Do local needs matter?: the relevance of women’s NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa

This article focuses on the potential of women’s non-governmental organizations (WNGOs) for effectively addressing gender inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa. As the mainstreaming of gender and women’s issues continues to pervade global governance, scholars, and practitioners have questioned whether local WNGOs are capable of formulating projects that are relevant to the communities in which they work. One important challenge is local WNGOs’ dependence on external funding and agendas. The extensive literature on women and development indicates that there is a critical need to develop a more radical, transformative feminist agenda for women’s empowerment. The objective of this quantitative study is to test the association between WNGOs’ emergence and measures of gender inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that while there is evidence that WNGOs’ formation represents a legitimate response to African countries’ challenges in terms of gender inequality, the institutionalization of gender within NGOs does not automatically translate into greater gender equality and women’s empowerment. This article identifies some of the gaps and limitations of gender mainstreaming initiatives within African WNGOs. Examining the heterogeneity of women’s organizing and WNGO formation in the region and gaps in development activities, this study highlights the importance of place and space in developing a progressive feminist agenda. The quantitative analysis used in this study, which highlights the uneven geographies and scales of WNGO intervention in Sub-Saharan Africa, contributes to, and calls for more geographic studies on development and gendered activism.     

(En)Gendering the Maoist Insurgency in India: Between Rhetoric and Reality

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts a gendered analysis of the ongoing Maoist insurgency in India, particularly focused on women’s position within the movement, the continuum of gender based violence that they experience and the potential for transformative politics. The contemporary Maoist movement in India has been informed by a stated commitment to ‘progressive’ gender politics and social transformations; in that it marks a departure from the Naxalite movement of the 60s and 70s. Yet women remain concentrated in the group’s lower ranks and are absent from leadership positions. In addition, sexual and gender based violence and discrimination within the movement further undermine the commitment of the revolution to create opportunities for transformative politics including gender justice and equality. We consider it important that women’s lived experiences of the conflict - as combatants, supporters as well as civilians affected by it - are brought to the foreground. Drawing from postcolonial feminist approaches, we reflect on the challenges and possibilities for feminist politics and ethics within the Indian Maoist movement. We conclude that the rhetoric and reality of gender equality within the Maoist movement provides a unique opportunity to further investigate and analyze the ways in which feminist activism and the women’s movement in India have alienated the concerns of marginalized women from dalit and adivasi communities.     

Beyond Depoliticization? Caste,NGOs and Dalit Land Rights in Maharashtra,India

In India, Dalit mobilization for land rights and the cultivation of gaairan (grazing lands) in the last decade has attracted the attention of international civil society actors who participate in such mobilization through local non‐governmental organizations (NGOs). This article contextualizes the debate on the growth and role of NGOs by presenting the politics of formation and working of a funding‐driven network of NGOs on Dalit rights and livelihoods in India. It cautions against exaggerating the role of international civil society actors in local democratization processes, and also argues that the feared depoliticizing of public interests as a result of INGO involvement is misplaced in the case of Dalit politics.     

The Violence of Poverty: Theology and Activism in an “Age of Austerity”

ABSTRACT

Faith groups are in the front line of the struggle to defeat poverty in breadline Britain. Given their roots in local communities Churches and Christian NGOs are well-placed to challenge economic policies that have resulted in the spiraling of food poverty, homelessness, personal debt and child poverty. By framing poverty as a political choice, a form of structural violence and systemic sin this paper brings peace studies and political theology into a constructive dialogue. In the face of ongoing “austerity” the paper demonstrates that poverty represents a clear and present danger to the social fabric of the UK and argues that only a re-imagined interdisciplinary theology of liberation can provide academics and activists with the tools needed to defeat systemic poverty and the cultural violence upon which it rests.     

Engendering Gramsci: Gender,the Philosophy of Praxis,and Spaces of Encounter in the Climate Caravan,Bangladesh

This paper examines the gendered politics of national and international networking amongst peasant farmers' movements in South Asia. In particular the paper provides an ethnographic account, based upon the author's critical engagement with the Bangladesh Krishok (farmer) Federation and the Bangladesh Kishani Sabha (Women Farmers' Association), of the Climate Change, Gender and Food Sovereignty Caravan that was organised in Bangladesh in 2011. The paper draws upon Antonio Gramsci's theory of the philosophy of praxis and feminist research on social reproduction, dispossession and materiality to interrogate the spaces of encounter and solidarity‐building practices of the Caravan between different communities in the country and between different social movement actors. The paper examines how processes of political organisation and consciousness‐raising within and between social movements are problematised by gendered power relations. The paper concludes with suggestions concerning how the philosophy of praxis in Bangladesh might be “engendered” to incorporate a politics of social reproduction.     

Gendered water spaces: a study of the transition from wells to handpumps in Mozambique

In many parts of rural Africa, women and children spend a lot of time collecting water. In the development literature, the water collection task is portrayed as oppressive, arduous, and disliked by women. Eliminating this activity from women's lives is believed to empower them, yet there has been little research investigating what actually happens at the water source or how women themselves perceive the time spent there. This research is based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in five rural communities in the northern province of Nampula, Mozambique. Over this year, handpumps were constructed in communities where people previously collected water from distant shallow wells and rivers. This article compares the social interactions and activities between the customary water sites and the handpump through the lens of gendered space. The customary water sites are controlled by women and highly valued for their social attributes. While clean water is more accessible at the handpumps, men often regulate access to the technology and social activities are limited. This article contributes to feminist geography and political ecology by showing how differences in the materiality of water spaces interact with local norms to shape social interactions and gendered subjectivities, and how, in turn, men and women contribute to the production and meaning of these spaces. I argue that the handpumps open up new spaces for men and women to negotiate gender roles and (re)define their associations with modernity and development.     

Feminist Mobilization,Claims Making and Policy Change: An Introduction

More than two decades after the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, gender equality policies have not delivered in the ways envisaged. This special cluster of articles seeks to understand why. Women's mobilization and feminist activism was central to the Beijing process and the advocacy that followed, yet their influence on policy processes seems constrained in the current context of global political and economic changes. The articles in this cluster explore the negotiations between different actors, institutions and discourses — and the tensions and contradictions therein — as explanations for why certain domains of women's rights remain at the margins of political agendas and others receive more attention. Specifically, why have women's labour rights and the demands of the unpaid care economy failed to gain policy traction? The articles point to the importance of political practice, which includes the ‘framing’ of policy demands as compelling narratives, engagement with state entities and the forming and managing of alliances. There are trade‐offs inherent in each of these elements, for example, between transformative gender equality objectives and the pragmatic impulse to frame claims in less politically and socially threatening ways. Further, in a context of increasing globalization, mobilization is required at multiple levels — from the local to the transnational. The articles thus seek to deepen our understanding of how policy change for women's rights occurs.     

Scaling up Civil Society: Donor Money,NGOs and the Pastoralist Land Rights Movement in Tanzania

Tanzania's pastoralist land rights movement began with local resistance to the alienation of traditional grazing lands in Maasai and Barabaig communities. While these community–based social movements were conducted through institutions and relationships that local people knew and understood, they were not co–ordinated in a comprehensive fashion and their initial effectiveness was limited. With the advent of liberalization in the mid–1980s, they began to gain institutional legitimacy through the registration of pastoralist Non–Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Registered NGOs provided community leaders with a formal mechanism for co–ordinating local land movements and for advocating for land rights at the international level. The connections of pastoralist NGOs to disenfranchised communities, and their incorporation of traditional cultural institutions into modern institutional structures, resonated with the desires of international donors to support civil society and to create an effective public sphere in Tanzania, making these NGOs an attractive focus for donor funding. In spite of their good intentions, however, donors frequently overlooked the institutional impacts of their assistance on the pastoralist land rights movement and the formation of civil society in pastoralist communities. NGO leaders have become less accountable to their constituent communities, and the movement itself has lost momentum as its energies have been diverted into activities that can be justified in donor funding reports. A political movement geared towards specific outcomes has been transformed into group of apolitical institutions geared toward the process of donor funding cycles.     

Soft power in global politics? diplomatic partners as transversal actors

The extent to which diplomatic partners act as transversal actors, exercising soft power in global politics, is explored in this research paper. Diplomatic partners are found to be key actors operating on every level—the personal, the social, the political and the international—furthering the interests of their official partners, and the state. Although located in the private sphere, male and female diplomatic partners are conditioned by a gendered norm that incorporates them into their official partners’ profession. As a consequence of this incorporation, diplomatic partners become instrumental (transversal) actors in the international public sphere of the diplomatic service. A feminist ontology that theorises the dynamic relationship between the public and private spheres is shown to be necessary for an accurate and comprehensive understanding of global politics.     

Beyond ethno‐nationalism: emerging trends in Cypriot politics after the Annan Plan†

ABSTRACT. Historically, conflict between the two communities in Cyprus has been characterised by the diverging demands of ethno‐nationalists. The introduction of the Annan Plan for the solution of the Cyprus problem has fostered new trends in Cypriot politics and a new alignment of the political forces on the island. This paper argues that the conventional ethno‐nationalist division and the left–right divide are no longer sufficient in understanding the conflict in Cyprus. The new dividing and unifying elements in Cypriot politics can be best understood through analysing the views of political actors on such issues as sovereignty, territoriality, identity and power‐sharing.     

