The figure of the traitor plays an intriguing role in modern
politics. Traitors are a source of transgression from within,
creating their own kinds of aversion and suspicion. They
destabilize the rigid moral binaries of victim and persecutor,
friend and enemy. Recent history is stained by collaborators,
informers, traitors, and the bloody purges and other acts of
retribution against them. In the emergent nation-state of Bhutan,
the specter of the "antinational" traitor helped to transform the
traditional view of loyalty based on social relations. In Sri
Lanka, the Tamil Tigers' fear of traitors is tangled with the Tamil
civilians' fear of being betrayed to the Tigers as traitors. For
Palestinians in the West Bank, simply earning a living can mean
complicity with people acting in the name of the Israeli
state.While most contemporary studies of violence and citizenship
focus on the creation of the "other," the cases in "Traitors:
Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of State-Building" illustrate
the equally strong political and social anxieties among those who
seem to be most alike. Treason is often treated as a pathological
distortion of political life. However, the essays in "Traitors"
propose that treachery is a constant, essential, and normal part of
the processes through which social and political order is produced.
In the political gray zones between personal and state loyalties,
traitors and their prosecutors play roles that make and unmake
regimes. In this volume, ten scholars examine political, ethnic,
and personal trust and betrayals in modern times from Mozambique to
the Taiwan Straits, from the former Eastern Bloc to the West
Bank.This fascinating collection studies the tension between close
personal relationships, the demands of nation-states, and the moral
choices that result when these interests collide. In asking how
traitors are defined in the context of local histories,
contributors address larger comparative questions about the nature
of postcolonial citizenship.
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