Rockefeller Humanities Fellowships: Institute of International Studies; University of California Berkeley
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The strength of the community as a keyword or building block for this project, namely its inclusiveness and its reach across fields and professions, is also of course a source of its weakness. In order not to founder on the reefs of replication12 or scale, Community in Contention will focus on three themes which confer the advantage of being both less well understood -- for example community reconstruction and cultures of tolerance rather than community deconstruction and violence -- and of providing a ground on which differing forms of intellectual activity, scholarship in and outside of the academe, and activist-practitioners can meet. Insofar as one major thread which runs across the themes is the linking of humanities with social science policy and practitioners, Community in Contention builds upon two existing programs with pronounced emphases on practice: the Human Rights Center's concern with the rebuilding of communities devastated by human rights violations, and the IIS/Environmental Politics Working Group's focus on rural and urban community-based resource management and community governance in regard to indigenous people and minorities.
The first year will focus on community in crisis -- post-genocidal, war torn, and "green calamities" -- but more properly on the processes and understanding of rebuilding, of reconstruction, and rehabilitation, of rebuilding trust and sociability. Year Two addresses the idea of communities in exile, in which exile is interpreted broadly to encompass not only refugees, displaced people, and political exiles but also some of the utopian and high modernist efforts to create community de novo (for example through "villagization" [see Scott 1998]) and to explore the distanciated, transnational communities "stretched" across space. And Year Three explores the connection among community rights, community-based notions of citizenship and community based forms of economic, environmental and political governance as part of a potentially much larger investigation of democracy.
In the face of unthinkable calamities -- genocidal violence in Rwanda, civil war in southern Sudan, nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl -- how can communities be rebuilt and rebuild themselves? Much ink has been spilled in the course of accounting for the complex ways in which communities are thrown into crisis: how the narcissisms of minor ethnic difference in the Balkans is converted into monstrous, irreconcilable and exterminative differences; how long-distance nationalism fed violent religious impulses in India; how racism, police corruption and violence, and economic devastation fueled the South Central (Los Angeles) riots; how corporate irresponsibility and bureaucratic ineptitude, coupled with urban poverty, could produce the devastation of Bhopal. But much less has been said about the aftermath, and how the genesis shapes the prospects for renewal, and how the deadly circle of intolerance and mistrust can be broken? How justice and accountability can be served? The theme of Year One is explicitly on community reconstruction recognizing that such remaking must be with, not on, the ruins of the old community itself. In this sense the destructive impulse itself -- genocide, civil strife, environmental "accidents" -- carry their own burdens and anxieties, threats and insecurities -- to say nothing of the specific forms of vengeance and retribution -- which have to be addressed. Reconstruction is understood as simultaneously a material and symbolic process: it necessitates new forms of imagining but also new forms of governance, new institutions, and forms of material improvement. It must link rights, with imagination, with politics, and development. The rebuilding must necessarily engage history and memory but not become its prisoner as Ariel Dorfman noted. Take for example Ignatieff's (1997, p.15) observation on what he calls the "dreamtime of vengeance":
Reporters in the Balkans often observed that when they were told stories of atrocity they were uncertain whether these stories had occurred yesterday, in 1941, 1841 or 1441.
This sort of historical compression is often an expression of a territorialized or ethnicized history. But what might it mean for the ways in which a community can recover, or how a differing dream time might be cultivated? It is here that the humanities and the practitioners might find a common ground.
The themes seeks to emphasize that creating communities of trust and tolerance is a practical exercise -- that is to say inclusive of discourses and practice -- and one in which questions of tolerance and vengeance loom very large. Furthermore reconstruction may involve specific communities and legacies: 20,000 Muslim women were raped by Serb men between 1991-1995 in Bosnia. Here, then, women, Muslim women, and the recognition of rape as a weapon of war and a crime against humanity figure centrally in the rehabilitation process, and made even more vexed as Minnow's (1998) account shows by the fact that nearly all the rapists remain free. The rehabilitation of youth combatants in Mozambique or the legacy of extremely high incidence of orphanage or child abandonment in Uganda gives particular inflections to the notion of community reconstruction. Rebuilding in the context of the stigma of illness, and youth disfigurement, and of hostility toward the Soviet state represents a quite different community reconstruction in the case of Chernobyl.
The communities in crisis theme will focus on two sorts of broad questions. One is how under conditions of community destruction one can cultivate what Keane (1998, p.156) calls "public spheres of controversy" (how violence can be monitored by citizens non violently). The other is drawn from Martha Minnow's (1998) book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: "what responses do or could lie between vengeance and forgiveness if legal and cultural institutions offered other avenues for individuals, communities and nations" (1998, p.21). Here the experiences of trials, truth commissions and reparations and redistributive justice13 will provide an important current running through the community reconstruction process. Posing questions like: what should count as a good reason to forgive, what are the appropriate limits of vengeance?, what do community institutions require to come to terms with the past and dream time in order to heal?, and what could build a community capable of preventing future atrocities? brightly illuminates the extent to which philosophy, law, history and institution building meet up on the ground of communities in renewal and rehabilitation.
"Exile is one of the saddest fates," noted Edward Said (1994, p.47) in his Reith Lectures. In the twentieth century, the meaning of exile has been transformed: from the punishment of the individual into "a cruel punishment of whole communities and peoples" (p.47). Said was of course concerned to explore the experience of intellectual exile, of expatriates and marginals who as individuals may draw a curious sustenance and vitality from what he calls "exilic displacement." Exile may liberate the intellectual from particular culturally-coded paths or careers, who responds less to the logic of convention than to daring and audacity. In the same way, being marginal (a condition of exile) "frees you from having to proceed with caution" (Said, p.63). In a similar vein Lawrence Weschler in his novella of exile, Calamities of Exile (1998), explores the predicament of those -- the Afrikaner poet, the Czech student activist -- who flee totalitarianism. As he pus it "the condition of actual exile ordinarily dictates a...sort of double movement in its victims, toward simultaneous atomization and homogenization and the wearing down of the potential for agency" (p.x). Subjectivity is shorn to the point where individuals experience themselves as "abject objects" tossed by a heartless and senseless fate.
Both Said and Weschler describe individual conditions: the guilt and nostalgia of the political exile, the risks and experimentation of the expatriate intellectual. But how might such questions travel into an explicitly sociological space; that is to say, what are the tensions, conditions, and characteristics of communities in exile? The confluence of post Cold War politics and globalization has produced a massive proliferation and dispersion of communities in exile. The astonishing growth of refugees and displaced people in the last quarter century -- from barely two millions in 1975 to 17 millions in 1997 -- has been driven by famine, war and disease. The current crisis in central Africa in which communities shuttle back and forth across national boundaries which, at one level, have little meaning for those displaced, both illustrates and problematizes the idea of exile itself. Indeed the central African case itself reveals a curious double movement in which communities are in a sort of permanent exile irrespective of location and territory. Ethnic Tutsi are in exile in Ugandan refugee camps, and yet sufficiently marginalized and terrorized "at home" in Congo to be what one might call "exilic citizens." But transnational migrant communities -- the stretching of community over space in a diasporic sense -- not some much driven by forcible displacement as by labor market dynamics, can equally be seen in exilic terms. Senegalese in Turin, Filipinos in Kuwait, Muslim Turks in Germany can be usefully explored through the figure of exile, not only through tropes of assimilation or exclusion.
Year Two will focus explicitly on communities in exile, recognizing that the very term exile can be usefully broadened to encompass a variety of conditions, some quite peculiar to the late twentieth century, in which communities stand in relation to an acknowledged home (Caplan 1996). Exile makes explicit the relationship of community, and community building, to a home, however constituted. Malkki's (1995) work on Rwandan refugees in Tanzania is a particular provocative exploration of how exile shapes questions of membership, purity, territory and citizenship. Relatedly the policies of states to create community de novo -- villagization in Ethiopia, Cambodia and now Rwanda -- or community flight to the frontier, can also be productively seen in exilic terms. And not least there are the sorts of exile communities implied in Anderson's (1998) notion of long-distance or fax nationalism -- in short the diasporic community -- in which, for example, expatriate Canadian Hindus orchestrate mob violence at Ayodhya. Running through exile is a thread, or perhaps a threat, of cosmopolitanism (Cheah and Robbins 1998); here the sorts of questions raised by Ong (1998) in her discussion of "flexible citizenship" among Chinese cosmopolitans, and by Anderson (1998) on the "phantom" communitarianism of transnational communities are worthy of a more careful exploration.
Over a relatively short period, really since the early 1970's, "indigenous peoples" have been transformed from a prosaic description without significance to what Kingsbury (1998, p.414) calls "a concept with considerable power." For example, the question of Indian rights for some 40 million "ethnically indigenous people" in Latin America -- whether Zapatistas in Chiapas or Indian confederations in Ecuador -- is now part of a critically important story of how indigenous peoples have become political subjects (Brysk in press; Warren 1998). And yet the challenges which these movements represent to both international law and to certain notions of citizenship and rights associated with the nation-state and with certain strains of liberalism, have produced little more than extreme contentiousness in regard to basic meanings and principles. International definitions of indigenous peoples -- most notably provided by the United Nations, the International Labour Organization and the World Bank -- differ markedly, and international law deals inadequately with non-state actors. Furthermore, questions of definition and relevant indica as regards indigenous communities -- for example a close cultural affinity with a territory or historical experiences of exploitation and dislocation -- become enormously complex when abstract concepts are to be rendered operational. Working among minority communities in southeast Asia LI (1996) notes, for example, that the interests of women, distress migrants and underclasses may be submerged in a focus on community that "leaves begging the central question of who is enables or constrained: whose economic circumstances or security of tenure is at stake." Indeed what is striking about the consequences in which indigenous communities struggled are internationalized -- through international green networks or the World Court -- is the plasticity and malleability of the shared meanings of "tradition" or "custom."14 And not least there is a tension between certain lines of liberal thought which, in either utilitarian or contractual views, takes the individual as the sovereign author of her life who pursues private rational advantage or conception of the good and the very idea of community rights. In the liberal view politics remains negative and citizenship an accessory. Liberalism in this account is distrustful of group-based claims extending beyond non-discrimination, and calls for neutrality with respect to competing substantive views among groups as to what is good and how to live. The community claims of indigenous peoples often come at an angle to this tradition. But they may have something in common with civic republicanism in which individuals are above all parts of political communities and this political attachment provides the citizen with her identity (Shafir 1998, p.10).
A similar movement is afoot in the broad realm of conservation and resource management in which there has been a strong emphasis on community-based resource management. Whether it is the failure of state-run National Parks in Africa (Neumann 1999), or the crisis of Federal land management in the United States (McCarthy 1998), the impulse is unequivocally to return powers to the community. In the case of Wise Use in the US, it is a nineteenth century moral economy rooted in Lockean concepts of property; in Zimbabwe or Kenya is it the participatory powers of native village communities (for example CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe). What this represents of course is a shift of power and of governance to a community which, like indigenous peoples, has enormous definitional, legal, political and social complexity. What is at stake is precisely the community itself: membership, inclusion, property claims, representativity (Peters 1996; Moore in press; Baviskar 1995). Whether common property resources, local forests, or community sea tenure, the specificities of community institutions and their own dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and co-ordination require careful consideration.
The focus of this theme is the links between new forms of community governance and the question of democracy. By focusing on arenas such as indigenous peoples, community resource management, and forms of economic governance associated with the new economy, the year's activities will permit a serious exploration not only of the questions of community definition, but also of the forms of community governance. By linking community governance across quite different cultural and political economic spheres, Community in Contention can explore the specific ways in which regional civic traditions of the Putnam sort and social modes of co-ordination (networking, steering, alliances) intersect around issues such as transparency, accountability and participation. Community governance raises the broader question, posed by Jessop (1998), of governance failures. More abstractly, these governance questions can pry open the complexities of community and democracy. Will small communities reject others in the name of local identity? Will parochiality replace argumentation and reason? Will the admission of diversity into the community allow members to reach consensus through collective political judgment? Since communal citizenship takes precedence, will there be an impetus toward broad rights? These are complex questions already broached by the likes of Charles Taylor (1989) and Iris Young (1990) around First Nations in Canada, but their relevance is of course far wider.
Next: Program Organization and Structure
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