Recognition and Global Politics: Critical encounters between state and world 9781526101037

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Recognition and the International: Meanings, Limits, Manifestations
Part 1 Meanings: Critical Interventions
Unsettling Pedagogy: Recognition, Vulnerability and the International
Ambiguity, Existence, Cosmopolitanism: Simone de Beauvoir and a Global Theory of Feminist Recognition
Recognition, Multiculturalism and the Allure of Separatism
Recognition and Accumulation
Part 2 Limits: Recognition’s Blind Spots
Lost Worlds: Evil, Genocide and the Limits of Recognition
In Recognition of the Abyssinian General
The Recognition of Nature in International Relations
Part 3 Manifestations: International Orders and Disorders
Paternalistic Care and Transformative Recognition in International Politics
Recognition in the Struggle against Global Injustice
Recognition in and of World Society
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Recognition and Global Politics

Recognition and Global Politics Critical Encounters Between State and World Edited by Patrick Hayden and Kate Schick

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Patrick Hayden and Kate Schick 2016 The right of Patrick Hayden and Kate Schick to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Contents Contributorsvii Acknowledgementsx 1

Recognition and the International: Meanings, Limits, Manifestations Patrick Hayden and Kate Schick1

Part 1  Meanings: Critical Interventions23 2

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Unsettling Pedagogy: Recognition, Vulnerability and the International Kate Schick25 Ambiguity, Existence, Cosmopolitanism: Simone de Beauvoir and a Global Theory of Feminist Recognition Monica Mookherjee45 Recognition, Multiculturalism and the Allure of Separatism Volker M. Heins69 Recognition and Accumulation Tarik Kochi85

Part 2  Limits: Recognition’s Blind Spots99 6 7 8

Lost Worlds: Evil, Genocide and the Limits of Recognition Patrick Hayden101 In Recognition of the Abyssinian General Robbie Shilliam121 The Recognition of Nature in International Relations Emilian Kavalski and Magdalena Zolkos139

Part 3  Manifestations: International Orders and Disorders157 9

Paternalistic Care and Transformative Recognition in International Politics Fiona Robinson159

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10 Recognition in the Struggle against Global Injustice Greta Fowler Snyder175 11 Recognition in and of World Society Matthew S. Weinert195 Bibliography217 Index243

Contributors Patrick Hayden is Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on the implications of the work of critical theorists and existentialists for issues in international and global politics. His books include Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts (Routledge, 2014), Political Evil in a Global Age: Hannah Arendt and International Theory (Routledge, 2009), Critical Theories of Globalization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, with Chamsy el-Ojeili), Cosmopolitan Global Politics (Ashgate, 2005) and Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought: Between Despair and Hope (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). Volker M. Heins is Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen, Germany, as well as a member of the social science faculty of the University of Bochum. He is also Faculty Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. His areas of teaching and research are moral struggles in world society, multiculturalism and human rights, the politics of collective memory, and the Frankfurt School and its aftermath. His recent publications include Beyond Friend and Foe: The Politics of Critical Theory (Brill, 2011), Der Skandal der Vielfalt. Geschichte und Konzepte des Multikulturalismus (Campus, 2013) and Humanitarianism and Challenges of Cooperation (Routledge, forthcoming; co-edited with Kai Koddenbrock and Christine Unrau). Emilian Kavalski is Associate Professor of Global Studies at the Institute for Social Justice, Australian Catholic University, and the Editor for Ashgate’s ‘Rethinking Asia and International Relations’ series. He is the author of three books, including Central Asia and the Rise of Normative Powers: Contextualizing the Security Governance of the EU, China, and India (Bloomsbury, 2012), and the editor of several volumes, most recently World Politics at the Edge of Chaos: Reflections on Complexity and Global Life (State University of New York Press, 2015). His current research explores the encounter of International Relations with life in the Anthropocene, especially the engagement with nonhuman agency; and the nascent Asian normative orders and the ways in which they confront, complement and transform established traditions, norms and institutions.

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Emilian contends that in both these areas the application of Complexity Thinking has important implications for the way global life is approached, explained and understood. Tarik Kochi is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His research focuses on questions related to conflict and security, violence, war and international law, as well as the relationship between law, political economy and capitalism more generally. He is the author of The Other’s War: Recognition and the Violence of Ethics (Routledge, 2009). Monica Mookherjee is Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy in the School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy at Keele University. Her major research interests lie in issues of multiculturalism, feminism, toleration, human rights and the politics of recognition, reparation and reconciliation. Her major contribution, Women’s Rights as Multicultural Claims: Reconfiguring Gender and Diversity in Political Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), explores the tensions between feminism and multiculturalism in contemporary political theory. Monica is also the editor of the volume Democracy, Religious Pluralism and the Liberal Dilemma of Accommodation (Springer, 2010), and the author of a number of articles for journals such as Res Publica, Journal of International Political Theory, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy and Feminist Theory. Her current projects include a monograph on a human capabilities-based approach to multiculturalism and a historical study of cosmopolitan feminist approaches to the politics of recognition. Fiona Robinson is Professor of Political Science at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, where she specializes in International Relations and Political Theory. From 1994 to 1998 she was Lecturer in the Department of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex, UK. She is the author of The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security (Temple University Press, 2011) and Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory and International Relations (Westview Press, 1999), and co-editor, with Rianne Mahon, of Feminist Ethics and Social Politics: Towards a New Global Political Economy of Care (University of British Columbia Press, 2011). In 2014, she was awarded the J. Ann Tickner Book Prize from the University of Southern California for The Ethics of Care. Kate Schick is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, and was formerly an Economic and Social Research Council

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Fellow at the University of St Andrews. Her books include Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and The Vulnerable Subject: Beyond Rationalism in International Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, with Amanda Russell Beattie). Robbie Shilliam is Reader in International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Black Pacific: Anticolonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2015) and co-editor of Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Color Line (Routledge, 2014). Greta Fowler Snyder is Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research spans the fields of social movement and normative theory and she is interested in the topics of identity, inequality and culture. She has published in The Journal of Politics, Polity and Souls, has work forthcoming in Du Bois Review and is currently completing a book manuscript which highlights the significance of contemporary black identity politics in the USA for recognition theory. Matthew S. Weinert is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science & International Relations at the University of Delaware. He works in English School theory and normative international political theory. More specifically, his research focuses on the development of architectures of (global) governance that emerge at the intersection of state interests and human wellbeing. He is the author, most recently, of Making Human: World Order and the Global Governance of Human Dignity (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and is currently working on issues related to the protection of the cultural heritage of humankind. Magdalena Zolkos is Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Social Justice, at the Australian Catholic University. She is a political theorist working in the area of memory politics, collective trauma, affect theory and feminism. She is the author of Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing (Continuum, 2010) and the editor of On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe (Lexington Press, 2011). She is currently working on a book project on the restitutive sentiment in the politics of memory and historical redress.

Acknowledgements The origins of this book are rooted in a research workshop convened at the University of St Andrews in April 2014. Thanks are due to the University of St Andrews for helping to fund and provide a hospitable venue for the workshop, which allowed us to assemble an international team of scholars for a series of productive and animated discussions about the need for greater theoretical engagement with the notion of recognition in international, world and global politics. We would like to extend our gratitude to the contributors to this volume, whose enthusiastic participation and creative ideas on the range of approaches, interventions and insights about recognition and the international stand at the heart of this volume and render it an important contribution to the still nascent debate on this conjuncture and its implications. We would also like to thank the reviewers for providing valuable feedback on our book proposal. Moreover, we are grateful to Caroline Wintersgill and the editorial team at Bloomsbury for facilitating a smooth and timely transition from manuscript to book publication. Lastly, on a more personal note, our deep appreciation extends to our families; without their ongoing love and support this book would not have been possible.

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Recognition and the International: Meanings, Limits, Manifestations Patrick Hayden and Kate Schick

Over the past two decades, critical debates and insights within philosophy, sociology and political theory have focused on the concept of recognition. From interpersonal relationships of self and other, to multiculturalism, identity politics, new social movements, economic inequality, human development and diverse modalities of power, theories of the ethics and politics of recognition have challenged mainstream liberal and communitarian accounts of political co-existence, oppression and the ‘normative grammar’ of social conflicts (see Thompson 2006). However, while the literature on recognition has had a significant impact within social and political theory delimited to the ‘selfcontained’ space of the territorially bounded state, it has been comparatively neglected in international political theory. Only recently has recognition begun to move from being a marginal concern for theorists of international politics to a more prevalent current of thought. Matters of international or global redistributive justice have been the primary focal point of this mounting interest in questions of human recognition. While this growing attention is to be welcomed, we believe that too much of this conversation thus far has been limited, incomplete or inadequate in failing to open up to a host of other issues cutting across the intersection of recognition and the international. With that in mind, the contributions in this volume consider how post-Hegelian recognition theory can enrich our understanding of international, global or world politics over and above matters of global redistribution – while nevertheless acknowledging the importance of problems of economic justice in today’s globalized world. Our research explores new dimensions of the recognition–international nexus that move the conversation into original, critical analyses of rights, humanity, power and emancipation. We explore why and how bringing the political theory of

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recognition into dialogue with international political theory provides valuable insights into more than distributive justice, and push the debates into areas rooted in larger empirical and normative phenomena: from genocide to revolutionary trauma, from gender injustice to practices of care, from cosmopolitanism to the non-human environment. Specifically, the book uses entrenched, emerging and evolving issues of international politics to probe the range and limitations of the concept of recognition, and to place the concept in interrelated contexts from the local to the global that may often include deficient, misguided or denied recognition. Even though the question of recognition is a relative newcomer to the scene of international political theory, it is a question that does not come out of nowhere. It has a particular place in the history of philosophy, as well as in modern social and political theory that attends to the ethical and political meaning of an intersubjective, shared yet conflictual world. In this chapter, we concentrate, first, on sketching the tradition of Hegelian recognition inaugurated in the early nineteenth century and, second, on some of the main extensions and transformations of this tradition throughout the late twentieth century and the outset of the twentyfirst. In tracing key theoretical growths from the roots of Hegel’s thought, the first section is organized around specific contemporary conversations about not only the precise sense of the term ‘recognition’, but also why it matters so much to persons, groups and nations embroiled in debates about democracy, culture, equality, justice, resistance and responsibility. In charting recognition theory in this way, we sketch the theoretical contours within which successive chapters are situated. The subsequent section then presents the three core themes explored in this volume, and provides an overview of the essays that follow.

Charting recognition What does ‘recognition’ mean? What critical approaches can we use to explore it? Recognition theory comes in numerous yet related forms – existential, Marxist, critical theoretical, feminist, poststructural, postcolonial, agonistic and psychoanalytic, to name a few – containing threads of the personal, cultural, social and political. While it is important to appreciate the multiple forms that recognition theory takes, and the connections between them, it is equally essential to clearly see its roots. The problem of recognition is a long-standing concern in moral and political philosophy, centring on questions about the relationship of the self to itself and to the other. Intellectually, Georg Wilhelm

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Friedrich Hegel plays a pioneering role in establishing the fundamental terms of the theme of recognition by calling attention to the nature of self-consciousness. His great innovation is to show that consciousness is always consciousness of something other than itself – both inanimate objects and animate others. Hegel’s phenomenology of consciousness was popularized when it deeply informed the thinking of leading French scholars such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice MerleauPonty, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as anti-colonial writers such as Frantz Fanon, by way of the leftist interpretation of Hegel popularized in the seminars of Alexandre Kojève from the 1930s through the postwar period.1 For Kojève (1969), in addition to whatever basic needs define the animal structure of human being, there exists a properly human longing for recognition that finds its satisfaction only in the mutuality of reciprocated desire – driving a dialectical process whose future completion will signal the end of history. More recently, the debate around recognition gained new life due largely to the work of philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, who reintroduced consideration of recognition dynamics into discussions of multiculturalism, religious conflict, social justice and the politics of identity. Although not the first figure to introduce the theme of recognition into modern philosophy – aspects of the concept of recognition can be found in Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant – Hegel undoubtedly presents the most systematic and famous account of its social and political ubiquity. Borrowing from the philosophy of Fichte, and rejecting the Hobbesian solution to social order, Hegel makes both empirical and normative qualities central to his formulation of recognition: the process of mutual recognition explains the intersubjective constitution of people’s identity, while it also grounds an affirmative principle of equality in a just social and political order. For Hegel, recognition mediates between the particular (private individuals) and the universal (social ethics), thereby articulating the reflexivity of self to other within successive and increasingly complex forms of socialization from the family to the state. In making this argument, Hegel claims that human self-consciousness will not properly develop in the absence of recognition by others (see Williams 1992); we are radically dependent on others for the development of our selves. Such recognition ideally manifests itself within three central spheres of ethical existence: in the family, in civil society and in the state. In the family, members initially experience an undivided feeling of love which gradually becomes differentiated as self-consciousness matures into full personality. In the sphere of civil society, consciousness manifests itself in the contractual relations and

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coordinated interdependence associated with private law, property and labour. In the state, consciousness develops further differentiation in its movement from its own independence towards mediation by public institutions, and in so doing also attains consciousness of universality through membership in the totality of the political order (Hegel 1967). Yet the process of recognition is also fraught with contradictions and failure and, for that reason, takes the form of a struggle waged by the subject through the stages of establishing interpersonal relationships, forming collective ethical horizons and advancing society’s moral progress. This struggle is famously depicted in Hegel’s account of the master–slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The surprising consequence of the subject’s desire for confirmation of its independence and self-certainty is that other subjects it encounters will resist extending recognition, because they too wish to claim their own independence. Self and other initially encounter each other as adversaries. This mutual resistance first precipitates a ‘life-and-death’ confrontation by which each selfconsciousness seeks the destruction of the other, followed by a struggle for dominance and subordination as self-consciousness realizes that destruction of the other would deprive it of the source of affirmation and thus of satisfaction (Hegel 1977: 114–15). It should already be clear that the asymmetrical master– slave relationship also proves to be unsatisfying, in that the slave’s submissive act of recognition cannot be of sufficient worth to the master, and the master’s own freedom and self-certainty is surrendered by having to negate the freedom of the slave (Hegel 1977: 116–17). If only full recognition provides the sufficient condition of the possibility of self-consciousness’s proper formation, then each subject must renounce the claim to absolute independence and domination of the other, concede that the freedom of both self and other arises through mutual dependence and accept equivalent claims to reciprocal recognition and respect. Only then can we say that the identity and agency of the subject is truly fulfilled out of the context of intersubjective relations with others.

Habermas and Taylor: Recognition, emancipation and multiculturalism Jürgen Habermas’s explicit engagement with Hegelian recognition began in the late 1960s. In Theory and Practice, Habermas argues that two conceptions of ‘spirit’ are present yet in tension in Hegel’s work. The first is found in his theory of self-consciousness, while the second appears in his account of the relationship between language, work and interaction. The merit of Hegel’s phenomenology

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of the struggle for recognition, notes Habermas (1973: 146), is his insight that ethical relationships may be formed on the basis of a reciprocity that reconciles the universal and the particular in a ‘moral totality’ of complementarily distinct entities. Yet this insight proves to be not entirely consistent with the fact that the formation of self-consciousness also takes place in the heterogeneous realms of language, or symbolic representation and communication, and of labour. On the one hand, the reconciliation that lies at the end of the struggle for recognition presupposes communicative interaction, which itself ‘is accomplished by virtue of the spoken word being accorded normative force’ (Habermas 1973: 160). Hence the dialectical mediation of self and other is actually possible because of the medium of symbols, which itself is already intersubjectively constituted. On the other hand, ethical reconciliation also presupposes the mutual satisfaction of material needs and desires, externalized both in an antagonistic nature that must be collectively subdued and in objects that are collaboratively produced through social labour. Consequently instrumental cooperation proves to be bound up in the same movement as intersubjective domination and subordination, ultimately institutionalized in legally and economically regulated interactions. While Hegel’s interpretation of the interrelationships between these realms evolved as his writing matured, for Habermas (1984) the indispensable point to take from this for a critical social theory is that the mutual demand for ‘reaching understanding’ communicatively, and thus for the affirmation of self and other as equal participants in the discursive process of reciprocal criticism and justification, is part of the process of human emancipation itself. Habermas’s intervention into recognition theory deepened with the arrival of the multiculturalism debates in the 1980s and 1990s. The work of Charles Taylor also figures prominently in these debates, most notably his 1994 essay ‘The Politics of Recognition’. The background to Taylor’s argument is the perception that just as the recognition framework can be applied to interpersonal and social relations, so too can it be extended to intercultural relations. Thus Taylor brings Hegelian self-consciousness to the point that it is compelled to confront cultural difference as an asset for authentic self-realization. Recognition and multiculturalism are connected, Taylor claims, by way of liberalism’s fundamental idea that every human person possesses a dignity independent of their natural abilities or social position, by virtue of which they should be respected by others as equal. In terms of public policy, this liberal principle has developed in two directions: first, through formal recognition of the equal rights of all citizens on the basis of ethical neutrality and, second, through equal recognition of the uniqueness of each individual and his or her distinctive identity. While

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the first model is ‘unable to give due acknowledgment to distinctness’ and therefore is intrinsically ‘homogenizing’ (Taylor 1994: 52),2 the second model allows for the distribution of equal rights across different cultural contexts. A liberal society attuned to the politics of difference would, says Taylor, adopt a substantive commitment to respect and promote the survival of diverse cultural identities, which will also have the effect of preventing any single communitybased identity from becoming hegemonic and potentially discriminatory. Taylor (1994: 32) emphasizes that human identity and agency are fundamentally dialogical in character, meaning that we ‘become full human agents . . . through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression’, which we learn ‘through exchanges with others’. Because mutual understanding is predicated on intersubjective dialogue, lack of recognition or misrecognition of distinct cultural identities, and concomitantly of the self ’s dialogical relations with others through which cultural self-understanding is generated, ‘can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being’ (Taylor 1994: 25). The ‘vital human need’ for recognition thus extends to acknowledging the presumed equal worth of different cultures and taking their perspectives into account ethically, legally and politically (Taylor 1994: 26, 73). Habermas’s response to Taylor contends, however, that the latter’s argument ultimately resorts to an untenable dualism between private and public autonomy. In essence, Taylor’s attempt to ‘correct’ liberal proceduralism by mapping collective rights intended to protect the substantial values of cultural groups onto the formal rights of individual citizens implies the splitting of autonomy into two separate yet somehow internally linked spheres. In the end, Habermas argues, the double-edged aspect of cultural identity within the liberal constitutional state – which defines individuals concurrently as citizens at large and as members of distinct cultural groups – will pose conflicts or dilemmas, typically associated with exclusion from the public sphere, to which Taylor’s position cannot adequately respond. Somewhat paradoxically, this may then render it difficult, if not impossible, for some people or groups to engage in the emancipatory struggles for recognition valued by Taylor. On Habermas’s own account (1994: 112–13), private and public autonomy are co-original, and recognition is a form of social practice that requires autonomy as a mode of communicative and deliberative participation. Rather than regarding rights as inhering either individually or collectively, then, Habermas suggests that both types of rights arise together in the relationships among people generated through practices of mutual recognition. In engaging in such practices, those affected by domination or marginalization – and here Habermas refers to

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feminism, multiculturalism and anti-colonialism – simultaneously assert their public autonomy and, through articulating the relevant aspects of their own particular experience, also secure their private autonomy (Habermas 1994: 116). In contrast to Taylor’s focus on the legislative and administrative recognition of the equal worth of different cultures, Habermas (1994: 126–9) advocates placing ongoing debates about what is and is not valuable, what is and is not deserving of equal recognition, within public discussions of an inclusive political process.3 The central difficulty here, of course, is that Habermas’s position presumes precisely what may be missing, namely, a degree of recognition sufficient to allow persons or groups to be seen as rightly having access (or ‘belonging’) to the public sphere. This leaves aside, then, the difficult problem posed by cases of radical non-recognition.

Honneth and Fraser: Recognition, redistribution and reframing Axel Honneth also borrows from Hegel the concept of a process whereby individuals fully develop a sense of self and self-worth only by recognizing and being recognized by others. But where Taylor takes recognition to its limit in cultural authenticity, Honneth identifies the development and maintenance of self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem as the most important factor that influences each individual’s capacity to engage in reciprocal recognition with others. In his view, the development of our faith and trust in others in turn shapes our sense of agency and responsibility, which itself then impacts on our sense of worth and distinctiveness. Ideally, each of these capacities is formed and sustained through corresponding types of intersubjective relations: from familial relations of love and friendship, to civic relations of equality and legal rights, to solidaristic relations of shared values and projects. The crux of Honneth’s account of the intersubjective conditions for identity formation is to show that the ‘struggle for recognition’ carries within it an implicit normative ideal. Unlike in Hobbes’s depiction of an egocentric war of all against all, the reworked Hegelian conception of social experience realizes that subjects engaged in a conflictual struggle must have ‘already positively taken the other into account’ as a ‘partner to interaction’ before the struggle could even ensue (Honneth 1995: 45). Our intersubjective relationships are conflictual precisely because human interaction is structured around a ‘normative expectation that one will meet with the recognition of others’. When that expectation is not met, we then act so as ‘to make the others take notice’ of us (Honneth 1995: 44). Since each of us acts to fulfil this expectation vis-à-vis others, a constitutive link binds

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us together as we seek to gain recognition of our not-yet-recognized needs, identities and expectations (Honneth 1995: 48). Honneth’s theory is normatively salient because it provides a basis for understanding the motivations behind the demand for recognition and thus for illuminating the ‘moral grammar’ of social conflicts. If mutual recognition is the condition that permits becoming fully human, then there is a shared human interest in attempting to create and re-create sociopolitical institutions that extend recognition to all. The struggle for recognition is, in short, a struggle for justice, for due recognition of all as equal and distinctive persons. This necessarily entails critique of those prevailing conditions that foster asymmetric relations of misrecognition, and of social, economic and political inequalities that violate self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem (Honneth 1995: 131ff). Honneth (2007) singles out violation of the body, denial of rights and denigration of ways of life as the most pernicious forms of disrespect. The experience of profound disrespect or humiliation can then give rise to resistance and organized social movements demanding the expansion of conditions of mutual recognition, as well as the political establishment of progressive institutions that advance the ability of the subordinated and excluded to become fully human. The interplay between forms of misrecognition predicated on racial, national, sexual and gender status orders, and forms of exclusion through socio-economic inequalities, is what Nancy Fraser believes prepares the ground for struggles for social justice. However, where Honneth maintains a monistic theory according to which all matters of justice can be located under the ‘fundamental, overarching moral category’ of recognition, Fraser pursues a dualistic theory which holds that the two categories of recognition and redistribution ‘are co-fundamental and mutually irreducible dimensions of justice’ (Fraser and Honneth 2003: 2–3). Traditional claims for socio-economic redistribution ignored or rejected issues of recognition, such as in ‘difference-blind’ welfare policies, while claims for cultural recognition culminating in contemporary multiculturalism valorized diversity to an extent that obscured matters of economic exploitation and inequality. Fraser argues therefore that an adequate theory of social justice must be ‘two-dimensional’ in understanding how injustices are rooted in the intertwined social spaces of economy and culture. While not necessarily occurring ‘in equal proportions’, given that ‘in all societies economic ordering and cultural ordering are mutually imbricated’, Fraser (2003: 63, 51) argues for attention to the ways that problems of maldistribution and misrecognition are related in situationally specific contexts. For this reason, she suggests that recognition theory ought to concentrate less on identity and more on status

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(Fraser 2003: 29). This shift to status recognition, she believes, helps move the focus from social psychological self-realization to institutional patterns that impose unjustified status inequalities on certain individuals and groups (Fraser 2008a: 59). Modifying the recognition approach in this way introduces what is, for Fraser (2008b: 17), the third dimension of justice, namely, the political. Fraser defines the political as acts and processes of framing or representation. This is essentially a concern with the question of ‘who’ as an expression of status: who counts as a subject of justice, who determines the procedures for admitting and adjudicating justice claims, and who is included in or excluded from a given political community (Fraser 2008b: 17–18). Frame-setting designates the process (the ‘how’) of constituting and reconstituting the ‘who’ of justice, insofar as the question of the ‘who’ presupposes the setting of boundaries and decision-rules. One cannot become a subject of justice without being recognized, that is, seen and heard as an equal member of the political community. Misframing, or the injustice of wrongly excluding some individuals or groups from participating in posing and contesting justice claims, can thus be grasped as the imposition of unjustified status inequalities (Fraser 2008b: 19–20, 144). Misframing falls foul of what Fraser refers to as the ‘principle of participatory parity’. Parity, for Fraser (2003: 101 n.39), ‘means the condition of being a peer, of being on a par with others, of standing on an equal footing’. Participatory parity gives democratic traction to the notion of equal status, promoting sociopolitical arrangements that ‘permit all to participate as peers in democratic discussion and decision-making’ and ensure ‘adequate representation and equal voice for those who claim standing vis-à-vis a given issue’ (Fraser 2008b: 44–5). The aim of political struggles for justice, therefore, should be to create the frameworks for participatory parity, contesting unwarranted arrangements that systematically misrecognize some categories of people, misframe political space and maldistribute wealth and collective goods. Seen in this light, many accounts of the struggle for justice overlook how inequalities are partly rooted in dynamics of misrecognition and misframing, displacing the task of resolving such inequalities almost entirely onto redistributive claims. In this way, Fraser contends, the redistributive dimension of social justice becomes overburdened with expectations that lack the capacity to diagnose and challenge the multifaceted nature of subordination and exclusion.

Butler and Ricoeur: Recognition, dislocation and mutuality Fraser also makes an important distinction between what she calls ‘affirmative’ and ‘transformative’ politics of recognition. Affirmative political strategies

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‘redress disrespect by revaluing unjustly devalued group identities’, that is, by extending official recognition and institutionalized rights to ‘existing group identities and differentiations’ (Fraser 2008a: 67 n.6). This approach has a tendency to prioritize the official ‘legitimating recognition’ (Butler 1999: xix) of state institutions such as the judiciary, which adjudicates rights claims in terms that are contingent upon the claimants’ accepted recognition within a specific political order and framework of rights. In comparison, transformative strategies correlate less with notions of stable, fixed and ‘official’ identities and more with relations of identity and status that remain outside the grid of authoritative acknowledgement (whether by choice, exclusion or some combination of the two). Whatever benefits may accrue from affirmative politics, it is nonetheless the case that the promise of official recognition of equal status does not necessarily translate into socially efficacious recognition of the most marginalized individuals and groups or into accurate representation of their specific experiences of injustice. Therefore, transformative strategies aim to connect the universality implicit in official recognition of equal rights with the plurality of needs, experiences and identities given voice by those who suffer from misrecognition, misrepresentation and silencing (Fraser 2008b: 23–4). In this sense, a transformative politics of recognition resonates with other recent theories of recognition that aim to ‘destabilize’ the assumption that subject-formation culminates in a transparent symmetry between the stable identities of self and other, as well as theories that seek to ‘decentre’ any conception of recognition which risks slipping into an economistic and utilitarian model of exchange. Judith Butler provides a prominent example of a ‘destabilizing’ intervention into the recognition debates. Emerging from the poststructuralist and deconstructive traditions, Butler’s work attempts to expose how sexual difference is produced by a heteronormative discourse grounded on a series of hierarchical and naturalizing conceptual distinctions between men and women. She argues that referring to a self-explanatory female gender identity is misleading, since women of different ethnicities, classes and religions rarely have the same or invariant interests and concerns. Influenced by the thought of Nietzsche and Foucault, Butler contends that there is no subject or ‘self ’ prior to discourse or narrative. Subjects are constituted as such through language governed by prevailing social norms. One implication of this argument is that it is impossible to escape gender perspectives in order to resist discrimination and exclusion because the self cannot be articulated, and cannot articulate itself, outside of language and its deeply gendered symbolic order and conceptual foundations.

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What is possible, however, is to dislocate, destabilize and subvert established hierarchies and normalized gender relations through deconstructive linguistic resources such as irony and parody (Butler 1999). However, by suggesting there is no innate self that is possessed in advance of its discursive formation, Butler appears to foreclose the possibility of an autonomous and responsible agent, capable of effectively opposing discriminatory misrecognition and oppressive institutional patterns. To counter the claim that deconstructing subject identity is tantamount to pulling the rug out from under coherent ethical-political agency, Butler (2005: 20) proposes a ‘post-Hegelian account of recognition that seeks to establish the social basis for giving an account of oneself ’ grounded on the ‘opacity’ rather than transparency of the subject. Butler proceeds by inverting Hegel’s account that begins from the self–other dyadic relationship and progresses to the broader social dimension of recognition infused by issues of power; self and other instead come into being as conditioned and mediated by social-historical language, conventions, criteria and norms that exceed the dyadic exchange of those involved in reciprocal recognition. Butler’s (2005: 30) interpretation of recognition accordingly emphasizes the impersonal, non-subjective operation of linguistic norms that constitute the intelligibility of the recognizable subject. On this interpretation, intersubjective relationships function as critical reflexive engagements with the intermediary of language, which continually challenge us to give accounts of who we are and put into question the givenness of how we relate to and treat others. This means that the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ are, in a sense, ‘dispossessed’ by the discursive practices deployed to confer and receive recognition, and the scene of recognition cannot be said to ‘belong’ wholly to self and other (Butler 2005: 24–6). Moreover, because any narrative account that makes recognizable and understandable who one is must resort to discursive elements that are not exclusively one’s own, the identity of the self is something singularly irreplaceable and, at the same time, commonly substitutable. This is reflected in the fact that one can never tell the whole story of one’s own life but must instead leave it in the hands of others, thereby imbuing self-formation with an unavoidable incompleteness and opacity; the self is given and taken away in the course of its narrative being addressed to others (Butler 2005: 38). For Butler, the complex recognition that dislocates the self thereby proves to be indispensable ethically and politically inasmuch as it can foster dispositions towards greater humility, generosity, responsibility and forgiveness, ‘precisely when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human’ (2005: 136). Such recognition, then, demands of us a willingness to be

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vulnerable, a willingness to relinquish the inhuman pursuit of self-preservation (Butler 2005: 103). Similar to Butler, but informed by phenomenological-hermeneutics rather than deconstruction, Paul Ricoeur also seeks to challenge the conception of recognition as a kind of property possessed by the subject subordinated to modern capitalism’s master idiom of ownership. Indeed, Ricoeur (1992) claims that we must distinguish not only between self and other, but between the different kinds of selves – subject, cogito, ego, me, I, ipse, idem – that are always something other, and the different kinds of others that are always all and none of these selves. In one of his last books published before his death in 2005, Ricoeur traces the polysemic character of the concept of recognition through three principal meanings. Recognition means, first, to identify an object, place or person that appears to perception through what Kant referred to as the threefold synthesis of representation. As an inner sense, the ‘circle of representation’ entails the imaginative process of combining the manifold of sense data and intuitions into the phenomenal experience of a single consciousness, which culminates in the ability to apply concepts to objects and thereby to identify, recognize and distinguish between them. This process unifies sensibility, understanding and judgement in relation to the spatiotemporal condition of consciousness (Ricoeur 2005: 36–58). Yet as Ricoeur (2005: 36) points out, Kant’s insistence on the subject’s transcendental unity and mastery over spatiotemporal perception neglects the significance of change and consequently the possibility of misrecognition – a possibility that gives recognition its ‘dramatic character’ and ‘existential, worldly form’. The second primary meaning of recognition concerns the ability of the human being to achieve self-recognition, that is, recognition of oneself as an agent capable of devising, pursuing and accomplishing activities that make things happen in the world. But far from being an act of purely autonomous free will, self-recognition, the sense of ‘I can’, exposes our reliance or dependence upon others. This is because self-recognition requires memory, the act by which we apprehend or recognize the past in the present. If the past were constantly forgotten, then no sense of self as agent could persist (Ricoeur 2005: 109–26). This reveals that the self which accomplishes, which achieves something, is also the self which promises. A promise is an illocutionary projection of the self from the present into the future, an assurance that one will do what one says (Ricoeur 2005: 127–34). It serves as a commitment to remember and maintain the self vis-à-vis others despite changing circumstances and the vicissitudes of life (Ricoeur 2005: 103). In this way, the retrospective and prospective dimensions of self-recognition necessarily encompass the

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recognition that one is also accountable, inescapably responsible to others for what one promises and does (or fails to do). At issue in this second meaning of recognition, then, is the possibility of failure – of not fulfilling a promise, of letting others down, of bearing the burdens of blame and punishment – which may both enrich and compromise the paradigmatic ‘desire to live one’s life freely’ (Ricoeur 2005: 69, 149). The question of how to conceptualize the forms of reciprocity that arise from surmounting asymmetries between individuals and groups bears on the third principal meaning of recognition. According to Ricoeur, it is difficult to sustain the Hobbesian belief that political order can be founded on a selfinterested contractual obligation that arises from fear, suspicion, rivalry and mistrust. Hegel’s theory of the desire for recognition, in contrast, sheds light on the presence of a human predisposition to sociability and hence on a moral motivation to leave the state of nature. Extending this line of thought, Ricoeur questions the prominence that Honneth places on struggle as essential to the idea of recognition. If one continues to take confrontation as the defining characteristic of recognition, then surely it would make little sense to claim that the struggle for recognition must be understood as the moral grammar of all interpersonal and social relationships. Even if we take conflictual interactions to be only one of the defining moments of recognition, this raises the prospect of failing to account not only for how the logic of conflict may license an interminable play of forces conducive to normalizing political violence, but also for genuinely peaceful experiences of recognition (Ricoeur 2005: 218–19). Far from insisting that the roots of recognition are conflict, and that mutual recognition is the exchange of comparable and calculable commodities in a competitive marketplace (which can give rise to new conflicts), Ricoeur suggests an alternative model based on such kinds of love as philia, eros and agape. Agape does not appeal to comparison, calculation and the equivalence demanded by a ‘fair trade’, but instead embraces the incommensurability of human beings and the practice of giving without expecting anything in return. The experience of states of peace, Ricoeur proposes, discloses a form of recognition as gift-giving that shifts away from reciprocity and towards mutuality.4 Where reciprocity implies that equality is tied to the expectation of an equivalent exchange, mutuality is the expression of a double generosity: that of the initial giver, who ‘neither requires nor expects a gift in return’, and that of the initial recipient, who nonetheless returns the gesture voluntarily yet also, paradoxically, obligatorily (Ricoeur 2005: 220–43). Yet the source of this obligation is a sense of gratitude rather than entitlement. Here recognition becomes less an acknowledgement

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of each subject’s identity and more an affirmation of the practice of gift-giving itself that lies between self and other – and thus of that unstinting generosity, though inexact and always unexpected, which is truly mutual or shared together. Consequently, Ricoeur’s argument raises two crucial points about recognition, whether interpersonal or international. First, it suggests that non-recognition, the refusal to give as well as to receive, exacts a terrible cost on those to whom recognition is denied. Second, it exhorts us to entertain the notion that proper recognition, even though it comes without a price, must be freely given in return.

Recognition’s new international direction The body of theory we have just reviewed offers rich perspectives and inflections on the experience and political significance of recognition. While the theories presented by Taylor, Habermas, Honneth, Fraser, Butler and Ricoeur open up new ways of engaging politics as conventionally circumscribed within territorial nation-states, we suggest that they require further supplementation by diverse accounts informed by international, global or world politics. Yet the vitality of the recognition debates has yet to translate fully into the international domain. This may come as something of a surprise since, as Jürgen Haacke (2005) stresses, the ethics and politics of recognition is highly pertinent for normative theorizing about international politics. Nevertheless, as noted at the outset of this chapter, the recent arrival of studies at the intersection of recognition and the international speaks both to the increasing appeal of the concept of recognition for international political theorists and to the expanding range of international and global issues regarded as amenable to discussion through the lens of recognition. Some of these studies remain statist in orientation, using the notions of the desire and struggle for recognition to unpack the causes and methods by which states confer legal personality on other states in terms of international law, treaties and diplomacy (see Lindemann and Ringmar 2011). Other scholars have begun to investigate the various ways that the recognition literature can be a departure point for larger conversations about globalization and redistribution beyond the state (see Burns and Thompson 2013; O’Neill and Smith 2012), while still others have limited their analyses to the case of human rights (Hayden 2012). This relatively small subset of what undoubtedly can be an enormous spectrum of international theoretical issues and empirical cases to be explored in connection with recognition makes clear, therefore, that there are a number of issues that remain unexplored or unsettled.

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In devoting attention to further understandings of the possibilities and limitations of the recognition–international nexus, the volume focuses on three related themes which correspond to the structuring of the book. Part One interrogates contemporary recognition theory as it appears both in social and political theory and in International Relations (IR) literature. Bringing a self-consciously global lens to bear upon dominant conceptions of recognition, these approaches rework recognition in imaginative new dimensions, in part through a creative retrieval of recognition theory’s Hegelian roots. Part Two attends to the blind spots of recognition frameworks, asking what happens when non-recognition prevails. By probing the limits of recognition, where personhood is denied, shared worlds obliterated and nature discounted, these chapters continue the project of challenging and redefining recognition theory. Part Three explores the myriad sociopolitical manifestations of recognition frameworks, tracing its operation in contexts of contemporary humanitarianism, global social movements and world society.

Meanings: Critical interventions The first four chapters of this volume challenge and extend dominant readings of recognition in political and international theory. They argue that contemporary recognition theory has lost the dynamism and radical dependency that characterized earlier readings of Hegelian recognition. Re-thinking recognition theory in the context of the international and the global, the chapters highlight limitations of dominant frameworks and encourage an innovative reworking of conceptions and discourses of recognition. Dominant recognition frameworks too often privilege individualistic and teleological accounts of recognition that focus on rights, identity and the formal institutionalization of recognition. The contributions in this section disturb these accounts by pointing to the gap between formal recognition and lived experience and insisting on a return to the radical relationality at the centre of Hegel’s account of recognition. They advocate a more complex account of subjectivities, whereby recognition is an ongoing, dynamic process that operates at multiple levels (individual, group, societal) and challenges perceptions of the self as well as relations with others. This more holistic and relational conception of recognition reflects on its location in broader social and economic relations and promotes reconfigurations of self and societal structures in response. Kate Schick interrogates the concept of recognition through a critique of liberal cosmopolitan attempts to promote recognition as global citizenship. She argues that cosmopolitan education cultivates recognition through the positive

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production of global citizens who subject their own beliefs to scrutiny, expand their knowledge of others’ lives and are imaginatively alive to the sufferings of others. However, although this approach promotes a kind of recognition based on an appreciation of our common humanity and vulnerability, the recognition it promotes is an impoverished conception that promotes more and better knowledge of others wielded to superficially solve problems of misrecognition and injustice. Schick advocates instead an approach to pedagogy and the international underpinned by an agonistic understanding of recognition. Rather than prescribing ‘more recognition’ or ‘more respect’ (which focuses in large part on what we can do for others), this approach advocates a ‘turn towards the subject’ that interrogates our own adoption of norms that marginalize and structures that oppress. This unsettling pedagogy focuses our attention on the desires that foster misrecognition, asking why we fail to accord others recognition and what this does to others and to ourselves. Agonistic recognition conceives of recognition as a difficult, risky venture that works towards comprehension of our selves, our relations with others and our location in social, economic and social structures. This understanding of recognition cannot co-exist with societal desires for certainty, self-preservation and invulnerability; it challenges the deeply rooted ignorance and indifference that spring from a fear of recognition and promotes instead a counter-cultural embrace of ambiguity, vulnerability and love. Monica Mookherjee, in turn, critically assesses the ability of Nancy Fraser’s status model of recognition to foster an international, or ‘cosmopolitan’, feminist theory of recognition. Fraser’s tripartite account of recognition, redistribution and political representation supports women’s empowerment as cosmopolitan agents of their own needs, rights and choices worldwide. However, Fraser’s objectivist understanding of misrecognition as status subordination fails to acknowledge the importance of lived experience of social suffering and injustice. Her robust anti-psychologism mutes the hidden and inarticulate dimension of misrecognition that persists despite formal institutional recognition. Mookherjee therefore turns to Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘ethic of ambiguity’ to counter Fraser’s overly objectivist account of misrecognition and to reformulate our understanding of recognition. This approach emphasizes the tension between the human freedom to choose and the body, materiality and circumstances that perpetually constrain this freedom. Arguing that Beauvoir’s account of lived, embodied social suffering comprises two distinct ‘moments’ of gender misrecognition, namely the ‘suppressed potentiality’ and ‘resistance within commonality’ moments, the chapter contends that her philosophy sheds more light than is commonly thought on the way in which diverse women

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experience globalization today. The central idea is that understanding Beauvoir’s two moments of gender misrecognition as an interactive dialectic between equality as sameness and as diversity suggests a commitment to an unstable and unfinished world community, and a cosmopolitan account of care across national borders which transcends, without rejecting, more standard measures of universal rights or economic reform. Mookherjee argues that Beauvoir’s emphasis on ambiguity points to cosmopolitan hope that consciousness of our essential ambiguity as human beings will form the basis for solidarity with those who exist beyond rights or recognition. Volker Heins then challenges the overly individualist and teleological conceptions of recognition promulgated by Axel Honneth and Jürgen Habermas, returning to the seminal writings of Charles Taylor to develop a more agonistic reading of recognition. He argues that Taylor’s revival of nineteenth-century conceptions of recognition was closely linked with the birth of multiculturalism as a practice and set of ideas. This connection has been dissolved by continental political philosophers such as Habermas and Honneth who reject all group-based understandings of recognition that cannot be reduced to aspirations for individual freedom. Habermas places immense confidence in the benign forces of modernization, maintaining that the dice of history are biased against all ‘stationary’ and ‘rigid forms of life’ and, as a result, his conception of recognition leaves little room for difference. Honneth also rids recognition theory of its multiculturalist implications, conceptualizing struggles of recognition as struggles for inclusion, not as more radical struggles about the kind of community into which people want to be included. Heins returns to Taylor to offer a more agonistic conception of recognition that highlights the possibility of thinking about society in radically relational terms. He notes that multiculturalism was conceived as a halfway house between assimilation and separatism and that Taylor’s explicit goal in elaborating multicultural recognition was to prevent the impending breakup of a diverse country like Canada. Heins explores the question of whether this idea can be elaborated with respect to the world community of states and societies. He argues that whereas thinkers like Habermas think of national and ethno-cultural identifications as something to be overcome in a linear process of abstraction and purification, it might be more appropriate to see them as possible counterweights against the powers of the central state and unaccountable international officials. Similarly, Tarik Kochi analyses dominant liberal readings of recognition, saying that contemporary recognition theory operates primarily as a functional mechanism to better organize liberal societies by focusing narrowly on liberal

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rights, questions of identity and private property relations. In this chapter, Kochi reclaims the dynamism and radicalism of Hegelian recognition theory and highlights the importance of thinking about recognition in terms of political economy and economic justice. He develops an understanding of recognition as a ‘hinge concept’ that links economic relations, the juridical form and political struggle. Kochi does this by revisiting Hegel’s account of the master-slave or lord-bondsman in The Phenomenology of Spirit. He shows how Hegel’s account makes clear the interdependent relationship between politics and economic production, where citizenship and freedom depend on slavery and unfreedom. He also revisits Hegel’s account of recognition as an emergent form of capitalist economic and social relations in Philosophy of Right, where recognition is the relationship of alienated individuals acknowledging and affirming the aspects of their alienated selves. Like Mookherjee, Kochi highlights the gap between formal recognition (individuals as ‘free’ individuals within a market society) and lived experience (actual conditions of material inequality). He argues that recognition of this gap can operate as a mode of self-reflection whereby conditions of impoverishment foster questioning and anger as the poor reflect upon and challenge the causes of their inequality. Thus, by focusing on its antagonistic basis, as struggle, a concept of recognition gives us a useful way of thinking about both historical and contemporary modes of global capitalist accumulation.

Limits: Recognition’s blind spots The first four chapters, then, reconfigure recognition theory in imaginative new directions. They argue that dominant conceptions of contemporary recognition theory fail to take seriously enough the radical potential of the concept of recognition and encourage a more dynamic interpretation that unsettles liberal givens. The next three chapters extend this interrogation of recognition theory by focusing on the limits of recognition. They ask what contemporary recognition theory ignores, dismisses and proscribes, acknowledging its cultural, historical and social origins and manifestations and the ways these constrain its emancipatory potential. By exploring the blind spots and failures of frameworks of recognition, these chapters productively and creatively extend and rework recognition theory: it is, after all, often on the margins provided by limits where we productively struggle to redefine, revalue, rephrase and resist. All three chapters investigate the lived reality of non-recognition, both of humans, in the context of genocide, slavery and the colonial project, and of the non-human, in the context of thinking about nature.

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Patrick Hayden examines the notion of evil as radical non-recognition. He notes that although the past decade has seen increasing public, political and scholarly attention to the theme of evil and its moral and political manifestations, contemporary recognition theory has so far failed to account for evil in global and transcultural contexts. In this chapter, Hayden explores the possibility of forming linkages between recognition and the problem of political evil by paying particular attention to the world, rather than self or other. The main point of departure for this interpretation revolves around distinguishing between evil and nonevil harms, given a shift in emphasis from dyadic interpersonal relationships to triadic intermediations with the worldly contexts that enable recognition. He first examines some of the key features of contemporary recognition frameworks that attempt to make sense of human vulnerability and harm, and outlines how these frameworks, in contrast to Hegel’s philosophy, stop short of the phenomenon of evil. He then discusses how Hegel’s insight into evil as the annihilation or ‘voiding’ of a shared world at the limits of recognition opens up an alternative paradigm, informed by Hannah Arendt’s thinking, that moves recognition outward towards the third term of a common world. On this account, evil is not simply indifference towards others, nor is it a struggle resulting in the mere submission of the other, but it is the ‘voiding’ – literally, the annihilation to non-existence – of a shared world that is both the constitutive ground and the affirmative outcome of mutual recognition itself. Hayden finishes by considering some of the ways that genocide can be said to constitute a special type of harm, appropriately considered evil, which aims at and results in the irretrievable loss of plural human worlds. Robbie Shilliam traces the radical non-recognition of persons by the powerful. What, he asks, if there is absolutely no chance of being recognized as a person by those who wield the power of law over you? Shilliam addresses this question by making us face a black plantation worker in British Guyana who, during the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy in 1935, identifies himself as an Abyssinian General. How can this General be recognized by the colonial authorities? Facing the Haitian Revolution, wherein Africans authored and executed their own liberation, Hegel can provide no answer to such a question. European Enlightenment thought did not engage with enslaved Africans except as 'slaves', that is, as humans in biology only. Africans were regarded as tragically devoid of reason and agency, especially what Hegel would call 'world-historical' agency. Hegel’s silence on the fate of the enslaved is one note in a chorus of oblivion that structures the majority of European Enlightenment thought on rights and recognition. Working through Frantz Fanon’s critique of the excisions and exclusions in Hegel’s dialectic of recognition, Shilliam turns to African American ethnographer Zora Neale Hurston and Jamaican

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author Erna Brodber in order to elaborate some of the practices of self-meaning and self-valuation undertaken by descendants of enslaved Africans who have been denied recognition. Returning, by way of these authors, to the Abyssinian General, Shilliam poses the following question: with what creative matter would it be possible to cultivate a new humanism – not the thin particular of European philosophy that masquerades as a universal, but a thick decolonized humanism that propels liberation? What might it look like to re-recognize one’s own personhood communally, drawing on spiritual resources to redeem a collective self? Emilian Kavalski and Magdalena Zolkos then highlight another limit of existing frameworks of recognition: the failure to recognize nature as an actor in international life. The prevailing conceptualization of recognition in IR relates to the collective endowment with a legal status as a legitimate participant on the world stage. This understanding draws on normative political theories of justice premised on a binary distinction between acts of acknowledgement (‘responsive model of recognition’) and acts of declaration (‘generative model of recognition’). Thus, the mutual collective recognition of and by states becomes the mechanism through which participation in the international domain is validated. However, this conceptualization offers little of value when it comes to IR’s recent struggle to offer an inclusive account not just for human, but also for non-human interactions in global life. At stake is not simply the need to extend the concept of recognition beyond the agency of the state, but also the requirement to radically reframe recognition into a non-anthropocentric notion that takes us ‘beyond the human’. More specifically, the ‘generative model of recognition’ has been indebted to the Hegelian strand in contemporary political theory, which emphasizes the centrality of reciprocity to the social practices of recognition. Blurring the sharp binary between recognition as an act of acknowledgement and recognition as an act of declaration, this paper considers critically the potential for more inclusive and encompassing understanding of recognition embedded in the reciprocity principle. Kavalski and Zolkos argue that if the study of IR is to address meaningfully the challenges of climate change through the conceptualization of recognition, it will have to confront and reframe its anthropocentric premise.

Manifestations: International orders and disorders Having interrogated the meanings and limits of contemporary recognition theory, the final three chapters explore its sociopolitical manifestations. They ask how, why and by whom recognition is mobilized and contested, pointing to

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its (mis)appropriation in the service of humanitarianism, emancipation, global social movements and world society. The first chapter shows how the lived experience of global politics unsettles ‘tidy’ categories of recognition, illustrating that recognition is often co-opted by relations of domination in the context of humanitarianism and care. The final two chapters explore the emancipatory potential of recognition politics in the context of struggles for global justice and world society beyond generic ‘sameness’. Fiona Robinson employs the concept of recognition to address the problem of paternalism in the ethics of care. Discourses and practices of ‘care’ in international politics have been used regularly to justify paternalistic acts of domination through the use of structural and physical violence – in the treatment of indigenous peoples, in the ‘protection’ of women and children in warfare, and in the practices of contemporary humanitarianism, including humanitarian interventions. This suggests the need to ensure the ‘other-regarding’ nature of care involves not only acting to address the needs of the other, but acting to recognize the other as a person in her own right. Much of the literature on justice as recognition emphasizes the need for powerful or dominant voices to ‘recognize’ the ways of life of marginal groups. However, Robinson argues that recognition in the context of globalized relations of care must involve an unsettling of the categories of those who ‘bestow’ care and recognition, and those who receive them. She builds on the argument of Marian Barnes, who uses Nancy Fraser’s notion of ‘transformative recognition’ as a basis for a politics of care. Transformative recognition is not so much about recognizing and promoting the autonomy of individuals and groups but rather ensuring that their agency is not constrained or effaced and that their voices are heard. It promotes practices based on a picture of mutual vulnerability and interdependence. Robinson’s approach involves a sustained analysis of the politics of representation – or what Narayan calls the ‘accounts’ that are given of the interdependencies and relationships – which are so crucial to an ethic of care. It challenges us to reflect on the harm we may be doing in ‘doing good’ and to rethink the implications of ‘moral’ actions in the context of global politics. In a further move, Greta Snyder focuses on the role the politics of recognition plays in constructing global struggles against injustice. She highlights three different sites in which recognition politics is essential to the success of global social movements: internal to progressive movements, between different progressive movements, and between progressive movements and the global public. At these different sites, she argues, recognition politics serves at least two important functions: integrative and performative. Recognition politics is integrative in that it fosters solidarity and enables individuals to recognize

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themselves as part of a global Left. It is performative in that by performing a democratic will, the Left can perform a kind of global democracy even in the absence of global democratic institutions. By identifying the sites at which recognition can contribute to global struggles and explaining the functions recognition serves, Snyder adds to our understanding of ‘regimes of recognition’, offers a new perspective on the ideal recognition encounter, and illuminates the importance of real-world political institutions like the World Social Forum and campaigns like the anti-War protests of 2003. Finally, Matthew Weinert uses recognition theory to challenge and extend the notion of world society, which captures a web of relations between diverse actors operating outside the formal rubric of the state. He argues that discourses of world society must move beyond generic frames of ‘humanity’ and acknowledge the deployment of difference that jettisons the sameness upon which that notion of humanity is founded. Weinert highlights one particularly problematic presupposition of world society and its cosmopolitan iterations, which concerns reciprocal, inter-human recognition. Given multiple practices and instances of dehumanization and misrecognition that undermine or deny the rights and status claims of certain ‘types’ of people – or even their claim to being human in the first place – we must turn this assumptive ideal of universal recognition into a question. That is, we must ask how recognition is cultivated if it is not automatically bestowed. Weinert posits a set of practices that aid in the constitution of inter-human recognition: resistance, reflection, replication of norms and (self-)responsibility. Because of their sociopolitical ramifications, these generative practices function as a primary, constitutive institution of world society conceived of as an inter-human society.

Notes 1 2

3 4

For discussion of the French reception of Hegel, and its influence on the surge of interest in recognition as a political concept, see Butler (1987) and Roth (1988). Taylor’s overall argument criticizes both (some) liberal theorists for postulating the abstract worth of the individual independently of processes of social recognition and (some) multicultural or identity theorists for reifying and ultimately relativizing difference as such. For elaboration of these points see Habermas (1996). Butler (2008: 54–6) also appeals to the example of the gift – influenced, as is Ricoeur, by the work of Marcel Mauss – in order to characterize recognition relationships.

Part One

Meanings: Critical Interventions

2

Unsettling Pedagogy: Recognition, Vulnerability and the International Kate Schick

Social and political theorists are becoming increasingly interested in the philosophy of education. Axel Honneth, for example, maintains that education is the ‘twin sister’ of democratic theory but notes that over the past century discourses of pedagogy have failed to occupy their rightful place at the centre of philosophy itself (Honneth 2013). Christopher Brooke and Elizabeth Frazer (2013) agree, arguing that disciplinary specialization has meant that education is not often prominent in contemporary discussions of political and social theory, despite inevitable overlapping concerns with educational philosophy and practice. Much of the philosophical (re)turn to education1 is self-consciously international in its concerns, with scholars pointing to mainstream education’s capture by dominant capitalist ideology and ensuing global trends such as a valorization of managerial efficiency, standardized testing, disciplinary specialization and commodification of knowledge (Adorno 1998a; Adorno and Becker 1999; Bartlett 2006; Brooke and Frazer 2013; Sinha 2013). Discussions of education, philosophy and the international have been dominated by the cosmopolitan turn in education and its appeal to a universal vision of shared humanity based on ideals such as freedom, respect and reason. Cosmopolitan thinkers promote the cultivation of global citizens through the critical examination of our own societies’ beliefs and practices as well as recognition of and rational exchange with other traditions. This literature is rooted in abstract rationality and promotes global justice through a forward-looking Enlightenment pedagogy marked by its adherence to universal moral values. However, it too easily elevates the notion of ‘humanity’, whilst failing to acknowledge our ‘all too human’ promotion of the very injustices that it seeks to address.

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In this chapter, I propose an approach to pedagogy and the international underpinned by an agonistic conception of recognition. An agonistic conception of recognition struggles towards comprehension of one’s self, one’s relation with others and one’s implication in structures of inequality and domination. Pedagogy informed by this understanding of recognition is uncomfortable and unsettling: it interrogates those aspects of ourselves and our society that promote continued misrecognition. I argue that contemporary modern societies are marked by a deeply rooted desire for security and invulnerability that has worked against recognition and this refusal of recognition has fostered pervasive ignorance and indifference. An education towards ‘critical self-reflection’ or ‘protest and resistance’ (Adorno 1998b: 193; Adorno and Becker 1999: 30–1) calls for recognition of and resistance to this collective blindness and coldness. A pedagogy infused by agonistic recognition is a radical pedagogy that promotes a counter-cultural embrace of ambiguity, vulnerability and love. This chapter does two things. First, it speaks to ongoing debates about critical pedagogy and cosmopolitan education and, in particular, to debates about how education can engender emancipation in a world pervaded by unnecessary inequality, injustice and suffering. An education towards critical self-reflection profoundly challenges cosmopolitan education literature, advocating an uncomfortable and unsettling pedagogy in the place of rational exchange and distant empathy. It also counters the pervasive ignorance and coldness that permeate contemporary society, advocating a radical pedagogy marked by vulnerability, self-reflection and, particularly in early childhood education, love. Such pedagogy is doubly disruptive. It unsettles inwardly, with its call to confront our own implication in ongoing norms and structures that oppress; it also unsettles outwardly, with its provocative challenge to dominant cultural values of self-sufficiency, self-advancement and mastery. Second, it speaks to continuing debates on recognition theory, advocating an agonistic conception of recognition that works towards understanding our own and others’ vulnerability, interrogating our adoption of values that silence and our complicity in structures that oppress. This approach is alive to the revisability embedded in the very structure of the word ‘re-cognition’, which implies the need to come to know again (and again), highlighting the uncertainty and contingency that attends any struggle for justice (Rose 1981: 71). It differs in emphasis from the conception of recognition promoted by thinkers such as Honneth, which is deeply rooted in social structures and seeks to ‘fix’ an affirmative and respectful relation to the other (Foster 2011; Honneth 2008; Schaap 2004). Against understandings of recognition that advocate giving

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‘more recognition’ (Markell 2003: 180) to marginalized groups to address inequality and oppression, an agonistic conception of recognition turns its gaze inwards first, confronting the desires that foster misrecognition. It asks ‘why’ we so deeply fear recognition of ourselves, others and the systems in which we are embedded, interrogating the ‘willful ignorance’ (Tuana 2006) and profound indifference to others (Adorno 1998b) that underlie the rejection of coming to know. In so doing, agonistic recognition works towards the countercultural production of particular kinds of subjects whose social and political engagement is informed by an understanding of their own embeddedness in structures that privilege some and marginalize many. The chapter is divided into three parts. In Part One, I outline the cosmopolitan turn in education, which is at the forefront of debates about education and the international. I argue that cosmopolitan education’s prioritization of common humanity tends too much towards the outward-looking adoption of particular values deemed universal and emancipatory (dignity, understanding, tolerance, respect, reason) and fails to interrogate those aspects of our selves and our relations to others that work against emancipation. In Part Two, I introduce the idea of ‘an education towards critical selfreflection’, which is underpinned by an agonistic understanding of recognition. A pedagogy that prioritizes self-reflection refuses to prescribe particular values but encourages attention to those aspects of our selves and our social world that foster indifference to others and ignorance of oppressive structures and practices. It is a collective endeavour that is acutely aware of human vulnerability and challenges entrenched norms of security and self-advancement. In Part Three, I argue that an education towards critical self-reflection is attuned to the challenges presented by two particular characteristics of liberal democratic societies: ignorance and indifference. To do this, I discuss Nancy Tuana’s concept of ‘wilful ignorance’ (2006), where the fear of coming to know one’s complicity in injustice is too great to risk engaging in the activity of self and other recognition and so ignorance is chosen over comprehension. I also explore Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of ‘coldness’ or indifference to others (Adorno 1998b), where the prioritization of self-interest results in the failure to care for those with whom one is not intimately connected. Pedagogy underpinned by an agonistic understanding of recognition works against ignorance and indifference and fosters the making (and re-making) of subjects able to embrace vulnerability, ambiguity and uncertainty. I finish by gesturing briefly towards an education inclined to critical self-reflection in the classroom. Recognition in this context goes beyond the cosmopolitan cultivation of world citizens who

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recognize one another’s common humanity and cultivate compassion for those previously unseen or ignored. It embraces a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ (Boler 1999) that interrogates those structures and relations that foster misrecognition and cultivates instead vulnerability, self-reflection and love.

