Seeing Political Settlements through the City: A Framework for Comparative Analysis of Urban Transformation

This article presents a new analytical framework for studying cities in the developing world based on the ‘political settlements’ approach. This has a dual purpose: to enrich comparative urban research by bringing new theoretical ideas to bear on this field, but also to use capital cities as a lens to better understand national political settlements. The central argument is that urban built environments and their transformations in situations of late development reflect the workings of different varieties of clientelism, and by analysing the former we can better understand the latter. Specifically, issues such as the nature of urban land use and land allocation, the pace and form of construction, the effectiveness of environmental regulation and the provision of housing for different income groups are all revealing of political settlements and their broader development implications. The potential of this approach is explored through three narrative ‘sketches’ of contemporary urban development in Eastern Africa: the ‘city as marketplace’ (Kampala), the ‘city as expo’ (Kigali) and the ‘city as construction site’ (Addis Ababa). In presenting this framework, the article seeks to advance debate on epistemological and analytical approaches to the study of both power relations and differential patterns of urban development.     

Mobile sovereignty: The case of ‘boat people’ in Australia

State sovereignty, in terms of the organisation and expression of political authority by nation states, is traditionally interpreted as a political container that is being weakened by increasing human and non-human mobilities. However recent research indicates that states are themselves becoming more mobile as executive bodies move and sovereign spaces are tactically reduced and expanded to intercept and control global mobilities. While challenging dichotomous notions of mobility and sovereignty, such research frames the movements of governments, territory and sovereign agents as the tactics of already established states. This paper builds on extant research by drawing on both a mobile ontology and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty to examine how mobilities constitute modern state sovereignty. To do so I examine Australian sovereignty and the related material and symbolic exclusion of asylum seekers arriving by boat. My analysis finds that mobilities, in terms of material movements and their representation, are essential to the construction of Australian sovereignty and the position of maritime asylum seekers as its outsider and limit identity. Through their mobile interception and management, and their representation as mobile ‘others’, maritime asylum seekers are used to create sovereign borders between specific types of movement; between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (im)mobilities. I argue that this form of state sovereignty is disarticulated from space and follows populations who construct territories as being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the Australian state as they move.     

‘Divided Within Itself’: The Parliamentary Labour ‘Right’ and the Demise of Post‐War Revisionist Social Democracy in the 1970s

The article seeks to identify a neglected dimension of the ‘crisis’ and schism of British social democracy in the 1970s from within the ranks of the parliamentary Labour ‘right’ itself. Accounts of the so‐called ‘Labour right’ and its influential revisionist social democratic tradition have emphasized its generic cohesion and uniformity over contextual analysis of its inherent intellectual, ideological and political range and diversity. The article seeks to evaluate differential responses of Labour's ‘right‐wing’ and revisionist tendency as its loosely cohesive framework of Keynesian social democracy imploded in the 1970s, as a means of demonstrating its relative incoherence and fragmentation. The ‘crisis of social democracy’ revealed much more starkly its complex, heterogeneous character, irremediably ‘divided within itself’ over a range of critical political and policy themes and the basis of social democratic political philosophy itself. The article argues that it was its own wider political fragmentation and ideological introspection in the face of the ‘crisis’ of its historic ‘belief system’ which led to the fracture of Labour's ‘dominant coalition’ and the rupture of British social democracy.     

Healthcare not airfare! Art,abortion and political agency in Ireland

Ireland’s near-total abortion ban was, in effect, a policy of offshoring abortions. Before the May 2018 vote to repeal it, the 8th Amendment allowed for conservative and nationalist groups to celebrate the idea of Ireland as an ‘abortion-free’ territory, while forcing women to travel to England for abortion or self-manage abortions with illegal pills at home. Artists in the Irish pro-choice movement have contested the public silence around abortion and abortion-travel; in doing so they have disrupted the political narrative of ‘abortion-free Ireland’ by symbolically re-placing Irish abortion seekers in public spaces. These place-based artistic interventions have larger significance for the changing relationship between women, reproduction, and the state. Drawing on ongoing debates in critical and feminist geopolitics, this article addresses the relationship between geopolitics, art, and political agency to theorize the role of pro-choice Irish artworks in challenging the enforced silence that surrounded abortion travel. It builds on geographical engagement with Jacques Rancière to address the feminist geopolitics critique of geopolitical scales and sites of ‘serious’ geopolitics. The article examines three artworks that depict Irish women’s experiences of abortion-related travel to England as part of the larger political campaign for liberalization of Ireland’s abortion laws.     

Municipal Councillors and the Everyday State: New Representations of Political Accountability in Ahmedabad,India

Scholarly literature on municipal councillors in urban India has variously labelled them as ‘lords’, ‘captains’ and ‘shrewd operators’ who have the power to mobilize resources and act as political intermediaries between the state and ordinary citizens. Conversely, voters are seen as collectively trading their votes to secure access to the state's resources. In this article, empirical fieldwork in the city of Ahmedabad, India, suggests that while traditional modes of patron–client relationships continue to exist at the municipal urban governance level, there has been a shift in the roles as perceived by municipal councillors themselves. The ‘state at the roadside’ model of urban governance is being expanded to include new modes and sites of mediation with citizens. Drawing from the literature on political representative claims and social representation theory, this article argues that the changes in the practices of municipal councillors are driven partly by political aspirations that are distinct from their identity as a party karyakarta (worker) and partly as a response to a better-informed citizenry, referred to as jagrukt janta (public awareness). These shifts create the conditions for new modes of civic engagement and political accountability within existing patronage-based networks.     

The Hidden Perils of Citation Counting for Australasian Political Science

In a recent article in Australian Journal of Political Science, Dale and Goldfinch present ‘standard’ journal-based publication and citation rankings of Australasian political science departments designed to complement what they characterise as the multidisciplinary, historical, qualitative and humanistic political science of the region. However, the ‘highly cited’ articles in their top-ranked political science department belong to quantitative psychology. Through unravelling why their study favours the opposite of that which it was meant to detect, this paper alerts political scientists to the hidden perils of accepting ‘standard’ Institute of Scientific Information-based approaches to citation counting as valid measures of research ‘quality’. It exposes the veiled bibliometric assumption that the ‘best’ social science is quantitative research, notes that incongruous citation scores may inform the distribution of block funding and departmental appointment processes, and warns against using ‘standard’ data to unintentionally self-police the future shape of Australasian political science.     

Transnational abductions and transnational responsibilities? The politics of ‘protecting’ female Muslim refugees abducted from Spain

This article examines evolving gendered protection narratives surrounding four ‘abduction’ cases in which Sahrawi refugee girls and young women living in Spain were ‘abducted’ by their birth-families and forcibly returned to the Algerian-based Sahrawi refugee camps between 2002 and 2009. By exploring Spanish state and civil society responses to these girls' ‘abductions’, I argue that there has been a major shift in the ways in which legitimate responsibility and authority over Sahrawi refugee women as Muslim female forced migrants have been conceptualised and invoked by Spanish actors. I therefore assess the gendered nature of competing claims of responsibility to ‘protect’ Sahrawi refugee women both within and outside of the Algerian-based Sahrawi refugee camps, exploring the motivations and implications of different actors' in/actions towards these girls and women. With Polisario claiming to represent and act as a liberal ‘state’ committed to protecting the rights of its ‘refugee-citizens’ in some instances, while denying politico-legal responsibility in others, the question of ‘who’ or ‘what’ claims the legitimate authority to ‘protect’ Sahrawi refugee women and girls is thus accentuated by such cases. By exploring shifts in Spanish public and political discourses of responsibility over the past decade on the one hand, and the accentuation of competing discourses as presented by Spanish, Polisario and Algerian actors on the other, this article highlights the complex nature and implications of the ‘intimate’ Spanish civil society networks that ensure the physical and political survival of the Sahrawi refugee camps. Ultimately, I argue that Sahrawi girls and women have become hypervisible in Spain, being conceptualised as women who ‘belong’ to the Spanish nation that in turn has a responsibility to ‘protect’ ‘our’ Sahrawi women from ‘their’ culture.     

President Obama at mid‐term

This article provides an analysis of President Obama at mid‐term. It looks at the mid‐term elections from the perspective of the political issues that informed the debate, the implications of Republican control of the House of Representatives for both legislation and relations between the administration and Congress, and the policy areas where cooperation and possible progress is possible. The article looks at the Tea Party movement as a collection of single issue and multi‐issue political groups ranging from ‘nativists’ to Christian fundamentalists to the eclectic and unprecedented combination of fiscal and social conservatives seen at Glen Beck's ‘honoring America’ event at the Washington Monument. This broad movement may be seen as a classical revitalization movement, not unlike those described by Anthony F. C. Wallace. It is opposed by another ‘revitalization movement’ namely the ‘American renewal’ promised by Obama as he ran for office in 2008. These countervailing narratives—in effect two different versions of America, one reflecting the Tea Party broadly conceived and the other reflecting Obama's ‘promise’—are seeking political traction among independents. The implications of this struggle are momentous. The prevailing narrative will frame policy going forward on a range of domestic issues and on selected foreign policy questions, which will include the present debate on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia and the upcoming debate on China, which will have even further reaching effects. Finally, this article describes Obama's struggle to frame his policy successes and the ensuing debate in a favourable light. His opponents have sought to limit his progress by presenting him as ‘the other”, an effective but destructive technique that could have longer term effects on the domestic political discourse. However, the author remains an optimist; he believes, together with 50 per cent of Americans, the president is likable, logical and gives a good speech, and that he will be re‐elected in 2012.     

Doing democracy and governance in the fast lane? Towards a ‘politics of time’ in an accelerated polity

This article examines the relationship between time, governance and political participation through a critical engagement with the ‘acceleration thesis’. Whilst the acceleration thesis argues that the ‘shrinking of the present’ is a condition of contemporary governance, others have viewed it as dysfunctional to the democratic process and effective policymaking. By drawing on a wide range of literature and through the use of illustrative examples, this article argues that slow and fast politics have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the practice of governance and democratic participation. In turn, questions are raised about how public organisations and others might manage temporality and change in an ‘accelerated polity’. The article concludes by calling for further research into the ‘politics of time’ and its effects on public policymaking and political participation.     

Beyond Holocaust Studies: rethinking the Holocaust in Hungary

This article argues that the ideological and emotional meanings of the terms ‘Holocaust’ and ‘antisemitism’ have obstructed their use as analytical concepts in Holocaust scholarship. It claims, specifically, that they frame the persecution and annihilation of Jews during World War II as unique, placing these events and processes apart from essential historical and political contexts. The destruction of Jews in wartime Hungary underscores how histories of state and nation building—in this case the drive to realize ‘Greater Hungary’ with a marked Magyar majority—generated multi-layered mass violence against non-Jews as well as Jews. Focusing on the multi-ethnic borderland of Subcarpathian Rus’ before the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 illuminates the links in the state's multi-layered attack against the region's society and sheds new light on the particular victimization of Jews, also after March 1944. Almost all the scholarship on the Holocaust in Hungary has addressed the period after the German invasion, dealing with ghettoization and deportation to Auschwitz. This perspective has provided important insight, but it has also overshadowed significant dimensions in the history of wartime Hungary. The histories of the state's borderlands, which have received limited attention, challenge this account of ‘the Holocaust’ in Hungary. This article uncovers how anxieties about disloyalty and foreignness played crucial roles in the exclusionary campaign against Jews, Roma and Carpatho-Ruthenians in Subcarpathian Rus’. The Hungarian authorities planned and carried out discriminatory and violent measures against them and, whenever national and international opportunities permitted, mass deportations. The examination of these related processes of mass violence lays bare the meaning of ‘antisemitism’ in a specific political context, highlighting connections between anti-Jewish policies and the persecution of other groups. Viewing this violence as it unfolded, rather than backward from the ‘final solution’ and Auschwitz, opens new paths to rethink ‘the Holocaust’ in Hungary.     

Book review

The article discusses some features of the political culture of late medieval Norway by focusing on the broader strata of the people and their political influence. To what extent could these groups express their own political goals and act to achieve them? The point of departure is the 1448–50 struggle for the Norwegian throne, the claimants being the Danish‐German Kristian I and the Swedish Karl Knutsson (Bonde). The Norwegian Council of the Realm was divided into two ‘parties’, both of which recognized the importance of the common people's support and acceptance of their candidate. However, the article argues that there were interesting differences in the two parties' tactics and rhetoric towards the common people. It was no coincidence that it was the supporters of Karl who mobilized the common people in the political struggle. Several central political, social and geographical arguments made by supporters of Karl were not employed in favour of Kristian. The supporters of the latter had to base their tactics on constitutional law and tradition. Nevertheless, it was concrete, contemporary political and economic interests that motivated the representatives of the common people, when they could not have a domestic king, to want Karl rather than Kristian,. This contemporary situation overshadowed a possible underlying constitutional conservatism among the common people. The popular representatives fought for what has been called ‘The Norwegian System’ in order to defend their own interests.     

