Rahul Rao. Third World Protest: Between Home and the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. xii + 275 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-956037-0.
Reviewed by Robert M. Press (Associate Professor of Political Science, International Development and International Affairs at the University of Southern Mississippi)
Published on H-Human-Rights (April, 2011)
Commissioned by Rebecca K. Root (Ramapo College of New Jersey)
Political Protests in the Developing World: The Enemy Within and Without
More than a look at some human rights protest movements in the developing world, this book plunges the reader into a world of “tension” between two views of who the enemy of the poor and mistreated is: (1) the state where the protestors live, or (2) the international community whose free trade and other economic and even humanitarian policies can sometimes do more harm than good.
Throughout the book, author Rahul Rao builds his case that neither of these views fully captures reality: the reality, he argues, is a “messy political compromise” (p. 201). The compromise is--or should be--an acceptance (by scholars and protestors) that the poor, those whose human rights are subject to abuse, may be victims not just of their own state but of the international community.
Other themes developed in the book include dependency of poor nations on richer ones; the concepts of cosmopolitanism and nationalism; human rights campaign strategies; and international relations (IR) theories. He attempts to bridge IR and comparative theories by paying “a great deal more attention to state-society relations than most variants of IR theory” (p. 31).
While these themes are not new, Rao’s contribution to our knowledge of political protest is to expose by compelling case studies from Mexico and India, and by theoretical argument, the overlapping and sometimes contradictory influences of both the state and the international community on the rights of the poor in developing nations. It is also a quiet bid to focus more attention on what happens in the developing world that might provide or shape theory, rather than simply trying to apply Western-based theories to the developing world (p. 31).
This is not a detailed study of particular social movements; their treatment is relatively brief. Nor is it a long treatise on the definition of human rights or the effectiveness of international mechanisms to enforce rights. Rao is clear about what he offers, describing his book as “centrally a work of normative political theory” (p. 31).
But the patient non-specialist can also find something of worth here. For example, he makes a brief (20 pages) visit to several writers who deal with the themes of the book in their own way, including James Joyce, Edward Said, Frantz Fannon, and Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. Rao suggests that writers, especially in fiction, are freer to point to how things might be than are political scientists, for example.
And this work is also a reminder that life really is a kind of messy confluence of competing and contradictory forces. For scholars of social movements and human rights, the book highlights how these competing forces influence political protest campaigns.
Rao concludes the book with reference to historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin, one of my favorite writers to whom I also turn to remind me that the world is not nearly as neatly divided into categories as we political scientists (among others) would like. Rao quotes Berlin’s observation that “the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other” (p. 201).
If there is a general weakness in the work it lies not in the arguments and cases themselves but rather in the way that they are presented. While at times the writing sparkles with clarity, at other times it is heavy. But let the reader decide. Here is an example of both styles used in making one of his key points about who is the enemy of the poor in their struggle for greater human rights:
“One strand of the critique explores the ‘sensibility’ of hegemonic discourses of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism--the silences, elisions, and inarticulate assumptions particularly in the form of the spatial imaginaries of threat that underpin these different world views. ”
He continues more clearly: “The major threats to human rights in the Third World are often assumed to be domestic and to emanate from the Third World state” (p. 6). And he adds that from the nationalist or communitarian viewpoint, however, the international community can be seen as “a predatory neo-imperialist realm against which the domestic must defend itself” (p. 7).
This is a solid scholarly work. But it is not designed for a quick read or a newcomer to these issues. Nor is it designed for someone looking for clear distinctions between the power of the state and the power of the international community. He describes the power of both to help and hurt at times (sometimes the same time) the poor and their rights in developing countries.
I recall that when I was doing my doctoral work, my professors sometimes said the work of the true scholar is to dig into things and find both supporting and contradictory evidence or arguments and only then make a conclusion as to which side seems to be the most compelling. But what often happens in scholarly investigation is a careful marshalling of evidence on one side of an argument and a much less vigorous exploration of opposing arguments.
Some scholars suggest this is fine, that the social sciences at least are like a giant debating experience: a position is staked out with supporting evidence only to be challenged by another with evidence on the other side.
Rao takes exception to this approach. Yet it is up to the reader to decide whether his argument for the “tension” between various concepts and influences is something many people already acknowledge or presented with the same kind of assurance and confidence that he criticizes in other scholars.
For example, Rao confidently asserts: “My conviction that this book describes a set of normative dilemmas that are widely experienced by Third World social movements has led me to construct an argument in Part I at a level of generality comparable to, say, Rawls’ the Law of Peoples” (p. 31). That is bold. Then he immediately adds: “I am also concerned by the occasional failure of normative theorists to appreciate the complexity of many empirical debates and the instability of empirical ‘facts’ on which their normative premises are often contingent.”
Part 1 of the book is his critical exploration (“The Dark Sides”) of two concepts regarding “boundaries. The first is “cosmopolitanism, which considers individuals to be the ultimate units of moral and political concern and moreover regards all individuals as being of equal moral worth in the eyes of all others” (p. 5). The second concerns “communitarians, who see community as a significant source of value in moral and political life ... [and] boundaries [as] morally significant in themselves because life as we know it would be inconceivable without communal affiliations” (p. 6).
Part 2 contains his case studies and excerpts from several writers. The cases, all from Mexico and India, do not pretend to be representative of social movements but are used as examples to support his arguments from part I. He notes that the Zapatista movement in the state of Chiapas, in southern Mexico, was making little headway with economic complaints against the state. Then it managed to attract global support of activists and others when its members framed their struggle as one of the poor against evil international forces such as the World Bank and so-called neoliberal, free trade policies that were undercutting local farmers. Thus the state was at first seen as the enemy; then it was seen as necessary to protect the people from harmful outside influences. The Karnataka State Farmers’ Association in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, is shown protesting against the state for higher prices for their produce and in favor of a stronger state that can block the “dumping of foreign agricultural produce” (p. 163).
Beyond the examples in this book are others of social movements appealing to international audiences for help. Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian academic who became the voice of the Ogoni people’s struggle in the oil-producing Delta region for a better life, helped turn that movement into a global activism cause by reframing it as an environmental battle against big, polluting oil companies.
In a chapter on the complexities of the gay rights movement, Rao notes a “quest for self-determination has entailed a struggle against both homophobia within their communities as well as salvation by international or white LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) allies. In part what these activists have been trying to say to their purported rescuers is that they are not just gay, but other things as well--Palestinian, Arab, Muslim [for example] and that gay liberation that does not respect those other identities is not liberation at all” (p. 192)
In conclusion, this is a challenging book. It starts with what most of us thought we already knew--that life is complex, that there are cross-currents of ideas and forces. But it leaves one more convinced than ever that this complexity needs to be acknowledged, not just for scholarly reasons, but for gently reminding us of the folly of intellectual certainty and of stubborn, dogmatic positions and explanations in life.
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Citation:
Robert M. Press. Review of Rao, Rahul, Third World Protest: Between Home and the World.
H-Human-Rights, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32271
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