The African frontier
Following on from remarks on the frontier, and touching upon questions of the extraterritorialisation of borders, courtesy of Pom, some passages from Paul Silverstein’s “The New Barbarians: Piracy and Terrorism on the North African Frontier” (CR, 5:1, 2005):
The cités are not the only site where state Vigipirate-type vigilance against piracy and terrorism defines a frontier zone in France’s mare nostrum. Indeed, a set of internal frontiers cuts across North Africa, marking spaces of contact between groups in asymmetrical relations of power. Historically, these frontiers have been defined through the sociogeographic divide of the bled el-makhzen (“depository land,” referring to the Moroccan treasury) and bled es-siba (“land of dissidence”) that marks out various centers and peripheries of state power and control. This divide has mapped out other racialized and spatialized dichotomies of rurality (or tribality) and urbanity, and Arabity and Berberity. It outlined the structural conditions of inequality under which corsairing flourished along the impoverished coastline of the Moroccan Rif, in the frontier zone between Christian marchers and Muslim peripheral subjects (Pennell 2001a). And, in spite of colonization and postcolonial nationalization, the makhzen-siba opposition remains still very much a constitutive feature of North African politics. […]
The implications of this deployment of the Barbary Analogy — the equation of corsairing and current Islamist “terrorism” — are vast. It implies that the structures of neo-liberal globalization have tended to underwrite violence and not decrease it as some political science measures indicate. It implies that supranational organizations like the IMF — in like fashion as the Sublime Porte previously (Martinez 1998, 347) — are content to watch civil warfare continue as long as their debts are repaid and their taxes collected. It implies, furthermore, that the logical end game to the current violence is not the progressive democratization of the regime and the peaceful negotiation of conflict resolution but rather the imposition of external sovereignty, the reconstitution of a French (or American?) mare nostrum.
This is perhaps what is most disturbing about the Barbary Analogy as deployed by Martinez or, more egregiously, by post-September 11th media pundits: it serves to legitimize neo-imperialism in the name of free trade and human rights. Like France’s internal “war on terror” waged in the frontier zone of the cités, a larger American-directed “war on terror” strives to re-occupy spaces where globalization has gone awry, where modern pirates (a.k.a. “terrorists”) have parasitically manipulated new technologies of trade, communication, and violence. While clearly implying the recrudescence of national sovereignty, the new imperialism operates through transnational channels, through global corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel (or Adidas and Sony, in the case of the French cités) whose interests largely overlap with those of the imperial states. Appealing to a global human rights discourse, neo-conservative political actors have moreover appropriated latter-day captivity narratives—e.g., reports of Algerian women forced into “temporary marriages” (al-zawaj al-’urfi) by Islamist maquis, mass emailed narratives describing the Taliban’s “war on women,” or jingoistic media reports of the brutal capture and heroic liberation of Private Jessica Lynch — to ignite popular indignation and provide an ethical veneer for their predatory military actions. And yet in this new geopolitical schema, as in the Algerian civil war, violence clearly constitutes the language and means of achieving power, whether locally or globally, for marginal subjects or state actors. What is important to recognize in detailing the historical continuities and discontinuities between the eighteenth century and the present is that the frontier zones where pirates and “terrorists” operate are not ontologically distant or prior to the central state. Rather, these spaces and characters are a projection of the nation-state’s abject relations — the foreclosure of subjectivities that continue to define the nation-state negatively and thus function as its “constitutive outside” (Butler 1993, xi). Using the psychoanalytic language of abjection is not to deny the continued power and salience of an Orientalist critique of the late Edward Said that remains critical for unpacking the dialectical relations of self and other central to colonial and postcolonial domination. Moments of global violence, however, call into question binaries of colonizer and colonized. Piracy and terrorism do not exist outside the globalizing state; they are but exteriorizations of such a state’s immanent instability.
I’m not sure that I would characterise the processes of exteriorisation as an effect of the state’s immanent instability - or, perhaps it’s more that this begs the question of what that instability consists of, in both its detail and analytical sense. Silverstein’s all-too brief remarks about the foreclosure of subjectivity are likely what would furnish much of that detail.
