War and pieces

Nonviolent geographies and integral anarchism: beyond the fragmentary practices of religion

Nick Megoran's (2010Megoran's ( , 2011 recent articles outlining an agenda for peace research and practice in contemporary human geography are both timely and necessary interventions if we are ever to reconfigure the discipline in such a way that Yves Lacoste's (1976) claim, that geography is first and foremost an art of war, no longer makes sense. In his most recent article, Megoran's (2011) starting point is a critique of Derek Gregory's (2010) plenary lecture for the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers 2008 conference entitled "War and peace". Megoran laments that although peace is gestured at in Gregory's account of the ongoing horrors of war waged by the global north, it quickly falls out of view. In Gregory's defence, he explicitly states that his emphasis is on war, yet he nonetheless wants to remind his audience of the mutually reinforcing processes that shape the contours of both war and peace. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (2004) attempt to do much the same in the introduction to their anthology "Violence in War and Peace"; here they set out to "trouble" the distinctions between war and peace by demonstrating how often the most violent acts consist of conduct that is socially permitted, defined as virtuous and enjoined as a moral duty in the service of conventional political economic and sociocultural norms. Likewise, drawing upon Giorgio Agamben's (1998) exposition on sovereign power, within my own work I have sought to acknowledge that what may at first glance appear as exceptional violence, in fact comes to form the rule; it becomes exemplary (Springer 2012b(Springer , 2013). Yet there is much to be gained from Megoran's analysis, not least of which is the recognition that it is one thing to critique how war and peace are entangled in a reciprocating arrangement, but it is something else to attempt to tear this dialectic apart at its seams, and therein fasten something altogether new and emancipatory. Like Megoran (2008Megoran ( , 2011 I am convinced that the continual performance of nonviolence in all areas of one's life is the answer, but I take issue with his invocation of Christian morality as the means to achieving this.

To make his case, Megoran curiously draws on Peter Kropotkin, an individual remembered today more for his influence on the development of anarchist philosophy than for his contributions to geography. Writing at a time when geographers like David Livingstone, Friedrich Ratzel and Halford Mackinder were content to perpetuate the discipline's relationship to colonialism (see Driver, 2001;Godlewska and Smith, 1994;Kearns, 2009), Kropotkin (1885) passionately argued that dissipating all manner of prejudice is "what geography ought to be" (see Springer, 2012a for a contemporary take on this thesis). If the standard postcolonial critique is that colonialism attempts to universalise and impose a particular version of morality (Sidaway, 2000), my skepticism leads me to question what prejudices remain hidden beneath a version of peace rooted in Christianity. I do not mean to call Megoran's own character to account here, as I have no doubt that his heart is in the right place. Instead, I think it is important to remember that all religions are the product of particular cultural developments, and so it follows that their versions of morality are informed by situated knowledges (Harraway, 1988). For Kropotkin (1897) morality had nothing to do with the cultural prejudices of religion, and far from requiring a proselytizing imperative, he argued that:

The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the sense of smell or of touch. As for law and religion, which also have preached this principle, they have simply filched it to cloak their own wares, their injunctions for the benefit of the conqueror, the exploiter, the priest. … Each of them covered themselves with it as with a garment; like authority [the state] which made good its position by posing as the protector of the weak against the strong. By flinging overboard law, religion and authority [the state], [hu]mankind can regain possession of the moral principle which has been taken from them. Regain that they may criticize it, and purge it from the adulterations wherewith priest, judge and ruler have poisoned it and are poisoning it yet. (Kropotkin, 1897, np.) Although I want to distance myself from the idea of morality being a "natural faculty", in identifying the series of mystifying erasures that authority and its own morality are premised upon, Kropotkin amply demonstrates his antipathy for the state, law and organised religion, considering them as a trident in the perpetuation of prejudice and domination. In this sense, Megoran's invocation of Kropotkin is peculiar, as he rooted his morality not in religious teachings, but in nothing more and nothing less than the presupposition of equality, an ideal we should recognise as being in perpetual need of verification, and the single most fundamental tenet of anarchism.

James Sidaway recently suggested that my version of anarchism seems to find something in common with certain elements of religion (personal correspondence). While I am generally quite adverse to this comparison, I have identified Tolstoy as a key influence on my thinking. This necessitates some critical reflection on my part as Tolstoy was often labeled a "Christian anarchist". Yet Tolstoy's version of Christianity was far from doctrinaire, so much so that he was labeled a heretic and excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. In his monumental The Kingdom of God is Within You, which was banned from publication in his home country, Tolstoy (1894Tolstoy ( , 2004 bases his scathing critiques of private property and statist violence on the teachings of Jesus Christ, yet he also rails against the institution of the Church and its entrenched ecclesiastical hierarchies. If Christianity is to simply mean an unwavering commitment to nonviolence and the absolute condemnation of war, as is Tolstoy's sense, then I can concede that my version of anarchism aligns to this. Taking this religious analogy one step further, the promise I see in Élisée Reclus' (1876-94) "universal geography" shares a lot with so-called "Eastern" religious philosophies. Far from an essentialising sense of the universal, human phenomena such as "culture", "economics", "politics", and "the social" are considered false dichotomies, necessarily imbued within and co-constitutive of the natural "environment". Such thinking coalesces with both the concept of Indra's Net from Buddhist philosophy and with Taoism's view of humanity's imbrication within the cosmos (Marshall, 1992;Rapp, 2012). This goes further than Noel Castree and Bruce Braun's (2001) conceptualisation of "social nature" inasmuch as it seeks to recognise how humanity is intimately intertwined within all the processes and flows of the entire planet, and indeed the universe at large. In many ways this necessitates an affective or even spiritual approach, one that goes beyond simply crossing interdisciplinary boundaries to initiate a process of "undisciplining" by engaging both critical geopolitics and geopoetics to suture together all the ostensibly separate pieces in articulating an "integral anarchism". Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, this view is not exclusively confined to a metaphysical exegesis, as Albert Einstein, the father of modern physics, conveyed a similar vision:

A human being is a part of the whole called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself [sic], his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. (Einstein, 2003, p. 10) Although the methodological approach of science claims objective detachment, the ongoing scientific search for a unified theory of everything, which Einstein initiated, is actually shot through with emotion. The unknowable mystery at the end of the universe and the fundamental significance of human consciousness has led some of the most scientific minds to accept the morality of existence, but without the need to invoke God (see Davies, 1993;Hawking and Mlodinow, 2010).

Human geography is in the midst of an affective turn (Thien, 2005), where Catherine Nolin's (2010) "geography that breaks your heart" and Vicky Lawson's (2009) "caring geography" are welcome antidotes to the neoliberal myth that our successes are achieved as autonomous individuals, helping geographers to visualise how we can bring the pieces of humanity back together through a solidarity rooted in affection. Advocacy, activism and affect are precisely what the discipline needs to shed its colonial skin, not more of the "old boys club" scholarship that Edward Holland (2011, p. 60) seemingly promotes whenin critiquing Megoran's religious positionality he writes:

to take a commitment to non-violence as the consistent point of departure for our analysis leads us too closely toward advocacy and away from the independent, unbiased perspective which is the foundation of the academy. This is a bewildering regression that ignores the beautiful vitality that feminism has breathed into the discipline. Even more confounding is that Holland actually recapitulates the very notion he critiques. In defending the oxymoronic notion of "just war", as if one could ever "remove" him-"Self" enough to determine where and when violence is moral, Donna Harraway's (1988) "god-trick" takes center stage in Holland's argument. Intellectual mastery, masculinist reason and disinterested appraisal stand in for divine omniscience to determine our morality for us. Does this really help geographers escape the prejudice Kropotkin disavows, or is it simply a delusion that chains geography even tighter to its colonial past? My answer is the latter, and contra any feigned sense of objectivity, I embrace the emotional turn as a much more honest assessment of how our inescapable humanity influences our scholarship. Yet I do so with my skepticism for organised religion intact, because within its contemporary practices, religious affection encounters, takes on, and at times and within particular places even provokes a divisive quality. The dictates of most organised religions maintain that care is extended unconditionally to all members of humanity. In actual practice, when it comes to "Others" in the form of non-believers and those from differing faiths, there is often a considerable degree of suspicion and doubt.

