Co-sponsored with Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion (CDTR).

Below is an excerpt from the public discussion Iweala had with Mamadou Diouf, the Leitner Family Professor of African Studies at Columbia University, on February 3, 2009, as part of the “Literature and Terror” series sponsored by the IRCPL. In particular, Iweala addresses the idea of a “clean war,” a politically organized conflict, in distinction from a chaotic “dirty war,” and how this relates to the portrayal of current conflicts in Africa. Elsadig Elsheikh, a human-rights leader in residence at Columbia’s Human Rights Advocates Program, responds by discussing his work on the Darfur conflict in the Sudan. George Rupp, director of IRC, responds by discussing his work in Myanmar. Additional comments made by readers.

Mamadou Diouf: The title of your book, Beasts of No Nation, announces that the violence that defines the African condition today is not linked to politics. If we are to think about the military coups in the sixties, it’s not even linked to an army. It’s about groups of people with arms, moving around and killing people. . . . So, in relation to your fascination of violence, your reader has to ask, what is the imagination behind this, how does it relate to this general presentation of what Africa is? It’s interesting that you used an expression that is the title of Mudimbe’s book, The Idea of Africa, and say that the idea of Africa is, as it is in Mudimbe, “revealed in the Western text.” It is this continent, which is the locus of disaster, where people are not able to fight even a clean war. One of the most powerful descriptions is when you describe Agu’s first act of killing, when the body dissolves into something indescribable. So, how do you even negotiate with these different tensions?

Iweala: Having grown up here and being an American in that sense, I was exposed to all of those ideas or themes that come up again and again when you read about Africa or when you speak about Africa. Unless you grow up in a vacuum, there’s no way you cannot imbibe them and let them affect the way that you think. That obviously creates an internal conflict, because you also know something very different from that, very different from the way this place is represented, and from the lack of differentiation in the representation of the place. That conflict definitely drives a lot of my writing. . . .

That said, when writing a book like Beasts of No Nation, I think that one of the main worries was, of course, knowing and being very angry about representations that, you feel, don’t have a counter, or are very simplistic in their analysis, or don’t acknowledge the existence of conflicts. You don’t want to fall into the same trap. Then the question becomes, how do you justify writing such a book that does, presumably, fall into the same trap? My argument is that the whole point of writing it was that it doesn’t. It was written, in a sense, to address a number of questions.

One is the idea of clean war. You bring up, which I think is a really interesting term in general, the idea that you can have a clean war and that you can have clean destruction. I mean, war essentially destroys and makes nonsense of what is organized. I don’t see how that can be clean in any fashion. The idea that in certain societies we’ve developed rules for conflict that allow and justify certain actions, whereas in other places it’s all savage, it fits into the larger narrative, the larger stereotype. If you saw some of the things that we’ve done — that we’ve justified as the country of the United States, because we have the voice and the ability to explain and structure the kind of violence that we use — it’s insanity. Let’s put it that way: all of the violence and the destruction that we’re using in any place is insanity. It’s just that in one place we can develop rules as to how we kill, and how we decide to kill, and who gets to die and who gets a voice afterward, while killing or after being killed. And in another place it’s put forth that there is no organization or there is no structure.

In reading and doing research to write this book, I found this was clearly not the case; in fact, these things are done in a very systematic way. The difference is that people haven’t taken the time to understand the system, so it’s labeled chaotic, savage, x or y. But there is a point, as I think you suggested in your opening remarks, that violence gets disassociated from structure, from political conflict. In my mind, it’s not. In my mind, there’s definitely an association with a political context, with its aims and goals. It’s just that I decided to not have it be in a particular country, because I didn’t want to write about a specific place. What I wanted to write about was the larger idea of violence and the structures that it creates in and of itself.

In 2009, human rights in the Arab world have significantly deteriorated, prompting CIHRS to refer to the region as a “bastion of impunity.” The report points to increased suppression of political dissent and raises concerns about religious freedom, the deteriorating status of religious minorities and the tendency of regimes to align themselves with radical Islamists.

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Human Rights (CSHR) and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR).

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Human Rights (CSHR).  Co-sponsored by the Human Rights Working Group at SIPA, the Human Rights Concentration at SIPA and the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR).

To RSVP: mj2412@columbia.edu

Co-sponsored by the Columbia-Paris Alliance Program; the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR); the Middle East Institute (MEI); the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and the UN Studies Program.

Organized by Jonathan Schorsch (Columbia) with Jonathan Boyarin (North Carolina), Chris Bracken (Alberta), Sarah Philips Casteel (Carleton), Christian Cwik (Cologne), Gelya Frank (Southern California), Jennifer Glaser (Cincinnati), James Hatley (Salisbury), Nimachia Hernandez (Harvard Divinity), Stephen Katz (Indiana), David Koffman (NYU), Jack Kugelmass (Florida-Gainesville), Rebecca Margolis (Ottawa), Alan Mintz (JTS), Akim Reinhardt (Towson), Michael Rom (Toronto), Rachel Rubinstein (Hampshire), Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (Naropa Institute), Sara Sutler-Cohen (Bellevue Community), Octaviana Trujillo (Northern Arizona) and Gerald Vizenor (New Mexico).

Co-sponsored with the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.

PhD Thesis Series on Religion and Politics co-sponsored with Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion (CDTR).

Co-sponsored with the South Asia Institute and Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion (CDTR).

The Annual Mary Keating Das Lecture co-sponsored with the South Asia Institute and Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion (CDTR).

Religion, Ethnicity and Politics Lecture Series co-sponsored by Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion (CDTR) and Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP).