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  • Dr. Govand Khalid Azeez is a Lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations at Ma... moreedit
In the context of the reconfigured global relations of production amidst the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), technology has rapidly become the overarching question of our times. Apropos the future of humanity, key theoretical... more
In the context of the reconfigured global relations of production amidst the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), technology has rapidly become the overarching question of our times. Apropos the future of humanity, key theoretical questions have dominated scholarly debates. Namely, does technology qua 'universal' science bring with it the promised possibility of an emancipated, thriving society? Or, is technology best epistemologically understood as a geist in itself, autonomously and violently determining the course of humanity worldwide? In engaging with these critical questions, this research nuances contemporary philosophical debates at the intersection of technology, authoritarian power and capital. It does so by reconceptualising technology as a sociohistorical process and a site of class struggle, placing it within the dialectics of global relations of production and historical apparatuses of state-system. Through an in-depth political-economic study of technology in the Middle East-from telegram and steam engine to electricity and Artificial Intelligence-it situates technology within capitalist expansion, colonial and imperial power, expropriation, commodification, hierarchy, and social stratification. As such, it lays bare technology as an inherent site of opportunities, conflict, struggle and contradiction, between the imperial core, state power, and the capitalist structures of accumulation; and its inverse, the periphery, dominated colonized masses and the global working classes.
Research Interests:
The global capitalist order is premised on the impossibility of change. Under the veneer of a harmonious oneness, capitalist totality spreads in predatory motion—its expansion as commensurate and homologous with the deep environmental,... more
The global capitalist order is premised on the impossibility of change. Under the veneer of a harmonious oneness, capitalist totality spreads in predatory motion—its expansion as commensurate and homologous with the deep environmental, economic, and socio-political contradictions and crises. Contrary to its ideological assertion of the ‘end’ of history and ‘death of politics’, recent social ruptures have demonstrated that global capitalism is haunted by anti-status quo social forces and movements.

This article examines the possibility of social change at the crux of the global system. Social change is envisaged as a dialectical continuum formed apropos three interconnecting, fluid topological nodes: ubiquitous, significant, and transformational. Grounded on this materialist ontology, the article argues that the structural-conjunctural contradictions and agential interests congealed in the Arab Spring may present the qualitative emergence of new, unknown possibilities. Possibilities that reveal that global capitalism is a site of ongoing struggle, and history an open-ended process.
Perhaps, today we can reverse Hegel's objective idealist formula in The Philosophy of History. It is not reason but foolery that rules the world and foolery is the false-true, eternally apparent and the absolutely powerful. The Fool in... more
Perhaps, today we can reverse Hegel's objective idealist formula in The Philosophy of History. It is not reason but foolery that rules the world and foolery is the false-true, eternally apparent and the absolutely powerful. The Fool in 'thought', orientation, action and expression (destruction of the planet, submission to traditional and modern hierarchies, deification of private property, granting free movement to corporates and capital over beings, mass caging of the vulnerable, populism, virtual lynching, 'cancel culture', hoarding toilet paper and canola oil, etc.) poses an existential social and planetary threat. All of this begs the urgent question, who is the being that commits to such acts? And, what social forces, processes and apparatuses give birth to or encourage the emergence of this being? In other words, who or what is the Fool, and what is their tomfoolery? Here via a historical materialist account I put forward eleven ontological, epistemological and ethical theses on what constitutes, manufactures and defines the properties of the Fool. It would seem that foolishness is one subset of the set of alienation derived from statist hierarchical relations and the regime of private property. A Fool is always alienated but an alienated being is not necessarily a Fool.
What exactly is Islamophobia? How can we best define this cultural force and ideological technique? Is it an anachronistic cultural construct emerging out of the old engines of the colonial apparatus, amongst them economicism, culturalism... more
What exactly is Islamophobia? How can we best define this cultural force and ideological technique? Is it an anachronistic cultural construct emerging out of the old engines of the colonial apparatus, amongst them economicism, culturalism and what Mignolo calls the ‘imperial racial matrix’? Is it a contemporary phenomenon shaped by the Huntingtonian ‘clash of civilizations’ hypothesis and the events of 9/11? Or, is it as some claim, the case of an individualized prejudiced logic, one amongst many in society and the existing mode of cultural production? This paper addresses these questions by exploring Islamophobia while decoding contemporary ideology in Michel Houellebecq’s oeuvre. Houellebecq’s bestsellers, as cultural artefacts, allow us to map out how culture, in conjunction with the ideological apparatus, is able to produce power-saturated politico-ontological typologies. Typologies which are indexed to the existing status quo, which in turn assigns them metaphysicalized attributes, a certain value and a predetermined fate.
The ‘Yes for independence’ campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan has been predominantly explained as an act undertaken by an omni-representative political governing structure (Kurdistan Regional Government) and a homogenous ethnic group univocally... more
The ‘Yes for independence’ campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan has been predominantly explained as an act undertaken by an omni-representative political governing structure (Kurdistan Regional Government) and a homogenous ethnic group univocally voicing a ‘Yes for independence’. However, the role of what Engels calls the ‘first great cleavage of society’: the historically conflicting exploiting and exploited classes and the manner in which they influence the cause, the means of articulation and the materialisation of this ‘Yes’ have been overlooked. This paper aims to demonstrate that this ‘Yes’ is a site of contestation between these two classes and their transcendental subjective political position and real material structural condition and interests. It exposes the fallacious and reactionary ideological proposition that KRG, the instrument of a semi-feudal and semi-bourgeois class, is the universal and legitimate representative of ‘Kurdish society’ and that there is a homogenous politico-ontological typology (the ‘Kurd’) articulating a cohesive and consistent ‘Yes’ for a new state.
The Middle East finds itself plagued by imperial and civil wars, capital ravaging and plundering its societies, dictatorships and plutocracies, the migration catastrophe, ecological crises, the rise of various forms of fundamentalism and... more
The Middle East finds itself plagued by imperial and civil wars, capital ravaging and plundering its societies, dictatorships and plutocracies, the migration catastrophe, ecological crises, the rise of various forms of fundamentalism and unimaginable poverty and inequality. Yet, today we find that, to borrow from Marx, the ‘arm of criticism’ has been hijacked by a cohort of postmodern-postcolonialist Saidians, who are unwilling or unable to provide an appropriate prognosis for these fundamental political and economic problems. Moved by cultural relativism, identitarianism, pathological religiosity, ad hominem logicality and postmodern epistemological nihilism, this epistemico-political faction has redirected scholarly critique in the region from an examination of class and private property to identity politics. Fetishising ‘alterity’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘Otherness’, dismissing the idea of a radical-truth that links the particular to the universal and impossibilizing a world beyond capital and the state, this worldview whilst always radical in tone manufactures a set of domesticated and interpellated subjectivities. Following the tradition of radical emancipatory and egalitarian positions of European and ‘Third World’ thinkers, this paper argues for a return to revolutionary universal politics
The synthesis of different modalities of power and ideological frameworks has ensured an overpowering and suffocating interpellation of the subject. The state apparatus in conjunction with the capitalist dispositif dictates not only the... more
The synthesis of different modalities of power and ideological frameworks has ensured
an overpowering and suffocating interpellation of the subject. The state apparatus in
conjunction with the capitalist dispositif dictates not only the ontological realities of
the subject but also its social destiny, its subjective capabilities and degree of
appearance in the world. In this paper, we examine and revisit Louis Althusser’s dual
mode of politico-ontological subjectivity: the Good-Subject and the bad-subject. The
former is the interpellated human-animal of the world of domestication which
through erasing or denying revolutionary-truth comes to conceive politics merely as
the art of being governed. This Good-Subject conceives political subjectivity as either
an endeavour to return to an authentic originary past, an ad hominem identitarian
logicality, or at best the amendment of the existing configuration of the system. On
the other hand, the bad-subject is one that is obsessed with the question of how not
to be governed by the existing capitalo-statist logic and order. We argue here that the
bad-subject is a generic subjective-operator consisting of a set of critical procedures,
radical ethos and praxical political steps that introduce a novel revolutionary-truth
into the structured hierarchized capitalo-statist world.
