“Vote with your feet”: Neoliberalism,the democratic nation-state,and utopian enclave libertarianism

This paper examines a series of emerging utopian discourses that call for the creation of autonomous libertarian enclaves on land ceded by or claimed against existing states. These discourses have emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and can be seen as a response to the crisis on the part of free-market advocates who critique previous waves of neoliberal reform for failing to radically transform the existing structures of the state. Enclave libertarianism seeks to overcome neoliberal capitalism's contradictory relationship to the liberal democratic state by rethinking the state as a “private government service provider” and rethinking citizens as mobile consumers of government services. Citizens are thus called to “vote with their feet” by opting-in to the jurisdiction that best fits their needs and beliefs. The paper argues that these utopian imaginaries are key to understanding specific new manifestations of post-crisis neoliberalism, and calls for more research into the diversity of discourses and imaginaries that circulate through networks of neoliberal actors beyond specific policy initiatives.     

Territory,sovereignty and entitlement: Diplomatic discourses in the United Nations Security Council

This paper builds upon feminist approaches within political science, international relations and geography that study how bodies haunt global politics, by exploring how entitlement to power connects through the scale of the body to that of the state. In a context of rising populism and political bluster, as well as post-#metoo discussions of personal entitlement displayed by well-known political figures, there is a need to take seriously how discourses of statehood within security crises are gendered in specific ways. This paper argues that the concept of entitlement offers potential for geographic enquiry by opening up new perspectives on masculinist framings of territory and state in critical geopolitics and in critical international relations. It considers specifically how diplomatic discourses ground and naturalize claims to territory by showing how states’ entitlement to territory and masculinist forms of personal entitlement are connected. Drawing upon feminist approaches to language, discourse and power, this paper studies diplomatic interventions at the United Nations Security Council in New York in 2014–2017 on the crisis in Ukraine. Methodologically, it analyses diplomatic speeches through the concept of entitlement to show how territorial claims are naturalized through rhetorical devices grounded in hegemonic forms of masculinity. It argues that a clearer understanding of the connections between discourses of personal entitlement and state territorial sovereignty can further our understanding of territory.     

‘Fit Only for the Scrap Heap’: Rebuilding Returned Soldier Manhood in Australia after 1945

This paper examines the expert and popular discourses that sought to construct and disseminate the idea that Australia faced a masculinity crisis with the return of servicemen at the end of the Second World War. It explores how these discourses proposed a process of remasculinisation to ensure the successful reintegration of returning servicemen. These discourses were directed primarily at wives, mothers and fiancées, who were seen to bear the responsibility for rebuilding the manhood of returning men. Doctors played an important role in producing this prevailing discourse on the looming post‐war masculinity crisis, identifying its symptoms and proposing solutions. This crisis discourse filtered into popular culture through many means, predominantly, however, advice literature and romance fiction. While some of these expert and popular discourses constructed a backward looking ideal of domesticity for women, romance fiction in particular explored more modern possibilities of companionate marriage. The dissemination of a discourse about an impending masculinity crisis created different possibilities for the reconstruction of relations between men and women. The remasculinisation project could look both backwards (through ideals of women's subservience to damaged men) and forwards (through notions of marriage as a partnership) in imagining post war gender relations.     

发达国家的非营利组织能力建设

在发达国家,非营利组织能力建设是一项广为接受的活动,它主要是指在各种支持组织的帮助下非营利组织提升组织能力的活动,而兴起根源在于福利国家变革背景下非营利组织的发展困境、市场化的负面影响、＂志愿失灵＂与治理危机以及新自由主义话语的兴起等综合作用的结果。发达国家的非营利组织能力建设活动取得了一定的积极成效,但也面临着一些问题。在我国,社会组织能力建设要与制度建设的实践相结合。     

El padre transgresor: Crisis familiar y crisis social en el teatro popular bonaerense, 1896–1934

This article analyzes how five exemplary works of Argentine popular theater (1896–1934) construct unconventional readings of a perceived social crisis during Argentina's insertion into the global capitalist market. While dominant discourses focused on women's “errant” sexuality as the source of social demise, these works place the father figure —metaphor for social leadership— at the center of the debate to explore the chain of factors that hinder these fathers from fulfilling their “proper” gender roles, which ultimately causes the so-called social crisis. This focus on the paternal figure allows these plays to posit that social crisis stemmed from a destructive capitalistic logic based on the circulation of money, fraud, competition, and theft rather than from “errant” women. The recovery of these unconventional perspectives contributes to a more complex understanding of discourses on gender in the period, as well as of the relationship between discourses on everyday life and modernization.     