Cosmopolitan education and the international In this section, I discuss cosmopolitan education, which is the prominent approach to thinking about pedagogy and the international. I focus in particular on Martha Nussbaum’s influential account of cosmopolitan education, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Nussbaum 1997). I do this for two reasons. First, Nussbaum’s account of cultivating global citizens makes her a central interlocutor for thinkers writing about education and the international. Second, her work is alive to the importance of emotion and emphasizes our common vulnerability, both of which are central to the recognition-infused pedagogy this paper advocates. However, Nussbaum’s project ultimately falls short of its emancipatory aims by failing to ask why misrecognition continues to abound or how we might be implicated in ongoing structures of oppression. In Cultivating Humanity, Nussbaum makes a case for the central importance of cosmopolitan education in forming world citizens. For Nussbaum, ‘world citizens’ are bound by their recognition of and loyalty to a common humanity. She adopts a ‘relaxed version’ of the classical conception of world citizen, maintaining that ‘however we order our varied loyalties, we should still be sure that we recognize the worth of human life wherever it occurs and see ourselves as bound by common human abilities and problems to people who lie at a great distance from us’ (Nussbaum 1997: 9). The task of cultivating humanity requires the development and nurturing of three foundational abilities: first, Socratic self-examination, where reason and logic are used to question traditional beliefs; second, an ability to conceive of ourselves as world citizens, whose ties and obligations go beyond the local or shared common identities; and third, the ability to imagine what it might be like to be other than who we are, or ‘narrative imagination’ (Nussbaum 1997: 9–11). The first capacity essential for cultivating humanity, Socratic self-examination, calls for a ‘life of questioning’ (Nussbaum 1997: 21), whereby conventional beliefs and established traditions are subject to rigorous examination as we learn to think for ourselves. Nussbaum (1997: 30) remarks that ‘the only kind of education that

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really deserves the name liberalis, or, as we might literally render it, “freelike”, is one that makes its pupils free, able to take charge of their own thought and to conduct a critical examination of their society’s norms and traditions’. The second capacity, coming to think of ourselves as citizens of the world, entails learning to perceive ourselves not simply as members of particular groups but as human, first and foremost, ‘bound to all other human beings by ties of recognition and concern’ (Nussbaum 1997: 10). Nussbaum emphasizes that we are all ‘fellow citizens in the community of reason’ (1997: 63) and that our engagement with one another ought to be marked by ‘critical scrutiny’ (1997: 60) and ‘rational exchange’ (1997: 65). Such engagement should be supported by a multicultural education that develops understanding of other ways of thinking and being by familiarizing students with histories, cultures, religions and languages other than their own (1997: 68). The third capacity is ‘narrative imagination’, which supplements knowledge of other lives with imaginative engagement, primarily through reading literature. One of the abilities that such engagement produces is compassion, which is ‘the recognition that another person, in some ways similar to oneself, has suffered some significant pain or misfortune in a way for which that person is not, or not fully, to blame’ (Nussbaum 1997: 90–1). According to Nussbaum (1997: 91), compassion also involves some evaluation of the other’s misfortune by the onlooker, requiring ‘a highly complex set of moral abilities, including the ability to imagine what it is like to be in that person’s place (what we normally call empathy), and also the ability to stand back and ask whether the person’s own judgment has taken the full measure of what has happened’. These moral abilities are supplemented by a consciousness of our ‘common vulnerability’, since our ability to feel compassion depends upon us being able to imagine ourselves experiencing similar suffering. Nussbaum’s vision of a cosmopolitan education, then, promotes the cultivation of global citizens who are rigorous in critically evaluating their own and others’ beliefs, committed to expanding their knowledge and experience of others’ lives, and imaginatively and compassionately alive to the emotions and suffering of others. In this way, she argues, cosmopolitan education can shape a humanity marked by greater respect, inclusivity and justice. However, although Nussbaum’s project is animated in part by an understanding of common vulnerability and acknowledges the centrality of emotions, it remains too close to the tradition of moral rationalism and its privileging of ‘useful knowledge’ (Beattie and Schick 2013; Geuss 2005: 3). The accumulation of knowledge about others’ lives is wielded to ‘solve’ ongoing problems of misrecognition

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and injustice, by cultivating understanding and respect for other beliefs and traditions and by pointing to our common humanity and vulnerability. Nussbaum’s call for Socratic examination promotes the interrogation of beliefs, prioritizing rational argument and rational autonomy. The cultivation of global citizenship encourages the accumulation of knowledge of other cultures, languages and histories, knowledge wielded for the purpose of expanding the ‘community of reason’ (Nussbaum 1997: 63). And narrative imagination fosters identification with other lives through Aristotelian empathic engagement, claiming our common vulnerability means we can imagine ‘what it is like to be in that person’s place’ (Nussbaum 1997: 91). However, the empathy Nussbaum promotes is a ‘passive empathy’ (Boler 1999: 158–61) based on pity, which mobilizes the fear that ‘[this] could happen to me’ and makes ourselves and not others the primary object of concern (Boler 1999: 159). Boler (1999: 160) highlights the danger of the type of identification Nussbaum encourages, arguing that it is ‘founded on a binary of self/other that situates the self/reader unproblematically as judge. This self is not required to identify with the oppressor, and not required to identify her complicity in structures of power relations mirrored by the text . . . to the extent that identification occurs in Nussbaum’s model, this self feeds on a consumption of the other’. Despite calling for self-examination, learning and emotional engagement, then, Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan education project fails to attend to our own implication in oppressive structures. Instead, it promotes an impoverished conception of recognition that accumulates knowledge about and superficially ‘consumes’ the other without reflecting critically on our own role in promoting continued misrecognition.

Agonistic recognition and vulnerability Cosmopolitan education has a thoroughgoing international sensibility. Its central goal is to pursue global justice through the cultivation of global citizens, making others less strange through contact with alternative beliefs and customs and via imaginative engagement. In this sense, one could argue that cosmopolitan education promotes recognition, in that it fosters understanding and respect for others’ identities. However, the critical engagement cosmopolitan education promotes tends too much towards the rationalist prescription of more, and better, knowledge of the other and fails to interrogate the roots of misrecognition. The form of recognition employed by this approach is an impoverished conception that fails to capture the ongoing struggle, ambiguity and vulnerability of a fuller, more properly Hegelian, conception of recognition.2

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In this section, I argue that pedagogy infused by a fuller and more agonistic conception of recognition offers a provocative challenge to cosmopolitan education. Where cosmopolitan education pursues emancipation through the positive production of cosmopolitan citizens characterized by particular values (such as tolerance and respect), the agonistic approach I advocate refuses to ‘preach love’ (Adorno 1998b: 202), advocating instead ‘an education towards critical self-reflection’ (Adorno 1998b: 193). A recognition-infused pedagogy of this type offers a radical challenge to mainstream and cosmopolitan education and, more broadly, to dominant liberal capitalist norms. This challenge crosses borders: the failure of mainstream education is a global problem that extends not just across borders but also ‘far beyond the boundaries of different political systems’ (Adorno and Becker 1999: 25). The understanding of recognition that informs my challenge to mainstream and cosmopolitan pedagogies is an agonistic conception of recognition as a struggle towards comprehension of one’s self, one’s relations with others and one’s implication in violent structures and norms. It is not worked towards and achieved; it is an ongoing journey towards understanding that is captured in the very word itself, which implies an initial cognition followed by the need to re-cognize, or know again (Rose 1981: 71). My understanding of recognition is informed by Gillian Rose’s reading of Hegelian ‘speculative’ recognition as a difficult and risky venture that insists on a dogged negotiation of the ordinary or ‘what there is’ (Rose 1992: 87).3 She presents a ‘radical Hegel’ (Rose 1981: viii) whose emphasis on relationality presents a serious challenge to thinking in terms of abstract universals and calls instead for an ongoing project of comprehension that interrogates settled norms and practices.4 Like Rose, Tarik Kochi (2012: 138) emphasizes the radical project of Hegel’s theory of recognition. He describes it as a ‘theory of freedom’ that presents a ‘social world constantly in flux, caught in the movement of struggle, conflict, restlessness and contradiction’ (Kochi 2012: 129). He continues: Never immediately successful, recognition takes place as mis-recognition and has to be repeated again and again, settling at times in relative stability and then upset again. In this respect, the biological, symbolic and socially derived desires, passions and affects that push the ego in multiple directions are all channelled through what Hegel calls recognition – the cognitive acts of the ego that attempt to make sense of the world all the while struggling, being pushed about and undone by the operation and negativity which renders thought-determinations more determinate and highlights their inadequacy. (Kochi 2012: 134)

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The dynamic process of recognition seeks to understand the world in which we reside; it seeks also to understand the ways we come to know and the desires that underpin the philosophical journey towards comprehension (Kochi 2012: 130). These desires are ‘often self-interested, culturally contingent and manipulative’ (Kochi 2012: 130) and include the pursuit of security and certainty. Deeply rooted in liberal capitalist society, these desires are incompatible with Hegel’s ‘radical project of mutual recognition’, which requires that we give up our ‘solipsistic tendencies toward self-certainty’ (Kochi 2012: 138) as we embark on its difficult and uncertain terrain. A radical project of Hegelian recognition, then, is closely attuned to human desire and vulnerability. It differs substantively from standard accounts of recognition in that it is not primarily about what we can do for others – the positive prescription of more recognition or more respect – but about what we have already done (and continue to do) to others and to ourselves, whereby the privilege of some comes at the expense of others. This agonistic conception of recognition interrogates the desires that underlie our location in structures that oppress, opening ourselves as well as others to scrutiny. Roger Foster’s incisive critique of Axel Honneth’s transcendental account of recognition in Reification (Honneth 2008) highlights the ‘static’ nature of Honneth’s concept of recognition, saying that it promotes a ‘fixed and isolable affirmative relation to the other’ (Foster 2011: 258). Honneth’s account of recognition is rooted in social structure and social practice; he argues that affective or caring modes of social relations are ‘primordial’ and prior to any cognition (Honneth 2008). Foster contrasts this with Adorno’s ‘dynamic’ concept of recognition,5 maintaining: Recognition . . . is not an underlying stratum of interaction; it is a dynamic process set in motion by an essential ambiguity in what it reveals – not only about others, but also about ourselves. This is not a normative ambiguity about positive concern or respect; it is rather an existential ambiguity. At the same time that recognition humanizes us, by constituting us as members of the human community, it reveals us to ourselves as exposed, dependent, injurable, and mortal. (Foster 2011: 257)

The characterization of the politics of recognition as an ongoing and dynamic process is shared by Gillian Rose, who emphasizes the uncertainty and equivocation that accompanies the difficult journey towards comprehension.6 This fuller, more agonistic conception of recognition welcomes vulnerability and ambiguity in the place of self-sufficiency and certainty.

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Standard conceptions of recognition also fail to attend sufficiently to the ongoing problem of misrecognition, to ‘our tendency to deny, repudiate, and refuse the voice of the other’ (Foster 2011: 256). Foster argues that denial is an insidious aspect of human relations and that this denial is twofold: we deny others a voice; we also deny our fear of recognition, which manifests itself in our ignorance of and indifference towards others. We refuse to embark on an agonistic journey towards recognition, which would require attending to our own desires and fears and to our own complicity in silencing and marginalizing others. A central focus of a radical politics of recognition, then, is ‘coming to terms with, working through, what leads us to want to refuse recognition . . . We refuse to recognize the other because of what the other is capable of revealing to us about ourselves’ (Foster 2011: 257). Opening ourselves to such scrutiny calls for vulnerability; indeed, being willing to become vulnerable is a central part of recognition. Vulnerability implies an ‘openness to being affected and affecting in both positive and negative ways’ (Gilson 2011: 310). However, embracing vulnerability is profoundly countercultural: the persistently negative characterization of vulnerability as something to be shunned (Drichel 2013; Gilson 2011: 311) and the elevation of mastery as something to be pursued results in a widespread failure to acknowledge our own vulnerability and the ways in which we are complicit in fostering harm.7 In sum, a fuller, more agonistic conception of recognition takes desire and denial seriously, making visible the misrecognition they engender. A recognitioninfused pedagogy disturbs settled conceptions of how we relate to ourselves and others, in part through a reframing of vulnerability as ambivalent, instead of seeing it as something necessarily to be avoided.8 It resists cultural pressures to relentlessly pursue self-advantage and certainty, calling instead for a radical acceptance of ambiguity (Rose 1996: 62; Schick 2012: 8–9, 49–51).9

Education towards critical self-reflection An education towards critical self-reflection is underpinned by an agonistic conception of recognition that reveals as much about ourselves and our own desires and denials as it does about our relations with others. The project of recognition cannot co-exist with the desires for certainty, self-preservation and invulnerability so pervasive in modern society. In this section, I argue that one of the foremost tasks of an education towards critical self-reflection is to challenge the deeply rooted ignorance and indifference that spring from a fear of recognition.

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Ignorance and indifference have become part of the fabric of modern life and any attempt to disrupt them will face ‘indescribable resistances’ (Adorno and Becker 1999: 32). Pedagogy informed by this conception of recognition challenges our extensive blindness and coldness, calling us to critical self-reflection and love.

Ignorance One of the central tasks facing an education towards critical self-reflection is to challenge the ignorance that pervades modern societies. The ignorance I am concerned with is not primarily about positive social or cultural knowledge or ‘facts’; recognizing ourselves and others requires recognizing relationality. I argue that oppressive relations are often rooted in ‘willful ignorance’ (Gilson 2011: 313–4; Tuana 2006) that disregards the oppression of others and, importantly, one’s own role in facilitating that oppression. This understanding of ignorance focuses not just on relations with others, but also on relations with oneself and one’s own desires and denials. Ignorance is inextricably linked with the desire for invulnerability and self-sufficiency and profoundly resists recognition. Erinn Gilson argues that invulnerability is a ‘form of ignorance’ and that failure to recognize one’s own vulnerability is a hallmark of capitalist societies underpinned by a particular kind of subjectivity: ‘that of the prototypical, arrogantly self-sufficient, independent, invulnerable master subject’ (Gilson 2011: 312). Ignorance, then, is underpinned by a fundamental denial of vulnerability. The invulnerability that is chosen instead is ‘a closure to a certain understanding of the nature of relations with others as well as to features of the self; it is a closure to change that alters the meaning of the self, the interpretations we have formed of ourselves’ (Gilson 2011: 319). The refusal to come to know aspects of one’s self as well as one’s relations with others is a refusal of recognition. Drawing on Nancy Tuana’s epistemologies of ignorance, Gilson argues that the failure to recognize vulnerability is ‘willful ignorance’ (Gilson 2011: 313–4). For Tuana, wilful ignorance is ‘a systematic process of self-deception, a willful embrace of ignorance that infects those who are in positions of privilege, an active ignoring of the oppression of others and one’s role in that exploitation’ (Tuana 2006: 11). Wilful ignorance is ‘not passive’ (Tuana 2006: 10); it combines not knowing with a determination to remain uninformed. It is fed by a fear of what it would mean to know, of what it would mean if we were in fact complicit in the exploitation of others. Tuana references Elizabeth Spelman’s essay on race and ignorance, which argues that the failure of white Americans to recognize their role in fostering systematic

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racism is not because of a ‘simple lack of knowledge’. It is not simply that they do not know that black Americans continue to experience systematic oppression. White Americans hope that the ‘facts’ of ongoing oppression are untrue but fear that this is not the case; this fear gives rise to the active adoption of ignorance because ‘the consequences of [these accusations of perpetuating systematic racism] being true are so high, it is better to cultivate ignorance’ (Tuana 2006: 11). Robbie Shilliam (2013b) also highlights the pervasive ignorance that shores up Western liberalism, arguing that it depends upon repression and displacement. Its underlying white supremacist psyche ‘must consistently repress the memory of its own illiberalism, displace its culpable relationships to the non-Western/ un-liberal worlds, and rationalize a fascististic obsession with the dominance of white, propertied hetero-male bodies via an abstract universality that it calls human rights’ (Shilliam 2013b: 133). Shilliam argues that challenging the deepseated ignorance and denial that sustains white supremacism requires a work of therapy that turns its gaze inwards in order to unsettle settled assumptions and uncover what has been repressed and forgotten. A therapeutic approach requires those who are embedded in and benefit from white supremacism to recognize their own culpability in creating and sustaining oppressive structures.10 Shilliam references Steve Biko’s call for white liberals to ‘realize that they themselves are oppressed if they are true liberals and therefore they must fight for their own freedom and not that of the nebulous “they” with whom they can hardly claim identification’ (Biko 1979: 25; Shilliam 2013b: 139). Biko maintains the emotion oppressed peoples want from white liberals is not sympathy, but anger: ‘anger about and for the debilitating effects that white supremacy had upon whites themselves’ (Shilliam 2013b: 140). Shilliam describes the accountability a therapeutic approach demands as ‘concretely ethical and relational’; it resists ‘narrowly procedural’ and ‘abstractly universal’ approaches as impoverished and lacking. Such an approach, then, offers a profound challenge to a cosmopolitan pedagogy: it calls for anger in the place of sympathy, self-critique in the place of identifying common values and vulnerability in the place of self-certainty.

Indifference I have argued that one of the tasks of a radical pedagogy with recognition at its core is to work against the ‘willful ignorance’ that sustains structures and relations of oppression. Radical pedagogy must also work against indifference towards others. Like ignorance, indifference is buttressed by desires for certainty and security and works against agonistic recognition’s call for vulnerability and

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relationality. In what follows, I consider Adorno’s notion of coldness, and argue that indifference towards others cannot be addressed with the straightforward prescription of warmth or love. Instead, it starts with the difficult task of recognizing our own lack of love and the pervasive societal coldness it reflects. In his reflections on ‘Education after Auschwitz’, Adorno argues that coldness – a fundamental indifference to others – facilitated the Shoah: ‘if people were not profoundly indifferent toward whatever happens to everyone else except for a few to whom they are closely bound and, if possible, by tangible interest, then Auschwitz would not have been possible, people would not have accepted it’ (Adorno 1998b: 201). For Adorno, the coldness that facilitated Auschwitz is inextricably linked with the pervasive prioritization of self-interest and self-advantage (Adorno 1998b: 201).11 A tenacious conformity to the status quo, in which atomized individuals act to maximize perceived ‘business interest’ (Adorno 1998b: 201), goes hand in hand with a ‘lack of love’ (Adorno 1998b: 202). Quite simply, then, coldness engenders a withdrawal from others. Adorno maintains that withdrawal from human relationality is so deeply rooted in contemporary society that people ‘withdraw their love from other people initially, before it can even unfold’ (Adorno 1998b: 201–2). We do not actively choose to be cold; the lack of love that characterizes coldness is ‘a lack belonging to all people without exception’ (Adorno 1998b: 202) in liberal democratic societies. As Simon Mussell notes, coldness is both ‘imposed upon individual subjects by social forces’ and ‘reproduced internally by each subject’ in order to survive the capitalist status quo (Mussell 2013: 60). Indeed, ‘it has become socially necessary to remain as indifferent as possible’ (Mussell 2013: 58): in Adorno’s words, ‘without such coldness one could not live’ (Adorno 1998c: 274).12 For Adorno, then, a profound indifference towards others was the condition of possibility that facilitated Auschwitz. This failure to care for others, to love, goes hand in hand with a failure to come to know and value ourselves as relational, vulnerable subjects. The elevation of self-preservation as a primary goal is driven by a deep-set desire to feel safe or protected. However, in exchanging a feeling of helplessness for one of protection, we are shutting down a crucial part of what it is to be a moral human being (Drichel 2013: 12–13). The skewed perception of vulnerability as facilitating only the negative possibility of harm and violence suppresses the transformative potential for love and care. Instead, it facilitates coldness, a refusal to love. Although coldness is fundamentally a failure to love, Adorno argues that to ‘preach love’ in response would be ‘futile’, in part because we all suffer from a ‘lack of love’ (Adorno 1998b: 202).13 The positive prescription of

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respect, tolerance and understanding based on common humanity cannot create community or challenge a culture of profound individualism and selfsufficiency. Instead, Adorno argues for a journey towards understanding: ‘If anything can help against coldness as the condition for disaster, then it is the insight into the conditions that determine it and the attempt to combat those conditions, initially in the domain of the individual . . . . The first thing is to bring coldness to the consciousness of itself ’ (Adorno 1998b: 202). Adorno maintains that the profound indifference to others that permeates society is so pervasive and deeply rooted that we are unaware of it – ignorant – and that the place to start in the fight against indifference is with a fight against ignorance. He argues that we should begin with an attempt to ‘bring coldness to the consciousness of itself ’ (Adorno 1998b: 202). At the centre of Adorno’s hopes for ‘Education after Auschwitz’, then, is a struggle towards recognition of those ways in which the insidiousness of coldness has permeated our being and shaped the way we engage with others and with our wider society. Simon Mussell argues that the risky endeavour of becoming aware of coldness is made more difficult by the apparent warmth of contemporary societal culture: ‘recognition of the pervasiveness of coldness is socially repressed by an equally persistent culture of (false) warmth, perpetual connectedness and familiarity’ (Mussell 2013: 60).14 By refusing false consolation, Adorno’s (cold) critique of coldness draws our attention to ‘the symptom that society would prefer to conceal or explain away as nothing more complex than a subjective pathology’ (Mussell 2013: 61). Adorno’s insistence on peeling back the layers of ‘false warmth’ (Mussell 2013: 60) in order to reveal the profound indifference to others it conceals goes hand in hand with a refusal to ‘preach love’ (Adorno 1998b: 202), correct misinformation or cultivate ideals such as ‘freedom and humanity’ (Adorno 1986: 128–9). Instead, Mussell maintains, Adorno ‘works within and through the dialectic of coldness’ (Mussell 2013: 59), marrying his critique of coldness with a ‘coldness of critique’ that challenges the capitalist status quo (Mussell 2013: 60). The core purpose of Adorno’s social theory goes beyond diagnosis and critique of existing social order; instead, it seeks to ‘tarry with the negative, recognising the coldness within ourselves the better to break through and sublate it’ (Mussell 2013: 63). Adorno asserts that ‘what is conscious can never bring with it as much fatefulness as what remains unconscious, halfconscious, or preconscious’ (Adorno 1986: 126). This emphasis on the negative, on coming to know our coldness – its genesis and its effects – is profoundly hopeful because it ‘refuses to recalibrate its coordinates to fit in with the limited horizons of the present’ (Mussell 2013: 63).

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According to Adorno, then, the prioritization of self-interest and a deeply rooted indifference towards those to whom we are not intimately connected facilitated the horrors of Auschwitz. Without the socially sanctioned pursuit of self-advantage, Auschwitz would not have taken place. In this sense, Adorno argues with cosmopolitan critics that we ought to enlarge our scope of moral-political concern. However, although he highlights the devastation that stems from a profound indifference towards others, his response is emphatically not the formal prescription of love or care. Love, for Adorno, cannot be called into being by prescribing eternal values or following injunctions to respect, tolerate or cultivate an understanding of others. Instead, love ‘resists formalization’; it draws attention to the sensuous particularity and materiality of others as a counter to ‘overwhelming tendencies of abstraction, exclusion, and alienation’ (Waggoner 2010: 111). As we have already discussed, Adorno is clear that countering indifference starts by becoming aware of our own coldness. However, he also maintains that it can be countered through the cultivation of loving relationships, particularly in the context of early childhood education. I explore both responses further in what follows.

Towards an education for critical self-reflection I have argued that ignorance and indifference work against recognition and against emancipation. Societal valorization of security, certainty and selfsufficiency has led to the denigration of vulnerability, ambiguity and love. Cosmopolitan education’s cultivation of global citizens fails to address these pervasive societal failings: the accumulation of useful knowledge about other cultures and beliefs and the exercise of empathy at a distance both fail to attend to our own implication in structures and practices that marginalize and oppress. In what follows, I argue that a recognition-infused pedagogy can address pervasive ignorance and indifference. I consider Adorno’s reflections on education after Auschwitz and Megan Boler’s ‘pedagogy of discomfort’, arguing that they offer a starting point on a journey towards unsettling pedagogy with a radical politics of recognition. Adorno himself took pedagogy very seriously – he was a committed public educator15 – and his writings on education offer a profound challenge to status quo understandings of pedagogy. He points to two cornerstones of education after Auschwitz: ‘general enlightenment’, which highlights the motives that facilitated the horrors of Auschwitz, and children’s education, with particular

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emphasis on early childhood education (Adorno 1998b: 194). Adorno maintains that there is little point in appealing to ‘eternal values’ or in stressing oppressed others’ ‘positive qualities’ (Adorno 1998b: 192); these techniques fail to address the mechanisms and motives that facilitate violence. Instead, he argues, ‘the only education that has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection’ (Adorno 1998b: 193). Adorno’s (negative) reflections on education offer an important challenge to pedagogic approaches that prescribe positive prescriptions for emancipatory change, such as those put forward by Nussbaum (1997). He advocates ‘making education an education for protest and resistance’, beginning with the attempt to ‘open people’s minds to the fact that they are constantly being deceived, because the mechanism of tutelage has been raised to the status of a universal mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived’ (Adorno and Becker 1999: 30–1).16 In advocating this ‘general enlightenment’, he advocates a ‘turn to the subject’ whereby subjects work towards comprehension of those ‘mechanisms’ that allowed Auschwitz to take place and, through this increased awareness, reduce the likelihood of its recurrence (Adorno 1998b: 193). Brian O’Connor (2012: 16) argues that Adorno’s programme of education fosters autonomy and resistance: ‘Education is now to be the business of enabling individuals to recognize within themselves, and thereafter to take an oppositional attitude to, those norms which have carried non-reflective, non-self-critical individuals – perhaps even themselves – into collective blindness.’ Foremost among those norms are the prioritization of self-advantage and coldness or indifference to others. An education for resistance, or ‘knocking things down’ (Adorno and Becker 1999: 31), encourages students to question these norms and practices rather than to ‘swallow and accept everything’ (Adorno and Becker 1999: 30). Critical self-reflection brings these norms to consciousness, which is an important act of resistance; it highlights our own complicity in structures and attitudes that oppress. Early childhood education is the other forum in which Adorno maintains societal coldness might be countered. He states that ‘[t]he pathos of the school today, its moral import, is that in the midst of the status quo, it alone has the ability, if it is conscious of it, to work directly toward the debarbarization of humanity’ (Adorno 1998a: 190). We have seen that Adorno has a profound antipathy towards ‘preaching love’, emphatically rejecting as counterproductive and superficial the active prescription of cosmopolitan values such as humanity, freedom, respect and tolerance. In the context of education, Adorno rejects the idea of formally cultivating understanding of the other by emphasizing positive

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qualities, for example. However, although he resists the prescription of love, he encourages the cultivating of loving relationships in the classroom. That is, he makes a distinction between what students are taught and how students are taught. In the context of early childhood education, he maintains, the presence of teachers who love is transformative: children who are loved are in turn better able to love and to resist the coldness that pervades modernity. Indeed, Adorno warns that teachers who are unable to love should not teach. Unloving teachers foster suffering in the classroom; they also pass on their inability to love to their students and in this way perpetuate the coldness that facilitated Auschwitz (Adorno 1998d: 28). O’Connor notes that children who are educated under loving and critically aware conditions ‘may develop a capacity for autonomy which is not compromised by the institutional practices of an intellectual theory’ (O’Connor 2012: 20). He goes on to argue that as ‘individuals without coldness’ they will be guided by love, ‘responding freely to the self-evidently morally repugnant, rather than by a need for institutional recognition’ (O’Connor 2012: 20). In the context of educating young children, cultivating loving relationships in the classroom is particularly important. Love continues to be important beyond childhood, however; the work of becoming vulnerable and learning to recognize oneself and others is a work of love.17 Such an education is emphatically not the tutelage identified by Kant as fostering immaturity and cowardice – instead, it is an education for maturity that invites critical self-reflection and love and, as such, is willing to become vulnerable and discomfited. Megan Boler’s ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ complements and extends Adorno’s education for critical self-reflection. As I noted above, Boler criticizes Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan education for advocating ‘passive empathy’ that acknowledges the suffering of others but ‘produces no action towards justice’ (Boler 1999: 161). Passive empathy ‘situates the powerful Western eye/I as the judging subject, never called upon to cast her gaze at her own reflection’ (Boler 1999: 161). Like Adorno, then, Boler emphasizes the need for critical self-reflection, bringing to consciousness our embeddedness in systems of power and privilege that marginalize and oppress. Central to this approach is recognition of ‘the deeply embedded emotional dimensions that frame and shape daily habits, routines, and unconscious complicity with hegemony’ (Boler 2004: 121). It draws attention to our location in systems of inequality and domination ‘in which privilege, such as white and male privilege, comes at the expense of the freedom of others’ (Boler 2004: 128). Analysis of these systems must be accompanied by a personal journey of political risk, which entails ‘willingness to engage in the difficult work of possibly allowing one’s worldviews to be shattered’ and ‘willingness to be fully

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alive in the process of constant change and becoming’ (Boler 2004: 128). Boler highlights the need for a pedagogy of discomfort to be enlivened by a conception of ‘critical hope’, which is manifested in a determination to work towards justice even though we do not know the outcome in advance (Boler 2004: 129). A pedagogy of discomfort, then, attends to those desires that underlie misrecognition, making us aware of our denial of other voices and the accompanying denial of the fear that underpins our refusal of recognition (Foster 2011: 256–7). Informed by an agonistic conception of recognition, Boler’s pedagogical approach requires letting go of attachment to certainty and self-preservation and welcoming vulnerability and ambiguity in their stead (Boler 2004: 129). It does not call students on a solitary journey; it is a collective endeavour that depends on ‘interpersonal relationships shaped in a political context’ (Boler 2004: 130). Relationships between students and between students and teachers are central in the process of radically re-evaluating one’s place in the world.18 The critical reflection entailed by this unsettling pedagogy is not one of ‘individualized self-reflection’; it involves a journey of collective witnessing, whereby one’s re-evaluation of one’s self and one’s place in the world is ‘always understood in relation to others, and in relation to personal and cultural histories and material condition’ (Boler 1999: 176–8).

Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that although cosmopolitan education encourages recognition of others, its influence is limited by its rootedness in a tradition of moral rationalism. Cosmopolitan education seeks to address injustice and inequality through the accumulation of knowledge about other languages, cultures and beliefs, and through empathic engagement that references our common vulnerability. In doing so, it cultivates global citizens marked by their knowledge of and respect for others. However, cosmopolitan education promotes an impoverished form of recognition that accords others ‘more recognition’ but fails to examine our own complicity in creating and sustaining those social and political structures that perpetuate misrecognition. Contra cosmopolitan education’s confident production of knowledgeable and empathic subjects, I advocate an unsettling pedagogy that requires a ‘turn to the subject’ (Adorno 1998b: 193), underpinned by an agonistic conception of recognition. Instead of formalizing values or prescribing care, this approach draws attention to the desires and fears that prompt us to refuse recognition,

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challenging the wilful ignorance and indifference that buttress liberal capitalism. It is profoundly countercultural: it rejects the valorization of the invulnerable, self-certain and self-serving master subject and welcomes in her place the vulnerable subject willing to turn her gaze inwards and embark on the uncomfortable journey of coming to know her implication in social and political structures that oppress.19

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6

7

See also the forthcoming collection of essays on education by prominent philosophers, critical theorists and psychoanalysts (Bartlett, Clemens and White 2015). See also Tarik Kochi’s contribution to this volume, which advocates a return to the ‘dynamism, radicalism and philosophical potential’ of earlier Hegel-recognition scholarship instead of the reductionist account prevalent in liberal recognition theory. See also Lloyd (2009: 144). See also Schaap’s (2004) discussion of agonistic reconciliation, which highlights the risk that attends any struggle for recognition. He argues that recognition ‘may as easily divide as it may reconcile’ (Schaap 2004: 525) and that ‘it appears both untenable and yet necessary’ (Schaap 2004: 537): untenable because of the way it appropriates and ‘over-determines’ the other (Schaap 2004: 531–4), and necessary because otherwise we are left indifferent to the other. An agonistic account of reconciliation is alive to the fragility of the nascent ‘we’ that reconciliatory politics attempts to create, proposing a model ‘that would affirm the non-identity of the other while forestalling the moment of positive recognition’ (Schaap 2004: 525). Such an approach unsettles those binaries (self and other, victim and perpetrator, friend and enemy) that pervade recognition politics, embracing ambiguity and ongoing possibility in their stead. Although Adorno does not use the concept of recognition explicitly in his social theory or writings on education, his work captures important aspects of a speculative or fuller understanding of recognition. See Foster (2011) for an excellent discussion of the concept of recognition in Adorno’s social theory. Rose maintains ‘certainty does not empower, it subjugates – for only thinking which has the ability to tolerate uncertainty is powerful, that is, non-violent’ (Rose 1993: 4). A dogged determination to present the self as invulnerable is pervasive in global politics; powerful states are marked by the promotion of their national Selves as self-certain and secure. Brent J. Steele (2010: 12) maintains that states employ

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aesthetic practices to portray themselves differently to what they really are, to obscure their fundamental vulnerability and insecurity. He argues that while these practices help to ‘veil the operation of power’, they ultimately engender further insecurities. 8 Simone Drichel (2013) argues that vulnerability presents us with the possibility of wounding, but it also carries with it the possibility of care, of love. By failing to engage with our helplessness, our vulnerability, but instead rushing towards a place of safety, we are ‘fleeing from and defending against the very relationality that, to be sure, is always a potential source of pain and wounding, but that is also the condition of possibility for pleasure and satisfaction, and ultimately for ethical life’ (Drichel 2013: 13). By acknowledging and tarrying with vulnerability and reacquainting ourselves with our fundamental relationality, in contrast, ‘what we learn is to be able to remain – anxiously, uncomfortably, but sticking it out nonetheless – in the space of vulnerability’s “ambivalent potentiality” ’ (Drichel 2013: 23). 9 My critique of standard recognition theory has much in common with Patchen Markell’s (2003) critique in Bound by Recognition. Markell argues that conventional recognition itself engenders further misrecognition by failing to address the roots of misrecognition. He maintains that it ‘gives short shrift to the underlying forms of desire and motivation that sustain and are sustained by unjust social arrangements, thereby ignoring both the possibility that demeaning images of others are epiphenomenal – that they are supported by structures of desire that are not in the first instance about others – and, more troublingly, the possibility that even affirmative images of others could be consistent with, or serve as vehicles of, injustice’ (Markell 2003: 5). Markell (2003: 7) advocates instead what he terms a politics of acknowledgement that ‘demands that each of us bear our share of the burden and risk involved in the uncertain, open-ended, sometimes maddening and sometimes joyously surprising activity of living and interacting with other people’. I argue that a fuller, more agonistic conception of recognition is able to capture those aspects of Markell’s politics of acknowledgement that are lacking in standard conception of recognition: that is, attention to the desires that underpin misrecognition and an embrace of vulnerability, ambiguity and political risk. 10 See Shilliam (2013b) for a detailed discussion of what such therapy might look like in practice. He discusses anti-racism workshops run in Aotearoa New Zealand churches for Pakeha (white New Zealanders) in the early 1980s that provided an unsettling corrective to dominant narratives of colonialism. 11 ‘Education after Auschwitz’ (Adorno 1998b) was written in 1966 and emerges from Adorno’s agonized reflections on the horrific suffering and death experienced by millions deemed other in Nazi Germany and his struggle to understand how and why this took place. Although Adorno’s remarks must be understood as emerging

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13 14

15

16

17

18

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Recognition and Global Politics from a particular historical context, his argument about the coldness of the modern subject applies to contemporary society as well, with its continued valorization of self-sufficiency, self-certainty and self-advantage. Adorno remarks that coldness is particularly apparent in people who ‘fetishize technology’ (Adorno 1998b: 200). In what seems like an eerily prescient reflection on present day technology and alienation, Adorno argues that the contemporary absorption in ‘machines as such’ (Adorno 1998b: 201), is ‘exaggerated, irrational, pathogenic’ and that it produces ‘[thoroughly cold] people who cannot love’ (Adorno 1998b: 200). See also Volker Heins’ (2012a: 78–9) discussion of Adorno’s prophetic style and his antipathy towards ‘preaching’. See also Adorno’s discussion of the false warmth of the Nazi regime: ‘For countless people, alienation’s chill seemed to be eliminated by the warmth – however manipulated and imposed – of togetherness’ (Adorno 1986: 121) See, for example, Volker Heins’ (2012a: 73) discussion of ‘Adorno as Educator’, where he points out that between 1950 and 1969, he ‘gave almost 300 radio talks, plus about the same number of public talks’. See also the discussion in Goehr (2005). By ‘tutelage’, Adorno refers to Kant’s well-known statement that ‘Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage’ (Kant 1991), drawing on Kant’s conception of ‘tutelage’ as a deeply problematic but pervasive form of education that fosters ‘immaturity and irresponsibility’ and the failure to use one’s own judgement due to laziness or cowardice. My use of love, here, is influenced by the writings of Gillian Rose, for whom love is ‘riskful engagement’ (Rose 1995: 71) and ‘involves negotiating boundaries between oneself and others, knowing that we will get love wrong, yet continuing to do “love’s work” ’ (Lloyd 2007: 699). See, for example, Gillian Rose’s (1995) phenomenology of love in her philosophical memoir, Love’s Work, and Vincent Lloyd’s (2011, 2008, 2007) discussion of the place of love in Rose’s writings. For a discussion of ‘teaching as a form of lovingkindness’ and the ethics and practicalities of inviting and guiding students on a discomforting journey, see Boler (2004: 130). I am grateful to Amanda Russell Beattie, Patrick Hayden, Kim Huynh, Greta Fowler Snyder, Brent J. Steele and Ben Thirkell-White for their helpful comments, advice and encouragement, and to Jess Balu for her invaluable research assistance.

3

Ambiguity, Existence, Cosmopolitanism: Simone de Beauvoir and a Global Theory of Feminist Recognition Monica Mookherjee

Introduction Given the diverse violations of human rights affecting women throughout the world, and the likelihood that such violations misrecognize their moral worth, a cosmopolitan feminist theory of recognition seems timely. While the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ has been understood in different ways,1 in essence the movement entails a shift away from normative political theory’s usual emphasis on the nation-state. That is, cosmopolitans claim that all individuals in the world count as objects of moral concern, with their geopolitical, cultural and class differences still acknowledged (Beck 2006; Hall 2002). Yet, some feminists have questioned the ability of current cosmopolitan theories to recognize gendered power relations in the world today (Reilly 2007; Vidmar-Horvat 2013). Furthermore, although the politics of recognition has become a key movement in contemporary political theory, feminists are often sceptical about this approach. A central concern is that to be recognized for one’s gender has been a source of much oppression in history, and that it is therefore unsatisfactory to rely on the concept of recognition in pursuing feminist goals (McNay 2008; Nicholson 1996). While these concerns are significant, a cosmopolitan feminist account of recognition still retains attractions. Although differences in age, class, gender, able-bodiedness and culture clearly matter, the central cosmopolitan idea that citizens of the world are connected through their common humanity seems to appeal to feminist moral intuition. At least, the focus on the moral arbitrariness of the nation-state appears rightly to emphasize that women around the world, and indeed all human beings, deserve moral concern beyond state borders in an

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age of globalization. Given long-standing debates about the false universalism of much feminist theory, or about its covert focus on First-World women’s experiences, it seems that feminists cannot avoid the ethical obligation to ‘recognize’, in the sense of understanding and seeking to assist, the lives of distant others. Therefore, the cosmopolitan movement away from excessive forms of nationalism, and its acknowledgement of bonds outside the classic social contract, remain important feminist goals. Briefly, to combine obligations to the distant needy with attention to the physically near appears crucial for gender justice today. The challenge lies in how to understand and theorize these commitments. A recent and prominent approach to feminist recognition has been offered by American critical theorist Nancy Fraser (2008b; 2013).2 Although Fraser herself steers away from the ‘cosmopolitan’ label, she convincingly contends that feminist theory in an age of pluralism cannot remain focused on territorially defined nations. She proposes a promising tripartite approach to gender justice, including recognition, redistribution and representation, which aims to apply to all the world’s women. Yet, as Fraser’s approach risks homogenizing women’s experiences in terms of objectively harmful social structures worldwide, it risks disregarding the lived realities of those who are impacted differently by globalization. In light of this problem, this chapter defends a different route to feminist cosmopolitan recognition, which focuses on the diverse, often hidden and unarticulated experiences of social suffering in the earlier existentialist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir (1948, 1972, 1968). Contesting charges that Beauvoir’s thought fails to respond adequately to contemporary feminist concerns, I suggest that a close re-reading of her theory yields a promising framework for a global feminist politics of recognition, which may speak more firmly to contemporary realities of globalization than some alternative approaches. With these points in mind, the chapter is structured as follows. Section 2 considers the difficulties with Fraser’s formulation of gender misrecognition, which motivate the chapter’s turn to Beauvoir’s feminist existentialism in The Second Sex (1972). Section 3 identifies in Beauvoir’s earlier text The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948) her understanding of the struggle for recognition as an ambiguous tension between human agency and the constraints of the body and situation. Suggesting that Beauvoir’s cosmopolitan universalism lies firstly in the common risk of repressing the human capacity to create meaning in the context of such tension, I label this dimension of the problem the suppressed potentiality moment of gender misrecognition. Section 4 extracts from Beauvoir’s account the more complex cosmopolitan insight that the plight of the distant

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needy, across state borders, may take priority over duties of care and reciprocity towards fellow citizens within a nation. The emphasis in this dimension is still on lived experience rather than objective social structures, as the very deprived in remote regions may experience their constraints in very different ways. I call this potential diversity in female experiences worldwide, the resistance within commonality moment of gender misrecognition. Section 5 concludes that Beauvoir’s cosmopolitan feminism involves an interactive understanding of the two moments of misrecognition, or a dialectic between equality and diversity, which sustains hope for coalitions between near and distant women. While this account meets Fraser’s key objective to establish duties of empowerment and care across borders, it goes further by requiring the self to confront crucial ambiguities in what it fails to understand or represses – that is to say, the Other within oneself (Kristeva 1993). In summary, this chapter’s turn back to Beauvoir’s post-war existentialism suggests an ambiguous world community, always in a process of becoming and perpetually incomplete. It advocates a truly cosmopolitan feminist practice of empowering those who seemingly exist beyond either rights or a more standard politics of cultural recognition.

Cosmopolitan feminism: Misrecognition as subjection to objective social structures? As I suggested at the outset, one of the few writers currently offering what might be deemed a cosmopolitan feminist approach to recognition is critical theorist Nancy Fraser (2008b; 2013). While Fraser explicitly avoids labelling herself a cosmopolitan, her recent aim is to show that social movements like feminism cannot remain with the frame of state-territorial justice alone, or within a narrow recognition theory which focuses on cultural identity. Doing so would, she believes, underplay the role of forces such as neoliberal markets in undermining the quality of diverse women’s lives. By highlighting sources of gender disempowerment such as the disproportionate burdens on women through neoliberal economic policies, Fraser (2008b: 39) urges engagement of the world’s most deprived in a dialogue about the source, or ‘frame’, of injustices affecting their lives. She thus offers a compelling three-dimensional analysis of gender injustices, including symbolic misrecognition, resource scarcity and lack of political representation. In spite of her rejection of the label, she suggests cosmopolitan hope for diverse women’s engagement as agents of their own needs and rights.

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While such aims are clearly noteworthy, certain blind spots in Fraser’s formulation of misrecognition seem to impede her diagnosis of the challenges facing a truly cosmopolitan feminism. For, while the effects of economic globalization may be deeply gendered, how the concept of misrecognition is understood seems crucial to addressing the situation of women worldwide. Although Fraser’s emphasis on the objectivity of social and economic structures is compelling in many respects, understanding misrecognition in these terms only seems to risk homogenizing human experiences. One risks failing to notice the hidden, inarticulate nature of social suffering, which often exists in spite of institutional recognition such as equal resources, representation or rights. On this reading, Fraser’s approach might not so easily secure the twin aims of cosmopolitan feminism, namely to recognize our common humanity (Diogenes’ kosmoupolitês or world citizenship),3 and to acknowledge diverse forms of female suffering, which may resist shared understanding in a transparent self–other relationship. To analyse this point more deeply, I shall briefly survey Fraser’s account of gender recognition, with the caveat that a more detailed discussion would be ideally needed to do justice to her account. Fraser’s interest in recognition politics began two decades ago, in the notable relation that she charted between redistribution along class lines, and an identity politics oriented to unequal status or misrecognition (Fraser 1995; Thompson 2006: 11). Over time, Fraser has insisted that redistribution and recognition should be analysed together, and she appeals to the ‘bi-valence’ of gender disadvantage in particular, or the location of female oppression in both distributive inequality and status subordination (Fraser 2007). The solution that she proposes, of ensuring participatory parity, or the capacity to interact as the social equal of others with dignity, seems a worthy cosmopolitan feminist premise. The concept of participatory parity seems to acknowledge the complexity of women’s experiences of social disadvantage, without reducing them simply to a lack of confidence or of compromised self-esteem. The rejection of a psychological account of misrecognition, however, brings both advantages and drawbacks. Unlike other notable recognition theorists (Honneth 1995; Taylor 1994), Fraser opposes a focus on individual psychology in an analysis of misrecognition. She distinguishes her ‘status’ model from an approach based on ‘identity’ (2003: 31). Charles Taylor, a proponent of the identity model, famously claims that misrecognition produces an internally damaged relation-to-self, and ‘inflicts a grievous wound, saddling its victims with crippling self-hatred’ (1994: 26). Similarly, Honneth (1995) argues that the psychological experience of being denied self-respect forms the motivation for most social justice movements. Fraser does not deny such psychological harm, but claims

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that this does not, in itself, explain misrecognition. Rather, the injustice lies in the status order of society. She holds this view for at least three reasons (Thompson 2006), which seem relevant to understanding her approach to cosmopolitan duties of care and empowerment for women across national borders. To be specific, one of Fraser’s central worries is that if misrecognition is measured by the individual’s state of mind, then it is a short step to ‘blaming the victim’, or paternalistic intrusion into the minds of the oppressors (2003: 31). Her concern is also that if the psychological theory through which the harm is explained were discredited, then a person’s claim of unjust misrecognition would fail. Furthermore, and perhaps most relevant for cosmopolitan feminism, Fraser is anxious that any account of misrecognition based on a theory of the human psyche would appeal to a controversial, and probably sectarian, concept of the good life which would not be supported by all globally (Fraser 2003: 31). From these critiques, Fraser suggests an alternative ‘status’ model of recognition, which assumes that human identities are discursively constructed (2008b: 152) from mutable institutional practices, such as norms of gender segregation. Individual subjectivity is relevant to understanding gender misrecognition; but, for Fraser, it must be seen as constructed in relation to objective patterns of social disrespect, which result from systematic institutional and material structures that denigrate certain human lives. The ethical commitments arising from Fraser’s account of gender misrecognition seem productive. It seems right to focus on deconstructing the objective structural norms that denigrate women’s identities by, for instance, marginalizing the value of domestic labour. Yet the complex realities of contemporary globalization seem to invite cosmopolitan feminists to envisage a richer account of structure-agency relation to better understand struggles against misrecognition. They seem to involve acknowledging the diversity of ways that human beings ‘live’ these social structures. Without appreciating the variable relationship between individual subjectivity and macro-social structures, one risks underestimating the obstacles confronted by real people in articulating their needs and rights in the most restrictive environments. While social structures may be objective, they are mediated through concrete human experiences in the symbolic dimensions of social life.4 To this extent, a cosmopolitan feminism built on Fraser’s insights might elide crucial issues, because to overemphasize social structures is perhaps not to explain misrecognition as a distinct mode of oppression. An added problem is that Fraser’s key distinction between ‘identity’ and ‘status’ recognition seems overdrawn, and, arguably, fails to provide a viable

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theoretical insight for global feminists. Fraser believes that the identity model presupposes an authentic self which the oppressed aspire to reclaim through positive social acknowledgement (2003: 32). Fraser takes this affirmative identity mode of recognition, in contrast to her ‘transformative’ approach grounded on parity of social status, to presuppose an individual who seeks recognition by identifying with ascribed social identifications. However, while the pursuit of authenticity in this sense seems applicable to cultural or national groups, and is keenly reflected in social movements such as German Romanticism (Zurn 2003: 530), it does not appear to flow logically from the psychological, identity-based conception of recognition as such. Moreover, the distinction between pursuing authenticity and transforming unequal status does not seem to apply very well to non-cultural movements such as global feminism. Of course, cosmopolitan feminists might wish to contest any ideal of gender recognition which advocates conformity with accepted conceptions of womanhood. However, they might still view authenticity as a central goal, at least where it is a matter of recognizing one’s humanity, or, to use Hegelian language, one’s status as a ‘being-for-oneself ’. To this extent, identity-models like Honneth’s seem right to focus on lived experience, and to suggest that selfalienation in severely restricted environments provides a reasonable indicator of injustice (1995: 22; Zurn 2003: 221). If this is true, it seems that a focus on objective structures risks failing to recognize the complexity of misrecognition in a global era. While Fraser aims to theorize the post-socialist condition, her most recent feminist writings (2013) seem to draw on a grand theory of economic oppression which may be opposed to the deterritorializing impulse of a critical cosmopolitanism, or its desire to engage with diversity and unfamiliarity (Vidmar-Horvat 2013). If all female experience were reducible to objective social structures, it would be hard to conceptualize the human differences which form the real challenge of cosmopolitan theory. Indeed, it is likely that any grand theory of social structure would be as controversial globally as the psychological theories which Fraser criticizes. The objectivist approach might return feminists to earlier worries about the tendency of cosmopolitanism to ambitiously declare universal law in ways that are insensitive to the real problems faced by ordinary people (Vidmar-Horvat 2013: 3). The specificity of social movements would be lost, along with diverse human beings’ everyday experiences of injustice. While acknowledging the acuity of many of Fraser’s insights, then, this chapter responds to the difficulties of her approach to recognition by turning back to feminists’ long-standing emphasis on lived experience, in order to propose

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more realistic duties of empowerment across borders. The approach will aim to theorize ethical ties to a shared humanity without homogenizing the experiences of the near and the distant. Although cosmopolitanism assumes that ‘there are reciprocal moral obligations and bonds of human solidarity that transcend other identity-categories’ (Colas 1994), the task is also to recognize variety in human experiences within processes of globalization. As transparent understanding between self and other might always be elusive, the aim must be to embrace this ambiguity, and to recognize that the empowerment of distant others is not only a matter of economic reforms or asserting a charter of rights. As Martha Nussbaum (1997) observes, the cosmopolitan desire to respond to common humanity must be combined with a concern sympathetically to understand the predicaments of the distant needy, who may be located in different ways in multiple oppressions. Moreover, the aim of cosmopolitan feminism would be to acknowledge the aporia in relations of recognition, or the fact that the Other is never reducible to the same, nor entirely other, but both familiar and partly obscure (Kristeva 1991). Recognizing existential unfamiliarity as the challenge for world citizenship encourages a view of recognition as always in process of ‘becoming’. Such a cosmopolitan feminist theory of recognition would, it is hoped, support relations of recognition which are constantly formulated and reformulated, never fully or perfectly achieved (Weir 2008: 111).5

Beauvoir, ambiguity and the cosmopolitan universalism of lived experience Even if cosmopolitan feminists appreciate the need to focus their account of recognition on lived experiences of social suffering, they might have doubts about turning back to the post-war feminist existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir (1948, 1968, 1972). While Beauvoir’s notable portrayal of woman as the Inessential Other appears strongly cosmopolitan in its universalist aspiration, certain thirdwave feminists later charged her with drawing only on her own ‘First-World’, middle-class context (Spelman 1990). Furthermore, although Beauvoir might be read as seeking to embolden women to overcome a subordinate sexual identity, her feminist proposal has been thought a ‘masculine’ ideal, and even a ‘revolt against femininity’ (Young 1985: 173). Although such concerns are significant, I shall emphasize the relevance of Beauvoir’s thought to contemporary feminist theories of recognition, by highlighting its potential to establish cosmopolitan solidarity between women without homogenizing their experiences.

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To begin, Beauvoir’s acclaimed feminist treatise in The Second Sex (1972) reflects her earlier outline of the human condition in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948). This earlier essay puts forward insights about embodied human experience which seems to underpin a productive cosmopolitan feminist claim. Following Kruks’ (1998, 2012) analysis of the concept of ambiguity in Beauvoir’s thought, I suggest that Beauvoir’s concern with the denial of women’s human ambiguity provides a compelling initial ground for a feminist cosmopolitan theory of recognition. I shall call this initial claim the ‘suppressed potentiality moment of gender misrecognition’. Beauvoir does not deny that objective structures sustain gender inequality, and in partial accordance with Fraser, locates female oppression in biological, historical, economic and psychoanalytical processes (1972: Chapter 2). However, misrecognition for Beauvoir principally involves a human being’s personal experience of a risk to their potential to create meaning in the world, and of being defined by others in such a way that denies their essential ambiguity. This rather complex idea can be best understood by seeing that Beauvoir’s central feminist claim that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (1972: 293) builds on her earlier insistence in The Ethics that human beings are without biological or any other essence: we become what we will ourselves to be. Thus, it is the vulnerability of all to a suppression of our potentiality to create original meaning in the world that explains, for Beauvoir, the problem of misrecognition. We are all at risk, because human life is ambiguous in a number of ways. Firstly, although we must act, our agency is constrained by our bodies and situation. Moreover, our ends are ambiguous owing to a potential conflict between our goals. Finally, as we project our life-plans into an unknowable future, we have insufficient control over the world to ensure these projects (1948: 18). In these senses, Beauvoir premises her account of misrecognition on the lived experience of social suffering. Rather than appealing to metanarratives of historical materialism or biological determinism, she submits that it is women’s ambiguity, and, in relation to it their trans-cultural need for ‘ethical-spiritual self-creation’ (Vintges 2006: 214), that explains their common proneness to misrecognition. More specifically, in contrast with Sartre’s (2003) account of freedom as disembodied consciousness, Beauvoir takes human action to arise from the constraints of the body and social relations, which provide us with the concrete location from which ‘we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting’ (1948: 2–3). While Beauvoir therefore does not deny Fraser’s insight concerning the restrictiveness of social structures, her consciousness of the excesses of fascist movements of her time leads her to question the metaphysical givenness of these

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structures and to insist on the normative responsibility of human beings to create humane values and modes of living together (Kruks 1998: 52). Beauvoir invokes her reading of Hegel, Merleau-Ponty and Kojève to insist that true humanity involves acknowledging ambiguity rather than succumbing to totalitarianism. In fact, it is the former that defines human beings and explains the necessity of ethics itself (Kellner 2006: 11). If this interpretation is plausible, Beauvoir’s feminist insight is not that women’s oppression is so pervasive that their achievement of recognition is impossible (cf. Lundgren-Gothlin 1996).6 Rather, her key thought is that, while they are socially construed as inessential (1972: 29), women are nonetheless involved in the specieswide struggle for reciprocal recognition (1972: 195).7 This is because human life is not a matter of transcending our facticity through a struggle against others, as Sartre would have it, but a question of seeking mutuality or reciprocity (1948: 28; 1972: Conclusion).8 Like all humanity, women confirm their existence by creating meaning intersubjectively, as life is impossible without friendship and generosity (1972: 140; Ward 2006: 154). The risk that one’s effort to create intersubjective meaning will be stunted is thus reflected in Beauvoir’s account of misrecognition as a suppressed potentiality for self-definition in dialogue with the Other. Rather than assuming the futility of women’s efforts for recognition,9 then, Beauvoir seeks in the The Second Sex to show how all human beings risk misrecognition of their distinctive humanity. For Beauvoir, this risk afflicts women particularly, because they are prone to assume the social roles foisted upon them, falling into what she calls, following Sartre, the condition of ‘seriousness’. On this account, external (religious, political or patriarchal) values are taken as given. To fall into seriousness is to deny one’s ambiguity, which is common not only because human beings typically evade the anguish of assuming responsibility for creating meanings. It is also because, in the struggle for recognition, for Beauvoir man is the Subject that defines himself in contrast to all that he perceives as different. Femininity thus becomes ambiguous in the further sense that women are cast as whatever man as Subject decides that he is not. The attributes of femininity in any society may thus be ‘diverse and incompatible’ (Kruks, 2012: 69). As Beauvoir further explains, ‘it is this ambivalence of the Other, of Woman, that will be reflected in the rest of her history . . . But this will be ambiguous: by complete possession and control, woman would be debased to the rank of a thing’ (1972: 112). Gender misrecognition for Beauvoir thus inflicts a serious wound in Taylor’s sense because women’s ambiguity is suppressed by the male–female dualities that human consciousness has produced; and because society creates ambiguities for

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women by foisting on them diverse and conflicting roles (Kruks 2012: 70). The possibility of misrecognition arises readily because women become mired in the infantile world in which established meanings are accepted unquestionably (1972: 52). This is why Beauvoir famously dismisses the possibility of a female revolution, claiming that women’s rebellion has never been ‘anything more than a symbolic agitation’ (1972: 19). While contemporary feminists might be concerned about what seems a dispiriting account of women’s experience, Beauvoir’s insight is not ultimately pessimistic. As I hope to show, the fact that women of all national and cultural contexts, from the Independent Woman to the woman in the Harem (Beauvoir 1972: Chapter 10), live with their human ambiguity provides a productive premise for contemporary cosmopolitan feminist theories of recognition. To support this idea, however, the issue of whether Beauvoir presents an exaggerated picture of gender misrecognition requires further attention. Later feminists (e.g. Irigaray 1992; Spelman 1990) complained about a seemingly problematic tendency in Beauvoir’s writings to regard gender as the primary axis of power. However, this criticism is questionable, as Beauvoir’s key point is that alterity, or the process of othering, is central to all human relations. She is wary of essentialist identities such as ‘the Slav soul, the Jewish character, the primitive mentality, or das ewige Weib, the eternal feminine’ (1972: 3) – images which have led to fanaticism in history and which deny human ambiguity. This is so, even though she believes in a ‘common basis that underlies individual feminine experience’ (Beauvoir 1972: 1). If this is right, Beauvoir’s concept of gender misrecognition is not limited in principle to women’s campaigns for sexual and reproductive freedoms in European societies, important though such movements have historically been. As Stavro (2007) observes, Beauvoir recognizes the historical contingency of the structures that uphold gender oppression, thereby breaking down the oppositional gender binary that The Second Sex seems to construct, and confirms that diverse women address their human ambiguity through various social structures in different cultural and political locations. For instance, as Stavro (2007: 449; citing Beauvoir 1972: Chapter 4) observes, Beauvoir recognizes that women in pre-industrial societies were actively engaged in village life; and she praises the financial independence of working-class women. Thus, women live their predicaments in different ways in different social contracts; but what unites them is their ambiguous location between mind and body; the fact that they are ‘not free not to be [women], for that is how the social world designates [their] embodied existence’ (Stavro 2007: 449).

