On July 1st, 2022, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (also known as AMLO) inaugurated the Dos Bocas oil refinery in his home state of Tabasco. The inauguration was a huge publicity coup for the president, who had promised to build the refinery when he first took office.
 
One of the highlights of the ceremony was the moment when the president unveiled—and fawned over—“La Aurora de México” (1947). La Aurora de Mexico [“The Dawn of Mexico”] is a painting depicting a woman embracing several oil towers as if these were her babies. La Aurora was painted by the late Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. It celebrates the expropriation of foreign oil companies and the nationalisation of the Mexican oil industry in 1938 by then-President Lazaro Cárdenas. Cárdenas appears at the top left of the painting together with Vicente Lombardo Toledano, a labour organiser who helped oil workers unionise.
 
La Aurora harkens back to a product of an era in which the Mexican state actively supported artworks and monuments in public plazas, crossroads, and buildings around the country. That the authoritarian Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) was able to maintain a one-party rule for over seventy years (1929–2000) can, in part, be explained by its ability to tie its political achievements to those of the nation and ideologically interpellate the public into its political project through widespread political communication. The latter included supporting the production of artworks and monuments, many of which were was based on the idea of “art for the people” and, like La Aurora, are characterised by their “narrative style, realist aesthetic, populist iconography, and socialist politics”.[1]
 
AMLO’s public celebration of La Aurora is noteworthy because the Mexican state’s support for the arts and its collaboration with artists has been waning for decades. This decline has accelerated in the wake of the country’s transition to a formal electoral democracy in 2000. Market-oriented reforms have enabled an unprecedented incursion of private corporations and collectors into the art world, who have increasingly supplanted the state as the arts’ main patron.[2]
 
Despite AMLO’s declared opposition to the neoliberal turn in Mexican politics and his nationalist rhetoric that recalls the PRI era, this process has accelerated during his time in power. One of the most surprising characteristics of AMLO’s tenure has been his vocal disdain for artists and intellectuals. Rather than bringing artists back under the aegis of the state, the president has excluded them from his populist project by consistently accusing them of being members of a nebulous, neoliberal elite, and by cutting resources earmarked for artistic institutions as part of his fiscal policy of austeridad republicana or republican austerity.[3]
 
In this context, the display of La Aurora de México during the Dos Bocas refinery’s inauguration is telling. Instead of commissioning a new artwork or monument for the new infrastructure, the government used an old painting that harkens back to the country’s post-Revolutionary authoritarian era and one that celebrates a key political accomplishment that has been framed by official history as a major act of anti-imperialist sovereignty.
 
By displaying this painting at the inauguration, AMLO sought to signify a new era of assertive Mexican sovereignty and nostalgia for a time when Mexico’s economy grew rapidly through a politics of economic nationalisation. As he has argued repeatedly, the refinery will generate a “massive turn” (“un gran viraje”) back from the “neoliberal turn” of the 2000s and 2010s that had made Mexico dependent on imported petroleum.[4] In so doing, it will pave the way for the country to become more economically self-sufficient, which in turn suggests the return of an accompanying economic prosperity.
 
The Aurora itself, meanwhile, is not actually publicly owned. Instead, it belongs to a private owner who loaned the piece to AMLO for the occasion. The Aurora will not remain at the refinery; the painting was returned to the owner as soon as the inauguration was over.[5]
 
AMLO’s one-day exhibition of Siqueiros painting during the Dos Bocas inauguration is paradoxical. On the one hand, AMLO is using the Aurora to signify continuity with a past that is associated with the assertion of Mexican sovereignty and a state-driven economic policy, as a way to signal a break with neoliberal policy. On the other, the brevity of the display, and the fact that the artwork is privately owned also signifies the decline of the Mexican state’s support of public art and thus a continuity with the neoliberal turn rather than a break with it. But what if this interpretation is missing the point? What if rather than focusing on the Siqueiros’ painting as the refinery’s aesthetic and ideological locus we focused on the refinery itself? What if AMLO’s works of infrastructure—of which the Dos Bocas refinery is one among many—are the current administration’s monuments and works of art?
 
Traditionally, monuments have been defined as interventions into the landscape that are built with the purpose of celebrating, commemorating, and glorifying a particular person or event and doing so by conveying a sense of permanence.[6] Extending J.L. Austin’s famous definition, Kaitlin Murphi argues that “monuments effectively function as speech acts: they are public proclamations of certain narratives that are intended to simultaneously reify that narrative and lay claim to the space in which the monument has been placed.”[7] In other words, Murphi maintains, in addition to conveying information, monuments also do things: they usher in or create a new state of affairs simply by laying claim to a space through their presence.
 
While the Siqueiros painting cannot be said to have achieved this, given its impermanent presence, the refinery itself certainly did. Briefly framed by La Aurora, the refinery draws selectively from that celebrated past of oil nationalisation, thus operating like a monument. Indeed, works of infrastructure, much like monuments, possess a sign value that enables them to engage in similar meaning-making and political operations.[8] The Dos Bocas refinery instantiates the ways in which infrastructures may be attributed the symbolic power to effectively function as monuments.
 
Monuments are “focal points of a complex dialogue between past and present,” connecting historical events that are worthy of monumentalisation and spectators who engage with the past via these objects.[9] The relationship that Dos Bocas establishes with that past and its glory is, crucially, mediated through the current political significance that this refinery is expected to have: it is not merely meant to be a repetition of the past, but rather another such moment of revolutionary change. This change, in the president’s words, is marked by a revival of the nationalised oil industry, which had been weakened by neoliberalisation, and thus a recovery of the nation’s lost dignity as a notable producer of oil. The refinery may then be mobilising the past of the Aurora towards its self-fashioning as part of an autonomous aesthetic-political project, making this infrastructure both a monument to the past and to itself. It is also, in many ways, a monument to an economic ideology that once proved to be quite fruitful and an attempt to revive the historical moment in which it did.
 
However, when AMLO inaugurated the refinery, it was not yet ready to be used. Dos Bocas was rushed into being so as to mark a milestone of the current administration, but it was still at least a year away from beginning production. According to several news outlets, only the administrative part of the plant was ready, which represented 30% of the infrastructure. This was not lost on commentators, including prominent critical journalists who described the inauguration as a simulation, forcing AMLO to admit that the refinery was in fact just starting a trial period and would begin operations in earnest in 2023.
 
In a sense, the incomplete—and, in a technical sense, useless—refinery merely constituted the staging of AMLO’s celebration of himself. By inaugurating it before it was finished, the president set the refinery in what Marrero-Guillamón calls a state of suspension, which is not “a temporary phase between the start of a project and its (successful) conclusion, but as a mode of existence in its own right.”[10] Without performing any technical function, the refinery’s power and meaning remain purely aesthetic and discursive, rendering it a monument.
 
By being inaugurated in pieces, infrastructures may work as promises[11] and, therefore, as monuments to those who build them. For AMLO, this was not the first time he used Dos Bocas to stage a political event. On December 9, 2018, barely a week after his inauguration, AMLO laid the first stone at a massive event at the same site. This was marked by the attendance of several high-ranking politicians and a lengthy presidential speech that framed the refinery as part of an urgent solution to a profound crisis in Mexico’s oil industry, caused by waning investment in the state company, Pemex, and the failed effort to open the oil sector to private companies. This event circulated widely: its video was uploaded that same day to AMLO’s personal YouTube account, where it has been streamed over half a million times. The president has also frequently spoken about the refinery during his daily press conferences, showcasing other milestones in its construction, each time setting off discussions in the press and on social media.
 
Following Isaac Marrero-Guillamón, we may see the materiality of Dos Bocas as “redistributed… into multiple instantiations other than its construction, such as exhibitions, technical documents, and public presentations.”[12] We can further extend this redistribution by considering how the extensive media coverage of these public events stretched the refinery’s visibility throughout the public sphere in its capacity as a monumental setting of presidential power. Indeed, a large part of the refinery’s public presence depends not on the concrete and steel of the infrastructure itself, but rather on the circulation of its representations. Given its remote location in a small coastal town in southwest Mexico, the refinery is only connected to most Mexican citizens in these highly indirect ways, much as the gasoline it will (eventually) produce will make its way through the pipelines and into the gas tanks of the vehicles transporting them.
 
Like a monument, the meaning and experiences around Dos Bocas are produced in its abundant “verbal and textual sources.”[13] In official discourse, the refinery is meant to materialise the president’s project of soberanía energética, or energy sovereignty, which, in turn, points to a broader notion of sovereignty—that of an autonomous nation, no longer the object of its commercial partners’ imperial power. More than that, Dos Bocas is meant to be exemplary of the president’s political-economic project, dubbed the Fourth Transformation (4T). Though a precise definition of the 4T is lacking, the president usually invokes it “to describe a revindication of national pride, a political project of aligning the presidency with the popular will, and the creation of a social movement that could do away with the old party system, social inequality, and the economic status quo.”[14] It is meant to match the magnitude of three previous watershed moments in Mexican history: the Independence War (1810–1821), the Guerra de Reforma (Reform War, 1858–1861), and the Revolution (1910–1917). One could perhaps wonder whether the construction of a refinery can in fact be seen as revolutionary in an era of climate change, or whether it in fact constitutes an anticolonial, sovereign act.
 
The refinery’s value rests less (if at all) in its technical function than in its performative capacity. Going back to Murphi’s definition of monuments, Dos Bocas, even in its unfinished stage, does things: it reifies the profound political transformation that AMLO claims to be spearheading and gives AMLO’s discourse concrete reality, thereby conjuring it into being. In so doing, the refinery ushers in a state of affairs that connects multiple temporalities. It draws on a glorified sovereign past and heroic struggle to shape a present that is rendered permanent through the infrastructure’s claim to space. In this scenario, artworks and monuments that celebrate AMLO’s political project are no longer needed, it is the infrastructure itself that does the work.
 
The effectiveness of this infrastructure’s performative power vis-à-vis the old regime’s use of public art remains, however, an open question. To evaluate it, one may need to delve more deeply into the features of the ideological projects that each one is a part of and the conditions that have sustained them. These may include the actors involved in their orchestration and their aims; the distinct ways in which each project’s message has circulated—the former, for instance, privileging visual form in artistic representations of infrastructure, while the latter has resorted to discourse and spectacle; and the ways in which each has been taken up by those they are meant to address; as well as the possibilities for each message to be debated and challenged. But rather than thinking of these two projects separately, as competing endeavours, we must look at their mutual intertwinement as the source of their power. As we saw, La Aurora’s brief display at Dos Bocas’ inauguration meant to transfer its dense meaning to this infrastructure. The refinery’s symbolic force then hinged upon La Aurora’s own (historical) force, which AMLO sought to take in new directions. And, as he did so, he reaffirmed, perhaps reinvigorated, the force of an old, superseded medium, making it part of a new form of political communication.



[1] Mary Coffey, How a revolutionary art became official culture (Durham: Duke University, 2012): 22.

[2] Daniel Montero, El Cubo de Rubik. Arte Mexicano en los Años 90. (México, RM, 2014).

[3] https://www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/pdf/LFAR_191119.pdf

[4] Jon Martín Cullel. “López Obrador defiende la “autosuficiencia” en gasolinas en la inauguración de la refinería de Dos Bocas,” El País (July 1, 2022): https://elpais.com/mexico/2022-07-01/lopez-obrador-defiende-la-autosuficiencia-en-gasolinas-en-la-inauguracion-de-la-refineria-de-dos-bocas.html

[5] Leticia Sánchez Medel. “Obra de Siqueiros es exhibida en la inauguración de la Refinería Dos Bocas,” Milenio (July 1, 2022): https://www.milenio.com/cultura/refineria-bocas-exponen-obra-siqueiros-inauguracion

[6] James Young, The Texture of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

[7] Kaitlin Murphy, “Fear and loathing in monuments: Rethinking the politics and practices of monumentality and monumentalisation,” Memory Studies 14 (6): 1143-1158.

[8] Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta, The Promise of Infrastructure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018)

[9] Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989 (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005, 7).

[10] Isaac Marrero-Guillamón, “Monumental Suspension: Art, Infrastructure, and Eduardo Chillida’s Unbuilt Monument to Tolerance,” Social Analysis 64 (16): 28.

[11] Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2018; and Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327-343, 2013.

[12] Marrero-Guillamón 2020, 28.

[13] Carrier 2006, 22.

[14] Humberto Beck, Carlos Bravo Regidor, and Patrick Iber, “Year One of AMLO’s Mexico,” Dissent (Winter 2020): https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/year-one-of-amlos-mexico

Emily Katzenstein: You describe your own work in terms of ‘decolonising urban spaces’ through artistic interventions. Can you tell us what that decolonisation means in this context? What projects are you currently working on?

Yolanda Gutiérrez: At the moment, I have two different kinds of projects. One is the Urban Bodies Projects. That’s a project that deals with the colonial past of European cities. I am working with local dancers in each city. The next one will be in Mexico City, and then one, next year, in Kigali. My second project is the Decolonycities Project. That’s a project about dealing with the German colonial past in the city of Hamburg, through the eyes of those who were colonised. I am planning to do five projects in five countries—Togo, Cameroon, Tanzania, Namibia, and Rwanda [countries Germany colonised in the late 19th and early 20th century—eds.]

And then I have the Bismarck-Dekolonial Project, which I started when this Bismarck controversy arose. In Hamburg, they are renovating the Bismarck monument for €9 million. It became a big controversy and overlapped with the Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S., and here in Germany. Here in Hamburg, activists started to paint or graffiti all kinds of colonial monuments and symbols of white supremacy. Suddenly, overnight, these monuments had been altered. But you can’t really do that with the Bismarck statue because they’re currently renovating it and it’s surrounded by protective walls. So, we’ve been having a two year long discussion about what should happen with the Bismarck monument.

The discussion in Hamburg was driven by a lot of activists, especially people of colour. For me, however, it was important to see what would happen if we brought in the perspectives of artists from former German colonies (Namibia, Cameroon, Togo, Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania—eds.) who are living with the consequences of Bismarck’s role in Germany’s colonial past. So I acted as a producer and curator, and I invited artists from the countries that Germany colonised in Africa to stage their own performances in Hamburg, at historical sites that are linked to Germany’s colonial past. The artists who participated were Isack Peter Abeneko[1], Dolph Banza, Vitjitua Ndjiharine, Stone, Moussa Issiaka, Fabian Villasana aka Calavera, Sarah Lasaki, Faizel Browny, Samwel Japhet, and Shabani Mugado.

That’s a political statement. When the invited artists put themselves in the spaces that have some significance in Germany’s colonial history, they appropriate those spaces. The artists put on performances that reinterpreted the meaning of the places in which they performed. During the International Summer Festival, when the invited artists from Bismarck-Dekolonial put on their performances, for example, the audience could participate in what I call a decolonising audio-walk: you could see the artists’ performance while simultaneously listening to an audio track that plays the sounds of German troops leaving the Hamburg port, for example—a huge event at the time. So, the audio of German troops leaving from the Hamburg port is juxtaposed with the performance of the artists from Namibia, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Cameroon. You are listening to an audio track about the event of German colonial troops leaving from the Hamburg port, and, simultaneously, you see the performances of artists who are descendants of those who were most directly affected by Germany’s colonial policy.

We often tend to think of history as something stale, dead—something that belongs in the past, that we don’t care about. In discussions of Germany’s colonial past, that is a reaction that you encounter quite often. People say: That’s in the past and there is nothing that we can do about it. The past cannot be undone. And my reaction is: Yes, the past cannot be undone but we can change the perspective of how we look at history.

EK That is something that brings the different contributions of this series together—the sense that the past is, in a sense, contemporaneous, and that the stories that we tell about the past are crucial to our sense of who we are today. Can I come back to the question I asked earlier? What does decolonisation mean when it comes to artistic interventions? How do you conceive of decolonisation in your own work?

