The End of Certainty Quotes

“يلاحظ مثلًا في الدول المتخلفة أو التي تمر باضطرابات أن السعي لإيجاد دستور ( و إن لم يكن دائمًا لطيفًا ) يبدو ملحًا”
― Stephen Chan , The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism

“Intellectuals sign petitions, perhaps march in the streets, attempt their own soundbites when broadcasting, but confine their extended energies to debate and discourse among themselves.”
― Stephen Chan, The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism

“Chan has had the courage to subvert standard scholarly approaches to show that the very framework within which academics operate is itself an impediment to the leap of imagination required to meet the demands of our sublimely chaotic world.”
― Stephen Chan, The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism

“My fifth point is that, nevertheless, the experience, memory or imagination of enforced abnegation does play a key role. Years of real or imagined oppression — or a solidarity, even an identification, with those who have been oppressed elsewhere — lead to a rebellion. The question missing from most analyses, however, is that the oppression that is resisted is not only a political oppression of a people — for example, the Palestinians (which almost every Islamic state and militant organisation has conspicuously failed to help beyond very limited points) — but a perceived oppression or denigration of a sense of self and a sense of core belief; and it is perceived as applied personally, but also as systemically applied to the collective manifestation of this core belief. To that extent, it is belief that seems as if it is called upon to fight back, because it is belief and philosophy that have been subject to abnegation. It is not, however, just the philosophy that fights back, but, as mentioned above, the philosophy of the means chosen. Does abnegation justify a sacrificium in which huge numbers of innocent people are swept into death? Does the sacrificium necessarily sacrifice others? In so far as the memory or re-created memory of abnegation is strong and made stronger, it triumphs over the memories and values of self held by others. Terror thus becomes a requital and ruthlessness — requital for sins committed perhaps against self but certainly against self’s historical and contemporary cohorts, and ruthlessness in an exploding outwards.”
― stephen chan , The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism

“That kind of aura of ambivalence is carried over into Devil May Cry for, after all, Dante in the electronic game is still half-devil, and something brooding and smoldering inside him may yet emerge in future editions of the game. Games technology being what it is, players may in future be able to choose how good or how evil Dante will be. He will never lose his evil side completely. He even has a twin brother who seems destined to convert from evil to good and back again forever. Dante survives in his world of evil because he understands it. He understands it because it is part of him. It is part of his genetic drive. But he makes decisions in his life — rather, the players of the game can decide for him — as to what drives him most, a moral vision or a base, devilish autarky. The way he goes around ruthlessly slaying hordes of his half-cousins, I’d say the equation that makes up Dante is a set of sliding numbers and hypothetical values. For Dante, evil and good are an algebra. They are not absolutes.
So it is not as simple as saying ‘there is good in everybody’, but is more to do with complex investigations and calculations as to how best to intersect.”
― Stephen Chan, The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism

“This is a question that extends beyond theology, for it involves the same principle by which humanity organized itself on a 44- year cold war precipice, from 1945 to 1989. No one moved back from the sheer drop but stood, armed and balanced, at the very edge — each side daring and betting against the other’s nerve. What was called the balance of power involved massive nuclear armament; and the principle of armament was not deployment and use, but the threat of it. It was the careful preparation of a threat to do great evil, ostensibly (on both key sides) for the sake of a foundation good — whether for the good of democracy and ‘American values’ or the socialist values of the proletariat. But, just as economics has become a discipline in love with its key instrument of econometrics — the elegance of the equation is everything and its applicability somewhat less so — so the balance of power became a love affair not with power and its possible final triumph, but with the balance.”
― Stephen Chan, The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism

“Can there be such layers in international relations? Layers, say, of compassion and mercy, ambivalence and imagination, abjection and horror, forgiveness and history, industrialism and
birdsong, power and faith? Well, there had better be. The world is not getting any easier to navigate. Might as well navigate it in all its layered complexity. It is the sort of ‘long revolution' the Welsh thinker Raymond Williams once sought to impose upon cultural and intellectual work within a capitalist society — to subvert and change it from within its very structures, not of exchange, but of communication. Well, I think it just got harder, because we must seek to understand communication and its foundations within societies we have never approached on their own terms before. And, in the clamour of industrialised and industrialising world politics, we must seek still to do it serenely. Seek to appreciate the flower, with myriad colours in its petals, surviving still at the mouth of the sewer that carries our fetid human and chemicalised wastes towards the gasping ocean.”
― Stephen Chan, The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism

“There are typecastings, un-typecastings and re-typecastings in any imagination. A ‘healthy’ type might be one with a balanced mixture of all three. Demonisation should not be swamped by its antidote. Scepticism is always welcome in a world where few things can be as they seem. The work of international relations might be to see the fused layers of every actor and its background, and not just a layer which is forcibly represented as the worst aspect possible. It would of course be reflective if each actor could see its own fused and often contradictory layers — and they are fused together; they can be analysed in their component parts, but they can’t be unglued completely. However,in a world of ascendancy and descendancy in the international, every actor essentialises its historical glamour and greatness as an underpinning for victory. The trick for the observer — and the wise statesman — is not to believe anything, but to believe everything; to know and believe each and every single layer of the whole even when, often, the layers are far from neatly stacked but
are jumbled materials that form a living collage of interchanging shapes and colours — Jackson Pollack in 3d. It would certainly make the study of international relations, and even more so its practice, quite fascinating in more than its present morbidity of power relationships.”
― Stephen Chan, The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism

“هذا السؤال يتجاوز اللاهوت ، فهو يتضمن المبدأ نفسه الذي نظمت البشرية نفسها به على شفا حرب باردة مدتها أربع و أربعون سنة ، من عام 1945 إلى 1989.
لم يتراجع أحد عن حافة الهاوية ، بل صمد مدججًا بالسلاح و متزنًا على الحافة و كل طرف يتحدى الآخر و يراهن على جرأته و كان ما يعرف بتوازن القوى يشمل تسليحًا نوويًا مكثفًا و لم يكن مبدأ التسلح النشر و الاستخدام بل التهديد بهما
كان الاستعداد الحريص للتهديد بارتكاب شر عظيم في سبيل خير أصيل سواء في سبيل الديمقراطية و القيم الامريكية أو القيم الاشتراكية للطبقة العاملة.
و لكن بما أن الاقتصاد أصبح نظامًا يعشق أداته الأساسية الميزان الاقتصادي - أناقة المعادلة هي كل شيء و قابليتها للتطبيق أقل من ذلك نوعًا ما - فإن توازن القوى أصبح علاقة غرامية لا بالقوة و بانتصارها المحتمل بل بالتوازن”
― Stephen Chan, The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism

“و مع ذلك ففي عالم من الارتفاع و السقوط في المجال الدولي يبلور كل عنصر فاعل رونقه و مكانته كدعامة للنصر. و المسألة بالنسبة للمراقب - و بالنسبة لرجل الدولة الحصيف - أﻻ يصدق شيئًا ، و لكن أن يصدق كل شيء ؛ أن يعرف و يصدق كل طبقة من الكل حتى حين تكون الطبقات غير منضدة بانتظام بل مواد مبعثرة تشكل ملصقة حية لأشكال و ألوان متبادلة - جاكسون بوﻻك ثلاثي الأبعاد. و هذا ﻻ شك سيجعل دراسة العﻻقات الدولية بل مزاولتها أمرًا رائعًا مقارنة بكآبتها الحالية في علاقات القوة.”
― Stephen Chan, The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism

“و إلى هذا الحد فهو إيمان يبدو كأنه يُلجأ إليه للثأر ، لأن الإيمان و الفلسفة هما اللذان يتعرضات للتضحية. و لكن ليست الفلسفة وحدها التي تثأر ، بل فلسفة الوسيلة التي يقع عليها الاختيار كما سبقت الإشارة. و هل تبرر التضحية بالنفس تضحية بعدد هائل من الأبرياء ؟ و هل التضحية تضحية بالغير بالضرورة ؟ و بقدر ما تكون الذاكرة أو ذاكرة التضحية بالذات المعاد إحياؤها قوية و تزداد قوة تنتصر على ذاكرات الذات و القيم لدى الغير. و بذلك يصبح الإرهاب انتقامًا و وحشية ، انتقام لخطايا ربما ارتُكبت ضد الذات و لكنها يقينًا ضد الجماعات التاريخية و المعاصرة للذات و وحشية في انفجاره نحو الخارج”
― Stephen Chan, The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism

“ما مغزى القصة ؟ إنها قصة حب، و لكنه لم يكن حبًا سليمًا أو هادئًا أو مسيحيًا. إنها قصة شجاعة، إلا أنها لم تكن شجاعة واعية بذاتها. إنها قصة حرب، لكن الحرب لا يفترض أن تشمل على حب و عاطفة. إنها قصة كمين و بقاء، إلا أن كثيرًا مما لم يكن على خط الجبهة في القصة لقوا حتفهم تلك الليلة دون ذكرى. إنها قصة أيديولوجيات تتصادم في الحقول، لكن كثيرًا ممن قاتلوا و قضوا في ذلك الحقل كانوا مجندين يريدون أن يحبوا و يعيشوا أيضًا. إنها قصة من الكفاح الأريتري في سبيل الحرية، إلا أن هذه الحرية غُدر بها الآن.”
― Stephen Chan, The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism