Theoretical Musings

Dark Threats & White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism. Sherene H. Razack. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2004. 236 pages.

At the beginning of her analysis of Canadian peacekeeping, and particularly of what has come to be popularly known in Canada as the Somalia Affair, Sherene Razack uses a well-known poem by Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ to set the stage for her analysis:

Take up the White Man’s burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child (xi).

This poem not only acts as an apt metaphor for Canadian peacekeeping in Razack’s analysis, but also serves to locate her discussion throughout this study. What Razack is arguing, quite convincingly following a very thorough look at a wide range of documents related to Somalia and Canadian peacekeeping more generally, is that the encounter between Canadian peacekeepers and peoples of the Global South, in this case in Somalia, but more recently in Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan is a colonial encounter that is, in her words, “overdetermined by race” (6). As a colonial encounter, it inserts itself into broader national narratives about the civilizing role of Canadians called forth to bring peace, order, and democracy to corners of the world that are decidedly inferior, and thus, in dire need of help. She suggests that, in fact, this de-historicized narrative makes violence inevitable, since it is through violence against subjugated bodies that this fanciful national myth is actually constituted. She also reminds us how Canadians have actually been produced as national subjects through the violence done against indigenous peoples and people of colour, and that this history has in turn shaped the peacekeeping encounter. In this way, the spaces of here and there are markedly linked.

Why then, should we look at peacekeeping, such a cherished symbol of Canadian kindness and decency, in these terms? Razack believes that the strength of thinking about peacekeeping violence as colonial violence is that in this way it implicates us all, since it is done in our names in the first place. It no longer becomes about a few bad apples tarnishing the entire bucket, as she explains, but it is about dismantling the national narratives that set out our innocence and benevolence, our innate abilities as humanitarians, by probing their productive functions.

Razack uses national archives, popular media sources, testimony from the federal commission of inquiry into the Somalia Affair, various criminal and military trials, canonical literature (see Kipling and Conrad), and, of course, numerous academic sources to build her case. And while it might make for an at-times dizzying array of source material, in the end I would argue that she is able to use it all productively to dismantle several central myths in the contemporary making of Canada.

Among many other cases, Razack uses the example of General Roméo Dallaire, a well-known Canadian peacekeeper on the international stage, to illustrate her argument. Dallaire is the Canadian soldier who, at the height of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, was left with a skeletal UN force unable to quell the surrounding violence (recently captured in the film Hotal Rwanda, featuring Nick Nolte playing Dallaire). Powerless in the face of great evil, or so we are told, he returned to Canada a broken man traumatized and suicidal. Razack is not interested in exhaustively reviewing his role in the unfolding events or to probe the extent of his trauma, but instead focuses on how his story, and those of other traumatized peacekeepers like him who served in Somalia, has entered the national narrative. How, when violence travels from South to the North, is it largely “forgotten and forgiven, erased and de-raced” (7)? Razack suggests that it is in seeing Canadian soldiers as the victims of genocide, as overwhelmed by the absolute evil in places like Rwanda or Somalia, that this narrativized version of events takes place. This way, people from the South are rendered ‘speechless,’ an act that is accomplished because the horror is unthinkable and unknowable precisely because it takes place outside of history (22).

Razack asks us, in the case of Rwanda: What of Belgian colonizers’ role in creating the native-settler divide between the Hutu and Tutsis? What about the French army’s role in prolonging the struggle, or of the UN’s role in doing the same? These are of little relevance, since the story has now become one of traumatized Northern soldiers returning from a place of savageness, badly broken. And in a telling example pointing to the colonial nature of the encounter in Somalia, those Somalis murdered, tortured and otherwise abused by Canadian peacekeepers are made to take the blame for the soldiers’ trauma, since it is their very being that facilitates Canadian peacekeepers’ fall into madness, an old colonial trope. It is here that Razack so courageously implores us to recognize that this narrative is only intelligible through race, since the trauma can only be read if one accepts that Somali bodies are always already constituted as a threat, even when this threat is a 9 year-old boy looking for water, as was often the case in Belet Huen, where Canadian peacekeepers were stationed (the front cover of the book is an image of the military chaplain guarding several young boys, bound and blindfolded in the scorching 40 degree weather, accused of just this).

And yet, Razack points out that even as the racial nature of the encounter is everywhere evident, it disappears in the law and in national memory. As such, in the end it becomes a story of innocent Canadians duped by our military, and the very madness of Somalia. Once again, it is a story of Canadian victims, even though the entire Affair came to the attention of Canadians through the gruesome images of Canadians peacekeepers posing for so-called trophy photos with the mutilated and murdered body of Shidane Arone, only one of several victims of Canadian torture, abuse and ultimately, murder, as she so painstakingly demonstrates. This will to forget peacekeeping violence is no better demonstrated than in the conclusions of the federal commission inquiring into the ‘Somalia Affair,’ which stated rather confidently that the “victim is Canada and its international reputation” (144).

Of course, Razack is herself constructing a narrative that while compelling, at times points to her inability to account for obvious discrepancies. The relative weakness of her argument, at least in relation to the points I mention in the two previous paragraphs, lies mostly in her inability to explain why certain soldiers engaged in such acts of peacekeeping violence, while many others did not. She herself struggles with this same question on several occasions throughout the text. As such, the link holding her story together is at times tenuous, as is the case with the national narrative she seeks to dismantle, something she unfortunately fails to explore more in-depth. She could have avoided this by perhaps developing her methodological approach more clearly. What she calls the ‘case-study’ approach is by no means a settled concept, and her unpacking of it left me with more methodological questions than answers.

Another key point that fails to be properly addressed, at least theoretically, is Razack’s understanding of the national subject. While Razack makes a strong case for seeing the peacekeeping story as one about “race and the masculinities that make the nation white” (7), she offers very little insight into the processes through which differently-positioned subjects enter and are interpellated into this narrative. While I agree that colonial violence does implicate us all, it is no coincidence that Razack chooses not to look at how it implicates us all differentially, since this would undoubtedly complicate her rather neat storyline.

Another of this book’s shortcomings, related to the last, lies in its failure to consider the multiple ways in which some national subjects resist the narratives under study. It is true that Razack spends some time reviewing the anti-racist, anti-colonial interventions at the national inquiry and how the commissioners subsequently silenced these, but this story of resistance does not follow through her entire analysis. A more thorough investigation of the ways in which national subjects negotiate their relationship to these national narratives is needed.

Finally, at times Razack usefully gestures towards how the global economy plays a role in further exacerbating old and emerging colonial relations, as evidenced by her discussion of how IMF and World Bank policies, with the help of Canadian corporations for example, have impoverished many of the nations of the Global South where peacekeeping operations take place. However, never does she enter into a deeper theorization of how some of the new and emerging neo-liberal features of the global economy have led to what she is calling the “New Imperialism,” much in the same vein as David Harvey (2005, monograph by the same title) has, but with less focus on its material practices. In any case, a more thorough consideration of how the global political economy in fact helps to construct places in need of ‘peacekeeping’ in the first place, especially as this relates to Somalia, would have strengthened her analysis.

However, in returning to the strengths of Razack’s work, I would like to highlight her constant re-appraisal of the shifting moral ground in relation to peacekeeping interventions. Instead of washing her hands at the question of when and under what conditions one should intervene in acts of genocide or state-sponsored violence, Razack delves fully into this question. This is a refreshing act of candour in an academic world often loath to go beyond simply critiquing national policies. The basic question she returns to is: What exactly does it mean to act morally in situations of genocide and mass murder?

Razack’s answer to this answer is complicated, but stands out for its intellectual and ethical clarity. She suggests that it is not simply enough to stay home while events like those that occurred in Rwanda unravel before our very eyes. But we musn’t rush to the rescue either, since this only re-inscribes dominant national narratives of helpful Northerners bringing civilization to the savage Global South. A story of dark threats and white knights that renders whole categories of people superfluous and becomes an easy story of good versus evil.

It is here that Razack usefully introduces the work of Hannah Arendt to illustrate the dangers of this too-easy ‘thoughtlessness,’ or what she summarized, relying on Arendt, and speaking directly to contemporary debates, as the “repetition of simple truths meant to convince us that we are locked into a moment in history when the ‘axis of evil’ must be defeated at all costs” (162). She suggests that it is through this thoughtlessness, entered into in this case through national mythologies of good and kind Canadians specially suited to help others, that people come to see evidence of brutal violence, in this case peacekeeping violence, as simply ordinary. The answer, in Razack’s opinion, is to leave behind our national dreams of innocence and practice what Lisa Malkki has called “historicized humanism” (150). That is, we must think about how we get involved in international and national events using what she calls an anti-colonial approach, since this will allow us to get beyond moments of acute crisis. While Razack does not fully develop this anti-colonial concept, she does offer some insight into what it might look like.

She strongly suggests that a moral position worth holding would be to, “put ourselves back into history, rendering ‘evil’ thinkable and finding out how we have produced it” (12). In other words, an anti-colonial approach “begins with the premise that we are not bearing the white man’s burden” (164). Otherwise, as she has very skillfully argued throughout, we engage n a relentless collective pursuit at redemption that remakes us as colonizers and innocent national subjects.

Of course, how one goes about doing this work remains a difficult question. There is obviously little political support for the adoption of an anti-colonial approach, as suggested by Razack, since colonialism itself is popularly understood in Canada as something benign that happened in the past. As she readily points out, her ‘solution’ is no solution at all, since it offers no quick-fix. Therefore, in this context, Razack’s argument on the colonial nature of the peacekeeping encounter has most likely fallen on deaf ears in policy circles, for instance, since her approach not only calls for a revamping of peacekeeping policies, but for a fundamental shift in how Canadians see themselves in relation to others, especially people in/from the Global South. However, I believe this last section on the morality of intervention nicely frames her overall argument, since it spells out what exactly is at stake in continuing on the peacekeeping path we have set out, especially as this relates to the national subjects who are constituted by such encounters.