‘I am a novelis, writer, doctor, a psychiatrist and president of Arab Women's Solidarity association. I live in Egypt’ – she describes herself. It does not do Dr Nawal El Saadawi justice, for she is much more. The ultimate humanist, she looks beyond the injuries specific to her own gender. So, she is a harsh critic of both female and male circumcision, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, the Taliban's treatment of women in Afghanistan or the ‘allied’ Anglo-American onslaught on Iraq. And of course, she continues to challenge her own government and clergy of the Islamic society that she belongs to. She has been imprisoned, exiled, censored and her books banned. She was director of Health and Education in Cairo, but was dismissed in 1972 for her political writing and activities. In 1981, she was imprisoned by Anwar Sadat for writing against the government's policies and the growing religious fundamentalism in Egypt. A fatwa hangs over her head even now, but she continues to write and speak out against injustice, wherever she senses it. Many of her books are taught at prestigious western universities where she often lectures.

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the recent dispute between Argentina and Uruguay over the installation of two pulp mills near the Uruguayan city of Fray Bentos, on the bank of the Uruguay River (a resource shared by the two countries). At present, only one of the pulp mills (involving investment by the Finnish firm Oy Metsä-Botnia Ab) is under construction at the originally planned location, since the other project (involving the Spanish company ENCE) has been relocated to another Uruguayan region. The Argentinean government claims that the Fray Bentos pulp mill will have severe environmental consequences, in particular for the nearby Argentinean city of Gualeguaychú, while the Uruguayan government argues that it will have no noticeable environmental effects.

This case has garnered increasing regional and international attention, as the dialogues, technical analyses, and legal disputes of the past two years have failed to arrive at a solution to the bilateral crisis.

In fact, the conflict has been intensifying over time. Bilateral relations have been deteriorating even within the framework of MERCOSUR, the regional trade agreement into which Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay entered (with Bolivia and Chile as associate members) in 1991.

In an attempt to move the analysis beyond the details of the conflict and the opposing views of the two countries, this chapter adopts a regional perspective.

It's often overlooked that the revolution in film taste promulgated in the '50s and '60s by Cahiers du Cinéma (and, to a lesser extent, by Positif) was at least as much a matter of interviews as it was a matter of reviews and essays. Admittedly, the most consequential broadside by the most prominent Cahiers critic-turned-filmmaker was François Truffaut's, “Une Certaine Tendance du cinéma français” (“A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema”), which first appeared in the 31st issue (January 1954). But if that opening salvo established an important polemical position, it must be conceded that Truffaut's clinching victory came a dozen years later with Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock (1966), his book-length interview with his avowed master, published in English the following year with the simpler title Hitchcock.

“Une Certain Tendance” was at most a warning shot–a contentious article that created waves in the Parisian film world, but still a local event, appearing in an oddball monthly with a thenmodest circulation. Hitchcock, on the other hand, marked an international paradigmatic shift from the position that commercial cinema was basically a form of light entertainment to the more controversial notion that Alfred Hitchcock, the most recognizable director of light entertainment in Hollywood, was also one of the medium's most serious, accomplished, and even experimental and thoughtful artists.

Truffaut set out to prove this premise by engaging Hitchcock himself in the discussion–an undertaking requiring the services of an expert translator, Helen G. Scott, because neither speaker was fluent in the other's language.

I used to go to a slow-open group about once a week. The number of group members varied. I realised how important the others were one Sunday afternoon when I was the first one there, and for a while I stood and waited and watched the smooth undisturbed water, so clear that I could see through it and imagine that I was about to dive into a huge blue room. For a moment it was as if the very emptiness and silence had made the water disappear, as if only the activity of other people could make it visible and real enough for me to be able to drop into it and find my way across to the other side. On quiet days, the one or two other people who are there engaged in strange disconnected elements of activity, make stark echoes against the glass roof, but the splashing, which makes the water real, still serves to accentuate the bareness of the place. Then we studiously avoid each other and deliberately display the way we swim as being a solitary enclosed activity that needs let no one else into our space. It is only when the numbers get up to about nine or ten that the swimming pool really turns into a wet group.

This wet group could be a small group, sometimes turning into what might be termed a ‘median’ group (that is, what group analysts call a medium-sized group) – but usually no more than this for me when I have my contact lenses in.

The history of human civilizations is also the history of human displacements. Civilizations are both inclusive and exclusive. They foster a sense of unity among different social/cultural groups in given times and places; create loose yet culturally homogenizing identities, and, by the same token, alienate others, who could not be fit in the schemes of such homogeneity; identify them as ‘aliens’ and even ‘enemies’; and, in may instances, purge them from the so-called geopolitical territories of given civilizations, giving birth to ancient Greek words like ‘exodus’ and ‘diaspora’.

There have been displaced populations for millennia. We are told in the Exodus how the persecuted and enslaved Israelites fled Egypt. In the sixth century, persecuted Muslims fled Mecca for Medina in the Hijra and the fifteenth century saw the mass expulsion of Moors and Jews during the Spanish Inquisition.

However, in the contemporary world, World War II and its aftermath was the watershed event in the history of the refugee problem. The tragedy of forced exile still exists and is growing throughout the world, so the last century has in fact been described as the ‘century of refugees’. Many of them, like the Palestinians living in numerous camps, have endured this traumatic experience for years or even generations, without ever having known any other type of life. According to an estimate, there were about 22 million refugees in the world in 2001.

Introduction

A large number of elections are held each year with the specific purpose of promoting peace. However, there is an increasing appreciation of the obstacles involved in electoral processes in war-torn societies. Elections are often postponed for security reasons. When elections are held, they are often fraudulent, and marred by violence and boycotts. Former warring parties frequently play a key role in war-shattered societies and the very issues that caused the armed conflict are often reflected in the electoral contestation. An increasing body of literature on war-torn societies has concluded that elections can even increase the risk of violent conflict. The parliamentary elections in Macedonia and Sierra Leone in 2002 and in Burundi in 2005 served the purpose of sealing the respective peace agreement and established a new order of governance. However, several other elections held after a peace agreement, such as the ones held in Angola 1992, Cambodia 1993 and the Congo 2002, were followed by armed conflicts. These cases raise a pertinent question about post-accord elections. Why do some war-torn countries manage to hold elections without subsequent armed conflict, whereas elections in other countries are followed by such conflicts?

The study is motivated by three reasons. First, there is a policy need for improved knowledge on the role of elections in building peace. Election is not only a key component of democratization efforts, but has also become part of the peacebuilding agenda.

Can more psychology help us to understand something more of the 9/11 terrorist ‘attack on democracy’? Or is psychology already too much around us, leading us in the wrong direction as we try to make sense of these ‘strange times’? Psychology generally invites us to think about what people are thinking and why they do what they do, people as torn from social context; but psychological ways of thinking are also in the language we use when we articulate different ways of accounting for what is going on in the world. Some psychological theories are more tempting than others. A case in point is psychoanalysis, even when, and perhaps especially when, it seems to account for group psychology at times of war.

The search for a personal response to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks is one of the easiest things to do in this culture, easier even than the search for the one person responsible; but both kinds of search are driven by an underlying assumption that the most important causes and effects of such an event are to be found deep inside individuals. And some kind of psychology is always already at hand here to help us target what we feel and open it up for others to see. More difficult is an understanding of the material conditions which structure that search and make it seem as if the individual is source and destination of what has been going on since 11 September.

RW: What is now the main priority of your movement – sending back the refugees first or stepping up the movement for democracy in Bhutan?

Gazmere: Clearly the priority for us now is to send back the refugees rather than wait for changes to take place in Bhutan. This is an issue, which divides the ‘pro-repatriation forces’ and the ‘pro-democracy forces’ in our movement today. There are those amongst us who argue that unless the problem that led to the creation of the refugee crisis is taken care of, it is no use sending back the refugees. But, I would like to see the repatriation of the refugees first rather than wait endlessly for democratic changes to take place – the repatriation of the Bhutanese refugees should not be entangled with the movement for democracy, which may take years to materialize.

Nowhere is the biomoral character of Bengali medical discourses and their shaping within a cosmopolitan medical market more clearly marked out than in the texts on what has come to be called the dhat syndrome in psychiatric literature. Most available histories of this affliction, however, have been framed by the debate amongst psychiatrists over whether it can be called a ‘Culture Bound Syndrome’ (hereafter CBS) or not. These histories, therefore, follow contemporary medical practice in assuming dhat to be a single, unified, pathological reality, be it an independent category or part of some larger denomination. This means that the phenomenon is thought to have a fixed set of symptoms located in the human physiology, and a clearly defined vocabulary to distinguish these.

We will argue, however, that the Bengali physicians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had not conceptualized it as a unitary pathological reality. We will argue that they had conceptualized it as a shifting cluster of ideas. The specific form the cluster took and the vocabulary that was deployed to describe it could often vary. What were described as symptoms in one text could be described as a related illness in another. Moreover, words and categories used could change—slightly or more drastically. New categories could be added or old ones discarded. Following Deleuze and Guattari thus, we suggest that the reality of the dhat complaints in these texts should be conceptualized as a rhizoid reality.

India is generally considered as a generous host to the refugees compared to her neighbouring states. But, there is hardly any place for complacence. In recent years, government policies have become more stringent and discouraging. This is evident in the case of Sri Lankan Tamils (particularly after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi) and also in the case of Bhutanese refugees of Nepalese origin, who had been detained and then sent back to Nepal. It is time to review the situation of the external shelter seekers in India. But equal, if not more attention must be devoted to the alarmingly increasing number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in India, who have lost their homes on various accounts.

