Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Edited by
Lori A. Crowe
The activities of the Centre, a research unit of York University, range from
large, interdisciplinary collaborative research projects to individual faculty
projects, supported by a variety of seminar series, publications and conferences.
We work and partner with academics, policymakers, practitioners, and activists
across Canada and around the world. Our members include York faculty and
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ISBN 978-0-920231-51-7
Editorial Forward
Lori A. Crowe 7
Salt Water Thieves: Piracy off the Horn of Africa | Timothy O’Leary 141
Contributors:
Felix Grenier began a Ph.D. in Political Studies at the School of Political Studies
of University of Ottawa. In previous years, he had completed a M.A. in
International Studies and a B.A. in Political Science, in Quebec City. His
academic curriculum also includes year-long study internships at Sciences-Po,
|5
in Paris, and at the State University of Social Sciences in Moscow. His main
research interests are related to domains such as theories of International
Relations (IR), disciplinary sociology and teaching in IR. As young researcher
at the University of Ottawa, he is also associated with the Chair of Ukrainian
Studies. Since 2007, he has given numerous conferences and published articles
and research papers about the discipline of IR, theories and metatheory in IR,
and post-communist countries foreign policies. After defending his thesis
proposal in 2010, Felix is currently writing his Ph. D. thesis.
Vanisha Sukdeo is currently pursuing her Ph.D. (Law) at Osgoode Hall Law
School in Toronto, Ontario. She is also an Instructor at Osgoode teaching first
year law students. Her dissertation is entitled “Shareholder Proposals: Corporate
Social Responsibility and the Intersection of Workers’ Rights” and her supervisor
is Professor Poonam Puri. Vanisha received her B.A. from York University where
she majored in Political Science. She then received her LL.B. from Queen’s
University and was Called to the Ontario Bar in 2007. Vanisha completed her
LL.M. at Osgoode before starting her dissertation. She was a Fellow of the
Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security in 2009-
2010.
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Editorial Foreword
The York Centre for International and Security Studies (YCISS) held its 17th
Annual Conference on 4-5 February 2010. Entitled New Directions: The Future
of Canadian (in)Security Studies, the Conference sought to explore how the
concept and study of security/insecurity has been challenged, re-defined, and
re-imagined in a changing political and theoretical global environment. Canadian
security and defense in theory and practice has undergone significant changes
since Canada’s increased participation in Afghanistan in 2006 and with the
election of the Harper Conservatives, giving rise to questions about the discipline
and future directions for scholars at both the local and global level. Against this
backdrop, conference participants were encouraged to take up these challenges
by engaging in a dialogue on recent theoretical turns in the field as well as in-
vestigations into contemporary issues.
The conference was a testament to the fact that engagements with security from
outside the traditional fields are offering unique perspectives on the problematique
of security and are challenging our understandings in important ways. From in-
terrogating traditional methods of theorizing and questioning state security
practices to recognizing how recent shifts in areas such as intelligence and how
elements of popular culture such as music are impacting security, this conference
critically engaged with the past in order to contribute to new and creative ways
of thinking about the future. The following collection is a selection of papers
presented at the conference that speak to the importance of a diversity of
approaches for future directions of studies in/on (in)security.
The proceedings begin with queries into the ontology and epistemology of
security. Grenier’s paper invites us to revisit security through a theoretical re-
framing. He argues that during the last two decades, intense efforts have been
invested to criticize and deconstruct traditional frameworks of analysis, theories,
and discourses in International Relations (IR) and security studies. While
recognizing the great achievements of the critical movement in IR and security
8|
studies, Grenier has also come to the conclusion that the reconstruction process
has not received adequate attention, as up to now, few attempts have been made
to produce and propose a coherent approach that could stand as a legitimate al-
ternative research program, or paradigm, in IR. Thus, while the traditional para-
digmatic hegemony does not stand anymore in IR, current debates are often still
conducted in reference to this past paradigm/research program. Grenier’s paper
explores diverse theoretical approaches and suggests what is required is a
pradigm that includes a new matrix of analysis, schemas, and epistemological
perspectives, in order to begin (re)constructing an alternative research program
that could found the researches, representations, and teaching models in our
academic field in the next decades.
Addressing how the biopolitical strategies of powerful actors affect the security
of space and bodies, and the way in which communities and individuals are
creating sites of resistance, Arik and MacDonald effectively apply critical theo-
rizations to contemporary dilemmas. Arik examines the role of bio-politics and
honor in her study on gendered insecurities by drawing on Agamben’s concep-
tualization of the state of exception from a feminist perspective. Arik’s paper
looks at the intersections where gendered administration of law functions in
leaving women in abandonment, thus reproducing gendered violence under
masculine sovereign exception. Looking at the case of Pippa Bacca, a 34 year-
old Italian performance artist, Arik reveals how the “expectedness” of this
tragedy reflects the commonality of women being reduced to objects of violent
practices, systematically. She relates this to the ways female honor and sexuality
is socially and spatially constructed, arguing that the questionability of female
honor at certain spaces and the formal recognition of female honor by law
constitute the basis for gendered insecurities in public space. Through Pippa’s
case, Arik points at the functionality of honor as an agent of bio-political
strategies of the state and the inherent masculine hegemony embedded into its
institutions and social structures.
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Highlighting the need to pay closer attention to issues beyond our borders, the
collection then turns to analyses that locate multiple spaces of ‘securitization’
and insecurity across and between state borders. Abeling investigates emerging
questions surrounding the securitization of the environment by examining recent
processes of environmental peacemaking with the development of Peace Parks
in Southern Africa. Although transboundary protected areas are a new phenomenon
in nature conservation, the issue of “peace parks” has received increasing
attention among policy makers and academics in the last decade, furthering the
idea that ecological conservation and the sustainable use of natural resources
across national borders can provide a platform for dialogue between states and
ultimately, the establishment of peace. Questioning the assumption that envi-
ronmental cooperation can contribute to the prevention of violent conflicts,
Abeling draws on the example of the promotion of peace parks in Southern
Africa to reveal that peace parks are an inadequate instrument to implement the
ideas of environmental peacemaking. Illustrating how in this case peace parks
primarily play a rhetorical role in legitimizing an “interventionist” approach to
poverty alleviation and development in the region, Abeling argues that the
economic prospects of eco-tourism and western funding requirements incite
African governments to pursue a process of regional integration that has harmful
effects and provokes rather than prevents conflict. Within this process, the
security of local communities, especially those depending on the area dedicated
10 |
Morgan brings our attention to Thailand, a country that in recent times has
featured prominently in international headlines for its political instability as
well as for its strategic and much maligned relationship with Burma. Bringing
together the unlikely combination of Carl Schmitt and Antonio Gramsci,
Morgan’s analysis attempts to provide readers with an understanding and
explanation of the root causes of the prolonged turmoil that has racked Thailand
since 2006 when Prime Minister Thanksin Shinawatra was deposed in a military
coup d'etat. Morgan argues that with Thailand entering a period of organic crisis
defined by the degradation of its political institutions and the detachment of
social forces from them, elements of the Thai elite responded by declaring a
state of exception, represented by the 2006 coup, in an attempt to contain and
end the crisis. Yet the crisis only deepened, with conflict spreading and Thai
society becoming more divided. Morgan examines the rising insecurity of the
region, arguing that the potential for a regional conflagration is now greatly ex-
emplified as Thailand’s crisis is now expanding to the regional level, as old
rivals like Cambodia become involved.
O’Leary addresses the issue of modern piracy and asks if lessons can be learned
from the Barbary campaign and successfully applied to modern piracy off the
Horn of Africa. Revealing that the reality off the coast of Somalia is shockingly
divergent from the images of the pirate in Western popular imagination, O’Leary
calls on the need to address the dramatic increase in attacks from modern-day
pirates preying on commercial shipping. Addressing questions of the role (or in-
adequacy) of satellite surveillance and jet aircraft, O’Leary suggests that the
solution may find its foundations in previous resolutions of similar situations,
citing intervention by western powers that led to the elimination of piracy in the
region the Barbary Coast of Africa around the beginning of the nineteenth
century.
While the previous authors consider international issues, the final section draws
our attention to challenges for the Canadian state within a global context.
Nadeau engages with an ongoing concern for Canadian scholars and policy
practitioners: the security and sovereignty of the North. Nadeau argues that
space is on the verge of becoming a fourth military environment for warfare and
this has major implications for Canada’s plans to defend its sovereignty in the
North. Critiquing Canada’s growing dependence on satellite technology as a
means of monitoring Canada’s vast Arctic terrain and maritime approaches,
Nadeau maintains that Canada will be faced with the dilemma of deciding
whether to reconsider its long-term opposition to ongoing American space-
| 11
The final paper in this collection calls for an examination of Canadian criminal
law, which, today, functions as a critical issue for the study of individual
security. Sukdeo argues that the Supreme Court of Canada has muted the rights
of the accused. This is demonstrated by examples of recent decisions from the
Court such as R. v. Grant (2009 SCC 32) and Grant and R. v. Nasogaluak (2010
SCC 6). Through these cases Sukdeo demonstrates how the Canadian Charter of
Rights and Freedoms (“Charter”) was created to protect the rights of the accused
but has recently been used as a device to weaken those same rights. Section 7 of
the Charter guarantees ‘security of the person’ and Section 8 of the Charter
protects against ‘unreasonable search and seizure’ yet the recent direction of the
Court has been to allow in evidence that which was gathered as a result of a
breach of a Charter right due to the seriousness of the charges. Sukdeo then
examines sentence reductions as an appropriate solution to be used as a remedy
for Charter breaches.
The resounding success of this conference and the above collection of papers
are the result of the hard work and generous support of many people, without
which, the Conference and this Proceedings would not have been possible.
Firstly I would like to thank Shannon Stettner and Abhinava Kumar for your in-
valuable contribution of time and skill. Thank you to Gary Galbraith and the
Conference Co-Organiser Karen Walker for their hard work and efforts that
were crucial for the success of the Conference. Thank you to Vivianne Vatavalis
whose efforts and dedication always are priceless, and to Chris Hendershot
whose advice, tireless support, and encouragement was immensely important. I
would also like to thank David Mutimer and Robert Latham for your valuable
direction and advice. For continuing to explore, critique, and push the boundaries,
I would like to thank the Roundtable Participants: Mark Salter, Mark Neufeld,
Barbara Falk, Elizabeth Dauphinee, Peter Nyers, Miguel Larrinaga, and David
Mutimer. YCISS thanks the following York University sponsors for their kind
support for the New Directions conference: The Office of the Vice President,
Research and Innovation; The Office of the Vice-President Academic and
Provost; The Faculty of Graduate Studies; The Nathanson Centre for Transnational
Human Rights, Crime and Security; The Department of Social Science; The
York University Conference Fund; The Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional
Studies. The New Directions Conference has also been kindly sponsored by the
Security and Defence Forum of the Department of National Defence. Finally, I
12 |
Lori A. Crowe
| 13
Section I
Imagining Security:
Theoretical Re-Framings
14 |
Grenier | Revisiting Theoretical Frameworks and Models in IR |15
In the last three decades, what was identified as the “Third Great Debate” in In-
ternational Relations (IR) (Lapid, 1989) have seen a growing number of critical
authors1 working and writing to reveal the flaws, injustices, and biased perspectives
that characterized traditional frameworks of analysis, theories, and discourses in
IR2. Efforts to develop renewed theoretical frameworks and to engage meta-the-
oretical debates in (critical) security studies are thus closely linked to similar de-
velopments in the field of IR. The emergence of critical or reflexivist (Keohane
1988) approaches brought along new perspectives to analyze and understand the
world and traditional approaches. These existing approaches have been targeted
as discourses that maintain insecurity, and consequently have been seriously
challenged and undermined. Reflecting on this vast disciplinary process, Yosef
Lapid declared in 1989: “the third debate [marked] a clear end to the positivist
epistemological consensus” (235).
1
See Jarvis 2002 for the definition I refer to while using the label ‘critical’.
2
In my framework of analysis, I identify the label “traditional” and “conventional approaches” in
IR to theories and epistemologies such as classical realism, neo-realism, liberal-institutionalism,
the neo-neo synthesis, rationalism and positivism.
16 | New Directions
attempt to systematize a new way to view the world, a process that can be
associated with the idea of science3 itself (Krippendorff 1982).
In past decades, critical and reflexivist authors have placed a great deal of
attention to criticizing representations and models proposed by traditional
approaches in IR. Among others, the traditional/conventional position on the
levels of analysis, the status of ontological units, the agent-structure debate, and
the epistemological representation of positivism as the sole legitimate scientific
perspective in IR have all been subjects of vigorous challenges and debates (See,
among others: Cox, 1981; Ashley, 1984, 1988; George, 1988, 1994; Lapid, 1989;
Hollis and Smith, 1990; Wendt, 1992, 1995; Booth and Smith, 1995; Neufeld,
1995; and Smith, 1995, 1996, 2004). Conventional representations were mainly
attacked because, as argued by critical authors, the categorizations they introduced
were more than often incomplete and too rigid compared to the reality they tried
to depict (See, among others: Bourdieu, 1977; Walker, 1993; Ayoob, 1998;
Carlsnaes, 2002; and Tickner 2003).
But some critical authors also undermined the legitimacy of modeling, depicting,
or schematizing act by underlying “performative” effects they have on reality. In
that vein, Colin Wight declared:
[T]aking seriously the fact that its practitioners largely construct
IR, we can see how the fault lines of contemporary IR might
3
I am conscious that this term is normatively loaded, and therefore of the need to problematize it.
I didn’t have the time and space to uphold this task at this point, but choose this term anyway as I
consider it the most appropriate to represent my thought.
18 | New Directions
4
For critical views on scholarship in IR, see, among others, Holsti, 1985; Ishiyama and Breuning,
2004; Waever, 2004; Brown, Pegg and Shively, 2006; Maliniak et al., 2007; and Tickner and
Waever, 2009.
5
Of course, there are exceptions to this misunderstanding. See for example Wight, 2002: 24.
Grenier | Revisiting Theoretical Frameworks and Models in IR |19
The terms “compendium” and “constellation” translate well the difficulties that
exist to clearly and coherently represent this movement and group of approaches.
While this might not be a major intellectual obstacle to conduct revealing and
successful research projects, this may be one of the major problems when the
time comes to synthesize, schematize, represent, and/or teach what constitutes
the critical approach(es) in IR.
As this paper is still a work in progress, the suggestions I make in the following
pages are still preliminary and tentative, but they show some directions towards
which I intend to move on with this project. The first step I take towards
describing alternative models and representations in IR is to identify some
common “demarches” or principles that appear to be at the core of what is to be
reflexivist and critical (therefore guiding the elaboration of the following models
and representations). Second, I develop synthetic propositions relating to the
epistemological approaches adopted by most critical and reflexivist authors.
Thirdly, those propositions enable me to present a complex of models and repre-
sentations unfolding what such an alternative ontology suggests for IR.
My review of the literature has suggested that the alternative view of the
scientific work that is proposed by the relexivist and critical approaches are more
generally guided by principles such as pluralism, openness to social change, and
reflexivity, i.e., self-questioning of one’s scientific, practical or theoretical work
and actions. These intellectual dispositions enable – if it doesn’t make necessary
for – the author to contextualize questions and knowledge, maintain scientific
humility, or a margin for uncertainty, towards knowledge of the observed and
lived reality, and favor the combination of diverse perspectives on problems or
social events. Starting from these broad (and very much summarized, at this
point) principles, I can begin to define how could be represented, in general
terms, a critical and relfexivist epistemology and ontology.
much linked, as discussed in the first part of this paper, with the roles and
purposes of representations and models in teaching and, more generally, in the
disciplinary existence. The order of these three sub-sections is also voluntary.
Indeed, I believe that going from the most abstract principles to the more
concrete representations of the social reality in IR more effectively represents
the necessary inductive approach that is taken to elaborate such ideas and con-
cepts.
While these epistemological propositions are still in a very preliminary and in-
complete state, it is clear that such synthetic formulations are necessary to
achieve the elaboration of easily comprehensible and coherent representations of
critical and reflexivist approaches. Leaving this section until further work, I will
now clarify what, consequently, could be represented as an alternative ontology
in IR.
The three interrelated categories of structural units that are represented in this
first matrix – material, social, and ideational units – enable us to explicitly and
synthetically recognize the diversity of objects or structural aspects inherent in
all social realities. In the beginning of the 1980s, Robert Cox (1981) had already
engaged in such direction to illustrate the constitution of a structure. He explained
that: “Three categories of forces (expressed as potentials) interact in a structure:
material capabilities, ideas, and institutions. No one-way determinism need be
assumed among these three, the relationships can be assumed to be reciprocal”
(Cox, 1981: 98).
Cox also explains how we should understand the utility of such a matrix:
The three sets of forces…are a heuristic device, not categories
with a predetermined hierarchy of relationships. Historical
structures are contrast models; like ideal types they provide, in a
logically coherent form, a simplified representation of a complex
reality and an expression of tendencies, limited in their
applicability in time and space, rather than fully realized
developments. (Ibid: 100)
Even if this representation is still in a preliminary form, it serves the purpose of
clear and comprehensible representation of an alternative view of reality in IR.
In that sense, I could define, in broad terms, the nature of those three categories.
In the schema I present, the material perspective comprises aspects of reality
such as geography, material and financial resources, demography, and the natural
and physical environment; the ideational perspective comprises immaterial
aspects of reality such as ideas, norms, values, identities, symbols, discourses,
and cognitive schemes; and the organizational perspective comprises aspects of
reality such as institutions, systems, organizational forms and structures, and
networks from the diverse human spheres of activity (political, economic,
cultural, etc.).
To help understand the utility and the rationale of such a representation, I can
posit the diverse IR theories in this triadic matrix. This positioning also helps
clarify that this schema enables to compare conventional and critical approaches,
while the “ensemble” explicitly entails a critical and reflexivist, or postpositivist,
perspective on social realities. For example, I can posit that the material side of
24 | New Directions
the matrix is more generally subject of the focus of Realist, neo-realist, geopolitical,
international political economy (IPE), and Marxist theories. For their part, con-
structivist, neoliberal, feminist, postmodernist, and poststructuralist theories at
least partially focus on an ideational perspective. Finally, IPE, institutionnalist,
liberal, neomarxist, postcolonial theories, and historical sociological formulations
somehow concentrate their attention on the organizational aspects of reality. Ob-
viously, many IR theories and approaches combine more than one of these per-
spectives/preoccupations.
It is clear that the outlook of these theories on the ontological categories already
mentioned are at least slightly different (even if I can make such an assertion in
regards to the perspectives that are used by every theory in IR). Indeed, it seems
clear that the roles of the structural factors/units diverge from one theory to the
other, and that the content of each category also diverges. A clearer definition of
what each of these categories of structural ontological units encompasses is
therefore one of the next steps that need to be taken in this project. Up to now, I
have been able to develop a better understanding of the organizational
perspective/category, mainly through a review of the level-of-analysis debate in
IR.
Departing from this model, I have define four propositions to synthesize how
critical and reflexivist approaches generally propose a different view on this
debate. First, the ontological diversity of the organizational and social aspects of
IR realities greatly surpasses the traditional representation of it. Second, the
relations between actors involved in a social reality/sphere of activity must be
understood as a mix of two types of interactions, i.e., egalitarian/horizontal and
hierarchical/vertical relations (see Annex III). Third, the diverse units or levels
included in the ontological scheme can’t be conceived as clearly delimited and
universal, but must be thought as flexible, changing, and interconnected. My
conceptualization should also enable a better understanding of changes, as well
as creation or demise, in dominant and dominated forms of social organizations
(see Annex IV). Finally, the framework for analysis of a particular case or social
reality should not be understood as a fixed system of uniform actors but as a
sphere of activity or a field of interactions constantly moving, i.e. expanding or
shrinking, that included plural forms of actors themselves constantly changing.
The Agent-Structure Debate
Reviewing the Agent-Structure debate helps to determine how an alternative
ontology differentiates and how it represents relations between the concepts of
Grenier | Revisiting Theoretical Frameworks and Models in IR |25
agents and structures. Even if there are diversified positions on this subject
throughout critical and reflexivist approaches, I propose a synthetic, even if not
definitive and complete, representation of what I believe is a relatively convergent
alternative position on this subject. I do so again to achieve the objective I have
set for this paper, i.e., to present clear and comprehensible representations of al-
ternative “demarches” and positions in theoretical and meta-theoretical debates
in IR.
First of all, this debate gives us the opportunity to provide a definition of what is
the essence of social reality in IR, and how critical and reflexivist approaches
conceive the interactions between agents and structures: Social reality is generally
understood as a complex set of interactions (collaborations, oppositions, resist-
ances…) between actors (individuals or groups of individuals) who are using on
different terms and levels the existing and changing structures (material, ideational,
and social). Social reality is not, therefore, formed by interactions between
agents and structures but by interactions between diverse actors with diverse
resources (or diverse access to structural resources) (Knafo, 2008) (see Annex
V). Second, the roles of agents and structures can be clearly differentiated:
structures do not have agency. They might have a configuration that is favorable
or not to different categories or groups of agents, but it’s the agents that are using
(or not) ‘structural dispositions and configurations’ at their advantage.
This simple view on the Agent-Structure Debate suggests that a critical and
reflexivist approach to social reality in IR places agents at the center of the
framework of analysis, and take into consideration as interactions between
agents and influences between structures and agents. This proposition can be
represent by a final three dimension matrix that conjugates the other models that
I have presented throughout this paper (see Annex VI).
Conclusion
While recognizing the preliminary state of the ideas and models that are presented
in the conference paper, I have tried to propose inroads towards better answers
on three problems in contemporary IR. First, I have made explicit and explain
the importance of representations and simplified models in the teaching practices
and in the construction of a discipline like IR. Second, I have detailed the
assertion that the relative failure of critical and reflexivist authors to overturn the
disciplinary and theoretical structure in IR is at least partially a consequence of
the lack of attention that was given to such simple and coherent models and rep-
resentations of the critical and reflexivist “demarches” or approaches. Finally, I
have attempt to propose such coherent and comprehensible models and represen-
tations that could picture, in simplified ways, the critical and reflexivist approaches
to social reality in IR.
I am aware that this demonstration raises many more questions and necessitates
more work, but I hope that it might have generated interest, potential for
exchanges, and will to go beyond the critical and peripheral positions that were,
up to now, the ones mainly occupied by critical and reflexivist authors in IR.
26 | New Directions
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Copeland | Make Intelligence, Not War | 37
In the first part of this paper, the importance of intelligence for security studies is
examined more thoroughly, and the reasons for its neglect are delineated, showing
where it must be integrated into current writings on security. Then, the narratives
of intelligence used in intelligence studies itself will be delimited, beginning with
an orthodox definition of intelligence, arguing that it fails to capture a critical
aspect of intelligence. In the final section, intelligence’s place in constructing a
terrain of the world for policymakers is explicated through the security imaginary
heuristic.
There are a number of reasons why intelligence has not become a topic of interest
in security studies. The first reason for neglect is that intelligence may seem to
have an unclear disciplinary niche. As noted, it is a sub-sub field, but additionally
some areas of intelligence are claimed by other fields of study. Defence studies,
in its various forms, is the study of the military, which includes military
intelligence. Historically, intelligence was primarily used in warfare, and in the
United States, America did not have a standing peacetime intelligence service
until the last half of the 20th century. As such, the study of intelligence is partly
captured by defence studies. Domestically, both police forces and domestic
intelligence agencies such as the F.B.I. use criminal or policing intelligence and
thus law enforcement seems to carve off another important section of the study
of intelligence. Many studies of the collection of information and tracing
populations through data prefer to focus on surveillance. This focus is likely due
to the popularization of the idea of the panopticon and its regime of surveillance
in Foucault’s work (1975). Surveillance is an important tool of intelligence, yet
surveillance studies looks mainly to mechanisms, such as satellites, and data
mining, often operated by intelligence agencies, and not to intelligence itself.
Intelligence studies journals also rarely publish critical work and remain sceptical
of postmodern approaches. This creates a significant disconnect between critical
security studies research on surveillance and more traditional work on
intelligence. This may be why the study of intelligence is seen as a relic of the
spy vs. spy Cold War era; many intelligence scholars are former Cold War
practitioners themselves. While intelligence has been titled ‘the world’s second
oldest profession’, it is no holdover from the era of bipolar covert actions.
Intelligence is more important than ever to our understandings of security, and
without it, no account of danger, threat, crisis, and war, is complete.
Copeland | Make Intelligence, Not War | 39
Intelligence is now the essence of the national security state. It is the lifeblood of
the military and foreign policymaking apparatus because intelligence institutions
have become the primary mechanism for states to handle the increasing influx of
information from the outside world. Moreover, the majority of modern security
threats are not military in nature, but covert. Intelligence both predicts and
prevents these threats, and offers a means by covert action to attempt to eliminate
them without war. Intelligence will only grow in importance as it is the backbone
of the state’s adaptation to our (post)modern society of security. As the security
imaginary heuristic will demonstrate, intelligence helps to articulate the threats
and opportunities each state perceives, and defines its position on a terrain of
politics. Thus the neglect of it is a crucial disservice to critical security studies.
Using Intelligence
Der Derian’s Antidiplomacy is one of the few critically positioned security works
that actually takes intelligence seriously. Der Derian even devotes his first two
chapters to ‘spies’. He sees intelligence as one of three new antidiplomatic forces,
undermining traditional diplomacy. He names these forces: spies, terror, and speed
(1992: 4). Because of these three forces, the utility of traditional state warfare has
been reduced in the nuclear age and intelligence has become an alternate form of
warfare. This cannot be understood by looking only at surveillance – something
Der Derian clearly came to understand, changing his discussion of antidiplomatic
forces in his original 1990 article entitled “The (s)pace of international relations:
simulation, surveillance and speed”, to his later reformulated subtitle: Spies,
Terror, Speed and War. Antidiplomacy, then, is one of the best security oriented
works on the subject because it does what I will demonstrate many do not; it
considers intelligence’s importance in speaking to war, terror, and the security
threat. Der Derian also does not simply discuss surveillance when explaining
intelligence, but takes the theory and definition of intelligence seriously. He looks
beyond satellites and defence intelligence to the historical uses of intelligence,
spy scares in the cold war era, and the use of technical intelligence (1992). Yet
while Derderian’s general concern with warfare, simulation, and surveillance
would seem to necessitate a discussion of intelligence, other scholars work on
similar issues but disregard intelligence.
tracking the movement of threats from inside to outside, and securing the
population against the foreign. So while Campbell wants to study foreign policy
and bracket off other related processes, the importance of intelligence in
constructing threats and determining the foreign is lacking in Writing Security:
It is not something that can be put aside as the subject of other works. Paul Virilio,
famous theorist of warfare, information, cinema and perception, is cognisant of
intelligence because of its essential relationship with the ‘secret’- the seen and
not seen. He sees the role of intelligence agencies pushing ‘industrial optics’, that
is, the spy satellite and the ability to see the whole world at once (2000: 29). He
also recognizes the changes in intelligence in the industrialized age and through
total warfare. Unfortunately he too mentions intelligence and the spy only in
passing, but like Der Derian, grasps that along with speed and the revolutions of
information and communication and warfare, comes intelligence.
These ‘interventions’ of intelligence into theories of war, terror, and danger are
not intended to demonstrate a fully formed body of literature, but show the
intimations that these scholars have recognized the importance of intelligence,
but that much more remains to be told. Fittingly, I move to look at the Foucauldian
lack of engagement with intelligence. While Foucault and Foucauldians are not
primarily theorists of security or war, much has been done with Foucualt’s work
on biopower, and its application to war, terror, etc, as well as the discussions in
the work of his contemporaries/collaborators (Agamben 1999; Delleuze and
Guattari 1986; Hardt and Negri 2005). Foucault’s greatest contributions are on
the nature of power (power/knowledge), and a ‘hidden’ mechanism of power such
as intelligence, should have been important to him. Significantly, the concept of
intelligence could have assisted what some have seen as the tentative nature of
Foucault’s engagement with security mechanisms, and the breaking off of his
discussion of them to focus on governmentality and biopower. I would identify
intelligence as one of the important new forces of the society of security Foucault
began to discuss in his “Security Territory Population” and “Society Must Be
Defended” lecture series. Yet Foucault never mentioned it, save for a reference in
the manuscript for Security, Territory, Population. Here an ‘information apparatus’
was briefly mentioned in his text, but did not make it into the lecture itself.
The manuscript adds… 4. Fourth instrument: an information
apparatus (appareil). Knowing one’s own forces (and what’s more
hiding them), knowing those of the others, allies and adversaries, and
hiding the fact that one knows them. Knowing them implies that one
knows what the force of states consists in. Where is the secret in
which it resides: the mystery of Spain, which lost its power, and the
mystery of the United Provinces, one of the important states of
Europe (2007: 305).
Copeland | Make Intelligence, Not War | 41
Intelligent Studies?
If the lack of intelligence has been sketched very briefly, it remains to examine
what intelligence is and how it needs to be understood. The concepts developed
in intelligence studies itself are the natural beginning. I will not reproduce the
(extensive) debate over the definition of intelligence from intelligence studies,
but broadly survey its use, and the detriments to the binary conception of
intelligence.
1
Foucault investigated different dispositifs (or apparatuses) of the society of security in
the lecture Security, Territory, Population (2007). In particular, dispositifs dealing with
the attempt to cancel out or ‘innoculate’ based on statistics, profiling and prediction of
the future, suggest something like what intelligence has become after the cold war and
9/11.
42 | New Directions
mapping the binary as good/bad. This dates back to the founding of the modern
US intelligence community, and the battle over whether intelligence should be
‘close’ to policy and actively pursue ‘opportunities’ to advance policy in the
collection and analysis of intelligence (see Godson 1989, Davis 1992). The
proponents of opportunity-oriented intelligence complained that traditional
analysts were too isolated, and saw themselves as academics or at a university,
deriding them as ‘ivory tower’. This continued as technical forms of intelligence
developed, such as spy satellites, which seemed to offer truth contra the analysts’
mere opinion.
The problems with this binary definition from intelligence studies suggest perhaps
intelligence should be re-examined before reintroducing it to security studies. Is
intelligence really half warfare and half library science? More importantly, it is
questionable whether this binary conception can capture the complex position of
intelligence in late modern statecraft. I argue that security studies should look past
a simple binary because intelligence has an additional ontological role in
constructing security. That is, beyond collecting information, conducting covert
operations, and analysing information, one of the most important functions of
intelligence is its capacity for assessment. This does not simply mean the national
intelligence estimates on various countries, or production of papers on a variety
of subjects like the security implications of climate change, the threat of AIDS,
and the like. Intelligence also makes foundational judgments about the state’s
friends and enemies, threats and opportunities. It helps to create a portrait of the
world itself, positioning the state on a terrain of politics.
This is not to say that intelligence creates a fictive universe of imaginary enemies,
and is the sole instigator of the state’s perceptions of danger or threat. Foreign
policymakers, the public, industry, arts and culture all contribute to creating and
circulating meanings that both reflect and construct the world around us. Some
of these meanings and worldviews, such as that of the state department, or the
president, are more influential in the actual conduct of state relations. The
administration making decisions about the world can privilege intelligence
supporting decisions as fact, while dismissing outsiders’ views as mere ‘public
perception’. Naturally, to preserve their importance and government funding,
intelligence agencies promulgate the idea that they posses truth. The CIA’s motto,
for example, inscribed at Langley, VA, reads: “And ye shall know the truth, and
the truth shall make you free”. This is a potent claim, to possess truth, and one
often implicitly accepted – despite spy scandals and intelligence ‘failures’. The
very idea of the problem of intelligence failure is that ideally intelligence should
be a perfect predictor of all threats and all future events affecting the state or its
interests. Naturally, the goal of the intelligence community is to be effective, but
practitioners complain that intelligence cannot predict every event, and that they
Copeland | Make Intelligence, Not War | 43
are unfairly blamed for failures that were really caused by the inaction of others
(9/11 is often portrayed this way). R. Betts has attempted to implant the idea that
intelligence cannot be perfect, and it will fail and that we should accept such
‘failures’ as inevitable (Betts 1978). However, while this is a reasonable assertion,
the aim of intelligence, to gather information and facts, and thus predict or prevent
danger to the state – so easily becomes an ideal: to gather all information and
facts, and predict every danger to the state and its interests. When intelligence
agencies claim an authority in pronouncing these truths and facts, they are not
specific about the limitations, that they possess only some truths. Thus they are
caught between the majesty of their claim to authority and knowledge, and the
limits to what can be done in reality. However, with the help of the security
imaginary heuristic, we can see what intelligence actually does accomplish, in its
ontological role.
Origins
Louis Althusser looked at the ability of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) to
‘hail’ or constitute a subject. This is the concept of interpellation. He lists these
2
This concept is drawn from the Althusserian conception of interpellation, in Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays (1970) but now is generally more in line with Judith
Bulter (1997a, 1997b) and others’ broader conceptions of hailing.
44 | New Directions
In more recent work, Weldes and Muppidi both adapt the security imaginary
heuristic. They each use it to focus on zones where cultural understandings clash
at the edges of two different security imaginaries. Muppidi looks at the conceptual
divide between the American and Indian security imaginaries. Muppidi argues
the US historically failed in its hailing of India, because the subject position the
US created was not consistent with the organizing principle of the Indian security
imaginary, postcoloniality. India could not see ‘itself’ in the construct of relations
the US presented to it (Muppidi 1999). Weldes looks at the Cuban Missile crisis
and how the identifications and articulations surrounding the event differed in the
Soviet and American imaginaries (1999a). Thus they do not hew to a purely
Althusserian interpretation of interpellation. Following Weldes and Muppidi’s
work, the security imaginary can be an important heuristic for demonstrating the
impact of intelligence on the state’s conception of security and the (re)creation of
enemies and allies.
both specific crises, and in shaping the political generally. The dominant cultural
conception of intelligence therefore shapes the map of the world that intelligence
furnishes to government. Intelligence pictures the nature of the state, the
‘sovereign’ self at the centre, positioned on a terrain of politics (hostile or friendly)
confronting state enemies and other actors, with the assistance of or indifference
of other nations and allies. Intelligence could be called the unseen narrator of
security and all it entails.
3
The secret nature of most intelligence information clearly blunts the transfer of the
portrait of the world painted by intelligence to the public. However, the key relation to
the security imaginary is that intelligence uses existing conceptions of the world (as all
concepts/ideas/theories predate testing) and attempts to determine what the current and
future nature of it will be. It validates some articulations of threat and security in the
existing security imaginary, and may lessen the authority of others, or introduce new
articulations. Finally, it also directly tests the assumptions about the subject positions of
other entities/states, by asking how the government believes other states or actors will
act, and attempting to discern if this prediction is correct, and what fundamental
assumptions can be made about these actors.
46 | New Directions
Interests
Most states claim a set of, often diffuse and unarticulated, ‘interests’. Realists
assume these are dictated by the facts of the external environment and the state’s
own capabilities and citizenry to a lesser extent. However, these national interests,
to an observer foreign to the society, would not seem to be obvious or natural.
Even to states themselves ‘national interests’ are not clear and can change rapidly.
Witness the incident said to have sparked the Korean War, where Secretary of
State Dean Atcheson signalled a lack of US interest in Korea. His speech to the
National Press Club seemed to leave Korea out of the US’s ‘defense perimeter’
(Gaddis 1974: 399). Yet this lack of interest was rapidly revised, so that the US
fought a UN authorized ‘police action’ in Korea when it appeared that Korea
might ‘fall’ to communism. Often, it is the intelligence community which finds
and develops these foreign sites of state ‘interest’, thereby playing an important
role in the security imaginary. This arises because intelligence tasking, as it is
called, is often unclear or contains endless or unranked ‘priorities’ – which would
be impossible to exhaustively accomplish (see Lowenthal 2006:56, Quiggin
2007:53). The intelligence community cannot collect information on everything,
so agencies end up making some of their own decisions as to what the state’s
interests are, and what information needs to be collected to understand events
surrounding them. When policymakers are unclear on the state’s interests,
intelligence then plays an important role in constructing the sites of national
interest for the state because of lack of direction. Intelligence therefore helps to
create and reinforce interests articulated from the security imaginary.
Facts
Intelligence has historically set out a baseline description of the facts of the world.
‘Facts’ might be defined as matters over which there is no difference of opinion
or measurement. The CIA world Factbook is evidence of this endeavour; before
the internet the CIA was the foremost government repository of information about
every country. Intelligence still has an important role in situating the ‘facts’ of the
world. While the number of parliamentarians in a particular nation is not an
opinion, the framing and accumulation of the facts of the world is not without
decision. The categories and concepts we use to describe facts are themselves
cultural, and can be society-specific (Sayer 1992: 20). Moreover, once a
supposition is accepted it may become a fact, but prior to its acceptance as true,
a fact as mere information is subject to debate. This is illustrated by the cold war
controversies over soviet materiel. The CIA attempted to ascertain the numbers
of soviet forces, type of missiles, number of tanks, etc and these material ‘facts’
would be the basis for assessments of soviet power and threat. However, because,
once accepted, these numbers would become ‘facts’ and thus help demonstrate
other CIA estimations, these numbers were contested by a political group that
Copeland | Make Intelligence, Not War | 47
sought a revision in the portrayal of the soviet empire as deterrable (Cahn 1998).
Much information in intelligence is ambiguous and subjective. It is often the
intelligence analyst who decides if a satellite photo shows a nuclear weapons
manufacturing plant or not (Hulnick 1999). This is the sort of folly that led to the
Iraq Survey Group4 failure to find WMDs based on pre-war intelligence (this
despite the many procedures common to analytic tradecraft, to question base
assumptions, and verify reports). These intelligence based facts become the base
of perceptions of security, and eventually, articulations in the security imaginary.
Threats
Intelligence helps determine threats to the state. Clearly the nature of ‘threat’ is
not objective. As constructivists have noted, the possessions of nuclear weapons
by the UK is not considered a threat to the US, while that of Iran would be a
serious threat (Ackelson 2005: 170). Likewise, both the evidence of capabilities
and intentions of a nation/other do not clearly dictate that they are a threat. For
example, it has been proposed that the evidence of Saddam’s nuclear and
biological programs was manufactured by his government in an attempt to deter
attackers. It was intelligence agencies that made the judgment as to the credibility
of sources on his capabilities and intentions and what this evidence meant
(MSNBC/AP 2010). Some countries, such as Canada, with almost the same
information as the US agencies, made the decision that there was no significant
threat in Iraq.5 Thus it was the peculiarities of US intelligence that helped make
the decision as to whether there was a threat. Hence intelligence helps link or
‘articulate’ ideas of threat or danger that become part of the security imaginary.
These elements all point to the subjective nature of intelligence. Yet because of
the seemingly scientific or factual claims of intelligence, it can be used by the
state to justify its articulations of threat drawn from the security imaginary. The
manipulation of intelligence can end up manipulating the very definition of state
security. During the cold war, whether or not the Soviet Union was aggressive
and aimed at world domination - or peaceful and would not use a first strike-
depended on the acceptance and use of certain intelligence (Cahn 1998). Now,
intelligence reports on terrorism seem to define whether or not any state is ‘safe’
4
This is the group that was sent into Iraq after the US coalition invasion, to attempt to
determine what weapons of mass destruction had in fact been possessed by the Hussein
regime.
5
Certain Canadian departments did accept or ‘verify’ the American assessments of Iraq,
but a number of other Canadian intelligence sections did not find the information
credible after evaluation. However, the elements of the decision have not been released
publicly.
48 | New Directions
and how citizens should live their lives. So while surveillance studies attempts to
lay bare the oppressive regimes of the state (and capital) that imply the production
of docile bodies, the study of intelligence must demonstrate how it can function
to pacify our minds.
Bibliography
Ackelson, Jason. “Constructing Security on the US-Mexico Border.” Political
Geography 24 (2005): 165-184.
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz : the Witness and the Archive. New
York : Zone Books, 1999.
Betts, Richard K. “Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are
Inevitable.” World Politics 31:1 (Oct., 1978): 61-89.
Cahn, Anne H. Killing Détente: The Right Attacks the CIA. University Park:
Penn State University Press, 1998.
Campbell, David. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the
Politics of Identity. Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1992.
Delleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Nomadology : the war machine. New
York, NY, : Semiotext(e), 1986.
Der Derian, James. Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War. Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1992.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. New York:
Random House, 1975.
Gaddis, John Lewis. “Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point?” Foreign
Affairs 52:2 (1974): 399.
Godson, Roy ed. Intelligence Requirements for the 1990s. Lexington, Mass.:
Lexington Books, 1989.
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age
of Empire. New York : The Penguin Press, 2004.
Hulnick, Arthur. Fixing the Spy Machine: Preparing American Intelligence For
the 21st Century. Westport, Conn.: Preager, 1999.
Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. London ; New York : Verso, 2000.
Weldes, Jutta. Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 1999b
52 |
| 53
Section II
Biopolitics and
Resisting (In)Securities
54 |
Arik | Veiled Insecurities | 55
Introduction
‘Sexuality’, ‘honour’, and ‘violence’ constitute the three interrelated concepts
that have given direction to the way patriarchy has shaped women’s experience
as a way of controlling them. For Turkish society, one issue that is inherently en-
meshed with female honour and sexuality, and yet makes no reference to them,
has been the issue of the headscarf. Specifically, after the 1980s and increasingly
into the 2000s, the headscarf debate has been an integral part of Turkish politics
and a marker of the tension between political Islam and the modernist secular
state ideology. The ban on the headscarf at university campuses in Turkey and
various attempts by Islamist parties to make constitutional amendments to
remove it, have brought the headscarf to media attention and garnered public dis-
cussion on how women should dress in public, the places they can enter, and the
political meanings they carry with their bodies.
On the other hand, the headscarf itself, and the broader practice of veiling in
Islam, connoting full attire and a particular dressing style, are rooted in historical
religious practices that have taken various forms and styles throughout the
Islamic world. This practice emerges through the patriarchal gender relations
that define female honour through female sexuality within the private sphere.
Genealogies of veiling, and also the Islamic texts, suggest that the veiling of
women is a way of carrying women’s privacy into public space, covering her
sexuality, and protecting her honour.
However, within the current political atmosphere in Turkey, the headscarf is ex-
clusively perceived as a symbol of resurgent Islamic politics that challenge the
hegemonic framework of Turkish modernity, which has always been at odds
with public representations of religion in public space. Within this context, either
through collective or individual efforts of headscarved university students or
through the diplomatic efforts of Islamic political parties, the headscarf issue has
been itemized as a human rights issue, specifically regarding individuals’ rights
to the public sphere within the negotiations between Islamism and secularism.
However, what these debates largely dismiss is that it is only women’s bodies
and their representation in public space that is turned into a political debate topic.
That is, the meanings conveyed by a woman choosing to wear/not-wear a
headscarf have gone largely unvisited.
In this paper I argue that the headscarf debate needs to be perceived as a gender
issue that is intimately linked to construction of femininity. Within the current
56 | New Directions
political context in Turkey discussing the female body and sexuality is legitimized
through the debates over the headscarf, which functions within a patriarchal
discourse that defines and controls female honour and sexuality, and makes it
vulnerable to masculine violence. In other words, the patriarchal discourse that
enables the discussion around the headscarf springs from the same discourse that
renders the female body prone to violence through spatial constructions of
female sexuality and honour.
1.
Kemalism is the official ideology of the Turkish state defined by the principles of
republicanism, secularism, nationalism, populism, statism, and revolutionism (or reformism), as
established by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Ozcetin 2009).
2.
Significant to institutional regulations is the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924. Along
with this religious schools and orders (tarikats and tekkes) were closed down as part of the
erasure of religious identities (Özdalga 1998).
Arik | Veiled Insecurities | 57
Although not formally regulated, there was significant emphasis on the properness
of women’s ‘modern/western’ style apparel, coupled with strong discouragement
of Islamic veiling (Gokariksel and Mitchell 2005, Gokariksel 2009). These
measures were geared towards increasing women’s presence in the public sphere,
as emblematic features of Turkish modernization (Cindoğlu and Zencirci 2008).
However, the state-promoted feminism still functioned within patriarchal
discourses and reemphasized women’s traditional reproductive roles as mothers,
3.
This started with the abolishment of the Caliphate (official Islamic leadership) and Sharia Law
in 1924 (Davison 2003).
4.
DRA was founded in 1924 to monitor and regulate religion and it is annexed to the Prime
Minister. As Gokariksel and Mitchell (2005) suggest, it promotes interpretations of Islam that
help create a ‘modern’ republican subject to develop the modern state.
5.
The new civic code granted women equal rights in inheritance and divorce in 1926, and
suffrage rights in 1934 (Arat 1998, Kandiyoti 1997).
6.
The fez is a felt hat in the shape of a red truncated cone that was widely adopted by men in late
Ottoman period.
58 | New Directions
Following a large-scale migration to urban centers in the 1960s, the Muslim rural
population gained access to secular education and upward social mobility (Göle
1997, Delibas 2009). Also with the neoliberal economic policies of the 1980s
they obtained social and political power (Gökarıksel and Secor 2009).7 A new
Islamic middle class emerged and started appropriating urban space in an effort
to fuse it with Islamic lifestyles8 (Gole 2002, Kömeçoğlu 2006, Seckinelgin
2006). The first Islamist political party, the National Order Party (NOP), was es-
tablished in 1969 in an attempt to provide previously-rural Muslims with a guide
of conduct for daily life and new forms of political expression (Gole 1997,
Gulalp 2001).
Starting with the NOP’s closure in 1971, Islamist political parties were closed
down several times as a result of secularist anxiety, yet kept on re-opening under
different names (Sakallioglu 1996). They pursued steady growth and gained
major electoral success in the mid-1990s with the Welfare Party (WP). The WP’s
political discourse9 created significant concern for Kemalists, military generals,
secular-minded civilian politicians, mass media, and the secular public (Uzgel
7.
These include market and trade liberalization, financial austerity measures, increased
transnational capital mobility, and the privileging of small-scale businesses more adaptable to
flexible markets (Gökarıksel and Secor 2009).
8.
These include the emergence of the veiling fashion industry and establishment of cafés and
restaurants with non-alcoholic beverages commensurate to an Islamic life style (Komecoglu
2006, Seckinelgin 2006).
9.
The successor Islamist party, the Welfare Party, specifically advocated an Islamic common
market and an Islamic version of NATO (Aydin and Cakir 2007)
Arik | Veiled Insecurities | 59
2003). The Turkish military in particular took the accession of the WP into gov-
ernment as confirmation that Islamist reactionism was a substantial threat to the
secular order (Cizre and Cinar 2003). This brought about severe polarization
between the Islamists and the secular segments of society, including mass media
and parts of bureaucracy spearheaded by the military (Uzgel 2003).10
An important agenda item for Islamist political parties has been the dress,
mobility, and status of Muslim women – specifically focusing on the headscarf
ban. After a military coup in 1980, the government introduced the “Dress and
Appearance Regulation,” which defined the headscarf as a symbol of Islamist
ideology and prohibited it for public employees in state institutions (Olson
1985). This coincided with the increased enrolment of headscarved students at
universities (Gole 1996) and created considerable legal and Islamist public
opposition to the Turkish state ("Turkey: headscarf ban," 2004). Like the ‘eman-
cipated’ Republican woman who represented secularism, the headscarved woman
became the marker of Islamism, as an agenda item that Islamist political parties
campaigned around (Saktanber 2002). With a visible corporeality that challenged
‘secular’ public space, headscarved women became crucial agents for the daily
articulation and reproduction of Islamist ideologies (Saktanber 2002, Göle 1997).
10.
The military’s stance against the government was so harsh that the generals began to spell out
their discontent with the government openly, even to the extent of reprimanding local
administrators of the Welfare Party and accusing the Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan of trying
to introduce an Islamic regime (Uzgel 2003, 184).
11.
The National Security Council (Milli Güvenlik Kurulu) is chaired by the president of the
republic and includes largely high ranking military officers as well as the prime minister and the
representatives of the government. It is mostly seen as a forum through which the military
influences the general direction of what is happening in the country (Seçkinelgin 2006: 767).
12.
Unlike previous instances in the 28 February military intervention there was no direct
government overthrow. Instead, the military chose to engage in an ‘education’’ campaign,
whereby prosecutors, judges, academics, journalists, businessmen came together against the
supposed Islamization of Turkey (Cindoğlu and Zencirci 2008: 800).
60 | New Directions
The emphasis on the significance of the headscarf issue reached another dimension
with the diplomatic moves of the Islamist parties. After the closure of WP its
successor Virtue Party (VP, Fazilet Partisi) joined the elections in 1998. On 3
May 1999, Merve Kavakcı, who was elected as a deputy from the VP, entered
the Grand National Assembly wearing a headscarf. This incident was found
extremely provocative and named as “a bald challenge to laicite and secular”
order.13 Her presence was protested by social democrat deputies, who beat on
the desktops, shouted, and demanded that she leave. This incident initiated a
Constitutional court case that led to closure of VP and more significantly
objectified the headscarf as an Islamist weapon against secular order (Saktanber
and Corbacioglu 2008).
The currently governing party, the Justice and Development Party (JPD, Adalet
ve Kalkınma Partisi), came to power in 2003 as the single ruling party. Different
from its predecessors, JDP has adhered to a more conservative democratic strand
and refrained from provocative ‘Islamist’ moves. However, the headscarf still
caused stir. Several ‘reception crises’ occurred in 2003, when the presidential
palace failed to invite to a significant reception the wives of MPs from the JDP
who wear the headscarf (Cindoğlu and Zencirci 2008).
Especially after the 1980s, a new style of Islamic dress became increasingly
popular among educated, upwardly mobile young women, who play active roles
in Islamist politics (Aktaş 2006, Gökarıksel and Secor 2009). Once perceived as
a sign of backwardness and oppression of women, the headscarf was now
adopted in defense of individual rights of religious expression and as a symbol of
prestige (Saktanber and Çorbacıoğlu 2008). This was also accompanied by the
proliferation of the veiling industry which was driven by the Islamic middle
class that started gaining economic power (Gökarıksel and Secor 2009).
Starting from the late 1960s and increasingly into the 1980s, legal cases started
appearing regarding the ban on the headscarf. Court cases were filed at The
European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) by university students alleging the
ban for violating the constitutional rights to freedom of religion and conscience.16
For all of these cases, ECHR reached a decree stating that the headscarf ban in
Turkey was not a violation of human rights and asserted that the state has the
right to make prohibitions in order to protect public order, the pluralism at
universities, gender equality, and the respect to others (Çorbacıoğlu and Saktanber
2008).
Besides the institutional regulations and court appeals, the headscarf issue also
led to the emergence of civil society organizations17 and it became a regularly
visited agenda item in the national media. In particular, the cases of Merve
Kavakçı, the ‘reception crises,’ and the presidential elections intensified the
focus on the headscarf and lead to further polarization on its ‘political’ or
‘cultural’ meanings. Also with the Islamist partys’ attempts for Constitutional
amendments to lift the ban on the headscarf in 2008, new styles of wearing the
headscarf were being discussed on TV shows or in the print media.18
This view, Mernissi (1987: 44) suggests comes from the perception of women’s
sexuality as dangerously strong and destructive, as a force that can be perceived
as a threat to the order of the ümmet (community). Moreover, the word fitne
(disorder) is used to express women’s ‘dominant’ sexuality, which can possibly
‘seduce’ men and lead them into wrong deeds. Thus, men, who are perceived as
mentally, physically and morally superior over women, should take the responsibility
to control them (Mernissi 1987). In order to suppress woman’s potential and
strength, practices based on sexual segregation of spaces are introduced. Within
this division, man’s space is ümmet, worldly religion and power, and woman’s
space is the family, where her confinement is realized (Mernissi 2003: 490). In
this context, veiling is a practice based on sexual segregation of spaces that carry
and reproduce social construction of gender identities, connoting specific
meanings of female sexuality.
18.
This was also reflected in the marketing strategies of Islamist businesses. For example, as
Gökarıksel and Secor (2009) suggest, in response to the attempts to lift the ban, Tekbir (a major
tesettür dressing company) publicized new special styles of wearing the headscarf for university
students and they projected a 30 per cent increase in their sales.
Arik | Veiled Insecurities | 63
Orientalising views on the veil are also explored by several scholars. For instance
Mernissi (2001) explores the construction of Muslim women in European
literature and art as passive sexual objects in harems. Similarly Yeğenoğlu
(1998) investigates the representation of the veil and the Western fascination
with veiled women due to the invisibility and inaccessibility of veiled women to
the western gaze. She suggests that the “veil is one of those tropes through which
Western fantasies of penetration into the mysteries of the Orient and access to the
interiority of the other is achieved” (Yeğenoğlu 2003: 543). In the same vein,
Shirazi investigates the semantics of veiling by analyzing the plentiful visual and
printed material on the veil. By focusing on the role of veil in popular culture,
such as its importance to advertisers of western products, she explores how fixed
sexual images of Middle Eastern women have been imagined on the western
mind, often ascribing an erotic meaning to the veil (2001: 11). In line with
Shirazi’s analysis Mernissi also suggests that as a marker of women’s sexuality,
veiling heightens the sexual dimension of any interaction between men and
women (2003: 491). I also perceive veiling as the symbolic and material
embodiment of sexual segregation on the female body that reproduces and
increases its sexuality in contrast to the initial purpose of controlling it. Even
though Turkey’s population is mostly Muslim, the same orientalist and eroticizing
view of the headscarf/veil is present because of the adoption of the secularist
discourse of modernity starting from the early years of Turkish Republic.
The most common issue that brings up the concept of honour has been the
honour killings and honour crimes within the Turkish context. In the edited
collection, Violence in the Name of Honour (2004), Sirman presents an analysis
of the social conditions that produce honour-related crimes, and she defines them
as an infringement of women’s human rights, including their right to work, to
travel, to their own bodies, and finally their rights to life (2004: 39). Persistent in
the societies like Turkey, where honour is considered as a constitutive element in
making of the society, such crimes are perceived as an extension of protection of
virginity and gender values (2004: 40).
Within the context of the modern nation-states honour crimes are considered
‘traditional’, and thus perceived as doomed to disappear with education and
progress within the context of modernity (Sirman 2004). However, as Sirman
(2004) suggests, in post-colonial nation-states, the notion of honour is reproduced
as a critical value for the making of the new subjects and this is based on the ‘tra-
ditional’ notions of femininity and female sexuality. The state supports the con-
struction of gender identities through law. For example, until 2004 in most
honour related crimes the Turkish penal code recognized illicit sexual conduct
(adultery), as a reason for penalty reduction on the side of the offender (Sirman
2004). This usually worked to the advantage of the male partner or the family
member who ‘clears the honour of the family’ by executing the woman who is
suspected of an illicit relationship or any form of non-marital sexual conduct.
Every year approximately 200 women are being victimized in honour crimes,
i.e. killed on the basis of being raped, sexually harassed, or having committed
adultery (“Human Rights Watch Report”). Akkoç (2004) argues that this cannot
be considered apart from the construction of femininity and its definition as “out
of place”.
Women must always protect themselves from harassment and rape; being unable
to carry out this responsibility is accepted as an offence that deserves punishment
(Akkoc 2004: 120). As Secor’s ethnographic study (2002) on women’s veil,
mobility, and Islamic knowledge also demonstrates, wearing a headscarf is a sig-
nificant tool that women use to avoid harassment on the streets and protect their
honour in public. Within the same context with the honor crimes, by covering the
body parts that are defined to be private and sexual, this practice also embodies
Arik | Veiled Insecurities | 65
certain codes of honour, which in most cases become the criteria that determine
women’s experiences, which may vary from being respected to being harassed.
Thus, I argue that there is an intimate link between the discourses that produce
veiling as a gendered religious practice and honour crimes/assaults as mechanisms
that evaluate and control female sexuality in specific ways. The practice of
wearing a headscarf conveys certain meanings on the female body and defines a
‘decent and honorable’ female identity and draws a boundary between public
and private on the body of the female subject. It designates what is sexual, i.e.
what needs to be protected as one’s honour. In addition to fulfilling a religious
duty, by wearing a headscarf Muslim women carry their private bodies into the
public space by covering and protecting them from the public gaze. The headscarf
covers the private parts of the body that would otherwise be open to what is con-
sidered as an “illicit sexual conduct” according to the moral practices of Islamic
way of life. Thus, women’s experience in relation to the practice of the headscarf
is based on the same construction of female sexuality and honour that has
significant consequences regarding women’s lives and mobilities, as presented
by the cases of honour crimes.
On the other hand, the secularist discourses always make reference to the incom-
patibility of fashion and the headscarf, and blamed headscarved women as
hypocrites for contradicting their own Islamist principles. Through various
channels, such as facebook groups or websites, ‘inappropriate’ photos of
headscarved women were being shared. These could be either image of a
headscarved woman wearing (too) tight clothes or kissing with a partner in
public. In various ways headscarved women have been stigmatized and judged
on the basis of their preference for wearing a headscarf. Since it has been made
possible to talk about headscarved women in various aforementioned contexts,
these discriminatory views and their public expressions became a banal aspect of
everyday life.
Kathryn McKittrick (2006: 79), in her work on geographies of slavery and the
black female body, says “The moment of sale of the black female body (on the
auction block) marks the scale of the body as “sellable”, thus abstracting human
complexities and particularities and discursively naturalizing multiscalar ideologies
that justify local, regional and national violence and enslavement.” I likewise
argue that a multi layered objectification and othering of women, headscarved or
not, is occurring through these processes. The discourses over the headscarf
allow for the emergence of other spaces where the female body can be violated
in terms of their physical integrity, sexuality, and mobility. As demonstrated by
the aforementioned cases, the discourse over the headscarf reinforces the control
of female bodies through the social constructions of female sexuality and honour.
It constructs the female body as a scale: “discussible and measurable” and
makes violence possible.
Arik | Veiled Insecurities | 67
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the Name of Honour. Eds. Sahrazad Mojab and Nahla Abdo. İstanbul:
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Cizre, U. and Cinar, M. “Turkey 2002: Kemalism, Islamism, and Politics in the
Light of the February 28 Process” South Atlantic Quarterly, 102:2/3
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Cinar, A. Modernity, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places and Time.
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———. “Subversion and subjugation in the public sphere: secularism and the
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Cindoglu, D. and Zencirci, G. “The Headscarf in Turkey in the Public and State
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Appendix
That this violence mediates, monitors, and controls the spaces within defined
favelas is generally not contested; however, this violence is beginning to permeate
the larger urban areas of Brazil with greater frequency and greater force. As
these powerful actors continue to struggle over the spaces within the favelas, in-
evitably the violence escapes the threshold of the periphery, spilling beyond the
spaces of exception throughout the greater metropolitan areas of society initiating
a spatially indifferent inclusion, as most recently evidenced in Rio de Janeiro
(October 17, 2009).3 The ‘excluded’ periphery is becoming more inclusive of
1
I would like to thank the organizers of the ‘New Directions: The Future of Canadian
(in)Security Studies’ conference held in February 2010 for the opportunity to explore these ideas
initially. Special thanks are also due to Rita Rolim for translation assistance, and Lori Crowe,
Elizabeth Lunstrum, and an anonymous editor for their helpful comments and contributions to
earlier drafts of this paper.
2
Typically, a favela is defined as having been “located on land which has been illegally invaded
or transferred by verbal agreement from its previous owners; they are usually found in the
outlying parts of the city… and are characterized by a type of housing unit – flimsy shacks – and
by the poor living conditions of their population” (Prefeitura do Municipio do São Paulo 1974:
17, cited by Lloyd-Sherlock 1997: 291; see also Davis 2006: 22). However, Perlman’s recent
research indicates that the favela is becoming an increasingly ambiguous term, and she argues
that the distinctions between the formal and informal cities are eroding, further supporting the
core theme of this paper (2010: 29-30).
3
This paper was originally written in December, 2009. Serious events have occurred more
recently in Rio de Janeiro since (eg. November, 2010).
74 | New Directions
the central urban areas, as “dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the
politics in which we are still living” (Agamben 1998: 175), and what was the
‘camp’ is engulfing and normalizing the ‘city’ as ‘camp’.
This power duality is being challenged by a third force, that of the favelados,
dwellers within the ‘spaces of exception’, led and encouraged through popular,
cultural expressions, most specifically hip-hop. “As the role of the state as a
provider of social services has diminished, forms of community-based cultural
activism have begun to fill the void” (Dunn 2009: 234; Yúdice 2003: 25-26), and
Brazilian hip hoppers have produced a “powerful critique of Brazilian society, as
they try to articulate a means of controlling the proliferation of violence and
death among young residents of the poor peripheries” (Caldeira 2004: 258).
Emerging hip hop ideologies indicate that hip hop discourse, both aural and
visual, can be read through a political lens, or lenses. Through an increasing
cultural awareness, including recognition and acceptance, as well as a promotion
of consciousness and deliberate cultural transformations, marginalized populations,
such as those living in the peripheral areas of Brazil’s large cities are re-
negotiating their place, as included, within society. Growing acceptance of this
perspective is apparent within the hip hop community, as MV Bill states: “In
Brazil, hip-hop is not any longer a type of music, a culture, but it has become an
instrument of transformation, of changing people’s lives” (cited in Pieterse 2007:
7).
Two hip hop groups in particular, one from each of Brazil’s largest cities, Rio de
Janeiro and São Paulo have been studied herein to learn if a different approach
for imagining politics is being developed within the cultural realm of music,
specifically within the peripheral4 sound of hip hop. These groups, which
include AfroReggae (Rio de Janeiro) and Racionais MCs (São Paulo), have been
selected due to their prominence both nationally and internationally, their
community involvement, and their political imperative, narrated through both
their actions and their lyrical discourses. Although these two groups are
ostensibly quite dissimilar, projecting disparate images, emerging from different
circumstances, with distinct histories, and of course from different geographies,
both AfroReggae and the Racionais MCs engage in and perform intensely
political hip hop, and thus together they provide a rich discourse for a comparative
analysis.
Agamben’s philosophy as laid out in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life (1998) will provide the theoretical basis for this study, and the key concepts
of the sovereign ban as manifested through the practice of abandonment, the pro-
duction of bare life, and the state of exception represented by ‘the camp’ as the
modern metaphor of politics will be explored, compared and contrasted with the
4
As compared with popular national music styles, such as samba.
MacDonald | Peripheral Spaces, Peripheral Sounds |75
reality as perceived by the favelados and those living within the periferia of
Brazil’s major cities. Through a discourse analysis, both lyrical and performance
based, this paper hopes to determine whether the permeation of violence within
and without the borders of the favela can be overcome through peripheral cultur-
al-politics, reversing the trend of camp to city, and ushering in a re-conception,
or a re-territorialization of city to camp.
Peripheral Spaces
Since the 1970s, the larger share of world urban population growth has been
absorbed by slum communities within the periphery of primarily ‘third world
countries’, suggesting the need to re-think peripherality (Davis 2006: 37). Due
to harsh structural adjustments in Brazil, high inflations, devaluations of the
currency, low economic growth, and a large disparity in equality, favela populations
have increased steadily over the past thirty-five years and Brazilian census data
increasingly reveals the gradual impoverishment of the country’s population
(Davis 2006: 17; Perlman 2006: 155). Globally, Brazil has the third highest
absolute population currently living in slum conditions (Davis 2006: 27). In São
Paulo alone there are more than 2.4 million precarious dwellings located on the
periphery of the city, and more than 60% of the metropolitan area’s families
occupy substandard dwellings, with between 8% and 20% residing in favelas, in-
dicating a very high degree of social vulnerability (Jacobi 2006: 219). As
inequality has risen, so has homelessness, joblessness, and open poverty.
Accordingly, the causation of this growth in informal settlements is now posited
as growing downward social mobility rather than the previously witnessed in-
migration (Lloyd-Sherlock 1997: 294 – 295; Perlman 2006: 158).
Peripheral Voices
The Racionais MCs, Brazil’s preeminent hip hop group, was formed in 1988 in
São Paulo and is composed of Mano Brown (Pedro Paulo Soares Pereira), Ice
Blue (Paulo Eduardo Salvador), Edy Rock (Edvaldo Pereira Alves), and DJ KL
Jay (Kleber Geraldo Lelis Simões). All of the members of the Racionais MCs
originate from the ring of favelas surrounding São Paulo, in an area known
locally as the periferia. As a group, the Racionais MCs emerged from the
periferia denouncing the oppression of marginalized populations, specifically in
Brazilian cities, and their lyrics combine themes of social justice, community
recognition and empowerment, police violence, and the reality of oppression, in-
cluding commentaries on crime, poverty, social and racial prejudice, drugs, and
political consciousness (Caldeira 2004: 258; Magaldi 1999: 314). They have
chosen to remain within the favela, as they believe that by residing in their com-
munities, they have the knowledge and motivation required to pursue hip hop
and consequently work for social and material change (Pardue 2008a: 68).
Caldeira notes that “their mission is to take young men out of the path of drugs,
5
The racialized nature of urban violence in Brazil is an extremely interesting aspect of this
argument, and while beyond the scope of this paper, it is the focus of future research.
MacDonald | Peripheral Spaces, Peripheral Sounds |77
alcohol and organized crime. For them, this is the only alternative in a universe
basically without alternatives, the only chance of life” (2004: 258).6 By
positioning themselves within the periphery, and identifying as favela community
members, the Racionais MCs are respected as legitimate speakers for and within
the community, and in this way, they position themselves within a critical
discourse on the social inequality in Brazil.
6
Not all hip hop or hip hoppers are conscious of the need for gender equality, as the Racionais
MCs have the attitude that ‘women are to be avoided’: “From the brotherhood are excluded not
only the usual suspects (rich, white, policemen, politicians) and those with the wrong attitude.
Excluded also are their sisters – all women. Maybe the only women treated with respect in the
raps are their mothers who suffer, cry for them, and give them character. Verses despising
women abound. The list of faults attributed to women is more detailed than those attributed to
rich whites and sometimes the words used to refer to them are more offensive” (Caldeira 2004:
265-266).
7
The Racionais MCs essentially refuse to communicate with the media, as part of their contest
against ‘the system’.
78 | New Directions
MCs encourage youth to reconsider their places and roles in life, and to create an
outlet for knowledge and a safe space for political expression.
Brosy outlines GCAR’s four key principles upon which they operate for the
benefit of the participants of the various programs. One of the key aims of
GCAR is to instil self-esteem in the favela youth. AfroReggae has performed for
MTV Brazil and internationally in Europe and the United States, gaining
popularity with the middle-classes as well as favela society. This rise in
popularity, due to the fame and recognition of the group, leads all of the
associated members to develop their sense of personal self-worth (Brosy nd: 2).
Additionally, AfroReggae has begun to change favela stereotypes as Brazilians
throughout the city and the country witness the favelados engaging in positive,
non-violent cultural activities instead of drug and gang related violence (ibid).
AfroReggae also provides a political voice for its marginalized members, as
singers and rappers are able to vent their daily frustration by making scathing
critiques of social injustice with their lyrics and performances (ibid). Finally,
GCAR offers training and education possibilities to provide favela youth with
marketable skills that enable its members to enter the performance and entertainment
industries and become citizens of mainstream Brazil (ibid: 3).
Although these two groups are ostensibly quite dissimilar, projecting disparate
images, emerging from different circumstances, with distinct histories, and of
course from different geographies, both AfroReggae and the Racionais MCs
engage in and perform intensely political hip hop, and thus together they provide
a rich discourse for a comparative analysis.
Peripheral Sounds
Agamben’s work has been used to illustrate the ways in which politically mar-
ginalized individuals risk the increased possibility of being killed with impunity
(Garmany 2009: 731). The creation of the ‘state of exception’ through the
originary act of the sovereign, the sovereign ban, excludes those set outside the
law through a process that instead transcends the law in the form of its suspension.
As Agamben states, “he who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside
MacDonald | Peripheral Spaces, Peripheral Sounds |79
the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and
threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become in-
distinguishable” (1998:28). This abandonment, wherein the state absolves itself
of all responsibility within the excepted territory often manifests itself through
violence, as the suspension of law creates permanent chaos within the indistinctive
zone. Agamben states that “violence...is situated in a zone in which it is no
longer possible to distinguish between exception and rule” (ibid: 65), and that
“the violence exercised in the state of exception clearly neither preserves nor
simply posits law, but rather conserves it in suspending it and posits it in
excepting itself from it” (ibid: 64).
Lund and Melgarejo state that, “the practice of letting die is at the heart of the
particularity of the modern slum. The modern slum is not the failure of
discipline, the breakdown of the state’s relations to urban space. It is the total
absence of the state’s disciplinary practices; it is abandonment as social policy”
(2008: 183, emphasis mine). In light of the statistics discussed above, Brazilian
youth are specifically recognized as victims of ‘the sovereign ban’ implicated in
actualized state policy, and it is increasingly “vital not to lose sight of the
humanity who... grow up amidst terror and effective social abandonment”
(Pieterse 2007: 14). Importantly in terms of independence and agency for the
favela residents and communities, Agamben’s thesis of abandonment is ac-
knowledged within hip hop discourse, as for example in the Racionais MCs
lyric, “Cada sentença um motivo, uma história de lágrima, sangue, vidas e
glórias, abandono, miséria, ódio, sofrimento, desprezo, desilusão, ação do
tempo” (Every sentence a reason, a story of tears, blood, lives and glories, aban-
donment, misery, hatred, suffering, contempt, disappointment, weathering)
(Racionais MCs, “Diário de um Detento”, Sobrevivendo No Inferno 1997).
Through the act of the sovereign ban, the exclusion of those outside the law by
means of political abandonment, and the creation of the space of exception,
Agamben argues that those who have been banned become non-citizens, dena-
tionalized or de-politicized; they have been reduced to bare life. This reduction
to bare life, as lives outside the law, but inside the space of exception, permits the
exposure of violence, including the taking of life (killing) without consequences
or punishment, or as Agamben states, “what is captured in the sovereign ban is a
human victim who may be killed but not sacrificed” (1998: 83).
“Lá dentro estado desesperador... Puta desespero, não dá pra acreditar, que pe-
sadelo” (Inside, it’s a desperate state... Fucking desperate, you cannot believe it,
what a nightmare) (Racionais MCs, “Mágica da Paz”, Sobrevivendo no Inferno
1997). Within both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the implied absence of the
State in favelas has allowed criminal organizations to engulf entire neighbourhoods,
acting as what is occasionally referred to as a “parallel state power”8, wherein
the control or provision of basic services such as transport, gas and cable, is
organized through the crime syndicates, as well as responsibility for the hosting
of community festivals and/or parties, resident taxation, and judicial services
(Alston 2008: 13).9 Garmany sees this within Agamben’s philosophy, noting
that “docile bodies in favelas, perhaps, are disciplined by raw fear more so than
surveillance and state intervention. As such, the law may be enacted in these
spaces due to the fear that marginalized people rightfully have of becoming bare
life” (Garmany 2009: 732). This absence of the State within the favelas is
helping to create the conditions needed for the production of bare life through
the construction of fear and the abandonment of citizens to violence.
After the fall of the military dictatorship, seemingly police institutions did not
successfully make the transition from their role of ‘protectors of the state’ to the
role of ‘protectors of citizens’, a problem that many have realized to be integral
to the problem of police violence currently seen in Brazil today. The problems
include executions by on-duty police, executions by off-duty police operating in
death squads, militias or as hired killers, and killings of inmates in prisons
(Alston 2008: 5). Police in the states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have killed
a combined total of more than 11 000 people since 2003, according to official
statistics.10 These official statistics refer only to on-duty killings by police in
8
See Perlman, 2010 for a further discussion of the possibility of the parallel state power in
favelas.
9
For example, the Complexo de Alemão favela has largely been left without state services, a fact
acknowledged by representatives from the state Government. For a population of 180,000,
Complexo de Alemão has only three city schools, 60 teachers, and three health centres. Just 13
public officials work there. There are no government-run cultural institutions, no police stations
and no community policing programs. The absence of the state is brought into sharp relief when
one compares these numbers with those of other Rio de Janeiro areas. In the municipality of
Japeri for example, although it has just 96 200 residents, there are 10 health centres, 27 city
schools, 1918 public officials, and 1092 teachers. (Governo do Rio de Janeiro, “Programa de
Urbanização de Favelas” , cited in Alston 2008: 13).
10
The number of on-duty police killings in ‘resistance’ cases totalled 11 010 from 2003 through
September 2009, with Rio de Janeiro police killing 7611 people and São Paulo police killing
3399 people (HRW 2009: 20). These are merely the official statistics and do not include
instances of police violence by off-duty officers – in reality, the numbers are suspected to be
much higher than these reports indicate.
