603Natal alienation fails on the continent---colonial rule strengthened kinship to get the labour.
Olaloku-Teriba 18 — Annie Olaloku-Teriba. Writer and researcher on race, political blackness and anti-racist organising. Historical Materialism, “Afro-Pessimism and the (Un)Logic of Anti-Blackness,” vol. 26, no. 2, p. 96-122, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/afro-pessimism-and-the-unlogic-of-anti-blackness/ Clopus
This point can be elaborated through a comparison of the impulses that distinguish processes of racialisation in the antebellum US from those in colonial Africa. Orlando Patterson’s ‘social death’ thesis, which Wilderson and Sexton take as inherent to the black condition, posits three elements of coercive power in slavery: violence, dishonour and natal alienation. It is easy to see all three manifested in the condition of the black slave in the Americas. Dislocated from kinship relations and subjected to brutal relations of force, ‘their political existence [had] been destroyed’.[62] Try as they might, Sexton and Wilderson’s generalisation of natal alienation as embedded in the black condition cannot stand against the empirical evidence that we now have regarding the technologies of colonial rule.
In colonial southern Africa, the need for labour to service the farms, mines and industries – set up by settlers for the purposes of capital accumulation – necessitated interventions in the pre-capitalist social formations that still existed in the periphery.[63] On one hand, labour needed to be geographically mobile: this meant that the formal, predominantly male workforce needed to spend increasing periods of time away from the homestead. On the other hand, labour migrancy presented the possibility of ‘detribalisation’, disrupting birthrates and the possibility of ‘full proletarianisation’.[64]
Consequently, urban centres and the rural periphery had an interdependent but contradictory relationship in which the colonial administrations required both the integration of the native into capitalistic wage labour and the maintenance of ‘elements of pre-existing relationships’ to preserve the ability to reproduce the workforce.[65] The contradiction between legitimacy and accumulation meant that colonial authorities frequently intervened to strengthen the hold of kinship bonds, in order to secure young men’s labour in a system of indirect rule. Wage labour was ethnicised, with ethnic identity often determining which forms of labour were performed. Workers were often employed through ‘tribal’ authorities. Thus, the African’s primary relationship to the state was neither as a worker, nor as a black, but as Xhosa, Zulu, et cetera. These cultural identities were in turn stabilised as ‘biological’ lineages. This fragmentary worker status, in which an interaction between the urban mining and cash-crop areas and the (ethnicised) homestead was institutionally mandated, refracted relations of super-exploitation.[66]
This phenomenon of ‘class-ethnic structures’ stands in stark contrast to the technologies of the transatlantic slave trade. Without a steady stream of slave labour from across an ocean, colonial authorities had to consider the long-term reproduction of the workforce. Without the complete dislocation from traditional hierarchies of authority that the transatlantic passage represented, colonial authorities found themselves competing with pre-existing loyalties and political obligations. Thus, these problems were incorporated and transformed by administrators who sought to stabilise and absorb these pre-colonial socio-political formations.[67] Thus, while it is understandable that the ‘blacks who lived in the United States, Central, and Latin America in fact needed a cultural matrix to cling to’, the phenotypical register of blackness obscures much more than it illuminates regarding the various technologies mobilised to violently incorporate Africans into global capitalism.[68]
Were we to think of these two cases in conjunction, without the baggage of a mystifying search for a programmatic ‘anti-blackness’, we see a different set of similarities. Consider, for example, Steve Biko’s claim that ‘being black is not a matter of pigmentation’, which is elaborated in the logic he advances in addressing the unity, under the banner of blackness, of those designated as ‘Africans’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Coloureds’ by Apartheid:
604If they were right the theory couldn’t be written---the world is a project, not a result.
Gordon 18 — Lewis R. Gordon. Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies. Contemporary Political Theory, “Afro pessimism,” vol. 17, no. 1, p. 105-137, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-017-0165-4 Clopus cut from the author’s own reprint of his contribution to the forum
The first is that “an antiblack world” is not identical with “the world is antiblack.” My argument is that such a world is an antiblack racist project. It is not the historical achievement. Its limitations emerge from a basic fact: Black people and other opponents of such a project fought, and continue to fight, as we see today in the #BlackLivesMatter movement and many others, against it. The same argument applies to the argument about social death. Such an achievement would have rendered even these reflections stillborn. The basic premises of the Afropessimistic argument are, then, locked in performative contradictions. Yet, they have rhetorical force. This is evident through the continued growth of its proponents and forums (such as this one) devoted to it.
605Africanness doesn’t disappear into Blackness---Fanon says the problems differ, and he was there.
