Transnational Capital, Urban Globalisation and Cross-Border Solidarity: the Case of the South African Municipal Workers

The article discusses the redefinition of strategies of international solidarity and action in South African organised labour, with particular regard to the South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU). SAMWU has recently been challenged by the pervasive penetration of global capital and multinational corporations in schemes of "PublicÐPrivate partnership" in the delivery of municipal infrastructures. These developments carry potential dangers for trade union organisation and for public services in a context of extreme inequality. SAMWU has identified international action against global capitalism as a decisive terrain of struggle for workers' and citizens' rights. However, the union's difficulties in articulating an effective confrontation at this level reflects broader problems in internationalist approaches adopted by South African labour. These refer primarily to a problematic conceptualisation of new subjects of opposition and of alliances with emerging global social movements.     

Agrarian Differentiation in Post–Socialist Societies: Evidence from Three Upland Villages in North–Western Vietnam

The literature on post–socialist transformations displays a fairly broad consensus that changes in macro structures of state and economy generate or increase rural inequality. This article examines the distributional effects of macro changes in Vietnamese villages. Findings from local–level research highlight the multiple ways in which people react to changes in macro structures. Core fields of negotiation by local people include exchange relations, the use of surplus, and land tenure. Local negotiation may lead to local–level trajectories of agrarian change that differ significantly from national–level changes. Changes in macro structures thus may not substantially alter the underlying process of differentiation. Rural people may be rich and poor for the same reasons as under collective agriculture, though income differences may have become more accentuated.     

Transnational Organising and Feminist Politics of Difference and Solidarity: The Mobilisation of Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

Domestic work represents a significant share of global wage employment, but domestic workers – the majority of whom are women – remain to a large extent excluded from the scope of labour laws and, consequently, from the legal protection enjoyed by other workers. Since they work behind the closed doors of private homes, domestic workers are also shielded from public attention and are often hard to mobilise. In Hong Kong, women’s activism involving local and migrant domestic workers illuminates points of connection and distance as they are simultaneously privileged and marginalised along the hierarchies of class, ethnicity and nationality. Building on feminist and social movement scholarship, I illustrate how global frames facilitate our understanding of feminist solidarity among local and migrant domestic workers. I argue that the meanings of solidarity that dominate at any particular moment are not stable and enduring, but rather formed out of negotiation and struggle within and across domestic workers’ unions. This framing process involves these women working deliberately to make connections between global processes and local contexts.     

“It is loved and it is defended”: Critical Solidarity Across Race and Place

Since 2010, the Wixárika (Huichol) indigenous people of western Mexico have struggled against transnational mining activity in their sacred pilgrimage site of Wirikuta in the semi‐desertic plateaus of San Luis Potosí. This struggle has been accompanied by a multitude of non‐indigenous and largely urban actors who have joined the Wixárika, bringing with them their own cultural, political and geographic registers for understanding and mobilising against mining in the region. Taking Wirikuta as a contemporary demonstration of interracial and cross‐geographic alliance building, I analyse how social movements that express solidarity and affective ties with the territories and cultures of indigenous peoples struggle to unsettle entrenched racial and spatial relations.     

Postcards from Heaven: Critical Geographies of the Cold War Military–Industrial–Academic Complex

Abstract: This article examines a little‐known project funded by the US Air Force and CIA, and carried out by communications scientists at the University of Washington during the early 1950s. Project Revere sought to investigate how the seemingly humble information leaflet could be deployed, via air drops, as a “flexible weapon” to spark “interpersonal communications” and spread rumours throughout particular target populations. While the testing ground for these aerial experiments was the northwest United States (Washington State, Utah, Idaho), Revere scientists were aware that their work would find particular application in supporting America's Cold War activities overseas, not least in the Korean peninsula. At the same time, however, the Revere tests were implicated in the intensification of domestic anxieties as leaflets dropped over rural Washington State and Utah mobilised issues of civil defence, emergency procedures and warnings about “enemy bombers”. In this way, we suggest that Revere corresponded with, and heightened, efforts by national and local governments to mobilise citizens into a Cold War “call to arms”.     

The Decline of the Scottish Conservatives in North‐East Scotland, 1965–79: A Regional Perspective

This article takes a fresh look at the decline of the Conservative Party in post‐war Scotland, a phenomenon that has provoked much debate. The analysis presented here is innovative in that it takes a regional approach, whereas other contributions to this field have tended to ignore the considerable regional diversity of Scottish political behaviour. By examining one particular region of Scotland – the rural north‐east – this article demonstrates that the Conservatives’ decline occurred at the hands of parties – the Liberals and the Scottish Nationalists – that did not brand themselves as left wing or right wing; the latter in particular eschewed conventional political labels. This marks another departure from the established literature, which has tended to discuss the decline in terms of the Conservative Party or the Scottish electorate moving ‘left’ or ‘right’. Furthermore, the article makes it clear that a serious decline befell the party between 1965 and 1979: before the advent of Thatcherism that has widely been held responsible for the Scottish Conservatives’ electoral woes. This analysis is conducted by examining the local press coverage of the region, as well as the national and regional records of the parties concerned. It therefore seeks to make a contribution to the wider study of post‐war British politics, by demonstrating the benefits of local and regional approaches in this period where they have been largely overlooked. This article demonstrates that even in the 1960s and 1970s, when politics seemed so nationally uniform, there is considerable diversity to be appreciated in different parts of the country.     

Reflections on Gender and Status Distinctions: An Analysis of the Liturgical Textiles Recorded in Mid–Sixteenth–Century London

This paper considers the relative significance of social standing and gender in parish life within early modern London, and how this was expressed via their liturgical textiles up to 1552. The data are drawn from the 1552 parish inventories that recorded these textiles and the other appurtenances of worship. Vestments worn for communion, robes for boy choristers and the range of textiles associated with birth, christening, churching, marriage and death are evaluated to see how far they reveal distinctions between men and women, adults and children, rich and poor, laity and clergy. A range of differences can be seen, as can the way in which social and gender considerations interlink.     

Aid and the Geopolitics of the Post‐Colonial: Critical Reflections on New Labour’s Overseas Development Strategy

In the post Cold War era, issues of poverty, inequality and social exclusion have become central to many of the key discussions of international relations and development aid. In this context, this article sets out to analyse the nature and specificity of the development strategy of the New Labour government in Britain, as it has evolved since 1997. In the setting of the literatures on post‐colonialism, aid and development, the authors examine the specific concepts and approaches that help to frame such a strategy, giving particular attention to the commonalities and divergences between the British Government’s 1997 and 2000 White Papers. The perspective used connects ideas and issues from domains of knowledge which tend to remain independent of each other, namely aid and development studies and post‐colonial theory. Situated on the terrain of aid and development, the guiding objective of the article is to raise certain questions concerning power, knowledge and geopolitics, so that a wider conceptual and policy‐oriented debate might be engendered.     

Capitalizing on Desire: Reconfiguring ‘the Social’ and the Government of Poverty in the Philippines

Tracing the contours of ‘the social’ is of critical importance today, since there is a widely shared understanding that ‘the social’ has been undergoing a fundamental mutation under the encroaching influence of globalization and neoliberalism. This mutation means that a population and its risks are increasingly administered and managed through the nurturing of free subjects, productive citizens and active communities. By focusing on conditional cash transfers as a poverty‐alleviation programme in the Philippines, this study examines how the contemporary government of poverty attempts to realize social inclusion through the nurturing of desires, habits and dispositions that are conducive to an ‘investment in human capital’. The study argues that such regimes produce various forms of exclusion and counterclaims by the beneficiaries, and that these counterclaims, which reflect the popular notions of patronage and clientelism, have serious implications for envisioning the alternative configuration of ‘the social’.