A War on People. Jarrett Zigon
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vision of what that future might be like or how to get there.3 Confronted with this contemporary condition in which many clearly seek an otherwise but without a vision of what that might be, political anthropologists and theorists have come to recognize the dual problem of this lack of political motivation and alternative visions. Notwithstanding the now increasingly common recognition of these lacks and a few important attempts to offer theoretical alternatives to traditional political thinking, the actual articulation of what a possible future might be and how it may be achieved remains largely missing from this growing body of literature.
This book is an attempt to address this lacunae by offering a glimpse at one of these possible futures and showing the political process by which its potential is being ushered into existence by some unlikely political actors: active and former users of heavy drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine. I call these political actors unlikely because for over a century drug users around the globe have been systematically excluded not only from political processes but, as will become clear throughout this book, from humanity as well. What I hope to show and consider in this book, however, is that despite this unlikelihood, the globally networked anti–drug war political movement organized and run by drug users is, in fact, at the forefront of offering an alternative political and social imaginary. In particular, I will focus my considerations on how this anti–drug war imaginary and political activity is enacting nonnormative, open, and relationally inclusive alternatives to such key ethical-political concepts as community, freedom, and care.
For many it may seem odd that so-called addicts and junkies could show us an alternative social and political vision. But as I hope becomes clear throughout this book and as I will emphasize in chapter two, such a response is more a result of what anti–drug war agonists call the “fantasy world” created through drug war propaganda than it is indicative of the lives and capacities of most drug users.4 I would therefore like to ask readers to set aside any preconceived notions they may have of drug users and invite them to consider instead that in fact the lives of drug users and the war waged against them illustrate well the contemporary condition within which many of us now find ourselves. This condition, I will argue shortly, is best considered one of war as governance. If the drug war is just one particularly clear example of this global condition of war as governance, then the wager of this book is that the ways in which the anti–drug war movement fights against the drug war—and the alternative worlds they are creating in doing so—may offer us some guidance in rethinking some of our most basic political and ethical motivations, tactics, and aims.
This book draws from an ethnographic archive accumulated from nearly fifteen years of research I have done on the drug war and the ethical, political, and therapeutic responses to it in various parts of the globe (chapter 1). In particular, I draw from this archive in order to hermeneutically interrogate the ways in which the global anti–drug war movement is currently building new worlds through political and ethical activities and relations. What I call the anti–drug war movement is a pluralist assemblage of diverse—and sometimes seemingly contradictory—groups and organizations that have created a counterhegemonic alternative to what I describe below as the global condition of war as governance.5 While in this book I focus primarily upon the political and ethical activity of unions of active drug users and their most immediate allies, such as drug policy organizations, harm-reduction advocates, and housing-reform organizations, the global anti–drug war movement also consists of such unexpected participants as organizations of law enforcement against the drug war, right-wing libertarians, and the parents of those who have died drug war deaths. Many of these unions, groups, and organizations have become globally networked, regularly meet to share ideas and experiences, and have come to agree on a long-term strategy for ending the drug war.
In addition to this network of political activity, the anti–drug war movement has also established a global information and “ideology” dissemination machine to counter drug war propaganda (chapter 2). This includes, for example, a number of websites; Facebook pages and Twitter feeds; intellectuals and journalists who produce books and articles for the general public; good relations with a number of mainstream and alternative media outlets; and conferences and workshops that regularly occur at the international, regional, national, and local levels. The anti–drug war movement, then, has established a global infrastructure for the transmission, dissemination, and enactment of a counterhegemonic alternative to the contemporary global condition of war as governance.
Despite the global reach of this political movement, much of the activity is done at the local or regional levels, addressing what in chapter one I call the localized situations of the more widely diffused complexity of the drug war. Nevertheless, because these localized situations are the situated manifestations of the globally diffused complexity of the drug war, these agonists find themselves in a shared condition of war that, as I show in chapter one, is more or less the same no matter where it manifests. As a result, although tactics and strategies differ to some extent according to the differences of the situated manifestations, overall the global anti–drug war movement has been able to construct a coherent long-term strategy because those involved have been able to recognize that they are all, in fact, caught up in shared conditions despite the local differences.
In my hopes to present as clearly as possible the political response to this widely diffused complexity of the drug war, I primarily focus upon three localized anti–drug war groups. Thus, agonists in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada; in New York City, United States; and in Copenhagen, Denmark, will take the forefront of this book. This is so for various reasons, the most important of which is that in these three locales we can most easily discern the emergence and endurance of the kinds of new worlds I will argue the global movement in general seeks to build. These three locales also illustrate the different scales that worlds can take—from the intersubjective to the neighborhood and ultimately beyond—and thus help us see that transforming worlds does not occur all at once from the center outward or from the top down. Instead, that transformation spreads by means of persistent political activity and across networks of relationality through processes of attunement that hermeneutically affect and intertwine others in transformative ways.6 It is important to emphasize that this transformation is not temporary prefiguration but is actually happening and sticking. The anti–drug war movement is actually changing worlds, slowly but surely.
The success of the anti–drug war movement is, in part, a result of its organizational structure and the political activity this allows. Unlike the fetishization of horizontalist full participation that now dominates much of what has come to count as left political activity today, the anti–drug war movement, for the most part, combines a hierarchical, or vertical, structure with some aspects of horizontalism, such as autonomous groups, diversity, networking, and temporally limited full participation. In contrast to the long-term instability of horizontalist politics, this “combination of horizontal and more centralized organizational models,” as Jeffrey Juris has speculated, allows for a broad-based, effective, and sustainable political movement.7 To be clear, however, the centralized organizational model of most anti–drug war groups that I did research with is an open and inclusive political leadership that, much like Hannah Arendt’s notion of political activity and the community of whoever arrives (chapter 3) they seek to build,8 welcomes anyone who wishes to participate. Thus, many of these organizations have a decision-making and leadership process that closely resembles that of democratic centralism,9 through which all of those who wish to participate in the political leadership debate, discuss, and come to consensus on, for example, tactical and strategic decisions, which are then carried out by the participants or members of the organization at large. The result is a politics of action that has lasting and sustainable effects. Consequently, this politics of worldbuilding has been able to go beyond the momentary prefiguration, spectacle, and protest that have come to characterize much left political activity today and is now actually building new worlds,10 which include not only infrastructure, values, and social and worldly interactive practices but the onto-ethical grounds for such worlds.
WAR AS GOVERNANCE
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