Transgender migrations: prostitution,identity and notions of ‘home’ in contemporary France

ABSTRACT

Migrant street prostitution in France has increased since the 1990s, largely as a result of the ease of movement facilitated by political shifts in Eastern Europe opening up national borders and the arrival of greater numbers of prostitutes from Africa and China. These often precarious migrations have generally been made by cisgender females; although, a comparatively smaller (but progressively significant) number are transgender. The representation of this latter group is explored in this article through four documentary/docufiction films that respectively recount what can be described as the sequential stages of geographical mobility (i.e. pre-migration, migration, and post-migration). Motivated by the concern that more particular voices within the ‘queer community’ are insufficiently represented, the focus here will be on how this group of transgender migrant prostitutes articulate a sense of ‘home’. Analysis is framed through Sara Ahmed’s notion of ‘home’ as ‘skin’, a porous space that blends the static and the mobile, the ‘here’ and ‘there’. The selected texts disarticulate the epistemology of prostitution in gendered terms and dislocate the transgender body from material associations that link successful migration with the movement from one place and body to another.     

Going Against the Flow: Sinn Féin’s Unusual Hungarian ‘Roots’

Can states as well as non-state political ‘actors’ learn from the history of cognate entities elsewhere in time and space, and if so how and when does this policy knowledge get ‘transferred’ across international borders? This article deals with this question, addressing a short-lived Hungarian ‘tutorial’ that, during the early twentieth century, certain policy elites in Ireland imagined might have great applicability to the political transformation of the Emerald Isle, in effect ushering in an era of political autonomy from the United Kingdom, and doing so via a ‘third way’ that skirted both the Scylla of parliamentary formulations aimed at securing ‘home rule’ for Ireland and the Charybdis of revolutionary violence. In the political agenda of Sinn Féin during its first decade of existence, Hungary loomed as a desirable political model for Ireland, with the party’s leading intellectual, Arthur Griffith, insisting that the means by which Hungary had achieved autonomy within the Hapsburg Empire in 1867 could also serve as the means for securing Ireland’s own autonomy in the first decades of the twentieth century. This article explores what policy initiatives Arthur Griffith thought he saw in the Hungarian experience that were worthy of being ‘transferred’ to the Irish situation.     

‘Mountain women’: silent contributors to the global agenda for sustainable mountain development

In this article, we examine the transnational and international discourses and initiatives focused on and/or carried out by the so-called ‘mountain women.’ Tracking the growing reference to ‘mountain women’, we analyze the way in which the construction and the claim of a gendered identity has developed within the general debate on the international recognition of the global importance of mountain environments that emerged about 20 years ago. Drawing on documents, a survey and interviews, our main objective is exploring how such a reference could lead to the making of an imagined community of ‘mountain women’ offering opportunities for political action. This article concludes that, though women are identified in international discourses as essential contributors to sustainable mountain development, the social identity ‘mountain women’ has not yet evolved into a collective identity around which political solidarities and strategies coalesce to ultimately ground collective action. Indeed, women's organizations have other themes on their agendas and are active at other scales apart from the global one. Indeed, few are willing to identify themselves as ‘mountain women.’ For the time being, ‘mountain women’ remain silent partners in the global agenda for sustainable mountain development.     

A fine instrument: two nation‐building strategies in post‐Soviet Belarus*

Abstract. This article pursues two aims. On the empirical level, it challenges the view of Belarus as a ‘denationalised’, or ‘failed’ nation, and exposes the country as an area of intensive nation‐building. The article demonstrates that, unlike most post‐communist states, two versions of national identity have been advanced in Belarus since 1989, with divergent results for their proponents. On the theoretical level, such an atypical experience places qualifications on the instrumentalist approach, that regards nation‐building as a political tool. The analysis of identity creation in Belarus suggests that nation‐building as a political strategy may be limited by the existing attitudes in the society in question, the socio‐economic structures, as well as by the influence of foreign actors.     

