IT comes as a shock that the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies is already old enough to be celebrating its 50th birthday. When I first knew the Centre, it was a young and exciting new venture, not the venerable and internationally admired institution of social and humanistic studies that it has become over the course of five decades. But what stands out for me as its signal achievement is the degree to which the original spirit and ethos of the Centre has not been compromised or tarnished by aging, by inevitable changes in personnel, and by an evolving agenda of research priorities. I am not sure how many of us can credibly boast of a comparable coherence between our own youthful idealism and our ‘mature’ retrenchments that tend toward reaching a variety of accommodations with the stubborn facts of life. I say this not to be cynical about the innocence of the young versus the jaded prudence of the aged, but to point out what an inspiring example has been set by the Centre in its impressive resistance to the tribulations of aging.

My early contacts with the CSDS were mainly by way of a close collaborative relationship and friendship with Rajni Kothari and Giri Deshingkar, starting in the 1960s. We worked together for the next two decades in the course of intensive work on two undertakings: the World Order Models Project (WOMP) and the United Nations University’s Programme on Peace and Global Transformation. Both of these initiatives were motivated by a shared commitment to using knowledge and the public engagement of intellectuals in the service of humanity, and specifically, in addressing the great sources of human suffering: war, poverty, oppression, and later, ecological disruption. The focus of both projects was on what could be done to bring about change and justice by nonviolent means at varying levels of societal complexity, and with deference to the diversity of cultural values, political orientations, and regional priorities that existed in the last half of the twentieth century. Our work was also animated by attempts to grasp the opportunities and obstacles for democracy and development present in ‘the post-colonial moment’, as well as by the dangers and distractions of the Cold War, and its barbarous wars, especially those in Asia.

 

The collaborative work, especially in the setting of the World Order Models Project, brought to the surface a range of differences in responding to the realities of the existing national, regional, and global setting. The project brought together scholars from the major power centres of the world including North America, Europe, India, China, Latin America, Japan, and Africa. Those of us from the North brought a greater emphasis on war/peace preoccupations and expressed a stronger interest in transforming global institutions, especially those forming the UN System, so as to realize world order values. Those participating from the South, and especially Kothari, were much more focused on the challenges of development, unleashing the economic potential of former colonies, but doing so in a manner that drew upon the cultural resources of country and civilization.

Such differences generated some stimulating discussion and brought to the surface some sharp disagreements. In retrospect, I would say, and felt at the time, that the views from the South carried the day, especially on two matters: the privileging of development and democratization as ways to promote maximum human well-being in a desirable and attainable manner and the skeptical questioning of schemes for world government and centralized global governance, which came to be treated as a distasteful combination of utopianism and western hegemonic daydreaming. WOMP was an important learning experience for me, which included benefiting from the sort of atmosphere encouraged by the CSDS worldview that valued informal discussion and intense controversy as much as seminar style response to prepared papers.

 

Kothari’s role as director of the United Nations University project on Peace and Global Transformation gave this work, with its periodic long meetings, a strong CSDS flavour, including an innovative focus on working for change from below in societal frameworks and conceiving of civil society as possessed of agency with respect to the pursuit of social goals on behalf of the most marginal elements of society. I worked closely in this project with Mary Kaldor, as well as with Rajni and Giri, on a book we called Towards a Liberating Peace (1989), a set of reflections drawing its inspiration appropriately from Gandhi’s call for a politics built around the societal challenges posed by the poorest of the poor.

This bottom up approach in important respects was a complete intellectual withdrawal from the mainstream thinking in peace studies and international relations to which I had been accustomed by my own academic background, which featured the dynamics of a state-centric world with its rather sterile debates between ‘realists’ and ‘liberals’. In this sense, much greater hope for the future was based on the human empowerment that could be envisioned and encouraged within local communities than what could be realistically derived from governmental institutions. I think this understanding of political reality has contributed over the years to both the progressive identity of CSDS and the shaping of its overall research agenda.

 

It was in the midst of this work that I got to know the CSDS, which I quickly discovered was really an embodiment of the values, visionary hopes, and epistemological inclinations and pedagogical originality of Kothari, Deshingkar, as well as such other close collaborators as Ashis Nandy and D.L. Sheth. It was this cutting edge quality of epistemological and pedagogical orientation that exerted its greatest influence on me. I was at the time a typical American junior member of the Princeton faculty in the late 1960s, with training in law, an interest in world politics, and some standard academic publications, although this conventional persona was complicated somewhat by my increasingly militant opposition to America’s grand strategy, which led me to devote a decade of intellectual activism taking the form of participation in the anti-war movement generated by the Vietnam War and the anti-nuclear movement that was fearful of a catastrophe borne from Cold War miscalculations and a nuclear arms race.

I also brought to this early experience a strong interest in India’s culture and philosophy that derived from my student days, especially intensive study with the Whiteheadian philosopher, F.S.C. Northrop, author of The Meeting of East and West, whose prophetic concerns anticipated by half a century the current effort to form an ‘alliance of civilizations’. In relation to CSDS, this background encouraged me to abandon the boundaries between politics and culture in seeking to shape a normative identity that proudly rejected the idea that knowledge should content itself with being a neutral bystander on the battlefields of human struggle.

I was also influenced by Rajni Kothari’s personal journey from his early and much praised work on political parties that was in the tradition of western social science and his later scholarship that was embedded in the struggles of people for a better life, perhaps most comprehensively depicted in his contribution to the WOMP series of books, published under the title Footprints into the Future (1975). And also by Smitu Kothari’s and Vandana Shiva’s eye-opening engagements with movements of local empowerment, which represented existential rejections of state-centric political science and law and expressed confidence that people were themselves the only valid, reliable, and effective source of their own liberation. During these years, I recall listening with raptured attentiveness to Smitu talking of his deep commitment to the work of Lokayan (Dialogue of People) and a very youthful Vandana lyrically reporting on the Chipko struggles to save the forests by reliance on Gandhian tactics of resistance.

 

The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies imparted to me its instinctively innovative epistemology and pedagogy that has had an enduring impact on my subsequent work as scholar, teacher, activist, and engaged citizen. It was clear to me at the time that the Centre was something different from a university, although it valued knowledge and free inquiry to a similar extent, and was in its way a teaching institution dedicated to helping students find pathways to knowledge and productive work and life. The distinctiveness of CSDS had to do with several of its features: a lack of crippling boundaries of specialization that reward the narrowness of research interests in most university settings and tend to discourage individual and group work that is multi-disciplinary and sensitive to the relations between culture and policy; pressures to maintain a posture of scholarly objectivity and detachment from the great struggles over social policy that are the substance of political life and a sign that a member of the academic community is sufficiently neutral to be trusted by the full spectrum of opinions present among students; and a subtle bias that subsidizes work on behalf of the established order and marginalizes, if not outlaws, intellectual efforts that are seen as counter-hegemonic or as challenges to entrenched policies and interests, and most of all, certified methodologies and modes of thinking. Of course, to some extent this is a negative caricature of the academic culture that dominates most universities, but to some extent a broad brush portrayal that exaggerates to make its point.

 

Although exaggerating the differences in approach as between universities and the CSDS orientation is useful as a first approximation, it does not fairly tell the whole story. There are many scholars in universities that seek to stimulate students to be creative citizens and constructive members of society; there are often supportive relations among members of academic departments at universities, and in the name of academic freedom scholars are free to take on most controversial issues, although there is often a high price to pay. At present, for instance, in many American universities it is almost an assured obstacle to an academic appointment, and often an obstacle to promotion and recognition via fellowship and rewards to be perceived as critical of Israeli state policies. What is probably most troubling about many university environments, and I speak mostly of those in North America which I have experienced, is the subtle yet strong encouragement of and respect for participation in government, lucrative private sector relationships, and activities that reinforce prevailing public policy. These corrupting pressures are coupled with a corresponding discouragement of comparable participation in movement and oppositional politics and, even more so, to active involvement in public opposition to mainstream thinking on controversial issues. In essence, to be a public intellectual is scorned, while to be a government apologist or consultant or an advisor in the world of finance is honoured.

 

In contrast, it was my strong impression from the outset of my contact with the Centre that it was pedagogically conceived and built from its inception to realize an opposite set of normative assumptions: essentially to create a communal space for exploration that sought to understand the tensions of past and present, while working for development, democracy, and social justice in the future. It was fiercely independent of special interests, of government, and of ideological dogmatism. In this regard, the CSDS was a space in which diverse views were safe, and where those from many sectors of society, from the very poorest to the richest, from the dissenter to the government bureaucrat, could gather to exchange ideas, debate alternatives, and search for practical avenues of accommodation.

What was never in jeopardy within the Centre was the integrity involved in upholding these commitments to independent and heretical thought or its evident belief that learning was a community enterprise in which movement activists had as much to contribute as those who spend their days, and even their nights, closeted in library stacks. Part of this sense of the milieu of a proper learning environment was both a recognition of the relevance of play and the organic importance of culture. I remember my own experiences at the Centre, its ping-pong table and programmes of poetry readings and dance recitals being as important as its schedule of lectures and seminars.

Building on these recollections of my contact with the CSDS and these much cherished friendships, aside from deepening my love of and fascination with India, especially its Gandhian legacy and panoramic diversity of colour and vitality, I believe my own intellectual and political evolution exhibits a similar journey that can be clarified by reference to three vectors of thought, feeling, and action: agency, normativity, and location.¹ 

 

Agency: By agency I refer here to those who act in a historically relevant manner, and call particular attention to civil society roles that offer liberating hope to the peoples of the world, especially in relation to overcoming various forms of human insecurity and to establishing substantive democracy (accountability, transparency, participation, rule of law, equity, civility). The agency of the established order, and of the narratives that often define the parameters of our political mentality, give privileged attention to the role of elites, and in world affairs, to governmental actors representing governments, particularly those enjoying hegemonic status of regional and global scope. Progressive politics in the early 21st century involves reminding the multitudes of their still largely dormant potential for agency that exerts a transformative influence.

 

Normativity: The ideal of normativity is meant to introduce the vector of preferred values into the matrix of analysis and prescription. It is a matter of deliberately biasing knowledge in the direction of the useful and desirable without distorting the evidence. It also helps in the selection of subject matter and methodology. This open avowal of normativity repudiates the pretensions of detached knowing or knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Arguably, normative inquiry can be for the sake of animals or beauty, and need not be invariably ethically or humanistically motivated. All that is implied is a valued end.

It is possible that what is most valued by an individual or a collectivity is nihilistic or even genocidal. Such perverse normativity from the perspective of humane and inclusive values is an epistemological risk that cannot be avoided except by establishing a community of scholars that sets some agreed limits on diversity of belief and practice. Perhaps, the ultimate assurance of normative propriety is a strong, although not necessarily absolute, commitment to nonviolence. Even nonviolence has its problematic side as was expressed by the plaintive words of Nelson Mandela uttered in 1964 during the height of the apartheid era in South Africa: ‘The years of nonviolence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation and fewer and fewer rights... [I]t would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching nonviolence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force.’

What is at stake is awareness that knowledge and inquiry are implicated in choices with societal implications, and that the responsible scholar practices his/her craft by being transparent and dialogic about the values professed and preferred. I felt this kind of normative epistemology was the standard operating procedure of CSDS, or at least of those whose work I was familiar with.

 

Location: It is evident that our geographic and psycho-social location is a crucial determinant of our being-in-the-world, and shapes our understanding of what is important within the spatial/temporal dimensions of our personal experience. Identity politics does not necessarily point us toward issues of race, class, and nation even if we feel the weight of discrimination, although it does often have that effect. It may be if oriented toward sympathy and compassion that include an acceptance of responsibility for inflicting pain and abuse on others that captures our attention.

I believe that I was most strongly drawn to oppose the Vietnam War in 1968 after I visited North Vietnam in the midst of the war, and experienced the acute vulnerability and decency of the Vietnamese people being bombed from largely safe altitudes by my countrymen; earlier as a critic of American foreign policy and the decolonization process I had opposed the war intellectually because I thought it would end in defeat and wastefully divert American resources and weaken its global leadership capacities.

Such concerns were similar to anti-war positions based on assessing national interests and endorsed to varying degrees by such notable realists as George Kennan and Hans Morgenthau. My political consciousness, based on location, shifted from academic scholar to scholar activist as a result of this visit to Vietnam that exerted a stronger locational influence than did my years of bookish immersion in the literature of international relations. I would say that a similar process has pulled me away from my ethnic identity as a Jew in relation to the Israel/Palestine conflict, exemplifying my receptivity to the moral gravitas of victimized peoples.

Perceiving the world as ‘a global village’ or through the optic of globalization alters our sense of perspective, and maybe diminishes the significance of national boundaries, but it does not erode the significance of location in relation to knowing and acting. In this period of inter-civilizational discourse and global civilizational emergence, there are new problems posed about the multiple connections between identity and location that complicate and confuse the relations between location and space. Indeed, the challenge of climate change forces upon our moral and political imagination serious concerns about the relations between location and time, to what extent do we limit carbon emissions, and maybe constrain consumerist lifestyles, for the sake of future generations.

My intention in this essay of celebration and appreciation is to draw some broader conclusions from my experience of CSDS and its founding generation. In my own imaginings I would like to claim that this experience as refracted through the prism of my consciousness has led and is leading to the formulation of a peace and justice epistemology and pedagogy. By this I merely mean a distinctive way of knowing, teaching, and learning that views the classroom as a metaphor for experiencing the world in particular ways that is always challenging us to go further in pursuit of human betterment in any of its myriad forms. I have resorted at times to the trope of ‘citizen pilgrim’ to capture this sense of citizen engagement as a life journey endowed with spiritual significance, that is, extending our understanding beyond the limits sanctified by the Enlightenment legacy of instrumental reason.

 

Footnote:

1. I borrow this usage of agency and normativity from an inspirational essay by Maivãn Clech Lam, ‘Rooting Change: Indigeneity and Development’, Oxford Handbook on Development Thought, forthcoming 2013.