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As it is, however, this account of Beauvoir’s concept of feminist recognition may fall short from a cosmopolitan perspective. While her narrative concerning misrecognition as the suppression of ambiguity seems instructive, one might worry about the solutions that she envisages, such as equal rights and institutional reforms favouring equal pay and reproductive freedom (Beauvoir 1972: Conclusion). Reflecting her post-war, middle-class French experience, the concern is that the national specificity of the struggles for gender recognition that she describes render her account of the struggle against misrecognition rather parochial. The implication may be that women inevitably address their ambiguity within a particular sphere of gendered meanings such as a nation. On this reading, Beauvoir’s emphasis on liberalizing norms of sexuality and motherhood in The Second Sex presumes shared understandings about gender roles which are most likely sustained within a particular territorially bounded historical form such as the nation. The account might fall short of explaining women’s connection with, and duties to empower, others in radically different social, economic and political locations. Cosmopolitan feminists would presumably wish to acknowledge an ethical connection between ‘First World’ women and those who might experience different, and even more severe, deprivations in radically different locations. The way the latter experience misrecognition might be distinct from women who perceive tensions between, say, conventional Western norms of beauty, and the pressure to conform to an ideal of motherhood, for instance. Yet, as we shall see, Beauvoir’s thought offers resources for re-imagining relations of recognition and duties of care beyond borders. The framework of her thought addresses the challenge that cosmopolitan feminist theories confront by explaining human solidarity realistically across the deep social and economic divisions between human lives, and across the boundaries of different public spheres in the contemporary world. Beauvoir’s concept of ambiguity, as I hope to show next, promises a global vision of gender recognition and care that does not replicate the problems with older cosmopolitanisms, which, arguably, often asserted ideals of ‘peace’ or ‘human rights’ in ways that were not truly helpful for emancipatory causes (Reilly 2007: 182; cf. Archibugi, Held and Kohler 1991). To pre-empt my discussion below, then, Beauvoir’s cosmopolitanism is robustly anti-parochial, in that her underlying but qualified commitment to (early) Marxist ideas enables her to envisage, with Fraser, that women’s lives diverge radically around the world, with some existing below nutritional adequacy, without shelter, bodily security or opportunity. Thus, seriousness is not just one condition, but one of many; it affects women diversely. Beauvoir

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acknowledges that sometimes social norms are so entrenched in distant parts of the world that a person’s failure to revolt, and hence their descent into seriousness, may not be thought voluntary. Arguably, this is the situation of the world’s disenfranchised and deprived, a distressing proportion of whom are women, who seem to exist beyond rights and recognition (Jaggar, 2001). For Beauvoir, while all are united by their experience of ambiguity, personal experiences diverge across different regions of the world, and diversity is found even within the most destitute regions. The idea that the more fortunate have duties to empower the distant Other may be extracted from Beauvoir’s thought, thus taking post-war existentialism beyond the fraught twentieth-century European feminist causes, which formed the impetus for Beauvoir’s groundwork in The Second Sex.

The diversity of global misrecognition: The ‘resistance within commonality’ moment Although Beauvoir’s focus on the lived experience of ambiguity seems, then, more attractive than Fraser’s objectivism, a question that arises is whether her approach assumes that individuals may always, even outside the Western liberal democracy on which her writings focus, act voluntarily to contest social meanings in the globalizing world. Such an assumption might disregard the fact that globalization has been thought to lead to severe economic burdens and intense forms of fundamentalism for women of developing countries in particular (Moghadam 1999; Ngan-ling Chow 2003). In this context, would Beauvoir’s cosmopolitanism acknowledge the wide gulf between experiences of women of richer and poorer nations, where no common framework of gendered meanings could be assumed? While such shared meanings might provide a basis for solidarity between women in a particular social contract or national public sphere, the challenge is to establish feminist duties of empowerment and care globally, in a manner which is still cognizant of diversity. While Beauvoir distinguishes in The Second Sex the twentieth-century Western woman from the African slave of the past (1972: 145), she could not, in fairness, have anticipated the range of diversity that feminist cosmopolitans encounter today. Moreover, even within her own context, her sweeping survey of women in history, literature and psychoanalysis10 seems marred by reductive statements, such as, ‘We shall study the evolution [of femininity] in the West. The history of woman in the East, in India, in China, has been in effect that of a long

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and unchanging slavery’ (1972: 113). In spite of this, I shall now contend that Beauvoir’s notion of ambiguity contains normative means to establish feminist obligations between the near and the distant realistically, in a cosmopolitan account of gender misrecognition. One finds hints of this wider concept of misrecognition in her claim that women in different societies have contributed assiduously to productive labour, without ‘a definite conquest of [their] social dignity’ (1972: 168), even though Beauvoir admittedly assumes middle-class French society to be ‘typical’ (1972: 168 fn. 6). I shall call the broader dimension of misrecognition in Beauvoir’s thought the ‘resistance within commonality moment of gender misrecognition’. It suggests how women of vastly different economic and social regions may experience their condition differently than women in more privileged circumstances, and differently too than others who share their material situations. Beauvoir’s thought enables a conception of misrecognition that establishes duties of empowerment, connection and care by addressing these divergent experiences directly. This second moment of gender misrecognition may be explained by considering Beauvoir’s acceptance of the early Marx’s ideas (Lundgren-Gothlin 1996), in contrast to the orthodox communism prevalent in France in the 1940s. The Second Sex appeals repeatedly to concepts of alienation and false consciousness to explain women’s oppression, even though Beauvoir ultimately avoids communist rationalism and urges instead an ‘ambiguous humanism’ (Kruks 2012), which views socialist transformation as a means to realize diverse modes of living and of social organization (cf. Stone 1987).11 While she accepts the material base of oppression, Beauvoir’s psychological understanding of subjugation leads her to acknowledge that, even in conditions where people enjoy very little option, they share with the more fortunate the necessity of negotiating and responding to their situations uniquely, owing to the ambiguity of all human projects and ends. As Stavro observes (2007: 440), Beauvoir defends a notion of ‘connected existences’ between all human beings, recognizing class difference without assuming its unique causal power and without economic reductiveness.12 Against Engels, she insists that class conflict does not explain gender inequality (1972: Chapter 3);13 and that women do not form a class. As women ‘have no past, no history, no religion of their own’ (1972: 20), the interweaving of gender with different axes of power is recognized. Bourgeois women often feel solidarity with men of their class rather than with working-class women; and white women often disregard the concerns of women of other ‘races’ (1972: 19). Yet the implications of this apparent pessimism with regard to global solidarity are mitigated by Beauvoir’s deeper belief in reciprocity and friendship

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(1972: Conclusion). The possibility Beauvoir envisages of human connections in the face of class differences and colonial power emerges in her essay about Djamila Boupacha, a member of the Front de Libération Nationale during the Algerian struggle for independence. Boupacha had been raped and tortured by French soldiers. Her cause was taken up by Gisèle Hamili, an Algerian attorney, with whom Beauvoir worked to assist the young woman (Beauvoir and Halimi 1962). Stavro summarizes Beauvoir’s attitude in the following way: Beauvoir never assumed that she could understand Boupacha . . . nor could she speak for her; however, she did not abandon all efforts to understand her. As their work proceeded, Beauvoir came to appreciate their cultural differences. Her perspective was enlarged, but this did not give her licence to speak for women of colonial status, nor as an Algerian nationalist. (2007: 453)

The first stage of establishing care and connection was Beauvoir’s acknowledgement of the wide gulf between the women’s experiences and their division through colonial violence. So much so that the words ‘I am French’ became ‘scalded on [her] throat like a hideous deformity’ (Beauvoir and Halimi 1962: 454). Beauvoir thus suggests that, while it is possible to challenge bourgeois women for failing to take responsibility for their freedom and their human ambiguity, the other’s failure to resist may not be a voluntary act of bad faith. Moreover, it is the responsibility of the more fortunate to acknowledge this difference, and to struggle on behalf of the least well-off (Beauvoir 1948: 71).14 While Beauvoir’s cosmopolitan premise is that all human beings are prone to the suppression of their potentiality to create meaning, some in the most materially deprived and politically unstable regions experience this condition differently. It is important that Beauvoir offers this insight, to avoid the charge of defending an abstract feminism which would fail to respond to the real gendered dynamics of the postcolonial world. As we shall see, Beauvoir acknowledges qualitative difference in women’s embodied experiences globally, encouraging an open dialogue between the ‘privileged’ and the ‘oppressed’ about their needs and rights. Conscious of her colonial privilege, then, Beauvoir’s thought is that, while people in remote locations might seem without options or choice (Kruks 1998: 43), they never lose their agency or humanity. Even the severely oppressed retain what Beauvoir calls ontological freedom (1948: 41, 21; Lisenbard 1999); thus, they retain their ambiguity. To deny this fact risks further dehumanizing them. Beauvoir therefore emphasizes both commonality and difference in the experience of gender misrecognition, in order to refute absolute distinctions between ‘First’ and ‘Third World’, or ‘privileged’ and ‘most oppressed’ women

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while still maintaining the Marxist insight that the experiences of the more and least fortunate differ qualitatively.15 As Weiss (2006) observes, Beauvoir does not follow through the implications of her thoughts in this regard. However, such openness is productive for a cosmopolitan feminist theory of recognition. It demonstrates that, while women may share a common structural disadvantage globally, the Other’s experience might always challenge and disrupt a stable understanding of what misrecognition or oppression concretely mean. We shall return to this issue, but the key point for now is that Beauvoir recognizes the disparity of life-conditions in different regions of the world, and encourages cosmopolitan solidarity between near and distant others in the face of this difference. In conditions of extreme exploitation and gender stratification, it is not that a person loses their ambiguity; rather, it is that their field of interpretive possibilities is very closed (Butler 1986). Here, the anguish of the suppressed potentiality moment is, arguably, surpassed by a different condition. A person who is without food, education, political freedom or real opportunity may not even be able to conceive the open future which those from the outside might observe (Weiss 2006). Hence, a woman who opts to abort her unborn foetus in a developing nation may think and decide, but may not be able to conceptualize a path to individual or collective emancipation. She may respond, react and resist; but, ultimately, ‘living is not dying’, and even, at the very extreme, perhaps in cases of torture, ‘human existence [becomes] indistinguishable from absurd vegetation’ (1948: 82–3). Revolt becomes unlikely, as individuals are nearly reduced to facticity.16 Kruks (1998: 56) interprets Beauvoir to mean that the very misrecognized have internalized their thing-like status to a point that their ontological freedom is modified. But this extreme reading is contradicted by Beauvoir’s insistence on ontological freedom even in the most constrained circumstances (1972: 41; Linsenbard 1999: 153). That the most downtrodden share human traits with the more fortunate, while also, potentially, suffering a different, ‘resistant’, experience is reflected in Beauvoir’s discussion of female genital mutilation in Africa late in her life (Wenzel 1986). This practice is as much ‘our’ problem as it is that of the ‘other’ woman, because women who undergo these surgeries still experience their ambiguity; they resist the thing-like designation. ‘The Other is multiple’ (Beauvoir 1948: 144). Beauvoir therefore reads Marx in a specific way, and as usual refuses to accept received sociological or philosophical narratives uncritically. Against the French Communist Party, she argues that ‘the very notion of action would lose all meaning if history were a mechanical unrolling in which man appears only as a passive conductor of outside forces’ (1948: 15). Following the labour theory of value,

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she agrees that the work of the extremely oppressed can become meaningless, or reduced to ‘the repetition of mechanical gestures’ (1948: 83). Yet human experience still takes primacy over social structures, as facticity is always variously interpreted. So, even if a woman in an economically deprived setting cannot decide to act in a way that would radically change dominant social relations, her interpretation of and reaction to her situation, owing to her culture, social standing, age and able-bodiedness, might differ from that of a woman in a similarly deprived region elsewhere. This diversity is exemplified by the ambiguous figure of the hetaira in The Second Sex (1972: 580). On the one hand, she gains social power and recognition from her beauty and sexuality, but, ultimately, to Beauvoir’s mind at least, ‘does not reveal the world, [and] opens up no avenues to human transcendence’. The crucial point in regard to a feminist cosmopolitanism is that Beauvoir’s awareness of this diversity between women’s experiences motivates her to contest universal civil and political rights as the certain route to feminist justice (1948: 133). For Beauvoir, the unquestionable assertion of rights in any sphere, whether culture, nation or world, is a form of seriousness which, like the materialist conception of history or the pursuit of socialist revolution, denies the ambiguity of humanity (Zakin 2006: 42). Thus, Beauvoir urges unsettling any one social contract or field of ethical concern, as we cannot evade our responsibility to make difficult choices about how to effect our duties of care in particular cases. To Beauvoir’s mind, the problem with ambitious declarations of jus cosmopoliticum or universal law is that if we ‘dissimulate our subjectivity’ into one static form of citizenship, absolutizing a single cause such as postcolonial liberation or world hunger, we risk failing to respond appropriately and contextually to others’ humanity (Beauvoir 1948: 49). This idea should be carefully understood. Beauvoir does not deny the value of human rights and equality, as she concedes that democratic societies ‘strive to confirm in citizens a feeling of their individual value’ (1948: 106). For this reason, she continually insists that liberal feminist reforms in post-war France, such as equal pay, reproductive rights and access to clinically safe abortion, would be necessary for citizens to realize their ambiguity (1948: 106–7). However, as Zakin explains, ultimately she suggests the limits of any concrete universal morality, and points to a dimension of meaning-creation excessive of them (2006: 43). Thus, while later French feminists have tended to identify Beauvoir’s feminism disparagingly with conventional equality reforms for middle-class French women only (Irigaray 1992; Kristeva 1986; cf. Beauvoir 1972: 736–7),17 Beauvoir’s commitment to the ultimate ungroundability of absolute values moves her theory beyond any unproblematic assertion of citizenship rights, and to question any sphere of

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ethical concern, whether ‘the Nation, Empire, Union, Economy, etc.’ (1948: 145; Bergoffen 1997). Absolutizing any social or political value in any location not only risks totalitarianism, but it mystifies the fact that human beings must decide what to do in the face of equally compelling claims, where the outcomes of our projects are ambiguous. Moreover, absolutizing one moral scheme cannot resolve all the human suffering encountered in the world. This is not only because such suffering is diverse and complex, but because neither the pursuit of economic equality nor liberal rights can bring about the symbolic changes needed for human beings to recognize each other’s ambiguity fully (Zakin 2006). Hence, these moral frameworks cannot ground First World women’s commitment to the well-being of the Other. They cannot ground our pursuit of human connection or care. To summarize, the ‘resistance within commonality moment of gender misrecognition’ suggests that the experience of oppression, while depending on our shared human condition, may be experienced in different ways even by those in similar material situations. While Beauvoir assumes this point as a trans-cultural, trans-historical truth about the human condition, the problem of misrecognition cannot be resolved through historical materialism or universal rights. Only by appreciating human ambiguity fully can we understand the ‘choice’ of a woman, in the example given earlier, in a context of severe material deprivation and gender disadvantage, to abort the foetus of the unborn female child (Moazam 2004; Rogers et al. 2007). This is not to dismiss the value of universal rights or to tolerate injustice, but it is to recognize the contestability of the meaning of those rights and universal prescriptions. The more fortunate should foster this contestability because, as human beings are ontologically free, they make the most rational choices that they could possibly make in their circumstances. Moreover, at times people exercise rights in a very restricted field of interpretative possibilities. By insistently pursuing rights, communist revolution, or any other concept of universal justice, one might fail to appreciate the material and psychic specificity of other lives. Thus, the ‘resistance within commonality’ moment responds to and encourages the aspiration for women to articulate their own needs and rights in both Fraser’s and Beauvoir’s senses. Commonality between women may be acknowledged, without reducing each to an instance of the same. This second moment in Beauvoir’s thought enables feminists to acknowledge the location of women in the same oppressive social structures, without presuming too much from this commonality. As Stavro aptly summarizes, Beauvoir establishes unity in diversity without fully reducing women’s situations to either subjective ‘free’ choice or the objective constraints of social and economic class (2007: 474).

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Being-for-the-misrecognized in Beauvoir’s cosmopolitan feminist theory At this late stage, it is worth pressing on the cosmopolitan implications of the two moments of gender misrecognition in Beauvoir’s thought. I would like to suggest finally that, when the two ambiguous moments are construed as an interactive dialectic between equality as sameness and diversity, Beauvoir’s philosophy supports a commitment to a negotiated, unfinished cosmopolitanism, which recognizes the complexities of care across borders, and which is open to learning from the misrecognized rather than simply assisting through static commitments to rights. Rather than rejecting the value of human rights and equality, Beauvoir in fact encourages movement beyond them, as we have seen. Instead of following the familiar feminist campaigns for ‘equality in difference’, Beauvoir’s cosmopolitan feminism recognizes ‘differences in equality’ (Zakin 2006: 47). As Zakin explains, Beauvoir urges an ideal of human recognition which speaks to the ‘diversity and multiplicity of sexed subjects, towards the demassification of the universal’ (2006: 47) and its rootedness in the particularity and locality of real human beings’ lives. This must be so because, as Beauvoir says, ‘particularity is precisely a universal fact’ (1972: 180). It is because of this emphasis on the locality of our experiences that we cannot wait on the metaphysical guarantee of a charter of rights or communist manifesto. We may rely only on the humane values and projects that we create together, as a response to our human ambiguity. The ideal of reciprocal recognition extracted from Beauvoir’s thought in my view provides new inspiration for cosmopolitan recognition theory. It responds well to the concerns of writers who contend that cosmopolitan feminism must avoid narrowly defined, Western understandings of human rights (Reilly 2007: 180; Robinson 2003); and that it should clear space for democratically grounded emancipatory projects. Beauvoir’s thought is productive here not only because, contrary to charges of liberal conventionalism and masculinism, she envisages symbolic change towards recognition of femininity as the major solution to gender disempowerment (Beauvoir 1972: 740). In a sense, this is to point to the fact that the universal, for Beauvoir, may only be accessed through the embodied specificity and diversity of human lives, the content of which continually re-forms and revises the shared terms of social cooperation. In Zakin’s apt words, for Beauvoir ‘there is no utopian community in which the separation between subjects might be dissolved or restored’ (2006: 38–9). We thus learn from Beauvoir’s thought the need to, and the risks of, engaging in what Lugones (1987) calls world-travelling, or a metaphorical shift

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to the perspective of the other in deliberating about rights, and the project of attempting to reach an understanding, however imperfect that inevitably will be. There is always incompleteness in the self–other relation, no perfect Mitsein, because human interactions always prompt both self-reflection and awareness of a remainder, or some aspect of the other’s situation that one does not understand. The attempt to locate the shared and resistant aspects of a cosmopolitan community is important for feminists, an insight which is further supported by returning to Beauvoir’s analysis of being-with-others in the first part of The Ethics. At its most fundamental, Beauvoir’s thought in this respect anticipates her later readers’ cosmopolitanism based on strangeness and unfamiliarity (e.g. Kristeva 1991; 1993; Kruks 2012; Zakin 2006). In particular, Beauvoir’s defence of being-with-others rejects Hegel’s assumption of a perpetual antagonism between the self and other. As Beauvoir argues, ‘this hatred of “the other” is naïve; and the desire immediately struggles against itself. If I were really everything, there would be nothing besides me: the world would be empty’ (1948: 29). In this striking passage, Beauvoir stakes the importance of reciprocity and the need to make the freedom of the Other one’s cause in order to avoid the absurdity of one’s facticity (1948: 30). Against many Marxist and liberal humanists, however, the assumption is not that all good wills harmonize. Beauvoir warns that while being-with-others suggests that each must form and pursue a project that serves the good of all, ultimately others are separate and distinct beings (1948: 31).18 Beauvoir’s generous but cautious reciprocity therefore recognizes both unfamiliarity and familiarity of the Other. As one’s existence is a matter of existing for humanity, the ideal is for an ambiguous world community, in which moments of commonality and irreducible difference are acknowledged in a shared struggle to understand the underlying ethos of universal rights. Beauvoir’s two moments of gender misrecognition therefore suggest a dialogical feminist approach to recognition, empowerment and care across borders. It claims that those who are, in a sense, fortunate enough to experience their ambiguity as anguish should take responsibility to engage the least welloff in dialogue about their needs and rights, or at least to provide them the minimal material conditions through which they might pursue their struggle. However, the theory also suggests that there is no unambiguous or disinterested way to empower others (1948: 41; Kruks 2012: 118).19 In her interaction with Boupacha, as we know, Beauvoir became acutely conscious of her complicity in structural injustices and of the impossibility of purity in politics.20 Some questioned Beauvoir for her intellectual abstraction in this case, and her refusal

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to get involved practically in the Algerian woman’s situation (Caputi 2006). However, as Caputi explains, Beauvoir’s limited involvement indicated her prescient awareness of Markell’s later suggestion in Bound by Recognition that the challenge of intervening for the well-being of the least well-off is to do so in a way that addresses the social and economic forces that have made the misrecognition possible (Caputi 2006; Markell 2003). Ultimately, Beauvoir knew that she could not speak for or even know Boupacha. She sensed the contradictions and limits of the cosmopolitan encounter between self and other. The implications of Beauvoir’s commitment to cosmopolitan recognition are finally highlighted by briefly contrasting certain concepts in The Ethics, namely charity, which Beauvoir takes as a denial of human ambiguity; and reciprocity, generosity and friendship, which are worthwhile, in Beauvoir’s eyes, because they are psychologically demanding. The problem with charity is that, as it is exercised from the outside, ‘it is according to the caprice of the one who distributes it and who is detached from its object’ (1948: 86). It need not require ethical involvement or obligation. Duties to assist across borders are therefore not best conceived as charity, but as reciprocity and friendship, which require engagement with the existential conditions of others’ lives (Beauvoir 1948: 731). For Beauvoir, friendship and generosity are not ‘facile virtues’, but rather ‘humanity’s highest achievement’ (1972: 154). Beauvoir never really specifies how reciprocity can be brought about in deeply unequal, patriarchal societies. However, it involves a symbolic change, on account of which each person begins to see themselves as both subject and object, not only remaining for the other as another, but seeing the other within themselves (Beauvoir 1972: 140). As has been noted, Beauvoir’s awareness of the difficulties of reciprocity in the Boupacha case limited her involvement to intellectual argument. She recognizes that the pursuit of one end might involve sacrificing another, which is the ambiguous condition of human political action. Given the conditions under which feminists exercise concern and care, the two moments of gender misrecognition in Beauvoir’s account thus offer cosmopolitan feminists the possibility of cautiously fostering sympathetic understanding between those differently located in power, forging spaces of friendship in the absence of transparent understanding. The interaction of the two moments fosters awareness that the self–other relation involves appreciating that ‘we’, for ‘them’, are also unfamiliar objects (Kristeva 1991). Thus, although the challenge is always to ascertain the political conditions under which genuine reciprocity and friendship may be secured, for Beauvoir community and care are only possible when each recognizes oneself as at once a subject and object (1948: 7). The fortunate risk confronting their own existential

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groundlessness in order care for the Other in such a way that unsettles, and hopes provisionally to reconstitute, the universal. Finally, Beauvoir evidently did not wish to speak for all women or to claim to represent their experiences and, for this reason too, any cosmopolitanism extracted from her thought remains ambiguous in a further sense. However, her core idea concerning the self conceived as both subject and object suggests the hope of coalitions between women across borders (see Vintges 2006: 225). Significantly, this idea has not remained unnoticed in feminist theories. The core ideas of Beauvoir’s feminist theory of recognition are indirectly taken up and pursued in some of the most intriguing contemporary cosmopolitan accounts. For instance, one of Beauvoir’s severest critics, Julia Kristeva (1991), later develops the idea of the unknowability of the other in the constitution of a world community. In Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva builds on the insight that Beauvoir articulates only minimally, namely the unfinished remainder beyond the struggle for recognition. While Kristeva openly criticizes what she takes to be the feminist-existentialist ideal of interjecting women into masculine project, time and history,21 in fact she extends certain ideas that come to light in reading Beauvoir closely (Zakin 2006: 47). She develops Beauvoir’s understanding, on the one hand, of the always imperfect recognition between self and other and, on the other, of the concept of being estranged from oneself, perceiving oneself as the object. Crucially, then, Beauvoir’s framework for feminist recognition takes contemporary recognition theory beyond the logic of rights, representation and redistribution. Her insights redound in late twentieth and early twenty-first century feminist theories, which focus on the symbolic, and not only social-structural, changes necessary for human beings to exist in their realities differently. The approach that she provides to bringing recognition theory within ‘the international’ nourishes the attempt to ground justice in the world today by accepting ambiguity, and identifying the Other not only in a distant region but, crucially, within ourselves.

Conclusion This chapter has suggested that, in spite of criticisms raised by her interpreters over time, Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist existentialism may support a more convincing cosmopolitan approach to recognition than an approach that grounds misrecognition in objective social structures alone. In summary, when the ‘suppressed potentiality’ and ‘resistance within commonality’ moments of gender misrecognition extracted from Beauvoir’s framework are read as an

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interactive dialectic of equality and difference, cosmopolitan feminists might reconceive the project of empowering the Other on somewhat deeper terms than through static rights charters or mandated economic reform. This approach to recognition theory arguably speaks to the complexity of contemporary structures of globalization today, realistically appreciating that women even in the most constrained circumstances are differently impacted by their life-conditions, in ways that cut across gender binaries and class divisions, exemplifying the ambiguity of the human condition. As Michèle le Doeuff (2006: 12) recently suggested, ‘Times have changed. We have changed them, and it is no longer possible to claim that . . . Beauvoir is obsolete’. If le Doeuff is right, it seems plausible to pursue a cosmopolitanism inspired by Beauvoir’s thought. It seems right to envisage agency within the experience of misrecognition, and to hope to empower those who apparently exist beyond liberal rights or more familiar struggles for cultural recognition.22

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

‘Cosmopolitanism’ may be broadly taken to refer to a universalistic theory that encompasses the whole world rather than only the nation-state. While it is historically associated with Kantian universalism, current cosmopolitans such as Beitz (2005) focus on duties of redistributive assistance owed to citizens of distant countries. More recent, critical forms of cosmopolitanism, associated with Continental writers like Julia Kristeva (1991), focus on a symbolic decentring of the citizen as a member of a world community in order to foster global justice projects which are not confined to issues of resource distribution as such. While I focus here on Fraser’s approach, other approaches to feminist cosmopolitanism should not be ignored; for instance, Nussbaum’s (1997) capabilities-oriented and Benhabib’s (2006) rights-based accounts. The Cynic Diogenes, famous for introducing the idea of cosmopolitanism in Western discourse, did not offer a political theory favouring a world-state, however. Rather, his idea of cosmopolitanism focuses not so much on structures of global governance as on the individual’s attitude to the world, and, specifically, on their critical stances towards local prejudices. In addition to Simone de Beauvoir, other feminist writers who attribute a greater emphasis to lived experience are, to some extent, Young (2005) and Bartky (1990). Stavro further argues that ‘since we are not solitary or monistic entities, our experiences are not closed onto themselves, and hence are partly communicable; however, the particularity of our situations means that our experiences are never wholly accessible’ (2007: 447).

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7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

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As Beauvoir writes: ‘Thus, humanity is male and man defines women not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being . . . she is the incidental, the incidental as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute’ (1972: xix, my emphases). I use the term ‘reciprocal recognition’ here to reflect Beauvoir’s reading of Hegel, for whom the concepts of acknowledgement or recognition seem crucial. However, while these concepts may be inferred from Beauvoir’s discourse on ‘reciprocity’, she does not herself frequently invoke the word ‘recognition’ as such, or its equivalent in French, reconnaissance. ‘Thus, we see that no existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. It appeals to the existence of others. The idea of such a dependence is frightening, and the separateness and multiplicity of existents raises highly disturbing problems. One can understand the men who are aware of the risks and the inevitable element of failure involved in any engagement in the world to fulfil themselves outside of the world’ (Beauvoir, 1948: 28). Lundgren-Gothlin rather controversially argues that for Beauvoir, woman is not analogous to the slave of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic because, since woman does not demand recognition from man, she is in a situation of perpetual stasis. Beauvoir does often refer to women in different cultures who appear to be ‘empowered’ to some degree, such as Egyptian women (1972: 108) and the Brahmins in India (112). Yet, she concludes rather pessimistically that ‘in truth, that Golden Age of Woman is a myth’ (102). Beauvoir argues against Engels by insisting that it is ‘the imperialism of human consciousness, seeking always to exercise sovereignty in objective fashion’ (1972: 58) which constitutes the real origin of sexual difference. While, for Beauvoir, material well-being is necessary for human beings to realize their humanity, she vacillated in the emphasis that she would give to the material base of oppression. In The Force of Circumstance, she asked: ‘Why did I write concrete liberty instead of bread?’ Yet, even then, Beauvoir’s theory views oppression always as a ‘psychological mechanism’ (see Arp 2001: 123). As Beauvoir argues in response to Engels’ thesis regarding the origin of patriarchy in a shift in the economic mode of production of early societies: ‘If the human consciousness had not included in it the original category of the other, and an original aspiration to dominate the other, the invention of the bronze tool could not have caused the oppression of women’ (Beauvoir 1972: 89). Caputi, however, further suggests an ambiguity about where Beauvoir’s humanitarian demands take us. ‘How’, she asks, ‘can we respond to every human being? And if we do not suffer as they do, what can we know authentically about their suffering?’ (2006: 117). This is obviously an important issue which cannot be discussed fully in this chapter for reasons of space.

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15 As Beauvoir explains: ‘Oppression divides the world into two classes: those who enlighten mankind by thinking it ahead of itself and those who are condemned to mark time hopelessly in order merely to support the collectivity’ (1948: 35). 16 As Weiss observes, in contrast to those who live in ‘bad faith’, for Beauvoir there are also those who ‘live in the universe of the serious in all honesty, for example, those who are denied all instruments of escape, those who are enslaved or those who are mystified’ (1972: 47–8; Weiss 2006: 248). 17 Beauvoir seems to envisage the conventional politics of equality as a stepping-stone to a deeper psychic transformation of society: ‘woman cannot be transformed unless society has first made the equal of men . . . It seems sooner or later they will arrive at complete economic and social equality, which will bring about an inner metamorphosis’ (1972: 738, my emphasis). 18 For Beauvoir, charity is ultimately an act of bad faith, as we cannot fully fight the Other’s fight for them. While we have to assume the minimal well-being of the least well-off as our project, it is also true that ‘the oppressed are more totally engaged in the struggle’. This is so even though the better-off cannot fulfil themselves morally without taking part in their struggle (1972: 36). In a sense, this is the paradox of altruism. 19 Beauvoir suggests here not only that the means of assisting are ambiguous, and that worthy causes and political concerns are multiple. Not only can one ‘never respect all freedoms at the same time’ but also we must ‘accept the tensions in the struggle’ (1948: 43). Realistically, what order should be followed? What tactics should be adopted? ‘For each one, it also depends on his individual situation’ (1948: 38). 20 Many French intellectuals of Beauvoir’s time similarly failed to get involved practically in the pro-Algerian struggle. This situation motivated Frantz Fanon’s complaint that the French intellectuals’ ‘horrified’ reaction to colonial atrocity was self-indulgent and arose from their perception of the ‘colonial tragedy’ as an assault on French honour (Caputi 2006: 119–20; Fanon 2008). However, Fanon did not direct his complaint against Beauvoir particularly. Also, given Beauvoir’s critique of nationalism in The Ethics, it seems at least ungenerous to interpret Beauvoir’s reactions as pure self-indulgence. 21 In fact, in her famous essay ‘Women’s Time’ (1986), Kristeva does not name Beauvoir as a proponent of the ‘first-wave’ existentialist feminism. However, she has been widely understood to refer critically to Beauvoir’s philosophy in this text. 22 I would like to thank Patrick Hayden and Kate Schick for very kindly inviting me to contribute to the research project which gave rise to this volume, and for their constant encouragement. This research would not have been possible without their support, patience and kindness. I am particularly indebted to stimulating and valuable conversations with them and the other participants at the workshop held at the University of St Andrews in April 2014, at which an early draft of this essay was presented.

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Recognition, Multiculturalism and the Allure of Separatism Volker M. Heins

In Charles Taylor’s seminal writings, the revival of the nineteenth-century concept of ‘recognition’ was closely connected to the birth of ‘multiculturalism’ as a public policy and normative idea. This connection has unfortunately been dissolved by continental political philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth who reject all group-based understandings of recognition which cannot be reduced to aspirations for individual freedom within a given state or society. Yet this individualist bias has proven to be rather unproductive in the field of international political theory. I therefore suggest returning to and clarifying the original conceptual connection between recognition and multiculturalism as a way of rethinking the relations between cultural groups, nations and states from a normative point of view. The first generation of multiculturalists has dealt primarily with the subject of just and sustainable intergroup and internation relationships – between dominant national majorities, restive national minorities, immigrant and Aboriginal communities within legal nation-states. Multiculturalism was conceived as a halfway house between assimilation and separatism, and as a remedy against both. The explicit goal for Taylor, in particular, was to introduce multicultural ‘recognition’ as an antidote not only to the injuries of forced assimilation, but also to the ‘impending breakup’ (Taylor 1994: 52) of a highly diverse country such as Canada. My argument in this paper is about the question whether Taylor’s idea can be elaborated with respect to the world community of states and societies. I proceed in several steps. Firstly, I wish to highlight the link between recognition and the international by reconstructing Taylor’s concept of multiculturalism as an antidote against ethnic separatism. Secondly, I argue that Taylor’s continental critics such as Habermas burned the bridge connecting

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recognition and the international by confining struggles for recognition to the domestic sphere of firmly established nation-states. Thirdly, I argue against Honneth’s overly harmonious and teleological approach, and in favour of a more agonistic reading of the concept of recognition. More specifically, I contend that his theory does not improve our understanding of situations where groups crystallize around strong imaginations of national, ethnic or religious integrity. Such potentially separatist groups straddling the boundaries of the national and the international are not interested in reciprocal esteem, do not seek recognition (in the full sense of the term) from their opponents and cannot reasonably be expected to do so. After illustrating this thought with two vignettes on the politics of Malcolm X and the early James Joyce, I conclude with a comment on the anti-separatist element in the politics of recognition and its international implications.

Beyond the domestic–international divide: Taylor To avoid misunderstandings, I should begin by clarifying the meaning of the term ‘recognition’ as it is used by moral and political philosophers who draw more or less systematically on Hegel (e.g. Honneth 1995; Ikäheimo 2014; Ricoeur 2005; Taylor 1994). The concept offers the possibility of thinking about society in radically relational terms and in grasping why and how people respond to attitudes of rejection or disrespect. Recognition is thus not concerned with the acceptance of institutions or principles as legitimate or valid, but only with relations between persons and groups who are both recognized and recognizers. Only persons and groups can ‘struggle’ for and suffer from a lack of recognition. This is the point of departure in Taylor’s essay ‘The Politics of Recognition’, which was first given as a lecture inaugurating the founding of Princeton University’s Center for Human Values in 1990. Taylor focuses on the moral consequences of the denial of recognition for persons and groups. These consequences are described not simply as embarrassing or annoying, but as blatantly unjust. Recognition is ‘a vital human need’ (Taylor 1994: 26) because it is closely intertwined with questions of identity and our sense of place in the world. If our understanding of who we are doesn’t resonate with the wider society, whose members refuse to recognize us, we are likely to suffer from a lack of self-confidence and a sense of powerlessness. Certain forms of non-recognition or misrecognition are unavoidable in modern capitalist societies, for example the experience of lovers whose love

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is not reciprocated or of workers whose specific skills have been devalued by rapid technological change. Taylor, however, is interested only in those forms of deliberate misrecognition which can be countered through social struggles and politics. Recognition comes in two variants: ‘difference-blind’, universal respect based on equal rights and particularistic ‘esteem’ for what makes someone’s qualities or achievements special (1994: 40, 48–9). Referring to the example of ‘women in patriarchal societies’, Taylor describes the mechanism of misrecognition as follows: those women ‘have been induced to adopt a depreciatory image of themselves. They have internalized a picture of their inferiority, so that even when some of the objective obstacles to their advancement fall away, they may be incapable of taking advantage of the new opportunities’ (1994: 25). For advocates of liberation, this is deeply troubling because the lack of self-respect produced by systematic misrecognition can be so profound that victims of disrespect are unable to muster the energy to transform their ‘need’ for recognition into an effective ‘demand’ (1994: 25). Thus, structures and practices of misrecognition have paradoxical consequences insofar as they impel disrespected persons and groups to push for the realization of standards of dignity while undermining the strength and self-respect needed to engage in struggles for recognition. Two more points can be teased out from the above quotation. Firstly, the Canadian philosopher implicitly acknowledges that even if ‘vertical’ recognition between persons and groups on the one hand and social institutions or political authorities on the other hand has been established, the ‘horizontal’ misrecognition between persons or groups may still persist, because low self-esteem inhibits victims of injustice from contributing their part to the transformation of social relations.1 The problem of vertical and horizontal dimensions of recognition is connected to the problem of rights and esteem as two different forms of recognition. Whereas rights can be established through political will and legal reform, esteem cannot be demanded but depends on the unforced evolution of social manners and mores. Without downplaying the significance of equal respect and legal equality, Taylor emphasizes the role of particularistic esteem as an autonomous source of freedom and well-being. What I find more striking though, and more relevant in the present context, is Taylor’s intellectual indebtedness to the anti-colonial writer Frantz Fanon, who was the first to make the point that people can be ruled by imposing on them ‘a picture of their inferiority’: ‘Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The

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colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards’ (Fanon 2008: 9; see Taylor 1994: 65–6). Taking this cue from Fanon, Taylor returns to the original meaning and critique of assimilation – a concept that was introduced in colonial contexts before it has been used in debates about the incorporation of immigrants in Western nation-states. In fact, the concept first appeared in the vocabulary of the British Empire after the loss of the American colonies, when officers in London decided to tighten the reins on their subjects in the rest of the empire. It is also worth recalling that the defeat of the British in the American War and the Declaration of Independence of their former colonies sparked another, much better known conceptual innovation when Jeremy Bentham first introduced the new word ‘international’ in the vocabulary of legal and political thought (Armitage 2013: 179). Interestingly, the initial testing ground for disciplinary techniques of ‘assimilation’ in what then looked like an increasingly ‘international’ world was the French-speaking province of Quebec in Canada, where a hopeless attempt was made to turn rural Catholic immigrants from the Normandy and Brittany regions of France into Englishmen. Taylor can be read as drawing radical consequences from insights that already occurred to eighteenth-century British administrators who realized that they had to make concessions to the ‘enduring ethos of the French Canadians as expressed in language, religion and social usage’ (Harlow 1964: 713; Price 1969: 181–2). Taylor shares Fanon’s instinctive appreciation of the potential value of territorially bounded cultural identities without accepting his view that the struggle for cultural recognition is necessarily a struggle for independent statehood. The happy medium between a ‘difference-blind’ society and the separation of oppressed or disadvantaged minorities is rather what Taylor calls ‘multiculturalism’. Faithful to his own imperative that we must always start with the ‘presumption’ (Taylor 1994: 66–8) of equal worth of all cultures, Taylor attempts to combine and reconcile Anglo-Canadian and Quebecois perspectives. Much of his classic essay is devoted to the defence of Quebec as a ‘distinct society’ with its own collective goals. At the same time, his reasoning is driven by his fear of the ‘impending breakup of the country’ (1994: 52) at the hands of angry separatists in Quebec who for a long time used to describe themselves, in Fanonian terms, as the ‘white niggers of America’ (Vallières 1971). Taylor’s moderate and reconciliatory defence of Quebec nationalism is backed up by a principled argument about different ways of interpreting liberalism and the politics of equal respect. But there is also a strong element of contextual and pragmatic reasoning based on the search for second-best solutions for a given

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pluralistic society that cannot be redesigned at will (Levy 2007). Other societies may simply be under less pressure to search for new ways of multicultural accommodation because they are more homogeneous. The general trend of our time, however, is that the domestic sphere of most societies increasingly looks like a mirror image of the international sphere as more and more national societies become multicultural. For this reason, the conventional model of difference-blind liberalism is not only unjust but also ‘impractical in tomorrow’s world’ (Taylor 1994: 61; emphasis added).

Re-establishing the domestic–international divide: Habermas At least in the beginning, Taylor’s multiculturalism was not so much about the incorporation of immigrants, but rather about assuaging the separatist passions of the French-speaking national minority of Quebeckers within the Canadian federation. Separatism, if legitimate, is the response of people who have already been separated from mainstream society. At the same time, Taylor is critical of separatist movements and maintains that they can and should be countered by policies of recognition and the abolition of unitary states based on the fiction of undivided popular sovereignty. But neither the empirical circumstances nor the potentially innovative conceptual consequences of Taylor’s particular focus on a national minority threatening secession were fully grasped by his commentators. This is true although the issue of Quebec figured prominently in the debate stimulated by Taylor. Habermas, in particular, criticizes Taylor for justifying the special status of Quebec and the right of its government to enact laws deemed necessary for cultural survival, for example by not allowing francophones and immigrants to send their children to English-language public schools. In his article ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State’, he argues that Taylor ‘calls into question the individualistic core of the modern conception of freedom’ (Habermas 2002: 205) by pitting the protection of individual rights against safeguarding collective ways of life, and by giving precedence to the latter in certain cases of conflict. Nevertheless, Habermas accepts Taylor’s initial diagnosis that entire groups of citizens can grow alienated even from a democratic state, because the diverse and fluctuating composition of the population may not be reflected in social policies, school curricula, public holidays and the general spirit of institutions. This in turn can lead to ‘cultural battles in which disrespected minorities struggle against an insensitive majority culture’ (2002: 218). However, Habermas

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does not contemplate the possibility that at least some groups engaged in struggles for recognition might opt for ‘exit’ instead of ‘voice’ by developing a separatist mentality, either literally by reclaiming their ancestral homeland, or metaphorically by withdrawing into a parallel moral universe. Nor does he believe in the wisdom of granting of group rights as a way of recognizing and including historically disadvantaged minorities. By arguing against group rights, which are rejected as being ‘not only unnecessary but questionable from a normative point of view’ (2002: 222), Habermas passes up the chance of constructing a confederal and multicultural middle ground between the sacred domestic space of wellordered democratic societies and the profane world of international anarchy. His argument is twofold. Firstly, whereas Taylor develops the idea of a liberalism for any ‘cultural community that wants to survive’ (Taylor 1994: 61; emphasis added), Habermas misreads group rights as legal instruments akin to measures of biological species protection. His highly influential critique culminates in the charge that multiculturalism amounts to an attempt to ‘guarantee’ the survival of cultural groups by administrative means, even against the will of their members. Secondly, Habermas reduces the range of candidates for cultural recognition by introducing ‘modernization’ as a faceless force of homogenization. His rhetorical analogy between group rights and the preservation of endangered biological species attests to the evolutionist spirit of his political theory which tends to represent unwelcome forms of life as doomed to disappear anyway. In Habermas’s view, struggles for recognition between cultural groups take place against the intimidating backdrop of the maelstrom of modernity. Many traditional and rural ‘subcultures and lifeworlds’, he reminds his readers, have vanished without a trace. ‘Those forms of life were caught up and crushed in the process of modernization’, and he makes it clear that this is no cause for sadness (Habermas 2002: 222). The dice of history are biased against all ‘stationary’ and ‘rigid forms of life’ – a lesson Habermas explicitly applies to ethnic ‘immigrant cultures’ (2002: 223) in contemporary societies. My conclusion is that Habermas has shifted the terms of the debate on recognition and the international in important ways. For one, he deconstructs the connection between recognition and the multiculturalism by not leaving much cultural difference to recognize. His unenquiring confidence in the homogenizing as well as ultimately benign forces of modernization, which destroy earlier, traditional or ‘ethnic’ ways of life, makes the problem of recognition much less urgent. On this account, there is no justification, but also no need for ‘imposing a false homogeneity’ (Taylor 1994: 44) on increasingly diverse populations, (a) because much of the job of assimilation is done anonymously through

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modernization and (b) because the resulting greater cultural homogeneity cannot be false, since the survival of forms of life is synonymous with their vibrancy and ethical attractiveness. Obviously, Habermas fails to consider forms of life that might have been attractive to those living them, but were nevertheless crushed. Moreover, he separates what is connected in Taylor’s thinking by treating struggles for recognition as an internal affair of democratic states that can be resolved without any significant moral or legal innovations. Habermas also trivializes Taylor’s contribution by glossing over his highly original fusion of western and postcolonial perspectives, epitomized by his references to Rousseau and Montesquieu as well as to Fanon. As I understand it, Taylor’s multiculturalism starts from the insight that the ‘international’ gradually eats into the domestic sphere of modern constitutional states, often nurturing ‘metaphorical nations’ (Bhabha 1990) of natives, migrants and minorities, some of which might one day develop less metaphorically separatist ambitions. Taylor and other multiculturalists are intrigued by this potential of internationality, or even international anarchy, within the legal nation-state, which in recent times has often been reinforced by foreign voices getting involved in domestic quarrels over issues such as allegedly blasphemous artworks, the building of mosques or the regulation of male ritual circumcision. Habermas adopts the opposite perspective: discussing the international sphere in light of the domestic analogy, he expresses the hope that international relations between states can be domesticated and subject to the same forms of institutional and juridical control that regulate social relations within states. His writings on the European Union, for example, are inspired by the twin ideals of an ever-expanding transnational domestic sphere under a comprehensive legal ‘harmonization’ regime, and of an entire continent speaking to the world with ‘one voice’ (Habermas 2012: 3, 118). From this point of view, the international is itself a passing phenomenon slowly succumbing to the domestication of world society.

The trouble with recognition Honneth completes the dual disjuncture between recognition and multiculturalism, and between recognition and the international. First of all, he has rid the theory of recognition of the multiculturalist implications emphasized by Taylor. Moreover, and perhaps more surprisingly, he tends to describe relations of recognition as an internal affair of firmly established states or societies. I now turn to discuss these two theoretical moves in more detail.

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Whereas friendly critics such as David Owen (2007) have tried to reinject multiculturalism into recognition theory, Honneth has so far seen little reason to elaborate on his few dismissive remarks about multiculturalism as a basically redundant policy that adds nothing to the struggle for equal rights (Honneth 2003: 169–70). I would like to reinforce Owen’s point that any political theory of recognition needs to say something substantial about the status of disadvantaged cultural minorities in liberal societies, and why certain modes of incorporation of outsiders are to be preferred to others. For Honneth, critical theory is not about handing down indisputable normative principles to be applied to whatever circumstances may present themselves; the goal is rather to draw out principles of justice from real-world social struggles. Arguing against the abstraction and distance of political philosophy from the lived experience of most people in the world, he wants to narrow the gap between the theorist and other citizens. Recognition theory is a political philosophy with people in it. Given these aspirations, it is astonishing that Honneth’s theory has no place for the specific struggles of cultural minorities, some of which go beyond demanding equal rights. Honneth acknowledges that individuals often feel the need to belong to particularistic cultural groups and that they sometimes struggle to obtain recognition for their difference. However, he argues that the sheer fact of belonging to a group cannot be reason enough to demand any kind of special appreciation from those who do not belong to the same group. My right to be different is simply my right to be treated equally and not to be discriminated against because of my belonging to particular groups. However, these general propositions are unhelpful in deciding what to make of recent controversies over issues such as the wearing of headscarves and veils, kosher and halal slaughter or male ritual circumcision. In these ongoing controversies, spokespersons of religious or ethnic minorities argue not simply for equal treatment, but for exemptions from dress codes in public institutions, exemptions from animal protection laws or culturally sensitive notions of children’s welfare. Yet, from the point of view of recognition theory, such claims are legitimate only if they can be translated into calls for legal ‘equality’ or for more esteem based on the specific ‘achievements’ of the respective groups (2003: 138–50). His argument that most cultural struggles of minorities are, in fact, about legal equality is only partly convincing, as the example of the blanket prohibition of Islamic headscarves in French or Turkish public schools shows, which – for instance according to a 2004 ruling by European Court of Human Rights in the landmark case of Leyla Şahin v. Turkey – is not in itself

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discriminatory. If cultural struggles are instead waged not for equality, but for esteem, then they are self-defeating, as Honneth correctly states (2003: 168; see Taylor 1994: 70). Demanding esteem for the particular manners and mores of a religious or cultural minority doesn’t make sense, because one can decide to ignore or tolerate something, but not to like it. Esteem cannot be willed but needs to be cultivated in continuous interactions. This argument also casts a dubious light on the slogan of a ‘struggle’ for recognition. Struggling for recognition as esteem can only mean that members of society vie for acknowledgement and sympathy by advertising their contributions to the welfare of others. This is very different from struggles for equal rights, which usually have to overcome opponents by force. My impression is that, despite the orientation of his theory to the experiences of real people, Honneth tries to shoehorn those experiences into prefabricated categories. Many multicultural struggles are not about legal equality or even about legal issues at all (Amir-Moazami 2014). And they are not about gaining the esteem of others but about living an authentic life, for example a life modelled on the prophet Daniel who declined to eat non-kosher food in Babylon and rejected assimilation to its cultural system. Against the intentions of a reconstructive critique of contemporary society based on the moral claims real actors make, Honneth narrows the scope of recognition theory to those struggles that fit his idealized principles of legal equality and merit. Honneth’s dismissal of the politics of cultural difference has consequences for his international thought. By taking the existence of firmly established states for granted, he underestimates how some multicultural struggles call into question the very identity and even the boundaries of the political community in which they take place. Struggles for recognition are conceptualized as struggles for inclusion, not as more radical struggles about the kind of community into which people want to be included. Consider the following quotes: legal rights including welfare rights allow citizens to develop a sense of ‘ “full-fledged” membership in a political community’ (Honneth 1995: 116); individuals desire to have their achievements valued ‘within their community’ (1995: 134); struggles for recognition take place ‘within a society’s inherited cultural horizon’ (1995: 134); the question to be answered is how ‘moral progress can be evaluated within such [liberal-capitalist] societies’ (Honneth 2003: 185). On all these occasions, Honneth consistently takes the identity and boundaries of ‘political communities’ or ‘societies’ as given. This implies a restriction of the purview of the theory which has something to say about social movements beyond national borders, but remains silent on international

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conflicts between states, struggles for independent statehood and struggles for collective autonomy within states. The domestic bias is reinforced by a weak concept of struggle. In a discussion with Luc Boltanski, Honneth has emphasized that his use of the term ‘struggle’ differs from Marxist or Weberian versions in that it tries to combine ‘the conflictual and the peaceful’ (Boltanski and Honneth 2009: 89). Struggles for recognition are struggles by disrespected and marginalized groups for inclusion into the larger moral and political community of which they are a part. In the words of the sociologist Andreas Pettenkofer, Honneth writes ‘conflict theory’ as ‘consensus theory’ (Pettenkofer 2010: 166; see also Schaap 2005). This tendency becomes even more obvious in his most recent work, where the modern ideals of legal equality, solidarity and love are said to be ‘generally accepted’ and ‘already institutionalized’ (Honneth 2014: 10, 63). Future struggles are left with the residual task of fully realizing those uncontroversial ideals.

Two examples: Malcolm X and James Joyce But is it plausible to assume that oppressed groups always confine themselves to applying universally accepted moral or legal principles to their situation? The contested nature of the very standards and dimensions of mutual recognition can be demonstrated by exploring the case of the civil rights and black liberation movement in the United States after the Second World War. The two figures of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X epitomize two different strategies of connecting experiences of disenfranchisement, feelings of shame, and collective protest and self-organization for change. Whereas King appealed to Christian values and to the American Constitution, Malcolm X fell for the allure of separatism. He did not conceive and organize the resistance of African Americans, whom he did not even view as ‘Americans’, within the horizon of a common culture shared by all citizens of the United States. The idea was instead to create a new, ultimately separatist African and Muslim identity out of the revived collective memory of slavery and oppression. Black Muslims likened law enforcement authorities in the urban ghettos to occupying powers, and their own struggle to postcolonial movements in Africa. Addressing a crowd in November 1963, Malcolm insisted, ‘A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation’ (cited in Marable 2011: 264). Despite his deplorable anti-Semitic leanings, Malcolm’s concept of emancipation was modelled on the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt (Rogers 2009).

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Together with the ambition to create a parallel culture with distinctly ‘black’ ways of dressing, speaking, making music, worshipping and child rearing, the public representation of a proud new black identity was itself considered a political action. Self-respect was sought not as a consequence of white America finally changing its mind and recognizing black women and men as equal fellow-citizens, but through spiritual self-reliance and a kind of self-sustaining bootstrapping operation. The idea of developing an autonomous group ethos was meant to counter the dispiriting legacies of slavery and thereby shorten the path to liberation by de-emphasizing the importance of what the ‘white devils’ were thinking or doing. To be respected by ‘the white man’ was still a goal of the movement, but Malcolm urged his followers to ‘demand his respect’ in the way strong personalities command respect and awe without ever expecting ‘love’ (cited in Marable 2011: 186). This example points to a systematic problem in recognition theory. It shows that the answer to the question of who the ‘significant others’ are (Taylor 1994: 36–7) from whom recognition is sought depends on the cognitive map guiding the action of persons and groups in everyday life as well as in political and social struggles. Our moral expectations change depending on what sort of recognition we are seeking. Only respect for equal rights is expected from everyone. But to be properly appreciated, esteem for our achievements has to come from particular sources. And we definitely do not want to be loved by everyone. For the black Muslims in the United States the significant others were not their own fellowcitizens, but Muslims in other parts of the world. Like some of his comrades, Malcolm travelled extensively in the Middle East and Africa, and even joined the pilgrimage to Mecca, not only to garner sympathy for an imagined common cause, but also to deepen his particular transnational Shi’a Muslim identity. As Manning Marable writes in his critical biography, many black Americans, after converting to Islam, did not care at all about being recognized by non-black Americans, but tried hard and ‘had much to gain from recognition or even acknowledgment by major Muslim states’ (Marable 2011: 165) and other, nonstate authorities.2 The important lesson here is that a neo-Hegelian, teleological conception of recognition tends to restrict our view of the full range of possibilities for disrespected and marginalized groups willing to change their situation. In particular, such groups do not necessarily struggle for inclusion into the same pre-existing community from which they were first excluded and which was the very source of their humiliation. They might as well struggle for inclusion into an altogether different community yet to be created. Critics of

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the standard version of recognition theory such as Cillian McBride (2013) have argued that victims of disrespect do not usually seek recognition from everybody, and that they struggle not just for recognition but also over the question of which particular individuals, groups or institutions are worthy sources of recognition. Consider James Baldwin’s classic The Fire Next Time: ‘I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them’ (Baldwin 1992: 21). Freeing oneself from the very need for recognition from particular quarters is an essential part of liberation. Another great writer on the subject of oppressed nations or minorities being trapped by their desire for recognition was James Joyce, who was born and raised in Ireland when the country was still ruled by Britain.3 Joyce is not usually discussed as an anti-colonial writer, which is indeed a problematic label, if only because of his well-known mockery of Irish nationalism in Ulysses (plus the fact that he never gave up his British passport). What makes Joyce’s early critical writings fascinating for political theorists, are the complications and ambivalences of his subtle and inquisitive position on the relationship between Britain and her Irish colony. In his lecture ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’, given in Trieste in 1907, he argues for a ‘moral separation’ (Joyce 2000: 116) between the two countries – a phrase which implies that a complete and factual separation is neither possible nor desirable: not possible because of the manifold and deep connections between the two nations; and not desirable because a victorious anti-colonial nationalism would only unleash new forms of domination that replicate the original colonial violence, in particular in the guise of ecclesiastical and priestly authority. This, however, must not be taken as a defeatist or escapist attitude. Joyce is very much in favour of cultural self-assertion and the cultivation of a positive national self-image against belittling and offensive English notions of the Irish. Rhetorically he asks, ‘Does the slave’s back forget the rod?’ and occasionally even expresses sympathy for ‘Fenian violence’ (2000: 121) against the colonizers. Moreover, his early writings are much concerned not only with the Irish case, but also with other colonial cultures in places such as Canada, India, Burma or northern Africa. At the same time, Joyce is acutely aware of the danger that the forces of resistance remain in thrall to their historical adversary without ever achieving true freedom. Joyce (and his literary alter egos from Stephen Hero to Stephen Dedalus) runs the gamut of possible sources of respectability and recognition, and finds them all wanting. The list includes the colonial state, the Catholic Church, Protestant proselytizers, the

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Irish middle classes and revolutionary sects. True freedom ultimately requires a liberated form of subjectivity with no need for recognition from unexamined authorities. For this kind of freedom James Joyce uses the reference to Stephen’s mythological namesake Daedalus, the prisoner of the labyrinth, who breaks free on self-fashioned wings.

