Murders in the Sky and on Ground

Ranabir Samaddar; Director, Peace Studies Programme, South Asia Forum for Human Rights, Kathmandu

Counted, the murders in the sky on 11 September would be probably somewhere near six thousand, enough to make us immune to murders here, sit up and take notice, but nowhere deaths at some places else. But seen on the screen, heard, and read, their effect is apocalyptic. From death in the sky in two strikes, it has transformed into a world phenomenon, which deaths of thousands and millions in the Middle East, Rwanda, and the Balkans in the last decade could not achieve. It could be achieved not by similarity, but by difference between deaths.* Thus, if your deaths are fifty thousand, they are not much; if our deaths are six thousand, they should belong to humanity. If your deaths are on the ground, they are banal; if our deaths are on the sky, they are extra-ordinary. If the killing field was in your country, then it was your country's one thousand years' past and the present that was at fault; if the killing field is in my imaginary space of innocence for 250 years, then our innocence must outshine your culpability, for these deaths have hit the cradle of civilization. If you have demanded your way of life, you are dangerous; if we have demanded our way of life that is because, we have the inalienable right of self-determination. Your response to killings of your kinsfolk should be reconciliation; our response is retribution. Our dream of greatness is historical necessity, yours is fascism. All the rules apply to you not to us. Perhaps this is what baroque death is, a chasm between single deaths and the death universalized, deaths that become universal not by numbers, but by the density of death achievable only by acceleration of its effects.

The attacks from the sky to murder people who were literally unable to run away to the ground were a major atrocity. In scale they may not have reached the level of Clinton's bombing of Sudan destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies, and Sr. Bush's and Jefferson Clinton's blockade of Iraq killing unknown numbers of people, but in intensity, they will be more, with harsh security controls and many possible ramifications for undermining civil liberties, internal freedom, racial tolerance, and the little geopolitical sanguinity still left. This crime is a gift to the baroque art that had almost died, an art whose utility lay in making the significance of death universal, and the denial of whatever was living. In one shot, to be correct two shots, old wickedness has been wiped off the register, which had the record of American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into Lebanese ambulance in 1996, American shells crashing into a village called Qana, Lebanese right-wing militia, paid and uniformed by America's friend Israel, raping, hacking, and butchering their way ahead through refugee camps, the bombing of baby food producing plant in Baghdad, the silent witnessing on one day in the summer of 1995 in Srebrenica in Bosnia when 5000 to 7000 were killed by the Serb militias and the UN watched, while Srebrenica was an internationally "protected area" so declared by the UN itself, the massacre at My Lai, but that is long enough past to forget, and much more.

Deaths bring new possibilities with ending existing geopolitical sanguinities, possibilities in form of funerary baroque. The toys of defence shields may aim at blocking the road of the Chinese to the sources of energy in the Middle East, to encircle Iran and Iraq after the American success in squeezing Syria and Lebanon between the two pro-American regional powers, Israel and Turkey. Furthermore through their influence in Afghanistan the Americans may acquire the ability to enhance their influence over Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan where a considerable amount of gold and patrol were recently uncovered, also influence the internal dynamics in Iran and Iraq, which must come with the change in the political scenario in Afghanistan. Explorations into the geopolitical ramification of the so-called terror-deaths can go far. These geopolitical ramifications suggest new a form of war, as the deaths of 11 September by themselves were of new form, wherefrom these ramifications flow, exactly as the deaths fifty-six years ago on 6 August and 9 August were of new form. In forging an alliance for this new war launched by President Bush against unknown enemies (but partly defined by "our" anti-terrorist bloc against "their" terrorist bloc), all kinds of required concessions to would be allies, may well result in the sacrifice of old sanguinities such as the National Defense System (NDS), the agenda for the enlargement of NATO, and an Atlantic-based power system. Thus, India may be upgraded to the status of strategic ally, a process that has already begun, to strike at the hostile forces in West Asia and Central Asia, Pakistan downgraded to the role of peons and orderlies for strategic intrusions in the region, and a new government may have to be installed in Kabul. But here the uncertainties accelerate. For, setting up a new government in Kabul will require the cooperation, or at least positive neutrality, of Russia and all Afghan neighbours; in return concessions would have to be given elsewhere, positively a new scenario that finally draws the curtain on the Europe-centric cold war, thirteen years after it had ended in 1989. To become finally Asian power with land base with required logistical support-system, the West will have to non-westernize itself, thus ending the Calvinistic campaign of democracy in Muslim-majority countries, allow countries like Iran, Uzbekistan, Kazhakstan, and Russia have "constructive non-alignment" in response to American presence in the region, resume trade with Iran (through the lifting of sanctions imposed by the Iran-Libya Sanction Act), and strategically confront China from a direction completely un-anticipated by the Chinese at least formally till now. In this new war, China too to begin with, has to remain neutral, as indeed it has been while unequivocally condemning the terrorist act, and probably expecting in vain that the West would co-operate in its stand against Uyghur, Tibetan, and Taiwanese separatisms. The Great Game, when it began, began with deaths; the new great game is on, and who could doubt that the baroque deaths were an affirmation of old power, solemn and terrific, by adding something new to it?

