WEEK 13: Epistemic Violence PDF

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Lecture, reading and seminar notes for Week 13 of Power and (In)security of Global Governance...

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WEEK 12: Epistemic Violence Lecture - Foucault: epistemic violence is the imposition of a given set of beliefs over another – relationship between power and knowledge - Spivak: epistemic violence results when the subaltern is silenced by colonial and indigenous forms of patriarchal power. Incompatibility of Indian female subject to represent herself - The problem of ‘representation’ – reproduction of multiple marginalities and epistemic privilege - Knowledge exercises violence – is it possible not to be epistemically violent when one makes a truth claim? Can/should language be non-violent? - A certain degree of violence may be unavoidable in everyday interactions – under which conditions is it acceptable? Spivak on epistemic violence - Eurocentric and Western domination and subjugation of former colonial subjects and misconception of their understanding and perception of the world - Result of ‘violence of imperialistic epistemic, social and disciplinary inscription’ - Erases the history of the subaltern - Follow enlightened colonisers, learn from them, adopt their worldviews and fit into the periphery of their world as second-class citizens International norms - Research into how norms influence state behavior, how they develop, to distance from realist and liberal theories of international relations - Finnemore and Sikkink develop a model of how norms develop and diffuse and influence international politics. NGOs advocating for women’s rights increase awareness throughout states and institute a normative change; there is a tipping point where norm becomes normalized and accepted in international politics - Norm life cycle

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How deviants challenge established norms Which norms diffuse? Finnemore and Sikkink identify factors that allow norms to become internalized o Legitimacy of norms o Prominence o Intrinsic quality of norms (universal, rational, moral progress?) o Resonance with existing norms o Context – world time

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Universal vs particular norms – F & S find that it is generally Western liberal norms that tend to become universal norms o “norms making universalistic claims about what is good for all people in all places (such as many Western norms) have more expansive potential thaan localized and particularistic normative framework like those in Bli described by Clifford Greetz” Writing colonial violence out of history - The act of forgetting or erasing certain parts of history - “only Europe is theoretically knowable” – European concepts and theories are applied to postcolonial settings. This is how knowledge can be violent. Reading Kevin J. Ayotte and Mary E. Husain, “Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil,” NWSA Journal 17, no.3 (2005): 112133. - “U.S. representations of the burqa rhetorically construct the women of Afghanistan as gendered slaves in need of "saving" by the West, increasing women's insecurity by promoting various forms of neocolonial violence” (112) - Much of IR exclusively considers security as deriving from state power and military strength, as seen in realist theories. “Feminist scholarship has challenged this notion of security on the grounds that women have never been secure within (or without) the nation state – they are always disproportionately affected by way, forced migration, famine, and other forms of social, political, and economic turmoil” (112) - Realism is inadequate to explain the insecurity faced by women (112) – must look at various forms of violence; physical, structural and epistemic - The war on terrorism in Afghanistan demonstrates that the appropriation by the West of third-world women’s voices and bodies is an instance of epistemic violence, which needs to be addressed along with “material oppressions” (113) - Argument: “representations of the women of Afghanistan as gendered slaves in need of ‘saving’ by the West constitute epistemic violence, the construction of a violent knowledge of the third-world Other that erases women as subjects in international relations” (113). Particularly the image of the ‘woman in the burqa’ has been employed to justify US military intervention. - “The pursuit of gender security must therefore account for the diverse ways in which the neo-colonialism of some Western discourses about third-world women creates the epistemological conditions for material harm” (113) - The conditions experienced by women in the third world arise from a variety of material and structural factors (114) - The mandatory imposition of the burqa for all Afghan women by the Taliban is perceived as the principal symbol of oppression in Afghanistan (115). Oppression by the Taliban is decidedly more widespread than the imposition of the burqa, but this act has been employed as a discourse by Western media to represent the violence faced by Afghan women (115) - The West’s appropriation and construction of the third-world Muslim woman as a ‘victim in need of saving’ is a form of epistemic violence (117) - Notably, the monolithic representation of the covering practices conceals the historical and cultural contexts behind them. Covering has functioned as an expression of agency (resistance movements against secular governments in

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Turkey, Egypt, Algeria and Iran), as the initiation of women into fundamentalist resistance movements, as a symbol of protest (1979 Iranian revolution) (117) “The consequences of such analytical reductionism are not merely theoretical; homogenization of Muslim covering practices partakes in exactly the paternalistic logic that underlies the neocolonial politics of U.S. efforts to "liberate" Afghan women according to an explicitly Western model of liberal feminism” (117) Agency of women is ignored in these discourses of oppression against women (118) Specific forms of epistemic violence perpetrated by Western discourses about Islam against women (119) o Demonization of the burqa, rather than its imposition – the veil as a material object becomes an oppressive object with human qualities. Barbara Walters referred to it as the “dehumanizing veil” ("Revolutionary Afghan Women's Association Explains" 2001). This representation addresses the women wearing the burqa rather than the Taliban’s imposition of it. Effectively, this denies women the possibility for agency. o Homogenization of Islam by implying that the form of oppression characterized by the burqa is intrinsic to Islam – “nowhere in the Muslim world are women treated as equals” (The Women of Islam, Time). Islam is translated into ‘non-Western’ in this context. (120) o Fetishization of ‘unveiling’ through US media celebration of the lifting of the veil imposition – this perpetuates the erasure of female agency in freely choosing to implement certain covering practices (120) The presence of epistemic violence does not deny the reality that physical violence against women remains the most significant concern due to the threat to survival faced by women (121) The epistemic violence perpetrated by erasing women’s agency was further used as a justification for particular forms of military action taken by the US against the Taliban – this provoked direct (physical) violence on Afghan women as ‘collateral damage’ during conflict (123) Structural violence includes “inadequate education and health care, exploitative employment conditions, endemic poverty, and other conditions that inflict damage on lives without the brute immediacy of physical violence” (126) “U.S. discourses that associate gender oppression with covering practices while imputing all responsibility to the actions of the Taliban or al Qaeda mask the role of U.S. national security policies in perpetuating the insecurity of structural violence against women in Afghanistan” (127) The epistemic violence on Afghan women through Western representations of covering practices as gender oppression facilitates the perpetration of structural and physical violence against women (127) An alternative to this epistemic violence is a focus on ‘fundamentalists’ as the “root cause of the oppression of women” (127) – not specifically about the burqa or a particular regime, but rather forms of fundamentalism. An alternative representation needs to return agency to Afghan women in making decisions regarding covering practices. An example of this approach is

found in the RAWA website – Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan...