September 11, 2007
Mittelman recognized for path-breaking global scholarship
On the night of January 25, 1971, James Mittelman was awakened by gunfire.
He thought it was just the work of the “kondos,” or thieves, whose gunshots sometimes troubled the sleep of Kampala, the Ugandan capital where he was teaching. Barely three years earlier, he had arrived at Makerere University as its only Western student, knowing almost nothing about Africa. Now he was back in Uganda, living in the placid faculty quarters just inside the secure university gates.
Then came a knock on his door. He peered through the peephole and spotted a black Mercedes Benz. A government car. The man at his door was a stranger, but his face was familiar. “Sir,” the man said to Mittelman, “may I take refuge in your flat?”
It was a minister in the government of President Milton Obote, who had just been toppled by Idi Amin. All of Uganda was about to change.
Mittelman would end up writing a pioneering book on politics and ideology in Uganda that would be the start of a career of path-breaking scholarship. Four decades later, he is respected around the world for his scholarship on development in Africa and as a theorist of global social change. He has recently been named University Professor of International Affairs in recognition of his wide-ranging and influential work.
His many publications, according to Dean Louis Goodman, School of International Service (SIS), “constitute an enormously coherent and influential career of scholarly work,” focusing particularly closely on the connection between ideas and power in nations where political systems have evolved in the twentieth century from a colonial past.
His interests have grown from studying the role of ideas in national politics to studying strategies of development more broadly in various parts of the world. By the early 1990s, those studies were leading him to look at what is now called globalization.
In studying different strategies of development, from Africa to Asia to Latin America, he found, Mittelman said, “a certain blockage for all but a handful of countries.” What, he asked, has been blocking their advancement?
‘Hyperconflict’
This search for explanations pushed him to look beyond the local level to national and regional conditions, and inspired him to examine the changing macro-dynamics of peace and conflict. “We’re beginning to enter a new epoch in history,” he says, “that may be defined as a galaxy of hyperconflict.”
This new universe is marked by an increasing subjective feeling of insecurity, with a perception of increased risk in life in spite of, in many cases, an apparent improvement in economic conditions, life expectancy, and other indicators.
In the Philippines, for instance, the economy has been growing at a healthy rate, yet household surveys show that the ordinary Filipino feels increasingly impoverished. Around the world, while specifics may differ, there is an increasing perception that material conditions are worsening, crime is rising, and violent movements are multiplying.
“New technologies spread tensions at hyperspeeds,” he says, and “the reorganization of political violence means that instruments of violence are out of the hands of governments and their agents.”
Of course, the global rise of insecurity means different things in different places. “Paraguay is not Chad,” he notes. “But conflicts are all tethered to the central dynamics of globalization.”
An impact around the world
Mittelman’s interest in Africa began with a college course on international organizations in the 1960s, when he was startled to learn about the existence of a social system in South Africa called apartheid. To Mittelman, who had become attuned to injustice while growing up in a segregated suburb of Cleveland, learning about apartheid was a shock that would lead to a global quest for knowledge.
After he graduated from college and started a graduate program in government, he felt dissatisfied with his education in the United States. “It was provincial in the extreme,” he felt. So he asked a diplomat of his acquaintance if there were any good universities in Africa.
There were indeed, he was told, and one was in Uganda. So he left the U.S. in 1968 for Makerere University to pursue a course in African studies. It was a time when most African nations had just emerged from colonialism and begun to chart their own futures. The way that ideas and ideology impacted the formation of these new states fascinated him, and led to a scholarly career with an impact on numerous fields, including sociology, economics, and political science. His work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish, and is being translated into Malay.
Mittelman came to AU as professor of international relations at SIS in 1992 after serving as dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver and dean of the Division of Social Sciences at Queens College, City University of New York.
Malaysia’s current prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, center, introduced James Mittelman, right, as Pok Rafeah Chair in International Studies at the National
University of Malaysia in 1997. Badawi was then the foreign minister, and Sham Sani, left, was the university’s vice chancellor. (Photo courtesy of James Mittelman)
His global career has stretched far beyond Africa. He was in Malaysia from 1997 to 1999 as the Pok Rafeah Chair in International Studies at the National University in Malaysia, was visiting professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in South
Africa in 1996, and was visiting professor at Ritsumeikan University in Japan in 2000. He has consulted with the United Nations and other international organizations.
Mittelman is now one of three University Professors, and the first in many years for SIS.
“His scholarly record is a wonderful example and inspiration for his colleagues,” Goodman says.
For Mittelman, his greatest reward has been watching the careers of his students. Some have gone on to influential positions in their governments as ambassadors, ministers, and even, in one case, as a prime minister. Others teach at universities, or work for international organizations.
In his classroom, they discussed the impact of ideas on political systems, global dynamics, and the lives of billions. Now his former students are making a difference, in every quarter of the world.“That,” he said, “is really my greatest source of pride.”
