Poverty and Neo‐Liberal Bias in the Middle East and North Africa

This article examines the definition of poverty and the evidential base for the claims that the region of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has historically low levels of poverty and relatively good levels of income distribution. It argues that the dominant trend in the literature on poverty in the global south in general, and in MENA in particular, has a neo‐classical bias. Amongst other things, that bias fails to understand that poverty does not emerge because of exclusion but because of poor people's ‘differential incorporation’ into economic and political processes. It also raises the question: if the MENA has indeed had relatively low levels of poverty and good income distribution, does this complicate the issue of autocracy and the western drive to remove political ‘backwardness’ in the region? In particular, the characterization of autocracy and the west's attempt to promote political liberalization is likely to impact adversely on the social contract that autocratic rulers have enforced regarding the delivery of basic services.     

‘Social Exclusion’ Discourse and Chronic Poverty: A South African Case Study

This article questions the export of ‘social exclusion’ discourse to the field of development and poverty studies. It considers the findings of ongoing research into chronic poverty in the Western Cape district of Ceres, one of the centres of the South African deciduous fruit export industry. It explores the links between the livelihood options of poor people and processes of global integration, agro‐food restructuring and the modernization of paternalist farming styles. In this context the concept of ‘social exclusion’ is of only limited utility, and has significant disadvantages. Although it has the potential to focus attention on the disabling effects of poverty, its most common usage often fails to capture how poverty can flow not only from exclusion but also from processes of integration into broader economic and social networks. The author argues that these are better captured by the notion of ‘adverse incorporation’, and calls for a more cautious approach to the modernizing myths and moralizing narratives that shape policy debates.     

Radicals,Tories or Monomaniacs? The Birmingham Currency Reformers in the House of Commons, 1832–67*

Benjamin Disraeli described Thomas Attwood as a ‘provincial banker labouring under a financial monomania’. The leader of the Birmingham Political Union, Attwood's Warwickshire accent and support for a paper currency were widely derided at Westminster. However, the themes of Attwood's brief parliamentary career were shared by the other men who represented Birmingham in the early‐ and mid‐Victorian period. None of these MPs were good party men, and this article illuminates the nature of party labels in the period. Furthermore, it adds a new dimension to the historical understanding of debates on monetary policy and shows how local political identities and traditions interacted with broader party identities. With the exception of Richard Spooner, who was a strong tory on religious and political matters, the currency men are best described as popular radicals, who consistently championed radical political reform and were among the few parliamentary supporters of the ‘People's Charter’. They opposed the new poor law and endorsed factory regulation, a progressive income tax, and religious liberty. Although hostile to the corn laws they believed that free trade without currency reform would depress prices, wages and employment. George Frederick Muntz's death in 1857 and his replacement by John Bright marked a watershed and the end of the influence of the ‘Birmingham school’. Bright appropriated Birmingham's radical tradition as he used the town as a base for his campaign for parliamentary reform. He emphasized Birmingham's contribution to the passing of the 1832 Reform Act but ignored the currency reformers' views on other matters, which had often been at loggerheads with the ‘Manchester school’ and economic liberalism.     

Fundamentalism: examining the role of public reason in ‘non-liberal’ approaches to ‘unreasonable’ doctrines

In this article, we examine ways in which critics of liberalism come to adopt, without acknowledgement, ‘liberal’ forms of public reason in responding to homogenising tendencies of fundamentalist doctrines. We focus on the divergent approaches of John Gray and Slavoj ?i?ek, arguing that the former upholds a comprehensive form of liberalism, while the latter upholds a political form popular among policy makers who endorse a ‘fundamentalism’/‘extremism’ dichotomy. We argue that the latter fails to recognise that ‘philosophical’ unreasonableness often translates into political unreasonableness. Examining these non-liberal approaches not only indicates the apparent value of reason as reciprocity, it also supports a long-held charge against liberalism: that it is not able to uphold its promise of accommodating radical forms of diversity.     

Mother,Child, Race,Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption

‘Third World’ poverty and hunger conjures up certain conventionalised images: thin children, with or without their mothers. This paper explores the genealogy of such images in the mid‐twentieth century, and shows how they mobilise ideologies of ‘rescue’ while pointing away from structural (political, military and economic) explanations for poverty, famine and other disasters. These images had a counterpart in practices of transnational and transracial adoption, which became the subject of debate in the USA during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and were at least as much about symbolic debates over race as the fate of particular children. Together, these visual and familial practices made US foreign and domestic poverty policy intelligible as a debate over whether to save women and children. When they cast the USA as rescuer, they made it all but impossible to understand what US political, military or economic power had to do with creating the problem.     

The image of the city in modern literature

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship.

All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century – repatriation, resettlement and local integration – are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation–state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership – and through this of access to citizenship rights – that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights?

This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled.

Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation – or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation – became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’.     

Visions of Statesmanship Across The Atlantic: Presidential Masculinity and the American Response to Benito Mussolini

This article explores how hegemonic masculinity forged discourses of modern statesmanship in the United States and Italy in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It unpacks the ‘presidential masculinity’ of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and compares these gendered performances of political leadership in the United States to Benito Mussolini's Fascist rule in Italy during the 1920s. In doing so, this article contends that the manliness of these three modern leaders rested on a contrasting of pairs: if Roosevelt embodied the hegemonic ideal of the ‘frontiersman-as-president’, Wilson personified its ‘unmanly’, bourgeois-liberal countertype and thereby engendered the initially hospitable view of Mussolini's Fascist masculinity in the United States during the Jazz Age. The article covers the publications in The Atlantic Monthly to reveal how the American disillusion with Wilson's liberal internationalism transformed the Duce into a Fascist surrogate for Roosevelt. In a decade of political, economic and social upheaval, the transatlantic ‘public relations state’ in both the United States and Italy discursively positioned Mussolini as the personification of the masculine ideals of acumen, willpower and virility for the American public; a ‘Doctor-Dictator’ who, akin to Roosevelt, became a symbol of modern manliness that signified stability, progress and reform. In the process, the Duce's Fascist manhood shaped hegemonic ideals of statesmanship across the Atlantic while hinting at the paltry support for the liberal democracies of the West.     

Social,economic and political dilemmas of reform in Yugoslavia

All of the communist party‐ruled states of Eastern Europe, from the elder brother of the ‘socialist family’, the Soviet Union, to non‐aligned, sui generis Yugoslavia, are in some degree of economic crisis. Gone are the once loudly trumpeted assurances that the socialist ‘economic formation’ by its very nature — its centrally planned and directed economy, its leadership by a communist party armed with the ‘scientific’ social and economic theory of Marxism‐Leninism and its foundation on the principles of proletarian social justice — excluded the possibility of economic ailments such as sluggish growth rates, inflation, social inequality and unemployment. It is now admitted that precisely these problems currently threaten virtually all communist systems. The principal issue for the political elites in these countries (with the perhaps temporary exception of relatively prosperous East Germany and Czechoslovakia and perennially contrary Romania) is not whether radical reform is necessary, but how to implement the requisite economic, social and quasi‐political reforms without undermining the foundations of ‘socialism’ and of the communist party's domination that they identify with it Yugoslavia is a valuable test case of the general project of reform in communist systems, since it consciously undertook to dismantle the of Stalinist system it had been establishing under Soviet tutelage at the end of World War II in response to Stalin's ostracism of Tito in June 1948. From its inception the Yugoslav reform process was informed by a commitment to return to the sources of Marxian social and economic theory in order to build an authentic socialist system untrammeled by the structures and immoral practices of Stalinist ‘etatism’. Worker self‐management, ‘market socialism’, the decentralisation of political and economic decision‐making, periodic rotation in office, and a number of other formally democratic, participatory socio‐political processes, most of which Gorbachev and his supporters have been discussing under the rubric of perestroika, glasnost’ and demokratizatsiia, have all been tried in one form or another in Yugoslavia during the past four decades.     

John Stuart Mill’s Political Pessimism

John Stuart Mill devoted much of his life to developing a ‘science of morality’ to enhance the social, moral and intellectual character of individuals and society as a whole. His liberal aspirations included the reform of legal and political institutions according to utilitarian principles and consistent with personal liberty, and the development of a diverse and creative culture. Paradoxically, Mill, the liberal optimist, was also a pessimist about achieving these goals. This article argues that Mill’s pessimism reveals an intellectual depth and forthright political realism about England’s parliamentary democracy and the political and cultural consequences of growing affluence and social equality. Mill’s critiques of liberalism and socialism in their original emergence point the way to explaining why his ideas remain provocative and profoundly illuminating in contemporary debates concerning multiculturalism and human rights.     

Prices and Politics in Andean Water Reforms

Water rights are best understood as politically contested and culturally embedded relationships among different social actors. In the Andean region, existing rights of irrigators’ collectives often embody historical struggles over resources, rules, authorities and identities. This article argues, first, that the neo‐liberal language that is increasingly used in water policies is ill‐suited for recognizing and dealing with these social, cultural and political dimensions of water distribution. Local water rules and rights, their dynamics, and the way they are linked to power relations, local identities and contextualized constructions of legitimacy, remain invisible in neo‐liberal policy discourse. Second, this same discourse actively destroys these local rights systems and presents itself as the only viable cure to the problems it generates. The ways in which local irrigators’ collectives attempt to protect their water security raise questions about the fundaments and effects of neo‐liberal water reforms, but these questions are neglected or poorly understood. This article proposes a more situated, layered and contextualized approach to Andean water questions, not just to improve representational accuracy but also to increase political visibility and legitimacy of peasant and indigenous water claims. What is needed is not just a new ‘typology’ or ‘taxonomy’ of water rights, but an alternative ‘water rights ontology’ that understands locally existing norms and water control practices, and the power relations that inform and surround them, as deeply constitutive of water rights.     