All the more therefore the question, what is terrorist killing and terrorist death? Not killings of terrorists not even killings by terrorists, but killings that arouse terror - a terror-death, a death that terrorizes, a terror that produces death, a death that will not be considered normal, banal, but exceptional and so different from the living as to produce terror. Therefore, part of the population in various parts of the world unable to fathom the deaths in the sky will not be terrorized at the deaths up there in the buildings touching the sky, but terrorized at the prospects of deaths that those deaths in the sky will have brought upon them. Terrors of different kinds, and this difference that the baroque cannot erase - in fact the more universal the death the more are the differences. Americans were not terrorized at the deaths in Rwanda, Tamils were not terrorized at the killings in Punjab and Bengal; death is therefore universal while terror is differential. We know that for the last half-century killings have gone on with indifference of many not affected immediately, but we also know that deaths have become now matter of concern, they produce terror, death has become a being, an act that leaps into universality. Torture of the dissenting sects in medieval times, regular throttling of infants and children to death by the Ottoman emperors, stoning of liberals to death in the rugged squares of a city, or shooting of communists by firing squads in soccer stadium - in all these death is protocol. The protocol is of establishing what should be alive, compared to the great anonymous slaughters in wars. The latter scarcely rank as events; they are not symbolic (in contrast to the deaths in the temples of financial and military power), though acknowledged as facts. They are slave massacres, unknown, collective, plebian. But paradoxically in making death a baroque act, the singularity is destroyed. Massive deaths become banal, in time what the anonymous deaths have been.

Death is an occasion always for states to come to sense, for the return of the State. Revolution needs deaths, much more than that a statist counter-revolution needs death as the necessary protocol. The State, in order to make a come back, requires a murderous rite. The victim holds office, he is innocent, he is clean, he had no complicity with murders, he typifies the daily life of rule - he was not exceptional. His death is therefore dying at the hands of a murderer, the duration of an act, the slaughter of innocence, the catastrophe of silence, a death that requires baroque funeral - in form of wholesale incarceration of family and clan members to death, of the wife led to the pyre, of rounding up of members of a locality to the execution ground, or in form of a grand memorial, or forming a State or States. The effects outshine the occasion, or the effects outshining the cause are the occasion, the monumental Taj in building and destroying in honour of death. We must not eat for some days, observe certain purifying rites, force others into penance, silence, and agony, kill a few or thousands to avenge, build a mausoleum - a kind of denial of death by absorbing immediately this death into monuments of other acts that include the dying of others, an avenging angel that will make killing (of others) look like a suicide (of selves). In this way, the State returns with all controls. It returned repeatedly in Mughal India, in Ottoman Turkey, in Agrippina's Rome, in Socrates' Athens, in Sheikh Mujibur Rehman's Bangladesh, or after the killing of Prince Ferdinand in Europe when thousands and thousands followed the Austrian Prince and the cause of his nemesis, Gavrilo Princip the Serb freedom-dreamer, into dying in the second decade of the last century. In revolution, more in restoration, power needs the protocol of dying. Death by terrorist or a terrorist death is like life, for it brings so many back to life. Consider for example the following: the State that comes alive after some deaths (in Indira Gandhi's case in India or Premadasa's case in Sri Lanka, after one single death), victim who becomes the decor of life (Gandhi, Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr.), unconcerned who become the anxious victims-to-be (Central Asia in 1990s), and the counselors who find their vocation earlier snatched away from them by the banality of life and death restored to them now (West Europeans to the Balkans). The change in the form of murderous tool does not matter. Hand (throttling), rope (tying), knife (assassinating), rifle (shooting), bombing (en masse destroying), ramming aircraft (piercing), atom bomb dropping (finishing everything in fire and smoke), chemical weapon (poisoning), death by injection (pleasant death), and guided missiles (revolutionary killing, the RMA) - all these are incidental. Essential is death achievable through killing and achievable of terror. The fundamental principle is that, this death was not certain, terror did it; it may visit me. Even after the most furious act of omission or commission, the most severe ruler like the Emperor Aurangjeb would have pardoned me, but this death may visit me any time. Therefore the ghost must be laid to rest, rubble must be turned into ashes, the corpse must be taken out of grave and given new burial - again the mode is purely instrumental, the murderous function of a killing is the protocol of the power that is living.

Death begins however with attack on life, though its function is to make at least some lives reaffirm their souls. Thus the deaths in the sky were an attack on " way of life", reinforcing old polarities, old struggles between "democracy" and "totalitarianism", "modernism" versus "backwardness", "pluralism" versus the "imposition of one opinion", and "rationality versus fundamentalism", in other words between "life" and "death". Born again Christian fundamentalists, supported by the most reactionary and religious coalition, which includes people such as the infamous Pat Robinson, avenge deaths by waging the war of modernity and rationality against fundamentalism. It has been always so, everywhere, wherever modernity had to be rescued from its own fate.

To die is then to perceive life, whence the question - how did the death come, how did the death become so liquid, how did terror become real leaping as it were to life from fantasy, what were the gods and bystanders doing when the killer was taking position - in other words does death have a structure, death that is supposed to do away with all structures? In other words, what do we mean when the philosopher says that terror-death is not "bookkeeping, but vegetation", reproduced but not repeated, death in My Lai is and is not death in the Manhattan, death on the ground is and is not the death in the sky?

Michael Ignatieff in Blood and Belonging speaks of the almost semi-erotic gun culture of the checkpoints and contrasts it with the responsibility of guns in yester-times when violence reminded of the need to be responsible. You had the means of violence, so you had to responsible for you could not use them indiscriminately. But that responsibility was gone with each period of restoration when the victorious power used violence indiscriminately, to show that the event of restoration was final. Thus the defeat of every anti-colonial uprising was followed by bloodbath. The Mutiny of 1857 in India, the Boxer uprising in China, or the uprisings in Vietnam had been drowned in the blood of genocide. Similarly, the victorious army after the Paris Commune in 1871, the state forces, hoodlums, and the gangsters in Indonesia in 1965-70, the fascists in Chile in 1974-75, and Lebanese rightist forces and the Israeli army in Beirut in 1983 - all pursued a policy of deliberate terror through indiscriminate use of violence. Then came chemical warfare, gas warfare, biological warfare, and above all production of more nuclear bombs that had been dropped once on the civilians of the two defenceless cities; all these showed how spread of barbarity accompanied waves of globalisation. Hitler's methods, initially considered as exceptional, quickly gained acceptance wide across the globe - from French methods in Algeria, British methods in Malay, US methods in Vietnam, and Serbian methods in the Balkans to Pakistani methods in East Pakistan, and the games of the warlords in sub-Saharan Africa. Several countries not mentioned here have been no better. The issue is why and how are globalisation and the spread of methods of genocide organically connected? It is here, it would be well to remember, local and the global are truly linked in a "world history", or to be more precise, linked in a world of what Sankaran Krishna terms as "mimetic histories".

Spread of technology and the scientific community, diffusion of methods of coercion and of counter-insurgency, privatisation and eventual breakdown of the state, and the sinister air of virtual reality, all have played their role in universalising terror, mass murder, and in the manufacture of global silence over such genocides accompanied by selective protests. Clearly we are witnessing the eclipse of a sense of responsibility, a decrease of the area of shame, and a rise of values that are good on pride and not on shame. The demise of ideology, we often forget, brings in the demise of the moral community also, howsoever the presence of such moral community might have conveyed at some time a sense of freedom-less-ness. In this era of virtual reality characterized by a lack of territorial constraints and mass public pressure, concentration of attack has ushered in revolution in "military affairs" - sophisticated electronic and psychological warfare as shown in Kosovo - which has not been lived up to its claims of targeted annihilation, but certainly successful to a significant extent in manufacturing global silence. They have ushered in revolution in terror-methods also as evinced in the attacks on the Manhattan. The "new wars" that we witness are products of globalisation, which they in turn advance. We can advance three theses here.

First, the civil wars of mutual claims of recognition and determination have done away with every sense of responsibility, restoration of trust, and a just reconciliation of claims. Precisely because old territorial forms of political living (territorial units such as a state, county, province, autonomous republics in a multi-national state, nation-state) are considered inadequate or irrelevant by the political classes in many parts of the world, that the grab is up for new forms of territory as a matter of life and death struggle in the politics of recognition and determination. In this sense, new wars do not signify banal geopolitics.

Second, the new wars on the basis of the RMA cannot be fought without a political consensus (G 7, new north-new south, Christian, western, Atlantic), and the RMA thus provokes globalisation of confrontationist politics. It may not be preposterous to argue therefore that neutrality today is more difficult than it was in the days of cold war/long peace.

Third, a discriminatory history of responsibility encourages the global powers to wage new wars. That, responsibility too has a discriminatory history should not surprise us. Daniel Warner reminds us that when Max Weber was making the well-known distinction between an ethic of responsibility and an ethic of ultimate ends, using the figure of Martin Luther as the ultimate responsible man (in other words responsible to his own self ultimately), he was advocating irresponsibility towards others, who constituted their existence outside the universe (his person, his group, his state, or his followers) of the "mature man" to whom responsibility remained limited to his universe only. Understanding why we want to know who is responsible for which deaths, and the limits of that responsibility may be as important as, if not more important than, the process of determining responsibility that is so developed in international law...It is only when we appreciate the politics of identity and its closure, which animate our desire to know, that we can begin to glimpse new possibilities of responsibility/community outside of or beyond the limitations of that desire." In this sense, we can say that even the history of responsibility and reconciliation reaches the post-colonial subjects in a determined form. As Mark Selden wrote in the report "On Asian Wars, Reparations, Reconciliation", Germany unconditionally apologized for war crimes, the US did not own responsibility for war crimes in Vietnam, but went on forcing responsibility on other states for offences; none of the Latin American states has accepted responsibility for mass murders in seventies and eighties of the last century, and Japan has consistently refused to own blanket responsibility for rape and enslavement of nearly two hundred thousand women ("comfort women"), particularly after the Nanjing massacre. This history of responsibility symbolized by a skewed war crimes tribunal at The Hague does not question the flagrant discrepancy, and is shown to be what it is by parallel trials such as the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery that sat in Tokyo on 8-12 December 2000, or the trials by the citizens for deaths of thousands of people in India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan and elsewhere in state-backed communal riots and frenzy of the security forces. The discriminate nature of legal and moral justification for "international" war crimes tribunals, set up by resolutions of the UN Security Council to punish crimes in only two areas in the world so far - the former Yugoslavia (for which a tribunal was set up in 1993) and Rwanda (1994) is evident. The most shocking example of the tribunals' impotence has been the state of Israel, which has continued to behave in the most flagrant contempt not only of the UN, seizing tracts of territory and exploiting and enslaving the inhabiting people, but also of the most basic laws and conventions covered by the statute of the international war crimes tribunals and written into international law by Security Council resolutions such as power to prosecute persons "committing or ordering to be committed grave breaches of the Geneva conventions" including willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. If there is any doubt about this, one has to consider only Article 3 of the Tribunals' statute that which refers to the "wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages or devastation not justified by military necessity", or Article 5 that empowers the Tribunal to prosecute persons responsible for crimes against humanity, including murder, if it is "committed in armed conflict and directed against any civilian population". Or, remember in this context of Ariel Sharon's gruesome history - his role in the slaughter of over 60 Palestinians in the village of Qibya in 1953, documented by Israeli historian Benny Morris; or his responsibility as Israeli defence minister for the butchery of at least 2,000 people in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 (the climax of Sharon's invasion of Lebanon, denounced as illegal by the UN and even by Margaret Thatcher). Indeed, the daily breach by Israeli troops of the tribunals' own statute should pose a challenge to the tribunals' judges, prosecutors and administrators. The fact therefore is that, the emerging official discourse on responsibility and reconciliation remains completely insensitive to the truth that no healing is possible without reconciliation, no reconciliation possible without justice, and no justice is possible without some form of restitution.

