Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A cultural history

This article examines Ernest Belfort Bax's interpretation of the French Revolution and traces the impact that his idea of the Revolution had on his philosophy and his political thought. The first section considers Bax's understanding of the Revolution in the context of his theory of history and analyses his conception of the Revolution's legacy, drawing particularly on his portraits of Robespierre, Marat and Babeuf. The second section shows how the lessons Bax drew from this history shaped his socialist republicanism and discusses his support for Jacobin methods of revolutionary change. The third section of the article looks at the ways in which Bax's reading of revolutionary history affected his internationalism and shows how his ‘anti-patriotism’ led him to support the Anglo-French campaign in 1914. I argue that the Bax's understanding of the French Revolution gave body to his philosophy and greatly influenced his understanding of the socialist struggle. Bax believed that socialists had history on their side, but was so emboldened by the idea of the Revolution that he was led to advance a view of socialist change that undermined the historic values that socialism was supposed to enshrine.     

Infrastructural Discontent in the Sanitary City: Waste,Revolt, and Repression in Cairo

In this article, I examine the relationship between waste, revolt, and repression in Cairo's sanitation system from the early 20^th century to the present. I coin the term infrastructural discontent in the sanitary city to describe how discontent slowly accretes around Cairo's sanitation system and becomes a powerful force in the city's politics—a force that can be mobilised for popular revolt and state repression. I detail three expressions of infrastructural discontent in Cairo's sanitation system, paying careful attention to the deeply related mundane and spectacular productions of these expressions. Tracing the formation of infrastructural discontent in the sanitary city, I show how resistance and repression are produced and contested in material infrastructural relations which contain the accretions of long‐standing struggles over colonialism, development, and uneven urbanisation.     

Luxemburg on Tahrir Square: Reading the Arab Revolutions with Rosa Luxemburg's The Mass Strike

The protests on Tahrir Square in Cairo have come to symbolize the Arab uprisings of 2011. They have proven that Arab political life is more complex than the false choice between authoritarian rule or Islamist oppositions. The popular uprisings witnessed the emergence of “the Arab peoples” as political actors, able to topple entrenched authoritarian leaders, challenging repressive regimes and their brutal security apparatuses. In our contribution we want to analyze the political dynamics of these uprisings beyond the salient immediacy of the revolutionary events, by taking, as our guide, Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet The Mass Strike (2005 [1906], London: Bookmarks). An interesting theoretical contribution to the study of revolution, Luxemburg's book provides us with tools to introduce a historical and political reading of the Arab Spring. Based on fieldwork and thorough knowledge of the region, we draw from evidence from the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and the more gradual forms of political change in Morocco. Re‐reading the revolutionary events in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco through the lens of The Mass Strike offers activists on the ground insights into the dialectic between local and national struggles, economic and political demands, strike actions and revolution. The workers protests in Tunisia and Egypt during the last decade can be grasped as anticipations of the mass strike during the revolution; the specific mode in which workers participate as a class in the revolutionary process. This perspective enables an understanding of the current economic conflicts as logical forms of continuity of the revolution. The economic and the political, the local and the national (and one may add the global), are indissoluble yet separate elements of the same process, and the challenge for revolutionary actors in Tunisia and Egypt lies in the connection, organization and fusion of these dispersed moments and spaces of struggle into a politicized whole. Conversely, an understanding of the reciprocity between revolutionary change and the mass strike allows activists in Morocco to recognize the workers' movement as a potentially powerful actor of change, and trade unionists to incorporate the political in their economic mobilizations.     

State repression in the Iranian bazaar, 1975–1977: The anti-profiteering campaign and an impending revolution

This article examines state repression in the Iranian bazaar during the anti-profiteering campaign from 1975–1977. While many have argued that the anti-profiteering campaign helped spark the revolutionary mobilization of the bazaar itself, this article posits that scholars should also consider the notion that the campaign helped to foster popular support for the revolutionary movement as a whole. Given the bazaar's ties to middle and lower classes of Iranian society, as well as their status as the country's “economic barometer,” this article presents the theory that the anti-profiteering campaign played a role in generating popular discontent against the former regime in the period just prior to the 1979 Revolution.     

