International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 132
Underestimating the Political Dimension in Urban and Geopolitical Violence
There are of course bloody conflicts in Africa with obvious social aspects.
However, while these cannot be denied, they do not necessarily originate only
from socioeconomic conditions, but also from the thirst for power, the desire to
live as a warrior rather than a peasant or laborer/subordinate, and also the symbolic
integration of models considered to be scientific, such as the Marxist-Leninist
model. Hence the need to reintroduce the concept of human passion and recall
the centrality of politics. Yet it seems to be rather underestimated that an individual
can be African, North African, or Asian, and want to dominate the other by
imposing on him one’s way of seeing the world. Rejecting this secular fact, i.e. by
overlooking such an influence on the Western historical form, equates to exaggerating
or reducing factors solely to their sociohistorical and psychological dimensions,
while sidelining the strictly political dimensions in the sense of belonging to
a project of appropriation, in favor of a factorial unilateralism.
In fact, and through a strange paradox, the supposedly most comprehensive
analyses of the resentments felt by various populations in the Global South fail to
understand that states of consciousness may also—and perhaps above all, in this
case—originate from strictly political motivations. These are represented by a rejection
of change, a movement, a rejection of the foreign, a refusal to allow women
or units of action (a person or structure) to make their own decisions; or instead,
motivations that are constructed using sources other than religion alone.
The fact that the attacks in Pakistan are not solely a reaction to social deprivation
is one that remains unfathomable to certain experts. Thus Bertrand Badie
writes in his exploration of the endemic crisis of institutions in postcolonial states
that this reveals not the way in which the universal concept of the rule of law is reflected
institutionally, but its “importation,” which is presented solely as one other
dysfunction of the structure in question:
The crisis of the state is even more marked in the Global South: the
failure of the imported state and the universalization of the Western
state have accompanied the process of decolonization. ( ... ) Above
all, this deprives international affairs of an essential point of liaison,
since the collapse of governments in the Global South and the
breakdown of institutions render the mechanisms of international
regulation inoperable, including the old games of clientelism, while
constituting a field day for a whole series of substitute actors: tribal
or clan-based, religious, but also mafia-like, not to mention private
militias (Badie 2006, 14–16).
It is odd to analyze the—secular—status of tribal, clan, and religious actors
as one of “substitution” when these are the permanent elements of tribal, feudal,
and seigniorial political structures (as the USA found out to its cost in Iraq). This
rather underestimates the still-tribal way in which African, North African, and
Middle Eastern societies function. It is also odd that Badie does not observe with-
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