MacDonald | Peripheral Spaces, Peripheral Sounds |81
Principally due to the drug trade, large segments of the police force have been
corrupted by bribery, and a key reason for the ineffectiveness of the police in
protecting citizens is that they too often engage in excessive and counter-
productive violence while on-duty and/or participate in what amounts to organized
crime while off-duty (Alston 2008: 6). Extrajudicial executions are committed
by police who murder rather than arrest criminal suspects, or during “large-scale
confrontational ‘war’ style policing”, in which excessive use of force results in
the deaths of suspected criminals and innocent bystanders (ibid: 10). On-duty
police are responsible for a significant proportion of all killings in Brazil,
however exact numbers are often disguised by the fact that on-duty killings by
police are excluded from the homicide statistics. While São Paulo’s official
homicide rate has reduced in recent years, the number of killings by police has
actually increased over the last three years, with on-duty police in 2007 killing
one person a day (ibid). In Rio de Janeiro, on-duty police are responsible for
nearly 18% of the total killings, and kill three people every day (ibid). According
to official statistics, there were 6133 murders (not including killings by police) in
11
Resistance killings refer to instances when police kill people while on-duty and report the
deaths as legitimate acts of self-defence, responding to violence from criminal suspects (HRW
2009: 1).
12
In the state of São Paulo, although the number of on-duty resistance killings was significantly
lower than in recent years such as 2002 and 2003 (609 and 787, respectively), it remained high
and relatively constant between 2007 and 2008 (401 and 397, respectively) (HRW 2009: 30).
These São Paulo figures do not count the substantial number of police killings committed while
off-duty, some of which have in the past been recorded in that state as resistance killings. In
2002, there were 152 such resistance killings off duty, and in 2003, there were 124. In 2007 and
2008, there were 36 and 34, respectively. These resistance killings while off-duty from São Paulo
have been kept out of the ongoing analysis in order to maintain comparable data. (Military Police
Internal Affairs Unit of the São Paulo State Secretariat of Public Security, ‘Mortos por Policiais
Militares (2002 – 2008)’; Civil Police Internal Affairs Unit of the São Paulo State Secretariat of
Public Security, ‘Mortos por Policiais Civis (2002 – 2008)’, cited in HRW 2009: 30).
82 | New Directions
Rio de Janeiro in 2007; that same year there were 1330 citizens killed by police
(ibid). An independent commission of inquiry report based on forensic science
investigating 124 resistance deaths estimates that 60 to70 percent of the persons
killed bore signs of having been the victims of executions (ibid: 12; HRW 2009:
28).
Police officers responsible for unlawful killings in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo
are rarely brought to justice. Although there has recently been some important
progress in the reining of certain high-profile militias in Rio de Janeiro as well as
in the arrest of several death squad members in São Paulo, impunity for
extrajudicial executions committed by police officers remains the norm (HRW
2009: 2). Here we see how bare life is produced in the favelas of Brazil, as “in
the case of Homo sacer a person is simply set outside human jurisdiction without
being brought into the realm of law” (Agamben 1998: 82). Or as the Racionais
MCs would say, “Assustador é quando se descobre, que tudo dá em nada, e que
só morre o pobre” (Scary is when you discover, that everything’s for nothing,
and that only the poor die) (“Mágica da Paz”, Sobrevivendo no Inferno 1997).
Brazilian political hip hoppers are acknowledging the peripherality of the favela
as a space of exception, and the favelados, ‘the poor’, as representations of bare
life within it, as victims of violence – to have their life taken or to be killed
without punishment.
Thus, this production of bare life and the figure of Homo sacer through
abandonment constitutes the fundamental basis for Agamben’s introduction of
“the camp [as] the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to
become the rule” (1998: 168-169). The camp is recognized as “the most
absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized”, and because it is willed
through the introduction of the state of exception, it inaugurates a new juridico-
political paradigm in which the norm becomes indistinguishable from the
MacDonald | Peripheral Spaces, Peripheral Sounds |83
exception (ibid: 171), or in other words, “the politicization of life has reached
such an extent that the state of exception comes more and more to the foreground
as the fundamental political structure” (Ek 2006: 368). Thus, the spaces in
which bare life and juridical rule enter the threshold of indistinction are the rep-
resentation of, or the essence of, the camp (Agamben 1998: 174). Afroreggae
acknowledges this by revealing the existence of “Áreas demarcadas onde
vivemos, em um eterno conflito com toques de recolher, como se estivéssemos
num campo de concentração” (Marked areas where we live, in an eternal conflict
with curfews, as if we were in a concentration camp) (Afroreggae, “Conflitos
Urbanos”, Nova Cara 2001).
“Marginality is what hip hoppers seek to change in their belief in and performance
of hip hop”, and through performance, Brazilian hip hoppers are attempting to
institute an alternative system of ideology, while redesigning the traditional
social categories of race, class, and gender as well as socio-geographical
categories such as periphery and marginality through a process of further
developing an empowered sense of self (Pardue 2008a: 2-3; Pardue 2008b: 160-
161). In the process of transforming periferia reality, hip hoppers create and
codify an alternative ideology, one of self-knowledge as an empowering point
from which one can produce an alternate history (Pardue 2008a: 6). Virtually all
Brazilian hip hoppers are invested in retelling periphery ‘reality’ through
narratives of marginality with the aim of both legitimating the periferia as a
potentially empowering space of identity and revealing problems of mainstream
Brazilian views of social difference mostly around the markers of class and race.
The transformation in ideology encompasses the idea that “life is not about
meaningless violence and insurmountable corruption, but respect, honesty and
neighbourhood pride” (ibid).
people to rebel. Let’s burst the chains that, castrate our creativity and dignity....
What kind of shit country is this?” (Afroreggae, “Conflitos Urbanos”, Nova
Cara 2001). Where in Agamben’s philosophy, biopolitical resistance is passive,
through a retreat or a withdrawal within the metaphors of the refugee, or more
extremely, the Musselman13, Brazilian hip hoppers are instead presenting an
active resistance to the politics of the favela. This response of rage, as opposed
to that of pure alienation, I argue is that which is preventing the favelados from
accepting their positions within bare life, as Homines sacri, as through this
recognition of reality and the empowering emotions engendered through a
discourse of rage, political hip hop acts as a narrative challenge to the experienced
reality of the periphery. Political practices of rage and confrontation unsettle the
normative frameworks of mainstream society (Pieterse 2007: 16).
This explication of locality and community is also indicative of hip hop’s politics
of recognition and rage, as the marginality of the periphery and the favelas is
coded within the language and performance of the artists. The centrality of the
favela, or the periferia as both an ethical and aesthetic focus of hip hop narration
and performance limits its spatial expansion, thus hip hop remains primarily an
urban culture within the major cities of Brazil (Pardue 2008a: 79). This
reclamation, or more accurately cognition, of the periphery as a legitimate space
acts against the state, or ‘the system’ and its originary act of abandonment. The
acknowledgement of the favela as a space included within the city, yet distinct as
a locality is significant to the discourse of political hip hop.
Clearly, much of hip hop cultural practice is about giving voice and recognition
to the marginalized position of poor neighbourhoods and their residents, whilst
also putting forward an alternative conception of everyday life, urban justice,
inclusion and agency; one based on addressing the systemic economic and insti-
13
The extreme figure of bare life.
86 | New Directions
tutional factors that reproduce this situation (ibid: 15). This ideology of the
politics of recognition and rage thus act to reverse the trends of bare life and
abandonment inherent within Brazilian society.
However, during the late 1990s, Brazilian hip hoppers began to argue that this
approach was not enough, and a perceptible shift towards positive hip hop was
noted, with an accompanying shift towards solutions to peripheral reality and a
politics of hope (Pardue 2008a: 7). Specifically, marginalized youth in Brazilian
peripheral areas such as favelas began turning to hip hop as a hopeful opportunity,
as an alternative to continued peripheral existence. Against the background of
hip hop as the discourse of the peripheral reality for many marginalized youth,
entertainment and independent thought are presented as integral to a restructuring
the oppression of the periferia, and positive hip hop is offered as an ultimate
response to the critique that hip hop only reports and recognizes without offering
solutions (ibid: 85). Whereas marginal hip hop would state “that’s the way it is”,
positive hip hop transforms this statement to one of hope, by stating instead “it
should be like this” (ibid). “A realidade das ruas, que não media outras vidas, a
minha e a sua. Viemos falar, que pra mudar. Temos que parar de se acomodar,
e acatar o que nos prejudica, o medo... A mudança estará em nossa consciência”
(The reality of the streets, that did not measure other lives, mine and yours. We
came to talk, about that for the change. We have to stop to accommodate, and
accept what harms us, the fear.... The change will be in our consciousness)
(Racionais MCs, “Pânico na Zona Sul”, Holocausto Urbano 1990). Personal be-
haviour and attitude are integral to the discourse, and proponents of positive hip
hop see it as a means of reclaiming the favela or the periferia as safe territory
(Pardue 2008a: 87).
Positive hip hop claims that “while discourses of crime and violence are
generative they can also reinforce historically grounded and systematically
enacted structures of domination,” and instead, espouse the need to design a
more empowering periferia through and beyond the mediation of marginality
(ibid: 89). “É necessário sempre acreditar que o sonho é possível, que o céu é o
limite e você, truta, é imbatível” (You must always believe that the dream is
possible, the sky is the limit and you, truta, are unbeatable) (Racionais MCs, “A
Vida é Desafio”, Nada Como Um Dia Após O Outro Dia 2002). Manifested
through community action, solutions include orientations towards information
and sound technology, an emphasis on education and literacy, and a valuation of
culture as a means to escape the limited resources of the periphery; hip hop as
itself an agent for change (Stapleton 1998: 231).
“The first AfroReggae action is the inclusion of cultural and artistic projects, to
affirm life” (Almeida 2009: 7), through “dança, capoeira, tambores em fúria,
funk, hip-hop, samba e percussão” (dancing, capoeira, drums in a fury, funk,
hip-hop, samba and percussion) (Afroreggae, “Capa da Revista”, Nova Cara
2001). Indeed to live in the favelas is the initial act of resistance against the
MacDonald | Peripheral Spaces, Peripheral Sounds |87
social production of death in the Brazilian peripheries (Almeida 2009: 7). “Eles
não morreram, nem viraram bandidos. São testemunhos vivos, que romperam
as estatísticas. E aí irmãozinho pode se levantar, o pesadelo pode acabar,
chegou a hora de sonhar” (They did not die, nor become bandits. They are
living testimonies, that broke the statistics. And that little brother can arise, the
nightmare can end, it’s time to dream) (AfroReggae, “A Parada é Outra”, Favela
Rising 2007). Culture is being forwarded as an alternate discourse for change,
for example as “AfroReggae used a musical discourse to claim citizenship, an in-
clusion by inclusion rather than by exclusion” (Ohmer 2009: 6), or as “the
production of a culture of change, for culture is empowerment” (Yúdice 2001:
59-60), for through culture, “tudo vai mudar ... tocando nas vielas, mostrando a
sua força, como aqui se espera... Essa é a nova cara, tudo vai mudar” (everything
will change.... Playing in the alleys, showing its strength, here as expected....
This is the new face, everything will change.) (AfroReggae, “Capa de Revista”,
Nova Cara 2001). This positive response is understood through a promotion of
socio-cultural actions, despite the continuing production and reproduction of
social misery (Almeida 2009: 2). “A cultura é o principal instrumento da
mudança” (Culture is the main instrument for change) (AfroReggae, “Iguais So-
brepondo Iguais”, Nova Cara 2001). Importantly, hip hop remains an acknowl-
edgment of achieved, not ascribed power (Pardue 2008a: 165).
Through their cultural work, political hip hoppers in Brazil attempt to restructure
the peripheral spaces of their cities, not only through metaphorical refashioning
in lyrics but also through a heightened sense of occupation, and thus hip hop is
the first organized effort to represent the periphery as a distinct symbol of
aesthetics and ethics, as a socio-geographical manifestation of marginality. By
focussing on performance, the level of consciousness of the neighbourhood is
raised, and hip hop as a movement perceives itself as part of the trajectory of
working class social activism within Brazil thereby challenging the state’s aban-
donment and definition of the periphery as a space of exception (ibid: 72).
Additionally, the community action and social work both the Racionais MCs and
AfroReggae engage in contribute to citizenship-consciousness, particularly with
the marginalized youth, as these groups attempt to convince them of the
importance of an alternative system designed to provide a more regularized
option for the youth in the periferia (ibid: 76). “AfroReggae is an ideology – to
teach culture, social responsibility and creativity. These days if you really want
to change a situation you first have to change people’s self-image in that
situation” (Júnior, cited in Neate 2003: 199-200).
This shift towards a recognition of community and culture as active agents in the
production of life within the periphery resonates within new thinking within so-
ciology, wherein a re-conceptualization of social capital is being reviewed to de-
termine the positive consequences of sociability (Alder and Kwan 2002; Portes
88 | New Directions
Thus, it is proposed that Brazilian political hip hop, specifically through the
groups Racionais MCs and AfroReggae is re-imagining the politics of the
periphery through peripheral cultural-politics, expressed in their aural and per-
formance discourse, their community actions, and their promotion of peripheral
cultural movements, thereby potentially transforming the violence within and
without the borders of the favela and consequently overcoming and reversing the
trend of camp to city, and ushering in a re-conception, or a re-territorialization of
city to city. “Through their music, a revolution will come” (Favela Rising 2005).
14
As a population, people are governed not as a mere aggregate of individuals, but as a group of
living beings which presents to political authority all the problems of humanity. Agamben
perceived the production of the biopolitical body as the original activity of sovereign power, and
thus the idea of biopolitics is as old as the sovereign exception, and thus the ban (1998: 6).
“Placing biological life at the centre of its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing
other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life” (ibid). Thus, an effort to
overcome the production of bare life should necessarily reflect a shift away from biopolitics.
15
Ethopolitics has been proposed by Rose as a means of characterizing the means by which
features of human individual and collective existence, such as sentiments, values, and beliefs,
have come to “provide the medium within which the self-government of the autonomous
individual can be connected up with the imperatives of good government” (1999: 477).
Population civility, the level of trust in society, and the intensity of community feeling are valued
and become important for the construction of politics and society. Rose proposes that from their
adjustment and encouragement a series of other beneficial developments will follow. Thus,
improving communities should be the approach forwarded in a program designed to reduce
crime, improve job opportunities, or to make representative government more effective (ibid).
Governmental ideals would necessarily be re-directed towards a moral politics, wherein freedom,
justice, equality, mutual responsibility, citizenship, common sense, economic efficiency,
prosperity, growth, fairness, and rationality (Rose and Miller 1992: 179) would replace
discrimination, racism, prejudice, abandonment, societal brutality, corruption, violence, and the
camp as the norm.
MacDonald | Peripheral Spaces, Peripheral Sounds |89
Bibliography
Adler, P.S., and S.W. Kwon. “Social Capital: Prospects for a New Concept”.
The Academy of Management Review, 27(1) (2002): 17-40.
Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Soverign Power and Bare Life (D. Heller-Roazen,
Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Favela Rising. Dir. Matt Mochary and Jeff Zimbalist. Sidetrack Films, 2005.
90 | New Directions
Goldstein, D.M. Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality
in a Rio Shantytown. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2003.
Human Rights Watch. Lethal Force: Police Violence and Public Security in Rio
de Janeiro and São Paulo. New York, NY: Human Rights Watch Press,
2009.
Lund, J., and M. del Pilar Melgarejo. “Walking in the Slum: Urban Cultural
Production Today”. Hispanic Issues On Line, Fall 2008. Electronic
Document, <www.hispanicissues.umn.edu>. Accessed 23 October
2009.
Neate, P. Where You’re At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip Hop Planet.
London: Bloomsbury, 2003.
Neate, P., and D. Platt. Culture is our Weapon: AfroReggae in the Favelas of
Rio. London: Latin American Bureau, 2006.
Ohmer, S.S. “Performance Responses Outside of the Law”. LASA 2009, 2009.
MacDonald | Peripheral Spaces, Peripheral Sounds |91
———. “Hip Hop as Pedagogy: A Look into ‘Heaven’ and ‘Soul’ in São Paulo,
Brazil”. Anthropological Quarterly, 80(3) (2007): 673-709.
———. “‘Writing in the Margins’: Brazilian Hip-Hop as an Educational
Project”. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 34(4) (2004): 411-
432.
Perlman, J.E. Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Rose, N., and P. Miller. “Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of
Government”. British Journal of Sociology, 43 (1992): 172-205.
Stapleton, K.R. “From the Margins to Mainstream: The Political Power of Hip-
Hop”. Media, Culture, and Society, 20(2) (1998): 219-234.
92 | New Directions
Section III
Global Issues:
Rising Insecurity?
94 |
Abeling | Implementing Environmental Peacemaking |95
Introduction
Although transboundary protected areas (TBPA) are not a new phenomenon in
nature conservation, the concept of “peace parks” has received increasing
attention among policy makers and academics over the last decade. The idea that
conservation and sustainable use of natural resources across national borders can
provide a platform for dialogue between states is widely recognized as an
innovative approach to prevent conflicts and ultimately, establish peace (Ali
2007, Griffin et al. 1999, Sandwith et al. 2001). In the field of security studies,
this notion has been framed by the concept of “environmental peacemaking”. By
asking how environmental cooperation can contribute to the prevention of violent
conflicts, this concept portrays the environment as an opportunity rather than a
threat to national security. Environmental peacemaking thus offers an alternative
understanding of the way in which environmental factors relate to security. In
particular, it can be distinguished from the traditional discourse on “environmental
security”, in which the environment has often been securitized.1
In order to contextualize the notion of peace parks, the paper will first discuss the
traditional discourse on environmental security, which emerged in the early
1
For the purpose of this paper, a rather broad understanding will be applied that perceives
securitization as a process in which an issue is discursively constructed as an existential threat that
requires extraordinary policy responses outside the normal bounds of political procedure (Trombetta
2008).
2
“Global governance” will be broadly defined in this paper as a “project [that] is normatively about
dispersing power away from geographically defined nation states” (Duffy 2007: 57)
96 | New Directions
1970s. Special attention will be given to the way that the discourse has securitized
the environment. Against this background, the paper introduces the concept of
environmental peacemaking, which opposes the securitization of the environment.
Because environmental peacemaking promotes the environment as an opportunity
and calls for broader forms of environmental cooperation, it can be seen as the
conceptual frame for peace parks. As environmental peacemaking has not yet
been adequately reflected in the academic literature, the paper will discuss in
greater detail the two primary pathways through which the concept seeks to
work and will take into account the implications that these have for the notion of
identity, security, and state sovereignty. Considering the example of the Great
Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) between South Africa, Mozambique, and
Zimbabwe, the paper assesses some of the shortcomings and pitfalls of
implementing the notion of environmental peacemaking through peace parks.
Special attention will be given to the complex global network of actors and
interests that are involved in the GLTP and that implement the project on
neoliberal paradigms of economic growth. This approach often negatively affects
people living within the park, who are faced with resettlement processes aiming
at increasing the park’s tourism potential. Ultimately, these developments show
that peace parks in many ways affect the national sovereignty of the participating
countries and potentially reinforce or create conflicts.
3
The emergence of the ecological movement in the 1970s was informed by a variety of political
events and publications. Among the most important political events was the 1972 United Nations
(UN) Conference on the Human Environment, which created the UN Environment Programme, as
well as the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, which revealed the tremendous environmental damages
of warfare. At the same time, important books like “Limits to Growth” (Meadows et al. 1972) and
“The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology” (Commoner 1971) highlighted the scarce
character of natural resource and the impacts that human activity has on the environment.
Abeling | Implementing Environmental Peacemaking |97
security debate has been subject to extensive criticism. In his 2001 book “The
Meaning of Environmental Security”, John Barnett nicely summarized the
academic debate when stating:
The concept of environmental security has become increasingly
popular since the end of the Cold War, but its meaning is by no
means clear. The literature has evolved in an ad hoc manner with a
variety of interpretations vying for credibility. Ambiguity and
diversity are characteristics of this literature. Environmental security
arises from the conjunction of two powerful yet (probably)
ontological divergent words: ‘environment’ and ‘security’ (Barnett
2001: 1).
Barnett points to a variety of significant problems and pitfalls related to the
debate on environmental security. Most importantly, there is no consensus as to
what the debate is actually about. The meaning of “environmental security” is
diffuse and hosts a variety of causal assumptions. Generally, two different
pathways can be identified: threats to security emerging from the environment,
and threats to the environment, caused by human impacts.4 The dominant body
of literature is concerned with the former understanding, which assumes that
scarce resources and environmental degradation can be the source of violent
conflict. This thesis was prominently put forward by Homer-Dixon and the
University of Toronto Peace and Conflicts Studies Programme (Homer Dixon
1994, Homer-Dixon and Percival 1996) and the Environment and Conflicts
Project (Bachler and Spillman 1996). These projects have shaped the terminology
of “environmentally-induced conflicts” and contributed to the prominent role
that “resource wars” play in the public discourse.
4
Especially in the early stages of the debate, a third way of addressing environmental security
existed, which was concerned with the way the environment was used as a means of warfare. This
approach “involves the targeting, destruction, or manipulation of the environment for hostile
purposes” (Foster 2001: 382) and roots in techniques deployed in the Vietnam and Cold War. Today,
this method of “environmental warfare” is prohibited under the 1976 “Convention on the Prohibition
of Military or any Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques”.
98 | New Directions
Much attention has been given to the way the environment has been securitized
in the discourse on the linkages between environmental change and security and
to the implications that this development has for the formulation of security
policies worldwide (Barnett 2001, Dalby 2009, Deudney 1990, 1999, De Wilde
2008, Trombetta 2008). From its very beginning, the debate contained a powerful
rhetoric which portrayed the environment as an existential threat to the survival
of humankind. The most drastic example of this is probably Richard Kaplan’s
1994 article “The Coming Anarchy”, which linked the environment to a darkly-
painted future of “disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of
resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation states and
international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms,
and international drug cartels” (Kaplan 1994: 44 and 46).
The primary way to achieve this goal is to foster environmental cooperation. The
authors suggest that there are two pathways for environmental peacemaking to
become reality. First, environmental problems should be understood by all
Abeling | Implementing Environmental Peacemaking |99
5
Due to the association of environmental problems with the tragedy of the commons, several authors
have applied game theoretical models to analyze environmental security, in general, and the
establishment and effectiveness of peace parks, in particular (cf. Soroos (1994) and Lejano (2007)).
100 | New Directions
Duffy (2001, 2007) has explicitly pointed to the role of global governance in this
process. Defining global governance broadly as a “project [that] is normatively
about dispersing power away from geographically defined nation states” (Duffy
2007: 57), she argues that the effective implementation of extensive forms of en-
vironmental cooperation should be based on transnational networks of non-state
actors and societal forces rather than on traditional inter-state cooperation.
Because most environmental problems are transnational in character, it is argued
that environmental peacemaking needs to be implemented through forms of gov-
ernance which go beyond the nation state. In this respect, environmental
peacemaking challenges the traditional Westphalian understanding of the nation
state and as the key actor in international relations and promotes transnational
forms of identity. The institutional framework of environmental cooperation
Abeling | Implementing Environmental Peacemaking |101
It is beyond the scope of this paper to assess whether the explicit promotion of
sovereignty of global actors is a radical demand or simply a factual assessment
of current practices in international relations. Either way, environmental
peacemaking risks legitimizing “interventionist” approaches to environmental
cooperation and conflict resolution, as it marginalizes the role of sovereign
nation states. It thus is a post-Westphalian project with far reaching consequences
for our understandings of identity, security, and sovereignty. Before analyzing
some of the problematic implications of this approach by drawing on the example
of the GLTP, the next section will introduce the concept of transboundary
protected areas and peace parks in greater detail.
102 | New Directions
Despite these early developments, it is only since the 1990s that TBPA are
explicitly recognized as instruments of conflict prevention. Drawing on the logic
of environmental peacemaking, it is argued that cross-border conservation offers
the opportunity to establish dialogue and cooperation. Hence, the term “peace
park” was increasingly used to describe the establishment of cross-border con-
servation areas. No universally accepted definition exists of the term “peace
park“. This fact significantly contributes to much of the confusion and lack of
conceptual clarity of the notion. Different actors involved in the process of
promoting and establishing peace parks use different definitions. This paper
adopts the definition of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature
(IUCN), which defines peace parks as “transboundary protected areas that are
formally dedicated to the protection and maintenance of biological diversity, and
of natural and associated cultural resources, and to the promotion of peace and
cooperation” (Sandwith 2001: 4). In theory, countries involved in establishing a
peace park sign an international treaty and establish a joint management regime
that allows officials of all countries involved to execute powers and influence
both the overall political administration as well as the day-to-day management of
the park. If these institutions are effective, the establishment of a peace park can
lead to the removal of border fences between the different national parks. A rare
case in which the creation of a transboundary protected area has actually
translated in the removal of fences and the establishment of multinational man-
agement institutions is the Great Limpopo National Park. Because of its relatively
sophisticated management structure, the park is considered as one of the most
advanced peace park projects worldwide.
Abeling | Implementing Environmental Peacemaking |103
Although the early history of the Great Limpopo National Park can be traced
back to the 1920s, the park in its current form was established in 2002.6 It links
South Africa’s Kruger National Park (KNP or “Kruger”), Mozambique’s Limpopo
National Park (LNP), and Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Park (GNP). The
GLTP encompasses approximately 35,000 km2 (see Annex: Map 1). It is envisioned
to be only the core protected area of a much wider Great Limpopo Transfrontier
Area (GLTA), which will be roughly 100,000 km2 in size.7 The GLTP has to be
seen in the regional southern African context. As Spenceley and Schoon (2007)
point out, the end of the Mozambican civil war and the establishment of the
Southern African Development Community (SADC) in 1992, as well as the fall
of South Africa’s apartheid regime in 1994 facilitated a proliferation of peace
parks in Southern Africa, as the aftermath of both conflicts provided an opportunity
for innovative approaches to post-conflict reconciliation. According to the Peace
Parks Foundation (PPF), a South Africa based international NGO, there are
currently 14 transboundary nature conservation projects in the region that are
pushed towards becoming peace parks (PPF 2008). In terms of its institutional
development, the GLTP is certainly the most advanced of these parks, as the
three countries signed a treaty in November 2002 which established a comprehensive
management regime that encompasses a ministerial committee, a joint management
board, as well as several issue-specific management committees.
6
For a detailed discussion of the early history of the GLTP, see Mavhunga and Spierenburg (2009).
7
The dimensions of the GLTP project are extraordinary. If the GLTA is established according to the
current plans, the protected area will be larger than Portugal or roughly one third the size of
Germany. The implications of the devotion of such vast areas to nature conservation and broader,
socio-political objectives such as conflict prevention are not sufficiently studied and accepted rather
uncritically in the academic literature. Further research is needed in this area.
104 | New Directions
The coalition involves amongst others the governments of South Africa, Mozam-
bique, and Zimbabwe, the Southern African Development Community (SADC),
several western donor agencies such as the World Bank, the German Development
Bank “Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau” (KfW), and the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID), as well as powerful international NGOs,
above all the South African based Peace Parks Foundation.8 The creation of the
GLTP did not create an entirely new conservation area but rather merged
previously existing national parks. In this respect, the natural resources and bio-
diversity within GLTP were not immediately threatened prior to its existence.
This undermines one of the key rationales of environmental peacemaking,
namely that the common threat of ecosystem degradation causes different parties
to cooperate to avoid this development. The existing literature on the establishment
of the GLTP suggest that rather than a common threat, a joint interest of the
involved actors to increase ecotourism revenues and regional economic development
motivated the establishment of the park, as the economic potential of the GLTP
project, in particular the opportunity to increase ecotourism, is recognized by all
actors involved (Wollmer 2003, van Amerom and Büscher 2005).
8
The PPF has been decisive for promoting the idea of a transfrontier conservation area in the late
1990s, played a major role in attracting donors and funding, and is contracted as the major
implementing agency for the GLTP (Duffy 2006).
9
It is beyond the scope of this paper to identify the particular interests of the companies funding
the PPF. However, it certainly is not coincidental that among the biggest donors of the organization
are large corporations from the infrastructure, luxury goods, and resource extraction sector, such as
Daimler Chrysler, Deutsche Bank, De Beers, Vodafone, Total, Philips, and Caritier (Peace Parks
Foundation 2008).
Abeling | Implementing Environmental Peacemaking |105
10
Limpopo National Park was established in 2001 one year after the initiation of the GLTP process.
In November 2000, the Environment Ministers of South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe signed
a Memorandum of Understanding that initiated the process and lead to the 2002 signature of the
international treaty that formally established the GLTP. Changing the status of the previous hunting
area Coutada 16 in Mozambique to a national park was identified as a crucial step towards the
realization of the GLTP project.
11
The relocation of animals is often promoted as a return to the “natural conditions” of the Great
Limpopo ecosystem. However, it can be assumed that strategic considerations played a more
106 | New Directions
important role than the desire to create a viable ecosystem. Besides the development of LNP’s
tourism potential, the relocation also aims at mitigating the effects of South Africa’s contested
“hands-off” natural resource management. Because South African authorities refused to cull animal
populations in Kruger, the park is close to its maximum carrying capacity (Spenceley 2006, 2007).
12
In this paper, the term “local communities” will be used to describe people living in villages
within or around the GLTP areas.
Abeling | Implementing Environmental Peacemaking |107
One of the main conflicting issues concerning local communities in the GLTP is
the harmonization of land use between South Africa and Mozambique: while
South Africa’s KNP maintains a preservationist management regime, which
allows no-one to reside or hunt in the park, Mozambique’s LNP was previously
designated a hunting zone and is still home to approximately 20,000-28,000
people (Rodgers 2009). The settlements within LNP have caused conflicts
between South Africa and Mozambique, because the population concentrates
along the three main rivers in LNP, which were identified as offering the highest
potential for tourism and wildlife conservation (Van Amerom 2002). South
African policy towards communities in LNP suggests that the country envisions
implementing the same land use regulatory framework in LNP as in KNP.13 This
requires the resettlement of the local communities in the Mozambican part of
GLTP. Indeed, the changing of the status of Coutada 16 hunting area to a more
conservation-oriented national park in 2001 “can partially be interpreted as
Mozambique giving in to South African pressure” (Van Amerom and Bücher
2005: 171), as it established stricter regulations to reduce the impact of humans.
Furthermore, Mozambique in 2003 launched a “Resettlement Policy Framework”
for LNP, which sets out the overall resettlement approach for the park and that
started a resettlement program for at least 6,500 of the people living within LNP
(Limpopo National Park 2004). As in the case of the revenues for ecotourism,
the struggles surrounding the settlements within LNP demonstrate the South
African hegemony in the overall decision making framework.
13
This assumption is supported by statements made by leading South African officials. In 2002, the
Environment Minister of South Africa caused diplomatic tensions when calling for a fast
establishment of the GLTP, which would require an “instant Kruger” in Mozambique (Duffy 2006).
108 | New Directions
Spenceley 2006, Dressler and Büscher 2008, Rodgers 2009). The reasons for this
are diverse, and cannot be assessed comprehensively at this point. However, it
seems worth noting that the establishment of the GLTP and the CBNRM schemes
are driven by a top down approach that is characterized by a significant lack of
communication. The rapid establishment of the LNP had significant impacts on
the livelihoods of local people, as it was not communicated sufficiently. Rodgers
(2009) points out that in many cases, the people living within the park did not
even know it was established, and were unaware of the stricter conservation reg-
ulations. This led to the fact that local hunters were arrested, because they did not
know hunting became illegal in the new park. In cases where local people
actually were aware of the developments, they often expressed financial constraints
over the CBNRM process. People were unwilling to wait a minimum of 18
months before first results of ecotourism become visible, and another two to five
years before the venture becomes profitable (Duffy 2006). This even led to local
resistance against the granting of tourism concessions in the GLTP. All these
examples have caused fears among observers that the establishment of the GLTP
follows the shady colonial legacy of nature conservation in Africa, which is tied
to displacement, violence, and racism.14
National Sovereignty
The notion of peace parks as instruments of environmental peacemaking has im-
plications not only on the local scale, but on the supranational scale, too.
Promoted as part of a process of regional integration, peace parks intend to bring
borders under supranational regimes (Ramutsindela 2007). However, the peace
park concept fundamentally relies on states to implement the joint management
regimes. As shown above, even the sub-national level can be important for peace
parks, as it legitimizes some of the practices associated with cross-border con-
servation, for example, ecotourism. Therefore, the promotion of peace parks
takes place in an environment which integrates the supranational, national, and
local level and which weakens the notion of sovereignty.
The establishment and management of the GLTP demonstrate this. Officially, the
international treaty that established the GLTP in 2002 clearly reaffirms the
national sovereignty of South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. Article 5 of
the treaty states that the “sovereign rights of each Party shall be respected, and
no Party shall impose decisions on another” (Treaty of the GLTP 2002: 8). In
practice, however, these prescriptions prove to be problematic. The attempts to
harmonize land use between South Africa and Mozambique have demonstrated
that the establishment of a peace park can significantly limit national decision-
making power. The settlements in Mozambique’s LNP have caused fears in
14
For a detailed discussion of the colonial legacy of national parks and transboundary protected
areas in Africa, see Ramutsindela (2004). For a critical anthropological discussion of local
populations and conservation in the GLTP, see Hughes (2008).
Abeling | Implementing Environmental Peacemaking |109
South Africa that excess elephants transferred from KNP could be poached. The
South African Department of Environmental Affairs (DEAT), together with the
Peace Parks Foundation, thus actively pushed for Mozambique to resettle the
local communities from LNP. As shown above, the Mozambican resettlement
policy can be interpreted as giving in to this pressure.
Conclusion
Environmental peacemaking certainly is an innovative concept that offers a
meaningful change in the long debate on environmental security. The increasing
attention that this approach receives from academics and policy makers is a
promising sign that environmental concerns will become a strong element in
conflict resolution strategies in the future. However, it is important to critically
reflect on the mechanisms through which the concept is implemented. This
analysis has demonstrated some of the problematic implications that the imple-
mentation of environmental peacemaking through peace parks can have. The
GLTP project at best has a mixed record of establishing cooperation so far.
Although a comprehensive institutional framework has been established, the
park has caused rather than prevented conflicts. This does not mean that the
concept of peace parks should be abandoned, altogether. Rather, pointing to the
potential shortcomings and pitfalls of peace parks can help to raise awareness
and further develop the idea.
110 | New Directions
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MIT Press, 2007.
Commoner, Barry. The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology. New
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Dressler, Wolfram and Bram Büscher. “Market triumphalism and the CBNRM
‘crises’ at the Southern African section of the Great Limpopo
Transfrontier Park.” Geoforum 39 (2008): 452-465.
———. “Peace Parks and Global Politics: The Paradoxes and Challenges of
Global Governance.” Peace Parks. Conservation and Conflict
Resolution. Ed. Saleem Ali. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. 55-68.
Great Limpopo National Park Joint Management Board. Joint Management and
Policy Guidelines for the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. 2002.
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Kaplan, Richard. “The Coming Anarchy.” Atlantic Monthly 273:2 (1994): 44-
76.
Matthew, Richard, Mark Halle, and Jason Switzer. Conserving the Peace:
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Rodgers, Graeme. “The Faint Footprint of Man: Representing Race, Place and
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(2006): 294-312.
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Annex
!
Thailand has been in a constant state of upheaval since a military coup deposed
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in September 2006. Beyond a simple change
in government, the coup, and the prolonged chaos which has followed it,
represents the failure of a social and political project. Thaksin was not simply
just another prime minister, he represented the ascendency of a newly confident
business class, who sought to transform the country along the lines of Western
economic policy by creating a consumerist culture that elevated CEOs, yet also
provided a social safety net for its citizens, with the goal of establishing Thailand
as a confident and self-assured country. Politically Thaksin frequently spoke in
favor of the “Singapore model” and hoped to rule for at least a decade with his
Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party. In a country where no elected prime minister had
ever completed their term, these were bold ambitions. Understanding the rise of
Thaksin, the composition of his initial basis of support, and how key influential
figures turned against him is crucial for comprehending the instability that
Thailand currently finds itself mired in.
September 2006. As I will argue, the coup represented an attempt by the “old
guard” of Thai society, comprising elements of the military, the state bureaucracy,
and various figures with close connections to the Thai royalty, popularly referred
to as the “network monarchy” to regain its waning dominance, who felt threatened
not only by Thaksin and his empowerment of the ignored masses of the Thai
countryside, but also by Thailand’s watershed 1997 constitution, which democratized
the organs of the Thai state at the expense of its traditional power bases. The
extended period of instability, which has followed the coup, with the inability of
any single actor or institution of Thai society to exercise any clear modicum of
control, is a direct result of the failure to integrate the rural majority in any
meaningful way into Thai society. Their anger arises from what they see as the
unjust deposition of Thaksin, their best hope for social, political, and economic
advancement. However the roots of the current crisis in Thailand cannot be
simply confined to the rural majority. The cause of the present instability, as I
will show throughout the course of this paper, results from the sharp antagonisms
between class forces in the country, which had briefly unified in 2001 over the
social project of Thaksin and his TRT party. Ironically then, Thaksin has been re-
sponsible for drawing Thai society together and breaking it apart.
word. His often cryptic statements are poured over for any signs of disapproval.
In a country not historically known for stable or benevolent governments the role
of the King as a father figure, intervening when necessary to protect his people,
with, supposedly, their best interests in mind, holds obvious appeal. Outside of
the direct power of the King the charge of lèse majesté, insulting the King, holds
dire consequences. While the King himself is unable to charge anyone with lèse
majesté, nothing prevents those who proclaim themselves as defending the King
from doing so, with prison sentences of several years following successful con-
victions. For those in public life, even the mere accusations of lèse majesté is
often enough to end a political career.
While the political situation may have been one of stagnant institutions and an
ossified elite which sought to maintain its own power at the expense of any
notion of the national interest, economically, at least in its urban centers, Thailand
was experiencing a renaissance. Viewed as a regional bulwark against the spread
of communism Thailand received large amounts of American aid, this along with
the receipt of World Bank loans on favorable terms, and the successful pursuit of
an export-orientated industrialization policy resulted in the spectacular sustained
growth of the Thai economy. From 1960 to 2000 its GDP grew at an average of
7% a year, per capita GDP rose from US $100 in 1961 to US $ 2,750 by 1995.
Correlated with this economic growth was the rapid surge in Thailand’s population,
which doubled in this period, with the city of Bangkok quadrupling in size
(Phongpaichit and Baker 2004: 9). The exponential expansion of Bangkok
drastically altered its class composition, formerly the preserve of government
bureaucrats, by the mid 1990s they found themselves dwarfed by the rising
urban middle class, who now outnumbered them 3 to 1 (Phongpaichit and Baker
2004: 9). Yet the economic dynamism in the country was largely confined to the
boundaries of Bangkok. The majority of the population remained in the rural
north, passed over in large part during the economic boom and entrapped in a
clientist political framework that provided no outlets for the expression of their
interests.
The blurring between business and politics and the wealth it brought Thaksin
was unusual only in terms of the speed in which he acquired his fortune and its
eventual size. As noted above, the Thai parliament was comprised primarily of
those who had entered politics in order to protect and extend their business
interests. Phatharathananunth agrees with this shallow characterization of Thai
politics. “At best, Thai electoral politics can qualify as democracy in form only.
From the point of view of almost all Thai politicians, involvement in politics is
the best way to access wealth. Therefore, for them competing in elections or
playing politics, as they refer to it, has become a kind of business activity”
(Phatharathananunth 2002: 127). While Thaksin had profited handsomely from
his contacts in the Thai state, following the nature of Thai politics he would
eventually be drawn into assuming political positions himself in order to secure
his assets and expand his own power. This appeared to be more necessary than
ever considering the continued instability in Thai politics. Another military coup
in 1991 had faltered under the pressure of widespread protest. With the declaration
of a state of emergency by the military after widespread rioting in the capital and
threats to shoot protesters on sight, the King, intervened, forcing the resignation
of the junta government. Chamlong Srimuang, the charismatic leader of the anti-
military protests, founded the Phalang Dharma Party or “moral force” party
shortly afterward. Thaksin, under Chamlong’s guidance joined the party in 1994
and as Phalang Dharma was part of the government Thaksin was quickly
appointed foreign minister. Chamlong left the Phalang Dharma following its
decline in fortunes in the July 1995 election, in which it was reduced from 46 to
23 seats. He was successful however in having Thaksin, whom he considered his
protege, (“Chamlong gives Thaksin support”) confirmed as leader of the party, a
position that would allow him to secure to token position of deputy prime
minister in charge of Bangkok traffic. Thaksin would hold the office for only a
few months, pulling out of the government in August 1996, in protest at what he
saw as widespread government corruption and forcing another election, one that
Morgan | The Absence of a Coherent Elite in Thailand | 121
would see the collapse of the Phalang Dharma party after it won only a single
seat and Thaksin’s first ejection from political life.
While the drive towards the 1997 constitution had popular support, a far-sighted
section of the Thai elite also threw its weight behind the process. As Thailand
modernized it behooved the traditional constellation of power around the
monarchy to expand its base of support beyond simply members of the Thai state
and rural peasants who uncritically supported the King. The rise of an urban Thai
middle class, centered primarily around the capital, required a more sophisticated
method of governance, one which on the surface democratized Thailand’s
antiquated institutions, while at the same time allowing the traditional centers of
power to maintain their overall control. The need to incorporate the middle
classes into an expanded framework of governance assumed special importance
as King Bhumibol, the linchpin who held the country together, entered his
seventies. Thus the 1997 constitution, as McCargo argues, was an attempt to
prepare for a post-Bhumibol Thailand.
The 1997 constitution legislated in the wake of the Asian
financial crisis of that year, generated immense public interest
and enjoyed a high measure of legitimacy. Prominent royalists
such as former premier Anand Panyarachun and social reformer
Dr Prawase Wasi, who might bedubbed the ‘liberal wing’ of the
network monarchy, played a key role in negotiating this elite pact.
On 2 November 1995, Prawase declared to a crowded Bangkok
ballroom that Thailand urgently needed a new constitution, to
help avert the potential calamity of political violence following
Bhumibol’s death. None of the media outlets represented in the
room dared report this highly sensitive speech,one of the few
122 | New Directions
While the 1997 constitution was a response to the rise of Thailand’s urban
middle class and was meant to reestablish Thai politics upon a new foundation,
its elaboration occurred against the backdrop of near economic collapse, as the
country experienced its worst downturn in the modern era, ending decades of
successive economic growth. Thailand was the epicenter of the Asian financial
crisis and suffered most heavily from it, with its economy contracting a startlingly
11 percent in 1997 alone (Tejapria 2006: 23). The intervention of the IMF, along
with demands by American officials that Thailand restructure its economy along
Morgan | The Absence of a Coherent Elite in Thailand | 123
more neoliberal lines, provoked a nationalist backlash from within the country,
which saw its present economic situation as the result of hostile outside forces.
Thaksin would ride this wave of resentment all the way to the apex of political
power. The sitting government of Chuan Leekpai had come to power in November
1997 as the financial crisis continued to rattle the economy, in large part favored
the economic orthodoxy of the IMF, arguing that Thailand needed to accept the
“bitter medicine” of economic reform. Thaksin, clearly contrasting himself with
Chuan, explicitly aligned himself against the IMF and with the growing popular
outrage against its economic prescriptions, as Lewis recounts:
Thaksin’s challenge gathered momentum, his policies about
aiding the poor and defying the IMF, as well as his image of
being a decision maker familiar with information technology,
became more attractive...his policies and image contrasted with
Chaun’s attachment to IMF orthodoxy and his preference for
orderliness was interpreted by the public as indecisiveness (Lewis
2006: 42).
Seeking to capitalize on the widespread discontent against the Chaun government,
Thaksin founded a new political party, Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais), clearly
positing himself as the nationalist alternative to Chaun.
Not only would Thaksin profit politically from the Asian financial crisis, the
upheaval it would cause in the Thai economy would also see his corporate
holdings emerge more dominant, aided once again by his impeccable connections.
Thaksin’s relationship with Thanong Bidaya, finance minister when the financial
crisis broke, went back at least a decade. In the past he had served as a financial
advisor to Thaksin and later as one of his corporate directors. It was rumored that
he informed Thaksin a week before the decision to float the bhat was officially
announced, allowing Thaksin to hedge his bets. Whether these rumors are true or
not, it cannot be denied that Thaksin’s corporate holdings suffered far less than
those of CP Telecom Asia, his chief competitor. All in all Thaksin’s companies
lost a total of 1.1 billion bhat in 1997, compared to 26 billion for CP Telecom
Asia (Phongpaichit and Baker 2004: 58-9). Thaksin would utilize his reputation
as a successful and savvy businessman to his benefit as he sought to gain support
for the new TRT party.
The formation of TRT was something new to Thailand, whereas historically Thai
political parties had clearly been ruled by specific fractions, with provincial
interests and narrow bases of support, leading to chronic instability. TRT appeared
to be a truly national party. Pongsudhirak elaborates on the ramifications of the
TRT's formation:
The TRT represented a new phenomenon in Thai politics. Never
before has such a large party been able to keep such a tight reign
124 | New Directions
The 1997 constitution was an attempt to incorporate the urban middle classes
into the country’s governance structures, yet in the same year the rising confidence
of this class was shattered as the economic chaos of that year sharply undermined
its future prospects. It was at this point that Thaksin began to draw around him
what would become the core of TRT, comprised of Thaksin loyalists in the old
Phalang Dharma Party and those who had assisted him in some manner in his
business dealings in the past, with Thanong Bidaya figuring prominently amongst
this segment. The orientation of the party was strongly pro-business, with
nationalist overtones. What truly set the party apart from its competitors however
was its appeal directly to the neglected rural majority, who had historically been
overlooked in the political process. Many of the TRT’s policies directed targeted
Thailand’s rural constituency amongst these were a 30 Baht per hospital visit
scheme, a 3-year debt moratorium for farmers, and a 1 million Baht micro-credit
development fund for all rural villages. These proposals proved to be extremely
popular, granting the party near universal support in the rural north, combined
with the support of the urban middle classes of Bangkok, support for the TRT ex-
tended across all major segments of Thai society.
The promises that Thaksin made regarding health-care and support for the devel-
opment of villages were largely fulfilled during his first term. His most notable
achievement in this regard was the extension of cheap and readily available
health care to nearly three-quarters of the population. Although only essential
services were covered and quality remained an issue, the health-care program
created by the Thaksin government greatly benefited the lives of Thailand’s
poorest citizens:
The publicly provided and funded healthcare in Thailand is no
doubt very basic, but it is a vast improvement over the situation
prior to universal coverage, which exposed the poor to great
financial uncertainties and stress...there has been a noticeable
increase in utilization rates and a significant decline in the
incidence of poverty due to healthcare expenditures (Ramesh
2009: 164).
The newly introduced healthcare program was so popular that it was retained
even after the military takeover in 2006. However while state programs were
being used to benefit the most downtrodden in Thai society, at the same time the
pervasive corruption of Thaksin, combined with his autocratic tendencies,
undermined the hard-fought gains of the 1990s, which had culminated in the
landmark 1997 constitution.
Before he even officially took office Thaksin was already facing allegations that
he was subverting the law and engaging in corrupt practices. In April 2001 it
emerged that Thaksin had transferred 10 billion baht in shares from his companies
to his maids, chauffeurs, and guards in order to avoid having to fully declare his
assets, as required by electoral law. Declaring that had had made an “honest
mistake” and after running a strong PR campaign across the country, he was
acquitted by a single vote in a judicial tribunal on the eve of assuming power
(Lewis 2006: 73). Further scandals would continually plague Thaksin during his
first term in office, which would dramatically undermine the emerging democratic
culture in Thailand by assaulting the array of good governance institutions
created by the 1997 constitution, as well as important civil society organizations.
126 | New Directions
The first such incident was provoked by a seemly trivial matter. Early in
Thaksin’s term The Far East Economic Review published an article claiming
that there were tensions between Thaksin and the royal family. In response
Thaksin launched an investigation of all media, which he deemed to be biased
against him, including the two largest daily newspapers in the country, The
Nation and the Thai Post. Thaksin utilized a curious tool against the media.
Accusing them of being funded illegally through foreign sources, he had the
Anti-Money Laundering Office (AMLO), originally created to crackdown on
politicians suspected of receiving bribes, launch a formal investigation. The
vigorous defense of the accused media organizations, along with a total lack of
evidence, combined with the government rapidly distancing itself from the pro-
ceedings put a quick end to the investigations. The demise of the AMLO
investigation so soon after it had began was an embarrassment to the government
and undermined a supposedly independent government agency. However some
posited that the true purpose of the investigation was to distract from new
regulations, which would benefit Thaksin’s business interests:
The AMLO dispute drew attention away from TRT’s introduction
of new regulations concerning large telecom concessions that
would benefit Shinawatra companies and from the government’s
failure to establish a National Broadcasting Commission and
National Telecommunications Commission.... Thaksin’s political
strength was increasing. A new business-based nepotism centered
on the Shinawatra family was replacing the older-style military
clans that had formerly run Thailand (Lewis 2006: 82).