Politics and social violence in developing democracies: Theory and evidence from Brazil

How do the political institutional features of developing democracies influence how violence occurs? Building on research showing that ‘hybrid democracies’ are more prone to social violence, this article argues that elite competition for power in the context of limited institutional oversight plays an important role in explaining violence. The framework here presents possible mechanisms linking subnational political dynamics and rates of social violence in poorly institutionalised contexts. It highlights how political competition, concentrated political power, and constraints on cooperation can create opportunity structures where violence is incentivised and the rule of law is undermined. This is examined empirically using sub-national homicide data from over 5000 Brazilian municipalities between 1997 and 2010. Findings suggest violence is greater in contexts that are highly competitive – where political actors face credible challenges and have a more tenuous grip on power – and those where power is highly concentrated – where political actors have held power for longer periods or face limited credible challenges. Findings also suggest violence varies depending on whether interactions between state and municipal government are likely to be constrained or cooperative; and are consistent with literatures emphasising the importance of structural explanations of social violence. In light of on-going democratic transitions across the globe, the article highlights the value of understanding links between institutional context, contentious politics and social violence.     

Informal sovereignties and multiple Muslim feminisms: Feminist geo-legality in Sri Lanka

This paper argues that Muslim feminisms emerge as spatially differentiated strategies and tactics to accommodate local varieties of Muslim “informal sovereignties”. These informal sovereignties are exercised by Muslim judges, scholars and lawyers regulating Muslim marriages and divorces, based on diverse readings of the Muslim Personal Law and situated in the context of different forms of violence, such as Islamophobia and ethno-religious communalism. Comparing two districts in Sri Lanka - Puttalam and Batticaloa - the paper shows how Muslim feminist activists navigate spatially diverse forms of informal sovereignties exercised by Muslim movements and institutions, in response to locally specific political, social and economic challenges that Muslims face in the aftermath of Sri Lanka's decades-long civil war. The struggles over implementing and reforming the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act (MMDA), the Muslim Personal Law in Sri Lanka, focus on Muslim women's bodies and spaces as main sites of politics. The paper thereby contributes to debates in feminist geo-legality and Muslim femininity by pointing to the need to understand the contextuality of Muslim Personal Law within Sri Lanka's varieties of lived Islam.     

How elections are fought in Ascoli: kinship,politics, history and culture

Based on fieldwork and archival study in a small north Puglian town, this article explores the complex interrelationship between kinship and politics. In the context of a recent local election, it seeks to show how ties of kinship and affinity provide a moral framework and idiom for civic cooperation, and how shared political ideologies and a common political heritage define and reinforce a sense of lineage identity. It argues that a failure to engage with the implications of 'kinship beyond the household' has both detracted from the analysis of Italian local politics and impeded our understanding of the long-term resilience of wider kinship forms,especially in periods of acute system change.     

Formalization and its Discontents: Conceptual Fallacies and Ways Forward

The concept of formalization has long underpinned policy interventions and measures intended to connect informal entities with state institutions or formal economic structures. However, despite the policy enthusiasm, the outcomes of formalization policies have frequently been disappointing. This article argues that this disconnect lies in the concept of formalization itself and that common approaches to formalization are often rooted in three conceptual fallacies: a binary distinction between formal and informal economic actors, a lack of appreciation for the diversity of informal economic actors and the idea that ‘becoming’ formal necessarily spurs positive externalities. These conceptual confusions pay insufficient attention to contextual complexity and the political and social dynamics that shape informality in a given context and they are frequently rooted in the practicalities and power structures that shape knowledge creation in this area. This article demonstrates this through case studies of tax registration and property titling. Thus, it argues for a new research agenda on formalization that challenges both its conventional conceptual foundations and the practices of research that engage with it.     

Community asset transfer and strategies of local accumulation

Community asset transfer enables local groups to own or manage a government-owned facility and related services. For critics, it is merely an extension of rollback neoliberalism, permitting the state to withdraw from welfare and transfer risk from local government to ill-defined communities. The paper uses quantitative and case-study data from Northern Ireland to demonstrate its transformative potential by challenging the notion of private property rights, enabling communities to accumulate and creating local consumption circuits. It suggests that asset-led social enterprises are entangled in a mix of pro-market and alternative economic strategies which are necessarily traded off each other in the reproduction of social value. There is not an ethically pure form of asset transfer but the tactical adaptation of different modes of working, including the enhancement of state services as well as more independent forms of economic and social organisation. However, the analysis points to the political weaknesses of three specific projects and in particular, the lack of corporate working that has limited their reformist potential. The paper concludes by highlighting the implications for more progressive forms of social economics and the skills, finance and practices that facilitate local accumulation strategies.     

