The New Nature of Things? Canada's Conservative Government and the Design of the New Environmental Subject

Since coming to power in 2006, Canada's government under Stephen Harper has worked to recalibrate federal regulatory, legislative and economic development frameworks as they overlap in the littoral zone of the environment. We argue that Harper's Conservative government is pursuing a totalizing strategy in reconfiguring the desired Canadian environmental subject. This strategy approaches an integrated design that eclipses the incremental strategic options most Canadian federal governments have understood themselves to be constrained by. This design's basic features include the discursive strategies employed to collapse “the environment” into a singular resource extraction paradigm, a programmatic concentration of power to the executive branch of the Canadian government, and a classical conservative ideology that associates environmental regulation and management with dominion over and improvement of national territory, to the exclusion of other frames and relations. We query the articulation of consent and certainty in relation to the environment and extractive economies in Canada.     

The strange case of ‘John Black’ and ‘Mr Hyde’: constructing migrating Jamaicans as (un)worthy nationals

This paper examines how migrating Jamaicans were constructed as ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’ of Jamaican diasporic membership in the early years of statehood, to demonstrate the role of nationalist cultural repertoires in constructing particular diasporic imaginaries. I conduct a discourse analysis of Jamaica's national newspaper, The Daily Gleaner, between 1962 and 1966, a period encompassing crucial transitions in Jamaican migration movements and from colony to statehood. I argue that tropes of respectability present in Afro‐creole nationalist ideology form the cultural repertoires used to distinguish migrants' actions as worthy or unworthy of national membership. These distinctions specify who ‘counts’ as part of the diaspora and how migrants of different social positions may claim and articulate their membership.     

East and West in Jewish nationalism: conflicting types in the Zionist vision?

ABSTRACT. This article analyses the ethnic and civic components of the early Zionist movement. The debate over whether Zionism was an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement or a Western‐civic movement began with the birth of Zionism. The article also investigates the conflict that broke out in 1902 surrounding the publication of Herzl's utopian vision, Altneuland. Ahad Ha'am, a leader of Hibbat Zion and ‘Eastern’ cultural Zionism, sharply attacked Herzl's ‘Western’ political Zionism, which he considered to be disconnected from the cultural foundations of historical Judaism. Instead, Ahad Ha'am supported the Eastern Zionist utopia of Elchanan Leib Lewinsky. Hans Kohn, a leading researcher of nationalism, distinguished between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ nationalist movements. He argued that Herzl's political heritage led the Zionist movement to become an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement. The debate over the character of Jewish nationalism – ethnic or civic – continues to engage researchers and remains a topic of public debate in Israel even today. As this article demonstrates, the debate between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Zionism has its foundations in the origins of the Zionist movement. A close look at the vision held by both groups challenges Kohn's dichotomy as well as his understanding of the Zionist movement.     

Walker Connor's political psychology

In a 2002 overview, Daniele Conversi rightly highlights ‘Nationalism as an emotional bond’ as a central theme in Walker Connor's works. Nearly half a century on from Connor's initial assertions, the discipline of psychology has made important strides in understanding the social‐psychological dynamics that influence nationalist feelings. Building on this base of psychological evidence, this essay asks two questions. First, to what degree are Connor's claims supported by or compatible with what psychologists now know? Second, to the extent that Connor's arguments are correct, to what degree have scholarly understandings of nationalist politics recognised the implications of Connor's insights? I conclude that Connor's insights stand up remarkably well, but few have picked up on them, to the lasting detriment of our field of study.     

Glyphosate regulation and sovereignty politics around the world

Bayer's best-selling herbicide, glyphosate, is a once in a generation product. This pesticide has come to symbolize widespread opposition to corporate influence over agrochemical regulation and led to calls for greater democratic accountability in science. In the 1960s, the modern environmental movement was born from campaigns against the insecticide DDT. In the 2010s, glyphosate is helping to foster new coalitions between environmentalists and nationalist groups calling for chemical sovereignty. This guest editorial describes how glyphosate has helped shape these movements in postwar Sri Lanka and the European Union before and after Brexit.     

Reconsidering nationalism and feminism: the Kurdish political movement in Turkey

Feminist scholars have documented with reference to multiple empirical contexts that feminist claims within nationalist movements are often side‐lined, constructed as ‘inauthentic’ and frequently discredited for imitating supposedly western notions of gender‐based equality. Despite these historical precedents, some feminist scholars have pointed to the positive aspects of nationalist movements, which frequently open up spaces for gender‐based claims. Our research is based on the recognition that we cannot discuss and evaluate the fraught relationship in the abstract but that we need to look at the specific historical and empirical contexts and articulations of nationalism and feminism. The specific case study we draw from is the relationship between the Kurdish women's movement and the wider Kurdish political movement in Turkey. We are exploring the ways that the Kurdish movement in Turkey has politicised Kurdish women's rights activists and examine how Kurdish women activists have reacted to patriarchal tendencies within the Kurdish movement.     

Excavating the Pilbara: A Polanyian Exploration

Taking its cues from the ‘substantivist’ economics of Karl Polanyi, the paper retraces a socio‐economic history of the Pilbara from the pastoral capitalism of the region's initially tenuous colonial settlement to the contemporary regime of extractive capitalism. Spatial fixes have been etched deeply into the landscape of this heterogeneously ‘productive’ region, but crises of social reproduction have remained endemic. Since the nineteenth century, disequilibrium has been the reigning principle, as successive failures of commodification and marketisation have marked a long and non‐linear history of double movements.     

Property Rights for Biodiversity Conservation and Development: Extractive Reserves in the Brazilian Amazon

Many of the world's most valuable biodiverse areas are successfully managed by indigenous communities, often under peculiar property rights structures. In many cases, these communities are economically disadvantaged, even by local standards. But can particular local property rights regimes which are ecologically successful also allow communities to compete productively in market economies? The extractive reserves of the Brazilian Amazon offer an opportunity for investigating the connections between property rights, conservation and development in the context of tropical forests. This article aims to analyse whether the existing property rights in these reserves — an idiosyncratic mixture of public, collective and private property rights — can support the explicit development aim of a competitive, yet sustainable, exploitation of the area's natural resources. The analysis identifies three promising development paths open to extractive reserves, but points to a fundamental contradiction between the static structure of the property rights system and the dynamic nature of two of these paths. The current design of internal property rights fails to take into account the broader economic context in which reserves must generate a viable revenue stream. If extractive reserves are expected to develop without reliance on external aid, then changes to the property rights structure both inside and outside the extractive reserves have to be explicitly considered.     

Labour Bureaucracy and Labour Officialdom in Evo Morales's Bolivia

Evo Morales has labelled his government the ‘government of social movements’, and much has been written on relations between social movements and the state in Bolivia since the turn of the century. The Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) — Bolivian Workers’ Central — has, however, remained largely absent from discussions in much of the literature. This article seeks to analyse the position of the COB under Morales, and to explore the nature and consequences of its relationship with the government over the past 12 years. The article differentiates between the concepts of labour bureaucracy and labour officialdom and examines how they can be used as analytical lenses that shed light on the position of the COB today. The author argues that during Bolivia's neoliberal period (1985–2005) the need to look after the COB bureaucratized union structures, as personal needs of the leadership were placed above those of the Bolivian working classes. This then allowed Morales's government to easily co‐opt sections of the labour movements’ leadership to form a labour officialdom, leaving the COB unable to challenge the continuation of the neoliberal structure of the economy and represent the majority of the country's working classes.     

Politics and the nation: nationalist mobilisation of ethnic differences

Abstract. Based on a critique of the exogenous and expressive views of politics underlying many studies of nationalism, this article analyses the political factors that affect nation‐building processes in a direct manner. First, ethnicity should be considered not so much as an historical and objective starting point but as the outcome of nationalist intellectuals' efforts at filtering and selecting political and cultural elements. It is important to examine the structure and genealogy of nationalist ideological capital using myth/symbol analysis or frame analysis. Second, one of the key concepts in the study of nationalist movements is the Political Opportunity Structure, as it refers to the developmental context, both institutional (democratisation, decentralisation, etc.) and strategic (potential allies, electoral dealignments, etc.). In this sense, ethnic regulation policies should not be taken as mere effects or responses, but as decisive intervening causes in the very process of national identity‐building. Finally, this article argues that rational choice analysis and collective action logic can be found useful in explaining the successes or failures of nationalist movements that attempt to mobilise and organise politically as mass phenomena.     

