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Social Text 94 • Vol. 26, No. 1 • Spring 2008

DOI 10.1215/01642472-2007-018 © 2008 Duke Universi ty Press

Never to go home again,

for this was home!

— Derek Walcott, “Exi le”

Only in a world in which the spaces of states have been thus perforated

and topologically deformed and in which the citizen has been able to

recognize the refugee that he or she is — only in such a world is the

political survival of humankind today thinkable.

— Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights”

The Famously Forgotten

One could justifiably begin a discussion of Internally Displaced Per-

sons (IDPs) with a polemic against theorists of globalization for rou-

tinely ignoring this category of dispossessed people. One could protest

that in the context of globalization and contemporary sovereignty, the

main human issue is usually taken to be that of transnational migration.

Migrants, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are routinely ana-

lyzed as participating in the flows of capital, information, and culture

through legal and illegal border crossings across hard and soft borders inthe context of weakened nation-states.1 Compared to the plethora of work

on refugees, we could point out that there is a relative paucity of work on

the internally displaced,2 the literature on IDPs is indeed quite small, and

the disparity is striking, particularly as the number of IDPs far exceeds

When Home Is a CampGlobal Sovereignty, Biopolitics,

and Internally Displaced Persons

Kalpana Rahita Seshadri



3 0 Seshadri • When Home Is a Camp

that of refugees and their numbers are on the rise every year. But to make

such a straightforward protest would be to miss an interesting paradox:

even though there is widespread knowledge about the plight of the inter-

nally displaced and awareness that they now constitute the majority of

those affected by war, IDPs continue to be regarded as the most forgotten

of refugee populations. What does it mean that the internally displacedare best remembered as having been forgotten?

What are the facts? The IDP monitoring center run by the Norwe-

gian Refugee Council in al liance with the UNHCR (United Nations High

Commission for Refugees) in its last statistical update of December 2006

estimates that there are at least 23,700,000 IDPs the world over. In Sudan

alone there are 5,355,000 IDPs, and Iraq at the last count, in February

2007, has more than 1,884,000. On the other hand, the number of refu-

gees and asylum seekers — that is, forced migrants who cross international

borders — is actually diminishing. As Thomas Weiss writes:

Those displaced within a country often are at least as vulnerable [as refu-

gees], but they receive less attention and can call upon no special interna-

tional agency, even though the General Assembly has called upon UNHCR

to minister to all those in “refugee-like situations.” Although the lot of

refugees is hardly attractive, they may actually be better off than IDPs,

whose existence customarily causes the issue of sovereignty to raise its ugly

head.3

This is hardly news since it is every day in the news. However, the fact

remains that despite the dramatic (and well-known) scenario of IDPs

immobilized by the gorgon’s head of sovereignty, when they analyze con-

temporary sovereignty under the rubric of globalization and transnational

capitalism, most theorists rarely if ever address the phenomenon of inter-

nal displacement. Nor do they consider possible links between modalities

of globalization, the expansion of international law, and increasing rates of

displacement. But this is not a charge I wish to press; rather, I suggest that

we view this gap in analyses of globalization as a scotomized symptom of

how global sovereignty functions today as an epistemological regime.

The phenomenon of IDPs, I contend, can be regarded as a blind

spot at the very center of modern notions of sovereignty insofar as it is

a point of convergence among at least three factors: current practices of

political globalization, the economic interests that condition civil conflicts,and human rights law (premises I shall discuss momentarily). This het-

erogeneous and variegated population of dispossessed peoples comes into

view only in the liberalist context of international law, that is, within an

internationalist framework where world politics is conceived in terms of

interaction between traditional nation-states and international institu-

tions with their treaties, contracts, and conventions. Humanitarian law



31Social Text 94 • Spring 2008

in this context of multilateralism, or even what Seyla Benhabib terms

“cosmopolitan norms,”4 appears as one of those rich paradoxes of liberal

democracies where “territorially bounded states are increasingly subject to

international norms, states themselves are the principal signatories as well

as enforcers of multiple human rights treaties and conventions through

which international norms spread” (90). International treaties becomecosmopolitan law in the sense that the latter increasingly “binds and

bends the will of sovereign nations” (87). This view conceives of global

sovereignty in strictly humanitarian terms, quite apart from the forces of

economic and political globalization, and as a brave and delicate balancing

act between liberal ism and democracy. Given this framework, internally

displaced peoples are conceived of as generic recipients of emergency aid

and represented by human rights advocates entirely as victims of state

oppression and neglect. Succinctly, from the point of view of liberal human

rights advocacy, state sovereignty is an impediment to aid delivery, and it

is the task of the international community and global sovereignty as such

to intervene on behalf of this vulnerable population and protect it from the

scourges of civil war and ethnic conflict. This view assumes the foundation

of global sovereignty to rest on the rights of man and therefore regards

the growing interdependency between states leading to the expansion of

global sovereignty as a sign of a promising new global order. In short, the

world made by economic globalization with its increased economic and

political interdependency is seen to make nation-states more accountable

to the international community, and thereby to reprimand and restrain

arbitrary state action.5

However, this logic of the neighborhood crime watch, the Smiths and

the Joneses looking out for each other, greatly simplifies and overlooks fun-

damental factors in the constitution of internally displaced people, namely

the complex imbrication of civil wars that in this age of global capital are

economically motivated; political globalization or the transformation of

nation-states into what Philip Cerny aptly terms the competition state; 6

and the vested interests of international law as the real foundation of global

sovereignty. (In the following, by global sovereignty, I mean precisely this

machine of governance that knits regional war, political economy, and

humanitarian law on a global scale.) A close look at the dominant con-

ception of IDPs reveals something of the circular logic of the humanitar-

ian view, where global sovereignty is held up as a savior of the very hellit creates. Indeed, global sovereignty itself provides the only legitimate

perspective on IDPs: that they are innocent victims of human rights vio-

lations caused by intrastate upheavals such as separatist struggles, ethnic

conflict, and tribal warfare. They are seen as requiring in the short term

the intervention of the international community and international law to

render humanitarian assistance and deliver justice, and in the long term



32 Seshadri • When Home Is a Camp

more economic development as a civilizing influence. As a net effect of

this v iew the political potential of IDPs must be conceived as nonexistent

and ineffectual, or must perforce remain imperceptible and illegible if they

are to be the needy recipients of international aid.

Against this context, the argument that I build here contends that

global sovereignty produces the very conditions of displacement that itseeks to redress through international law, and that it deploys a form of

modern power that is biopolitical. In making this argument, I am indebted

to three lines of research that form my premise: the work on political trans-

formation of the nation-states in the context of globalization, most notably

that of Philip Cerny; the research that links civil wars and globalization,

most notably as in the collection Greed and Greivance; and the recent work

on the linkage between international law and colonial history by Antony

Anghie.7 When these analyses are braided together, a completely differ-

ent picture of global sovereignty emerges, one that reveals its biopolitical

effects in being able to create the conditions where human beings are

reduced to merely living persons deprived of access to their political lives.

Displacement is, of course, an exceptional condition, a state of emergency

produced at the nation-state level that severs citizens from their political

lives. But when responsibility for this emergency is surrendered to the

international community, humanitarian law is disclosed as an empty juridi-

cal substitute for the state. In this context, between the nonfunctioning

nation-state that has abdicated its responsibility to its own citizens and the

empty gestures of international law, the displaced who are complex political

actors are depoliticized and rendered into a unitary and global category in

need only of global humanitarian aid and relief. Between the subnational

actors of civil war and the supranational actors of international law, the

displaced person, now a generic victim, finds him- or herself thrown into

a state of nature with little or no access to political expression without risk

of assuming the label of terrorist.

The production of internally displaced persons as passive recipients

of humanitarian aid (under indeterminate global protection) is necessitated

by the international community that acts in every instance to reproduce

and expand the rule of global sovereignty. The point of departure for the

international community is the hyperreal fact of violence itself that enables

the constitution of IDPs as a universal category, a global epistemological

unit through a holistic naming of diverse actors of regional conflict as aworldwide problem. Through a blanket condemnation of violence beyond

any consideration of political economy and the effects of globalization,

global sovereignty discloses itself as a biopolitics, as a modality of power

that cares for life. In other words, the nomination and identification of

IDPs as a global problem constitutes them as barely human nonsubjects

separated from their political lives, who must be cared for in their mere



3 3Social Text 94 • Spring 2008

humanness beyond their status as citizens or political actors, that is, beyond

any assessment of their actual capabilities.

My aim is to reason through how it is that the political character of

displaced peoples is elided between the analytical norms governing on

the one hand civil conflict and on the other humanitarianism, thereby

rendering displacement as such the blind spot of global sovereignty. I sug-gest therefore that what is required is a diagnosis of this blind spot as a

way of grasping something of global sovereignty’s efficacious deployment

of biopower. In other words, the category of the IDP is not descriptive in

some simple sense, but is constitutive of an identity that serves mainly

to reinforce sovereignty’s capacity to depoliticize. To put it differently,

sovereignty is secured fundamentally by an epistemological regime that

renders any form of political life outside its purview completely silent and

wholly unintelligible. In the last section, I offer as an example one sce-

nario of IDPs in India, the Muslim minority that survived the carnage in

Gujarat in 2002.

Mean Machine

My premise is that global sovereignty should be understood as the imbri-

cation of political globalization, modern civil war, and international law.

By political globalization, I refer not so much to transnational economic

flows and the presumed weakening of nation-states but the political trans-

formations effected by such flows upon the state. In “Paradoxes of the

Competition State: The Dynamics of Political Globalization,” Philip

Cerny argues that the nation-state today is reinventing itself from the

traditional welfare state into a competition state or a “quasi-enterpriseassociation” (254), one that is sensitive to the demands of the global

marketplace. According to Cerny, this shift heralds a crisis of liberal

democracy “and therefore of the things people can expect from even the

best-run government. In this context, for example, a new and potentially

undemocratic role is emerging for the state as the enforcer of decisions

and outcomes which emerge from world markets, transnational ‘private

interest governments,’

and international quango-like [quasi-autonomous

NGO] regimes” (258). The competition state is characterized by its pur-

suit of “increased marketization” and therefore commits itself to reduced

government spending to encourage private investment and deregulation

of all capitalist enterprises (259). Interestingly, Cerny writes that “liberal-

ization, deregulation, and privatization have not reduced the role of state

intervention overall, just shifted it from decommodifying bureaucracies

to marketizing ones. ‘Reinventing government,’ for example, means the

replacement of bureaucracies which directly produce public services by

ones that closely monitor and supervise contracted-out and privatized




services” (266). An effect of this political transformation, Cerny sug-

gests, is that the state “is sometimes structurally fragmented” (268). The

nation’s capacity to engender a sense of gemeinschaft or community is

considerably eroded:

Even more problematic are the subnational, transnational and supranationalethnic cleavages, tribalism and other revived or invented identities and tradi-

tions . . . which abound in the wake of the uneven erosion of national iden-

tities, national economies and national state policy capacity characteristic

of the “global era.” Globalization can just as well be seen as the harbinger

not simply of a “new world order” but of a new world disorder , even a “new

medievalism” of overlapping and competing authorities, multiple loyal-

ties and identities, prismatic notions of space and belief, and so on. (256;

emphasis in original)

Significantly, for our theme of displacement and civil war, Cerny

also suggests that the nation’s gemeinschaft funct ion will erode more rap-idly in the economically weaker states which will now be “torn by groups

attempting to recast those gemeinschaftlich bonds through claims for the

ascendancy of religious, ethnic, or other grassroots loyalties” (272). In

conclusion, Cerny writes that “the postmodern irony of the state is that

rather than simply being undermined by inexorable forces of globalizat ion,

the competition state is becoming increasingly both the engine room and

the steering mechanism of political globalization itself” (274).

States play a crucial role as stabilizers and enforcers of the rules and prac-

tices of global society. Furthermore, states and state actors are probably the

most important single category of [sic ] agent in the globalizing process. Asnew forms of political organization surrounding, cutting across and coex-

isting with — and fostered by — the state crystall ize, states and state actors

are the primary source of the state’s own transformation into a residual

enterprise association. (257 – 58)

When this analysis of the neoliberal state is brought into conjunction

with those analyses that disclose the links between contemporary civil

war and economic globalization, we can begin to discern something of

the conditions of possibility that engender civilian displacement. Recent

scholarly research has shown that contrary to traditional understandings of

civil wars as engendering economic collapse, modern regional conflicts arein fact productive of alternate war economies that are hugely advantageous

for combatants. There are several models for understanding economic

motives of contemporary civil wars: that of the profitability of violence

in the wake of the enterprise state; wars fought over natural resources, or

separatist struggles arising out of real grievances pertaining to inequitable

distribution; and even the manipulation of populations by humanitarian




aid agencies. The globalizing economy itself is seen to increase the pos-

sibility of resistance by exacerbating economic disparities and real poverty

and thereby prompting violent struggle and resistance.8 In all cases, the

globalizing economy plays a complex and significant role, but one that

requires analysis on a case-by-case basis, thus disclosing displacement in

its singular political coloring in each context. In other words, civil warsare not merely local skirmishes arising out of irrational and traditional

hatreds but are fully economically motivated and are often enabled by

the soft borders of global trade corridors and the fragmentation of the

traditional nation-state.

In this context, in relation to international law, the true paradox is

not the one identified by Benhabib that sovereign liberal democratic states

submit themselves to a higher Kantian principle of international law. The

true paradox is that, in order to climb onto the bandwagon of global compe-

tition, states weaken or withdraw from their democratic roles as guarantors

of minimal social and economic protections, safety nets, and public ser-

vices to their citizens, thereby engendering conflict and fragmentation, but

now readily sign onto international t reaties and conventions with greater

and increasing enthusiasm — treaties that guarantee the human rights of

human beings as human simpliciter . In the context of the nonfunctioning

nation-state, the salient question should be: what does it mean that states

effectively surrender their responsibilities to the international community

that targets a nonpolitical being? In effect, international law functions as

an empty substitute (rather than a supplement) to the legal rights of the

citizen, and its protection of the human person can only serve to further

depoliticize the displaced. In short, my point is not to reiterate the oft-heard

protest that the global economy corrodes human rights.9 Rather, I wish to

underline that there is an unmistakable correlation between the expansion

of the global economy, the competition state, and international law. With-

out grasping this complex layering of contemporary sovereignty, we cannot

apprehend the multiplicity and heterogeneity of displaced populations. The

additional paradox is the refusal on the part of liberal theorists to relate

the expansion of global sovereignty with increasing rates of displacement,

choosing instead to adopt a simple globalist nomination of IDPs as emer-

gency aid recipients in need of more international intervention.10

International law is part of a package that makes up global sover-

eignty and is not simply a reactive ambulance truck. As Antony Anghiehas shown, the very history of international law is wholly implicated in and

is continuous with the history of colonial domination and contemporary

global sovereignty. Anghie writes: “Globalizat ion, with the inequal ities it

promotes, challenges if not threatens the integrity of human rights law,

precisely because it uses human rights as a means of furthering itself.

Examined in a historical context, furthermore, the new alliance between




globalization and the neo-liberal version of human rights . . . is hardly novel

or surprising: commerce has, since the time of Vitoria, furthered itself

through an invocation of ‘civilization’ ” (256). Anghie goes on to analyze

as well the capitulations elicited by International Financial Institutions

(IFI) such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

of their clients through the concept of good governance. The logic is thatsustainable development requires human rights, therefore good governance

is mandated. Of course, good governance requires certain prescriptions:

The shift to governance has massively expanded the range of domestic

issues that can be subjected to IFI management. The Bank is prohibited by

its Articles of Agreement from interfering in the political affairs of a recipi-

ent state. Now, however, by asserting that economic development depends

on good governance, on the political system of a country, the Bank can

justify formulating an entirely new set of initiatives that seeks explicitly to

reform the political institutions of a recipient state, on the basis that such

reform is necessary to achieve development, the central concern of the Bank.(261 – 62)

My concern in this essay is fundamental ly epistemological. Given the

prism of global sovereignty in its economic, political, and jur idical aspects

and its invisible hand in the increase of civi l wars, especial ly in the periph-

eral states, what does it mean that this prism is repeatedly scotomized and

disavowed in favor of a perspective where displaced peoples are given a

collective designation as IDPs who require assistance as human beings

simpliciter ? The relation of responsibility to sovereignty, how responsibil-

ity itself is conceptualized and translated into policy, then becomes a key

issue that must be looked at more closely.

