Neo-orientalism and the new barbarism thesis: Aspects of symbolic violence in the Middle East conflict(s)

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 591-599

  Tuastad, Dag ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OSLO   (Norway)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ORIENTALISM; POLITICAL CONFLICT; TERRORISM; VIOLENCE;

ASIA; EURASIA; MIDDLE EAST;

EID: 24944446332     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: 13602241     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0143659032000105768     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. Pierre Bourdieu, Symbolik matt, Oslo: Pax forlag, 1996, pp 40-42.
2. Quoted in Edward W Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books, 1977, pp 309-310.
3. Elia Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.
4. Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind, New York: Scribner, 1973.
5. Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel, p 84.
6. Ibid, pp 84-85.
7. Alroy, quoted in ibid, p 87.
8. Ibid, p 92.
9. Said, Orientalism, p xiii.
10. Carole Nagengast, 'Violence, terror, and the crisis of the state'. Annual Review of Anthropology, 23, 1994, pp 109-136.
11. John Gledhill, Power and its Disguises. Anthropological Perspectives on Politics, London: Pluto Press, 2000, p 167.
12. Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth & Resources in Sierra Leone, Oxford: James Currey, 1996.
13. Guardian Unlimited, 27 September 2001.
14. Zygmunt Bauman, Modemiteten og Holocaust, Oslo: Vidarfbrlaget A/S, 1997.
15. Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest.
16. Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, New York: St Martin's Press, 1993.
17. In 1993 the USA considered invading Bosnia. It could no longer be denied that the cause of the war in Bosnia was the aggressive, warring Serb separatism, where Serb militias were systematically carrying out attacks on the Bosnian Muslim population. But then Bill Clinton got Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts for Christmas, according to Richard Holbrooke in his memoirs on the peace negotiations after the civil war. Balkan Ghosts is an archetype of a primordial explanation of ethnic violence. The reader gets the impression of unchangeable, eternal ethnic violence between ethnic groups of the region. In the Balkans, Kaplan writes, 'men have been isolated by poverty and ethnic rivalry, dooming them to hate'. After reading Kaplan's book Clinton concluded that it was not possible to do anything in the area. The spiral of violence was ineluctable, once in you would never get out. For that reason the plans on intervention were put on hold. Two years later splint grenades exploded in the marketplace of Tuzla and in a besieged Sarajevo, killing dozens of innocent civilians. With the TV spotlights on, US opinion now demanded action. NATO planes then bombed Serb held positions and, despite all warnings, the Serb positions fell like a house of cards and the Bosnian Serbs capitulated. Soon peace negotiations were held, and although until recently Bosnia has looked more like an international protectorate than an independent democratic state, the people have lived in peace. The arguments against intervention had been proven wrong. The same could have been achieved if the intervention had come in 1993. Since Clinton received Kaplan's book, 200 000 people had been killed, and half the Bosnian population had become refugees or internally displaced persons.
18. Robert Kaplan, The Coming of Anarchy, New York: Random House, 2000.
19. Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest, p xiv.
20. Kaplan, The Coming of Anarchy, p 24.
21. Ibid, p 26.
22. Ibid, p 45.
23. Ibid, p 47.
24. Ibid, p 44.
25. Ibid, p 48.
26. Samuel P Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
27. Ibid, p 207.
28. Ibid, p 216.
29. Ibid, p 217.
30. Ibid.
31. Quoted in Yahia Sadowski, 'The new Orientalism and the democracy debate'. Middle East Report, 183, 1993, p 14.
32. Ibid, p 16.
33. Ibid, p 17.
34. Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
35. Crone, quoted in Sadowski, 'The new Orientalism and the democracy debate', p 17.
36. Crone, quoted in ibid.
37. Sadowski, 'The new Orientalism and the democracy debate', p 18.
38. Ibid, p 18.
39. Ibid, p 19.
40. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, p xiv.
41. Ibid, p 75.
42. Gledhill, Power and its Disguises, p 167.
43. Ibid.
44. Kaplan, The Coming of Anarchy, p 43.
45. Ibid, p 42.
46. Ibid, pp 103-104.
47. Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem, London: Fontana/Collins, 1993, p 429.
48. Ibid, p 441.
49. Ibid, p 444.
50. Ibid.
51. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem, p 446.
52. Jerusalem Post, 27 September 2002.
53. Gledhill, Power and its Disguises, p 170.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid, p 167.