Disrupting Colonial Peace with Mahdis Azarmandi

 In this episode of Unsettling Extremism I spoke with Dr. Mahdis Azarmandi, Senior Lecturer the School of Educational studies and Leadership at the University of Canterbury. Beyond her work in education, she also has expertise in Political science and Peace and Conflict Studies.  We talked about the construction of the concept of peace, different forms of violence, and how terms like terrorism and extremism can be problematic.

If you would like to read some of Mahdis's work, some selected works are below:

Azarmandi, M. (2018). The racial silence within peace studies. Peace Review, 30(1), 69-77.

Azarmandi, M. (2021). Freedom from discrimination: on the coloniality of positive peace. In The Palgrave handbook of positive peace (pp. 611-621). Singapore: Springer Singapore.

Azarmandi, M. (2023). Disturbing a Discipline: Towards Pluriversal Peace and Conflict Studies. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 1-15.

Aikman, P. J., & Azarmandi, M. (2023). Koro and the Statue: Disrupting Colonial Amnesia and White Settler Sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand. In The Palgrave Handbook on Rethinking Colonial Commemorations (pp. 33-51). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Here is a list of of some of the scholars/works Mahdis discussed in this episode:

Debbie Bargallie https://experts.griffith.edu.au/19242-debbie-bargallie/publications

Martin Luther King Jr. https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

Alana Lentin https://www.alanalentin.net/books/racism-book/

Nelson Maldonado -Torres https://caribbeanstudiesassociation.org/docs/Maldonado-Torres_Outline_Ten_Theses-10.23.16.pdf

Charles Mills https://books.google.co.nz/books/about/The_Racial_Contract.html?id=LPbBdyxGNhQC&redir_esc=y

Transcript

Unsettling Extremism Episode 4 
Disrupting Colonial Peace with Mahdis Azarmandi 

Mahdis  

My concern with extremism is when we take terms that are umbrella terms, and sometimes that can be helpful because they allow us to look at things from a macro perspective. What do they, they replace? And for me, the category of extremism has often replaced conversations around systemic forms of violence that we don't want to name.

Avery Smith  

Welcome to Unsettling Extremism, a podcast by He Whenua Taurikura. In this episode, I spoke with Dr. Mahdis Azarmandi, Senior lecturer at the School of Educational Studies and Leadership at the University of Canterbury. Beyond her work in Education, she also has expertise in political science, Peace and Conflict studies, and Anti-racism. We talked about the construction of the concept of peace, different forms of violence, and how terms like terrorism and extremism can be problematic. It's a conversation that I hope will push your thinking as it did mine. Let me introduce you to Mahdis. 

Can you tell me a little bit about your background? Where did you grow up? Yeah. What was it like growing up there?

Mahdis  

This is always an interesting one. When I get asked, I find that such a hard question to answer. And it should be so simple. So I am German Iranian. And I grew up in Germany. I studied my undergrad in Germany, and then did my Masters in Spain, and my PhD at Otago, pretty much throughout my masters and my PhD and focused on racism gradually. So initially, when I was interested in politics, I was really interested in Middle Eastern politics, particularly what's defined as Palestinian Israeli conflict, which I don't call it that, but that's what it's referred to in the literature. I always thought I would probably end up more in development aid or development studies, and work in the field for an international organization, I did not really ever think that I was going to become an academic. Yeah, I grew up in the 1990s immigrant had very much like an immigrant identity growing up as someone who was Middle Eastern and growing up in Germany. And I studied politics, Jewish Studies in English in  undergraduate, and then did peace and conflict studies. And it wasn't probably till I finished my master's degree that I realized, I actually have an interest in theory, but more than I realized, I like teaching. So I worked in NGOs, and political education for a number of years after my master's, and then decided to go back and do a PhD. And by the time I'd decided to do a PhD, I had shifted completely from where I'd set it off. And I really want it to look at Western State and Europe in particular, and the experiences of racialized people in Western countries, and look at racism as a form of violence. Because obviously, in peace and conflict studies, studying violence and peace and war is really central. And over the course of time, I just realized that the conflict and the violence we studied, was always located in the Global South, it was always along the lines of armed conflict of war official warfare. So there's definitions of things that we could really clearly assess, and didn't necessarily consider Europe and didn't consider the structural forms of violence that I encountered in Europe. So by the time I went back, I was like, I'm going to study racism. I'm going to look at white supremacy as a form of conflict in the West and why it's understudied in Peace and Conflict Studies. But really, my background initially, was just somebody who was really interested in Middle East and Baltics, and always thought I would end up working for an international organization somewhere in the field doing peacebuilding work, and I couldn't be further from that at the moment. Yeah, so I feel like there's a part of me that's like, oh, there's a 20 year old was really disappointed with some of these choices. But at the same time, every choice kind of led me to what I do now. So it makes a lot of sense that I ended up where I am and not delivering some aid somewhere. Yeah.

Avery Smith  

So you spoke a little bit about how you ended up in Peace and Conflict studies. What's your area would you say of research expertise.

Mahdis  

So again, I'm a little bit and interdisciplinary or what I've described as promiscuous when it comes to disciplines. So I do, on the one hand, look at race as an analytical concept in Peace Studies and how it's been omitted. So doing race-critical research within the field of peace and conflict studies, more theoretically speaking, rather than looking at specific case studies. As such, and then the other work I do is around politics of memory, particularly in places like Spain. But I've also looked at it here in Aotearoa. So how do people fight back against these whitewashed, normalized forms of memorializing the colonial past in the present cityscape. So those I think, would be the two main areas. Yeah, most of my work really looks at race and white supremacy, and how it's normalized how race is absent, like how race is both present and absent. So it's absent in the sense that the term race is made to disappear. And these other placeholders take its place and by taking its place also come up with solutions to the problem of white supremacy, that would be different if we actually looked at race at the center of white supremacy. That's kind of what I do because I think race is really important, or to cite Alana Linton, you know, why race still matters, like it does matter as an analytical category for us to make sense of white supremacy, or race as a technology of organizing people. So that's a lot of my work is just a lot of race and racism,

Avery Smith  

Race and racism, Peace and Conflict. But you know, it's interesting, because, you know, I think, obviously, those two pieces of your, of your research are actually very complimentary, because the sort of colonial mythmaking, and the way that we do remember things as societies is obviously impacted by by race and by settler colonialism. And so those two things that you study, race and racism, and you know, how we remember things are completely intertwined. And so it makes, it makes a lot of sense to me that you would, that you would be studying those,

Mahdis  

it does to me now to I used to perceive them as being two different things. And I would do the memory work for enjoyment, because I really liked studying monuments and how people respond to public memory. And more and more, I see the overlap of what I'm doing. And that is where I'm studying similar phenomena just from different angles. And I think with Peace and Conflict, something similar has happened as well, when we think about how do we come to know what is violence and what is war. And how this, there's this, this process of self-deception, I think that takes place in the West and the, to cite Charles Mills, who's a philosopher whose work I quite enjoy is written the Racial Contract, where he says, you know, white people create a world that they themselves do not understand at some point, right? Like, they kind of like fail to see that that's a world that they've created that self just basically deceives them yet, then they hold on to it as the ultimate truth. Right. And, for me, what is interesting about how Europe imagines itself is that Europe imagines itself as the cradle of civilization, democracy, and human rights, and how a lot of European countries and European political discourse so how nation states talk how the EU as a political body talks about itself, completely erases the fact that we haven't been a continent that has been that peaceful for that long. Right. So we are on the one hand, the seat of the home of some of the institutional bodies of international rights, and we talk about human rights violations elsewhere. And we talk about other places being perpetually at war. And we pretend that it wasn't less than 100 years ago, that one of you know, like a massive genocide took place in Europe that we had was in the 90s on European soil, and that European countries have been involved in warfare in the last 30 years in other places. So we assume that because the war doesn't happen on our own soil, that we are not involved in wars, like we could think about the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the arming of the State of Israel at the moment through European powers. So we are not outside of warfare as Western nations at all. But somehow, the self-identification is that was something that happens elsewhere. And we're not complicit in it. I'm not only complicit we are we're not involved, right, like we just kind of like and I think that to me, like that's becoming more and more visible. So people describe that as Oh, this is a hypocrisy, and I'm not sure it's a hypocrisy. I don't actually think it’s a hypocrisy. Is the system doing what it was designed to do. And it's, it's a continuation. It's not an era. Yeah, right. So I think that's something I'm noticing now is like how the self-imagination and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are creates Europe and Europeans by default, always as people tied to democracy tied to human rights tied to peace and the people in this peripheries. as violent as savage, well, you know that as outside of order 

Avery Smith  

That leads perfectly into my next question because I know in reading a few of your articles in the lead up to this conversation today you cited and I can't remember who it was who said this, so help me remember this. But there was some European official who was talking about Europe being the garden, and then everywhere else as being the jungle. And I feel like that's a perfect metaphor for how sort of Europe sees itself?