Minimal Humanity

Before taking up the biopolitical aspect of global sovereignty, it is neces-

sary to sketch the humanitarian perspective: According to the UNHCR,

IDPs today make up the largest number of migrants the world over, and

“the world’s largest group of vulnerable people. Currently, there are an

estimated 25 million of them in at least 50 countries living amidst war

and persecution. They have little legal or physical protection and a very

uncertain future — outcasts in their own countries.”11 Policy experts on

IDPs would agree that while issues surrounding immigrants, particularly

in the overdeveloped world, are often at the forefront of world news and

refugees are protected by international law, internally displaced peoples

are often simply silent victims, camp inhabitants, trapped by the indif-

ference of their own governments that effectively denationalize them with

no possibility of asylum.12






is illusory as governments overwhelmed by conflict have proven unable or

unwilling (especially when they themselves are the cause of the displace-

ment in the first instance) to provide any protection.15

Focused international attention to the plight and needs of IDPs,

according to Roberta Cohen (senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

and foremost advocate, scholar, and policy analyst of IDPs), is not more

than fifteen years old.16 Even though there are no UN agencies work-

ing specifically with IDPs (the UNHCR’s mandate is refugees), there

has been increasing recognition of the humanitarian problem posed by

IDPs. A milestone was reached in 1998, when the then – representative

of the secretary-general Francis Deng presented to the UN a set of guid-

ing principles for dealing with IDPs drawn up by a team of international

lawyers under his direction. Also, the Norwegian Refugee Council (with

the help of the UN) has created the Internal Displacement Monitoring

Center and collects information and maintains a database on IDPs. Many

more aid and humanitarian organizations, including NGOs such as the

International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), CARE USA, MSF,

and IGOs such as the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian

Affairs (OCHA), WFP, and UNICEF, work to dispense aid, sometimes

offer protection from violence, and advocate for the rights of IDPs (MF

187 – 212). Other rights-monitoring agencies, such as Amnesty Interna-

tional and Human Rights Watch, have begun focusing on the plight of

IDPs as the single gravest human rights crisis in the world. However, there

is as yet no separate legal document like a treaty or even a convention that

binds nations to the principles laid out in the 1998 document. Though this

document, the 1998 Guiding Principles, has become standard in termsof assessing and relieving the situation of IDPs, there are no systems in

place whereby the internat ional community can monitor, let alone enforce,

states’ compliance to the rules.

Responsibility and Sovereignty

The first question that ar ises for anyone thinking about IDPs in relation

to globalization is why or how this population, which is unquestionably an

ancient demographic probably as old as sovereignty itself, is now suddenly

a cause célèbre of the international community. Why is protection of IDPs

now acknowledged as a mandate of the international community requir-

ing the hand of international law? Why now? Why international law?

Roberta Cohen and Francis Deng offer several reasons as to why the

international community feels the need to protect IDPs.17 They suggest

the reasons are not simply humanitarian but have to do with polit ical and

strategic consequences as well. Cohen, in her Radcliffe speech, cites the




sheer numbers: the 20 – 25 mil lion and rising each year in fifty countries

is cause enough. She also suggests that civil wars that displace populations

are a huge threat to regional stability; that IDPs have the highest mortality

rate in the world; that the instability within nations that generates huge

numbers of IDPs can be breeding grounds for political extremism with

severe strategic consequences. In her view, in our post-Holocaust world, theworld community cannot stand by on the grounds of respecting national

sovereignty while civil wars and genocide claim lives. Moreover, peace and

reconstruction cannot be possible without the reintegration and resettle-

ment of IDPs, but given the fact that they receive less international protec-

tion and assistance and are not covered by the 1951 refugee convention, this

is, she suggests, along with Antonio Gutteres, the UN High Commissioner

for Refugees, one of the “biggest failures in terms of humanitar ian action”

for the international community (FR; MF 15 – 30).

How does this emerging sense of responsibility toward IDPs on the

part of the international community emerge within (or as) the machina-

tions of global sovereignty? I do not mean to suggest that the well-meaning

liberal sense of responsibility is causal ly related to civil war, but that there

is a correlation between the global prioritizing of human rights and the

enforcement of neoliberal regimes that effectively abandon their responsi-

bility to citizens. After all, the violation of human rights (as well as human

rights law), insofar as it is seen as a global problem, something to be tackled

on the macro level of world politics, can be possible within the prismatic

structure of global sovereignty only as an outline above (i.e., economic

globalization and its transformative effect on the political structure of the

nation-state) the burgeoning of civil wars as part of the new world dis-

order and the hand of the international community (i.e., the structure of

internat ional law and its authority to use force).18 Bottom line: the intrinsic

relation between the constitut ion of IDPs as a worldwide demographic and

global sovereignty is unmistakable.

That the peoples who have been displaced by civil war, in terms of

numbers and level of misery and vulnerability, pose a grave humanitar ian

crisis — that they suffer — is not in dispute. However, that they should be

acknowledged as such so recently, and identified as a specific demographic

only in our own lifetimes, is surely a symptom of a shift in the ways in which

we now conceive of national sovereignty and the mandate of the interna-

tional community. In fact, the very nomination and abbreviation (IDPs)ontologizes them into a body and reifies them as a global phenomenon —

simple recipients of humanitarian aid. There is no question that the phe-

nomenon of internal displacement is not a recent one. As Cohen points

out, besides the Nazi genocide of the last century, which remains the prime

example, just within the last half century the world passively consumed

as so much newsprint the internal affairs of nations that permitted large-






or have learned history’s lessons and have evolved ethically in our commit-

ment to alleviate human suffering (though this may of course be true for

individuals). Rather, the global expression of care for IDPs, and the inter-

national community’s newfound sense of confidence in its own militarized

power, cannot be isolated from the political transformations effected by

the global economy on states. Within this context, global sovereignty canrepresent national sovereignty as an obstruction that must be tempered

from autonomy to accountability to serve its interests. More obviously,

IDPs can be constituted as targets of international concern only if there is

a global vantage point that can perceive them as a worldwide phenomenon.

Without this vantage point, IDPs as such cannot be spoken of as a group.

Perhaps this scenario can be said to prove Anghie’s thesis about interna-

tional law: understood within its h istory of colonial domination, interna-

tional law is a part and parcel of contemporary global sovereignty. Thus,

the construal of national sovereignty as an impediment is a feint in the sense

that economic globalization is aided and abetted by the nation-state itself

and the parceling out of sovereignty from national to supranational and

subnational actors who are empowered to engage in violence is facilitated

by the very forces of globalization that supposedly integrate nations into a

world community. This point leads to the next question.

The second question that arises perta ins to the numbers of IDPs. It

is an exponentially rising demographic. We learn from the data banks that

when IDPs were first counted in 1982, there were 1.2 million in eleven

countries. In the 1990s the count was 20 – 25 mil lion in forty countries,

and these numbers are rising in the twenty-first century. Why in the wake

of global sovereignty are there increasing numbers of IDPs, very often if

not always created by the very nation-states that are ostensibly declining in

power? The immediate answer supplied by Cohen herself is that there has

been an increase in civil wars (FR). These civil wars are understood as a

global phenomenon. In Masses in Flight , Cohen and Deng remind us that

not only was the Cold War greatly responsible for the globalization of war,

but that “the nations in Africa [and elsewhere] that experienced the most

extreme violence and the highest levels of displacement were those that

were most closely aligned with and received the highest levels of aid from

the two cold war protagonists” (MF 20). They cite other historical reasons

such as the colonial construction of national borders, ethnic separatism and

governmental repression of these movements, the manipulation of ethnicdifferences, and above all the important fact that internal displacement is

almost always caused by “conflict between a government and a minority”

(21). The authors go on to say that internal displacement does not have

only one distinct cause (23), and the reasons, if they can be enumerated, as

to why ethnicity is so volatile, and instabil ity and violence so widespread,

cannot possibly be synthesized into a proposition about the contemporary




state of world politics. Unsurprisingly, Cohen and Deng do not correlate

the expansion of the global economy and the polit ical transformations it

effects on states with civi l wars, instead choosing to read regional conflicts

through traditional and familiar categories of ethnic violence and minor-

ity struggles.

One of the problems in discerning IDPs as the blind spot of contem-porary sovereignty pertains to the d ifficulty of overcoming state-centric

notions of civil war. In this older framework, intrastate conflict is conceived

as an aberration or an interruption of normal peaceful coexistence, usually

attributed to the inflammation of ancient hatreds, and seen as a setback to

development.20 However, as Mark Duffield has argued, clear oppositions

between war and peace as “distinct conditions” are founded on a notion

of discrete autonomous states that could legally engage in and conclude

war with a warring party.21 Today, Duffield suggests, the situation is bet-

ter served by a theory of “durable disorder.” Most political conflicts and

wars today are regional rather than national or between sovereign nations,

and the number of such conflicts is rising. During the Cold War, regional

hostilities enjoyed subvention from the superpowers. Today, as Duffield

puts it: “Warring parties have been forced to develop their own means of

economic sustainability. Reflecting the logic of globalization, this has often

meant moving beyond the state in the pursuit of wider alternative economic

networks” (73 – 74). In this situation of “post – nation state conflict” (75),

warring parties act autonomously and generate war economies that traffic

across the soft borders of weakened nation-states. In the examples cited by

Duffield, globalization works to further marginalize peripheral states from

core states. “Deregulation coupled with the qualification of nation-state

competence is helping war economies to expand. Rather than globalization

fostering development, poverty reduction, and stability, one can expect the

current pattern of overt political instabil ity outside the core areas of the

global economy to continue” (82). The evidence that Duffield marshals

undercuts the more simplistic and optimistic view of globalization as miti-

gating civil wars, especial ly civil wars construed only as minority struggles,

by spreading democracy, eliciting accountability to the international com-

munity, and enhancing the role of international peacekeepers. The salience

of Duffield’s argument lies in the fact that civil wars are economically

motivated, profitable for combatants and elites, and fundamental ly enabled

by the trade corridors opened up by globalization.22

Given the complex interaction between globalization as a force of

durable disorder, the cooperation of nation-states with economic globaliza-

tion, and the none too innocent role of international law, we can begin to

discern something like a necessity in the production of IDPs as the blind

spot of contemporary sovereignty. What is missed is not so much the real-

ity of IDPs, but the process of depoliticization as a modality of power, or




more precisely biopower: global sovereignty as providing the condition of

possibility for civil war that causes displacement, and the production of

the displaced as a unity, merely as recipients of global aid. What is in the

blind spot is that people are displaced by civil wars that more often than

not are enabled by the forces of global capital, that they are often complex

and singular actors in such strife (sometimes even potential recruits forthe local militia and other subnational warring parties) who cannot be

totalized, and that their production as a global unity, in need of the strong

arm of international law, is a fundamental strategy of global sovereignty

that produces the very conditions of depoliticization endemic to displace-

ment as such.

In other words, global sovereignty is a modality of contemporary

power that functions as a process of depoliticization on two related levels:

first by creating the conditions for civil disorder (or states of exception)

through the transformation of the traditional nation-state into the compe-

tition state, and second by capturing the displaced within the globalized

dispositif of humanitarian relief as nonpolitical actors. To diagnose this

process of depoliticization, we must set aside what appears as an opposition

between national and global sovereignty to discern the intimate collabora-

tion between the two as part of the same network of power: if sovereignty

traditionally exerted itself through a certain deployment of the political,

the decision that declares states of exception,23 it is manifested much more

effectively at the global level as the concern and care for life: the competi-

tion state, free trade, good governance, the promotion of democracy, and

international law. In other words, the fact that states themselves sign onto

international treaties is no paradox at all. They are simply fulfilling the

itinerary of sovereignty as such: an itinerary that can be described as the

increased manifestation of power’s capacity to abandon the political sub-

ject, power’s potentiality to function by not functioning (i.e., law’s capacity

to be in force without signifying).24 By examining the role of sovereignty

in the political subject, we can grasp what is truly at stake in the shift from

national to global sovereignty.

Therefore, instead of interpreting this shift in the purely conventional

terms of bad nations versus good international community, this other

angle discloses the unacknowledged complicity between the two as (a)

power’s capacity to capture and inscr ibe human l ife at its most vulnerable

and depoliticized level, and (b) more important for our concerns, poweras the epistemological occlusion of the political character of people who

have been uprooted by civi l war. To perceive this complicity, and to grasp

the contemporary logic of sovereignty, citizenship, and human rights, we

must turn to Foucault, who teaches us that we must shift our attention

from the why of power to the how ;25 in other words, here we must now ask

how power functions by intervening at the raw level of biological life to




produce and manage IDPs as depoliticized nonsubjects whose occluded

and imperceptible political lives are the condition of possibility for global

sovereignty to reproduce itself as a biopolitics.

Nations, Citizens, Biopower

Let us note that in the term internally displaced persons the words internal

and persons presume the political form of the modern nation-state even

though the official definition does not directly use this term, favoring

instead more domestic words such as home and place of habitual residence.

If the idea of “internal” alludes to the form of the state as a territorially

circumscribed entity, “persons” refers to an ambiguous grouping that,

insofar as it is within (and therefore belonging to) the limits of the state,

bears a relation to but is differentiated from the juridical “citizen” as

well as the “stateless person” who is also covered by the UN convention

of 1954. Stateless peoples such as the Palestinians, the Kurds, and the

Kashmiris could be displaced, and the populations of minorities who

have been internally displaced could be denationalized, but the two terms

being stateless and denationalized are not necessarily identical, a differ-

ence that the designation of IDPs aims to transcend altogether. Though

they are invariably minorities within a given nation-state, their political

status as either stateless or as denationalized is not something that can

be marked within this generic and totalized category. The international

community produces IDPs as characterized by their depoliticization, as

simple, global, featureless specimens of naked existence requiring protec-

tion (rather than empowerment), thereby occluding the history of their

political positioning.

Problematic

Once we invoke the biopolitical in the production of IDPs, a series of

questions then arises: Within the matrix of the nation-state, which is the

space of legibility for the IDP, who or what is a “person” who is internal

to the state but is however not properly a citizen? How does the state

render the singularity of its citizens into undifferentiated persons identi-

fied only by their displaced condition? How does the state displace its

own citizens, who are by their very depoliticized, ex-juridical status also

effectively denationalized? Is there then a hidden logic in the modern

relation between state and citizen that is figured in the abjection of the

depoliticized and denationalized person? If to be a political subject is to

be in continual negotiation with the state over one’s political agency, how

does global sovereignty legitimate itself by seizing the moment of political

desubjectivation of the citizen as a condition of its own possibility? How




does the global concept of IDPs effectively render displaced and negotiat-

ing minorities into “nonsubjects” of global sovereignty, thereby further

distancing them from political access and agency? What does it mean for

the international discourse of human rights to stress the depoliticized and

denationalized notion of the human person as the ultimate responsibility

of global sovereignty? Is the discourse of human rights (the assert ion of“the human” as depoliticized substance) then to be understood as the

actualization of global sovereign power that is marked above all by its

ability to seize upon denationalized political subjects, to create a global

state of exception?

Let us consider first the ontological status of the citizen. In an ar ticle

titled “Subjection and Subjectivation,” Etienne Balibar traces the genealogy

of the modern autonomous self-conscious subject as a hidden or disavowed

“play on words” between subditus or subjection to an external authority,

and subjectum or substratum of properties.26 According to Balibar, the

modern subject, who is quintessentially free and a citizen of the world, is

to be attributed not to Descartes but to Kant and the Enlightenment. This

Kantian subject, Balibar argues, is a reformulation of the ancient notion

of subjection and dependence into an inner obedience to an inner voice of

the moral and juridical law. For our analysis of the mode of functioning

of sovereignty in the production of IDPs, the significant point in Balibar’s

argument is his insistence on the principles of secular democracy as a his-

torical threshold that irreversibly set in motion a fundamental equation

between man and subject mediated by a necessary third term, namely the

citizen. From now on, “ ‘man’ is a (the) citizen of the world; his ‘essence’ is

nothing other than the horizon within which all the determinations of that

universal ‘citizenship’ must fall” (7). The outcome of the great bourgeois

revolutions of the eighteenth century, Balibar suggests (through a reversal

of the idealist doctrine), is the abolishing of subjection, and this political

agency is the prior condition that gives access to self-consciousness and

subjectivity. Therefore, “citizenship is not one among other attributes of

subjectivity, on the contrary: it is subjectivity, that form of subjectivity that

would no longer be identical with subjection for anyone” (12). Who is this

subject-citizen? As the subject of law, he is now

no longer the man called before the Law, or to whom an inner voice dictates

the Law, or tells him that he should recognize and obey the Law; he is

rather the man, who, at least virtually, “makes the Law,” i.e., constitutes,

or declares it to be valid. The subject is someone who is responsible or

accountable because he is (a) legislator, accountable for the consequences,

the implementation and non-implementation of the Law he has himself

made. (11)




But this freedom of the modern subject is not a simple overcoming of the

ancient subditus. Rather, the man-subject-citizen bears a relation, even a

biopolitical relation, to subjection (13). Balibar writes:

Why is it that the very name which allows modern philosophy to think and

designate the originary freedom of the human being — the name of “sub-

ject” — is precisely the name which historically meant suppression of free-

dom, or at least an intrinsic limitation of freedom, i.e., subjection? We can

say it in other terms: if freedom means freedom of the subject , or subjects,

is it because there is, in “subjectivity,” an originary source of spontaneity

and autonomy, something irreducible to objective constraints and determi-

nations? Or is it not rather because “freedom” can only be the result and

counterpart of liberat ion, emancipation, becoming free: a trajectory inscribed

in the very texture of the individual, with all its contradictions, which starts

with subjection and always maintains an inner or outer relation with it?

(8 – 9)

Balibar, in this essay, does not elaborate on this inner/outer relation to

subjection, but his analysis of modern human subjectivity as the sutur ing

of the metaphysical or ontological and the political (man-subject-citizen)

clarifies the grounding of contemporary sovereignty as the juridicization

of humanness. In other words, man is a subject (“zôon politikon te phusei,

the being natura lly living by and for the city” [7 – 8]) only insofar as he is

a citizen endowed with rights. Conversely, it is precisely this equation of

the subject with citizen that led Hannah Arendt in her analysis of state-

less peoples to suggest that to strip a human being of his status as citizen,

or to expel him beyond “the pale of the law,” was also to strip him of his

status as human subject, to reduce him to his minimal animal existence toan “abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human” (297).27

Given this inscr iption of human freedom in the law and legal status, since

as Arendt puts it “no one seems able to define with any assurance what

these general human rights, as distinguished from the rights of citizens,

really are” (293), what are the implications for our understanding of sov-

ereignty in this nexus of power where citizenship is the precondition of

human subjectivity? I quote Balibar again: “This equation means that the

humanity of man is identified not with a given or an essence, be it natural or

supra-natural, but with a practice and a task: the task of self-emancipation

from every domination and subjection by means of a collective and uni-versal access to politics” (12). Furthermore, if, as Balibar suggests, such

an equation of subject and citizen also carries within it the inseparable

conjunction of equality and liberty,28 then the “person” who through

displacement is depoliticized and denationalized into a noncitizen within

the nation-state is not only unequal and unfree, but he or she also loses

his or her status as subject due to his or her exclusion from politics and




from the law itself. Arendt: “The calamity of the rightless is not that they

are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality

before the law and freedom of opinion — formulas which were designed to

solve problems within given communities — but that they no longer belong

to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal

before the law, but that no law exists for them” (295 – 96).From this angle, there are two ways of approaching the depolitici-

zation of the citizen into an internally displaced person. We can argue

that no human being should be denationalized, and that the citizen-man-

subject nexus should be strengthened. Here we would be reiterating what

is already accepted, that all human beings are citizens of the world or

state whose rights should be ina lienable. Or we can acknowledge what is

staring us in the face in spite of the above iteration: that sovereignty as

such is nothing if not the potentiality to suspend what Arendt calls “the

right to have rights” (296) and thereby denationalize, depoliticize, and

decide on states of exception. Power here is fundamentally the ability not

simply to control, punish, or incarcerate, but to expel human beings from

organized community sustained by the law and throw them into a “state

of nature” as fully demonstrated by the neoliberal state. Perhaps a proper

politics that is attentive to human futurity will have to work toward the

elimination of the very conditions of possibility where human beings can

be denied access to politics. Focusing only on the plight of the internally

displaced and not on the political logic of internal displacement embedded

in the prism of global sovereignty, the international community laments

the inhumane conditions of IDPs, and human rights advocates agitate for

the transpolitical rights and natural dignity of the human person. But as

Hannah Arendt points out, there are no human rights in nature: “We are

not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength

of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights” (301). In this

context, the discourse of humanitarian ism and human rights law appears

blind to its own participation in the global machine. The advocacy of

human rights for the depoliticized and denationalized person is u ltimately

a form of bloodletting as cure. It fails to recognize that when the neoliberal

state no longer serves as the bond between subject and citizen, thereby

abandoning the citizen to civil conflict, displacement, and the empty form

of international law, human rights are directly implicated in perpetuation

of depoliticization.In her trenchant rebuttal of Michael Ignatieff’s center-right defense of

the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as good at the very minimum for human

rights, Wendy Brown insists that human rights discourse is “a politics and

it organizes political space.”29 But, she writes, “for the most part, human

rights activism refuses the political mantle on which I am insisting. Rather,

it generally presents itself as something of an antipolitics — a pure defense




of the innocent and the powerless against power” (453). In a sense, it is

this attachment to what Arendt calls the nothing more “than abstract

nakedness of being human, nothing but human” and the rigid insistence

on that antipolitical nakedness as the foundation of its own legitimacy that

makes the discourse of human rights a lethal weapon — a biopolitics — in

the hands of global sovereignty.That sovereignty functions as biopower, which is the separation,

management, and decision regarding the natural and the political within

man, has received its most thoroughgoing elaboration in the thought of

Giorgio Agamben. Biopower as delineated by Foucault in his 1976 lectures

and The History of Sexuality is the state’s care of life, manifested as its

“imperat ive to protect the race” (81). This ameliorative logic aimed at the

elimination of all threats invariably carries a core of eugenic racism within

it. Unlike disciplinary power, which is internalized, biopower is “applied

not to man-as-body but to living man, to man as living-being; ultimately,

if you like, to man-as-species” (SMD 242). It consists of apparatuses and

forms of knowledge that mass singular human beings into abstract popula-

tions and demographics. Agamben suggests that the history of sovereignty

should be studied as the site of convergence between the individualizing

network power of disciplines and the massifying biopower of the state. If

in Western political thought sovereignty legitimates itself by introducing

a series of caesuras between the private and the public, our bare life (or

zoe, the life we share with animals) and our political life (bios, or properly

human life), its true potential can be understood not merely as the rule of

law, but as the ability to suspend the law in the state of exception. State of

exception “defines a ‘state of law’ in which, on the one hand, the norm is

in force but is not applied (it has no ‘force’) and, on the other, acts that do

not have the value of law acquire its ‘force.’ ”30 This capability of the law to

be “in force without signifying,”31 thereby creating a zone of indistinction

between bios and zoe, or human and animal, is sovereignty’s fundamental

capacity to produce a depoliticized “state of nature.” “The state of excep-

tion,” Agamben writes, “is not a dictatorship . . . but a space devoid of

law, a zone of anomie in which al l legal determinat ions — and above all the

very distinction between public and private — are deactivated” (SOE, 50).

Here the man-citizen-subject of the Enlightenment is reduced to bare (or

sacred)32 life, whose status as human subject is indeterminate. Life here,

bare naked li fe, is simply exposed. It bears a relation to death at the limitof the law, where the law through its deliberate suspension no longer covers

this nakedness; it works by not working. This, and not merely the rule of

law, is the true potential of sovereignty, whose genealogy Agamben traces

through a thoroughgoing intellectual and philosophical history as a funda-

mental preoccupation of legal and political thinkers in Western thought.

For Agamben, the paradigm of the state of exception, where sover-




eignty reduces citizens to bare life, is exemplified in the structure of the

Third Reich’s decrees and its internal displacement, denationalization, and

dehumanization of Jews in camps. Auschwitz, Agamben suggests, is not

simply an aberration of history. Taking his cue from Benjamin’s insight

that “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’

in which we live is not the exception but the rule,”33

Agamben writes: “Inour age, the state of exception comes more and more to the foreground as

the fundamental political structure and ultimately begins to become the

rule. When our age tried to grant the unlocal izable a permanent and vis-

ible localization, the result was the concentration camp. The camp — and

not the prison — is the space that corresponds to this originary st ructure

of the nomos.”34 This is unfortunately not a hyperbolic statement. The

great increase in civil wars and internally displaced persons then attests

to the normalizing of the state of exception and the reduction of citizens

to depoliticized persons. That these persons are reduced to anonymous

bare life whose life and death cease to signify is discernible in every sce-

nario of displacement. The struggle and discourse of human r ights in this

context are not in a simple opposition to the machinations of sovereignty.

As Agamben writes:

The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are expe-

riencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man

from the rights of the citizen. In the final analysis, however, humanitarian

organizations — which today are more and more supported by international

commissions — can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred

life, and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the

very powers they ought to fight. It takes only a glance at the recent publicity

campaigns to gather funds for refugees from Rwanda to realize that here

human life is exclusively considered (and there are certainly good reasons

for this) as sacred life — which is to say, as l ife that can be killed but not sac-

rificed — and that only as such is it made into the object of a id and protec-

tion. . . . A humanitarianism separated from politics cannot fail to reproduce

the isolation of sacred l ife at the basis of sovereignty, and the camp — which

is to say, the pure space of exception — is the biopolitical paradigm that it

cannot master. (133 – 34)

What then of the agency of the displaced and of the stateless? Do

the theories of Arendt and Agamben further distance these abandoned

rightless people from political subjectivity, as some critics contend? I sug-

gest that there is another layer in the problem that Arendt and Agamben

discuss as the perplexities inherent in the concept of human rights apropos

refugees and the stateless. Like Agamben, Arendt speaks of the absolute

rightlessness of these people as a condition not so much of deprivation of

rights, as a complete expulsion from the very provenance of the law, where




law simply does not exist and one is not a subject of the law. She then

suggests that this reduction of the refugee to complete irrelevance before

the law is a symptom of globality, which organizes the entire world into a

community. “Only with a completely organized humanity could the loss of

home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity

altogether” (297). My point is that there is a crucial epistemological aspectto global sovereignty as well, and it can be formulated as follows: in the

completely organized world, where there are no more unpenetrated areas

left, where sovereignty is global, political agency as such can only be legible

within the purview and epistemological frame of the law; it is impossible

for us to think or perceive agency that emerges from a place outside the

referentiality of the law. Not only does global sovereignty insist on the

abject state of the expelled as a condition of its own possibility and produce

their identity as stateless, it also legitimizes itself by coming to the aid of

and acting on behalf of people who have no agency. Because sovereignty is

our only frame of reference, political agency of the stateless remains tru ly

the unthought. Therefore the view that Arendt or Agamben’s diagnoses

of sovereignty and human rights lack a theory of resistance overlooks the

fundamental aspect of political agency: sovereignty is first and foremost

a frame of meaning making, and anything that falls outside that frame,

particularly a political life and agency, is doomed to silence, unintelligi-

bility, or elimination. This is why the urgent political task as delineated

by Agamben is to think a form-of-life emancipated from the division of

bare life from politics “with the irrevocable exodus from any sovereignty.”

He continues: “The question about the possibility of a nonstatist politics

necessarily takes this form: Is today something like a form-of-life, a life for

which living itself would be at stake in its own living, possible? Is today a

life of power available?”35

In the concluding section, I offer a concrete example of global sover-

eignty as epistemological occlusion of nonjuridical political agency.

Gujarat 2002: “We Have No Orders to Save You”

In December 2006, four years after the carnage in the industrial state

of Gujarat, India, the Muslim survivors of the riots continue to live in

squalid and makeshift camps whose existence the state government flatly

denies and the international community largely ignores. The Gujarat

government’s outright dismissal of these camps is particularly egregious

in light of the fact that Indian activists have documented conditions in

the camps and much of that material has been made publicly available,

particularly at the conference organized in February 2007 titled “The

Uprooted — Caught between Existence and Denial: A Convention of the

Internally Displaced in Gujarat” in Ahmadabad, Gujarat. Harsh Mander




(the Indian Administrative Services officer who resigned in protest over

the riots) writes in his survey “Inside Gujarat’s Relief Colonies”:

It is bitter evidence of the deliberate fai lure of the state government to restore

even a minimal sense of security and equal citizenship to its brutalized

minority residents, that even almost five years after the cataclysmic storm of

state enabled mass violence, several thousand people have stil l not returned

to their original homes and are losing hope of this even in the future. An

unknown number have migrated out of the state . . . [or] are living in make-

shift colonies that the state government refuses to acknowledge, let alone

authorize and equip with basic human facil ities. The reason why information

about these internally displaced people is not available is because the state

government has stubbornly refused to collect and share data about these

survivors of the 2002 carnage, as this would entail both accountability . . .

and responsibility.36

Concentration camps today have a new name: “relief colonies.”

Mander defines them as squalid camps that have acquired an air of per-

manency. When the state suspends itself from its own citizens, it invariably

concentrates (as in reduces) them down to displaced people. The case of

Gujarat in 2002 is a strong example of the workings of state sovereignty

when extreme right-wing Hindutva mobs murdered thousands of Muslims

(the official estimate is seven hundred; one NGO estimate is more than

two thousand) in what is widely acknowledged as a state-sponsored ethnic

cleansing program. It should be noted that direct and indirect displacement

of the poor, particularly indigenous people, in boomtown India is literally

an everyday occurrence. Big dam projects such as those over the river

Narmada in northern and central India and Polavaram over the river Goda-vari in the south threaten to submerge hundreds of villages and displace

tens of thousands of poor and tribal people with no alternate sources of

livelihood or proper plans for rehabilitation. Everyday evictions of squat-

ters, street vendors, and slum dwellers to make room for wider roads, urban

restructuring, and so on are another daily occurrence. As for displacement

due to ethnic violence, since the trauma of the 1947 partition riots, several

states in India have witnessed periodic outbursts of riots along lines of

religion, caste, class, and ethnicity.

However, the riots in Gujarat in 2002 were unprecedented for their

gendered and rationally organized violence. As Samir Kumar Das writes,somewhat rhetorically: “The point is not that the property and lives of the

minorities were never the targets of communal frenzy before. It is rather

the other way around. [Previous riots] did not seem to emanate so much

from the urge to exterminate an entire community as much as to acquire

the land and property left by them.”37 The 2002 riots were so vicious

that they seemed to be motivated by sheer blind hatred, but the economic




aspects of the riots are not invisible. The right-wing majority called for

a total economic boycott of Muslim-owned businesses and services as a

means of isolating riot victims.38 In the 2006 report, Mander writes that

the boycott continues in many villages, and “people of the majority com-

munity continue . . . to refuse to trade or employ Muslims. . . . They will

not buy from their shops or eateries; they are known to even avoid usingjeeps taxis and rickshaws

owned and operated by Muslims” (5238). The

riots, or more properly the ethnic cleansing program, continued unabated

for a week, yet the central government exhibited complete indifference

to the events.39 Relief efforts were thwarted by the state itself, and camp

conditions were by all accounts inhumane. The riots were a campaign of

terror unleashed by the Gujarat state machinery under the rule of chief

minister Narendra Modi, an extreme right-wing Hindutva ideologue. It

was unprecedented, too, in that it was a very modern campaign of murder.

Rioters were extremely well organized, armed with computerized lists of

Muslim-owned properties and residences and well-planned strategies to

target, capture, torture, rape, and murder Muslims, and had organized

support mechanisms. But the most important aspect of the Gujarat riots

was the blatant cooperation of the state machinery, from the police up to the

ministerial levels in promoting, aiding, and abetting the riots. NGOs such

as Human Rights Watch, as well as hundreds of First Information Reports

(FIRs) and eyewitness reports, including the report of the National Human

Rights Commission, have held the government of Gujarat direct ly respon-

sible for the riots.40 When they appealed to the police, who simply acted

as passive spectators at a sporting event, Muslim victims frequently heard

the reply “We have no orders to save you,” which appropriately became the

title of the HRW report.

