Ravi Dev column – The dearth of theory

May 18, 2008 Ravi Dev

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One of the fallouts of the demise of Marxism as the dominant world-view of our political elites has been a dearth of alternative theoretical models to account for the political behaviour of our population. This in turn had led to a situation where politicians have resorted to ad hoc proposals to address what they consider to be the issues of the day.

In the late eighties, a group of us challenged that Marxist class-centred approach – which had survived here out of inertia, more than anything else – by offering a thesis that Baytoram Ramharack had defined as “the Ethnic Security Dilemmas”.

Over the last two decades, there has been an acceptance of the first premise of the proposal – that “Race/Ethnicity, in Guyana, transcends class as the dominant cleavage and suffuses politics as well as most other social interactions.” But the ethnic security dilemmas that flowed from that premise within our political framework elicited several objections that I would like to address once again, as the political temperature appears to be inexorably rising.

The reason, as I have been stressing over the past few weeks, is that since the theory has correctly predicted political behaviour (retrospectively) since the late fifties, an acceptance of its policy recommendations may assist our politicians in moving our politics from the zero-sum mode it has been stuck in since then.

Last year, Mr Dennis Wiggins, a very thoughtful and committed analyst and commentator of Guyanese politics, suggested that “Mr. Dev has adopted in Guyana the application of a term used to describe intra-state ethnic conflict without accepting the tenets and methodology by which such application is applied.” But Mr. Wiggins’s own explication of the theory he refers to should have suggested to him that he was off base in his criticism.

Originally from the early fifties, the concept of the “security dilemma” was deployed in the neo-realist theory of international relations that stressed the anarchic environment in which states operate. In that arena, each state is ultimately responsible for its own protection from other potentially aggressive states, so that it must obtain the wherewithal to defend itself by strengthening its military capability. But in accumulating the means to defend itself, a state can also simultaneously threaten others. In turn the latter beef build up their armaments and inevitably reduce the first state’s security. This creates a dilemma since while states must provide for their security actions to accomplish this situation can actually result in making them less secure.

The modification of this theory of inter-state behaviour to “intra-state ethnic conflict” that Mr. Wiggins refers to, and for which we purportedly did “without accepting the tenets and methodology by which such application is applied”, was done first in 1993 by Posen and then a more nuanced fashion by Kauffman in 1994.

It should have been obvious to Mr. Wiggins that our formulation of the “Ethnic Security Dilemmas” in Guyana could not have possibly used the “framework” of Kauffman (or Posen) when ours (1988, 1990) preceded theirs.

Our formulation arose specifically to address our Guyanese circumstances that we felt was spiralling out of control with the “kick-down-the-door phenomenon. We agree with Mr. Wiggins that Kauffman’s and Posen’s formulations, which addressed post-Soviet scenarios may not be appropriate for our impasse. We have suggested, however, that the original formulation may be more appropriate to analyse the PPP’s behaviour since 1997, since they were forced to operate in an anarchic arena against an opposition that had the wherewithal to challenge it frontally.

Our formulation centred on our majoritorian political system, within a colonial (and post-colonial) state, that structured our political behaviour into dilemmas for both major groups. For Africans, as a group that had literally slaved to establish the foundations and jumped through all the hoops set by the colonial masters – deculturation, education, Christianity, mixing, “proper behaviour” etc. – their dilemma was that if they played by the rules they would be locked out of Executive office in a polity where ethnic voting prevailed.

For Indians, whose claim to legitimacy runs through saving the sugar industry, while the majoritorian rules may help secure them the Executive, their hold on that institution would always be problematical if the Armed Forces were composed almost exclusively of their political opponents – Africans.
The latter thesis has been hotly challenged on the ground that the latter situation is occasioned by “sociological” factors. One set of interlocutors questioned the willingness of Indians to join the Armed forces in a historical fashion that seemed to suggest that Indians were genetically programmed to avoid the Army and Police.

These objections were well ventilated and addressed in the newspapers over the last decade but recently they were rephrased by Mr. Frederick Kissoon thusly: “The Indian Security Dilemma is a sociological phenomenon. Its dissolution does not need political innovations. Briefly, there are private security firms; community policing; applications for membership of the security forces.”
Now for this notion of a “sociological” phenomenon not needing “political innovations” for its dissolution. Well, “class” is also a “sociological” phenomenon – does it also not need “political innovations” for its dissolution?

The fact of the matter is that like class, ethnicity/identity is not only a possible ground of politics; it is also a consequence of politics.

As I outlined in excruciating detail in “State and Societal Violence against Indians in Guyana: The Ethnic Security Dilemmas” the Staffing of the Army and Police by Africans was a conscious policy by the British as part of their divide and rule tactic in dominating greater numbers of “natives”. The same policy was followed in, say, Uganda, where the Nubians rather than the Baganda were preferred for the Armed Forces. Dr. George Danns, in his book, “Domination and Power in Guyana” details the Burnhamite policies that exacerbated the British exclusion of Indians from the Armed Services after 1964.
We cannot treat categories like race and ethnicity as exogenous to the political process – the unprompted consequence of some universal (genetic?) but not easily discernable membership. Instead, we should interrogate the role institutions (as rules), discourses, and policies play in creating the terms of political contestation – as well as the institutions (as organisations) of power. Constructivist theorists of identity/ethnicity formation, for instance, focus on how institutions, in particular, structure incentives and lived experience in ways that make some affiliations seem more natural, useful, or significant than others.

To blame Indians at this time for not joining the Armed Forces is to miss the entire point. Remember the physical requirements and dietary rules over the last century?

But Mr Kissoon goes beyond eliding the role that politics played in peripheralising Indians from the Armed Services. He advises a “private”, rather than public/political initiatives, to rectify the destabilising imbalances. The fact of the matter is that the security of its citizens is a “public good’ and is a fundamental responsibility of the state.

Mr Kissoon, the lecturer, would know that the state itself is famously described as being the sole legitimate repository of force to enforce that security. There is not a modern multiethnic state (and that includes all but a literal handful) that does not accept that the security of the society is enhanced to the extent that the force reflects the composition of the population.
The “profesionalisation” of the coercive arms of the state must include its composition as well as training, equipment, intelligence etc. I would have hoped that the sponsoring of “private/phantom” death squads in Guyana rather than a government sponsored professionalised Armed forces would have convinced Mr. Kissoon that security is too important a public good to be left to the vagaries of private market forces.

To return to the utility of theorising on political behaviour, our formulation suggests that politicians should agitate for an effective input of the representatives of Africans into the executive of this country as well as for affirmative measures to address the security concerns of Indians, which include recomposing the Armed Forces to reflect the population mix of the country.

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