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9 - Divided World

Encountering Frantz Fanon in Kabul

from Part II - Historical Sociology and the Imperial Fundaments of International Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2023

Klaus Schlichte
Affiliation:
Universität Bremen
Stephan Stetter
Affiliation:
Universität der Bundeswehr München
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Summary

In his seminal work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon develops a micro-sociology of colonial society. He characterizes the latter as a world divided in two, one for the colonizers and one for the colonized. In many former colonies such enforced racial or ethnic segregation has become a thing of the past. Yet, the socio-spatial arrangements described by Fanon re-emerge in contemporary zones of conflict, where they are recreated as security measures intended to separate the protagonists of international peace and development from the threats posed by contentious local populations. Based on ethnographic field research in Kabul in 2015, this contribution analytically pursues these structural resemblances. The aim, however, is not to make a (cheap) argument about the neo-colonial character of global humanitarianism, but to investigate the significance of this particular presence of the past for a sociology of world society.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Historicity of International Politics
Imperialism and the Presence of the Past
, pp. 191 - 207
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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