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Mail & Guardian
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Mail & Guardian
Could Ali Mazrui's nuclear pragmatism inspire practical policies?
Kenyan American political scientist Ali Mazrui Possession of nuclear weapons is not incidentally negative, it is directly and purposefully so, designed to instantly kill millions of people upon pressing an intercontinental ballistic missile button, according to Kenyan American political scientist He made this obvious point in the course of comparing what he called the crises of global survival, including climate change and nuclear war. He knew this was an obvious point, although it was often ignored. The Russo-Ukrainian War and the potential fractures in United States extended deterrence have today triggered fears of a renewed nuclear arms race and nuclear proliferation, or even a nuclear war. Contemporary nuclear politics may therefore need creative and even radical ideas that part ways with established practices. One such idea is Mazrui's 'nuclear pragmatism', which holds that horizontal nuclear proliferation — the spread of nuclear weapons to new actors in the Global South — is a necessary step toward a universal nuclear disarmament. He believed this could fundamentally change the mindsets of the leaders of major nuclear powers and encourage them to abolish their arsenals. This idea, a little too counterintuitive for sure, has long been overlooked in the Western canon of security studies literature. I argue that giving it a closer look could at least provoke new lines of thinking. 'Abolish to abolish' and 'proliferate to abolish' are the two schools of thought in Africa on nuclear disarmament championed, respectively, by the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and by Mazrui. Both Nkrumah and Mazrui were for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. Nkrumah argued that nuclear weapons were too dangerous to be used for any purpose, including deterrence, since a threat of violence itself is a form of violence. Mazrui agreed with Nkrumah that nuclear weapons must be abolished. But the two diverged sharply on how to achieve this. Nkrumah preferred a geographically focused, legally based approach. The ideas of Africa as a nuclear-free zone and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons resonate with the approach once advocated by Nkrumah. Mazrui maintained that Nkrumah's approach could at best lead us to a nuclear-free Africa but not to a nuclear-free planet; the former is meaningless if it does not lead to the latter. Mazrui thus asserted: '… African countries should stop thinking in terms of making Africa a nuclear-free zone.' His alternative suggestion was for African countries to 'reconsider their position' vis-à-vis the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which came into being in 1968. In other words, Mazrui suggested that African countries should (threaten to) withdraw en masse from the treaty. He insisted, '… non-proliferation for the nuclear 'have-nots' will be a nonstarter until it is matched by progressive military denuclearization among the 'haves'.' From Mazrui's point of view a modest proliferation of nuclear weapons in Africa and the Middle East could increase nuclear anxieties among the major nuclear states in the Global North, intensify the pressure on the leadership there for total nuclear disarmament and ultimately lead to the rejection of nuclear weapons by all — and their abolition. He passionately advocated this idea for more than half a century. Unlike Nkrumah's view, Mazrui's idea was never seriously considered in Africa, and it was never referenced in the mainstream discourse on nuclear disarmament. But this appears to be slowly changing in recent years. The assertion made by the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, in February 2025, however, still accurately captures the prevailing mood about nuclear weapons in the Global South. Guterres said: 'The nuclear option is no option at all.' Mazrui's nuclear pragmatism is based on at least four assumptions: (1) nuclear weapons are evil by nature and should be illegitimate, not just for some, but for all; (2) a modest horizontal nuclear proliferation in the Global South would increase nuclear anxieties within the major nuclear powers; (3) this anxiety, in turn, would intensify the public pressure on the leaders of the major nuclear states for total military denuclearisation; and (4) ultimately, the whole process would lead to the rejection of nuclear weapons by all and their total abolition. Mazrui started from the premise that the nuclear accident at Therefore, he posed the question: what other, less catastrophic alternatives might lead to global nuclear disarmament? What thus came into being was his nuclear pragmatism: horizontal nuclear proliferation, specifically a modest increase in nuclear capabilities in Africa and the Middle East, could offer such an alternative, fostering a climate where crises may be manageable and constructive. Of course, horizontal nuclear proliferation has its