But on a recent Saturday in downtown Ottawa, about 90 suit-and-tie Christians listened in silence as Mr. Manning brought them lessons from the political wilderness: Drop the God talk, tone down the righteous indignation, take your time. Issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage will not be resolved in a single vote.

Right-wing Christian organizations have taken on a face in recent years, in part encouraged by the success of Stephen Harper. For instance, the National House of Prayer, also newly created and in Ottawa, seeks to ‘establish a presence in Canada’s capital to pray for government’. Ottawa has also recently seen the opening of the Institute of Marriage and Family, widely seen as the Canadian wing of Focus on the Family. (Although Canada does, in fact, have a Focus on the Family chapter, the Institute of Marriage and Family benefits from a different appellation. and isn’t located at the P.O. Box in Langley, B.C..)

In other news, an interview with Marcel Gauchet, most famously the author of The Disenchantment of the World, from Le Monde.

Europeans’ problem is that they can no longer understand what religion means in societies where it still maintains a structural power. They’ve forgotten their own past. For them, religion has become a system of individual and private beliefs. Now the rest of the world does not operate that way. It also is not spared the “departure” of religion which accelerates with globalization. But this “departure” of the religious organization of the world, destroyed by urbanization, Western-style economism, liberal thought, technical efficiency and consumption cohabits with an aspiration to rediscover traditional religion.

One might wish to compare Gauchet’s comments with those of Zizek.

Richard Hass tells us to “rethink sovereignty“. Which is, incidentally, the suggestion that James J. Sheehan, makes in his presidential lecture to the American Historical Assocation, “The Problem of Sovereignty in European History“. It seems that Sheehan has little new to say:

What is the problem of sovereignty ? It is, first of all, a problem of definition. Sovereignty is obviously a political concept, but unlike political concepts such as democracy or monarchy, it is not about the location of power (the sovereign, Hobbes wrote, can be “the one or the many”); unlike parliament or bureaucracy, it does not describe institutions that exercise power; and unlike order or justice, it does not define the purposes of power. The concept of sovereignty has to do with the relationship of political power to other forms of authority. Sovereignty assumes, first of all, that political power is distinct from other organizations in the community—religious, familial, economic. Second, sovereignty asserts that this public authority is preeminent and autonomous, that is, superior to institutions within the community and independent from those outside. In theory, the sovereign can be no one’s vassal: at home, sovereigns are masters; abroad, they are the equals of other sovereigns.

Sheehan’s lecture ends pretty much were it began:

As has been the case throughout sovereignty’s long and complex history, the makers of sovereign claims both assert their authority and accept its limitations, defend their terrain and acknowledge where it ends. And as always, there is a distance between sovereign theory and practice, between the order and stability promised by the doctrine and the compromises and unresolved conflicts imposed in the realm of political action. Sovereignty, in other words, continues to be a problem and thus helps us to recognize the lines of continuity that join Europe’s present to its past.

Paging David “D-Ho” Horwitz: a new frontier in the battle for an Academic Bill of Rights — “supervisor abuse”.

And, finally, Somali pirates are back in the news. This time skirmishing with American warships. Apparently the biggest problem with these pirates is that we don’t know who to blame. The article puts it clearly: ” Their nationalities were unknown.”

LONDON (AP) — Pirates fired a rocket-propelled grenade and machine-guns Saturday in an attack on the luxury cruise liner Seabourn Spirit off the coast of the east African nation of Somalia, the vessel’s owners said.

One crew member was slightly injured before the attackers were repulsed, Seabourn Cruises said. The 10,000-tonne vessel was only slightly damaged.

The Bahamas-registered Seabourn Spirit, which is carrying more than 300 passengers, was 160 kilometres off Somalia when the attack took place early Saturday, said Seabourn Cruises spokesman David Dingle.

“The ship’s crew immediately initiated a trained response and as a result of protective and evasive measures taken the occupants of the small craft were unable to gain access to the ship,” Dingle said.
Dingle said the company had no reason to believe it was a terrorist attack and all the evidence pointed to pirates, who have been active in the area in recent days.

Press Association, the British news agency, said passengers were woken by the sound of gunfire Saturday as two 7.5-metre inflatable boats approached the liner and started shooting as their occupants tried to get on aboard. The injured crew member was reportedly hit by flying debris.