Mahdis  

Absolutely. It's Jospeh Borrell. And I can tell you, let me find the exact context in which he's said it. So for people who don't know, Jospeh Borrell representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security. And in 2023, he is talking in the context of the War of Russia on Ukraine. And he describes the European Union in particular, so not just you have the European Union in particular, as a as a garden symbolizing order, prosperity and harmony in the rest of the world as a jungle. And I'm just going to read this out because I want people to understand I'm not making this up. This is a real quote of what he said. And he says “The rest of the world is not exactly a god and most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden, the garden should take care of it, but they will not protect the garden by building walls. A nice small garden surrounded by high walls in order to prevent the jungle from coming in, is not going to be a solution, because the jungle has strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough, in order to protect the garden, the gardeners have to go to the jungle, Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us by different ways.” And now there's multiple different really interesting things in there.

Avery Smith  

Whoa, there's so much going on there. There's so much going on there. Can I just, I mean, wow, absolutely. I mean, just the racialization of the image of the garden and the jungle and the jungle invading the garden, it's just next level.

Mahdis  

And the garden as the and the garden is the metaphor of the peaceful. So for people who aren't familiar, like cultivation, is a very violent process. Right? So the curating neat little gardens where everything is symmetrically organized, and really beautiful. And pulling the weeds requires a taming. But it's interesting how that is seen, the garden is seen to be this peaceful place, and the jungle is going to invade, invade the garden. Now, in his defense, he's pulled back on some of this and, and said was that wasn't exactly what he was trying to say. However, I think it's so it's so useful to look at it as an analogy of how Europe imagines itself and how it looks at the rest of the world. So there's some really interesting work by historians who look at maps, and have looked at Colonial maps in particular, and how mapping obviously, like mapping is a colonial exercise as well, it's really interesting work if you ever want look at that. But for my dissertation, I looked at some maps and visualizations of maps, and how they presented these other unknown parts of the world. So it is often the representation of the jungle of these animals, of these beings that are more animal-like than human-like, and it and it comes up everywhere, right? So if you go to Barcelona, and you look at the Columbus statue, which is in the port of Barcelona, and you look at the base of the statue, it has images of the arrival, quote, unquote, in the Americas, and in one scene, you can see the indigenous people who are depicted on the base of that monument, as kind of creeping out of the trees and bush and right, 

Avery Smith

The jungle. 

Mahdis

Yeah, yeah. So I think this, this, like civilizational binary, really has, is really, really, really entrenched in how the spaces of violence and war versus spaces of peace and order are imagined. And with that, then you also get the people who cause disorder in the space of peace. So they have populations that are considered to be troublesome, that need taming that are disrupting the order, the rule of law, and order and peace. And that is often when we see political dissent in the West. Right? So the framings of Black Lives Matter movements and from 2020 onwards or even before we can see that with the student encampments for Palestine. So who is framed to be disturbing the peace and where's the peace? The peace really is a colonial peace. It's a peace of the status quo, that when it's not disturbed, we believe that there is no injustice and no violence happening. But then when you contest that order, then you become a representation then, of the violence that you're actually trying to make visible 

Avery Smith  

Here at He Whenua Taurikura that's something that we like to think about a lot. So we think about, obviously, extremism, hate missing disinformation. But our name translates into a land at peace. And so that's one of the things that we're trying to sort of interrogate and, you know, explore further what this concept of peace is. And so I would love to hear more about your takes on what peace is as a Peace and Conflict Studies scholar.

Mahdis  

So peace studies has a slightly different approach, I would say to peace and fields like international relations and Political Science, more generally, and that is that we don't necessarily look at peace as just the absence of war. So peace scholars would say peace requires more than the absence of war and conflict that requires, some would say the presence of justice, or it includes other forms of elimination of Structural Violence. in the field. This is often attributed to a Norwegian scholar, Johan Galtung, who coins who's supposed to have coined the term positive and negative peace. Now I will push back against that because we know as early as in the 60s, MLK actually makes reference to the term negative piece in his letter from Birmingham jail. And I believe there's a couple of other people who use that term negative piece. Different prior to Galton, but often in the literature that's it's placed with this Norwegian scholar. So in my own work, I actually go back to letter from Birmingham jail and say, Well, yes, obviously, peace is not just no act of warfare, no act of armed conflict but as much more than that. So it would require us to get rid of structural violence and cultural violence, which are the other terms that Galton came up with. So it distinguishes between direct violence, cultural violence and structural violence. Others would say we would have to include epistemic violence in that notion as well, the way we construct and recognize knowledge systems and how colonialism has been an act of epistemic violence against indigenous forms of knowledge.

Avery Smith  

Can you break all this down a little bit? There's, there's, you know, you're talking about epistemic violence, structural violence…

Mahdis  

What is the structure of violence, and just to give some examples, Things that are systemic, such as, for me, obviously, white supremacy, poverty. So they can be they can create access or lack of access for populations without the immediate use or threat of physical violence. So not having adequate access to health care, education, housing, basic resources, and the difference being that it's not about, like, let's say, an earthquake happens, and then suddenly, people don't have access because of the natural catastrophe. What we are saying with structural violence is that they're avoidable, but they're not remedied in the system. So we are aware that we could feed everyone but we live in societies that choose not to feed everyone so there are avoidable forms of harm, that are not avoided. So that's why what makes them violent, um, and cultural violence and refers to these beliefs that circulate in culture about other people who might not be who again might not necessarily lead to overt forms of violence, but that underpin direct aggression, and physical harm. So ideologies beliefs, I often in class use the example of victim blaming, which is one that students relate to really well, like that is or rape culture. Yeah, that is a cultural thing. Yeah.

Avery Smith  

And then epistemic violence,

Mahdis  

it basically refers to how in particularly like Eurocentric knowledge production, we have a hierarchy of who acknowledges are recognized and centered. And by not looking at how part of colonization was the destruction of knowledge systems, but in a cosmologies political structures and forms of knowing the world or thinking the world. But how that is actually perpetuated, continues to be perpetuated within Academic structures of thought. So when we look at what are we learning, who are we learning, where our theories based, who's writing who's writing about who we can see this epistemic violence throughout the way we continue to even analyze and unpack and even criticize some of these things? I think that would be some of the ways in which people would say like the Colonial system, even though it admits colonialism as an official administrative structure, sees Is to exist not everywhere, but in a lot of places, the way colonialism functions. So coloniality continues to be reproduced in those places, in the ways we think about others and the ways we write about others, and the ways we think about ourselves, etc, right?

Avery Smith  

And through these forms of violence that you were just talking about, right? 

Mahdis  

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And then the structural is often absent, right? Like the, when I say often, I mean, you know, not necessarily in Peace and Conflict studies literature, because peace scholars tend to focus on structural issues for sure. What I would say is largely absent even in my field that is normatively against war and violence, is the implications of the role of colonialism. So I think even we do have a little blind spot when it comes to what is imperialism and colonialism allowed us to do in terms of creating the world that we that we look at the moment? And why is it important for us to look at that. So in my work, I critique, like this focus is over focus on human rights. Because I think the human rights discourse in Peace Studies doesn't question where the idea of the human comes from. And that for the longest time, many people colonized people, racialized people are often not included in that category of the human that we so frequently uphold as our ways to accessing justice. So we see that now again, if we look at what's happening in Gaza, it's a complete suspension of a lot of international law. And we see gross, like real gross crimes against human rights violations atrocity crimes. And we have an international system where we cannot yet we cannot uphold it in a way that is supposedly universal. So Europe, on the one hand, is the cradle of civilization, democracy and rights. And you know, the home of universal rights, yet we see the application of those rights is never universal. So then I say, how can we make sense of human rights discourse if we don't think about how human rights discourse is stratified by race? 

