Islam and the Dutch in the East Indies: Oppression or Opportunity?

ABSTRACT

Dutch colonial ambitions in the East Indies had to contend with Islam, and this contention intensified as colonisation progressed and Islamisation deepened. The Dutch made pragmatic alliances with Muslim leaders and sultans in pursuit of trade dominance and profits. This, combined with protestant reformation in the Netherlands, allowed for significant religious freedom in the East Indies. The Dutch did proselytize Christianity, with most success in the Outer Islands to the east, mostly because of an absence of a major established religion in those areas. They favoured coexistence over religious wars. In order to improve the lives of locals, Islamic movements were permitted to establish enduring institutions. In the early twentieth century, this included the two largest Muslims groups in the world, the traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulama and the reformist Muhammadiyah, which coincided with the emergence of political Islam in the form of the Islamic Traders Party. These formed important socio-religious structures that influenced political thought and modern state institutions, including the state ideology, the Pancasila, and the constitution, which obliged the state to accommodate religion.     

Mirage in the Desert? Access to Educational Opportunities in an Area of Social Exclusion

While for British policymakers the route out of social exclusion is paid work through the acquisition of educational qualifications, research shows that academic achievement in areas of social exclusion is often poor. Based on a study undertaken on an inner London council estate, this paper explores the experiences of a group of carers and their children's access to secondary school education. It demonstrates the importance of a geographical focus on inequality, and the need for a nuanced approach in explaining educational opportunities in socially excluded areas. It also counters the notion of working class people as an undifferentiated group, devoid of cultural capital, whilst at the same time acknowledging the structural constraints of place which limit the full exercise of agency, so that for many, the opportunities apparently open to them turn out to be illusory.     

Mobility and migration in Byzantium: who gets to tell the story?

This article underlines the importance of approaching written sources for what they are: authorial constructs. This is true also for depictions of mobility and migration. Byzantine authors instrumentalized these for their own purposes beyond the event at hand. Authorial focus, along with the requirements of the chosen literary genre, is also the reason for the different scales of actors that appear in these texts, whether large blurry masses of nameless people, smaller groups with a distinct profile, or finely drawn individuals.     

Is the Future of Mobility Electric? Learning from Contested Storylines of Sustainable Mobility in Iceland

Planning for sustainable mobility is a complex and demanding task and the knowledge of how to trade off multiple, often conflicting, goals is not entirely clear. One of the most contentious and confounding issues in the context of urban planning has been, and continues to be, the place of the automobile within the evolving sustainable mobility paradigm. The recent emergence of strong policy and planning support for the introduction of electric vehicles raises thorny questions as to whether or not this development will be complementary to, or conflicting with, other sustainable mobility planning goals, such as the pursuit of compact cities, restrictions on automobiles, promotion of walking and bicycling, and support for public transport. The results of a recent pilot study conducted in the Reykjavik city region suggest that a strategy of provision for electric vehicles on a large scale may represent a continuation of the dominant transport engineering approach, drawing scarce financial and institutional resources away from path-breaking measures such as the efforts to create denser development patterns and promote non-motorized and public forms of transport.     

‘The Claims of Asia and the Far East’: India and the FAO in the Age of Ambivalent Internationalism

If any nation were poised to actualize the developmental promises that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) extended to the international community, it was India. India's independence came in the wake of devastating famine in Bengal and the fears of its recurrence, and the nationalists who had midwifed India's freedom staked their legitimacy to the promise of food for all. Yet from independence, the FAO played only a marginal role in India's agricultural development, its projects reflecting a winnowing scale of ambition. From early investigations into the improved cultivation of basic food grains, the FAO's projects grew increasingly modest by the time of the Green Revolution, revolving around modest improvements to capitalist agriculture, from wool shearing to timber and fishery development. Instead, India drew more substantively upon resources made available by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the United States Technical Cooperation Mission and occasional Soviet largesse. Meanwhile, the Indian most associated with the FAO, B.R. Sen (Director-General, 1956–1967), struggled to align the Organization's capacities with India's scarcity crises, even as his own understanding of famine drew upon his experience as India's Director of Food during the Bengal Famine.     

Does the Structure of an Urban System Affect Income Disparities?

In this paper I analyze the impact of basic training and specialized training on the distribution of skill, income disparity, social welfare, and on the structure of a decentralized specialized city system. This is done in a spatial general-equilibrium model of a closed economy producing a single consumption good. The economy is populated with a continuum of unskilled labor with potential heterogeneous ability. The only consumption good can be produced by specialized technology or by general technology. Specialized technology requires specialized training that enables each worker to transform his potential ability into productivity. General technology requires basic training that enables all workers, independent of their potential ability, to produce the good at a constant marginal product. In this framework I show that such an equilibrium exists uniquely and is efficient. Then I characterize the conditions that lead to a different distribution of skills, a different system of cities, and generate income disparity endogenously. Thus, the paper presents a link among income disparities, social welfare, and the structure of an urban system that is new to this literature.     