Olaloku-Teriba 18 — Annie Olaloku-Teriba. Writer and researcher on race, political blackness and anti-racist organising. Historical Materialism, “Afro-Pessimism and the (Un)Logic of Anti-Blackness,” vol. 26, no. 2, p. 96-122, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/afro-pessimism-and-the-unlogic-of-anti-blackness/ Clopus
Thus, we return to the second premise of Afro-pessimist theory – a necessary conceptual convergence between the African and the Negro. Wilderson parses this logic flippantly: ‘slaveness is something that has consumed Blackness and Africanness, making it impossible to divide slavery from Blackness’.[56] This convergence is developed in greater depth by Sexton: ‘As in the case of black immigrants to the United States, the movements for decolonization in Africa encounter the “racial calculus and political arithmetic” … of slavery as an internal limit on their capacity to claim (national or regional or continental) sovereignty and independence in the manner of their Asian and Latin American comrades.’[57] The manner in which Africanness disappears into Blackness is indeed suspect: it distorts the conceptual space between the Negro and the African which Fanon elaborates. In short, the Afro-American scholar’s desire for an American genealogy of slaveness to overwhelm the complex encounters between Africans and imperialism alone, however fierce his intuition, cannot make it such.
In large part, the problem for Wilderson and Sexton is that their analysis takes for granted the salience of a phenotypical register of blackness. They read Fanon, presuming that his different registers of ‘black’ are one and the same. This can be addressed by a return to his more resonant text of the period – The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon explicitly argues that the relationship between national consciousness on the African continent and a shared African consciousness ‘does not rest upon a metaphysical principle’, but on the mindfulness to the rule that a colonialism which ‘lingers’ anywhere poses a threat to freedom everywhere.[58] In his essay on national culture, he addresses these different registers head on. Transformed by his experience as part of the Algerian Revolution, he revisits negritude, which he had previously described as his ‘last chance’.[59] He argues that, ‘once the concept of negritude had been elaborated’, the project of establishing the ‘existence of an African culture’ with the ‘inner dynamism’ of distinctive national cultures faced serious problems.[60] He goes on:
[Gradually] the black Americans realized that their existential problems differed from those faced by the Africans. … But once the initial comparisons had been made and subjective feelings had settled down, the black Americans realized that the objective problems were fundamentally different. The principle and purpose of the freedom rides whereby black and white Americans endeavor to combat racial discrimination have little in common with the heroic struggle of the Angolan people against the iniquity of Portuguese colonialism.[61]
606Casting the harm as the recipient’s character is the move---the aff refuses it and names the supplier.
Stavrianakis 25 — Anna Stavrianakis. May 12. Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex; works on the arms trade, militarism and export control. Middle East Critique, “Air Power, Controversy, and Colonial Continuities: UK Arms Sales and the War in Yemen,” https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2025.2496844 Clopus
As such, the difference between Saudi and Western practice is less stark than mainstream analysis might at first imagine. And crucially, if the Saudis ‘couldn’t do it without us’ (Deverell, quoted in Merat 2019) then British complicity with today’s practices means the line between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is harder to maintain. Gulf military expert Michael Knights draws a direct comparison between the Saudis’ ‘out-and-out coercive air campaign’ of ‘terror bombing’ over the city of Saada in 2015 and 2016, and the 1991 Gulf War. ‘You couldn’t have hit more civilian targets’: Saudi military chiefs ‘worked their way down a list of all the national infrastructure targets like we did [when the US and UK bombed Iraq during the Gulf War] in 1991 … that meant everything: cranes, bridges, ministries … water treatment plants’ (quoted in Merat 2019). The Saudis’ conduct in Yemen both bears similarities to Western practice and poses a political problem for their backers. So how does the British state manage when the Saudis do what it has also done?
Managing the Controversy
The controversy over arms sales generated by Saudi air strikes in Yemen is marked by the centrality of Saudi Arabia to the Orientalist and racialized ‘repressive regimes’ narrative that dominates British arms control discourse (Rossdale 2019, ch. 9). In this framing, the violence of states like Saudi Arabia is marked ‘as fundamentally Other, as external to modernity, rather than as intimately and historically interwoven with Western practices of warfare’ (Rossdale 2019, 252). When a racialized partner exercises violence, the British state has to try to create distance between what the Saudis are doing and UK practice. It does so by ‘externalising the explanatory focus onto the terrain of cultural difference’ articulated by Orientalist processes of racialization (Wearing 2024, 370). The ambivalent relationship that air power as a practice has with civilian harm, both today and historically, has to be deflected and the problem cast on to the failure of the Saudis to internalize humanitarian and human rights norms or accept the tutelage offered to them. The Western defense of Israeli military practice in Gaza offers the starkest of contrasts: airstrikes from drones and fighter jets have been a central mode of genocidal violence against Palestinians, yet the US and UK have gone to extraordinary lengths to try and normalize and legitimize Israeli violence, which is racially coded as white (Lentin 2016; Naber 2017).
There is thus a displacement of the historic features of air power onto the character of the Saudis, which allows the reassertion of British moral benevolence and the obscuring of Britain’s role in generating the problem that has become controversial. As the examples given earlier indicate, the use of air power has never been without its critics: legitimation has always been a core component of its practice. From the early days of the interwar period, a ‘potent moral critique’ emerged in response to the horror of aerial bombing (Satia 2006, 36) in which critics were quick to emphasize the indiscriminate and inhumane character of air power (Townshend 1986, 146). In response, ‘a well rehearsed script of official denial was soon written’ (Thomas 2013, 88). This official script persists today through practices of military tutelage, political cover, and legal deflection.
607Their literature needs the here-and-now---critique that rejects reform ends up an empty signifier.
Austin 26 — Jonathan Austin. Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen; works on humanitarianism, violence and knowledge production. Review of International Studies, “Is all decolonialism metaphorical? On the aesthetics of decolonizing humanitarian futures,” https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526102113 Clopus
These debates are academic. But reading them through attempts to push them into the real world – as through decolonial humanitarianism – reveals something different. To see this, we can return to Koli Jean Bofan’s novel Congo Inc and his satire of the ‘experts in culture, humanitarianism, or conflict resolution’ heading to the Congo to ‘propagate holiness around zero latitude … muttering dogmas they’d memorized in the humanities departments in the northern hemisphere’. The theories underlying decolonial humanitarianism, of all kinds, have emerged precisely from those humanities departments in the northern hemisphere where – indeed – many ‘humanitarians’ are trained. On the one hand, it is thus easy to criticize, for example, reformist and rejectionary decolonial humanitarianism for a fundamental conservatism or co-optation and, therein, with having misread or failed to take seriously decolonial theory. Especially when most of the practical guidance on how to decolonize humanitarianism is written by researchers or practitioners based in the Global North.
On the other hand, it is also true that applied knowledge politics must necessarily be different from abstract knowledge politics. Decolonial humanitarianism makes this abundantly clear. It is a practical attempt to decolonize knowledge production at the centre of global power structures, and so will always deviate from theoretical treatises. Indeed, decolonial theory has largely pursued its own counter-aesthetic strategies at the level of the individual, often through high-artistic interventions that have changed very little in the ‘real-world’ of power politics. Decolonial humanitarianism, by contrast, mobilizes aesthetics organizationally and institutionally, working to challenge the hegemony of knowledge production at the centre of global governance. It is therefore a uniquely instructive arena in which to assess the practical efficacy of decolonial ambitions. In this regard, and to conclude, I want to suggest that it is important for the future of decolonial humanitarianism that it avoids becoming enmeshed in an endless cycle of internal theoretical critiques between its different forms.
Instead, what would happen if we accepted all forms of decolonialism as being metaphorical? The idea that an aesthetic, metaphorical, discursive, etc. project of decolonizing the ‘imagination’ is not subsidiary to material change but rather integral to it? Important here is that aesthetics is central not only to decolonizing ‘the imagination of the dominated’ but also to creating new imaginaries themselves. There is a long tradition in thinking in such terms, most obviously in the poetic-aesthetic language deployed by anticolonialists such as Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, or Frantz Fanon himself, where aesthetics is both a form of critique and productive of alternatives. In Humanitarian Fictions , Megan Cole Paustian evokes this possibility in an analysis of novels focused on humanitarian action. While she unpacks the white saviourism and coloniality of this tradition, she also moves instead towards novels (largely produced by African writers) that work to ‘demystify and reinvent the vocabulary of global care’. Such novels, much like the aforementioned Congo Inc :
Situate humanitarian representation within a political network of social relations, and they negotiate the tension between utopian desire and real-world necessity. Their language is universalist but not imperialist, progress-oriented but not salvation-based, postsecular but nonmissionary, invested in giving but not in the frame of benevolence. They show the entanglement of ethics with social, political, and historical forces. They prioritize humanity but draw more on the language of sacredness than sameness. Above all, it is stressed that these critical humanitarian fictions, while rejecting the liberal ‘international community’, also ‘affirm that, in this irreversibly globalized world, some version of transatlantic care must endure’. In this, their imaginaries of change mix reformist, rejectionary, and revolutionary aesthetic tones – seeking the decolonization of knowledge but also change in the here-and-now. The contradictions of this navigation between ‘utopian desire and real-world necessity’ – moreover – can be reconciled precisely because of the power that aesthetics has as a form of authorizing knowledge. Unlike claims to expertise grounded in objective, neutral, technocratic, etc. methods, aesthetic credibility emerges from a sense of appropriateness that does not require linearity in its workings: the ‘open’ nature of the aesthetic allows complexity to be expressed.
Put differently, it is important to stress that while the knowledge politics evoked here through counter-aesthetic strategies must not become, with Tuck and Yang, an ‘empty signifier’ – devoid of any meaning – it perhaps actually benefits from having become a floating signifier. Floating signifiers are concepts that are fuzzy, loose, or vague enough that they lack a fixed meaning that can be generalized across contexts but which, nonetheless, unite different actors. Their value lies in the multiplicity of meanings they contain and those unifying qualities. In this, ‘the open nature of a floating signifier invites to dialogue, constitutes identity, accounts for ongoing change, and thereby contributes to the relevance of a concept’. More, as others have noted, they are very common in global governance itself. To return to Rancière, the aesthetic strategies that often undergird floating signifiers are important because ‘the aesthetic movement of politics consists above all in the framing of a we ’. Or, put differently, aesthetics allows politics to move beyond difference and to create community.
Vis-à-vis decolonizing humanitarianism, the goal must therefore be to find ways to unite actors that are diverse and different not only in their specific postcolonial experience but also internally, where – for example – divisions also necessarily exist between domestic elites and those suffering from humanitarian crisis. As any form of global governance, the (utopian) goal is always to move beyond difference and find forms of solidarity. It is for this reason, perhaps, that decolonial humanitarianism must generally remain vague on its concrete image of the future, which is something that will emerge only after a long period of negotiation, contingency, and political uncertainty. To return to the humanitarian practitioner mentioned earlier, the idea that ‘we’ll figure out the other [technical] stuff’ on what decolonial humanitarianism means in practice ‘later’ might not be immediately pragmatically satisfactory at first glance, but is actually an astute strategy for coalition building.
Decolonial counter-aesthetics must, therefore, be necessarily vague, open, and imprecise – floating across different identities. In doing so, decolonial humanitarianism at its best, and in practice, embraces what Edouard Glissant described as a politics in which we do not have to ‘understand’ or ‘agree’ with everyone ‘in order to agree to live with them, to build with them, to take risks with them’. For us, understanding how all decolonialism is metaphorical, thus allows us to see the radicality that exists across its diversity. For example, despite critiques, there is a true form of decolonial praxis in Adeso’s refusal to accept funding from international development or humanitarian organizations, albeit one that then leads to a reliance on the private sector. Equally, there is a true form of decolonial praxis in the efforts of reformists to imagine a form of global ‘emergency fund’ led by local actors, albeit one that indeed risks retaining elements of white saviourism. And, despite the critiques above, there is naturally also a true form of decolonial praxis in revolutionary attempts to grapple at more structural levels with global capitalism and imperial structure. As Paustian’s discussion of critical humanitarian fiction makes clear, however, those who inhabit the ground truths of humanitarian violence are opaque in their preferences for one or another among these forms of humanitarian praxis. Indeed, they typically mix these approaches in action. The aesthetics of decolonial humanitarianism are thus also necessarily opaque in how they authorize expertise differently, maintaining an ambiguity that allows for allegiances to be built.
608Nigeria has a foreign policy---it broke with Kissinger over Angola and it can break again.
Campbell 20 — Horace G. Campbell. Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. Africa Development, “The Quagmire of US Militarism in Africa,” vol. 45, no. 1, p. 73-115, https://journals.codesria.org/index.php/ad/article/view/653 Clopus
Racism compounds the alliance between sections of the Nigerian capitalist class and the US security establishment. This contradiction strengthens the forces inside Nigeria that historically supported the antiapartheid struggles and refused to be drawn in as an ally of white supremacy. Former Nigerian President Murtala Mohammed had provided crucial leadership in 1975 when Henry Kissinger was pressuring Nigeria to oppose the frontline states that supported the freedom fighters in Angola. This experience demonstrated that the Nigerian political leadership could take positions that would be in the interest of pan-African solidarity. According to the constitution of Nigeria, the foreign policy of the state is guided by five key concepts: a. promotion and protection of the national interest; b. promotion of African integration and support for African unity; c. promotion of international co-operation for the consolidation of universal peace and mutual respect among all nations and elimination of discrimination in all its manifestations; d. respect for international law and treaty obligations as well as the seeking of settlement of international disputes by negotiation, mediation, conciliation, arbitration and adjudication; and e. promotion of a just world economic order. Despite these clear objectives, thus far since the era of Murtala Mohammed, the political leadership has worked against the promotion of African integration and support for African unity. Nonetheless, this leadership cannot escape the unforeseen consequences of the US currency wars with China. The Nigerian state has earned the wrath of the US financial class because the rulers have decided to place 10 per cent of their currency reserves in the Chinese currency, the RMB. As one component of great power competition, the US remains very nervous about currency swap arrangements between African states and China (Prasad 2016). Popular opposition forces are calling for uprisings while former military officials are now calling for ‘People-centred Security Sector Reform’.
609The alternative is necessarily vague---opacity is a design feature, not an oversight.
Austin 26 — Jonathan Austin. Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen; works on humanitarianism, violence and knowledge production. Review of International Studies, “Is all decolonialism metaphorical? On the aesthetics of decolonizing humanitarian futures,” https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526102113 Clopus
Vis-à-vis decolonizing humanitarianism, the goal must therefore be to find ways to unite actors that are diverse and different not only in their specific postcolonial experience but also internally, where – for example – divisions also necessarily exist between domestic elites and those suffering from humanitarian crisis. As any form of global governance, the (utopian) goal is always to move beyond difference and find forms of solidarity. It is for this reason, perhaps, that decolonial humanitarianism must generally remain vague on its concrete image of the future, which is something that will emerge only after a long period of negotiation, contingency, and political uncertainty. To return to the humanitarian practitioner mentioned earlier, the idea that ‘we’ll figure out the other [technical] stuff’ on what decolonial humanitarianism means in practice ‘later’ might not be immediately pragmatically satisfactory at first glance, but is actually an astute strategy for coalition building.
Decolonial counter-aesthetics must, therefore, be necessarily vague, open, and imprecise – floating across different identities. In doing so, decolonial humanitarianism at its best, and in practice, embraces what Edouard Glissant described as a politics in which we do not have to ‘understand’ or ‘agree’ with everyone ‘in order to agree to live with them, to build with them, to take risks with them’. For us, understanding how all decolonialism is metaphorical, thus allows us to see the radicality that exists across its diversity. For example, despite critiques, there is a true form of decolonial praxis in Adeso’s refusal to accept funding from international development or humanitarian organizations, albeit one that then leads to a reliance on the private sector. Equally, there is a true form of decolonial praxis in the efforts of reformists to imagine a form of global ‘emergency fund’ led by local actors, albeit one that indeed risks retaining elements of white saviourism. And, despite the critiques above, there is naturally also a true form of decolonial praxis in revolutionary attempts to grapple at more structural levels with global capitalism and imperial structure. As Paustian’s discussion of critical humanitarian fiction makes clear, however, those who inhabit the ground truths of humanitarian violence are opaque in their preferences for one or another among these forms of humanitarian praxis. Indeed, they typically mix these approaches in action. The aesthetics of decolonial humanitarianism are thus also necessarily opaque in how they authorize expertise differently, maintaining an ambiguity that allows for allegiances to be built.
610Anti-saviour framing gets captured---the same rhetoric erodes civilian protection and criminalises critics.
Aina 26 — Folahanmi Aina. April 13. Lecturer in Global Security Challenges, University of London; specialist on the Sahel and West African security. Small Wars and Insurgencies, “Ibrahim Traore: Burkina Faso’s saviour, dictator or revolutionary anti-imperialist,” vol. 37, no. 6, p. 1473-1488, https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2026.2656299 Clopus
Despite the centrality of security to Traore’s justification for the seizure of power, the insecurity situation in the Sahel has remained complex. The expansion of jihadists’ territorial control under his watch reveals the structural limits of militarized counterinsurgency in the troubled Sahel region. Traore’s strategy has relied heavily on the expansion of auxiliary forces, including civilian militias, and the deepening of security partnerships with non-Western actors such as Russia’s mercenary forces previously known as the Wagner group and now rebranded as Africa Corps. While framed as pragmatic sovereignty-enhancing measures, these approaches carry significant risks: the erosion of civilian protection norms, the entrenchment of war economies, and the further fragmentation of state authority in contested zones.
Moreover, the securitized governance model has narrowed the political space necessary for long-term conflict resolution. The prioritization of military solutions over dialogue, local mediation, and governance reform reflects a broader regional trend among Sahelian juntas. In practice, these risk reproducing the very same political outcomes such as grievance, exclusion, and state violence that has traditionally fuelled insurgent recruitment. Traore’s claim to be restoring order thus sits uneasily with a reality in which insecurity is increasingly normalized as a permanent condition of rule.
The consolidation of power under Traore has revealed that the underside of his revolutionary governance style is authoritarian. The suspension of constitutional protections, repression of dissenting voices especially those of journalists, and coercive mobilization of citizens in the name of national survival point to a governing logic that equates unity with forced obedience. Media restrictions and the targeting of perceived critics have been justified as necessary to prevent sabotage and foreign manipulation, yet they also insulate the regime from accountability.
This authoritarian turn is not incidental but structurally embedded in Traore’s political project. Revolutionary narratives often require a permanent state of exception, in which emergency becomes routine, and pluralism is reframed as betrayal. In this sense, Traore’s rule reflects a familiar paradox of post-colonial revolutionary regimes, the pursuit of emancipation through instruments of coercion. The danger lies not only in democratic backsliding, but in the institutionalization of militarism as the primary mode of governance.