The initial resurgence of indigenous mobilization in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s was certainly driven by the framework of the ‘politics of recognition’. However, since then much has been altered in the politico-economic and... more
The initial resurgence of indigenous mobilization in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s was certainly driven by the framework of the ‘politics of recognition’. However, since then much has been altered in the politico-economic and cultural framework of Latin American societies. This paper examines a new strand of indigenous mobilization in the region today, what we call ‘revindicative autonomism’. Moving away from the language of ‘rights’ and statist autonomy arrangements, this is a struggle against the much-lauded regimes of multiculturalism and differentiated citizenship. Although officially formed back in the late 1990s, the Coordinadora Arauco Malleco (CAM) has more recently emerged as the central actor in what has been called the ‘New Arauco War’ in south-central Chile. This movement has put forward a sui generis project for autonomy that is contingent on the complete territorial recovery and the reconstruction of Wallmapu as a whole. To achieve that, CAM draws from the pre-colonial past and resuscitates the ontologies and epistemologies of the Mapuche nation.
At the forefront of critically examining the effects of colonization on the Middle East is Edward Said’s magnum opus, Orientalism (1978). In the broadest theoretical sense, Said’s work through deconstructing colonial discourses of... more
At the forefront of critically examining the effects of colonization on the Middle East is Edward Said’s magnum opus, Orientalism (1978). In the broadest theoretical sense, Said’s work through deconstructing colonial discourses of power-knowledge, presented an epistemologico-methodological equation expressed most lucidly by Aimé Césaire, colonization=thingification. Said, arguing against that archaic historicized discourse, Orientalism, was simply postulating that colonialism and its systems of knowledges signified the colonized, in Anouar Abdel-Malek’s words, as customary, passive, non-participating and non-autonomous. Nearly four decades later, Said’s contribution has become tamed and domesticated to an extent that most heterodoxic critical endeavours in the field have become clichéd premeditated anti-Orientalist tirades. At best, these critiques are stuck at analysing the impact of power at the macro-level, polemically regurgitating jargons like “hegemony”, “misrepresentation” and “Otherness”. At worst, they have become dogmatic or ethnocentric, closing space for scholarly debate through insipid cultural relativism, pathological religiosity or pernicious Occidentalism. I argue there is a need to go beyond that old postcolonial epistemological equation through examining the follow on effects of thingification on the thingified subject’s Weltanschauung, cultural practices and more importantly, subjectivity. I aim to undertake this critical endeavour through theorizing what I call Counter-Revolutionary Discourse (CRD). This discourse is an historicized, Eurocentric-Orientalist implicit programme of action and an analytical tool, which functions as a cognitive schema and a grammar of action that assists the colonial apparatus in surveillance, gauging, ranking and subjectifying Middle Eastern subjectivity and resistance according to imperial exigencies. Through tracking the matrix of Western statements, ideas and practices, I demonstrate that imperial enthusiasts in encountering Middle Eastern revolutions, from the Mahdi, Urabi, Zaghloul, Mossadegh, the PLO and the PKK to the ‘Arab Spring’, draw on a number of Counter-Revolutionary Discourse systems of thoughts, which I argue are responsible for re-interpellating Oriental subjectivity and resistance. In the process, I put forward a new post-Saidian equation that not only transcends that tried and tested scholarly narrative, but a formula much better suited for tracing the infinite and insidious effects of neocolonial power that aims to negate the negating act: Colonization= thingification + re-interpellation of subjectivity.