Seabourn Cruises said the Seabourn Spirit was on a 16-day cruise out of Alexandria in Egypt and was on its way to Mombasa in Kenya when it was attacked.

Dingle said the crew managed to remain calm, but “the passengers were somewhat surprised and shocked because it happened at 5:30 in the morning and they were woken,” he explained.

“The passengers were mustered in a public room, told what was going on and reassured that we were fighting off the attack. They were shocked but no passengers were injured whatsoever.”

The ship will no longer stop at Mombasa and will end the cruise in the Seychelles on Monday, he said.

From the Toronto Star

Setting up the house is taking much longer than I thought. Real entries soon.

There are a couple of things I wanted to return to in that article on pirates and terrorism by Burgess I discussed in my last post. I decided to leave out the comments as the post was already getting too long. This goes towards my uneasiness with declaring terrorists as hostis homini generis.

Burgess begins his discussion of pirates with the following paragraph:

AT FIRST GLANCE, THE CORRELATION BETWEEN PIRACY AND TERRORISM seems a stretch. Yet much of the basis of this skepticism can be traced to romantic and inaccurate notions about piracy. An examination of the actual history of the crime reveals startling, even astonishing, parallels to contemporary international terrorism. Viewed in its proper historical context, piracy emerges as a clear and powerful precedent.

It is the third sentence that is of most interest: “An examination of the actual history of the crime reveals startling, even astonishing, parallels to contemporary international terrorism”. Unfortunately he leaves most of these parallels implicit. Burgess writes the following description of pirates:

The pirates of the so-called golden age, as historian Hugh Rankin described them, were “a sorry lot of human trash.” Coming from the lowest tier of the English merchant navy, they struck indiscriminately in ferocious revenge against the societies that they felt had condemned them. Often these disenchanted sailors cast their piratical careers in revolutionary terms. The 18th-century English legal scholar William Blackstone defined a pirate as someone who has “reduced himself afresh to the savage state of nature by declaring war against all mankind,” while another account tells of one Edward Low, common seaman, who “took a small vessel, [hoisted] a Black Flag, and declared War against all the World.” Pirates gave their ships names that reflected this dark purpose: Defiance, Vengeance, New York’s Revenge, and even New York Revenge’s Revenge.

Perhaps the most telling statement of the pirates’ motives comes from a pirate named Black Sam Bellamy. To a captured merchant captain, he boasted, “I am a free prince, and have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a 100 sail of ships and an army of 100,000 men in the field.”

This was more than bravado. Historian Marcus Rediker has suggested that it indicates a new “pirate democracy” that drew its revolutionary principles from its perceived war against civilization and cast itself as civilization’s antithesis. Some pirate bands even had constitutions. The “pirate articles” that became commonplace in the early 18th century purported to lay out in legal terms both the rights and obligations that members in a pirate band enjoyed. An excerpt from articles of Captain John Phillips, drafted in 1723, even provides a sort of liability insurance for injured comrades.

Burgess creates an interesting series over the course of these three paragraphs. First, pirates are the lowest of the low; the most disenfranchised; they chose a career path that leads to certain death — i.e., piracy as capital offense — in order to enter into war against “all mankind” or “all the world”. Burgess, however, is happy to leave the point stated simply: it isn’t the world understand in a particular way or “mankind” or “civilization” understood in a particular way; rather, it is the entire world and everyone living in it. Pirates aren’t, as Burgess tells us, opposed to a particular constituted juridical order — one, for instance, that would kill them for taking their disenfranchisement to its logical conclusion — but are rather opposed to order as such. This is interesting given his second paragraph: he cites Sam Bellamy who claims, by virtue of capturing and commanding a ship, to be on the same level as anyone else possessing means of violence. Bellamy describes himself in two ways: as a “free prince” and as having “authority”. Clearly, Bellamy isn’t opposed to order at all: he understands order for what it is and wants a part of it. Finally, we come to the most troubling aspect of piracy for Burgess: “pirate democracy”. Not only do some bands of pirates organize themselves around constitutions and democratic principles, they also create forms of social welfare approximately two hundred and some years before comparable schemes are governmentalized in the European states.

