Michael Watts, Professor of Geography
Director, Institute of International Studies
Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley: Currents
Michael Watts, Professor of Geography
Director, Institute of International Studies
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third theme will address what Stuart Hall has called the
"continual interplay of history, power, and culture" which underwrites
the wide array of identity politics that seem to have attended the
collapse of the bipolar world of the post-1945 period. Whether one
agrees with Eric Hobsbawm that barbarism has been on the increase for
most of the twentieth century (and that there is no end in sight!), the
recent events in Bosnia and Rwanda have brought home the fragility of
some multiethnic nation states and the ways that cultural difference can
be converted into theatres of irreducible hatred. For example, the
process by which Bosnian Serbs are eliminating any signs of what they
call Turkish and Austro-Hungarian oppression -- as names disappear from
maps, street signs, dictionaries, and encyclopedias -- rests not on an
eternally fixed identity of what it is to be Serb or Croat or Muslim,
but as Michael Ignatieff puts it, on turning "the narcissims of minor
difference into the monstrous fable that the people on the other side
were genocidal killers." Whether we are dealing with the rise of the
Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria and Al Arqam in Malaysia, the
fragmentation of Tadzhikistan, or the constitutional crisis in Nigeria,
Hall's admonition seems powerful and compelling, but one must recognize
that it can also be used to explore the creative (as much as the
seemingly destructive) ways in which identity politics is reshaping the
public sphere.
nd finally, there is the question of peace and security after the
Cold War. In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the signing of the United Nations Charter were held in San Francisco. Yet ironically, the role and function of the UN, as Brian Urquhart and others have suggested, is in question in part because the world is a very different place than in 1945. The maintenance of
international security by collective means was primarily intended to
curb interstate war in the context of Cold War alliances, and the
Charter was largely interpreted in this way. While interstate war is
hardly likely to disappear in the next fifty years, civil strife capable
of triggering regional or global multilateral responses -- one thinks of
Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia -- is much more probable. Indeed, one might
anticipate military or security operations to enforce arms control,
disaster relief, political freedoms, and even population movements.
Whether the UN specifically can command the resources, the legitimacy,
and the capacity to shoulder this burden is part of a much larger set of
problems turning on questions of multilateralism or unilateralism as
procedures of governance, and on centralization or subsidiarity as the
rubric for collective security arrangements. The Institute is in fact
sponsoring a yearlong series of workshops in 1995 entitled Global
Governance: The United Nations and the Next Fifty Years. Human rights,
collective security, sustainability, economic regulation, and
humanitarian relief will be examined both as a way of shedding light on
the role, function, and mandate of UN agencies and also as a way of
exploring the broader question of multilateralism in the twenty-first
century.
hese four themes in no sense exhaust the intellectual territory of
International Studies -- indeed, the example of Chiapas suggests a number
of other topics, including the relationships between political and
economic liberalization and, not least, the slow and uneven move toward
representative democracy and a full range of citizens' rights (including
indigenous); the rise of delegative as opposed to representative
democracies, as Guillermo O'Donnell calls it. Still other questions turn
on civil society and those institutions that serve as prerequisites for
the market -- the role of social networks and social capital in capitalist
development, for example -- and on the new regulatory structures which may
be associated with a period of capitalist development that rests in some
way on flexible production and new forms of innovation-based
competition. What seems to run through all of these concerns,
nevertheless, is a need to link the global and the local in a way that
does justice to the complex relations between place-specific forces and
the forces of globalization that are in some sense footloose. Global
movements of capital, twenty-four-hour trading, and a worldwide media
industry have not, of course, made us all the same -- though New York and
Hong Kong may now have more in common in some respects than, say, Los
Angeles and Atlanta -- but have rather produced new sorts of geographic,
cultural, and economic difference. The local is now almost always a
global site in which all manner of economic, political, and cultural
modernities are being fashioned, contested, and reworked.
f our intellectual and theoretical concerns are in some way driven
by the complex realities of post-Cold War politics and the global
reconfigurations of late twentieth-century capitalism, these same
realities also have profound implications for graduate training. The
endeavor to understand Bosnia or Rwanda owes as much to the ways in
which meanings are constructed, contested, and reinterpreted as to the
politics of state-building and colonial history, all of which suggest
that there is much to be gained from supporting small interdisciplinary
working groups of faculty and students around subject matters that cut
across the humanities, the professional schools, and the social
sciences. To this extent, the Institute will fund a series of such
working groups and expand the highly successful doctoral dissertation
workshop program initiated several years ago under the auspices of
International and Area Studies.
omparative and transnational research strikes at the heart of a
number of pressing concerns in curriculum, public policy, and social
science theory. I am hopeful that the Institute of International
Studies, at a critical moment of rebuilding and faculty recruitment on
the Berkeley campus, can play a constructive and catalytic role across
all of these domains.
Previous page: NAFTA, Chiapas, and the Importance of International Studies
See also the Globetrotter Research Gallery The Changing United Nations and the 2001 interview with Michael Watts
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