In such a situation, political agency becomes a crime. According to

the Gujarat Concerned Citizens Tribunal:

Evidence recorded by the Tribunal shows, that when Muslims, who had

been denied police protection during the most vicious attacks on their lives

and property, came out to defend themselves, they were picked up by the

police and charged with a range of offences, including section 307 (attempt

to murder). Over 500 innocent Muslim youth, our evidence shows, still

languish in Gujarat’s lock-ups and jails and there have been no attempts by

the state, through its public prosecutors, to get them released.41

How does global sovereignty play a role here? For this, we only have

to look at the international community’s response to the riots. As Harsh

Mander writes with regard to the paucity of secular relief efforts,

This underlines a grave abdication not just by the state, but also by interna-

tional and national humanitarian organizations which were by contrast very




active in relief and rehabilitation efforts in the Gujarat earthquake of 2001

and the tsunami of 2004, but chose to turn away from the suffering of the

survivors of the carnage because this intervention was seen as politically

risky to open and partisan state hostility to the survivors on purely sectarian

grounds of their faith.42

It is clear that the overtly political character of the riots posed a serious

problem for the human rights community. Moreover, given that India

presents great opportunities for foreign investment and the state has

transformed itself into a market-friendly competition state, and that the

United States perceives India as a geopolitical counterweight to China

and is a reliable partner in the global war on terror, it made sense for

the international community by and large to ignore the r iots as a conve-

niently “internal” matter. The U.S. government basically absolved the

Indian government in its “International Religious Freedom Report 2005,

Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.”43

During the riots, there was little concern expressed by the interna-tional community and media. As one commentator wrote,

A deceptively reassuring silence marks American news coverage of the situ-

ation in Gujarat, India, after the onset of anti-Muslim riots there on Feb.

28. Except for a couple of articles in the New York Times, the major media

have said little during recent months about the aftermath of violence by

Hindu fundamentalist gangs who swept through the Muslim areas of Guja-

rat state, raping and killing residents and burning and looting their houses

and shops.44

Protests against the EU’s indifference were also launched by theInternational Dalit Solidar ity Network and the Federation Internationale

des Ligues des Droits de L’Homme. Futile research papers have been writ-

ten on the promotion of impunity in India and its relation to the global war

on terror.45 The only way the Muslim displaced could be acknowledged, if

at all, was as generic victims, which was not entirely easy to do. In short,

it was a case of passing the buck, a doubled abdication of responsibility

at both the state and global levels. The international community chose to

conceive the Muslim r iot victims in purely abstract terms, as only requir-

ing stronger protection of the state, thereby disavowing the real political

struggle occurring in India between the BJP government of Hindutva

ideologues and secular forces. This reduction of Muslims to abstract

displaced people not only depoliticized the minorities and the situation of

violence, but the oppressors themselves were now perceived as aberrant

criminals who acted on their own behalf rather than as state-sponsored

perpetrators of violence. This permitted global sovereignty to decide

whether to intervene, under the aegis of international law, to render aid




and humanitarian assistance or, under the mandate of neoliberalism, to

ignore them on behalf of its capital investments and interests. It chose, as

we know, to absolve the state and to reconsign the survivors to the very

state that had abdicated its responsibility. “Protected” but disempowered,

Indian Muslims are left to express their political agency by other means.

These expected other means evolved in the absence of legitimate access topolitics, enabling the state to evoke the threat of terrorism. At this point,

in its sovereign capacity as protector of the people, the state can fire upon

these victims-turned-terrorists. Of course, immediately in the aftermath

of the riots the Indian government passed the POTA (Prevention of Ter-

rorism Act) that was used widely to detain and incarcerate Muslims as

potential terrorists. The elimination of such agency always requires the

elimination of the agent. Speaking of Nazi concentration camps, Arendt

writes: “The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was created

before the right to live was challenged” (296). The Concerned Citizens

Tribunal reports:

Gujarat Police has finally admit ted that it killed more Muslims than Hindus

in its ostensible attempts to stop what was clearly targeted Hindu violence

against Muslims. Of the 184 people who died in police firing during the

post-Godhra violence, 104 were Muslims, says a report drafted by Gujarat

Police. This statistic substantiates the allegation of riot victims from virtu-

ally every part of the state that not only did the local pol ice not do anything

to stop the Hindu mobs; they actually turned their guns on the helpless

Muslim victims.46

With that, the full circle of global sovereignty as global civil war that

engenders local civil war and implosions is once again completed and

reactivated. In the middle of that circle of violence stands what Agamben

calls sacred life — the rightless displaced vict im of sovereignty and human

rights, whose every sign of political l ife, due to its sheer unintellig ibility,

is also his or her own death warrant.

Notes

Many thanks to John Limon, John Burt, and Nicholas De Warren for reading and

commenting on drafts of this paper.

1. Academic conferences on cosmopolitanism, border crossings, and national-

ism routinely foster discussions on immigration, migration, tourism, refugees, and

so on, but the monstrous phenomenon of IDPs is almost always ignored or treated

as incidental.

2. A simple keyword search through Harvard’s Hollis catalog pulled up 9,510

entries for refugees versus 43 for internally displaced persons and 34 for internal

displacement.

3. Thomas G. Weiss, “Whither International Efforts for Internally Displaced

Persons?” Journal of Peace Research 36 (1999): 363 – 73.




4. Seyla Benhabib, “On the Alleged Conflict between Democracy and Inter-

national Law,” Ethics and International Affairs 19, no. 1 (2005): 85 – 100. See also her

Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2002), especial ly “Who Are We?” 147 – 77.

5. See, for instance, David Mason, “Globalization, Democratization, and the

Prospects for Civil War in the New Millennium,” International Studies Review 5, no.

4 (2003): 19 – 35.6. Philip G. Cerny, “Paradoxes of the Competition State: The Dynamics of

Political Globalization,” Government and Opposition 32 (1997): 251 – 74. See also

his collection edited with Henri J. M. Goverde, Mark Haugaard, and Howard H.

Lentner, Power in Contemporary Politics: Theories, Practices, Globalizations (Thousand

Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000).

7. Mats Berdal and David M. Malone, Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas

in Civil Wars (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000). See also Karen Ballentine and

Jake Sherman, The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance

(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003); Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and

the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

8. For instance, Paul Collier’s “Doing Well out of War: An Economic Perspec-

tive” (Berdal and Malone, Greed and Grievance, 91 – 111) stresses that conflicts often

arise due to the opportunities offered by violence rather than the use of violence to

express real grievances. For an analysis of how humanitarian aid agencies manipulate

populations, see David Shearer, “ ‘Aiding or Abetting’: Humanitar ian Aid and Its

Economic Role in Civil War,” in Berdal and Malone, Greed and Grievance, 189 – 203.

On the resource scarcity question, see Indra de Soysa, “The Resource Curse: Are

Civil Wars Driven by Rapacity or Paucity?” in Berdal and Malone, Greed and Griev-

ance, 113 – 35. For case studies, see Ballentine and Sherman, The Political Economy

of Armed Conflict , which steers clear of the quantitative approach of the essays cited

above. For a dependency theory view of this issue, see Samir Amin, Maldevelop-

ment: Anatomy of a Global Failure (London: Zed, 1990). For a useful review of both

sides of the globalization and civil war debate, see Katherine Barbieri and Rafael

Reuveny, “Economic Globalization and Civil War,” Journal of Politics 67 (2005):

1128 – 1247.

9. See, for instance, the collection of essays titled Globalization and Human

Rights, ed. Alison Brysk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), espe-

cially the two by Richard Falk, “Interpreting the Interaction of Global Markets and

Human Rights” (61 – 76) and “Economic Globali zation and Rights: An Empir ical

Analysis” (77 – 97).

10. A representative work is Arthur Helton’s The Price of Indifference: Refugees

and Humanitarian Action in the New Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2002).

