An insight to hostilities that mar today’s landscape
On 9/11, when dark monstrous clouds engulfed downtown Manhattan, live footage of the disaster was relayed across the planet and drew responses from all over – from a primary school teacher in Iraq calling it a tit-for-tat occurrence to urban dwellers of world’s leading cities proclaiming it as a catastrophe. George Bush was shown to be in a sort of daze in a Texan primary school on hearing of the upheaval in Michael Moore’s Bush basher, Fahrenheit 9/11. Such is the plight of global media – a tiny fraction of an idea called globalisation – that ramifications of a Khaled Mashaal sneezing at a rally, finds echoes with jihadis stacked in sleeper cells in the valleys of Kashmir and in cities such as Delhi and Mumbai – the binding idea behind Sumantra Bose’s Contested Lands – thoughtful insights into the world’s leading hostility zones, confederated carefully by means of a thin string running through colossal boulders of antagonistic melodrama.
Bose (Bosnia after Dayton), a Professor of Comparative and International Politics at London School of Economics (LSE), in Contested Lands looks at five such disputes and peace processes – of Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus & Sri Lanka. And on breezing through his text, one sees a shift in the long-drawn and often clichéd perspectives that usually fills newsrooms and ‘scholarly’ debates. Also Bose’s convergent view on these prolonged mini-wars is not for the politically motivated for he overrules the ‘who did what’ and ‘who is to blame’ angles and calls for a comprehensive settlement, something he finds more effective over the concept of “incrementalism” – “a strategy of step-by-step progress towards a final settlement that emphasises gradual confidence-building measures between parties in conflict.” “The Israeli-Palestinian peace process fell into this trap, and the incremental process currently underway between India and Pakistan is unlikely to produce a resolution on Kashmir,” he further contends. On peace processes – a vital pie of the entire process, the professor calls them “notoriously fragile.” “The history of recent years is littered with the wreckage of peace processes that aimed to settle intractable disputes, but failed to live up to its promise.” Further, determining core areas for such conflicts, he blames self-determination and etho-national identity driven causes as main ingredients for such mayhems. Thus in identifying real issues, Bose calls for a pragmatic as well as comprehensive approach to cool down these hot zones. Something like the “fast-track strategy” that ended the Bosnian war in late 1995.
The book is just and reasonable in its approach, deeply informative of regional politics and historical insights into each individual issue. While most honest in his approach, Bose also calls for a third party to broker such deals, eventually ending up slapping as well as patting America for all the conflicting roles that it has played in various peace processes. However above all, in Bose’s words, lie strong shades of realist optimism. He calls theses wars “intractable but not insoluble,” underlying the positive tenor. And to sum up all – the predicaments and the individual solutions – he quotes Frost. “Good fences make good neighbours,” but also “Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out… something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”
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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008
On 9/11, when dark monstrous clouds engulfed downtown Manhattan, live footage of the disaster was relayed across the planet and drew responses from all over – from a primary school teacher in Iraq calling it a tit-for-tat occurrence to urban dwellers of world’s leading cities proclaiming it as a catastrophe. George Bush was shown to be in a sort of daze in a Texan primary school on hearing of the upheaval in Michael Moore’s Bush basher, Fahrenheit 9/11. Such is the plight of global media – a tiny fraction of an idea called globalisation – that ramifications of a Khaled Mashaal sneezing at a rally, finds echoes with jihadis stacked in sleeper cells in the valleys of Kashmir and in cities such as Delhi and Mumbai – the binding idea behind Sumantra Bose’s Contested Lands – thoughtful insights into the world’s leading hostility zones, confederated carefully by means of a thin string running through colossal boulders of antagonistic melodrama.
Bose (Bosnia after Dayton), a Professor of Comparative and International Politics at London School of Economics (LSE), in Contested Lands looks at five such disputes and peace processes – of Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus & Sri Lanka. And on breezing through his text, one sees a shift in the long-drawn and often clichéd perspectives that usually fills newsrooms and ‘scholarly’ debates. Also Bose’s convergent view on these prolonged mini-wars is not for the politically motivated for he overrules the ‘who did what’ and ‘who is to blame’ angles and calls for a comprehensive settlement, something he finds more effective over the concept of “incrementalism” – “a strategy of step-by-step progress towards a final settlement that emphasises gradual confidence-building measures between parties in conflict.” “The Israeli-Palestinian peace process fell into this trap, and the incremental process currently underway between India and Pakistan is unlikely to produce a resolution on Kashmir,” he further contends. On peace processes – a vital pie of the entire process, the professor calls them “notoriously fragile.” “The history of recent years is littered with the wreckage of peace processes that aimed to settle intractable disputes, but failed to live up to its promise.” Further, determining core areas for such conflicts, he blames self-determination and etho-national identity driven causes as main ingredients for such mayhems. Thus in identifying real issues, Bose calls for a pragmatic as well as comprehensive approach to cool down these hot zones. Something like the “fast-track strategy” that ended the Bosnian war in late 1995.
The book is just and reasonable in its approach, deeply informative of regional politics and historical insights into each individual issue. While most honest in his approach, Bose also calls for a third party to broker such deals, eventually ending up slapping as well as patting America for all the conflicting roles that it has played in various peace processes. However above all, in Bose’s words, lie strong shades of realist optimism. He calls theses wars “intractable but not insoluble,” underlying the positive tenor. And to sum up all – the predicaments and the individual solutions – he quotes Frost. “Good fences make good neighbours,” but also “Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out… something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”
For Complete IIPM Article, Click on IIPM Article
Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008
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