617Táíwò indicts them---revolutionary decolonialism has no programme and is distant from real suffering.
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
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui equally critiqued the co-optation of indigenous or subaltern knowledge by high-theoretical social scientists in the Global North. For her, their use of terms such as rupture, de-linking, pluriversality, or even decolonialism/decoloniality itself is distant from the lifeworlds of humanitarian suffering: isolating ‘academic treatises from any obligation to or dialogue with insurgent social forces’. As such, the revolutionary humanitarian decolonial idea that ‘to decolonise is not to critique from within, it is to rupture and rebuild’ can be seen as irresponsible in its abstraction. Consider in this regard Olúfẹ́ mi Táíwò’s critique of ‘decolonialism’ tout court , and his words that he is:
Flabbergasted by the refusal to engage with … the desperate lifeworlds dominant in African countries and the denial to millions of their basic dignity as humans in these countries – and not all of this is traceable only to the depredations of colonialism. Olúfẹ́ mi Táíwò’s critique here echoes that of Kwasi Tieku: scholarship grounded in the reality of suffering rarely sees itself as pure in its thinking, whereas scholarship that is too distant from that reality, whatever its claims to radicalism, tends to fall into a form of ‘disciplinary decadence’. The critique, at its base, is that revolutionary decolonialism lacks a ‘programme of concrete changes’ to the world of comparable specificity to those offered by reformist or rejectionary strands. In large part, the critique continues, because these approaches are intensely metaphorical, relying on a far too vague aesthetic imaginary of the future, or blunt yet underspecified demands for Indigenous sovereignty. Reversing the critique that reformist decolonial humanitarianism represents simply a ‘move to innocence’ – a symbolic act that soothes institutional guilt – these critiques would see more radical decolonial approaches as equal moves to innocence, given they can fail to take the risk of acting, recommending, or engaging with the impurity of politics, instead maintaining an innocent radicalism.
618US militarism is the imperial relation in Africa---so cutting it is the anti-imperial move.
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
The US military – as the pivot of the reproduction of US imperialism – has been caught in the midst of this resurgence of white supremacist ideas in the context of the maintenance of racial capitalism. Faced with the antiglobalisation movement at the turn of the century, US strategic leaders had launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Iran, and destabilised societies opposing capitalism such as Cuba and Venezuela. These endless wars rolled into an on-going combination of stalemate and quagmire – a word referring to an awkward, complex or hazardous situation (taken from the English word denoting a soft boggy area of land that gives way underfoot) – and the reasons for global militarism morphed from fighting ‘terror’ to preparing for great power competition. It was in Africa where the quagmire of US militarism was rapidly exposed as white nationalist forces came up against sustained opposition to neoliberal imperial apartheid, Islamophobia, climate denialism and chauvinism. African allies of US capitalism found themselves on the defensive with the racial hierarchy of the Trump administration castigating African societies as ‘shithole countries’. When former National Security Advisor John Bolton rolled out the Trump Africa policy in 2017 he had determined that the continent was ‘a cesspit of poverty, disease, terrorism and corruption’ (Pilling 2018). This castigation was reinforced by placing a ‘travel ban’ on a number of African countries.
These contradictions facing allies of the US in Africa were compounded by the global anti-racist and anti-fascist forces that were building new networks for reparations, peace, social justice and the repair of the natural environment. In the particular cases of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and the broader reparations for slavery movement, these movements were strengthened by the activism and calls for health care for all. The push to link anti-racist struggles internationally reached the US armed forces to the point where the US announced in December 2018 a formal retreat of its planned deployment of forces for the US Africa Command (Cooper et al. 2019). At the same time, sections of the US foreign policy establishment determined to focus on rewriting the narrative on national engagement with Africa, focusing primarily on control of the electromagnetic spectrum of African states – i.e. the manipulation and exploitation of electromagnetic frequencies such as telecommunications, wave technology and infrared. Ghana and Kenya are two countries that are caught in this new web of the Pentagon’s deployment of new command cells for electromagnetic spectrum operations (Munoz 2020). The 2018 military agreement between Ghana and the US, for example, whereby the US military will have free access to Ghana’s radio spectrum, has exposed the direction of the so-called ‘light footprint’ for the US military in Africa.
The Pentagon is seeking to refine capabilities in electronic warfare where it failed in its promotion of the 3Ds – ‘development, diplomacy and defense’ – for a more prosperous and secure Africa. The Trump administration had rolled out its strategy of ‘Prosper Africa’ to clarify their relationship with ‘responsible regional stakeholders’, meaning collaboration with the servile allies of US militarism in Africa. These African allies of empire were, however, caught in the middle of challenges to US hegemony as the multiple wars against the peoples of Iran exacerbated and sharpened broader opposition to US military power. This includes the killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard General Qassim Suleimani, Iraqi commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) unit Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, and eight others at Baghdad airport at the beginning of 2020. This assassination of Suleimani was indeed a unilateral act of war in violation of international law, but it was a logical step in a long-standing US strategy and not just a personality quirk of Donald Trump’s impulsive action (Hudson 2020; see also Bergman and Mazzetti 2019). In the analysis of Michael Hudson, who had earlier written on ‘Finance as Warfare’, ‘the assassination was intended to escalate America’s presence in Iraq to keep control of the region’s oil reserves, and to back Saudi Arabia’s Wahabi troops (Isis, Al Quaeda in Iraq, Al Nusra and other divisions of what are actually America’s foreign legion) to support U.S. control of Near Eastern oil as a buttress of the US dollar’ (Hudson 2020). African peoples of all regions were drawn into this battle between Iran and the US and no declarations on changing the objectives of the US military in Africa could mitigate the increasing weaponisation of everything by the US political establishment (Brooks 2016; Wright 2017). This weaponisation is failing as the logic of militarism comes up against global resistance in the context of the systemic fragility in the global economy (Rasmus 2016). This fragility has become even more pronounced in the appearance of the COVID 19 pandemic and the accompanying economic depression. Within a month of the pandemic economists such as Nouriel Roubini, Jayati Ghosh and the IMF were predicting a worse downturn than the Great Depression giving ten reasons why this downturn will be unprecedented. (Roubini 2020)
African historians have documented how in the last great depression, Western Europe transferred some of the costs on to the backs and shoulders of Africans. (Rodney 1976) That experience occurred in another era before the struggles for independence and the fight against apartheid. Deep divisions within the ranks of the US military have also brought to the fore the Achilles heel of a leadership that is seeking to expand the spread of US military bases, full spectrum warfare, military clients, surrogate armies and imperial social science during the demise of the unipolar world. It is the militarism in Africa that undergirded this world and its quicksand that will be the focus here.
Militarism has been defined as ‘the pervasiveness in society of symbols, values and discourses validating military power, and preparation for war’ (Hutchful and Bathily 1998). Usually North American scholars point to Third World societies with authoritarian leaders as examples of militaristic societies. These manifestations of militarism represent one brand, but the militarism of the imperial state is even more formidable than the powers of Third World dictators. Since 1945 the US has exceeded pre WWII Germany with its militaristic focus (Crawford 2019). Karl Liebknecht, the German revolutionary, had recognised the long history of warfare in all modes of production but understood the specific relationship between ‘warfare and capitalism’ (Kaldor 1982; see also Gelot and Sandor 2019). The impact of German militarism and the interconnections between warfare, eugenics and fascism is still being studied to grasp the ways in which capitalist competition and greed fuelled war, imperial expansion and genocide. With the rise of white nationalism and neo-fascism, Besteman (2019) has determined that this form of militarism is an expression of ‘militarized global apartheid’. Just as the intellectuals of the global pan-African struggles inspired the world to oppose apartheid, so the current Black Lives Matter movement is inspiring another generation to resist this global apartheid (Ransby 2018; Kelley 2016).
619The only exit was movement pressure on policy---refusal without a demand has never moved the Pentagon.
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
The global peace movement is faced with two choices: deepening the quagmire or making a break with the logics of US military interventions and the European competition with the dollar. David Halberstam and The New York Times had identified the US quagmire in Vietnam as the drip-drip policies that pushed the US deeper and deeper into Vietnam until it was defeated. Arthur Schlesinger summed up the process of drip-drip decisionmaking in this way:
In retrospect, Vietnam is a triumph of the politics of inadvertence. We have achieved our present entanglement, not after due and deliberate consideration, but through a series of small decisions. It is not only idle, but unfair to seek out guilty men. Each step in the deepening of American commitment was reasonably regarded at the time as the last that would be necessary. Yet, in retrospect, each step led only to the next, until we find ourselves entrapped today in that nightmare of American strategists, a land war in Asia –a war which no president…desired or intended. (Schlesinger 1967:37) This assessment of how the US became bogged down in Vietnam ignored the imperial role that the US had assigned itself in the context of maintaining the international capitalist system and the reality that the logic of the military management of the international system propelled the US into the quagmire of East Asia. Studies on the US quagmire also ignore the flourishing of the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement and the environmental justice movement in the wake of the war against the Vietnamese people. After all, it was Dr Martin Luther King Jr who, in his opposition to war and racism, called upon citizens to oppose war in order to escape spiritual death.