With this rather odd discussion of pirate democracy and an opposition to the constituted order, Bellamy creates the following parallel between pirates and terrorists:

The corollaries between the pirates’ “war against the world” and modern terrorism are profound and disturbing. With their vengeful practices, pirates were the first and perhaps only historical precedent for the terrorist cell: a group of men who bound themselves in extraterritorial enclaves, removed themselves from the protection and jurisdiction of the nation-state, and declared war against civilization. Both pirates and terrorists deliberately employ this extranationality as a means of pursuing their activities. The pirates hid in the myriad shoals and islands of the Atlantic. The terrorists hide in cells throughout the world. Both seek through their acts to bring notice to themselves and their causes. They share means as well—destruction of property, frustration of commerce, and homicide. Most important, both are properly considered enemies of the rest of the human race.

Suddenly the revolutionary impulse, the democracy, and the social welfare has disappeared. Pirates are suddenly reduced to the negative moment of the “war against the world” (where ‘world’ is undefined and taken as legitimate — a questionable claim at best). The positive reconstructive and constituent moment is lost in the comparison with terrorists and this, I think, rather revealing of the entire approach to the “War on Terror”: the specificity of the revolt (“against the world”) must be erased so as to erase the more important element — the possibility of a “pirate” or “wild” democracy. A democracy and a constituent power that legitimately challenges the constituted power — a power even those in power will call corrupt at any opportunity.

More on deterritorialization later.

Like Jon, Douglas R. Burgess, Jr., does not address this essential question in his essay, “The Dread Pirate bin Laden“, but he does address some other issues worthy of consideration. Burgess’ article has three moments: first, he gives a brief history of the pirate from the Roman Empire to the end of the nineteenth century; next, he gives an even briefer history of terrorists from the Cold War to the present culminating in a comparison of terrorists and pirates; finally, he suggests a legal solution to “the moral authority of the United Nations and its strength in condemning” (as Kofi Annan puts it) terrorism on the model of hostis humani generis. While the general comparison is correct — postmodern terrorists as the current incarnation of Golden Age pirates — Burgess’ solution is, nonetheless, disquieting, if not dangerous. The effect of the definition of hostis humani generis being pirates are reduced the homo sacer described by Giorgio Agamben and thus become figures to be killed without impunity. One also wonder, returning to Agamben, if terrorists as political actors without a state become the inverse of refugees, thus revealing once again the problematic relation between universal declarations of rights and political reality.

The problem that terrorism provokes, and the lack of ‘moral authority’ in combatting it, is simply a matter of law:

What is needed now is a framework for an international crime of terrorism. The framework should be incorporated into the U.N. Convention on Terrorism and should call for including the crime in domestic criminal law and perhaps the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. This framework must recognize the unique threat that terrorists pose to nation-states, yet not grant them the legitimacy accorded to belligerent states. It must provide the foundation for a law that criminalizes not only terrorist acts but membership in a terrorist organization. It must define methods of punishment.

If the community of international actors can agree to a single legal framework on the definition, prosecution and punishment of terrorism, the problem, presumably, would go away. Or, at the very least, there would be means for retribution when terrorism does occur. The clear problem, in this regard, is that a definition of terrorism becomes nothing but the imposition of will and power of certain states over others. Claiming that “a terrorist is X” does not resolve the problem (and it is a significant problem for Burgess) that does who support the ‘terrorists’ will redefine their activities as ‘freedom fighting’. If it were even possible to define terrorism via international law — and the United States is, at best, reluctant to join new international accords and disinclined to follow commitments under current accords — such a definition would merely become another tool in realpolitik. (As the intervention against Saddam and the lack of intervention in Darfur adequately demonstrate.)

But, Burgess tells us skeptics, there is nothing to worry about. If we imagine that terrorists are a lot like pirates, then we can come up with an international framework by analogy that will solve the problem of the legal status of the terrorist, the definition thereof, and legitimate means of reprisal:

Coming up with such a framework would perhaps seem impossible, except that one already exists. Dusty and anachronistic, perhaps, but viable all the same. More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero defined pirates in Roman law as hostis humani generis, “enemies of the human race.” From that day until now, pirates have held a unique status in the law as international criminals subject to universal jurisdiction — meaning that they may be captured wherever they are found, by any person who finds them. The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable. More important, there are enormous potential benefits of applying this legal definition to contemporary terrorism.

Leaving aside the false claim that “the ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror”, we see a troubling distinction emerging in the definition: pirates and terrorists are hostis homini generis — enemies of the human race. There’s an immediate opposition created between ‘the human race’ and their ‘enemies’ which, in an important sense, legitimates their killing because they do not fall under the purview of protections afforded to ‘the human race’ that we find in the declarations of rights ‘and man’. This logic follows immediately from The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), whose first three articles read as follows:

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.

2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.

Following the movement of this argument, we see that, first, all humans “are born and remain free and equal in rights”. Second, when humans band together, they do so to form a “political association”, which has the purpose of realizing the “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen”. Among these rights secured by political associations is “resistance to oppression”. Third, these rights through political association can only be realized through the nation, which is the vessel that holds sovereignty. Only a sovereign power, meaning an equation between the nation and the state, can be a determinant of right. Thus, the only legitimate form of “resistance to oppression” is to realize the state form modeled on the nation.

Pirates and terrorists, however, are neither nations nor states, they are “nonstate actors” who have a “hybrid status in the law” which necessarily opposes them to “recognized state actors”. Outside the protection of the state and of the nation, the pirates are reduced to homo sacer; they are the realization of ‘the ban’. Homo sacer, like the hostis homini generis, is a figure from Roman law (one wonders: why does the current imperial arrangement always look back to the Romans for legal principles?). Homo sacer is sacred man “who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (Homo Sacer, 8). The terrorist as hostis homini generis and homo sacer meets the essential question of the contemporary biopolitical arrangement: is a life of terrorism “a life worthy of being lived” (Homo Sacer, 137)? If it is not ‘a life worthy of being lived’, the life has no value as such and is thus reduced to a variable in a calculation: should the life continue to live? The answer, of course, for Burgess, Bush and Blair alike is “no”.

When the answer is “no”, the terrorist enters into relation with the refugee via “the sovereign ban”. The ‘law is in force but without significance’ (Homo Sacer, 51). “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” is, as human life, ‘in force’, but removed from the protection of nation, state and sovereignty, the Declaration has no standing:

The concept of the refugee (and the figure of life that this concept represents) must be resolutely separated from the concept of the rights of man, and we must seriously consider Arendt’s claim that the fates of human rights and the nation-state are bound together such that the decline and crisis of the one necessarily implies the end of the other. The refugee must be considered for what he is: nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state, from the birth-nation to the man-citizen link, and that thereby makes it possible to clear the way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of a politics in which bare life is no longer separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights (Homo Sacer, 134).

It is, perhaps, best to leave the original to Burgess the final word. He concludes his essay as follows:

If the war on terror becomes akin to war against the pirates, however, the situation would change. First, the crime of terrorism would be defined and proscribed internationally, and terrorists would be properly understood as enemies of all states. This legal status carries significant advantages, chief among them the possibility of universal jurisdiction. Terrorists, as hostis humani generis, could be captured wherever they were found, by anyone who found them. Pirates are currently the only form of criminals subject to this special jurisdiction.

Second, this definition would deter states from harboring terrorists on the grounds that they are “freedom fighters” by providing an objective distinction in law between legitimate insurgency and outright terrorism. This same objective definition could, conversely, also deter states from cracking down on political dissidents as “terrorists,” as both Russia and China have done against their dissidents. Recall the U.N. definition of piracy as acts of “depredation [committed] for private ends.” Just as international piracy is viewed as transcending domestic criminal law, so too must the crime of international terrorism be defined as distinct from domestic homicide or, alternately, revolutionary activities. If a group directs its attacks on military or civilian targets within its own state, it may still fall within domestic criminal law. Yet once it directs those attacks on property or civilians belonging to another state, it exceeds both domestic law and the traditional right of self-determination, and becomes akin to a pirate band.

Third, and perhaps most important, nations that now balk at assisting the United States in the war on terror might have fewer reservations if terrorism were defined as an international crime that could be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court.

Thus, “Terrorists, like pirates, must be given their proper status in law: hostis humani generis, enemies of the human race.”