‘International’ cooperation on a moral diet After this brief detour, let’s return to the subject of possible meanings of internationalizing and pluralizing recognition. We have seen that, although the rights and needs of non-ethnic groups such as women, gays and lesbians, or the disabled have sometimes been discussed under the heading of ‘multiculturalism’, the concept was first introduced by Taylor to tackle the problem of potentially separatist groups. Only these groups can enhance their otherwise benign ‘will to self-assertion’ (Habermas 2002: 222) to a point where the unity of the political community is threatened. Taylor’s concern with the causes and dangers of the ‘impending breakup’ of his country can be placed in a tradition of thought that reaches back to Thucydides and his reflections on civic strife and the disintegration of political communities in ancient Greece. Mutual recognition is the modern equivalent of a polis-centred conception of citizenship. Similarly, multiculturalism is not only a moral preference, but also a governmental technique of coaxing sub-nations, metaphorical nations and alienated immigrant communities out of riots of disagreement and mutual ignorance. I conclude this essay with a few remarks on the implications of a multicultural theory of recognition for thinking about the world order. To begin with, it is worth noting that Honneth (2012: 140) has rightly rejected the simple ‘conceptual transfer’ of the vocabulary of recognition theory from intersubjective to international relations. But we have seen that even self-confident minorities within nation-states often do not simply struggle for recognition, if recognition means inclusion into a pre-existing community. One reason is that, unlike individuals, group agents do not necessarily depend on recognition from outside. Recognition is constitutive of individual personhood – each of us was literally born and raised by a significant other – but groups can emerge and prosper simply because individuals create a new ethos and decide to relate to each other in certain ways, for example by setting up a secret society that by definition is not even known to outsiders. Of course, other groups such as charities, firms and states need to be recognized by outsiders in order to exist.

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Groups may also come into existence as autonomous groups and then take on responsibilities towards other sections of society (Laitinen 2014). States can be seen as akin to (very large) groups that depend on outsiders for being seen and treated as states, although it would be preposterous to argue that states need to esteem and respect like persons in order to function as members of international society. David Hume noted that ‘nations can subsist without intercourse’ and, further to this, ‘may even subsist, in some degree, under a general war’, that is, under conditions of radical disrespect from outside forces (Hume 1998: 99–100). Alexander Wendt has made a similar point: unlike individual persons, states can choose to withdraw from interaction with other states, or swallow other states through imperial expansion or voluntary fusion (Wendt 1999: 223). They can also, unlike individuals, split apart without becoming schizophrenic. For Habermas and Honneth, ethnic or other close-knit groups are passing or even pathological phenomena which are not taken seriously as alternative sources and distributors of self-respect. Both theorists assume capitalist societies and national states in which struggles among culturally defined groups do not affect the basic homogeneity and coherence of the political community. As a consequence, they do not pay enough attention to the ways in which cultural groups are able to generate alternative value orientations which transform the experience of disrespect into sources of particularistic honour and prestige. History shows that groups do not even need to be oppressed to be good at developing narratives of their own marginalization. These narratives, in turn, lead to tighter-knit communities with values of their own and conceptions of the good life that are independent of those of other groups. The unexamined assumption of stable frameworks of pre-existing political communities or fixed cultural horizons underestimates the extent to which the identity of a political community riven by conflict can become disturbed or even disappear in the course of a conflict. In the American Civil War, for example, ideologues of the South went so as to devise separate genealogies for their ‘people’, and to invent a Southern ‘nation’ searching for their own ‘country’ (McCardell 1979). The implication is that a polity, even if formally constituted, is predicated on the subjectivities of unstable and mixed multitudes. Perception and consensus are all-important. The laws and conventions which define the state in the minds of its citizens have no independent existence and can be corrupted. Taking for granted the boundaries and identity of the polity within which conflicts over recognition take place is therefore both theoretically misleading and politically naïve. Struggles for and over recognition lead to new inclusions and exclusions

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that redefine the very political entity in which different people used to live together. The evil of a total loss of order threatening to destabilize the world is different, but not worse than the evil of an excess of order. With regard to international society, multiculturalists tend to emphasize the persistence of deep differences over norms and values, and are sceptical about claims regarding the spread of Western-style liberalism or the convergence of societies around the same notions of reason and modernity. If the very desire for recognition is already shaped by power relations (McBride 2013: 35), then it is unlikely that people around the world seek recognition from and respect the same institutions, and in light of the same principles. The international analogue to domestic multiculturalism is the decentring of Europe and the questioning of its civilizational primacy which by no means implies the demand to embrace the values of others. It implies, however, a lowering of expectations of unanimity on the global stage. Habermas maintains that ‘the enduring political fragmentation in the world and in Europe is at variance with the systemic integration of a multicultural world society’ (Habermas 2012: 7). But these two things are not more contradictory than the right of adults, including gays and lesbians, to form their own, legally protected family units and live in a world of ever-expanding social networks. Similarly, the expansion of civic solidarity across geographical and cultural scales and boundaries should not be conceived of as happening at the expense of more localized or ethno-cultural loyalties, as Habermas seems to think. In his enthusiasm for centralization and ‘harmonization’, in particular in the European Union, Habermas thinks of national and ethno-cultural identifications as something to be overcome in a linear process of abstraction and purification, although it might be more appropriate to see them as possible counterweights against the powers of the central state and unaccountable international officials.

Notes 1

This is the flip side of the example given by Tocqueville in the first volume of Democracy in America, where he predicted that the situation of blacks in the United States would not improve substantially as a result of the abolition of slavery. He rather believed that racism would be perpetuated by the white majority’s social mores which would likely become even more ingrained after its legal basis had vanished (Tocqueville 2003: 400–2). On the difference between vertical and horizontal recognition, see Ikäheimo (2014: 17).

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Recognition and Global Politics The irony of this huge detour was that, by becoming an orthodox Muslim, Malcolm discovered that Islam is indifferent to race and as ‘colourblind’ as the American liberals he disliked so much. This in turn led him to soften his advocacy of black nationalism to a point where in his last years he became an advocate of international ‘human rights’ (Marable 2011: 305, 408). This move made him a global icon whose image has been put on a postage stamp not only in Egypt, but also in the United States. The following remarks are inspired by and draw on Gibson (2013).

5

Recognition and Accumulation Tarik Kochi

Introduction The latter years of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a number of very interesting reinterpretations of G.W.F. Hegel’s moral and political philosophy in which the concept of ‘recognition’ (Anerkennung) was given pride of place. Scholars such as Ludwig Siep, Gillian Rose, Axel Honneth, Robert R. Williams, Charles Taylor and Robert Pippin drew attention to the primary role that recognition played within Hegel’s philosophical system. In differing ways each developed dynamic interpretations of Hegel’s philosophy, reopened and reenergized by the struggles, play and follies of recognition and misrecognition operating on and across a variety of differing registers. One result of this new line of Hegel-interpretation has been the takeup of a concept of recognition as something of a stand-alone theory within political thought more generally. In particular the very popular philosophical exchange around the concept of recognition between Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser (Fraser and Honneth 2003) has sparked a small academic discourse of recognition theory and its application to identity politics, questions of moral and political rights and issues of global justice. While aspects of recognition theory have been adopted in interesting ways within feminism and postcolonial studies, perhaps the predominant branch has been utilized by liberal political theory with rather less exciting results. What we might call ‘liberal recognition theory’ (see McBride 2013) gives up on much of the dynamism, radicalism and philosophical potential that was articulated by earlier Hegel-recognition scholarship and instead, what gets presented is generally a reduction of the concept of recognition to a set of liberal rights and identity questions. In this discourse, the concept of recognition

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is ‘flattened-out’, beaten almost lifeless, and becomes merely a functional mechanism used to better organize liberal politics. In other words, the concept of recognition is reduced to strategy within a language game played by liberal political theorists whose global philosophical horizons extend little further than the texts of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Alongside liberal recognition theory resides a social-democratic theory developed by Nancy Fraser which draws conceptual and political distinctions between claims for economic redistribution and a politics of recognition. While her position seeks to integrate these into a broader theory of social justice, it relies upon a somewhat overdetermined and erroneous separation between modes of status subordination and economic subordination. Fraser’s account overlooks the historical ways in which a politics of recognition always involves claims over economic inequality, injustice and redistribution. To miss this connection is to ignore something crucial about the nature of recognition and its connection to any radical, transformative political project. What this chapter seeks to present is an interpretation of the concept of recognition which undercuts these versions of liberal and social-democratic recognition theory, and instead draws attention to the important role of thinking about recognition in terms of political economy and struggles over economic justice. Drawing upon a reading of the concept of recognition in the philosophy of Hegel, I will show that there are resources within a theory of recognition which point to important questions of international political theory often ignored by liberal political theory. In what follows I will develop an understanding of recognition as a ‘hinge concept’ – one which links economic relations, the juridical form, moral claims and political struggle. This is not to portray recognition in any economically determinist sense. Rather, by focusing upon its antagonistic basis, as struggle, a concept of recognition gives us a useful way of thinking about both historical and contemporary modes of global capitalist accumulation and struggles over economic justice.

Lords and bondsmen made free Hegel’s most infamous passage on recognition – that which gets all of the attention, that which brings Johann Fichte’s concept of recognition into the light, radicalizes it, transforms it – is presented in the second section of The Phenomenology of Spirit (2000). There are many different and varied interpretations of this section, some perhaps more convincing than others.

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What I want to emphasize in this interpretation is the link between political, economic and juridical forms that are presented in the relation of Herrschaft and Knechtschaft, sometimes translated as the relationship between ‘lord and bondsman’, or between ‘master and slave’. My argument is that we need to take seriously Hegel’s presentation of the relation between lord and bondsman as a something of a ‘hinge concept’. As a hinge concept he is introducing an idea which has transhistorical significance at a very abstract level, but on the other hand, contains alternative modes of concrete meaning within differing historical and cultural epochs. This hinge concept links the political, juridical and moral to the economic order. For example, we could think of Hegel’s account of the relation between master and slave as being situated within the ancient economies of Greece and Rome. This makes some sense given that the section on Stoicism and Scepticism follows the section on master and slave. In referring to the ancient economy Hegel is presenting a very personal relation of power and domination of one body over another. In contemporary language, this is something of a ‘biopolitical’ relation in which the master controls and regulates not merely the life of another, but life in general, the plural, often indeterminate lives of a number of slaves. Such an interpersonal, or intersubjective power relation is a political relationship, insofar as it is a constitutive part and outcome of a political process of the Greek polity or Roman republic in which a sphere of freedom is attached to citizenship and a sphere of unfreedom to slavery – those who are predominantly non-citizens, captured in battle and whose coerced labour materially sustains the political relation of the ancient republic.1 In this sense the ancient republic is made possible through a form of political exclusion and economic inclusion of slaves (as well as of women and foreigners). The labour of the slave opens the political space of citizenship, and thereby allows the citizen of the ancient republic the leisure time to actively participate in a plural, agonistic political process. Hence the excluded, the written-out, those outside the order are constitutive of its inside, the included, the celebrated.2 Here the relationship of ancient slavery is a hinge concept which links very clearly the interdependent relationship between politics and economic production. Ancient republican citizenship, civic participation in public deliberation, policy-making and judicial decisions are reliant upon an economic form of labour and production in which the coercive nature of ancient slavery plays an important role. That is, the political realm of the ancient republic cannot be disconnected from the economic relation of ancient slavery. This is not to argue a dogmatic and defunct orthodox Marxist position of base-superstructure,

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but merely to state a rather common sense materialist position, that the political constitution cannot be disconnected from the economic constitution. We can read Hegel’s account of the relation between master and slave as a story which emphasizes an important linkage in which the ancient political mode of understanding and self-understanding (i.e., ‘self-consciousness’) is one of the freedom of the citizen of the republic set openly against the unfreedom of the slave. Self-consciousness thus is shaped by an understanding derived from the ancient republican political mode and also from the ancient economy which was heavily reliant upon slavery. This form of self-understanding then drew upon, or was mediated through, the legal categories of citizenship, slavery, property ownership (in which the slave is a thing) and a set of normative or moral beliefs governing differing forms of interpersonal relationships whereby such legal ‘status’ played a predominant role. Such a relation was also ‘international’ or interrepublic if we think then of the important role that war played in ancient state-formation and in the deriving of the economic resource of slavery. The ancient republic’s economic mode of slave production was reliant upon a constant process of international conflict in which enemy non-citizens, via capture in war, were drawn in as the includedexcluded part of the ancient republic – the non-citizen-foreigner-barbarian whose labour sustains the ancient republic and who makes a republican politics of liberty and agonistic deliberation possible. The ‘struggle for recognition’ contains then, from the beginning, an ‘international’ dimension, as one outcome of ancient war was the possible humiliation of a formerly free citizen-soldier being captured and then sold into slavery. In this sense, the struggle to the death is the choice of a form of honourable death for the republic, or the clinging onto life then lived through the unfreedom and domination as a slave. This life, a life of labour, of drudgery, is the life that makes the freedom of the other (the slaveowner, the rival ancient republic or empire) possible. In this respect the concept of recognition designates a division of labour in which coerced, economic slave production is linked to the free political sphere of the republican form. In this the political and economic (together with the juridical and ethical) are coconstitutive, each one is dependent upon the other, freedom and unfreedom interdependent. Thought of in this sense, recognition involves the free mutual recognition between some as citizens within the ancient republic, each holding and affirming in each other a shared sense of social being – that of having their existence and identity as mediated and realized through each other and through their collective political form in the sense celebrated by Aristotle’s Politics

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(2001). That is, recognition between free citizens is an ethical relation whereby through the self-identification of self-other as common, some form of ‘good life’ (eudaimonia) may be realized. For Hegel, this mode of mutual recognition situated in ancient republics is not natural, but historical and political and must be won. Further, it contains within it a moment of exclusion and the refusal to recognize a very large number of human beings who are reduced to a level of limited recognition, dominated and forced into servitude. This relation of recognition and misrecognition is violent; it involves struggle and war stretching between and across communities. Recognition as a hinge concept links the polis with the oikos; it links the sphere of free political citizenship with the economic sphere of slave labour and accumulation. Hegel’s insight is important here: recognition involves deliberation; it is the back and forward of argument and ideas; it is a linguistic tension and as such emphasizes the agonism of ancient republican politics in a way that has been subsequently inherited and celebrated in the twentieth-century political theories of Hannah Arendt (1958) and Jürgen Habermas (1984). Yet, Hegel’s concept of recognition explicitly links the agonism of the polis to the antagonism of political struggle, intercommunal war, open violence, domination and the coercive economic relation of slave labour. In both Arendt and Habermas, as in much liberal political theory, this link is generally underemphasized or ignored. Hegel, like Niccolò Machiavelli before him, and like Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin after, was acutely aware of the role of violence in constituting and sustaining forms of political community. On this view, there is an uneasy continuum between the polite deliberation and disagreement within forums, senates and parliaments, and the fighting and killing that bring these into being and sustain them internally against opposition and against rival communities and empires. This understanding of recognition makes clear the link between free political deliberation amongst citizens and a coercive economic mode of production. The political, the sphere of freedom (citizenship, deliberation, plurality) is bound to the economic, the sphere of unfreedom (slavery, domination). What mediates the two is force, coercion, which at times is open violence and war and which is also the operation of political/economic struggle over freedom, over economic justice and the control and distribution of surplus. If we were to think of other historical forms of political domination and struggle which Hegel’s account touches upon, or could be seen to be drawing upon, then the idea of thinking about recognition as a hinge-concept between the political and economic constitutions holds further weight. In each, the idea

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of struggle plays an important role. One might think of the relationship between lord and bondsman as describing a set of feudal relations and the struggle for recognition being quite openly a conflict over political rights and control of surplus carried out between the noble class of the manor and their serfs, bonded peasants and tenant farmers. Recognition in this sense might be thought more openly as modes of political and economic domination, as class struggle, in the sense expressed by Marx in the opening of The Communist Manifesto (1969), and of that described in differing ways by Marxist historians such as Rodney Hilton (1973) and Robert Brenner (1977). Another way may be to think of recognition in relation to modern colonialism and slavery, and in particular, with regard to the Haitian slave revolt and constitution of a Haitian republic following the interpretation of Susan Buck-Morss (2000). A third would be to think of recognition as a hinge concept linking the political and economic in relation to struggle for recognition taking place via the French Revolution and Terror, as celebrated in the interpretation of Hegel offered by Kojève (1969).

Recognition in the capitalist economy Hegel’s account of the modern market or ‘capitalist’ economy can be found in the Philosophy of Right (1991) and primarily in the section on ‘Civil Society’ (die bürgerliche Gesellschaft), which, sandwiched between the institutions of the Family and the State, makes up the concrete content of ‘Ethical Life’ (Sittlichkeit) within the modern, Western European world. Hegel’s account shows quite a heavy influence of Adam Smith (1999) in sketching an account of political economy in which individual property owners operate within a realm of exchange and wage labour, and whose individual desires and needs are mediated through market mechanisms which allow a thin level of universality and which in turn help to influence an infinite set of consumer wants and desires (Hegel 1991: §182–7).3 The relationship between differing consumers and producers mediated by exchange in the market is for Hegel a particular historical instantiation of the concept recognition. This mode of recognition is however different in form and content to the mode of recognition that takes place in the relationship of love in the family, and is different again to the mode of recognition that may take place when citizens identify and comprehend their social being in and through the political relationship of the state. In this account, there is a clearer distinction, a separation between the spheres of family life, the capitalist economy and the

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political realm. Unlike the ancient economy, in the modern market or capitalist economy the individual, existing under conditions of modern freedom, can be both (in differing degrees) a citizen and a worker. In this respect Hegel’s account describes an (somewhat idealized) economic and political situation in Western Europe, in which a degree of basic individual liberty is necessary for wage labour and the freedom of exchange within the market. For Hegel, recognition within the market economy is twofold. It involves a degree of recognition of the formal legal personality of individuals and property owners who interact and affirm each other through marketbased exchange (Hegel 1991: §191, 192). Yet, the formality of this market-based interaction means that the degree of freedom and self-other affirmation is limited. Freedom via market-based recognition is limited to levels of wealth and resources set against the infinite social creation of desires and demands (Hegel 1991: §195). Hegel’s consideration of the problems of poverty and alienation is more developed and nuanced than that of Adam Smith (and Adam Ferguson) before him and we can interpret the concept of recognition as being turned towards a wider consideration of these questions within a market or capitalist economy. One consequence of a market-based society of producers and consumers whose intersubjective social relationships are mediated via private property rights, contracts and market exchange, and in which labour takes place on the basis of ever-increasing division of labour, is the atomization of society. This involves the tearing up of old social bonds, forms of cultural attachment and the destruction of the protective modes of group-identity within families. Recognition then is the relationship of alienated individuals acknowledging and affirming the aspects of their alienated selves – a formal and limited relation of intersubjective affirmation (Hegel, 1991: §238, 241). One further consequence of the inequalities of market societies is for Hegel the problem of poverty, of which it is worth quoting a few passages: Not only arbitrariness, however, but also contingent physical factors and circumstances based on external conditions (see §200) may reduce individuals to poverty. In this condition, they are left with the needs of civil society and yet – since society has at the same time taken from them the natural means of acquisition (see §217), and also dissolves [aufhebt] the bond of the family in its wider sense as a kinship group (see §181) – they are more or less deprived of all the advantages of society, such as the ability to acquire skills and education in general, as well as the administration of justice, healthcare, and often even the consolation of religion . . . (Hegel 1991: §241)

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The existence of poverty and the active process of impoverishment of parts of a market society stem, for Hegel, from a combination of ‘natural’ inequalities and from inequalities of capital (Hegel 1991: §200). As opposed to the ancient economy in which the slave was excluded from full recognition of its individuality via open force and coercion, in modern market or capitalist economies individuals are formally recognized as free individuals and potential property owners, but are excluded through the actual conditions of material inequality. It is an economic relation of impoverishment which denies individuals mutual recognition as ‘free’ individuals within market society. On Hegel’s account, one consequence of modern impoverishment is the emergence of a class in society, a ‘rabble’ (Pöbel), who feel their conditions of social inequality as a ‘wrong’ inflicted upon them. Hegel (1991: §244) argues: When a large mass of people sinks below the level of a certain standard of living – which automatically regulates itself at the level necessary for a member of society in question – that feeling of right, integrity [Rechtlichkeit], and honour which comes from supporting oneself by one’s own activity and work is lost. This leads to the creation of a rabble, which in turn makes it much easier for disproportionate wealth to be concentrated in a few hands.

In the Addition to this section, Hegel (1991: §244) states: Poverty does not reduce people to a rabble; a rabble is created only by the disposition associated with poverty, by inward rebellion against the rich, against society, against government etc.

In editing the H.B. Nisbet’s English translation of the Philosophy of Right, Allan Wood has attached to this section in the footnotes, material from Hegel’s lectures of 1819–20. In these Hegel (1991: 453–4) states: The poor are subject to yet another division, a division of emotion [Gemüt] between them and civil society. The poor man feels excluded and mocked by everyone, and this necessarily gives rise to an inner indignation. He is conscious of himself as an infinite, free being, and thus arises the demand that his external existences should correspond to this consciousness. In civil society it is not only natural distress against which the poor man has to struggle. The poor man is opposed not only by nature, but also by my will. The poor man feels as if he were related to an arbitrary will, to human contingency, and in the last analysis what makes him indignant is that he is put into this state of division through arbitrary will. Self-consciousness appears driven to the point where it no longer has any rights, where freedom has no existence. In this position, where the existence of freedom becomes something wholly contingent, inner indignation is necessary.

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Because the individual’s freedom has no existence, the recognition of universal freedom disappears. From this condition arises the shamelessness that we find in the rabble . . . On the one hand, poverty is the ground of the rabble-mentality, the nonrecognition of right; on the other hand, the rabble disposition also appears where there is wealth. The rich man thinks that he can buy anything, because he knows himself as the power of the particularity of self-consciousness. Thus wealth can lead to the same mockery and shamelessness that we find in the poor rabble. The disposition of master over the slave is the same as that of the slave . . . these two sides, poverty and wealth, thus constitute the corruption of civil society.

These passages are quite telling, and they lead in differing ways towards Nietzsche’s (2000) category of ‘ressentiment’, as well as towards Marx’s conception of the development of the notions of ‘class consciousness’ and ‘class struggle’. It is in these passages that the importance of thinking about ‘recognition’ as a hinge-concept arises quite clearly. It is the conditions of impoverishment and the sense of the ‘wrong’ done to the poor which lead to the feeling of being not fully recognized by society and of directing anger back against the rich, against society, against government. Recognition here refers to a mode of selfreflection, self-consciousness in which the poor attempt to comprehend the reasons for their impoverishment, upon which they come to reflect upon the causes of their inequality. It is the sharp and contradictory split between the idea of modern market or capitalist society in which the individual is given the ideal of freedom, of autonomy, of liberty, and the material reality of being consistently denied this through economic inequality – of being reduced to some form of economic servitude. Hegel’s response is closer to Adam Smith than to Marx. It is towards the provision of public authorities to attempt to alleviate questions of health, education and poverty (Hegel 1991: §245). Further, the political realm of the modern state is intended to provide some kind of reconciliation to bring all citizens back into the fold, to give them some access to shared mutual recognition, universality and common identity. The story of Marx’s critique of this idealization is well-known, as is his turning of the critical analysis of political economy via alienation, commodification and impoverishment into a wider societal ‘struggle for recognition’ in which wage-labouring slaves (proletariat) attempt to overcome, via political organization and force, an economic system and class rule within modern capitalism (see Marx 1994 and 1988). This position puts Marx’s account of the master–slave relation closer to the younger Hegel of The Phenomenology of Spirit, closer to modern and ancient republican theories

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of class conflict and revolution of Machiavelli and the Gracchi, and closer to the slave uprisings of Spartacus and of Haiti. Still, regardless of which directions these sets of struggles sail off towards what remains clear is the work recognition does as a hinge-concept. On one hand it links economic relations to political conflict while, on the other hand, it also links these to juridical forms and moral conceptions of value, worth, dignity and entitlement. Recognition in this sense is not merely the apportionment of rights within a liberal market society, it is the active process in which the process of alienation, commodification, inequality and class power within modern capitalism leads to the formal recognition in political and juridical senses and non-recognition and exclusion of those who are impoverished. The moral indignity of this contradictory situation can lead to political anger levelled at a regime of masters. It can involve the demand of material equality and the reorganization of politics and economics as something that would guarantee full, mutual recognition for all humans. The concept of recognition in the modern world then contains this radical and impossible desire. As capitalism spreads historically across states, this desire – and the indignation of the impoverished against global inequality – spreads with it.

Recognition going global On the reading given so far, two forms of freedom are affirmed within a concept of recognition. The first is the idea of republican citizenship, that is, the freedom of citizens who are affirmed communally as equal members of a political community. This mode of human understanding stretches across the ancient world of Greek and Roman republics and is reimagined in modernity in a variety of liberal, socialist and social-democratic guises. The second is the modern idea contained within commercial or capitalist societies in which individual freedom is expressed via intersubjective market exchange as the mutual satisfaction of needs. Yet within capitalist economies any trend towards the impoverishment of large parts of the population and the rise of high levels of economic inequality across societies presents a sphere of unfreedom. Poverty and inequality are the economic modes of unfreedom in which parts of the population are denied full mutual recognition. In this a class of individuals are forced into a life in which they are denied the opportunity for the full realization of freedom, either as agents who participate equally in the political realm, or as agents who realize their particular needs and desires via the market.

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In this respect, under modern conditions of capitalism, there sits a contradiction and a gap between the ideal of freedom in both political and economic senses, and the realities of unfreedom occurring as a consequence of impoverishment and inequality. One response to rampant inequality is an attitude of indignation, an understanding that the state of affairs is wrong. A possible consequence is ongoing struggles for recognition which attempt to negate this condition of unfreedom and to make ‘real’ or ‘actual’ whatever is posited as a modern ‘rational’ ideal of freedom. In response to differing concrete conditions of unfreedom within differing regions of global capitalism, these responses and claims for recognition may take differing forms – from open violence and revolt, to non-violent occupation. The contemporary forms of such struggles for recognition are plural and perhaps chaotic; they cross differing spaces and territories and manifest in differing forms of antagonism and social conflict. Contemporary demands of recognition combine claims of identity, political inclusion and economic equality. Hence, recognition, as a philosophical and political concept, always contains within it the demands for economic redistribution and economic justice. This dual account helps us to reconsider the relationship between the concept of recognition and the international. Such an approach broadens also the ways in which Hegel’s concept of recognition can be seen to be relevant to an understanding of international affairs. Within the Philosophy of Right, Hegel uses a political conception of recognition to offer an account of interstate relations in which the focus is upon questions of war and violence and the shaping of international legal personality through the acknowledgement of statehood by other states.4 On this view the state is a status; it gains the status of international legal personality in a manner that bears some similarity to the recognition of citizenship within ancient and modern republics (Hegel 1991: §331). In some respects this manner of interstate recognition is merely formal, as a state which has military power and wealth is perhaps less in need of acknowledgement than its weaker neighbours. Yet, in other respects the formal non-recognition of the status of statehood is very significant. The denial of recognition of the independence of a political community has played a key role in forms of domination that have characterized international relations in modernity. In a manner similar to the non-recognition of the individual, the refusal of republican equality and the portrayal of an individual as subservient, nonhuman or as slave, in interstate non-recognition has extended throughout modern international relations and international law via the history of colonialism, international hegemony and empire. Mastery and slavery, freedom and unfreedom within the international have been shaped by modern theories

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of race and cultural superiority. In the nineteenth century, intellectual figures like Hegel could thus adopt something of a hypocritical position in relation to the concept of recognition. On the one hand, Hegel was a supporter of a modern republican ideal in which all citizens of European states should be granted civic and economic freedom and formal equality. On the other hand, Hegel stands within a tradition of European thinkers adopting an ‘orientalist’ mind-set who viewed a number of peoples around the world as so uncivilized as to not deserve the recognition of statehood (see Said 1978). Consider Hegel’s comment in the Philosophy of Right: [R]ecognition requires a guarantee that a state will likewise recognise those other states which are supposed to recognise it, i.e. that it will respect their independence; accordingly, these other states cannot be indifferent to its internal affairs. – In the case of a nomadic people, for example, or any people at a low level of culture, the question arises of how far this people can be regarded as a state. (Hegel 1991: §331)

There is quite a lot that can be drawn out from this, though here two ideas are perhaps most relevant. In one sense, while Hegel’s Eurocentric and somewhat racist comments strike the contemporary ear as unfortunate and morally wrong, they do point to something important within our understanding of modern international relations and international law. For Hegel, the form of republican equality and liberty that comes from mutual recognition is not a given. Rather, it is the outcome of very often violent, political struggles for recognition in which the status of citizenship and communal–state independence is often won or lost via fighting. The idea of the violent struggle for recognition by the slave thus has relevance to understanding the sphere of global anti-colonial struggles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a point taken up and developed by Frantz Fanon (1968). In another sense, the hypocrisy of Hegel’s position can be seen to continue today not simply at a level of global racial politics, but in the ideological nonrecognition of particular states, political formations and forms of life. We can think of how in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the dominant, global hegemonic power, the USA, has refused to recognize the independence of a number of political regimes and through both open and covert violence has set out to destroy their independence. One example is the USA’s war against Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. Another is the USA’s war against and occupation of Iraq (2003-) and, even more provocatively, against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) (2014-). In each of these cases the question of non-recognition of status is linked to the way in which an international hegemon attempts to assert

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power and control over a global capitalist world system.5 In this respect, violent international struggles for recognition and status between political groupings, which take place as war, occur also as attempts by competing political elites to arrest control over the economic ordering of societies, domestically, regionally and internationally. Identity and status recognition claims here are deeply linked to attempts to control the process of global capitalist accumulation and implement differing ideological visions of economic justice. Struggles for recognition within the international, especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, cannot be divorced from conflicts between rival political groupings over the nature of domestic and global questions of economic justice. While commonly these conflicts have taken place through the juridical and political frame of statehood, self-determination, national liberation and nationalism, these conflicts arise also across juridical and political boundaries. Here Hegel’s conception of the indignity of economic alienation and impoverishment under the conditions of modern capitalism remain vitally relevant, as are his concerns about the demands of the ‘rabble’. Hegel’s concept of the ‘rabble’ is interesting, in that the rabble is not a fully conscious economic class which adopts some form of transformative historical and political agency as in Marx. Rather, it appears more as a sense of disorganized bursts of outrage and anger against an economic and political system which offers the promise of economic freedom and satisfaction but grants only impoverishment, the denial of dignity and a feeling of indignation. The rabble represents the failure of political and economic recognition under modern capitalism. Further, the concept of the rabble expresses the contradictory demands of wanting both full satisfaction from an economic system, and the negation of the same economic system. The rabble responds to a distinct lack of recognition with its often contradictory demands via chaotic forms of protest and riot. There is something of a revival of Hegel’s concept of the rabble among aspects of contemporary ‘post-Marxist’ political theory which celebrate the nontotalizing, multiform, chaotic and multipolar senses of this form of political (dis)organization. One example is Hardt and Negri’s (2000) concept of the ‘multitude’ which attempts to describe the contemporary forms of inoperative spurts of protest, riot and political groupings which came to prominence in North America and Western Europe by way of the anti-globalization protests in the 1990s.6 Similarity can be found also within current forms of anti-capitalist protests, either in terms of the ‘Occupy’ protests of early twenty-first century, or in the forms of protest that constituted the Arab Spring which combined protests against impoverishment with the denouncing of authoritarian regimes.

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In this light, we can consider the last decade of the twentieth century and the initial decades of the twenty-first to involve a set of diffuse, sporadic and largely uncoordinated (or only thinly coordinated) bursts of protest, riot and revolt popping up across the globe, all of which share a number of similar sentiments. Each of these situations can be considered in terms of recognition claims that express a feeling of indignation against the injustices of modern global capitalism, and which demands some form of economic justice. The exact content of what this form of ‘economic justice’ might be is in no way uniform or universal. However, something that perhaps is shared amongst these contemporary ‘rabbles’ or ‘multitudes’ scattered and stretched across the globe, is the feeling of indignation, the feeling of not being recognized and not being affirmed by a political and economic system that robs people of their dignity through wage exploitation, alienation and impoverishment. What remains clear in these protests, riots and revolts across the globe is that these are struggles for recognition in which the demand for economic justice is deeply linked to demands of status and identity.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6

My account of the ancient economy is a very inexact gloss. For clearer accounts, see Finlay (1999), Brunt (1971), Anderson (1996), Forrest (1966) and Mann (1986). On the constitutive role of exclusion generally see Nancy (2000). On the influence of classical political economy on Hegel’s thought see more generally Riedel (1984), Ritter (1982), Avineri (1972) and Pocock (2003). Hegel echoes a theme about the economically productive and utilitarian nature of commercial self-interest that runs from Grotius to Hobbes to Mandeville to Locke and is given its clearest expression by Adam Smith. Hegel (1991:§199) argues: In this dependence and reciprocity of work and the satisfaction of needs, subjective selfishness turns into a contribution towards the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else. By a dialectical movement, the particular is mediated by the universal so that each individual, in earning, producing and enjoying on his own account, thereby earns and produces for the enjoyment of others. For a more detailed account of this see Kochi (2009). On the role of economic, military and political/cultural hegemony within the ‘modern capitalist world system’ see Wallerstein (2011). Hardt and Negri would generally deny this Hegelian aspect of their thought, and instead trace the concept of the ‘multitude’ to Machiavelli and Spinoza. See also Ruda (2013).

Part Two

Limits: Recognition’s Blind Spots

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Lost Worlds: Evil, Genocide and the Limits of Recognition Patrick Hayden

Over the past decade ever-increasing public, political and scholarly attention has focused on the theme of evil and its moral and political manifestations. Evocations of evil have been associated particularly with global terrorism (often in overtly racialized terms) (see Wieviorka 2012), yet this attention has also generated wider questions about the seemingly enigmatic nature of, and the boundaries between, right and wrong in a turbulent global environment beset as much by confusion, uncertainty and conflict as by integration, interdependence and cooperation (Hayden 2009; Jeffery 2008; Vetlesen 2005). During the same period similarly increasing attention has been devoted to theories of recognition from scholars working on issues within international politics. A crucial insight of this growing body of work is that recognition is central to the dynamics of social interaction and conflict from the interpersonal to the international, and is equally fundamental to local and global processes of how we experience moral injury within the legal, political and economic, as well as cultural spheres (Burns and Thompson 2013; Weber and Berger 2009). Despite the enhanced interest in evil and in recognition from many quarters, the debates surrounding both have failed to generate a common conceptual ground from which efforts at understanding the worst of human wrongdoing might be based. In this chapter, I explore the possibility of formulating linkages between recognition and the problem of political evil by paying particular attention to the world, rather than the self or the other. The main point of departure for this project revolves around distinguishing between evil and nonevil harms, given a shift in emphasis from dyadic interpersonal relationships to triadic intermediations with the worldly contexts that enable recognition. The chapter proceeds in three sections. In the first section, I examine some of the key

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features of contemporary recognition frameworks that attempt to make sense of human vulnerability and harm, and outline how these frameworks, in contrast to Hegel’s philosophy, stop short of the phenomenon of evil. In the second section, I move on to discuss how Hegel’s insight into evil as the annihilation or ‘voiding’ of a shared world at the limits of recognition opens up an alternative paradigm, informed by Hannah Arendt’s thinking, that moves recognition outward towards the third term of a common world. I finish, in the third section, by considering some of the ways that genocide can be said to constitute a special type of harm, appropriately considered evil, which aims at and results in the irretrievable loss of plural human worlds.

Recognition and its limits: From harm to evil Human vulnerability and the problem of harm have been ascendant in recent international political thought. The influential work of Andrew Linklater is illustrative of the turn to vulnerability and harm. Although Linklater treats the existence of a principle to avoid serious mental and physical harm as a given of every functioning society and thus as possessing transnational if not universal recognition, different contexts and periods offer competing outlooks on how to define and respond to unjustifiable harm. On the one hand, he acknowledges that no single a priori answer to the question of harm is possible. Yet Linklater (2011: 261) also claims that a transculturally shared moral point of view can be attained through the dialogical ‘development of universal structures of consciousness with significant cosmopolitan potential’. This moral point of view is oriented towards the fact of ‘the body and its vulnerabilities’ (Linklater 2011: 106). While disavowing rationalist forms of morality, Linklater (2011: 107–8) believes that increasing awareness of the shared vulnerabilities of the human condition has the potential to nourish a form of universal normativity that opposes unnecessary cruelty, suffering, humiliation, degradation and injury. Examples of this universal normativity include ‘cosmopolitan harm conventions’, frequently enshrined in the language of human rights, which proscribe reprehensible harmful behaviour such as torture, slavery and genocide. The current conversation about vulnerability and harm is shaped by a variety of theoretical approaches that repeatedly cast harm, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, as a problem of recognition (see Beattie and Schick 2013; Clark 2013). Whether done for reasons of race, gender, religion, ethnicity or sexuality, or because of political beliefs, class status or social membership, or

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simply due to negligence and indifference, one feature common to the diverse work in the turn to vulnerability and harm is the belief that serious harm is an affliction arising from, or connected with, the failure to acknowledge, not so much the pain and suffering of other human beings, as those other human beings themselves. Recognition of harm is possible only on the basis of the recognition of other human beings who are vulnerable to harm (Turner 2006: 54). Emerging from the Hegelian tradition, contemporary recognition theory also argues that identity and self-realization are premised on the recognition that others give to individuals and groups, and therefore that constraints on mutual recognition have numerous deleterious ethical and political effects. As Charles Taylor (1994: 1) puts it, the denial of recognition ‘can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being’. For Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, this focus on the harms that misrecognition can inflict on vulnerable others appears especially useful to a transcultural or global account of justice, calling on us to concern ourselves with the fates of others through the deeply relational view of struggles for recognition against unjust forms of exclusion, assimilation and subordination. On this view the harms of misrecognition are not simply ‘applied’ to pre-existing autonomous subjects but, since they are relational modes of deprivation, extend into the very constitution of embodied subjects, both individuals and groups. In their respective writings, Honneth and Fraser call for regarding ‘each other reciprocally as vulnerable and threatened beings’ (Anderson and Honneth 2005; Honneth 1995: 48). Both Honneth and Fraser offer an array of examples to support their claims that misrecognition is at the root of a seemingly diffuse set of harms ranging from injustice, degradation and disrespect, to inequality, insult and injury (Fraser and Honneth 2003). Honneth (1995: 131ff.; also see Honneth 2007) writes that asymmetric relations of misrecognition foster social, economic and political inequalities that violate self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem, thereby generating moral experiences of humiliation within processes of identity-formation and self-realization. Fraser (2008a, 2008b) cites many instances of the intertwining of forms of misrecognition predicated on racial, national, sexual and gender status orders and forms of exclusion through maldistribution and socio-economic inequalities. When theorists today turn to the problem of harm to address contemporary international or global politics, then, they tap into the tradition of recognition. At the same time, another common feature of efforts to specify ethico-political responses suited to shared human vulnerability is that the proliferation of harm talk has neglected to wrestle squarely with the question of evil. For instance,

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Linklater (2011: 42), citing the Oxford English Dictionary, notes that the idea of evil is central to defining harm, but calls the idea ‘notoriously complex’ and does not address it further throughout the remainder of his analysis of harm. Honneth (2009) refers to suffering and injustice as ‘social and moral evils’ several times in Pathologies of Reason, but does not elaborate there and appears not to use the term elsewhere in his writings. Fraser (2013) refers to dominance and subordination as ‘evil’ in The Fortunes of Feminism, but I can find no other instances of this in her work. While the Hegelian influences are undeniable in these strands of thought, recent inquiries into vulnerability and harm also represent something of a contraction of conceptual and political ambitions from Hegel’s own phenomenological affirmation of evil as a symptom of radical non-recognition. Undoubtedly the problem of harm today takes its bearings from a very different set of conditions than those of Hegel’s own time. Yet I suggest that there is still more at issue than injustice, inequality, humiliation and disrespect within the spectrum of harms that arise from the denial of recognition. Insofar as radical non-recognition is based upon the deliberate quality of attempting to annihilate others from a shared moral or political realm, it also offends against the human condition at the ontological level of the world. Such annihilation crosses a threshold between misrecognition that is harmful and non-recognition that is evil. It is true that Hegel’s thought is greatly limited by the suspect metaphysics of the dialectic. Yet if read in conversation with contemporary advocates of the turn to vulnerability and harm, his phenomenological insights alert us to the profound experience of evil that can be wrought by radical non-recognition and gives reason to believe that the question of evil is of great importance, even as he mistakenly subsumes that phenomenon under the force of Providence. The phenomenon of evil appears in several different registers across Hegel’s philosophy. At the most abstract level, evil appears under the general concept of the negative as the dialectically inseparable contrary to the category of the positive. Evil is manifest in the very process of reality as the negation of the good. World history – the ‘slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized’ (Hegel 2004: 21) – unfolds in large part through disease, disasters, massacre, slavery, war and other seemingly unintelligible atrocities that appear to overwhelm the beautiful, the good and the true. Yet Hegel (1975: §35) also asserts that evil exists only as a moment within the dialectical movement of the Absolute, which reaches its completeness through the reconciliation of good and evil in the totality, rationality and necessity of the teleological self-becoming of Spirit,

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and therefore in a superior positivity. Herein lies Hegel’s (in)famous speculative amelioration of the reality of evil in human history, insofar as evil is regarded as the destructive yet necessary moments that fuel the motor of historical progress. In the teleological self-becoming of Spirit, Hegel (2004: 15) holds, reason must confront the negativity of evil in history ‘so that the ill that is found in the World may be comprehended, and the thinking Spirit reconciled with the fact of the existence of evil’. While Hegel’s theodical philosophy of history arguably dissolves the full significance of human evil into a kind of ‘collateral’ misfortune that guarantees reason’s inevitable and ultimately progressive triumph,1 his dubious metaphysics is neither his last nor best word on the phenomenon of evil. Hegel offers a phenomenologically richer and politically deeper insight into the experience of evil on the more concrete intersubjective register. Subjectively, human evil arises through a kind of deformation in the transition from morality (Moralität) to ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Morality coincides with the actualization of selfconsciousness, according to Hegel, insofar as the developmental stage of being conscious of oneself as an individual, and therefore as existing in relation to other free selves, corresponds to the standpoint of the self as a person, that is, an agent that seeks to actualize itself through its own volition and action. Ordinarily, the moral self aims to do what is good in the process of reconciling his or her particular will with the universal implied in the mutual recognition between persons (Hegel 1977: 394). Yet the limitation of morality, in Hegel’s view, is that while the subjective concern with one’s own volition, actions and the consequences of those actions can accentuate the value of individual freedom, conscience and responsibility, it can also pass over into an egoistic concern with one’s desires and interests to the detriment of others. In its most aberrant forms, subjectivism can lead not only to the criminal violation of the rights of others but, at the extreme, to the nullification of the will of all others as moral agents in their own right. Moral evil, in other words, arises from the actions of a subject that elevates his or her own private will to the status of the universal, thereby assuming a kind of radical conviction that absolute self-interest should function as the general norm determining one’s choices and actions (Hegel 1967: §139). Lesser forms of egoistic hypocrisy, immorality and crime are distinguished from evil inasmuch as they are committed in light of an awareness of the distinction between what is morally right and wrong, while evil acts destroy this distinction by equating the good with any conduct whatsoever that is subjectively willed (Hegel 1967: §140). Subjectively speaking, to be evil is to act on the conviction that nothing that one does can in fact be evil (or even wrong),

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and hence one can be completely indifferent to the freedom and integrity of others.2 When transferred into the intersubjective realm of ethical life, where the moral agent is meant to assume the character of a concretely situated being for whom reciprocity and accountability facilitate the realization of freedom in relation to others and a system of shared social institutions, evil becomes not only a moral but a political phenomenon as well. Hegel describes how the negativity of a self-consciousness that regards itself as absolute ‘pure inwardness’ and refuses to acknowledge the status of others, to the point of reducing others to non-being on both an individual and collective level, leads to radical nonrecognition. Evil in this sense amounts to a negation of particular others from one’s social world, a world that is then defined by its rigid non-relation (or absolute opposition) to those others who are perceived as if they should not be (Hegel 2004: Introduction; Hegel 1967: §341–60). In political terms, what should be a ‘unified’ social world is hollowed out by evil that instead ‘substitutes a void’ (Hegel 1967: §140). Evil, then, is not simply indifference towards others (which may or may not harm them), nor is it a struggle resulting in the submission of the other (which may dominate and injure but not necessarily destroy), but it is the ‘voiding’ – literally, the annihilation to non-existence – of a shared world that should be both the constitutive ground and the affirmative outcome of mutual recognition.

World: The third term of recognition Hegel gestures towards the possible political significance of evil as world annihilation but does not fully conceptualize this dynamic, and the more recent variants of recognition theory inspired by Hegel seem to offer little help in this regard. This underdeveloped but tantalizing aspect of his phenomenology of ‘voiding’ a shared world of recognition is deserving of much greater attention, however. What is needed is further explication of how world annihilation is politically salient for our understanding of evil. How can we make sense of this claim? Hannah Arendt’s work offers the most sustained effort to theorize the value of the concept of ‘world’, formulated as a substantive noun, for contemporary politics. Specifically, she elaborates a phenomenologically inflected account of world that she believes is indispensable to a pluralist conception of political existence. In doing so, she responds to the post-Hegelian invitation to reimagine the experience of evil while trying to show that particular ways of withdrawing recognition from others are sociopolitically dependent on or mediated by worlds

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of human coexistence possessing distinctive ontological characteristics. Arendt’s relationship to current variants of recognition theory is contentious (see Markell 2003). While recognition is typically cast as a matter of undistorted cognition of the particular socially embedded identities carried by self and other, Arendt takes a dim view of any theoretical subordination of the political to identity, above all when identity is reified in terms of certain inherent (biological, racial, national, sexual) qualities. Alternatively, recognition is formulated as a normative standard of the requirements of justice, but again Arendt is notoriously dismissive of any view that equates politics with the implementation of (deductively derived) theories of justice. At the same time, however, Arendt (2004: 380) provides a powerful analysis of the plight of stateless persons that exposes the hollowness of human rights guarantees based on ‘the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human’, that is, on the presumption of an ahistorical human essence that meaningfully persists independently of public recognition. Arendt’s notion of the ‘right to have rights’ thus presupposes a process of extending mutual recognition as constitutive of legal personality and political equality, one that entails political struggle with others and yet whose precariousness can ensure nothing permanently (Arendt 2004: 381–3). More than that, for Arendt mutual recognition cannot take place in isolation from a common and factual reality, that is, a common world. Arendt’s account of world as the ground of recognition and hence of political coexistence provides us, I suggest, with yet another way to grasp not merely vulnerability and harm but, further, evil as the obliteration of a common world altogether. But how does she interpret ‘world’, and how exactly can it help us both to better understand evil and to effectively address the limits of recognition? It is the phenomenological-existential emphasis on how world is central to human sociality that leads Arendt to think that recognition should focus our attention not so much on identity as on the conditions of a shared world fit for human habitation. For Husserl, ‘world’ refers to the perceptual circuit of intentional consciousness to meaning. World is shaped by perceptual phenomena in the sense that the apprehension of objects as they appear in experience is synonymous with the apprehension of meaning. The subject lives in an intersubjective ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt) of historically and culturally preconstituted meanings which serve as an abiding ‘horizon’ for all knowledge, interpretation and action (Husserl 1970: 49–50, 142). As Husserl suggests, the interpersonal lifeworld is linked intimately to what makes common experience and its historical transmission possible. This dimension of Husserlian phenomenology is developed by Heidegger, even though the latter distances his own understanding of world

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from the investigation of consciousness and situates it instead in relation to the question of Being. Heidegger (1982: 297) emphasizes that ‘self and the world belong together . . . not two beings, like subject and object’, but ‘the unity of Being-in-the-world’. Human being (or Dasein) ‘primordially’ encounters the world instrumentally, as a totality of ‘equipment’ and conditions for practical engagement, but the intimacy that characterizes the unity of self and world also manifests as the horizon of all possible meaning and action and therefore of taking care (Sorge) of the world. The binding power of being-in-the-world is, for Heidegger of course, language, which belongs elementally to the world as a ‘sign-structure’ or ‘referential totality’ that discloses the meaningful experience of ‘any entity whatsoever’ (Heidegger 1962: 49–51, §17). The complex intertwining of phenomenal reality, the interpersonal and world is elevated to a position of much greater political import in the work of Arendt. There are three main elements to Arendt’s account of world as the space of public appearance: the guiding vision of human artifice, the relationship between plurality and identity, and the disjunctive synthesis between people (individually and collectively). The vision of human artifice Arendt advances resonates strongly with the classical conception of the public realm. The concept of world she advocates is characterized by practical activities that build and shape the objective conditions, as distinguished from the natural environment, in which humans live – through instrumental praxes such as labour and work, which produce objects for consumption as well as endow the social structure with relative durability and stability, but also through the initiation of freely undertaken action that begins something new whose outcome is uncertain and unpredictable. In this way, goods are produced for consumption, artefacts (cultural, aesthetic, technological, educational) are invented that confer relative durability and stability on the social fabric, and associative practices and institutions based on mutual respect and equality are created that cultivate opportunities for collective interaction and foster diverse opinions about the character of public coexistence (Arendt 1958: 7–11, 22–33). While all three activities are interdependent, Arendt believes it is through action that a world acquires properly human significance and reality since it manifests a public, and paradigmatically political, aspect of togetherness that no other activity can give it. It is with reference to this public character of world that the interplay of plurality and identity appears. Arendt’s concept of world is pluralist in the dual sense that all phenomena appear through the plurality of perspectives that human beings take on a world, and that human beings appear to one another as a plurality of worldly, situated beings. Arendt (1958: 7) points out, on the

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one hand, ‘that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’, and on the other hand, that ‘the reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself ’ (1958: 57). The sense of reality is therefore intersubjectively grounded in a shared world of appearances in which our different standpoints on the ‘sum total of aspects’ presented by the same object are composed by taking on board the views and interests of others. Similarly, identity is intertwined with the manner in which we reveal the distinctiveness or uniqueness of ‘who’ rather than ‘what’ we are through the exchange of words and deeds with and amongst others in a world (1958: 179). A world is ‘where I appear to others as others appear to me’, Arendt (1958: 177) argues, and in so doing we become recognizable; put differently, the achievement of identity and the ability to appear before others are co-constitutive.3 As Jacques Taminiaux (1997: 83) remarks, belonging to and sharing a world with others is the condition that permits a life to be the life of ‘someone’. Lastly, with respect to a world’s disjunctive synthesis, insofar as it publicly manifests and can be perceived and talked about by all from the myriad perspectives taken upon its appearance, a world serves as an ‘in-between’ that both connects together and differentiates plural persons. As an intermediary space that arises between people (inter-est), a world serves as a kind of phenomenal medium of equilibrium in which people recognize each other simultaneously as worthy of equality, and thus of deserving to appear in public, and also as separate and unique, since too much intimacy or closeness destroys (respect for) worldly plurality (Arendt 1958: 243; 1994: 406). In her ‘Introduction into Politics’, Arendt (2005: 175) makes the controversial claim that ‘[s]trictly speaking, politics is not so much about human beings as it is about the world that comes into being between them and endures beyond them’. Arendt’s point introduces a shift in perspective that both calls into question the conventional dyadic limits of recognition and offers a way to understand the phenomenon of political evil by bringing into view the centrality of world. With this shift in perspective, we can see that a world is an intermediary third dimension that is irreducible to the persons who relate through and to it (Arendt 1968: 4). We can understand a world, in political terms, as a precondition for interpersonal recognition. It is the site, as it were, where recognition is situated. As Taminiaux (1997: 84) notes, ‘there must be a world before the life of someone may appear’. World-building establishes a meaningful public context for recognition, and by treating world as having the same ontological status as self and other, existing as a definite and historically specific ensemble of relations between different persons, we place recognition within a triad of self-world-

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other. Theorists such as Honneth and Fraser tend to suppose the dyadic presence of one human being to another, which overlooks the world as intermediary third dimension. Recognition, then, is distinguished not only by reciprocity between plural persons but by the presence of an acknowledged common world, a third, shared object of concern which serves as the site of political coexistence around which persons are constituted together. Placing the worldly intermediary at the centre of recognition likewise highlights that worlds are susceptible to loss and even obliteration. Because world is synonymous with human artifice it does not possess a natural permanence (even though it is undeniably bound up with the natural environment). Consisting of both tangible and intangible elements – objects, customs, languages, concepts, institutions, memories, practices, experiences, habits, beliefs, symbols, monuments, narratives and traditions – worlds accumulate a density over time and are remade only through various modes of socio-historical transmission and inheritance (Pitkin 1998: 303 n.93). A world is the collective repository of a past, the meaningful condition of a present and the potential expression of a future. Indeed, if a world is to acquire the quality of publicity then it must ‘survive the coming and going of the generations’ (Arendt 1958: 55). The ability to act within and upon a world, in other words, turns upon there being a common world to begin with. This insight puts into a different light the contemporary recognition account of vulnerability and harm, inasmuch as every world, being a uniquely constructed artifice, is itself vulnerable by definition. And in emphasizing that the phenomenal world is the decisive context for the very possibility of mutual recognition, we better illuminate why radical non-recognition, which casts into the void those refused acknowledgement of sharing the common, corresponds to a sense of political evil as world-annihilation.

Genocide’s evil: World as missing link In this section I want to elaborate how an understanding of world-annihilating violence can help us make sense of the distinctive evil of genocide. To do so, I first want to turn to a short, but telling, historical vignette. In 1876, the last ‘full-blooded’ Aboriginal Tasmanian, a woman named Truganini, died at the Oyster Cove Aboriginal Station. Of the many case studies of genocide amassed by Raphael Lemkin, the Polish jurist who first defined the term ‘genocide’, he found the plight of the Aboriginal Tasmanians to be particularly troubling.4 The Oyster Cove Aboriginal Station was simply the last in a line of internment

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camps established by the colonial authorities for the purpose of resocializing the Aborigines into a ‘civilized’, European mode of existence: from their clothing, to their diet, housing, education, labour, family structure and religion, Aborigines were forbidden to partake in and reproduce the existential foundations of their distinctive worldly coexistence. When the British imperial government established its first permanent settlement on Tasmania in 1803, the precolonial Tasmanian communities had formed a rich and enduring society over a period of thousands of years. Approximately 5,000 Aboriginals – representing nine tribes and more than fifty bands, two languages and multiple dialects, and diverse cultural practices – inhabited the island at the time of British settlement (Ryan 1996: 11–14), and they soon experienced numerous lethal and non-lethal efforts to destroy both them and their world. Between 1803 and 1818, more than half the Aboriginal population died from a combination of massacres committed by settlers and Royal Marines, and starvation caused by dispossession of their hunting grounds (Kiernan 2007: 265). By 1832, following a brief period of armed resistance against British military forces, only 300 Aboriginals remained alive. Subsequent to the campaign of military ‘pacification’, the colonial government devised a plan to transplant the surviving Aboriginals into a reserve – first on Flinders Island and then at Oyster Cove – in order to conduct a ‘civilizing’ experiment under the direction of the builder and missionary, George Augustus Robinson. Motivated not by genocidal intent but rather by a ‘misguided kindness’ to save the Tasmanians through assimilation (Lemkin 2005: 179), Robinson pursued the complete ‘eradication of their beliefs, customs, and even identities’ (Brantlinger 2003: 126). The Aboriginals learned English and Christianity, adopted European names and dress, cut their hair, studied European trades and occupations, and women and girls were married to settlers. They also suffered severe mental illness, depression, apathy, alcoholism and disease amid the complete collapse of existing community relationships. Despite the absence of direct physical force against the Tasmanians during this period, by 1876, Lemkin (2005: 195) reports, they were ‘civilized off the face of the earth’. Involuntarily placed in a position of being compelled to renounce ties to their land, to their language and culture, and to each other – indeed, forced even to deny their own historical reality, that is, their world as a shared repository of memory and experience – the Tasmanians ceased to be able to present themselves and their unique world for the acknowledgement of others. Here was a process of annihilation that utterly destroyed one world – effectively disintegrating the preconditions for a meaningful coexistence long before Truganini’s death – and casually imposed another as if the first had never existed.

