60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

the history of mass violence since colonial times 21
Atomisation of knowledge – production and reproduction
The atomisation process of splitting people from themselves, their
environment, did not stop there. Along with it emerged a process of
knowledge production and reproduction which parallelled the atomisation
process, as can be seen not just in the scientifi c disciplines, but
also in the social sciences and history, among others. With the end of
the Cold War came the end of international area studies, giving way
to concerns shaped by the impact of globalisation.
What writers like McDonough and Braungart, James Lovelock, Charles
C. Mann (and many others whose names can be found in the bibliographies
of these books) have in common is a conviction that it is possible
to look at the biography of Earth or the biography of people in
such an encompassing way that the current dichotomising thinking
about Earth, and its human and non-human inhabitants, is abandonned
because such thinking, it is now realised, will eradicate life on Earth.
The mindset Einstein insisted had to be changed did not just refer to
how physicists looked at the world; it referred, one might guess, in part
at least, to how competitive conquest has always operated: by dividing
and splitting all the time. Change will necessarily mean going in
the opposite direction: uniting, converging, healing after the destruction,
all the time. It may sound a trivial observation, but when looking
at a picture of Earth from space, one does not see the boundaries that
separate countries. Such a change will not happen quickly because, as
Mann (2005: 106) points out, there is the growing realisation that so
much is at stake. Written by victors, history, from the point of view
of States and corporations, has tended to prescribe a way of thinking
which has reproduced itself beyond their own immediate vicinity.
To many historians of Africa, Trevor-Roper is infamous for having
stated on the BBC that there was no such thing as African history.
Of the Natives in North America he wrote that their ‘chief function
in history is to show to the present an image of the past from which
by history it has escaped’ (Mann 2005: 15). George Bancroft, one of
the greatest historians of his time, described North America in 1834
as ‘an unproductive waste… Its only inhabitants were a few scattered
barbarians, destitute of commerce and of political connection’ (Mann
2005: 14-15). A century later, Alfred L. Kroeber ‘theorized that the
Indians in eastern North America could not develop – could have no
history – because their lives consisted of warfare that was insane, unending,
continuously attritional’ (Mann 2005: 15).
Except for making passing references of a rhetorical nature, most historians
of Africa do not seem to look at the colonisation of North