Samir Das and Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury in a very useful article seek to fill this gap, at least conceptually. In ‘Population Displacement in India: A Critical Overview’, they propose a very important ‘Typology of Internal Displacement’, which is immensely helpful, especially for beginners: both academics and activists. The authors classify this phenomenon into five broad categories and hold insightfully: ‘The fact that some communities are perpetually vulnerable to displacement than some others speaks of a deep – yet undeclared divide within the Indian society between the so-called “nationalist mainstream” and the outside’.

Introduction

How can donors and other external actors help to bring about durable peace and systems of governance based on democratic institutions and norms in developing countries that have experienced devastating civil wars? Democratization has become an integral part of contemporary peacemaking efforts to end civil wars. Because issues of failed governance and exclusive and discriminatory politics often are the root causes of internal conflicts, democracy is seen as the cure that may both resolve the issues at stake and simultaneously build the foundation for a peaceful postwar political order. The logic behind the view that democracy is a powerful peacebuilding device after intrastate war is that a democratic society is based on overarching principles, such as the right of all parties to exist and have a say, mutually agreed rules for the contest for power and a renunciation of violence as a method for resolving conflicts. As such, it enlarges the number of possible outcomes beyond losing the war or winning it. In theory, therefore, building peace through democracy is the ultimate route to sustainable peace and development in weak and war-torn states.

However, the empirical record of postwar democratization following the end of the Cold War era has demonstrated that this arranged marriage between peace and democracy has, in many cases, experienced serious difficulties, setbacks or even reversals. We argue that one of the key reasons for this oftentimes troubled relationship is the structural characteristics of the state itself in many parts of the developing world, which makes it difficult for the democratic project to work “as intended“.

INTRODUCTION

Throughout the years since 1983 in which military conflict between the Sri Lankan security forces and the Tamil militant groups has been the order of the day, we have witnessed a never-ending saga of a people forced into nomadic existence fleeing the areas of active conflict in search of a more secure and settled existence. Initial displacement of persons was a result of anti-Tamil campaigns in the southern parts of Sri Lanka in 1958, 1977 and 1978, which forced many Tamils to leave their homes in the Sinhala dominated parts of the country and move to the north and in the plantation areas in the late 1970s. Many of these people from the central highlands of Sri Lanka settled in the Vavuniya and Kilinochchi Districts of the Northern Province. Muslim and Sinhalese people living in Tamil majority areas have also been forced to leave due to threats against them.

[…] The question of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Sri Lanka is one of the main challenges for the humanitarian and human rights communities.

CATEGORIES OF IDPs IN SRI LANKA

The IDPs can at present be categorized under different headings to get a clearer understanding of the problem and the extent of resultant suffering, namely:

• IDPs living in government controlled areas in the North and the East;

• Internally displaced Tamils living in the North and East in territories held by the militants;

• […]

The refugee situation is one of the burning issues in today's world, where refugees make up more than 1 per cent of the whole population.1 Moreover, a great majority – of over 80 per cent – of refugees are women and their dependent children. The world's refugee situation is thus strongly manifested in and lived through the gendered experiences of women refugees. Yet, even in the face of the telling figures there however exists a striking disparity between the reality of the refugee situation and the business-as-usual of the refugee regime – refugee women's experiences are deemed to fundamental otherness. According to UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), ‘(H)istorically, the refugee definition has been interpreted through a framework of male experiences’. […]

Without taking into account refugee women's experiences, it is not possible to understand the refugee situation in a comprehensive and integrated manner. Omitting women's experiences leads to a deficient and incomplete refugee regime and results in inadequate and often even faulty responses to the refugee situation. […]

It is also of importance and interest to elaborate on the argument on a broader plain. It is possible to connect the argument for example to feminist historiography. In this connection, the argument for the importance of moving towards a more complete refugee regime through listening to women's experiences can be strengthened by the notion that ‘a representative history can only be written if the experience and status of one half of humankind is an integral part of the story’.

The following interview took place over a five-hour period at Bresson's (1901–1999) home on Île St Louis in Paris, shortly after L'Argent (Money) shared the 1983 Grand Prize for creative cinema at the Cannes Film Festival. It was conducted in both English and French, all of which I myself later translated. Parts of this interview have previously been published in other places; this is the first appearance, in print, of the entire, uninterrupted conversation between me and M. Bresson.

Yes, that's fine. Why not?

The title came from my desire to give the donkey a Biblical name. So I named him after one of the Three Wise Men. The title itself is the motto of the nobles of Baux, who claimed to be heirs of the Magie Balthazar; their motto was indeed “Au hasard Balthazar.”