We the living, as a race, are capable of nursing one another, weeping for one another and moaning at the pain of others, and at the same time can slaughter one another, that too, so casually. At least that is what becomes evident if one revisits the savagery inflicted by men on fellow men in Rwanda, Chechnya, London, Madrid, Lebanon, New York and right now in Syria. It is an enigma: How could the most wise and the most moral resort to such unmindful slaughtering of fellow beings under the guise of ‘ism’, religion, ethnicity, etc.?

The planet has witnessed leaders like Gandhis, Martin Luther Kings, Mother Teresas and Mandelas who inspired awe in us by their sheer goodness. It has also seen Hitlers and Pol Pots who left us in shame. This is our paradox: we are the altruistic and we are the atrocious too. And this enigmatic process has perhaps been running right through the history. With the stockpiling of nuclear arsenal, we are, for the first time, facing the threat of extinction of human race and of all life on the planet. With the scientific advances we have made in building weaponry, our cruelty appears to have grown in intensity and efficiency, more so in the recent past.

The result is, today the world is undergoing a state of profound crisis. It is a complex and multidimensional crisis, the facets of which are touching every aspect of our life. It indeed is a crisis of intellectual, moral and spiritual dimensions. The underlying reasons for this disharmony between people, between societies, between religions and between nations and the resulting mercilessness are many. Primarily, it is the economic marginalization of many by a few and the resulting injustice that appears to have driven people to take up arms. Secondly, it has been flared up further by cultural clashes and religious fervor. And the advances made in weaponry have only made the effects of this hatred that much worse.

Amidst this crisis, there are many who are strikingly aiming at peace, and peace does not mean mere ‘no war’, but it is concerned with, according to the Vedanta, shanti, understood as tranquility or equipoise and achievement of personal integration and individual harmony. Indeed, Einstein too echoes the same when he said, “Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison (of bondage with the self) by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” So to construct a better human society, we have to be nirmamo nirahankarah—without the thought that ‘This is mine’ and ‘This I am’ (Gita, II.71) and advesta sarvabhutanam maitrah karuna eva ca—non-hating, friendly and compassionate (Gita, XII.13). But the question is: How to achieve this transformation? There is, of course, an answer: leadership—leadership across the nations alone can aim at it and it is not beyond the reach of men.

In this context, we have three interesting papers that dwell on some such issues at length. The first paper, “Local Resistance in the Era of Capitalist Globalization: Clash of Cultures in the 21st Century”, by Niccolo Caldararo, traces how the exploitative corporate capitalism, usurping systematically and mercilessly the natural resources that belong to all, for private profit, has pushed the tribal people, minorities and the marginalized millions to the wall and thus forced them to rebel against the state in despair. And intriguingly, the national governments, as the author asserts, labeling them as ‘terrorists’, too perpetrated injustice in the society, though unwittingly through state violence. The author, referring to the political and economic sophistication of groups such as Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), also avers that the reprehensible killings of so-called ‘informers’, ‘black sheep’, etc., by such terrorists, drug lords and other war lords are not acceptable. The paper also highlights the misuse and abuse of the media by the US and the west to propagate their own version of the truth, as they did in the case of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that Iraq was alleged to possess. The collapse of the Soviet Union that led to the emergence of a new civil entity called Russia had, in the eyes of the author, only resulted in the dismemberment of the Soviet Empire, with the result—just as it had happened with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire—that the Russian periphery had become unstable along the southern borders and the border flanking Europe as well. And this phenomenon is considered by the author as a threat to the stability of the world. Simply put, the inherent violence of the corporate capitalist development and the opposing rebellious terrorist violence are both not acceptable to the author. The paper would have been more interesting had the author also suggested the way forward from the current impasse.

Moving on to the next paper, “The Arab Spring Phenomenon and European Security: Change and Continuity Under the Spectrum of Securitized Idealism”, we have its author, George Voskopoulos, averring that the Arab Spring movement, emerging from internal activation of social, religious and political forces struggling for power, power-redistribution or domination, which had introduced regime changes in the respective countries, indeed caused worries to the European Union (EU), for it was perceived as a threat owing to its potential for causing migration influx into the EU. The author also points out the gaps in the value system of Arab countries and the EU. He observes that the EU, which is often referred to as a superpower, lacks organizational wherewithal to interfere in the world for coordinated action. And ultimately, he sums up his arguments with the statement that the “EU’s policy vis-à-vis Arab Spring phenomenon is far from satisfactory.”

The third paper, “Ethnofederalism and the Ethnogeopolitics of Afghan State”, by Ambrish Dhaka, argues, tracing the power sharing arrangement between Pashtun and non-Pashtun groups within the fiduciary limits of ethno-federalism, that Afghanistan, having been formed based on ethno-political portioning, suffers from intrinsic limitations for the success of democracy, more so when its ethnic groups also engage with their neighboring countries. Cumulatively, Afghanistan, according to the author, is pitted against the federal approach to nation building.

Finally, we have the paper, “India-Argentina Trade Relations: What India Needs to Focus on”, in which the authors, Syeeda Khatoon and Sonal Mittal, measuring the Trade Complimentary Index, Trade Intensity Index, Export and Import intensity, Revealed Comparative Advantage and Intra-Industry Trade indices of India in relation to world and Argentina, suggest ways and means for India to augment its exports to Argentina.

-- GRK Murty
Consulting Editor