Land,Life and Labour: Indo‐Fijian Claims to Citizenship in a Changing Fiji

Since the coup of May 2000 an estimated 24,000 Indo‐Fijians have left Fiji, the majority of them moving to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. Those who remain in Fiji have faced increasing marginalisation as the government of Prime Minister Qarase has proposed significant reforms to both the administration of land and Constitutional arrangements of political representation. The situation has been further compounded through Qarase's recently proposed ‘Unity Bill’, which would grant amnesty to some of those responsible for the 2000 coup. These reforms are all part of an effort to ensure the ‘paramountcy’ of indigenous Fijians as well as to limit Indo‐Fijian participation in Fijian national politics. In this paper, I employ Greenhouse's concept of ‘empirical citizenship’ to analyse Indo‐Fijian responses to their political marginalisation in Fiji. After considering how national identities and sentiments of belonging are expressed in Indo‐Fijian discourse through the symbolic inter‐connection of the land and the Indo‐Fijian body, I argue that even if Indo‐Fijians are openly willing to recognize indigenous Fijian supremacy in national politics and the project of nation‐making, assertions of their right to live and labour on Fijian land constitute claims to ‘citizenship’ that are highly contestable in Fiji's current political climate.     

Indigenous bodies,indigenous minds? Towards an understanding of indigeneity in the Ecuadorian Amazon

This article explores how perceptions about bodies and interpersonal exchanges contribute to the production of indigenous subjectivities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Drawing on feminist methodologies and experiences with Cofán, Quichua and Secoya peoples in the province of Sucumbíos, I reflect on how bodies and their ‘grammar’ can become analytical spaces through which to understand indigeneity. Specifically, I look at the body as object and subject of imaginaries of difference with the goal to examine how moments and interactions through which people commonly identify as ‘indigenous’ construct, contest and/or maintain indigenous subjectivities. I conclude with a discussion on the possibilities of thinking about and with bodies to further a post-colonial questioning of indigeneity.     

Topographies of citizenship: Purhépechan Mexican women claiming political subjectivities

A variety of politics are waged through recourse to the language of ‘citizenship’ and ‘democracy’: from George W. Bush's selling of free trade for the Americas by invoking freedom and democracy, to the calls for citizenship and equality by popular movements throughout Latin America and other regions. This article links these paradoxical and transnational constructions of ‘citizenship’ to the daily economic and political struggles of indigenous women in rural Mexico. A transnational and what Cindi Katz calls a ‘topographical’ analysis of local processes deepens and complicates our understanding of local changes as they articulate with global dynamics, and it transforms how we conceptualize the global. Drawing on an ethnography of local gendered political transformation in Cherán, Mexico, I map processes visible locally onto spatialities of power and meaning across scales, weaving together various symbolic and material processes—the intentional actions and negotiations of individual women; the history of Cherán as a place and community; neoliberal economic globalization; and the effects of profoundly gendered and racialized nationalisms—in order to produce a situated knowledge of global citizenship politics. This approach highlights how women in Cherán, situated within global political economic relations and the symbolic horizons of ‘modernity’, transform the meaning and practice of citizenship and political subjectivity.     

Youth and the revolution in Egypt (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The 2011 popular uprising that led to the overthrow of the Egyptian regime was initiated by groups of engaged ‘internet youth’. In this editorial I offer some personal reflections on the shift in political consciousness among Egypt's urban middle‐class youth, and on the discourse about generations that has unified Egyptians during the momentous events currently sweeping the Arab world. Whereas for members of my generation, the ‘stability’ of the Egyptian regime connoted comforts and opportunities, for today's Egyptian youth, it had come to signify no prospects for the future.     

Populism and nationalism

Few social science categories have been more heatedly contested in recent years than ‘populism’. One focus of debate concerns the relation between populism and nationalism. Criticising the tendency to conflate populism and nationalism, De Cleen and Stavrakakis argue for a sharp conceptual distinction between the two. They situate populist discourse on a vertical, and nationalist discourse on a horizontal axis. I argue that this strict conceptual separation cannot capture the productive ambiguity of populist appeals to ‘the people’, evoking at once plebs, sovereign demos and bounded community. The frame of reference for populist discourse is most fruitfully understood as a two‐dimensional space, at once a space of inequality and a space of difference. Vertical opposition to those on top (and often those on the bottom) and horizontal opposition to those outside are tightly interwoven, generally in such a way that economic, political and cultural elites are represented as being ‘outside’ as well as ‘on top’. The ambiguity and two‐dimensionality of appeals to ‘the people’ do not result from the conflation of populism and nationalism; they are a constitutive feature of populism itself, a practical resource that can be exploited in constructing political identities and defining lines of political opposition and conflict.     

Anti‐Politics as Political Strategy: Neoliberalism and Transfrontier Conservation in Southern Africa

Studies on conservation and development often point out that interventions rely on anti‐political manoeuvring to acquire legitimacy and support. Recent ‘aidnography’, in particular, has done much to expand and add nuance to our understanding of the complex, micro‐ (anti‐)politics at work in conservation and development interventions. In doing this, however, aidnography seems to have led the focus away from two crucial, broader issues related to conservation and development interventions: how they are regulated through the wider, neoliberal political economy, and how this fuels and obscures (global) inequality. Drawing on empirical research on a transfrontier conservation and development intervention in Southern Africa, this article argues that the differential workings of anti‐politics in practice warrant a renewed appreciation and a more explicit political operationalization of the concept. This is done by re‐emphasizing anti‐politics as an essential political strategy within conservation and development interventions and as an intrinsic element of the wider political economy of neoliberalism.     

All at Sea. Rethinking fishers' identities in Australia

In fisheries a new ecological order is being created based upon conservation sciences. Bio-economic models of conservation sciences are being pursued globally in response to the crises generated by over-fishing. Drawing upon Haraway's concept of ‘cyborg politics’ we provide a material analysis of the gendered identities belonging to both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ orders. In this case study, empirical evidence is derived from observation and qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with trawlers, deckhands and managers of the Australian South East Trawl Fishery. We show how conservation sciences, framed within the New Right's economic policies, have prioritised performances of masculinity centred on managerialism over those of manual labour.

En pesquerías un nuevo orden ecológico se crea sobre ciencias de conservación. Modelos bíoeconómicos de las ciencias de conservación se persiguen global en reacción a la crisis generado de sobrepescar. Empleándose el concepto de Haraway del ‘político del ciborg’ proveemos un análisis material de las identidades de género que corresponden a los ordenes ‘viejos’ y ‘nuevos’. En este estudio de caso, la evidencia empírica se derivan de observaciones y análisis cualitativa de entrevistas profundas llevado a cabo con jabegueros, marineros de cubierta, y gerentes de la Pesquería Red Barredera de Sudeste Australia. Ilustramos como las ciencias de conservación, enmarcado dentro de las políticas económicas de la nueva derecha, han priorizado los representaciones del papel de masculinidad que se concentran en gerencialisma además de los masculinidades de labor manual.     

Rentiers and Autocrats, Monarchs and Democrats, State and Society: the Middle East Between Globalization, Human 'Agency', and Europe

The key concerns in work on the politics of the Middle East in the past decade have been economic and political liberalization/democratization (or the absence thereof) and security, both domestic and international, along with a continued focus on the Arab‐Israeli conflict. There has been an increasing recognition that these issues are strongly interrelated. Europe cannot avoid concerns over economic and political stability in the region affecting its own interests. Together with economic reasons for engagement with the region, this has brought about a desire to see economic and political reform take place. The Euro‐Mediter‐ranean Partnership Initiative (EMPI) is one result of this. The background against which these policies, concerns and hopes are evolving is ‘globalization’, both of the discourse of ‘democracy’ and in the growing hold of liberal market economics internationally. Recent research on the politics and political economy of the region, and on EMPI, however, shows that a combination of political‐economic and related political‐cultural factors, along with the Arab‐Israeli conflict, continue to hamper political and economic reform in the Middle East, and that European policy as currently conceived is unlikely to affect this greatly. Yet such recent work also shows that aspects of globalization are changing the environment in which Middle Eastern regimes are having to function, while at the same time offering civil society new tools. Middle Eastern societies do, to varying extents, possess the necessary ‘spaces’ and traditions for human ‘agency’ to escape the constraints of domestic and international ‘structures’ and evolve new political cultures‐including democratic ones. Existing judicial or legislative institutions may acquire volition of their own and reinforce this process. There is nothing in ‘Islam’ that necessarily obstructs such possibilities. And supposedly ’obsolete‘ monarchies might yet be among the most successful types of regime in coping with such change.     

Pluralising political legitimacy

Does the Australian state exercise legitimate power over the indigenous peoples within its borders? To say that the state’s political decisions are legitimate is to say that it has the right to impose those decisions on indigenous peoples and that they have a (at least a prima facie) duty to obey. In this paper, I consider the general normative frameworks within which these questions are often grasped in contemporary political theory. Two dominant modes of dealing with political legitimacy are through the politics of ‘recognition’ and ‘justification’. I argue that in order to address the fundamental challenges posed by indigenous peoples to liberal settler states today we need to pluralise our conceptions of political legitimacy.     

Khat: Chewing on a bitter controversy (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

When the slender green succulent leaves of the khat tree are chewed, a mild natural amphetamine called cathinone is gradually released, and absorbed into the bloodstream through the mouth and cheek tissues. The effects, which last for several hours, include the softening of one's temper, increased gregariousness, and a piqued sexual appetite, while at the same time inhibiting hunger, anxiety, and feelings of fatigue. In the Arabian peninsula and the Horn of Africa, where khat is autochthonous, men have been chewing it recreationally for hundreds of years. Khat chewing has recently burgeoned to a global and pointed controversy, however, featuring in academic ethnopharmacology journals, the official publications of neoliberal development organizations, and worldwide in popular news media outlets. Khat has thus received multitudinous accusations of it being: an obstacle to economic growth; a pernicious narcotic; a positive mediator of political discourse in the public sphere; a public health concern; and a barrier to national development. Of these ambiguous tensions, Klein et al. (2012: 1) say that ‘Khat provides a unique example of a herbal stimulant that is defined as an ordinary vegetable in some countries and a controlled drug in others’, fingering khat as an exemplar of a globally contested object of concern – constituting different political stakes when viewed from distinct situated perspectives – and ready prey for anthropological critique. This essay interrogates some of the divergent formulations that khat has taken across the distinct political arenas that orchestrate the ‘controversy’. Following a Latourian actor‐network approach, I argue against a universal ontology of khat, suggesting instead that khat might be more meaningfully traced and apprehended through the political work it achieves in its various contexts and situated deployments. This critical reading of khat as a ‘thing in movement’ should therefore speak to the anthropology of controversy more broadly.     

The Idea of Indigenous Knowledge

The idea of ‘indigenous knowledge’ is a relatively recent phenomenon that, amongst other things, constitutes part of a challenge to ‘western’ thinking and conceptualization. Advocates of indigenous knowledge maintain that its study has profound educational and ethical relevance and also emphasise its significance in antiracist, antisexist and postcolonialist discourse, in general, and in terms of the ‘African Renaissance’, in particular. This paper argues the following: (1) ‘indigenous knowledge’ involves at best an incomplete, partial or, at worst, a questionable understanding or conception of knowledge; (2) as a tool in anti-discrimination and anti-repression discourse, ‘indigenous knowledge’ is largely inappropriate. I show, further, that in the development of ‘knowledge’, following some necessary conceptual readjustments in our understanding of this term, there is considerably greater common ground than admitted by theorists. It is this acknowledgement, not adherence to a popular concept of debatable plausibility that has profound educational, ethical and political consequences.     

European integration and the social science of EU studies: the disciplinary politics of a subfield

This article takes the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome as an opportunity to reflect upon half a century of academic discourse about the EU and its antecedents. In particular, it illuminates the theoretical analysis of European integration that has developed within political science and international studies broadly defined. It asks whether it is appropriate to map, as might be tempting, the intellectual ‘progress’ of the field of study against the empirical evolution of its object (European integration/the EU). The argument to be presented here is that while we can, to some extent, comprehend the evolution of academic thinking about the EU as a reflex to critical shifts in the ‘real world’ of European integration (‘externalist’ drivers), it is also necessary to understand ‘internalist’ drivers of theoretical discourse on European integration/the EU. The article contemplates two such ‘internalist’ components that have shaped and continue to shape the course of EU studies: scholarly contingency (the fact that scholarship does not proceed with free agency, but is bound by various conditions) and disciplinary politics (the idea that the course of academic work is governed by power games and that there are likely significant disagreements about best practice and progress in a field). In terms of EU studies, the thrust of disciplinary politics tends towards an opposition between ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘pluralist versions’ of the political science of EU studies. The final section explores how, in the face of emerging monistic claims about propriety in the field, an effective pluralist political science of the EU might be enhanced.     

Mungiki,Vernacular Organization and Political Society in Kenya

This article uses the concept of ‘political society’ as unfolded by the ‘subaltern studies’ in India to shed new light on present‐day political actors and democratic transitions in Africa. It discusses the political practices and discursive terrains of organizations within ‘really existing’ civil society that are based on identities and regarded as outside legitimate civil society. It looks at politics from below, taking the example of the 2007 elections in Kenya, and the role of Mungiki, an organization characterized by the intersection of class, generation, religion and ethnicity. Mungiki builds on Kenya's history and rich archive of indigenous popular culture. It originated in the early 1990s’ turmoil of ‘ethnic clashes’ and population displacement and now operates in rural and poor urban areas, providing income opportunities, service delivery and extortion/protection. During elections, sections of Mungiki have been recruited by political leaders and functioned as violent militia; concurrently, it seeks representation in formal and parliamentary politics. The organization is distinct from ‘respectable’ segments of Kenya's civil society who participate in NGO activities and mainstream churches. The article ends by calling for an inclusive and non‐normative approach to the study of state–civil society engagement that recognizes culturally based discourses and organizations when analysing the transitions to and the broadening of democracy in post‐colonial societies.     

Hacking the citizenry?: Personality profiling, ‘big data’ and the election of Donald Trump

This article examines the reported use of ‘big data’ analysis by Cambridge Analytica in support of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. It investigates the transformations enveloping the overlapping worlds of politics, technology and social science. In particular, it critically reviews new developments in the field of psychometrics that have enabled researchers to harvest vast quantities of data by accessing social media platforms such as Facebook. The article also assesses claims that predictive analytics and ‘psychographics’ led to Trump's unexpected victory. The article concludes with a broader discussion about the state of political discourse in an era of digital communication.     

The technoscientists: a Swedish construction of basic research in World War II

The paper examines a group of engineers and scientists in Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s that worked to gain political support for what they called ‘technoscientific research’. Following their own terminology and the ideas of close relations between engineers, scientists, industries, and politics it implied, I call these actors ‘technoscientists’. Critical to their approach was the strategical use of the concept of ‘basic research’, constructed by the technoscientists to associate knowledge production with economic development and demarcate an area of responsibility for public support of industrial research. The technoscientists promoted this strategy by linking basic research to the technical exigencies caused by World War II and by integrating it with politics of welfare, defense, and trade. The technoscientists were thus important political reformers that laid the foundations of public support of science and technology before the 1950s and 1960s when science policy emerged as an institutionalized political practice in Sweden.     

Political sociology and political reality: The concept of democratic consensus

The investigation of consensus was a leading theme in the political sociology of democracy from the early 1950s until the late 1960s. Consensus has since become something of a suspect category of social inquiry. The consensus literature (V. O. Key, R. Dahl, H. Eckstein, S. M. Upset, G. A. Almond) has been charged by the ‘post‐behaviouralists’ as conservative politics disguised as impartial social science. This paper investigates the possibility of restoring consensus as a research category through an examination of its original use by John Stuart Mill. The link between Mill and contemporary political sociology is Edward Shils, who is here identified as one of the guiding spirits of the consensus literature. The paper compares consensus as treated in Mill's explicitly political science with Shils’ implicitly political science. The ‘post‐behaviouralists’ sought the recovery of the political as the leading theme of social inquiry. This is exactly as Mill originally intended. The consensus literature, however, took its bearing from Shils’ restatement of Mill, in which the political categories are submerged according to the demands of a novel and apolitical science of politics. The recovery of democratic consensus as a research category would greatly benefit from the substitution of Mill's original project in place of Shils's much weaker, if more influential, restatement of it.     