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.     

Sub‐state nationalism and the left–right divide: critical junctures in the formation of nationalist labour movements in Belgium*

Abstract. Despite their similar political agendas, sub‐state nationalist movements in the industrialised West align themselves on different positions along the left–right spectrum. Through an analysis of Belgian sub‐state nationalist movements, this article proposes an explanation for this phenomenon by focusing on critical junctures. In particular, the focus is on the difference between Walloon and Flemish nationalist labour movements. Walloon nationalism has historically been led by socialist trade unions, while Catholic trade unions form a core part of the Flemish nationalist movement. The article seeks to explain this pattern by analysing the critical political alliances formed during the introduction of universal suffrage. The elections of 1894 established socialists as the dominant force in Wallonia and Catholics as dominant in Flanders. The emerging pillarised social structure ensured the reinforcement of the initial choices.     

Regional development in a resource production system: long distance commuting,population growth,and wealth redistribution in the Western Australia Goldfields

Resource towns often exist on a knife‐edge, largely depending upon global demand for their resource/s and, at the same time, playing a critical role in the development of a nation. The transition from single resource towns to diversified economies has been modelled on several occasions, but their application to other resource locales is difficult given the unique interplay of geographic, political, social, and economic factors. Nonetheless, Innis' Canadian staples theory may explain the political motivations of resource extraction and exportation, not least in relation to the Western Australia Goldfields. This paper seeks to explore the theory's potential in this context by examining the implications of high labour mobility. It employs a two‐step process using, first, a social network analysis to map the entire Australian labour commuting network and, second, a regression analysis of commuting, regional wealth, and population size against population change. While the Goldfields historically grew in line with processes described by Innis' theory, contemporary high labour mobility has created a variegated landscape of different development dynamics and trajectories. This finding carries implications for network patterns of residence and work. Labour acts to extend the distribution of wealth by sending incomes to the metropolitan core and to amenity‐rich regional towns across the State and nation. In such light, regional development scholars must view the resource town in its broader urban system of distinct but interlocked, and sometimes overlapping, activity nodes.     

Unearthing Women's Anti‐Mining Activism in the Andes: Pachamama and the “Mad Old Women”

Women play an important role in social activism challenging the expansion of extractive industries across Latin America. In arguing that this involvement has been largely unrecognised, this paper explores Andean Peruvian and Ecuadorian women's accounts of their activism and the particular gendered narratives that the women deploy in explaining and legitimising this activism. These discussions contribute to understanding the patterning of grassroots activism and making visible the gendered micro‐politics of resistance and struggle around natural resource use, as well as to understanding the gendered and strategic ways in which women contest dominant discourses of development.     

When nationalism beats populism: The secessionist movement in Texas

Six members of the Republican Party have presented and supported a House Bill in the Texas House of Representatives proposing a referendum to decide whether Texas should leave the United States. This initiative has been seen as a success by the Texas Nationalist Movement, who has been advocating for Texit for years. Applying frame analysis on an extended corpus of Texas nationalist sympathisers' statements, this article empirically explores the discourse of the Texas Nationalist Movement. The analysis contributes to recent literature on new nationalist movements and shows that Texas nationalism articulates its discourse around a homogeneous and exclusionary national conception based on the need to achieve independence as a solution to the country's problems.     

