Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"A key aspect of the current crisis—one which is regularly understated, if not  effaced  entirely—is the complicity of those of us residing in the global North in the collective punishment of over 81 million Iranians through and by means of one of the most comprehensive and unrelenting sanctions regimes in modern history." An interjection on the Western left's response to the recent protests in Iran

What is required is a Foucaultian investigation into the conditions of possibility for truth statements about "Islam." Instead of assuming and seeking to uncover the machanisms by which something called sexuality operates inside the category Islam, scholars must begin with the "positive mechanisms" that generate this Western will to know. Folowing Foucault, "we must investigate the conditions of their emergence and operation ... we must define the strategies of power that are immanent in this will to knowledge." The outcome of this kind of approach will reveal much about how Western scholarship on sexuality not only constitutes something it calls "Islam" but also how it constitutes "Europe," the "West," as an always already racialized normativity." The question to ask then is not what is the nature of "sexuality," its operations, repressions, manifestations, and productions in Islam, but rather in a specific

Humanitarian relief is increasingly seen as giving Western governments the appearance of ‘doing something’ in the face of a tragedy while providing an alibi to avoid making a riskier political or military commitment that could address the ‘roots of a crisis’.   The advocates of human rights-based foreign policy are in the forefront of the campaign against humanitarian approaches. Under the slogan that ‘humanitarianism should not be used as a substitute for political action’ they are in fact arguing for a rights-based humanitarianism that is entirely subordinate to policy ends. Today, instead of feeding famine victims, aid may well be cut back as the UK government has done over Sudan and Ethiopia.   Human rights advocates would seem to be happier with military intervention and the establishment of ‘safe areas’ rather than granting asylum which is seen as legitimising ‘ethnic cleansing’.   As journalist David Rieff notes: ‘humanitarian relief organizations...have become some

"The only politics that offers a way out of the dilemma of contemporary Third World sovereignty is an internationalism that recognizes that its subjects are political actors, not just suffering subjects; that the repression launched by struggling secularist regimes undermines secularism just as it invites intervention; that the beneficiaries of Western intervention are to be found in Moscow, Riyadh, Arlington, and Islamabad, not Homs and Benghazi; and that the struggles of global refugee diasporas are coextensive with the domestic political communities they were forced to leave behind." How humanitarianism became imperialism