Avery Smith  

Well, who's human and who's dehumanized? Right, and some of these different situations in these contexts? Absolutely. And it makes you obviously, go back and question what is the basis are we using for humanity? Right. And, you know, obviously, that goes back to Europe and the colonial structures that were started there. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the way that you think that Peace and Conflict Studies can contribute to there are ways of thinking about terms like extremism, terrorism myths, and disinformation, what contributions do you think can be made by peace and conflict studies in that area?

Mahdis  

So a lot of these terms create these trends in academic research that then are also shaped by funding. And that in turn shapes, the discourses that are created and what is considered to be important for us to look at. I feel like terrorism was one of one of them. And there's some interesting work in Critical Terrorism Studies, that has often been critically looking at terrorism. Personally, I don't find that term useful, because I think it's more interesting for us to look maybe up the term political violence rather than terrorism. And there's incredible scholarship by a lot of scholars of color, and Muslim scholars who look at how these labels are extremely racialized, and how terrorism categories often do not consider the state as the perpetrator. And if they do consider the state as a perpetrator, these states are never Western states, so I think there's that like, that's one of the one of the places that I have some reservations, and some people fight back against the critique of terrorism by applying it to other people. So people who, for example, say that we should consider the Christchurch shooter, a terrorist, and it was really important to put him on trial for terrorism. And not necessarily saying I disagree with that. But I just feel like if we're critical of that category, we don't, we don't really question the category by just opening it up and putting more people in it. So I, I would be just as wary as the category of terrorism, if it applied to white people to at the moment, it often does. And it is not a term that is frequently used to describe forms of crimes and violence committed by, you know, certain populations. It's very frequently used for populations that are racialized, and is also it also uses the religious marker of Islam in a particular way. So it uses racialization of, of Islam as a marker of difference. And I feel similarly about extremism. So I think my concern was extremism is when we when we take terms that are umbrella terms. And sometimes that can be helpful because they allow us to look at things from a macro perspective. What do they what are they replace? And for me the category of extremism has often replaced conversations around systemic forms of violence that we don't want to name. Right? So is it transphobia that you don't want to name is it white supremacy that we don't want to name? And if we turn it all into one, one category, what are some of the nuances that get lost? So for example, there's some countries that kind of equate terms of left wing extremism in quotation marks, I say this to right wing extremism, and present them as if they are an equal threat, as if they are both merged from some similar place of hatred and history. And I find that really, really dangerous. I also think that categories like extremism, and terrorism are more and more frequently used by the state to crush dissent and activism. And we should be very wary of that. So environmental activists, anti-racist activists, so how can the state appropriate these categories and use them against people who are organizing against the status quo. And I also think that extremism then assumes that there is some, some non-extreme core where these people are just a deviation from that core. And I'll just focus on racism. So if we think that the racial state is inherently based on white supremacy, right, whether or not it engages in overt forms of direct violence, that are white supremacist, but then it is that the structure in itself was built on certain ideas, and might work for some people better than for others, then where does the extreme start? Right? So I think, in those ways, and again, it's not my area, I'm not somebody who comes up with definitions, and kind of like somebody was like, critiques definitions. So I think that's where I find these terms, while they can be helpful, we need to be really careful of how we use them. And I think sometimes it's really important to name the system that produces a form of exclusion or a form of violence. And for me, one of the ones that I find really hard to wrap my head around is hate crime, because that has been so watered down now that anything read like it encapsulates everything. 

Avery Smith  

That's so interesting, because as you were talking, I'm thinking about, you know, how these terms have just become, well, at least in my in area, sort of like everyday parlance, like extremism, right. And, and you're right, we do use it to talk about many different myriad of different things. And you just kind of throw it all in that same category. And I do hear what you're saying around, you know, by doing that, you kind of invisiblise, the systems and the structures that create that, that certain kind of ideology that you're that you're talking about. And there is power in naming, like this specific thing that you're talking about. So that makes a lot of sense to me.

Mahdis  

And, the accountability has to both be an individual, but also at the system's level. Right. So I mean, I give the example of people to students in my class when we talk about hate crime. And I say, so if we think about the context of the American South. So I often use examples that are historic and really overt because I find that easier for people to wrap their head around these really overt cases of violence, rather than how the everyday is really violent. And you would have somebody who committed a lynching, right? And for us to reduce that, just to a personal hate crime is to erase maybe the role of the KKK in the south of systems of organized white supremacist violence of organized structures of fear, and manipulate, you know, like some like, so for me, in that context, you can't just say what has happened here is merely a hate crime. And I think hate also the other thing that it does is to reduce forms of systematic exclusion and violence to some kind of moral failure. A moral failure. 