Precarious Democratization and Local Dynamics in Niger: Micro–Politics in Zinder

Literature on the African state often finds it hard to specify what is state and what is not. The closer one gets to a particular political landscape, the more apparent it becomes that many institutions have something of a twilight character. This article argues that studies of local politics in Africa should focus on how the public authority of institutions waxes and wanes and how political competition among individuals and organizations expresses the notion of state and public authority. This is explored in the context of contemporary political struggles in Niger, played out in three different arenas in the region of Zinder around 1999, as home–town associations, chieftaincies and vigilante groups all take on the mantle of public authority in their dealings with what they consider to be their antithesis, the ‘State’.     

Decentralization,the State and Conflicts over Local Boundaries in Northern Ghana

Decentralization projects, such as that initiated by the Rawlings government in Ghana at the end of the 1980s, create a political space in which the relations between local political communities and the state are re‐negotiated. In many cases, the devolution of power intensifies special‐interest politics and political mobilization aiming at securing a ‘larger share of the national cake’, that is, more state funds, infrastructure and posts for the locality. To legitimate their claims vis‐à‐vis the state, civic associations (‘hometown’ unions), traditional rulers and other non‐state institutions often invoke some form of ‘natural’ solidarity, and decentralization projects thus become arenas of debate over the boundaries of community and the relationship between ‘local’ and national citizenship. This article analyses one such debate, in the former Lawra District of Ghana's Upper West Region, where the creation of new districts provoked protracted discussions, among the local political elite as well as the peasants and labour migrants, about the connections between land ownership and political authority, the relations between the local ethnic groups (Dagara and Sisala), and the relevance of ethnic versus territorial criteria in defining local citizenship.     

Young People's Politics and the Micro-Territories of the Local

In spite of the late modern interpellation of youth as mobile and globally oriented, and a perception of social and political issues as increasingly playing out in a transnational arena, young Australians exhibit strong local and individualised tendencies in expressing politics. They are bounded by the ‘micro-territories of the local’; that is, their political thinking and acting takes place within the spaces of home, friendship groups, school and neighbourhood. This paper draws on an ARC project with nearly 1000 mainly 15–17-year-old Victorians to examine the relationship between young people's embeddedness in their local worlds and their views of themselves as efficacious political actors. It considers how their competency within such micro-territories opens up neglected sites and strategies for political expression and engagement while limiting their sense of sense of political efficacy, and it asserts the significance of considering this age group, not for what these young people will become in the future, but for their particular location, socially, physically and politically in the present.     

From Head‐hunter to Organ‐thief: Verisimilitude,Doubt, and Plausible Worlds in Indonesia and Beyond

In the last few years, occult head‐hunters – elusive figures that have haunted communities and the public imagination in Indonesia since at least colonial times – appear to have adopted a novel and troubling tactic. Instead of decapitating their victims and using the heads in construction rituals as they are said to have conventionally done, head‐hunters are now allegedly harvesting their victims’ organs to sell them on the global market of body parts. Based on a comparison of ethnographic material from North Maluku, a province in the eastern part of Indonesia, and news reports in regional and national papers, I trace how accounts about headhunting have morphed with narratives about organ theft. I argue that this plasticity is not a merely a change in symbolic ideas of the occult that reflects changing political and economic realities. Rather, I propose that their turn to organ theft enrols head‐hunters in a contemporary and global ‘travelling package’ that includes and entangles organ trafficking practices, media accounts, political imaginaries, and social anxieties within the same field of reality and possibility, a field of verisimilitude in which fiction and fact, rumour and reality, are fundamentally blurred. The article proposes a ‘more‐than‐representational’ approach to the organ‐stealing head‐hunter that sees him not just as a representation of particular political and historical circumstances but as a co‐producer of these circumstances, of particular political worlds and their attendant scales of anxiety. This approach, I argue, challenges the epistemological distinction between symbolic representation and political reality that informed (but also incommoded) the analyses of headhunting rumours in the 1980s and 1990s – and that continues to inform anthropological analyses of ‘the occult’ more generally.