Posts com a Tag ‘Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (T)’

The opening scene of this fascinating book about human rights in the Global South, nationalism (‘home’) and cosmopolitanism (‘the world’) by Rahul Rao, Lecturer in Politics at SOAS, is central London in 2003. The author participates in a manifestation against the impending Iraq War, seen by many as an imperialist venture that will most certainly endanger Iraqi civilians. Yet he also professes to the “struck by the tacit alliance between a politically correct Western left, so ashamed of the crimes of Western imperialism that it found itself incapable of denouncing the actions of Third World regimes, and a hyper-defensive Third World mentality […].” After all, as British foreign policy makers pointed out, Saddam Hussein was guilty of the largest chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian-populated area in history, which took place in Halabaja in the late 1980s, at the end of the war against Iran.

Both sides may care about the fate of the Iraqi population. Yet, what sets the two groups apart, Rao remarks, is that they have identified different enemies: Communitarians and nationalists pointed to the international system as the main threat, while cosmopolitans point to the state, or, more specifically, to the often brutal ‘Third World state’. Leia Mais