611...or it bars the policy---but their own African peace scholarship demands the policy break.
Campbell 20 — Horace G. Campbell. Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. Africa Development, “The Quagmire of US Militarism in Africa,” vol. 45, no. 1, p. 73-115, https://journals.codesria.org/index.php/ad/article/view/653 Clopus
Racism compounds the alliance between sections of the Nigerian capitalist class and the US security establishment. This contradiction strengthens the forces inside Nigeria that historically supported the antiapartheid struggles and refused to be drawn in as an ally of white supremacy. Former Nigerian President Murtala Mohammed had provided crucial leadership in 1975 when Henry Kissinger was pressuring Nigeria to oppose the frontline states that supported the freedom fighters in Angola. This experience demonstrated that the Nigerian political leadership could take positions that would be in the interest of pan-African solidarity. According to the constitution of Nigeria, the foreign policy of the state is guided by five key concepts: a. promotion and protection of the national interest; b. promotion of African integration and support for African unity; c. promotion of international co-operation for the consolidation of universal peace and mutual respect among all nations and elimination of discrimination in all its manifestations; d. respect for international law and treaty obligations as well as the seeking of settlement of international disputes by negotiation, mediation, conciliation, arbitration and adjudication; and e. promotion of a just world economic order. Despite these clear objectives, thus far since the era of Murtala Mohammed, the political leadership has worked against the promotion of African integration and support for African unity. Nonetheless, this leadership cannot escape the unforeseen consequences of the US currency wars with China. The Nigerian state has earned the wrath of the US financial class because the rulers have decided to place 10 per cent of their currency reserves in the Chinese currency, the RMB. As one component of great power competition, the US remains very nervous about currency swap arrangements between African states and China (Prasad 2016). Popular opposition forces are calling for uprisings while former military officials are now calling for ‘People-centred Security Sector Reform’.
The other cogent feature of the US/Africa military relationship can be found in the historical relations between the states of southern Africa and the US military. Throughout the years of the anti-apartheid struggles, Tanzania had taken the lead within the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) liberation committee to give coherence to the military, diplomatic and political alliance that had emerged in the region. The current disinformation campaign that is carried out from Kenya and supported by AFRICOM’s social science research platform is more difficult in the states that had fought against apartheid. Notwithstanding the fact that the US had spent US$ 1 billion after the defeat of apartheid to harness the energies of the youth to join ‘conflict management’ fronts (Hearn 2000), it had been difficult to convince the peoples of the region of southern Africa that the principal impetus for US engagement with apartheid was to fight communism in Africa.
Sustainable peace and a transformation of the militarised institutions that have been established in Africa since the colonial era requires a break with the old US security policies. This author has joined in the forces of peace that are working to build a new pan-African peace infrastructure for Africans and peace-loving peoples all over the world. Such an infrastructure project must break with the pre-occupation with strategic minerals and energy that is based on the extraction of petroleum resources. Peace and transformation in Africa is inseparable from a break with environmental destruction in Africa. Just as how there is now an understanding in the US that the society needs an economic recovery programme that is based on the green collar economy, there is also an understanding in Africa that African economic transformation must be built around the provision of food, clothing, shelter and health care for its citizens. This also involves the fight against militarised global apartheid.
612Applied politics is different from abstract politics---the aesthetic version has changed very little.
Austin 26 — Jonathan Austin. Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen; works on humanitarianism, violence and knowledge production. Review of International Studies, “Is all decolonialism metaphorical? On the aesthetics of decolonizing humanitarian futures,” https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526102113 Clopus
These debates are academic. But reading them through attempts to push them into the real world – as through decolonial humanitarianism – reveals something different. To see this, we can return to Koli Jean Bofan’s novel Congo Inc and his satire of the ‘experts in culture, humanitarianism, or conflict resolution’ heading to the Congo to ‘propagate holiness around zero latitude … muttering dogmas they’d memorized in the humanities departments in the northern hemisphere’. The theories underlying decolonial humanitarianism, of all kinds, have emerged precisely from those humanities departments in the northern hemisphere where – indeed – many ‘humanitarians’ are trained. On the one hand, it is thus easy to criticize, for example, reformist and rejectionary decolonial humanitarianism for a fundamental conservatism or co-optation and, therein, with having misread or failed to take seriously decolonial theory. Especially when most of the practical guidance on how to decolonize humanitarianism is written by researchers or practitioners based in the Global North.
