Mahmood Mamdani

This article is about decolonization in general and decolonization in Palestine in particular. One way to consider decolonization is by asking, as in the title, when does the settler become a native? But what kind of question is that? Is it historical — how much time needs to pass for the settler to become a native? Sociological — what changes must the settler go through to become a native? Ethical — what actions must the settler undertake in order to become a native? Personal — does it suffice for the settler to start feeling like he was a native? And what is the role of the native himself in this entire process?

The article is in part forward-looking, but it does not aim to offer concrete solutions; at best, it can offer conceptual directions. In the case of Palestine/Israel, the article does not advocate a definite solution in the form of a “one-state solution” or a “two-state solution.” It does not offer a clear institutional arrangement; rather, it offers an approach that aims to transcend settler-colonialism as a dynamic order, and to move beyond the settler-native opposition. As such, the article is a conceptual one — offering ways to think about the issue without committing to a clear constitutional-institutional position.

Many African indigenous poetic forms are routinely called “praise” because of their thematic concentration on adulation. Like the traditional forms themselves, modern cultural forms – fiction, music, poetry, among others – have complicated this classification because they thematically subvert the motif of adulation, address adulation to unconventional referents, and so on. This paper first reads Toyin Falola’s In Praise of Greatness, a collection of celebratory writings on “public intellectuals,” as an instance of such reinvention. With insights from history, cultural criticism and ethnographic field experience, Falola’s generic choice is also, however, shown to be implicated in the reduction of poetry – or any of its modern analogues – to “praise.”
Keywords: Africa, indigenous poetry, anti-praise, public intellectuals, memory

The absence of politics as a subfield unto itself actually does something quite insidious: it divides the world into them and us, where “they” are “primitive,” “pre-modern” peoples studied by anthropology, and “we” are “modern” Westerners, studied by sociology and other disciplines. The division was instituted through “holism,” and it is still an idea at anthropology’s core.

Prospect (UK) and Foreign Policy (USA) conducted a global poll 2008 to determine the hundred most important public intellectuals. The top ten turned out to be Muslims. Identity politics notwithstanding, they offer us a cross-section of diverse views that influence the world of contemporary Islam. The course, allowing us to eavesdrop in the conversation that Muslims are having among themselves, is in a series on alterity i.e. we need to know the ‘other’ to know ourselves.

Lecture 1: African Perspective: Mahmood Mamdani
Lecture 2: South Asian Perspective: Aitzaz Ahsan, Muhammad Yunus
Lecture 3: Egyptian Perspective: Amr Khaled, Yusuf al-Qaradawi 
Lecture 4: Iranian Perspective: Shirin Ebadi, Abdolkarim Soroush
Lecture 5: Turkish Perspective: Orhan Pamuk, Fethullah Gulen
Lecture 6: European Perspective: Tariq Ramadan

This paper seeks to contribute to the literature on political judgment by proposing that the faculty of judgment is essential for responsibly coping with the undeniable fact of distant suffering and the controversial duty of humanitarian intervention. To achieve this end, Mahmood Mamdani’s text ‘The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency’ will be mobilized for a constructive dialogue about which specific conception of political judgment is at stake when we debate a situation like Darfur today. The main claim is that political judgment in times of acute crisis requires the members of the public sphere to strike a precarious balance between two contradictory impulses: the deliberative impulse to enlarge the pool of particular standpoints, and the decisionist impulse to finally bring the conversation to a halt and adopt a normative stance. The theoretical framework for this balanced view of the faculty of judgment will be articulated through a hybridization of Hannah Arendt’s notion of an ‘enlarged mentality’ and Jacques Derrida’s concept of an ‘aporetic decision’.

Effective software effort estimation is one of the biggest challenges in software engineering. One of these challenges occurs when it is required to estimate software effort in the early stages of the software life cycle, as software requirements in this stage are usually incomplete. As Unified Modeling Language (UML) model became more prominent in software requirements and design processes, software estimators became more interested to use UML model and especially the use case diagrams to estimate software. In this paper, a novel regression model based on the use case point method is created for software effort estimation. Moreover, a Mamdani Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) approach is applied on this model to enhance the accuracy of estimation. Results show that an overall improvement of 10% can be achieved after applying the proposed approach.

Is contemporary international criminal law (ICL) compatible with sovereignty and
traditional international law (IL) as it is comprehended by the doctrine of Dualism,
as understood by the great majority of international jurists, scholars, government
representatives and those working at the tribunals? What the literature has entirely
missed is that three most important figures in the initial creation and institutionalization
of ILC for the Yugoslavia Tribunal in 1994 – Antonio Cassese, Cherif Bassiouni and
Theodor Meron – all shared a commitment to a monistic view based on expansive
and radical interpretation of ICL in which international criminal jurisdiction (IICJ) –
because it makes individuals its sole legal subject – as radically legally, politically and
even ontologically incompatible with – and inherently to superior – sovereignty, as
well as all those institutions based on traditional sovereign IL (e.g., international
humanitarian law, the UN Charter system, and human rights). Normatively, they call
for “the humanization” or individualization of international law marked by direct and
unmediated relationships between IICJ institutions and the individual. Practically,
they acknowledge ICL’s basis in modern statist domestic criminal law and Security
Council power means that it is necessarily a unitary, top-down and subjecting power,
incompatible with the claims of both dualists and pluralists. If the monists are correct,
the African Union (AU) must be very careful not to presume that what one likes about
international courts (African, treaty- or sovereignty based tribunals) can be easily separated
from what one does not like (UNSC power, ICC), because it was ICL itself, not
the tribunals, which is fundamentally anti-sovereign. As a result, this article concludes
that ICL itself is now too closely ground in IICJ to think that it could be separated in
an African court.

Abstract—Effective software effort estimation is one of the biggest challenges in software engineering. One of these challenges occurs when it is required to estimate software effort in the early stages of the software life cycle, as software requirements in this stage are usually incomplete. As Unified Modeling Language (UML) model became more prominent in software requirements and design processes, software estimators became more interested to use UML model and especially the use case diagrams to estimate software. In this ...

This article discusses the contemporary relevance of Saba Mahmood’s
argument in “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: an Incommensurable Divide?” (2009) to explain the roots of the Muslim injury in relation to representations of Muhammad in a series of polemic cartoons published in Denmark, South Africa and France. First, it compares Mahmood’s article especially to another article by Mahmood Mamdani, among others; second, it contextualizes Mahmood’s article in relation to her own work. My argument is developed around a strong point of contention in contemporary anthropology of religion: to what extent the focus on the religious subject helps to understand behaviors and sensibilities as the ones made evident by the injury in question?

I designed this syllabus for a new course offering entitled Justice & Global Conflict. Taking an African-centered focus to International Relations, and particularly Justice & Global Conflict, the syllabus provides a comprehensive critique of foreign intervention and international criminal law whilst introducing students to histories of African conflict and African-centered avenues for justice and social restoration.

For the 2018-2019 academic year, Justice & Global Conflict will explore selected challenges in conflict and security in Africa. National and regional insecurity threatens a country’s capacity to protect the well-being of its citizens while at the same time participating in international organizations and treaties. This course explores the origins of instabilities, and management of external intervention and conflict in modern Africa. Much discussion of the nature of violent struggles in Africa is often attributed to the politics of identity and ethnicity. But what do we mean by conflict in Africa? Is conflict always as violent and pervasive as the media portrays? And most importantly, what are the historical roots of contemporary conflict throughout the African continent? Focusing on the historical precursors to violence and the complex negotiations for conflict resolution in contemporary Africa, students will explore a selection of topics including: colonialism, Africa and the World Wars, nationalism and decolonization, apartheid South Africa, the Cold War, genocide, and sexual and gender based violence. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which our current global world order and its instruments (particularly United Nations’ Peacekeeping and the International Criminal Court), work – and sometimes fail – to promote and preserve justice in Africa between and within nations. Different theoretical approaches to justice and reconciliation in selected regions will be discussed alongside how African perspectives on conflict, justice and reconciliation at times differ from former colonial powers and those outside of the continent. By exploring case studies from a continent with a variety of security concerns, and unpacking the difference between justice and injustice, students will gain a deeper understanding of how current geopolitical actors can structure and affect the prospects for national security policy reform in the global south.

The central argument in Alain Ricard’s Le Sable de Babel. Traduction et apartheid explores the complex relationship between translation as a practice that builds bridges and makes connections and apartheid as a set of concepts, laws and institutions that sought to implement racial separateness.  Ricard emphasizes the ethics at work in dialogic translation; a practice that involves the creation of meaning and intercultural dialogue.  Following the myth of Babel in the Bible according to which people were dispersed into different language groups, Ricard takes up Paul Ricoeur’s invitation to embrace translation as a means of overcoming these linguistic divisions with an ethics of hospitality across languages (Ricoeur, Sur la traduction, 2004).  Of course, any openness to transcend the boundaries of language and ethnicity through translation was banished under apartheid with the adoption of racist laws, the segregation of space and the virtual exclusion of translation from Bantu education programs.  Through the separation of people by race came connections between territory (inhabited by whites, blacks, coloreds, Indians), language (Afrikans, Xhosa, Zulu, etc.) and political rights in South Africa.  Whereas many may have seen the form of despotism that was set up in South Africa under apartheid as somehow unique to that regime (1948-1994), Mahmood Mamdani has argued that the “decentralized despotism” under apartheid can and should be seen as exemplary of colonial relations of domination everywhere on the continent (Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, 1997).  Ricard builds on Mamdani’s observations and argues that African literature as a basic expression of freedom came up against a concept of human relations defined by the domination of one group by another across the continent.

For awhile (as part of the Mellon-funded research project into Media and Citizenship) whenever I have to think about citizenship theoretically in an African context I've been turning to Mahmood Mamdani's wonderful book Citizen and Subject. After a year of working on this project (see our blog and my post Speaking from the South) I've read a lot on citizenship, migrancy, refugees, minorities, rights, democratic regimes, etc, and still his voice — among all this wealth of information and theory — is the one that speaks loudest when I have to figure out how to approach what's going on in South Africa today.