Loomnie

15th Berlin Roundtables on Transnationality, March 28 – 31, 2012

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a new era seemed to have opened up: a world without borders and thus – potentially – a world with less conflict and more freedom. Today, more than 20 years later, we can observe that some border systems have softened while others have been consolidated, and many more border-based regulations have been created on national and supra-national levels. The nation-state has not disappeared and neither have its borders. However, borders and borderlands cannot be reduced to spaces of division and conflict but they also exist as spaces of social, ethnic, cultural and economic blending – territories of their own. In the tradition of previous Berlin Roundtables held on urban development, transnational risks, human rights, and cultural diversity the 15th Berlin Roundtables on Transnationality will focus on borders and borderlands as contested spaces.

For further details please see the background paper.

Conference Format
The 15th Berlin Roundtables will be held at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) from March 28 – 31, 2012. Based on an international essay competition, approximately 45 applicants will be invited to discuss their research, concerns and agendas with peers and prominent scholars in Berlin. The Irmgard Coninx Foundation will cover travel to and accommodation in Berlin.
Discussions will take place in three workshops:

“The Social Life of Borders and Borderlands” chaired by Julie Y. Chu (Anthropology, University of Chicago) and Tatiana Zhurzhenko (Political Science, University of Vienna),
“The Politics of Borders: Security and Control” chaired by Mattias Kumm (Law, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, WZB and New York University) and Eric Tagliacozzo (History, Cornell University),
“Natural Resources and the Environment along Borders and Borderlands: Conflicts and Solutions” chaired by Michael Redclift (Geography, King’s College London) and Maria Tysiachniuk (Environmental Unit, Center for Independent Research St. Petersburg).

The conference will be accompanied by evening lectures. Guest speakers will be announced soon.

Eligibility and Application Procedure
The call for papers extends to scholars (max. up to 5 years after Ph.D.) and practitioners (e.g. workers in governmental or urban services, NGOs, journalists). Please submit your paper (maximum 3500 words including footnotes and bibliography), an abstract (max. 300 words), a narrative biography and a CV using the online submission form and the style sheets for your abstract and essay.Submission deadline is November 30, 2011. Please note that co-authorship and already published papers will not be accepted. All participants are expected to actively participate during all days of this workshop.

Irmgard Coninx Research Grant
Conference participants are eligible to apply for one of up to three short-term fellowships to be used at the WZB in Berlin. For further information on the fellowship please visit our research grant site. Conference participants will receive all necessary details on the grant application shortly before the conference.

Jonathan Rosenthal, The Economist’s European finance correspondent writes about my (for now) adopted city, Berlin:

Iconoclasm is not just the preserve of the rebellious poor. In Berlin’s opera houses—there are still three, despite the broken budget—audiences are known to boo and hiss. When I went to a performance directed by Nigel Kennedy earlier this year at the Berliner Philharmonie, which was beautiful if unconventional, I found people brazenly getting up from their seats to leave before the end. That may have been because the bad boy of Vivaldi had upset their sense ofOrdnung by discarding the programme. Yet a few months later the audience almost flattened Daniel Barenboim in their rush to leave the concert hall before him.

For all this, Berlin is a very human city and easy to love. A stranger once ran two blocks to hand me a tiny shoe that my infant son had thrown from his stroller. When my wife got into a taxi with a child who was upset, the driver started singing to calm him down. And the city’s many Kindercafés provide a remarkably grown-up environment to drink good coffee while the children head for the communal pile of toys in a sandpit. Berlin’s suburbs are surprisingly compact and easy to get around. London, it is often said, is a city of villages, but that has more to do with its origins than a real sense of kinship. Berlin really is a city of neighbourhoods. Most have been built with a village-like communalism in mind. Park benches are set close to one another, so that strangers can talk. And sharing tables in restaurants is common, as long as you remember to make the ritual enquiry, “Is this free?”

You come across thoughtfulness in unexpected places. I saw a pierced, tattooed and black-clad young man waiting for the lights to change before crossing an empty road. “It sets a bad example for children,” he told me when I wondered why he, of all people, should be so obedient. In this tangle of contradictions, the thing that perplexes me most is the seeming inability of Berliners to form a queue. In this regard there are two sorts of Berliners. Some of my German friends take umbrage at the notion that they are pushy. Yet when quizzed they confess that if confronted with, say, a single queue in front of two ATM machines, they would unthinkingly walk straight to the front to form a second line. The second sort of Berliner tells me that they have noticed when travelling abroad how foreigners line up and often have gates and ropes to guide them. Yet they find this infantilising and an assault on liberty. “Free people”, one tells me, “don’t queue.” I finally felt I had gone native late one night at the main railway station when I pushed past a throng of people waiting for taxis and hailed the first one I saw. As I got in I overheard the wistful complaint of a German couple who had been waiting. “Why can’t we be more like the English?” one of them said. I shuddered.

Zimbabwe: How the Berlin Wall collapse affected us: Zimbabweans have no compelling reason to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – or the fall of Communism, which followed it, domino-like. True or false? Most zealots of the original plot to turn the country into a one-party state pretend it never happened. Or that, if it did, it had little effect on their politics or the country’s political destiny. That, some would say, was the height of self-delusion.
The two liberation movements, ZANU PF and PF ZAPU were proteges of communist China and the Soviet Union respectively. Without their material, ideological, and moral support, they wouldn’t have made any headway in the struggle against the white supremacists.

Then, after independence, the short-lived coalition government chose Marxism-Leninism – almost inevitably. ZANU PF was more obsessed with that goal than PF ZAPU. There is little doubt that Robert Mugabe was keener on controlling everything and everyone in the country than Joshua Nkomo. Journalists working for the private media found themselves, after 1981, suddenly working for the government media. This point of “control” was brought home to them with the violence of a tsunami. Those who had visited the Soviet Union and China saw the stark similarities: the campaign of regimentation, of all people dwelling on one thought – serving the Sate and The Party. For them, it had a sickening sense of de javu.

Overnight, there were incessant briefings, not just by Mugabe himself, but by diverse cabinet ministers. Their theme was the same: acquaint the people with the government programme – which was of implementing “Gutsa ruzhunji” – socialism. There was no time for according capitalism any special mention, except as the No. 1 Enemy of the People. Capitalism had backed the Smith regime against the socialist-backed struggle of the guerillas of ZANLA and ZIPRA. Most of the journalists had learnt their journalism through Western eyes. Their view of both China and the Soviet Union was jaundiced: intrigue, murder, lies, falsehoods, and the “oneness of the people” – the one party system.

After the fall of both the Wall and communism, there was an embarrassed, ambivalent silence among the leaders. Most whispered among themselves that there would be a reversal: Mikhail Gorbachev was pilloried. He didn’t know what he had started, they warned darkly. He had taken on more than he could chew, they said. They predicted he would bite the dust. There was an inept attempt to pretend the crisis was overblown. It was no crisis at all – Communism would survive, would bounce back, they insisted, rather desperately. Remember Hungary in 1956? Remember Alexander Dubchek in Czechoslavakia? They had all fizzled out, and communism had triumphed. It was indestructible.

Then Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize. No leader in Zimbabwe came anywhere near to winning anything of anything. Nobody was giving awards for bungling an economy that should have been nursed carefully to achieve its potential. So, who had bitten the dust? Rather apologetically, both Russia and China made gestures to the leadership that they were still looking after their interests, even if less glaringly than before. Both could not disguise their willingness to profit from the change in their ideological thrust: the Russian Federation was manifestly capitalist. China went crazy over the consumerism of free enterprise. Continue reading.

Last week, I wrote a column titled Africa after 1989.

1. Nigeria to Limit Domestic Banks’ Market Share to 20%

2. Nigeria in big scamster crackdown

3. Achebe calls for revolution in Nigeria

4. Berlin Wall: 20 years after the fall (with video)

5. Some (Possibly Heretical) Thoughts on Agriculture

6. Is UK Aid failing?

Yesterday I read a journal article on the hypersexualisation of blacks and the redefinition of citizenship in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In plain English, German women saw black men as exotic consumables – blacks here meaning both Africans and African American GIs. But the experiences in both cases are radically different. It is a really interesting article that tries to cover the two different accounts. I’ve learnt quite a bit about this from conversations with Africans who were in Berlin when the Wall came down.

A friend sent me this story today about a German journalist who goes undercover to discover life as a black person in Germany. Still trying to decide whether I should watch the movie he made from the experience. Wondering why I can’t decide? Read the Der Spiegel article for yourself.