Politics,Society and Financial Liberalization: Turkey in the 1990s

This article focuses on the political economy of Turkey in the 1990s to illustrate the importance of analysing economic variables that intersect with the quality of political democracy. In 1989, the debt‐ridden state moved to systematically and completely deregulate Turkey’s financial markets. Together with the ongoing processes of liberalizing commodity markets and integrating with global capital markets, financial liberalization was expected to achieve fiscal and monetary stability, stimulate business confidence to invest in productive sectors, produce stable growth, encourage privatization and control inflation. However, the new hegemony of the capital markets has gone hand‐in‐hand with deteriorating macroeconomic performance, a worsening income distribution, the discrediting of politics and its isolation from society. The authors examine several key dynamics which are helping to legitimate the neoliberal agenda of the 1990s. These include the distribution of state largesse to manipulate electoral capitalism; the rise of an informal sector in the ‘Anatolian Tigers’; promotion of the seductive attractions of the market; and an antipolitical reform populism adopted by political actors to exploit popular disillusionment with the political system.     

Gendered Politics and Nationalised Homes: Women and the anti-colonial struggle in Delhi, 1930-47

The aim of this article is to highlight the ways in which women achieved agency in a nationalist movement that, while encouraging female participation, attempted to spatially delimit this activity to the home. While nationalist historiographies have acknowledged those women who left the home and joined nationalist protests in public, there were many more women supporting those processions and meetings in private. While the home cannot be considered outside of the community, local or national scale activities that framed it, an examination of the varieties of political participation within the home should help revise Partha Chatterjee's suggestion that the Indian middle-class home was a site of silencing and resubjection. Combining interview material with archival evidence, this research investigates the ways in which women in Delhi between 1930 and 1947 responded to Gandhi's call to be politically active from the home. Using the work of bell hooks on 'homeplaces', the home is portrayed as a potentially political space of anti-colonial resistance, rather than an apolitical site of withdrawal, oppression or safety.     

Communal Discourses,Marriage, and the Politics of Gendered Social Boundaries among South Asian Immigrants in Tanzania

Focusing on communal discourses among South Asian groups in Tanzania, the author highlights the manner in which discourses around religion, caste and race shape gendered patterns of migration and marriage and the everyday politics of social boundaries in an immigrant community. The article demonstrates how discursive processes operating at the community level mediate between the household and the broader political economic processes. It also illustrates that although discourses, boundaries and social relations are easily modified in response to changing circumstances, new narratives and ideologies frequently emerge to ensure that the predominant balance of power in a community is not disturbed significantly.     

Politics of Social Policy in a Late Industrializing Country: The Case of Turkey

This article approaches social policy as an integral component of a capitalist society and, by drawing on the notion of the double movement introduced by Karl Polanyi, argues that social policy intervention both limits and contributes to market expansion. While this argument could be generally applied to recent social policy changes in the current context of economic globalization, these changes were shaped against different histories of social policy development in early and late industrializing countries. This article examines the increasing importance of social policy in late industrializing countries by focusing on the case of Turkey. It is argued that social policy transformation in Turkey has involved the expansion of social security coverage along with the privatization and marketization of health and pension systems. A new system of labour market regulation has contributed to the commodification of labour while the ‘state-supported familialism’, which forms an important aspect of current trends in the area of social care, has served to integrate women in the prevailing flexible employment relations by simultaneously sustaining their position in the gender division of roles within traditional family relations. The populist strategy of polarization pursued by the ruling government is discussed to show how opposition to these trends toward privatization, marketization and labour commodification has been isolated.     

Young People's Politics and the Micro-Territories of the Local

In spite of the late modern interpellation of youth as mobile and globally oriented, and a perception of social and political issues as increasingly playing out in a transnational arena, young Australians exhibit strong local and individualised tendencies in expressing politics. They are bounded by the ‘micro-territories of the local’; that is, their political thinking and acting takes place within the spaces of home, friendship groups, school and neighbourhood. This paper draws on an ARC project with nearly 1000 mainly 15–17-year-old Victorians to examine the relationship between young people's embeddedness in their local worlds and their views of themselves as efficacious political actors. It considers how their competency within such micro-territories opens up neglected sites and strategies for political expression and engagement while limiting their sense of sense of political efficacy, and it asserts the significance of considering this age group, not for what these young people will become in the future, but for their particular location, socially, physically and politically in the present.     

回眸中国古代地方政治的贪腐与黑暗

以马克思主义对等级授职制批判为指导,分五个方面对古代地方政治的主流予以回顾和总结。强调历朝历代地方政治的贪腐与黑暗,简直就是在一个模子里刻出来的。这个模子非它,就是专制主义中央集权的等级授职制,各种贪腐与黑暗的遗传密码正是在这个模子里得到了世世代代的传承和发扬。研究中国古代地方政治,正是为了将古代地方政治制度史,写成活的地方政治制度史。在一般情况下,信息传递对地方政治的好坏,其作用是相当次要的。     

Scottish Historical Archaeology: International Agendas and Local Politics

Historical archaeology as practiced in Scotland is divergent from the mainstream tradition of historical archaeology/post-medieval archaeology that dominates North America and the English-speaking world. Cultural and historical forces have shaped an historical archaeology with a deeper time depth, which extends back into the Middle Ages. It also focuses on different subjects reflecting the political concerns associated with Scottish national identity. Examples drawn from Glasgow’s history are used to illustrate the distinctiveness of the Scottish tradition and how it is evolving. I argue that one of its strengths of Scottish historical archaeology is that it provides a corrective contrast to the subjects and approaches which dominate historical archaeology in the English-speaking world.     

Precarious Democratization and Local Dynamics in Niger: Micro–Politics in Zinder

Literature on the African state often finds it hard to specify what is state and what is not. The closer one gets to a particular political landscape, the more apparent it becomes that many institutions have something of a twilight character. This article argues that studies of local politics in Africa should focus on how the public authority of institutions waxes and wanes and how political competition among individuals and organizations expresses the notion of state and public authority. This is explored in the context of contemporary political struggles in Niger, played out in three different arenas in the region of Zinder around 1999, as home–town associations, chieftaincies and vigilante groups all take on the mantle of public authority in their dealings with what they consider to be their antithesis, the ‘State’.     

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.     

Local Politics,Economic Structure,and Performance: The Case of Sakhalin

Two geographers assess the results of the State Duma elections in Sakhalin Oblast and relate the regional pattern of voting to varying socio-economic conditions of the region. The research is structured to test a working hypothesis that voting patterns in large part can be explained by regional variations in economic structure and performance. More specifically, it explores whether, at the rayon level, there is any relationship between: (1) economic specialization and election results; (2) economic trends and election results; and (3) long-term socioeconomic indicators and election results. The case study is presented as a caveat against the uncritical use of national party preferences as a measure of the political climate in Russia's regions. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: J60, O18, R12. 2 figures, 7 tables, 36 references.     

The Gendered Genealogy of Political Religions Theory

This article explores the origins of certain theories of fascism, notably political religions theory, in the gendered intellectual milieu of the late nineteenth century. It suggests that political religions theory owes much to Gustave Le Bon's collective psychology (or crowd theory), a discipline that depended on a distinction between the feminised, racialised mass and the active male elite, and which saw women as trapped in the traditional phase of history. The article shows the influence of collective psychology in Durkheimian sociology and Freudian social psychology, and details its transmission to political theory via Talcott Parsons's account of the origins and nature of Nazism. The unacknowledged influence of collective psychology means that advocates of political religions theory either ignore women, or depict them as passive creatures defined by their need for the domination of a male elite.