越南华侨与戊申云南河口起义

论文分析梳理了越南华侨与云南河口起义的密切关系,探讨了越南华侨对辛亥革命的巨大贡献。在河口起义中,越南华侨发挥了极其重要的作用,包括积极支持、参与建立河口起义的革命机关和革命军,是起义的骨干力量;参与掩护、救助因起义和策应起义而被法国方面拘押的革命志士;为起义踊跃捐款;担当起义的后勤运输、通信联络以及宣传报道等工作;起义失败后积极做好起义善后工作以及无怨无悔地默默承受起义的后果。因此,他们在起义中的所作所为,是辛亥革命前海外华侨的革命楷模。     

Political Theology,Democracy, and the Exception in the Egyptian Revolution

As the sixth anniversary of the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square passes, those uprisings and the events that followed continue pose important challenges not only for students of Middle Eastern and North African politics, but also for students of political theory and political theology. While scholars debate the extent to which the “Arab Spring” has amounted to a truly revolutionary turn of events, it is commonly accepted that the protests that swept the region were exceptional in their unanticipated and profound disruption of ordinary affairs. Under the influence of Carl Schmitt's theory of sovereignty, “the exception” has become a key figure in contemporary reflections on political theology, but attention to events in Egypt suggests that the familiar figure of the exception has not yet been mined for all of its implications for democratic practice. Slipping below grand articulations of the exception as a moment of sovereign decision, or as the suspension of the law, this essay turns its attention to the minor, everyday, background patterns of exceptionality that accompany the emergence of democratic practices outside the purview of the sovereign state. I argue that there is an intimate connection between the forms of exceptionality produced by longstanding practices of Egyptian secularism, the forms of exceptionality peculiar to the 2011 uprisings and their aftermath, and the forms of exceptionality that both make and unmake democratic practices. My argument has three parts: first Egyptian secularism is a process that manages and transforms authorized forms of Islamic practice, while at the same time producing exceptional formations, of which the Muslim Brotherhood is a key example; second that revolutionary politics can be understood as a matter of opening and sustaining the kind of exceptional circumstances that attended the 2011 uprisings, and that this can be usefully framed as an open-ended process of conversion; third that democratic practice requires courting both kinds of exception, despite their challenges, ambivalences, and potential dangers.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 27, Number 2. April 2011

Front and back cover caption, volume 27 issue 2 Front cover THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION OF 2011 Over a million Egyptians in Tahrir Square praying in remembrance of the 25 January revolution's ‘martyrs’. More than 300 people were killed in the popular uprising that forced President Hosni Mubarak to step down on 11 February. A memorial, seen in the centre of the image, displays the photographs of some of those who lost their lives. Motivated by a pressing need for political and social reform and inspired by the recent success of the Tunisian revolution, Egyptians took to the streets on 25 January in unprecedented numbers. For 18 days, major protests erupted in several Egyptian cities calling for the removal of the regime. In Cairo protesters converged upon and occupied Tahrir Liberation Square, which became both the symbolic and physical centre of the revolution. With the tide of revolt sweeping across the Arab world fears were raised, both internally and internationally, about a possible Islamist hijack. Yet in Tahrir Square the main ideology was liberal; hundreds of thousands of Egyptians from diverse social backgrounds and radically different ideological inclinations united on the fundamental demands of freedom, equality, justice and dignity. In this issue, Selim Shahine reflects on the political consciousness of the young activists who led the uprising, and on the discourse on generations that surrounded these events. Mohammed Rashed presents a participant's account from Tahrir Square and reflects on some of the factors that might have contributed to the success of its continued occupation: the formation of an embryonic form of community, and the receding of the usual identities based on class and religion in favour of a simple yet powerful identity as people of the revolution. Back cover CLIMATE CHANGE AND ANTHROPOLOGY A man watches the ocean waves on Jaluit Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Few societies have a more intimate relationship with the sea. The country's average elevation is a mere seven feet, and the highest point is 32 feet. No point in the archipelago is more than half a mile inland, and most locals live within 100 feet of the shore. The islands have always been vulnerable to the ocean; an early 19th‐century account of Marshallese life refers to a local fear of inundation, and magical formulae to prevent it. In the present century, such dangers may increase past the point of adaptability and resilience, as sea‐level rise and other consequences of global climate change are likely to render the country uninhabitable. Marshall Islanders are familiar with these threats via local observation as well as media coverage, forcing them to come to terms, both conceptually and emotionally, with the possibility that their homeland is doomed. We usually conceive of climate change as an ‘environmental’ issue, but this framing may say more about Western conceptions of nature‐culture than about climate change itself. Global warming could as easily be termed a social issue: it is caused by socioeconomic behaviour, experienced by local actors, interpreted according to culturally specific ideologies, and communicated by human agents. In this issue, Peter Rudiak‐Gould draws on his ethnographic investigation of Marshallese climate‐change attitudes to argue that anthropology has only scratched the surface in its contribution to our understanding of global warming. A question of theoretical and practical importance remains largely uninvestigated: how is the foreign scientific prophecy of devastating climate change received, interpreted, understood, adopted, rejected and utilized by local communities? It is a question of particular relevance in an island society for whom that prophecy amounts to no less than nationwide destruction.     

Conceptions of place: approaching space,children and physical activity

In this paper, we argue that place mapping is useful for approaching children's conception of place and that this is of relevance when designing physical activity interventions. We contend that socio-material factors influence children's perception and use of places, and are crucial to understand in relation to their use of local neighbourhoods for physical activity. A place mapping of children's understandings and everyday use of their local neighbourhood in suburban Copenhagen was conducted with a fifth grade elementary school class. The mapping and subsequent analysis resulted in three categories of relevance to children's conceptions of place; located social experiences, experiences of the unknown, and children's contested spaces. We argue that such knowledge can provide useful information in the development and evaluation of activities that promote physical activity in urban spaces.     

European private law and the challenge of plural legal subjectivities

This paper argues that the approach to questions of authority, legitimacy, and personal identity characteristic of contemporary European law presents a paradox. The power of the legal project that emerged after the French Revolution lay in its deployment of the notion of abstract legal subjectivity to challenge claimed authority. Much is made of the public law dimensions of this revolutionary moment—the creation of political constitutions establishing national citizenship and human rights standards. But the transposition of abstract legal subjectivity into the private law through national social constitutions like Civil Codes has been far less successful. Abstract legal subjectivity in public law regimes necessarily privileges some personal identities over others in its construction of citizenship. These privileged identities of public law citizenship limit how legal subjects can express their identities in the private law. The paper proposes an alternative, pluralist, theorization of the diverse, iterative character of everyday human interaction that gives content to the idea of legal subjectivity in the private law. It seeks to reconcile a public law of abstract, unitary citizenship with a private law of plural legal subjectivities in a manner that advances the project of democratic constitutionalism.     

The Jacobinism and patriotism of Ernest Belfort Bax

This article examines Ernest Belfort Bax's interpretation of the French Revolution and traces the impact that his idea of the Revolution had on his philosophy and his political thought. The first section considers Bax's understanding of the Revolution in the context of his theory of history and analyses his conception of the Revolution's legacy, drawing particularly on his portraits of Robespierre, Marat and Babeuf. The second section shows how the lessons Bax drew from this history shaped his socialist republicanism and discusses his support for Jacobin methods of revolutionary change. The third section of the article looks at the ways in which Bax's reading of revolutionary history affected his internationalism and shows how his ‘anti-patriotism’ led him to support the Anglo-French campaign in 1914. I argue that the Bax's understanding of the French Revolution gave body to his philosophy and greatly influenced his understanding of the socialist struggle. Bax believed that socialists had history on their side, but was so emboldened by the idea of the Revolution that he was led to advance a view of socialist change that undermined the historic values that socialism was supposed to enshrine.     

The Battle of the Camel: Revolution,transition and tourism in Cairo

This article asks how the 25 January 2011 revolution in Egypt led to the entrenchment of existing forms of privilege and marginality. To answer this question, critical scholars have taken for granted the revolution's linear temporality and focused largely on institutional processes at the state level following the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. In contrast, I provide an original take on this question through extensive ethnographic engagement, focusing on moments of rupture and urban spaces of contestation at the time of the revolution and beyond. More specifically, I trace the significance of an understudied moment during the revolution: the ‘Battle of the Camel’, when horse/camel drivers who sell rides to tourists at the Pyramids charged at protestors in Tahrir Square. An ethnography of this moment allows me to draw out the complex temporalities of the revolution by recognizing diverse moments of contestation by marginalized subjects at its different ‘stages’. This article traces how these alternative temporalities were driven but also obscured by longer-term patterns of tourism and urban development. It finds that relations of power and marginality were reproduced through tourism and elite Egyptian visions of temporality and authenticity in the key urban spaces relevant to this battle – the Pyramids of Giza and Tahrir Square. These sites were positioned as spaces of Egypt's ‘authentic’ past and future respectively, reinforcing a colonial and neoliberal narrative of development that made possible the protection of tourism and elite priorities and the remarginalization of ‘underdeveloped’ camel drivers and street vendors in these sites.     

刀客与陕西辛亥革命

刀客是一种带有地域色彩的绿林,主要存在于关中地区。陕西辛亥革命期间,革命党人与刀客等势力联合反清。西安起义前,井勿幕、胡景翼等同盟会会员积极与刀客相结纳．发展革命势力。在陕西各县市的光复过程中,刀客发挥了重要作用。陕西的光复,是革命派与刀客等势力联合运动的结果。但由于其在政治上的不稳定性,有些刀客站到了革命的对立面,有些在参加革命后沦为军阀或其爪牙,成为革命者镇压的对象。     

Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people's everyday politics

This paper examines how high school-aged young people from New Zealand are crafting their everyday political subjectivities within the liminal status and liminal spaces they occupy in society. With a specific focus on schooling and the citizenship education curricula in New Zealand, three vignettes are introduced which examine young people's less reflexive and ‘everyday’ forms of political action in the interstitial liminal space between Public/private, Formal/informal and Macro/micro politics. These vignettes underline how young people's everyday politics were embedded within spatial and relational processes of socialisation with adults within their schools and communities, yet, also showed both agency and resourcefulness with these spaces. Young people's liminal status and occupation of liminal spaces provided them with unique perspectives on social issues (such as bullying, racism, water conservation, and obesity) and enabled them to respond in ways that were ‘different’ to adults' Politics, yet nonetheless showed their political and tactical selves (de Certeau, 1984). A focus on young people's political practices in liminal spaces allows for new possibilities and understandings of the political.     

Women,Nationalism and the Philippine Revolution

Abstract. Filipino women participated actively in the Philippine Revolution (1896–1902), performing a wide range of tasks essential to sustaining the revolutionary challenge against Spanish and American imperialism. Though largely omitted from mainstream histories of the nationalist revolution, women's involvement has been recorded in several marginalised texts. However, these texts have invariably used a limiting format based on presenting biographies of outstanding women. This article suggests an alternative approach, by situating the history of revolutionary Filipino women within a comparative framework. The article outlines key ideas of feminist writers who have analysed women's participation in nationalist struggles from an international perspective. Drawing on these ideas, some new approaches to women in the Philippine Revolution are suggested.     

Experimental Publics: Activist Culture and Political Intelligibility of Climate Change Action in the Hunter Valley,Southeast Australia

The ethnographic study of Western environmental activism opens up the prospect of studying subjectivities formed in opposition to dominant Western ideas and values, and yet encapsulated within Western societies and democratic polities. One of the directions in which it points the anthropologist, which is pursued in this article, is towards the study of the political lifeworlds of activists, their self‐identity as citizens and their embeddedness in the wider society. Environmental politics can be an emergent activity in citizens' lives, as expressed in John Dewey's concept of ‘the public’ as citizens who organise themselves to address the adverse consequences of situations that they experience in common (Dewey 1991[1927]). This paper focuses on a middle ground of social action between habitual daily practice, and the domain of institutional politics: groups of people in small voluntary organisations in the heavily coal‐mined Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia, who are moved to collective action to address the threatening aspects of anthropogenic climate change. Action group members variously articulate their reflexive understandings of the structural contradictions of environmentalism in corporate capitalist societies where values of consumerism and processes of individualization corrode collective concerns of citizenship‐based politics. These understandings inform activists' personal motivations, values and ideals for a ‘climate movement’, diverse modes of political action and striving for wider political intelligibility.     

Conceiving the Republic of Mankind: The Political Thought of Anacharsis Cloots

During the French Revolution, Jean-Baptiste “Anacharsis” Cloots (1755–1794) developed a theory of the world state as the means to guarantee perpetual peace for mankind. Though his ideas have largely been misunderstood, Cloots's political writings were in fact an extensive plea for a more cosmopolitan understanding of the French Revolution. His system adapted institutions and concepts of the French revolutionary republic for a world state, the republic of mankind. This essay recovers his political vision and connects it both to the heritage of eighteenth-century political thought, especially Rousseau, and to revolutionary political culture. The goal is to retrieve the meaning of Cloots's universal republic, and with it a chapter in the history of cosmopolitan thought.     

Concepts of citizenship in France during the long eighteenth century

François Furet famously described the French Revolution as ’the first experiment with democracy’, and modern French citizenship is often seen as having emerged during this period. Universal male suffrage was practised for the first time in 1792 and the Revolution also witnessed debate over such issues as: the rights of citizens; the extension of the franchise to poorer inhabitants and black slaves; and even whether women should be given political rights. Yet, the modern idea of citizenship did not emerge from nowhere in 1789. Rather it was the product of more than a century of debate. This article examines the different understandings of citizenship that were competing for dominance in France during the long eighteenth century: the ancient conception; the Bodinian understanding and the rights-based approach. Not only does it demonstrate the contribution of these approaches (and in particular the last) to revolutionary understandings of citizenship, but it also highlights how the tensions of the eighteenth-century debates, and the ambiguities inherent in the rights-based conception, sparked some of the key controversies of the Revolution.     

The missing revolution: The totalitarian democracy in light of 1776

During much of his prolific career, the late historian Jacob Talmon was preoccupied with revolutionary movements, and was especially unsettled by, and attracted to, the force displayed by the French and Russian Revolutions. The young United States’ long and bloody war against the British Empire, followed by the creation of a republican novus ordo seclorum, supposedly fitted Talmon's revolutionary model and narrative. Hence, it is hard to account for the complete absence of the American Revolution from Talmon's extensive and celebrated trilogy.

This paper examines how Talmon understood revolutions and how the major historiographical schools interpreting the American Revolution could not accommodate, for different reasons, Talmon's paradigm of the nature and essence of revolutions. The paper further demonstrates how not only the failings of different historical interpretive schemes convinced Talmon to ignore the American Revolution. Rather, since the American Revolution could be conceived either as Lockean or Machiavellian, but in any event not as Rousseauian, Talmon overlooked its Atlantic nature; he chose to focus solely on messianic Europe. The paper will thus analyze the meaning and consequence of the fact that Talmon left the examination of the pursuit of happiness to Americanists, and chose to leave 1776 out of his corpus. Indeed, a missing revolution.     

Enacting nationalism through youthful mobilities? Youth,mobile phones and digital capitalism in a Lao‐Vietnamese borderland

Mobile phone use has become a defining feature of what it means to be young, and the relatively remote Lao‐Vietnamese borderland area that is the focus of this study is no exception. Drawing on Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, this article investigates the interplay between the everyday styles of being young, the forces of digital capitalism and the enactment of nationalism. We do this with a focus on ethnic minority youth's appropriation of the mobile services offered by Viettel, the most popular mobile services provider in the study area and owned by the Vietnamese Ministry of Defence. We suggest that the everyday performances of being young, revolving around the mobile phone, are affected by the forces of digital capitalism. We further suggest that the cultural context of Viettel's digital capitalism is embedded in a fabric of Vietnamese nationalism, leading ethnic minority youth, consciously and unconsciously, to enact nationalism through their everyday styles of being young.     

MAPPING CHILDREN'S POLITICS: SPATIAL STORIES,DIALOGIC RELATIONS AND POLITICAL FORMATION

This article confronts a persistent challenge in research on children's geographies and politics: the difficulty of recognizing forms of political agency and practice that by definition fall outside of existing political theory. Children are effectively “always already” positioned outside most of the structures and ideals of modernist democratic theory, such as the public sphere and abstracted notions of communicative action or “rational” speech. Recent emphases on embodied tactics of everyday life have offered important ways to recognize children's political agency and practice. However, we argue here that a focus on spatial practices and critical knowledge alone cannot capture the full range of children's politics, and show how representational and dialogic practices remain a critical element of their politics in everyday life. Drawing on de Certeau's notion of spatial stories, and Bakhtin's concept of dialogic relations, we argue that children's representations and dialogues comprise a significant space of their political agency and formation, in which they can make and negotiate social meanings, subjectivities, and relationships. We develop these arguments with evidence from an after‐school activity programme we conducted with 10–13 year olds in Seattle, Washington, in which participants explored, mapped, wrote and spoke about the spaces and experiences of their everyday lives. Within these practices, children negotiate autonomy and self‐determination, and forward ideas, representations, and expressions of agreement or disagreement that are critical to their formation as political actors.