YG: Yes, my work reflects on the fact that history has been written by the colonisers. For hundreds of years, the colonial gaze has shaped our understanding of the societies that Europeans colonised. For example, during the Spanish conquest of Latin America, Spanish priests often took on the role of historians. Their impressions of the societies they encountered was heavily influenced by the own cultural presuppositions. For example, they had certain notions about the role of women in society, notions about gender roles, etc. That coloured and distorted their view of the societies they tried to describe. In the case of women in Aztec society, for example, they confused expectation and reality, and described what they expected to find—they portrayed Aztec women as unemancipated and occupying a predominantly domestic role, because that’s the way they saw the role of women in Catholic Spain. But now there are new histories of indigenous societies. There was an amazing exhibition in the Linden Museum Stuttgart on Aztecs culture, for example, that reflected very critically on the ways of seeing that have shaped European impressions of Aztec society over generations. That is what I am trying to do in terms of my artistic interventions—to publicise and communicate ‘unwritten’ histories, untold stories, and marginalised historical perspectives.

To do that, I work closely with historians. For example, my most recent project is situated in Namibia, which was colonised by Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century. From the beginning, I’ve collaborated with Jan Kawlath, a doctoral student in history at the University of Hamburg. His PhD investigates how the departure of German colonial troops was publicly celebrated to performatively construct images of Germany as a colonial power. And when we visit the historical sites at which we will stage performances, we listen to his writings about events that took place there, and his writing about these places and sites informs our choreography.

In that sense, my work is influenced by Gloria Wekker’s work on the cultural archive.[2] Wekker writes so powerfully about the importance of the cultural archive. There’s also a James Baldwin quote that captures it well: “History is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.”[3]

EK: In your work, you’ve experimented with different modes of presentation and media to stage decolonising artistic interventions. You already mentioned the ‘decolonising audio-walk’. Can you explain the concept of a decolonising audio walk?

YG: Yes, I use the concept of decolonising audio walks in all my projects. The audience has head-phones, and walks to historical sites that have some significance in the colonial past of the city. When you arrive at a site, you see the performance while listening to the audio soundtrack. It is a combination of different types of information, historical facts, interviews with experts, statements by artists, music, etc. etc. Afterwards, you walk to the next site, and so on. It is a way to incorporate a lot of different elements: Dance, audio—it’s an embodied experience for the audience because they walk through the city. Walking through the city allows you to see familiar places with new eyes. I mean, normally, once you’ve lived in a city for a while, you assume you know the place and you’re not going to go on a tour of the city. But then, during the decolonising audio walk, you experience yourself not knowing the city that you assumed you knew, and that allows you to uncover the histories that are normally not talked about.

EK On the website of the Bismarck-Dekolonial Project, you raise a question that I found fascinating, and that I wanted to put to you: namely, what kinds of artistic interventions are effective in contributing to decolonising urban spaces? How do you think about the different artistic strategies and interventions one can stage, and about the differences in the impact they have? With regards to the ‘decolonising audio-walk’, is there a tension between this momentary performative intervention and the monuments that embody permanence? Can performances effectively contest the built environment?

YG: Performances in urban spaces are a way to reach people easily. By contrast, universities have, for a couple of years, been doing a lot of “Ringvorlesungen” (series of lectures by different speakers), where you have artists and academics talk to each other about decolonisation. I have been following all these discussions, and I think that’s also an interesting approach, but they don’t reach a broad audience. Similarly, in the arts, there are many exhibitions that deal with decolonisation, but they are framed in a very particular way, and it’s for a particular audience; they don’t reach as many people. And what I really love about dance is that it allows me to juxtapose different temporalities and sensory impressions—historical accounts or sounds from the past are juxtaposed with a performance that’s very much in the moment. You can connect the history to which you are listening to what you see. In that sense, it’s a way to demonstrate the contemporaneity of the past. It’s like puzzle pieces coming together.

But audio walks, and performances more generally, are ephemeral, and that is my big challenge. You can put on as many performances as you like—for example, during the International Summer Festival 2021 in Hamburg, we put on five performances every day, which was already a lot. But even if you do a hundred performances per day, it doesn’t change the fact that it is ephemeral. So right now, my big question is how we can turn this into something more permanent. Because it’s all about memory, right? It’s about memorials and historical sites that need to be decolonised. And the challenge for me is: How can I, as an artist in the performing arts, leave a print that’s permanent? I am trying to get ‘into memory’ and I am still trying to figure out how far we can go with these performances and audio-walks in historical sites, what their impact is.

So that’s my big next challenge. I always say that the fact that the artists who participated in the Bismarck-Dekolonial Project—Isack Peter Abeneko, Dolph Banza, Vitjitua Ndjiharine, Stone, Moussa Issiaka, Fabian Villasana aka Calave, Sarah Lasaki, Faizel Browny, Samwel Japhet, and Shabani Mugado—put on these performances around the Bismarck monument means that the space has been altered. It is no longer the same space, no longer holds the same meaning. The traces they left are ephemeral but they are there, nonetheless. There is a trace. That’s why I want to work on putting up a QR code or something similar. At the moment, my idea is to combine it with a visually appealing sculpture or something else that attracts passers-by, so that they say: “What’s that? I want to know more.” And then they can use the QR code to watch the performance that happened in the space.

EK: One of the questions that always structures debates about contested monuments, it seems to me, is how we should think about the relationship between meaning and monuments. As an artist, how do you think about this relationship between monuments and meaning? Can we speak of a ‘hegemonic’ meaning of particular monuments or should we think about a multiplicity of meanings? Should we oppose hegemonic meanings with counter-hegemonic meanings, or prioritise showcasing the diversity and multiplicity of possible interpretations and meanings? What’s your approach to this?

YG: In Germany, we haven’t spent enough time reflecting Germany’s colonial past. The Second World War is obviously a horrific part of Germany’s history, and it tends to overshadow everything else, including Germany’s colonial past. But that means that you miss crucial connections, and that people don’t know Germany’s colonial past. For example, that the idea of the concentration camps was first developed during the genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia, camps that were built in the beginning of the 20th century. For me, the representation of Bismarck is a symbol of the power that Germany had in the world at that time. In the case of Bismarck, this is dangerous, because it works as a magnet for the right-wing, and we experienced that in a very, very bad way. During the performance of Vitjitua Ndjiharine, a visual artist from Namibia, one person in the audience suddenly went up to her and gave the Hitlergruß. He was facing the Bismarck monument, and stood in front of her, and gave the Hitlergruß.

So, trying to deal with this statue and with what it represents is exactly where the power is, for me. I mean, just look at it. The sheer measure of the monument is so imposing. And I think that’s the way that Germans were feeling when they colonised Namibia. If you read the writings of German colonial officials at the time, there is this feeling of supremacy. And that’s difficult to deal with, especially now, when they are polishing the Bismarck monument and literally making it whiter.

EK: There have been many proposals as to what should happen with the Bismarck monument. Some have argued that the monument should be removed altogether, others have argued that it should be turned on its head, and yet others propose letting it crumble. I assume letting it crumble is not really an option for safety reasons, but I’ve always liked the symbolism of it. What do you think should happen with the monument?

YG: I think if you vanish the Bismarck monument that doesn’t mean that you’ve vanished the meaning of Bismarck in the minds of people; what his figure means for people. And you can’t simply let the monument crumble—the size of the monument means that that is unfeasible. There were issues with the static of the monument, that’s why they’re renovating it. I mean with some monuments, you can let them crumble, no problem, but given the size of the Bismarck monument that’s not feasible.

But you know what? I could see it happening in a video, a video that’s then projected unto the Bismarck monument. That’s something that we have experimented with, too. We didn’t pull the statue down but we did what we call ‘video mapping.’ We did it at night, and that’s when I really felt like an activist. I had a generator, and it was midnight, and we had to set everything up. That’s the first time where I had to inform the municipality and said: Hey, I'm going to do this at the Bismarck monument. And they said, OK, that’s fine. You're going to destroy it. Nothing is going to happen. But I mean, you could see the change—suddenly the Bismarck monument became the canvas instead of the symbol it usually represents.

Of course, that’s a temporary intervention. But I am also convinced that we need a permanent artistic intervention. I think we need an open space for discussions. For example, I could imagine a garden around the monument, a place where we can keep this dialogue and this discussion going once the renovation is done.

I am not a visual artist, obviously, but I was on a podium discussion[4] about decolonising and recontextualising the Bismarck statue with several other artists. There were two very interesting women, Dior Thiam, a visual artist from Berlin, and Joiri Minaya, a Dominican- American artist based in New York. Joiri Minaya has already covered two colonial statues at the port of Hamburg, a statue of Vasco da Gama and a statue of Christopher Columbus, with printed fabrics of her own design[5]—it’s very interesting work. As I said, I am not a visual artist, but I think that a permanent art intervention is necessary. Because what I do is so ephemeral, and I have the sense that we need to reach as broad an audience as possible.

EK: The discussions about what to do with the Bismarck monument have been ongoing for the last two years. What impact has the debate had? Do you get the sense that the debate has contributed to a broader political awareness of Bismarck’s role in Germany’s colonial past in Hamburg? Or is this largely a debate amongst a relatively narrow set of actors?

YG: Yes, the question about impact. What I got tired of were all these discussions on advisory boards, and advisory committees: People discuss a lot. I am a maker, and I sat at a lot of these discussions and said, yes, we can keep discussing but we also need to do something now. And people had a lot of reasons for why we couldn’t do anything until later. But to me it seemed wrong to wait until the renovations are finished. It seemed like a strange idea to stage an intervention once Bismarck’s shining in all his glory, you know. The discussions are good and all, but they are not enough. They don’t reach enough people; they don’t reach communities. I think it would be fantastic to have something like the project Monument Lab in the United States here in Germany. Monument Lab is combination of different layers of communities—they bring together artists, activists, municipal agencies, cultural institutions, and young people. That’s precisely what we need to do around the Bismarck statue. We need a multilayered participatory process that includes different groups in society.



[1] Due to pandemic-related travel restrictions, Isack Peter Abeneko could only participate remotely from Dar es Salaam.

[2] Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham, 2016.

[3] As cited in I Am Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck (2016; New York: Magnolia Pictures, 2017), Netflix. (1:26:32).

[4] Behörde für Kultur und Medien Hamburg, “(Post) colonial Deconstruction: Artistic interventions towards a multilayered monument”, 16.09.2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6215&v=hRFzASv_ea4&feature=emb_logo

[5] For images of the covered statues and an explanation about the symbolism of the printed fabrics, see the link above at 1:25-1:30.

Recent years have seen successive waves of “statue wars”[1]—intense controversies over the visible traces of European colonialism in built commemorative landscapes. The most recent wave of controversies about so-called “tainted” monuments[2]—monuments that honour historical figures who have played an ignominious role in histories of slavery, colonialism, and racism—occurred during the global wave of Black Lives Matter protests that started in reaction to the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. During a summer of global discontent, demonstrators famously toppled statues of Jefferson Davis (Richmond, Virginia), and Edward Colston (Bristol), beheaded a Columbus statue (Boston), and vandalised statues of King Leopold II (Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent), Otto von Bismarck (Hamburg), Winston Churchill (London), and James Cook (Melbourne), to name just a few examples.

These spectacular events sparked heated public debates about the appropriateness and permissibility of defacing, altering, or permanently removing “contested heritage”.[3] These public debates have also led to a renewed interest in questions of contested monuments and commemoration in political theory and political philosophy.[4] So far, however, this emergent debate has focused primarily on normative questions about the wrong of tainted commemorations and the permissibility of defacing, altering, or removing monuments.[5] Engagement with the political-sociological and aesthetic dimensions of monuments, monumentality, and commemoration, including their relationship to political ideologies and subjectivities, by contrast, has remained relatively thin in recent debates about commemoration and contested monuments in political theory. This means that crucial questions about the role of commemorative landscapes in political life and in the constitution of political subjectivities have remained underexplored. For example, there has been only a relatively superficial reconstruction of the ideological stakes of the debate over the fate of contested colonial monuments. Similarly, while there have been several powerful defences of vandalising and defacing “tainted commemorations,”[6] the literature in political theory and political philosophy has not yet engaged fully with innovative aesthetic strategies for contesting colonial monuments through decolonising artistic practices.

This series, Contested Memory, Contesting Monuments, seeks to curate a space in which emergent debates about monuments and commemoration in political theory can be in conversation with debates about the politics of the built commemorative landscape in political science, anthropology, sociology, and area studies that explore political-sociological and aesthetic dimensions of monuments and commemoration. Importantly, it also seeks to facilitate a direct exchange of perspectives between scholars of monuments and commemoration in the academy, on the one hand, and memory activists and artists who are actively involved in today’s politics of memory and monuments, on the other.

This is intended to be an open-ended series but we start with a wide-ranging series of inaugural contributions. In the first contribution to the series, Moira O’Shea traces the history of contesting Confederate monuments in the US and reflects on our relationship to the past. Upcoming contributions include an interview with Yolanda Gutierrez, a Mexican-German performance artist, and the founder of Bismarck Dekolonial, in which we discuss the realities of attempting to decolonise the built environment through artistic interventions; Chong-Ming Lim’s exploration of vandalising tainted commemorations; Sasha Lleshaj’s Sound Monuments, which reflects on very idea of monumentality, and connects struggles over ‘contested heritage’ to political contestations of ‘soundscapes’; and Tania Islas Weinstein and Agnes Mondragón analyses of the political uses and abuses of public art in contemporary Mexican politics.



[1] Mary Beard, "Statue Wars," Times Literary Supplement, 13.06.2020 2015.

[2] Chong‐Ming Lim, "Vandalizing Tainted Commemorations," Philosophy & Public Affairs 48, no. 2 (2020).

[3] Joanna Burch-Brown, "Should Slavery's Statues Be Preserved? On Transitional Justice and Contested Heritage," Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 no. 5 (2022).

[4] Helen Frowe, "The Duty to Remove Statues of Wrongdoers," Journal of Practical Ethics 7, no. 3 (2019); Johannes Schulz, "Must Rhodes Fall? The Significance of Commemoration in the Struggle for Relations of Respect," Journal of Political Philosophy 27, no. 2 (2019); Burch-Brown, "Should Slavery's Statues Be Preserved? On Transitional Justice and Contested Heritage."; Lim, "Vandalizing Tainted Commemorations."; Macalester Bell, "Against Simple Removal: A Defence of Defacement as a Response to Racist Monuments," Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 no. 5 (2021).

[5] Daniel Abrahams, "Statues, History, and Identity: How Bad Public History Statues Wrong," Journal of the American Philosophical Association, First View , pp. 1 - 15 (2022).

[6] Bell, "Against Simple Removal: A Defence of Defacement as a Response to Racist Monuments."; Ten-Herng Lai, "Political Vandalism as Counter-Speech: A Defense of Defacing and Destroying Tainted Monuments," European Journal of Philosophy 28, no. 3 (2020); Lim, "Vandalizing Tainted Commemorations."

Although there is a popular drive towards a much-touted ‘pragmatic’ understanding of global events, an ideological theory of international relations has become more important due to the complexity of these events. This means the creation of new methodologies and conceptions to demonstrate that the adaptability and everydayness of ideologies has become even more essential in a dynamic world. One way of doing this is to treat ideologies as living variables that can interact with contexts to shape policies and the substance of the ideas themselves. What this also means is to further enhance the bid to see ideologies as phenomena that are “necessary, normal, and [which] facilitate (and reflect) political action”.[1] In this piece, I argue that a contextualisation of socialism and classical liberalism into the Nkrumah and Danquah-Busia-Dombo ideological debate, respectively, has been the ideological binary pervading Ghanaian politics since independence despite the changes in government and personnel.
​
Making a case for thought and action through ideological contextualisation

Many African governments have not hidden their love for or association with existing macro-ideologies like liberalism, Marxism, and socialism. Yet, for most of the journey of ideological studies, since its beginnings with Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Africa has been overlooked due to the preoccupation with the assumption that African states have little room for policy manoeuvre due to foreign influence—a position captured in the extraversion and dependency arguments.[2] This has been consolidated by the view that the rhetoric and actions of policymakers do not conform to dominant ideologies, or external influences appear to override the ideological objectives of African governments. In this article, I argue against this position, emphasising that dependency is not akin to a lack of ideology; and demonstrate that ideology is indeed relevant in Ghanaian politics as it will be in the rest of Africa. What I suggest is that although the ideas of Ghanaian governments may not be pure or conform fully to the core tenets of existing macro-ideologies, paying attention to contextually relevant ideological variables and how they interact with macro-ideologies is a viable way of understanding the dynamic role of ideas in Ghanaian and African politics, in general.

