From Militant Particularism to Anti‐neoliberalism? The Anti‐Enron Movement in India

Abstract: The memorandum of understanding between Enron and the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, signed on 20 June 1992, set in motion the Dabhol Power Project, the largest corporate‐led venture in Indian history. But even while the project was gaining official clearance, it attracted considerable local opposition on environmental and livelihood related grounds. Additionally, the fact that Enron was awarded the contract by the Congress Party led state government of Maharashtra, in the absence of procedural transparency and open bidding, entangled the project in deep controversy. This paper, based on fieldwork, examines opposition to the Dabhol Power Project. I particularly focus on the relevance of militant particularism, and the importance of counter‐hegemony of the working class and/or the subaltern counter‐public in the context of multi‐scaled manifestations of neoliberal power.      

Governing Homo Subprimicus: Beyond Financial Citizenship,Exclusion, and Rights

The paper presents an alternative to scholarship on the distributional politics of finance that emphasizes citizenship‐based claims to new financial rights. To compensate for the dominance of exclusion‐based etiologies of financial marginality in financial geography, I reframe financial exclusion as a problem of financial government—that is, as a problem of conducting the conduct of risky populations without threatening the security and autonomy of financial markets. Drawing on Foucault's distinction between technologies of discipline and security, I describe how barriers to the extension of financial government create tiered processes of financial subject formation. The inchoate “subprime’ financial subject produced is the correlate of a specialized financial governmentality—a homo subprimicus eminently governable by financial means. I close by calling for greater attention to questions regarding the relationship between technologies for valorizing bare life, new systems of financially mediated value extraction, and emerging capitalist class processes.     

Winners and losers: Industry policy and gender concerns in the clothing industry

This article is broadly concerned with the federal government's industry policy in relation to women machinists in the clothing industry. From analysis of various reports and a series of face‐to‐face interviews with 120 people representing government, business and unions, as well as workers in various sections of the industry, I argue that the government's approach to restructuring this industry has not adequately incorporated an understanding of the issues facing the women who make up the majority of employees. The federal government's current textile, clothing and footwear (TCF) industry plan has failed to sufficiently address women's frequently disadvantaged position. In regard to the clothing industry, I will show that although there have been gradual gains for women, major victories are scarce, particularly for the growing number of outworkers.     

Ethno‐religious ‘unmixing’ of ‘Turkey’: 6–7 September riots as a case in Turkish nationalism*

Abstract. This article examines the structural and ideological factors that paved the way for the eruption of violence against non‐Muslims in Turkey on 6 September 1955. I argue that the conventional explanations that treat this instance of collective violence either as spontaneous rioting caused by over‐excited masses or as a government conspiracy that eventually got out of control are insufficient in that they fail to answer how and why so many people participated in these riots when we know that nothing on this scale ever took place in the history of the republic. In order to adequately understand the dynamics behind these riots one first needs to situate them in the broader historical context of the emergence, development and crystallisation of Turkish nationalism and national identity that marked the non‐Muslim citizens of the republic as the ‘others’ and potential enemies of the real Turkish nation. This historical analysis constitutes the first part of the article. Since ethno‐national riots do not always occur whenever there are conflicting identities, one also needs to explain the processes through which ethno‐national identities become radicalized and polarized. Thus, in the second part of the article, I focus on the economic, political and social conditions of the post‐single‐party era (post‐1950) that helped to radicalise the sentiments of the growing urban populace against the non‐Muslim ‘others’. I argue that it was the socio‐economic, ideological and political transformations of the Democrat Party era that made it possible for ethnic entrepreneurs and state provocateurs to mobilise the masses against a fictitious enemy.     

Saving nature or performing sovereignty? Ecuador's initiative to ‘keep oil in the ground’ (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The Yasuní‐ITT proposal by the government of Ecuador to “keep the oil in the ground” in the untouched, highly biodiverse Ishpingo‐Tambococha‐Tiputini sector of Yasuni National Park in exchange for compensatory 3.6 billion dollars from the international community, has been interpreted and analyzed by academics and the media alike as a radical environmental intervention. In this article I argue that the ITT initiative it less of a radical environmental plan, and more of a performative articulation of post‐IMF nationalism. I problematize the notion that the ITT initiative heralds a shift to a radical new environmental paradigm, and argue that it should be understood primarily as a critique of Ecuador's experience with foreign debt and neoliberal restructuring.     

A “Supertanker” Against Bureaucracy in the Wake of a Housing Crisis: Neoliberalizing Planning in Netanyahu's Israel

This paper critically questions the state's hostile takeover of planning regulation followed by experimentation initiated by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has been seeking to subordinate the planning apparatus to market calculus and to short‐term political ends. To substantiate this argument, I have examined a large corpus of documents (official government documents, planning records, and court appeals and rulings, and NGO reports) and analyzed the media coverage between 2011 and 2016. By introducing fast‐track planning that is firmly controlled by the central state and focusing on the fictitious delivery of housing units, the structure of the planning regulation has dramatically changed. Further, two already‐dominant government ministries (Finance and Defense) have been significantly empowered, becoming the supervisors of the reformed planning system. In a state captivated by neoliberal fixation and embroiled in a housing crisis, the restructuring of planning governance has been a means to an end.     

Populism,Hegemony, and the Politics of Natural Resource Extraction in Evo Morales's Bolivia

Is populism necessary to the articulation of counter‐hegemonic projects, as Laclau has long argued? Or is it, as ?i?ek maintains, a dangerous strategy, which inevitably degenerates into ideological mystification and reactionary postures? In this paper, I address this question by exploring the politics of discourse in Evo Morales's Bolivia. While, in the years leading to the election of Morales, a populist ideological strategy was key to challenging neoliberal forces, once the hegemony of the new power bloc was stabilised, indigenous demands for emancipatory socio‐environmental change began to be perceived as a threat to resource‐based accumulation. In this context, the populist signifiers that originated in indigenous‐popular struggles were used by the Morales government to legitimise repression of the indigenous movement. I argue, therefore, that ideological degeneration signals a problem not with populism per se, but rather with the class projects and shifting correlations of forces that underpin it in changing conjunctures.     

‘The Gospel of Health’: American Missionaries and the Transformation of Ottoman/Turkish Women's Bodies, 1890–1932

This article explores an overlooked aspect of American missionary modernisation efforts in the late Ottoman Empire: the attempted transformation of women's bodies. By the late nineteenth century, American missionary women and Ottoman government officials both viewed Ottoman women's bodies as a visible reflection of the empire's weaknesses, yet also as central to its survival and revival. The transformation of women's bodies from ‘uncontrolled’ to ‘robust’, they believed, was a prerequisite for a modern society. Through a close reading of missionary reports, correspondences and student memoirs, this study traces the development of physical education, hygiene and recreational sports at the missionary‐run American College for Girls (ACG) in Istanbul. Over time, the female teachers at the ACG partnered and collaborated with male Ottoman/Turkish government officials to implement these courses at girls’ schools across the region. While the government endorsed physical education as key to national progress and regeneration, the ACG educators framed it as a mode of international, feminist self‐empowerment. In reality, the missionaries continued to assert their own Western superiority and advance Orientalist notions through the education courses. By highlighting the shifts in women's body ideals, curricular development and nationalist rhetoric, I argue that women's bodies must be studied as a crucial site of missionary and republican reform.     

Positive Returns and Equilibrium: Simultaneous Feedback Between Public Opinion and Social Policy

This paper pushes forward political research from across disciplines seeking to understand the linkages between public opinion and social policy in democracies. It considers the thermostatic and the increasing returns perspectives as pointing toward a potentially stable set of effects running between opinion and policy. Both theoretical perspectives argue that opinion and policy are reciprocally causal, feeding back on one another. This is a general argument found in opinion‐policy literatures. However, much empirical research claims to model “feedback” effects when actually using separate unidirectional models of opinion and policy. Only a small body of research addresses opinion‐policy endogeneity directly. In this paper I consider an opinion‐policy system with simultaneous feedback and without lags. I argue that there is a theoretical equilibrium in the relationship of opinion and policy underlying the otherwise cyclical processes that link them. Given that available cross‐national data are cross‐sectional and provide limited degrees of freedom, an ideal theoretical model must be somewhat constrained in order to arrive at empirically meaningful results. In this challenging and exploratory undertaking I hope to open up the possibility of a general system of effects between public opinion and social policy and how to model them in future research. I focus on social welfare policy as it is highly salient to public interests and a costly area of government budgets, making it an area of contentious policymaking. Social policy is also a major part of the thermostatic model of opinion and policy, which was recently extended to the cross‐national comparative context (Wlezien & Soroka, 2012) providing a critical predecessor to this paper because identification of equilibrium between public opinion and social policy in any given society is greatly enhanced through comparison with other societies. This counterfactual approach helps to identify opinion‐policy patterns that may not change much within societies, but can be seen as taking on discrete trajectories between societies.     

MOVING CENTRAL KNOWLEDGE TO A NORTHERN PERIPHERY: EXPLORING LOGICS OF PUBLIC SECTOR JOB RELOCATION IN SWEDEN

Through the means of Swedish relocation politics, the capital of Stockholm has been constructed as a governing centre with the ability of giving something to a periphery thought of as unable to survive on its own. The relationship between centre and periphery, furthermore, produces images of what kind of knowledge can be located to “central” or “peripheral” regions. In this article I research the move of a knowledge‐intense government agency from Stockholm to Östersund, a smaller inland town in the north. The data were collected through an ethnographic case study of a government agency. I adopt a discourse theoretical approach that provides a clear ontology of identity and processes of identification. This enables research on how ideological images of places create geographical identity positions. The aim of this article is to explore how groups of professionals at the government agency identified with geographical identities dependent on whether they were seen as experts or generalists. In conclusion, identity positions became important for how the relocation was organized. The establishment of the two identity positions functioned to stabilize the social environment during the move, a time when many things at work seemed to be in turmoil. At the same time the positions worked to exclude other ways of identifying with (work)place, and in this way sustained asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination between centre and periphery.     

Land,Life and Labour: Indo‐Fijian Claims to Citizenship in a Changing Fiji

Since the coup of May 2000 an estimated 24,000 Indo‐Fijians have left Fiji, the majority of them moving to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. Those who remain in Fiji have faced increasing marginalisation as the government of Prime Minister Qarase has proposed significant reforms to both the administration of land and Constitutional arrangements of political representation. The situation has been further compounded through Qarase's recently proposed ‘Unity Bill’, which would grant amnesty to some of those responsible for the 2000 coup. These reforms are all part of an effort to ensure the ‘paramountcy’ of indigenous Fijians as well as to limit Indo‐Fijian participation in Fijian national politics. In this paper, I employ Greenhouse's concept of ‘empirical citizenship’ to analyse Indo‐Fijian responses to their political marginalisation in Fiji. After considering how national identities and sentiments of belonging are expressed in Indo‐Fijian discourse through the symbolic inter‐connection of the land and the Indo‐Fijian body, I argue that even if Indo‐Fijians are openly willing to recognize indigenous Fijian supremacy in national politics and the project of nation‐making, assertions of their right to live and labour on Fijian land constitute claims to ‘citizenship’ that are highly contestable in Fiji's current political climate.     

Cluster policy in the Basque country (1991–2002): constructing ‘industry–government’ collaboration through cluster‐associations

In this article the industrial cluster policy in the Basque Region (Spain) since the early 1990s is analysed as a social process, where public and private organizations and institutions have interplayed and fostered two interrelated outcomes: (a) the construction of cluster‐associations, contributing to the development of inter‐firm interactions and a more inclusive industrial associationism in the weak Basque industrial and business associative system; and (b) the construction of an industry–government collaboration dynamic within a traditional lack of industry–government interactive relations. These outcomes present some strengths and weaknesses, and indicate some potentials to improve the initiated regional ‘industry–government’ collaboration.     

Emperors,bishops, art and jurisprudence: the transformation of law in Eusebius of Caesarea

This article analyses the collection and repurposing of legal documents in the early fourth‐century historical writings of Eusebius of Caesarea. Some of these individual documents have been the object of repeated study; others are still largely neglected. But they are even more interesting, I suggest, when considered as a collective, as Eusebius’ careful editing reveals they were intended to be. This mobilization of collated and embedded law was, I argue, the meeting of two separate wider trends that took off in this early fourth‐century watershed moment – the so‐called late antique artistic aesthetic, and the gradually changing legal dynamic between government and governed. Eusebius used both as strategies to resist imperial dominance in the uncertain times in which he wrote, constructing an image of the bishop capable of going toe to toe with emperors. In doing so, he anticipated not just the growing conflict between church and state in the centuries to come, but the rhetorical strategies that would come to be employed.     

The atomic meal: The cold war and irradiated foods, 1945–1963

Following World War II, food technologists in the US participated in an Army‐led program to develop food irradiation technology. The program involved over 120 military, government, industrial, and academic institutions. Focusing on the MIT Department of Food Technology, I trace the networks that formed between these groups and their motivations for developing the technology. I argue that food irradiation was Cold War science directed towards the development of a consumer product, and that it highlighted the links between large‐scale military‐funded research and consumers' everyday lives. I suggest that researchers advocated for irradiation not because the technology produced better processed food, but because the development of the technology produced a number of valuable benefits for the researchers. These included increases in funding, materials, and prestige.     

Learning from Schools: School Choice,Political Learning,and Policy Feedback

This article investigates the policy feedback and political learning effects of school vouchers. Of particular interest is how market‐based policies affect the likelihood that program participants will connect their experiences with the policy to the government. I examine parent survey data from an evaluation of the Milwaukee school voucher program. I find that voucher parents are more likely than public school parents to perceive that the government has influenced their child's schooling and to believe that their experiences with their child's school have taught them about how government works. Further, voucher parents report that their experiences with the policy have made them more politically active. While majorities of voucher and public school parents support increased public school expenditures, there is some evidence that school vouchers may decrease support for public schools.     

Legal Manoeuvres and Violence: Law Making,Protest and Semi‐Authoritarianism in Uganda

This article explores the interplay between violent protest and the making of laws in Uganda. It advances two main arguments. First, since multipartyism was restored in 2005, the Ugandan government has repeatedly drafted intentionally contentious new laws in part to provoke, divide and politically manipulate opposition. Implementing these laws has often not appeared to be a priority; rather, drafting, debating and (sometimes) passing them represent tactical ‘legal manoeuvres’ geared towards political gain. Second, I argue that these manoeuvres can be linked to another trend since 2005: the rise in urban‐based protests and riots, which have often become violent and resulted in aggressive crackdowns by the state. In bringing these trends together, this article argues that the use of legislative processes as part of a strategic repertoire to destabilize political opposition has exacerbated unrest, especially among urban dwellers. Moreover, in response to rising protest the government has engaged in further legal manoeuvring. The analysis suggests that the semi‐authoritarian nature of the regime in power, where the symbolic importance of the legislature and relatively free media contend with fundamentally authoritarian tendencies at the centre, is propagating this cycle of legal manoeuvres and violence.     

THE CO-PRODUCTION OF NARRATIVE IN AN ENTREPRENEURIAL CITY: AN ANALYSIS OF CINCINNATI, OHIO, IN TURMOIL

In April 2001 Cincinnati, Ohio, erupted into violence and protracted unrest after the police shooting of an unarmed African‐American named Timothy Thomas. African‐American interest groups in the city subsequently organized an economic boycott of downtown businesses. In response to the demonstration and the boycott, the Cincinnati government issued a marketing campaign entitled ‘We're On the Move!’, intending to give nod to past failures and launch forward movement on their part. In this article I investigate the entirety of these events as narrative moments under the auspices of urban entrepreneurialism to answer the question: How does the local population inform, rather than simply mediate, the narrative administration of an urban entrepreneurial form of governance? I then turn to a response to the campaign by an African‐American newspaper columnist in Cincinnati to underscore a dialogic relationship between an entrepreneurial city and its citizens as it forms the presentation of entrepreneurialism. In turn, this conception allows for a more nuanced version of entrepreneurial governance more generally.     

Performing Rootedness in the Negev/Naqab: Possibilities and Perils of Competitive Planting

Through ethnographic and historical analysis of the Negev region of Israel, this article examines competitive planting as a common tool in land conflicts. In a context of disputed land ownership, some Bedouin Arab residents plant crops in defiance of government policy. Government enforcers of land‐use regulations destroy many of these crops and engage in counterinsurgent tree‐planting. I suggest that planting is such a potent tactic because it draws on “environmental idioms” of agricultural labor, the rootedness of trees, and a fundamental Jewish‐Arab opposition that have been central to the development of both Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms. For Bedouin Arabs, whose relationship to both nationalisms has long been contested, the multivalent symbolism of planting makes it a particularly promising tactic for asserting land claims. Further, I contend that these plantings demonstrate both the power of environmental idioms to structure land claims along ethnic lines and the creative potential of participants to challenge dominant environmental discourses by adding new connotations.     

All That Is Solid Melts into the Bay: Anticipatory Ruination and Climate Change Adaptation

This paper explores the shaping of Bangladesh's southern coastal region, often framed as the most climate vulnerable place in the world, as a zone of climate crisis. As rising waters threaten communities inhabiting the low‐lying coastal islands scattered across the deltaic plain, many within the government and donor community have identified shrimp aquaculture as a principal adaptation strategy. Shrimp aquaculture is integral to the dynamics of what I call anticipatory ruination, a discursive and material process of social and ecological destruction in anticipation of real or perceived threats. I elaborate anticipatory ruination as a process that both responds to and produces Bangladesh's climate crisis. I use this concept to explore not only the dynamics taking place in Bangladesh's delta region, but also the ways in which climate crisis is constituted more broadly.