The salient lesson was that the US could only get out of the quagmire through the intense work of the peace movement and the black liberation movement. The peace movement was thus allied with the forces fighting for basic rights in the US and the anti-apartheid movement. This alliance between the peace movement and the black liberation movement was one of the highest points of the struggles for social justice and a new social system in the US. The current struggles by the environmental justice movements, affordable health care for all, the reparations movement and the peace movement provide another opportunity to rekindle the kind of grassroots alliance to oppose US militarism at home and abroad. The reparations movement is one front where the struggles can converge. It is on the question of reparative justice and the building of a strong union of the peoples of Africa where the progressive forces will begin to link the struggles for peace in Africa with the anti-racist forces of the Black Lives Matter movement. Through the Africa Command social science research projects and the new German financing of research in Africa, there has been a push to isolate African scholars from the global claims for reparations and peace. The coming to power of the Bolsonaro government in Brazil and the white supremacist ideas of Making America Great Again has placed more urgency in pan-African co-operation for peace. As a holding operation, the government of France has accepted that it committed crimes in the past and committed itself to returning all cultural artefacts to Africa. There was one caveat – these could not be returned because the African states do not have the infrastructure to maintain their own cultural heritage. The scourge of the COVID 19 pandemic and the visual images of hundreds of thousands of people dying because of the business model that placed profits before human health has galvanised the call for pan-African solidarity, indeed, global solidarity and cooperation.
The experience of the solidarity of Cuban doctors supporting health services in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and elsewhere has exposed one window of international cooperation when the United States has sought to intensify sanctions against Cuba. The Caribbean islands have stood firm in opposing US sanctions and military threats against Venezuela and Cuba. The Caribbean Reparations Commission has approached the African Union to support Cuba and Venezuela, while advancing the educational work within the African descendant caucus of the UN African descendants’ decade. Intellectual work on collective reparations and the pressures inside the US have brought about recognition of the centrality of African labour to the wealth of the US. This is now manifest in the 1619 project of The New York Times , which seeks to re-examine the legacy of slavery in the US. As one component of the intellectual energy behind the 1619 project, the editors of the NYT called on the US military to change the names of the US military installations that celebrate white supremacy. Thus far, sections of the old left who have diminished the role of racism in the evolution of capitalism have recoiled from linking reparative justice to peace and health.
620Reflexive anti-imperialism is inverted Kissinger---it erases everyone living under the other empire.
Ayoub 24 — Elia J Ayoub. August 25. Researcher and co-founder of the From The Periphery Media Collective. Red Pepper, “Left analyses of imperialism must stand against ‘campism’,” https://www.redpepper.org.uk/global-politics/war/left-analyses-of-imperialism-must-stand-against-campism/ Clopus
The campist left inverts the Kissingerian formula of realpolitik, appealing to what Leila Al-Shami once described aptly as the ‘anti-imperialism of idiots’
Campist positions usually combine some level of political affinity to such states with strong assertions of the maxim that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Ironically, this is similar to the ‘realpolitik’ associated with the former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger . He divided the world into ‘spheres of influence’ and treated such questions as international law and human rights as trivial compared to the ‘hard-headed’ pursuit of state power within these supposed ‘spheres’.
The campist left inverts the Kissingerian formula. Rather than a defence of the west and US geopolitical interests, they appeal to an often-vague ‘anti-imperialism’. This group sees itself as the main, perhaps the ‘only’, true opponents of the US empire. But in reality they replicate imperial modes of thinking that erase the experiences of peoples living under authoritarian regimes. My co-conspirator Leila Al-Shami once described this aptly as the ‘ anti-imperialism of idiots ’. Opposition to these states is often dismissed as ‘liberalism’, as if the people who oppose their governments are mere collaterals in the march of the revolution. This type of thinking is logical for someone with Kissinger’s conservative and nationalistic politics. But it makes no sense for those that support genuine internationalism based on mutual respect and solidarity.
621The conflict is locally produced---land allocation and divisive politics, not distant empire.
Babatunde and Ibnouf 24 — Abosede Omowumi Babatunde and Fatma Osman Ibnouf. Professor at the Centre for Peace and Strategic Studies, University of Ilorin, Nigeria. Peace and Development researcher, University of Khartoum. African Studies Review, “The Dynamics of Herder-Farmer Conflicts in Plateau State, Nigeria, and Central Darfur State, Sudan,” https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2024.53 Clopus
While the remote conflict issues relate to the lingering ethno-religious and indigene/settler conflict, the proximate issues relate to dwindling land spaces, the high rate of youth unemployment, access to small arms, a rise in the crime rate, and drug abuse. These issues are shaped by the actions of state and local leaders who perpetuate divisive politics, marginalizing one group and privileging the other group, while also manipulating the idle and unemployed youth to engage in violence.
In Bokkos, the indigenous people are the Ron, Mushere and Kulere, and their main occupation is farming. The scarcity of land for farming inevitably fuels competition among the farmers (indigene) and herders (settlers) in Bokkos. Most of the Fulani herders interviewed accused the farmers of farming on grazing routes. The political and local leaders’ lopsided distribution of land, which is a vital resource for the livelihood of both groups, has intensified violent confrontations to access this resource. Although individuals and families own land in rural communities, the state and local governments determine land rights and control (Kwaja and Ademola-Adelehin 2018;Ojo2020). Thus, the farmers who occupied a position of advantage as indigenes are favored, while the sedentary and semi-nomadic herders, regarded as migrants, are disadvantaged in terms of land rights. In fact, government use of land for mining, residential and industrial purposes; often meant increasing scarcity of land for farming and grazing. Thus, the farmers are incentivized to extend their farmland to grazing routes which were established through the Nigerian Grazing Reserve Act of 1964, on the claim that the land belongs to them. The action of the farmers is supported by politicians and local government officials who are also from the indigenous communities. In contrast to the partisan behavior of the political and local leaders in Plateau State, in the Eastern Lakes state in South Sudan, Ryle and Amuom (2018) observe that the constructive response of community leaders to issues over resource scarcity has promoted peaceful relations between the farmers and herders.
622...or it bars the demand---but the movements they cite make demands on companies, not gestures.
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
Situating martial technology companies as a component of global policing can also facilitate solidarities between social movements contending with different forms of state and market violence. It is especially productive when thinking across movements against war and the arms trade and movements against policing. Historically, there have often been tensions between movements active on these fronts. Significant elements of peace, anti-war, and anti-arms trade movements in the West have struggled to contend with the role of policing as a violent, racializing, martial force within “the domestic” realm (Manchanda and Rossdale 2021). Movements against policing, often largely comprised of people who have been subjected to imperial and racial violence, have better recognized the intimate entanglements of war and policing (Elliot-Cooper 2021). Still, many have paid limited or no attention to the role of martial technology companies in this nexus.
There is force in the refusal to draw firm distinctions between different forms of state and market violence. While such distinctions can build toward precise and important analysis, they can also obscure common political logics. It is here that Seigel’s collapse of different strands of state and market violence into the unifying category of violence work is compelling; it directs attention to both the collective project of reproducing racial capitalism and to the work those categories do in obscuring that collective project (2018). A famous version of this argument is Emory Douglas’ cartoon “It’s All The Same,” printed in the Black Panther newspaper, depicting three martial pigs—the police, the national guard, and the US army (Bloom and Martin 2016, 173). Even as they developed particular analyses of these different forces, the Black Panther Party also insisted on an account that collapsed these avatars of capitalist imperial violence, and developed an internationalist politics that attended to them collectively (Malloy 2017). For the Panthers, this did not mean an internationalism that ignored local struggles, nor a localism that ignored the international; rather, it was a refusal to cede to that dichotomy.
623Their own history is a coalition that moved policy---the peace and liberation movements together.
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
The global peace movement is faced with two choices: deepening the quagmire or making a break with the logics of US military interventions and the European competition with the dollar. David Halberstam and The New York Times had identified the US quagmire in Vietnam as the drip-drip policies that pushed the US deeper and deeper into Vietnam until it was defeated. Arthur Schlesinger summed up the process of drip-drip decisionmaking in this way:
In retrospect, Vietnam is a triumph of the politics of inadvertence. We have achieved our present entanglement, not after due and deliberate consideration, but through a series of small decisions. It is not only idle, but unfair to seek out guilty men. Each step in the deepening of American commitment was reasonably regarded at the time as the last that would be necessary. Yet, in retrospect, each step led only to the next, until we find ourselves entrapped today in that nightmare of American strategists, a land war in Asia –a war which no president…desired or intended. (Schlesinger 1967:37) This assessment of how the US became bogged down in Vietnam ignored the imperial role that the US had assigned itself in the context of maintaining the international capitalist system and the reality that the logic of the military management of the international system propelled the US into the quagmire of East Asia. Studies on the US quagmire also ignore the flourishing of the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement and the environmental justice movement in the wake of the war against the Vietnamese people. After all, it was Dr Martin Luther King Jr who, in his opposition to war and racism, called upon citizens to oppose war in order to escape spiritual death.
The salient lesson was that the US could only get out of the quagmire through the intense work of the peace movement and the black liberation movement. The peace movement was thus allied with the forces fighting for basic rights in the US and the anti-apartheid movement. This alliance between the peace movement and the black liberation movement was one of the highest points of the struggles for social justice and a new social system in the US. The current struggles by the environmental justice movements, affordable health care for all, the reparations movement and the peace movement provide another opportunity to rekindle the kind of grassroots alliance to oppose US militarism at home and abroad. The reparations movement is one front where the struggles can converge. It is on the question of reparative justice and the building of a strong union of the peoples of Africa where the progressive forces will begin to link the struggles for peace in Africa with the anti-racist forces of the Black Lives Matter movement. Through the Africa Command social science research projects and the new German financing of research in Africa, there has been a push to isolate African scholars from the global claims for reparations and peace. The coming to power of the Bolsonaro government in Brazil and the white supremacist ideas of Making America Great Again has placed more urgency in pan-African co-operation for peace. As a holding operation, the government of France has accepted that it committed crimes in the past and committed itself to returning all cultural artefacts to Africa. There was one caveat – these could not be returned because the African states do not have the infrastructure to maintain their own cultural heritage. The scourge of the COVID 19 pandemic and the visual images of hundreds of thousands of people dying because of the business model that placed profits before human health has galvanised the call for pan-African solidarity, indeed, global solidarity and cooperation.
624The counterterror rationale is duplicitous---the base was for migration and Algeria, not the Sahel.
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
The Congressional Research Office record of the events in Niger and Mali became talking points for academic contractors of the military and temporarily turned media attention away from the demand for the full Pentagon report on the Tongo Tongo ambush. The summary of the Pentagon report, which was released to the public in May 2018, cited multiple failures of the military with recommendations to ‘improve mission planning and approval procedures, re-evaluate equipment and weapons requirements, and review training that U.S. commandos conduct with partner forces’ (Baldor 2018). The key formulation that reflected the quagmire in this context was the repetition of the word ‘failure’ – a word that had also been used to describe the half billion-dollar expenditure of the US military on counter terrorism in Mali, the Pan Sahel Initiative and the Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP).
The US troops had been deployed in West Africa by AFRICOM – the United States Africa Command – when the US had been waxing lyrical about maritime and energy security in the Gulf of Guinea, violent extremists and combating HIV/AIDS with PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. What was significant about PEPFAR was that a plan to support the US pharmaceutical industries was run through the Pentagon). The reasons for the AFRICOM deployment had thus been muddled by the imprecise definitions of US military objectives in Africa. Nonetheless the emergence of the Trump administration in 2017 had given clarity to the objective of great power competition in Africa side by side with militarised borders for the interdiction of would-be immigrants (Sieff 2015).
Building a very large base at Agadez had been justified to the US Congress on the grounds of fighting terror in the Sahel region of Africa. Niger is a major terminus in the global trafficking of African labour to Western Europe through Libya and an important space for the US and Europe to monitor and surveil would-be immigrants ensnared in the world of both illegal mining and human trafficking. However, it was understood by sections of the Nigerien military that one of the reasons for the US presence in the northern part of Niger, close to Algeria, was to manage the political transition process in Algeria. In December 2019, the US government announced that it would be vacating Nigerien Air Base 201 in Agadez, which had just become operational in November at a cost of US$ 110 million (Cornell 2019). Reports on the planned disengagement of the US from Africa noted that US assistance to French forces – numbering some 4,500 troops – in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso might also be rescinded.
US militarism in Africa for the past two decades had been justified on the basis of fighting terror and countering violent extremists, but the declarations of the Pentagon after the killing of the Special Forces in Niger revealed the duplicitous nature of US military engagement with Africa. There is currently a body of scholarship that seeks to portray a ‘massive’ US military presence in Africa with forward operating bases (FOB), cooperative security locations (CSL) and contingency locations (CL), which conveys the impression that with under 6,000 troops deployed, the US can control African spaces and over one billion Africans (Turse 2018; Gelot and Sandor 2019). Every agreement including programmes such as the traditional International Military Education and Training (IMET) is represented to demonstrate the image of a massive US military presence across the continent. There is no distinction between the US military role in a country such as Tanzania and a country that has been integrated into Western strategic interests, such as Kenya, in this mapping of US military facilities in Africa.
After the killings in Niger, the efforts at a cover up within the Pentagon brought out recriminations to the point where two years after the killings, the Defense Secretary could not release to the public the full report on the details of the encounter. The US soldiers had been killed a few dozen kilometres from the border with Mali, while the justification for building the Agadez base had been to fight violent extremists in the north of Niger. By the end of 2017, the White House’s National Security Strategy proclaimed that the US had almost totally crushed the major threat of terror and must turn its focus on a new threat: the return of the ‘great power competition’ that defined earlier geopolitical eras, this time against Russia and China.
625The arms flow sits inside militarised global apartheid---Nigerians were banned while being armed.
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
The slowness of countries such as Nigeria and Tanzania to speed up the integration and inter-operability of their surveillance techniques has rendered these two countries open to pressure that is manifest in their inclusion on the travel ban. The Trump administration claimed that the ban was a national security measure and that the added countries failed to meet US security and information-sharing standards. One indication of how subjective this ban has been could be seen from the way in which Sudan was included in 2017 but after massive lobbying by the UAE was subsequently removed. Following the uprisings in Sudan in 2019, however, the country was once again included in the ban. Commentaries from the mainstream media pointed out that the ban on Nigerian citizens represented racism at its worse and was a clear manifestation of global apartheid. Those who have linked racism and racist immigration practices defined militarised global apartheid as follows:
Militarized global apartheid is a loosely integrated effort by countries in the global north to protect themselves against the mobility of people from the global south. The new apartheid apparatus takes the form of militarized border technologies and personnel, interdictions at sea, biometric tracking of the mobile, detention centers, holding facilities, and the criminalization of mobility. It extends deeply into many places from which people are attempting to leave and pushes them back, it tracks them to interrupt their mobility, stops them at certain borders for detention and deportation, pushes them into the most dangerous traveling routes, and creates new forms of criminality.
(Besteman 2019:26) In the name of security the US government was now criminalising more than a quarter of the population of Africa. As noted by the British Newspaper the Guardian, Feb 16, 2020, ‘Trump started out by scapegoating Muslims in 2017. Now, it’s not just the Muslim ban. It has turned into an African ban’ (Levin 2020).
626Refusal collapses into camp loyalty---states in the “other” camp use the same techniques.
Ayoub 24 — Elia J Ayoub. August 25. Researcher and co-founder of the From The Periphery Media Collective. Red Pepper, “Left analyses of imperialism must stand against ‘campism’,” https://www.redpepper.org.uk/global-politics/war/left-analyses-of-imperialism-must-stand-against-campism/ Clopus
The campist analysis misses the commonalities between states that appear to be in different ‘camps’ and the often-eclectic nature of their international relations. The Assad regime has in the not-too-distant past happily positioned itself as a western ally. It took part, for example, in the CIA’s torture programmes after 9/11. The Assad regime also bombed and destroyed the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, which had more than 130,000 inhabitants before 2011. It is now largely ethnically cleansed. For its part, Israel has combined its special relationship with the US by cultivating ties with Russia. Prime minister Netanyahu has actively appealed to Israeli citizens of Russian heritage and, in 2019, his party even put up billboards in Tel Aviv picturing him with Putin, celebrating their close political affinity.
Assad’s destruction of Yarmouk was preceded by a campaign of dehumanisation. This has strong echoes in the practices of the Israeli state in Gaza today. The value of a Palestinian person under such a worldview is negligible. Palestinians have been so thoroughly dehumanised that the Israeli state views them as a ‘demographic threat’, and not a people with rights and freedoms. As the Israeli state controls the territory known as ‘Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories’ between the ‘river and the sea’, this dehumanising logic necessitates the creation of a second class of human beings, a system of semi-formalised apartheid.
Perhaps more revealing still is the way the Israeli government has come to understand the practice of this apartheid system of governance over Palestinians. This system has some similarity to the concept of ‘useful Syria’ that was used to describe Bashar al-Assad’s vision for ruling over the specific parts of the country that he and his Iranian allies value. This useful/useless dichotomy continues to influence the regime’s politics and practices today. It is an inherently violent logic that requires regular acts of violence, from direct bombardments to mass incarceration, torture and executions, to reaffirm absolute power over the civilian population.
627Anti-imperialism in practice isn’t autonomy---the AES traded France for a new dependence.
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
Traore’s foreign policy choices situate Burkina Faso within a broader geopolitical realignment in the Sahel. The formation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) with Mali and Niger represents a collective rejection of Western-led security architectures and a bid for regional autonomy. This bloc is as much ideological as strategic, articulating a shared narrative of resistance against neo-colonial domination and international hypocrisy.
Yet, anti-imperialism in practice is not synonymous with autonomy. The pivot away from France and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has entailed new sets of dependent relationships, particularly in security cooperation and resource governance. While framed as partnerships of equals, these relationships raise questions about the reproduction of asymmetrical power under different banners. Traore’s anti-imperialist posture therefore functions less as a clean break from external influence than as a renegotiation of dependency within a multipolar order.
628The literature is settled---political dynamics, not scarcity or empire, drive the conflict.
Babatunde and Ibnouf 24 — Abosede Omowumi Babatunde and Fatma Osman Ibnouf. Professor at the Centre for Peace and Strategic Studies, University of Ilorin, Nigeria. Peace and Development researcher, University of Khartoum. African Studies Review, “The Dynamics of Herder-Farmer Conflicts in Plateau State, Nigeria, and Central Darfur State, Sudan,” https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2024.53 Clopus
The political ecology of resource governance and conflict is relevant in understanding the farmer-herder conflicts. Political ecologists view the farmerherder conflicts as “responses to context,” in which the key conflict drivers transcend resource contestation (Turner 2004) and intersect with power relations associated with the rent-seeking actions of state and nonstate actors that fuel marginalization and injustice (Benjaminsen and Ba 2009; Khanakwa 2022).
The central debate about the key source of the conflict relates to whether it is primarily linked to competition over resource access or to the power relations that shape it (Brottem and McDonnell 2020). While environmental changes are seen as an important contextual factor driving the conflict, there is a broad consensus in the literature that socioeconomic and political dynamics underpin resource conflicts in diverse contexts (Moritz 2010; Majekodunmi et al. 2014; Mkutu 2019). This can manifest in predatory behavior by political actors who abuse their position for financial or political gain in ways that fuel grievances and heighten resource competition (Brottem and McDonnell 2020). A political ecology framing situates the farmer-herder conflict within the materiality of natural resources governance and politics (Benjaminsen and Ba 2021). Citing the case of East Africa, Hesse and MacGregor (2006) opined that land scarcity should be construed as political and economic factors in which those with low political power are dispossessed of economic resources, such as land for pastoral grazing, by those in control of political power. In a case study of pastoral conflict in Eastern Ethiopia, for instance, Kenee (2022) described how identity politics and the predatory behavior of political elites have shaped the conflict.
In ethnically, religiously, or politically polarized countries, the potential for state and local leaders to be implicated in the conflict between farmers and herders is higher. Kew (2021) found that in Nigeria, polarization along ethnic, religious and political lines often fuel the perception that some state governments are contributors to the farmer-herder conflicts, thereby resulting in opposition to government policies. Politicians and religious leaders have been accused of politicizing identity, engaging in partisanship in land deals, and inciting attacks (Madueke 2019; Oosterom et al. 2021). In Mali, the government land policies and laws are perceived to favor farming at the expense of pastoralism, because they led to the transformation of pastoral landscape into farmland, blocked livestock corridors, and resulted in encroachment on key pastures (Benjaminsen and Ba 2021).
In many African countries, armed bandits, insurgents, criminal syndicates and ethnic militias have capitalized on the conflict to engage in cattle raids and trafficking of people, arms and drugs, often transnationally, for materials gains (Cline 2020). The porosity of borders across the continent allows for fluidity in the movement of people and arms in many countries (Mkutu 2019). In Chad, the challenges of small arms and light weapon proliferation led to the closure of the Chad-Sudan border to contain the spread of arms from Sudan, Central African Republic, and Libya (Kwaja and Smith 2020). The conflict in Libya and Mali contributed to the increasing circulation of small and large arms used by groups involved in the conflict in Nigeria (Ojo 2020). Similarly, in Sudan, the intensity of the farmer-herder conflict has been attributed to the influx of sophisticated arms and weapons linked to cross-border attacks from Chadian and Central African Republic militias (Mohammed 2003, 479) and the flow of weapons from Libya.