Setting aside Dharmic and Taoic religions, we have discourses of "infidel" and "heathen" emerging from and circulating between the various fractures of Abrahamic faith, to say nothing of the splintering, ridicule and contempt that has arisen and continues to proliferate within the manifold denominations of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. These broken pieces in and of themselves seem to tell us something important about the systematic hierarchies embedded within the practice of organised religion, where "organisation" in this sense entails a considerable dose of discipline. In God and the State, Mikhail Bakunin was unforgiving in identifying this relationship, isolating Christianity as the primary recipient of his ire:

Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence, because it exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity. God being everything, the real world and man [sic] are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation. But whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs, prophets, priests, and legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognized as the representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of humanity, chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation, necessarily exercise absolute power. (Bakunin, 2010(Bakunin, [1882, p. 13, original emphasis) While I would hesitate in singling out Christianity in identifying an apex to the ways in which organised religions function as the ultimate sovereign authority, I think the case for theistic domination and hierarchy is well made by Bakunin. In getting back to Megoran, the problem I see in some of his work (see Megoran, 2007), is that it attempts to position itself as emancipatory, but without fully coming to terms with the prejudices organised religion so often entails, and the pieces it produces in its actual practice. From the wars of extermination in the Tanakh, to the Reconquista, to the Crusades, to the Thirty Years War, to the Taiping Rebellion, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, to the contemporary "war on terror", organised religion has repeatedly revealed its capacity to divide us.

Redressing the post-political zeitgeist: peace as the infinitude of anarchy While I dream of a world without war, without domination and without violence, the suturing together of the various broken pieces, or integral anarchism, that I advocate is not tantamount to envisioning a global consensus without dissent or difference. This is not the mirror image to the neoliberalised "new world order" anticipated by the Project for the New American Century, nor do I seek to stoke the fires of anti-immigration and xenophobic sentiment through the misguided perception that diversity is a "problem" that threatens the unity of particular communities, municipalities, or nations. I have elsewhere argued in favour of radical democracy as a form of dissensus that powerfully disrupts the depoliticising order built by government and the violence this evokes (Springer, 2011a). Radical democracywhich I interpret as tantamount to anarchismstands in stark contrast to the representative model of democracy, and is accordingly the antithesis of the post-political consensus that reduces politics to organisational functions and governmental techniques. Bringing the fragmented pieces back together instead means to summon the repudiation of antagonism, which is not only the primary modality that conditions violence and provokes war, but is also ingrained within consensus models of democracy (Mouffe, 2006). The widely accepted process of voting, for example, encourages one to reduce opposing positions to hostile caricature (Graeber, 2009), where the unspoken implicationand sadly at times the manifest resultis that individuals are considered in black and white, as either part of the consensus, or as enemies to the "peace", "order" and "stability" of the community that has been administratively imagined, territorially demarcated and electorally reified (Anderson, 1991). Radical democracy replaces the latent enmity of representative democracy (read "electoral authoritarianism") with agonistic pluralism, which is rooted in a form of mutual respect that mirrors Jacques Rancière's (1999) presupposition of equality, while allowing for the ever-present possibility of difference and dissent. Dissent becomes the lifeblood of anarchism precisely because it is not treated as divisive, as is the view maintained by advocates of a post-political consensus as well as many organised religions; it is instead viewed as a continually unfolding process that embraces difference through the lens of "radical equality" (or equality as an axiomatic given). Put differently, dissent becomes a way of life, where its perpetuity represents the very practice of politics, an unremitting and unbreakable thread that ties the people (demos) together by recognising, rebuking and rescinding hierarchical and oppressive power relations in society as and when they form.

