Goose or Gander: Remapping the locus of global diplomacy?

27 Dec, 2020 - 00:12 0 Views
Goose or Gander: Remapping the locus of global diplomacy? President Mnangagwa receives signed copies of Vice President Constantino Chiwenga’s book “Goose or Gander: The United Nations Security Council and the Ethic of Double Standards” before its launch at State House recently. — Picture: Tawanda Mudimu

The Sunday Mail

Richard Mahomva

IN my last review instalment of Vice President Retired General Dr Constantine Chiwenga’s recently launched publication “Goose or Gander: The United Nations Security Council and the Ethic of Double Standards”, I discussed how the book is a seminal decolonial import to political science thought.

Using Zimbabwe as a main unit of analysis — and considering that the author is a distinguished politician, with sanguine peace and security craft competence credentials grounded in the African anti-colonial experience, I underscored that the publication offers practitioner-based prescriptions to the role of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).

Last week’s article formed the merit of my validation of Dr Chiwenga’s submission as a rigorous analytical catapulting standpoint to Africanise political science — and its sub-themes of political theory, governance, multilateral egalitarianism, international peace and security. To this end, I insist that the book is a relevant political science text which finds undoubted lodgement in the top shelf archive of any erudite reader of politics.

This week, the specific point of my intervention is on the book’s epistemic banditry route as the writer invades the status quo of Western hegemonic logic. In challenging the moral credibility of the UNSC, the writer is interrogating the integrity of the United Nations (UN) and its purported role of prefecting peace, good governance, and delivery of human rights and advancing other key aspects of global-development. In terms of interrogating conservative global diplomacy, the publication lampoons the hypocrisy of international diplomatic decorum and protocol discourses.

In Bismarkean terms, the writer has reasserted that ‘‘. . . the problems of the day shall not be resolved through speeches and resolutions. Instead, the book spells out the crisis of pretentious courtesy which has legitimised the perennial oppression of the Global-South. Through its breaking the silence approach, “Goose or Gander: The United Nations Security Council and the Ethic of Double Standards” sustains the polemic global subaltern/global periphery/third-world call for equality.

Instead of subscribing to the normative pro-western globalist rhetoric, Dr Chiwenga is unapologetically unrelenting in exposing the pitfall of the structural imbalance of the UNSC.

Such an authorial stance cannot be entirely dismissed as reactionary. Instead, such a radical inclination is imposed on the African philosopher by our continent’s past — as well as the recurrence of the colonial past in our supposed conditions of independence. In support of this view, Mafeje (2011: 31–32) states that:

“. . . we would not talk of freedom, if there was no prior condition in which this was denied; we would not be anti-racism if we had not been its victims; we would not proclaim Africanity, if it had not been denied or degraded; and we would not insist on Afrocentrism, if it had not been for Eurocentric negations . . . Of necessity, under the determinate global conditions, an African renaissance must entail a rebellion — a conscious rejection of past transgressions, a determined negation of negations.”

When juxtaposed with Prof Mafeje’s submission, Dr Chiwenga is right to submit that Anglo-American supremacy constructs a hierarchy of superior and inferior ecologies of being and power.

Inversely, international diplomacy through institutions such as the UNSC and International Finance Institutions (IFIs) sustain this crisis. Inevitably, the paradigm of development will remain divided.

At the same time, conflict derived from such asymmetrical marginalities will persist. It is through this reality emphasised in Dr Chiwenga’s offering that we need to rethink the basis of international diplomacy and situate its credence in the broad-based mandate of rehumanising power. In as much as colonialism was never about humanising and civilising Africa, its neo-colonial continuum must not be exonerated of the vice of dehumanising Africa’s political economy. This is further reiterated by Mpofu (2020: 107):

“Colonial forces have not given up their manipulation of our ethnic diversity to keep Africans at war. The Global North is guilty of sponsoring the infrastructure of violence in Africa while equally playing the Big Brother role in cosmetic conflict mediation. This has seen calls for transitional justice for African conflicts being lobbied for in Western capitals. On the ground, NGOs are deployed as agents of defining post-conflict transitional terms. Oftentimes, such interventions are usually premised on underhand meddling of Western interests in African politics.”

The absent African being in the global matrix of power has often taken the simplistic stigma of a people without their own philosophy, writing, memory, development and today we are epistemologically postured as a people without democracy, good governance and human rights.

With this constant erasure of our existence in many aspects, it becomes critical for our academics to break the normalcy of this marginality. As such, the writing by Vice President Chiwenga is instructive of Africa to reassert her existence beyond the linear extermination of her intellectual and ontological base.

With precision of revolutionary thought, “Goose or Gander: The United Nations Security Council and the Ethic of Double Standards” tackles head-on the global designs of power informing the reproduction of racism through subtle and illegitimate institutional technologies of imperialist hegemony.

As a result, this writing challenges the hypocritical moral fundamentalism of this false equality masquerade by the so-called international institutions.

While it is easy to diagnose realism and pursuit of selfish national interest in discussing global power inequalities, the African thinker must be constantly cognisant of the fact that colonialism has reproduced itself through mass-scale institutional frameworks.

As a microcosm of the uneven global power, the post-colonial state is a site of the vestiges of the grotesque legacy of colonialism.

Beyond the zone of the border, multilateral institutions are transplant hubs of neo-imperialism. Therefore, the role of imperialist actors in global institutions should be a reminder of the continued subtle agendas of colonialism.

Global colonialism which we are experiencing today can be noted through international advocacies which promote the control and manipulation of non-Western people, their ideas and aspirations. The same pro-West development supremacy backings have advanced the continued perpetuation of the docility of our intellectual rigour to Western domination.

However, it brings so much pleasure to have a text such as this one by Vice President Chiwenga as it unmasks the folly of Western domination in the sphere of global power.

As the post-colony breaks away from the colonial centre there must be a deliberate turnaround in foreign policy-making decorum of the post-colonial state. One of the most decisive routes to pursuing this agenda must be seen in the way African countries disentangle Western supremacy in all its manifest terms.

On that note, Vice President Chiwenga’s bold attack on global power imbalance facilitates the need to rationalise the importance of realigning discourse of democracy, human rights and international security issues with African interests. This is part of an important cause to exterminate Africa’s socio-political, economic and ideological dependence on the imperialist Western powers.

This is important in establishing principles which will stimulate equality within the international system. This way, global diplomacy will be premised on authentic, mutual and fraternal interaction as pitched through Vice President Chiwenga’s profound research.

Through his academic input, VP Chiwenga encourages a global frank talk among academics and policy-makers that not only the UNSC needs reform, but every other multilateral organisation founded to guide global moral benchmarks of governance should reform.

Meanwhile, pursuant to Emperor Haile Selassie’s call for Africa to consolidate her independence, Dr Chiwenga is reminding Africa that the failure to organise is an ingredient to agonise.

 

Richard Runyararo Mahomva (BSc-MSU, MSc-AU, MSc-UZ) is a Political-Scientist with an avid interest in political theory, liberation memory and architecture of governance in Africa. He is also a creative literature aficionado. Feedback: [email protected]

 

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