Abstract From 1960s onwards, liberal multiculturalism – from Iris M. Young's notion of a ‘differentiated citizenship’ or what Rodolfo Stavenhagen terms ‘internal self-determination’ to Will Kymlicka's multicultural citizenship and... more
Abstract

From 1960s onwards, liberal multiculturalism – from Iris M. Young's notion of a ‘differentiated citizenship’ or what Rodolfo Stavenhagen terms ‘internal self-determination’ to Will Kymlicka's multicultural citizenship and federacy arrangements, Arendt Lijphart's consociationalism and Rainer Bauböck's pluralist federation – has played a fundamental role in the recognition of difference as well as questioning the configuration of the nation–state as racially homogenous and administratively unified. So far, these liberal approaches have successfully addressed and accommodated some of the core political and cultural demands of religious and ethnic minorities. Yet, drawing on field research conducted in Chile and Nicaragua as well as a critical examination of this liberal canon on multiculturalism, this paper theorises that in the case of indigenous quests for autonomy, these approaches exude nothing but epistemological blindness, ignoring or dismissing alterity. At worst, they function as an epistemic violence that silences, incorporates and decontests synchronic alternative autonomist indigenous articulations.


Sinopsis

A partir de la década de 1960, el multiculturalismo liberal, representado preponderantemente por las teorías de “ciudadanía diferenciada” de Iris M. Young—o lo que Rodolfo Stavenhagen ha denominado “autodeterminación interna”—así como los modelos de ciudadanía multicultural y federacía desarrollados por Will Kymlicka; la democracia consociacional elaborada por Arendt Lijphart y la federación plural desarrollada por Rainer Bauböck, ha jugado un papel predominante en el reconocimiento de la diferencia étnica. De la misma forma, el modelo liberal de multiculturalismo ha sido pionero en el cuestionamiento de las premisas del estado-nación como ente racialmente homogéneo y administrativamente unitario. Hasta ahora, estos regímenes multiculturales han exitosamente tratado las exigencias culturales y políticas y han llevado a la transformación de legislaciones nacionales a favor de las demandas de un gran número de minorías étnicas y grupos religiosos. Sin embargo, este artículo, a través de una examinación crítica del multiculturalismo liberal y la yuxtaposición de este modelo inherentemente Occidental con las articulaciones de autonomía emanadas de movimientos indígenas en América Latina, en particular en Nicaragua y Chile, teoriza que estos modelos de autonomía, en el mejor de los casos, exudan únicamente una ceguera epistemológica que ignora o descarta alteridad. En el peor de los casos, funcionan como una violencia epistémica que silencia e incorpora articulaciones autonomistas indígenas sincrónicas.
Colonization, I postulate, has a far more profound effect on the colonized than conceptualized in Aimé Césaire's postcolonial equation, colonization = thingification. Rather, here I put forward a new postcolonial equation for tracing... more
Colonization, I postulate, has a far more profound effect on the colonized than conceptualized in Aimé Césaire's postcolonial equation, colonization  =  thingification. Rather, here I put forward a new postcolonial equation for tracing the infinite and insidious effects of colonialism: Colonization  =  thingification + re-appropriation of subjectivity. I argue that Western imperial narratives and what Edward Said calls its ‘evaluative judgment’ and ‘implicit program of action’ also subjectify the thingified subject's Weltanschauung, cultural practices and more importantly, subjectivity. I present this equation through theorizing what I call Counter-Revolutionary Discourse (CRD). This discourse is an historicized, Eurocentric-Orientalist implicit program of action and an analytical tool, which functions as a manual that assists the colonial apparatus in surveillance, gauging, ranking and subjectifying Middle Eastern subjectivity and resistance according to imperial exigencies. Through tracking the matrix of Western statements, ideas and practices, this genealogical exploration demonstrates that imperial enthusiasts, from Napoleon, Renan, Le Bon and Stoddard to Winston Churchill and David Petraeus, in encountering Middle Eastern revolutions—from the Mahdi, Urabi, Zaghloul, Mossadegh, the PLO and the PKK to the ‘Arab Spring’—draw on four Counter-Revolutionary Discourse systems of thought, which, I argue, are responsible for interpellating Oriental subjectivity and resistance, and which I denominate as: Recrudescence of Fanaticism, Progress Fetishism, Outsourcing of Agency, and the bipolar cognitive device Revolutionary Narcissism-Red Peril.

The Middle East Critique
Western Notions of Middle Eastern Revolutions 2
Edward Said’s Orientalism through deconstructing colonial discourses of power-knowledge, postulates that colonization for the colonized has a particular ontological finality, reification. I contend here that the process of subjection has... more
Edward Said’s Orientalism through deconstructing colonial discourses of power-knowledge, postulates that colonization for the colonized has a particular ontological finality, reification. I contend here that the process of subjection has a far more profound effect than merely reifying the colonized, to borrow from Anouar Abdel-Malek, as customary, passive, non-participating and non-autonomous. Rather, Western imperial narratives and what Said calls its “evaluative judgments” and “program of actions” also come to interpellate the reified subject’s cosmovision, agency and its forms of resistance. Focusing on the Middle East, this study is a genealogy that exposes how techniques and technologies of imperial power have symbolically and materially produced the Oriental rebel in Western history. Through  re-reading institutionalized knowledges and resurrecting a counter-history, this paper reveals a hidden and buried discursive formation, one which I call counter-revolutionary discourse. I argue that this system of thought is built through dispersed and heterogeneous but power-laden statements from Aymeric and Comte de Volney to Napoleon Bonaparte, Ernest Renan, Gustave Lebon, and Thomas Friedman.
Research Interests:
This article explores the politics, discursive utterances and postures of an under-studied indigenous autonomist movement whose anti-colonial and anti-Western project demands to be studied per se: the Council of Miskitu Elders of the... more
This article explores the politics, discursive utterances and postures of an under-studied indigenous autonomist movement whose anti-colonial and anti-Western project demands to be studied per se: the Council of Miskitu Elders of the Communitarian Nation Mosquitia in Nicaragua. As the epitome of what here is denominated revindicative autonomism, this movement presents an articulation of autonomy that not only deviates from but also challenges the current hegemonic model of liberal multiculturalism. Engaging in an anti-colonial struggle, the Council of Elders rearticulates autonomy firstly by bringing to the fore the territorial component of the nomos. Secondly, it does so by pushing for the outright rejection of the Western nation-state and its hierarchical multicultural models of governance. Drawing from an extensive and detailed examination of this movement’s textual and rhetorical contrivances as well as field research conducted in the region, this work explores the rarely acknowledged bottom-up politics of autonomism and attempts to diversify the often reductionist theorisation of indigenous autonomist demands in Latin America.
What factors have caused and sustained Islamism in West Africa? In answering this historically relevant question, this article re-examines the dominant narratives and hegemonic schools of thought that have attempted to tackle this... more
What factors have caused and sustained Islamism in West Africa? In answering this historically relevant question, this article re-examines the dominant narratives and hegemonic schools of thought that have attempted to tackle this phenomenon. Drawing from existing theoretical trends, this article repackages and synthesises their hypotheses into a
basic formula. Escaping the ideological trappings of the past and overcoming the old structure-agency and material-ideational divide, this article argues that in West Africa, and the Sahel-Sahara region in particular, prerequisites for terrorism and factors that allow an effective dissemination of Salafi-jihadism are primarily located in geography (human and physical) and history. Islamism, this article argues, is thus a mix of context-derived geopolitical and contemporary factors and a case of ideational resuscitation of historical events and religious memories.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
A new wave of social mobilisation has emerged in recent years. At its epicentre lies the question of monuments, statues, and edifices of colonial and statist power. These colonial commemorations sit at the intersection of interconnected,... more
A new wave of social mobilisation has emerged in recent years. At its epicentre lies the question of monuments, statues, and edifices of colonial and statist power. These colonial commemorations sit at the intersection of interconnected, local and global, historical, geospatial, and politico-economic assemblages of power. But what constitutes a colonial monument? What is its essence? And why is this radical struggle to rupture and open new futures perceived and treated like a snagged social thread, that if pulled, has the potential to unravel and obliterate the entire socio-cultural fabric of capitalist system and its Eurocentric history? This paper aims to address these questions by demonstrating that the monument is polysemic and mediates different kinds of phenomenological and political stimuli and output to different subjects and social forces. This phenomenological division is linked to historicosociological polarisations anchored in the nexus of colonial historical apparatuses, the state, class, and private property.