Avery Smith 

Yeah, individual. Yeah. 

Mahdis

So and it's exactly what makes conversations about racism so hard is because what people hear is I'm being called evil. I'm being called a bad person. Right. So I think, while I'm not saying people don't have hate, I'm sure there's people who are, you know, very much filled with hate. We also need to understand where do these ideas come from, and why are certain forms of thinking about other people dehumanizing other people so socially acceptable? And, and how is it possible for us to tap into that so quickly? Because these ideas are already in circulation. 

Avery Smith  

It's really resonating with me because you know, so much of the rhetoric around some of these violent acts, these physically violent acts that we see is talked about as like a lone wolf, right? There's this one guy who got just filled with hate, and decided to do this, this terrible thing, right. But it was, what it doesn't take into account is the underlying like ideologies and the underlying structures that sort of allowed for this kind of thinking, and this, this kind of action to take place. And so what, what I really appreciate is the way that you're kind of framing, you're framing it as not just an individual level problem, but it's a problem that goes across society and is, you know, structural, as well. 

Mahdis  

And it sits in the middle, too. You know, I don't think that we would find a lot of people who describe a number of our politicians we currently have in power as extremists, while some of the views that they share a very much widely shared by people that sit in a basement and write really nasty comments online. And then my question is, who is more dangerous, the person who's really unhappy and filled with hate in some basement somewhere? Who writes a lot of horrendous comments on online, not saying that that is great, or people who are dismantling our democracy as we speak. Right. So I think this is where I find these times around extremism quite misleading. You know, I also think that they allow, they allow the broader middle that they allow everyone who sits very conveniently and doesn't want to pick aside to say, I'm not a bad one, because I can identify the bad ones, and they're over there. Right. And I saw that in my PhD very clearly, I interviewed anti-racist activists, and about their definitions of racism and what they thought, you know, racism was and how to combat it. And they would often talk about the real racist, you know, like the idea of the real racist, and I was like, so there's racists and real racists. And they were the racists that were, you know, very overt, in their thinking, who might maybe, maybe repeat scientific ideas about racial inferiority, etcetera, right? So it's like, okay, I'm sure that that is definitely a racist is somebody who says other people are genetically inferior. But we also know that the biggest issues we have around racist racism is the racist impact that is often detached from some personal intent is the product of systemic issues, such as, you know, lack of access to resources, or the lack of redistribution of resources, which happens in the absence of overt racial thinking very much in the absence of that. So we know that some of the most racist things that are being said today, in our political system, do not name racial groups at all. But the impact these changes are going to create is very racialized,

Avery Smith  

Absolutely, there's going to be a disparate impact on certain populations. Yes. Even though that's not named. Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah.

Mahdis  

So I think like when I when we say race matters, is that we need to develop. And this is Debbie Bargallie work in Australia, like a literacy for race. Right? Like how to read race and in the world, how to make sense of that it's there that it's, it operates. It's it does something is Alana Linton would say, right, like, it's not so much what race is, is what race does. And what race does is create this differential impact. 

Avery Smith  

Oh, I like that. Race is it's what race does? Oh, that's a that's actually a really profound way to put it. In your work, you think critically about whether peace is possible in colonial contexts. Can you say a little bit more about what you're thinking around that?