While Thaksin had alienated members of the media and his rising power had
concerned members of the military, who had traditionally comprised the elite in
the country, further scandals would turn the middle-classes of Bangkok as well
as formerly staunch allies against him, creating the circumstances in which he
would be removed from power in September 2006.
Most noteworthy amongst the numerous scandals in the later years of Thaksin’s
reign was the replacement of the commissioners of the National Committee to
Combat Corruption (NCCC) with those more favorable to Thaksin. The NCCC
was responsible for launching several investigations against Thaksin and his
allies, however its work ground to a halt in May 2005 after a historic ruling by a
judicial tribunal that found the commissioners on the NCC were themselves
guilty of corruption for awarding themselves substantial salary increments. The
TRT was able to take advantage of this situation and succeeded in appointing
new commissioners who were closely linked to senior political figures. Accordingly
ongoing investigations against the government were halted (Mutebi 2006: 309-
310). Thaksin’s refusal to be bound by the tenets of the new constitution would
create a deep-rooted and hostile antagonism in the middle classes that would be
Morgan | The Absence of a Coherent Elite in Thailand | 127
exploited by sections of the old elite who had seen their power diminish with
Thaksin’s rise to power.
The unending stream of scandals and allegations of corruption that had marred
the Thaksin government from the beginning fractured the unpredicted unity
amongst Thailand's diverse social stratum that had brought him to power. Despite
this however he succeeded in winning a second term in February 2005, becoming
the first elected prime minister in Thailand's history to fully complete a term in
office. Yet what seemed to be the start of a political dynasty was quickly undone
as an organized campaign against Thaksin began in earnest in the Autumn of
2005. It was started by two key figures of the Thai establishment who had
formerly been Thaksin’s close allies, Sondhi Limthongkul and Chamlong
Srimuang. Their main tactic was to portray Thaksin as someone who had
offended the highly revered Thai royal family, a well-tested and highly effective
means of discrediting someone in Thai society. What triggered the anti-Thaksin
campaign was the charge made in September 2005 that Thaksin was anti-
royalist. It was the owner of the Manager media group, Sondhi Limthongkul,
who made this accusation (Lewis 2007: 127). Sondhi was someone who had a
long history with Thaksin. He had in fact been a strong supporter for Thaksin for
years as Thaksin had bailed out his media conglomerate, which had been hard-
hit by the Asian financial crisis in 1997. Sondhi’s anger towards Thaksin arose
from the cancellation of his highly popular investigative journalist show that
aired on state-run and had recently shown a series of programs critical of
Thaksin. The second important figure crucial to Thaksin’s eventual demise was
Chamlong Srimuang, former Governor of Bangkok and leader of the 1992
protests that succeeded in bringing down the military government. Chamlong
had previously been Thaksin’s political mentor in the defunct Palang Dhama
Party and was in fact highly influential in bringing Thaksin into politics in the
first place. As a devout Buddhist, Chamlong was deeply offended by Thaksin’s
drive to privatize the country’s largest liquor company, Thai Beverage citing “...a
grave threat to the health, social harmony and time-honored ethics of Thai
culture if Thai Beverage was listed on the stock exchange” (Pinyorat 2005). The
combination of Chamlong’s political skill and Sondhi’s media interests meant
that they would be formidable opponents for Thaksin. While both Chamlong and
Sondhi had undeniably very personal reasons for opposing Thaksin, they were
successful in taking advantage of the growing discontent amongst the middle
classes with Thaksin and succeeded in creating an anti-Thaksin mass movement
based in Bangkok.
From the fall of 2005 onwards, Thaksin was regularly vilified in the press and
calls for his ouster grew increasingly strident as the opposition coalesced into the
People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD). Comprised primarily of the middle
128 | New Directions
classes of Bangkok who had initially supported Thaksin, the PAD also drew
support from a number of prominent academics and civil society organizations
along with those who had traditionally aligned themselves with the monarchy.
While the PAD was angered by what they saw as Thaksin’s subversion of
Thailand’s political institutions, their solutions, as will be seen below, were
anything but democratic. The PAD represented a minority of the population
overall, but they were the majority in the national capital and hence were able to
have huge impact on the nation’s affairs. Regular demonstrations of tens of
thousands of people demanded Thaksin’s ouster, created a sense of crisis for the
government, greatly interfering with its ability to conduct its daily business.
Seeking to break the deadlock Thaksin called for snap elections to take place on
April 2, 2006. These elections were largely boycotted by the opposition and saw
TRT returned to power with a majority for the third time. Following the outcome
Thaksin announced that he would not accept the role of prime minister when
parliament reconvened, but would remain on in a caretaker capacity, until a
suitable replacement could be found. This proved to be a moot point however, as
the Constitutional Court, in a landmark case of judicial activism, annulled the
results of the election, due to the “awkward positioning of the polling booths”
(“Constitutional Court invalidate the April election” The Nation, 2006). New
elections were ordered to take place in October, elections which the Democrat
Party, the largest oppositional party in the country, announced that it would
contest. It was in this confused and highly volatile situation that the military in-
tervened on September 19, 2006 taking control of the capital while Thaksin was
out of the country at a United Nations summit in New York City.
The seizure of power by the military was an attempt to change the rules of the
game. Interventions by the military in the past had decisively altered the Thai
political landscape, setting the acceptable conditions under which politics could
be conducted. This coup would be different however, not only because of whom
it was directed against, but also because if its goal was to restore an acceptable
level of stability to Thailand, it failed miserably. Instead it merely temporarily
froze the tensions in Thailand.
Immediately after coming to power, the military junta known as the Council for
National Security (CNS), repealed the 1997 constitution and replaced it with an
interim constitution, while it worked to devise a more permanent solution. While
this process was ongoing in May 2007, the Constitutional Tribunal officially
dissolved the TRT and banned all 111 members of the party executive from
holding political office for the next five years due to a series of alleged
irregularities from the annulled April 2006 election. Although they were also
charged with committing the same crimes, the opposition Democrat Party
escaped without penalty, leading many to question the neutrality of Thailand’s
courts. In the political vacuum following the coup the judiciary had assumed a
position of prominence in the country's affairs:
The episode illustrated a growing trend towards judicialization,
a royally promoted view that complex political problems could
not be solved through electoral politics or by elected officials,
but were best left to knowledgeable and highly moral judges....
If a military coup was the blunt instrument used to oust Thaksin
from office, judicialization could be seen as the means by which
the monarchical network sought to manage and reorganize
political power in the post-coup period (McCargo 2008: 335-
336).
As the elected bodies of Thailand and even the military have proved ineffective
in solving the present crisis, the courts have assumed a far more prominent role.
The annulling of an election and the forced destruction of the country’s most
popular political party would only be the first in a series of decisions by the
courts directed against Thaksin and his successors.
The more long term solution, meant to set the foundations for a post-coup
Thailand and return to it a semblance of stability was the 2007 constitution. It
was an unremarkable document that followed in the long tradition of constitutions
propagated by military governments in Thailand’s history. The constitution was
drafted solely by the junta behind the 2006 coup. Although draft versions were
freely circulated, it was illegal to publicly criticize them. Unsurprisingly the
2007 constitution reduced the democratic gains made by the 1997 constitution.
However the military had done nothing during its rule to rectify the deeply
130 | New Directions
Elections were held in December of 2007, with the military agreeing to cede
power to the winner the following month. Unsurprising for an astute observer,
but shocking and infuriating for the PAD, was the victory of the People’s Power
Party (PPP) officially led by Thaksin, but with Somchai Wongsawat, Thaksin’s
brother-in-law as acting leader due to Thaksin’s inability to enter the country.
Samak Sundaravej became Prime Minister. No one could accuse Samak of being
a leftist or harboring anti-monarchy sympathies. He in fact had a long history on
the ultra-right and was implicated in instigating the violence that led to the
massacre of 46 university students in Bangkok in 1976. (Handley 2006: 222).
Morgan | The Absence of a Coherent Elite in Thailand | 131
Samak was chosen because he was seen as a “tough” political figure who could
not be smeared as being opposed to the monarchy. Despite this however, Samak
would be quickly outmaneuvered on the streets and in the courts. Protests by the
PAD began in earnest that June, eventually culminating in a sit-in outside of
Government House, the prime minister’s residence, and violent clashes.
As the protests by the PAD continued throughout the Summer of 2008 they took
on an increasingly anti-democratic tone, with leaders of the PAD declaring that
as Thaksin supporters had on average lower levels of education, they should not
have equal say in the running of the country (Fuller: 2008b). PAD supporters
witnessing that the coup of 2006 had failed to undermine Thaksin’s base of
support now openly advocated anti-democratic measures as means to ensure that
Thaksin’s allies, and by connection the will of the majority in the country, was
denied:
PAD leaders demanded that Samak step down and two basic
changes be made. First, the proportion of the Parliament that is
elected should be limited to 30 percent, the rest appointed by the
elite. Second, they demanded the possibility of a prime minister
who was not an elected member of Parliament... The
position of the PAD was thus a rejection of one-person-one vote
electoral democracy (Warr 2009: 337).
The policies favored by the PAD were thus extremely regressive, making it clear
that their understanding of democracy was a highly restricted one, with democracy
becoming the reserve of the urban elite to the exclusion of everyone else.
As the protests by the PAD mounted throughout the Summer of 2008 tensions
rose rapidly, regular protests and blockading of parliament by PAD members
began to interfere with government business, and Samak, despite his tough guy
image, appeared to be reluctant to crack down on the protests, perhaps fearing a
greater confrontation. A blockade of Government House by the PAD began in
early September, forcing Samak to hold cabinet meetings at a nearby international
airport. When Samak finally attempted to clear the protesters, violent clashes
erupted, leaving one protester dead and dozens injured (Mydans and Fuller
2008a). In response Samak declared a state of emergency and ordered the army
onto the streets to maintain security, an order that the army refused to obey.
General Anupong Paochinda, the Army Chief of Staff, stated that the army had a
“neutral stance” towards the PAD, but called for Samak’s resignation (Mydans
2009a). Samak vowed to stay on, but he would eventually be forced from power
by mid-September, as the Constitutional Court found his work as host of a
cooking show Tasting, Ranting on Thai state television was an illegal conflict of
interest. His tenure in office had lasted just 7 months.
132 | New Directions
The PPP, for the time being, remained in power however, and it quickly appointed
Somchai Wongsawat, acting party leader, and Thaksin’s brother-in-law, as Prime
Minister. In response the PAD simply continued their protests, maintaining their
blockade of Government House, but realizing that a drastic escalation was
required if they hoped to achieve their objective of forcing the PPP from power.
A cycle of confrontation, protest, and counter-protest, became the norm in
Thailand as the UDD began to mobilize in Bangkok clashing violently with the
PAD, with injuries and deaths resulting (Associated Press 2008a). The decisive
action occurred when the PAD stormed and occupied Suvarnabhumi International,
the nation’s largest airport, forcing the cancellation of all flights. The local police
force seemed reluctant to intervene to end the stand-off causing Somochai to
dismiss Bangkok’s chief of police. Once again, it was the nation’s courts that
stepped into the void, issuing a ruling that the PPP was essentially a proxy of the
TRT and therefore an illegal party, that must disband. Somochai resigned after
less than 3 months in power, with the occupation of Suvarnabhumi airport
ending after eight days, stranding 230,000 tourists (Fuller 2008a), and costing
airlines tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
It was at this moment that splits became clear in the PPP. A segment of the PPP,
expecting that the party was about to be banned, formed a new party, Pheu Thai
Party (PTP), For Thais Party. The PTP was a rump party as most of those who
had served in executive positions in either the TRT or the PPP had been banned
from participation in politics for a minimum of five years. However a number of
now former PPP members, tiring of having to continually remaining one step
ahead of the courts and wishing to retain the benefits of a government MP
defected, joining the opposition Democrat Party. Such a move aligned the
defectors with their former enemies, as many of the leaders of the PAD were also
members of the Democrat Party. The banning of a large number of PPP members
from parliament, along with the defections to the Democrats, made it the largest
party in Parliament, allowing its leader, Abhisit Vejjajiva, to become prime
minister on December 17, 2008. While the PAD was jubilant, the UDD was
outraged, seeing with no lack on justification, that their democratic victories had
essentially been stolen from them. While the UDD had to some extent confronted
the PAD during the demonstrations of the past month, the PAD, based in
Bangkok and with a deeper well of resources to draw upon, clearly had the
advantage at this early stage. This would soon change however as the UDD
began to build the networks necessary for a sustained campaign of mobilization.
Abhisit, despite wishing a return to some semblance of normality, proved unable
to mollify the rising anger of the UDD and halt their momentum. Abhisit was
viewed as simply part of the elite, which had denied them their voice in
determining the course of the nation and, as Mydans notes, will be unlikely to
appeal to Thaksin's rural base.“Mr. Abhisit has the polished resume of his
Morgan | The Absence of a Coherent Elite in Thailand | 133
country’s elite, but he has not cultivated ties with its decisive electoral bloc: the
rural and urban poor”(Mydans 2008c). The divide between the PAD and UDD
shows no sign of being bridged anytime soon, with vitriolic statements and acts
of violence now common on both sides. Neither side is able to maintain a distinct
advantage for any significant length of time. Although Abhisit has been able to
remain in power longer than his two predecessors, due to support from the
monarchy and security services, his government remains illegitimate in the eyes
of many Thais and he fears traveling outside of his base of support in Bangkok,
having yet to make a visit to the north of the country because of concerns for his
safety (Thai News Service 2009). The upheaval in Thailand shows no sign of
abating with its intractable crisis continuing for the foreseeable future.
Conclusion
The current, seemingly intractable crisis in Thailand is rooted in the failure of
two distinct social and political programs. The first, Thaksin’s project to integrate
the rural majority into a meaningful way into the fabric of the country, collapsed
under the weight of his own corruption, costing him the allegiance of the middle
classes, who at least initially, supported him. The old elite, always fearful of
Thaksin’s popularity, was able to align itself with the middle classes and form a
bloc capable of forcing him and his allies out of office. This led to the second
failure, as this new alliance lacked the insight and ability to draw in the rural
majority, politicized by Thaksin, into its new framework for the nation, choosing
at best to ignore them, and at worse to actively erode the tentative gains they had
made in recent years, with their goal seeming to be a return to a pre-modern
Thailand, ruled solely by the monarchy. These two opposing poles are now dead-
locked, with the divide and animosity continuing to grow between each side. The
tragedy of this situation is even if one side achieves a decisive victory over the
other, the people of Thailand will continue to suffer. A victory by the royalist
forces would lead to the sweeping away of the last vestiges of democracy in the
country and would likely be a short-term victory at best, as Thailand’s revered
monarch enters his mid 80s in declining health and lacking an obvious successor
capable of playing the unifying role that he has traditionally assumed. The return
of Thaksin to a position of political prominence would elevate a crony capitalist
interested in bending the state to serve his own economic interests and those of
his allies over constructing a political system that could actually serve the needs
of the dispossessed majority. It seems increasingly likely that only a drastic
sequence of events will overcome the untenable present. Either a rising tide of
repression succeeds in successfully depoliticizing the red-shirted majority or the
oppositional forces are successful in breaking the back of traditionalism in the
country and reestablishing the country on new, potentially, democratic foundations.
134 | New Directions
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140 |
Copeland | Make Intelligence, Not War | 141
Swashbuckling ruffians sailing under the Jolly Roger, fuelled by rum and a lust
for gold doubloons, scouring the seas for ships to plunder at the point of a
cutlass. The image of the pirate in Western culture has fuelled the popular
imagination from “The Pirates of Penzance” to “The Pirates of the Caribbean.”
At present, however, a less romantic reality has become the norm off the coast of
Somalia. Attacks from modern-day pirates preying on commercial shipping have
increased dramatically. Questions are being asked as to how, in an age of satellite
surveillance and jet aircraft, ships of powerful nations are still falling victim to a
scourge that has stalked the seas since before the Roman Empire. This paper
means to examine the roots of Somali piracy, its organization as a form of
business, as well as potential solutions to it.
In order to fully explore this question the concept of maritime piracy must first
be properly defined. There have been a variety of competing attempts to elucidate
the term piracy. Cicero defined piracy “as a crime against civilization itself”
(Burgess 2008). A more modern definition is found in Article 101 of the United
Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea:
Piracy consists of any of the following acts:
(a) any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any acts of
depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the
passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed:
(i) on the high seas, against another ship or aircraft, or against
personsor property on board such ship or aircraft;
(ii) against a ship, aircraft, persons or property in a place outside
the jurisdiction of any State;
(b) any act of voluntary participation in the operation of a ship
or of an aircraft with knowledge of facts making it a pirate ship
or aircraft;
(c) any act of inciting or of intentionally facilitating an act
described insubparagraph (a) or (b). (UNCLOS Part VII)
At this point it may be useful to introduce a significant distinction. Many
analysts are concerned that piracy off the coast of Somalia falls into the
classification of terrorism. While the UN condemns terrorism, and recognizes its
interrelation with organized crime as reflected in UN Security Council Resolution
(UNSCR) 1373 passed on 28 September 2001, it cannot come to an agreement as
to its clear definition (BBC “UN seeks definition of terrorism” 2005).
142 | New Directions
This contrasts with modern day piracy off the Somali coast. The key difference is
that the pirates in question are not focussed on the provocation of a state of terror
to compel subscription to a larger agenda, but rather on using violence or the
threat of violence solely for profit. As such, they have been described as being
engaged in the conduct of “armed robbery at sea” and may be looked upon as
another facet of organized crime (Reveron 2009). Terrorist organizations work
towards an end state that would see societal change, a mutation of public
organization into what they view as a better model (Keefer and Layza 2008: 17).
This is completely different from piracy which, rather than seeking a better
system for the greater public, exists and operates in pursuit of private gain. The
claim that Somali piracy has at its essence the defence of their sovereignty will
be discussed later. It may even be asserted that while terrorism seeks to “provoke
a state of terror” in its target audience, piracy is more parasitic in its nature. It
wants to keep a steady flow of profit issuing from its targeted demographic, in
this case international shipping. As such its model is close to that of a business.
The “business” of piracy, for instance, depends directly on a
thriving and active global shipping industry while contemporary
terrorists associated with the international jihadist network
generally seek to disrupt maritimetrade as part of their self-
defined economic war against the West. Theincompatibility of
these objectives was repeatedly expressed…during interviews
with Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Home
Affairsofficials…(Greenberg 2006: 14).
Were pirates to provoke a state of fear and alarm similar to that sought by many
modern terrorist organizations the disruption would likely include, amongst
other things, their source of income, and thus be counter-productive for their
ultimate goal.
Copeland | Make Intelligence, Not War | 143
This distinction is not to say that terror is not an intrinsic component of piracy.
Indeed for those heavily armed men climbing out of a skiff hundreds of miles
from nearest shore terror must be viewed as a tool, a means to compel their
victims to bend to their will. This tactic, however, is more akin to the same shock
and dread experienced during a bank robbery. It is a tactic, and does not operate
at a level intended to alter the policies of nations or international bodies.
What is the overall import of making this delineation in the modern context?
Since the attacks of al-Qaeda against the United States of America on 11
September 2001 much of the western world has been involved in the “War on
Terror,” to one degree or another. Acts of terrorism have already been conducted
using the world’s oceans as a theatre of war, one that has not yet proved as
fruitful as ashore, but which is certainly as accessible. Attacks against the U.S.S.
Cole and merchant shipping vessels are prime examples of how seaborne
terrorism can be executed (The 9/11 Commission Report 2004). There is real
concern on the part of world experts on terrorism that the seas may serve as a
conduit, if not a focal point, for subsequent acts of terror (Burgess 2008). Were
piracy then, seen to fall into the category of terrorism, the declared mandate to
eradicate the latter, a publicly stated resolve on the part of many of the nations of
the world (UNSCR 1566), could be used to initiate action against the former.
This speaks to the idea of “collective security.” This is the concept of nations co-
operating with one another to defend against a common threat. Terrorism at sea
is certainly extant today, and the potential for it to mutate into or collaborate with
acts of piracy exists, but it does not presently apply to the case of the Somali
coast
When examining the architecture of piracy it has been argued that there are five
factors which are integral to the success of a pirate venture: “an available
population of potential recruits, a secure base of operations, a sophisticated or-
ganization, some outside support, and cultural bonds that engender vibrant group
solidarity” (Lunsford 2008). A 2008 RAND study asserted that there were even
more elements in which modern piracy was rooted: “local corruption, increased
maritime traffic, small arms proliferation, lax coastal/port security, increasingly
difficult maritime surveillance, lingering effects of the Asian financial crisis, and
the denser traffic through congested choke points” (Patch 2008). If it is accepted
that piracy falls within the criminal realm then these may be further distilled into
what are thought to be the basis of crime: motive, means, and opportunity (Rex v.
Kelly 1916). An examination of motive is best begun with a brief overview of
the history of the Somali pirates
144 | New Directions
Somali Piracy
Origins
The Somali Republic was declared on 1 July 1960, when the former British So-
maliland joined with the former colony of Italian Somaliland as an independent
state. On 21 October 1969 a bloodless coup saw power in Somalia seized by Ma-
jor-General Mohamed Siad Barre, ending the democratic process that had existed
in the country since it achieved independence (U.S. Department of State). Barre’s
government was initially supported by the Soviet Bloc, signing the “Friendship
and Cooperation Treaty between the U.S.S.R. and Somali Democratic Republic,”
which gave Soviet forces access to a substantial base in Berbera harbour (Patman
1990:307-310). In 1980, in response to Soviet support of Somalia’s traditional
adversary Ethiopia, the General switched to the Americans as his allies of
choice, relying on them for arms and advisors (Lennox 2008: 5).
The collapse of the Soviet Union, and their backing of the Barre government,
saw Somalia enter a phase of being divided between a multiplicity of competing
factions. Somalia had long been based on a complex clan system, and these over-
lapped and meshed with political agendas and outright criminal activity (Clarke
1997: 4-5). The predominant faction was the United Somali Congress (USC),
which on 29 January 1991 declared Ali Mahdi Mohamed president. This was
soon contested by the head of another faction within the USC, led by General
Mohammed Farad Aidid, who was elected Chairman of the party with 72% of
the vote (Drysdale 1997: 119). These differences translated into a violent contest
for power, plunging Somalia into bloody civil war between competing factions.
The UN had recognized Mahdi as the interim president (Drysdale 1997: 120),
and many countries came to the conclusion that in addition to an arms embargo
imposed in mid-1992 (UNSCR 733 1992) a physical presence ashore would be
required to address both the widespread strife and the extensive starvation in the
country. This was initially composed of the Unified Task Force (UNITAF) sent
into Somalia in 1992. These were multinational forces led by the United States
and its Operation Restore Hope. Of the 37,000 troops deployed under this
mandate some 28,000 were American (Brune 1998: 21). This was followed by
an additional force of up to 3,500 troops under the aegis of UNSCR 775 who
were known as the United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) (The
United Nations and Somalia 1992-1996 1996: 93).
soldiers being dragged through the streets by throngs of celebrating Somalis. The
impact that these pictures were to have on domestic popular opinion in the most
powerful member of the UN mission led to the United States withdrawing from
Somalia (Brune 1998: 32-33). The relevance of this will be returned to shortly.
At the same time a popular Islamist movement, the Coalition of Islamic Courts
(CIC) seized much of the country. By June 2006 they had run the last of the
feuding warlords out of Mogadishu, and controlled the southern two thirds of the
country (Lennox 2008:5). In the areas under the Islamist regime there was
relative peace as they disarmed many factions and promoted reconciliation
between feuding clans. They had also used their armed element, al-Shaabab,
along with their influence with the various coastal clans to deny pirates support
from their logistical bases ashore, driving the number of pirate attacks to the
lowest that Somalia has seen this decade (Gettleman 2009).
The United States took a dim view of an Islamist government in Somalia, seeing
the CIC as a potential conduit towards terrorist organizations setting up a base of
operations in the country. This concern was modelled on the manner in which
Al-Qaeda had established support infrastructures for their operations in Yemen
and Afghanistan. The result was that the United States supported Ethiopia when,
in conjunction with elements of the TFG, they invaded Somalia at the end of
2006 (Salopek 2008).