Fourth, the history of wars and militarism in the third world loses its own social and economic specificity in the global mirror. Exactly twenty years ago Irving Horowitz in a seminal work on third world militarism showed these specificities, and the specifics of democracy there. In his words, "The third world is faced with a set of false options...Democracy is not addressed by politics or economics but has to do with health, education, welfare and the social uses of the public domain". Studying "globalizing wars and integrating world systems", military nationalism and the state in the third world, issues of legitimacy and illegitimacy of third world rules, and "the zero-sum economics and egalitarian politics", he further commented, "The lesson is clear - While one cannot predetermine dictatorial or democratic outcomes, neither should one prejudge the possibility of outcomes simply on the basis of the military origins of many Third World Revolutions". Written at the heydays of three worlds theory, Horowitz still rings true in the post-1989 age of democratic transition and restitution.

All in all, this is a curious history of globalisation; and this curious history of globalisation should not escape our eyes. Community, state, nation, region, civilization, and the globe, all have been dumped into the box that the current history of globalisation is. They may jostle for space. But that is fine with today's global order. Similarly, the "internationalism of Microsoft's chairman" and the one "expounded by Tagore or Gandhi" both find accommodation in this current history. There is no doubt that the current phase of global politics is pushing for a new dialogue for justice. It does not mean however that, this politics will be less confrontational than the politics of the cold war. If the deaths in the sky of Manhattan are some deaths, there was another kind of death - single no doubt, but marked as much by its own specificity. I am speaking here of the death on the street in Genoa. If the protests at Genoa were an indication, rising before us are the new questions, new dialogues, new confrontations. Even though the grand statesmen of the West assembled in Genoa on 20 July this year would not have liked the images of conflict that their summit left in its wake, the media that they could not do without had a satisfying day with some help from the city's carabinieri. Carlo Giuliani, a young political activist, was shot dead at the venue of the G-8 summit; hundreds were injured. The worldwide audience of TV onlookers since three years ago in Seattle, and then successively in Prague and Gothenburg, could not but be bemused at how this gathering of the cultured representatives of the trans-Atlantic ruling class, assembled to discuss ways and means of reducing poverty, had provoked such vehement opposition, leaving one dead, still others mutinous, and people across the globe derisive of the pomp and circumstance that accompanied the summit.

The protesters with the grassroots trade unions (SLAI-Cobas) were in a combative mood and well prepared to make the 20 July "rebellion in Genoa" a success. Among those present in the ancient mercantilist capital were delegations from Yugoslavia, Mexico, Turkey, Greece, Sardinia and elsewhere. As expected, the demonstrators represented various views and orientations -unions, political activists (including anarchists and communists), development NGOs, religious and humanitarian groups, human right activists and a whole lot of others attracted to Genoa by the assembly of Big Men. The slogans ranged from the demand to withdraw NATO from Yugoslavia and the Balkans, to the dissolution of Hague 'inquisition', to support for the Palestinian Intifada, and opposition to the embargo against Iraq and Cuba. However, the general theme that cut across the disparate groups was in the arena of global economics and politics - the need for "globalization from below", a reduction of the current Third World debt burden, and the control of international capital flows by "civil society" rather than by the international corporations and the governments at their beck and call.

