Enacting power through networks

We argue here that processes of political centralization and hierarchy building can be profitably explored by focusing on how resources were strategically manipulated in search of power by people organized in social networks of varying sizes and spatial extents. Adopting this perspective encourages reconsideration of the ways in which such core concepts as structure, agency, and society can be redefined to cast new light on ancient power contests. In addition, we suggest that a network approach complements traditional emphases on processes of domination and resistance by drawing attention to the importance of alliances in shaping political formations. The potential utility of these precepts is illustrated in an example drawn from our research on Terminal Classic (800–1000 AD) political struggles in the Naco valley of northwestern Honduras. Special attention in this case centers on the manner in which craft products were manipulated by people of varying ranks to define and achieve goals as well as to control the actions of others. The study’s broader implications for the analysis of ancient political relations are highlighted at the essay’s conclusion.     

The camp and the question of community

Recent literature in camp geographies has sought to emphasize the significance of political agency among camp residents, particularly in refugee camps, as part of a critical reaction against the highly influential Agambenian conceptual vocabulary of exception and bare life. The concept of community has been integral to this body of work, with diverse accounts of the camp implicitly or explicitly positioning community as the natural scale through which camp resident and inmate agency is formulated, and yet there has hitherto been little research reflecting directly on the meaning that community takes on in the specific context of the camp. In this article we adopt Roberto Esposito's critique of the concept of community to problematize the assumption that camp communities necessarily constitute a space of empowerment and agency for camp residents and inmates. Drawing on Esposito's genealogical account of communitas (2010), whereby community is encountered not in terms of a property shared among individuals but instead as the loss of individuality and other forms of ‘the proper’, we suggest that the implementation of community, while generative of agency, is also fundamental to camp authorities and related regimes of power. Furthermore, we argue that the operation of camp communities includes its own forms of politics that are specific to the exceptional space of the camp and that potentially expose individuals to violence. We develop this argument through an experimental reading of communitas in relation to the two empirical contexts that have been most influential on the trajectory of camp studies within geographical debates, the concentration camp and the refugee camp, represented in this paper by Auschwitz and the contemporary archipelago of Serbian refugee camps respectively. The ambivalent account of power relationships emerging from these readings suggests that Esposito's rendering of community may have important analytic value in investigating the complexity of camp spatialities and the distinctive co-articulation of power and agency therein.     

Impacts of Market Liberalization on Regulatory Network: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Swiss Telecommunications Sector

This article looks at the reconfiguration of the regulatory actors' network, as induced by the liberalization and reregulation processes in utility sectors. It investigates the changes in governance structures and patterns of collaborative ties between actors resulting from these processes. Applying stochastic actor‐oriented modeling (SAOM) to data on the liberalization of the Swiss telecommunications sector over two decades, we test whether and to what extent structural changes driven by liberalization and reregulation express themselves through network effects, that is, through changing patterns of interactions between political authorities, regulators, regulatees, and interest groups. Our empirical tests highlight a rearrangement of the regulatory network and a reorganization of relational patterns around new actors, such as the sector‐specific regulatory agency, coregulators, and new operators.     

Agency Evolution, New Institutionalism, and 'Hybrid' Policy Domains: Lessons from the 'Greening' of the U.S. Military

Neoinstitutionalists applying the logic of rational choice institutionalism have leavened our understanding of public agency design and evolution in the domestic and national security policy domains. This paper seeks to advance theory building in empirically grounded ways by assessing the explanatory power of an important theoretical perspective (rational choice institutionalism), in an understudied "hybrid" policy domain where domestic and national security aims interact (domestic environmental policy and national security policy), and in an organizational type (the U.S. military) that has drawn scant attention from students of bureaucracy in political science, public administration, or public management. Analysis of three major efforts to green the U.S. military suggests that the patterns of politics accompanying agency evolution involving hybrid policy domains differ from domestic and national security domains in ways that limit the generalizability of rational choice institutionalism.     

Policymaking in the Parallelogram of Forces: Common Agency and Human Service Provision

The "congressional dominance" literature in political science provides valuable insights into the legislative control of administrative agencies. However, this literature tends to be conceptualized with respect to regulatory agencies, and it is not especially helpful in understanding the dynamics of policymaking in the provision of human services. After distinguishing the tasks of regulation and human services provision, we present an alternative: a common agency model of human service policy as the outcome of interest group bargaining. We illustrate its implications with an analytic narrative of service provision for the seriously mentally ill.     

The limits of control: Technological agency,urban terrain,strategy and the state in the 2014 Gaza War

This article reassesses of the role of military technologies both in normative strategic thought and in the critical geopolitics literature by problematising their shared tendency towards representing the power of military technologies in a binary and sometimes hyperbolic way in relation to the complexity of terrain and the emergent intensity of war. In order to do so, it borrows theoretically from Object-Oriented-Ontology, using Harman's concept of “duomining” in dialogue with other understandings of material agency from assemblage theory and Actor-Network-Theory. This interstitial epistemology is applied to analyse the political implications for the State of Israel of its military's decisions on the use of weapons in urban warfare during the 2014 Gaza War. Through this framing, the paper argues that technological agency is ambivalent to the project of state stabilisation, and can act across spatial and temporal boundaries in ways unanticipated by political and strategic decisionmakers. It also demonstrates, counterintuitively, that technological objects can exercise agency as much by their absence as their presence in an event. These findings foreground the need for a more accurate accounting of what technological objects are, not just what they do, alongside a more nuanced consideration of the contingency of their power to shape politics in relation to the complex milieu of human and non-human factors that comprise geopolitical phenomena.     

Policymaking in the Parallelogram of Forces: Common Agency and Human Service Provision

The "congressional dominance" literature in political science provides valuable insights into the legislative control of administrative agencies. However, this literature tends to be conceptualized with respect to regulatory agencies, and it is not especially helpful in understanding the dynamics of policymaking in the provision of human services. After distinguishing the tasks of regulation and human services provision, we present an alternative: a common agency model of human service policy as the outcome of interest group bargaining. We illustrate its implications with an analytic narrative of service provision for the seriously mentally ill.     

'Ladies are often very good scaffoldings': Women and Politics in the Age of Anne

The age of Anne saw unprecedented politicisation of society, the expansion of patronage and the election of ten parliaments between 1695 and 1715. If, as has been argued for the second half of the 18th century, such factors facilitated women's political participation, then the prerequisites for women's political involvement, at least at the level of the political elite, existed in the age of Anne. Yet we still know surprisingly little about the shape and extent of women's political participation beyond the dynamics of the Augustan court. This article encourages historians of women and politics to return to the age of Anne and consider women's political participation writ large. Was this period, which has often been seen as a political watershed, also a watershed for women's political involvement? Through an examination of Elizabeth Coke's involvement in the Derbyshire election of 1710, where she served as her brother's political agent, this article calls historians' attention to the activities of one group of politically-active Augustan women – those who served as intermediaries and agents. It argues that politics could be one aspect of a broader familial agency, one which saw women step in and out of family, household, estate and political management, as necessary. Nor, it argues, should these women be seen as mere Swiftian 'scaffoldings'– as means to an end for politically-ambitious men. As agents and intermediaries, women as well as men played recognized political roles, in similar ways, in campaigns across the country; their involvement requires closer examination.     

Ruling the Land of the Yellow Lama: Religion,Muli, and geopolitics in the 17th century Sino-Tibetan borderland

Abstract

The author scrutinizes the history of Muli (木里) as a semiautonomous political entity in the 17th century southern Sino-Tibetan borderland. By tracing Muli’s improvization in the face of multiple powerful regimes such as the Naxi kingdom, the Geluk Tibetans, the Khoshut Mongols, and the Chinese dynasties, the author explores how an indigenous notion of power took shape in the wake of geopolitical turbulence. Before 1580, Muli was a colony of the Naxi kingdom and dominated by the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. After 1640, it became a stronghold of the Tibetan Buddhist Geluk school and was deeply involved in the power struggles between the Geluk and Kakyu schools as well as the Tibetans and Mongols. Despite of acknowledging multiple sovereigns, Muli rulers utilized various tactics to hold on to power and prioritize local interest. The nuanced, yet creative, strategies Muli people adopted showcases the significant role border regimes played and their agency in shaping the power dynamics in pre-modern Eastern Asian borderlands.     

The politics of numbers: explaining recent challenges at the Australian Bureau of Statistics

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has experienced several significant challenges in recent years, including a declining operating budget, criticisms of its technical capability and concerns about political interference. In-depth interviews were conducted with senior ABS and Treasury Department officials to obtain their perspectives on the causes of the agency’s difficulties. Interview data were interpreted using frameworks from the political science literature on delegation, including the principal-agent paradigm, models of bureaucratic strategy and the public service bargains approach. The study finds that the principal-agent perspective does not help to explain the ABS’s difficulties, but that problems of administrative strategy and tacit bargains between the government and the ABS have contributed significantly to the agency’s challenges. The findings provide insights into the politics of official statistics, and shed light on the evolving role and status of expertise in Australian politics and government.     

International development aid and young people's participation in societal development of the global south

ABSTRACT

International development aid has in recent years sought to strengthen youths’ societal participation by cooperation between international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and local youth associations. In this paper, we address and conceptualise some of the underlying causes that may enable and/or limit such efforts to support youth participation in the global south. We seek to contribute to the growing literature exploring the multiple scales of young people's political agency. A core argument proposed is that notions of generational relationality, as seen in the case of international development aid targeting youth, must include conceptions of power as a topological relation across space.     

Children caring for their worlds: The politics of care and childhood

This paper builds on political geographies of children and youth by looking at the ways children express their political agency through acts of caring. Ethnographic research was conducted with a group of 19 children aged 9–11 years old in a rural town in New Zealand. This paper discusses the results of a photojournal project in which the children were given disposable cameras to use as a way to explain their cares and concerns in their daily lives and in the larger world around them. Drawing on Tronto's care ethic framework in which subjects are active in maintaining, continuing and repairing their worlds, the children's photojournals illuminated their abilities and efforts to care for their worlds. As a political concept, care brings attention to interdependences, connections and relationships that are essential to our individual and collective survival and often overlooked in liberal political theory. This paper demonstrates that the framework of care and exploring children's everyday caring practices help us better understand the often unacknowledged political agency of children.     

Discursive Agency: (Re‐)Conceptualizing Actors and Practices in the Analysis of Discursive Policymaking

Interpretive discourse analysis commonly claims to address the interrelation between actors and discourses. However, the analytical focus of most approaches is on structures (discourses) while much less attention is paid to agency. This paper explicitly addresses discursive agency in two steps. First, we systematically review theoretical and analytical dimensions of agency in existing interpretive discourse analysis approaches. This review reveals a set of shared assumptions; most notably a concept of “trialectic” agency emphasizing the constitution of agency among the individual, the (discursive) structures, and the researcher's interpretation. Second, we propose an analytical heuristic, the Discursive Agency Approach, which is developed on the basis of the review and own empirical data. The proposed approach consists of four elements: (1) policy discourses, (2) political institutions, (3) agents defined via a set of characteristics, and (4) strategic practices. This approach is meant to facilitate a systematic exploration of agency under a discourse perspective, tackling the question of how a policy is constituted through the agency ascribed to its proponents in dynamic discursive processes, and how actors acquire political relevance through discursive means. To enable this goal, we propose distinct research steps and associated methods that link the approach to existing means of analysis.     

Alternative pathways to power in late Postclassic Highland Mesoamerica

In recent years, scholars have become dissatisfied with neoevolutionists’ view of social evolution as a series of step-like transformations leading to political centralization and have refocused attention away from traditional theory and toward issues of agency, power sharing, and alternative pathways to complexity. To build on this emerging theoretical orientation, we propose that collective action theory provides a useful path to explaining social change. To evaluate this idea, we make use of ethnohistoric and archaeological sources on the Postclassic (AD 1250–1521) of Highland Mesoamerica (Central Highlands of Mexico and the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca), to investigate the causes and consequences of key aspects of sociopolitical change. Of the study states, Tlaxcallan, Cholula, Texcoco, and other central Highlands polities relied extensively on internal revenues and, accordingly, implemented power sharing, control of political officials, and infrastructural power. Conversely, states in eastern Puebla and the Mixteca Alta focused on external revenues and, thus, exhibited greater degrees of despotic governance. These results suggest that collective action provides a useful starting point for understanding state-building in Highland Mesoamerica and merits further testing with other Mesoamerican cases as well as societies in other world areas.     

Regulating commercial public service broadcasting: a case study of the marketization of Norwegian media policy

This article looks at the issues facing the regulation of commercial public service broadcasting in Norway. A document analysis of the 2010 renegotiation process to renew TV 2’s public service licence illuminates how a general marketization affects the regulation of the television sector. This process comments on Hallin and Mancini’s model of democratic corporatism in the Nordic countries regarding the power of the state to regulate private media enterprises as cultural institutions. As such, the process of commercialization should include not only the broadcasting sector, but also the political sector. As part of a solution to retain TV 2’s licence agreement, the government effectively had to re‐regulate the cable distribution sector. This case study demonstrates not only the enduring strength and value of the public service institution in a political context, but also the extent to which regulation is guided by technical and economic forces to sustain democratic considerations.     

Beyond the predicted: expanding our understanding of creative agency in international development through practice and policy

This article analyses the framing of creative agency within the field of international development before going on to challenge some of the limitations of that framing. The critique is informed by research undertaken with artist-led initiatives in Central America that reveals the political implications of that framing and, at the same time, points to alternative forms of creative agency at work. The paper highlights the approaches of a number of international development donors whose policies appear able to support more expansive and emancipatory conceptions of agency for artists and artist-led initiatives, and makes a claim for the political importance of such policy platforms, despite some on-going limitations.     

Dilemmas of Counter‐Mapping Community Resources in Tanzania

Recent work has celebrated the political potential of ‘counter‐mapping’, that is, mapping against dominant power structures, to further seemingly progressive goals. This article briefly reviews the counter‐mapping literature, and compares four counter‐mapping projects from Maasai areas in Tanzania to explore some potential pitfalls in such efforts. The cases, which involve community‐based initiatives led by a church‐based NGO, ecotourism companies, the Tanzanian National Parks Authority, and grassroots pastoralist rights advocacy groups, illustrate the broad range of activities grouped under the heading of counter‐mapping. They also present a series of political dilemmas that are typical of many counter‐mapping efforts: conflicts inherent in conservation efforts involving territorialization, privatization, integration and indigenization; problems associated with the theory and practice of ‘community‐level’ political engagement; the need to combine mapping efforts with broader legal and political strategies; and critical questions involving the agency of ‘external’ actors such as conservation and development donors, the state and private business interests.     

实处与窄处:民族复兴运动时论中的新生活运动

国民政府初期的民族复兴运动本起于民间,是"思潮"的一种强化说法,但这种社会意识氛围,正好为取得执政地位不久的国民党当局所运用。蒋介石亲自发起新生活运动,使时人发生民族复兴运动可落到实处的想象,但其提倡的礼义廉耻、服从命令、国民生活军事化所包含的特定政治意图,暴露出严重排他性和狭隘性,"实处"沦为"窄处",效果难彰,变成"纸上的运动"。这可能是常态建设"运动"化、社会运动"政治化"很难避免的结局。     

Colonial encounters,local knowledge and the making of the cartographic archive in the Venetian Peloponnese

Current research on the cartography of the Venetian Empire rests on a state-centred perspective which reduces maps to mere technical tools in the service of maritime expansion and colonial government. In contrast, this paper argues that such an approach cannot sufficiently account for the multiple ethnocartographic transactions between Venetian authorities and local communities which defined Venetian map-making projects. Taking the seventeenth-century conquest of the Peloponnese as its focus, the paper proposes to rethink the Venetian cartographic archive as constituted through a set of socio-cultural and political practices involving both colonial surveyors and native inhabitants. By analysing the assemblage of cartographic knowledge in the context of the encounter between colonisers and colonised, the paper examines topographical surveys as the product of cross-cultural communication shaped through negotiation, competition and unequal dialogue. Ultimately, the paper aims to show the heuristic value of a dialogic approach to cartography for a better understanding of both the colonial society of the Venetian Peloponnese and the making of knowledge in Venice's overseas empire.     

"二二八"事件中国民政府派兵问题再探讨

“二二八”事件是台湾光复后一股强烈的民怨所引发的政治事件。爆发之初的一周内 ,台湾当局未向国民政府请兵镇压 ,而是千方百计地封锁消息。然而 ,由于台湾当局对局势的错误估计和官僚态度 ,台湾局势逐渐失控。面对当时复杂、混乱的局面 ,台湾当局反应过度 ,将台湾民众正常的政治要求错误地定性为暴乱 ,向中央政府请兵赴台。国民政府 (主要是蒋介石 )在错误信息下进行了错误的判断和错误的决策 ,派兵赴台镇压 ,终于酿成惨案