The result was disaster for Somalia. In the fighting between the CIC and the
TFG-Ethiopian alliance, which operated within the framework of the complex
clan and regional landscape, over 300,000 residents of Mogadishu were forced
to flee the city (Menkaus 2007). The TFG, supported by Ethiopian troops, were
unable to bring prolonged peace to the country, with the UN Humanitarian coor-
dinator in the region stating in April 2007, “Unless something is done, the hu-
146 | New Directions
manitarian crisis is going to turn into a catastrophe very soon” (AFP News
Service 2007).
At present there are 8,000 African Union troops in and around the Somali capital
(The Economist, 2010), but it is unthinkable that this will be able to address what
has been described as “complete state collapse”(Menkaus 2007). When attempting
to quantify this “broad rubric of state collapse” some experts point to three broad
concepts: the protracted collapse of central government, protracted armed conflict,
and lawlessness (Menkaus 2004: 10). On the whole it seems clear that the
American intervention and support of the Ethiopian invasion have compounded
the already untenable state of affairs in Somalia. (Prendergast and Thomas-
Jensen 2007) In the words of Somalia scholar Ken Menkhaus, “Somalia is one of
the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11. By any rational metric,
what we’ve ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted”
(Salopek 2008).
Both of these new entities, outside of the reach of the ruling parties in Mogadishu,
opposed the CIC, and focused on developing their own infrastructure while
actively resisting attempts to be drawn into the control of the Islamists (Menkaus
2007). As in many coastal regions around the world the water provided more
than a means for transport for Somaliland and Puntland, it was also a prime
source of food and income. With the collapse of the central government, and the
de facto if not de jure secession of these two regions there remained no naval or
sea going constabulary presence to protect these resources, with the Somali navy
being operationally ineffective from 1991 onward (Lehr and Lehmann 2007:
11).
This collapse also affected the core economy in the littoral area. With no
effective law enforcement to protect the rich fish stocks off the Somali coast,
fishing vessels from far and near came to compete in an unregulated harvest. Not
only were these vessels free from any sort of inspection of the quota and type of
stock that they pursued, but they were also devoid of any practical obligation to
constrain themselves to legal means of fishing. As a result they employed
universally prohibited equipment such as illegal underwater lighting, nets in
excess of legal size, and nets with mesh sizes finer than allowed (Lehr and
Lehmann 2007: 12-13). This resulted in the stocks of a wide variety of fish
species being decimated, as mature and immature fish were plundered from the
ocean. The Fisheries and Aquaculture Department of the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the UN, the body responsible for monitoring such activity,
states:
There are an estimated 700 foreign-owned vessels that are fully
engagedin unlicensed fishing in Somali waters…It is impossible
to monitor their fishery production, in general, let alone the state
of the fishery resources they are exploiting (2005).
Some estimates put the total worth of the stocks of tuna, lobster, and shrimp
being looted from Somali waters by foreign vessels at over $300 million (U.S.)
per annum (Hari 2009).
This exploitation was further compounded as, in their search for further plunder,
the foreign fishing vessels pursuing this illegal course of action began to work
closer to the Somali shores, depriving the inshore indigenous fishing industry of
its catch (Lehr and Lehmann 2007: 13). Adding insult to injury the larger foreign
trawlers began using violence to interfere with those smaller Somali craft that
were still attempting to fish their native waters, in some cases ramming them
(Lehr and Lehmann 2007: 13). Some of the fishing vessels negotiated with local
warlords to obtain “licenses” for fishing in “their” waters, but these were more
akin to bribes than permits issued by a legal regulatory body (Khalif 2005). Un-
148 | New Directions
fortunately there were even more odious events to take place in the traditional
fishing grounds of the coastal peoples of Somalia.
Against this perceived theft and threat, a number of Somali men began an
aggressive course of action. Declaring themselves a “coast guard,” they took the
faster of their craft and married them with some of the small arms that have
flooded the country in recent years (Reveron 2009). They took these boats into
the region in which the foreign fishing vessels were operating, seizing them and
holding them for ransom. In one instance a trio of Taiwanese trawlers were im-
pounded by “The Somali Volunteer National Coast Guard,” a band of young
fishermen, who declared that each of the forty-eight fishermen captured would
need to be ransomed. The “fine” of US$5,000 apiece was levied for poaching in
Somali waters (Lennox 2008: 9). Pirate chieftains claim that they were driven to
these extremes in an attempt to protect their people and their livelihood (Bahadur
2009). Jamal Akhmed, convicted of piracy by the authorities in Puntland and
sentenced to life in jail, asserted, “We are not pirates. We are gentlemen,
defending our shores against foreign fishermen. It did become a business, but it
was forced upon us because we were attacked. We have bills to pay and families
to care for” (Harding 2009). Although the circumstances of dumping toxic
materials and using illegal technology to nearly eliminate fish stocks may be
unique to modern times, the idea of having no option but to turn to piracy for
survival is not. Akmed’s statement brings to mind the words of William Scott as
he was led to the gallows in Charleston, South Carolina centuries earlier, “What
I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to gett a
living, which is much against my will” (Rediker 2004: 154).
Using their knowledge of the local sea lanes, the former fishermen of both
Somaliland and Puntland pursued a new business model, a means by which they
Copeland | Make Intelligence, Not War | 149
could finance their communities in the midst of the famine and poverty ravaging
the country. Like Barbarossa before them, the potential for expanded plunder to
serve as an economic base for their communities would prove too tempting to
eschew. Somalia is opportunely situated on some of the more strategically
important real estate in the region. While the east coast sees the regular transit of
significant amounts of commercial merchant shipping, the narrow Gulf of Aden
sees the passage ninety-five percent of the Far East’s exports to Europe, and fifty
percent of the world’s oil (Lennox 2008, 4). Geographically positioned near
these major shipping routes, the pirates found themselves in a target-rich
environment, if they could establish a modus operandi to exploit it.
A prime example of the way the pirates are carrying out sophisticated seizures of
large merchant ships came with the capture of the Saudi supertanker M/V Sirius
Star in late 2008. This incident was noteworthy for three reasons. The first is the
fact that the ship, classified as a Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC), was taken
some over nine hundred kilometres off the coast of Kenya en route to the United
States, dispelling any notion that the pirates were confined to the littorals of the
Somalia coast (UNSCR 1851 2008). The second is the sheer size of the Sirius
Star. With an overall length of three hundred metres and weighing in at three
times the size of a modern aircraft carrier, the oil onboard the VLCC represented
one quarter of Saudi Arabia’s daily output (Rice 2008), yet this hulking behemoth
was no match for motivated bandits operating from small skiffs. The final
150 | New Directions
element of this particular high jacking again relates to the ship’s cargo. When
captured, the hold of the Sirius Star was filled with an excess of two million
barrels of crude oil. To put this in perspective, global oil consumption is, at
average, 80 million barrels per day (Luft and Korin 2004). The potential for en-
vironmental catastrophe was enormous should the pirates have decided to vent
her tanks or attempt to rupture them using explosives. Fortunately, as has been
discussed earlier, the primary motivation of pirates is profit, and once the $3
million (U.S.) ransom was paid the ship and her crew were freed (Pham 2009).
Yet the seizures of this vessel was by no means unique. At a time when incidents
of piracy in waters like the Malacca Straits, long viewed as a rich hunting ground
for these modern buccaneers, has been on the decline (in part due to treaties
which will be discussed shortly) the opposite trend has been evidenced off the
Somali coast. Here we find the pirates taking advantage of the opportunity
presented them. The Gulf of Aden alone regularly sees the transit of 33,000
vessels each year (United States House Armed Services Committee 2009). The
first quarter of 2009 saw sixty-one pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden and off the
east coast of Somalia. This is compared with six incidents for the same region in
the first quarter of 2008 (Cargo Security International 2009 ). In total, through
the course of 2008, there were 111 incidents of piracy off the coast of Somalia,
resulting in forty-two vessels being hijacked. In 2009 the same waters had
already seen 114 attacks by mid-May, with twenty-nine ships being seized by
pirates (International Chamber of Commerce 2009). This has occurred despite
naval forces from some twenty-three nations operating in the area in an attempt
to thwart the attacks (United States House Armed Services Committee 2009).
As a result of the successful track record of the pirates, an economy has been
formed in Puntland and Somaliland in support of the proven business model they
have adopted. Devoid of any other option, and sustained by the revenues
generated from ransoms and theft, the pirates are formed into organized, clan-
affiliated bands, with a chain of command (Bahadur 2009). They are supported
by specialists in negotiations, logistics and other facilitators of the proven infra-
structure (Torchia 2009).
What then is the best means to address piracy in this region? It has been asserted
that numerous problems negate UNCLOS’ usefulness in dealing with piracy
(United States House Armed Services Committee 2009). In the case of modern
Somalia, however, this does not seem to have been the case. Not only have the
significant number of nations mentioned agreed to work in concert in an attempt
to combat what Shakespeare called “salt-water thie(ves)” (Shakespeare 1930:
76), but it needs to be appreciated that UNCLOS does not operate in a vacuum.
While UNCLOS and similar conventions do not address every problem and
Copeland | Make Intelligence, Not War | 151
provide for every contingency few bodies of law do. This is especially true in in-
ternational law where signatories are coming from different legal systems and
perspectives. International law has long provided for an armed response for the
international collective against violent attack (Gray 2000: 126). Room for inter-
pretation of these statutes has been and remains the purview of legal bodies and
this is regularly exercised. Lack of sufficient legal grounding is not at the core of
the problems with Somali piracy.
This said, some of the legal challenges that have been raised off the coast of
Somalia have to do with questions of jurisdiction and the willingness of those
nations’ that have captured pirates to prosecute them (Koring 2009). Some
nations are not willing to take pirates that they have captured back to their own
country, where, after serving their sentence, they may be able to settle as
refugees. Others, like Kenya, are willing to act as a surrogate under the Djibouti
Code of Conduct to try and incarcerate those who have been arrested for
participating in piracy by law enforcement officials from other nations, and
turned over to their legal system (International Maritime Organization 2009).
The Code of Conduct is a regional attempt to provide what legal and administrative
framework is not already clearly extant in addressing piracy in the area. It is
based on similar conventions such as the “Regional Cooperation Agreement on
Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia,” which was the
first modern treaty dedicated solely to the elimination of piracy in a region
(Kraska 2008). Yet it is not primarily a lack of clarity in jurisdictional and prose-
cutorial matters that is failing to stem over one hundred pirate attacks in the
course of a four month period.
For the senior leadership of today’s navies, the chance to battle piracy offers a
significant opportunity to buttress the standing of their forces. In a decade that
has repeatedly seen the apparent worth of investing funding in land combat
forces as they engage in conflict from Iraq to Afghanistan to Chechnya, to
admirals the world over Somali piracy must represent something more. If
warships are sent out to battle in the name of the national interest, in a conflict
152 | New Directions
This said, how effective can these navies be in bringing an end to Somali piracy?
Consider the scale of the problem: the coastline of Somalia is approximately
3,898 kilometres long. The Gulf of Aden alone covers some 530,000 square kilo-
metres. Bodies of water of this scale require significant allocations of naval
forces to afford regular surveillance and patrol, and catholic coverage around the
clock would demand a massive deployment of both naval and air assets. This
coverage, were sufficient forces to be generated, would by no means guarantee
security. As has been discussed the vehicles used by today’s pirates are not the
distinctive galleys and pirate ships of the North African shores. They are, rather,
the same skiffs, dhows, and coastal vessels with which Somali coastal communities
continue to populate the waters of the region as they attempt sustenance fishing.
To preclude these boats, each a potential pirate, from free navigation would be
contrarythe present international mandate (UNSCR 1816 2008).
Responses
These are hypothetical answers to piracy, though, which presume that sufficient
naval forces are extant to battle those armed men in skiffs seeking plunder at sea
off the Somali coast. Today’s realities do not support this. The United States
Navy, a neophyte when it drew over the horizon of the shores of Tripoli, is now
the most potent in the world. Much of this power is focussed on strategic issues
such as the provision of a nuclear deterrent , or carrier strike groups dedicated to
remaining ready to project American power against the shores of potential
adversaries such as North Korea and Iran. Forces already committed to these op-
erations need to be removed from the equation. Other naval forces, their
compelling and destructive power borne witness to through cruise missile and air
strikes against Iraq and other countries, could only be exercised if the naval com-
mander was given an extremely aggressive offensive mandate. This issue will be
returned to.
The ability to conduct this mission, if and when so ordered, may be better con-
textualized in light of raw numbers. The United States Navy now possesses 283
warships, including submarines (Reveron 2009). Britain’s Royal Navy, once
guardians of an empire on which the sun never set, includes 44 major warships
Copeland | Make Intelligence, Not War | 153
and submarines (The Royal Navy 2009). It should be noted that these are the
wholesale numbers of ships, not taking into account the significant percentage in
refit at any one time, or conducting training to certify them for operations, or
awaiting disposal due to obsolescence. Even given the number of navies presently
participating in counter-piracy operations off the Horn of Africa it seems unlikely
that sufficient forces could be dedicated to saturating the area with warships for
any significant period of time. Like the final French blockade of Algerian pirates
in the nineteenth century the cost of such a prolonged expedition would also
likely be prohibitive.
A navy’s role, at all times, is to act as dictated by the national interest. At present
no nation with the ability to act unilaterally or lead a coalition has sufficient
reason to dedicate the massive resources required to end the piracy with the ap-
plication of seapower alone. While piracy is dramatic and makes for good
television, its effect on the international economy has been negligible to date.
Modern pirates attack less than one percent of shipping (United States House
Armed Services Committee 2009). In an age when people have become resigned
to price hikes generated by the cost of oil the question may be asked, “At what
point will the economic impact of Somali piracy generate sufficient public
outcry to motivate a systemic address of the problem?” Why is the price of
paying ransom for the occasional tanker or freighter, or more often fishing
trawler, any different than paying transit fees for the Panama canal?
Almost every single one of the above positions sees its counterpoint in the
modern western world. Nations view significant losses of their citizens as cause
to protest and potentially withdraw from campaigns from Iraq to Chechnya to
Afghanistan. The image of the bodies of American soldiers being dragged
through the streets of the Somali capital would doubtless find fresh viewers the
moment that the deployment of “boots on the ground” would be suggested. The
more conventional option, modelled on the French solution to the problem of
Algerian piracy, is equally unpalatable. France’s invasion of Algiers resulted in
the creation of a colony and continued involvement for well over a hundred
years. No contemporary western leader would even countenance proposing such
a plan to their voters as a solution to present-day Somali piracy.
Similarly while western support of, and participation in, “limited” campaigns
such as Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia has occurred, it is unlikely that such
techniques could be effectively applied to the neutralization of the pirate bases.
There are those authorities who advocate, “tak(ing) out the pirates where they
live…” (US Naval Institute 2009) This is not in keeping with the realities of
popular opinion worldwide. The first footage to appear on CNN and BBC World
showing a Somali a village destroyed by cruise missiles may not help sell this
154 | New Directions
view to western voters, nor is it likely to ease relations between the West and
others in the region when it appears on Aljazeera. The unwillingness of many
nations to bring suspected Somali pirates back to their own nations for trial and
imprisonment may be contextualized, not only against the potential for refugee
claims, but also against the echoes of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
Finally the numerous non-military options that the west did not possess when
dealing with the North African states now exist in depth. Having invested in the
UN, the EU, NATO, the African Union, and similar organs people expect a
return on their investment, however slow and impotent these international bodies
may prove to be in the end. If the answer is not, then, sending forces ashore, or
destroying pirate communities as Lord Exmouth once did, what then is the an-
swer?
The answer is economic, and returns to the purpose of piracy: profit generation.
Only when an alternative source of revenue is available to the coastal communities
of Somalia will they have any incentive to abandon the “business model” to
which they presently subscribe. As such if the international community is sincere
in its desire to eliminate piracy then, while they can continue to use naval assets
to execute a constabulary role as a safeguard to current shipping routes, the crux
of the solution is developmental. Substantial investment will need to be made
through NGOs, national governments, and multinational organs such as the UN
and The World Bank, to empower the governments of Somaliland and Puntland,
as well as the government in Mogadishu. This approach must include the
buttressing of their organs for law enforcement. Legitimate industry will have to
be created, almost from the ground up. Finally, the international community
must make a concerted effort, not only to end the overfishing and hazardous
waste disposal that precipitated this situation in the first place, but must also seek
to renew what fish stocks can be repopulated to allow fisherman on the Horn to
return to their traditional livelihood.
This solution is not sexy. Rippling broadsides of gunfire and drawn cutlasses are
a solution that would sell more tickets in a cinema. The problem of Somali
piracy, however, is not theatre. It is a situation where people devoid of any other
hope of survival have turned to a violent and dangerous occupation as a means of
survival and profit. When the leaders of the Barbary Powers turned to a similar
modus operandi over a century earlier they were met with empires who gave no
second thought to unleashing massive force against the North Africans. While
similar states exist today such heavy-handed strategies do not provide the
international community with viable options to address the realities at sea off the
Horn of Africa. As has been seen international law and standing organizations to
promote collective security have resulted in a situation where unilateral large-
Copeland | Make Intelligence, Not War | 155
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| 163
Section IV
Canada in the Contemporary Context:
Securitizing the State and the Individual
164 |
Nadeau | Assessing Canada’s Approach to Outer Space Security | 165
Space is on the verge of becoming a fourth environment for warfare and this
could have major implications for Canada’s foreign policy. For decades now,
Canadian officials have publicly declined offers to participate in American
defence initiatives involving the possible deployment of weapons in space. In
1985, following parliamentary hearings, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney
declined government-to-government participation in the Reagan Administration’s
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) claiming it risked muting “a noble voice...in
the question of arms reduction and arms limitation” (Crosby, 1996-97: 107).
Then, in 2005, Prime Minister Paul Martin refused to publicly endorse the Bush
Administration’s Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) amidst increasing public op-
position to the United States and its aggressive foreign policy.
The common thread that binds these decisions seems to be a long-standing belief
among many Canadians that Canada is, and ought to remain, a peaceful space-
faring nation. This principle has given some government officials such as former
foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy and his supporters the incentive to treat
space as an arms control issue as a means of bolstering Canada’s ‘middle power’
image. Remaining neutral on the issue of BMD, they argue, has strengthened
Canada’s influence in international arms control negotiations and has therefore
outweighed the costs of down-playing continental defence relations. Pressuring
the United States into signing non-weaponization treaties or adhering to rules of
the road has remained for many the only acceptable objective for Canada to
pursue in international space relations.
deploy armed microsatellites to help protect its assets from rising space powers
such as China. If so, this begs the question: how would this affect Canada’s long-
standing position in international space relations? Would it still be in a position
to oppose space-based and space-related weapons platforms if it benefits from
American military space assets through NORAD? Moreover, considering it
might once again seek Canada’s endorsement, would the United States now be in
a position to coerce Canada into supporting its decision to deploy these weapons?
Canada has long approached international space relations from a Global Institu-
tionalist perspective. It has been a member of the UN Committee on the Peaceful
Uses of Outerspace (COPUOS) since 1958, when the Committee was first
formed to address the launch of Sputnik. Canada has also ratified every major
UN treaty pertaining to space activities. As an active participant at the Committee’s
yearly Conference on Disarmament (CD), Canada has often supported, and even
proposed, treaty legislation banning the deployment of space-based weapons or
the use of existing space assets as weapons. Although the 1967 Outerspace
Treaty (OST) only forbids “the orbiting of nuclear weapons or other weapons of
mass destruction”, Canadian officials have long interpreted the term ‘peaceful
use’ in the treaty as implying that outer space can only be used for non-
aggressive purposes such as surveillance and communications (Sloan 2005:
106). This position has often placed the country at odds with the United States
over proposed American defence programs such as Ballistic Missile Defence: a
program that had initially received funding to design and test space-based kinet-
ic-kill interceptors1 in outer space (Boese and Pomper 2005). Even though
research by the US Missile Defence Agency on space-based platforms had been
conceived primarily to inform public debate about the feasibility of these
weapons, according to former MDA Commander James Obering, Canadian
delegates emphasized as early as 2001 that non-weaponization would be a
condition for participating in the program during high-level meetings with senior
American officials (Fergusson, 2010: 235). Then, in 2004, public debate in
Canada became increasingly centered around whether participation would conflict
1
The component used to intercept an incoming ballistic missile in midcourse flight (while it
traverses space) is an exoatmospheric kill vehicle (EKV). The EKV is a 1.4m long cylindrical
device equipped with long range electro-optical infrared sensor that scans for and detects
incoming missiles in space. Upon detection, the EKV propels itself towards, collides with, and
destroys the incoming missile. For more information on EKV developments and specifications,
see Jane’s Defence Weekly (which article?).
168 | New Directions
Canada’s national strategy since the late 1990s, as conveyed by DFAIT over the
years, has been to exert its moral influence in space relations to dissuade other
space faring nations from weaponizing space. This strategy reflects the political
views of former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy. A Ph.D graduate in
political science from Princeton University, Axworthy had been a strong proponent
of Joseph Nye’s notion of ‘Soft Power’ and he saw Canada as a ‘Middle Power’
in world affairs capable of persuading other countries through its ideas and
values (Hillmer and Granatstein 2008: 310). While the United States often relied
on economic coercion in diplomatic relations, Axworthy believed that Canada
could lead by moral example.
To this end, Axworthy saw space security not only as an important issue in and
of itself, but also as a means of strengthening Canada’s image in international
affairs. Axworthy, a prominent Liberal MP during the 1980s, had been a strong
opponent to Canadian participation in SDI. As he later wrote in his memoirs: “at
a time when there is a wholesale challenge to the legal framework governing not
only arms control and disarmament issues but matters of human rights, environment,
and security, a global campaign to prevent an arms race in space could be
achieved. It could offer a brake to the unravelling of the global rule of law”
(Axworthy 2004: 367). Under Axworthy, the issue of space security was gradually
2
For more information on the mobilization of Canadian public opinion against BMD by foreign
policy activists, see Steven Staples’s book Missile Defence: Round One (2006).
Nadeau | Assessing Canada’s Approach to Outer Space Security | 169
Although DFAIT has shifted its strategy in recent years away from pushing for a
treaty and towards promoting regulatory measures in other areas, such as space
debris mitigation, it still approaches space security primarily from an arms
control perspective. This is apparent given that space issues have remained the
mandate of the Non-Proliferation, Arms Control, and Disarmament Division
beneath the International Security Bureau (ISB) (Fergusson 2007: 65). Studies
funded and produced by members of this division provide additional examples
of this trend. One of these was submitted by a former Executive Director under
the Clinton Administration, Dr. Nancy Gallagher, in 2009. Gallagher proposed
drafting a companion agreement to the Outerspace Treaty, the major UN treaty
regulating outer space, and defining the term ‘peaceful purpose’ as excluding
“the placement of any type of weapon in outer space” (Gallagher 2009: 32).
DFAIT Senior Advisor Phillip Baines, meanwhile, has argued for ‘non-offensive
defensive’ tactics for securing these assets, including minimizing satellites and
strengthening them to resist anti-satellite attacks. A “universal reliance” on non-
offensive defensive tactics, he argues, could help reduce the likelihood of a
‘deleterious’ arms race in space (Baines 2004: 172). Moreover, Canada’s message
at the United Nations General Assembly has remained fairly consistent in recent
years: that Canada seeks to ban the placement of weapons in outer space,to
prohibit the testing of dedicated anti-satellite technology, and to prohibit the use
of satellites themselves as weapons (Mergle 2009).
of the program such as then Foreign Affairs minister Bill Graham and Defence
minister John McCallum to try to separate the issue of space weaponization from
missile defence in public statements. Graham claimed that Canada had affirmed
its opposition to space-based weapons during the negotiations even though the
system was primarily land and sea-based. He even suggested that Canada
participate in BMD as a means of influencing the United States not to weaponize
space in the long run. In the end, however, constant reminders in the media that
joining would weaken Canadian soft power by compromising Canada’s neutrality
proved too powerful for Paul Martin to dispel from the public psyche and he
eventually opted against supporting the program (Staples 2006: 194-196). These
events suggest that Canadian soft power in international space relations has been
perceived by Axworthy, the public, and other government officials as largely de-
pendent on Canada’s image of neutrality in space.