‘Ain’t I a feminist?’: the politics of gender violence,anti-violence,and education in Oakland,CA

This article focuses on the ways gender violence politics become reduced to liberal narratives of victimization in contemporary U.S. deployment of feminist identity politics, within academic and activist discourses. Such victimization narratives, I argue, exploit suffering and reproduce social stratification between a growing middle class in the academy and poor black people outside of it. This article draws from moments in California’s Bay area when questions of feminism, gender violence, and anti-violence in schools arose. In each case, left feminists had an opportunity to reshape these questions towards new political paradigms and new academic discourses. Instead, amidst the ‘safety’ of left discourse and practice, each moment confronted contradictory silences that called into question such ‘safety’ and made generative political movement impossible. I analyze the dynamics of this silencing as constitutive of the co-optation of feminist identity politics within a capitalist university that reproduces an oppressive race and class order. We face a problem of language to adequately explain and disrupt the incapacity for collective social change that victimhood, identity politics, and reformism have produced. Each instance I present function as moments of history making from which we may reflect and strategize forward movement against capitalist oppression and racial dehumanization.     

Introduction: the feminist politics of refugee migration

The interdisciplinary field of refugee studies includes gender analyses, but feminism is not its forte. Scholarship in the field has neglected the development of feminist frameworks to trace the power relations that shape the gender and other politics of forced migration. Specifically, the underplayed concept of ‘refugee transnationalism’ is elaborated as a form of globalization where the social and political intersect in particular ways.     

Kitchenspace: Gendered territory in central Mexico

Drawing on extensive ethnographic field research with multiple women and kitchens in two central Mexico communities, this article argues for kitchenspace—indoor and outdoor spaces where food preparation takes place—as gendered territory. Using a feminist political ecology approach, it explores private and semi-public space in the everyday, household kitchen and the fiesta or ‘smoke’ kitchen at the center of community celebrations. Marked as gendered territory by distinct social boundaries and gendered, discursive strategies, kitchenspace is vital to the maintenance of traditional forms of organization and generational transmission of cultural and embodied knowledge. This article questions assumptions about ‘the kitchen’ as a site of social isolation and women's oppression that often characterize feminist approaches. It considers embeddedness in local social and spatial contexts and the importance of everyday life in private and public spaces.     

Reforming Peasant Production in Africa: Power and Technological Change in Two Nigerian Villages

Differential access to state-allocated incentives, based on socio-economic inequalities in rural society, is commonly assumed to be a key determinant of change in rural Africa. This article argues that, given the spatial diversity of Africa's rural political economies, analysis of the politics of rural change needs to be premised on an appreciation of the multiplicity of social relations through which rural power structures are configured. Data from a field study of a World Bank assisted agricultural development project in Lafia, Nigeria, are used to illustrate the manner in which spatial and inter-community variations in responses to commercialization, cultural divisions and the reorganization of political relations during the colonial era combine to sustain regional power structures which are defined by such differences. A comparative analysis of two village communities at opposite ends of the regional spectrum of commercialization is employed to demonstrate how such power structures provide a framework within which the political conditions of access operate to the advantage of both dominant socio-economic strata and members of particular cultural communities.     

Gendered Structures of Local Politics in Turkey

Indicators offered by available international statistical data and observations of many researchers point out that women's formal political involvement at the local level is stronger than that at the national level for the majority of states. However, gendered political patterns in Turkey have been following a rather different path. One and the most significant contradictory aspect is that women's representation at local elected organs is weaker than the national parliament. This article, first, investigates the reasons for this relatively weak existence in formal local politics. The references of this relativity are both national formal politics of Turkey, and the dominant worldwide model. Secondly, the article tries to establish country‐specific links between formal and informal local politics concerning women's participation. The experience in Turkey has proven that women's local engagement does not necessarily propel decision‐making power and women's empowerment. Women's local mobilization in Turkey has been mostly limited to socio‐cultural and charity activities instead of central decisions on the settlement, and of efforts for establishing women's local political agendas. Moreover, as a very prominent factor concerning the maintenance of asymmetric gendered structures of local politics, women's movement at the national level has been lacking in systematic political interest in the issue until very recently. In this article, these pretensions and future prospects are discussed in terms of the actual global‐national circumstances affecting local politics as well as women's local conditions. To these ends, existing quantitative‐qualitative research, data and analysis, and relevant findings of the author's recent (2000–2003) original research, as well as her observations through participation in recent feminist activism targeting local politics are being evaluated.