It’s just that different. The immigrant could only feel secure by developing positive give-and-take relations with his neighbors; the settler could only feel secure by owning arms which threatened the life of his neighbors. The two are completely opposite projects.