‘Sandwich theory’ an excuse for not taking a stand: Indian academic Radha D’Souza

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 23 November 2011, 17:59 GMT]
“Those wanting to remain equidistant from state and the struggles of people. [..] actually end up legitimating the moral authority of the state by giving the state the moral authority to continue with the war on people.”, observes Radha D’Souza in an interview to TamilNet on Sunday. Dr. D’Souza, who is a reader of law at the University of Westminster and a social justice activist from India, argues that such an approach by international agencies that act as ‘peace-brokers’, ‘NGOs’, and local actors, only benefits militarist states in the final analysis. They are the other face of oppression because the other face is necessary to sustain the armed intervention, she says. 

Radha D’Souza

On ethnic questions, D’Souza says: “Vast majority of ethnic conflicts happen in societies with colonial histories. In the formation of European nation-states, they were truly nations and capitalist. In the colonies, that is not how the state structure came in to being. In the colonies, the colonizers just lumped together people in one state structure. The territorial boundaries were often the result of inter-imperialist rivalries between colonising powers – the Dutch, French, English, Portuguese whatever.

“During the anti-colonial struggles people thought that it was possible to retain the state structure to fight the common enemy and things could be worked out together after Independence. Which may have been possible, but not in the context of this overarching imperialist world where imperial economies must depend on arms and defence industry – Eisenhower’s military-industrial-commercial complex – to exist. This is why movements have to question the nature of imperialism today and the way ethnic conflicts are fuelled by the imperial war machine.

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