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- 123