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The civilizing extermination of the aboriginal Tasmanians, on the face of it, would seem to fit within the terms of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. British settler, religious and secular authorities collaborated with the explicit intent, at times at least, of destroying a distinct group. Yet beneath this surface simplicity, the annihilation of the Tasmanians exposes some deeper complexities and questions involved by introducing the concept of ‘world’ into the dynamic of non-recognition, since the extermination of the Aboriginals enacted a relational process of destruction whose effects are irreducible to a singular intended object of harm. My goal here is not to offer a comprehensive theory of genocide that would attempt to explain why it occurs, through which methods and what, if anything, can be done to prevent it. Rather I want to explore the meaning of the question of what makes genocide so morally and politically damaging that the ordinary language of injury and injustice fails to capture its severity and which therefore compels us to resort to the language of evil. What is generally overlooked in this regard, I want to suggest, is the way in which the idea and the reality of an enduring, sharable world becomes an object seriously compromised and even destroyed within the genocidal process. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly as the official international commitment to ‘liberate mankind from such an odious scourge’, embodies the legal definition of genocide. But what exactly does this ‘odious scourge’ signify? How should we interpret, in other words, the broader meaning of genocidal annihilation as a form of political evil? Although the Genocide Convention defines, it does not conceptualize. In order to begin to make sense of these questions we should turn to the crucial work of the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin coined the neologism ‘genocide’ in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, and his conception is worth quoting at length: By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group . . . . Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the

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lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group . . . . Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals. (Lemkin 2008: 79; also see Lemkin 1946: 228)

As Lemkin (1947: 147) reiterated elsewhere, the first distinctive characteristic of the harm of genocide is that it is ‘directed against groups, as such, with individuals selected for destruction only because they belong to these groups’. The notion that, first and foremost, groups are the victims of genocide was codified in the Genocide Convention, whose second article ascribes to genocide ‘the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. Both Lemkin and the Convention make clear that genocide differs from wars of mass extermination and mass murder. What marks genocide as a distinctive harm is the effort to ‘destroy’ or ‘annihilate’ a group in its specificity. Neither Lemkin nor the Convention limit the term ‘genocide’ to directly killing members of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, although killing may of course be one method by which destruction is pursued. As Lemkin stresses, a group might be destroyed by ‘disintegrating’ its existential foundations (culture, language, institutions, heritage, economy), and sections (b) to (e) of Article II of the Convention adopt a similar (though less expansive) view: causing mental and bodily harm, subjecting groups to destructive conditions, preventing births and forcibly transferring children are all forms of genocidal conduct. Importantly, the non-lethal attempt to destroy the existential foundations of a group is no less genocidal than direct killing. In addition, Lemkin and the Convention maintain that acts designed to destroy groups in part, as well as in whole, should be regarded as genocidal; destruction need not be total, nor directed at every group member, in order to threaten group annihilation. Despite continuing disputes about what shared features constitute a potential target group, as well as about which groups qualify as potential victims (delimited by the Convention to national, ethnic, racial and religious groups), the conception that genocide is a group-level harm – related to the special vulnerabilities of groups as such – is now deeply engrained in international law. This assumption is also widely reflected in the scholarly literature. Prominent definitions, for instance, describe the aim of genocide as the ‘destruction of a collectivity’ (Fein 1990: 24) and

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the ‘destruction of civilian social groups’ (Shaw 2007: 154). Nonetheless, there remains much confusion about why group destruction counts as a moralpolitical harm; in other words, how should the special status of genocide’s wrongness, its distinctive evil, be understood? The damage done by the evil of genocide has been understood in three primary ways. The first possibility emphasizes the collectivist dimension of harm. Under this conception the chief object of harm is the group to which individuals belong. As Steven P. Lee (2010: 341) observes, on ‘a collectivist account, there is intrinsic moral value in the group that is not reducible to the moral value of its members, and it is the harm to that moral value (or the intent to do that harm) that is the distinctive moral wrong of genocide’. On such an account, individuals are harmed only instrumentally, as a means to harm the group itself. The collectivist characterization of genocide as damaging groups as such relies on a notion of ‘groupness’ similar to Michael Walzer’s understanding of a ‘moral community’. Walzer (1977: 53–4) assigns moral value to ‘the reality of the common life’ within a community, which describes the ‘sum of things [its members] value most’, taken on its own. A ‘common life’ does not merely aggregate the rightful moral claims of its members, but adds to them in its own right. What this position brings to our attention is that genocide consists, at least in part, of an attack on the cohesive social relations of an antecedent group to which individuals belong and which they share in common. Another formulation of genocidal harm characterizes genocide’s distinctive wrongness as harm to individuals who belong to a targeted group. This position does not square easily with the wide acceptance of Lemkin’s characterization of genocide as directed at groups as such. Yet some scholars are uncomfortable with the ontological problems of ‘groupness’, especially when groups are formulated as undifferentiated corporate entities whose moral standing transcends the accumulated interests or rights of their constituent members.5 Lon Fuller (1967: 117), for instance, cautioned that ‘we must not suppose that the “thing” [the group] is something more than the sum-total of its properties’, and, more recently, Larry May (2010: 7) warns that ‘groups do not have any value in themselves’. Instead, May contends, genocide is rightly said to target individuals because it destroys various forms of symbolic and material recognition of individual autonomy. Similarly, Claudia Card (2010: 237, 265–6) argues, genocide is reprehensible because it deprives individuals of their capacity to associate with others and acquire a socially recognized identity. Genocide therefore is a non-trivial harm to individuals insofar as individual dignity and moral standing are destroyed as a consequence of the forced loss of a group-based context for interpersonal recognition.

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A third possibility claims that genocide damages humanity. This manner of characterizing the distinctive evil of genocide is familiar from the term ‘crime against humanity’ (although technically the legal violation of crime against humanity is broader than that of genocide, since it refers to a family of similar actions that nonetheless lack genocidal intent). Despite its familiarity, however, the term itself does not convey how humanity as a whole can be an object of moral harm. In response, two interpretations are most prevalent. The first interpretation is conceptualized through Kantian (or religious-spiritual) notions of intrinsic human dignity. On this reading, genocide violates ‘humanity in the person’ or the ‘high worth of humanity’ which is independent of, or at least surpasses, the moral standing of its members (understood either as individual persons or groups, or both) (see Kateb 2011; Lang 2005: 5–17; Murphy 1998). The second, empirical interpretation suggests that ‘humanity at large suffers’ from genocidal acts because the destruction of diverse cultures represents a loss to ‘the overall prosperity of humankind as a species’ (Macleod 2012: 201). This interpretation closely follows Lemkin’s own conception of the special moral wrong of genocide. For Lemkin, humanity exists as the collectivity of ‘world culture as a whole’, which is composed by and enriched through the historical contributions made to it by unique constituent cultures. When any group and its contributing culture is destroyed humanity itself is impoverished. ‘The world’, Lemkin (2008: 91) asserts, ‘represents only so much culture and intellectual vigour as are created by its component national groups . . .. The destruction of a nation, therefore, results in the loss of its future contributions to the world’. Lemkin’s thought here has been vital to genocide jurisprudence. The 2004 ‘Appeal Judgement’ in the case Prosecutor v. Krstić (ICTY 2004: §36), for instance, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia concludes: ‘Those who devise and implement genocide seek to deprive humanity of the manifold richness its nationalities, races, ethnicities and religions provide. This is a crime against all humankind, its harm being felt not only by the group targeted for destruction, but by all humanity’. Yet there is a fourth possibility for describing genocidal harm as a distinctive type of moral-political evil which, however, has so far received scant attention. This is the destruction of a phenomenal world as a space of appearance which links us to others. I don’t mean to reject any of the three previous options, since I believe that each captures a plausible aspect of the destructive process of genocide. Nevertheless, one of the principal deficiencies of debate surrounding the question of the special damage wrought by genocide is the conviction that only one type of harm is most fundamental, and only this harm correctly denotes what is genuinely wrong with

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genocide. Steven Lee (2010: 354) and Larry May (2010: 7) insist, for example, that the ‘chief ’ objects of harm are the individual members of a group, while William Schabas (2009: 3–8) and Berel Lang (2005: 9) assert that the ‘special’ harm at the ‘core’ of genocide is committed only against groups. Similarly, according to Christopher Macleod (2012: 198), what is most distinctive of genocidal harm is that it ‘primarily concerns’ humanity itself. None of these characterizations of the objects of genocidal harm is incorrect, yet by themselves they are phenomenologically incomplete and normatively weakened by uncharitably assuming that only one type of harm counts as the sum total of what is truly wrong with genocide. To reduce the myriad objects targeted by genocide to a predetermined, contexttranscendent account of a single proper harm is problematic not only because such a narrow commitment will inevitably result in exclusions and marginalizations, but also because it runs counter to the way that moral-political judgement of a particular case reflects interpretation from a particular perspective and according to the demands of the specific situation at hand. Rather than regarding harm to individuals, harm to groups and harm to humanity as three mutually exclusive options, I take it that we should view them as three dimensions of a single, complex continuum of genocidal harm. For this reason such harms should not be compartmentalized abstractly, but instead should be seen as interrelated. If that is the case, an intermediary is required to tie together these various dimensions into a meaningful whole. That intermediary element, I suggest, is the third dimension of world. What is more, while persons and groups can still physically survive when faced with the loss of their distinctive and interwoven worldly conditions – such as their unique languages, links to particular territories, artistic endeavours, cultural symbols and ritual practices – by means of the destruction of such worldly conditions themselves an obliterating darkness settles down upon their meaningfully human existence. In annihilating a world, genocide cuts persons and groups off from the very ‘public thing’ that ensures the relative permanence and reality of existence shared with others. There are several ways that the addition of world to our spectrum of the objects of genocidal harm supplements the conventional focus on individuals, groups or humanity, when thinking at the limits of recognition. First, while there are a number of theoretical accounts of the harm done to persons in genocide, they tend to overemphasize the ways that genocide is individualistically consequential. In many popular, media, and policy accounts, for instance, persons are instrumental to a moral calculus which quantifies the severity of the overall harm according to the greater number of individuals affected – this is the

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familiar ‘body count’ approach (see Lackey 1986). On this account, genocide matters, or becomes recognizable, only if a sufficient number of individuals are maimed or killed. This framing not only treats the formative conditions underlying genocidal destruction as self-evident, but also obscures the larger contexts shaped by group relationships and the historical interactions and practices around which social worlds are formed. In doing so, it fails to provide an adequate role not only for reciprocal relations of recognition between self and others but also for the deep interplay between self, others and world. In addition, affirming the phenomenal world as a mediating entity between personal ‘I-thou’ recognition and collective modes of ‘we’ recognition facilitates validating this milieu as a core existential foundation of a group while guarding against essentialist ontologies of ‘what’ a group ‘is’, such as when ‘groupness’ is defined in terms of national or racial ‘essence’.6 Instead of searching for what supposedly is ‘in’ individuals, groups or humanity, we can instead look at the recognizable relationships ‘between’ them. While much of genocide jurisprudence and theory endorses the idea that genocide harms a previously existing people or community, there is no consensus as to what actually constitutes a group as such (and by extension, for some accounts, of those groups that ‘count’ as eligible for legal protection) (see ICTY 2004: §50, ‘Partially Dissenting Opinion of Judge Shahabudden’). This has a knock-on effect of sowing confusion about how to conceptualize the non-physical, non-lethal destruction of a group. In this light, a worldly concept of group existence – one defined in terms of the relatively fluid web of relationships, beliefs, languages, customs, histories, institutions and shared experiences around which a group coheres rather than in terms of inherent characteristics – allows us to make sense of a peculiar kind of malrecognition perpetrated by genocidaires. Thus, many European Jews, Cambodian ‘bourgeoisie’ and Guatemalan ‘communists’, for example, may have existed in a meaningful social group only because of the types, intensities and meanings they themselves invested in their heterogeneous and mutable relationships with each other. Yet genocidaires tend to produce the very groups singled out for destruction, often imagining an immutable group into existence and assigning members to it, irrespective of the assigned members’ own senses of identity, difference and relationship – even when no special affinity had previously obtained.7 This same fateful illusion has led to logical gymnastics within genocide jurisprudence as courts attempt to confine application of the Genocide Convention solely to the four ‘protection eligible’ groups enumerated on grounds of race, ethnicity, nationality and religion. They do so by relying upon a suspect anthropological metaphysic that rigidly separates supposedly ‘stable’ or ‘objective’ groups from

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‘mobile’ or ‘subjective’ groups, with political and economic groups being the most controversially excluded from legal protection. Thus the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, for example, has held that ‘objective’ Tutsi ethnicity always trumped ‘subjective’ political identity in perpetrators’ genocidal intent during the Rwandan genocide, even though ethnic identity and political identity were effectively merged as well as historically imposed in Rwanda. Yet the ICTR also held that ‘half-caste’ victims of mixed heritage, lacking an ‘objectively’ fixed race or ethnicity, also qualified as part of the protected group simply because they appeared to be Tutsi in the eyes of perpetrators.8 Finally, stressing the significance of the phenomenal world as a focal point of recognition helps to refine what it means to claim that genocide harms humanity. Specifically, it refers to harming two worldly conditions distinctive to human existence: on the one hand, to plurality as world-constituting and, on the other hand, to reality as world-affirming. In one sense, humanity refers more to what lies between plural persons and groups than to what lies in them. Humanity, in other words, is an emergent and provisional universal represented only through the plurality of its constituent groups exposed to the unique lives and views of others. The loss of humanity occurs whenever the attempt is made to purify or purge the common world, to produce another type of world untainted by plurality. But to describe humanity in terms of its constituent plurality means something else too. To say that plurality is the central attribute of the world’s commonality indicates that our sense of reality is dependent upon a plurality of others to whom and with whom we appear in a shared world. The radical aversion to plurality embodied in genocide should also be understood, then, as an extreme hostility to reality, inasmuch as our sense of reality (both sensate and historical-political) is established only through the exchange of diverse perspectives on a common mediating world. That which cannot be seen and spoken of by others from at least one different standpoint becomes unreal or ‘derealized’. As Arendt (1958: 58) observes, ‘the end of the common world has come when it is seen only under one aspect and is permitted to present itself in only one perspective’. Therefore, if a common world is forcibly ‘cleansed’ of plurality so too is the fragile fabric of reality rendered increasingly threadbare – to the point, in genocide, where the fantasy of a singular ‘Man’ annihilates any need for mutual recognition between ‘men’. This in turn suggests that genocide should be understood both as a complete refusal to share a world with others and, further, as the tangible attempt to ‘void’ the reality of a common world in which any of us can appear in our variety and uniqueness. No greater evil can be inflicted upon the vulnerable human artifice that is a world.

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Conclusion As the specific case of the Tasmanian Aboriginals illustrates, this example of genocidal destruction reminds us that the problem of evil is tied up with the question of what it is either to build or to annihilate a world, and thus with particular ways of acknowledging or denying worlds. Here the perpetrators of genocide sought to find and destroy an other defined not only by skin tone, eye colour or facial features, but also by thoughts, convictions, ceremonies, rituals, narratives and memories carried precariously through time. The perpetrators understood themselves to be destroying something more than a group of individuals; they believed they were up against a world whose difference from their own was so complete that only one of these worlds could survive. For this reason the perpetrator’s actions attacked not only individual lives but also the relational bonds of recognition that held together the Aboriginal world itself. In doing so, the common human world was emptied of some measure of plurality and reality at the same time. As I have suggested, recognition is what moors us to one another as well as to a world, but without a world as an intermediary third dimension there would be no dyadic intersubjective recognition at all. Because a world is something both pregiven to, and made anew by human beings through their mutual recognition of its appearance between them, it can also be torn apart by the refusal to acknowledge some persons or groups as part of a world that is shared in common. The radical non-recognition to which Hegel gestures is a form of maldistinction that defines an absolute erasure of relations between those whose right to exist is acknowledged, and those whose right to exist, and therefore to be-together-with-others, to inhabit and manifest a world, is not. Keeping this in mind may help us better appreciate the anti-political character of genocide, which destroys the rich variety of plural worlds that serve as the sites and objects of humanizing recognition. Genocide is not simply a two-sided conflict between self and other, but a three-sided relationship of annihilation between self, world and other. Yet all too often, we grasp what is at stake in having a world only when the light of its reality has been extinguished. What I have hoped to show is that when we think about political evil, we need both to recognize the vulnerability of a world in all its plurality and to grapple more thoroughly with questions of the negation of the worldly in-between in which mutual recognition takes place and on which it depends.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

7

8

Perhaps the most unrelenting critic of Hegel in this regard is Theodor Adorno (1973). In the words of Paul Ricoeur (2004: 58), ‘the more the system prospers’ in Hegel’s philosophy of history, ‘the more the victims are marginalized’ to the point that ‘the question of happiness and misfortune is abolished’. For more on how Hegel’s philosophy of history ‘finds sense inside evil itself ’, see Neiman (2002: 84–103). On this point, Hegel might be read as prefiguring Arendt’s notion of the ‘banality of evil’. For Arendt (1963), this banality corresponds to ‘thoughtlessness’ which, rather than being immoral, is amoral insofar as it carries with it a complete lack of awareness of the rightness or wrongness of one’s acts. Thoughtlessness thus stands behind an unshakeable belief that anything is permitted. Cf. Arendt (1993: 154). To put a further gloss on this point, identity is the acknowledged (not ‘essential’) aspect of one’s being – or more accurately the acknowledged aspects, since various aspects of our being – familial, social, ethnic, sexual, economic and so on – are recognized over time although not always in the same way or by the same persons, depending on how and when we reveal ourselves to others. Moreover, our identity may not necessarily become evident at the moment of appearance, but only in the indeterminate time that follows. Lemkin spent nearly fifteen years working on a book on the world history of genocide, but it remained incomplete and unpublished at the time of his death in 1959. Lemkin’s manuscript included the paper later published as ‘Tasmania’ (Lemkin 2005). For detailed discussions of groups as corporate moral persons see French (1984), and May (1987). For a recognition-theoretical discussion of individuation within the processes of shared group experience, in light of tensions between different conceptions of what constitutes a group, see Axel Honneth (2012: Chapter 12). Another example would be the Maori, who ‘saw themselves simply as belonging to dozens or hundreds of groups with different lineage and relation to natural resources’, and who formed a shared and unified group identity only in response to British colonization of New Zealand/Aotearoa (Young 1997: 90). See ICTR (2003: §56), and (2004: §467). Compare these to ICTY (1999: §70): ‘it is more appropriate to evaluate the status of a national, ethnical or racial group from the point of view of those persons who wish to single that group out from the rest of the community’. Weaknesses in the orthodox logic also have been exposed by the ICTR and ICTY landmark decisions (e.g. ICTR 1998) recognizing that rape can constitute genocide, thereby further confounding conventional understandings of gender and sexuality vis-à-vis the binary of ‘stable’ and ‘mobile’ group identities.

7

In Recognition of the Abyssinian General Robbie Shilliam

I am an Abyssinian General. These are my troops. Do not cross this bridge. You see me lying down with cutlass in my hand? I will cut you if you cross. No plantation work at Lusignan today. Or tomorrow. Not here, nor anywhere in Demerara. Don’t try send the Indian workers. They won’t cross either. For we are at war. With Italy. And with you. Over wages? Well, true, we always agitate around this time of year, after crop over. And true, this year we yielded high with the sugar so our wages are bound to be even lower. But don’t call it a strike. I told you. Can’t you hear the drums? This is war. And see this red flag? That is our flag. No hammer and sickle. The red flag of Africa. This year is the year of salvation and of our liberation. We heard the district commissioner say that we had an extraordinary idea of the relationship between Britain and Abyssinia. They can’t fool us. We know that even the Governor is shook up. He worries that our mind has been most powerfully affected by our war with Italy. That we are seeing the world situation here and there through the lens of colour. And he is right. The 100 extra police sent from Georgetown will not be enough to quell this fire. ***** This is not a bondsman, nor a slave descendent, but an Abyssinian general. How the descendent of an enslaved African became an Abyssinian general is a mystery to the slavemaster/massa/governor/lord. It is certainly not a reasonable transformation; and more distressingly, it seems to have been pursued out of sight of massa. Perhaps it has been happening behind the provision grounds communally at night. On the wings of a song that traverses the hinterlands of the spiritual realms wherein no ocean could block the pass. This General is not concerned as to whether the Governor of British Guyana recognizes him as

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such or as a deluded and impressionable black who has mistaken the English for Italians. (Perhaps it is a communist conspiracy.) Regardless, the Abyssinian general will pursue African liberation at home and abroad. The Abyssinian general is not recognized, nor is he misrecognized. He is unrecognizable to massa. Recognition theory, predominantly ensconced in debates over the prospects and pathologies of the European modern self, stumbles when it comes to engaging with the radical un-recognition that is congenital to the reproduction of colonial difference and perhaps at its most extreme in the slave plantation archipelago of the Americas (and elsewhere too). However, enslaved Africans and their descendants have struggled to maintain and cultivate practices of recognition that work autonomously to – if always in confrontation with – massa and his European episteme. In this chapter we will journey from colonial recognition towards a recognition of the Abyssinian general that is other-wise. ***** Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) prepares the student to grapple with his system of Logic (1975) by positing that the dialectic between consciousness and self-consciousness is a necessary existential as well as philosophical pursuit. Does it prepare the student to recognize the Abyssinian general? Over a number of different sections of The Phenomenology, Hegel replays the seemingly ceaseless movement to realize self-consciousness in the world, that is, to be in-and-for oneself by relating to other self-consciousnesses inand-for-themselves. Two entities start by recognizing themselves as other selfconsciousnesses in a state of radical equality: ‘each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same’ (Hegel 1977: 112). Hence, each entity is the ‘middle term’ for the other: I am for myself, but I am also for another. Through the middle term these self-consciousnesses ‘recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another’ (Hegel 1977: 112). But the moment where this manifestation of Geist takes on the form of direct political struggle is in the showdown between the Herr and Knecht – the lord and bondsman. And with the entrance onto the stage of these two personalities an inequality splits the middle term up into two extremes. The lord only recognizes, the bondsman is only recognized (Hegel 1977: 112–13). The lord is an independent consciousness ‘whose essential nature is to be for itself ’, while the bondsman is a dependent consciousness ‘whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another’ (Hegel 1977: 115). Hegel does not explain the provenance of this sudden inequality that is injected into the dialectical unfolding of Geist.

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Nonetheless, Hegel proceeds to script a life and death struggle between lord and bondsman to be recognized as an independent self-consciousness. In this struggle death can hold no resolution, not even the death of the bondsman for the lord. For death will collapse the middle term into a ‘lifeless unity’ rendering both entities mere things. Alternatively, Hegel insists that recognition is key to self-consciousness, even that of the lord. So although the lord might recognize the bondsman only as a thing, it is still a thin recognition: the lord is essential only because the bondsman is unessential (Hegel 1977: 116). Alternatively, Hegel considers the bondsman to have an independent existence even if only in terms of thinghood. In fact, the experience of sheer negation has filled this bondsman with the dread of losing her being. So she must retrieve her self-consciousness. And rather than death, it is her service to the lord through work which will provide an alternative route to shape this thing that is her entity. Through fear and service she recognizes herself again, indeed, she becomes even more self-conscious of her own agency (Hegel 1977: 118). At this point the lord and bondsman disappear from view in Hegel’s text, hardly to be heard of again (Buck-Morss 2000: 848). They have appeared suddenly and they disappear just as suddenly. The reader might be left wondering: was reconciliation achieved between the two? A more surreptitious reader might also question, of what use for the dialectic is the lord, now that the bondsman has liberated her own self-consciousness in a way that the lord could not? Perhaps it is only the bondsmen who, through their lived experience, are able to dialectically arrive at being in-and-for their selves through relating to other self-consciousnesses in-and-for-themselves . . . Susan Buck-Morss (2000) suggests that the appearance of the lord and bondsman is prompted by reports of the Haitian Revolution which appear in Minerva, a journal that Hegel reads. Sybille Fischer (2004: 24–33) suggests that the disappearance of the lord and bondsman might be something to do with the resolution of the Haitian Revolution in 1804. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) points out that this triumph of the enslaved was a resolution to the life/ death struggle that European philosophy had no framework through which to comprehend. The Haitian constitution of 1805 announced in Article 2 that slavery was forever abolished; neither the American nor French Declarations had dared to progress the struggle for recognition to that extreme. And yet European Enlightenment thought did not engage with enslaved Africans except as ‘slaves’, that is, as humans in biology only. Africans were regarded as tragically devoid of reason and agency, especially what Hegel would call 'worldhistorical' agency.

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Hegel’s silence on the fate of the enslaved is one note in a chorus of oblivion that structures the majority of European Enlightenment thought on rights and recognition. This chord strikes an epistemic silence on behalf of colonial difference and is played in almost every enlightenment Psalm (see Shilliam 2013a). In these texts, discussions of rights are usually made through speculative reason and recourse to natural law. And in these discussions, humanity is assumed and hence rights discourses are, within their abstract parameters, universalistic. However, substantive investigations of the composition of humanity – and who is deemed to be competently human – are usually made separately to rights discourses via anthropological and/or historical treatises or even through practical considerations on imperial administration. There, the competencies required to be human are delineated on the spurious grounds of race and culture. Via this division of labour the universal impulse of rights and recognition can avoid crashing into the partial and discriminatory framing of who is to be included as competently human. So for example, Locke’s Two Treatises can affirm the inherent equality and freedom of human beings under natural law, that is, the impossibility of justifying slavery; yet, in his drafts of the slave Constitution of Carolina Locke can categorically state that slave-owners can hold Negro slaves in utter dominion with no hope of salvation (see Farr 2008). Kant can argue for categorical imperatives that are universally binding in terms of conduct. He can even apply this to peace treaties and diplomacy in ways that, in principle, demonstrate an anti-colonial ethos of recognition across difference (see Jahn 2005). Yet in his anthropological work, Kant can separately set out the basic competencies of being human. He does so by utilizing racist travelogues that allow him to segregate peoples who have the potential to appreciate the sublime and the beautiful from those who have no such faculty, or can only feel for the grotesque (Eze 1997; Shilliam 2011; on aesthetics and colonial difference see Mignolo and Vazquez 2013). We can situate Hegel in the same flow of colonial mentality. His Phenomenology and Philosophy of Right make speculative reason work critically on the matter of family, civil society, religion, state and world history through the recognition process, that is, the becoming of self-consciousness. Yet in his Philosophies of History, as is well known, Hegel judges Asia to be lacking in the cultural competency to move with the dialectic, and he completely disavows Africa as unable even to enter such a process (Guha 2002; Lockward 2006; Taiwo 1997). This is perhaps why the passage on the lord and bondsman is so telling. To follow his own logic, Hegel would have to follow Geist, the World Spirit, to

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Haiti, populated by Negros who, although winning their freedom in thought and action, should not even be standing on the world-historical stage. In those few passages that follow the lord and bondsman, the colonial difference is suddenly revealed in the kinetic energy discharged when speculative reason, recognition and racism briefly collide. **** Inspired by the Negritude movement in Martinique and dismayed by his racist experiences while studying psychiatry in metropolitan France, Frantz Fanon dwells on this collision. In fact, he situates his critique of recognition directly within the silent yet explosive space of colonial difference. In his major treatise on the subject, Black Skin White Masks, Fanon partly mirrors Hegel’s method in the Phenomenology of consistently working through the strivings and failures of self-consciousness to actualize itself. Fanon also, in a Hegelian fashion, duplicates himself as the voice of the text – that is, the consciousness that is experiencing the process – as well as the theorist of this experience (Gordon 2005: 4). But Fanon radically differs from Hegel in making race and colonial difference the starting point of both experience and theory. And unlike Hegel he does not segregate speculative reasoning on recognition from anthropological delineations of the competencies of human being. Fanon (2008: 10) announces this confrontation by declaring, at the start of his text, that ‘the black is not a man’; what appears, instead of a man, is a ‘zone of non-being’. And, exposing Kant’s prejudice, Fanon (2008: 44–5) argues that racial difference provides for a ‘genuinely Manichean concept of the world’ wherein white is beauty and the precision of definition, while black is a fusion with the world and an abandonment of ego. Crucially, Fanon’s starting point, unlike that of Hegel’s, is not that of radical ontological equality. Rather, a human faces an un-human – a presence faces non-being (see Kleinberg 2003: 116, 121; Honenberger 2007: 158). From this starting point there can be no dialectical pathway available to cultivate mutual recognition (Oliver 2001: 23). The white does not ‘see another do the same as he does’ (Hegel 1977: 112) because he does not recognize that the thing facing him is a fellow self-consciousness. As Kelly Oliver (2001: 3–9) puts it, Fanon proposes that the black cannot even experience the privilege of alienation because there is no confrontation between selfconsciousnesses – even unequally positioned ones. What is more, although each colour is ‘sealed into his own peculiarity’, Fanon (2008: 44–5) states that black being is fundamentally comparative. So contra Hegel’s schema of ontological equivalence, the black cannot be an individual

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(Fanon 2008: 211). As a non-being, the black must compare itself to a humanity colonized by whiteness (Fanon 2008: 110). Conversely, the white has no need to reciprocate such an anxiety. By these terms, in order to become an individual with self-consciousness, the black must somehow become white (Gibson 2002: 31). Hegel never considers this kind of transmogrification, argues Fanon (2008: 63), a process that would require recognition to be pursued intergenerationally through miscegenation and self-erasure – ‘passing’ (also, to die). In this respect, colonial difference outlaws the ontological basis of reciprocity: they are not both human beings, and so the bondsman has no independence even in bondage as Hegel assumes (Fanon 2008: 169). The master laughs at the ‘consciousness’ of slaves. He does not require recognition from them; that would make no sense, because they are non-beings. Instead, the master simply demands work (even unto death) (Fanon 2008: 172). Confronting the problem of recognition in the intimate presence of colonial difference articulated through race, Fanon’s project is less concerned with mutuality between lord and bondsman and much more focused on practices of self-meaning and self-valuation undertaken by the bondsman. That is, the challenge for the bondsman is not so much disalienation in terms of reconciling individual self-consciousnesses to each other, but more so disalienation as a process of collective rehumanization (Coulthard 2007: 453–4; Oliver 2001: 29). (This is a necessarily collective process as individuality is outlawed by racist racialization.) In Hegel’s colonial schema this project would appear as ‘negativity’, that is, a turning away from relationality and the movement of Geist. Yet this assumption is precisely what Fanon brings Jean-Paul Sartre to task for. Sartre appraises Negritude as a transient antithetical moment on the way to a preordained synthesis of European humanism. But, Fanon (2008: 133–4) remarks, ‘that born Hegelian had forgotten that consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self ’. Speaking to the challenge of indigenous self-determination in Canada, Glen Coulthard (2007: 454) argues that Fanon’s critique of Hegel requires the colonized to re-evaluate their own histories. And it is here that I would suggest that Fanon’s decolonial episteme falls short. For Fanon is surprisingly receptive to the ‘fatal impact’ thesis of colonial lore, which proposes that no indigenous culture can survive the colonial encounter (Moorhead 1987). While often mobilized as a narrative frame for South Pacific colonial histories, I would argue that this thesis is clearly evident in assessments of the fatal impact of enslavement on Africans. Indeed, the vast majority of the most committed white abolitionists still presumed that these bondsmen had been stripped to the bone of all social

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and cultural competencies. All that remained was a ‘negro’, that is, a blank body requiring social and cultural fulfilment by European lords. Fanon seems to have internalized the fatal impact thesis, especially in terms of his Martiniquean provenance. Famously, Fanon asks what is left of dialectical selfdetermination if the lord simply gives the bondsman – the thing – her freedom without even a struggle? Fanon is here alluding to the gift of emancipation provided by Victor Schœlcher (president of the metropolitan Commission for the Abolition of Slavery) to enslaved Antilleans in 1848. But we should contrast this settlement to that provided by the Haitian Revolution wherein the enslaved utilized the martial, political, social and spiritual skills that approximately two thirds of them had learnt in the Kingdom of Kongo to eventually clear the island of its white lords (see in general Thornton 1998). The oath sworn at the inaugurating meeting of the Revolution at Bois Caïman in 1791 was freedom or death (death being life again). So we find that in this French colony enslaved Africans were most certainly involved in a deadly struggle for freedom (BuckMorss 2000: 848). Moreover, no blank bodies were involved in this dialectical moment – they came with African matter to fertilize the soil of St Domingue long before the revolution. It is even the case that Martinique itself witnessed revolts and rebellions just before, during and just after the Haitian Revolution (Geggus 1996). The whole of the Caribbean was in ferment, of course. It is, then, somewhat alarming to find that Fanon effectively quarantines the Haitian Revolution to the realms of colonial unbelief, where Hegel himself had consigned it. In its place, Fanon carries with him the defeat of the enslaved in Martinique by Napoleonic forces and the concomitant re-introduction of slavery. Even these doomed struggles disappear in Black Skins when Schœlcher, the white lord, changes his heart in 1848 and proposes to his colleagues, ‘let’s be nice to the niggers’ (Fanon 2008: 222). What is more, in his concluding chapter Fanon (2008: 226) seems to partially disavow inheritance of the Revolution when he proclaims that ‘I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible solely for the revolt in Santo Domingo’. We must place this somewhat anxious statement within Fanon’s engagement with Negritude. Fanon, Bernasconi argues, might here be endorsing fellow Antillean Aimé Césaire’s apprehension of a blackness routed through struggle, yet disavowing the continental version of Negritude expressed by Alioune Diop and Léopold Sédar Senghor wherein blackness is rooted in an African soul (see Bernasconi 2002). Accepting the fatal impact thesis, Fanon is wary of consigning black agency to an African past that, for him, no longer lives, and so he treats any claims to an African identity/soul with great suspicion. Indeed, these souls are not authentic

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for Fanon but merely by-products of the segregating logic of colonial rule. In short, the very notion of African identity/soul is framed by whiteness already (Bernasconi 2002: 72–3; Fanon 2008: 186). And because he is trying to escape from such whiteness, Fanon (2008: 226) implicitly substitutes the African pasts active at Bois Caïman for a focus on creating a brand new humanism. In his later writings, Fanon (1968: 57) does turn back to those traditions utilized at Bois Caïman, whereby, in the protective and permissive drum circles, the dehumanized allow themselves to be possessed by the ancestral spirits, lose their limits and animate themselves so as to embark upon an exorcism of colonialism. Nevertheless, Fanon treats these ‘traditions’ instrumentally. Keen to escape the dialectical traps laid down by the lord/massa, Fanon cannot consider the drum beats as aspects of living knowledge traditions. Indeed, we should not forget that for Fanon drums are the ultimate fetish that white people have used to entrap him in an unhuman blackness, a zone of non-being: I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships. (Fanon 2008: 112)

Hence Fanon believes that what is being played out on the tom-toms are merely internalized reactions to the violence of colonial rule. Such reactions have no epistemic validity, although the pulse of the drum might somehow kinetically charge a movement to forge brand new futures. In sum, Fanon radically repositions Hegel’s dialectic of recognition so as to confront the colonial difference – to move to the impossible place where the discriminatory delineation of humanity coincides with the speculative claims of universal right. To escape from this impossible condition the colonized must turn inwards, into the night of the absolute, in order, precisely, to reclaim their universality and humanity. However, Fanon effectively sanctions Hegel’s silence on Haiti, and with that, implicitly endorses (or at least does not substantively refute) Hegel’s narrative of world history that leaves Africa and Africans as prehistory. Turning inwards there is nothing to be found worthy of preservation. A surreptitious reader might ask this: so with what creative matter (not generic instrumental energy) would it be possible to cultivate a new humanism – not the thin particular of European philosophy that masquerades as a universal, but a thick decolonized humanism? Fanon could have the answer to his own problem and it lies in dispensing with the fatal impact thesis. At the start of the concluding chapter of Black Skins, and

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announcing the anti-colonialism of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon washes his hands of the Antillean intellectual who, he argues, wilfully seeks to become alienated through an intimate relationship with European culture. In contrast, the ‘Negro laborer building the port facilities in Abidjan’ is being exploited by a colonial authority that holds his humanity in contempt (Fanon 2008: 223–4). Fanon then relates a correspondence between this Negro labourer, one who does not even enjoy alienation, to one working on the sugar plantations of Martinique and admits that ‘it would never occur to me to ask these Negroes to change their conception of history’ (Fanon 2008: 224). Indeed, of the ‘few workingclass people’ whom he knows in Paris, Fanon notes that they never posed the problem of discovering a ‘Negro past’ precisely because ‘they knew they were black’ (Fanon 2008: 224). Fanon does not ask, what is the provenance of this blackness that they knew? ***** I am an Abyssinian general. I must do my part in the collective struggle for African liberation – here in the plantations of Americas and in the highlands of Ethiopia. I have the Africa flag and African drums. They are my compass and my energy store. ***** Was there a High John de Conquer in Martinique that Fanon did not know about? Zora Neale Hurston, famous African American anthropologist and relater of African American folk lore, reveals the existence of High John to the white North American public just as the United States enters the Second World War. It is a moment where even white people need something to believe in. High John was a mighty man, but not a normal man. He was first a whisper, a ‘will to hope’, ‘a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song’ (Hurston 1995: 922). He became flesh and walked in rhythm, ‘as if the world he walked on was a singing-drum’ (Hurston 1995: 922). You could tell High John was present through his laugh and his drum beat. He had come from Africa, travelling to the Americas ‘on the waves of sound’ and on the winds that filled the sails of the slaving ships (Hurston 1995: 923). High John de Conquer provided for the enslaved ‘an inside thing to live by’. The slave master could not understand this precious thing: ‘in an outside way, [slavery] was old massa’s fun, so what was old cuffy laughing for?’ High John fought pitched battles ‘without outside-showing force’, winning wars from within, for the liberation of the souls of black folk: ‘He who wins from within is

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in the “Be” class. Be here when the ruthless man comes, and be here when he is gone’ (Hurston 1995: 924). On the plantation, old John could beat unbeatable odds. Occasionally, massa would win, but even then High John could avoid a terrible fate and massa would have to laugh at that too. High John would even force upon massa ‘a sort of recognition that life is not one-sided . . . [and that] we are just as ridiculous as anybody else’ (Hurston 1995: 927). But most importantly High John told his enslaved people that they had to find a song that would carry them through to liberation and beyond. He took them on a journey through spiritual hinterlands, to hell and heaven and finally to the workshop of the Old Maker who crafted for them their own tune. A wordless tune, hence, one that ‘you could bend and shape in most any way you wanted to fit the words and feelings that you had’ (Hurston 1995: 929). And that became the freedom song which drove the struggle forward. After emancipation, High John de Conquer went back into mystery, travelled back to Africa, but left a root of his power in the soil of the Americas, so as to be summoned again when needed. Aunt Shady Anne Sutton, who recounted to Hurston these memories of High John, was wary of people like her niece who had gone north to pursue an anthropological education: I hope you ain’t one of these here smart colored folks that done got so they don’t believe nothing, and come here questioning me so you can have something to poke fun at. Done got shamed of the things that brought us through. (Hurston 1995: 925)

Shame might force you to embrace the pseudo comfort of a fatal impact thesis. Worse still, shame might even make you misrecognize Hegel’s racist Geist as a friendly spirit that could guide you to a dialectical ‘turning point’ where your selfconsciousness would leave behind ‘the colorful show of the sensuous here and now and the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond’ (Hegel 1977: 110–11). Leaving behind High John de Conquer. Only then would Geist be able to deliver you to the ‘spiritual daylight of the present’ (Hegel 1977: 111), a daylight illuminated by another self-consciousness that stands in front of you in reciprocity. You, however, will be confronted with massa, with un-recognition of your humanity, with no basis for reciprocity to begin the process of dialectical illumination. Then you will stand in the spiritual darkness of the present, as a zombie, wondering how you might ever become enlivened to repossess yourself and your communality. Geist will desert you. And massa will utterly control the manifest world. Perhaps he might allow you a slender escape to an afterlife. An afterlife that he nevertheless guards the gates to, as testified by this old song from Antigua:

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massa say if I serve him when I die a gonna go to heaven when I die serve him at the very best heaven me portion when I die wo, wo, wo, wo heaven me portion when I die. (Smith and Smith 1986: 88)

You would be in dire need of navigation. High John shines spiritual nightlight on your present condition. He guides you to creatively retrieve the agency that came with you from Africa so long ago for the redemption of your collective self in the here and now. In the absolute nightlight you might glean agencies that dwell in places that could never be enslaved, that is, in the spiritual hinterlands. Erna Brodber (1997: 98) calls this mode of reclaiming – re-recognizing – your collective self as ‘the hegemony of the spirit’. And she terms the methodology for such retrieval as ‘celestial ethnography’ (Brodber 1997: 61). A cartographic practice too, no doubt. Brodber expounds this methodology in the novel, Louisiana, which she conceived as a lecture to peoples of African Caribbean and African American heritages on their long history of cooperation (Brodber 2012: 123). It is fundamentally the story of three women of black consciousness, two – Anna and Lowly – who have passed to the spirit realm, one – Ella – who is in the manifest realm. Brodber intentionally models Ella as a carrier of Hurston’s legacy – an African American anthropologist (albeit born in Jamaica to Jamaican parents) who is paid to go into the field, the Black South – with a big tape recorder, and who ends up retrieving less the data to feed white theory and more the black matter for redeeming collective self (Brodber 1997: 125). Ella has been instructed to extract a life history from Anna, the Southern matriarch, but it does not go well. At the end of her first session Anna has given her little of substance, ‘one whole side [of the tape] gone’, ponders Ella, ‘and not a thing to give to the white people’ (Brodber 1997: 21). Tragedy strikes when Anna passes before Ella has the opportunity for further interrogation. Yet at the funeral, a strange thing happens. Ella loses herself and although she cannot remember doing it subsequently, utters ‘ah who sey Sammy dead?’ A voice speaks to her, familiar but not of her immediate relatives: ‘the ears are hearing other frequencies. The child has come through. Anna, she’ll make it’ (Brodber 1997: 28). Later, Ella realizes what experience she has undergone: There is a name for that state in which your body is depressed into physical collapse and something else is activated, rather like an injection needle is pushed

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forward and the shell in which it resides recedes. ‘Getting over’. I prefer to call it hegemony of the spirit. (Brodber 1997: 98)

From this point Anna, her Jamaican friend Lowly (who had affirmed that the child had come through) and Ella are bonded in a ‘celestial ethnography’ (Brodber 1997: 61). As Ella replays the tape recorder the voices of Anna and Lowly progressively reveal to Ella a history of struggle. Anna, it turns out, is born into a family culture that has been defined through ‘punished resistance’, and she carries on this tradition as a Garveyite, a black nationalist organizer of the South in the early twentieth century. The celestial sisters regularly announce their forthcoming presence to Ella by whispering the modified line of a song, the line that Ella uttered at Anna’s funeral. This Jamaican folk song is entitled ‘Sammy Dead Oh’ and was re-popularized in the 1960s (Brodber 1985). The song tells of how Sammy grows a crop and is killed by his envious neighbours. There is a spiritual wickedness to his death; a suggestion that Sammy’s neighbours used Obeah (science) to unnaturally kill him and in so doing release a restless spirit. Through Ella, Brodber turns the refrain around: ah who say Sammy dead? Sammy has been redeemed and his spirit is at rest (Sharpe 2012: 96). Remember, High John de Conquer says that you can put any lyrics into the freedom song, so long as you make it yours and turn it towards emancipation. And Ella has realized that this skill of ‘turning’ is her vocation: Stand if you will. Let your arms hang loose in front of you. Now put the tips of your index fingers and the tips of your thumbs together. Your extremities now form a diamond. Imagine the diamond to be solid three dimensional. Now pierce a hole through the center of this. That hole, that passage is me. I am the link between the shores washed by the Caribbean sea, a hole, yet I am what joins your left hand to your right. I join the world of the living and the world of the spirits. I join the past with the present. In me Louise [Lowly] and Sue Ann [Anna] are joined . . . I am Louisiana. (Brodber 1997: 124)

Ella has become the ‘kind of historian who gives the ordinary people their history’ (Brodber 2012: 123). This vocation might well have shamed her Jamaican parents, if they were to see it (Brodber 1997: 31). And massa’s halls of learning back in Columbia University cannot fathom this kind of knowledge cultivation. When Ella returns the tape recorder, years after her process of edification and transcription, she realizes that ‘for this world that I had once inhabited and had to leave, I was mad’ (Brodber 1997: 133). In any case, the story that Ella retrieves from the venerable sisters is not much more than what was already known by the anthropology professors of Columbia (Brodber 1997: 153). Yet the extraction of

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data is not the point of celestial ethnography; it is rather to cultivate a retrieval of collective personhood from spiritual resources – from the waters of the inside, where the outside is a desert. As Ella herself finally passes, she gushes forth ‘one sound. From one body. A community song’. And her husband, Reuben, recounts the meaning of Ella’s life: ‘[Anna] would not tell the President nor his men her tale for it was not hers; she was no hero. It was a tale of cooperative action; it was a community tale. We made it happen’ (Brodber 1997: 161). Part of Brodber’s fascination with Louisiana is to do with ‘how people who have never met each other can walk similar paths’. This is the phenomenon that Louisiana (Lowly-Anna – African Jamaican and African American) invokes. Is this evidence of a collective unconsciousness? ponders Brodber (2012: 125). In consideration, she invokes Jung (Brodber 2012: 125). And so does Fanon. Yet for Fanon, Jung’s work is shot through with racist colonial stereotypes, especially that of the uncivilized savage, ‘the negro who slumbers in every white man’ (Fanon 2008: 187). Jung locates this unconsciousness in ‘inherited cerebral matter’, but Fanon (2008: 188) counters that it is ‘purely and simply the sum of prejudices, myths, collective attitudes of a given group’. For Fanon, then, the collective unconsciousness is purely massa’s domain. Fanon cannot have heard of High John de Conquer. No one played old John’s drum to his ear, nor taught him that freedom song. Fanon was never armed with a methodology – a compass – with which to navigate the absolute nightlight and travel through the spiritual hinterlands. The French halls of learning refused him that; all they offered was the thin pathway of Geist, which he nevertheless refused to follow. But still, he must have heard at least a whisper. After all, how could he have been so confident in saying yes to life and love in the face of the deathly dialectic of Hegel and massa (Fanon 2008: 222)? Where did that matter come from, Frantz? I think that even without possession of a celestial ethnography you still did your best to practice the hegemony of spirit. So I tell this story of the Abyssinian general as testimony to your great spirit my bredrin. ***** We are walking similar paths. I am singing and chanting. … Ithiopians the tyrants are falling Who smote thee upon thy knees The children are lovingly calling From over Jah distant seas . . .

*****

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It was not that massa was ever unaware of the spiritual hinterlands; indeed, he regularly tried to ban the sciences that allowed for ‘getting over’ there. In fact massa made getting over a crime by gathering all diverse practices – some of which were only for individual gain, others of which were for collective healing – into the category of Obeah (see Stewart 2004). Special attention, in this respect, was given to the African faiths that focused upon the spiritual agency known as Water Mamma. Here is evidence of an emphasis on spiritual mediumship that actively guides the living. In many West and Central African cosmologies, rivers are powerful places that intersect the human and spirit worlds to form ‘aquatic temples’ (Zahan 1983: 20–1; Van Stipriaan 2005). The (usually feminine) spirits of the waterways are powerful agents of intercession. High John can be accessed through many natural elements, it seems. What is more, the numerous African renditions of Christianity that pepper the Caribbean islands share key similarities with these non-Christian African cosmologies. Baptism might be the quintessential act of colonial enculturation, denoting re-birth into the new (white) family of Christ. Yet many enslaved priests of the enslaved saw in this the continuation of what they knew already from African cosmologies, that is, the significance of water as a medium of transmission between the profane and sublime realms. Pentecost, the speaking in tongues, was just another word for the practice of channeling the spiritual agencies and ancestors, a well-established tradition in many African faiths. (Was this not the directive whispering of High John de Conquer?) And Exodus, that quintessential story of deliverance: was that not their story of African redemption? Was this not the hope that old John had brought with him now being returned? Psalms 68:31 told them so directly; gave them a compass bearing: princes and princesses must come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto Jah. Well, they knew that they were Ethiopians because Jeremiah had proclaimed as much: a leopard could not change his spots nor an Ethiopian her skin (see Shepperson 1953; Shilliam 2013a). Armed with such compass and energy store, you would be able to subvert and step over the American lands of the zombie wherein you could only be recognized as living dead. To re-recognize your own personhood communally, you would journey to the spiritual hinterlands and cultivate your politics of recognition there. At the annual meal for loa (spiritual agents) in Haitian Vodou, a long litany is recited that invites the ancestors of all nations without exception to attend (Larose 1977: 103). A diplomatic gesture. While at comparable meetings in the Kumina faith of Jamaica, whites cannot ask the Bongo (Kongo) ancestors for

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help, but Indians and Chinese can join in the Kumina ‘bans’ (groups) (Stewart 2004: 147). In Guyana Comfa, the Heights is composed of the angels, biblical prophets and apostles; the centre of the universe is inhabited by manifest humans; and the terrestrial realms is traversed by the spirits of discarnate souls, including representatives of the Africans, Surinam Africans (‘Dutch’), Indians, Chinese, Amerindians, English and Spanish, all of whom are enfolded into the global architecture of colonial rule, and all of whom are variously entreated with their own songs during ceremonies (Gibson 2005: 209–10). Members of the Converted, an African Baptist faith from St Vincent, practice a form of spiritual journeying through which they will receive guidance for problems that plague their everyday life. In this journeying they also might visit Africa, India and China – originating places of the various labourers brought to the islands by British colonialism. They might also meet Ethiopians, ‘a tribe of very small, eery dark people in Africa’; although to enjoy this encounter the sojourner must have a ‘tone [that is] deep in the Spirit’ (Zane 1999: 85, 137; Stewart 2004: 147). The 1823 Demerara uprising of enslaved peoples in Guyana announced the introduction of Biblical narratives into the faith systems that propelled the liberation struggle. Famously, John Smith – a member of the London Missionary Society – was accused of aiding the enslaved on the east coast of Demerara by teaching them the Exodus narrative. Smith was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. Dying of consumption in custody instead, he became the ‘Demerara martyr’ (Smith 1976: 321–3). Nevertheless, the enslaved that Smith taught were not empty vessels waiting to be filled. They carefully and considerately took from these teachings of the martyr what they already knew and what was useful to them in their ongoing ‘inside’ struggle for recognition, the results of which were, at the right time, to be made known ‘outside’ (see Titus 2002). After the Demerara uprising many enslaved Africans took the Biblical narrative with them as they turned away from white churches that seemed to be hand in glove with massa and headed back to the spiritual hinterlands, there to plant the Bible. In Guyana, Obeah practices – that is, night time meetings accompanied by drumming, chanting and dancing – were regularly outlawed during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. And the most (in)famous of these was Comfa. Comfa works in a non-dualistic universe where the material and spiritual, living and ancestors are related. Many practitioners have also been practicing Baptists, and over time a number of Comfa articles of faith have come to be justified through biblical narratives (Gibson 2001: 17). Into this historical context stepped the Jordanites (see in general Bisnauth 1996: 180–4; Roback 1974). Joseph Maclaren was an Anglican Grenadian

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working in Trinidad in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Introduced by his friend Bhagwan Das to Hinduism, Maclaren also underwent a ‘baptism by immersion’. His disciple, a Barbadian man called Bowen, migrated to Guyana and there undertook a proselytizing mission, baptizing members into his ‘church’. One such member was Nathaniel Jordan, a cane field labourer from whom the faith derives its name. The Jordanite Baptist faith had already been prepared by Comfa and the popularity of Water Mama. Indeed, the Jordanites place great emphasis on full immersion baptism as well as spiritual mediumship for communicating with ancestors. Upon Jordan’s passing, Elder James Klein picked up the leadership. But aside from being a Jordanite Klein was also a member of the Guyana chapter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westmaas and de Barros 2011). That there would be strong resonances between both groups is not a surprise. Jordanites are adamant that their God is black and that Jesus had African ancestry. This knowledge concurred with Garvey’s own theological premise, a critique of Hegel’s racist Geist, that, while God has no colour, Africans must worship the Most High through the lens of one’s own self-image, that is, through the ‘spectacles of Ethiopia’ (Garvey 1967: 34, vol.1). In the 1920s both the Jordanites and Garveyites were accused by colonial authorities of spreading a seditious messages of ‘race hatred’ against whites (Hill 2011: clxvii). (Massa must have thought that those spectacles were doing Obeah work.) Later, when the Italy-Ethiopia war began in October 1935, both organizations cooperated to agitate for Ethiopia’s defence. It was most probably the Jordanites and Garveyites who organized meetings to petition King George V for their members to be allowed to fight on behalf of Haile Selassie I (Weisbord 1970: 34–5). The Jordanites were not only strong in greater Georgetown but also along the east bank of Demerara, the rural area where, from October 1935 onwards, a series of uprisings commenced on plantations. As the Governor of Guyana noted, while unrest amongst rural workers around cropping time was not unusual, in 1935 the low price of crops had combined with a ‘very strong sympathy which the blacks have for Abyssinia as against Italy’ (Governor of British Guiana 1935a: 2). This had led, reckoned the Governor, to a ‘new feature’ whereby ‘combinations’ of black villagers had entered the estates and prevented mostly Indian labourers from working (Governor of British Guiana 1935a: 2–3). The intensity of the uprisings led the Governor to approve the temporary enlistment of one hundred extra police (Governor of British Guiana 1935b). Additionally, the Governor requested all District Commissioners to relay the message to their local populations that Great Britain was doing its utmost to put a stop to

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the Italian invasion and that black labourers could help by observing the law and keeping order. However, just one week after this pronouncement, rumours abounded that Italian doctors were poisoning black children in Georgetown and near the east coast of Demerara (Governor of British Guiana 1935c). A similar episode had recently happened in Jamaica, and the Governor, judging the mood to be incendiary, requested a warship to patrol the coast (Governor of British Guiana 1935d). A few episodes from the rural uprisings in East Coast Demerara are of great interest to recount. In a report to the secretary of the Governor, the inspectorgeneral of police testified that two overseers had been assaulted, compelled to carry red flags and forced to march with strikers on the sugar estates (InspectorGeneral of Police 1935: 2). While rumours of communist infiltration always accompanied peasant uprisings in the 1930s Caribbean, this flag should not be confused with the hammer and sickle. Red is the spiritual colour of Africa in many Caribbean faiths. In Trinidad, the colour of Shango – the agency of thunder and lightning – is red. And, for the converted faith in St Vincent, red is the colour of Africa (Pollack-Eltz 1993: 17; Zane 1999: 84). In Guyana Comfa, red also represents Africa, as well as St Judas (the patron saint of desperate causes, we might also call him ‘old John’), Leo (one of Haile Selassie I’s title is Moa Anbessa, the Conquering Lion) and love (Is it red Frantz’s secret colour?) (Gibson 2001: 85). Another estate driver, providing evidence later at a labour disputes commission, recounted how a field labourer had tried to force him to perform an ‘African war dance’ as drums were played. And in another incident, the overseer discovered that twenty strikers were blocking a bridge to the fields: ‘One fellow laid down and said he was an Abyssinian General. He defied anybody to cross and said he meant to chop anyone who tried to do so’ (Labour Disputes Commission 1936). The Chair of the commission asked the driver what he supposed was to be gained from these actions; the overseer replied, ‘I suppose they thought that with the Abyssinia war on they would have a war too; in fact, that is what some of them said’ (Labour Disputes Commission 1936). I am an Abyssinian general.

8

The Recognition of Nature in International Relations Emilian Kavalski and Magdalena Zolkos

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Martin Luther King, Jr. (16 April 1963)

Introduction The prevailing notion of recognition in International Relations (IR) refers to the collective endowment of states with a legal status as legitimate international actors (Griffiths 2013: 716–17; Onuf 2013). Within the Westphalian framework of the discipline, the mutual recognition of and by states has thus been the mechanism through which one’s participation in the international society of states is simultaneously validated and formally guaranteed in international law. More recently, however, there have been attempts at conceptualizing a less state-centric notion of recognition. This includes arguments that recognition constitutes a pivotal normative-institutional framework in post-conflict transformation (Lindemann and Ringmar 2011; O’Neill 2012); that it is one of the operative principles of the international human rights regime (Hayden 2012); and that it illuminates the dynamics of normative power in non-Western contexts (Kavalski 2013, 2014). Others have utilized the critical theory of recognition – as developed primarily, though not exclusively, by Alex Honneth – to illuminate how the ‘institutionalized recognition order[s]’ of immigration policies or of the sociopolitical practices of citizenship are challenged by emancipatory struggles for recognition (Cox 2012; Heins 2012b).

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However, there have been few attempts at applying the concept of recognition in IR to provide an inclusive account not just of the human, but also of the nonhuman interactions in global life (Cudworth and Hobden 2011). This chapter aims to address the issue of recognizing nature as an actor1 in international life – by which we mean the ontological and political reorientation of IR to make itself open and responsive to non-human agency (cf. Hobden 2015). We use the concept of ‘nature’ not in an essentialized sense, but as a framework providing ‘an independent domain that both enables and constrains human activities, and [that] will not prove endlessly adaptable to the demands made on it by human beings’ (Soper 2010: 223). Nature, therefore, acts as ‘the inherent force which directs either the world or humans or both’ (Williams 1983: 16–17). Consequently, humans and their activities are not removed from nature, but rather coincide on a ‘site, habitat, or medium of ecological interaction and encounter’ (Hayden 1998: 115). Such an engagement with nature should not be new to IR – in fact, it is IR scholarship that has raised awareness of nature’s place as ‘the primary agent of Western politics’ (Rowe 2003: 644). While the location of nature in IR discourses will shortly be addressed at length, it is worthwhile pointing out here that already in the 1950s Harlan and Margaret Sprout were outlining their ‘ecological viewpoints, concepts, and theories in connection with politics in general and international politics in particular’. The Sprouts defined world politics as a turbulent set of ‘man-milieu relationships’, which includes ‘both tangible objects, non-human and human, at rest and in motion, and the whole complex of social patterns, some embodied in formal enactments, others manifest in more or less stereotyped expectations regarding the behaviour of human beings and the movements and mutations of non-human phenomena’ (Sprout and Sprout 1956). Some recent instances of nature recognition in international life include the incorporation of climate protection into the constitutional arrangements of the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Tunisia. These instances exceed an earlier trend to constitutionalize ‘the right to live in a healthy environment’, which reduces the environment to a human right and does not recognize its agential qualities (Aulakh 2014). Instead, recent constitutionalizations of climate protection reflect the emergence of nascent international environmental legislation, including the use of the International Court of Justice for complaints regarding other states’ emissions levels, as well as create the possibility for granting refugee status on the grounds of climate change. In the case of emerging ‘Earth jurisprudence’ (cf. Berry 2002; Litfin 1997; Stutzin 2002), the term ‘recognition’ signifies more than simply awareness or acknowledgement of nature as a factor in international life.

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Rather, at stake is a declaratory and constitutive act that launches a new state of affairs (cf. Onuf 2013: 126). The wider intellectual and political context of this investigation is the interdisciplinary debate about the Anthropocene. Anthropocene is an informal descriptor of the current geological era, which draws attention to the unprecedented impact – from the point of view of Earth’s history – of human species and their activities on the planet’s climate, biodiversity and environment. In short, the label of the Anthropocene suggests that the human species has become a geological force in terms of its capacity for affecting Earth’s processes (Chakrabarty 2009; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). At the same time, it is often overlooked that the Anthropocene functions as shorthand for a new system of planetary inequality, whose ‘terraformative power’ according to Timothy Luke (2003) enforces ‘asymmetries between different populations of humanity and aggregations of nonhumanity’. In particular, current global patterns of commodity production and consumption are: subjecting objects and subjects to exchange and forcing everyone and everything to perform within the ways of the market. Whether it is bioengineering new life forms, remixing the composition of the planet’s atmosphere, or crowding out most other organisms within Earth’s carrying capacity, human economic exchanges are now a key environizing power that encircles, contains, and envelops living and nonliving things in the human nations and environmental niches that now constitute the world’s ecosystem. (Luke 2003: 393–5)

The reference to the Anthropocene should not be misunderstood, however, as an insistence on the similarity of human and non-human systems. On the contrary, the notion of the Anthropocene does not deny the qualitative distinctions between these two systems. Instead, it underscores that they are mutually implicated and interdependent. This study intends to remind the IR mainstream that human vulnerabilities in the face of climate change are intimately and intricately entwined with those of other beings, rather than separate from them (Mitchell 2014: 13). Furthermore, the attention to shared suffering also helps to bring realization of what James Rowe (2003) has aptly called ‘the mutual paradox [of] how the nonhumanities of human design are unevenly transforming both human and natural worlds into new interenvironments’. The interenvironments of planetary inequality that define the Anthropocene help reveal that ‘nature is now a near perfect register for continued colonizations that simultaneously serve as portals into the location and scale of ecological destruction’ (Rowe 2003: 642–3).

