Thank you so much for having me. Mohan. I'm looking forward to our conversation. I was really thinking about the title of this podcast, which is Interventions from the Global South, and really reflecting more on the the utility of the Global South versus the Global North as a lens, through looking at this kind of the binary lens through which we look at what is happening around the around the world. And so while I really think that the term Global South is very useful in various contexts, and it does help us grapple with certain terms.
At the same time, I really think that binary sometimes can, can also kind of mask various oppressions, when you only have kind of Western versus non western nations, and that binary, which arose during the Cold War. Recently, I've really been gravitating, I think, towards the term the periphery. And this is actually not a term that I thought of. It's a term that's being used now, I think by various journalistic collectives, like Mango Media. It really is also trying to get at the the regimes which are also oppressing us.
And so thinking about how the people who are peripheral to the state, regardless of whether that state is the Global South or the Global North - and so thinking about how, for instance, activists in China, in Russia, in Iran and in Syria, are peripheral to those states, which are then also peripheral to maybe to the West or to Western nations. And so the realities on the ground are a lot more complex than just looking at through this kind of simple ideological lens of Global South versus Global North. I've been thinking more about how we need to also maybe separate the nation state from the people on the ground. And it is so difficult to enter into these conversations because you never want to be perceived as somehow excusing certain imperialisms. But I think it's important that we add new ones and that we really look at the people on the ground and that we are able to see how in some situations, various imperialisms have been more harmful than others. And also, it's really important, I think, not to look at the region with one broad brush.
So for instance, I look, I think, in Syria, the US invasion of Iraq, which was extremely harmful and extremely, I mean, horrific, but it's still is the lens through which the region is seen. And so it's been over 20 years now. And it almost seems like for many Americans, I think time solidified in that moment. And that's how they've seen any intervention, or it really has colored how the Arab Spring, as it's called, has been, has been seen. One of the interesting things I've looked at more is how the US and the West continues to be placed at the center of the analysis, instead of really centering those on the ground. And so that's not to say that America hasn't been damaging to Syria, for instance, but that there are other oppressors who are on the ground in in a much more damaging way. The narratives, for instance, of moral exceptionalism have an idea of seeing America, the nation state, as a unique beacon of light for the world, as a unique, as a kind of special humanitarian actor for good. But then, to see how that same kind of moral exceptionalism sometimes can be flipped, and can only see America as a kind of a rogue imperial actor, and nobody else really is able to take that space. And what happens is that the the realities of those on the ground, and then kind of erased: the micro politics of resistance, for instance.
And so I remember when the assassination of Qasem Soleimani happened. Immediately, there was World War Three trending on Twitter. And there was a lot of concern about what it would mean, about the legality of the strike, about what it would mean for the Iranian-US relationship. And really, there was no real mention of Iranian imperialism in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. On the other side of the globe, if you look to what was happening in Syria, Syrians were in the streets celebrating, he was considered a child murderer, he was considered a terrorist, he was considered a colonial figure who had, you know, engaged in starvation sieges, who had engaged in genocide, who had really elongated their own oppression by the Assad regime.
And so there is an erasure of the suffering of Syrians at the hands of another, and it shows you this detachment which is occurring. And when we can only see brown state actors as only being victims of America and they're all apolitical victims, there is this zero sum equation of evil in the world, and only America can commit oppression. And so I love the quote from Rohini Hensman, who talks about like, brown actors have agency to do good and to commit evil against others.