The morality police are coming! Muslims in Norway's media discourses (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In early 2010, a series of reports appeared in the influential liberal‐conservative Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten drawing attention to what appeared to reporters to be a self‐appointed, de facto Muslim ‘morality police’ attempting to use harassment to exert social control over non‐hijab‐wearing women of immigrant background and gay men in the district of Grønland in the inner city of Oslo. What came to be known in Norway as the ‘morality‐police debate’ demonstrated the extent to which the figure of the Muslim male as an embodied threat to Norway's presumed relative gender equality and lack of homophobia had come to be embedded in the country's media and political discourse. This article suggests that the debate can tell us much about why certain tropes central to Norway's anti‐Muslim discourses have gained such currency across the Norwegian political board in recent years.     

Talking to strangers (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The language used by politicians and its social effects have been of long‐standing interest to social anthropology. Opinion‐formers on both sides of the North Atlantic have recently argued that this language can inflame tensions and reinforce divisions. In the UK, the discussion has centred on relations between a white majority and a Muslim minority, while in the US, in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of a Democratic Congresswoman in Arizona, it has focused on the risk of political language provoking violence. The antidote to inflammatory language is often assumed to be moderation, defined as a (self‐) disciplined engagement with divided publics. Drawing on the insights of Danielle Allen's Talking to strangers, here I suggest that moderation might be re‐imagined, not as a vague commitment to centrism and the ‘middle ground’, but as a powerful resource for citizens and communities to challenge the ideological excesses of politics, religion and the market in the twenty‐first century.     

Domestic troubles,national identity discourse,and China's attitude towards the West, 2003–2012

Prior to its recent, much discussed international ‘assertiveness’, China's attitude to the West had deteriorated, as reflected in official discourse of national identity. Drawing from political science and social psychology literature on identity studies, I argue that the discursive pattern of national identity can shift as a function of an elite strategy to exclude internal others through opposition to foreign others. Internally exclusionary nationalism, often employed by elites during major crises, is instrumental to consolidating control and maintaining order. But when targeting internal opponents alone is politically inconvenient or lacks public resonance, elites will accentuate ethnocentric national identity discourse vis‐a‐vis foreign nations in order to reinforce internal battles and divert popular discontent externally. An interpretive analysis of the official texts of Chinese national identity discourse during the Hu Jintao decade, supplemented by quantitative data, shows a significant correlation between the regime's fear of internal instability and bottom‐up political opposition on the one hand and the timing and intensity of ethnocentric identity discourse regarding the West on the other. The party‐state negatively framed the West in order to shift the blame for domestic troubles onto foreigners and discredit internal resistance.     

Anxiety geopolitics: Hybrid warfare,civilisational geopolitics,and the Janus-faced politics of anxiety

Working at the intersection of political geography and international relations, this article does two things. First, it theorises the relationship between geopolitics and anxiety. Second, it uses this conceptual lens to analyse and critique the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’. The conceptual part draws on Lacanian political theory and contributes to critical geopolitics, ontological security studies, and the literature on politics of anxiety. It is built around the notion of anxiety geopolitics, which denotes a discourse that promises to deal with social anxiety by providing geopolitical fixes to it, yet also ultimately fails in doing so. We then move to argue that ‘hybrid warfare’ is a prime case of such discourse. Using examples from the Czech Republic, we show how the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’ successfully connects different sorts of anxieties together and creates a sense of ontological security by linking them to familiar East/West civilisational geopolitics that points to Russia as the ultimate culprit. Yet, at the same time, the discourse simultaneously subverts itself by portraying ‘hybrid threats’ as too insidious, invisible and constantly shifting to be ever possibly durably resolved. We conclude that this makes ‘hybrid warfare’ self-defeating, normatively problematic, and strategically impractical.