The future lies beneath: Mineral science,resource-making,and the (de)differentiation of the Peruvian underground

Engaging with recent scholarship on the relations among science, resources, and territory, this paper examines the role of late-nineteenth-century mineral science in the rendering of the Peruvian underground as a knowable and actionable space. I focus on the mineralogical work of Italian-born naturalist Antonio Raimondi, identifying in it a dual dynamic of geo-political differentiation and ontological dedifferentiation. On the one hand, Raimondi constructs Peruvian national territory as distinct due to the abundance and diversity of minerals contained in its subsurface. On the other, his mineralogy was undergirded by the idea that Peru's minerals were ontologically equivalent to minerals anywhere else, and thus knowable through ‘universal’ scientific knowledge practices. Both aspects of Raimondi's mineral science reflected an underlying aim: stimulating the ‘rebirth’ of Peruvian mining. Yet, I suggest that the influence of Raimondi's mineralogical work on the history of resource-making in Peru lay not in its immediate utility for political-economic calculation, but rather in its contribution to an imaginary of Peru as mineral-rich and underexploited. In conclusion, I call attention to the need for research on the political economies of Earth science to approach science as an historically and geographically situated practice, to attend to the multiple (e.g., calculative and symbolic) dimensions of scientific activities, and to be attentive to ways in which the logics and aims of Earth science may not fully intersect with those of capital and the state.     

Thai Labour NGOs during the ‘Modern Slavery’ Reforms: NGO Transitions in a Post-aid World

This article explores how domestic NGOs responded to new opportunities that emerged during the 2015–2020 ‘modern slavery’ labour reforms in Thailand's seafood sector. The analysis takes place against the background of civil society transitions in a ‘post-aid’ setting. Like NGOs in other middle-income countries, the Thai NGO sector has struggled to remain relevant and financially viable in recent decades, as international donors have withdrawn from countries with steadily declining poverty rates. As a result of the ‘developmental successes’ of Thailand, the NGO sector needed to rethink its strategies. Examining the modern slavery labour reform process provides an opportunity to understand the strategic choices available to NGOs in the face of several important phenomena: the emergence of new actors such as international philanthropic donors; the growing influence of the private sector in governance matters; and the need for NGOs to balance multiple strategic alliances. The article draws on in-depth interviews to explore narratives of Thai labour NGO adjustments during the period of the modern slavery reform. The study contributes to a better understanding of how NGOs in post-aid countries transition and adapt to changing circumstances by embracing new roles as ‘sub-contractors’ for emerging global philanthropic donors and as ‘partners’ of private corporations.     

Challenging the ‘absent state’: Neoliberal extractivist governance and state effects in the northwest Peruvian Amazon

Natural resource extraction has been the base of Peruvian economic growth, notably since the neoliberalization of the economy in recent decades. Academic and media accounts portray Peru as an absent state – one of weak institutions to exert environmental control and guarantee citizens' rights – particularly in remote resource extraction areas. This article scrutinizes this idea of absence in the context of neoliberal extractivist governance, via the case of a mining conflict surrounding the creation of the Ichigkat Muja National Park (PNIM) in the Cordillera del Cóndor, in the northwest Peruvian Amazon. We argue that the state is not absent: it is the outcome of contested and re-negotiated relations, institutions, and ideologies. We posit that the goal of guaranteeing private investment shapes state agents' attitudes and interventions to address conflicts. Based on key informant interviews and the review of official social conflict reports, we examine two roles of the state: as a protector of rights and a provider of basic services. We find that, in this case, the regional government's recognition of citizens' rights appears ambiguous, and in general, the state's role as a provider of basic services is deployed to mitigate conflicts that affect significant extractive projects or involve intense social protest. Thus, the neoliberal project of the Peruvian state is mediated in complex relations, constituting a particular and evolving form of neo-extractivism, where social investment is functional to guarantee mining.     

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.     

A Picturesque Modernity in 1920s Peru and Argentina: Ruins,Cuzco and Americanism in the Photographic Reportages of Variedades and Plus Ultra

This essay focuses on a series of pictorial reportages on the city of Cuzco and the surrounding region published in the Peruvian illustrated magazine Variedades in 1924 and 1925. Looking at the interplay of the aesthetic and documentary value of photographs, I analyse how the reportages on Cuzco’s architecture and ruins contributed to the indigenista proposal of regional and national identity and how, in so doing, they articulated an idea of modernity which opposed the main narrative of Western modernization produced by the magazine. I argue that Variedades became the discursive place of an interplay between opposite ideas of modernity since it afforded its readers-viewers a dual, almost conflictive, experience. Moreover, I posit that the magazine ‘mediated’ the regional discourse for the Limeño readers through the discourses of tourism and the picturesque familiarizing them with those ‘unknown’ regions. By comparing the reportages with similar documents published in the same decade by the Argentine magazine Plus Ultra, I also show that this was not something exclusive to Peru, but rather part of a broader Americanist trend that was shaping the relationship between native tradition and modernization as well as giving form to a proposal for a ‘pan-American’ identity in the 1920s.     