On the other hand, it is also true that applied knowledge politics must necessarily be different from abstract knowledge politics. Decolonial humanitarianism makes this abundantly clear. It is a practical attempt to decolonize knowledge production at the centre of global power structures, and so will always deviate from theoretical treatises. Indeed, decolonial theory has largely pursued its own counter-aesthetic strategies at the level of the individual, often through high-artistic interventions that have changed very little in the ‘real-world’ of power politics. Decolonial humanitarianism, by contrast, mobilizes aesthetics organizationally and institutionally, working to challenge the hegemony of knowledge production at the centre of global governance. It is therefore a uniquely instructive arena in which to assess the practical efficacy of decolonial ambitions. In this regard, and to conclude, I want to suggest that it is important for the future of decolonial humanitarianism that it avoids becoming enmeshed in an endless cycle of internal theoretical critiques between its different forms.
613Supplier states engineer non-complicity---they claim insight for friendship and ignorance for law.
Stavrianakis 25 — Anna Stavrianakis. May 12. Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex; works on the arms trade, militarism and export control. Middle East Critique, “Air Power, Controversy, and Colonial Continuities: UK Arms Sales and the War in Yemen,” https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2025.2496844 Clopus
The UK government claimed its role in arming, supporting, and advising Saudi Arabia did not constitute participation in the coalition or the war. It trod a line between having influence and being confident in Saudi respect for IHL, while not being complicit if the Saudis were found not to be complying. For example, the government position was that the UK does not provide ‘direct support’ for sorties in Yemen: RAF personnel ‘do not prepare’ aircraft for operations, are prohibited from loading weapons and are ‘not involved in the planning of operational sorties’ (Lancaster 2019) – although UK personnel do ‘store and issue weapons for use by the Saudi air force, load weapons for its training missions and participate in training exercises with the Saudi air force’ (Miller 2020a). Similarly, UK trainers ‘would provide generic advice on improving Coalition documentation, but they would be careful not to directly contribute or approve them or provide any direct advice on how to conduct the campaign in Yemen’ (Watkins 2016b). And liaison officers
are not embedded personnel taking part in the Saudi Arabian-led operations and are not involved in carrying out strikes, directing or conducting operations in Yemen or selecting targets and are not involved in the Saudi targeting decision-making process. All personnel remain under UK command and control. (Crompton 2016, para. 47)
They are there to provide training and advice ‘on best practice targeting techniques to help ensure continued compliance with international humanitarian law’ but do not have an operational role (MoD, quoted in Graham-Harrison 2016). A different way of putting this comes from journalist Iona Craig, who describes British and US officers as providing ‘logistical support in Saudi’s command and control centre, albeit separated by a glass wall to provide deniability that we are “in the room”’ (Craig 2017).
This maneuvering is central to British political and legal efforts to try to ensure that facilitation of military action does not count as support for potential war crimes. ‘A lot of energy is spent on trying to keep us not a party’, according to one Whitehall official (in Merat 2019). The UK government has to tread the line between friendship, to maintain its relationship with the Saudi Arabia government, and complicity – to protect itself against negative domestic public opinion and legal challenge. The longstanding defense relationship between the UK and Saudi Arabia is described mutualistically as a ‘framework of co-operation’ involving the ‘sharing of operational expertise’ and ‘training together’, which gives the UK insight into Saudi systems, processes, and procedures (Watkins 2016a). And, crucially for the question of navigating complicity, ‘this degree of insight is higher than it would be normal to expect the UK to have into another country’s Armed Forces given that we are not a member of the Coalition or a party to this conflict’ (Watkins 2016a). Yet while the UK claims privileged knowledge of Saudi practice, thus demonstrating benevolent superior friendship, it also claims ignorance as a legal defense against complicity, in that ‘UK Defence personnel are unable to form a complete understanding of the Coalition’s regard for IHL … as they do not have access to all the information required to do so’ (HMG 2016).
614Their own program is action against the trade---not a posture, a campaign against the supplier.
Rossdale 25 — Chris Rossdale. Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol; author of Resisting Militarism. Global Studies Quarterly, “Racial Capitalism Must Be Defended: Reading the Arms Trade through Critiques of Policing,” vol. 5, no. 2, ksaf032, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksaf032 Clopus
It is in this vein that positioning the arms trade as part of global policing is productive. It pushes movements challenging the arms trade to attend to the role of the industry beyond conventional war, and movements against policing to recognize how martial technology companies reproduce a world of patrol, surveillance, and social sorting. For both, it positions companies like Thales as integral to the project of ordering and defending racial capitalism. There are examples of movements working in this direction. In the United Kingdom, CAAT is placing increased focus on how martial technology companies relate to policing around the world (Weitzberg 2022), albeit still within a broad framework of police militarization. In the United States, movements like the Carceral Tech Resistance Network (2020) recognize the intimate entanglements of military and police violence, and the central role of martial technology companies here.