risks, Mazrui added, but are those risks really more dangerous than the risks of vertical proliferation in arsenals of the superpowers themselves? A key element of Mazrui's nuclear pragmatism is the distrust that Western powers have about nuclear weapons in the Global South. This distrust could be beneficial if it generates enough alarm in the Northern Hemisphere, which could, in turn, lead to a significant movement aimed at declaring nuclear weapons illegitimate for all nations and working toward their elimination in every country that possesses them. It must nevertheless be reiterated that Mazrui never overlooked the risks associated with nuclear proliferation. The ideal scenario for him was total nuclear disarmament or an initiative toward that end without any additional nuclear stockpile (vertical nuclear proliferation) and additional membership in the nuclear club (horizontal nuclear proliferation). For him, however, horizontal nuclear proliferation would lead to a sufficiently great sense of imminent peril to tilt the judgment in favor of total denuclearization in the military field everywhere. According to Mazrui, the racial prejudices and cultural distrust of the white members of the nuclear club may well serve the positive function of disbanding the larger club. The geographical focus of horizontal nuclear proliferation was to be Africa and the Middle East. But a modest horizontal proliferation in the Middle East would be more dangerous in global terms than a slightly higher level of proliferation in Latin America or Africa. This is partly because a regional war in the Middle East carries a greater risk of escalating into a world war than does a regional war in Latin America or Africa. It was, therefore, the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East that could cause greater alarm in the Global North and trigger a movement for the prohibition of nuclear weapons for all. 'Perhaps until now, the major powers have worried only about 'the wrongs weapons in the right hands,'' Mazrui reasoned, 'when nuclear devices pass into Arab or African hands, a new nightmare will have arrived — 'the wrong weapon in the wrong hands'.' This Northern fear could be an asset for getting the North to agree to total and universal denuclearisation in the military field. Dr Seifudein Adem is a research fellow at JICA Ogata Research Institute for Peace and Development in Tokyo, Japan. He is also Ali Mazrui's intellectual biographer.
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
University of Oklahoma students express concerns about student visa revocations
NORMAN, Okla. (KFOR) — Visas for international college students are being revoked nationwide and here in our state. University of Oklahoma students say the sudden actions have them worried. An international student from OU spoke to News 4 about her concerns regarding the revocations. Due to privacy, we are protecting her identity. She's Kenyan American and already has her citizenship, but has siblings and friends who rely on visas. 'It's very scary because you don't know, like, if you'll be impacted,' she said. 'Education has been a tool for many years for people to change their circumstances and just create a better life for themselves and their families back home.' OK immigration attorney: Students with visas revoked in for 'painful experience' Here in Oklahoma, we know of at least 14 college students with revoked visas. Oklahoma State University, University of Central Oklahoma, Oklahoma Christian University, Langston University, and Rose State College are all sharing information. However, the University of Oklahoma says they cannot share the information and sent News 4 a statement: Due to FERPA protections, we are unable to provide any information related to your request. The University of Oklahoma However, universities in California, North Carolina, Ohio, Minnesota, Colorado, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada and Oregon also confirmed visa revocations, saying it does not violate federal privacy laws. Another OU student weighed in on the matter. 'They already worked so hard, and they gotta go back to their home, that's not a good thing,' Rodric Davis said. Governor Kevin Stitt also addressed the topic in Wednesday's press conference. 'I will say I'm confident that President Trump is not revoking visas just to do that,' Stitt said. 'There is either some kind of criminal activity, there is something happening with those visas that they say that's a danger to America. I totally trust President Trump.' The international student said OU withholding information is unsettling. 'We have had no communication about what's going on,' she said. 'We've just seen like things that are going on across the state to other schools.' According to the O'Colly, of the eight known OSU students impacted, political activity was cited as a reason for one student. The other seven visas were revoked due to criminal activity ranging from a previous arrest, to a speeding ticket. In a research study from the Association of American Universities, international students brought nearly $44B to the U.S. economy last academic year and supported nearly 400,000 jobs. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Times
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A New New Museum, for Humans and Robots and Everyone in Between
When the New Museum reopens this fall on New York's Lower East Side, after a major expansion that shuttered it in March 2024, it will almost double its exhibition space to more than 20,000 square feet, thanks to a new, free-standing building designed by Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas of the architecture firm OMA. It is the first public building in New York City by OMA, and will be interwoven with the museum's Sanaa-designed building from 2007. From the outside, the addition will look distinct from the flagship at 237 Bowery, at Prince Street. Against the irregularly stacked, opaque cubes of the original building, Shigematsu and Koolhaas's design is angular. It emphasizes transparency and upward movement, with escalators and elevator shaft visible from the street leading up to terraces on its upper stories. The interior of the two buildings will be seamlessly connected. The artistic director of the museum, Massimiliano Gioni, said in a recent interview that in the face of all this newness, it seemed fitting for the museum to tackle 'ideas of the future, rebirth and new starts.' Gioni's opening exhibition, titled 'New Humans: Memories of the Future,' will unpack the question of what it means to be human in the face of sweeping, even paradigm-shifting, technological change. The gestation of the show and the building happened during, and in the wake of, the Covid-19 pandemic, 'when the question of whether there was even such a thing as a world to come was debatable,' the curator added. 'So we decided to look at how artists imagined such possibilities in different times in history.' The show will fill the entire museum, with 150 artists from more than 50 countries. Perhaps surprisingly for an institution so historically focused on the contemporary, it will stretch back to the early decades of the 20th century. 'As a noncollecting institution, we thought it was an interesting challenge,' Gioni said. 'How can a museum engage with history if it doesn't have a permanent collection?' Works by Pierre Huyghe, Tau Lewis, Precious Okoyomon, Philippe Parreno, Hito Steyerl and Anicka Yi will be in conversation with works by 20th-century artists and cultural figures such as Francis Bacon, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Hannah Höch and El Lissitzky. The Kenyan American artist Wangechi Mutu, subject of a 2023 retrospective at the New Museum, will make a new series of drawings based on Octavia E. Butler's masterwork of short fiction, 'Bloodchild.' The series will appear alongside surrealist work by Salvador Dalí, and the dada artists Francis Picabia and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (known as the Baroness Elsa). Another gallery will look at artists interested in prosthetics and mechanical extensions of the body, including the Beijing-based artist Cao Fei. 'The show is suggesting a kind of symmetry between the 1920s and 1930s and today,' Gioni said, both in their explosions of technology and concurrent fears of the same. The word 'robot,' he explained, was coined in 1920 in a play by the Czech writer Karel Capek, and is 'loaded with fears of replacement, of emancipation from work, of machines taking over.' 'Those ideas are still very urgent' in light of conversations around A.I., he added. While technology is front and center, Gioni said, 'It's not just a parade of mannequins and robots,' pointing to the emergence of expressionist painting in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust and the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But make no mistake, there will be robots — including the special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi's animatronic for Steven Spielberg's 1982 blockbuster 'E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,' and the prototype for the xenomorph in Ridley Scott's 1979 film 'Alien,' which was based on a design by the Swiss Surrealist H.R. Giger. For the curator, the questions the exhibition will raise are not only aesthetic, but ethical and even existential. 'There are plenty of creatures generated digitally or from other machines,' Gioni said. 'But we've always tried to bring it back to the ways in which those creatures have shaped understanding of the self.' Gioni said that curating a show of this scale — the biggest the museum has mounted in gallery space and number of artists — was especially challenging because it was largely done before he had seen the new galleries. The new building has dedicated studio space for artists-in-residence and facilities for New Inc., the museum's cultural incubator for creative entrepreneurs. It will also include an entrance plaza for public artwork. The first occupant: the English artist Sarah Lucas, recipient of the museum's first Hostetler/Wrigley Sculpture award, established to support large-scale work by female artists.