JUST WAIT UNTIL THERE'S A DROUGHT: MEDIATING ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES FOR URBAN GROWTH

Pro-development water managers from a southern Californian jurisdiction secured voter approval for importing water supplies by mediating a six year drought. Through reorganized water management structures, unsustainable technological practices, and “crisis” discourses, water managers overcame residents' historic resistance to imported water by defining it as insurance against a “natural” emergency, not a social mechanism for growth. The research suggests how the environmental crisis can advance development-oriented state agencies' hegemony. Given the otherwise general advocacy of environmentalism and “slow-growth in the empirical setting, water managers” success in overturning sustainable water development regimes reveals potential contradictions within the “environmentalist” landscape.     

Reordering Society: Vigilantism and Expressions of Sovereignty in Port Elizabeth's Townships

Crime and vigilantism in South Africa are generally seen as a reaction to the breakdown of formal law. Both are constituted outside the state and emerge when the new social contract has been broken — that is, when the state can no longer provide security. This article argues that there is often an intimate relationship between vigilante formations and state structures. It explores this apparent paradox through public discourses on crime and the emergence of twilight institutions such as vigilante groups. It suggests that vigilantism has to be analysed as an attempt to promulgate a new legal‐political order, despite being constructed outside this order. This argument is explored in the context of the Amadlozi, a vigilante group operating in the townships of Port Elizabeth. The article situates this discussion within an examination of discourses on crime, as well as the production of township residents and their protection from crime. Finally, it proffers some ideas on sovereignty and its relationship to twilight institutions.     

Sovereignty,Risk and Biotechnology: Zambia's 2002 GM Controversy in Retrospect

The southern African food crisis of 2002 led to one of the most significant controversies over the use of genetically modified (GM) crops in the developing world to date. Zambia's staunch opposition to GM food aid during the crisis is still frequently used as a reference point in debates over GM seed technology in agricultural development, and the morality of advanced biotechnology. This article re‐examines the controversy and its contemporary relevance using oral history interviews with key scientists, policy makers and development practitioners engaged in debates and decision‐making processes in Zambia in 2002, alongside a review of discourses in the Zambian press. The author argues that, rather than different perceptions of health and environmental risks derived from GM crops, it was questions of sovereign regulatory control of technology in a context of diminished state capacity — and the decline in the Zambian state's capacity for agricultural science research in particular — that played a central role in shaping anti‐GM attitudes. In addition, trust in the arguments of GM advocates was diminished by communication efforts which treated Zambian scientists and policy elites as a lay rather than an expert audience.     

Masculine hegemony,the state and the incorporation of gender equity discourse: The case of Australian sport

Although the impact of affirmative action, equal opportunity and gender equity programs on the lives of Australian women have been explored in a number of areas, state interventions related to sport have received scant attention from public policy analysts. This paper examines how the Australian Sports Commission has framed its gender equity policy in the mutually reinforcing hegemonic discourses of masculinity and corporate managerialism. It is argued that the Commission's articulation of gender equity policy in terms of ‘market‐oriented individualism’ is both constituted by, and constitutive of, the shift from a ‘patriarchal‐welfare state’ to a ‘patriarchal‐managerial state’ in Australia. The paper also provides an example of the tensions between bureaucratic and feminist discourses in the state sphere.     

Creating environmental subjects: Conservation as counter-insurgency in Aceh,Indonesia, 1925–1940

This article examines the creation of Gunung Leuser Wildlife Reserve in the highlands of Aceh, Indonesia within the context of the Dutch-Aceh War in the early twentieth century, arguing that conservation was used as a form of counter-insurgency. While the agendas of the colonial military and conservationists diverged at times, they overlapped in their goals to secure Leuser from resident communities, whom they viewed as a threat to colonial order and the ecologies of the region. This article draws together the discourses of militarized conservation with their material implications. It does so by examining the nexus of military and conservation discourses, the historical context of park creation, and the processes by which colonial actors stole rights to land and created new laws and regulations dictating the people's relationships with and access to land. Scholars have shown that conservation discourses continue to normalize human rights abuses, Indigenous dispossession and displacement, and deadly violence against local peoples. These discursive tactics frame expertise and responsibility as residing in the hands of white elites who are tasked with saving imperiled environments from the people who depend on them for subsistence. I suggest that the military and conservation agendas were both operating within overlapping, constructed frameworks of crisis and emergency that constituted the resident communities as anti-environmental subjects. Discourses of environmental crisis in Leuser held a power that justified militarization while concealing the violence from international constituencies at a historical moment when an ideology of Western responsibility for threatened species around the world was growing. Moreover, the history of Leuser as viewed through the analytical framework of militarized conservation helps us rethink the history of Aceh. Through this framework, it becomes evident that the Dutch-Aceh War did not end in 1913, as many historians suggest, but instead continued throughout the colonial period.     

Perilous Journeys: Visualising the Racialised “Refugee Crisis”

This article explores the benign and malignant power of the visual in the racialised framing of the ongoing “European refugee crisis”. Bringing together literatures on racial discourses, visuality, storytelling and decoloniality for the first time, this paper breaks new ground in our understandings of the political possibilities that visual storytelling offers in shifting “lines of sight” in an increasingly vitriolic anti‐refugee climate. It does this by analysing prominent graphic narratives created by the non‐profit organisation PositiveNegatives, animating the refugee experiences of Syrian men in Scandinavia. We consider the affective engagements that such progressive storytelling promotes and the decolonial potential invested in it, arguing that the modality and content of narratives of this genre offer important scope to provoke encounter and empathy. Contributing to geographies of race, migration, visuality and decoloniality, we suggest that these narratives allow new and gently radical ways of resisting the dehumanising impetus of mainstream media discourses.     

Feared Rumours and Rumours of Fear: The Politicisation of Ethnicity During the Fiji Coup in May 2000

In this article I explore rumour and fear as crucial to the politicisation of ethnicity and the attempt of ethno‐nationalists to gain political hegemony during the coup in Fiji in May 2000. I discuss rumours during the Fiji crisis as emotional discourses articulating fears and anxieties that have influenced interethnic relations in Fiji since the indenture of Indian labour. I argue that these feelings of fear and insecurity are linked historically to issues of land, demography and race and investigate how the George Speight Team and Fijian ethno‐nationalists aimed at reinforcing and foregrounding these emotions to mobilise support. I also look at the role of rumours and fear in the silencing of dissent and opposing voices. I ask how rumours were in dialogue with other discourses circulating at the height of the crisis and how they complemented ethno‐nationalist political strategies. I suggest that part of the political success of the George Speight Team stems from their effective engagement of different local, national and global levels to reinforce an old discourse of ethnic Fijian unity and fear of Indo‐Fijian colonisation around which they mobilised ethnically based political support. The effect of this ‘indigenous articulation’ was a polarisation of Fijian and Indo‐Fijian positionings in the nation.     

‘Our land is only founded on trade and industry.’ Economic discourses in fifteenth-century Bruges

Economic historians study production, consumption, market phenomena, and economic policies, while what is referred to as ‘the history of medieval economic thought’ largely remains the province of historians of ideas. However, participants in medieval industry and commerce, informed by daily production, market and financial practices, also uttered discourses on the state of the economy and on the measures governments should take to resolve crises or economic decline. When the burghers of Bruges formulated their economic demands in times of crisis, such as during the revolt of 1488, their utterances reveal commonly accepted presuppositions of which institutional levels, the prince, the town, or the guilds, should stimulate the economy by reducing transaction costs.     

Responding to the ‘crisis of masculinity’: the perspectives of young Muslim men from Glasgow and Edinburgh,Scotland

Debates about the so-called crisis of masculinity have tended to focus on the experiences of white working class young men and black young men to the exclusion of other groups of men. This article seeks to redress this omission by exploring young Muslim men's knowledge and understanding of the crisis of masculinity and the ways in which they respond to such discourses. Using qualitative data collected during interviews and focus groups with young Muslim men – mainly of Pakistani heritage – living in Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland, I demonstrate that young Muslim men's responses to the crisis of masculinity debate are informed by a complex range of issues including their own class position, familial and related gendered expectations alongside the young men's interests in sport and leisure activities.     

