The definition of culture in culture-based urban development strategies: antagonisms in the construction of a culture-based development discourse

Implementing culture-based development strategies is a recent trend in large and small cities all over Europe. The definition of culture and the objectives of cultural strategies are highly contested in the public debate. Analysing the newspaper debates on the establishment of the Cultiva foundation in Kristiansand, Norway, this article discusses how and why the discursive debate on the definition of culture creates different discursive positions in the public debate on culture-based development. In the different discourses on what these strategies should be, there are a number of antagonisms that contribute to defining the relationships and interfaces between the different discursive positions. The main lines of discursive conflict are between urban planners and/or policy-makers who follow a spatial logic that emphasises a comprehensive understanding of territorial planning and cultural workers and/or artists who follow a critical artistic creation logic that emphasises the values that exist in art and the potential of the cultural field for personal development, general education and social criticism.     

The Expansion of Emergency Powers: Social Conflict and the Military in Indonesia

The exercise of emergency powers is always controversial. This article identifies the expansion of the type and scope of emergency powers through legislative reform. It does so by examining the Indonesian Law on Social Conflict 2012, which allows a state of social conflict to be declared at the national, regional or local level in response to social conflict, such as conflict between religious or ethnic communities. The deliberate choice of the term “state of social conflict”, rather than “state of emergency”, is an attempt to obscure the nature of these powers. Analysis of these powers and the debate that has ensued suggests that the law expands the types of situation in which powers usually only reserved for an emergency are used, and by delegating this power to local authorities, the law in effect amounts to the expansion of emergency powers. I suggest that this should lead to renewed focus on meaningful limits and checks on the exercise of power during times of emergency.     

A diamantine struggle: redefining conflict diamonds in the Kimberley Process

Diamonds are forever. But what of the definition of conflict diamonds used by the Kimberley Process (KP)? Despite the fact that civil society has raised attention to the cloudy issue of state‐perpetrated diamond‐related human rights abuses throughout the past decade, the continued longevity of the central definition around which the Kimberley Process revolves still appears to be a crystal‐clear fact. As it turns out, calls to broaden the scope of the conflict diamond definition have not been successful because several discourse manipulations within the KP have had formative effects on other actors' identities and interests. Discourse spacing—the strategic allocation of ‘appropriate’ spaces for certain discourses within a particular institutionalized setting—has been strategically employed in an attempt to place boundaries on the redefinition discourse. By claiming that addressing human rights abuses lies beyond the mandate of the KP, several KP participant states have sought to convince others that discussing redefinition has no place on the KP reform agenda. Discourse timing has also been key, where numerous African states' perceptions of redefinition were influenced by accusations of neo‐colonial intent on the part of western KP participant states that stemmed from a sanctions debate that was taking place parallel to the redefinition debate. The article finds that these two occurrences, alongside the KP's consensus‐based decision‐making structure and several KP participant states' fears about setting a human rights precedent, have obstructed the road to the redefinition of conflict diamonds.     

Gender,Traditional Authority,and the Politics of Rural Reform in South Africa

The new South African Constitution, together with later policies and legislation, affirm a commitment to gender rights that is incompatible with the formal recognition afforded to unelected traditional authorities. This contradiction is particularly evident in the case of land reform in many rural areas, where women’s right of access to land is denied through the practice of customary law. This article illustrates the ways in which these constitutional contradictions play out with particular intensity in the ‘former homelands’ through the example of a conflict over land use in Buffelspruit, Mpumalanga province. There, a number of women who had been granted informal access to communal land for the purposes of subsistence cultivation had their rights revoked by the traditional authority. Despite desperate protests, they continue to be marginalized in terms of access to land, while their male counterparts appropriate communal land for commercial farming and cattle grazing. Drawing on this protest, we argue that current South African practice in relation to the pressing issue of gender equity in land reform represents a politics of accommodation and evasion that tends to reinforce gender biases in rural development, and in so doing, undermines the prospects for genuinely radical transformation of the instituted geographies and institutionalized practices bequeathed by the apartheid regime.     