Several studies have shown that events and politics in Africa are as dynamic and interesting as politics elsewhere.[3] Hence, I agree with Thompson that “if the study of ideology helps political scientists to understand the politics of the West, then the same should also be true for post-colonial Africa. Any book seeking to explain the politics of this continent, therefore, needs to identify and explore the dominant ideologies that are at work in this environment”.[4]

I first admit that the African context is unconventional and atypical. Unconventional because ideologies are embedded in context and the existing macro-ideologies evolved from contexts and situations outside the African conditions. Interestingly, in a lecture by Vijay Prashad (Indian historian) he demonstrated how India and China have integrated Euro-American ideologies, similar to the point I am making here.[5] Second, I acknowledge the tight spaces in terms of structural institutional constraints, history and the level of dependency of African states that makes it quite unique from the politics of the global North. Therefore, to embark on this analysis of ideology in an unconventional setting requires certain theoretical adjustments to reflect the dynamic conditions of the politics in African states.

My approach to these adjustments is what I call an Ideological Contextualisation Framework (ICF). Ideological contextualisation is a coined concept that connotes that ideologies and ideological analyses should consider the immediate environment and historical experience of the cases being explored. It is inspired mainly by the works of Michael Freeden and Jonathan Leader Maynard on ideology. In the process of policy-making, large abstract political ideas must be translated into actual decisions, policy documents, plans, and programmes of action. To do that, ideological concepts need to be made to ‘fit’ a particular place, time, and cultural context. Part of this bid to make ideologies ‘practicable’ in different contexts flows from the field of comparative social and political thought to a more recent conception of comparative ideological morphology by Marius Ostrowski.[6] For instance, James McCain’s experimental analyses of scientific socialism in Ghana, published in 1975 and 1979, reveal that it does not conform to the assumptions of orthodox ‘African Socialism’.[7] Instead, what a leader like Nkrumah meant with this ideology was to exploit its political mobilisation feature within the Ghanaian cultural context. This is because it was a response to the needs at the time. Emphasis is, therefore, placed on the “native point of view” and “whatever that happens to be at any point in time”.[8]

The essence of contextualising ideas is to avoid the analytical shortfalls dominant in the African context occasioned by analyses that focus on either the overbearing role of ideology, which leads to policy failures, or the non-existence of ideologies at all. These analyses fail to capture the dynamics of ideology and what falls in-between these extremes.

While Ghana is unique, its conditions resemble what happens in many African countries. This year, Ghana’s celebrates 65 years of gaining its independence and of being the first sub-Saharan African country to do so in 1957. Since independence, there have been highs and lows on the development spectrum. Ghana has experienced military, authoritarian, civilian, and democratic governments over the last six and half decades. At independence, Ghana was among the most economically promising countries in the world, but the 2020 Human Development Index Report ranked Ghana 138th in the world. Ghana has not experienced a full-blown civil war or war with other countries but has had pockets of internal conflicts. Over the years, Ghana’s politics and policy-making have also been a dynamic mix of successes and challenges that characterises many African states.

Just like many exegeses of politics in other African states, it is common to hear commentary in Ghana about how genuine commitment to ideology has ended or how it has lost its traction for understanding Ghanaian politics, especially after the Nkrumah era. In one of such instances Ransford Gyampo, in his study on Ghanaian youth, emphasises that ideology does very little in orienting party members, especially the youth.[9] He further insisted on ideological purity as a conduit for organising the youth members. However, scholars like George Bob-Milliar have argued that political parties supply ideologies for their better-informed members who vote based on ideological differences.[10] For Franklin Obeng-Odoom and Lindsay Whitefield, such ideological differences rarely exist as neoliberalism has become a supra-ideology that pervades the different ‘isms’ to which parties subscribe.[11] Although the challenge here lies in the mischaracterisation of ideology, the jury is still out on ideology and its role in Ghanaian politics, just like many other African countries. A recalibrated look at the history of Ghanaian politics from the perspective of contextualisation presents a situation where ideology stretches far beyond magniloquence.

Ideology and the history of Ghanaian politics

What I do here is to briefly explore Ghana’s political history and demonstrate that ideology is and has indeed been relevant to Ghanaian politics. This ideology is typified by the ideological dichotomy between Nkrumah and the Danquah-Busia-Dombo group, which has lasted from the late 1940s to date. As I will explain below, the late pre and early post-independence period was characterised by two groups: one led by Dr Kwame Nkrumah, leader of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) that eventually won independence for Ghana in 1957. On the other hand was the opposition United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC)—the party that brought Nkrumah to Ghana from London—led by Joseph Boakye Danquah, and later by Kofi Abrefa Busia and Simon Diedong Dombo. These two groups agreed and disagreed on many policy issues based on their ideologies and such duality has characterised Ghana’s political milieu since independence. I limit this discussion to the period from independence to the end of Kufuor’s administration in January 2009.

The beginnings of the politics of ideas in Ghana was more profound during the late colonial period after the split between Kwame Nkrumah and other members of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) that manifested in the formation of different political parties till Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966. After this split in 1949, Nkrumah formed the Conventions Peoples Party (CPP) and went ahead to win independence for Ghana in 1957. The UGCC, on the other hand, transformed into different parties which contested and lost to Nkrumah in all the pre and early post-independence elections (1951, 1954, 1956 and 1960).[12] On the internalised level, the two groups were split by their commitment to socialism, African socialism, scientific socialism, or what later came to be known as Nkrumaism for the CPP and classical liberalism or what came to be known as property-owning democracy for the UGCC. One thing to note here is that the changes in vocabularies, as mentioned above and a common feature across subsequent administrations, is a practical manifestation of the constant search not just for a vocabulary that fits the Ghanaian context but ideas that reflects the aspirations of governments.

These party formation dynamics have even deeper ideological outcomes for the Nkrumah and Danquah-Busia-Dombo group on some key issues.  For instance, beyond their internalised socialist ideas, the CPP had what they called ‘African personality’ while the Danquah-Busia-Dombo group preferred the ‘Ghanaian personality’ beyond classical liberalism. What the CPP or Nkrumah administration meant by ‘African personality’ was for “recognising that Africa now has its personality, its own history and its own culture and that it has made valuable contributions to world history and world culture”.[13] According to Nkrumah, ‘African personality’ was to demonstrate to the world Africa’s “optimism, cheerfulness and an easy, confident outlook in tackling the problems of life, but also disdain for vanities and a sense of social obligation which will make our society an object of admiration and of example”.[14]

The Danquah-Busia-Dombo group introduced the idea of Ghanaian personality counter the CPP’s African personality. By Ghanaian personality, they meant “giving more meaning to this freedom [republican status] to express our innermost selves”.[15] This meaning was contextual as it was the period after two harsh laws were passed by the Nkrumah government, CPP. The Avoidance of Discrimination Act (ADA) of 1957 banned all regionally based political parties and forced all opposition parties to merge into the United Party (UP). The Preventive Detention Act (PDA) of 1958 allowed for people to be detained without trial for five years if their actions were deemed a threat to national security. For the opposition, the best way to project an African personality, in the spirit of freedom (decolonisation) and unity (African integration), was first to project a Ghanaian personality that prioritised the same rights.

The two ideas—African and Ghanaian personality—represented their contextual aspirations and significantly impacted their policy preferences and approach. They manifested in policy differences in issues such as how and when independence should be granted, how much Ghana should be involved in the politics of other African states, perceptions about colonial metropoles and future relations with them, how to approach regional integration, economic diplomacy and foreign policy, in general. It also influenced the domestic development goals and approaches.

To give some few policy examples, the CPP fundamentally wanted independence ‘now’ regardless of the consequences while the Danquah-Busia-Dombo wanted independence within the shortest possible period through what they perceived as legal and legitimate means. Parsimoniously on regional integration, while the CPP preferred rapid regional political unity on the continent with all African states, the Danquah-Busia-Dombo group preferred functional regional integration starting with economic and from within the West African subregion. In terms of domestic developmental approach, the Danquah-Busia-Dombo group always preferred alternative routes to Nkrumah’s state-led and managed Import Substitution Industrialisation and common or state ownership.

Throughout this period, the interpretation of ideological components such as economic independence was a key part of the ideologies of the two groups. Even though they both considered it a crucial concept, their interpretations varied, leading to some significant differences in policies and approaches. However, the growing power of contextual structures such as the Bretton Woods has occasioned similar ideas and policy path-dependence over time since the overthrow of Nkrumah in 1966. A cursory look at the IMF and World Bank interventions in Ghana since 1967 shows a common neoliberal trend in approaches to resuscitate Ghana’s economy. This has later accounted for some sort of ideological convergence that some scholars have identified in their study of Ghana’s Fourth Republic (since January 1993). For a developing country that is yet to address some of its basic needs, like infrastructure and education, there are points of convergence in terms of common components that address basic developmental needs. They translate into policies that can, in most cases, appear similar because they have similar inspirations. One of such examples is how even the different ideological factions within the CPP and other political parties acknowledged the need for independence and formed some sort of ideological convergence on that regardless of their fundamental ideological differences. This late colonial and early post-independence period of ideological dichotomy and similarities set the stage for subsequent administrations amidst variations. I explain these dynamics below.

The National Liberation Council (NLC) that overthrew the CPP government pursued policies that showed ideological consistency with the anti-Nkrumah group, Danquah-Busia-Dombo. This was buttressed by the fact that a one-time opposition leader during the CPP administration, who later went into exile, Prof. Kofi Abrefa Busia, became a leading member of the administration and headed the Centre for Civic Education—an organisation responsible for public education on civil liberties and democracy. The administration shifted Ghana’s domestic and foreign policy based on that ideological dichotomy flowing from the Nkrumah and the Danquah-Busia-Dombo debate. More instructively, they shifted to framing liberal-oriented development programmes and building stronger relations with the West—something the Nkrumah-led CPP administration was wary of.

When the Progress Party (PP) took power in 1969, it continued what the NLC began after the overthrow of Nkrumah’s CPP in 1966. Led by Prof. Busia himself, the PP government pursued policies that were ideologically at variance with Nkrumah but in line with ideas espoused by the UGCC before independence. For instance, the belief in non-violent decolonisation occasioned their policy to discontinue Ghana’s financial support for the African nationalists in South Africa, preferring dialogue with apartheid South Africa instead. In 1969, the Aliens Compliance Order promulgated by the government to return undocumented migrants affected many Africans and had implications for Ghana-Nigeria relations under subsequent governments had to address. For instance, in 1983 the Shehu Shagari government of Nigeria’s decision to deport undocumented migrants (half of the about three million deportees were Ghanaians) was popularly interpreted as a retaliation for Ghana’s 1969 deportation policy.[16] 

Although economic reasons were cited for Nigeria’s decision, it is obvious that what Ghana, or the PP government did in 1969 made the Nigerian government and people more relentless to follow through with their decision in what came to be known popularly as ‘Ghana must go’—a name also associated with the type of bag the migrants travelled with.[17] Based on Nkrumah’s relations with African settlers, the Aliens Compliance Order is a policy the CPP government would not have embarked on or fully encouraged.[18] Under the CPP government, Ghana was touted as the Mecca for African nationalists due to the government’s warm reception.

Another point of difference between the two groups was the disagreement of large-scale industries of Nkrumah and the role of the state their building and operation. Therefore, a lot of Nkrumah’s industries were either discontinued or privatised. Some of these industries include the Glass Manufacturing Company at Aboso, in the Western Region, GIHOC Fibre Products Company and the Tema Food Complex Corporation, both in the Greater Accra Region.[19]

The PP government was overthrown by an Nkrumaist oriented junta, the National Redemption Council (NRC), who tried to restore Ghana to its putative glorious years under Nkrumah by resuming Ghana’s contribution to African nationalist movement against Apartheid South Africa, supporting African states in several endeavours, resuming Nkrumah’s industrialisation agenda, pursing a domestication policy that aims to at food self-sufficiency, and repudiating foreign (especially Western) debts. These policies were grounded in the contextual ideological components of economic independence and Pan-Africanism, whose interpretations were closer to the CPP administration’s intentions.

This Acheampong-led NRC government, and later Supreme Military Council (SMC I) administration, was overthrown by an Edward Akuffo-led Supreme Military Council (SMC II) who, though they orchestrated a palace coup to overthrow Acheampong, did not deviate much from the previous administration’s pro-Nkrumah policies. Instead, they were more focused on restoring Ghana to multiparty elections. However, this administration lasted for only eleven months and was overthrown by a group of young militants, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), who took power until after the 1979 elections and handed over to a democratically-elected People’s National Party (PNP).

The PNP government, led by Dr Hilla Limann, was one of the latter attempts to bring introduce a full-fledged Nkrumaist party after the CPP was banned before the 1969 elections. Although to the disappointment of many Nkrumaists, this government did not pursue politics based on the ideas of Nkrumah’s CPP, its policies were somewhat closer to what the Danquah-Busia-Dombo group preferred—for instance, in attempting to the IMF for bailouts and broader pro-West economic relations. This was one of the reasons why the Rawlings-led military junta, now the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), returned to overthrow the PNP government in 1981. Although this group (PNDC) was generally touted as radical and anti-West, their internal ideological dynamics resembled the broader ideological dichotomy between the Nkrumah and Danquah-Busia-Dombo groups. Within the PNDC government was a group that aligned itself to Nkrumah’s CPP ideology and, for instance, were wary of the West, former colonial metropoles and programmes like the Structural Adjustment Policies. On the other side were those who were touted as less radical and ideologically closer to the Danquah-Busia-Dombo group, who were rather willing to engage the World Bank and IMF through the Structural Adjustment Programmes.

This internal dialectic shaped the government’s domestic and foreign policy. However, from 1984, there seemed to be a broader consensus within the party as one whose ideology and politics was shaped by contextual structures, which made it difficult for the government to pursue policies just based on its internalised ideology. The PNDC later metamorphosed into the National Democratic Congress (NDC) when the government, under several domestic and international pressures, adopted multiparty democracy and elections from December 1992. After leading Ghana democratically for eight years, the NDC lost the December 2000 elections to the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

Coming directly from the Danquah-Busia-Dombo tradition, the NPP government led by John Agyekum Kufuor pursued policies mainly in line with what the forerunners have proffered, especially against Nkrumah’s policies. For instance, they created an enabling environment for private property ownership and entrepreneurial development, including encouraging foreign investors, a strengthened relationship with the West, and for a greater emphasis on its economic and democratic values. To further the idea of Ghanaian personality that was based on respect for humanity and human rights, the government opened itself up for review by other African states through the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), and took steps to pursue regional integration from a functional economic perspective.

From the discussions above, a few things must be clarified regarding Ghana’s ideological history. Socialism (for Nkrumaists) and classical liberalism (for the Danquah-Busia-Dombo group) have been the two dominant internalised macro-ideological leanings in Ghana, since independence. However, in an ever-changing, developing, and dynamic context like Ghana and the rest of Africa, these ideologies cannot function in their pure form, in their influence on policies. Therefore, in Ghana and Africa, I argue that context matters.

Looking at the Ghanaian case teaches us three main things analytically about the African continent. First is the dominance macro-ideologies or the fact that we cannot ignore ideologies like liberalism, Marxism and socialism as they are usually primary to the ideological structure of many governments. Second is the power and relevance of contextual structures, like regional organisations and the Bretton Woods, to produce ideas that African governments take on or adjust to because of their putatively weaker position. Constructivists have long emphasised the learning function of states. Third is existence of historical conditions that have evolved into ideas over time. Chatterjee Miller’s study of India and China’s foreign policy reveals a longue durée ‘post-imperial ideology’, comprising a sense of victimisation and driven by the goal of recognition and empathy as a victim of the international system to maximise territorial sovereignty and status.[20] In the Ghanaian case, some of these conditions include economic independence, Africa consciousness and good neighbourliness. While these conditions pervade across different governments, the interpretations and approaches vary. Across the continent, these conditions of ideological value may vary, but they are very relevant to any analysis of ideology. This affords us the laxity to focus on ideological components, treating the macro-ideologies as part of the components.