To be sure, however, the full extent of Canada’s influence over BMD command
and control is not well understood given that the system has never been used to
intercept an incoming missile. Canada could also push to have the BMD
management site physically relocated outside of Cheyenne Mountain and portray
172 | New Directions
Justifying such a deployment is feasible given that many Canadian scholars ac-
knowledge its legitimacy. The United States, unlike Canada, has long interpreted
the 1967 Outerspace Treaty as only prohibiting “the orbiting of nuclear weapons”
around the Earth and permitting, through Article 51, the use of outer space to
defend national security (Sloan 2006: 106). Even Canadian legal experts such as
Gleeson concede that the prohibitions of the Outer Space Treaty, governing the
use of outer space, do not amount to a complete prohibition on the deployment of
weapons or the lawful use of force in space (Gleeson 2007: 155). Canadian
scholars Moens and Cooper also provide an interesting counter-argument to Paul
Martin’s argument in 2004 that space ought not to be weaponized by the United
States because it does not belong to any country. The authors argue that, by that
logic, “Canada should have no Navy because the oceans belong to no country”
(2005: 3). Yet Canada, the United States, and many other countries have ships
Nadeau | Assessing Canada’s Approach to Outer Space Security | 173
navigating international waters and these ships are often on standby for armed
conflict. These are but a few compelling arguments the United States could rely
on to justify future space-based defence initiatives.
Positioning microsatellites near certain assets would inevitably allow the United
States to criticise Canada for benefiting from the very weapons Canada opposes.
Two particular types of assets stand out: the International Space Station and NO-
RAD-related satellite systems. Canada has been a member of the ISS project
since 1998, when it signed the Clinton Administration’s Inter-governmental
Agreement. Although the ISS is fundamentally considered a ‘civilian’ asset, and
Article 14 stipulates that ‘its operation and utilization shall be for peaceful
purposes, in accordance with military law” (US DoS 1998), there are no laws ex-
plicitly prohibiting the United States from defending it with microsatellites.
Petras reasons that the ISS can legally be used by the United States for military
purposes as long as its use remains ‘non-aggressive’ in accordance with the
United States’ interpretation of ‘peaceful purposes’ (2002). This gives military
personnel and American defence contractors the right to board the station and
conduct experiments as long as those experiments are not themselves aggressive
at that time. Furthermore, NASA has already launched civilian microsatellite
technology aboard the ISS numerous times, including in 2006, when it launched
its SPHERES microsatellites in an effort to practice autonomous docking and
formation flying (Malik 2006). Dedicating microsatellites to the task of defending
the ISS, even if only in speech, would technically render them space weapons by
Canada’s rigid standards. Since Canada is an active partner in the ISS project, a
174 | New Directions
To be sure, such a deployment would also implicate other ISS members such as
Russia, who could equally oppose the deployment on similar grounds. Article 23
of the IGA also gives each partner the right to request group consultations with
each other “on any matter arising out of Space Station cooperation” (Petras
2002) and this could complicate matters for American policy-makers intent on
using the ISS as a coercive policy tool.
To be sure, Canada could try to frame the issue as it has with nuclear weapons in
the past by portraying itself as a reluctant beneficiary of microsatellite defences.
Nadeau | Assessing Canada’s Approach to Outer Space Security | 175
But whereas Canada has had no way of distancing itself from the benefits of
American nuclear deterrence, primarily because of its geographic proximity to
the United States, Canada could disassociate itself from microsatellite defences
by simply giving up its privileges to American space assets. Article 28 of the In-
tergovernmental Agreement stipulates that Canada has the legal right to withdraw
its participation from the space station program at any time provided it gives one
year’s prior notice (US DoS 1998: 20). Canada could also legally opt out of
NORAD. Article 4(3) of the NORAD Agreement explicitly states that Canada
“may terminate this Agreement upon twelve months’ written notice to the other
Party” (GoC 2006). Canada would therefore have difficulty claiming it is a
reluctant beneficiary of microsatellite defences since it could distance itself by
simply opting out of these bilateral agreements.
Furthermore, Canada would not likely give up these privileges just to preserve
the mere image of neutrality because doing so would significantly weaken both
its influence over continental defence matters and its prestige as a space faring
nation. Although Canadian prime ministers have often found themselves trapped
in a security dilemma, where asserting Canada’s sovereignty has conflicted with
the national interests of its more powerful neighbour, they have generally opted
for continental defence over greater independence perceiving the threat of
nuclear weapons as warranting the trade off (Fawcett 2010: 39). The Bomarc
missiles in the 1960s, the Cruise Missile tests and SDI in the 1980s, and BMD in
2005, are all instances where prime ministers have had to contend with unpopular
American defence proposals. As Noble points out, however, even the most
defiant prime ministers have understood the importance of maintaining good
defence relations over partisanship politics (2005: 25). Trudeau, for instance, au-
thorized the unpopular testing of cruise missiles over Alberta in 1983 and later
addressed his many critics as hypocrites for living under the American ‘nuclear
umbrella’ and refusing to hold the handle. Even Diefenbaker, who was confronted
with the far more controversial demand of stationing nuclear-tipped Bomarc
Missiles on Canadian soil as a contribution to NORAD, never opted out of the
agreement. Diefenbaker might have deliberately delayed his response on the
issue, perceiving some leeway in the negotiations (Bow 2009: 47), but he always
remained certain about the need to contribute to continental defence in the
nuclear age. And although Martin was criticized for dithering on the issue of
BMD before declining the offer, he nevertheless publicly reaffirmed that “Canada
remains steadfast in its support of NORAD, which is essential to continental
security and our national sovereignty.... It is in Canada’s strategic national
interest” (Staples 2006: 218). Considering NORAD’s perceived relevance to
Canada throughout history, it is highly unlikely that any Prime Minister would
favour opting out of NORAD simply to protect Canada’s image of neutrality in
space relations. Merely deploying microsatellite defences near certain American
176 | New Directions
Conclusion
This study has focussed on the impact an American space weaponization initiative
could have on Canada’s current approach to international space relations. In
doing so, it has attempted to identify and exploit the weaknesses of Canada’s
soft-power strategy to predict whether or not this approach could withstand
potential coercion from the United States. Those government officials still
espousing Axworthy’s soft power approach to international space relations would
do well to consider that the United States could have considerable leverage over
Canada in continental space relations depending on the kind of space-based
weapons it may deploy. Simply deploying defensive microsatellites near key
American space assets used by Canada, for instance, could allow the United
States to challenge Canada’s image of neutrality in international space relations.
Government officials opposing space weapons would then have difficultly either
justifying why Canada is willingly associated with these weapons or why they
should remove Canada from the NORAD agreement simply to preserve the mere
image of Canadian neutrality. This would amount to a situation similar to that of
2005, when many officials opposing space-based weapons could not justify sup-
porting a missile defence system that would eventually integrate a test-bed of
space-based interceptors.
In the end, this article is meant to challenge the foundation of Canada’s current
approach to international space relations to spark greater debate between policy-
makers and academics about what role Canada should play in continental space
relations; a topic that has largely been overlooked in the literature. This kind of
debate would, in turn, help promote greater government transparency in an area
that seems rather obscure to most Canadians. Although no one can predict
precisely why the United States might deploy space-based weapons, they are
currently capable of doing so. DFAIT would therefore do well to focus more on
how space might become rather than on how space ought to remain.
178 | New Directions
Bibliography
Axeworthy, Lloyd. Navigating a New World: Canada’s Global Future. Toronto:
Random House, 2004.
Brown, Peter J. (2009) “Space is Suddenly on the Agenda.” Asia Times Online.
Electronic Document.
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on 29 April 2009) 1-2.
Crosby, Anne D. “The Print Media’s Shaping of the Security Discourse: Cruise
Missile Testing, SDI, and Norad.” International Journal 52.1 (1996-97):
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Deblois, Bruce M. et al. “Star Crossed: the Potential to Wage War from Space.”
IEEE Spectrum 42.3 (2005): 1-11.
———. (2010) Canada and Ballistic Missile Defence 1954-2009: Déjà Vu All
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———. (2009c). “US Air Force Space Tracking and Space Surveillance
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<http://search.janes.com/Search/document View.do?docId=/content-1/
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Noble, John. J. “Defending the United States and Canada, in North America
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Sloan, Elinor. C. Security and Defence in the Terrorist Era. Montreal: McGill
UP, 2005.
Introduction
The criminal justice system is an adversarial one, in which there are two parties
involved: the government being represented by the Crown Attorney, and the
accused being represented by a criminal defence lawyer or representing themselves.
The Charter was enacted in 1982 to enshrine certain fundamental rights and
freedoms to the accused and provided remedies if those rights and freedoms are
breached. Sections 7 to 14 guarantee what are known as “legal rights”. These are
the rights that are triggered when someone gets arrested, or has dealings with law
enforcement. Security in its most fundamental sense is in regards to one’s
person. The Charter guarantees ‘security of the person’ because one’s person,
one’s body is supposed to be protected and not invaded without the utmost
necessity. If one’s own body cannot be secured against invasion and exploitation,
then any other protections are meaningless. If accused persons are denied
security of the person as an individual right, then trying to codify that same right
as a group right is rather ineffective. The rights of the accused are meant to be in-
dividual rights to protect the bodily integrity of those who face criminal charges
in Canadian society.
bag of weed’ and a firearm. At this point, the officers arrested and searched the
accused, seizing the marijuana and a loaded revolver. They advised him of his
right to counsel and took him to the police station.
Case Treatment
At trial, the accused alleged violations of his rights under ss. 8, 9, and 10(b) of
the Charter. The trial judge found no Charter breach and admitted the firearm.
The accused was convicted of five firearms offences. The Court of Appeal
upheld the convictions for different reasons. It concluded that a detention had
crystallized during the conversation with Grant, before the accused made his in-
criminating statements, and that the detention was arbitrary and in breach of s. 9
of the Charter. However, it held that the gun should be admitted into evidence
under s. 24(2) of the Charter. The court agreed with the trial judge that the
accused’s act of moving the gun from one place to another fell within the
definition of “transfer” in the Criminal Code, and that this justified the conviction
for possession of a firearm for the purposes of weapons trafficking. The Supreme
Court held that the appeal on the trafficking charge should be allowed and an
acquittal entered. The appeal should be dismissed on all other counts. While the
case focuses on ss. 8, 9, and 10(b) there is no mention of Section 7. The
argument could be made that the s. 7 right to ‘security of the person’ is truly the
right that protects against being accosted randomly on the streets by police
officers without having to argue other sections of the Charter.
Sentence Reductions
The use of sentence reductions as a remedy for Charter violations is a useful tool
for judges. If a Charter breach is not horrendous enough to warrant a remedy
under s. 24(2) namely an exclusion of evidence or a stay of proceedings, then
judges can use the alternative of granting a sentence reduction. This gives the
accused a remedy for Charter violations while still upholding the repute of the
justice system. The purpose of section 24(1) is to grant remedies. If it is obvious
Sukdeo | The Charter and Security of the Person | 185
that one’s rights have been violated and that breach is not remedied, then a new
violation is created. To remedy a breach after a violation of rights has occurred is
not the ideal situation because the damage has already been done by the initial
violation. Unjustified strip searches and other abuses cannot be undone, only
compensated after the fact. But to fail to provide an adequate remedy for such vi-
olations is in itself a violation of one’s rights. Sentence reductions allow a
convicted person whose Charter rights have been violated to achieve a just rem-
edy.
This means that in order to have standing to seek a remedy one must be the
person whose rights have been breached. This section also implies that the scope
for remedies is broad. This section is broad in scope in order to allow judges to
determine what the best remedy is in each particular situation.
Caselaw
Examining the sentence reduction caselaw shows that this remedy is rather
unevenly used. This uneven application leaves the accused facing uncertain and
unpredictable consequences as a result. Sentence reductions are not often used
but should be as they provide a remedy for a Charter violation that is a ‘midway’
point. They are not the stay of proceedings that most accused desire or an
exclusion of the challenged evidence, which at times may bring the justice
system into disrepute. Sentence reductions are a halfway measure that allows the
justice system to acknowledge that the accused’s Charter rights have been
violated and remedy that while still not being lenient. As noted by Professor
Kent Roach,
[b]efore the Charter, sentence reductions were a possible way to
recognize the unreasonable delay an accused was forced to endure.
186 | New Directions
The Charter was implemented to be a tool that helps protects citizens from
having to be subjected to treatment that is harsh and unwarranted. To protect
these rights there has to be a remedy once these rights are breached.
R. v. Glykis (1995)
In R. v. Glykis the respondents were charged with importing cannabis resin from
Jamaica into Canada. At trial, defence counsel argued that s. 8 and s. 10 of the
Charter were breached and sought to have the challenged evidence excluded
under s. 24(2). The trial judge stated that the appropriate sentence for both
accused would ordinarily be 18 months, but handed down sentences of 12
months each due to the Charter breach. The Crown appealed to the Ontario Court
of Appeal and the appeal was dismissed. The appeal judge disagreed with the
reasons of the trial judge, but did not alter the sentences. Professor Don Stuart
notes that:
However, in Glykis (1995), Chief Justice Dubin held for the
Ontario Court of Appeal that a breach of a Charter guarantee
should not be considered in imposing sentence unless it mitigated
the seriousness of the offence or constituted a form of punishment
or undue hardship. It is not clear what this means and why the
Ontario Court put such roadblocks in the path of what might well
be a just remedy. (Stuart 2005: 513).
Professor Stuart is criticizing the court’s rather obtuse decision in that future
accused are still left to face uncertainty when it comes to whether or not sentence
reductions will be used. Even if used at the trial level there should be more
certainty at the appeal level as to whether or not they will be upheld.
R. v. MacPherson (1995)
In R. v. MacPherson the defendant pleaded guilty to possession of property
obtained by crime and driving while disqualified. He was arrested on Friday and
kept in jail over the weekend. He was not taken before a judge until the Monday
after his arrest. MacPherson’s appeal from conviction was dismissed. However,
his application under section 24(1) was allowed and his sentence was reduced
from six months to three months. It was held that his rights under section 9 of the
Charter had been breached:
Under the circumstances, and to emphasize that a violation of this
Charter right is serious, I would dismiss his appeal against
convictions but allow his application under s.24(1) of the Charter
Sukdeo | The Charter and Security of the Person | 187
The judge used a sentence reduction to help remedy the fact that the defendant’s
section 9 rights were violated.
R. v. MacPherson (1996)
In R. v. MacPherson, Mr. MacPherson brought a complaint as a result of cruel
treatment in jail. He was strapped to a stretcher for two to three hours as
punishment for causing a disturbance. The judge stated, “I find that he was a
victim of cruel and unusual treatment and arbitrary detention in violation of his
rights under s. 12 and s. 9 of the Charter. The way he was dealt with shows very
limited recognition of his rights to retain and instruct counsel under s. 10(b) of
the Charter.” (177 N.B.R. (2d) 1: para. 56). His sentence was reduced to time
served, a reduction of approximately three months.
R. v. Carpenter (2002)
Although the accused, Carpenter, was not granted a sentence reduction, the
discussion by the judges on the topic is worth exploring. In the judgment the
issue was crafted in the following way: “where an offender’s Charter rights have
been violated but not in so serious a way as to result in the exclusion of evidence
against him under s. 24(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, can
and should the violations be ‘remedied’ by a reduction in his sentence of impris-
onment?” (2002 BCCA 301: para. 1). The author of this paper would answer
with ‘yes’, which is the answer given in the dissent. The court states in dissent
that “[c]omment from the academic community has been in favour of using sen-
tencing reductions as means of remedying violations of the Charter.” (2002
BCCA 301: para. 25). Professor Kent Roach, Professor Don Stuart and Professor
Allan Manson seem to all be in favour of sentence reductions as a tool to remedy
Charter violations.
R. v. Nasogaluak (2007)
In R. v. Nasogaluak, the convicted person was handed a conditional discharge by
the trial judge as a result of Charter violations of ss. 7 and 11(d). The appeal was
allowed with respect to the conditional discharge granted for impaired driving
and was dismissed with respect to a charge of evading a police officer. The
appeal court ruled that the trial judge had no jurisdiction to provide a constitutional
exemption from a mandatory minimum sentence. The conditional discharge was
set aside. The respondent ended up having to pay a $600 fine.
188 | New Directions
R. v. Nasogaluak (2010)
At the Supreme Court level the issue was about whether the sentence was
lawfully reduced at the trial level in that the trial judge’s decision to not follow
mandatory minimums was overruled by the Court of Appeal. The facts of the
case outlined what happened during the arrest to breach the rights of the accused:
When Mr. Nasogaluak refused to offer up his hands to be
handcuffed, Cst. Dlin punched Mr. Nasogaluak in the back, twice.
These blows were strong enough to break Mr. Nasogaluak’s ribs,
which later punctured one of his lungs. Cst. Olthof was kneeling
on Mr. Nasogaluak’s thigh throughout this brief struggle. (2010
SCC 6: para. 11)
The trial court found that the first two punches were necessary and lawful to
subdue the accused but found that the next series of punches were “ unwarranted
and therefore excessive…”(2010 SCC 6: para. 16). This decision is important to
note what standard the Court is adopting towards excessive force by police
officers as that conduct is what may lead to Charter breaches. The acceptable
standard will help to devise an appropriate remedy for potential future breaches.
The first step is outlining the acceptable behaviour by police officers during
arrest, which will help formulate standards and procedures.
One important point to note is that although judges have discretion in regards to
sentencing under s. 24(1) of the Charter they also have broad discretion under
sections 718 and 718.2 of the Criminal Code. For the legislature to grant judges
this discretion and criticize them when they use it seems pointless. Judges must
be trusted to use their vast legal experience and expertise to make decisions in a
Sukdeo | The Charter and Security of the Person | 189
just and fair manner, including sentencing. In the case of Nasogaluak the accused
is Native and should be treated in a manner that respects his Native heritage in
that sometimes the process for trying Native accused is different than non-
Natives (sentencing circles, etc.). In Nasogaluak the issue was that the lower
court judge handed down a sentence that did not comply with mandatory
minimums. This was rectified by the Court of Appeal handing down a fine that
complied with mandatory minimums. The Supreme Court upheld the $600 fine
but refused to grant Mr. Nasogaluak’s request to uphold the decision of the lower
court in regards to not even having to pay a fine. This shift of the legislature to
draft mandatory minimums is moving towards a model crafted by the United
States of America. The rates of incarceration in the U.S. are much higher than in
Canada, which may be causally linked to mandatory minimums. To move
towards putting more people in jails is not in the best interests of justice or
society at large. While it is important for the judiciary to respect the wishes of the
legislature, the debate surrounding judicial activism is still active and significant.
While some may argue that judges are not elected and do not reflect the true
wishes of the population, it is worth noting that judges have legal expertise that
may be lacking in the legislature.
trial judge filed a formal report to the Court of Appeal: “‘I am respectfully of the
view that it is not in the public interest that police constables should be perceived
as ‘getting away’ [with] ill treating aboriginal people, and I am no longer of the
view that a civil remedy is the proper form of redress.’” (2010 SCC 6: para. 52).
This rescission on the part of the judge in Pigeon seems to imply that some
judges no longer hold the view that police misconduct is a separate triable action
distinct from the realm of sentencing. As outlined in the factum submitted by the
one of the Interveners in Nasogaluak, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association,
sentence reductions are imperative because they serve a purpose that no other
remedy could provide:
Moreover, on principle this remedy should be available because:
a) There is no realistic civil remedy for the majority of Charter
violations;
b) Sentence reductions can be appropriately tailored in
circumstances where the only other remedial options typically
available are to stay the charges completely or leave the Charter
violation unaddressed; and
c) Sentence reductions enhance confidence in the administration
of justice, by ensuring that the judicial system effectively
expresses its disapproval of unlawful state conduct. (Canadian
Civil Liberties Association: para. 8).
The purposes of sentencing are not undermined by the use of sentence reductions.
Rather they are enhanced. Sentencing must also take into consideration the
rights of the accused and judges cannot hand down sentences that are out of
context in that they disregard Charter breaches.
This position gives encouragement to judges to use all of the tools available to
them. They should not feel pressured to hand down sentences that may seem less
contentious, especially seeing that many courts in various Canadian jurisdictions
have used sentence reductions as a Charter remedy. “The Courts are apparently
reluctant to stay proceedings or dismiss a charge where the wrong is not
egregious and the offence is serious, or where there is no connection between the
breach of the Charter to be remedied and the proceedings to be stayed. In these
situations, an alternative remedy can be found in sentence mitigation.” (Brown
1986: 1). Using sentence reductions is a way of appeasing both the wronged
person and the person who may be victimized, be it an individual or society as a
whole, which helps to foster a sense of fairness and justice: “Even if a Charter vi-
olation is established, a criminal court is limited to its normal arsenal of remedies
such as adjournment, dismissal, judicial stay or reduction of sentence. The
remedy of allowing the Charter breach to be a ground for mitigation of sentence
appears to be a useful compromise and has been accepted by Courts of Appeal.”
(Stuart 2005: 513). The fact that sentence reductions are a way of remedying a
breach while not bringing the justice system into disrepute is worth considering
it as a remedy that should be used more often. Professor Roach argues,
In deciding whether a sentence reduction was appropriate and
just as opposed to the more drastic remedy of a stay of
proceedings or a simple order expediting a trial, the judge should
consider factors such as ‘the length and nature of the delay, the
seriousness of the offence with which the accused is charged, the
nature of the injury suffered by the accused and any prejudice to
the accused’s defence inherent in the delay.’ (Roach 2006: 9.970).
Obviously for more severe violations of Charter rights the reduction in the
sentence should be greater, but the justice system also has to avoid becoming a
bizarre bartering system where one unjustified strip search is always equal to a
sentence reduction of two months. The system should not be formulaic, but
should instead be determining on the surrounding circumstances of each individual
case: “The Supreme Court of Canada should clarify this inconsistent and
192 | New Directions
potentially important area of the law. In my view, the Court should make clear
that sentence reductions can be used as a s. 24(1) remedy in appropriate cases
and that they may be appropriate even in cases where evidence is not excluded
under s. 24(2) of the Charter.” (Roach 2006: 9.1036).
The test to determine whether evidence gets excluded hinges on whether the
evidence is conscripted, meaning that the breach of the accused’s rights is what
lead to the discovery of the physical evidence. Derivative evidence is conscripted
evidence that “combines aspects of both statements and physical evidence –
physical evidence discovered as a result of an unlawfully obtained statement.
Sukdeo | The Charter and Security of the Person | 193
The cases refer to this evidence as derivative evidence.” (2009 SCC 32: para.
116). The courts have been reluctant to allow in evidence that is derivative in that
the test of repute of the justice system needs to be observed.
Admission of evidence obtained by deliberate and egregious
police conduct that disregards the rights of the accused may lead
the public to conclude that the court implicitly condones such
conduct, undermining respect for the administration of justice.
On the other hand, where the breach was committed in good
faith, admission of the evidence may have little adverse effect on
the repute of the court process. (2009 SCC 32: para. 108).
To determine what exactly a ‘good faith’ breach of a Charter right is seems to be
a futile exercise. An exploration into the intent behind the breach is unnecessary.
An accused does not have to prove motive in an alleged breach.
explored and clarified in the caselaw. Accused persons should not bear the onus
of defending their rights when those same rights may be unknown to them.
Conclusion
This paper argued that the most critical issue in security and Canadian criminal
law today is that the Supreme Court of Canada has muted the voices of the
accused. This weakening was demonstrated by recent decisions from the Court
such as R. v. Grant in which the accused’s Charter rights were said to not have
been breached even though he was arbitrarily stopped by police, as the crime
was determined to be so serious that the breach was justified. This paper argued
that sentence reductions are a useful tool that allow judges to reduce the sentence
that is handed down to convicted persons who have had their Charter rights
violated. The paper demonstrated that sentence reductions are beneficial because
they allow the Charter breach to be remedied and still maintain the repute of the
justice system. In order for a right to be truly expressed there must be a remedy
to undo the wrong when that right is infringed.
Sukdeo | The Charter and Security of the Person | 195
Bibliography
Cases
R. v. Carpenter 2002 BCCA 301.
R. v. Glykis [1995] 24 O.R. (3d) 803.
R. v. Grant 2009 SCC 32.
R. v. MacPherson [1995] 166 N.B.R. (2d) 81.
R. v. MacPherson [1996] 177 N.B.R. (2d) 1.
R. v. Nasogaluak 2007 ABCA 339.
R. v. Nasogaluak 2010 SCC 6.
Sources
Brown, Elizabeth, Mary Campbell & Scott Feltman. “Charter Update” Ontario
Criminal Lawyers’ Association Newsletter (July 1986).
Stuart, Don. Charter Justice in Canadian Criminal Law, 4th ed. Toronto:
Thomson Canada Limited, 2005.