In recent years, movements in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle have recognized the arms industry as integral not only to the occupation and genocide but also to the global circulation of policing technologies. Through the occupation, companies have developed and refined weaponry, drones, surveillance, and border control technologies, which are then deployed in broader systems of global order (Halper 2015; Machold 2016). This recognition has fostered powerful expressions of solidarity between movements opposing imperial violence and those challenging policing (Erakat 2020). Since October 2023, Palestine solidarity movements around the world have faced widespread police repression, often while taking action against arms companies; they have been forced to confront the deep entanglements of military and police violence, and the position of the arms industry in relation to both (Dasha et al. 2024; Fekete 2024). By confronting those entanglements, these movements offer visions of global solidarity against the forces of war and policing.
615The recipient is an active participant---the criticism is of the patron’s management, not the client’s character.
Stavrianakis 25 — Anna Stavrianakis. May 12. Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex; works on the arms trade, militarism and export control. Middle East Critique, “Air Power, Controversy, and Colonial Continuities: UK Arms Sales and the War in Yemen,” https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2025.2496844 Clopus
The UK government response to controversy over the harms caused by airstrikes has been framed as part of ‘what we try to do overtly, but also quietly, to advance change in Saudi Arabia’ (Ellwood 2016c). Practices of military tutelage and Orientalist political cover demonstrate an attempt on the part of the British state to educate Saudi Arabia into liberal ways of militarism, including high-tech military responses to political crisis, justifications of war-fighting based on the notion of professionalism and occasional mistakes, and an emphasis on media management in lieu of accountability. These efforts are accompanied by legal deflection in an attempt to insulate the British state from accusations of complicity in war crimes. Taken together, these practices illustrate how the management of controversy over civilian harm is primarily about managing the fallout when a racialized friend misbehaves and shielding the UK from criticism. Yet Saudi Arabia is not a passive recipient merely subject to British maneuverings. The Saudi state has been an active participant in the legitimation of its practices in the war, co-opting British responses to try and justify itself, thus resisting British hierarchizing while simultaneously relying on British support. Saudi practice is thus doubly disruptive for the UK: its use of airstrikes generates problems for the British self-image as a responsible arms supplier and its comparisons to Western practice draw attention to the wider operation of air power in the Middle East.
616They defend the vagueness---an opaque alternative is one nobody can be held to.
Austin 26 — Jonathan Austin. Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen; works on humanitarianism, violence and knowledge production. Review of International Studies, “Is all decolonialism metaphorical? On the aesthetics of decolonizing humanitarian futures,” https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526102113 Clopus
Decolonial counter-aesthetics must, therefore, be necessarily vague, open, and imprecise – floating across different identities. In doing so, decolonial humanitarianism at its best, and in practice, embraces what Edouard Glissant described as a politics in which we do not have to ‘understand’ or ‘agree’ with everyone ‘in order to agree to live with them, to build with them, to take risks with them’. For us, understanding how all decolonialism is metaphorical, thus allows us to see the radicality that exists across its diversity. For example, despite critiques, there is a true form of decolonial praxis in Adeso’s refusal to accept funding from international development or humanitarian organizations, albeit one that then leads to a reliance on the private sector. Equally, there is a true form of decolonial praxis in the efforts of reformists to imagine a form of global ‘emergency fund’ led by local actors, albeit one that indeed risks retaining elements of white saviourism. And, despite the critiques above, there is naturally also a true form of decolonial praxis in revolutionary attempts to grapple at more structural levels with global capitalism and imperial structure. As Paustian’s discussion of critical humanitarian fiction makes clear, however, those who inhabit the ground truths of humanitarian violence are opaque in their preferences for one or another among these forms of humanitarian praxis. Indeed, they typically mix these approaches in action. The aesthetics of decolonial humanitarianism are thus also necessarily opaque in how they authorize expertise differently, maintaining an ambiguity that allows for allegiances to be built.
Understanding decolonial humanitarianism in this opaque and pluralistic manner is not simply a technical question relating to knowledge production, but also a means of protecting its potential to produce radical change. Despite controversies over the relationship between anticolonial, postcolonial, decolonial, and other theoretical traditions, they all form part of the same lineage: the desire for emancipation from a colonially enforced ‘feeling of not existing’. Today – however – the attacks on this knowledge liberation movement are more acute than they have been for decades. Humanitarian organizations have been scrubbing references to terms linked to decolonialism from their web pages since the Trump administration’s onslaught. Political winds have turned, as they not infrequently do, against more progressive knowledge politics. Against such an onslaught, appreciating the power of aesthetically and metaphorically articulated decolonialism to preserve imaginaries of a different future is more crucial than ever given, to close with Achille Mbembe, ‘the basic goal’ of decolonialism ‘is not just to bring a specific political consciousness into being but to make it effective’.