Rethinking Power and Authority: Symbolic Violence and Subjectivity in Nepal's Terai Forests

Recent work on authority, power and the state has opened up important avenues of inquiry into the practices and contexts through which power is exercised. Why certain forms of authority emerge as more durable and legitimate than others remains a challenge, however. In this article we bring together two bodies of thought to engage this issue, feminist theories of power and subjectivity and Bourdieu's ideas of symbolic violence, in order to explore how power and authority are reproduced and entrenched. Our purpose is to advance theorizing on power and authority in the context of contentious political situations and institutional emergence. This unusual theoretical synergy allows us to illustrate how power is exercised in relation to natural resource management and the ways in which the conflict/post‐conflict context creates institutional forms and spaces which simultaneously challenge and reinforce antecedent forms of authority. To animate our theoretical concerns, we draw on work in community‐based forestry in Nepal, with a focus on some of the conflicts that have arisen in relation to the valuable Sal forests of the Terai, or lowland plains.     

The Arab Opposition Molehill

Arab Islamic oppositions have proven largely ineffectual in molding regime outcomes since the liberalizations of the 1980s and 1990s, although many continue to overestimate their potential for propelling reform. This article argues that a keen sense of the past is necessary when evaluating whether or not an opposition matters for political reform. Section I introduces noted scholar Juan Linz's notion of “semi‐opposition”—limited and “semi‐free” opposition groups that may sustain authoritarian regimes as much as repression. Using interviews and English and Arabic sources, Section II demonstrates historical correspondences between semi‐opposition and the Jordanian and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) organizations concerning origins and support, ideology and approach to politics, regime tolerance and political environment, and political behavior. Section III develops Linz's hypothesis on the links between semi‐opposition and authoritarian persistence by examining how the MB marginalizes and raises the costs of dissent for other opposition groups and actors. The MB is briefly contrasted with the Algerian Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) opposition party of 1989–1992 in Section IV . Decidedly not a semi‐opposition, the FIS proved far more transformative than either the Jordanian or Egyptian MB, inducing centrifugal politics and the collapse of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) state that governed Algeria from 1962.     

Diasporic assistance in authoritarian settings: Evidence from military Brazil

The study of diasporas in international politics concentrates on migrants and their descendants in liberal democratic host countries; however, diasporas in non-democratic states experience significantly different political relationships that warrant investigation. Such diasporas are not only numerous but can also be influential. Their participation in international politics and assistance to the homeland require navigating distinct political affiliations. This article explains what enables an authoritarian host country's consent to such diasporic assistance. It proposes that assistance is likely to be tolerated insofar as it does not conflict with the host country's interests, the diaspora member donors have powerful allies within the regime, and they are not identified with the opposition. This theoretical framework is illustrated by analyzing evidence from the Jewish diaspora in authoritarian Brazil (1964–1985). A comprehensive online appendix provides additional background, discusses refuted hypotheses, and details the research process toward making this article transparent and the research replicable.     

The Countersovereignty of Critical Infrastructure Security: Settler-State Anxiety versus the Pipeline Blockade

Scholars argue that blockades of infrastructure pose an economic threat to capital circulation. This explains how activists can gain power through strategic spatial occupations and why states seek to protect “critical infrastructure” from disruption. However, Indigenous-led blockades of pipelines gain power not (only) by disrupting economic flows alone, but by eliciting state anxieties about the racialised political, psychic and economic project of settler colonialism. Analysing public discourse surrounding the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, including legislative measures introduced to criminalise protest since the blockade at Standing Rock, we reframe critical infrastructure security as a component operation of settler countersovereignty. The criminalisation of Indigenous dissent through the state’s escalation of protest legislation is an investment in maintaining settler political authority, leading us to conclude that blockades must be understood not only as a form of anti-capitalist resistance, but also as a locus of anti-colonial struggle.     

Staking claims: Hybrid governance and state-making on the North Kosovo frontier

This article examines how state and non-state actors claim public authority in areas of contested sovereignty. It develops the concept of the frontier as a point of departure. As zonal spaces of weakly established or overlapping authority, frontiers have historically been sites of collaboration between state and non-state actors. Extending the concept to shed light on contemporary forms of state and non-state governing arrangements, I argue that frontiers can be can also be analysed across specific domains of public authority. I highlight three domains in particular: the symbolic domain, where the state is imagined as a collective actor; the contractual domain, which depends on the use of public services to establish a social contract; and the protective domain, the classic Hobbesian justification for the state as a provider of security. Applying the frontier framework to North Kosovo, I argue that Serbia has sustained a near monopoly over the symbolic and contractual domains in the contested region yet is severely constrained in the protective domain. As a result, Belgrade has relied on outsourcing authority to local illicit actors to maintain leverage. However, these actors have also carved out their own autonomous forms of authority and actively manipulate the ambiguous political boundaries in North Kosovo to their advantage.     

The emigration state and the modern geopolitical imagination

This article systematically reviews how a large number of states relate to their diasporas. It shows how states constitute various extra-territorial groups as members of a loyal diaspora, through a diverse range of institutions and practices. The article distinguishes two types of diaspora mechanism: one which cultivates and recognizes diaspora communities, and another which draws them into reciprocal ties with their homeland. The article demonstrates that, contrary to the common wisdom, it is normal for states to have a variety of such mechanisms protruding beyond their borders and impacting on a variety of extra-territorial groups. It is useful to view these institutions and practices collectively as “the emigration state”. The article argues that the emigration state has been overlooked by what John Agnew calls “the modern geopolitical imagination”, in which territorial nation-state units, locked into competition at a fixed international scale, are thought of as the highest form of political organization.     

Gendering pastoral power: masculinity,affective labour and competitive bonds of solidarity among Filipino migrant men in Saudi Arabia

This article draws on Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to understand Filipino men’s care work and the making of migrant masculinities in Saudi Arabia. Feminist scholars have indicated the gendered nature of pastoral power and emphasized what Young refers to as the ‘logic of masculinist protection’ that characterizes the contemporary security state. However, the notion of pastoral power invites further consideration of the taken for granted cultural assumptions about the way that hegemonic masculinity and forms of homosociality are characterized mainly by aggression, competition and dominance. Men’s talk about and practical involvement in assisting fellow migrants in diasporic settings foregrounds the way that an ethics of care runs up against and is entangled with the competitive bonds of masculine solidarities. While markers of material success are privileged in measuring migrant men’s accomplishments in country of origin, practices of care become central to men’s achievement of symbolic power and social legitimacy especially among their peers in the diaspora. That spatialization is also linked to temporally shifting models of masculinity and normative expectations about men over the life course.     

A diasporic right to the city: the production of a Moroccan diaspora space in Granada,Spain

In this paper, I bring together ideas of ‘diaspora space’ and ‘the right to the city’ and empirically demonstrate how the formation of diasporas is frequently dependent on migrants attaining certain rights to the city. These rights, I argue, are conditioned and attained by the interplay of urban structural context with the place-making strategies of migrants. Drawing on 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate that Moroccan migrants in Granada, Spain, have achieved a partial right to a neighbourhood of the city, producing a multi-sensory, self-orientalised diaspora space. First, I show that certain urban conditions in Granada provided a foothold for Moroccan migrants to begin to form a diaspora and transform urban space. Second, I demonstrate that through the mobilisation of a strategically self-orientalised cultural capital, the diaspora have partly appropriated the valuable history of Al-Andalus, a key component in the city’s tourist imagery. These factors and strategies have enabled Moroccan migrants to gain a right to have a visible presence in the city, a right to produce and transform urban space and a right to spatalise diverse identities – all key rights, I argue, in the formation of a diaspora.     

Translocational Irish identities in Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl (2012)

A rural-urban exodus subsequently followed by overseas migration has characterised geographical movement in Ireland. While Irish women have outnumbered men in their diaspora, physical and symbolic identification with Ireland has been decisive to the polemic of Irish female migration. This article explores how real and symbolic contradictions in Irish women experiencing displacement are reflected in Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl (2012). Using translocational positionality as an intersectional research framework, the article reveals the importance of spatiality in the ‘life writings’ of a particular situational subject and its major role in identity construction processes. Furthermore, this article relates the individual biography to the collective and complex construction of identity of Irish women abroad in the second half of the twentieth century. The analysis sheds light on many unvoiced experiences shared by female migrants and discloses key aspects of Irish migration that result in a problematic gendered relation with the land still unresolved.     

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’.     

Harnessing the sending state: Pragmatic improvisations and negotiated memberships of the Chinese diaspora in Laos

As a form of state-led transnationalism, diaspora strategies have garnered much scholarly attention over the past two decades. Yet, the robust intellectual field still sees a dearth of works addressing how the power of the sending state is lived and experienced in the prosaic lives of transnationality. This paper fills the gap by examining the grounded ramifications of a specific approach that the Chinese government deploys to cultivate diaspora. It prioritizes coopting civil association leaders (hui-zhang) from populations abroad for diaspora governance. I unpack how street-level bureaucracies involved in the execution of this sending state strategy has been exploited by the Chinese entrepreneurs in Laos through qualitative fieldwork. My analysis reveals that these situated actors scrambled to set up their own diaspora associations in an attempt to make themselves hui-zhang eligible for the home country government's targeted engagement. In doing so, they accessed opportunities to appropriate and rework resources from the Chinese state for self-interested accumulation of symbolic and social capital. Both forms of capital are crucial to propel their wealth amassment in private career as intermediaries who extract commissions and kickbacks by brokering Chinese investments into Laos. Detailing these dynamics, the paper elucidates how the power of the sending state is disseminated and enacted through mundane and pragmatic improvisations of diasporic actors. Empirics presented also bring forward a nuanced understanding of the de facto convoluted relations between the Chinese government and the overseas Chinese populations.     

Negotiating the nation: diaspora contestations in the USA about Hindu nationalism in India

ABSTRACT. Diaspora positions and identities are being continually constructed, negotiated and reframed. Nevertheless, many studies tend to focus on the ethno‐centric, exclusionary and/or nationalistic orientation of some groups. In this article, I will explore variations in the responses of the Indian American diaspora community to Hindu nationalism in India. The article will focus on the opposition of progressive groups to a particularly controversial Hindu nationalist leader, Narendra Modi. They stand in contrast to those US‐based organisations that support Modi and his political ideology. The debate between the two sides shows a high degree of political polarisation within the community. This study illustrates the variations in interpretations of nationalism and identity that exist among groups operating in the transnational political space. In particular, it shows us that the political process that articulates these differences can impact policy in the home or adopted country.     

Forging a ‘Good Diaspora’: Political Mobilization among Somalis in the UK

This article is about a campaign that was initiated by Somalis in London in 2013 against Barclays Bank's decision to shut down the accounts of four Somali remittance companies in the UK. It explores how young Somalis mobilized politically around the issue, and how, in the process, they created and reified a particular ‘imagined community’. By drawing on multicultural notions of community, and development idioms of diaspora engagement, they fashioned themselves around a notion of ‘good diaspora’ based on generation, pan‐Somali unity, and ideas of ‘professionalism’. In so doing, they were able to mobilize politically as both national and transnational actors, but were also confronted with some of the limits of the ‘good diaspora’ identity category. This article establishes a dialogue between the literature on diaspora engagement and that on migrant political mobilization by exploring how young Somalis navigate across these different national and transnational conversations, discourses and social categories.     

Decentralization,the State and Conflicts over Local Boundaries in Northern Ghana

Decentralization projects, such as that initiated by the Rawlings government in Ghana at the end of the 1980s, create a political space in which the relations between local political communities and the state are re‐negotiated. In many cases, the devolution of power intensifies special‐interest politics and political mobilization aiming at securing a ‘larger share of the national cake’, that is, more state funds, infrastructure and posts for the locality. To legitimate their claims vis‐à‐vis the state, civic associations (‘hometown’ unions), traditional rulers and other non‐state institutions often invoke some form of ‘natural’ solidarity, and decentralization projects thus become arenas of debate over the boundaries of community and the relationship between ‘local’ and national citizenship. This article analyses one such debate, in the former Lawra District of Ghana's Upper West Region, where the creation of new districts provoked protracted discussions, among the local political elite as well as the peasants and labour migrants, about the connections between land ownership and political authority, the relations between the local ethnic groups (Dagara and Sisala), and the relevance of ethnic versus territorial criteria in defining local citizenship.     

Rights to the rescue? The promotion of Indigenous women's political-electoral rights and the rise of the Mexican security state

This article demonstrates how the promotion of Indigenous women's political-electoral rights in Mexico has furthered a conservative agenda of state securitization. To do so, it presents a discourse analysis of national media reports focused on the story of Eufrosina Cruz, a Zapotec woman who became the figurehead for state-led initiatives to promote Indigenous women's rights. It argues that a colonial rescue narrative constructed through Cruz's figure helped generate new hegemonic discourses of gendered indigeneity that portrayed Indigenous peoples' alternative political practices and spaces as anti-democratic and illegal. In an era where advancements in party democracy were linked to processes of state securitization, these categorizations helped justify new forms of state intervention into Indigenous peoples' lives. By exploring how rights initiatives were discursively constructed through racialized, spatialized and gendered constructions of indigeneity, this article contributes to a critical geography of indigeneity within political geography.     

Making a homeland,constructing a diaspora: The case of Taglit-Birthright Israel

The study of diaspora policies in political science, international relations, and political geography has moved away from conceiving diasporas as bounded entities to conceptualizing diasporas as a process to be made. One body of literature maps different strategies employed to bond diasporas to their country of origin, while another body of literature pays specific attention to diasporic identities and the ways such identities are reproduced and constructed abroad. This article seeks to bring these two literatures together by focusing on homeland tourism as a diasporization strategy, i.e. the construction, reproduction, and transmission of diasporic identity. Through the case of Taglit-Birthright – a free educational trip to Israel offered to young Jewish adults – the article identifies the specific mechanisms and micro-practices used in order to transform Israeli territory into a Jewish homeland, reproduce the narrative of dispersion, and demarcate group boundaries. Incorporating insights from theories of territorialization and based on the program's educational platform and existing ethnographies of Taglit-Birthright, this article unpacks the notion of the homeland and demonstrates how the homeland itself – as an embodied, affective, and symbolic site – is strategically used in order to cultivate diasporic attachments.     

From Democratization to Securitization: Post‐Arab Spring Political Order in the Middle East

This article examines the question: why and how the wave of democratization in the Middle East has receded, giving way to the prioritization of security in the post‐Arab Spring by conducting analyses at three levels: societal, state, and international. By applying the main concepts and theories found in the literature on democratization and securitization and by analyzing the Bertelsmann Stiftung's Democracy Status Index, the Arab Barometers Survey, and the Arab Opinion Survey, the article concludes that: at the societal level, the tragic unfolding of events after the Arab Spring prohibits the public from pushing a reform agenda; at the state level, the post‐Arab political environment raises doubts among the ruling elite about how far political reforms should be extended; and at the international level, with the rise of new security threats, international pressure on Middle East countries to democratize has been restrained, giving way to security cooperation as the top priority.     

Parliament,the Tories and Frederick,Prince of Wales*

The alliance between the tories and Frederick, Prince of Wales has usually appeared at best a passing interlude of opportunism in eighteenth‐century politics, dismissed alike by scholars upholding ‘jacobite’ or ‘Hanoverian’ constructions of the party's identity. This article offers a re‐examination of the relationship, assessing tory actions at Westminster against the larger hinterland of party literature and journalism. It argues that, especially after 1747, the association fronted a much more serious enterprise than is conventionally assumed, highlighting the continued political and ideological independence of the party into the 1750s and shaping the subsequent evolution of its identity. Intellectually, Frederick's image as a ‘Patriot King’ was driven by radical manifestos originating within the jacobite diaspora in Paris. Inside Westminster, his patronage changed the balance of power, bringing the tories to a point of primacy hitherto unmatched over the larger opposition. For four years, the promise of the prince of Wales provided the glue to hold the tory party together; his death threatened to unleash a process of fragmentation. The long‐term legacy of the alliance informed the direction of those who remained tories into the following decade, determining the section of the party that would gain the ascendancy within the reign of George III. By showing how a member of the ruling dynasty could be recast in a favourable and highly partisan political complexion, the pact with Frederick represented a decisive stage in the reinvention of English toryism, and its movement from mid‐century opposition towards rebirth as the loyalist champions of the house of Hanover.     

UNIQUE ISOLATION VERSUS NETWORKS OF OPPORTUNITY: THE COMPETING DISCOURSES OF TASMANIA

In order to understand why people move, we must first try to comprehend how they understand their migration decisions and recognize that such understandings are intricately tied to their understandings of places. Place construction – the way people understand and discuss the nature and meaning of places – occurs at all levels from individual constructions to constructions by economic and political interest groups. These place constructions necessarily influence each other, and hence they are in constant flux and reflect power relations evident in society. This article examines these issues in the context of the negative net migration of young adults in the Australian state of Tasmania through an examination of the experiences of thirty young return migrants who participated in in‐depth interviews and group discussions about their experiences of migration. It finds that bounded constructions of Tasmania – which stress the physical isolation and social and political insularity of the state as well as the uniqueness of the state's environment and society – appear to be dominant for these young returned migrants. However, the article argues that these bounded constructions necessarily exist in relation to networked constructions, which focus on the opportunities for people, ideas, goods and money to benefit through connections with other places as well as the loss of the uniqueness of the Tasmanian environment and society. This article concludes with a discussion of the political, economic and social consequences of these different forms of place construction.     

BIFFOs,jackeens and Dagenham Yanks: county identity, “authenticity” and the Irish diaspora

Despite being an everyday point of reference in Irish discourse, the extent to which the county serves as a locus of identification has been oddly overlooked in the Irish studies literature. In particular, the persistence of identification with the county of origin post-migration offers new insights on the construction and maintenance of identity within the Irish diaspora. Drawing on my PhD research on discourses of authenticity and identity among the Irish in England, this article investigates the ways in which county identity is invoked both by Irish migrants and those of Irish descent. It illustrates how the county is used as a rhetorical tool to situate the speaker within discourses of belonging and authenticity, but how this may also act as a constraint on the articulation of a collective, diasporic identity. It argues for a greater research focus on translocalism within the context of changing Ireland–diaspora relations.