Ambiguous immigrants? Examining the changing status of the English in New Zealand

Drawing on a qualitative interview‐based study of English migrants in New Zealand, this article examines, if and how, overseas migration triggers national sentiments that were previously relatively amorphous in their country of origin. In those cases where this occurs, it analyses the diverse and contextual orientations migrants display, and discusses the empirical and analytic challenges posed when seeking to conceptualise a category of persons that have been described as ‘ambiguous immigrants’. The study concludes that research on this ambiguity contributes to debates about the relationship between dominant ethnicity and national identity while highlighting the simplicities of many concepts used to describe and analyse ‘the English’.     

Misaligned Social Policy? Explaining the Origins and Limitations of Cash Transfers in Sudan

This article examines whether the transitional government in the wake of the December 2018 Sudanese revolution succeeded in realigning social policy with public demands. The article focuses on the evolution of cash transfer programmes from the 2012 cash programme under the Ingaz regime to the transitional government's programme 2021. While the recent programme was popularly viewed as a ‘World Bank programme’, its originators were in fact Sudanese professionals. Similarly, the Ingaz regime experimented with cash transfers before seeking out World Bank technical support. In this sense, cash transfers cannot be seen as an external imposition, as domestic actors have favoured them across different regimes. Yet, their appeal may still reflect the ‘choicelessness’ that Thandika Mkandawire associated with structural adjustment, as in both cases cash transfers were introduced as part of broader economic reform. Sudan's case is distinct in the sense that its domestic policy makers did not begrudgingly accept cash transfers but were enthusiastic instigators of them. The article traces the origins of this enthusiasm within Sudan's recent political history and explores the way in which alignment with international mainstream policy making locks Sudan into a bind. The country urgently needs to reverse the fragmentation of social policy along geographic and racial lines, yet these programmes do little to overcome such regional and racial inequalities. Thus, even after a popular revolution displaced the prevailing political settlement and called for radical change, policy makers remain misaligned to public demands.     

Who is in control of the international monetary system?

Although the financial and economic crisis did not directly hit the international monetary system, it has lead to the rethinking of the overall architecture that underpins the world economy. Can the current system of floating currency blocs with dollar‐based trade and reserves withstand the strains of the global adjustment ahead? It is time to consider alternatives. This article argues that the existing system needs to evolve into a multicurrency one in which a number of international currencies, ideally representing the main trading areas, have the function of storing value and providing the unit of measure. A multicurrency system would respond more flexibly to the demand for liquidity and would provide a way to diversify the accumulation of reserve assets. It is also more appropriate for the increasingly multipolar world economy. The article discusses how in today's larger and more integrated world economy the dependence on the dollar as the basis of both trade flows and financial reserves has become excessive, creating some fundamental imbalances. However, while the rationale for change is clear, the current system is locked in a form of stable disequilibrium where the status quo carries the lowest risk for most players in the short‐term. Any abrupt move away from the dollar could trigger trade flow disruption and exchange value losses. Policy cooperation should keep the imbalances under control and manage the transition to a more stable system. The system will evolve, albeit gradually. Looking at the steps taken by some countries, notably China, there is the gathering impression that this decade is one of transition, rather than a ‘Bretton Woods moment’. Any reshaping will have to bring in the views of the ‘rising powers’, China in particular, and their concerns about the limitations of the existing system and the increasingly asymmetric burden of adjustment that it imposes.     

Who Knew the Minds of the People? Specialist Knowledge and Developmentalist Authoritarianism in Postcolonial Ghana

By the mid-1960s, local-level development workers in Ghana were expected to act as the eyes and ears of the state, reporting on ‘the minds of the people’ and explaining their reactions to President Kwame Nkrumah's project of socialist reconstruction. This articles argues that through mass education, social welfare and community development plans, both the late colonial and early independent state sought to make its presence manifest in the everyday lives of its citizens, to bind them to a broader vision for their country, and to present their successes to the outside world. By identifying some of the competing models of social development that were promoted by British, Ghanaian and African-American experts in the aftermath of independence, this article investigates the role of specialist knowledge in the developmentalist authoritarianism which is often presented as a generic legacy of the colonial state in Africa.     

Destroying the Joint and Dying of Shame? A Geography of Revitalised Feminism in Social Media and Beyond

Has feminist geography really lost all relevance? This paper examines what the revitalisation of interest in feminist thought and practice, especially in Australia, means for geography. We illuminate the trajectory of the feminist revitalisation in new media and beyond through developing a spatial analysis influenced by Rose and Fincher. Notions of paradoxical space and issue publics inform this reading of two pivotal moments in the feminist revitalisation: first, the creation of Destroy the Joint, a campaign launched and maintained in Facebook and Twitter spaces; and second, the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's speech against sexism and misogyny in Parliament in October 2012. Both these moments, coming from political and public spaces, received worldwide interest, and we critically examine the context and ramifications of these instances while situating the institutional processes surrounding them within the growing feminist revitalisation. In so doing, we argue that these Australian‐based cases indicate a growing feminist movement that is open and multiply focused, connecting personal politics to public campaigning, and achieving material impacts. We conclude that developing a feminist geography of new media is a challenging task, as these spaces circumvent and renegotiate traditional spatial dimensions – including scale and place – through their dynamic networks. It is, nevertheless, a task worth doing.     

The evolution of elite high-rise condominiums in India: from the global to the neo-colonial?

The article focuses on the neo-liberal model of elite residence in India—the high-rise, high-density condominium. The growing presence of this model as an expression of social mobility indicates the critical role played by this new housing type in relation to the socio-cultural transformations advanced by neo-liberalism. This article, then, is an architectural inquiry into this new residential type within the contemporary setting of globalisation. I employ the idea of physical and social thresholds as a conceptual tool to investigate the progress of this spatial and cultural typology, following its injection into the Indian architectural landscape. I explore the multiplicity of physical thresholds within its spatial planning as a signal of manifest social relationships of increasing complexity. The two case studies in the global node of Mumbai explored in this research represent the beginning and the peak of development of this gated housing type. The methods used include spatial analyses of the design of the condominiums, participant observation and a reading of marketing material. The findings reveal that what started as a global residential type devoid of socio-cultural overlays has now evolved into a residential form with deeply entrenched cultural hierarchies echoing many attributes of colonial elite-status building.     

What are the Limits of Social Inclusion? Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Governance in Canada and the United States

ABSTRACT

Contemporary debates about poverty and its mitigation often invoke the idea of social inclusion: the effort to increase the capacities and opportunities of disadvantaged populations to participate more fully in the economy, polity, and institutions of developed societies. While practical outcomes have been inconsistent, this idea has been prominent in the social policies of both Canada and the United States. Both generally see themselves as liberal democracies committed to building socially inclusive societies, and both have adopted policies in support of that goal. However, we argue in this article that social inclusion, as presently conceived, fails to comprehend or address the distinctive situation of Indigenous peoples in both of these countries. Our critique focuses on four aspects of social inclusion as applied to Indigenous peoples: the external conception of needs, the individualization of both problems and solutions, the favoring of distributional politics over positional politics, and the conditionality of inclusion. We argue that both Canada and the United States need to reconceive social inclusion in ways that address these issues and that a more capacious conception of federalism may hold the key.     

Exclusive Visions? Representations of Family,Work and Gender in the Work of the British Social Exclusion Unit

The Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) of the British Government is a recent and innovative response to social problems in the UK. Through an examination of selected publications of the SEU, the article highlights some of the representations of family, work and gender which provide the discursive context in which the SEU operates and to which it, in turn, contributes. The article suggests that perspectives found in the post-1945 welfare state continue to influence approaches to problems of exclusion. Whilst there are areas in which current political thinking shows evidence of sensitivity to the social recomposition that has attended economic restructuring since 1970, it is argued that there remain tendencies within SEU discussions which reinforce a more nostalgic constitution of work, family and gender relations. Consequently, the article concludes that the potential of the social exclusion debate to grasp fundamental issues is yet to be fully realised.     

Agrarian Social Structure in the Central Lake District,c. 1574–1830: The Fall of the ‘Mountain Republic’?

Abstract

Many social commentators of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, notably those influenced by Romanticism, were keen to highlight the historical stability of agrarian life in the northern uplands. Founded on the supposed existence of an egalitarian ‘republic’ of smallholding yeomen, this stability was then contrasted to the apparently inexorable erosion of the economic position of such farmers around 1800. The present article uses records from the central Lakeland manor of Grasmere (with a comparison with the neighbouring manor of Langdale) to explore the agrarian social structure of the uplands between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It argues that while a stable core of farmers can be found in the early modern period, there is also clear evidence of greater social differentiation amongst the customary tenantry by the third quarter of the eighteenth century, well before the process began to be noticed by social commentators and Romantic writers.     

Who Pays the Ferryman? Industry Policy and Shipbuilding in Australia

The lightweight fast ferry industry that has emerged in Australia over the last couple of decades has been a remarkable and surprising success story. Given the contraction of manufacturing in general and traditional shipbuilding in particular, its growth is all the more noteworthy. This paper analyses the evolution of the industry and considers the impact of industry policy on its development. Although the effectiveness of industry policy in Australia has generally been undermined by a lack of political support and inadequate integration with other government policies, it was, nevertheless, an important part of this industry's expansion.     

Was the Revolution Tweeted? Social Media and the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia

Tunisia's Internet freedom prior to the “Jasmine Revolution” that overthrew longtime authoritarian leader Zine el‐Abidine Ben Ali has been described as roughly on par with that of China. Despite that, Tunisia's revolution has been described as one of the first “Twitter” or Internet revolutions, in which Internet technologies are said to have played a significant role This article illuminates how Internet technologies were (and weren't) used in challenging the Ben Ali regime. Based on interviews with Tunisian activists in early 2013, the research sheds light on Internet activities bridging street activism and Internet dissent. Whether through Internet or traditional face‐to‐face means, building the capacity to mobilize street protests long before mass mobilization was crucial to Tunisia's successful revolution.