Presupposing egalitarianism does not require us to base this idea in naturalistic assumptions, as was the framework for Kropotkin's thought. Rather, as political philosophers like Slavoj Žižek (1999), Jacques Rancière (2006) and Todd May (2009), as well as human geographers like Erik Swyngedouw (2011) and myself (Springer, 2011a) have all shown, we can make claims about radical equality without essentialising humanity or falling victim to the "post-politics" school of thought popularised by Francis Fukuyama's (1992) "end of history" and Anthony Gidden's (1999) "third way". The aim of my anarchist political project is not to establish a rational or utopian consensus that is to stand for all time and thereby represent an apolitical, ahistorical and ageographical end-state. Rather, like Mouffe (2004), I hope to calm the potential of human hostilities by allowing for the possibility of antagonism to be transformed into agonism. Opening such an opportunity for mutual respect, accommodation, humility, support and compassion to germinate and flourish involves dismantling the administrative structures, apparatuses and logics of archy that maintain the rigid codifications of space and belonging that are antecedent to the multiple lines of antipathy we see in the world today.

In his essay "Ten Theses on Politics", Rancière (2001) develops a masterful exegesis of archy, or arche, by drawing from Hannah Arendt's (1998Arendt's ( [1958), who identifies the power of archein as the power to begin anew: "To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, 'to begin', 'to lead' and eventually 'to rule' indicates)." From this Rancière (2001, np.) contends that "the logic of arche presupposes a determinate superiority exercised upon an equally determinate inferiority", which he links to the original usage of democracy as a term of derision, where those arbitrarily "qualified" to govern by virtue of their birth, seniority, wealth, knowledge and most of all their means to violence, articulated the "power of the demos" (democracy) as rule by those who have no specificity in common, apart from their having no qualification to govern. Democracy, from the vantage point of the governing class, was an affront to the "order" they had constructed, and was thus akin to chaos. The parallels to the contemporary caricature that informs mainstream accounts of anarchism should not go unnoticed (see Springer, 2012a). To Rancière, the demos exists only as a rupture of the logic of arche, of being ruled. Yet it should be emphasised that this rupturing does not require a fragmentation into distinct pieces, as the demos "should not be identified either with the race of those who recognize each other as having the same origin, the same birth, or with a part of a population or even the sum of its parts" (Rancière, 2001, np.). Identity still matters and is accommodated for and indeed celebrated through democratic practice, yet the demos is not about breaking humanity into evermore pieces, but instead enters a radical equality that sees no privilege assigned to any particular category of belonging.

Through Rancière we can begin envisioning how the idea of arche allows us to develop a very rich idea of an-arche, which emphasises the project of autonomy rather than heteronomy. The participation proper to politics is actually allowed for through the very rupturing of all those logics of allocation and administration that are exercised through the matrix of arche. "The 'freedom' of a people that constitutes the axiom of democracy," Rancière (2001, np.) avers, "has as its real content the rupture of the axioms of domination: a rupture, that is, in the correlation between a capacity for rule and a capacity for being ruled." An-arche thus becomes not the realisation of a utopian end-state without domination, nor as we have seen, can an-arche be conceived of as having a definitive "beginning". Instead, an-arche, or anarchism, speaks of the "infinitely demanding" struggle of being active, of forging solidarities across space, of evading sovereign logics, of accommodating dissent, of denying authority, of ethical commitment, of resisting oppression and ultimately of taking up the challenge of "ruling" ourselves (Critchley, 2007). To Rancière this trial represents the very essence of the political, where politics is to be conceived as a very specific burst in the logic of arche:

It does not simply presuppose the rupture of the 'normal' distribution of positions between the one who exercises power and the one subject to it. It also requires a rupture in the idea that there are dispositions 'proper' to such classifications. (Rancière, 2001, np.) This explication cuts to the very heart of anarchist geographies, which I have defined as the: kaleidoscopic spatialities that allow for multiple, non-hierarchical, and protean connections between autonomous entities, wherein solidarities, bonds, and affinities are voluntarily assembled in opposition to and free from the presence of sovereign violence, predetermined norms, and assigned categories of belonging. (Springer, 2012a(Springer, , p. 1607 Anarchism is accordingly to be understood as the perpetual implementation (through thought, speech and direct action) of a promise for something better, wherein it is not peace and the finitude of utopia that become synonymous, but rather peace and the infinitude of an-arche.

Although I take radical equality as the basis of my emancipatory concerns, my arguments should not be interpreted as denying political responses that attended to the marginalisations that emerge through our lived experiences as differently situated actors. Indeed, at the root of a feminist ethics of care is the rejection of the masculinist and Kantian idea that we can or should treat everyone exactly the same. Janine Wiles and Audrey Kobayashi (2009) differentiate between "formal equality", which is concerned with the principle of treating individuals the same regardless of the outcomes, and "substantive equity", which conversely refers to the principle of achieving an equitable outcome. In this sense, the radical equality I support is compatible with the feminist tradition and its suggestion that it is, at times and in particular spaces, perfectly ethical to care for some more than others, given that:

Lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe. Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as 'grievable'. (Butler, 2004, p. 32, emphasis added) Hence the ethical principle of substantive equity, which I take as a core constituent of the larger process of radical equality (as opposed to formal equality), is that selective priority should be given to improving the situation of the most socially disadvantaged groups in a society, which requires continual readjustment of existing structures and a recalcitrance towards processes that drive an inequitable system (Wiles & Kobayashi, 2009). Consequently, the radical equality I propose is not something that can be implemented instantaneously as an ideational flashpoint that is subsequently assigned a finality or completeness. Rather as a properly political process, radical equality is something that is in need of continuous confirmation precisely because, as Jacques Derrida (2001[1967]) argues, normalising codes conceptualise and materialise difference through the irreducible relationality and intertexuality of human experience. Subject positions and their distribution are always being made and remade, meaning that identity politics are both inexorable and insurmountable.

In this light, my arguments should not be misinterpreted as wanting to disavow any particular or all religious philosophies, as was the historical imperative of Communism and its practices of attempted censure and erasure. To deny religion tout court is to repudiate the freedom of particular categories of affinity, identity and belonging, which is a step towards convening a normative frame for all of humanity, an idea I have been arguing against. This is the exact danger we currently face under globalised neoliberalism and its aspirations of a "global village" of properly neoliberalised subjects (Kingfisher, 2007). Within the context of neoliberalism's aligned global "war on terror", Judith Butler (2004, p. 32) asks, "To what extent have Arab peoples, predominantly practitioners of Islam, fallen outside of the human as it is being naturalized in its "Western" mold by the contemporary workings of humanism?". The amplification of religious fundamentalism on both sides of this divide should be recognised as an alarming trend that attempts to set rigid moral limits to what it means to be human, thereby renewing the notion of homo sacerlife that does not count as politically qualified, and so may be killed, but not sacrificed (Agamben, 1998). My concern is thus for an honest appreciation of how the current workings of organised religionas opposed to faith itselfengender particular forms of prosecution and hierarchy, and the need to be attentive to refashioning spiritual affinities in ways that are more inclusive, compassionate and forbearing without denying the identity and sense of belonging that religious affiliation fosters.