Mahdis  

I wrote something on the construction of the enemy within and Western states when it came to resisting police brutality and racism, particularly anti-blackness in the States and I said how black and brown people are constructed as the enemy within and suddenly the the warfare that is usually geographically in places of the global south comes home at sometimes when you look at how police and the state response to violence, of resistance, resembles warfare. So when we actually say because people say oh, it looks like a war zone, you know, like this look like a war zone. I'm like, it is a war zone. Like it literally is. If you unleash tanks and riot police on people, you create conditions of war. On your own populations. So in that piece I read the concept of peace and colonial conditions past and present, therefore, as an ontological impossibility for the colonized subject, as peace and order are always already based on violence committed against the against the colonized, this is the case not only for those who resist colonization, but also those who are apparently innocent, since control must be exercised against corporative. And uncooperative bodies, in a sense is not something that is naturally granted to racialized and colonized subjects. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So again, think about it in the context of, and I think this may have been Trayvon Martin, who was walking home. So when I say innocence is a naturally granted to some people. And I think we see the same thing when government talks about that businesses can refuse service to people with facial tattoos, is that innocence isn't granted to everyone equally. So just because you have a facial tattoo now people can pretend or assume that you are somehow engaging in forms of criminal activity, or you're suspicious or you're violent or so for me, because colonialism, and this is not me saying that this is Franz Fanon saying that colonialism is violence, there is no colonialism that is not inherently always already, all of it violent. So if we're in a colonial context, which is always already violent, how can there be peace? It can't, it can't. So I think, for me, inherently, A, you have to decolonize to have a space, you have to get rid of colonial conditions to have peace, unless the peace that you're talking about is a different kind of pace that I'm talking about. And so far, it hasn't been extended to colonized folks. So I think it's not just people who are living in settler colonial context, but also the people who have come from former settlers from former colonized spaces into the Imperial core, because they're also always treated as having to prove themselves, right like you, you have to prove, prove your innocence for us to not unleash violence on you. And when you when you rebel, then that violence is justified, or you yourself become that violence. So we also talk about how like racialized protect

Avery Smith  

Well, you then represent a jungle? Yeah. And you're invading. And you're going into that, to that colonial garden space. Right? 

Mahdis  

And when is it? And when is it okay to kind of think about some of these processes as, as acts like as a result of so like mass migration, refugee movements, those are not detached from the actions of imperial powers. Right? So people sit somewhere and say, We don't want you to come, but they don't want to think about how do we get rid of war that displaces people? How do we get rid of extractivism and exploitation in a lot of these countries that causes mass displacement, genocide in some places ethnic cleansing, civil unrest, civil war in those places. But then when they come to our countries, we don't want them. Right, like I think what looking at race in the history of colonialism doesn't in political analysis, is to look at these entanglements. And explaining these phenomena that we see, not only from the vantage point of the nation-states, of Oh here is as a person from another nation-state seeking entry into my nation-state, but what are all of these political power plays of power that have happened that produce conditions in certain places and produce wealth and other places, 

Avery Smith  

People are not looking at the ways that colonialism is already implicated in a lot of these conflicts that we that we are still seeing today

Mahdis  

and end imperialism. I would definitely add imperialism, imperialism.

Avery Smith  

Yeah. Well, that kind of leads in like to my to my last question for you here, which is, you know, how we can think more critically about our notions of peace. 

Mahdis  

I wish we would have had this conversation before like, October last year, because I would have been slightly more I want to say optimistic, so it’s not a word I use, but I guess, hopeful, and hope and like the way abolitionist Miriam Makeba, talks about, like hope, as a discipline, something that you have to practice every day and decide to engage in not this naive kind of hope. I find that really hard at the moment, I have to say, to think to write or theorize about peace at a time where we see multiple, you know, forms of ethnic cleansing going on around the world. And what happened, what happens in Gaza being live streamed and the world still finding ways to justify the violence that is inflicted on people are somehow self-induced, you know, like that. They have caused that violence themselves. So it makes it very hard. However, what does give me ways to think about it is what's happening in solidarity around the world, where I think people are putting together the dots. So people are thinking about the interconnected into, like related nature of forms of colonial dispossession and harm. So from Kanaky to Gaza to Congo to Haiti, calling for divestment in industries of death, which is not just the arms industry, there's I think other industries that engage and create conditions for premature death for us as a planet and people. So those are the ways in which in which I would like to think about peace. More recently, I'm thinking about what abolition can do for us to think peace. So abolition of systems like the prison systems, like the military systems, or capitalism. So abolition isn't about getting rid of something. It's about building other structures. So I think people often are like, Oh, you just want to get rid of the military? And I'm like, Yeah, but in order to engage in abolitionism, you have to create a completely different world with completely different sets of relationships, and putting different values at the center. So I think if we focus on what are the systems of violence and the systems of oppression and the systems of extraction, that dictate this inherently violent world, or as Maldonado Torres would say, coloniality is the endless war, which I think is a really interesting way of thinking about the remnant, not the remnants but the continuities of colonialism is an endless war. So what does it look like for us to undo? Which systems do we have to completely dismantle, to be able to think about peace? But I also think at the moment, it's very hard to think about peace without thinking about resistance, and how we think about how we police resistance, because often people will say, I agree with you, I just don't agree with your methods. And I think that's also a very, very old trick in the playbook. Again, I feel like I've come back to letter Birmingham jail like five times today. It's exactly what people were told, when they were engaging in nonviolent direct action during the Civil Rights Movement, we agree with you to someone like your tactics, can you do it differently? Can you do it more politely? And at no point in human history…

Avery Smith  

Can you do it in a way that doesn't make me feel uncomfortable?

