Civil society,political society and politics of disorder in Cambodia

This paper questions under what conditions the social foundation necessary for the construction and sustenance of civil society are present in post-colonial social formations, and the extent to which there has been a need to develop concessionary politics to maintain a project of rule. It utilizes Partha Chatterjee's usage of Gramsci's political society to understand how Cambodia's ILO-led garment factory monitoring regime secures legitimacy not by the participation of worker citizens in the matters of the state, but by claiming to provide for their well being. I argue that the hegemonic project is fraught by virtue of the fact that consent-seeking forms of regulation, which aim to prevent strikes through trade union membership and tripartitism, have reached their limit and spilled over and into a disaggregated, messier terrain of struggles akin to political society. To develop the argument that workers' politics cannot be expressed in state-civil society relations, I present case studies of two forms of protest. The first form is distinguished by mass faintings, which I characterize as ‘visceral protest’ against the terms of workers' insertion into industrial capitalism. The second is large-scale, worker-led strikes that signal a ‘politics of social disorder’ is emerging, characterized by extra-legal, disruptive, and sometimes violent protest. The paper calls for a re-politicization of labor, and research attuned to workers' ambitions that cannot be reduced to a stable location or sphere within state-civil society relations.     

The politics of education for globalisation: managed activism in a time of crisis

Since the 1990s, governments of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have begun to promote their foreign aid politics domestically via global education. This policy remit has its origins in civil society and has been combined with a stated aim on the part of governments to prepare populations for globalisation, but also to convince populations of the need for increased aid spending in the context of various challenges, including calls for aid effectiveness, large-scale protest by the metropolitan left and rising parochialisms that diminish cosmopolitan world views. In the context of the apparent spontaneity of political mobilisation globally, this article seeks to qualify the optimism of the political sociology and social movements literature on the network society by comparing two OECD government remits for global/development education in the UK and Australia, which are attempts to manage or socially engineer civic activism and engagement. The problem which this article addresses is that, on the face of it, state funding of ‘global education’ appears to be a success of the activism of educators combined with the networked advocacy efforts of development non-governmental organisations, except that it has occurred in tension with international drivers to use education to further global economic competitiveness and governments' desire to promote their own foreign aid spending in a climate of falling legitimacy. This phenomenon of state funding for global education might be considered an elaboration of network politics, but this article argues that it must equally be read, via Gramsci, as a hegemonic contest in the struggle for subject production appropriate to the global knowledge economy.     

Mothers/Fighters/Citizens: Violence and Disillusionment in Post‐War El Salvador

This article explores post‐war El Salvador as characterised by disillusionment in the nation's neoliberal rebuilding project. A key part of my argument is that this disillusion‐ment is gendered. Specifically, I focus on a spectrum of gendered experiences and responses to social and inter‐personal violence in El Salvador's recent history. Is there a relationship between wartime political violence, continued processes of exclusion (i.e. education, healthcare, housing), and post‐war waves of domestic violence, youth violence and ‘random’ violence? While some scholars posit questions regarding Salvadoran toler‐ance to violence through time, I tackle this question by focusing on emerging criticisms of El Salvador's post‐war reconciliation. I privilege a focus on the everyday and people's ambiguities as they deal with political change and a neoliberal economy that marginalises the rural sector. In particular, I argue for placing many rural women's stories of gender‐based violence, their assertions of an embodied vulnerability and daily insecurity, within a political economic understanding of the contradictions of El Salvador's peace and nation‐building project. Through a series of ethnographic examples based on seventeen months of research in a former warzone, I suggest that a daily and gendered violence is rendered invisible. My aim is to theorise a range of women's and men's losses and to impart the urgency of their narratives that problematise assumptions of what constitutes pain, sorrow and the challenges of war‐torn life. This is an attempt to write outside privileged texts that ask subaltern women to speak in a collective voice and articulate their past loss and future hopes. In doing so, I discuss methodology and historicise my own fraught positioning as an international witness/researcher at a very particular moment of El Salvador's transition to democracy.     

Maximum Working Class Unity? Challenges to Local Social Movement Unionism in Cape Town

Joint political mobilisation between trade unions and community groups, often referred to as ‘social movement unionism’, has been upheld as a way forward for organised labour in a neoliberal world economy. Analysing the interaction between unions and communities is critical for understanding the potential and actual roles played by trade unions in voicing the concerns of marginalized workers and poor communities. This article examines the efforts of organised municipal workers and urban social movements trying to unite their forces in post‐apartheid South Africa, by looking at the politics of the Cape Town Anti‐Privatisation Forum (APF). While the participants of the APF have in common their opposition to commercialisation and privatisation of service delivery, their political unity is fragile. By contrasting the ‘ideal‐type’ social movement unionism depicted in the contemporary literature on labour and globalisation with the findings of this particular case, we uncover some main dimensions along which this organisational cooperation is challenged. In contrast to the political unity experienced during the anti‐apartheid struggle, the APF initiative operates in a restructuring post‐apartheid economy where bridging internal organisational differences and confronting the hegemonic position of the African National Congress (ANC) in civil society have proved particularly challenging.     

The Process of Kinship in the Paternal/Fraternal House of the Austronesian‐speaking Amis of Taiwan

In this essay, I will describe the traditional social organisation of the Amis peoples of Taiwan which previous ethnographers have portrayed as consisting of a matrilineal clan‐based system conjoined with a residential‐based male age‐set/grade system. Following David Schneider's critique of ‘kinship’ cross‐culturally and the ‘new kinship studies' which his work inspired, I will attempt a reinterpretation of overall Amis social organisation as instead a total kinship‐based system comprised of a paternal/fraternal system which integrates and encompasses the multiplicity of maternal‐focused houses constitutive of village communities. Rather than being a system composed of kinship and non‐kinship parts, I argue that Amis social organisation is comprehensively kinship‐based. Moreover, I shall describe how through paternal/fraternal relations generated by rites of male initiation and rebirth this overall integration of diverse matrifocal units is achieved. In the first section, I will describe the structure of the paternal/fraternal initiatory system. In the following section, I will draw upon the major anthropological theories of initiation including rites of passage and the literature on sacrifice to describe numerous aspects of initiation activities, showing how the classificatory father‐son and elder‐younger‐brother relations between and within the initiation sets are explicitly represented by the concepts and practices of the Amis.     

When the personal becomes political: using legal reform to combat violence against women in Ethiopia

This article focuses on Ethiopia's first civil society organisation, the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA), which has been campaigning for legal reform to secure women's rights and address violence against women. Implementing legal changes to benefit women in Ethiopia is impeded by difficulties in using the formal legal system, by poverty and deeply embedded gender inequalities, by plural legal systems, and by entrenched cultural norms. However, the article argues that the most significant challenge is the increasing degree of authoritarianism in Ethiopian state politics, that this is crucial in determining the space for activism, and that this shapes the successful implementation of legal change. The research shows how women's activism around personal rights challenges public/private and personal/political boundaries and can be seen as a political threat by governments in contexts where democracy and rule of the law are not embedded, leading to repression of women's activism and hindering the implementation of measures to protect women's rights when states become more authoritarian. Little is known empirically about the impact of democratisation on the implementation of measures to protect women's rights in Africa. This article shows how the emergence of democracy and legal reform intersects with the emergence of women's rights, especially with respect to gender-based violence. It shows how trying to secure women's personal right to be free from violence through the law is profoundly political and argues that the nature of democratisation really matters in terms of the implementation of measures such as legal changes designed to protect women's rights.     

From ethnic outbidding to ethnic conflict: the institutional bases for Sri Lanka's separatist war1

Abstract. Beginning in the mid‐1950s Sri Lanka's politicians from the majority Sinhalese community resorted to ethnic outbidding as a means to attain power and in doing so systematically marginalised the country's minority Tamils. This article consequently argues that institutional decay, which was produced by the dialectic between majority rule and ethnic outbidding, was what led to Tamil mobilisation and an ethnic conflict that has killed nearly 70,000 people over the past twenty years. It also analyses the influence informal societal pressures exerted on formal state institutions and how this contributed to institutional decay. Evaluating the relations that ensued between social organisations and the Sri Lankan state shows how institutions can prescribe actions and fashion motives even as it will make clear how the island's varied institutions generated a deadly political dynamic that eventually unleashed the ongoing civil war.     

Peace Protest and Policy

The tremendous fluctuations in public mobilization against United States nuclear weapons policy, a relatively stable policy over four decades, present a difficult riddle to social scientists. Since the dawn of the nuclear age small groups of activists have consistently protested both the content of United States national security policy and the process by which it is made. Only occasionally, however, has this protest spread beyond a handful of relatively marginal groups, generated substantial public support, and reached mainstream political institutions. This article examines the political cycles of peace movement engagement and quiescence, and their relation to external political context, particularly public policy. I begin with a brief review of the relevant literature on the origins of the movements, noting parallels in the study of interest groups. Building on recent literature on political opportunity structure. I suggest a theoretical framework which emphasizes the interaction between activists choices and political context. I then describe the cycles of peace movement activism and quiescence on nuclear weapons issues in the United States using mass media sources to delineate periods of mobilization. I outline a number of policy variables which may help explain protest mobilization. My conclusions address the importance of policy and political context in explaining movement cycles and the potential influence of protest movements on policy.     

Engendering Gramsci: Gender,the Philosophy of Praxis,and Spaces of Encounter in the Climate Caravan,Bangladesh

This paper examines the gendered politics of national and international networking amongst peasant farmers' movements in South Asia. In particular the paper provides an ethnographic account, based upon the author's critical engagement with the Bangladesh Krishok (farmer) Federation and the Bangladesh Kishani Sabha (Women Farmers' Association), of the Climate Change, Gender and Food Sovereignty Caravan that was organised in Bangladesh in 2011. The paper draws upon Antonio Gramsci's theory of the philosophy of praxis and feminist research on social reproduction, dispossession and materiality to interrogate the spaces of encounter and solidarity‐building practices of the Caravan between different communities in the country and between different social movement actors. The paper examines how processes of political organisation and consciousness‐raising within and between social movements are problematised by gendered power relations. The paper concludes with suggestions concerning how the philosophy of praxis in Bangladesh might be “engendered” to incorporate a politics of social reproduction.     

THERE IS NO COLONIAL RELATIONSHIP: ANTAGONISM,SIKHISM, AND SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES

This article identifies how scholars have displaced antagonism within histories of Sikhism and South Asian Studies more broadly. In contrast to this displacement, this article foregrounds antagonism by taking into account a third element within the presumed colonizer and colonized relationship: a curved space of nonrelation that signals there can be no colonial relationship. By considering the constitutive nature of antagonism within social reality that remains unable to be demarcated, this article examines the generative principles of Sikh practices and concepts that both structure Sikhism's institutions and productively conceptualize this antagonism. Examining these concepts and practices, I consider the possibility of different modes of both historical being and becoming not bound within our current conceptual rubrics. These different possibilities culled through Sikh concepts and theories demand we reflect upon the rabble: those unable to be contained within colonial civil society or within attempts by the colonized for self‐determination in political societies. This void then fractured Sikh reform organizations historically, providing multiple avenues for politics unaccountable within our bifurcated and asymmetrical understandings of civil society and political societies and colonizer and colonized.     

Karl Barth and Jürgen Habermas: Transcendental aporias of Global Civil Society

Abstract

Currently, religion and globalization seem to be working towards opposite ends. As Mark Juergensmeyer has noted, while religiously invoked terrorism fragments society, the Internet, cell phones and the media industry foster the formation of an increasingly global social fabric. But religion is not a single faceted phenomenon. As much as there are prophets of violence such as Osama bin Laden, there are prophets of peace and reconciliation such as Bishop Desmond Tutu. How a civil society might be configured in relation to the inherent ambiguity surrounding religious traditions remains difficult to discern. How might Christian traditions make a positive contribution to this context? To answer this question I will articulate a dialogue between Jürgen Habermas's theory of civil society and the politico-ethical theology of Karl Barth.     

Arendt’s Promise to Civil Society: Bridging the Social and the Political

In Arendt’s political theory the concept of civil society is often read as an extension of her concept of the social and is therefore dismissed as irrelevant to her political vision. This view leaves Arendtian theory in an exclusivist position with regard to contemporary political contexts and experiences. My aim in this essay is to address this problem by discussing the relationship of Arendtian theory and the concept of civil society in the context of contemporary political experience. This calls for not only a particular reading of the social in Arendt but, more importantly, for a joint reading of Arendt’s concept of the council state and civil society. Here, civil society is defined as the associations institutionalized by the voluntary engagement of active citizens, which definition, I argue, is compatible with Arendt’s concept of politics as action, plurality, and participation.     

Wake up,Russia! Political activism and the reanimation of agency

When protest movements do not achieve policy outcomes, they are often considered failures. But as I learned while working with feminist and pro‐LGBT activists in Moscow's radical left, becoming a political activist may in itself be an important form of resistance to overwhelming and demoralizing power structures. During the mass anti‐Putin protests of 2011–2012, which were widely experienced as an awakening of political subjectivities, to talk with activists about what constituted “politics” was to talk about the possibility of agency in the face of what often appears to be overwhelming constraint. Activism can thus be as much a form of subjectivity work as a means of changing public policy.     

Beyond structure and agency: Rethinking political identities in Iraq after 2003

This paper examines ethno‐symbolic and instrumental explanations of ethnic and sectarian identities placed within the constructivist turn in the study of political identity, both in the abstract and how they have been deployed to explain the increasing contemporary influence of ethnosectarian mobilisation in Iraq and the wider Middle East. The paper identifies explanatory value in these approaches but finds their focus on either ideational structures or individual rationality too narrow to provide a comprehensive explanation of what happened to political identities in Iraq after 2003. Instead, the paper deploys what can be termed a ‘Bourdieusian method’, in an attempt to get beyond the polarities of structure and agency. It uses Bourdieu's conceptions of political field, principles of vision and division and symbolic violence to understand the influence that de‐Ba'athification, the creation of the Muhasasa Ta'ifia or sectarian apportionment system and national elections had on political identities in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.     

On realpolitik and its limitations

A largely peaceful collapse of dictatorships both in the communist world and beyond occurred in 1989. That year also saw one notable failure: the violent suppression of peaceful protest in Tiananmen Square, raising the perennial question of how far dictatorships can be effectively undermined by non‐violent methods. This review article offers no definitive answer to the question but provides a series of specific case‐studies from different countries, each chapter written by an expert on the country concerned. Besides covering the collapse of communist rule in the Baltic states, East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia, it examines the role of non‐violence in four post‐communist revolutions: in the rump Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Georgia and Ukraine. But its scope goes far beyond the former communist world. The authors demonstrate that non‐violence has, with varying degrees of success, played a role in many regions—in India under British rule; in the US civil rights campaign; in Northern Ireland prior to the troubles; in Portugal during the transition to democracy in the 1970s; in Iran before the overthrow of the Shah; in the Philippines before the removal of President Marcos in 1986; and in Chile in the late 1980s, gradually ending the Pinochet dictatorship. The negotiated dismantling of apartheid in South Africa is the subject of a long chapter. The book also examines two conspicuous failures of peaceful protest—China in 1989 and Burma in 2007. The book's conclusions are understandably cautious, but the authors concede that civil resistance has proved a more potent weapon than was previously supposed. At all events, so the reviewer argues, the notion that civil resistance can only work in free societies has been proved demonstrably wrong.     

Workers,Unions and the State: Migrant Workers in China's Labour‐intensive Foreign Enterprises

Migrant workers present a new challenge both to China's increasingly diversified industrial relations and to its state–society relationship, especially vis‐à‐vis China's developmental state. Through an examination of the situation of migrant workers in the country's labour‐intensive foreign investment enterprises, this article argues that it is difficult to establish tripartite industrial relations in China and that pluralistic labour organizations will not easily develop into civil society type labour entities. China's developmental state is in an ambiguous process in redefining its role. Its ability to micro‐manage society is weakening substantially. However, its developmental character at the macro‐level largely remains strong, allowing it to continue to restrict progress towards civil society. The future will ultimately depend on a collective determination by key players — the workers, unions and the state — to find a compromise.     

Ethnic Nationalism and Subaltern Political Process: Exploring Autonomous Democratic Action in Kashmir

Abstract. This article argues that the emergence and development of subaltern political process is a significant conflict dynamic found in the escalation of ethnic nationalist movements. These ethnie‐defined modes of political participation are in turn an expression of the autonomous nature of ethnic nationalism, but occur ‘underneath’ and often antecedent to the organised violence and militancy which distracts most analyses of these conflicts. The article discusses this process of insurgent political mobilisation as a response to the structural paralysis of the post‐colonial state, using the ethnic nationalist conflict in Indian Jammu and Kashmir as the central case study. In its discussion of this case, the article seeks to argue that the presence of such subaltern political process provides additional empirical evidence of the autonomous nature of ethnic nationalism, and its capacity to carve out alternative options for democratic action and popular participation.     

An Exceptional Response? Security,Development and Civil Society in Spanish Policy after 11‐M

This article considers the ways in which Spanish state institutions responded to the Madrid bombings of 11 March 2004 in the context of the global ‘War on Terror’. It examines three inter‐related arenas of Spanish policy after 9/11 in which security and civil society are invoked in ways that impact upon the country's development agenda toward its southern Mediterranean partners. The first relates to Spain's external relations with its North African neighbours, and in particular the place of migration in shaping these relations over the last decade. The second concerns Spain's political relations with the representative organizations of its own Muslim populations. A third area of analysis pertains to the juridical‐institutional reactions of the state to the 11 March attacks: how have public authorities and civil society been affected and refashioned in the face of jihadist terrorism on the peninsula? The author argues that in each of these domains, the post‐9/11 context generally, and the 11 March attacks in particular, have elicited a securitization of civil society, which has in turn been associated with the country's international relations and domestic politics. Such securitization, however, has only been partially successful, thus vindicating the continuation of ‘politics as usual’ among Spain's state officials and its civil society.     

Geographical Imaginations and Spaces of Political Engagement: Examples from the Indian Alliance

This paper is concerned with the various ways in which geographical imaginations are inflected in politics. It draws on examples from a three‐way partnership of civil society organisations based in Mumbai, India. This movement seeks to reconfigure the governance of anti‐poverty strategies by placing "poor people" at the centre of its activities. The partnership, which refers to itself as the Alliance , is involved in the mobilisation and creation of a range of alternative geographical imaginations that are inflected in the production of new spaces of political engagement. By exploring two of the Alliance's strategies—enumerations and exhibitions—I will illustrate some of the ways in which these alternative geographical imaginations feature in the creation of spaces of political engagement. These strategies involve the practical demonstration of the capacities of the poor to donors and states, and reflect a particular conception of the poor and social change.
The spaces of political engagement formed in part through the Alliance's work depend significantly on a commitment to non‐party alignment, an approach that has received criticism from NGOs and commentators involved with urban poverty. I will argue that the Alliance represents a broad development alternative—rather than a form of alternative development—which nonetheless is making substantial progress in the politics of citizenship in Mumbai.