Conclusion

If human geography is to convene a morality premised upon the presumption of radical equality, which I have already suggested is akin to humanity's collective birthright, one might object to this being an "ordinary normativity" (Sayer, 2003), no more or less a cultural prejudice than religion. My response is simply that the moment of birth knows no norms, where radical equality prefigures any and all cultural content. We learn to perform our assigned and hierarchically organised roles of class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion and so forth through culture, which geographers by now know very well, makes identities fluid and variable across space and time. What we cannot learn through any cultural program is how to be born, we just are. Put differently, while we come to learn to be different identities, we do not learn to simply be. Readers should not mistake my arguments as high Rousseau. It is not my intention to argue for the restoration of a pre-capitalist, pre-colonial, or pre-modern utopia, wherein only the proverbial noble savage exists. I am not convinced by anarcho-primitivist authors like Derrick Jensen (2006) and John Zerzan (2002) who explicitly prosecute such arguments, not least because in their imagined nostalgia they advocate all manner of violence to facilitate a supposed "return" to universal peace. So-called "classical" anarchists like Proudhon, Kropotkin, Reclus and Bakunin similarly advocated essentialist or naturalist views of humanity thatin light of the achievements of thinkers like Rancière, Butler, Žižek and Derrida -I find tremendously problematic. Accordingly, I place my views within the anti-essentialist frame of postanarchism, which denotes a merging of anarchist and poststructuralist thought (May, 1994;Newman, 2010). To postanarchists, identity still unavoidably matters and the notion of radical equality is intended to serve only as an ideological referent for our political engagements, not as an idealised reality of the workings of our present or as a fully realisable condition of our future. While the presupposition of equality should be understood as self-evident, it is nonetheless a promise to relentlessly struggle towards and a hope that we should aspire to live into.

There is no precursory or future utopian state for humanity, only the continual unfolding of systems of organisation that we ourselves construct, disassemble and reconstruct anew.

Unfortunately the contemporary zeitgeist sees such structures unfold in ways that appear ever more hierarchical in composition, and yet such an orientation largely goes unchallenged because it has become so routinised and quotidian that we have come to accept arche as a given. The very idea of government itself has become the essential condition of the post-political conjuncture, wherein the emancipatory potential of anarchism has been demonised, admonished, caricatured, berated and renounced as a dangerous "chaos" that threatens the existing consensus. The acceptance of the existing system of rule speaks to Arendt's (1963) "banality of evil", which views history's profoundest moments of malevolence not as being executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who simply accepted the premises of the prevailing order. As academics we consequently have an ethical obligation to reveal and challenge the quagmire of contemporary orderings of ache, which at their root represent nothing less than the very fog of war. My appeals to radical equality should accordingly be read as an appreciation for the potential decentralisation and diffusion of power, which is to be rooted in an affinity where difference is neither denied, essentialised, or exoticised, but embraced as potentially transformative (Day, 2005;Mueller, 2003). The project of anarchism is thus not at all about chaos, but about creating new forms of organisation that break with hierarchy and embrace egalitarianism (Graeber, 2009). We all make political choices, and the future of the thoughts expressed here reside in the notion that any praxis begins first and foremost with an introspective reflection on our own participation in the structures that facilitate and reproduce violence, and an unwavering commitment to unfastening these bonds. Our shared morality then, should not be premised upon the prejudices of life as it is currently lived through a politics of consensus that is antagonistic towards difference. Instead, we should allow the empathetic horizons of agonism to be our guide. By aligning anarchism with the most emancipatory current of feminist thought, and in embracing our ultimate integrality to each other and all that is, the morality of peace should accordingly function as an ethics of intersectionality (see Grillo, 1995;Valentine, 2007). This entails a categorical rejection of all the interlocking systems of domination, including capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, neoliberalism, militarism, nationalism, classism, racism, ethnocentrism, Orientalism, sexism, genderism, ageism, ableism, speciesism, carnism, homophobia, transphobia, sovereignty, the state and organised religion. The mutually reinforcing composition of these various dimensions of arche consequently means that to insulate any one of these pieces from our critical and vigilant interrogation is to allow the banality of evil to go unchecked, and thereby perpetuate the conglomeration of war as a whole.