One of the reasons why ideology has been overlooked is the assumption that African states are weaker and have very little policy options because a lot of their policies are dictated by foreign powers. However, looking at ideology in itself is a bid to explore existing spaces, shed more light on those that have so far been neglected, and begin analyses of African politics from a perspective that acknowledges a certain contextual relevance and policy constraints. To do this, we should see ideologies as living variables that can interact with contexts to shape policies and the substance of the ideas themselves.

Conclusion

The place of ideology in global politics has been evolving in methodologies and vocabularies. This article is borne out of the bid to take Africa more seriously in that conversation by paying more attention to the contextualisation of ideas. This is not to say that ideologies explain everything, but it is to highlight the relationship between the interpretive value of ideology and contexts, and to emphasise that such relationships have a significant effect on African politics. The Ghanaian ideological context has been dominated by different shades of the Nkrumah and the Danquah-Busia-Dombo ideological dichotomy, characterised by an interaction between big-isms, contextual components and structures. These varieties of Ghanaian nationalism is bound to manifest differently in other African cases, but its conceptual proposition of interaction between context and ideas is very relevant. It demonstrates an understanding of African politics from within. Therefore, while this application gives us an indication and confidence to probe more into ideologies and policy-making in other African states, it also responds to the agency question which is fundamental to domestic and foreign policies.
 
 

[1] Freeden, M. (2006). Ideology and Political Theory. Journal of Political Ideologies, 11(1), p. 19.

[2] Bayart, J. F. (2000). Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion. African Affairs, 99, 217–267; Robertson, J., & East, M. A. (Eds.). (2005). Diplomacy and Developing Nations: Post-Cold War Foreign-Policy Structures and Processes. Routledge Taylor & Francis.

[3] Brown, W., & Harman, S. (Eds.). (2013). African Agency in International Politics. Routledge Taylor & Francis.

[4] Thompson, A. (2016). An Introduction to African Politics. In Routledge Handbook of African Politics (4th Edition). Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, p. 32.

[5] Vijay Prashad (2021) What's the Left to Do in a World on Fire? | China and the Left. Public Lecture Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd8w3ONjv6Y&t=453s Accessed 13th March 2022

[6] Ostrowski, M. S. (2022). Ideology Studies and Comparative Political Thought. Journal of Political Ideologies, 27(1), 1–10.

[7] McCain, J. (1975). Ideology in Africa: Some Perceptual Types. African Studies Review, 18(1), 61–87; McCain, J. (1979). Perceptions of Socialism in Post-Socialist Ghana: An Experimental Analysis. African Studies Review, 22(3), p. 45.

[8] Ibid, p. 46

[9] Gyampo, R. E. Van. (2012). The Youth and Political Ideology in Ghanaian Politics: The Case of the Fourth Republic. Africa Development, XXXVII(2), 137–165.

[10] Bob-Milliar, G. M. (2012). Political Party Activism in Ghana: Factors Influencing the Decision of the Politically Active to Join a Political Party. Democratization, 19(4), 668–689.

[11] Whitfield, L. (2009). “Change for a Better Ghana”: Party Competition, Institutionalisation and Alternation in Ghana’s 2008 Elections. African Affairs, 108(433), 621–641; Obeng-Odoom, F. (2013). The Nature of Ideology in Ghana’s 2012 Elections. Journal of African Elections, 12(2), 75–95

[12] Frempong, A. K. D. (2017). Elections in Ghana (1951-2016). In Ghana Elections Series (2nd Edition). Digibooks.

[13] Potekhin, I. (1968). Pan-Africanism and the struggle of the Two Ideologies. Communist, p. 39.

[14] Kwame Nkrumah: Official Report of Ghana’s Parliament of 4th July, 1960, col. 19

[15] S. D. Dombo: Official Report of Ghana’s Parliament of 30th June 1960, col. 250

[16] Aluko, O. (1985). The Expulsion of Illegal Aliens from Nigeria: A Study in Nigeria’s Decision-Making. African Affairs, 84(337), 539–560.

[17] Graphic Showbiz (21st May, 2020) Ghana Must Go: The ugly history of Africa’s most famous bag. Retrieved from https://www.graphic.com.gh/entertainment/features/ghana-must-go-the-ugly-history-of-africa-s-most-famous-bag.html#&ts=undefined Accessed 13th March 2022

[18] Although in 1954, when Nkrumah was the Prime Minister and three years before Ghana’s independence, some Nigerians were deported; but not on the scale, in terms of number and government’s involvement, of what happened in 1969. After independence, Nkrumah’s support for African immigrants and other African states seems to have overshadowed the 1954 deportation of Nigerians.

[19] Ghana News Agency (28th September 2020) Ghana: 'Revive Nkrumah's Industries'. Retrieved from https://allafrica.com/stories/202009280728.html Accessed 13th March 2022

[20] Miller, C. M. (2013). Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China. Stanford University Press.

Udit Bhatia: It might be useful for our readers if you could start off by saying what the idea of transformative constitution is and what work it does in your reading of the Indian constitution.

Gautam Bhatia: The term transformative constitutionalism or transformative constitution originated in post-apartheid South Africa and it had a, it is a contested term. My understanding of it is that there are basically two things about it. First, that it's distinctively post-liberal in its approach to constitutionalism. There was a certain classic understanding of constitutions as being about limiting state power. That is an understanding that comes from the American Constitution that has had a disproportionate influence on constitutionalism across time and across the world. Transformative constitutionalism is post-liberal in the sense that it understands the role of a Constitution to be more than containing the state and it actually involves directing the state towards achieving certain social goals. Another really fundamental tenet of liberal ideology is the idea of neutrality. For example, John Rawls’s ‘right over the good’, where we can disagree over goals but there are certain rights- based principles that are non-negotiable. But transformative constitutionalism specifically says that there’s a certain vision of society we're trying to get towards. In that sense, it’s also post-liberal that you could call it perfectionist again to use the term from analytical philosophy. But it has a certain blueprint of the society that it envisages as being the good society and it sees constitutions and constitutionalism as vehicles for getting there. And then it also calls for changing legal culture, so it's not just what a constitution can do. To make the constitution do that you have to then alter the way people argue in court, the things that courts can do and just the structure of legal argument and legal culture.

So the original article by Karl Klare, a labour lawyer talked about both these things, and often a bit about legal culture is forgotten and in my book, the term transformative constitutionalism broadly does something similar in the sense that it specifically talks about the Indian Constitution as being post-liberal in the sense that it was understood to be an intervention, both with respect to containing state power and providing political and civil rights and transforming subjects into citizens. But also, it was meant to bring about a far-reaching transformation in Indian society and, specifically, tackling private power. So power that exercise through institutions, whether they are social institutions like caste or economic institutions like the marketplace or cultural institutions, various religions. The Constitution, constitutional law, ideas of rights were envisioned as applying to what we classically understand as the private domain. In that sense the Indian constitution was meant to challenge the ideology, so to say, of the public-private divide. That's how I understand the transformative constitution in the Indian context.

UB: Perfect, thanks Gautam! I think one of the things that struck me was how much of the work of excavating these transformative elements happens through your reading of dissenting judgments. Now someone might look at that and think ‘well, great, there’re all these resources you’ve managed to identify in India’s legal history’. But on the other hand, one might think ‘why is this all just dissent—that’s worrying!’. So could you say a bit more about what's going on here?

GB: Historically the constitution's transformative impulses have been submerged by the adjudicatory body that is charged with being the final word on the Constitution, which is the Supreme Court of India. The dominant interpretation that the Indian Supreme Court has placed upon the Constitution and its provisions has been a conservative one. The transformative interpretation exists, and I use Edward Said’s idea of the ‘contrapuntal canon’. So there is a canon—there is the Indian constitutional canon of judgments which, despite a contrary long-standing public perception, encouraged by the Court, and by various scholars, is conservative. But then there are these dissenting judgments, some High Court documents, and the odd majority judgements as well. If you read these against the grain, in a contrapuntal way, you can excavate the transformative impulses that are there in the Constitution’s text and structure.

UB: As one reads the book, you get an idea of the substantive transformative elements in the constitution—especially their engagement with private regimes of power, or their focus on community ties that can infringe individual autonomy in all sorts of ways. But the other side of this story might be the conservatism of the constitutional text in procedural terms: the fact that the constitution set up elitist representative institutions with few opportunities for contestation by ordinary citizens. So, in a way, the transformative constitution was always likely to end up as a dissenting note. I wonder how wedded you are to the idea of transformative constitutionalism through the constitutional text.

GB: The great thing about texts is that they’re always open to interpretation. Something like a constitutional text, given the complicated social histories leading up to the framing of the Constitution, given that constitutional texts are invariably in the language of the abstract principle and not concrete commitments, given that a constitutional text is always open to a diverse range of interpretation—all this makes the interpreters task to bring together different elements, text, history, structure and so on—and fashion the most persuasive reading possible of the constitutional document and I think it is eminently possible to fashion a conservative reading of the document, given its history, and given the text. And that project hasn't happened yet, in my view, although some of H.M. Seervai’s work gestures towards that—though I wouldn't call it necessarily a right-wing interpretation. It is conservative in just placing the boundaries of interpretation as being contained by the text and not beyond that. So it is an essentially a legally conservative reading that he provides, although ironically It is far more rights-protective than a lot of the supreme court's own judgments. But the task that I see for myself as the interpreter is to use these materials that are in existence to fashion a persuasive transformative reading of the text of the constitutional law.

I don't think there is a view from nowhere, and there can’t be a non-engaged engaged standpoint. And my standpoint is from the internal perspective, which is that of a lawyer who works with the Constitution and who believes that there’s a set of important progressive goals that a Constitution is a vehicle towards achieving. It‘s a perspective which says that the Indian Constitution can and should be persuasively interpreted, so that it leads us towards those goals. I don't claim for myself the standpoint of an objective interpreter. I don't think there is any such standpoint but I am a participant and I'm saying ‘look, this is my argument and see if it's a good argument’. If somebody else has a better conservative argument for the Constitution, then fair enough. If that persuades you, as the public, then that’s perfectly fine. This is my argument I am placing before you and I hope that it persuades you.

UB: You’ve made it quite clear in the book that you’re telling us only the judicial side of the story of transformative constitutionalism in India, and that’s not the whole story. But could you say more about the trajectory of this idea outside the courts?

GB: I would recommend Rohit De’s book “A People's Constitution” that deals with the first decade after independence, throws light on how ordinary Indians understood the Constitution, leveraged it, and used it as a tool to expand their rights. And they weren't always successful but It really shows you how the Constitution became an idiom for language outside of the courts.

In the last few years—and this is a really cliched example by now—but the CAA protests are a really good example of the constitutional idiom going beyond the courts. I think what was really interesting about the CAA protests was that the protesters were really clear about the fact that they were advancing an understanding of the Constitution that derived its legitimacy and validity, not in the hope that it would be one day accepted by the Supreme Court, but by the force of argument alone outside of the Court. They fashioned a certain reading of the preamble of the Constitution, a certain reading of Article 14, the equality clause, and they were very careful to decentre the Supreme Court. If you look at the history of those protests and how the Constitution was used, it was always a reliance upon the document and there was no reference to the fact that there were pending constitutional challenges in the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court might or might not vindicate this understanding. It was a reading of the construction that stood on its own legs. That is one of the I think standout examples of transformative constitutionalism that did not rely upon the court.

If you look at a lot of work being done in Assam right now, in the aftermath of the NRC by lawyers like Aman Wadud, you find that they're setting up these Constitution centres in various places, explaining the Constitution. Again, they’re doing this without necessarily anchoring it to Supreme Court’s understandings of the constitution.

UB: Over the last few years, commentators like yourself have noted the rise of authoritarianism in India—and the courts have not been immune from this. You’ve expressed concerns about the extent to which one can continue pretending the judiciary operates along the line of rule of law. According to you, what’s the role of the lawyer in such circumstances?

GB: I think the role of the lawyer is a very difficult one, especially when it involves issues like the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act), Kashmir, Aadhar—basically, issues involving state power and the constitution. You need a set of lawyers who will represent a client’s case as if everything was completely normal, as if this were a functioning democracy, with independent institutions. You need one set of lawyers, in my view, who will do that because that's work that needs doing. You also need a set of lawyers, whose knowledge of the practice of lawyering and judging, which is an internal perspective—because they've been in court—and no matter how careful an external analysis might be given, given the number of context-specific practices that can have developed over the years, there are things a lawyer sees just by virtue of being in court that are impossible to see from outside. So I think you also need a set of lawyers who draw upon that experience to mount a critique of the Court and the role the Court in checking or failing to check authoritarian tendencies and centralisation and so on.

I think that you need both kinds because as long as courts exists as centres of power, you need people who will speak in the language of the institution. But if that is the only kind of speaker that there is, the perception will remain of a well-functioning institution. So you will also need to have people who will critique the functioning of the institution. Yet, if you only have people who do that then there'll be nobody left to make the case inside the court. You need a combination of both things, I think. It's every lawyer’s decision, a question of conscience, what role you want to occupy. You have to have one of the two roles, assuming you have the privilege, the resources, and the luxury of choosing. I think one of those two roles is important when the situation is one in which authoritarian tendencies are overwhelming institutions.

Bruno Leipold: Oh, maybe I could jump in quickly and ask one question about the book. One thing that struck me is that you quite extensively draw on the idea of republican freedom. I would be quite interested to hear more the way in which debates about republican freedom were helpful to formulating your arguments about transformative constitutionalism?

UB: It also seemed that this was also one of the shorter chapters, and the sense I was getting was this isn’t something that's come up much with the court—except in a judgment where exploitative economic conditions for workers is interpreted as something like forced labour. Could you give us a sense of the judiciary’s further engagement with this idea? Has this notion come up again in other cases?

GB: Yeah so the second question is a shorter one so in brief, no, the PUDR judgement—which held that the right against forced labour includes a right to a minimum wage—is the only Supreme Court judgement to have given that interpretation to article 23. You find one High Court judgment 1994 in Allahabad that said something similar. But that's it, and I think it's just because the radical implications of that argument. So, after the PUDR judgement, there were a couple of Supreme Court judgements where people tried to rely upon PUDR as precedent and the court just shut them down and distinguished the case, and you know basically just kind of buried that that judgment. And I think it's obvious why because its just the implications are radical it, it would mean basically an anti-capitalist reading of the Constitution, which our courts or any set of courts anywhere are not willing to sanction.

As far as the role of republicanism goes, I think that the insight that republicanism provides for that kind of a reading of the forced labour clause is the focus on freedom as non-domination. Now classical republican theorists still locate the source of domination in a personalised manner, so you still need an identifiable person to pin that dominating power on. Which, of course, is not feasible and that's where workplace republicanism comes in, that is expressed I think most powerfully in writings of scholars like Corey Robin and William Claire Roberts and so on, is a depersonalisation and institutional or structural view of domination and of power.

So, if you just look at the classical understanding of fundamental rights and why they were applicable against the state, the idea was that the state has the has a monopoly over power. Right, and this idea of the monopoly then kind of runs through constitutionalism so when you want to affix liability for rights violations on a private party, a question that courts often ask is that does this private party exercise the monopoly over an important good or service, so if, for example, a body has monopoly over all the water supply, in an area or electricity in an area and it's discriminating and not say providing water to people of certain religion right, then the court can often argue that okay, because of its monopoly this private body has a state-like function, and therefore the constitutional rights provisions apply to it and therefore you know we are you know stopping this from going forward.

What that ignores is that you don't need to have a monopoly, but it may still be impossible to exit from an institution—which is the classic you know the whole point about the workplace and about labour, the labour market is that no individual capitalist has a monopoly, in fact, you know the capitalist is as constrained by the demands of capitalism, as the worker, it is the capitalist that has to constantly ensure that you know they're cutting costs and increasing profits because otherwise they’ll get out of business, and that we know that going back to Marx. So it's not it's not an individual capitalist who is a monopolist but it is the kind of a structure or the institution of the labour market that’s exercising that power through individual capitalists. So workplace republicanism I think gives us a way or a method to frame that insight and constitutional language and to say that therefore workers have constitutional rights against their bosses, even though a boss, is not the state.