Bringing Chinese Law in Line with Western Standards? Problematizing “Chinese” and “Western” in the Late Qing Debate over the New Criminal Code of Great Qing

This article examines the intense debates over the New Criminal Code of Great Qing (Da-Qing xin xinglü) in the National Assembly (Zizheng yuan) during the Qing empire’s New Policy Reform (1901–11). The focus is on the conflict between those who drafted and supported the new code and those who expressed reservations, especially over reform of the laws on filial piety and fornication. The issue of reconfiguring the family and social order through law was closely related to the overarching agenda of twentieth century legal reform in China—making an empire that “ruled through the principle of filial piety” into a modern nation-state that had direct relationships with its citizens. More importantly, an analysis of the late Qing debate over family law enables this article to problematize such concepts as “Chinese” and “Western” during this crucial moment of China’s empire-to-nation transformation. It showcases the paradox of China’s modern-era reforms—a contradiction between imposing Western-inspired order with a largely indigenous logic and maintaining existing sociopolitical order in the name of preserving national identity.     

China and Japan in Myanmar: Aid,Natural Resources and Influence

Abstract

This article highlights the parallels between Japan’s leveraging of foreign aid to secure access to strategic natural resources in the post-World War II period, and China’s similar use of foreign aid since the early 1990s. It then shows how both countries have applied similar strategies in their aid programs in Myanmar, and points out how dramatic shifts in Myanmar’s domestic politics have shaped their opportunities for economic engagement. China seized upon Myanmar’s political transition in 1988 to expand its aid program, while Japan has responded to Myanmar’s reform measures since 2010 by resuming its aid efforts. The article concludes by considering the potential for China–Japan cooperation through their aid programs in Myanmar.     

Standardizing the home?: Women reformers and domestic service in New Deal New York

In response to the poor working conditions suffered by domestics struggling to survive the Depression, middle-class women's organizations initiated various legislative reforms aimed at tackling the problems they believed plagued the occupation. Throughout these years, organized women debated three key pieces of reform related to domestic service: efforts to suppress street-corner markets, health requirements for prospective domestics, and state-level wage and hour reform. These reforms were united by the rhetoric of privacy, which clubwomen used both to oppose wage and hour reform and to support requirements that domestics have physicals before applying for work. This article examines the fine distinction that middle-class women's organizations drew between public and private in the appropriate application of government power and the resulting conflict between progressive women's gender ideology and their most deeply-held reform ideals. In doing so, it reveals organized women's struggle to reconcile their humane ideals with the reality in their kitchens.     

The Tax Policy Regime in American Politics, 1941-1951

This article analyzes the inception of the mass income tax during the Second World War as a decisive moment when relations among state, market, and citizens were reconfigured in a durable way. The state institutionalized the means to devise tax reform–a policy regime–during this formative period of partisan conflict over macroeconomic management strategies. The approach to policy analysis presented here illuminates the process by which political choices are made among competing policy visions embedded in state agencies. This study demonstrates that a policy regime perspective, when applied in a complementary way with interest-driven or institutionalist accounts, is best equipped to bring important but tacit constraints into clear analytical focus.     

The Cultural Politics of Resource Management: the Case of Bushfires in a Conservation Reserve

Recent bushfire events have seen a rise in conflict over bushfire management in south Australia. A case study from Kangaroo Island illustrates the conflict between the rural community and the National Parks and Wildlife Service. The debate is ostensibly concerned with the effectiveness of bushfire management strategies employed in reserves. Inquiry reveals, however, that the conflict is underlain by cultural and social tensions. These issues concern the protagonists' relationship with the Kangaroo Island landscape and recent land management changes. The autonomy and role of the rural community in the landscape has been challenged by these globalising trends in land management. Through the bushfire issue the community is seeking to reassert its position on Kangaroo Island as creator and steward of the landscape.     

Indigenous peoples' rights and the politics of the term 'indigenous'

This article forms part of an ongoing debate on rights and the use of the term 'indigenous', which has so far included exchanges in Current Anthropology , the New Humanist , and ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY , as indicated in the bibliography. The authors here respond specifically to an article by Adam Kuper, published in Current Anthropology and the New Humanist . Professor Kuper has been invited to respond and has indicated his intention to do so in the forthcoming issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY . Readers are invited to contribute their own views to the debate. [Ed.]     