The Political Construction of Extractive Regimes in Two Newly Created Indian States: A Comparative Analysis of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh

This article presents a multidimensional account of the politics of resource extraction in two subnational regions of India in response to the question: what are the political conditions that facilitate extraction? Emerging from the same moment of state creation in 2000, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh are adjacent mineral-rich states with similar demographic profiles and comparable levels of economic development. The authors argue that despite these similarities and India's highly centralized legislative framework for natural resource governance, the two states have developed distinctive ‘extractive regimes’ in the years since statehood, which contrast in important ways across three dimensions: political organization and history, institutional effectiveness, and the nature and management of social resistance. The article offers the first in-depth, comparative account of how subnational territorial reorganization in India acts as a critical juncture enabling the formation of extractive regimes, which have also converged in important ways in recent years.     

‘Peasantist nationalism’ in inter-war Greece (1927–41)

Abstract

‘Peasantist nationalism’ was a new radical nationalist discourse in the twentieth century. The crisis in agriculture in the 1920s, urbanism and the perceived overpopulation of the cities were important social factors that instigated the intellectual construction of the ‘peasantist nation’. Peasantist nationalism was by and large constructed by agronomists, a new stratum of technocrats who used nationalism as a vehicle for social mobility and their entry into the strata of the organic intellectuals of the bourgeoisie. Peasantist nationalist ideas, set forth earlier by the agronomists, were adopted by Metaxas' quasi-fascist regime and upgraded to the level of the state's hegemonic ideology.     

Authors and Authoritarianism in Central Asia: Failed Agency and Nationalising Authoritarianism in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan

Abstract

This paper aims to reconstruct widely accepted concepts of the top-down authoritarian nature of Central Asian politics in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan through a comparative study of the pro-democratic movements that emerged in the late 1980s. By analysing data from interviews with the cultural elites of the late Soviet perestroika period and data on the indigenous nationalist movements such as Erk, Zheltoksan, Birlik and others, we question why such nationalist movements did not “survive” or emerge as a significant political platform as promised in post-independence Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and why they failed to change the political outlook of one party rule or the dominance of one nationalising regime. Furthermore, we analyse how such nationalist movements had an opportunity to turn into semi-democratic movements but failed to transform after their agenda (arguably, independence) was achieved, leaving “communists-turned-nationalists” to continue their policies in newly formed countries. Thus, the paper also looks at how these cultural elites eventually contributed to the local “authoritarianism” and lack of plurality in views and identifications.     

The Anti‐Essentialist Choice: Nationalism and Feminism in the Interaction between Two Women's Projects

Abstract. Two cross‐national women's organisations, one in Northern Ireland the other in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, are observed here in interaction with each other. The article explores the connection between their ability to sustain such cross‐community alliances and their choice to be women's projects. In so doing, it addresses the question ‘are feminism and nationalism compatible?’ Not all the women are ‘anti‐nationalist’ in philosophy, but they draw distinctions between variants of nationalism, and may be described as ‘anti‐essentialist’. The article distinguishes between variants of ‘feminism’, recognising it, too, as a plurality of movements. An anti‐essentialist understanding of ethnicity and nation is partnered in both the Network and Medica by an anti‐essentialist feminism, in which a woman's family role is minimised and value placed instead on her autonomy and agency. Certain forms of feminism and nationalism are thus compatible – but the configuration may be progressive or retrograde.     

Gendered Agendas: The Secrets Scholars Keep about Yorùbá‐Atlantic Religion

Whereas scholars have often described the material interests served by any given social group's selective narration of history, this article catches scholars in the act of selectively narrating Yorùbá‐Atlantic cultural history in the service of their own faraway activist projects. Anthropologist Ruth Landes' re‐casting of the Afro‐Brazilian Candomblá religion as an instance of primitive matriarchy not only encouraged feminists abroad but also led Brazilian nationalist power‐brokers to marginalise the male, and often reputedly homosexual, priests who give the lie to Landes's interpretation. In the service of a longdistance Yorùbá nationalist agenda, sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi has declared traditional Yorùbá society ‘genderless’, and found, among both North American feminist scholars and Yorùbá male scholars, allies in concealing the copious evidence of gender and gender inequality in Yorùbá cultural history. What these historical constructions lack in truth value they make up for in their power to mobilise new communities and alliances around the defence of a shared secret. The article addresses how politically tendentious scholarship on gender has inspired new social hierarchies and boundaries through the truths that some high‐profile scholars have chosen to silence.