Fatima Waqi Sajjad (ed.) (2023), Peace as Liberation: Visions and Praxis from Below, Switzerland: Springer.

Farhan Hanif Siddiqi

Consider reading, teaching and learning International Relations not from the conventional lenses that border on Morgenthau, Waltz, Wendt and Mearsheimer but through the decolonial/anti-colonial writings of Fanon, Freire, Mignolo, Rivera, Said and others. What would the major assumptions of the International Relations subject be then? It certainly would not be fetishing on great power politics and strategic competition between power-hungry states but on the more challenging task relative to the omission, erasing and exploitation of the Global South in international politics. In order to accomplish this objective – the present volume edited by Dr. Fatima Waqi Sajjad, Director of the Critical Peace Studies Institute at the University of Management and Technology, Lahore – presents Liberation Psychology as a constitutive trope and remedy in order to position the Global South as victims of not only physical but also epistemic violence of colonial powers.

The edited volume brings together a cohort of excellent emerging and established scholars from the Global South who are critical of Western discourses and offer a refreshingly original perspective on contemporary politics. At its heart are questions of epistemic violence that relegates the indigenous voices of the South to the periphery of knowledge creation and offer a Euro- and West-centric subjectivity lens that is parochial, uninformed, and willfully biased to serve the interests of Western imperial masters. In the Introduction, Fatima Sajjad puts it out brilliantly by raising and answering the question: what does it mean to be fully human under conditions of oppression? She voices her passion and reason eloquently: “For us, being fully human entails being able to see and think clearly under conditions of oppression (conscientization), being able to speak/state out about what we see (problematization), being able to act to transform conditions of oppression (praxis) and being able to visualize peaceful conditions while confronting violence. This book offers the visions and praxis of liberation that help people from below to become more fully human”. (p. 5).

There are three argumentative and analytical sides to the book:

  1. The questioning and critique of existing Western knowledge through attention to notions of Gramscian hegemony, ethnocentrism, and the politics of exclusion in which the Global South stands marginalized
  2. Focusing on the voices of the marginalized as an intellectual-emotional response to their peripheralization.
  3. Building new knowledge of the Global South that situates itself as a site of argumentative and intellectual reasoning not entirely in a binary opposition to the West but as a project that stimulates new thinking in the social sciences.

The writers of this excellent volume are sentient beings expressing anger at their colonised status but using it not to engage in a reactionary tirade against their oppressors but making claims for an inclusive world based on harmony, cooperation and social cohesion. As Napan rightly and wisely argues, “Restoration does not come through revenge. It comes from acknowledgment by those whose ancestors have caused harm and who are still benefiting from it, by honest acceptance and awareness followed by restoration and transformation”(p. 31). There are interesting insights on IR theory beginning from the first debate between the liberals and the realists on how human nature is to be understood. Going beyond the confines of realist theory, which finds human nature as imbibed by the ‘will to dominate’, Sohaib expounding on the poet Muhammad Iqbal stakes the claim that human nature is not fixed but ascribes to it a teleological viewpoint understood for a constructive purpose (p. 50). Sohaib’s understanding of Iqbal seeks to go beyond its nationalism-serving potential imbibed in a religious epistemology, arguing that Iqbal was an advocate of diversity and humanity, whilst holding to his Islamist credentials. In short, his Islamist credentials were not built on a binary view but were laced with a call for humanity and togetherness.

The stories of the dispossessed, marginalized, and colonized are ably captured in two case studies from Jeju Island in South Korea and the peasant revolution against military landlordism in Okara, South Punjab. Merose Hwang captures the tragedy of the Jeju massacre and the present predicament of the Korean peninsula as a site where the Cold War still operates as a strategic and political reality. In a revealing and emotional account of the anti-communist purge on Jeju Island which led to deaths, enforced disappearances, torture, imprisonment and everyday social humiliation, Hwang’s account challenges liberatory discourse surrounding American geopolitics during the Cold War as false. The account of the military landlordism in Okara, expertly narrated by Muhammad Qasim, is a similar tale of post-colonial colonised oppression which sought to rob the indigenous community of their rights to the land. In essence, the tale of oppression in Okara is not merely the peasants’ struggle for material subsistence and gains but most crucially an ontological right to be recognised and dealing with the routine embarrassment and humiliation suffered at the hands of the military personnel. The stories enacted in Okara have similar resonance for Pakistan’s other peripheries in Balochistan, the ex-FATA region and Gilgit Baltistan where conflict resolution entails reaching out to the cries of the people by treating their basic needs to be identified and recognised as ‘human’ – ontological security – before dealing with their socio-economic deprivations – material security.

Delgado provides a searing insight into the omission of the indigenous community and narrative from the Miami-Dade community in the US. At issue is the social engineering of public education to highlight the achievements of the dominant community while omitting minorities as irrelevant and unimportant. The writer laments that, “In our education, there is no mention of colonization, White supremacy, anti-Black racism, anti-indigenous racism, xenophobia, and the deprivations of war. There is no mention of the capitalist interests that are at the root of the social conditions that we live in.” (p. 110) While reading this chapter, one is reminded of Renan’s profound and pioneering insight that “national unity is achieved through brutality” and one should add, omissions. Yunis and Tanksley bring forth an onto-epistemological framework of a Palestinian Critical Race Theory based on a transformational discourse of survivance and battling the erasing of Palestinians as a people and their framing as a radicalized community.

The final section on problematizing hegemonic discourses is perhaps the most interesting of the book, at least for this reviewer, as it provides an alternative decolonial lens to study and analyse the subject of International Relations. The section begins with a perceptive chapter on Bani Sadr, the lost and forgotten hero of the Iranian revolution for whom the revolution was not a project of authoritarian theocracy and the embedding of the concept of Velayat-e-Faqih but a people’s project for freedom.

The last two papers deal with the Eurocentric foundations of the IR discipline and most crucially, its pursuit as such in Pakistani universities and academia. As an IR faculty member engaged with and teaching the IR discipline for many years, the chapters by Ahmad Waheed and Syed Wajeeh Ul Hassan/Fatima Sajjad are an original, inspiring and challenging commentary on how the IR discipline in Pakistan reflects Western academic histories and traditions – fortifying Westphalian nation-state as the starting point of the discipline while failing to take account the brutal colonial legacy. Waheed rightly argues that realism remains the primary theoretical lens for understanding International Relations in Pakistan. This is because they provide the justification for a foreign policy schema dominated by the military and its worldview of strategic competition and conflict with its neighbours, India and Afghanistan, as well as two great power interventions in the region during the Cold War and the War on Terror, in which it was compelled to take sides and intervene. Such a Pakistani International Relations remains inhibited by a poverty of ideas at least at the very top, if not the general mass of academics. This poverty implies that only selective lessons bordering on wars and strategic competition are internalised while those bordering on transcending reality (in the sense that Galtung utilises ‘transcendence’ as transformation) are deemed idealistic, unimplementable, or simply discarded because they do not serve the interests of power holders in the country.

Waheed makes a compelling case of how the global Western criteria for academic excellence have been uncritically adopted by the local Higher Education Commission, whose performance indicators are based on natural science subjects and fails in appreciating the knowledge generation that is part of social science subjects. While Waheed rightly points out that social sciences and International Relations are marked by an intellectual inferiority and also the dominance of political realism, these are also reflective of a lack of work ethic, incompetence and the propensity of local academic to find an easy way out to churn research publications for the sake of job promotions and little to no motivation in pursuing academic rigour and knowledge.

Hassan and Sajjad’s interesting and challenging final chapter projects the primary concern of the IR discipline not as the pursuit of peace but in essence, maintaining the hegemony of Western knowledge. The primary predicament for the authors is to concentrate on the origins of the discipline after the First World War and argue that debates originating from this epistemological foundation minuses the brutal colonial project. The authors thus make the case for a Liberation Psychology which contests this colonialism as the dark side of modernity. In their estimation, the most important project for the modernist premise of the IR discipline was the pursuit and maintenance of interracial dominance and not truly international liberation where all are treated as equal and human. Hassan and Sajjad’s brilliant chapter provides the conceptual and theoretical framework of a Pakistani/Global South International Relations grounded in humanistic, decolonial and liberatory thinking which requires that one continues to challenge conventional orthodoxies in theoretical and policy settings by denaturalizing it and offering pathways for a peaceful, non militarised, future. This book is a brilliant starting point in this direction, broadens our mental horizons and sets one on the path of intellectual discovery. An absolute must read!

Farhan Hanif Siddiqi is an Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations, at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.