Kenya's new indigenes: negotiating local identities in a global context

ABSTRACT. This article examines the proliferation of communities that self‐identify as indigenous peoples by looking at the Ogiek, Sengwer, Endorois and Pokot of western Kenya. It shows how community leaders have self‐consciously employed a global discourse of indigeneity – and associated ideas of territorial association, marginalisation and especial vulnerability – to strengthen moral and legal claims to land and resources, to access new domains of action and cultivate new channels of patronage. The analysis also highlights how this process, together with similar developments across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, has prompted a re‐evaluation and stretching of this global signifier at the supra‐state level. Finally, the article reveals how the emergence of a new global space has provided new opportunities and strong incentives to renegotiate local “nationalisms” in a struggle for ownership and control of communal terroir, while factionalism has fed into, supported and fundamentally altered supra‐national definitions.     

Climate change, conflict and development in Sudan: global neo-Malthusian narratives and local power struggles

Dystopian accounts of climate change posit that it will lead to more conflict, causing state failure and mass population movements. Yet these narratives are both theoretically and empirically problematic: the conflict–environment hypothesis merges a global securitization agenda with local manipulations of Northern fears about the state of planetary ecology. Sudan has experienced how damaging this fusion of wishful thinking, power politics and top-down development can be. In the 1970s, global resource scarcity concerns were used locally to impose the fata morgana of Sudan as an Arab-African breadbasket: in the name of development, violent evictions of local communities contributed to Sudan's second civil war and associated famines. Today, Darfur has been labelled ‘the world's first climate change conflict’, masking the long-term political-economic dynamics and Sudanese agency underpinning the crisis. Simultaneously, the global food crisis is instrumentalized to launch a dam programme and agricultural revival that claim to be African answers to resource scarcity. The winners, however, are Sudan's globalized Islamist elites and foreign investors, whilst the livelihoods of local communities are undermined. Important links exist between climatic developments and security, but global Malthusian narratives about state failure and conflict are dangerously susceptible to manipulations by national elites; the practical outcomes decrease rather than increase human security. In the climate change era, the breakdown of institutions and associated violence is often not an unfortunate failure of the old system due to environmental shock, but a strategy of elites in wider processes of power and wealth accumulation and contestation.     

From global forests to local politics: unwrapping the boundaries within forest certification

Following decades of concern about unsustainable forest management practices, forest certification was developed in the 1990s to become an influential global forest governance approach. 25 years since its inception, forest certification is under attack, with questions raised regarding its legitimacy and efficacy in driving sustainable forest management. Recognising forest certification as a complex and dynamic boundary-spanning regime, understanding the impact of diverse boundaries on forest certification is essential to address escalating conflict and enable the improved design of forest certification systems. This paper empirically explores the implementation of a forest certification regime using a Forest Stewardship Certification pesticide derogation process. The case shows how competing boundaries place considerable pressure on the effectiveness and sustainability of the global certification regime. Embedded local interests and contested institutional claims hardened the boundaries between interests across the policy regime, weakening connections and hence weakening opportunities to find common solutions.     

The far side of international business: local initiatives in the global workshop

This article presents a case study of the entry of two Norwegianlifeboat companies into the Chinese production system. Ratherthan merely studying the situation through the eyes of thesecompanies, it includes a perspective from the far side of internationalbusiness, i.e., the local competitors. The article argues thatto understand the dynamics and development of both internationalcompanies and localized production systems in a global economy,it is necessary to explore how international and local actorsreflexively evaluate and act upon each other. The article, thus,presents a model for studying the internationalization processand localized production systems.     

Building local nodes in a global sector: Clustering within the aeronautics industry in Montreal

This article analyzes the mechanisms through which metropolitan governance is established in Montreal's aeronautics sector, one of the most important and innovative industries in the region. The article also examines the role of lead firms, socio‐economic actors, and public agencies from a territorial point of view. It is established that on the one hand the existence of a small number of prime producers at the local level facilitates productive linkages among businesses through subcontracting, and on the other hand, the intensive participation of intermediate socio‐economic agencies and organizations ensures a metropolitan anchoring of the sector and creates a strong territorial identity among the players.     

