The right to be neutral amid a war in the West – Ranabir Samaddar

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FORMER Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere once said: “When the elephants fight, the grasshoppers die; when the elephants make love the grasshoppers die.”

It’s through this lens that many in the Global South are watching the war in Ukraine, a European war that, while distant, is driving a rethink of what it means to be neutral.

Historically, smaller nations have preserved their right to remain non-aligned. They did so from the 1950s to the 1970s in the context of the Cold War when the Americans and the imperialist West demanded the rest of the world choose a camp.

In the neoliberal time, there is often no ‘just war’. Neoliberalism has fragmented identities, increased territorial wars, and sharpened insecurities. Military alliances have proliferated and seas, oceans, and the air have been militarised to an unprecedented degree.

All these have been in the background of extractive capitalism, which has turned water, precious metals, air, and sub-soil resources into fiercely competitive commodities. The conflicts produced from these geo-economic and geopolitical conflicts often have no ‘good’ sides and ‘bad’ sides.

To craft peace politics, the first requirement is to first refuse to take sides and then resist the pressure to take a side. But to do so means being against the Western tradition of transnational military alliances.


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