Mahdis  

And doesn't break any public property? At no point in human history, have oppressed groups of people gained rights by politely asking those who were oppressing them. And I think that's something we have to remember is that oftentimes, the rights gained that we have today are the results of people out in the street engaging in forms of civil disobedience at times breaking the law, like breaking unjust laws, inconveniencing, disrupting, that's the other thing, I think I think peace cannot be equated with stability. It has to be disruptive, like, it has to be two things, it has to be a peace that builds things, right like the World after we abolish these institutions of violence. So it builds, it constructs. But at the same  time, in order to get to the point of construction, it needs to disrupt it needs to disrupt the violent systems. And there's a very famous Howard Zinn quote that says, We're not disrupting the peace, we're disrupting the war talking about student movements in the 70s. I think. And I think that's, that's what I want to highlight is that the conversation about peace is impossible. Without a conversation about resistance. And, and how oppressed people, people who are[AS1]  living through all forms of violence are meant to engage, you know, how are they meant to, like, show that they're human in some ways. So I feel like yeah, that's kind of where I'm, where I'm standing now is like, we have to disrupt, and that's not going to be comfortable. And that might at some point be painful to. But it's only painful because if, if it wasn't uncomfortable for us before, then we weren't at the receiving end of the violence before. Because if you were on the receiving end of violence, and you stand up and you organize, it's actually not there's not that much difference, you know, you know, people who are overly incarcerated who are already excluded from systems who have lack of access, when they go to a protest and met with violence from the state. It's not that much different from what their everyday lives are like, anyway. It's just for the cushy middle that doesn't see the violence because it's not unleashed against them. And it might be like it might be once they stand up. So I'll give another example which I think is one of my favorite examples. When I was I went to talk on the anniversary of the anti-apartheid tour last year, and the number of activists from Ōtautahi, Christchurch who were talking about their experience becoming involved in the anti-apartheid movement here. And many of them pākehā, the vast majority pākehā women in particular, amazing, amazing group of people. And they all talked about when they kind of knew something was really fundamentally wrong. And they all had every single anecdote that was shared, had a reference to, and then we got arrested. And then we went to court. And the police lied, right? And all of these people until they went to court, and thought they were going to have a fair trial. And they could come to court and say, Well, no, actually, I didn't push I didn't do this, this thing that I'm accused of, and then they go up against the system, and the system treated them, not like they thought that system works. But it treated them like all of these other people. Who would doesn't take seriously. Right. And to me, I think that's the issue is that we have to see that the system doesn't work, even for the people who think it is designed for because the moment you stand up against it, it will turn its back on you too. So I think this is what we need to say is it, you need to be in the system to see that the system is violent. And once you see the violence of the system, then you change the way you think about disrupting it.

Avery Smith  

Um, my I'm having a lot of thoughts right now. One of them is just, you know, thank you for bringing up that whole idea of the relationship between peace and resistance. I think that that is going to be key to the way that I think about peace from this point forward. And also the idea of, you know, the systems that we've created aren't really working for most people. Right? Again, sort of how you build more just ways of working with each other. Right. So that's, that's truly amazing. Thank you so much for giving up your time and talking to me today about this, I've really enjoyed our conversation.

Mahdis  

Thanks for having me, and thanks for letting me take a long time to get to the point.

Avery Smith  

Thanks for listening to this episode of unsettling extremism, where Mahdis disrupted colonial notions of the concept of peace. She invited us to think critically about terms like terrorism and extremism, and shared her idea of peace being something that builds as it abolishes and asks us to decolonize as it disrupts. If you value listening to content that goes beyond basic and simplistic answers to complex issues, like, subscribe, and share our podcast with your community.

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