UB: It's interesting you bring this up because there's so much in the book on private regimes of power, and that the book ends on the dangers of Adhaar (India’s biometric identity system). And it strikes me that one of the risks of Adhaar is very much it becoming something that private players start to emphasise; for instance, by linking private services to the Aadhar system. Is there a relationship of complicity between these private regimes of power and state power?

GB: Yeah, so I think in the Aadhaar case private regimes are operating under delegated powers from the states because Aadhaar is ultimately a nationwide centralised biometric identification system where the centralisation is by the state; the UIDAI is a state body and to the extent that private players can use the database, they do it on sufferance under Section 57 which was struck down, but then, of course pretty shamelessly reenacted by the government. So in the Aadhaar case it's actually the state power that’s being parceled out to private parties now, of course, I mean there is an argument to be made that you know the State itself is a terrain of class conflict, and so, to what extent is actually distinct from private parties? So I think that’s a political theory argument, but in terms of at least Constitutionalism and the law, the Adhaar cases I think straightforwardly involves state power and private parties do have and continue to weaponise the database for you know data gathering, data collection and use of data and denial of service and so on, but that, but their authority still flows from a law whereas the argument on private regimes was more that if you have something like you know caste enforced you know, social boycotts, it’s not really relying on the state in at least formal terms. Of course, I mean there's a long argumentative tradition coming from the legal realists in the US, that ultimately the legal regime is gapless so you know I mean, even if there is no formal law, the state by its inaction is allowing things to happen so there's always the state involved and in that sense there's no real private action that is not either sanctioned by or the sufferance of the state. So you go down that route, then of course I mean the States always involved, you know in every private action or if you don't go down that route, then you know the distinction between state sanctioned law, as in the Adhaar case and the case of caste boycott, cases where private employers have not been paying a minimum wage, and so on.

UB: Bruno I might let you take over now and may come back to them after you're done depending how much energy we leave him with.

BL: So let’s turn to the literary side of things. I read The Wall in December and I want to start by saying what a fantastic achievement it is. There’s not many people in the world that can write both constitutional theory and beautiful, engaging science fiction! What I really loved about the book, and I think quite a few reviews of the book have picked up on this, is how impressive the level of world building is. You set out everything from the city’s origin myths, its constitutional history, its religions, its literary culture—it’s all there. Perhaps I could start by asking if you could give our readers a sense of what the book is about and also what led you to write it? Its, of course, quite a gear shift from your day job as a constitutional theorist!

GB: Thank you! I’ll start with the second question. So while people might know me from my day job as a lawyer, I have actually been a science fiction fan since the age of 10 when my parents got me a copy of the Hobbit and then of Asimov's Foundation. Of course, the genre has moved beyond that now, but that was my introduction. So since the age of 10 I’ve been a huge fan and my teenage years were full of handwriting science fiction novels—pretty bad novels obviously! And then in 2015 I joined Strange Horizons the science fiction magazine as a non-fiction editor. I've been involved with them for the last five years now, five or six years. So my association with science fiction and fantasy, is something that is much older than my association with law and you know it's always been there and this novel actually began life back in 2008 when I was in college and I didn't at all know that I would go on to become you know, a full time lawyer and my day job or even stay with law, so its origins actually go back to even before I really got into law as a profession.

As to what the book’s about to put it simply it's a speculative fiction somewhere at the borders of science fiction and fantasy. It is set in a city that is enclosed completely within a very high wall that nobody has crossed in living memory. There is abundant water (the source of which is unknown), but every other resource is scarce. But that scarcity is not an ideological imposition, it's actually physically scarce, and therefore, the food and the wood and the material required for clothes and so on are all actually limited quantities. And that influences the social, economic and cultural structures that are present in the city. It's not a dystopia because there is just about enough there for everyone to be able to live a life that is not a life of squalor or a life of want so it’s not a dystopic city, but it is stasis, and it is contained.

And the core plot point is that there are a group of people who do want to find a way beyond the wall and know what lies beyond and the book is about their efforts to do that, in the face of hostility indifference and so on.

BL: These are the Young Tarafians, right? Do you want to say something about the other ideological and political factions in the book and the underlying political structure?

GB: At the broad level there are three factions in the city. One is the Governing Council of the city of Sumer, called the Council, or the Elders, which are a group of 300 people who govern the city. That political arrangement doesn't really borrow from any one thinker or historical example, but is most closely inspired by James Harrington the 17th century English philosopher, because of his idea of 300 people and how the balance between propertied and non-propertied classes is achieved. One interesting thing, for me at least, is that in Sumer they do democracy, but in a slightly different way, in that they are not elected, they are self-appointed, but every decision that they take is put to a referendum in the city. So although it's not democracy at the starting point as there are no elections, but it is a democracy at the at the end point, in that their decisions have to be put to a popular vote. However, there is one catch, which is that if you want to actually alter the property relations or underlying constitutional arrangements you have to have a two thirds majority. That’s an idea taken from Pinochet’s military constitution that enshrined neoliberalism, and that also gives you a clue about some of the underlying ideological debates in the book.

So the Elders or the Council are the secular governing body of the city, and then there are the Shoortans—the religious group. That's drawn from the idea that if you have a city within a wall and its very clear that the wall is not natural, it was built by someone. And that someone gave to the citizens, the exact amount of resources in exactly the right balance to enable them to survive. So, clearly there is a governing intelligence or a governing hand behind this, which would lead to all kinds of duelling origin stories that are born from the realisation that there had to be a creator. So Shoortans have a set of beliefs about the creation and that the purpose of the wall is to keep them safe and therefore it should not be crossed.

The final faction are the scientists, who are also called the Select, whose job it is to ensure that the city continues to run and to survive. They ensure that the proportions of the resources remain just right and that consumption remains at a level at which everyone can continue to survive. Because if you're living in a semi-closed system then a small change can lead to widespread devastation. So the scientist’s role is to ensure that things are kept on track and they're kind of exist with the other factions in a somewhat unstable equilibrium with each other, where you know there is a division of power, but it's a little uneasy and unstable.

BL: Between these factions there's also ideological disagreement over what one of the central concepts of Sumer really means, that is the concept of ‘Smara’.

GB: The idea of Smara is a bit of a cheat on my part because an Indian reader would kind of guess it’s meaning because it does draw from an Indian word. I'm sure when Udit reads the book when he sees the word Smara, he would have a rough idea of where that thought line is going but a non-Indian reader might not immediately.

Smara, broadly is this idea of yearning or the yearning for a world without the wall, although what exactly it means is contested. It's a feeling that everyone has experienced, in the sense that everyone at certain times has this feeling of being enclosed, of being trapped, this yearning to know what's beyond that. To be able to see a world in which there is a horizon, because they also don't have a word for the horizon, but to see a world where actually you know everything you see isn't cut off by the wall.

For some, this is actually a reason to go beyond the wall, to find out what's beyond that, so that they can put an end to this constant yearning and to understand what it means. For the Shoortans it's a signal that you're not supposed to go beyond the wall and you're supposed to remain within where life is stable. So this idea, as you said, plays an ideological role in the sense that for the dominant faction it becomes a reason to ensure the continuance of status-quo but for the Young Tarafians it becomes a reason to break the status quo. Later on in the novel you have certain dispute about its exact meaning and where it's coming from that enables, not to give away spoilers, some people to find a way to break the status quo.

BL: I want to pick you up what you say about there being some specific cultural references that make more sense to an Indian reader. For me, when I was reading the book, one of the really enjoyable things was the many references to classical Greece and Rome. You already mentioned Harrington as one of your sources, and I wanted how these different literary and historical sources influenced your writing?

GB: I think that this a function of growing up in India in the 1990s, where there is this whole range of influences that you're exposed to as a child. One set of influences is you know a lot of the classical Greek and Roman stuff in translation.

You would have noticed that there is a progressive councillor, a social reformer who wants to democratise land ownership within the city and he's obviously based on Gracchus, the Roman tribune. But in my book his name is Sanchika and Sanchika was actually the pen name of E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the first Indian communist elected Chief Minister who also carried out land reform.

There are also other myths in the book that are a blend of various influences. In an early part of the book there is this myth about two birds who try and fly up to the sun and one of them is about to have their wings burnt off but the other one protects them by shielding them. Now, this might sound like the Icarus myth, but it's actually a story from the Ramayana involving Jatayu and his elder brother, which shows you that there's a common source to all these myths and they evolve a little differently in different countries. But what may look like an Icarus myth to a western reader is actually slightly different, it has its own source in Indian myth.

One specific reference that I want to point out, which speaks to the question of ideology and some of the underlying debates in the book. At one point in the book, one of the scientists, says that look, you can vote for or against decisions, you can have your referendum, but you can’t really vote against the wall. Because the wall is part of reality, it's always there. That's directly a reference to Jean-Claude Juncker saying in 2015 after the Greek election that ‘there can be no democratic choice against the European treaties’. What that’s basically saying is look, you can have your domestic votes, in your own little country, but you can’t vote against neoliberalism, against the governing philosophy of the EU.

So, one of themes I'm exploring in The Wall is that neoliberalism, and capitalism in general, has this whole myth of scarcity. A lot of the edifice of neoliberalism depends upon this ideology of scarcity and there not being enough. But what if you had a situation in which that scarcity was not an ideological construct but was literally a key part baked into the world and there was an identifiable reason why there was scarcity. Then how would society evolve and what would the arguments be.

BL: The global melding of myths is really one of the many strengths of the book. Another that really impressed me is how you managed to weave in discussions about the Sumer’s constitutional history and political structure and do so in a way that is plausible and never gets in the way of the narrative. There’s not that much sci-fi that really takes the politics of the world-building quite so seriously (China Mieville perhaps comes to mind).

I suppose this bring us to the somewhat inevitable question about how your day-job, your academic work, relates to you science fiction writing. In some interviews you’ve been a little hesitant to draw those links. But when I was listening to your ideas on the transformative constitution in the first half of our interview, it did seem that there were some similarities in The Wall. Especially the idea that constitutionalism goes beyond the political and that it matters to social questions and the social sphere. So I guess I want to ask a quite open question, to what extent, if at all, there are these links between legal and constitutional work and your fictional writings?

GB: I think that, first of all, it's just the fact that most science fiction writers have a day job. Apart from the lucky few who can make a living off their writing, they most have day jobs and that always bleeds into bleeds into the science fiction. A physicist, or an engineer, when they write science fiction they ensure that the spaceship has the right dimensions and can fly, and so similarly, when a lawyer writes science fiction, they will ensure that the underlying legal arrangements are persuasive and reflect the larger world. So in that sense, your professional specialisation will always bleed into your writing because you’re just aware of the role that plays in whatever you're writing.

I think that, for me, the understanding that has come from many years of being in legal practice and also writing about law is how law and legal structures constitute the internal plumbing of the world and they're always there. We’re not always are aware of them, but they exist and they are what make actions certain actions possible or not possible. That’s the kind of thing that once you see you can't really unsee. So when you're doing world building for science fiction, you will factor in the law and constitutional arrangements into that world building.
​
And where societies are under heightened stress, whether Brexit in the UK or what Trump did in the US or the Citizenship Amendment Act in India, people do talk about the constitution at that point of time. Because that's when it really comes to the fore, so it's quite natural for people living in societies that are undergoing a certain kind of stress to think about, reflect about and debate constitutional arrangements. And that is something that is reflected in the book, because it is a society under stress and it is destabilised by the Young Tarafians who want to get beyond the wall. They are claiming that they have good reasons to do so and people want to stop them. So obviously the issue of what is allowed, what isn't allowed, what the law allows, what the society’s political arrangements allow, would come to the fore and would be discussed. So in that sense, of course, being a lawyer influences the vocabulary, in which those claims might be framed. To that extent there is an overlap and influence.

​I think what I'm hesitant about, what I've been a little uncomfortable about, is people saying that this is legal science fiction or legal speculative fiction, that it is centered on law. Because, first of all, I'm telling a story, and that's what matters. As a writer you are trying to tell a good story and then you have all the things that go into making it a plausible world. Whether that is, for example, the understanding that in a semi-closed system, with no fauna, all your plants would need to be self-pollinating. So the only plants that your city can have are self-pollinating plants, so you then have to ask is cotton self-pollinating? It turns out it is, and therefore the clothes will be made of cotton.

So just like you pay attention to that kind of thing to make your world building plausible, you also pay attention to law to make it plausible. The fact that the writer is a lawyer should not distract attention from the story.

BL: We’re getting to the end of our time, so I wanted to ask how writing on the sequel is going. I think its called The Horizon?

GB: Yes, part two is called the Horizon and was finished in January. It's supposed to come out in September but given the Indian covid situation I don't know if that will happen or if it will be delayed. I haven't yet followed up because things are bad right now, and I think nobody should be pushed right now to work in India. So the formal release date was September and I don't know if it will be September, maybe a couple of months after.

BL: Of course. When it does appear I’m certainly going to buy it as soon as it's available.

GB: Thank you! Thank you so much, I'm so glad you enjoyed the book.

As in most liberal democracies, India’s national political parties work to gain the support of constituencies with competing and often contradictory perspectives on expertise, science, religion, democratic processes, and the value of politics itself. Political leaders, then, have to address and/or embody a web of competing antipathies and anxieties.  While attacking left and liberal academics, universities, and the press, the current, Hindu-nationalist Indian government is building new institutions to provide authority to its particular historically-grounded, nationalist discourse. The ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and its grassroots paramilitary organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have a long history of sustained Hindu nationalist ideology. Certain scholars see the BJP moving further to the centre through its embrace of globalisation and development. Others argue that such a mainstream economic stance has only served to make the party’s ethno-centric nationalism more palatable. By oscillating between moderation and polarisation, the BJP’s ethno-nationalist views have become more normalised. They have effectively moved the centre of political gravity further to the right. Periods of moderation have allowed for democratic coalition building and wider resonance. At the same time, periods of polarisation have led to further anti-Muslim, Hindu majoritarian radicalisation.
 
This two-pronged dynamic is also present in the Hindu Right’s cultivation of intellectuals, which is what my research is about. Over the last five to ten years, the BJP has been discrediting, attacking, and replacing left-liberal intellectuals. In response, alternative “right-wing” intellectuals have built a cultural infrastructure to legitimate their Hindutva ideology. At the same time, technical experts associated with the government and its politics project the image of apolitical moderation and economic pragmatism.
 
The wide-ranging roles of intellectuals in social and political transformation beg fundamental questions: Who counts as an intellectual and why? How do particular forms of expertise gain prominence and persist through politico-economic conjunctures? How is intellectual legitimacy redefined in new political hegemonies? I examine the creation of an intellectual policy network, interrogating the key role of think tanks as generative proselytisers. Indian think tanks are still in their early stages, but have proliferated over the last decade. While some are explicit about their political and ideological leanings, others claim neutrality, yet pursue their agenda through coded language and resonant historical nationalist narratives. Their key is to effect a change in thinking by normalising it. Six years before winning the election in 2014, India’s Hindu-nationalist party, the BJP, put together its own network of policy experts from networks closely affiliated to the party. In a national newspaper, the former vice-president of the BJP described this as an intentional shift: from “being action-oriented to solidifying its ideological underpinnings in a policy framework”.[1] When the BJP came to power in 2014, people based in these think tanks filled key positions in the central government. The BJP has since been circulating dominant ideas of Hindu supremacy through regional parties, grassroots political organisations, and civil society organisations.
 