11. UNHCR on IDPs, accessible at www.unhcr.org/basics/BASICS/405ef8c64

.pdf.

12. See especially Arthur C. Helton, “Forced Migration, Humanitarian Inter-

vention, and Sovereignty,” SAIS Review 20 (2000): 61 – 86, and former UN highcommissioner of refugees Sadako Ogata’s speech at the John F. Kennedy School of

Government, Harvard University, 28 October 1996, “World Order, Internal Con-

flict, and Refugees” (available at gos.sbc.edu/o/ogata.html).

13. Roberta Cohen and Francis M. Deng, Masses in Flight: The Global Crisis

of Internal Displacement (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1998), 305. This

work is cited in the text as MF.

14. Examples include Aceh, Indonesia, after the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane

Katrina in 2005.




15. David Fisher, “Epilogue: International Law on the Internally Displaced

Persons,” in Internal Displacement in South Asia: The Relevance of the UN’s Guiding

Principles, ed. Paula Banerjee, Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhuri, and Samir Kumar

Das (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 317.

16. Roberta Cohen, “The Forgotten ‘Refugees’: Protecting People Uprooted

in Their Own Countries,” speech given at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Research,

8 December 2005, cited in the text as FR. A video of the lecture is available at www.radcliffe.edu/events/video.php#lectures.

17. Sadako Ogata said: “It is important to start examining the linkages between

internal conflict and inter-state power relationships. While it is true that the sheer

number and intensity of internal conflicts call into question traditional thinking on

international peace and security, it is also true that what we consider to be internal

conflict is somewhat unclear” (“World Order, Internal Conflict, and Refugees”). See

also Maria Stavropoulou, “Displacement and Human Rights: Reflections on UN

Practice,” Human Rights Quarterly 20 (1998): 515 – 54.

18. Hardt and Negri in fact decline to differentiate between the international

community and empire. Speaking of the composition of intergovernmental organiza-

tions such as the World Bank and the IMF and the interests of the G7 nations, they

suggest that they are in truth “global institutions” rather than international. They

write: “The principal supranational institutions, of course, do have very different

functions and divergent institutional cultures, which can at times lead to conflict

and criticism among the agencies. In general terms, one could say that the IMF is

dominated by economic technicians whereas many working at the World Bank and

the UN aid agencies have an ethics of social welfare close to that of the NGO com-

munity. Despite such differences, however, we will argue, these supranational insti-

tutions exercise common and coherent economic and political controls” (Michael

Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire [New

York: Penguin, 2004] , 173).

19. For case studies from the humanitarian perspective, see Marc Vincent

and Brigitte Refslund Sorensen, eds., Caught between Borders: Response Strategies

of the Internally Displaced (London: Pluto Press, in association with the Norwegian

Refugee Council, 2001).

20. See Berdal and Malone’s introduction to Greed and Grievance, 4; and Mark

Duffield, “Globalization, Transborder Trade, and War Economies,” in Berdal and

Malone, Greed and Grievance, 74.

21. See Duffield, “Globalization,” 73.

22. Another perspective on civil war as postnational conflict is provided by

Hardt and Negri. In Multitude, the sequel to their academic best seller Empire, Hardt

and Negri suggest that al l wars today, even those between nations, should be under-

stood as civil wars, in the sense that the course and outcome of even low-intensity

warfare between nations are supervised and dictated by the interests that protect

global capital. It is interesting in this context to read in one recent news item that the

United States gave its assent to a secret arms deal between Somalia and North Korea

because it has an interest in promoting Somali militia in Ethiopia fighting radicalIslamists there. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2000), and Multitude.

23. I am alluding here to the rich body of work that has emerged around the

question of sovereignty and the state of exception centered around Carl Schmitt’s

work, particularly Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty,

trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); these works include

Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of




Chicago Press, 2005), and Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel

Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Chantal Mouffe,

ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999); and Gopal Balakrishnan,

The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000).

24. Agamben, Homo Sacer , 49 – 62.

25. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de

France, 1975 – 1976 , trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). See the lec-ture of 14 January 1976 (23 – 41), part icularly 24. This work is cited in the text as

SMD.

26. Etienne Balibar, “Subjection and Subjectivation,” in Supposing the Subject ,

ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1994), 1 – 15. Quotations in the text come from

this article, but Balibar also takes up these themes in “The Subject,” in “Ignorance

of the Law,” ed. Al issa Lea Jones, special issue, Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious

(2003): 9 – 23; see also his Politics and the Other Scene (New York: Verso, 2002) and

Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics before and after Marx (New York: Routledge,

1994), especially chaps. 2 and 9.

27. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace,

1951).

28. See also Bal ibar, “ ‘Rights of Man’ and ‘Rights of the Citizen’: The Mod-

ern Dialectic of Equality and Freedom,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas, 39 – 60.

29. Wendy Brown, “ ‘The Most We Can Hope For . . .’: Human Rights and

the Politics of Fatal ism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004): 461.

30. Agamben, State of Exception, 38. The work is cited in the text as SOE.

31. Agamben, Homo Sacer , 52.

32. In Homo Sacer , Agamben defines sacred life as “an object of a violence that

exceeds the sphere both of law and of sacrifice” (86).

33. Benjamin, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Poli-

tics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Min-

nesota Press, 2000), 6.

34. Agamben, Homo Sacer , 20.

35. Giorgio Agamben, “Form-of-Life,” in Means without End , 8 – 9.

36. Harsh Mander, “Inside Gujarat’s Relief Colonies: Surviving State Hostil-

ity and Denial,” Economic and Political Weekly, 23 December 2006, 5235. For his

eyewitness report of the carnage, see Cry the Beloved Country: Reflections on the

Gujarat Massacre (New Delhi: Rainbow, 2002).

37. See Samir Kumar Das, “India: Homelessness at Home,” in Internal Dis-

placement in South Asia, ed. Paula Banerjee et al. (New Delhi: Sage, 2005), 128.

38. See the text of a flyer circulated by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the so-

called cultural wing of the Hindu right, at www.countercurrents.org/sahmat2.htm

(accessed 13 November 2007).

39. See the full report on the riots assembled by the Concerned Citizens

Tribunal — Gujarat 2002, composed of lawmakers, scholars, and concerned people.

The full two-volume report, Crime against Humanity: An Inquiry into the Carnage at

Gujarat (Mumbai: Anil Dharkar, 2002), is available at www.sabrang.com/tribunal/index.html; for the role of the central government, see especially www.sabrang.com/

tribunal/vol2/rolegovt.html (accessed 13 November 2007).

40. For a small sample of ground-level reports on the atrocities and the legal

and political aftermath, see www.sabrang.com/tribunal /index.html.

The report of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust is available at www.counter

currents.org/sahamat1.htm. The media outlet is www.onlinevolunteers.org. The

Human Rights Watch document “We Have No Orders to Save You: State Participa-



tion and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat” appears at www.hrw.org/

reports/2002/india/. The site also posts other reports on intimidation of witnesses in

the trial of criminal elements. All sites accessed 13 November 2007.

41. Concerned Citizens Tribunal, Crime against Humanity, 1:194.

42. Mander, “Inside Gujarat’s Relief Colonies,” 5236.

43. The U.S. State Department International Religious Freedom Report 2005

is available at www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2005/51618.htm. See also Ashish KumarSen, “Bush Gives Clean Chit to Vajpayee on Gujarat Riots: Looks Forward to Man-

mohan Singh’s Visit,” Chandigarh Tribune, 17 September 2004.

44. Kathy Sreedhar, “Gujarat Update,” 22 August 2002, available at www.uua

.org/news/2002/020822.html.

45. See “IDSN, OMcT and FIDH Position in Response to: the European

Union’s Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European

Parliament and the European Economic and Social Committee Entitled ‘An EU-

India Strategic Partnership,’ ” August 2004, available at www.omct.org/pdf/omct

_europe/2004/comm_on_india_ idsn-omct-fidh_posit ion.pdf. See also Satchit Bal-

sari, “The Promotion of Impunity in India: How Oppressive National Political

Agendas Interact with the Global War on Terror,” working paper, François-Xavier

Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard School of Public Health.

46. Concerned Citizens Tribunal, Crime against Humanity, 2:84.

Documents

when home is a camp.pdf