Class,Power, and Patronage: Landowners and Politics in Punjab

In the century following their conquest of the province, the British in Punjab erected an administrative apparatus that, like those of precolonial regimes, relied heavily upon the support of the province's landed class. The relationship between the landed class and the colonial state was one of mutual benefit, with the latter using the former to ensure the maintenance of order and collection of revenue in exchange for state patronage. In this paper, it is argued that this administrative framework gave rise to a path-dependent process of institutional development in Punjab, allowing for the different fractions of the province's landowning class to increasingly entrench themselves within the political order in the postcolonial epoch. This paper outlines the mechanisms underlying this process of institutional development, focusing, in particular, on the strategies adopted by the landowning class to reproduce its power. This paper also considers the potentialities for institutional change in Punjab, allowing for the creation of a more democratic and participatory politics in the province.     

Nuisance Talk and the Propriety of Property: Middle Class Discourses of a Slum‐Free Delhi

Abstract: This paper examines the narratives through which associations of private property owners in Delhi depict slums as zones of incivility and “nuisance.” In tracing how this “nuisance talk” travels into and gains legitimacy in popular and state visions of urban space, the paper shows the role of discourse in justifying and enacting exclusionary urban imaginaries. As a lay term, nuisance is widely used to identify forms of aesthetic impropriety. But, as a primary element of environmental law, nuisance operates discursively as a catchall category allowing diverse private grievances to be expressed in terms of environmental welfare and the public interest. The widening depiction of slums as nuisances hence reworks the public/private divide, inserting once local codes of civility into the core of public life. By examining how nuisance talk circulates between property owners' associations, the media, and the government, the paper shows how slum demolitions have become widely read as a form of environmental improvement.     

New Labour's Escape from Class Politics

The connection between trade unions and parties of the left is traditionally close across Europe. In Britain the link is more than close: it is intimate, defining, and constitutive of what the Labour Party is and has been since its inception. This link allowed the party to survive during bad times and helped it to govern during good times, but during the 1970s it became less helpful, as policies backed by the unions not only failed to work but were also repudiated by union members themselves in what came to be known as the "winter of discontent" in 1979. New Labour was therefore built on the understanding that its past connection to the unions, and hence to a particular sort of "class politics," needed to be rethought and renegotiated. It is the new defining feature of the Labour Party.     

Property,Authority and Citizenship: Land Claims,Politics and the Dynamics of Social Division in West Africa

In the contemporary African context of rising competition and anxiety over access to land, neoliberal policy interventions designed to clarify property rights, broaden political participation and increase official accountability have frequently provoked rather than alleviated social and political conflict. Comparing case histories of local struggles over land and authority in selected rural areas in Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and Bénin, this paper argues that in situations where access to land has been linked historically to claims on authority and social belonging, pressures to privatize or clarify ownership have intensified debates over citizenship and governance as well as over land claims per se. Ensuing struggles over land and entitlement have intersected with national as well as local economic and political dynamics, reinforcing ‘traditional’ hierarchies, contributing to the proliferation of formal and informal governing agents and institutions, and frequently disrupting or subverting open governance and sustainable resource use, rather than helping to create conditions for sustainable development and democratization.     

中产阶级与近代英国城市郊区扩展

在18—19世纪城市化进程中,英国的中产阶级逐渐成长,到19世纪中叶基本形成。为逃避市区的环境污染,寻求个人生活的私密性,拥有一定经济收入的英国中产阶级不断向郊区迁移,使英国城市区域向郊外蔓延。他们在郊区租住相对宽敞、篱笆相隔、绿树荫窗的独立或半独立式住宅,"英国人的家就是他的城堡"成为事实。这充分体现了英国社会日益增强的个人主义特征,反映了人们工作和日常生活、工作场所与家庭的分离。     

中间阶层意识的日本文化内涵

据1993年总理府宣传室所进行的《关于国民生活的民意调查》,如按上、中上、中中、中下、下五个等级区分社会阶层的话,现今日本大众社会中人,自觉所属阶层的百分比分别为：1．2％、11．1％、54．6％、24．3％和5．6％;不明确者则为3．2％。     

Race,Class and Politics in Peninsular Malaysia: The General Election of 2008

Racial politics have bedevilled peninsular Malaysia since independence in 1957, largely sustained by a ruling coalition of partners sharing power unequally, in a consociational government. The effect of a racialised practice over fifty years is the institutionalisation of the politics of ethnic pluralism, each component driven by its own internal dynamic and cultural logic: for the Chinese it is the politics of economic security, for the Tamils the politics of religion and caste, and for the Malays incipient class antagonisms that are historically rooted in a feudal society. In the general election of 2008, there was an unprecedented swing of votes across the ethnic divide against the ruling government, resulting in the loss of five state governments to an opposition coalition espousing multiculturalism and the loss of the government's two-thirds majority in Parliament for the first time. However, we argue that these developments do not signal the beginning of the end of racial politics in peninsular Malaysia. Instead, the opposition has skilfully recoded multiculturalism as social justice and accountability in racial terms, and effectively communicated this to an essentially racialised electorate at a time when Malays, Chinese and Tamils had lost faith in the ruling government's ability to address deep-seated grievances specific to each of these communities.     

论中世纪晚期英国议会政治

在学术界,似乎有一个不证自明的定论,即：作为近代资本主义政治制度核心构件的议会政治是与中世纪封建社会无缘的。但事实上,在特定历史条件下,两也完全有可能联系在一起。英国由于在早期历史中形成了政治协商传统和初步成型的议会协商机制以及相应的社会化理念,从而为中世纪晚期出现议会政治奠定了必要的历史基础;但历史基础仅仅提供了议会政治早产的可能性,而将这种可能变为现实的决定性力量则是当时各种具体的特殊原因和个人因素构成的偶然机缘。换言之,中世纪晚期英国议会政治的早产是一种历史偶然现象。由此可见,偶然因素也是一种应当给予充分重视的历史决定性力量。