Research Interests:
Assessing and examining the causes and impact of 9/11.
What exactly is Islamophobia? How can we best define this cultural force and ideological technique? Is it an anachronistic cultural construct emerging out of the old engines of the colonial apparatus, amongst them acquisition of private... more
What exactly is Islamophobia? How can we best define this cultural force and ideological technique? Is it an anachronistic cultural construct emerging out of the old engines of the colonial apparatus, amongst them acquisition of private property and wealth, culturalist paradigms and the ‘imperial racial matrix’? Is it a contemporary phenomenon shaped by the Huntingtonian ‘clash of civilizations’ hypothesis and the events of 9/11? Or, is it, as some claim, the case of an individualized prejudiced logic, one amongst many in society and the existing mode of cultural production? This paper decodes Islamophobia in contemporary capitalist society by exploring Michel Houellebecq’s oeuvre. Houellebecq’s bestsellers, as cultural artefacts, allow us to ideologically map out how culture in conjunction with the ideological apparatus is able to produce power-saturated politico-ontological typologies. Typologies which are indexed to the existing status quo, and as such, are assigned metaphysicalized attributes, a certain value and a predetermined fate.
A new wave of socio-political and economic challenges have undermined the exercise of self-determination and autonomy in the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. The increasing advance of the frontera agrícola into the autonomous territories has... more
A new wave of socio-political and economic challenges have undermined the exercise of self-determination and autonomy in the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. The increasing advance of the frontera agrícola into the autonomous territories has led to the clearing and destruction of vast areas of rainforest for agricultural and cattle ranching purposes—fundamentally changing the landscape, demographics and the livelihood of indigenous and ethnic communities. The advance of the frontera agrícola is correlated to the phenomenon of mass migration of Pacific and central mestizo Nicaraguans (mostly peasants and lumpen-proletarians) to La Mosquitia. In the past decade, this migration has wrecked havoc and ethnic conflict in the indigenous territory. The mestizo peasant and lumpen-proletarian migrants, known by the local inhabitants as colonos, being forced out by large land-proprietors and transnational agricultural firms, have illegally settled into lands and territories originally protected by the System of Communal Ownership of Land of Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Communities of the Autonomous Regions of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua and the Bocay, Coco, Indio and Maíz Rivers (Law 445), which came into force in 2003. In this paper we examine the roots of this phenomenon of internal migration and ethnic conflict between the mestizo peasants and local indigenous forces in Nicaragua. We place the forced displacement of mestizo peasants, the illegal occupation of indigenous lands and the subsequent ethnic conflict in the symbiotic yet unequal relationship between the local bourgeoisie and its state, and the omnipresent and omnipotent global capitalist apparatuses.
Focusing on the Middle East, this study is a genealogical excavation and a rehistoricization of Western notions of Oriental resistance. Through resurrecting subjugated local knowledges and by default, a counter-history, this paper exposes... more
Focusing on the Middle East, this study is a genealogical excavation and a rehistoricization of Western notions of Oriental resistance. Through resurrecting subjugated local knowledges and by default, a counter-history, this paper exposes a concealed and somewhat overlooked discursive formation, one which I call Counter-Revolutionary Discourse. This discursive structure, I postulate, is built through dispersed and heterogeneous but power- laden statements from Robert the Monk and Hughes of Payens to Napoleon, Ernest Renan, Gustave Lebon, Winston Churchill, Lothrop Stoddard, Henry Kissinger and David Petraeus. In this process, I demonstrate that Western hegemonic beliefs, norms, principles and truths around Oriental revolutions are fundamentally empty and hollow, built on nothing but a solidified and internalized falsehood erected into a lofty truth for the purpose of colonization and denying the Other the right to resist.