Property and personal development: An interpretation of T.H. Green's political philosophy

This paper considers T.H. Green's theory of property in relation to recent studies of late nineteenth and early twentieth century liberal democratic thought. It is argued that neither the ‘Marxist’ spectacles worn by C.B. Macpherson nor the ‘Whiggish’ ones of Melvin Richter, Peter Clarke and Stefan Collini produce very clear or accurate images of Green's political philosophy. Macpherson's Green appears on close examination as yet another possessive individualist, while the ‘Whigs’ take a turn of the century standpoint and describe Green as holding positions that are ambivalent and fit awkwardly into the categories of individualism/ collectivism. In the remainder of the paper it is argued Green's property theory is best understood by focussing on his interest in the relationship between social life and personal development. By drawing on Green's published and unpublished writings it can be shown that Green's idea of personal development could be expressed in other language than that of economic individualism and that it cut across the individualist/collectivist categories in terms of which it is often discussed.     

Resources,regulation and the state: Struggles over gas extraction and passive revolution in Evo Morales's Bolivia

The indigenous-influenced policies of Evo Morales's Bolivia represent arguably the most important attempt to improve the socioenvironmental implications of resource extraction in recent years, reasserting the role of the state and social movements against ‘corporate-led governance’. In this paper, through combining the regulation approach with neo-Gramscian state theory, I carry out a conceptually informed analysis of struggles over hydrocarbon governance in Bolivia, in order to shed light on the reasons why such an ambitious political project has largely failed to realise its transformative potential. I make two interrelated arguments. First, initial, important advances in the governance of resources in Bolivia were later partially reversed, due to shifting power relations between social movements, the hydrocarbon industry, and the state. This points to the need of understanding resource governance and its changes as reflecting or ‘condensing’ shifting power relationships among social forces. Second, the coming to power of Evo Morales resulted in a ‘passive-revolutionary’ process whereby an initial radical break with the neoliberal order was followed by a gradual adaptation to pre-existing political economic relations and arrangements. Most notably, plans to reduce the country's dependency on gas exports as well as to challenge the transnational domination of the hydrocarbon sector were abandoned, generating an increasingly explicit incompatibility with indigenous demands. I conclude that neo-Gramscian theory offers important insights that enable us to advance our conceptualisation of the state in resource governance research and in political ecology more generally.     

‘Ain’t I a feminist?’: the politics of gender violence,anti-violence,and education in Oakland,CA

This article focuses on the ways gender violence politics become reduced to liberal narratives of victimization in contemporary U.S. deployment of feminist identity politics, within academic and activist discourses. Such victimization narratives, I argue, exploit suffering and reproduce social stratification between a growing middle class in the academy and poor black people outside of it. This article draws from moments in California’s Bay area when questions of feminism, gender violence, and anti-violence in schools arose. In each case, left feminists had an opportunity to reshape these questions towards new political paradigms and new academic discourses. Instead, amidst the ‘safety’ of left discourse and practice, each moment confronted contradictory silences that called into question such ‘safety’ and made generative political movement impossible. I analyze the dynamics of this silencing as constitutive of the co-optation of feminist identity politics within a capitalist university that reproduces an oppressive race and class order. We face a problem of language to adequately explain and disrupt the incapacity for collective social change that victimhood, identity politics, and reformism have produced. Each instance I present function as moments of history making from which we may reflect and strategize forward movement against capitalist oppression and racial dehumanization.     

At the Horizons of the Subject: Neo-liberalism,neo-conservatism and the rights of the child Part Two: Parent,caregiver, state

This paper is the second of two that examine the paradoxical relationship of the child to the liberal notion of the subject. Together they explore the range of contexts in which children's relationship to parents and other caregivers raise questions about the nature of the subject qua individual, and highlight the potential for a ventriloquist discourse around the child in which political projects are mobilized by neo-liberal and neo-conservative groups that purport to speak for the child. The first paper examined the emergence of two contradictory images: the ‘knowing’ fetal subject and the confused child; the second paper explores particular forms of presencing and absencing of the child in relation to parental rights and questions of social entitlements. Both papers speak to the contorted somatography and topography of the child-as-subject that is emerging at an historical juncture when children's rights are being mobilized to undermine the gains made by a range of heterodox subjects. They point to the limits of liberal constructions of the subject in struggles for emancipation.     

Ecotourism,Poverty and Resources Management in Ranomafana,Madagascar

Abstract

This paper explores how the protection of natural resources is managed in Madagascar in order to understand how and why tourism development is part of the strategy to safeguard these resources. Based on a heterodox political economy approach and using documentary analysis as well as exploratory interviews, this paper focuses on the specific case of Ranomafana National Park showing how the environment, economic growth and poverty alleviation strategies are instrumental to a ‘development framework’ that envisions the rural poor population as a problem as well as a solution with respect to resource depletion. The analysis concluded that tourism is far from being an ‘axis of development’ for the Malagasy economy, and, thus, an insufficient alternative to address the destructive practices described in this paper. The case study shows that ecotourism creates few work opportunities for local people and does not absorb the job seekers who rapidly revert to survival techniques and anarchic use of resources, thereby threatening the integrity of the forest and the long-term survival of ecotourism activities. In this context, the place of tourism in general and of ecotourism, in particular, appears to have been highly exaggerated in Madagascar as the direct economic benefits of tourism at the local level remain minimal.     

The problem of interests in contemporary liberal political theory

‘Interest’ is a central concept in contemporary liberal political theory. Much of this discussion is marked by related confusions between ‘interest’ and ‘actions‐in‐interests’ and between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ interests. These confusions are damaging, since liberal theorists are ostensibly firmly opposed to treating objective interests as politically relevant, but they inevitably finish up admiting the relevance of some form of objective interests. They do this by limiting valid interest judgements to those which are rational, or which favour future over present interests, or which are made post facto, or which favour public over individual interests. This admission of objective interests into liberal theory has important implications for the way in which liberal theorists conceive of relationships between the liberal democratic state and its citizens. In particular, it seriously undermines the democratic element in contemporary liberal democratic theories of political representation.     

Nairn's England and the progressive dilemma: reappraising Tom Nairn on English nationalism

In British political and intellectual circles, there is a longstanding disagreement between those envisaging an opportunity for the development of a radical English patriotism and those resistant to the idea of a progressive English imaginary. Despite their antithetical quality, both divergent frameworks were explored in the work of Scottish nationalist and New Left intellectual Tom Nairn, long before mainstream social science preoccupied itself with the ‘English Question’. Notwithstanding his later espousal of Englishness as a contribution to democratic renewal, Nairn's earlier notion of an inherently regressive nationalism remains the dominant frame for many intellectuals and politicians confronted by the challenges of increasingly politicised English identities. Whilst he has been only one of a number of thinkers and writers who have informed and contested political thinking on this question in the UK, the influence of his early work upon liberal and left circles has been underestimated, an oversight that this article addresses.     

The World Bank's ‘Assault on Poverty’ as a Political Question (1968–81)

This article analyses the actions of the World Bank between 1968 and 1981, under the presidency of Robert McNamara, in the context of the Cold War and the directions of US foreign aid policy. It discusses the reasons for, and the means by which the World Bank led, the ‘assault on poverty’, with an emphasis on rural poverty. It problematizes the theory which supported this initiative, analysing its operationalization in the countryside; it discusses the principal format that it assumed, the reasons which propelled it, the political calculation which guided it, the interests at play, and the results that were reached. Finally, the article argues that the ‘assault on poverty’ slogan expresses the disposition and the willingness of the World Bank to intervene in domestic questions, aiming to alter, in a selective and focused manner, the condition of particular social groups in client countries, rather than improving the general conditions of economies. This in turn demanded the strengthening of its advisory, technical assistance and economic research functions. If McNamara's policy of fighting poverty can be considered a failure in economic and social terms (a diagnosis widely accepted in the literature), this article argues that, politically, it was successful by constructing the foundations for the neoliberal-type focused social policies that were in vogue in the following decades.     

Richard Oastler,Toryism, Radicalism and the Limitations of Party,c.1807–46

Richard Oastler (1789–1861), the immensely popular and fiery orator who campaigned for factory reform and for the abolition of the new poor law in the 1830s and 1840s, has been relatively neglected by political historians. Few historians, however, have questioned his toryism. As this article suggests, labelling Oastler an ‘ultra‐tory’ or a ‘church and state tory’ obscures more than it reveals. There were also radical strands in Oastler's ideology. There has been a tendency among Oastler's biographers to treat him as unique. By comparing Oastler with other tories – Sadler, Southey, and the young Disraeli – as well as radicals like Cobbett, this article locates him much more securely among his contemporaries. His range of interests were much broader (and more radical) than the historiographical concentration on factory and poor law reform suggests. While there were periods when Oastler's toryism (or radicalism) was more apparent, one of the most consistent aspects of his political career was a distaste for party politics. Far from being unique or a maverick, Oastler personified the pervasive anti‐party sentiments held by the working classes, which for all the historiographical attention paid to popular radicalism and other non‐party movements still tends to get lost in narratives of the ‘rise of party’.     

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.