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This investigation takes its starting point in Onuf ’s redefinition of recognition beyond the state-centric position as a ‘way of talking about a constitutive event [in IR] of a transformative potential’ (2013). The suggestion is that the terms ‘constitutive event’ and ‘transformative potential’ can be contested as not necessarily human-centric, but, potentially, ecocentric and/or biocentric.2 More broadly, this interpretative move follows an approach outlined by Kompridis (2007), for whom the key question in recognition debates is not, as has been traditionally assumed, whether or not recognition is oppositional to redistribution, but rather, how the normative sociopolitical principle of recognition is construed and becomes operative. In this way, the chapter explores the construction and operation of the concept of recognition when applied to the agency of nature in international life. At the same time, this study also contests the anthropocentric assumptions of IR by challenging it to both recollect and reengage with its non-anthropocentric ontology and origins. The attempt to inscribe recognition within the post-human discourse is related, at least partly, to the critique of (what Nancy Fraser calls) ‘the KeynsianWestphalian frame [of justice]’, which has been solely concerned with ‘relations among fellow citizens [and] internal status hierarchies’ (2008b: 13). According to Fraser, insofar as globalization has been transforming the contemporary political imagination of what justice is, one needs to consider not only the firstorder questions of the object and subject of recognition, but also the meta-issue of how recognition is ‘framed’ (2008b: 15). As Fraser elaborates elsewhere – admittedly making no reference to other-than-human agency – at stake is the construction of a ‘new grammar of political claims-making’, where the question of the frame means addressing misrecognition as not simply exclusionary social practice (of, for instance, the agency of nature in IR), but also as monopolization of the symbolic-political production of externality (cf. Fraser in Nash and Bell 2007: 74–7). As instanced by Cudworth and Hobden (2011: 140), the inclusion of environmentalism as an ‘issue’ of security effectively buttresses the anthropocentric bias of IR either by incorporating nature as a ‘support system’ for the human world, or by objectifying it as an ‘environmental threat’ undermining the integrity of the state, as exemplified by the so-called ‘resource/climate wars’ (see Dyer 2008; Klare 2002; van der Molen and Hildering 2005; Welzer 2012). Instead, what is needed is a posthuman way of thinking about nature recognition (and nature misrecognition) in international life, subject to biocentric and/or ecocentric lines of inquiry and premised on a methodological move away from ‘shallow’ concerns for environmental issues of inter- and intrastate conflict and cooperation and towards ‘deeper’ preoccupations with systemic diversity,

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interconnectivity and symbiosis that cut across the traditional positivist thinking about the bifurcation between the human and the non-human. As we indicate, such a project, while demonstrating the limits of anthropocentric thinking about international life, is actually not new to IR – in fact, in its early days, the disciplinary inquiry used to be much more disposed to recognize the agency of nature than it is willing to do today.

Nature in international relations The problems associated with the dynamic patterns of climate change and their unintended consequences have challenged conventional capacities for comprehension and have demonstrated the fickleness of established models for their management. In fact, the growing impact of environmental contingencies on everyday lives has demanded a reconsideration of the relationship between sociopolitical and biophysical systems. This pattern seems to confirm Ernst Haas’ hunch that ‘ethical choices have evolutionary consequences’ (Haas 1975: 843). Yet, while ‘the state of nature’ is no longer just a fictional narrative but ‘the most pressing of practical issues’ (Booth 2007: 327), the IR mainstream appears to offer little, if any, attention to the agency of nature in international life (Hobden 2015; Hovden 1999; Kavalski 2011). The claim here is that this has not always been the case. Thus, while a pressing contemporary concern, the environment is actually not a new preoccupation for IR. In fact, it used to have an important place in the study and practice of international affairs. For instance, already in the 1920s, the discipline felt comfortable acknowledging that the natural environment is one of the key actors on the international stage. As Raymond Garfield Gettell insisted, despite ‘man’s best efforts to bring the world in which he lives under his control, the influence of the natural environment upon political evolution has been throughout all human history an important and, in many instances a decisive, factor . . . . Battles, upon whose outcome the fate of nations has depended, have been decided by natural phenomena such as wind, rain, fog or snow, beyond human control’ (Gettell 1922: 322). In this sense, already from its outset, IR demonstrates no squeamishness about acknowledging that nature’s agency – even if unintentional – plays an important role in the unfolding of world affairs (and should therefore not be discarded). For instance, it is often overlooked that with his emphasis on the ‘geographic causation [behind] the competing forces in current international

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politics’, Halford Mackinder, the so-called father of geopolitics, intended not only to draw attention to the crucial role played by geography, but rather ‘to exhibit human history as part of the life of the world organism’. He therefore went on to suggest that the conduct of world affairs reveals that ‘man and not nature initiates, but nature in large measure controls [the outcomes]’ (Mackinder 1904: 422). Thus, the actorness of nature in the study and practice of IR has urged Ernst Haas to proclaim that ‘international politics . . . is becoming synonymous with man’s efforts to carve out a pattern of coexistence with his biological and physical environment. International politics becomes ecopolitics’ (Haas 1975: 853; emphasis added). Likewise, and at about the same time (although in a much more normative vein), Sprout and Sprout (1971) insisted that the IR conversation should be moving ‘toward a politics of the planet Earth’. These statements offer a surprisingly contemporary description of global affairs at the start of the twenty-first century. The rearticulation of international politics as ecopolitics questions the ontological underpinnings of IR. In fact, it calls for a major revision of our understanding of international relations: Politics among and above nations is recognised as a part of a vast natural system, a biosystem. Therefore, all past units we [have] become accustomed to – territorial units and functional relationships – are subsumed under the biosystemic perspective. All units and all relationships become relevant. (Haas 1975: 842)

This perspective seems to fly in the face of all that IR has grown accustomed to since the end of the Second World War. Premised on the belief in human rationality and a fundamentally physical order, the disciplinary mainstream has uncritically subscribed to an Enlightenment ‘faith in a “makeable world” ’ – that is, the conviction that it is not only possible, but in fact mandatory to construct a secure, stable and predictable environment for human activity (Kavalski 2009, 536). Thus, the mainstream ontological purview of IR has been underpinned by the perception that human/sociopolitical systems (such as civil society, states, international organizations, etc.) are simultaneously detached from (not only conceptually, but in practice) and in control of the ‘nonhuman’ natural/biophysical systems within which they are embedded. In this respect the mainstream disciplinary conversation has been concerned only with ‘the human subject’ (and especially, with willed – that is, intentional – human/ sociopolitical phenomena) and its anthropomorphized effects (such as states and their alliances). Thus, despite the intellectual challenges posed by the growing interdependence and connectedness between human and non-human systems

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in the Anthropocene, the mainstream of IR research has been, on the one hand, dominated by the deterministic and parsimonious tools of the traditional reductionist mode of investigation and, on the other hand, underpinned by an inherent anti-biologism (if not biophobia). In this setting, the recognition of nature gains its significance to the theory and practice of IR, because it is only when ‘environmental factors [are] being perceived and taken into account in the policy-forming process’ (Sprout and Sprout 1965) that there can be hope for ethical adaptation to the challenges of the Anthropocene. It has to be acknowledged, however, that Haas was not quite sanguine about IR’s capacity to tackle the challenges underpinning the need for an ecopolitical transformation of the discipline. As he put it, this requirement ‘is not matched with a political recognition of the problem. The knowledge to bring about recognition exists. But the political institutions for acting on the knowledge do not. Hence, we are headed toward ecological catastrophe’ (Haas 1975: 853).

Recognition of nature in international life What does it mean, then, to grant nature a recognizable status as an agent in international life? In general terms, as Bennett suggests (2003), at stake in such an inquiry is a ‘recognition of the agential powers of natural and artifactual thinking, the greater web of their connections with each other and with human bodies, and . . . a more cautious, intelligent approach to our interventions in that ecology’. In the following, we elaborate on three distinct, yet mutually constitutive, conceptualizations of nature recognition in the theory and practice of IR. These are, respectively, (a) recognition of vulnerability and resilience of human and non-human systems and life forms; (b) recognition as respect; and (c) mutuality in the recognition-relation.

Vulnerability/resilience/loss W. Neil Adger et al. (2011) propose a conception of nature recognition that goes beyond the conventional acknowledgement of the material and economically quantifiable aspects of climate change and, instead, insist on cognizance of the incalculable, symbolic and non-material cultural and ecological loss of plurality of life modes, their interconnectivity, co-relationality and symbiosis. This loss confirms the shared individual and collective precarity of human life and nature in the Anthropocene. The attractiveness of recognition theory for the

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conceptualization of nature in IR lies precisely in its challenge to think of both human and non-human life in terms of their cross-sectionality, interdependence and mutual vulnerability. At the affective level, the acknowledgement of loss is thus expressed as mourning and grief for the irretrievable demise of non-human entities (Cunsolo Willox 2012; Roelvink and Zolkos forthcoming). The recognition of nature understood in terms of this affective response to the human-induced environmental and climatic change is significant insofar as it entails an act of validation of nature as a subject of mourning. The demise of non-human life forms is declared ‘grievable’ (see Butler 2004) in the sense of being ‘capable of degradation, destruction and suffering’ (Cunsolo Willox 2012: 147). Drawing from the Freudian idea of the ‘work of mourning’, Cunsolo Willox (2012: 145) reframes mourning as the lived experience of climate change to suggest that in mourning ‘we not only lose something that was loved, but we lose our former selves, the way we used to be before the loss . . . Through this mourning we are open to others – human, animal, vegetal, and mineral – and continually exposed and vulnerable to these bodies’. As a consequence, ‘[p]olitically, the work of mourning builds on [the] visceral and phenomenological experience of mourning, and challenges us to extend our limits of recognition of “mournable bodies” or “mournable entities” ’ – thus revealing its transformative potential by exposing ‘the inherent injustice in silenced deaths’ and counteracting the ‘derealisation of non-human [destruction]’ (Cunsolo Willox 2012: 150). Within the traditional (anthropocentric) IR framework, the importance of mournful affects and their mobilization of, and impact on, political processes, has long been recognized. For example, the mourning of lives lost in the Holocaust has led to the establishment of international anti-genocide legislation, which not only aimed to prevent the recurrence of similar acts, but also made possible the placing of limitations on the principle of state sovereignty by sanctioning different forms of external interference, including humanitarian intervention, to protect the citizens of states from the deeds of their governments. The project of nature recognition in IR means that not only human, but also non-human life is considered to be a potential subject of grief and, as such, generative of the politics of mourning – and, hence, international action. One of the ‘places at risk’ owing to climate change are the Pacific Atolls, where the radical transformations of climate patterns have threatened the islands’ ‘unique biophysical systems and species; . . . unique material cultures, social orders, diets, stories, languages, habits, and skills’, causing migrations for the islanders, the loss of home, habitat and identity insofar as it is place-based

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(Adger et al. 2011: 6; see also Barnett and Chamberlain 2010; Vidal 2013).3 Here the point is that within the current parameters of climate change, recognition of nature inevitably entails recognition of a certain loss of nature. This in turn indicates the need to rethink the ‘meaning and practice of [international] justice’ beyond considerations of state-centred approach to climate change ‘solution’, and beyond the human rights approach (Adger et al. 2011: 18). The grievable affects animated by the lived experience of loss of the Pacific Islanders have surfaced at international fora; for example during the 2009 climate change negotiations in Copenhagen when Ian Fry, one of the representatives of the Tuvalu delegation, wept during his speech. Notably, the ‘emotional outpouring of grief in a largely scientific and political setting served to disrupt the conversations momentarily, and to cause discomfort’ (Cunsolo Willox 2012: 152).4 Equally importantly, it served as a powerful indication of the discursive absence in IR of emotive and affective expressions of environmental loss, which can potentially contribute to the recognition of the mutual vulnerability of human and non-human lives (see Farbotko and McGregor 2010). While one pole of nature recognition is mutual vulnerability, the other one is resilience and adaptation to change of human and other-than-human systems. More specifically, for Adger et al. (2011: 5) nature recognition means not only acknowledgement of shared precarity, but also consideration of ‘traditional ecological knowledge’, that is ‘systems of practice and belief of how the natural world works’, for increasing resilience and for the implementation of change, adaptation and learning. In the example of the Pacific Atolls, the adaptive strategies, while limited, include (a) ‘relatively high degree of reciprocity among people, communities, and neighbouring islands [which] facilitates the kinds of exchanges of materials and information that assists in coping with surprises’; (b) ‘a long history of exposure to short-term environmental perturbations, [which has produced] various strategies that enable learning and adjustment’; and (c) ‘a high degree of traditional ecological knowledge, and . . . opportunities for building on traditional resource management institutions’ (Adger et al. 2011: 7). The islands have made transition to renewable energy sources, including the locally produced coconut-derived biodiesel and are undergoing infrastructural conversion to solar energy (Vidal 2013). Furthermore, these two elements of nature recognition – the shared biospherical vulnerability and the cross-species resilience and adaptability – focus attention on the prospects and possibilities for generating ecocentric (rather than anthropocentric) solidarity in international life. The recognition of human and non-human interdependence and mutual vulnerability underscores shared

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interests and articulates a vision of biotic togetherness, or an international posthuman community. To imagine community in ecological terms means thus that human systems are understood ‘in composition with nonhumanity, never outside of a sticky web of connections’ (Bennett 2003: 365). The idea of nature recognition as a base for an international posthuman community formation is premised on the post-Cartesian dislodging of humanity from its separate and hierarchical location.5 Cunsolo Willox (2012: 157) calls such community the ‘ecological democracy-to-come’, which ‘both includes and recognizes animal, vegetal, and mineral bodies and ecosystems’ and has ‘a potential to create a more fully inclusive political order’.

Recognition as respect Contributing to the debates in environmental justice, David Schlosberg (2004, 2007) turns to critical recognition theory in order to spell out a vision of international life where the diversity of agency not only goes beyond the statecentric domain, but also combines systemic elements of human and nonhuman interactions. This take on the project of nature recognition pivots on the notion and practices of respect. Within recognition theory, respect has been articulated in the context of democratic accommodation of difference (cf. Taylor 1994). On the one hand, respect functions as a way of trumping the pressures of cultural assimilation and/or stigmatization of peripheral identities. On the other hand, it assists with avoiding the perils of isolationism. Thus, in line with the Hegelian tradition of recognition, the respect for cultural difference can be extended to include respect for the irreducible uniqueness and specificity of diverse life forms. This assists the positioning of human species as belonging to (but not above) a non-human community of global life in which ‘each individual living thing [is] a teleological centre of life, [as] “striving for life” ’ (Taylor 1986). It is necessary to qualify here that recognition as respect is often (and erroneously) treated as synonymous with recognition as similarity. As Emmanuel Levinas (1969) suggests, the latter approach treats recognition as the elimination of the radical difference of the other by reducing it to ‘sameness’. It is for this reason that Levinas perceives recognition as a form of violence against the other (McQueen 2011). In the context of international politics, the ‘similarity approach’ implies that the recognition of non-human actors can occur only to the extent that there is some resemblance between them and human actors. The issue here usually is sentience – in particular, that it is not an exclusively human quality; hence, non-human actors who possess it should be treated similarly to

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us (Schlosberg 2007: 133–6). An example of recognition as similarity is the 2010 Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans drafted in Helsinki, which affirms whales and dolphins as ‘persons [who] have the right to life, liberty and well-being’. The declaration has garnered not only activist and scientific support, but has also been adopted in government initiatives such as the 2013 recognition of dolphins as ‘non-human persons’ by India (Coelho 2013). On similar grounds, in 2008, the Spanish Parliament acknowledged the ‘non-human rights’ of apes (Glendinning 2008), while at the end of 2014 an orangutan in Argentina has been granted the basic rights of a ‘non-human person’, including the right to be freed from its captivity at the Buenos Aires zoo (BBC 2014). In this setting, while commendable, premising the recognition of nature’s actorness on its resemblance to the human subject is problematic, because it indirectly affirms the superiority of the human as the norm (cf. Weitzenfeld and Joy 2014: 10). In contrast, recognition as respect defies the assimilative logic of the similarity approach by virtue of its insistence on the necessity of difference between the other and the self for the ‘mediated self-affirmation to be successful’ (Yar 2002: 69). In this interpretation recognition can only take place between two subjects. Borrowing from Henry Thoreau’s concept of ‘the Wild’, Bennett (2003: 348; Bennett 1994) suggests that ‘there is an existence peculiar to a thing that is irreducible to the thing’s imbrication with human subjectivity’. In the act of nature recognition the self encounters her/his other – or ‘the Wild’ – which in turn connotes the ‘startling element of foreignness in every object of experience, however familiar’ (Bennett 1994). Consequently, the emphasis on respect suggests that the key component of recognition is structural, and not psychological: recognition aims at overcoming institutionalized subordination and exclusion, rather than at preventing or undoing some ‘oppressive psychological harm’ (Schlosberg 2004: 537). At the same time, the politics of respect forges opportunities for overcoming the ‘insidious silencing’ of the non-human through the ‘recognition of agency in nature’ (Dryzek 2000: 149; Friskics 2001). In this context, nature recognition entails respect for the other-than-human life (in reference to individual living beings, as well as ecological systems), with the goal of ‘extending the community of [international] justice, and moving beyond the focus on the human use of nonhuman nature’ (Schlosberg 2007: 133).6 In turn, this calls for examination of the ‘underlying social, cultural, and political issues around . . . the recognition of nature’ (Schlosberg 2007: 132). Such a take reveals the inherent emancipatory potential of the project of recognition. It is with this in mind that the following section draws attention to the issue of mutuality.

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Recognition and mutuality As already indicated, the development of a more nuanced articulation of recognition in the IR literature has drawn from the critical theories of recognition (such as Taylor, Honneth and Fraser), which have their origins in the Hegelian concept of selfhood. At the heart of the Hegelian tradition is the suggestion that human beings acquire social existence intersubjectively and dialogically (Fraser and Honneth 2003; McQueen 2011). As Hegel himself famously declared in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1977), recognition entails the achievement of self-consciousness and affirmation of one’s autonomy and freedom in relation to others – that is, the emergence of a subject ‘with particular characteristics, traits, qualities and features, in short the establishment of one’s self-understanding . . . is inextricably dependent on recognition or affirmation on the part of others’ (Yar 2002: 59). In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel (1967) positions recognition at the centre of ethical life: ‘ethical subjects are constituted through the process of recognition . . . the mechanisms of ethical constitution are relational in nature, not simply originating in subjective rationality’ (Barkdull and Harris 1998; Thompson 2013: 320). While the Hegelian imaginary of the subject of recognition is explicitly human-centric (insofar as its agent is defined by features such as autonomy, intentionality and freedom, which have traditionally served the humanist ontology to mark the human distinction from nature; see e.g. Benjamin 2011; Oliver 2009; Wolfe 2009), this tradition nevertheless helps to suggest that the recognition of non-human actors in international life requires not simply the need to extend the concept of recognition beyond the agency of the state, but rather the requirement for its radical reframing ‘beyond-the-human’ into a nonanthropocentric conception of international life. According to Iser (2013), ‘[m] utuality has always served as the explanatory and normative core of the concept of recognition’. This explanatory and normative core of mutuality reveals recognition as a relational process which ‘cannot be coerced but [must] be freely given and received, as being at home in the other’ (McQueen 2011). In particular, the emphasis on mutuality suggests that the basic ontological condition of all international actors – be they human or otherwise – is relational. Thus, by recognizing the mutuality between human and non-human systems in IR, it is possible to begin the encounter with global life in the Anthropocene. The contention here is that contemporary world affairs are not merely about who gets what, when and how, but also about the capacity to encounter global life in all its complexity. Such an encounter elicits that all human interactions are located in and made possible by complex global interconnections. In other words, the

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recognition of nature in IR uncovers that the ‘world is not divided into territories in which bounded societies of humans live under singular political authority and in the context of discrete natural environments’; instead, global life is ‘a complex interweave of numerous systems nested, intersected and embedded in each other, all undergoing processes of co-evolution and linked by innumerable feedback loops’ (Cudworth and Hobden 2011: 173, 75). In this context, the attention to mutuality allows for recognizing the simultaneity, agency and subjectivity of both human and non-human actors on the global stage. The IR inquiry can therefore be reframed as a response ‘not only to human actions but also to the actions of plants, animals, stones, rivers, and mountains’ (Ruiz 2000: 336). The emphasis on mutuality reveals that the ‘international system’ is embedded within wider structural conditions and interactions located within the environment surrounding the conventional focus on interstate relations – an environment, which conceptually constitutes as well as causally conditions (although not in a mono-causal and linear fashion) states and other actors (Kurki 2008: 255–61). Human societies and their international interactions are just ‘one component in a package of interdependent life forms that continue to adapt to each other’ (Clark 2000: 4). The recognition of nature therefore proffers a ‘human-in-ecosystem’ perspective on the study and practice of IR, which takes as its point of departure ‘the mutual influence of ecological and social processes, instead of treating social and ecological systems as linked but separate domains’ (Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2003: 54). Such recognition of the agency of nature in IR also calls for a critical self-review of IR’s own investment in anthropocentric ontologies, epistemologies and politics.

Conclusions: The limits of recognition In this study we have explored the potential of the concept of recognition to sketch out a useful trajectory for the engagement of non-human agency in international life, as well as, more broadly, for the project of non-anthropocentric IR. This endeavour does not want to brandish the recognition of nature by IR as a panacea for either the crises plaguing the global condition or the flaws of the disciplinary purview; instead, the aim is to indicate that the recognition of nature opens up unique and novel opportunities for a thorough reconsideration of the explanation and understanding of the disciplinary mainstream. At the same time, it also contributes meaningfully to the ethical project of equitable, just, and sustainable living in the era of the Anthropocene. In this context, the

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analysis has drawn attention to the notion of mutuality – the explanatory and normative hallmark of the recognition-relation – as a mode for recognizing the complex interdependence of human and non-human actors. However, the encompassing of nature into the normative framework of recognition needs to consider the anthropocentric roots of the conception of mutuality. In the Hegelian idea of recognition, from which IR borrows, mutuality is understood primarily as reciprocity (rather than as relational interdependence, as we have proposed) and is used explicitly in reference to human subjects. Such origins suggest some potential limitations of the recognition concept to the nonanthropocentric project of IR.7 According to Hegel (1977: 230) the reciprocal character of recognition asserts mutuality as ‘the double process of both selfconsciousnesses . . . . Action from one side only would be useless, because what is to happen can only be brought about by means of both’. What is being acknowledged in the recognition process is ‘another self-consciousness, another human subject’ (Thomson 2011: 327). Hence, mutuality implies that recognition is either done or experienced by each party towards the other, and that it is binding or bearing on the parties equally. Nature is, thereby, excluded from the scene of recognition insofar as (drawing on Beauvoir’s critique of Hegel’s non-inclusion of women in recognition) it is designated as not capable of ‘transcendence’, and thus of becoming self-conscious in the sense of achieving self-identity as a person (cf. Burke 2005). More generally, Majid Yar demonstrates that in Kojève’s reading of Hegel – one that positions irreducible and radical difference at the heart of the recognition scene – it is precisely the distinction between human and animal that forms the condition of possibility for recognition of the self and other to take place. For Hegel (according to Kojève) it is ‘human desire’ that brings about recognition; it is ‘in and by – or better still, as – “his” Desire that man is formed and is revealed – to himself and to others – as an I, as the I that is essentially different from, and radically opposed to, the non-I’ (Kojève 1969: 3). What Kojève refers to as the ‘anthropogenetic Desire’ for the (recognition by) the Other is premised by mutuality not in the sense of ‘establishing an identity between myself and other, i.e. in recognizing in her only the very same characteristics I seek to have recognized in myself ’, but as an affirmation of the Other as a non-assimilative subject. Human desire for recognition means that ‘the other has to be deemed capable and worthy of granting recognition . . . the subject must trust and esteem the other’s capacity for judgment, he must value the other’s estimations as meaningful, significant and noteworthy’ (Yar 2002: 67). This assertion is based on Kojève’s explicit distinction between human desire and animal desire in Hegel, where the latter is a type of object-desire, directed at

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the material conditions that sustain life (food, shelter, etc.). In distinction from human desire, animal desire is directed ‘toward a real, “positive”, given object’, and its primary drive is to internalize, assimilate and possess the object (Kojève 1969: 6). For (Kojève’s) Hegel, to base the understanding of mutual recognition on the unnegotiable distinction between human and animal is thus indicative of traditional Western philosophic validation of the other only insofar as otherness and the desire for the other’s recognition is taken to be a ‘uniquely human concern’ (Benjamin 2011: 96). In the Western philosophic tradition the animal (and, more broadly, the natural world) is defined through its inability to grant and receive recognition, just as much as it is unable to respond, or perform acts of meta-communication (cf. Wolfe 2003). The point here is that just like IR, the theory of recognition is in need of a critical self-review of its own anthropocentric commitments and politics if its transformative potential for the project of nature recognition in IR (and not only) is to be explored. One possible pathway for resolving this quandary is – as we have done in this study – to redefine mutuality as not exclusively tied to the principle of reciprocity, but as an opening to the complex and nuanced ways in which human and non-human environments intersect and affect one another. The resultant ethos of interconnectivity nourishes responsiveness towards other (radically different) kinds of beings (Mitchell 2014: 7–9).8 This qualification notwithstanding, the suggestion here is that the recognition of nature in IR offers the potential to disrupt the entrenched human-centred purview of the discipline by urging it to account for the complex interactions between sociopolitical systems and the ecologies that they inhabit. Such an encounter with the embeddedness of international relations within larger systems of global interactions demands ‘asking questions about moments of imperial encounter and global governmentality that simultaneously involve multiple cultures and multiple forms of life’ (Youatt 2014: 223). Echoing William Connolly’s proposition that agency is not the property of individual human beings, but is enabled by a diversity of non-human actors and systems, the normative contention of this study is that the recognition of nature in IR might help us ‘find that our attachment to the world also ripens’: We do not seek to belong to an organic world but to heighten our attachment to a world replete with differential degrees of incompleteness and creative possibility. To appreciate our entanglements with a variety of nonhuman forces . . . may help to ennoble the larger ethos in which we participate. In such a world we are both partial product and constrained participants. (Connolly 2014: 451)

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Such a move would incite IR to abandon its striving for full security, control and predictability, by allowing it to sustain complexity, foster dynamism, encourage the cross-pollination of disparate ideas and engage the plastic and heterogeneous processes that periodically overwhelm, intensify and infect (while all the time animating) the trajectories of human and non-human lives (Anker 2014: 454; Connolly 2014: 447; Kavalski 2015: 5). The recognition of the mutuality between human and non-human systems can thereby assist with lifting the constraints on IR’s imagination that currently prevents it from offering original responses to the challenges facing global life in the Anthropocene. The hope is that this study makes a small but meaningful step in this direction.9

Notes 1

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Throughout the chapter we use the terminology of ‘agent’ and ‘actor’ as stylistic variations. However, we also acknowledge the point made by Bruno Latour (1999) that the terminology of ‘actorness’ has been traditionally associated with human activity; Latour thus proposes an alternative term of ‘actancy’ to include both human and other-than-human activity. Following Bennett (2003: 355, 351), we seek to reframe the terms of ‘actor’ or ‘agent’ in a non-anthropocentric mode as ‘that which does something, has sufficient coherence to perform actions, produce effects and alter situations’; and ‘the curious ability of inanimate [and animate] things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle’. The difference between the approaches of biocentrism and ecocentrism is not significant for the argument advanced in this study (which is why we use them interchangeably). It is important to acknowledge in this context the literature critiquing the claim that migration patterns in the Pacific can be solely ascribed to climate change. See for example the study by Hau’ofa (1994), which offers a more historically nuanced view on Pacific migrations than we are able to consider in this study. Our thanks to Vicki Flack for bringing this point to our attention. Another example of affective response to climate change, which has recently come to public attention, is the speech by Yeb Sano, the head of the Philippines delegation at the 19th Annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Warsaw in 2013. In his impassioned appeal to the conference delegates, Sano made a link between the devastating effect of the typhoon Haiyan and climate change, arguing that ‘[w]hat my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness, the climate crisis is madness. We can stop this madness right here in Warsaw’ (quoted in McGrath 2013).

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This is not to argue for an indistinction between human and non-human international systems. We endorse here the position of Cudworth and Hobden (2011) that posthuman (non-anthropocentric) international relations does not mean that one posits human and nonhuman systems as indistinct and reducible to one another. Rather, and taking inspiration from John Frow (quoted in Bennett 2003: 355), we suggest that the shift is from ‘vertical’ (and hence hierarchical) structuring of the human and nonhuman systems to the ‘horizontal’ structuring that presumes juxtaposition and continuum of agencies: the need is to ‘be flattened, read horizontally as a juxtaposition rather than vertically as a hierarchy of being. It’s a feature of our world that we can and do distinguish . . . things from persons [nonhuman and human systems]. But the sort of world we live in makes it constantly possible for these two sets of kinds to exchange properties’. A strand of this understanding of recognition addresses the issue of various forms of non-human sovereignty (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011; Goodin et al. 1997; Stone 1974). However, such discussions tend to reify rather than break the divisions between human and non-human systems, thereby perpetuating the central features of anthropocentrism. On the limits of the project of recognition in regard to human-animal relations, see Kompridis (2013). Another potentially productive way for decentring the anthropocentric underpinnings of the notion of recognition might be to engage the philosophical debates on ‘nonreciprocal recognition’ (cf. Burke 2005). The authors would like to thank Vicki Flack, Stephen Hobden and Nikolas Kompridis for their engagement with earlier drafts of this chapter. We also want to thank the participants of the workshop ‘Recognition and the International’ at St Andrews in April 2014 for their rich comments and discussion of the paper from which this chapter grew, and, in particular, the organizers of the event, Patrick Hayden and Kate Schick, for their intellectual generosity and their work on both the workshop and the edited collection.

Part Three

Manifestations: International Orders and Disorders

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Paternalistic Care and Transformative Recognition in International Politics Fiona Robinson

In this chapter, I address what Uma Narayan described in 1995 as ‘the selfserving collaboration between elements of colonial rights discourse and care discourse’ (1995: 133). Narayan argues that, in general terms, the colonizing project was seen as being in the interests of, for the good of and as promoting the welfare of the colonized (1995: 133). She suggests further that these notions draw our attention to the existence of a ‘colonialist care discourse’ whose terms have some resonance with those of some contemporary strands of the ethic of care (1995: 133). For about three decades, feminist philosophers and political theorists, including care ethicists, have been preoccupied with developing a sustained critique of various aspects of liberal individualism. As found in otherwise diverse moral and political philosophies including contract, rights-based and neoKantian theories, the individual moral agent has been criticized by feminists as disembodied, disembedded, self-interested and abnormally self-reliant (Walker 1998: 7, 131). This picture of the individual – flawed as both a description of reality and a normative ideal – has been criticized as being contrary to the experiences of most women. Feminists argue that this picture both ignores and obscures the ‘often unchosen, discretionary responsibilities of those who care for particular others, often dependent and vulnerable, in intimate, domestic or familial – “private” – contexts’ (Walker 1998: 51). In many ways, it is not surprising that feminist critique has been centred on ‘autonomous man’, ‘that centerpiece of modern Western culture and protagonist of modern moral philosophy’, and the discourses of rights and justice in which he is said to engage (Walker 1998: 131). But Narayan’s analysis disturbs the feminist dichotomy between rights-holding autonomous man and the relational

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subject. Narayan points out that the rights-discourse – the contractual focus on relationships between equals, and on agents as independent, separate and mutually disinterested – was only part of the liberal story. Another part was that these same subjects had paternalistic obligations and responsibilities to ‘inferior Others’, whether women in their own families or distant colonial peoples (Narayan 1995: 135). She suggests that while aspects of contemporary care discourse have the potential virtue of calling attention to vulnerabilities that mark relationships between differently situated persons, care discourse also runs the risk of being used to ideological ends where these ‘differences’ are defined in self-serving ways by the dominant and the powerful (Narayan 1995: 136). Care ethicists, of course, have not been blind to this danger. Especially as the ethics of care has spread beyond the realms of moral psychology and ethics to political theory, care ethicists have been particularly aware not only of the progressive potential of care ethics, but of the very real possibilities for domination that inhere. Thus Joan Tronto has suggested, ‘There is always implicit in care the danger that those who receive care will lose their autonomy and their sense of independence’ (Tronto 1993: 146). Because care ethicists are concerned to highlight moral (and political) relations of unequal power (and to point out that, in fact, this is what most moral and political relations actually look like), they cannot escape the possibility that ‘caring’ may end up looking more like domination. Marian Barnes (2012: 6–7) calls this the ‘dark side’ of care, and insists that it is important to acknowledge that much of what has been called ‘care’ in a variety of different contexts has been and remains associated with practices that are anything but ‘caring’. Within the literature on care and domestic social policy, the most powerful critiques of this nature have come from within the disability movement. In fact, the word ‘care’ itself has become virtually lost from social work discourse, replaced by an emphasis on ‘choice and control’ as key values (Barnes 2012: 6). Of course, practices of care among, say, mothers and children, or differently abled individuals and those who assist them, are very different from the relations and responsibilities of care that we normally consider to be most relevant to global politics. That said, if we are prepared to accept that questions about how we care for one another in the world are important questions for the theory and practice of international relations, then we must also accept the very real possibility that some self-described care is, in fact, ‘bad care’ (Barnes 2012: 7) and that the language of ‘caring about’ distant others is often used as a justifying discourse for ideological ends. While Narayan refers to the use of this language in the context of modern colonialism, its relevance extends beyond the period

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of formal imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, discourses of ‘care’ in international politics have been used regularly to justify paternalistic acts of domination through the use of structural and physical violence – in the treatment of indigenous peoples, the ‘protection’ of women and children in warfare, and in the practices of contemporary humanitarianism, including humanitarian interventions. As Michael Barnett (2013: 486) argues, however much humanitarian governance is propelled by an emancipatory ethic and the siren of humanity, it also contains elements of domination. This paper asks whether a global ethic of care – as a normative roadmap for relations among actors within and beyond borders – can escape the spectre of paternalism. What would it really mean to take seriously the problem of paternalism in global politics? Would it mean abandoning an ethic of care entirely? Is there a way of ensuring that practices of care involve listening to and hearing the authentic voices of all persons, so that care avoids eclipsing the other, or inhibiting the ability of the ‘cared for’ to be self-determining – to make their own decisions, to live their lives as they choose? Presumably, this would mean ensuring that the ‘other-regarding’ nature of care involved not only acting to address the needs of the other, but acting to recognize the other as a person in her own right. In other words, it would involve integrating the ethics of care into an account of moral recognition. At first glance, it would seem that the nub of the problem here concerns the opposing normative importance placed on the concepts of autonomy and vulnerability in the theories of recognition and care, respectively. Care ethics are widely lauded for their attention to mutual vulnerability and interdependence. Moral agents should be seen as embodied, frail and interdependent; exposing the ubiquity and centrality of care practices reveals the mutual vulnerability of all human beings. By contrast, autonomy is widely seen as a key element of ‘recognition’ – in other words, recognition must be seen as a necessary aspect of justice because it ensures autonomy – including both group and individual autonomy. In the international context, quests for political, legal and moral recognition all seem to be grounded in aspirations to autonomy and identity (Bartelson 2013: 124). Again, by contrast, care ethicists, and feminist theorists who are sympathetic to care ethics, have either rejected the (liberal) notion of autonomy, or have sought to ‘rethink’ it, most notably through the idea of ‘relational autonomy’. But in rejecting or even in revising the liberal understanding of autonomy, are care ethicists dispensing with a vital concept that is a necessary prerequisite of justice – especially transnational or global justice? Is a thoroughgoing account of recognition a necessary part of a global ethic of

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care precisely because it can guard against paternalistic care, and ensure the maintenance, development or retrieval of autonomy on the part of groups that are the ‘receivers’ of care – the ‘global poor’, the ‘developing world’, ‘the global south’? In this chapter, I start from the position articulated by Bartelson that, far from ensuring autonomy and moral equality, recognition in international relations has functioned primarily as a mechanism for excluding and marginalizing peoples who do not already meet the criteria for recognition. In this way, dominant theories and practices of recognition are also guilty of paternalism, insofar as they have served to uphold Western standards of civilization (Bartelson 2013: 123). I will argue that, in contrast to much of the literature on justice as recognition, which emphasizes the need for powerful or dominant voices to ‘recognize’ the ways of life of marginal groups, recognition in the context of relations of care must involve an unsettling of the categories of those who ‘bestow’ care and recognition, and those who receive them. Here I borrow from the work of Marian Barnes, who uses Nancy Fraser’s notion of ‘transformative recognition’ as a basis for a ‘politics of care’ (Barnes 2012: 178). As Barnes explains, Fraser draws a distinction between ‘affirmative’ remedies to injustice and ‘transformative’ ones. On this view, transformative recognition would require strategies designed to disturb and challenge widely held assumptions about the roles of ‘carer’ and ‘cared for’. Barnes explains how, in the context of social policy of European welfare states, this approach has the potential to destabilize categorizations that lead to competitive constructions of political objectives based in separate identities (Barnes 2012: 179). In what follows I will develop the idea of transformative recognition in the context of a global political ethic of care. In so doing, I will seek to highlight two key points. First, I will argue that simply invoking the idea of ‘recognition’ is no guarantee that the autonomy of all those involved will be upheld. In fact, it is quite plausible that the exact opposite is true. As Bartelson (2013: 121) argues, while theories of recognition seek to account for the inclusion of actors into some larger sociopolitical whole, the actual mechanisms for recognition have simultaneously served to exclude certain actors from membership, and thus deny their autonomy. Recognition is not meaningful if it involves powerful agents recognizing a version of the other that has little relation to who or what they are, or if it involves the ‘production’ of others as subjects whose existence serves to support or uphold existing, unequal relations of power. In a postcolonial world rife with development projects and strategies and anti-poverty campaigns, both ‘caring for’ and ‘recognizing’ distant others are potentially little more than discursive practices that produce particular kinds of subjects that serve the ends of the already-powerful.

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If the concept of recognition is going to mitigate the paternalistic tendencies of care ethics, it will have to look quite different from the way in which it has been theorized and practised in international relations thus far. For this reason, strategies of transformative recognition that support a global politics of care must involve sustained analysis of what Narayan calls the ‘accounts’ that are given of the interdependencies and relationships which are so crucial to an ethic of care (Narayan 1995: 136). Notions of differences in vulnerabilities and capabilities, Narayan argues, should be recognized as contested terrain, requiring critical attention to who defines these differences as well as their practical implications (Narayan 1995: 136; emphasis added). This brings me to my second point: that strategies of transformative recognition must involve attention to the politics of representation. By this I do not mean representation in the formal political sense, centred on issues of membership and procedure (Fraser 1995). Rather, I mean the political act of discursive framing and construction of subjects in order to serve specific ends – in this case, to serve the ends of ‘development’, ‘humanitarianism’ or ‘care’. Strategies of transformative recognition demand reflection upon the ways in which the discursive structure of injunctions to ‘care about’ distant others may serve to reinforce dichotomous and hierarchical categories of ‘carers’ and ‘cared for’ in the world. Recognition that is transformative questions and disturbs this basic structure in an effort to transform, rather than reinforce, existing inequalities. On this view, the function of recognition is not so much to recognize and ensure the autonomy of individuals and groups, but rather to ensure that their agency is not constrained or effaced, and that their voices are heard. Transformative recognition ensures that practices are based on a picture of mutual vulnerability and interdependence, and a shared need both to care and be cared for. This chapter is divided into three parts. In the first part, I will briefly outline the central ideas of both the ethics of care and the theory of recognition, focusing on the similarities, relations and points of intersection between the two approaches. This section will also address the (relatively scant) work that considers care ethics and recognition in the context of international politics, demonstrating the limitations of their dominant or conventional readings in this context. The second part will return to the problem of paternalism in care ethics, focusing specifically on the contemporary contexts of development and humanitarianism. Finally, part three will elaborate on the idea of strategies of transformative recognition, focusing specifically on how these ideas may be integrated to create a more complete account of a global ethic of care which mitigates the dangers of paternalism and domination.

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The ethics of care and the ethics of recognition The ethics of care is a relative newcomer in the field of ethics, but it has gained remarkable traction, especially in the past two decades. Care ethics presents a radical challenge to dominant, rationalist approaches. It is an account of ethics which sees the basic substance of morality as located in the dispositions and practices of caring which feature so significantly in the day-to-day lives of most people around the world. Care ethics starts from a notion of the self as fundamentally constituted by and through relations with others. Care ethics is constituted not by rules or principles, but through practices. In contrast to the masculinist moral subject constructed by rationalist ethics – autonomous, self-willing, governed by reason – care ethicists see moral subjects as naturally vulnerable and mutually dependent. Care ethics emphasizes embodiment and human frailty, and argues that our shared needs to receive and give care should be seen as starting points for thinking about ethics, rather than as merely private and thus irrelevant. While the ethics of care is normally traced to the work of moral psychologists, especially Carol Gilligan (1982), over the past three decades the idea of ‘care’ has been taken up by political philosophers and social theorists. Political theorist Joan Tronto’s book Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care set the stage for the development of a rich literature on the politics of care. In that book, Tronto (1993: 3) explicitly rejects the idea of care as a ‘women’s morality’, but affirms that it is an approach to ethics that ‘includes the values traditionally associated with women’. She explains, ‘questions of natality, mortality, and the needs of humans to be cared for as they grow up, live, and die, have not informed the central questions of philosophers . . . . Theorists’ exclusions operate forcefully to set boundaries between those questions and concerns that are central and those that are peripheral’ (Tronto 1993: 3–4). Due, in large measure, to this explication of the political implications of care, interest in care ethics has increased rapidly across disciplinary divides. No longer confined to moral philosophy, studies in the ethics of care can now be found in political theory, geography, environmental studies, peace research, social work and social policy, education studies and political economy. Only very slowly, however, is it advancing into the field of International Relations (see Hutchings 2008; Porter 2007; Robinson 1999, 2011). The contemporary theory of ‘recognition’ also, notably, grew up in response to dominant normative political theories. But this time it was not rationalist universalist moral theory as such, but the widespread Western consensus on

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theorizing about justice which focused on the ‘imperative to remove any form of social or economic inequality that could not be justified on rational grounds’ (Honneth 2001: 43). Seeking to move beyond the myopic focus on distributive justice, recognition theorists developed an understanding of justice whose normative aim was not the elimination of inequality but the avoidance of degradation and disrespect, towards the achievement of the ‘recognition of the personal dignity of all individuals’ (Honneth 2001: 43). Of course, as key recognition theorist Axel Honneth notes, the concept of recognition is not new; indeed, he suggest that it has always, in one form or another, played a central role in moral-practical philosophy. Indeed, it is Hegel who is widely recognized as the ‘lone initiator’ – the thinker who placed the principle of recognition at the core of his ethics, and who is undisputed ‘father’ of contemporary theories of recognition. Specifically, his differentiation between family, civil society and state reflects his distinction between and articulation of three forms of recognition widely used by contemporary theorists of recognition: love, esteem and respect (Honneth 2001: 47–8). Although there is very little existing work that treats the two concepts or literatures together, there are a number of affinities and points of intersection between the ethics of care and the ethics of recognition. Perhaps most importantly, care and recognition highlight relations between moral subjects: acts or practices of care and recognition can only occur in relation. That said, in the ethics of care, it is the relation itself, and the responses and responsibilities that flow from it, which are of both ontological and normative significance. In the theory of recognition, however, what matters is the effect or outcome of the relation on the individuals; in other words, that the effect of a given relationship is such that the individuals involved feel loved, esteemed or respected in the eyes of the other. As Carol Gould has pointed out, Honneth implicitly links recognition to care. As Gould explains, one of Honneth’s three forms of recognition is ‘love’, which for him includes the caring activities involved in child raising (Gould 2008: 92). The other types of recognition – respect and esteem – combine with love to form a total account of recognition. Notably, these three types of recognition are achieved and upheld in separate spheres: the home and family, the formal institutions of the law and within one’s ‘career’ (Gould 2008: 99). The inclusion of ‘love’ and ‘caring activities’ in an ethics of recognition, however, does not necessarily entail a political commitment to feminist goals. As Julie Connolly (2010) points out, although Honneth asserts the need for love-based recognition, emerging out of relations of nurturance, he also argues

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that relations encompassed by this category are ‘pre-political’. This serves to reinforce the public–private distinction, and therefore to marginalize feminist concerns with how power functions through recognition in the private sphere. This is in marked contrast to most feminist work on care ethics, which seeks explicitly to challenge the public–private dichotomy – specifically, the assertion that care matters only in the context of intimate, personal relationships but that it is irrelevant, or even dangerous, in the ‘public’ realm. Challenging this account within ethics is part of a wider feminist contestation of what counts as ‘the political’ and how these assumptions are fundamentally constituted through historically constructed gender norms, rules and power relations. In her analysis of the ethics of care and recognition, Gould employs a distinction between ‘rigorous recognition’ and ‘generous recognition’ (she also uses the terms ‘empathic’ recognition and ‘solidaristic’ recognition) in order to highlight the way that the latter sort of recognition embodies a ‘caring attitude towards others’ (2008: 99). This latter type of recognition includes a more ‘feelingful (as well as cognitive) understanding of the distinctiveness of others in their concrete circumstances and the difficulties they face, along with an acknowledgment and appreciation of their agency in that context’ (Gould 2008: 99). In this sense, we can imagine how the ethics of care might intersect with the ethics of recognition; both involve an assurance to the other that ‘I see you and I am listening to you’. Thus, both the ethics of care and recognition are premised on the relationship between moral agents, and both assert the importance of attentiveness to particular others. But while care ethics focuses on interdependence, shared vulnerability and human frailty within a normative framework of attentiveness to the needs of particular others, recognition theory is oriented towards the affirmation of individual and group identities and differences. In other words, while care ethics focuses on attentiveness as a method of addressing that other’s distinctive needs, recognition stresses attentiveness as a method of affirming the distinctiveness itself (usually the ‘cultural’ distinctiveness) of that other, either as an individual or as a group.

Recognition and ‘the international’ In the dominant (realist) strands of International Relations (IR) theory, international politics is understood as the relations among sovereign states. The modern state system is said to be unique in that its members recognize

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one another as equal authority claimants. Each is recognized as having the final and exclusive authority to use coercion within its territorial borders (Thomson 1995: 219). Thus, as Onuf (2013: 122) explains, insofar as scholars in IR think about recognition at all, we take it to be a legal condition – one that is well established in state practice and legal theory. But as Janice Thomson (1995: 219–20) has pointed out, while theoretical and empirical work persuasively demonstrates the crucial role external recognition plays in constituting state sovereignty, it remains unclear just who must do the recognizing: a majority of states, the Great Powers, all states, a core of elites, a hegemonic power or something else. Given the narrowness of the ‘international law’ conception of recognition, it is perhaps not surprising that the past decade has witnessed the growth of what has been called an ‘international political sociology’ approach, which has been used to explain ‘actor identities, the change and continuity of international social structures, the emotional needs of, and policy decisions by, international actors’ (Agne et al. 2013: 95). This approach has been described as the ‘constitutive’ theory of recognition, defended and developed in the contemporary debate by constructivist IR theorists (Erman 2013: 130). Thus, theories of recognition in International Relations have tended to focus on either the declarations of formallegal recognition of sovereign states by other states, or the practices of recognition that are constitutive of actors’ identities in international politics. The idea of moral recognition, however, has received comparatively less attention in International Relations. Bartelson argues that, in the international realm, moral recognition takes us beyond the mere recognition of rights, and into the thick recognition of social and cultural identities. Axel Honneth has recently addressed the idea of recognition in international relations, arguing that ‘the path for civilizing international relations primarily lies in sustained efforts at conveying respect and esteem for the collective identity of other countries’ (Honneth 2012: 149). It is worth asking, however, what this would mean in practice. First, what people or organizations are supposed to engage in these ‘sustained efforts’? While it is rarely articulated explicitly, there is little doubt that this model of recognition in IR presumes that ‘the West’ – the club of industrialized, incomerich states that make up the already-civilized world – are the actors who are supposed to make these efforts to recognize the collective identities of peoples in ‘Other’ countries. But why should they make such efforts? What mechanisms are in place, or could be put in place, to motivate this recognition? Why should we assume that the process of recognition will actually result in an affirmation

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of the distinctiveness and legitimacy of another state or culture, rather than a rejection? Bartelson is worth quoting at length here: Since recognition in the sense of acknowledgement presupposes a prior identification of the actor to be recognized, and since such identification in turn presupposes the possibility of distinguishing those actors that are fit for recognition from those who are not, actual practices of recognition will always depend on underlying schemes of classification. Since these schemes are historically variable and culturally contingent, the practices of political, legal, and moral recognition have also conditioned the differentiation between the European states system and its non-European outside. Thus, from a postcolonial perspective, the practices of political, legal and moral recognition look like little but advanced forms of back-scratching, through which Western powers have secured their dominance over the rest of the world by excluding those entities that do not conform to the Western state form, or to Western standards of civilization, from consideration as legal and moral equals. (Bartelson 2013: 121, 123)

Recognition in international politics also risks becoming an act of productive power, whereby the bestowing of recognition becomes construction of the other as ‘Other’ – in other words, an act of ‘Orientalizing’. Identifying ‘cultural groups’ to be recognized serves to reify and re-present those groups and their ‘cultures’. Tony Evans (2011: 1753) addresses this issue in the context of Islam, arguing that Islam is presented in European and North American societies as a ‘monolithic, proselytising creed dedicated to undermining, overturning, and eventually replacing the values that have sustained capital growth on a global scale’.

Paternalism in globalized care and recognition Can we act responsibly towards others without undercutting their autonomy and freedom? (Inayatullah 2013: 452) Much ink has (rightly) been spilled describing the paternalistic impulses and effects of European rationalism on so-called ‘non-Western’ cultures. The globalist and narcissistic tendencies of Western liberalism are inextricably linked to the paternalism that justified ‘civilizing missions’ around the world, and continue to justify various kinds of ‘humanitarian’ intervention in the lives of others today.

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Spreading ‘our values’ – through the promotion of democracy, the enactment of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’, or discourses of ‘end poverty’ campaigns – is often undertaken not only under the guise of care but under the guise of liberation. And yet, a tension exists within liberalism, especially in the context of the international. Despite the obvious role of liberalism in justifying interference in the lives of others, liberals can be credited, as Barnett argues, with ‘making paternalism something of a sin’. Using Gerald Dworkin’s definition, we can understand paternalism as ‘the interference with a person’s liberty of action justified by reasons referring exclusively to the welfare, good, happiness, needs and interests or values of the person being coerced’ (Dworkin, quoted in Barnett 2013: 487). Although paternalism ‘violates nearly every cherished principle of liberalism’, liberals are able to aggressively promote their own ideology without appearing to be guilty of paternalism (Barnett 2013: 492). But it is only through a remarkable sleight of hand that liberalism has been used by the powerful to make this tension disappear. In arguing that liberal principles are deontic principles – principles of right or ‘regulative’ principles which specify the terms and constraints under which substantive goods may be promoted and pursued – liberals are able to manage the contradictions between ‘liberty’ and ‘paternalism’. In other words, they are able to argue that the promotion of liberalism globally is not interference or domination or ‘telling others what is good for them’; rather, it is simply providing them with the freedom to decide for themselves. What critics like Evans and others have shown, however, is that liberalism effectively narrows the range of permissible conceptions of the good in ways that must be defended not merely as just but also as good (Smith 1996: 254). In the context of the international system, Barnett (2013: 490) notes the way that liberalism’s individualistic ontology leads to a ‘neglect of the underlying social relations that generates the positions of superiority and inferiority and a sense of noblesse oblige’. In contrast to the ubiquitous and well-founded critiques of liberalism, critical scholars have not worried too much about the paternalistic implications of international activities justified by the language of ‘caring’. Perhaps it is because we are already cynical about ‘care’ in international relations – perhaps we think we already know that anyone who purports to ‘care’ in the context of international politics doesn’t really do so, but is instead using that language to mask aims of domination, self-interest or self-aggrandisement. Barnett suggests that contemporary humanitarianism is constituted by both compassion and care on one hand, and command and control on the other (Barnett 2011: 105). On his view, however, this is not necessarily cause for concern. Indeed, Barnett argues that it is neither possible nor necessarily desirable to remove paternalism from

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the international humanitarian order; rather, he sees it as a latent or manifest feature of all relations of compassion (Barnett 2011: 128). Ultimately, he argues, the challenge is to discern when it is justifiable that actors should interfere in the lives of others because it will be for their own good, and when it is not (Barnett 2011: 105). The problem with this solution, as I see it, is that it leaves intact the underlying structures and norms which position some individuals and states as ‘carers’ – with responsibilities to protect, develop or educate – and others as ‘receivers of care’. How can we escape this paternalism that appears to be so deeply embedded in both the ethics of care and the ethics of recognition in the context of liberal internationalism? Is it sufficient simply to supplement care ethics with an ethics of recognition? One way of looking at this problem is to ask whether a global ethic of care is really about a powerful and benevolent ‘West’ caring about the vulnerable, needy and poor in developing countries? Elsewhere I have argued that a global ethic of care cannot be understood as a normative injunction to ‘care for’ distant others; rather, it should be seen as a critical theory that reveals the extent and scope of caring activities around the world in an effort to demonstrate both the importance of caring activities for the survival and security of all human beings, and the ways in which caring practices are governed by gendered, classed and racialized relations of power (Robinson 2011). But while this approach may present a more critical vision for care ethics – and one that has the advantage of paying attention to unequal relations of gender, class and race at multiple scales – it cannot escape the fact that rhetoric and narratives of care are widely used to justify paternalistic acts, and also that the ethics of care is usually understood in its strongly normative sense.1 In the section that follows, I try to map out a blueprint for strategies of transformative recognition that can help us to avoid the ‘dark side of care’.

Transformative recognition and a global ethic of care In her rich and insightful book Care in Everyday Life, Marian Barnes discusses the ‘categorical separation of care receivers from care givers and the assumptions of a different moral weight attached to these two distinct identities’ in the context of the disability movement. As Barnes argues, it is neither empirically accurate nor morally defensible – in this context and in others – to define people as only givers or receivers of care. She insists that the ‘political argument needs to be about care and the necessity and value of care, rather than the comparative merits

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of protecting the rights and interests of those who are currently “dependent” or “independent” ’ (Barnes 2012: 178). This is a very powerful argument. It suggests that the some of the normative and transformative power of an ethics of care is located not in the caring as such. The act of bestowing care on another, while it may appear ‘morally good’ in a conventional or superficial manner, is actually fraught with possibilities for damaging self-sacrifice on one hand and paternalistic domination on the other. What is important about care is its necessity – it must be done; and its ubiquity – it is always being done. The political task is revealing and defending the ways and extent to which practices of care sustain life that is physically comfortable and emotionally secure. This also involves addressing the historical and contemporary institutional conditions and structures that define relations of care in a variety of contexts and across multiple scales. This, in turn, leads to the task of setting out the conditions under which practices of care can be carried out under conditions that avoid domination, self-sacrifice and harm, or exploitation. This chapter asks how relations and practices of ‘globalized care’ can avoid the harms of paternalism. I am suggesting that care must involve recognition of the other, but that this recognition can be achieved only through strategies that are ‘transformative’ of the conditions under which roles of ‘carer’ and ‘cared for’ are constructed, edified and performed. The point of transformative strategies of recognition is that they redress disrespect by transforming the underlying cultural-valuational structure. As Fraser (1995: 83) explains, by ‘destabilizing existing group identities and differentiations, these remedies would not only raise the esteem of members of currently disrespected groups. They would change everyone’s sense of belonging, affiliation and self ’. Efforts to ‘develop’ the poor, whether framed in the language of care or justice, generally presuppose what Fraser calls a ‘universalist conception of recognition, the equal moral worth of persons’. But as she points out, as iterated over time, practices of ‘affirmative redistribution’ tend to set in motion a second, stigmatizing, recognition dynamic, which contradicts universalism (Fraser 1995: 85). Critical and postcolonial theorists in International Relations and international political theory have sought to reveal the effects of this dyadic structure in the context of North–South relations and ‘global justice’. Peggy Kohn (2013: 194) argues that the ‘normative argument that the rich have an obligation to help the global poor is convincing, but the rhetorical structure reinforces a hierarchical relationship’. Franziska Dubgen (2012: 69) describes ‘Africa Humiliated’, referring to tacit and overt forms of misrecognition within the practice of development aid. As she explains, development aid’s hegemonic image represents itself as a gesture

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of generosity while at the same time it serves to sustain the status quo, effectively affirming existing power hierarchies (Dubgen 2012: 83). In her powerful novel Americanah, author Chimamada Ngozi Adichie describes a scene in which the Nigerian heroine, Ifemelu, attends a party held by the wealthy white American family for whom Ifemelu works as a nanny. Ifemelu endures the guests’ sweeping generalizations about ‘Africa’, including descriptions of the charitable work in which they are engaged: Two women spoke about their donations to a wonderful charity in Malawi that built wells, a wonderful orphanage in Botswana, a wonderful microfinance cooperative in Kenya . . .. Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given, to be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy. (Adichie 2013: 209)

As these accounts suggest, there can be no positive change until this dichotomy of self-righteousness and humiliation is disrupted. The first step in this direction is to challenge the image of care as a dyad between caregiver and care receiver. As Tronto points out, this image is not only inaccurate, it has bad consequences. Indeed, it begins to ‘import into the very nature of care its inequality’ (Tronto 2013: 152–3). It obscures the fact that caregivers too are vulnerable, needy and sometimes incompetent. And it can serve as a justification for continuing to exclude and not think about care receivers and their close caregivers as full, participating citizens (Tronto 2013: 152–3). Just as Tronto argues in the context of caring democracy, the undermining of the hierarchical logic of care as dyadic is the first step towards developing non-paternalistic globalized care. As Mark Duffield (2007: 233) suggests, there must be an emphasis on ‘mutuality and reciprocity between provider and beneficiary while blurring the differences between them’. What is required, he argues, is a ‘change of comportment’ – instead of educating (or ‘caring for’) the poor and marginalized, there needs to be an openness to learn from their struggles (Duffield 2007: 233–4). While I cannot, in this chapter, offer a fully developed account of transformative recognition for global care ethics, I would argue that the key to such strategies lies in the politics of representation. Consider, for example, the website and associated songs and videos, ‘Radi-Aid: Africa for Norway’. Created by the Norwegian Students and Academics International Assistance Fund, SAIH, the website, songs and videos parody familiar tropes in Western humanitarianism – from ‘end poverty’ pop songs and videos, to ‘save the children’ television advertisements. As one of the creators explains, ‘Paternalistic

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narratives of Africa as a starving, hopeless and most recently rising continent continue to reinforce its stereotypical perception as an economic backwater replete with tribal conflicts and always in need of Western intervention. For charities, the images of starving and lonely African children established the norm for NGO fundraising’ (Olav Edland-Gryt 2014). While the ‘Africa for Norway’ music video does not really aim to suggest that freezing Norwegians really need help from Africans (by providing heaters), it does render laughable the idea that the generous-hearted and caring people of the (cold) North can help ‘Africans’ by donating money. As Olav Edland-Gryt explains, comedy can turn the tables on how we see development in Africa, shifting the focus from the less privileged to the privileged, shedding light on the role of the ‘white-savior industrial complex’ (Olav Edland-Gryt 2014). By ‘turning the tables’, ‘we’ in the global North are compelled to rethink the implications of our ‘moral’ actions. The result is that we cannot look at them with pity; instead, we are able to see their agency, and contrast their clever satire with our own puffed-up and pathetic gestures. It invites reflection on whether our ‘care’ is effective, and on the attitudes to and organization of care in our own wealthy and ‘comfortable’ societies. Moreover, it compels us to reflect on the harm we may be doing in ‘doing good’. The objection could be raised here that an initiative like this is still a creation of the West, and not a direct challenge by those who suffer at the hands of paternalistic caring. Indeed, Narayan suggests that political contestations and moral challenges must come from those who are constructed as the objects of care: ‘It seems to me that what such ideological pictures often yield to are not primarily theoretical moral self-corrections, based either on reason or on enlarged sympathies with Others, but to political contestations and moral challenges by groups who are victimized by the status quo’ (Narayan 1995: 137). That said, it can also be argued that it is not the duty of the oppressed to educate the oppressor. The effects of transformative recognition should not be, as Shilliam (2013b: 141) argues, to ‘shock and awe’, or ‘break down’ the powerful with guilt so as to ultimately build them up again. At the other end of the spectrum from comic satire lies the tragedy of war. In his short but thought-provoking 2009 article, Tarak Barkawi describes the disordering effect of great Western powers’ so-called ‘small wars’: What ‘small wars’ have the potential to unhinge are the archetypes by which the West comes to be the West. Westerners discover they are not liberators, but oppressors, not developers but destroyers, not civilized but barbaric: they discover to their horror, and despite all their electronic gadgetry, that they are

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not smarter than their enemies, but stupid and lumbering; . . . most of all, they discover, despite their impressive legions and their fearsome armaments, that they are not strong. (Barkawi 2009: 129)

Such wars, Barkawi explains, involve enormous and seemingly secure identity investments in the weak, who despite all manage to turn the tables on the West. Interestingly, Barkawi describes how the response to such a ‘loss’ could go in one of three ways: a return to isolationism, righteous ‘total war’ set off by ‘Orientalist panic’. It is the third scenario on which the possibility of transformation relies – the inspiration of ‘a degree of self-doubt, of reflection and reflexivity, of questioning of authority, willingness to accept responsibility’ (Barkawi 2009: 129). Of course, no one would advocate engaging in wars as a method for unhinging the dichotomous logics of weak and strong, carers and ‘cared for’ in the world today. However, the examples above illustrate how both self-conscious parody and real-world ‘big events’ can unsettle our comfortable pictures of our place in the world – of who is strong and who is weak, who is ‘smart’ and autonomous, and who is childlike and dependent. The point of ‘turning tables’ is not to keep them upturned, but ultimately to right them in a way that resists falling back into dichotomous logics, and puts our shared need to give and receive care at the top of the agenda for dialogue. While Michael Barnett (2013: 518) suggests that ‘the occasional act of paternalism’ is preferable to a ‘pledge of indifference’, I would argue that this stark binary between indifference and paternalistic care obscures the ways and extent to which practices of care can be transformative. In this chapter, I have argued that caring for others in the world must involve explicit strategies of transformative recognition. A global ethics of care cannot simply ‘care about’ unfortunate, weak or vulnerable others without critical reflection on the historical and contemporary norms, structures and institutions that shaped the positionalities of these caring relationships. Strategies of transformative recognition force us to confront the paternalism inherent in our gestures towards ‘global care’. Upending the dichotomous logic of ‘carer’ and ‘cared for’ in the world restores a vision of all persons as givers and receivers of care, and focuses attention on strategies for ensuring strong relations and networks of care in societies in all parts of the world.