Some of the Fulani nomadic herders and militias found in Nigeria are traced to neighboring Chad, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Benin Republic and Cameroon (Ademola-Adelehin et al. 2018; Ogundairo and Ijimakinwa 2020). Moreover, Brottem and McDonnell (2020) have noted that Nigerian transhumant pastoralists who migrated to Benin and Togo for safety from cattle rustlers were enmeshed in local conflicts and labeled as “foreign invaders.” In the Central African Republic, foreign pastoralists from or connected to Arabic herding communities in Chad or Sudan have been implicated in violence (Kwaja and Smith 2020).
The complex interlinkage among armed insurgency, criminality, and pastoralism necessitated regional and bilateral agreements as a conflict management priority focusing on borderlands, such as the Liptako-Gourma region (Burkina-Niger-Mali), Lake Chad, and the disputed areas between Sudan and South Sudan (Cline 2020). The African Union’s 2010 Policy Framework for Pastoralism, the Declaration of N’Djamena (2013) and Nouakchott (2013) were part of the measures to address pastoralist livelihood challenges (Brottem and McDonnell 2020).
629Same dispute, no violence elsewhere in the Sahel---what changes is the political crisis underneath.
Babatunde and Ibnouf 24 — Abosede Omowumi Babatunde and Fatma Osman Ibnouf. Professor at the Centre for Peace and Strategic Studies, University of Ilorin, Nigeria. Peace and Development researcher, University of Khartoum. African Studies Review, “The Dynamics of Herder-Farmer Conflicts in Plateau State, Nigeria, and Central Darfur State, Sudan,” https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2024.53 Clopus
The head of the vigilante group in Dorowan declared, “The conflict farms.” emerged as a spill-over conflict between the Berom and Fulani communities and spread to other communities, including Dorowan Babuje.” In Mararraban Kantoma, a Berom Christian and farming community, the community head, Damaje, observed that the conflict has been endemic in the community since 2010. The leader of Miyetti Allah, the association of cattle breeders in the Bokkos community, further disclosed that the conflict escalated to violence in 2013 and engulfed many communities in Bokkos LGA. In Bokkos, the people are predominantly Christians and farmers, although some of them rear cattle, while the Fulani who settled in the Bokkos communities are mainly herders. The escalating violence between the farmers and herders in Plateau State contrasts with the case of some parts of the Sudano-Sahel, where conflicts between farmers and herders did not result in intense violence (Brottem and McDonnell 2020). In Plateau State, identity division and the preexisting political crises intensified the violent confrontations between the farmers and herders. Figure 3 shows respondents’ opinions about the frequency and magnitude of the conflict.
630Their charge is insufficiency, not error---the fix is to indict normal supply, which is the plan.
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
While the evolving practices and capacities of police forces are undoubtedly deserving of careful attention, the conceptualization of these dynamics as the “militarization of police” has been subjected to numerous critiques. These have argued that, while the police militarization thesis purports to identify a blurring of the boundaries between military and police, it actually functions to reproduce these categories as separate, in a manner which “postulates an ideal of consensual policing, which has been corrupted into aggressive actions which see the ‘boys in blue’ at war with the citizens they are supposed to protect” (McMichael 2017, 115). The invocation of militarization as a process implies a shift from nonmilitarized to militarized, obscuring the fact that police forces have from inception been implicated in warlike relations with marginalized populations (Howell 2018; Chowdhury 2021; Elliot-Cooper 2021). The militarization thesis can also manifest as a kind of techno-essentialism, where a focus on the spectacle of “military-grade equipment” in the hands of police forces obscures the unspectacular, persistent role police forces play in maintaining existing orders (Kelley 2016, 27–8). The upshot of this can be an analysis that identifies “over”-policing (Weitzberg 2022, 3) or incidences of “excessively” or “overly” militarized policing (ACLU 2014, 5–6), in a manner that ultimately stops short of contending with the normalized violence and structural role of policing itself.
The repressive regimes and police militarization frameworks gesture toward dynamics that are in urgent need of critique and contestation. However, in critiquing only some policing some of the time, they insulate and normalize “normal” policing as an ideal away from which some (or many) policing actors have been diverted. They leave intact the ideal of policing as a nonpolitical, ultimately administrative project of protecting a virtuous order. Critiquing the arms trade as police, as deeply integrated and implicated in global policing, takes us away from this focus on occasional excesses toward recognizing the role of “normal” policing in defending and reproducing racial capitalism, and the role of the arms trade in stitching together a world of violence.