Watercourses and Discourses: Coalmining in the Upper Hunter Valley,New South Wales

ABSTRACT Water is a resource that both unites and divides people in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales, where many communities are facing the prospect of large‐scale open‐cut coalmining developments on productive mixed use land, or already live in proximity to mines and power stations. This article analyses conflicts over a proposed coal mine at Bickham in the Upper Hunter Valley, by contrasting the various protagonists' discourses of water scarcity, supply, and connectivity. It examines the ways in which the terms of opposition are narrowed to the arena of state and industry supported science and economic development, marginalising other cultural values and environmental ethics that are integral to opponents' discourses. Opponents have achieved some measure of success through contestation of the uncertain science of hydrological modelling, bolstered by the context of drought and increasing public acceptance of climate change science.     

In search of the nation in Fiume: Irredentism,cultural nationalism,borderlands

Irredentism is a crucial, yet understudied phenomenon of nationalism. Most scholars emphasise how irredentist thinking and practices function as a geopolitical instrument for inter‐state formation, resulting in radical nationalism. This article sheds light instead on the cultural preoccupations underlying irredentist discourses. It focusses on irredentist claims on the Adriatic city of Fiume (Rijeka) among Italian nationalists in the 19th and 20th centuries, emphasising how they were driven by cultural imaginaries of a spiritual borderland for the nation. These imaginaries continued to inform irredentist arguments during the phase of political mobilisation. This sheds light on contemporary European politics, in which irredentist imaginaries are once again shaping nationalist discourses.     

Unipolar Dispensations: Exceptionalism,Empire, and the End of One America

Public and political discourse around the 2016 US Presidential election constructed it as a time of crisis for America. Yet, while over 80% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, religion’s role in this crisis has been marginalized. Analyzing Trump’s support among premillennial dispensationalists, this article explores connections between dispensationalist discourses of divine providence and constructions of Trump’s election as a “turning point” for America. Charting links between conflicts over domestic cultural homogeneity and attempted impositions of US power over global “deviants” (terrorists, rogue states), it argues that the crisis of American identity figured by Trump’s election is tied to religious and secularized soteriologies emerging from notions of American exceptionalism and empire inaugurated by the end of the Cold War.     

From lockdown to rāhui and teddy bears in windows: Initial responses to Covid-19 in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Scholarly examinations of states of emergency frequently underscore how the crisis imaginary is employed to rapidly and unjustifiably expand state power. This line of analysis affords great insight into the misuse of state power. It also, however, tends to depict the citizenry as either weak and overwhelmed or at best, duped by the workings of the state, and thus ignores the possibility of democratic processes continuing within a state of emergency. Aotearoa/New Zealand’s response to Covid-19 reveals a collaborative dynamic in which the citizenry actively engaged in constituting the state of emergency, and suggests the need for a broader examination of how collective responsibility, care and blame are envisioned and enacted, not only by governments but by (neo-liberal) citizenries during times of national crisis.     

The tyranny of transnational discourse: ‘authenticity’ and Irish diasporic identity in Ireland and England

Through the prism of current state discourses in Ireland on engagement with the Irish diaspora, this article examines the empirical merit of the related concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’. Drawing on recent research on how Irish identity is articulated and negotiated by Irish people in England, this study suggests a worked distinction between the concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’. Two separate discourses of authenticity are compared and contrasted: they rest on a conceptualisation of Irish identity as transnational and diasporic, respectively. I argue that knowledge of contemporary Ireland is constructed as sufficiently important that claims on diasporic Irishness are constrained by the discourse of authentic Irishness as transnational. I discuss how this affects the identity claims of second‐generation Irish people, the relationship between conceptualisations of Irishness as diasporic within Ireland and ‘lived’ diasporic Irish identities, and implications for state discourses of diaspora engagement.     

State reconstruction in Africa: the relevance of Claude Ake's political thought

Studies on post‐conflict reconstruction in Africa have glossed over the need for state transformation as a prerequisite for sustainable peacebuilding in post‐conflict societies. This article fills this gap and discusses the relevance of Claude Ake's political thought for state reconstruction in post‐conflict Africa. It underscores the need for the autochthonous transformation of the state as a central component of peacebuilding and post‐conflict transition in the continent as Ake had suggested. Drawing on Sierra Leone, it theorizes Ake's works on the state in Africa against the backdrop of externally driven state reconstruction projects hinged on hegemonic discourses of ‘nation‐building’ in post‐conflict situations. It presents Ake's corpus as a basis for critiquing ongoing state rehabilitation attempts and urges a return to endogenous initiatives of rebuilding the state from below as a condition for achieving a sustainable democratic reconstruction of the state in post‐conflict Africa.