Note 1

Michael Barnett (2011, 2013) clearly interprets care ethics in this way.

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Recognition in the Struggle against Global Injustice Greta Fowler Snyder

Introduction State-specific solutions are necessarily inadequate to the task of effectively addressing the many global issues that humans face today – environmental damage, the ravages of neo-liberalism, violence against women, etc. As Nancy Fraser (2005: 304) has observed, a state focus can aid and abet global injustices by ‘systematically obscur[ing] transborder sources of . . . injustice that structure transnational social relations’. At the same time, the international institutional apparatus is relatively underdeveloped, and existing institutions face multiple difficulties in promoting cooperation and ensuring enforcement. In this context, global social movements are especially important in the struggle against injustice. Such movements draw attention to transnational sources of injustice and put pressure on multiple governments to change their behaviour. They also influence and/or give greater legitimacy to international institutions that are in a position to influence governments’ action. What does ‘recognition’ have to do with such sorely-needed global movements? Some would argue that recognition politics – struggles over the meaning of and status conferred to particular identities – pre-empts the kinds of large-scale unified movements needed to promote justice in this increasingly interconnected age. The seeking and attaining of recognition, for instance, has been criticized for pre-empting cross-identity coalitions by emphasizing difference among identity groups/hardening boundaries and suggesting that certain solidarities are un-natural (Brown 1999; Gitlin 1996). Based on this view, the politics of recognition is something that activists who hope to engender and sustain global resistance movements should avoid.

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While recognition politics can certainly have divisive effects, it would be wrong to portray ‘recognition’ as anathema to transnational or global movements. In fact, it is absolutely essential to their viability and success. For social movements to cross national borders, people have to be integrated across lines of local and national difference. And this is only the tip of the difference iceberg: racial, sexual, class and gender differences must also be bridged. The experiences of the last half century – the demise of Marxism, the splintering of identity movements like feminism – have taught progressive forces that difference will not be repressed and cannot be ignored. It must be engaged directly, and this direct engagement begins with recognition. In this chapter, I explore three different sites where recognition politics is necessary if global movements are to be realized, and two important functions recognition can play in forging global movements. In doing so, I add to our understanding of the ‘variety of sites and ways in which recognition can be thought and practiced’ or what Sallie Westwood (2001) calls ‘regimes of recognition’. While Westwood focuses on democracy, citizenship and the nation in her elaboration of recognition regimes, however, I focus on the politics of recognition as practised (1) within progressive movements, (2) between progressive movements and (3) by progressive movements on the global stage. Just as the sites Westwood describes, these are ‘key sites for the politics of recognition which . . . move us toward the kind of “planetary humanism” suggested by Paul Gilroy or the cosmopolitan future suggested by Beck among others’ (Westwood 2001: 248). And just as with Westwood’s argument, this extension of her understanding of regimes of recognition brings together a ‘series of sites with the modalities of recognition as we understand them’ (Westwood 2001: 254). Specifically, I argue that recognition politics at these different sites can be integrative and/or performative. An ‘integrative’ recognition politics brings the worldviews of different groups into closer alignment and enables diverse groups to act together. A ‘performative’ recognition politics manifests the will of a particular coalition and the strength of its claims. At the same time, as I insist on the necessity of recognition politics to the formation of global movements against injustice, however, I am sympathetic to critics who claim that recognition politics is appropriative or dominative, that it reifies difference and creates rifts. Recognition politics can take on pathological forms and have problematic consequences. But it need not. The question, then, is under what conditions does the politics of recognition realize its better self? What are the conditions that encourage an ethical integrative recognition politics? I explore these questions in what follows.

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The chapter will proceed as follows. First, I specify my understanding of the ‘politics of recognition’. In the second section, I explore the integrative function that ‘internally-oriented’ recognition politics (i.e. conducted both within progressive movements and between progressive movements) can serve, taking global feminism and the World Social Forum (WSF) as my points of reference. In the third section, I use the 2003 anti-war protests as an example of an ‘externallyoriented’ recognition politics that serves the function both of manifesting and coalescing a global democratic citizenry. In the fourth section, I draw on the work of feminists and analysts of the WSF to suggest some of the conditions that would encourage an ethically integrative recognition politics rather than one defined by domination or appropriation.

Parsing the politics of recognition The phrase ‘the politics of recognition’ begs the question: recognition of what? The implicit referent here is identity and, relatedly, status. Misrecognition of identity or lack of recognition of identity can negatively impact the subject’s own self-understanding as well as others’ understanding of who she is and what is owed to her; both non- and misrecognition can result in damage or distortion, marginalization, exploitation or exclusion. The belief that women are naturally or ideally submissive, for instance, may prevent women from obtaining leadership positions (and the resulting dearth of women leaders perpetuates gender inequity). Another example: people who are not considered citizens of any state are barred from accessing the full range of human rights in a system where states ensure rights. In both cases, mis- or non-recognition of a group justifies the withholding of status (by an international institution, by the state, by a public or by a segment of a public) from a specific group of people. Recognition, on the other hand, involves acknowledgement of an other’s self-understanding1 – both comprehension of this understanding and action in keeping with this comprehension. Recognition politics, then, refers to the symbolic struggle over the meaning and consequences of an identity. Most recognition politics involve efforts either to increase visibility of an identity group or to encourage others to see members of an identity group anew. The kinds of recognition sought are of many varieties, and recognition politics can be conducted in a number of different ways, so it is worthwhile to visit some distinctions that help us understand the lay of the land of recognition politics. In a recent article, Lisa Strömbom distinguishes between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ forms

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of recognition. Thin recognition politics involves acceptance into a universal category (human being, for instance) and the conferral of the status (human rights) that entails. Thin recognition, in other words, involves the recognition of an aspect of one’s identity that is shared with all others. Thick recognition, on the other hand, is recognition of the ‘features that make a subject unique’ (Strömbom 2014: 171) – such as race, gender, sexual orientation and so forth. In this form of recognition politics, ‘the subjectivity of the other is underscored’ (Strömbom 2014: 171), meaning the subject’s own understanding of the meaning of a particular aspect of her identity is given weight. As such, thick recognition requires ‘acknowledgement, understanding, or empathy for the situation and the views of the other’ (Strömbom 2014: 171). Another important distinction to highlight is that between a monovalent recognition politics and a multivalent recognition politics. As I have argued elsewhere (Snyder 2012), this distinction pushes back against portrayals of the politics of recognition as necessarily promoting essentialist conceptions of identities. Certainly, monovalent forms of the politics of recognition – a form in which recognition is demanded for an identity understood in monolithic terms – have abounded.2 But, other forms of recognition politics involve drawing attention to the multiplicity of an identity category – in fact, in these forms, attention to such multiplicity is considered essential to the revaluation of the identity category more generally. Such was the case with the early gay rights movement in America, which celebrated ‘unity in diversity’ and displayed the breadth of gay identities through gay pride parades. Contemporary ‘post-black’ identity politics is another example of a multivalent recognition politics; the post-black movement aims not to do away with blackness, but instead to challenge restrictive ideas about blackness placed on black Americans from both outside and inside the racial group. Having introduced distinctions that will come into play later in the chapter, I end this section with a short discussion of recognition and transformation. Some portray recognition politics merely as reifying one’s own perspective – I (am supposed to) reinforce what you think about yourself, you (are supposed to) reinforce what I think about myself and neither of us (our ways of thinking about ourselves or seeing the world) is changed in the encounter. I grant the possibility that one’s sense of self and worldview may be unchanged following a recognition encounter; but certainly, this is not true of all types of encounters in all types of contexts. It is equally possible that the recognition encounter changes one’s sense of self/view of one’s identity. So, we find that identity groups are not just internally heterogeneous (as multivalent recognition highlights); they are also not static. Hence, Charles Taylor suggests that a deepening of relations of recognition only

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comes about in terms of an interpretative dialogue oriented towards ‘shared horizons’ – suggesting that one’s horizons (the way one sees the world and oneself in it) can and do shift in recognition encounter. An ethical recognition encounter, then, involves not ensuring the other’s conception of her identity is preserved, but fully respecting her ‘normative power as discourse participant’ (Allen 2010: 209). So, to summarize: recognition politics involves the struggle over the meaning of an identity and the status conferred based on that meaning. Recognition politics can focus on universal or particular identities and can present identity in more or less monolithic ways. Transformation of one’s self and worldview can be a consequence of a recognition encounter.

The importance of internal recognition politics In this section, I discuss the importance of intra- and inter-movement recognition politics to the construction of effective and consciously global movements against injustice.

Intra-movement politics The feminist movement provides a clear example of why those concerned with forging effective global movements need to dedicate time and effort to intra-movement recognition politics, and feminist scholars and activists have expended significant effort reflecting on this. I thus draw from both feminist history and theory to make my argument. It should be noted, however, that similar dynamics have occurred within other progressive movements; the lessons of feminism are applicable to other progressive movements.3 Second-wave feminists made strong and sweeping claims about ‘woman’s’ nature, what ‘women’ need and the kind of society ‘women’ desire. Perhaps by virtue of their breadth, these claims received a great deal of attention and stimulated a significant amount of activism. Yet, most often, those who claimed to be speaking for all women were not representative of the variety of women, but instead just a subset: white, well-off feminists from countries in the global north (especially the United States). These particular women, in other words, mistook their particular experiences and the agenda they derived from them for universal experiences and a global agenda. Instead of ‘speaking for’ all women, such women were in fact imposing their perspective and priorities on women who had very different experiences.

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This imposition was aided and abetted by power inequalities. Racist and colonialist ideologies suggest white and Western knowledges to be superior to the knowledges of non-white, non-Western subjects. White Western feminists thus assumed a kind of epistemic privilege that made them certain that they had greater insight into the situation of non-white, non-Western women than they themselves did. Non-white, non-Western women were portrayed as more oppressed, more indoctrinated and less able to help themselves than white Western feminists. The imposition of white Western feminism ignited a slew of criticism. Chandra Mohanty was at the forefront of the critique of solidarity-damaging tendencies within Western feminist scholarship, demonstrating the complicity of the academy in the shaping of a problematic feminist activism. In ‘Under Western Eyes’ (1984), Mohanty ‘expose[s] the power-knowledge nexus of feminist cross-cultural scholarship expressed through Eurocentric, falsely universalizing methodologies that serve the narrow self-interest of Western feminism’ (2003: 501). This scholarship, Mohanty claims, underwrites the very kinds of paternalistic attitudes that undermine solidarity between women in different parts of the world. At the same time, as these internal tensions were rising, feminists were increasingly coming to realize the necessity of global feminism. In ‘Mapping the Feminist Imagination: From Redistribution to Recognition to Representation’ (2005), Nancy Fraser charts feminism’s trajectory as moving from a ‘redistribution’ phase in which feminists challenge an overly narrow economistic political imaginary, through a ‘recognition’ phase or identity politics phase focused on culture, towards a (superior) ‘representation’ phase. In the (contemporary) ‘representation’ phase, feminists (rightly) realize gender injustice to be a global problem, exacerbated by global forces, which requires global activism and solutions. Fraser understands recognition politics as continuing to be important in this third phase of feminism. This transnational phase, as she says, ‘integrates the best of the previous two phases in a new and more adequate synthesis’ (Fraser 2005: 297). But, it is worth interrogating what exactly Fraser means by ‘recognition politics’. For Fraser, recognition politics aims to change cultural preconceptions about women. She portrays the recognition exchange, in other words, as one that occurs between feminists and non-feminists, with feminists seeking to transform the perspectives of those who buy into chauvinist ideologies. What is left out of this understanding of the recognition politics that forms part of the representation phase’s ‘more adequate synthesis’ is significant in light of global feminism’s recent history. While the exchange between feminists and non-feminists is important, if history has taught us anything, it is that a

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recognition exchange between feminists themselves is necessary. For Fraser, recognition politics revalues women, rather than exploring the differences between women. It changes public culture, rather than movement culture. Fraser’s understanding of recognition politics is thus too narrow. Indeed, this lack of concern for internal recognition politics is performed in the way that Fraser constructs her argument. While she extols the importance of global feminism, Fraser limits most of her analysis to the United States and Western Europe, largely ignoring feminism in the ‘two-thirds world’.4 This is the exact kind of erasure – feminism does not exist outside of the West – that figures like Mohanty fight against. Fraser’s argument fails to appreciate the nature of the recognition politics needed to sustain the global feminism she deems essential, and even performs the sorts of misrecognitions/denials of recognition that threaten the viability of a truly global feminism. The demand for recognition is embedded (sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly) in the criticism of a white Western feminism that patronizes women in the two-thirds world and elides feminism there. Resistance to this imposition says: ‘You must acknowledge my understanding of myself, my needs, my desires, my political commitments, etc.’ Such demands should not be understood as a threat to the feminist movement; indeed, a lack of engagement would be much more threatening. Rather, they must be at least partly animated by the possibility of a movement integrated across difference, the hope for ‘unity in diversity’. In the case of feminism, an intra-movement politics must both assume and reinforce the position that there are different ways to parse the identity ‘feminist’. Just because women might be critical of the dominant ‘women’s rights’ paradigm, for instance, does not mean they are not feminist – rather, they may believe rights are ineffective in their locales, or they prefer a more community-oriented tack as opposed to an individual-oriented one (Sperling, Ferree and Risling 2001). The idea that women who do not get on board with certain Western-preferred strategies (for instance, rejecting the hijab) are not feminist constitutes a global movement-defeating misrecognition: Misrecognition is due not to our prejudices as such but the failure to adequately articulate them and to take those of the other seriously. Ethnocentrism means unreflectively judging the other in terms of our own vocabulary of worth. What is offensive about such judgments is that they fail to take sufficient account of the self-understandings of the culture in question. Moreover, in doing so they find these other cultures to be inferior. The other is found to be a transgressor of our own values rather than recognized as possessing his/her own conception of the good. (Schaap 2004: 528)

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There are different ways of doing feminism, and people with very different strategic priorities must be able to claim the identity ‘feminist’. To forge a global movement, difference cannot be overcome once and for all – efforts to do so are morally bankrupt and have been shown to be ineffective. Rather, the feminist movement requires ‘understanding [of both] the historical and experiential specificities and differences of women’s lives as well as the historical and experiential connections between women from different national, racial, and cultural communities’ (Mohanty 2003: 522). Intra-movement recognition politics allows for the articulation of common differences by bringing such specificities to light and to bear on global feminism’s direction. The transformations wrought by substantive recognition encounters enable a sound and lasting solidarity as well as contributing to movement efficacy. The global movement against violence against women (VAW) demonstrates this. Although efforts to conduct a global campaign against VAW started to take shape in the mid-1970s, it was not until the 1990s that this campaign gained real traction. The implementation of specific initiatives aimed to facilitate dialogue across the North-South divide was the turning point in this campaign. Specifically, anti-VAW ‘activists sought to ensure that Southern women were present, especially among the leadership . . ., that Southern women had the opportunity to articulate an independent agenda . . ., and that activists worked to build an agenda all could support, while expecting disagreement about priorities’ (Weldon 2006: 61). The substantive recognition encounters enabled within the newly constructed arenas for dialogue across difference clearly facilitated a degree of transformation, as ‘issues that had previously been very divisive became unifying issues’ (Weldon 2006: 62). Weldon relates: When Northern women raised the issue of FGM [Female Genital Mutilation] at earlier meetings, for example, many Southern women criticized the move as imperialistic. But at Nairobi, African women themselves organized discussions of FGM and African women’s strategies to address the issue. After Nairobi, activists were able to include FGM under the rubric of violence against women with little dissent. (2006: 62)

That transformation occurred, though, is not to say that all differences between feminists disappeared. Instead of repressing or ignoring differences, however, they were given a hearing and met with respect; as Weldon puts it, ‘a critical mass of women had decided that they could be feminists and disagree on certain issues’ (2006: 61). As a result of these inclusive efforts, many Southern feminists came to feel equal partners in the global movement, rather than clients of it.

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The success story that is the VAW campaign can only be built on if intramovement recognition politics is not considered a phase. Feminists constantly need to be reminded of differences within the ‘thick’ identities of ‘woman’ and ‘feminist’ and encouraged to attend to the meaning and significance of these differences. Continual demands for recognition and efforts to recognize are essential to building a lasting global feminism.

Inter-movement politics Dynamics within movements like feminism have been reflected on the larger scale of the Left as a whole. The demise of Marxism was not only due to what some have deemed the triumph of capitalism and liberalism, but it was also due to the rejection of the Marxist model by progressive forces. Many progressives did not feel that their particular concerns were adequately represented by the Marxist framework. In fact, many felt that such a universal theory and hierarchical politics actively repressed their concerns and ran counter to their values. In the wake of this ambitious project, it is unsurprising that we have witnessed the rise of identity politics in which concerns particular to a specific group are foregrounded, as well as issue politics in which issue-specific advocacy occurs on the global level. Boaventura De Sousa Santos describes the post-Marxist progressive arena as follows: The movements and the NGOs constitute themselves around a number of more or less confined goals, create their own forms and styles of resistance, and specialize in certain kinds of practice and discourse that distinguish them from the others. Their identity is thereby created on the basis of what separates them from all the others. The feminist movement sees itself as very distinct from the labor movement, and vice versa; both distinguish themselves from the indigenous movement or the ecological movement; and so on and so forth. All these distinctions and separations have actually translated themselves into practical differences, and even contradictions push movements apart and foster rivalries and factionalisms. (2008: 262)

This proliferation of distinctions has been both helpful and harmful to struggles against global injustice. Helpful in the sense that it brings focused and sustained attention to issues of injustice that were ignored by previous methods of organizing. Harmful in the sense that it feeds partiality. Resistance has taken the form of ‘manifold groups and movements all apparently parochially

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concerned with their particular struggles’ (Funke 2008: 453). This parochialism has encouraged the attitude that only the actions of one’s own movement are important or correct – or even more locally, one’s own organization within one’s own movement. This mode of organizing the field of resistance and the myopia it encourages have stoked battles among different progressive groups for resources and power. Partiality thus pre-empts collaboration. While this evolution is understandable, a series of ‘silo-ed’ movements will have a difficult time addressing global injustices, even if each independent movement is globalized (which, as the above discussion on feminism suggests, is not the case). Why? Injustices are interconnected; as Richard Iton puts it, ‘the issues of sexuality, gender, class, race and culture[, etc.] are conjoined’ (2008: 103). As such, ‘resistance on one front in isolation rarely represents a significant departure from or challenge to the dominant modes of being and production’ (Iton 2008: 103). This suggests that an effective struggle against injustice requires coordination and cooperation between multiple global movements – feminism, environmentalism, anti-globalization, peace and so on. Unification by way of advocating a one-size-fits-all solution is not the way forward.5 Such efforts not only smack of irony,6 they counter what progressives are trying to achieve. Repressing difference would reinforce the very same ‘hierarchical and logo-centric ways of understanding and organizing social reality’ (Osterweil 2005: 25) that perpetuate global inequalities. Instead, the struggle against global injustice requires the forging of connections between movements. The predominant emerging paradigm for a post-Marxist world is one of ‘networked’ movements – each focused on particular identities or issues in particular context but attentive to other identities/issues/contexts (and thus the particularity of their own positions) and interested in forging connections across difference (Gould 2007). The point of such networks is not to overcome difference, but instead to take advantage of intersections, points of commonality and opportunities for collaboration. ‘We’s’ that are active at the global level are formed of ‘solidarities of contingency with degrees of permeability’ (Young, quoted in Westwood 2001: 257), part of a politics in process rather than one predetermined. These connections can only be developed in and through an inter-movement politics of recognition. Reflecting on the possibility of global resistance, de Sousa Santos says, ‘If the project is to promote counter-hegemonic practices that combine ecological, pacifist, indigenous, feminist, workers’, and other movements, and to do so in an horizontal way and with respect for the identity of every movement, an enormous effort of mutual recognition, dialogue, and

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debate will be required to carry out the task’ (2008: 262). Part and parcel of this enormous effort are the appreciation of different political identities and the translation of different knowledges, different perspectives on the world and different understandings of how to navigate the fight against injustice. An effective inter-movement politics of recognition would not, I argue, require activists to submerge their identification with a particular movement into a more universal identity or to trade it for a different ‘thick’ identity. Some have seen Charles Taylor’s understanding of the politics of recognition as working towards ‘shared horizons’ as opposed to the ‘fused horizons’ of Gadamer as problematic inasmuch as it hedges between (1) embracing the transformative power of the recognition encounter and (2) the protection of the difference with which actors enter the encounter.7 On this criticism, the identities that predate the recognition encounter are more static than they are on the ‘fused horizons’ model. But perhaps this is exactly what progressive forces should be aiming towards. Remember that specialization has advantages. Specialization has directed attention and energy to problems undervalued by previous ways of organizing and freed activists to approach these problems in their specificity. This has resulted in the development of new insights and new forms of resistance, brought new people with different talents to the struggle. But, specialization need not entail myopia, just as maintaining one’s horizons need not pre-empt transformation in the way that actors see and carry out the struggles with which they identified. An inter-movement recognition politics that integrates across movements without the threat of eventual incorporation into a shared whole can have innumerable benefits for global progressive forces. It fights the parochialism of siloed movements, by making each aware of the ‘incomplete and partial character of their struggles, politics and philosophies’ (de Sousa Santos 2008: 252). It decreases suspicion between groups and may even foster trust by acknowledging past wrongs (misrecognition and the repression of difference). And it ‘fosters multiple [connections] across different kinds of difference – [connections] which are constantly emergent and demonstrate varying degrees of flux and im/ permanence’ (Conway and Singh 2009: 71–2) – but connections which enable action against mutually imbricated forms of global injustice. Efforts have been made to put in place structures that facilitate the recognition encounters which can ‘de-silo’ movements without imposing unity from above. The WSF, constructed as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, provides ‘open space’ in which ‘thousands of groups and movements

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of insurgent civil society from around the world’ can convene for ‘the free exchange of ideas, experiences and strategies oriented to enacting alternatives to neoliberalism’ (Conway and Singh 2009: 61). Though aiming to be maximally inclusive, the WSF does draw certain general boundaries: all included in the forum are aligned against neo-liberalism and committed to building ‘another world’ (the slogan of the WSF is ‘another world is possible’), and it excludes groups organized as political parties and groups that use violence as a tactic. The format of the WSF does not privilege any particular position (anarchist/ liberal), strategy (insider/outsider) or group (indigenous/feminist). It is, instead, intended to enable ‘horizontalist modes of relating’ (Conway and Singh 2009: 69) between autonomous individuals and groups. Though many are excited about the innovation that the WSF represents, others are fiercely critical of this forum. It is decried as both too inclusive and not inclusive enough. It has been called a ‘post-modern jester’ (oriented more towards putting on a show than establishing a valid counter-hegemony) and a tool of the privileged NGOs (Worth and Buckley 2009). These criticisms of the WSF, however, do not diminish the need for inter-movement recognition; they just make the question of how to facilitate this more urgent. Before considering this question, I will discuss the necessity of progressive forces engaging in recognition politics on the global stage.

The importance of externally oriented recognition politics Those who support the network model of progressive organizing are sceptical of those who call for a universal ‘Left’ movement – such a movement, they claim, would inevitably repeat the sins of Marxism. Their preferred model instead portrays ‘true or qualitative globality as comprised of many nodes, places, interconnections and relations that at no point are totally consolidated into a singular global entity’ (Osterweil 2005: 25). But, while there is good reason to be suspect of universal global movements (i.e. global movements that are not constituted in the network form), this does not mean we should extend the same scepticism to global protest events/campaigns. Even Michal Osterweil, critic of ‘universalizing globalism’, notes that ‘place-based globalism does not mean detaching completely from global campaigns’ (2005: 26). Such events on the world stage constitute a kind of a performative recognition politics that also has integrative effects, a recognition politics that is as essential to the struggle against global injustice as intra- and inter-movement recognition politics.

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As Charles Tripp observes, ‘performance is at the center of the political order through its power to shape social relations and expectations’ (2013: 205). Power is contingent upon right performance and mutual recognition. Power must perform the role of power correctly, and the people must recognize power as power and act accordingly. The status quo is perpetuated by all playing the roles which are scripted for them, with those in power having a greater capacity to determine the accepted script. If the people, however, have different ideas about the kind of performance in which they are involved, this can have ‘potentially serious implications for the configuration of power’ (Tripp 2013: 205). Tripp develops these ideas about performance, recognition and politics in relation to the example of the Arab Spring, but this can equally be said of global resistance movements. In fact, there is reason to believe that performance has a greater potential to disrupt the global political order than local political orders. The relative lack of formal institutionalization of relationships in the global arena (i.e. there is no world state) means that social expectations are more fluid and therefore more open to change. As John Dryzek (1999) has said, where the institutional hardware is relatively underdeveloped, the software (discourses, performances) becomes more important. Global protest events are typically incited by matters about which a large proportion of the global citizenry feels strongly, and in which they believe they should have a say. In protesting, individuals demand to be recognized as global citizens who should have a voice in world affairs. They perform their vote. Such citizens not only demonstrate the scope of the global progressive forces, they can actually bring global democracy into being, albeit in a partial and incomplete form – and only if the performance of global democratic citizenship is recognized as legitimate. Take the global protests against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Plans for this invasion sparked the largest single coordinated protest in history. As described in a recent retrospective on Time.com: Roughly 10 million to 15 million people (estimates vary widely) assembled and marched in more than 600 cities: as many as 3 million flooded the streets of Rome; more than a million massed in London and Barcelona; an estimated 200,000 rallied in San Francisco and New York City. From Auckland to Vancouver – and everywhere in between – tens of thousands came out, joining their voices in one simple, global message: no to the Iraq war. (Tharoor 2014)

While US leaders performed the power of national sovereignty (and international hegemony), people across the world met this with a performance

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of global democratic counter-power, with the expectation that the general would be heeded if clearly and convincingly performed. The world’s citizens acted out roles with the intention of gaining ‘international recognition’ (Tripp 2013: 205). And indeed, the protests did gain attention and respect, moving the script away from that written by the global hegemon at the time, the United States. Prominent figures such as New York Times reporter Patrick Tyler and UN head Kofi Annan helped to legitimize the performance. Tyler deemed world public opinion one of the ‘two superpowers on the planet’ (Tyler 2003) along with the United States. Annan took up this phrase – the ‘other superpower’ (Nunberg 2003) – in a speech that referred to anti-war opinion. This performative recognition politics arguably had serious ramifications in the international institutional arena. The United States sought UN Security Council authorization for its proposed invasion in order to cloak it in international legitimacy. And perhaps such authorization would have been given in the absence of a public outcry. But the clear expression of the global ‘no’ vote to the invasion bolstered opposition inside the United Nation. The strength of the global anti-war protest ultimately forced the Bush administration to abandon efforts to win UN endorsement (Bennis 2003). Of course, the performance of global democracy by the world’s citizens was not enough to stop the invasion – the performance did not totally shift the grounds of power. But it was, according to Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘the first time since the United Nations was founded that the United States, on an issue that mattered to it, could not get a majority on the Security Council’ (2003: 28). Thus, this performance of global democracy did result in a kind of political defeat, even if it was not the one for which the demos had hoped. In this recognition encounter – one in which power said ‘you will accept our prerogative as head of a nation and a leader of the global order’ and to which the people said ‘no, we are citizens of the world, and we have a say’ – citizens asserted ‘the right to play roles with radically transformative implications for the established hierarchy’ (Tripp 2013: 208). By performing a democratic will, progressive forces can manifest a kind of global democracy even in the absence of global democratic institutions. To the extent that citizens’ performance of global democracy is recognized, such performances can reconfigure expectations and disrupt power relations – influencing discourses and institutions that shape and wield power. ‘Performing resistance is . . . part of the intended reordering of power itself, bringing a new order into being through an appropriation of the spaces and the discourses that appeared hitherto to exist only for the benefit of established power’ (Tripp 2013: 203). In this sense, Peter Waterman may be right to suggest that ‘global-citizens-in-the-making might be also creating a

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global sovereignty . . . over an increasingly privatized sphere that is monopolistic in tendency, individualizing, intrusive and destructive of human sociality and creativity’ (2000: 145). Global resistance is a necessary part of – rather than the preface to – the reordering of the global order. It is important for the powers that be to see progressive resistance on a global scale. But it is also important for the forces themselves to see such resistance. Demands for recognition by the global progressives on the world stage also serve important integrative functions as well as performative functions. As Tripp argues, by appropriating public space, ‘the mass of individuals involved in the [Arab Spring] uprisings were performing their [global citizenship], reconstituting an activist and mobilized public and thus, through performance, gaining both self-recognition and recognition by others’ (2013: 207). Part of the importance of global protests is in enabling individuals to recognize themselves as part of a global resistance. For instance, participants in the United States said that ‘the global [anti-war] movement was a source of inspiration for those of us who spoke out. We gained confidence and strength in knowing that we were standing with the vast majority of the world’s people’ (Gillan and Pickerill 2008). Global protest events enable what Gillan and Pickerill call ‘imagined solidarity’ in which actors, acting locally, project ‘locally grounded actions into the global arena, thereby increasing the significance of a campaign for participants’ (2008: 72). Global resistance requires the iteration of such performances so that, becoming habitual, they shape individuals at their very cores: ‘Kneel, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe’ (Tripp 2013: 208). Like self-recognition, the gaining of others’ recognition further integrates individuals into global resistance movements – for instance, many in the antiwar movement adopted the label New York Times reporter Tyler penned, calling itself ‘the other superpower’ (Schell 2003). As Tripp says, ‘We perform for others, we comport ourselves, and act aware of the gaze of others – possibly only of certain designated others – seeking recognition but also a kind of validation of the self ’ (Tripp 2013: 207). The validation of world public opinion as represented by the global Left was a validation for the movement, but it was also a validation of the individuals that comprised this ‘superpower’.

Encouraging ethical recognition encounters Above, I paint a rather rosy picture of the potential of recognition politics. I imply recognition encounters that integrate without domination or appropriation,

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allowing the insights, diverse talents and numerical strength of variously situated peoples to be leveraged in global resistance movements. But recognition politics certainly can take on more problematic forms – the perspective that hamstrung global feminism can be thought of as arising from a problematic recognition encounter. The question is: what conditions incline the recognition encounter in one direction or another? This section provides some initial reflections on the conditions that encourage such encounters in a more ethical direction. An absent party will likely not be recognized or not recognized in a way that resonates with the absent party. There are reasons to believe, however, that some limit to inclusion in an arena intended to facilitate recognition paves the way for ‘better’ recognition encounters. An ethically integrative recognition encounter requires ‘a genuine attempt at understanding [that] presumes that the other’s form of life has something valuable to say to us, that in coming to an understanding of the difference between us we may discover some inadequacy in our own conception of the good’ (Schaap 2004: 528–9). This presumption – ‘your form of life has something valuable to say’ – is made easier by inclusion rules that emphasize a general shared orientation. De Sousa Santos agrees, saying ‘an overriding sense of a common purpose . . . tends to deemphasize polarizations among the movements and invite the latter to concentrate on building more intense coalitions with the movements with which they have more affinities’ (2008: 256). The interest in facilitating deep and ethical recognition encounters must be balanced with the need for inclusivity, however, and there is no clear formula to be followed. Many have lauded the WSF for its inclusivity, for instance, but others have argued that this very inclusivity makes deep encounters difficult if not impossible.8 Beyond the question of who should be invited is the question of the terms on which actors meet. An ethically integrative recognition encounter requires equality between the parties. A neutral but laissez-faire format for a meeting (like the WSF has) is a start on the road to equality, but it is not enough to place actors representing different struggles on the same footing given that the power dynamics that exist between groups outside of a meeting space are inevitably at work inside it as well. For instance, Western actors typically have greater power to exert influence in dialogic encounters, thanks to the privileging of Western perspectives and ways of knowing, the dominance of the English language and the fact that many significant funding sources are located in the West. Critics of the WSF have pointed out that ‘treating the WSF as if it were an open space free of power relations simply allows for the reproduction of hierarchies that the movement claims to be opposing’ (Conway 2011: 218).9 To enable parties

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to encounter one another as equals, then, conditions that neutralize intra- and inter-group power differentials must be established. For instance, initiatives that aim to amplify the voices of the marginalized can be put in place, and efforts to encourage movement actors to recognize their own imbrications with systems of domination made. Another condition worth exploring is the purpose of the meeting venue. Many have criticized the WSF for being ‘directionless-ness’, arguing that if it wants to contribute to a viable counter-hegemony, it must mediate between agendas, take stands, dictate strategy, distribute resources and organize actions. I am sympathetic to the criticism that by removing itself from politics, the WSF becomes a sink for progressive energies. But, it is worth considering the benefits of at least distancing recognition encounters from decisions about resources and strategy, as the WSF tries to do. An encounter without the pressure of an impending decision ‘frees its participating groups to encounter one another, to listen and to learn, and to be transformed in ways they could not be otherwise’ (Conway and Singh 2009: 71). The tone of this dialogue, along with the absence of fear of forced cooperation, may allow for a greater ‘fluidification’ (della Portia 2005: 88) of positions. In other words, this setting encourages what might be monovalent recognition politics under threat of an imminent decision to transform into a more multivalent recognition politics. Multivalent recognition enables thick difference to be read ‘heterogeneously’ – as encompassing ‘both similarity and dissimilarity that can be reduced neither to coextensive identity nor overlapping otherness’ (Young 1993: 130). By highlighting the differences within difference, this politics illuminates points of commonality which can provide the basis for cooperation. One committed to advancing a particular feminist agenda, for instance, may be more willing to lend support to the cause of indigenous rights when he sees these groups as overlapping. Identification and cooperation are then an ‘ever present possibility’ made more present by design. Finally, I maintain that the provision of an outlet for criticizing the conditions under which recognition encounters take place and a responsive process by which conditions can be amended are critical to the facilitation of ethical recognition encounters. The conditions that shape recognition encounters must be responsive to the very recognition processes they direct. In the past, ‘[subaltern groups have made] a claim on the WSF as a whole, agitating for recognition’ (Conway 2011: 226); to its credit, the WSF has been responsive to these demands for more active inclusion strategies, and its lead should be followed. The conditions designed to orient recognition encounters in more positive directions must evolve as relationships do.

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Conclusion While some may yearn for the halcyon days of a ‘united Left’ before identity politics tore it apart, it is important to note that these days were in fact only halcyon for some – that unity was won by repression and exclusion. Today’s progressive forces face new and unprecedented global challenges with the knowledge that difference cannot be wished away, ignored or submerged. Iniquitous global dynamics require strong global resistance, and in this chapter, I have argued that recognition politics – within movements, between movements and by progressive forces on the global stage – is essential to a strong resistance. In this post-Marxist age, recognition politics cannot be understood as a mere phase which prepares the way for an ultimate synthesis. The articulation, negotiation and translation of differences are a continual process. This need to continually recognize need not be seen as hampering progressives though – the diversity that the process of continual recognition brings to light can be a source of collective strength and enrichment (de Sousa Santos 2008: 261). Recognition politics opens people on the Left to new ideas, new strategies and new perspectives. It enables the formation of new and flexible political configurations. While recognition politics can make diversity into a source of strength, it is also important to note that recognition politics can be conducted in more or less productive ways, with more or less beneficial results for the global struggle against injustice. The conditions under which recognition politics occurs will impact whether the politics is oriented towards a coalition-enabling sharing of horizons or towards a dominative appropriation, whether it encourages the fluidification of identities or the closing of ranks. The analysis above suggests certain conditions that may encourage recognition politics in a more ethical and beneficial direction. It does raise the question, however, of the extent to which substantive recognition encounters can be institutionalized. More consideration of the conditions that encourage ethical integration, and of the structures that might put these conditions in place, would be a boon to the struggle against global injustice.

Notes 1

The other’s self-understanding should be acknowledged even when this selfunderstanding has been deeply influenced by oppressive cultural structures. To continue with the example above, when exposed to the belief that women

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are naturally or ideally submissive, at least some women may come to see themselves as best suited to subservient positions and want to be recognized as servants. I advance here a notion of recognition that stresses the importance of process (one takes on others’ perceptions about their collective identity), rather than acknowledging a specific objectively emancipatory content (whatever that means). This raises questions about representation – who should be empowered to communicate the group’s understanding of its collective identity, who should be involved in the recognition encounter? For instance, the US Organization – a black cultural nationalist group that held a great deal of influence in Black Power politics in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s – depicted black identity in a very homogenous and static way, as (essentially) African. Men held most of the most prominent positions in the Black Power movement, and ideology, tactics and agenda held strongly masculinist overtones (Ogbar 2005). Black feminists criticized not only white feminists for their inattention to black women’s struggles, but also male black power activists (Combahee River Collective 1978). The gay rights movement has been dominated in the contemporary period by Western middle-class white gay cis-men, leading to the formulation of a ‘gay’ agenda that reflects the priorities of this particular subset. The queer movement, comprised of lower-class gay men, gay men of colour, trans-men, in addition to other constituencies, emerged as a criticism of the assertion of the priorities of gay, white, well-off cis-men on them (Armstrong 2002). The term ‘two-thirds world’ is a category based on the quality of life led by peoples and communities in the global South and demonstrates that this category represents a social majority. Though some on the Left have tried to do so: ‘[The conventional Left] applies the same abstract recipe of human rights across the board, thereby attempting to reduce alternative ideologies or symbolic universes to local specificities that leave the universal canon of human rights unscathed’ (de Sousa Santos 2008: 252). ‘It would make no sense to fight for the recognition and respect of cultural differences “outside”, in society and not to recognize or respect them “at home”, inside the organizations and movements’ (de Sousa Santos 2008: 261). This is Andrew Schaap’s (2004: 530) position. He writes: ‘Taylor departs from Gadamer in representing the horizon in which undistorted recognition is arrived at as “shared” rather than “fused”. Within this shared horizon the constitutive identities of self and other remain as equally valid, but mutually discreet, bases for judgment. The “we” that is constituted by this shared horizon thus serves to preserve the authentic identities that originated the struggle for recognition.’ What the WSF does ensure is co-presence. But, as Janet Conway points out, ‘co-presence in the space, even with amplified visibility and voice does not automatically produce mutual intelligibility . . . much less genuine dialogue across

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Recognition and Global Politics cultural, class and colonial divides’ (2011: 226). There have, however, been formal efforts to institutionalize dialogues across certain divides. For instance, ‘a transnational feminist collaboration hosted an inter-movement dialogue in Dubai featuring two speakers from each of four movements: (1) women’s, (2) sexuality rights, (3) labour, and (4) Dalit rights and racial justice movements. Each was asked to speak about how their movement had incorporated class, gender, race and sexuality questions, the dilemmas and problems they had confronted and the strategies they had employed. Activists from other movements were asked to respond. Then the second speaker from the original movement was asked to comment, refute or clarify’ (Conway 2011: 229). ‘The WSF has been said to resemble “an international network of liberal-reformist globalisers” working to maintain a dominant vision of global civil society by stifling direct action and promoting unfocused discussion and debate’ (Worth and Buckley 2009: 655).

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Recognition in and of World Society Matthew S. Weinert

Why ‘recognition’? The term resonates differently and has distinctive implications depending on its use. The first is grammatical: to recognize something is to comprehend some measure of its essential truth; recognition implies a shared context of perception. The second resonance is intimate: recognition ostensibly connects us to others through shared perspectives, experiences, affiliations and commitments. The third resonance is political: recognition of collective political voice is an affirmation of a mutuality of communal commitments, some of which might conflict with those of other collectivities. Governments recognize one another; to be a political entity without recognition by others of that status is to be excluded from entire spheres of political interaction, access and influence. Recognition is, quite literally, re-cognition – to know again, and by that knowing, to share an affinity with the person or thing thus recognized, affirming the existence of the subject through the very act of recognition. To recognize something presumes a preliminary understanding of it, so that its return will be embedded in a relationship of pre-existing knowledge and thus familiarity. (Heath Justice 2010: 240)

Introduction In Heath Justice’s estimation, recognition hinges on a consciousness of self and other which rises above parochialisms to affirm simultaneously a plurality of Being and a core collective existence – a public – defined not merely by the material objects we have created, but importantly by a web of understandings,

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perceptions, rules, norms and principles that come to regulate, coordinate and inform the actions and behaviours of diverse people. His summary of recognition’s resonances establishes a particular claim: re-cognition is an openended, provisional intersubjective exchange. His implicative language captures the omnipresent potentiality of reversal, and hence the instability and limitations of the recognition schematic: there is simply too much presupposition at work. Recognition theory, therefore, needs to begin from the contingency, not automaticity, of recognition practices. On this reading, recognition’s grammatical resonance in Heath Justice’s framework is complicated by the fact that, leaving aside the practice of sharing, it is subject to the vicissitudes of chauvinism and misunderstanding. Shared worlds as we have seen in cases such as Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and Cambodia, may easily be reframed as particularistic worlds contaminated by the presence of an unacceptable other. Ideally, recognition’s intimate resonance must confront and shoulder the burden of sometimes dramatic shifts in sociopolitical conditions that negate our multiple connections to others. Yet in each of those genocidal instances, neighbours viciously attacked neighbours with whom they shared communal bonds; suspicion and aggrievement stymie or thwart post-conflict reconstruction and social rehabilitation, which are essentially projects of re-cognition. Politically, then, recognition often assumes the form of costs or criteria; I explore such criteria with respect to inter-state practices of recognition in the next section, and with respect to interhuman practices of recognition in the fourth section of this chapter. Succinctly stated, recognition theory demands deeper engagement of the production of recognition. Vagaries of political and social life, not to mention prejudices of multiple sorts, render the recognition project provisional if not tenuous. Such is, unfortunately, the nature of life with others. This is not to suggest that recognition theory does not explicitly (if not always fully) engage the question of how recognition is achieved. Hayden and Schick’s tracing of recognition theory in the Introduction to this volume strongly suggests that recognition requires ongoing and struggle-filled engagements over the long term. Such engagements may take multiple forms: Hegel’s ‘struggles for recognition of something of intrinsic worth’, Habermas’s discursive encounters, Taylor’s legislative, multicultural management of diversity, Honneth’s attention to the intersubjective conditions for mutual recognition, Fraser’s affirmative and transformative political strategies and Ricoeur’s focus on love in the production of recognition. This chapter picks up on that broader theme and offers a preliminary, non-exhaustive sketch of a particular set of intersubjective, interhuman practices, or what I call ‘processes of making human’. Such processes

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cultivate recognition of identity and status, since the two are mutually imbricated and entwined, and hence one’s treatment and admission as fully human in the so-called human family. In short, International Relations theory and recognition theory need to explore more systematically processes whereby recognition is inter-personally accorded.1 This is imperative given the long history of dehumanizing practices which have rendered various ‘types’ of people marginal, secondary or anathema to the multiple stories of ‘civilization’ peoples have constructed across time and space. Likewise, such an exploration makes increasing sense in an increasingly globalizing system whereby persons and people are becoming more central to world politics. I thus turn the assumptive ideal of universal (interhuman) recognition into a question and ask not only ‘what is recognition?’ but also ‘how is recognition produced if it is not automatically extended to the other?’ Answering such questions foregrounds the political and institutional translation of basic forms of human sociality in the constitution of world society, with profound implications for a globalizing international relations increasingly attuned to the human being and her multiple needs. In that regard, the chapter extends the argument to the International Relations theory concept of world society: constructions and forms of world society are very much contingent on who we recognize, how we do so and to what degree. To establish recognition’s contingency in the international sphere, the next section briefly examines interstate recognition practices. More specifically, a focus on (especially regional) recognition practices reveals that far from being an inveterate, immutable, foundational ‘thing’ of international relations that in the end is associated with state prerogative and permissiveness, sovereignty acts as a fulcrum to which conditionalities and responsibilities of states – often articulated at the regional level – are attached. Conditional interstate recognition practices hence may be read as fuelling the transformation of regional international societies, if not international society as a whole, from pluralistic clusters of states hinged on minimal rules of coexistence to thicker solidarist societies wed to deeper normative commitments. But, my core contribution to the literature pertains to the work done in sections three and four: applying recognition theory to the rather ambiguous if oft referenced conception of world society, which is described variously as world community, cosmopolitan polity or humanity/humankind. Section three begins by treating the literature’s acknowledgement of world society. Spatial considerations demand that I limit my focus. Instead of surveying the broad range of world society literature from John Burton’s cobweb model

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(1972) of world politics to the Stanford School (see Meyer et al. 1997), and more recent cosmopolitan, post-Westphalian iterations of a world polity, I treat only the world society concept as evolved in English School of International Relations scholarship. Unfortunately, I argue, the promise of the world society concept as a political force in the construction of (a) shared world(s) remains unfulfilled, mostly because the literature neglects how interhuman practices of recognition and, crucially, misrecognition, continually reconfigure world society. Put differently, following the footsteps of Judith Shklar (1982), I ‘put cruelty first’. Remedying this core deficiency in world society theory prompts me to examine in section four the production of recognition in world society. Accounts of world society must move beyond generic frames of ‘humanity’ and acknowledge that the (unfortunate and at times violent) deployment of difference often jettisons our biological sameness upon which a conception of humanity, and concomitantly, world society, is presumably founded. Even if on a cosmopolitan view we remain wed to the idea that all Homo sapiens do in fact comprise world society, then our accountings need to grapple with the fact that different types of human beings invariably occupy dissimilar positions. In this section, I propose four processes which aid in the production of recognition: resistance against forms of oppression, marginalization and dehumanization; reflection on the status and worth of others; the reproduction of prevailing behavioural norms; and the taking of responsibility for self and/or others. Given the salience of these processes with respect to the constitution of subjects of world society, I describe them in the concluding section as primary institutions of world society. How we recognize and understand world society, I maintain, is very much contingent on how we recognize its component parts.

The conditionality of recognition in ‘the international’ In English School theory, an international society of states is said to exist ‘when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions’ (Bull 1995: 13). One category of evidence for such a society of states concerns conditional practices of interstate recognition. While the practice of extending recognition to entities claiming sovereign status remains the province of political and diplomatic decision-making, international law provides two

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frameworks to guide state decision-making. The declaratory theory maintains that an entity becomes sovereign when it has fulfilled the requisite conditions stipulated in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (permanent population, territory, defined borders and a government capable of engaging in relations with other states). Alternatively, the constitutive theory maintains that an entity becomes sovereign when others recognize it as such (see Carter et al. 2007: 448). Neither framework – each a kind of ideal type – is wholly determinative in practice. Contrary to the declaratory theory, entities such as Taiwan may satisfy the Montevideo Convention criteria but are denied recognition as sovereign (even if they possess special status in international society). Contrary to the constitutive theory, entities such as Kosovo may declare independence and be recognized by many (even dominant) states but are denied sovereignty. In both cases, arguably, United Nations membership – which neither aforementioned state yet possesses – functions as the authoritative barometer of full recognition and hence inclusion in the international society of states. Clearly, great powers matter. To that end, Milena Sterio has proposed a ‘great power theory’ of self-determination to explain why East Timor and South Sudan became sovereign, but Chechnya, South Ossetia and Abkhazia (to which we add Taiwan and Kosovo) have not. Mining cases for continuities in practice, she identifies four necessary conditions for the international community to assess the validity of self-determinative claims to sovereign statehood: systematic oppression, a weak central government, administration by an international actor and broad great power support (2013: 57). This kind of argument contemporizes a strand of research that has focused on the non-automaticity of recognition practices hinged on satisfying distinct criteria. Historically, the most (in)famous of these practices appeared as the nineteenth-century standard of civilization by which European states could demarcate the boundaries between a civilized self from an uncivilized, even barbaric, non-European, non-Christian other (Gong 1984). Applied to non-European entities, ‘civilization’ was code for a set of benchmarks including ‘protection of basic rights of . . . citizens, standards of honesty and efficiency in administration, capacity to adhere to rules of international law and to enter into diplomatic relations, and avoidance of slavery and other odious practices similar to those which European states expected of each other’ (Gong 1984: viii, 15). If subjects met and adhered to them – Gong charts how particular countries navigated, managed and inculcated the standard, sometimes successfully (Japan and Siam) and sometimes not (the Ottoman Empire and China) – they theoretically could be granted full recognition and hence admission into the European society of states.2 In this regard, the standard

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functioned as a regulatory or governance norm that structured ‘decision-making and policies at all levels’ (True 2011: 76–7). The standard of civilization was not mere mimicry, however; its replication demanded the internalization of European norms and institutional procedures such that it functioned also as an embodied norm, meaning one ‘internalized in bodily practices [that] constitutes the subject and his or her recognition by others’ (True 2011: 76). Hedley Bull considered the brandishing of such norms as ‘equal rights of states to sovereignty, of peoples to self-determination, and of persons of different race to individual rights’ (Gong 1984: ix) by Africans and Asians as marking the apogee of ‘barbarian’ socialization and their recognition as fully human. Yet, the standard was likewise applicable to European selves as it ‘represented a code of expected “civilized” behavior’ embodying both ‘humanitarian sentiments and codes of noblesse oblige’ (Gong 1984: 6). We can read the standard, through regulatory and embodied frames, as a regime of recognition (of a particular sort); as such, the standard illustrates what Greta Snyder in this volume calls the integrative and performative functions of recognition, even if we are at pains to define the standard of civilization as ‘democratic’ in any substantive sense. On one level, the standard sought to integrate outsiders to cohere with a core international society of European states based on certain fundamental preconditions. On another, the effectuation of the standard, both by insiders and outsiders, substantiated the notion of an operative international will and enforced certain beliefs of what constituted a legitimate political community. Other conditions have appeared on the historical horizon. The monarchical principle of the nineteenth century developed under the auspices of the European concert system and justified by the need to maintain international peace and order allocated recognition of (European) states based on rule by a member of a legitimate royal family. Newly independent countries (e.g. Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece and, later, Norway) were enjoined to adopt a princely leader from a European royal family before formal legal recognition was bestowed. Failure to adhere to the principle led to Concert-authorized interventions, political or military in nature, in Prussia, Naples and Piedmont, Spain, Bologna and Parma, Rome, Hungary and Denmark (see Weinert 2007: 128–35). More contemporarily, the UN Charter stipulates general requirements for membership: that states be peace-loving and are able and willing to fulfil all of the obligations outlined in the document. The UN Security Council (UNSC) has layered onto these general criteria categorizations which strongly imply a hierarchical and highly contingent regime of interstate recognition. At bottom

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are pariah states straddled with sanctions, occupied by intervening international forces, or both (e.g. apartheid South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, North Korea, Libya, Iraq, Iran), the sovereign prerogatives of which have been stripped away or significantly curtailed. Failing states with substantial UN peacekeeping and peace-enforcement operations (e.g. Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo) occupy a lower-middle tier, while countries administered by the United Nations (e.g. Cambodia, Namibia, East Timor, Kosovo) occupy a tier above that. At the apex of the recognition pyramid reside, of course, not only the five permanent members of the UNSC, but also states elected to the two-year rotating nonpermanent seats which require additional contributions to support the Council’s work. Practices hinge recognition on responsibilities to self (e.g. adequate regard for human rights; legitimate modes of governance institutions and processes; rule of law) and responsibility to others (e.g. fulfilment of international obligations, especially ones related to security and participation in the global economy). Finally, in the late twentieth century, recognition of new and successor states emerging out of disintegrating multi-ethnic empires and republics (e.g. the USSR, Yugoslavia) was linked to their immediate and unconditional accession to international human rights and non-proliferation conventions. Practices in regional organizations constitute a species of the genus of recognition. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union (EU), the Organization of American States and the African Union, among others, specify conditions of membership related to economic, monetary and technical development; policy, institutional and internal governance reform; and the enactment (in varying degrees) of normative commitments to democracy, security and human rights. Both NATO and the EU even outline steps towards accession to membership (European Commission 2014). The five-country East African Community (EAC) has declined the membership application of the Republic of Sudan for failure to meet the admissions criteria as stipulated in Article 3 of the EAC Treaty which demands that members adhere to ‘universally acceptable principles of good governance, democracy, the rule of law, and observance of human rights and social justice’ (EAC 2014).3 Multiple regional and sub-regional organizations have imposed sanctions on, suspended or expelled members which have violated community standards. Military interventions by regional and sub-regional organizations into member states likewise may be viewed through regional optics of recognition/membership criteria. Criteria of recognition, membership conditions and disciplinary actions underscore the extent to which a logic of legitimacy has infused intra-regional interstate relations and moved them beyond procedural acknowledgement

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of autonomous, sovereign status (international regional relations as pluralist societies based on rules of coexistence) in ways that suggest the transformation of regional interstate societies into thicker, solidarist communities based on common values and principles. Additional developments at the regional level are of probative value. Logics of competiveness and legitimacy informed the 2002 creation of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM 2014) by which thirty-three countries voluntarily agreed to subject themselves to periodic evaluation ‘to encourage conformity’ with respect to ‘political, economic and corporate governance values, codes and standards’ and socio-economic development objectives in conjunction with the New Partnership for Africa’s Development ‘to reduce the risk profile of doing business in Africa’ (NEPAD 2014). Recognizing limited local resources and the constraints of a global economy, the Southern African Development Community’s Common Agenda outlines key regional principles and values, and a series of policies and strategies to achieve its integrative objectives to meet regional demands and be competitive in the global economy (SADC 2012). The highly anticipated release of the Pacific Plan Review by the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) in December 2013 outlines a framework designed to propel the region towards greater integration. Noting that ‘the region is vulnerable and . . . remains significantly dependent on the economies and goodwill of others’, the report urges member states to substantively reflect upon their readiness for deeper integration, the possibilities and challenges of ‘sharing sovereignty’,4 and acknowledging that ‘regional priorities that may not equate to national priorities’ (PIF 2013: 3). While delving deeper into these issues is beyond the scope of this paper, several observations bear highlighting. First, recognition as an intersubjective, interstate practice is often conditional. Second, membership conditions in regional and sub-regional organizations (as a type of criteria of recognition) suggest a transformation of some regional groupings of states into thicker solidarist societies that stretch beyond mere rules of coexistence – even if criteria are inconsistently applied and enforced. As such, third, practices of recognition and retribution reproduce and strengthen the normative foundations of interstate societies by promoting coherence with respect to human rights, democracy, economic governance, the rule of law and the like which, fourth, through greater cohesion among members, may likely fuel more extensive forms of integration and collaboration. This, fifth, acts to reconstitute actors’ identities and interests by further embedding them in social networks, and hence linking them to collective expectations and commitments.

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From international to world society: Extending conditional recognition practices While the international society of states has developed institutionalized practices of recognition across time and space to regulate not only membership per se, but membership in good standing (see Chayes and Chayes 1995), the same may not entirely be said of world society. Certainly, the world society concept has attracted considerable attention in academic accounts of our globalizing age as it is identified, paired or treated in conjunction with communication, cosmopolitanism, crime, culture, democracy, the economy, education, empire, the environment, global civil society, global governance, health, human rights, integration, international institutions, law, migration, non-governmental organizations, regionalism, religion, security communities, technology and transnational social movements. More theoretically inclined works assay world society in the International Relations terms of system, structure and process, and the Sociological ones of society and community. The sheer diversity of subjects associated with and tethered to it suggests that it has become something of a trope to capture a web of relations between diverse actors distinct from and operating outside the formal rubric of state governance and held together by some conception of common interests and values. On that reading, the systems or transactional view of world society, defined in terms of communication networks and the interaction capacity of systems (e.g. Luhmann 1982), are wed to the social view, defined in the (cosmopolitan) normative terms of shared values, rules and institutions (e.g. Vincent 1986).5 Yet, world society eludes, perhaps because of its use as a conceptual midden. Should it be defined primarily in ontological terms (e.g. natural and juridical non-state actors), or epistemological ones (e.g. cognitive dispositions towards cosmopolitanism, humanitarianism, regionalism, or civilizationalism)? Does it entail an explicit normative commitment to human rights and democracy? Is it a functional term pertaining to global communication, economic, environmental, legal and technological systems that organize actors, regulate their behaviours and engender particular sets of relations? Is it, alternatively, a process term focused on migrations of people, information and sundry objects across borders? Does one particular angle possess greater explanatory power than others to capture a diverse set of phenomenon in theoretically relevant ways? Or, reflective of the complexity of human societies, must we consider all formulations at the expense of parsimony and precision? So indistinct is the world society concept, despite its prevalent usage, that Barry Buzan, a prominent theorist of international

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relations, characterized some views of it as marked by incredulity: it ‘doesn’t exist in any substantive form, and therefore its moral priority is unattached to any practical capability to deliver much world order’ (2004: 36). If by practical capability we mean material instruments and resources to effectuate the will(s) of actors, then the point, as compared to an international society of states, may be defensible even if communications technology, among other structural and material factors, challenges the view.6 Despite such criticism, Buzan aimed to revitalize and provide traction to the world society concept by disaggregating it into two broad domains: transnational and interhuman societies. Transnational societies encompass the panoply of non-state, rule and norm-governed clubs, firms, lobbies, associations and coalitions that increasingly act across borders. Interhuman societies refer to ‘social structures based on interactions amongst individual human beings . . . mainly manifested as large-scale patterns of shared identity’ (Buzan 2004: xvii). They range from the basic family unit/clan as the primordial, minimum form of interhuman society; ‘ “imagined communities” such as nations, religions and various kinds of functional networks’ which constitute middle range interhuman societies; and maximal ones defined in terms of ‘universally shared identities which could vary from the minimum recognition by all humans of each other as like-units . . . to the advent of a world civilization linking all humankind together in a complex web of shared values and elaborated identities’ (Buzan 2004: 135). Yet, since most of these ‘globalisms tend to be separate rather than coordinated’ (Buzan 2004: 210), they raise the spectre that world society may be less cohesive and solidarist, and more pluralist and perhaps more dissonant than originally thought (see Williams 2005). Buzan’s interhuman reformulation, translated most basically as ‘individualto-individual interaction’ (2004: 120), attempts to respond to contemporary (globalizing) transformations in ways that draw upon strengths of International Relations theory and to push theoretical thinking to consider seriously and systematically ‘sub-global international social structures and the way in which they interact with the global level’ (Buzan 2004: 270). Yet, Buzan does not wrestle with the dynamics of interpersonal interaction; his concerns were structural since, in his view, world society ‘implies something . . . beyond the state towards more cosmopolitan images of how humankind is, or should be, organized’ (Buzan 2004: 1). But, organization has a predicate: identity (which implicates recognition practices). Thus, even in its current, anthropocentric/cosmopolitan/ interhuman conceptual incarnation, world society, defined as equable with ‘all parts of the human community’ (Bull 1995: 269; see also Buzan 1993: 337),

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which James Mayall (2000: 14) replicates with the ‘view that humanity is one’, remains conceptually and agentically delimited. On the one hand, the systems view by definition excludes those lacking access to presumably global systems or relegates people who perform ancillary roles in the global economy – e.g. female garment workers in Bangladesh, unskilled labour, indigenous and rural peoples – to the dispensable margins. Further, the inclusivity implied by the system view is undermined or negated if we accept that structural arrangements engender different interests, values and understandings based on agents’ positioning within them – some of which do not accord with, or even explicitly contravene and oppose hegemonic preferences which tend to play predominant roles in the constitution of the ‘world’ of world society. Think of imperial, hierarchic models of world society built and substantiated on standards of civilization and racialisms; varieties of capitalism constructed upon a deeply stratified international division of labour; or civilizational models that partition the globe based on broad, generalizable cultural attributes.7 On the other hand, the social view of world society by definition tends to exclude those who do not share or advance the normative commitments which are usually defined in Western/Northern and liberal terms. Further, the ontological and normative homogeneity implied by the social view modulates or even forecloses consideration of substantive variation in understandings of (presumably shared) normative and value commitments. Those who reject prevailing value commitments, or who proffer distinct and divergent interpretations of them, may face exclusion from organizations and processes associated with world society; such exclusion refutes the assumptive ideal of universal, interhuman recognition. Consequently, ‘the complex determination of maldistribution, misframing and misrecognition’, as Patrick Hayden (2012: 588) has argued with respect to the human right to health, prevents effective realization of people’s recognition. Thus, how humankind is or should be organized depends on primordial logics concerning identity and recognition. Consequently, our theoretical constructs need to consider both the aggregative and dissociative functions of identity and the allocation of recognition. Practices of misrecognition, exclusion and marginalization render certain ‘types’ of human beings as superfluous to humanity and illustrate that far from being an inclusive realm based on universality of membership, world society, like the international society of states, is highly stratified, infused as it were with competing understandings and experiences of class, ethnicity, gender, race and sundry

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other identifiers that have substantively shaped sociopolitical institutions and the systems within which they operate.

Practices of recognition in world society Accounts of world society must therefore move beyond generic frames of ‘humanity’ and acknowledge that the deployment of difference often jettisons our biological sameness upon which a conception of humanity, and concomitantly, world society, is presumably founded. Even if on a cosmopolitan view we remain wed to the idea that all Homo sapiens comprise world society, our accountings still need to grapple with the fact that different types of human beings invariably occupy dissimilar positions. Colour, ethnicity, gender, ideology, intelligence, nationality, occupation, physical capabilities, political affiliation, race, religion, sexuality and wealth, among other signifiers, have been used to justify colonization, discrimination, disenfranchisement, enslavement, ethnic cleansing, the forced removal of children from their families, genocide, homophobia, human trafficking, imperialism, internment, lynching, miscegenation prohibitions, misogyny, pogroms, purges, racism, segregation, sexism, sexual violence, sterilization, torture and wars of extermination. Misrecognition hinges on perception of difference, no matter how ephemeral or immutable, self-ascribed or other-imposed, which reveals an ambiguity or tension that animates if not defines our social existence: ‘we are always both the self we imagine and the body others see’ (Marso 2012: 167). Yet practices of misrecognition do not perforce dispute world society’s existence; rather, they eschew singular articulations of world society while positing plural, particularistic world societies. In this view, Nazi, Bolshevik and imperial forms parallel cosmopolitan conceptions: they merely represent alternative, if exclusive, circumscribed and ethically objectionable visions of how humanity should be organized. But exclusive visions of world society expose the irregularities and conditionalities of interhuman recognition. We therefore must ask, if recognition is not automatically bestowed, how is it produced? This, in my estimation, is the central question we should probe since answers to it implicate how membership and belonging (namely, to humanity itself) are negotiated, along what fault lines, and with which operating logics; what forms of world society interhuman interaction generates; in what specific ways discourses of humanity, humanitarianism and ethical obligations to others are translated

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into practice; and how, finally, world society/societies come to be constituted. Theoretically, I label practices of recognition in the aggregate as constituting a primary institution of world society by which I mean a ‘durable and recognized pattern of shared practices rooted in values commonly held’ that in the end ‘play a constitutive role in relation to both the pieces/players and the rules of the game’ (Buzan 2004: 181). Thinking in such terms might help scholars and practitioners view (mis)recognition more critically and construct more systematic methods for remedying the various injustices of misrecognition, maldistribution and misframing that plague interhuman relations. Drawing upon my work on humanization or ‘making human’ (Weinert 2015), I outline four processes that aid in the production of recognition: resistance against forms of oppression, marginalization and dehumanization; reflection on the status and worth of others; the reproduction of prevailing behavioural norms; and the taking of responsibility for self and/or others.

Resistance For some, recognition of their full human status (e.g. Tutsis in an ethnically charged Rwanda, Bosniaks in Serb-dominated territory, non-white Europeans in an imperial order) or a core identity component of the self (e.g. being a woman in an androcentric world, or non-heterosexual in a heterosexual one) proves to be a struggle ‘in connection with something of specific intrinsic worth’ (Hegel 1967: §351), which Drucilla Cornell (1995: 78) reframes as struggles ‘against the appropriation of the Other into any system of meaning that would deny her difference and singularity’. For Cornell, resistance exposes and opposes practices and institutions hinged on blindness to exploitation or founded upon violence against others. As a psychological exercise of ‘consciousness raising’, resistance demands that we question inherited, ostensibly naturalized and settled concepts, and work to ‘loosen’ their meanings by wrestling with convention, ‘expand[ing] our sensibility, and re-imagin[ing] our form[s] of life’ (Cornell 1995: 76). Volker Heins’s chapter in this volume picks up the theme: identity is not something to be erased or eschewed as it may serve as a potential counterweight to the marginalizing, dehumanizing effects of power operating at all levels. As a practice or performance, resistance assumes at least three forms. First, it may appear as confrontation, whether as physical protest (e.g. the suffragette marches or the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City which launched the ‘gay rights’ movement) or as legal action (e.g. the push for marriage equality in courts). Resistance manifests the misrecognized’s self-conscious break with

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the oppressive practices of the past, and a daring mentality which situates selfmeaning and self-valuation – matters more fully explored in Robbie Shilliam’s chapter – at the centre of the activist enterprise. Even if resistance does not initially produce recognition, it at least exposes the transgressive, transformative abilities and determinations of (marginalized, misrecognized) human beings as sociopolitical forces intent on remedying conditions of injustice. Second, resistance may be understood as a self-affirmational performance that actualizes potentialities of existence: think of Rosa Parks’ now iconic seating which unleashed a civil rights movement, or LGBT Pride Day parades that exhibit and celebrate a right to Be, or the 2013 ‘drive-ins’ in Saudi Arabia in which women, legally prohibited from driving automobiles, flouted the injunction (Hubbard 2013). Third, resistance may be construed as an alterior narrative posited against a dominating (silencing) discourse: ‘we humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human’ (Arendt 1968: 25). As then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (2011) noted in a speech on gay rights as human rights, ‘progress starts with honest discussion’8 between all persons on all sides of the issue. The point is not to force changes in belief – no one, Clinton mused, ‘has ever abandoned a belief because he was forced to do so’ – but to foster an understanding that ‘universal human rights include freedom of expression and freedom of belief, even if our words or beliefs denigrate the humanity of others’, and to inculcate knowledge that ‘while we are each free to believe whatever we choose, we cannot do whatever we choose’ (Clinton 2011). However, as some feminist theorists have observed, this perspective of resistance depends on a ‘speakability’ that often is absent in traumatic instances such as torture and rape.9 The ‘unspeakable’ demands, then, that we likewise recognize the silencing, recognition-erasing effects of certain actions and be willing to account for the impossibility of dialogue. How we are willing to account, though, varies. We may be compelled to re-present the claims of the silenced and advocate, as Fiona Robinson advises, in non-paternalistic fashion on their behalf; we may be forced as human beings to push back at governments – even powerful ones – that continue to maim and torture in the name of some parochial interest. Resistance as a constitutive, (re)productive and (re)generative practice of world society suggests certain avenues for research. Do certain types of resistance yield more desirable and sustainable outcomes than others? Are transnational linkages between groups determinative in the production of those outcomes? Do forms of resistance, in aiming for the prohibition, prevention

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and halting of harm, represent a moral minimum on which world society ought to be predicated?10 Yet, to what effect do normative advances connected to successful instances of resistance and which generate reactionary measures (e.g. anti-homosexual rights laws and violence; social pressures on women to remain in the home; rejection of claims of indigenous peoples for greater autonomy or participation in governance; particularistic interpretations of human rights; African denunciations of international criminal prosecutorial actions directed primarily against Africans) undermine these advances? How do the dissonances and fractures undermine or hinder world society? How might actors effectively respond?

Reflection Recognition may result from an extended process of reflection. Broadly defined, reflection on ‘our most basic notions of what it means to be human’ aims to disclose and clarify the ‘historical narratives’ which relate to and are constitutive of ‘identity and human self-knowledge, collectively and individually’ (Smith 2007: 243). The point of the exercise is, in Iris Marion Young’s critical, emancipatory formulation, to project ‘normative possibilities unrealized but felt in a particular given society’ (1990: 6). Inwardly manifested as introspection, reflection takes the self as its subject: to realize one’s potential, to seek self-meaning and value, to tackle and overcome the obstacles hindering one’s development. Outwardly directed with others as its subject, reflection re-presents the world and others in thought – the danger of which is always that ‘the other is met not as the other, but merely as part of the monological self ’ (Buber 1965a: 206). Reflection thus should never be an endpoint but only a beginning for engagement with and in the world. To put a finer point on it: reflection, even as an introspective exercise, is not mere solipsism. The language we use, whether in dialogue with others or in thinking, ‘is part of an activity or a form of life’ (Wittgenstein quoted in Onuf 1989: 44) that reproduces the myriad of social structures and conventions from which language emerges. Since reflection foregrounds the historical narratives that have shaped our understandings of and practices in the world, it forces us to ‘ “see” the world differently’ (Cornell 1995: 78–9). For instance, how we respond to rape depends on how we ‘see’ women and men: if we define rape as something that happens to women, then we miss sexual violence enacted upon men (see Carpenter 2005) such as happened in the Omarska concentration camp during the Bosnia – Serbia War. If we construe the sexual exploits of men during conflict as instances of male release, we miss rape as a weapon of war. In this

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view, our moral identity, conceptions of ethical behaviour and ways in which we care for others are ‘not secured in advance, but develop subject to a process of self-reflection’ (Beiner 1997: 20). Reflection as a constitutive, (re)productive and (re)generative practice of world society suggests certain avenues for research. Might we identify emerging sociopolitical understandings of moral minimums that might eventually be translated into what Andrew Linklater (2011) has called cosmopolitan harm conventions? How might global governance institutions stimulate deeper forms of reflection on the plight of the mis- and non-recognized, and generate methods to mitigate or remedy such injustices? In what ways might our liberal educational institutions and methods be reformed to focus less on ‘more respect’ or ‘more recognition’, as Kate Schick insists, and more on subjective self-analysis to encourage more sustained critical reflection of our role in the adoption of norms that dehumanize and marginalize, or our (direct or indirect) complicity in socio-economic structures that oppress? In what specific ways might mis- or non-recognized persons arrive at enhanced self-knowledge and value through deeper reflection on their own lived conditions – whether gendered, racialized or economized? Moreover, as Tarik Kochi has eloquently argued in his chapter, how might we use such conditions as the platform from which to question, and foment challenges to, the forms of inequality that stymie human development?

Reproduction or replication of norms The term ‘norm’ is usually coupled with terms such as shared, moral and good (Klotz 1995: 14). However, like Klotz, I hesitate to do so because the relational contexts within which norms operate, not to mention their (potentially unethical) origins or deployment, may neuter those more agreeable qualifiers. Feminist, critical and poststructural theories draw attention to the fact that norms may be imposed on others (see True 2011: 77); norms and their undergirding belief structures which signal what actors deem is right to do (Crawford 2002: 86–98) may confront the otherized as objective barriers to their humanization. Further, even in instances in which norms are emancipatory in constitution and intent, particular meanings and applications of them may clash with local understandings, blind societies to other existing forms of exploitation and violence or spawn new ones such forms (True 2011: 75–8). Still, norms perform central roles in humanization and recognition. First, norms may be crafted in direct response to the second-class status and/or

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the suffering of others, such as abolitionist (e.g. Crawford 2002: 159–200) or anti-apartheid (e.g. Klotz 1995) norms, notwithstanding any oppressive effects they may inadvertently produce.11 Second, norms may stem from disgust or disapproval of difference, and hence attach conditions to the emancipation, humanization and recognition of the other such as the nineteenth-century ‘standard of “civilization” ’. Norms of this sort aim to reproduce the social structures and normative beliefs equated with legitimate or appropriate modes of being. Finally, norms and normative beliefs may also humanize, emancipate and recognize the otherized through their use in ways that subvert or alter official or prevailing understandings of difference. The reproduction of norms as a constitutive, (re)productive and (re) generative practice of world society suggests certain avenues for research. In what ways have specific norms been deployed to perpetuate injustices of misrecognition, maldistribution and misframing? How have certain norms, despite their emancipatory intent, come to be interpreted in narrow ways that reinforce particular chauvinisms? How might norms be reappropriated to fulfil the integrative and performative functions identified by Greta Snyder? Certain lessons may be drawn from, say, a deeper study of Navi Pillay’s advocacy for the United Nations’ Free & Equal Campaign, who shifted the rhetorical grounds on which she has championed rights for LGBT persons. Her first statement (2010) on the issue focused entirely on legalistic issues stemming from systematic discrimination and violence. But, as many states have resisted the importation of LGBT concerns under a human rights rubric, she came to frequently refer to the ‘humanity’ of LGBT peoples and their experiences by underscoring the presence of same-sex relationships across time and space, appealing to basic human experiences of love and difference, and referencing changing attitudes as integral to the human condition. Similarly, proponents of marriage equality (re) appropriate concepts, practices and norms of love, care, commitment and family from a heteronormatively restrictive framework; such are the normative values of being human, not monopolistic possessions of certain categories of persons.

Responsibility Adherence to normative strictures constitutes an act of self-responsibility, which might be perceived as a condition on which recognition it hinged. Selfresponsibility entails obligations to care for one’s interior life (e.g. the emotional, intellectual, psychological and spiritual dimensions of our lives) and body; to explore the potentialities of Being constrained by the presence and capacity

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of others to do the same; and to accept the consequences of one’s actions and decisions. Self-responsibility might also be read as an act of resistance. William Paul Simmons argued the point with respect to human rights law and the marginalized other: one of the three ‘modalities’ he identifies for reconstructing human rights to more fully respond to the needs of the marginalized and oppressed involves the self-ascription of identity and self-assertion of rights (2011: 129).12 For too long, he maintained, human rights law ‘often disregarded’ and even ‘silenced’ the voices of the disempowered, marginalized and suffering as human rights theorizing has usually emanated from abstract universalisms, not ‘from the voices of the Marginalized Other’ (Simmons 2011: 3). Many feminist, critical and poststructural theorists anticipated the argument. Balakrishnan Rajagopal (2003: 12), for instance, noted that ‘the idea of human rights has proved to be blind to the tremendous variety that human-rights struggles take in the form of social movement resistance in the Third World’, especially with respect to gender,13 development and democracy. In Simmons’ view (2011: 129), the reconstruction of human rights also requires the exercise of responsibility and care for others: ‘patient listening to the voice of the Other’, and working in solidarity ‘with the Other to build the life-project that the Other is unable to complete because the Other is outside the system’ which share with an ethics of care explored fully in this volume by Fiona Robinson (see also Robinson 2011; Tronto 1993). If listening counters the patronizing tendencies some have charted in human rights discourse and practice, then working in solidarity builds coalitions between diverse people. Yet responsibility is Janus-faced. Following Foucault, Iver Neumann and Ole Sending (2010: 115) read the exercise of self- and other-directed forms of responsibility in terms of a sociopolitical transformation in which power no longer simply appears as an external force that compels an individual to do or refrain from doing something, but rather operates through individuals as selfregulation. In their view, individuals morph from being objects of regulation to subjects with rights (Neumann and Sending 2010: 120). The freedom of rightsbearing individuals, put differently, is maintained within social limits so long as individuals act responsibly, that is, in accordance with social rules and norms. On the one hand, the shift empowers. On the other, it implies that failure to exercise rights responsibly or to manage one’s life in accordance with prevailing norms invites surveillance and policing. Cognizant of this duality, Foucault (1986: 51–3) framed responsibility not as ‘an exercise in solitude, but a true social practice . . . a recognized hierarchy [giving] the most advanced members the task of tutoring the

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others’. Responsibility is ‘the attention one devotes to the care that others should take of themselves, [which] appears then as the intensification of social relations’. Care and power are on that view mutually implicative and constituting not only of societies but of selves. An ethics of care construes the self as relational – that is, not as a priori given, but as a product of ongoing relations with others (see Robinson 2011: 4). This ‘relational ontology’14 acknowledges that interdependence and dependence, and hence hierarchy (no matter how ephemeral or embedded), responsibility and power are pervasive features in human life; consequently, ‘the practices of care through which we fulfil our responsibilities to particular others’ must feature in our political analyses and not be relegated to the private realm. As Robinson (2011: 5) has persuasively argued ‘relations of care and intimacy are of great political significance in that their form and nature are determined by relations of power that play out in a variety of contexts – from the household to the global political economy’.

Recognition as a primary institution of world society Even if world society may be defined in the material terms of systems, structures, networks and in the ontological ones of actors, it ‘hangs together’ in significant degree because of an intersubjective web of assumptions, understandings, meanings, values, norms, principles and rules that permit us to speak of a common world and lend it ontological and determinative reality. But, these intersubjective elements do not automatically bind it as a unitary whole. Rather, this world as a space in-between human beings relates and separates them, which in turn pivots on practices of recognition and the processes that, in turn, help constitute recognition. Given conditions of globalization – ‘the massive movement of peoples, the intensification of contacts and interconnections between societies, and the multiple dislocations of established ways of thinking and of doing [which] have intensified’ and deterritorialized identity politics (Hurrell 2007: 294) – the importation into International Relations of serious consideration of individualto-individual interaction is increasingly warranted. Yet, any analytical traction or insights we gain by considering interhuman interaction as salient to the study of international relations are compromised by its inherent unpredictability and spontaneity. As such, this ‘sphere of “between” [or] . . . the real place and bearer of what happens between humans [which] has received no specific attention because . . . it does not exhibit a smooth continuity, but is ever and

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again re-constituted in accordance with [human beings’] meetings with one another’ (Buber 1965a: 203). To counter the possibility that research energies are not wasted on ephemeral interactions, we necessarily look for regularities. In that vein, Buzan preferred to recast world society in structural-organizational terms and thus viewed it through the transnational prism of associations, and the interhuman optic of large-scale patterns of shared identity. Yet might we find something more rudimentary in interhuman interaction that will help us understand the intersubjective foundations of world society? I have proposed an examination of recognition as an outcome of a nonexhaustive set of distinct processes. Studying those processes has broad implications for IR theory and practice. Witness debates regarding responsibility to others under threat of annihilation as grounded by the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine. Modes of interhuman recognition and awareness of moral universalisms filter through diplomatic discourse, interstate political rhetoric and non-state actor campaigns. Debates within international organizations evidence reflection in ways that discount the value of state borders and parochialisms when human well-being and human development are persistently at stake. Transnational social movements no matter their objectives document a human yearning to resist a politics of exclusion and the injustices of misrecognition. The articulation of human rights as applied to specific groups long denied them – e.g. indigenous peoples, children, women and, quite recently, LGBT persons – exhibits a universalizing tendency towards reflection on the lived experiences of specific peoples, and recognition of personhood, despite ideological arguments to the contrary. Responsibilities towards the global poor and the environment, even if weak and amorphous, manifest trends towards recognition through responsibility and care. Because of their sociopolitical ramifications, I argue that practices of recognition function as a first-order practice or, in International Relations theoretical terms, a primary institution. Viewing world society through the prism of recognition theory offers significant opportunities for the concept to be further developed and clarified. In short, practices of interhuman recognition, as a way of cutting into the world society concept, invite more sustained and systematic attention to the ways such processes, as constructive machinations, might inculcate greater coherence to emancipatory projects and solidarities between mis- and non-recognized peoples; generate forms of institutionalization that permit greater human engagement in world politics; encourage the interrogation and potential reform of existing institutions and organizational behaviours, processes and programmes in ways that will effectively address and

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alleviate the plight of dehumanized, marginalized others; and lend world society substance and practical capabilities it has otherwise been deemed to be lacking.15

Notes 1 2

3 4

5

6

7 8

I use the capitalized version of International Relations to refer to the academic discipline, and the lower-case to refer to the subject of study. Edward Keene (2002: 123) looks in the reverse direction and maintains that Gong tells only half the story as he omits from consideration ‘the entry of some civilized states – notably Germany, Russia and Japan – into the uncivilized world’. Membership applications from South Sudan and Somalia are currently pending. Cf. the preamble of the constitutive treaty of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS 1993) contains a provision that its sixteen member states are ‘convinced that the integration of the Member States into a viable regional Community may demand the partial and gradual pooling of national sovereignties to the Community within the context of a collective political will’. Buzan looks beyond human rights and the normative concerns usually associated with world society towards structural regularities as produced by the world capitalist economy and subglobal/regional integrations that shape identities, interests and roles. Patterson (2005) appends to that list the environment. The contribution by Emilian Kavalski and Magdalena Zolkos to this volume provides a robust critique of the conventional anthropocentric account of recognition, which is centered on a binary reciprocal relationship between the recognizer and the recognized. If international relations is to confront and understand meaningfully environmental challenges, they argue, we must develop a more inclusive, encompassing conception of recognition. Hedley Bull (1995: 269–70) reflected on ‘one important and novel factor affecting transnational relations today’ and opined that ‘the development of global communications’ creates ‘an unprecedented degree of mutual awareness among different parts of the human community . . . [though] this has not by any means led to a situation of “perfect” mutual awareness of all societies by one another’. Put differently, we need to think not in terms of world society, but in terms of world societies. See Buzan (1993: 337) and Williams (2005). On 26 July 2013, the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights launched its Free & Equal public information campaign in Cape Town, South Africa. The campaign aims ‘to raise awareness about violence and discrimination against . . . LGBT people . . . and focus on the need for both legal reforms and public education to counter homophobia and transphobia’ (Penn 2013).The official website is www.unfe.org/ [accessed 15 December 2014].

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9 I owe this point to a private conversation with Vivienne Matthies-Boon. 10 This is Andrew Linklater’s position and the subject of much of his research for over a decade (see 2011). 11 For example, while same-sex marriage in South Africa has effectuated constitutional provisions of equality, enhanced visibility of lesbians has contributed to the horror of corrective rape. 12 Self-ascription of identity is limited by the inherent ambiguity of Being that troubled Simone de Beauvoir: ‘we are always both the self we imagine and the body others see’ (Marso 2012: 167). Monica Mookherjee’s chapter uses Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity to counter Nancy Fraser’s objectivist framing of misrecognition as status which overlooks the lived experiences of suffering and finds in Beauvoir a basis on which to construct cosmopolitan solidarity with the mis- or nonrecognized. 13 See Reilly (2007) for a feminist critique of human rights universalisms as masking certain biases. 14 Martin Buber writes that humans exist ‘anthropologically not in [their] isolation, but in the completeness of the relation between’ each other (1965b: 84). 15 See Teitel (2011) for a humanitarian international law perspective, and Neumann (2011) for an English School one.

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Index Note: The letter ‘n’ following locators refers to notes. Aboriginal Tasmanians 110 abstractly universal approach 35 Academics International Assistance Fund 172 accumulation of knowledge 29–30 Adger, W. N. 145, 147 Adichie, C. N. 172 Adorno, T. W. 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 n.5, 43 n.11, 44 nn.12–16, 120 n.1 affirmative politics of recognition 9–10. See also politics of recognition African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM 2014) 202 African Union 201 agape 13 Agne, H. 167 agonistic recognition 2, 16. See also recognition and pedagogy 26, 27, 30–3 and vulnerability 30–3 Allen, M. 179 allure of separatism Joyce and 78–81 Malcolm X and 78–81 multiculturalism and 69–83 recognition and 69–83 ambiguity Beauvoir’s concept of 51–6 and cosmopolitan universalism of lived experience 51–6 humanity and 53 ‘ambiguous humanism’ 57 Americanah (Adichie) 172 American Civil War 72, 82 American Constitution 78 Amir-Moazami, S. 77 ancient slavery 87 Anderson, J. 103 Anderson, P. 98 n.1

Anerkennung. See recognition Anker, E. 154 Annan, K. 188 Anthropocene 141 Arab Spring 97, 187 Archibugi, D. 55 Arendt, H. 19, 89, 102, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 118, 120 nn.2–3, 208 Aristotelian empathic engagement 30 Aristotle 88 Armitage, D. 72 Armstrong, E. 193 n.3 Arp, K. 67 n.12 Aulakh, R. 140 Avineri, S. 98 n.3 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Lemkin) 112 Baldwin, J. 80 Barkawi, T. 173, 174 Barkdull, J. 150 Barnes, M. 21, 160, 162, 170, 171 Barnett, J. 147 Barnett, M. 161, 169, 170, 174 n.1 Bartelson, J. 161, 162, 167, 168 Bartky, S. L. 66 n.4 Bartlett, A. J. 25, 42 n.1 Beattie, A. R. 29, 44 n.19, 102 Beauvoir, S. de 3, 16, 17, 45–68, 152, 216 n.12 ambiguity and cosmopolitan universalism of lived experience 51–6 being-for-the-misrecognized in cosmopolitan feminist theory of 62–5 on charity 68 n.18 existentialist feminism of 46 post-war feminist existentialism of 51 Beck, U. 45 Becker, H. 25, 26, 31, 34, 39 Beiner, R. 210

244 Beitz, C. 66 n.1 Bell, V. 142 Benhabib, S. 66 n.2 Benjamin, A. 89, 150, 153 Benjamin, W. 89 Bennett, J. 145, 148, 149, 154 n.1, 155 n.5 Bennis, P. 188 Bentham, J. 72 Berger, M. T. 101 Bergoffen, D. 61 Berkes, F. 151 Bernasconi, R. 127, 128 Berry, T. 140 Bhabha, H. K. 75 Biko, S. 35 biospherical vulnerability 147–8 biotic togetherness 148 Bisnauth, D. 135 Black Skin White Masks (Fanon) 125, 127–8 Boler, M. 28, 30, 38, 40, 41, 44 n.18 Boltanski, L. 78 bondsmen 86–90 Booth, K. 143 Bound by Recognition (Markell) 64 Boupacha, D. 58 Brantlinger, P. 111 Brenner, R. 90 British Empire 72 Brodber, E. 20, 131, 132, 133 Brooke, C. 25 Brown, W. 175 Brunt, P. A. 98 n.1 Buber, M. 209, 214, 216 n.14 Buck-Morss, S. 90, 123, 127 Buckley, K. 186, 194 n.9 Bull, H. 198, 200, 204, 215 n.6 Burke, V. 152, 155 n.8 Burns, T. 14, 101 Burton, J. 197–8 Butler, J. 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 22 n.1, 22 n.4, 59, 146 Buzan, B. 203, 204, 207, 214, 215 n.5, 215 n.7 capitalist economy Hegel’s account of 90–1 poverty and 91–4, 97 recognition in 90–4 Caputi, M. 64, 67 n.14, 68 n.20

Index Card, C. 114 care dark side of 160 ethics 160 practices of 160 care ethicists 160 care ethics 160 described 164 and ethics of recognition 164–6 and interdependence 161 and love 165 and mutual vulnerability 161 and transformative recognition 170–4 Care in Everyday Life (Barnes) 170 Carpenter, C. 209 Carter, B. 199 ‘celestial ethnography’ 131 Césaire, A. 127 Chakrabarty, D. 141 Chamberlain, N. 147 Chayes, A. H. 203 Clark, I. 102 Clark, R. P. 151 ‘class consciousness’ 93 ‘class struggle’ 93 Clemens, J. 42 n.1 climate change 146–7 climate protection 140 Clinton, H. R. 208 cobweb model, of world politics 197–8 Coelho, S. 149 Colas, A. 51 coldness 27, 36 and creating an understanding environment 37 and love 38 reasons for 36 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx & Engels) 90 compassion, Nussbaum on 29 conditional recognition practices 203–6 Connolly, E. 153 Connolly, J. 165–6 consciousness Hegel’s phenomenology of 3 spatiotemporal condition of 12 in the state 4 constitutive event 142 constitutive theory of recognition 167 contemporary globalization 49

Index Conway, J. 185, 186, 190, 191, 193 n.7, 194 n.8 Cornell, D. 207, 209 cosmopolitan education 27. See also education and accumulation of knowledge 29–30 and emancipation 31 and global citizens concept 28–30 goal of 30 and the international 28–30 Nussbaum on 28–30 and recognition 30 cosmopolitan feminism 47–51 aim of 51 Beauvoir’s 47, 62 misrecognition as subjection to objective social structures 47–51 cosmopolitan feminist theory being-for-the-misrecognized in 62–5 of recognition 62–5 cosmopolitanism 2 critical 50 defined 66 n.1 feminist 60 globalization and 51 cosmopolitan thinkers 25 cosmopolitan universalism Beauvoir’s 51–6 of lived experience 51–6 Coulthard, G. S. 126 Cox, R. 139 Crawford, N. 210, 211 critical recognition theory 148 critical self-reflection education towards 26, 33–8, 38–41 ignorance 34–5 indifference 35–8 cross-species resilience and adaptability 147–8 Crutzen, P. 141 Cudworth, E. 140, 142, 151, 155 n.5 Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Nussbaum) 28 Cunsolo Willox, A. 146, 147, 148 Das, Bhagwan 136 Davidson-Hunt, I. J. 151 de Barros, J. 136

245

De Sousa Santos, B. 183, 184, 185, 190, 192, 193 nn.5–6 Declaration of Independence 72 Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans 149 della Portia, D. 191 Democracy in America 83 n.1 denial 33 deontic principles 169 desires animal 153 human 152–3 and recognition 32, 152 development aid 171–2 dialectical mediation of self 5 Diogenes the Cynic 66 n.3 Diop, A. 127 dislocation 9–14 distributive justice 165 diversity of global misrecognition 56–61 recognition politics and 192 Doeuff, M. le. 66 domestic–international divide Habermas on 73–5 re-establishing 73–5 Taylor on 70–3 domination 160–1 Donaldson, S. 155 n.6 Drichel, S. 33, 36, 43 n.8 Dryzek, J. 149, 187 Dubgen, F. 171, 172 Duffield, M. 172 Dworkin, G. 169 Dyer, G. 142 EAC. See East African Community (EAC) early childhood education 39–40 East African Community (EAC) 201 economic globalization 48 economic inequality 1 economic justice 1 ecopolitics 144 Edland-Gryt, O. 173 education. See also pedagogy Adorno on 38–9 cosmopolitan (see cosmopolitan education) and disciplinary specialization 25 early childhood 39–40

246

Index

and general enlightenment 38–9 multicultural 29 towards critical self-reflection 26, 33–8, 38–41 emancipation 4–7 and cosmopolitan education 31 empathy, passive 30, 40 Engels, F. 57, 67 n.11, 67 n.13 English School theory 198 environmentalism 142 Erman, E. 167 eros 13 ethics 1 care 160 emancipatory 161 Ethics of Ambiguity, The (Beauvoir) 46, 52, 64 ethics of care. See care ethics ethics of recognition and care ethics 164–6 encouraging 189–91 EU. See European Union (EU) European Court of Human Rights 76 European Enlightenment 19, 123–4 European Union (EU) 75, 201 Evans, T. 168, 169 evil of an excess of order 83 genocide 110–18 in Hegel’s philosophy 104–5 political 101 as radical non-recognition 19 recognition and 102–6 of a total loss of order 83 existence European mode of 111 group 117 existential recognition 2, 107, 111, 113, 117–19. See also recognition existentialist feminism 46 external recognition 167 externally oriented recognition politics 186–9 Eze, E. C. 124 Fanon, F. 3, 19, 68 n.20, 71, 72, 75, 96, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 133 Farbotko, C. 147 Farr, J. 124

Fein, H. 113 female genital mutilation 59 femininity 51, 53, 62 feminism 179–81 cosmopolitan 47–51 existentialist 46 global 50, 177, 180–3 feminist recognition 2. See also recognition Beauvoir’s concept of 55, 65 Fraser on 46 feminists and intra-movement recognition politics 179–81 on liberal individualism 159 Ferree, M. M. 181 Fichte, J. G. 3, 86 Finlay, M. I. 98 n.1 Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin) 80 First World women 46, 55, 61 Fischer, S. 123 Forrest, W. G. 98 n.1 Fortunes of Feminism, The (Fraser) 104 Foster, R. 26, 32, 33, 41, 42 n.5 Foucault, M. 10, 212 Fraser, N. 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 16, 21, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 61, 66 n.2, 85, 86, 103, 104, 110, 142, 150, 162, 163, 171, 175, 180, 181, 196, 216 n.12 cosmopolitan feminism and 47–51 objectivism of 56 on parity 9 on political justice 9 on recognition 7–9 social-democratic theory of 86 on social justice 8 Frazer, E. 25 French, P. 120 n.5 French Communist Party 59 French Revolution 90 Friskics, S. 149 Front de Libération Nationale 58 Fry, I. 147 Fuller, L. 114 Funke, P. N. 184 fused horizons model 185 Garvey, M. 136 Geggus, D. 127

Index gender injustice 2 gender misrecognition 53–4 gender segregation 49 general enlightenment 38–9 generous recognition 166 genocide aim of 113 Card on 114 collectivist characterization of 114 Lemkin on 110–11 and limits of recognition 101–19 neologism 112 Genocide Convention 112–13, 117 German Romanticism 50 Gettell, R. G. 143 Geuss, R. 29 Gibson, A. 84 n.3 Gibson, K. 135, 137 Gibson, N. 126 Gillan, K. 189 Gilligan, C. 164 Gilroy, P. 176 Gilson, E. 33, 34 Gitlin, T. 175 Glendinning, L. 149 global citizens 28–30 global ethics of care. See care ethics global feminism 50, 177, 180–3 global injustice and ethical recognition encounters 189–91 and externally oriented recognition politics 186–9 and global social movements 175 and internal recognition politics 179–86 and politics of recognition 177–9 global misrecognition, diversity of 56–61 global social movements 175 globalization 46. See also world society and changing concept of justice 142 complexity of contemporary structures of 66 contemporary 49 cosmopolitanism and 51 economic 48 and nature 143–4 Goehr, L. 44 n.15 Gong, G. 199, 200, 215 n.2 Goodin, R. E. 155 n.6

247

Gordon, L. R. 125 Gould, C. C. 165, 166, 184 Griffiths, M. 139 Guha, R. 124 Haacke, J. 14 Haas, E. 143, 144, 145 Habermas, J. 3, 4–7, 14, 17, 22 n.3, 69, 73, 74, 75, 81, 82, 83, 86, 89, 196 on domestic–international divide 73–5 on modernization 74 Haitian Revolution 19, 123, 127 Hall, S. 45 Hamili, G. 58 Hardt, H. 97, 98 n.6 Harlow, V. T. 72 harm collectivist dimension of 114 genocidal 114–16 ‘oppressive psychological’ 149 recognition and 102–6 Harris, P. G. 150 Hau’ofa, E. 154 n.3 Hayden, P. 1–22, 44 n.19, 68 n.22, 101–20, 139, 140, 155 n.9, 196, 205 Heath Justice, D. 195, 196 Hegel, G. W. F. 3, 4, 7, 19, 22 n.1, 53, 67 n.7, 70, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98 n.3, 104, 105, 106, 119, 120 nn.1–2, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 133, 150, 152, 153, 165, 207 concept of ‘rabble’ 97 Geist 122, 124, 130 on poverty 91–2 Hegelian recognition 2, 4, 15, 18. See also recognition and cultural difference 148 Heidegger, M. 107, 108 Heins, V. M. 17, 44 n.13, 44 n.15, 69–84, 139, 207 Held, D. 55 Herrschaft 87 Hildering, A. 142 Hill, R. A. 136 Hilton, R. 90 Hobbes, T. 3 Hobden, S. 140, 142, 143, 151, 155 n.5, 155 n.9 Honenberger, P. 125

248

Index

Honneth, A. 3, 7, 8, 13, 14, 17, 25, 26, 32, 48, 69, 70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82, 85, 103, 104, 110, 120 n.6, 139, 150, 165, 167 Hovden, E. 143 Hubbard, B. 208 human development 1 human rights violations of 45 Western understandings of 62 humanity cultivating 28–9 Hume, D. 82 Hurrell, A. 213 Hurston, Z. N. 19, 129, 130, 131 Husserl, E. 107 Hutchings, K. 164 identity, status and 49–50 identity politics 1 ignorance 34–5 and abstractly universal approach 35 invulnerability as form of 34 and narrowly procedural approach 35 pervasive 35 Ikäheimo, H. 70, 83 n.1 imagined communities 204 Inayatullah, N. 168 indifference 35–8 individual subjectivity 49 inequality 94–5 economic 1 material 18 integrative recognition politics 176 interhuman societies 204 inter-movement politics 183–6 internally-oriented recognition politics 177 importance of 179–86 inter-movement politics 183–6 intra-movement politics 179–83 international. See also International Relations (IR) conditionality of recognition in 198–202 and cosmopolitan education 28–30 and recognition 166–8 ‘international’ cooperation on a moral diet 81–3 International Court of Justice 140 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 118

international political sociology approach 167 international politics and physical environment 144 rearticulation of 144 transformative recognition in 159–74 International Relations (IR) and environmental factors 145 and moral recognition 167 nature in 143–5 and recognition 139, 168 scholarship 140 intra-movement politics 179–83 and feminist movements 179–82 and violence against women (VAW) 182–3 ‘Introduction into Politics’ (Arendt) 109 invulnerability 17, 26, 33, 34, 42 Irigaray, L. 54, 60 Irish nationalism 80 Iser, M. 150 Islam 168 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) 96 Iton, R. 184 Jaggar, A. 56 Jahn, B. 124 Jeffery, R. 101 Jordan, N. 136 Joy, M. 149 Joyce, J. 70, 78, 80, 81 justice economic 1 political 8 social 8 Kant, I. 3, 12, 40, 44 n.16, 124, 125 threefold synthesis of representation 12 Kantian universalism 66 n.1 Kateb, G. 115 Kavalski, E. 20, 139–55, 215 n.5 Keene, E. 215 n.2 Kellner, E. 53 Kiernan, B. 111 King, M. L. 78 King George V 136 Klare, M. 42 Klein, J. 136 Kleinberg, E. 25 Klotz, A. 210, 211

Index Knechtschaft 87 knowledge, accumulation of 29–30 Kochi, T. 17, 18, 31, 32, 42 n.2, 85–98, 210 Kohler, M. 55 Kohn, M. 171 Kojève, A. 3, 53, 90, 152, 153 Kompridis, N. 142, 155 n.8, 155 n.9 Kristeva, J. 47, 51, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66 n.1, 68 n.21 Kruks, S. 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 63 Kurki, M. 151 Kymlicka, W. 155 n.6 Lacan, J. 3 Lackey, D. 117 Laitinen, A. 82 Lang, B. 115, 116 Larose, S. 134 Latour, B. 154 n.1 Lee, S. P. 114, 116 Lemkin, R. 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120 n.4 Levinas, E. 3, 148 Levy, J. T. 73 Leyla Lahin v. Turkey 76 liberal proceduralism 6 liberal recognition theory 85–6 liberalism and paternalism 169 Western 168–9 life of questioning 28 limits of recognition 101–19 Lindemann, T. 14, 139 Linklater, A. 102, 104, 210, 216 n.10 Linsenbard, G. 59 Lloyd, V. W. 42 n.3, 44 n.17 Lockward, A. 124 lords 86–90 Louisiana 131 love and coldness 38 and recognition 165 and teachers 40 Lugones, M. 62 Luhmann, N. 203 Luke, T. W. 141 Lundgren-Gothlin, E. 53, 57, 67 n.9 Machiavelli, N. 89, 94 Mackinder, H. J. 144

249

Maclaren, J. 135–6 Macleod, C. 115, 116 Malcolm X 70, 78–81 male–female dualities 53 Mann, M. 98 n.1 ‘Mapping the Feminist Imagination: From Redistribution to Recognition to Representation’ (Fraser) 180 Marable, M. 78, 79, 84 n.2 Markell, P. 27, 43 n.9, 64, 107 market-based recognition 91 Marso, L. 206, 216 n.12 Marx, K. 59, 90, 93, 97 ‘class consciousness’ 93 ‘class struggle’ 93 Marxist recognition 2. See also recognition May, L. 114, 116, 120 n.5 Mayall, J. 205 McBride, C. 80, 83, 85 McCardell, J. 82 McGrath, M. 154 n.4 McGregor, H. V. 147 McNay, L. 45 McQueen, P. 148, 150 Merleau-Ponty, M. 3, 53 Meyer, J. 198 Mignolo, W. 124 Minerva 123 misrecognition diversity of global 56–61 gender 49, 52–4, 63–4 of identity 177 practices 205 psychological account of 48–9 as subjection to objective social structures 47–51 symbolic 47 Mitchell, A. 141, 153 Moazam, F. 61 Moghadam, V. M. 56 Mohanty, C. 180, 181, 182 monovalent recognition politics 178, 191 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States 199 Moorhead, A. 126 Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (Tronto) 164 moral diet, ‘international’ cooperation on 81–3

250

Index

moral recognition 167 multicultural education 29 multiculturalism 1, 4–7 and allure of separatism 69–83 Taylor’s concept of 69–70, 73, 75 multivalent recognition politics 178, 191 Murphy, J. G. 115 Mussell, S. 36, 37 mutual vulnerability and care ethics 161 and transformative recognition 163 mutuality 9–14 between human and non-human systems 154 and reciprocity 152 and recognition 150–1 Nancy, J.-L. 98 n.2 Narayan, U. 21, 159, 160, 163, 173 narrative imagination 29, 30 narrowly procedural approach 35 Nash, K. 142 nationalism 46 Irish 80 Quebec 72 NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nature and globalization 143–4 in International Relations (IR) 143–5 nature recognition 140. See also recognition elements of 147–8 in international life 142, 145–51 and mutuality 150–1 as respect 148–9 vulnerability/resilience/loss 145–8 Negri, A. 97, 98 n.6 Neiman, S. 120 n.1 neologism ‘genocide’ 112 Neumann, I. 212, 216 n.15 New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) 202 New York Times 188, 189 Nicholson, L. 45 Nietzsche, F. 10, 93 Nisbet, H. B. 92 normative political theory 45

norms concept of 210 reproduction or replication of 210–11 role of 210–11 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 201 Nunberg, G. 188 Nussbaum, M. C. 28, 29, 30, 39, 40, 51, 66 n.2 on cosmopolitan education 28–30 and cultivating humanity 28–9 and global citizens’ concept 28–30 and narrative imagination 29 O’Connor, B. 39, 40 O’Neill, S. 14, 139 objective social structures, misrecognition as subjection to 47–51 Ogbar, J. 193 n.3 Olav Edland-Gryt, S. 173 Oliver, K. 125, 126, 150 ontological freedom 58, 59 Onuf, N. 139, 141, 142, 167, 209 oppression 1, 6 Organization of American States 201 orthodox communism 57 Osterweil, M. 184, 186 Owen, D. 76 Oxford English Dictionary 104 Oyster Cove Aboriginal Station 110 Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) 202 parity Fraser on 9 participatory 9, 48 Parks, R. 208 participatory parity 9, 48 passive empathy 30, 40 paternalism described 169 in globalized care 168–70 and liberalism 169 and recognition 168–70 Pathologies of Reason (Honneth) 104 Patterson, M. 215 n.5 pedagogy. See also education and agonistic recognition 26, 27, 30–3 of discomfort 28, 40–1 radical 26

Index recognition-infused 31 and self-reflection 27, 33–41 Penn, D. 215 n.8 performative recognition politics 176, 188 personal dignity, recognition 165 personal ‘I-thou’ recognition 117 pervasive ignorance 35 Pettenkofer, A. 78 Phenomenology of Spirit, The (Hegel) 4, 18, 86, 93, 122, 124–5, 150 philia 13 Philosophies of History (Hegel) 124 Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 18, 90, 92, 95–6, 124 physical environment and international politics 144 Pickerill, J. 189 Pillay, N. 211 Pippin, R. 85 Pitkin, H. 110 planetary humanism 176 Pocock, J. 98 n.3 political justice 8 Fraser on 9 politics inter-movement 183–6 international and physical environment 144 intra-movement 179–83 recognition (see recognition politics) world 140 Politics (Aristotle) 88 ‘Politics of Recognition, The’ (Taylor) 5 Pollack-Eltz, A. 137 Porter, E. 164 post-Hegelian recognition theory 1 poverty 91–2, 94 power 11 Price, C. 72 Prosecutor v. Krstić 115 Quebec nationalism 72 ‘Radi-Aid: Africa for Norway’ 172 radical non-recognition 19 Rajagopal, B. 212 Rawls, J. 86 reciprocal recognition 4, 62, 67 n.7. See also recognition

251

reciprocity and mutuality 152 and recognition 152 recognition and accumulation 85–98 affirmative 9–10 agonistic (see agonistic recognition) and allure of separatism 69–83 Butler on 9–14 in capitalist economy 90–4 charting 2–14 critical interventions 15–18 critical theoretical 2 described 26 and desires 32 and dislocation 9–14 and emancipation 4–7 existential 2 feminist 2, 46, 55, 65 forms of 165 Fraser on 7–9 going global 94–8 Habermas on 4–7 from harm to evil 102–6 Hegelian 2–4, 15, 18 Honneth’s concept of 7–9, 32 and the international 166–8 international orders and disorders and 20–2 in International Relations (IR) 139, 168 Kochi on 31 limits of 18–20, 101–19, 151–4 market-based 91 within market economy 91 Marxist 2 multiculturalism and 4–7 and mutuality 9–14, 150–1 nature (see nature recognition) new international direction of 14–22 and paternalism 168–70 of personal dignity 165 personal ‘I-thou’ 117 polis and oikos 89 post-Hegelian 1 post structural 2 postcolonial 2 psychoanalytic 2 reciprocal 4, 62, 67 n.7 and redistribution 7–9

252 and reframing 7–9 Ricoeur on 9–14 speculative 31 Taylor on 4–7 third term of 106–10 transformative 9–10, 21, 50, 162–3, 170–4 trouble with 75–8 ‘we’ 117 in and of world society 195–215 recognition politics 175–6 described 177 integrative 176 internally-oriented 177, 179–86 monovalent 178 multivalent 178 parsing 177–9 performative 176 thick 178 thin 178 recognition production reflection 209–10 reproduction or replication of norms 210–11 resistance 207–9 responsibility 211–13 redistribution 7–9 redistributive justice, international or global 1 reflection 209–10 defined 209 as introspective exercise 209 reframing 7–9 Reification (Honneth) 32 Reilly, N. 45, 55, 62, 216 n.13 resistance 207–9 alterior narrative as form of 208 confrontation as form of 207–8 self-affirmational performance as form of 208 respect, nature recognition as 148–9 responsibility 211–13 self-, 211–12 Ricoeur, P. 9, 12, 13, 14, 22 n.4, 70, 120 n.1, 196 Riedel, M. 98 n.3 rigorous recognition 166 Ringmar, E. 14, 139 Ritter, J. 98 n.3

Index Roback, J. 135 Robinson, F. 21, 62, 111, 159–74, 208, 212, 213 Robinson, G. 111 Roelvink, G. 146 Rogers, M. L. 78 Rogers, W. 61 Rose, G. 26, 31, 32, 33, 42 n.6, 44 n.17, 85 on politics of recognition 32 Roth, M. S. 22 n.1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3 Rowe, J. K. 140, 141 Royal Marines 111 Ruda, F. 98 n.6 Ruiz, L. E. J. 151 Ryan, L. 111 Said, E. 96 Sartre, J.-P. 3, 52, 53, 126 Schaap, A. 26, 42 n.4, 78, 181, 190, 193 n.7 Schabas, W. A. 116 Schell, J. 189 Schick, K. 1–22, 25–44, 68 n.22, 102, 155 n.9, 196, 210 Schlosberg, D. 148, 149 Schmitt, C. 89 Schoelcher, V. 127 Second Sex, The (Beauvoir) 46, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60 Second World War 78 self dialectical mediation of 5 reflexivity of 3 self-consciousness 3, 87 Hegelian 5 self-responsibility 211–12 Sending, O. 212 Senghor, L. 127 separatism allure of 69–83 ethnic 69 multiculturalism and 17 shared horizons model 185 Sharpe, J. 132 Shaw, M. 114 Shepperson, G. 134 Shilliam, R. 19, 20, 35, 43 n.10, 121–37, 173, 208 Shklar, J. 198

Index Siep, L. 85 silo-ed movements 184 Simmons, W. P. 212 Singh, J. 185, 186, 191 Sinha, S. 25 small wars 173–4 Smith, A. 90, 91, 93, 98 n.3 Smith, F. C. 131 Smith, K. B. 131 Smith, N. H. 14 Smith, R. 209 Smith, R. M. 169 Smith, R. T. 135 Snyder, G. F. 21, 22, 44 n.19, 175–94, 200, 211 social conflicts 1, 8 social justice 8 redistributive dimension of 9 ‘two-dimensional’ 8 social movements 47 German Romanticism 50 global 15, 21 organized 8 social structures, misrecognition as subjection to objective 47–51 social suffering 48, 51 Soper, K. 140 Southern African Development Community’s Common Agenda 202 speculative recognition 31 Spelman, E. 34, 51, 54 Sperling, V. 181 Sprout, H. 144, 145 Sprout, M. 140, 144, 145 status, and identity 49–50 Stavro, E. 54, 57, 58, 61, 66 n.5 Steele, B. J. 42 n.7, 44 n.19 Sterio, M. 199 Stewart, D. 134, 135 Stoermer, E. F. 141 Stone, B. 57 Stone, C. 155 n.6 Strangers to Ourselves (Kristeva) 65 Strömbom, L. 177, 178 ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State’ (Habermas) 73 Stutzin, G. 140

253

‘suppressed potentiality’ 16 symbolic misrecognition 47 Taiwo, O. 124 Taminiaux, J. 109 Taylor, C. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 14, 17, 22 n.2, 48, 53, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81, 85, 103, 178, 185 on domestic–international divide 70–3 misrecognition and 48 Taylor, P. 148 teachers, and love 40 Teitel, R. 216 n.15 Tharoor, I. 187 Theory and Practice (Habermas) 4 thick recognition politics 178 thin recognition politics 178 Thompson, J. E. 167 Thompson, M. J. 14, 101, 150 Thompson, S. 1, 48, 49 Thoreau, H. 149 Thornton, J. 127 Titus, N. 135 Tocqueville, A. de 83 n.1 totalitarianism 53, 61 transformative potential 142 transformative recognition 21. See also recognition and global ethic of care 170–4 in international politics 159–74 and mutual vulnerability 163 and roles of carer 162 strategies of 163 Tripp, C. 187, 188, 189 Tronto, J. C. 160, 164, 172, 212 Trouillot, M.-R. 123 True, J. 200, 210 Tuana, N. 27, 34, 35 Turner, B. S. 103 tutelage 44 n.16 two-thirds world 193 n.4 Two Treatises (Locke) 124 Tyler, P. E. 188, 189 Ulysses 80 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 112 United Nations General Assembly 112

254 Universal Negro Improvement Association 136 universal normativity 102 universalism cosmopolitan 46, 51–6 moral 214 UN Security Council (UNSC) 200–1 UNSC. See UN Security Council (UNSC) US Organization 193 n.2 Vallières, P. 72 van Der Molen, I. 142 Van Stipriaan, A. 134 Vazquez, R. 124 Vetlesen, A. 101 Vidal, J. 147 Vidmar-Horvat, K. 45, 50 Vietnam War 96 Vincent, R. J. 203 Vintges, K. 52, 65 violence against women (VAW) 182–3 vulnerability and agonistic recognition 30–3 and care ethics 161, 163, 166 described 33 and harm 102–4, 110 and nature recognition 145–8 reframing of 33 Waggoner, M. 38 Walker, M. U. 159 Wallerstein, I. 98 n.5, 188 Walzer, M. 114 Ward, J. 53 Water Mama 136 Waterman, P. 188 Weber, H. 101 Weinert, M. 22, 195–216 Weir, A. 51 Weisbord, R. G. 136 Weiss, G. 59, 68 n.16 Weitzenfeld, A. 149 Weldon, S. L. 182 Welzer, H. 142 Wendt, A. 82

Index Wenzel, H. V. 59 Western liberalism 83, 168–9 Westmaas, N. 136 Westwood, S. 176, 184 white supremacism 35 Wieviorka, M. 101 willful ignorance 27, 34 Williams, J. 204, 215 n.7 Williams, R. R. 3, 85, 140 Willox, C. 146, 148 Wolfe, C. 150, 153 women in China 56–7 First World 46, 55, 61 in India 56–7 ‘Women’s Time’ (Kristeva) 68 n.21 Wood, A. 92 world as missing link 110–18 as phenomenon 106–9 third term of recognition 106–10 world citizens. See global citizens World Economic Forum 185 world politics 140 World Social Forum (WSF) 22, 177 world society. See also globalization conditional recognition practices 203–6 conditionality of recognition in 198–202 practices of recognition in 206–13 recognition as a primary institution of 213–15 social view of 205 Worth, O. 186, 194 n.9 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon) 129 Yar, M. 149, 150, 152 Young, I. M. 51, 66 n.4, 120 n.7, 184, 191, 209 Zahan, D. 134 Zakin, E. 60, 61, 62, 63, 65 Zane, W. W. 135, 137 Zolkos, M. 20, 139–55, 215 n.5 Zurn, C. 50