Mining Formalization at the Margins of the State: Small‐scale Miners and State Governance in the Peruvian Amazon

This article analyses the Peruvian government's quest to formalize small‐scale mining in the Amazon as a political process which shows how state governance problems are reproduced in the margins of the state. It asks why the central state is unable to govern mining activities in the Madre de Dios region, and examines how small‐scale miners have reacted to state attempts to formalize their activities. The author argues that, through political agency and the reproduction of ‘hybrid’ formal and informal institutions, small‐scale miners have learned to contest, reinterpret and build alternatives to central state governance. The article contributes to the literature on development policies by showing how difficulties in implementing regulatory policies may be analysed as governance problems, particularly in regions like the Amazon, where the state apparatus is not well established.     

The re-emergence of wardship: Aboriginal Australians and the promise of citizenship

In this paper, I suggest that the category of ‘ward,’ a designation used for Aboriginal Australians in the 1950s and 1960s, has re-emerged in contemporary Northern Territory (NT) life. Wardship represents an in-between status, neither citizens nor non-citizens, but rather an anticipatory citizenship formation constructed by the Australian state. The ward is a not-yet citizen, and the deeds, acts, and discourses that define the ward's capacities to act as a political subject can maintain their anticipatory nature even as people ‘achieve’ formal citizenship. Wardship can be layered on top of citizen and non-citizen status alike. Rather than accounting for the grey areas between ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen,’ therefore, wards exist beyond this theoretical continuum, demanding a more nuanced accounting of political subjectivities and people's relationships to the state.I trace the emergence of the category ‘ward’ in the 1950s and 1960s in Australia and its re-emergence for Aboriginal Australians impacted by the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response legislation. The promise of citizenship offered by the status of ‘ward’ is built upon expectations about family life, economic activity, and appropriate behaviour. These assumptions underscore an implicit bargain between individuals and the state, that neoliberalised self-discipline will lead to both formal citizenship rights and a sense of belonging. Built-in impediments, however, ensure that this bargain is difficult, if not impossible, to fulfil.     

Participation and Power: Poor People's Engagement with India's Employment Assurance Scheme

‘Participation’ has become an essential part of good developmental practice for Southern governments, NGOs and international agencies alike. In this article we reflect critically on this shift by investigating how a ‘participatory’ development programme — India's Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS) — intersects with poor people's existing social networks. By placing the formalized process of participation in the EAS within the context of these varied and uneven village–level relationships, we raise a number of important issues for participatory development practice. We note the importance of local power brokers and the heterogeneity of ‘grassroots’ (dis)empowerment, and question ideas of power reversals used within the participatory development literature.     

‘Miserable San Damian—But What Treasures!’: The Life of Aleš Hrdlička's Peruvian Collection

This article examines the lives of artefacts collected by physical anthropologist Ale? Hrdli?ka during his expeditions to Peru. In 1910 and 1913, Hrdli?ka travelled to the Andean nation to gather materials that could shed light on the peopling of the Americas, health and disease in pre-Columbian societies, and the purported racial ‘types' of the region. The study focuses on cultural artefacts the scientist acquired, beginning with these materials’ collection as specimens meant to reveal the racial prehistory of the Andes, and continuing with their classification, display, and exchange as museum objects at the Smithsonian Institution. My analysis of Hrdli?ka's Peruvian collection draws attention not only to how scientific representations of Peru and the Andes have shifted over time, but also to the way in which a focus on museum objects can elucidate changing notions about the cultural agency of prehistoric populations and their present-day descendants.     

Conceptualising environmental governance in turbulent times: Insights from Brexit and waste in the UK

Institutional turbulence created by the UK's EU exit (Brexit) prompts a wider need to re-think whether our conceptualisations of governance in the environmental sphere sufficiently understand the dynamics of change. In this context, Boltanski and Thévenot's ‘Orders of Worth’ (OoW) framework, has particular merit. This conceptualises governance regimes as composed of compromises between plural and incommensurable orders of the public good, with innate potential for instability; especially - we would add - when the territoriality of governance is in flux. The OoW approach is applied to an analysis of waste governance debates in the UK following the 2016 EU referendum. Documentary and interview data show how present and prospective governance arrangements in the waste and resources sector are subject to rival justifications, with actors advancing different compromises between economic, industrial, civic and environmental orders, but that each is also attached to conceptions of the relevant governance scale (EU, UK, devolved nation). Our study shows the wider potential fragility of environmental reforms, arising from the secondary status of environmental concerns in compromises with dominant market, industrial and civic orders. The ‘orders of worth’ framework requires attention to the scales of political authority being mobilised in disputes, which add their own incommensurability.     

NGOs and Environmental Public Goods: Institutional Alternatives to Property Rights

NGOs are linked to environmental objectives for good reason: non-profit NGOs provide a flexible, private-sector answer to the provision of international environmental public goods. The non-profit sector can link for-profit, non-profit, and public-sector objectives in complex contracts. This article examines how, for the case of the National Biodiversity Institute (INBio) in Costa Rica, such complex contracts with both domestic and international parties provide partial solutions to public goods problems in the absence of private property rights over genetic resources. INBio's ‘monopoly’ position, legitimized by the local government, brings in rents from genetic resources which are reinvested in the production of public goods.     

Participatory Governance in Urban Management and the Shifting Geometry of Power in Mumbai

This article questions the participatory dimension of urban governance in Mumbai. Based on surveys of a number of participatory projects for urban services, it compares the differentiated impacts of participation in middle‐class colonies with those in slums. Results demonstrate that changing citizen–government relationships have led to the empowerment of the middle and upper middle class who harness the potential of new ‘invited space’ to expand their claims on the city and political space. In contrast, the poor end up on the losing side as NGOs function more as contracted agents of the State than as representatives of the poor. Direct community participation empowers influential community members, small private entrepreneurs and middlemen, and contributes to labour informalization. Ultimately, these processes consolidate a form of ‘governing beyond the State’ that promotes a managerial vision of participation and leads to double standards of citizenship.     

The image of the city in modern literature

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship.

All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century – repatriation, resettlement and local integration – are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation–state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership – and through this of access to citizenship rights – that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights?

This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled.

Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation – or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation – became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’.     

Critiquing the heteronormativity of the banal citizen in New Zealand's mediated civil union debate

This article extends Billig's (1995) landmark thesis on banal nationalism by considering how processes of national deixis circumscribe the boundaries of citizenship and forms of belonging within nation-states. Drawing on critical analyses of sexual citizenship, the article provides a discursive analysis of the debate over civil union in the New Zealand mainstream press during 2004–2005. It argues that this mediated debate represented an historical moment where the routine deictic flagging of the nation, and the correlated flagging of the ‘banal citizen’, fundamentally broke down, thereby allowing this unmarked and ‘ordinary’ process to be systematically examined. Four major discourses are identified in press coverage: ‘Homosexual’ subjects as abnormal and disordered, tolerance, equality and human rights, the sanctity of marriage and the preservation of the family (and the social order). Although the passing of the Civil Union Act does mark a (faltering) step forward in sexual equality, we argue that the presence of these discourses suggests that forms of both ontological and cultural heterosexism persist in New Zealand society. Despite the Act conferring new legal rights, ultimately we conclude that the four discourses act to restrict the extent to which ‘homosexual’ subjects are considered ‘valid’ and ‘legitimate’ citizens. In continuing to structure the public politics of sexual citizenship in New Zealand, these discourses have influenced recent debates over legislative moves towards ‘marriage equality’ in ways that raise concerns over the continuation of heterosexist norms, as well as exclusionary forms of homo-nationalism. More generally, this research demonstrates the effectiveness of Billig's work as a valuable and productive analytic lens to explicate concerns over the exclusionary nature of citizenship itself.     

Imperial Legacies and Internationalist Discourses: British Involvement in the United Nations Freedom from Hunger Campaign, 1960–70

Between 1960 and 1965, the British public raised almost seven million pounds to support the Freedom from Hunger Campaign (FFHC), a United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization initiative that funded agricultural development projects across the underdeveloped world in an effort to ‘help the hungry to help themselves’. With the involvement of more than 100 countries and affiliated NGOs, the FFHC was by a considerable margin the largest humanitarian effort of its time, but it also forms part of a specifically British story about imperial benevolence and imperial decline. This article uses the British public's support for the campaign as a window onto the changing experience of British humanitarianism during an era of decolonisation. Did the British public's moral geography change as they lost their empire? Was there a role for the empire/commonwealth within the framework of an international campaign such as Freedom from Hunger? Which imperial legacies remained intact in the FFHC, which were adapted and which discarded?     

Instrumentalizing pastoralism? Understanding hybrid tenure and governance in Ilkisongo Maasai land of southern Kenya

Throughout Kenya, new governance regimes that are designed to sustain habitat connectivity for wildlife populations outside of national parks have gained increasing prominence. Though these new regimes often center a discursive emphasis on the synergies between wildlife conservation and pastoralist land use, it often remains unclear how they have interacted with colonial and post-colonial legacies that influenced pastoralists' relationships with land. As an effort to gain an improved understanding of the practices that conservation governance regimes deploy, and their underlying rationales, I present an empirically-driven account drawn from ethnographic field work in Kenyan Ilkisongo Maasai land surrounding Amboseli National Park. I argue that to understand recent configurations of land, it is essential to consider the multiple types of interlocking practices deployed by international wildlife conservation NGOs and the Kenyan state. Under a range of pressures to subdivide collectively titled land, a new territorial and governance configuration is emerging where land tenure will retain characteristics of being both private and collective. I argue that a discursive emphasis that frames conservation interventions as producing welfare for populations of wildlife and pastoralists alike has created new potentials to center the concerns of politically marginalized pastoralists, but has also raised risks of an ‘anti-politics’ that can reproduce and reinforce multiple dimensions of power asymmetries.     

Hill of Thorns: Custom,Knowledge and the Reclaiming of a Lost Land in the New South Africa

This article provides a detailed ethnographic exploration of a case of land restitution in South Africa. It shows how the development discourse invoked during the process of reclaiming land, rather than being imposed in an entirely top‐down manner, has been the result of negotiations between those claiming and those — in government and NGOs — who have helped them claim. The resulting knowledge about the ownership and appropriate governance of land reveals a complex and often contradictory understanding of concepts like ‘custom’, ‘community’ and ‘power’.     

Europe as a global actor: empire by example?

The European Union (EU) spreads its norms and extends its power in various parts of the world in a truly imperial fashion. This is because the EU tries to impose domestic constraints on other actors through various forms of economic and political domination or even formal annexations. This effort has proved most successful in the EU's immediate neighbourhood where the Union has enormous political and economic leverage and where there has been a strong and ever‐growing convergence of norms and values. However, in the global arena where actors do not share European norms and the EU has limited power, the results are limited. Consequently, it is not only Europe's ethical agenda that is in limbo; some basic social preferences across the EU seem also to be unsustainable. Can Europe maintain, let alone enhance, its environmental, labour or food safety norms without forcing global competitors to embrace them? The challenge lies not only in enhancing Europe's global power, but also primarily in exporting rules and norms for which there is more demand among existing and emerging global players. This means that Europe should engage in a dialogue that will help it to establish commonly shared rules of morality and global governance. Only then can Europe's exercise of power be seen as legitimate. It also means that Europe should try to become a ‘model power’ rather than a ‘superpower’, to use David Miliband's expression. The latter approach would imply the creation of a strong European centre able to impose economic pains on uncooperative actors. The former would imply showing other actors that European norms can also work for them and providing economic incentives for adopting these norms. To be successful in today's world, Europe needs to export its governance to other countries, but it can do it in a modest and novel way that will not provoke accusations of ‘regulatory imperialism’.     

Madrid's Retiro Park as publicly-private space and the spatial problems of spatial theory

The scholarly focus on the production of space necessitates a thorough reassessment of the static categories employed in the analysis of spatial processes. Emphasizing space as a process, this essay calls attention to the recent implication of Madrid's Retiro Park in larger processes of capital accumulation. At the same time, it highlights the insufficiency of the tempting yet problematic distinction between public and private space that obtains in easy solutions to the struggles over city-space. As many critics have pointed out, there is design flaw in the idea of public space—it can never explain how a given space, such as a park, comes to be free of the ‘private’ (personal and structural) interests operating throughout its societal context. The story of the Retiro ultimately foregrounds the pivotal role of city-space in the drive for capitalist intercity-competition and suggests that the latter process is insufficiently confronted by idealized notions of the role truly ‘public’ spaces might play in radical democracy and citizenship.     

Promoting Environmental Education for Sustainable Development: The Value of Links between Higher Education and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)

Environmental sustainability education, the dissemination of environmental education for sustainable development into the community, should be a lifelong process and not one restricted to a learner's years in higher education. Informal environmental sustainability education, including personal involvement in NGO environmental action, can be an effective way of increasing the understanding of environmental and sustainability issues. NGO projects help provide practical environmental education to environmentally aware people who have built their careers in other areas. In the process, they help environmental awareness to trickle into areas of life where it would not ordinarily impinge. In this case study of a community-based land reclamation research project, supported jointly by the NGO Earthwatch and Oxford Brookes University, analysis of the motivations and experiences of project volunteers shows that their aims include making a personal contribution to enhancing the quality of the environment and networking with like-minded individuals, and that they expect to carry their new understanding back into their everyday lives to influence other people in their workplace. Engagement in practical work and action research may help overcome some of the negativity linked to many assessments of the human impact on the environment and, working together, universities and NGOs can more effectively ‘think globally and act locally’. NGOs may provide the best hope for helping to change the destructive aspects of modern society but they are vulnerable through financial dependency on sponsors, volunteers and donors.