“For the Means of Your Subsistence ... Look Under God to Your Own Industry and Frugality”: Life and Labor in Gerrit Smith's Peterboro

The rural hamlet of Peterboro, the home of Gerrit Smith, the nineteenth century's most famous social reformer, has been portrayed as an idyllic and peaceful community free of class conflict. The extensive documentary record suggests a less harmonious situation and indicates that the community was fraught with struggle, engendered as much by Smith's reform efforts as by general class relations. This article examines class-based struggle through several vignettes, including a look at the voting patterns of the Liberty party in Smithfield, the social conditions of African Americans who lived in Peterboro, and the story of the temperance hotel.     

"Ready to shoot and do shoot": black working-class self-defense and community politics in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, black people in New York City encountered white violence, especially police brutality in Manhattan. The black community used various strategies to curtail white mob violence and police brutality, one of which was self-defense. This article examines blacks’ response to violence, specifically the debate concerning police brutality and self-defense in Harlem during the 1920s. While historians have examined race riots, blacks’ everyday encounters with police violence in the North have received inadequate treatment. By approaching everyday violence and black responses—self-defense, legal redress, and journalists’ remonstrations—as a process of political development, this article argues that the systematic violence perpetrated by the police both mobilized and politicized blacks individually and collectively to defend their community, but also contributed to a community consciousness that established police brutality as a legitimate issue for black protest.     

A CRISIS OF DEFINITION: CULTURE VERSUS INDUSTRY IN ODDA,NORWAY

This article addresses the influence of dominant and traditional ways of grasping the reality in social and economic processes of change. Our point of departure is how the perception of crisis in Odda, a small industrial community in Norway, influences the course of the process of change. The analysis focuses on a heated debate over the exploitation of a large site in the centre of Odda, left after the closure of the key factory. Rather than the economic and social consequences of the closure, the main challenge that arose from the crisis was related to the emergence of ambiguity in the local conceptual framework. Coming to terms with the situation stimulated various attempts to rearticulate the discourse of local development, with the result that industrial and culture‐based perspectives on development came into conflict. The economic crisis became a crisis of definition. In Odda, the industrial discourse finally domesticated the competing cultural discourse, ending years of conflict and inaction. In its explicit focus on the importance of local struggles and the way discourse structures such processes this story about recent developments in Odda complements literature on post‐industrial development.     

Strained relations: A critical analysis of the mining conflict in Prestea,Ghana

This paper examines the dynamics of the ongoing conflict in Prestea, Ghana, where indigenous galamsey mining groups are operating illegally on a concession awarded to Bogoso Gold Limited (BGL), property of the Canadian-listed multinational Gold Star Resources. Despite being issued firm orders by the authorities to abandon their activities, galamsey leaders maintain that they are working areas of the concession that are of little interest to the company; they further counter that there are few alternative sources of local employment, which is why they are mining in the first place. Whilst the Ghanaian Government is in the process of setting aside plots to relocate illegal mining parties and is developing alternative livelihood projects, efforts are far from encouraging: in addition to a series of overlooked logistical problems, the areas earmarked for relocation have not yet been prospected to ascertain gold content, and the alternative income-earning activities identified are inappropriate. As has been the case throughout mineral-rich sub-Saharan Africa, the conflict in Prestea has come about largely because the national mining sector reform program, which prioritizes the expansion of predominantly foreign-controlled large-scale projects, has neglected the concerns of indigenous subsistence groups.     

How to Reform a Reform Coalition: Outreach, Agenda Expansion, and Brokerage in Urban School Reform

Coalitions have always played an advocacy role in policymaking, but they are increasingly regarded as a form of community capacity that can be harnessed to civic ends. As explored in this study of urban school reform in Oakland, California, this civic view of coalitions confronts a tension between the cohesiveness and the inclusiveness of coalitions. Coalitions unified around cohesive goals and beliefs are often narrowly based, which can encourage the formation of rival coalitions. By contrast, reform coalitions that build broad-based support across the community may have difficulty developing coherent reform strategies. Using a social network analysis of key stakeholders to analyze the challenges of building civic capacity in Oakland, we find that the school district's recent reform experience more closely resembles an advocacy coalition than a broad civic coalition. The article then explores strategies for developing a broad civic coalition by expanding the existing advocacy coalition. We use the network analysis to identify opportunities for brokerage across individuals, institutions, and issues.     

‘Accidents’ and invisibilities: Scaled discourse and the naturalization of regulatory neglect in California's pesticide drift conflict

In this paper, I draw on the politics of scale literature in order to discuss the strategic use of scale as a framing device. I argue that scale-based framings can gain effectiveness through capitalizing on longstanding social inequalities and thus deserve careful consideration for their abilities to reinforce those inequalities and obscure ongoing illness. I discuss the ways in which actors in the present conflict over agricultural pesticide drift in California discursively engage scale in order to reframe the issue and justify (or, in other cases, contest) minimal regulatory response. I argue that the predominant scale-based framing of pesticide drift as a series of particularized, local ‘accidents’ gains its effectiveness through multiple intersections with long-standing social invisibilities and injustices endured by California's farmworkers, with the problematic results of rendering pollution invisible and naturalizing regulatory neglect. I also introduce the efforts of pesticide drift activists to ‘push up’ the framing of the issue, improve their political traction at the statewide level, and justify their demands for precautionary, health-based restrictions on the use of agricultural pesticides. Finally, I conclude by applying this analysis to recent debates for devolved environmental governance and problematizing the tendency to associate local governance and social justice.     

The Struggle to Reform Regulatory Procedures, 1978–1998

This article examines the attempts between 1978 and 1998 to enact general regulatory procedural reform legislation. Two decades of off-again, off-again legislative efforts have yielded only fragments of reform. A major explanation for this, despite the official popularity of reform, seems to be the inability of putative reformers-traditionalists, populists, and restrictivists-to agree among themselves on the direction and content of general reform legislation. This experience raises a number of important theoretical issues for students of regulation, including the ethicalness of using procedural restraints deliberately to disrupt or impede the regulatory process and the impact of procedural controls on regulatory policy.     

Religious Reforming Currents in Sixteenth‐Century Italy: The Spirituali and the Tridentine Debates over Church Reform

The history of religious reform in sixteenth century Italy has been the subject of much scholarly debate in recent decades, as well as uncertainty about how best to conceptualise the period, so indelibly marked by epoch‐changing events, such as the Protestant Reformation (from 1517) and the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Reforming currents in Italy were swept along by these events, and indeed appear to have been overwhelmed by them. Commonly, these currents are explored for their theological nature and especially their heterodox, even Protestant, character. Less well studied is their role in the debates over organisational church reform. It is here that we can discern the tenacity of these currents well into the Tridentine period. This article explores key protagonists of reform, known as the spirituali, with particular reference to the humanist bishop, Ludovico Beccadelli, and his role in the debate over episcopal residence. Through an analysis of his contribution to this divisive debate at the Council of Trent, the article seeks to shed light on a strand of the spirituali that was both resilient and prominent in the battle for the future direction of the Catholic Church.     

AIDS and global security

AIDS has been medically visible for 30 years; but only in the last five have the security implications of the pandemic begun to be discussed seriously. This debate has been in many ways unsatisfactory to date. The purpose of this article is to begin to rectify this at the moment when the first major efforts to combat the pandemic are beginning to take effect. It records therefore the history of that debate and ascertains in what useful and defensible senses AIDS can be described and managed as a security issue. It argues that there are, indeed, several that meet these criteria. The article describes the first three engagements with the disease from the time of its discovery and then suggests three newer ones and, it argues, more fruitful approaches that have advanced since 2000 of which the security dimension is one. The others are the geo-politics of the human immune system and analysis through the prism of political economy. The scope of the next waves of AIDS after the southern African one, is depicted. Its coming intersection with oil and Great Power politics is noted.