Travel,migration, exile: Garibaldi's global fame

In this article, it is argued that Garibaldi's global fame owes much to his own experiences as a migrant and exile in the Americas. Overseas, Garibaldi not only acquired several practical and political skills, he also built up an important network of friends and supporters and became a hybrid figure able to adapt his image to diverse political settings. At the same time, Garibaldi relied on the trope of exile, developed by people like Ugo Foscolo, to define his opposition to, first, Italy's Restoration governments and, after Italian unification, the new moderate liberal regime. The article also looks at Garibaldi's life on Caprera and it is further argued that here Garibaldi combined elements of his previous experiences to fashion a role for himself as a ‘foreigner in Italy’. Garibaldi was a symbol of many worlds as well as a hero of two and it is precisely this hybrid nature of his appeal that can explain his global popularity.     

Making Space for Energy: Wasteland Development,Enclosures, and Energy Dispossessions

This paper analyzes why and how wasteland development narratives persist through an evaluation of wasteland development policies in India from 1970 to present. Integrating critical scholarship on environmental narratives and enclosures, I find that narratives of wastelands as “empty” spaces available for “improvement” continue because they are metaphors for entrenched struggles between the government's shifting visions of “improvement” and communities whose land use practices contradict these logics. Since the 1970s, “improvement” has meant establishing different types of tree plantations on wastelands to ostensibly provide energy security. These projects have dispossessed land users by enclosing common property lands and by providing forms of energy incommensurate with local needs, a trend I term “energy dispossessions”. Factors enabling energy dispossessions include the government's increased attempts to establish public–private partnerships to carry out “improvement” and a “field of observation” constructed to obscure local livelihoods. Unveiling these logics will help to problematize and contest future iterations of wasteland development.     

Wari’s imperial influence on local Nasca diet: The stable isotope evidence

The highland Wari Empire established a presence within the Nasca region of south coastal Peru during the Middle Horizon period. To clarify the nature of this interaction, we analyzed stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios of human bone collagen from individuals living in the Southern Nasca Region (SNR) before (1–750 AD) and during (750–1000 AD) imperial influence. The stable isotope data do not indicate that the Wari Empire transformed maize agricultural labor in the Las Trancas Valley of the SNR. In fact, during both time periods, Nasca people had access to a wide range of food items.     

Chicago goes global: redevelopment,culture, and fear

Chicago's remarkably flexible growth machine, like their brethren across Rust Belt America, continues to aggressively press forward to build an internationally competitive city. This paper deepens our understanding of Chicago's recently changed growth machine. It focuses on its current redevelopment narrative as it is used on the South Side and chronicles two new features about it: its revamped use of fear and its re-fashioned notion of culture. I flesh out these two elements as they circulate through a now dominant redevelopment program: historic preservation. I chronicle three points in this paper. First, programs like historic preservation, like so many current city programs, have now fully shifted to being a neoliberal economic development tool to promote the “go-global Chicago” project. Second, two dominant fears recently nuanced anchor the narrative: fear of a city-destroying globalization and fear of city-subverting poor African-Americans. Third, a revamped notion of culture is used that helps provide resonance and dark appeal to the two offered fears. The culture notion is put into play as two dominant things, as the idealized and timeless glue that unifies Chicago's mainstream and as problematic values and meanings carried by black bodies which renders them civic tainting “ocular trash”.     

International influence and local response: understanding community involvement in urban heritage conservation in China

This paper explores the situation of community engagement in the heritage sector in China, which is facing increasing international pressure particularly through donor agencies. It is argued that government-led residents’ committees do not essentially serve the interest of the local communities, whilst grassroots civil societies and NGOs are, to a great extent regulated, by the prevailing political power. Given the situation of insufficient community involvement in the sector of cultural heritage conservation in China, local government has adopted the international approach introduced by donor agencies, but this has not resulted in power sharing and the state constrains community involvement within certain limits. This paper examines the situation of community involvement in heritage management in the city of Yangzhou.     

The dynamics of emerging middle-power influence in regional and global governance: the paradoxical case of Turkey

This article attempts to understand the properties, potentials and limits of middle-power activism in a changing global order. Extensive debate on the rise of emerging powers notwithstanding, the potential contributions of emerging middle powers in regional and global governance, and the imminent challenges they face in their struggle for an upgraded status in the hierarchy of world politics, is an understudied issue. This study aims to fill this gap by offering a broad conceptual framework for middle-power activism and testing it with reference to the Turkish case. In this context, the authors aim to address the following questions: What kind of roles can emerging middle powers play in a post-hegemonic international system? What are the dynamics, properties and limitations of emerging middle-power activism in regional and global governance? Based on an extensive study of the Turkish case, the authors’ central thesis is that emerging middle powers can make important contributions to regional and global governance. Their ultimate impact, however, is not inevitable, but depends on a complementary set of conditions, which are outlined in this study.     

Green infrastructure under pressure. A global narrative between regional vision and local implementation

This paper focuses on green infrastructure planning in three different regions, namely, the Ruhr in Germany, the Capital Region of Denmark and Greater Manchester in the UK. We investigate planning cultural research heuristics and propose a conceptual refinement of existing planning cultural research and approaches. We use framing and storytelling to show how societal beliefs and cultural assumptions are consolidated as spatial frameworks that guide planning practice. Theories of spatial governance describe how spatial frames are mediated, accepted and changed through institutionalized structures. We present arguments from urban design and implementation research to illustrate how planning ideas materialize. The empirical material presented in this paper shows how cultures of green infrastructure planning operate in diverse spatial contexts and that a dynamic perspective is useful for understanding how planning cultures develop and change over time.     

Science,geography, and nation: the global creation of Thumba

Abstract

The origins of the Indian space program are typically traced back to the founding of a rocket launch base in Thumba in the state of Kerala in India in the 1960s. In creating infrastructure at Thumba, Indian scientific elites used geography as an instrument to create a vast international network of scientific and political actors committed to the science that was possible within India, particularly cosmic ray studies. They were drawing on a long tradition of linking geography to science redolent of the colonial era but were inspired by their newly constituted political imaginary of independent India as a place where science, geography, and nation were perfectly mapped on to each other. NASA’s help was crucial in this regard, enabled as a tool in Cold War high politics, as American technocrats sought to steer India towards the West, while India itself was keenly aware of a more proximate phenomenon, Pakistan’s own burgeoning efforts to do the same. Concerned about domestic opprobrium to large Indian investments in space technology, Indian and American actors shielded the Thumba project from critique by installing it under the umbrella of the international order, in this case the United Nations. This internationalism was complemented by a deep and firm belief in the universalism of modern science as a portable instrument, capable of improving the social order anywhere, regardless of political or social context.     

Cultural capitals and cosmopolitanism in eighteenth-century Italy: the historiography and Italy on the Grand Tour

This article reviews the most recent body of literature in the English language that revisits cultural developments of eighteenth-century Italy in light of the internationalism of the peninsula in that period. In particular, it seeks to show how a consideration of the rhetorical strategy of the Grand Tour has both generated a discrete field of study as well as informed the work of a broad range of cultural historians seeking to identify and account for those innovations unique to Italy's eighteenth century.     

Improving the global environment: policies,principles and institutions

Recent surveys in Australia show that improving the global environment rates high as a public policy concern. Responding to these challenges at a global level requires more than finding the best or most appropriate scientific, economic and technical approaches. It also requires that global environmental governance be based on sound normative principles. Two of the most important principles respond to the challenge that, while humanity is outstripping its ecological footprint, contributions to global environmental change are uneven and the experience of environmental harm is being displaced across time and space. Improving the global environment should therefore take into account the precautionary principle and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. Improving the global environment also requires a more robust institutional framework. The model favoured here is to build on UNEP to establish a more coherent, more authoritative and more independent environmental organization.