The Double Life of Development: Empowerment,USAID and the Maoist Uprising in Nepal

The geographies of developmental empowerment and subaltern rebellion have unexpectedly overlapped and expanded rapidly in recent years, especially in peasant societies in the global South. By examining the relationship between the long history of development programmes and the emergence of the Maoist revolution in Nepal in the 1990s, this article demonstrates how developmental ideas, particularly the notion of empowerment, can be articulated politically. The author argues that development has a double life in which development subjectivities are reproduced through the simultaneous processes of enrolment and othering, generating the conditions of subordination for development's own reproduction. Development can generate the possibility of rebellion by creating negative consciousness of the process of othering. This article contributes to the growing literature on rebellion and development by showing how development, while striving for hegemony, continuously produces fissures in geographically specific ways that can become portals for the emergence of rebellious possibilities.     

US Empire and the Project of Women's Studies: Stories of citizenship,complicity and dissent

This essay charts some of the most urgent challenges feminists confront in relation to imperialism, militarization, and corporate globalization in the USA. It insists on the necessity of feminist anti-imperialist praxis, specifically in the context of the academic and non-academic projects engendered by Women's Studies scholarship and teaching in North America. An analysis of the Abu Ghraib events illustrates the deeply gendered, racial, and sexualized national practices of US military culture and the Bush/Cheney war state. The essay calls for feminist engagement with a US imperial (not just democratic in promissory terms) state by connecting domestic with foreign policy issues. Suggesting that the US academy is profoundly implicated in the current project of empire, the essay further analyzes the place of Women's Studies and its history of contested citizenship projects as a crucial site of feminist anti-imperialist praxis. It seeks to make an important distinction between feminist practice that is complicit in the project of empire, and radical, anti-imperialist feminisms anchored in a politics of dissent.

El Imperio Americano y el Proyecto de Estudios de Mujeres: Sobre las políticas de complicidad y disidente

Este artículo traza algunos de los desafíos más urgentes que se confrontan feministas en cuenta al imperialismo, militarización, y globalización corporativa en los Estados Unidos. Se insita en la necesidad de una praxis feminista antiimperialista, específicamente in el contexto de los proyectos académicos y no académicos que se engendran por la erudición y la instrucción de Estudios de Mujeres en Norte América. Una análisis de los eventos de Abu Ghraib ilustra que los prácticos de la militaría Americana y del estado guerrero de Bush/Cheney son hondamente racializado, sexualizado, y generificado. Este artículo llama para un debate feminista con el estado Americano imperial (no solo democrático en termas promisorio) que se conecta los problemas domésticos e internacionales de políticas. Sugiriéndose que la academia Americana es profundamente implicado en el proyecto actual del Imperio, este artículo analice, además, que el lugar de Estudios de Mujeres y su historia de proyectos contra-hegemónicos de ciudadanías como sitios cruciales para la praxis feminista antiimperialista. Este artículo trata de hacer una distinción importante entre la practica feminista, lo que es involucrado en el proyecto del Imperio, y las feminismas radicales, antiimperialistas que se fondean en una política de disidente.     

(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.     

The Taliban at war: inside the Helmand insurgency, 2004–2012

In seeking to explain why and how the war in Afghanistan has dragged on, most analysis has focused on the western and Afghan government effort. In this article, we examine how the war looks from the perspective of the insurgency. Using Helmand province as a case‐study, we draw on a large number of original interviews with Taliban field commanders and fighters to produce a uniquely detailed picture of the Taliban at war. In the first section, we explore how the Taliban returned to Helmand from 2004 to 2006, and show how the British made the situation far worse when they deployed forces to Helmand in 2006. In the second part of the article we examine the evolution of the Taliban insurgency in Helmand since 2006. We show how the Taliban has developed an increasingly centralized organizational structure, a more militarized shadow government and greater professionalism of field units. The overall picture that emerges is of a resilient insurgency that has adapted under immense military pressure. The Taliban have suffered very heavy attrition in Helmand, but they are far from defeated.     

Disaster Financialization: Earthquakes,Cashflows and Shifting Household Economies in Nepal

The political economy literature on post-disaster reconstruction tends to contrast ‘disaster capitalism’ narratives denouncing the predatory character of neoliberal rebuilding, and ‘building back better’ policies supporting market-driven reconstruction. This article seeks to provide a more nuanced account, developing the concept of ‘disaster financialization’ through a case study of household-level changes experienced through processes of post-earthquake reconstruction in Nepal. The concept of disaster financialization describes not only the integration of disaster-affected households into the cash-based logic of reconstruction instituted by donors and government authorities, but also the financialization of their lives, social relations and subjectivities. It is a transitive process involving a shift into financialized mechanisms of disaster prevention, adaptation and recovery. Analysing contrasting experiences across three earthquake-affected districts in Nepal, this study proposes disaster financialization as an integrative term through which to understand the simultaneous acceleration of monetization, the leveraging of cash incentives by donors and government to ‘build back better’, and the flurry of financial transactions associated with reconstruction processes. While some aspects of disaster financialization have had negative social impacts, such as debt-related anxieties and a breakdown of voluntary labour exchanges hurting the most vulnerable, the process has taken on variegated forms, with equally variegated effects, reflecting household characteristics and interactions with financial institutions.     

A civilisation at peril: Goethe's representation of Europe during the Sattelzeit

The importance of the concept of Europe as a source of meaning and object of contested discursive battles during the fundamental transition towards modernity of the Sattelzeit (1750–1850) can hardly be overstated. The Weimar Classics (Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland) made important contributions both to Enlightenment debates about Europe before the French Revolution and to the discursive battles about the continent taking place in the aftermath of the French Revolution in a context of heightened epistemic uncertainty and ideological confrontation. The paper aims to investigate Goethe's representation of Europe as an almost millenarian civilisation endangered at the end of the eighteenth century by a double process of economic and political modernisation. Particular attention is paid to how Goethe rooted his perception of Europe as a civilisation in geographic and climatic assumptions and how he compared the continent to other civilisational entities such as America, China, India or Persia. Finally, the political implications Goethe derived from his perception of Europe as an ailing civilisation shall be contrasted with democratic, romantic and conservative discourses about the continent in the aftermath of the French Revolution.     

Conducting Locarno Diplomacy: Britain and the Austro-German Customs Union Crisis, 1931

It has frequently been asserted that following its signing ofthe Treaty of Locarno in 1925 Britain withdrew from Europeanaffairs to concentrate on imperial and domestic concerns. Thisarticle, building upon an argument developed in an earlier volumeof Twentieth Century British History (Vol. 6. (1995), 1–22),seeks to demonstrate, using the example of British policy andthe customs union crisis, that rather than cutting Britain awayfrom European affairs, Locarno had the opposite effect. By signingLocarno, Britain had undertaken commitments it had no desireto honour, i. e. siding with either France or Germany in a renewedEuropean war. The continuing reconciliation between France andGermany was essential to ensure that peace would prevail inEurope and thereby secure a fundamental objective of Britishforeign policy. British policy regarding the customs union crisisprovides an example of how important Britain believed its roleto be in harmonizing Franco-German relations and maintainingthe Locarno system.     

Universalized categories,dissonant realities: gendering postconflict reconstruction in Nepal

International agencies, nongovernmental organizations, governmental agencies, and development policy-makers have sought to incorporate ‘gender mainstreaming’ into postconflict policies and programs in an effort to ameliorate the unequal gender impacts of war. This article uses narratives of widow heads of household collected through field research in Nepal in 2008 and 2011 to illustrate how postconflict development discourses purporting to engage with gender not only take a narrow view of gender (i.e., by equating it to women-focused activities), but also neglect the complex and dynamic realities of women's lives. Postconflict interventions employ simplistic assumptions that neglect gender-specific postconflict insecurities and oppressions (such as systematic violence against women). By neglecting the crucial significance of social networks for widows' survival, postconflict reconstruction assumes women to be individualized receptacles for development/empowerment. The crucial role of social networks in constraining women's agency is obscured. At the same time, assumptions of homogeneity ingrained in universalized categories such as ‘widow’ and ‘conflict-affected’ obfuscate women's multiple identities, roles, and agency in their struggles for survival. The insights emerging from field research suggest a greater attunement of postconflict development interventions to women's lived experiences and social settings.     

Sexual trafficking in Nepal: constructing citizenship and livelihoods

Sexual trafficking is a priority issue for many governments and has increasingly become a focus for debate within the academy. Despite this, many aspects of sexual trafficking remain poorly understood. In this article we focus on an area that has received scant attention in the literature: the situation of trafficked women when they return home and, specifically, the livelihood opportunities available to them as they experience differing notions of citizenship. In addition to the fact that there has been very little attempt to document poverty alleviation strategies post-trafficking, within the mainstream development literature little attention has also been given to questions of sexuality and how they relate to development and poverty reduction strategies. The aim of this article, therefore, is to seek to highlight a new research agenda and to develop an interdisciplinary framework to understand what we have termed ‘the sexual politics of poverty’. Bringing together distinct literatures on sexual citizenship and sustainable livelihoods we develop our analysis of these themes through a focus on the livelihood opportunities and strategies of returnee trafficked women in South Asia, drawing on policy analysis at national and regional levels and qualitative research carried out in Nepal. In particular, the Nepal case study highlights problems with skills training for returnee women and examines the relationship between marriage and sustainable livelihood opportunities.     

Traditions in transition: Sanskritization and Yakkhafication in East Nepal

Based on fieldwork conducted amongst the Yakkha of East Nepal from 1989–90, this article looks at the similarities and differences in how “tradition” is approached by anthropologists and historians. It focuses on reflexivity, performance and process as key intellectual traditions within both anthropology and history, but takes issue with Hobsbawm’s suggestion that “tradition” is the stuff of “modern” societies while “custom” is a feature of “traditional” ones. It also argues for the “construction” rather than “invention” of traditions, by anthropologists as well as by people they study. In the case of the Yakkha, this construction can be seen in the changes in agricultural techniques over the past 150 years, the use of pellet bows by Yakkha men, and the celebrations of the ostensibly Hindu festival of Dasain. Only with hindsight can the ‘invented’ nature of the Dasain tradition be appreciated; even so, during the research period covered by this article, the rituals that epitomized ‘Sanskritization’ were simultaneously the subject of ‘Yakkhafication’, a process reflecting the negotiation, manipulation and subversion of Yakkha identity.