The BJP’s ideas do not necessarily emerge from think tank intellectuals (as opposed to local leaders/groups), but the think tanks have the authority to articulate and legitimate Hindu nationalism within a seemingly technocratic policy framework. As primarily elite organisations in a vast and diversely impoverished country, a study of Indian think tanks begs several questions about the nature of knowledge dissemination. Primarily, it leads us to ask whether knowledge produced in relatively narrow elite circles seeps through to a popular consciousness; and, indeed, if not, what purpose it serves in understanding ideological transformation. While think tanks have become an established part of policy making in the US and Europe, Indian think tanks are still in their early stages. The last decade, however, has seen a wider professionalisation of the policy research space. In this vein, think tanks have been mushrooming over the last decade, making India the country with the second largest number of think tanks in the world (second only to the US). As evident from the graph below, while there were approximately 100 think tanks in 2008, they rose to more than 500 in 2018. The number of think tanks briefly dropped in 2014—soon after Modi was elected, the BJP government cracked down on civil society organisations with foreign funding—but has risen dramatically between 2016 and 2018.

​There are broadly three types of think tanks that are considered to have a seat at the decision-making table: 1) government-funded/affiliated to Ministries; 2) privately-funded; 3) think tanks attached to political parties (these may not identify themselves as think tanks but serve the purpose of external research-based advisors).[2] I do not claim a causal relationship between elite think tanks and popular consciousness, nor try to assert the primacy of top-down channels of political mobilisation above others. Many scholars have shown that the BJP–RSS network, for example, functions both from bottom-up forms of mobilisation and relies on grassroots intellectuals, as well as more recent technological forms of top-down party organisation (particularly through social media and the NaMo app, an app that allows the BJP’s top leadership to directly communicate with its workers and supporters). While the RSS and the BJP instil a more hierarchical and disciplinary party structure than the Congress party, the RSS has a strong grassroots base that also works independent of the BJP’s political elite.
 
It is important to note that what I am calling the “right-wing” in India is not only Hindu nationalists—the BJP and its supporters are not a coherent, unified group. In fact, the internal strands of the organisations in this network have vastly differing ideological roots (or, rather, where different strands of the BJP’s current ideology lean towards): it encompasses socially liberal libertarians; social and economic conservatives; firm believers in central governance and welfare for the “common man”; proponents of de-centralisation; followers of a World Bank inspired “good governance” where the state facilitates the growth of the economy; believers in a universal Hindu unity; strict adherers to the hierarchical Hindu traditionalism of the caste system; foreign policy hawks; principled sceptics of “the West”; and champions of global economic participation. Yet somehow, they all form part of the BJP–RSS support network. Mohan Bhagwat, the leader of the RSS, has tried to bridge these contradictions through a unified hegemonic discourse. In a column entitled “We may be on the cusp of an entitled Hindu consensus” from September 2018, conversative intellectual Swapan Dasgupta writes of Bhagwat:
 
“It is to the credit of Bhagwat that he had the sagacity and the self-confidence to be the much-needed revisionist and clarify the terms of the RSS engagement with 21st century India...Hindutva as an ideal has been maintained but made non-doctrinaire to embrace three unexceptionable principles: patriotism, respect for the past and ancestry, and cultural pride. This, coupled with categorical assertions that different modes of worship and different lifestyles does not exclude people from the Hindu Rashtra, is important in reforging the RSS to confront the challenges of an India more exposed to economic growth and global influences than ever before. There is a difference between conservative and reactionary and Bhagwat spelt it out bluntly. Bhagwat has, in effect, tried to convert Hindu nationalism from being a contested ideological preoccupation to becoming India’s new common sense.”
 
As Dasgupta lucidly attests, the project of the BJP encompasses not just political or economic power; rather, it attempts to wage ideological struggle at the heart of morality and common sense. There is no single coherent ideology, but different ideological intentions being played out on different fronts. While it is, at this point, difficult to see the pieces fitting together cohesively, the BJP is making an attempt to set up a larger ideological narrative under which these divergent ideas sit: fabricating a new understanding of belonging to the nation. This determines not just who belongs, but how they belong, and what is expected in terms of conduct to properly belong to the nation.
 
I find two variants of the BJP’s attempts at building a new common sense through their think tanks: actively political and actively a-political. In doing so, I follow Reddy’s call to pay close attention to the different ‘vernaculars’ of Hindutva politics and anti-politics.[3] Due to the elite centralisation of policy making culture in New Delhi, and the relatively recent prominence of think tanks, their internal mechanisms have thus far been difficult to access. As such, these significant organisations of knowledge-production and -dissemination have escaped scholarly analysis. I fill this gap by examining the BJP’s attempt to build centres of elite, traditional intellectuals of their own through think tanks, media outlets, policy conventions, and conferences by bringing together a variety of elite stakeholders in government and civil society. Some scholars have characterised the BJP’s think tanks as institutions of ‘soft Hindutva’, that is, organisations that avoid overt association with the BJP and Hindu nationalist linkages but pursue a diffuse Hindutva agenda (what Anderson calls ‘neo-Hindutva’) nevertheless.[4] I build on these preliminary observations to examine internal conversations within these think tanks about their outward positioning, their articulation of their mission, and their outreach techniques.
 
The double-sidedness of Hindutva acts as a framework for understanding the BJP’s wide-ranging strategy, but also to add to a comprehension of political legitimacy and the modern incarnation of ethno-nationalism in an era defined by secular liberalism. The BJP’s two most prominent think tanks (India Foundation and Chanakya Institute), show how the think tanks negotiate a fine balance between projecting a respectable religious conservatism along with an aggressive Hindu majoritarianism. These seemingly contradictory discourses become Hindutva’s strength. They allow it to function as a force that projects aggressive majoritarianism, while simultaneously claiming an anti-political ‘neutral’ face of civilisational purity and inter-religious inclusion. While some notions of ideology understand it as a systematic and coherent body of ideas, Hodge’s concept of ‘ideological complexes’ suggests that contradiction is key to how ideology achieves its effects. As Stuart Hall has shown, dominant and preferred meanings tend to interact with negotiated and oppositional meanings in a continual struggle.[5] Thus, as Hindutva becomes a mediating political discourse, it may risk incoherence, yet defines the terms through which the socio-political world is discussed.
 
The BJP’s think tanks, then, attempt to legitimise its ideas and policies by building a base of both seemingly-apolitical expertise and what they call ‘politically interventionist’ intellectuals. Neo-Hindutva can thus be both explicitly political and anti-political at the same time: advocating for political interventionism while eschewing politics and forging an apolitical route towards cultural transformation. However, contrary to critical scholarship that tends to subsume claims of apolitical motivation within forms of false-consciousness or backdoor-politics, I note that several researchers at these organisations do genuinely see themselves as conducting apolitical, academic research. Rather than wilful ignorance, their acknowledgement of the organisation’s underlying ideology understands the heavy religious organisational undertones as more cultural than political. This distinction takes the cultural and religious parts of Hindutva ‘out of’ politics, allowing it to be practiced and consumed as a generalisable national ethos.



​[1] Nistula Hebbar, “At Mid-Term, Modi’s BJP on Cusp of Change.” The Hindu. The Hindu, June 12, 2017. https://www.thehindu.com/thread/politics-and-policy/at-mid-term-modis-bjp-on-cusp-of-change/article18966137.ece

[2] Anuradha Sajjanhar, “The New Experts: Populism, Technocracy, and the Politics of Expertise in Contemporary India”, Journal of Contemporary Asia (forthcoming 2021).

[3] Deepa S. Reddy, “What Is Neo- about Neo-Hindutva?” Contemporary Southeast Asia 26, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 483–90.

[4] Edward Anderson and Arkotong Longkumer. “‘Neo-Hindutva’: Evolving Forms, Spaces, and Expressions of Hindu Nationalism.” Contemporary Southeast Asia 26, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 371–77.

[5] Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding.” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks 16676 (2001).

​It is difficult to overstate just how much of a watershed moment the immediate aftermath of WWI was for modern democracy. No previous global crisis had revealed on such a scale the self-destructiveness and the fundamental unsustainability—political, economic, and military—of the European states-system. Writing from London in 1917, the British economist John Hobson predicted the rise of new movements which would increasingly seek to disentangle democracy from the military-industrial state; as a result of the war, Hobson argued, “not only the spirit but the very forms of popular self-government have suffered violation.”[1] The war had made clear in stark terms the ever-present possibilities of autocracy and violence underneath the veneer of democracy in modern states.
 
Hobson’s observation proved prescient. The months after November 1918 witnessed a proliferation of political experiments, ranging from the council communism of the Spartacus League in Berlin to pluralism and guild socialism in Britain, France, and the United States, bringing together political and legal thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg, Léon Duguit, Harold Laski, and G.D.H. Cole. Though distinct in their respective ideologies, these movements were all propelled by disillusionment with the representative, parliamentary republics created in Western Europe through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 
That diagnosis was not restricted to pacifists and democrats. Carl Schmitt asserted confidently in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923) that nineteenth-century liberal models of representative government inherited from John Stuart Mill and François Guizot had outlived their usefulness in a new age of mass politics, and only remained standing “through sheer mechanical perseverance as an empty apparatus.”[2]
 
But how the problem that Schmitt called “the crisis of parliamentary democracy” was perceived beyond Europe and North America after 1918 still remains a largely untold story. In recent years, historians have uncovered the depth of interaction between subject peoples in the colonial world and the various political ideologies and institutional proposals circulating in Europe in the wake of the Great War. A notable example is Susan Pedersen’s exemplary study of petitions submitted to the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission by groups in the Middle East, the South Pacific, and south-western and eastern Africa, demanding political independence from imperial rule.[3] A much less examined aspect of this period, though, is the orientation of anti-colonial thinkers and leaders towards the critiques of nation-state sovereignty and representative democracy consuming European political thought of the time. To put it differently, how were Hobson and Schmitt’s diagnoses of the post-WWI situation understood in Bombay or Cairo, instead of in London or Berlin? The point of such an inquiry is both to provide a more global historiography of the early twentieth-century crisis of parliamentarism and to better understand the full range of political thought precipitated by the crisis.
 
My recent research explores these themes through an examination of the rise of a normative challenge to representative democracy, particularly its nineteenth-century parliamentary variant, within Indian political thought between 1918 and 1928.[4] My focus is on a group of historians and philosophers based at the north Indian universities of Allahabad and Lucknow and at the southern University of Mysore. Identifying themselves as political pluralists, these writers turned to pre-modern Indian history to unearth forms of classical republicanism and participatory law-making. Their books, pamphlets, and draft constitutions contained the earliest theories of direct democracy as a tangible constitutional ideal in modern South Asia. 
 
By the mid-1910s, there was an established, well-organised nationalist movement in the Crown Territories of British India. For three decades, the Indian National Congress (INC) had been lobbying for political and economic reform within the empire. Politically, the INC sought the introduction of a parliamentary system elected through adult suffrage, modelled on the settler colonies of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Parliamentarism was seen both as a distinctively English achievement and, as an arrangement wherein only representatives deliberated and legislated, as the most effective way of selecting members of an educated, urban elite to govern in the interests of the wider population.
 
Thus, between 1885 and 1915, Dadabhai Naoroji, a key figure in the evolution of Indian nationalism, repeatedly defined the Indian demand for self-rule (swaraj) as an extension of parliamentary principles established in England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and imported to the satellite states of the Anglosphere by the late nineteenth century. Even as nationalist politics came to be divided between liberal and revolutionary camps from the first decade of the new century, the embrace of parliamentarism remained secure. For the revolutionary leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who constantly linked Indian nationalism with the struggles for Home Rule in Ireland and Egypt and was hailed by Lenin as a “democrat” in 1908, swaraj meant the election of members of political parties into self-governing representative institutions. For all the disagreement over tactics, early nationalist arguments in India converged on a view of popular self-government as an indirect electoral enterprise, exercised by a limited number of deputies on behalf of the citizenry.
 
From 1918, the nationalist attempt to mediate popular sovereignty through the established procedures of parliamentary representation provoked a reaction amongst a new group of writers who held a different understanding of swaraj. A key moment in the fracturing of the consensus around parliamentary government was the publication of Radhakumud Mookerji’s Local Government in Ancient India in 1919. Mookerji was born in rural Bengal in 1884 and trained as a historian at the University of Calcutta. The backdrop to his political formation was the upsurge of anti-British agitation in eastern India in 1905, known as the swadeshi movement, which highlighted to him the role of historical narratives in shaping anti-colonial nationalist politics. Radhakumud eventually settled at the University of Lucknow as Professor of Ancient Indian History.
 
Local Government in Ancient India was a strikingly presentist political book to have been written by an academic historian. Radhakumud challenged the Indian National Congress’ uncritical acceptance of parliamentary government.[5] He insisted that WWI had made clear not only that parliamentary republics did not always express the full will of their people, but that representative institutions under the conditions of modern economic life, electioneering, and party politics could easily be co-opted by political and economic elites and interest groups. In seeking to transpose the nineteenth-century English system of electoral representation into India in the 1910s, the Congress was essentially introducing “self-rule from above,” leaving the power to make and amend law in the hands of a relatively small political class.
 
Radhakumud’s response was to turn to constitutional models from ancient and medieval South Asia. Relying on recent archival discoveries of Sanskrit and Pali-language treatises and archaeological inscriptions from southern India in the ninth and tenth centuries CE, Radhakumud made the claim that pre-modern Indian states had been elaborate federal structures consisting of semi-independent local jurisdictions overseen by a central monarchy. The jurisdictions themselves were governed by large citizens’ assemblies (sabha) consisting of adult house-holders; the sabha performed all legislative, executive, and judicial functions, and chose sub-committees for specialised functions on the basis of sortition.
 
Radhakumud was not the first modern Indian writer to give a republican re-interpretation of states which had frequently been denigrated in terms of either Oriental despotism or ungoverned anarchy, as in James Mill’s History of British India (1817). But Radhakumud was the first to consider a medieval federation of citizens’ assemblies as a viable political model for the twentieth century, as a real alternative to parliamentarism. Much to the chagrin of other historians, Radhakumud proposed that replicating a system of citizens’ assemblies provided a coherent model of direct democracy, much more participatory than the models of representative government espoused by the INC leadership.
 
Local Government in Ancient India went through two English editions in 1919 and 1920. Its core thesis was reproduced in a number of other Indian texts from the 1920s, including Brajendranath Seal’s Report on the Constitution of Mysore (1923), Radhakamal Mukerjee’s Democracies of the East (1923), and Beni Prasad’s A Few Suggestions on the Problem of the Indian Constitution (1928). Radhakamal Mukerjee’s Democracies of the East—from which I draw the title of this post—was the most detailed example of the genre. Radhakamal Mukerjee decried the nationalist acceptance of the English model of electoral representation, premised on suffrage, political parties, and parliamentary supremacy, as insufficiently democratic. Nationalist politics limited legislative sovereignty to “a certain small and well-defined class which packs and directs the assembly, and speaks in the name of the people.”[6] Radhakamal accordingly presented the creation of directly democratic assemblies patterned on medieval Asian states as a way to overcome the structural hierarchies of sovereignty embedded within parliamentary government. As in Local Government in Ancient India, the reconstruction of pre-modern republicanism was a response to the perceived inability of parliamentary states to allow for wide political participation.
 
Democracies of the East framed its program of historical recovery as an attempt to avoid the fate of European parliamentary regimes during WWI—in particular the threat of unaccountable governance by a class of periodically elected political elites, the conversion of popular rule into the rule of a few. Indeed, Radhakamal Mukerjee saw his proposals as part of a wider trans-national backlash against statism and representative democracy between 1918 and 1923, praising movements such as syndicalism, pluralism, and guild socialism in Western Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, and beyond. Indian history was for him a repertoire of intellectual resources to aid these movements in the imagination of new democratic futures. He was especially drawn to the guild socialist G.D.H. Cole, aligning his own intellectual project with the latter’s attempts to revive medieval practices of self-management in associational life in lieu of electoral forms of labour politics.[7] While there is no evidence that Democracies of the East was read in the British guild socialist circles around G.D.H. Cole, in the mid-1930s Radhakamal did travel to London to meet with Cole’s fellow pluralist Ernest Barker at the Institute of Sociology.[8]
 
The Indian pluralists’ visions of participatory democracy remained academic experiments in the 1920s, never really taken up by political movements on the ground. By the late 1940s, the dominant constitutional paradigm in India came to be narrowed into a demand for sovereign statehood and parliamentary democracy. As John Dunn has argued, in such circumstances the mid-century transition from imperial rule was unable to be a truly transformative rupture with the state-form of representative democracy ubiquitous in Western Europe following the Second World War.[9]
 
Given these subsequent developments, returning to the defeated democratic traditions emergent in the immediate aftermath of WWI in British India is an exercise of intellectual retrieval. It allows us to reconstruct the contours of a discourse and ideology at odds with the tradition of self-government which eventually triumphed with independence. The existence of the pluralist discourse indicates, above all, how the profound crisis of liberalism and modern democratic thinking that Carl Schmitt associated with the European 1920s was a global phenomenon stretching far beyond Europe.
 
In South Asia, these years were similarly an opening for thinkers to challenge the principles of representative government consolidated in the region’s political thought and practice by the 1910s—principles which, in the hands of nationalist leaders, would re-assert their dominance by the 1940s. The civilisational language that Indian pluralists adopted in their opposition to representative democracy—turning to an invented tradition of ‘Asian’ republicanism—was of course strikingly different from Schmitt or Hobson. Yet their turn to history was a response to similar underlying political dynamics, produced by a shared global moment of transformation and experimentation in theories of sovereignty and collective self-government.



[1] J.A. Hobson, Democracy after the War (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1917), 15.

[2] Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 21.

[3] Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[4] Tejas Parasher, “Federalism, Representation, and Direct Democracy in 1920s India,” Modern Intellectual History (January 2021): 1-29. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/federalism-representation-and-direct-democracy-in-1920s-india/625B0116F57186A02ABE261B001012CE.

[5] Radhakumud Mookerji, Local Government in Ancient India, 1st ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1919).

[6] Radhakamal Mukerjee, Democracies of the East: A Study in Comparative Politics (London: P.S. King & Son, 1923), 356.

[7] Mukerjee, Democracies of the East, 340-41. Also see G.D.H. Cole, Self-Government in Industry (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1918).

[8] Radhakamal Mukerjee, India: The Dawn of a New Era (An Autobiography) (New Delhi: Radha Publications, 1997), 166.

[9] John Dunn, Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 154.

The development of Islamic Studies during the twentieth century and beyond has found little favour with Islam as a religious phenomenon. The body of knowledge on Islam has expanded, and new genres based on new sources have gained momentum, such as social history, urban studies, public space, holy landscape, religious practices, gender, and the documentation and empowerment of subaltern voices (women, minorities, and slaves). But it seems that this wealth of scholarship has touched on Islam as a culture and civilisation, much less on Islam as religious thought, especially in terms of theology and jurisprudence, religion and state, jihad and martyrdom, war and the treatment of captives and non-combatants, international relations—issues that continue to provoke debates and polemics in the modern era as well.
 
The twentieth century witnessed a religious resurgence in all three monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, depicted by sociologist Jose Casanova as the “de-privatisation” of religion and its return as a contentious issue to the public sphere.[1] The Enlightenment project, which raised the banner of secularisation, confining religion to the private sphere, was contested, whereas manifestations of blasphemy remained on the sidelines. Thus, while modernity indeed constituted a significant challenge to the established faiths, it was also a fertile breeding ground for religious redefinition, innovation, and rejuvenation. In essence, modernisation had spawned new religious ideas, communities and movements. Some of these movements, like neo-evangelical Christianity, messianic Zionism, Israeli ultra-orthodoxy, or Islamists, questioned and often defied the prevailing “secular” order. In the Islamic milieu such defiance was accompanied by assertiveness, protest and violence, affecting intellectual and scholarly discourse, which also became dominated by rigid paradigms of tensions and antagonism among the Abrahamic creeds.
 
These paradigms lacked a comparative historical perspective and an awareness of the diversity of Islam and the complexity of interfaith encounters. One such paradigm, nurtured by post-colonial climate, was that of Edward Said’s book Orientalism (1978),[2] which accused Western discourse of harbouring demonic perceptions of Islam and the East as archaic and intolerant entities, in contrast to a rational and progressive West. The contribution of Orientalism to the craft of history and to Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies has been extensive. It has significantly altered the way we think, write and present the history of the peoples of Islam and the East by displaying sensitivity and empathy towards them. Orientalism heightened our awareness that non-Western societies can develop their own modernity without necessarily breaking away from indigenous identities and cultures—what Shmuel Eisenstadt called “multiple modernities.”[3] Yet, in spite of its merits, Said’s concept precisely because of its sweeping assertions sharpened the dissonance between East and West and gave further impetus to the politics of identities. Orientalism portrayed a Western plot to uproot indigenous cultures, and it permeated not only Islamic protest movements, but also academic institutions in the Arab-Muslim world.
 
The rise of the “culture of criticism” (al-thaqafa al-naqdiyya), carried out by socialists and liberal circles, which challenged and even dismantled Islamic traditions and norms, has been largely marginalised in the Western scholarship. Rather, many researchers were preoccupied with political Islam or Islamism and its call for the restoration of past legacies.
 
Another paradigm that drew the attention of scholarly discourse in the early 1990s was Samuel Huntington’s book Clash of Civilizations (1996).[4] It delineated a built-in tendency in Islam to violent conflict and to “bloody borders” between Muslims and non-Muslims, and demonised Islam as a religion of tyranny, intolerance and violence. The emergence of global jihad—especially in the wake of the September 11 attacks—played into Huntington’s thesis, creating a climate of cosmic war, of a permanent state of dissonance and confrontation.
 
The militancy image of Islam was reinforced by the rise of ISIS at the threshold of the twenty-first century and its chain of victories in Iraq and Syria. The question, posed by early Islamists in mid-twentieth century, as to whether there would be a revival of the religion of Muhammad has now been replaced by the question posed by global jihadists whether someone would be able to stand against the religion of Muhammad. Kasr al-hudud, namely the dismantling of geographical and political boundaries was ISIS’s driven force. This self-confidence mood was also reflected in ISIS’s English-language online magazine Dabiq, which opened one of its issues with the title “Break the Cross” and closed it with “By the Sword.”[5] The cross had become a code phrase for the “new crusade,” which harboured humanity’s deviation from the path of God—such as democracy, liberalism, feminism, and atheism. It served as a trigger for violence as a purifying force.
 
Yet, even analysts who were not convinced of such paradigms as Orientalism and the Clash of Civilizations continued to focus on the political aspects of modern religious revival, while downplaying historical legacies and ignoring other, more ecumenical voices, in favour of such labels as “fundamentalism,” “puritanism,” “scripturalism” and “strong religion.” Accordingly, fundamentalism in world religions was explained in the five-volume Chicago Fundamentalist Project (1991–1995) as a product of pressures of modernity and reactions to these pressures: thus secularisation led to religious revivalism; the consolidation of feminist ideologies caused a backlash favouring modesty and family-based ideologies; and technology and free access to knowledge have led to religious confinement and censorship.[6]
 
Neither Said’s Orientalism, nor Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, and nor the Chicago “Fundamentalism” project reflect the complex nature of interfaith encounters. Viewed from a historical perspective, civilisations were never fixed polities, but rather heterogeneous and diverse, with changing boundaries and intellectual orientations. Moreover, they were exposed to inner frictions, which at times overshadowed external conflicts with other cultures. This is true with regard to the religious wars in European history, as well as to clashes within Islamic societies, as the global jihad of al-Qaʿida and ISIS represented only one small radical fraction in a multifaceted Islamic spectrum.
 
On the Jewish-Christian axis recent years have witnessed an abundance of research reflecting a revived Christian interest in Jewish tradition, for example in Kabbalah. The revised scholarship has changed the long-standing stereotype of a monolithic divide between Judaism and Christianity in pre-modern times that was fed by sustained polemic traditions and modern anti-Semitism. It demonstrated the diverse nature of the study of Jewish esoteric lore among Christians, and, simultaneously, presented the Jews as agents of cultural transmission functioning within the framework of a wider society. The existence of a more diffused reality applies all the more to the multiethnic and culturally diverse Muslim world, where Jewish and Christian communities were influenced by Muslim values, norms and practices, and vice-versa, revealing deeply acculturated processes.
 
Approaching prevailing paradigms in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies as relative concepts that should be examined cautiously will highlight cross-cultural features and introduce a more constructive analysis of modern Islamic resurgence. Such an approach will also eschew a binary picture in favor of a diffuse reality of intertwined worlds: on the one hand, religions striving for the sole possession of revelation and holy places; and on the other, mutual recognition by religions of a shared background of myths, founding figures, injunctions, values, cosmology, social behaviour, and interactions across time and space.
 
Moving away from artificial precepts to examine more concrete communal realities, using sociological insights and fieldwork, is more productive and insightful. Thus, for example, many speak of religiosity and its manifestations in the public sphere. However, in the context of Islam in Israel, for instance, an increase in the number of mosques and welfare associations is clearly not a sufficient indication of the strength of the Islamic Movement and the degree of Islamisation of the Arab public domain. Public polls conducted in recent years among Muslims in Israel show that only 20% of the respondents indicated that religion should play an active role in the public sphere; the rest saw it as a moral and cultural code, and adopted a pluralistic approach to religion. Moreover, field studies conducted in mixed localities in which Muslims and Christians live, such as Haifa, Nazareth, and Kafr Qana, show cordial interethnic relations based on interpersonal and family acquaintances, joint activities in local institutions, and common interests related to their positions as minority groups vis-à-vis state authorities.[7]
 
A similar picture of Islamisation as a relative process can be traced in the Middle Eastern environment. For example, with regard to the veil or head covering which stem from a social, not only a religious, trigger that allows women to move freely in public. In addition, opinion polls and interviews conducted in various Arab countries from the 2000s onward showed that a significant percentage of respondents, mainly young people, expressed a desire for the shielding of personal freedoms and the establishment of a democratic regime. Some of them even displayed indifference and skepticism to religion. These indicators, together with the different approaches regarding the place of Islam in the polity, are clear signs of religious diversity.[8]
 
Perhaps it is, after all, not surprising that the Arab revolutions of 2011 (dubbed the “Arab Spring”), did not erupt on religious demands for the implementation of the shariʿa (Islamic law), but against the background of mundane issues, such as individual and civil rights, social justice, and democratisation. It is also plausible that the failure of the elected Muslim Brethren to promote these secular issues eventually brought on their downfall in 2013 only a year after they had gained power. The 2011 uprisings overturned entrenched research paradigms about the endurance of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and the inherent submissiveness of the people. The Arab public space changed both its face and its historic role. It was no longer a background against which rulers projected their authority in public processions and official festivals, while the masses played a submissive role, cheering and granting them legitimacy. The demonstrators, led by educated and embittered youths, stormed the symbols of sovereignty of the Arab state, creating new modes of collective action. The dramatic events attested to a Middle East that was an integral part of the global village in terms of its exposure to modern technology, communication networks, and Western ideas.
 
The post-2011 scholarship was seemingly reorganising its patterns of thought, but this was not the case. Two years after the Arab revolutions, and in the shadow of civil wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen, and against the backdrop of the rise of ISIS, another paradigm emerged—the failed state. The failed state model refers to the breaking of the state’s authority, which is reinforced by the renewed vitality of ethnic, religious, tribal, and regional identities. Hence, ethnic-religious sectarianism became a central component of the Middle Eastern landscape and provided a platform for bloody confrontations.[9] This conclusion seems too sweeping, and completely eliminates 100 years of state-building project in the Arab world, which witnessed the consolidation of geographical borders and the construction of national identity, even if feeble one.
 
Critical review of prevailing paradigms in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies does not aim to draw firm conclusions, but only to highlight the importance of having a historical and sociological perspective. Historical monitoring will keep us from falling into essentialist concepts, such as “Islam is the religion of the sword” or “the army of shrouds,” referring to suicide bombers.[10] Of course, one cannot ignore society’s formative ethos and judicial rulings anchored in classical texts, but one must closely examine their historical evolution and the new interpretations that have permeated them. After all, social agents and movements play a crucial role in remoulding of the “truth” of scriptures, in accordance with the circumstances and aspirations of their time.



[1] José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), mainly chapters 1, 8.

[2] Said, Orientalism (new ed., London: Penguin, 2003).

[3] S N. Eisenstadt, "Multiple Modernities," Daedalus 129/1 (2000): 1–29.  

[4] Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), mainly 254–265.

[5] Dabiq, 1437 Shawwal, no. 15. In: http://clarionproject.org/wp-content/uploads/islamic-state-magazine-dabiq-fifteen-breaking-the-cross.pdf

[6] Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.), The Fundamentalist Project (University of Chicago Press, 1991-1995).

[7] Muhammad al-Atawneh and Nohad Ali, Islam in Israel: Muslim Communities in Non-Muslim States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 73-101; Muhammad al-Atawneh and Meir Hatina, "The Study of Islam and Muslims in Israel," Israeli Studies 24/3 (Fall 2019), 101-125.

[8] Brian Whitaker, Arabs without God: Atheism and Freedom of Belief in the Middle East (California: Createspace, 2014).

[9] Kobi Michael and Yoel Guzansky, "The Nation State vs. the Failed State and the Arab Upheaval in the Middle East,” in Vladimir Sazonov et al (eds.), Cultural Crossroads in the Middle East (Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2019), 220-235.

[10] Meir Hatina, Martyrdom in Modern Islam: Piety, Power and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

When we think of international institutions, it tends to be a select few that come to mind: the UN, NATO, the IMF, and the like, as well as multilateral groups such as the BRICS and India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue Forum (IBSA). Less well-known is the Zone of Peace and Cooperation of the South Atlantic (ZOPACAS). But how should the ZOPACAS best be characterised? Is it even a formal organisation, an institution, or a military alliance? None of its member-states belong to the G7, although three are now members of the G20. It is made up of a collection of countries, some large like Brazil and South Africa, some very small like Uruguay and Benin, at times with Left- or Right-leaning governments, and some that have shifted from one to the other since its establishment. The ZOPACAS membership currently stands at twenty-four,[1] with three South American and twenty-one African nations, and four official languages: English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. What these member states have in common, despite their differing individual and political characteristics as well as colonial legacies, is a shared ideal that brings them together—a shared approach to peace. So what is the ZOPACAS and why is it important for contemporary trends in global relations?
 
The origins of the ZOPACAS
 
The ZOPACAS was established on 27 October 1986 by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Its founding Declaration, A/Res/41/11, has seven preambulatory and seven operative clauses. They detail the various commitments of the newly-created zone of peace. As well as being a zone of peace, a designated geographic area dedicated to the preservation of peace, the ZOPACAS can also be thought of as a nuclear-weapons-free zone (NWFZ). This is due to a stipulation of membership being that states must not be in possession of any nuclear weapons capabilities. As Ramesh Thakur explains, ‘A NWFZ is characterised by “four Noes”: no possession, testing, deployment, or use of nuclear weapons’.[2] This is significant, given that the ZOPACAS was established during the final decade of the Cold War. There are several other treaties that also have these tenets as core ideals. These include the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT); the Treaty of Tlatelolco, which prohibits nuclear weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean; and the Treaty of Rarotonga, which establishes the South Pacific as a nuclear-free zone. The ZOPACAS can thus be viewed as part of a wider movement, led predominantly by countries in the South, towards disarmament and the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
 
The commitments of the Declaration of the ZOPACAS, as described in A/Res/41/11, were centred principally around maintaining the South Atlantic as an area dedicated to peace and cooperation, ‘for the benefit of all mankind and, in particular, of the peoples of the region’.[3] The Declaration also includes the need to remove the threat and presence of foreign military powers from the South Atlantic region, as well as maintaining a strong stance against the introduction and proliferation of nuclear weapons. It also condemned South Africa’s existing racist Apartheid regime and the country’s contemporaneous and illegal occupation of Namibia, with a clause stipulating an end to both as ‘conditions essential to guaranteeing the peace and security of the South Atlantic’. Advocacy for change in South Africa was a progressive step for the ZOPACAS to take, and was seen as crucial if the ZOPACAS was to be effective and live up to its name in practice.
 
When the ZOPACAS came into being, the three South American member states, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, had recently returned to democracy following lengthy periods of Right-wing military dictatorship. They were keen to strengthen diplomatic and defence relations with their neighbours in South America and across the Atlantic. In West Africa, however, democracy was far from the norm, and states such as Nigeria and Ghana were governed by military juntas, whilst Angola was ruled by a Left-wing MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) government closely aligned with the USSR. Despite the differences in political leanings and forms of government, a shared ideological position informed their actions and those of other ZOPACAS member states to the extent that they came together to promote their interests in the South Atlantic. In straightforward terms, we are dealing with a delimited geographical space occupied by a collection of state actors that shared a common approach to peace and cooperation.
 
How did the ZOPACAS come about? The UNGA voting record for its establishment shows that one hundred and twenty-four countries voted in favour, eight countries abstained, and one country voted against. Amongst those voting in favour were the future ZOPACAS member-states, as well as the Cold War superpower the USSR and its fellow United Nations Security Council P5 member, the UK. The eight abstainers were the European NATO members France, Belgium, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, and the Netherlands, as well as the then-rising Asian power Japan. The only opposing vote was cast by the US.
 
What motivated these abstentions? Whilst the fifth operative clause of the Declaration of the ZOPACAS stressed the need for an end to Apartheid and self-governance for Namibia, it also urged ‘the implementation of all United Nations resolutions pertaining to colonialism’.[4] This may go some way to explain the abstentions of former colonial powers, particularly France, Belgium, and Portugal; after all, many member states of the ZOPACAS, including Brazil, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Senegal and others are former colonies of these European powers. France expressed reservations that the Declaration provided ‘no adequate guarantees for freedom of navigation on the high seas…. [and that there was] vagueness concerning the limits of the zone concerned’.[5] The Federal Republic of Germany articulated the same reservations. It is likely that the abstaining European powers, as exemplified by France and Germany, viewed the establishment of the ZOPACAS as a hindrance to their continued Eurocentric influence in the South Atlantic Ocean as well as in many of the countries of the region. This would reinforce their reluctance to support the establishment of a zone of peace from which they, as foreign military powers, would be excluded.
 
Why did the United States vote against the establishment of the ZOPACAS? Diplomatic records in the Itamaraty (Brazilian Foreign Ministry) archives show that the US had initially planned to abstain in the voting process, only to ultimately change course and vote against the ZOPACAS.[6] The cable shows that the US demanded that Angola be cited in the Declaration as a threat to peace in the South Atlantic region, in addition to mentioning South Africa and its occupation of Namibia. Furthermore, the cable shows that the US also shared the same concern as France and Germany with regard to freedom of navigation. These themes encapsulated the competing ideologies at play in the wider late-Cold War context. At that time, the socialist government of Angola, led by the MPLA, was backed by the USSR. It is likely that the US viewed Angola as a menace and an unsuitable guest at the table to discuss peace in the region, not least since the country was also in the throes of a civil war. It is also conceivable that the US was concerned that the ZOPACAS would, in time, evolve into a Southern alliance, one that could eventually challenge NATO. The United States’ decision to vote against the ZOPACAS did not, however, hinder its establishment in 1986.
 
We can pause for a moment to recap on the external ideological context at the birth of the ZOPACAS: a certain Eurocentrism on the part of some former colonial powers with a history and influence in the South Atlantic region, leading to abstentions in the vote to establish the ZOPACAS; the existence of Apartheid-era South Africa, isolated from and at odds with its African neighbours; and the closing years of the Cold War, when superpower rivalry was apparent in the ZOPACAS vote and the Soviet Union actively supported one side of the civil war in Angola.
 
The ZOPACAS’ evolution after its establishment
 
The first ministerial meeting of the ZOPACAS took place two years later, in Rio de Janeiro in 1988. The twenty-two founding member states convened to discuss the commitments of the ZOPACAS and would continue to do so at a further six ministerial meetings: Abuja 1990, Brasilia 1994, Somerset West 1996, Buenos Aires 1998, Luanda 2007, and Montevideo 2013. Those founding members were later joined by Namibia and South Africa, following the independence of the former and the end of the Apartheid regime in the latter. South Africa’s decision to end its nuclear programme and decommission its small arsenal of nuclear weapons also opened the door to membership. It is noteworthy that South Africa is the only known case of nuclear reversal and has since become a major advocate for nuclear disarmament, although this is more the result of steps to end Apartheid under F.W. de Klerk rather than a direct result of the formation of the ZOPACAS. The country would later host the 1996 ministerial meeting in Somerset West and eventually become a leading ZOPACAS member. The Treaty of Pelindaba, which established Africa as a nuclear-weapon-free zone, was also signed the same year. A subsequent meeting took place in Pretoria in 1996, at which ambassadors from several ZOPACAS member states (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Namibia, Angola, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo) as well as South African diplomats gathered to further discuss the protection of the marine environment, the denuclearisation of the South Atlantic, and combatting drug trafficking.[7] What does this mean for the ideals of the ZOPACAS? In short: a steady change in focus.
 
The ZOPACAS is dedicated to preserving peace in the South Atlantic, particularly through the elimination of threats, including those posed by the presence of nuclear weapons. With the end of Apartheid in South Africa and the achievement of Namibian independence, two explicit threats named in the Declaration of the ZOPACAS had been removed. However, new issues were taking centre-stage with an emphasis on cooperation, the combatting of piracy and drug trafficking, as well as environmental concerns. These have become new priorities but the ideals of the ZOPACAS, however, remain the same: maintenance of peace and the strengthening of multilateral cooperation between members.
 
For South Africa, one the many positive outcomes of the end of Apartheid was its membership of the ZOPACAS. Like the abandonment of its nuclear arsenal, it is an example of the country’s shift from isolation, from a regime based upon racism and a recent history of draconian internal repression of its majority population, to a shared ideological alignment with twenty-three other states, to the extent that it too sought common goals of peace and cooperation in the South Atlantic. The addition of South Africa introduced another important player, a country with power and influence in Africa but also one interested in furthering South-South cooperation. As members of IBSA, Brazil and South Africa have continued to collaborate, and both have participated, along with India, in the IBSAMAR naval exercises. The size and reach of South Africa suggests that in the future it may begin to rival Brazil in terms of influence in the ZOPACAS.
 
The ZOPACAS agenda has evolved since 1986 and has developed to keep up with changing security concerns in the South Atlantic region. In the post-Cold War period, there has been increased debate in international fora and elsewhere about the Global South and South-South cooperation. The agenda of peace and cooperation between member states, however, remains at the heart of the ZOPACAS. This has led to the ZOPACAS often being cited as an example of multilateral cooperation, and member states have also been vocal in their individual approaches to, and interests in, the South Atlantic and regional security. In recent years, there has been a rise in concerns over maritime security, sustainable development, and the presence in the South Atlantic of extra-regional actors (such as the US and China), as well as piracy and drug trafficking. These concerns have escalated interest in strengthening maritime security and also brought those issues into sharper focus as potential threats to peace. These matters have impacted the agenda of the ZOPACAS and what the organisation defines as a perceived threat, and as a danger to the maintenance of peace. In turn, there has also been an increased focus on the maritime region of the Gulf of Guinea where many of these concerns have arisen. The most recent ministerial meeting in 2013, in Montevideo, was the first to include defence ministers along with foreign ministers among countries’ representatives. This is significant in seeking to address the growing security concerns of the ZOPACAS member-states. This sign of evolution indicates an explicit shift towards addressing defence concerns and signals an acknowledged need to move towards explicit military cooperation.
 
Brazil and the ZOPACAS
 
Looking across to South America, Brazil, a hegemon in the South Atlantic region, has been a leading member of the ZOPACAS since its inception. With a coastline of over 7,000 km, it is not surprising that the South Atlantic Ocean is a principal area of interest for the country. It is therefore beneficial for Brazil to maintain good if not strong diplomatic and defence relations with its neighbours, both in South America but also across the ocean in Africa. Brazil’s interests and aspirations in the South Atlantic are military, commercial, socio-economic, and diplomatic. Furthermore, its diplomatic and defence agenda in the South Atlantic was central to its role in the establishment of this zone of peace.
 
In fact, the ZOPACAS can be viewed as a Brazilian project, and indeed without Brazilian efforts the continuation of the ZOPACAS would not have been possible. Senior Brazilian diplomats frequently refer to ZOPACAS as “our initiative”, and in several diplomatic cables in the Itamaraty archives, the ZOPACAS has been explicitly described as an ‘iniciativa brasileira sobre a zona de paz e cooperação do Atlântico Sul’.[8] Brazil has hosted two of the seven ministerial meetings and provides the momentum behind what can be referred to as a “new revitalisation” of the ZOPACAS. As mentioned earlier, the most recent ministerial meeting of the ZOPACAS was back in 2013; this has been the longest lull between ministerial meetings, the previous being between those in Buenos Aires in 1998 and Luanda in 2007. Brazil is currently taking steps to instigate another ministerial meeting and the importance of the ZOPACAS is apparent in both the 2020 Brazilian National Defence Plan and the Naval Strategy Plan 2040.[9]
 
The National Defence Plan makes reference to the importance of the ZOPACAS and details how strengthening it will help consolidate Brazil’s position as a relevant regional actor, increase the country’s influence in its strategic environment, and reduce the possibility of military interference by extra-regional powers in the South Atlantic. The Naval Strategy Plan, which includes a twenty-year outlook, mentions the need to consolidate the ZOPACAS and avoid what it calls the interference of illegitimate interests. These steps, taken by the Brazilian Ministry of Defence, indicate a direction of travel towards a “new revitalisation” of the ZOPACAS—as signalled by the reference to the ZOPACAS made by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in his speech at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020.
 
It would be fair to say that, until very recently during the populist Bolsonaro presidency, in terms of foreign policy Brazil has largely followed where the US led under Donald Trump. Yet the Bolsonaro government appearing to give its support to the ZOPACAS would nevertheless suggest some independent thinking, in relation to past US opposition to the organisation’s establishment. On the ideological front, Bolsonaro and his government stand as polar opposites of a number of the Brazilian presidents and governments that precede him, such as the social democrat Cardoso and the avowedly leftist Brazilian Worker’s Party (PT) governments of Lula da Silva and Rousseff; and yet despite this, Brazil continues to endorse the ZOPACAS. Even with a limited interest in multilateralism, Bolsonaro’s government appears to view the ZOPACAS as one route to maintaining relations with Brazil’s neighbours on both sides of the Atlantic.
 
ZOPACAS into the future
 
Brazil is not the only country paying renewed attention to this zone of peace. It is joined by most of the countries that make up what I would call the Big Five ZOPACAS member-states: South Africa, Nigeria, Angola, Argentina, and Uruguay. Two countries, Argentina and South Africa, along with Brazil, are members of the G20 and have relatively sophisticated armed forces. Nigeria and Angola have some dominance in Africa and have significant natural resources, including abundant oil reserves. Uruguay, although a small country, maintains a visible and strong contribution to UN peace keeping operations (PKOs). All five have striven to be important actors in both their respective continents and the Global South, and along with Brazil, they are the six countries that have hosted ZOPACAS ministerial meetings. The Brazilian Navy hosted an online ‘ZOPACAS Symposium’ as recently as 27 October 2020, with the participation of rear-admirals from Brazil, South Africa, Argentina, and Angola, together with a number of academics.[10] They discussed the ZOPACAS, wider South Atlantic security issues, current maritime security challenges in the Gulf of Guinea, such as the rise in piracy and drug-trafficking, and the presence of extra-regional actors in the South Atlantic, such as the UK and China. This was followed on the 9–10 November 2020 by the 6th Symposium on Regional Security, organised by the Brazilian Ministry of Defence, which featured a panel on the ZOPACAS and the Gulf of Guinea.[11] It included opening remarks given by Brazil’s Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo and its Vice President, retired General Hamilton Mourão, in which they lauded the importance of the South Atlantic for Brazil. This recent activity reinforces the notion of a “new revitalisation” of the ZOPACAS. It also shows the continuing importance of the founding ideals of the ZOPACAS and incorporates its newer concerns, such as the need for greater collaboration in maritime security in the South Atlantic.
 
The concern regarding extra-regional actors is also a growing one. The UK, China, and the US are all nuclear powers and members of the P5. It is not unreasonable to assume that their presence in the South Atlantic is viewed as an additional security concern for the region and the ZOPACAS member states, as evidenced by Brazil in its National Defence Plan. The founding Declaration of the ZOPACAS clearly mentions ‘the need to preserve the region from measures of militarisation, the arms race, the presence of foreign military bases and, above all, nuclear weapons’.[12] We know that the UK has a more permanent presence in the South Atlantic, in the form of British Overseas Territories, the Islands of the Falklands/Malvinas, South Georgia, South Sandwich, Ascension, Saint Helena, and Tristan da Cunha. It also lays claim to the British Antarctic Territory. Since the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War, there has also been a reinforced British garrison on the Islands. It is highly doubtful that the British presence in the South Atlantic will end or be reduced in the near future. The possibility of an increased military presence by nuclear powers further contravenes core ideals of the ZOPACAS. This is where projections of a possible institutionalisation of the ZOPACAS, albeit delayed by COVID-19, including the establishment of a formal structure, would aid the practical application of the ideals of the zone of peace. This would also be an important step in consolidating the ZOPACAS, and be useful in combatting these encroachments, giving the ZOPACAS an amplified voice and a presence as an international forum.          
 
Although no direct risk of military conflict with extra-regional actors seems evident at present, the ZOPACAS features prominently in current discussions on maritime security and peace and cooperation in the South Atlantic. The most pressing concern is combatting current threats to peace in the Gulf of Guinea, first and foremost clamping down on piracy and drug trafficking. As one of the most developed instances so far of South-South or South American-African cooperation, the ZOPACAS can serve as an ideological laboratory to test the regions’ approach and means to tackling such regional threats. The member-states of the ZOPACAS are renewing their interest in this zone of peace and in the face of growing security concerns, are more likely to band together to protect their interests and promote peace in the South Atlantic. A shared desire remains to defend and uphold the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of the ZOPACAS, although updated with the end of Apartheid and the independence of Namibia. As a consequence, it is clear that although it was established in the last decade of the Cold War and for the conditions imposed by a very different geopolitical context, the ZOPACAS is still relevant to further peace and cooperation in the South Atlantic. A path to a “new revitalisation” suggests that we will be hearing much more about the ZOPACAS in coming years.



[1]Angola, Argentina, Benin, Brazil, Cape Verde, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Namibia, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, São Tomé and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Togo and Uruguay.

[2] Ramesh Thakur (ed.), Nuclear Weapons-Free Zones (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 7.

[3] United Nations General Assembly, A/RES/41/11: Declaration of a zone of peace and co-operation in the South Atlantic (1986).

[4] Ibid.

[5] UNGA, A/41/PV.50, 1986.

[6] Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brazilian Mission to the United Nations (DELBRASONU) Collection, Diplomatic Cable Number: 1794 - XLI AGNU. Plenário. Item 139. Atlântico Sul. 24 October 1986.

[7] Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brazilian Foreign Ministry to Brazilian Mission to the United Nations (DELBRASONU), Diplomatic Cable Number: OF01613A – Retransmissão. ZOPACAS. Reunião em Pretoria. Relatorio e comentarios.

[8] ‘[T]he Brazilian initiative on the zone of peace and cooperation of the South Atlantic’. Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (1986). Brazilian Mission to the United Nations (DELBRASONU) Collection, Diplomatic Cable Number: 1640. XLI AGNU. Plenário. Item 139. Atlântico Sul. 10 October 1986.

[9] Ministério da Defesa, Plano Estratégico da Marinha (Brasília, 2020); Ministério da Defesa, Plano Nacional de Defesa (Brasília: Marinha do Brasil, 2020).

[10] Brazilian Navy, ZOPACAS Symposium. Online Event (27 October 2020), https://www.marinha.mil.br/simposiozopacas/.

[11] Brazilian Ministry of Defence, 6° Simpósio sobre Segurança Regional (9–10 November 2020), https://www.gov.br/defesa/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/6deg-simposio-sobre-seguranca-regional-europa-america-do-sul-tera-participacao-de-especialistas-internacionais-e-autoridades.

[12] UNGA, A/RES/41/11, 1986.