Just a week after the gathering of the big men in Genoa, a much-less-publicized anti-imperialist Camp was organized in Assisi, the mediaeval town of monks and mendicants, also in Italy. It was dedicated to developing political perspectives for the anti-globalization movement, which the organizers felt was at a decisive stage following the G-8 meeting and its well-publicized fallout. The violence in Genoa were seen as a signal to the movement - how to continue the protests against globalization, establish "civic control" over the emerging agenda in the wake of globalization, and stand firm to confront the forces that are pushing the one-way economic globalization. The continent most devastated by capitalism was present in Genoa as it was in Assisi: Lumumbist groups from Zaire-Congo whose country is being torn apart by Western intervention; people like Dr. Bashir Kurfi, an anti-imperialist intellectual from Nigeria; and activists from Sierra Leone, Senegal, Chad, Guinea... The delegates from West Asia questioned the West's management of peace in the context of the second Intifada, and sought lessons from the collapse of the Oslo agreement. Other activists pointed to how the Western powers were courting Turkey for the sake of its military machine even while in Ankara's jails political prisoners were engaged in fasts unto death. In Assisi, women from Afghanistan explained their struggle against the Pakistan-backed Taliban, while the Filipino members of the "Migrante" suggested the political possibilities available to Asian migrants in the West. The Mexicans warned of how the struggle for state power could be forgotten when "civil society" issues take over the agenda, as it had in their country in these times of neo-Zapatism.

Just as globalization has many faces, so too does the protest in its opposition. The rebellion in Genoa as much as the murders in the sky thus raises a problematic. By embodying contradictory phenomena, it asks of politics a whole series of questions that used traditionally to be part of the elite domain. If the meeting of G-8 was a manifestation of international democracy at work, how could such pomp and glory presume to represent the majority of people on this planet? How could those who claim to care for the poor and the victims allow "humanitarian bombs" and transnational murders? Was it possible for the manifold nature of the Genoa protest to be rewritten in a coherent standard political format, making it more powerful? That is what was requiring an answer, beyond the agitation and stone throwing.

There were many images available at Genoa, starting with the ambition of the trans-Atlantic club and the failure of its rhetoric. Then there was the desperate effort of the protesters to increase their ranks through global means, and the mobs' resolve to spit on the moral indignation expressed against the agitation by the political leaders of that club. The unreality of the agenda of the super-rich to fight poverty was mirrored in the death of the protestor on the Genoa pavement. It was a hallucinatory world all right. Just as it happened in the case of Raskolnikov's murder of his landlady, in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the killing of the youth in Genoa has left its clues everywhere. That lone, but symbolic, death now guarantees that henceforth the protests will continue wherever the symbols of global power present themselves. The G-8 may hereafter move their annual hermitage into the deepest forest of Canada or the furthest corner of Tasmania, but it does not look like they can easily meet amidst the glass towers and wide boulevards any longer. The docile welcome of the past will be a memory, with the protestors forcing them to remember the wealth that they represent -- and not the world that they would presume to.

But an assembly of emperors away from the bustle and din of crowd - will it serve the purpose? To ask this is to ask, what precisely is the purpose? Again, in Dostoyevsky's hands punishment and crime were not events in sequel; they were one. Crime was punishment. The moment of commitment of the crime was the moment when punishment had begun. The long shadows outside the palaces and glass hotels of Seattle, Gothenburg and Genoa are there to stay. The protestors had wanted the moments of assembly to become moments of derision and disbelief and now they have become that. An assembly deep in the forest or in a faraway island cannot attract glory. Montesquieu had reminded us more than two centuries ago, how the pursuit of glory was important for kingdoms. Modern republics, as kingdoms of today, pursue policies that promise glory, for glory brings in its wake power, wealth, and satisfaction. Hence the dilemma, how to pursue glory without murder, pomp without derision, riches without poverty, and democracy without coercion?

More than to those assembled at Assisi, this will remain a question to those who had met at Genoa.

The fault-lines of this new interrogative politics are not yet clear. Possibly they suggest as I have indicated earlier different deaths, differential deaths. Perhaps, one produces a vision from top, another vision from below. Perhaps, and as I tend to believe, that these deaths and the visions that stand as mausoleum to these deaths are enmeshed with each other. But there is no doubt that the death in Genoa is as much real as the death at Manhattan. Also there is no doubt that in this politics from below, we shall see the engagement of the principle of justice with that of claims and rights, of the ethic of responsibility with the reality of power unconstrained by responsibility, of the politics of dialogue with that of coercion, of our history of wars and peace with their history of the same, an engagement of our statelessness with their state. The early marks of these engagements are visible in the forms of new political realities in many parts of the world. They give lie to the claims of this history, already an exhibit in the curio shop after it began with the triumphal claim some twelve years ago, that globalisation promotes trade, trade promotes development, development produces interdependence, and interdependence produces peace. We can use one phrase that sums up the cinema, liberal peace.

Ranabir Samaddar