In what sense ‘spaces of neoliberalism’? The new localism,the new politics of scale,and town twinning

This paper draws on a study of town twinning in Britain since 1945 to engage with narratives of ‘the new localism’ and ‘the new politics of scale’. It argues that town twinning is often used in technical assistance programmes such as the UK Government's Know How Fund and various schemes of the Commonwealth Local Government Forum. ‘Fast policy’ is a concept that can be usefully applied to these programmes and the broader field of interurban networking, urban policy mobility, and policy transfer. Town twinning plays an active yet overlooked role in fast policy. The paper also argues that town twinning is part of a longer history of bottom-up localism that includes the political arguments of John Stuart Mill, at least two moments of twentieth-century municipal internationalism, the municipal foreign policy movement of the 1980s, and the community development movement of the last three decades. This longer history suggests sources of localism other than statecraft, and problematises the conceptualisation of power and periodisation of history found in regulation theories of devolution.     

The contentious sovereignties of the camp: Political contention among state and non-state actors in Italian Roma camps

The global proliferation of camps manifests an alarming phenomenon of burgeoning marginalization, and shows that the concept of ‘camp’ is today increasingly crucial to grapple with current changes in the world’s geographies of exclusion and inclusion. Specifically, this article focuses on ‘institutional camps’, i.e. created by government agencies in alleged emergency situations and aims to conceptualize sovereignty over this type of camp. After critically reviewing the ongoing scholarly debate on camp sovereignty, I situate my approach within the work of scholars who see political authority over the camp as comprising a multiplicity of both state and non-state actors. The article contributes to this perspective by drawing on the theory of ‘contentious politics’ advanced by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001). Through this analytical framework, I suggest construing camp sovereignties as contentious, i.e. inherently constituted by conflicting and ever-evolving power relations that change according to framing strategies, political opportunities, resources and repertoires of action. In order to show the benefits of such approach, the paper focuses on the empirical case of the Italian Roma camps in Rome, through which I show that camp sovereignty is not only fragmented into a multiplicity of actors but is also the result of conflict, compromise, negotiation, and co-optation among actors whose frames, opportunities, resources, and repertoires constantly change over time.     

The Struggle Continues? The Spectre of Liberation,Memory Politics and ‘War Veterans’ in Namibia

Memory politics continues to define the socio‐political landscape of post‐colonial Namibia. Interpretations of the country's recent political history are used to contest and legitimize current social and political relations. This article examines these issues as they appear in the negotiation of recognition and benefits between ex‐combatants and state and ruling party actors. A dominant narrative of national liberation, associated with the ruling party Swapo, casts Swapo ex‐combatants as heroes. This has propelled recurrent ex‐combatant demands to the forefront and relegated those who fought on the South African side to a secondary category of ex‐combatant ‘reintegration’. At the same time, this frame constrains ex‐combatant remembrance, pushing aside contentious memories that might lead to a more critical historical consciousness. Although telling a story of the emergence of a unified nation, the liberation narrative actually is an example of a far more exclusionary form of nationalism that uses the vocabulary of national belonging to make distinctions between citizens, and thus justifies practices of inclusion and exclusion. Its strength lies in its ability to link current material politics with emotionally compelling narratives of identity.     

Flag planting and finger pointing: The Law of the Sea,the Arctic and the political geographies of the outer continental shelf

The planting of a Russian flag at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean in the summer of 2007 precipitated a series of policy and media-level reactions including expressions of outrage and discontent. This paper develops an analysis of the work of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CCLS) and the different strategies used by coastal states to press ‘claims’ to outer continental shelf (OCS). The agency of Arctic ‘coastal states’ such as Canada, Norway and Russia is noteworthy but others including the European Union and indigenous peoples have also raised concerns about the behaviour of these geographically proximate actors. Finally, I consider other ways of looking at the Arctic as a circumpolar space and the challenges that are held to be facing the region in the present and future.     

‘Ain’t I a feminist?’: the politics of gender violence,anti-violence,and education in Oakland,CA

This article focuses on the ways gender violence politics become reduced to liberal narratives of victimization in contemporary U.S. deployment of feminist identity politics, within academic and activist discourses. Such victimization narratives, I argue, exploit suffering and reproduce social stratification between a growing middle class in the academy and poor black people outside of it. This article draws from moments in California’s Bay area when questions of feminism, gender violence, and anti-violence in schools arose. In each case, left feminists had an opportunity to reshape these questions towards new political paradigms and new academic discourses. Instead, amidst the ‘safety’ of left discourse and practice, each moment confronted contradictory silences that called into question such ‘safety’ and made generative political movement impossible. I analyze the dynamics of this silencing as constitutive of the co-optation of feminist identity politics within a capitalist university that reproduces an oppressive race and class order. We face a problem of language to adequately explain and disrupt the incapacity for collective social change that victimhood, identity politics, and reformism have produced. Each instance I present function as moments of history making from which we may reflect and strategize forward movement against capitalist oppression and racial dehumanization.     

The many shades of grey in urban governance: How illegality shapes urban planning,policy and development

Most research on urban planning, policy and development only considers legal practices and actors, and treats illegal ones as insignificant anomalies, unable to structurally affect the governance of urban space. However, this approach is inadequate for explaining urban governance in contexts (e.g. several countries in the Global South, the former Soviet bloc and Southern Europe) where illegal practices such as corruption and organized crime infiltration are widespread in many public and economic sectors. This paper addresses the role of illegal actors and practices in urban governance in the Italian context, using urban regime theory as the theoretical frame of reference. The research centres on the analysis of two case studies in the city of Rome (the In-between world investigation of a criminal network that had infiltrated the local administration and shaped several urban policies, and the investigation of episodes of corruption related to the project for the new A.S. Roma soccer stadium). It shows the existence of two shades of ‘grey urban governance’: firstly, the presence of a dark urban regime, centred on a criminal organisation and parallel to the ‘regular’ one; secondly, the use of corruption as a customary practice with which real estate entrepreneurs influence municipal decisions. Overall, this research contributes to moving away from a rhetoric of ‘gentlemanly’ urban capitalism and politics, and suggests the need to revise several aspects of urban regime theory – as well as other approaches to urban governance dynamics in general – in order to incorporate the role of illegal actors and practices.     

‘YOUTH RIOTS’ AND THE CONCEPT OF CONTENTIOUS POLITICS IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH

This article analyses European ‘youth riots’ as a social phenomenon after World War II. It also uses a specific riot – the 1948 Stockholm Easter Riots – in order to discuss the limits and potential of some theoretical assumptions underlying the field of historical contentious politics studies, primarily ‘contentious politics’ and ‘claims’. Using police reports and newspapers, the article shows that the riots were part of a European repertoire of post-war ‘youth riots’, but that they also bear similarities to an older popular repertoire of contention in Sweden. However, the riots do not really fit into the concept of ‘contentious politics’, as this concept is built on ‘claim-making’ as a key aspect and the participants did not make explicit claims. This leads to the conclusion that other theoretical tools, inspired by the concept of ‘moral economy’, are better suited for understanding the motivations of the rioters, whose actions are interpreted as a way of defending a perceived moral right of access to the urban public space.     

Disseminating the policy narrative of ‘Heritage under threat’ in China

ABSTRACT

Originating from within the UNESCO, narratives on ‘heritage under threat’ tell the story of how and why intangible cultural heritage (ICH) practices are valuable, why are they disappearing, and how they can be protected from destruction. Focusing on PR China, this paper conducts a frame analysis to identify narratives on ‘heritage under threat’ as employed by the UNESCO, the Chinese party-state, and academics. The study argues that while policy narratives in any country undergo a process of congruence-building, circulation, and implementation, these processes take distinctive forms in authoritarian countries due to the states’ discursive and political monopoly: While non-state actors are involved, the state primarily steers the appropriation process. Nevertheless, once established, the policy narrative transforms across time and space, enabling local actors to use it to pursue their own interests.     

Rethinking popular geopolitics in the Falklands/Malvinas sovereignty dispute: Creative diplomacy and citizen statecraft

For more than twenty years popular geopolitics has proven an intriguing and fruitful field of research. It has spurred a lasting interest in everything from movies to stamps as important cultural artefacts that reveal to their audiences the geopolitical visions of their producers. This paper, however, brings into question the ‘popularity’ of popular geopolitics. Using recent examples from the ongoing dispute over the Falkland Islands, we examine the influence of social media and the associated flourishing of ‘citizen statecraft’ which, through its production of geopolitical knowledges, hints at the possibilities of a genuinely popular geopolitics 2.0. We also examine how creative practices, understood in myriad ways in relation to ‘statecraft’, work to unsettle and complicate previously tidy geopolitical categories of the ‘popular’, the ‘formal’, and the ‘practical’. We suggest, by way of conclusion, that ‘citizen statecraft’ may be productive in the flourishing of new modes of international dialogue between communities in dispute.     

Gallantry on the Shankill road: the British ‘soldier-hero’ and state-media relations in Northern Ireland, 1969-1979

ABSTRACT

The study of the British ‘soldier-hero’ as a political and cultural icon after 1945 has been largely confined to literature concerned with the memory of historical figures. Rarely have scholars considered how post-war military deployments not only created contemporary soldier-heroes, but also transformed their place within politics and society as the moral interrogation of these wars threatened to encroach upon the prestige of these icons. This article examines how the soldier-hero interacted with one of Britain’s most contentious deployments, Northern Ireland, and how politicians sought to control narratives surrounding this figure to avoid public relations controversy in unusual political conditions.     

Historicising Agency

Why has ‘agency’ been such a tenacious concept in historical scholarship on women and gender, and what have been the consequences on this tenacity? This essay tackles these questions and proposes, through a brief examination of the history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond, how agency might be pushed in more surprising, more analytically productive directions. Too often agency slips from being a conceptual tool or starting point to a concluding argument. For example, in my subfield of African women's and gender history, statements like ‘African women had agency’ can stand as the impoverished punch lines of empirically rich studies. Consideration of Walter Johnson's 2003 essay ‘On Agency’ highlights the intellectual and political imperatives of 1970s Marxist and feminist social history that placed agency at centre stage. This essay examines why, more than a decade after Johnson's critique, agency endures as a ‘safety’ argument for reasons related to representational politics, research methodologies and the circumscribed imagination of intellectual gatekeepers. It argues that we should move beyond agency as argument by attending to the multiple concerns and desires – some intentional, others not – that animate human actions, including contentious gendered practices, and by examining how different historical actors have themselves understood agency. Agency has a history. By acknowledging and tracing that history, we will be better able to discern the usefulness and limits of agency for our own analyses.     

Rubber Erasures,Rubber Producing Rights: Making Racialized Territories in West Kalimantan,Indonesia

This article makes connections between often‐disparate literatures on property, violence and identity, using the politics of rubber growing in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, as an example. It shows how rubber production gave rise to territorialities associated with and productive of ethnic identities, depending on both the political economies and cultural politics at play in different moments. What it meant to be Chinese and Dayak in colonial and post‐colonial Indonesia, as well as how categories of subjects and citizens were configured in the two respective periods, differentially affected both the formal property rights and the means of access to rubber and land in different parts of West Kalimantan. However, incremental changes in shifting rubber production practices were not the only means of producing territory and ethnicity. The author argues that violence ultimately played a more significant role in erasing prior identity‐based claims and establishing the controls of new actors over trees and land and their claims to legitimate access or ‘rightfulness’. Changing rubber production practices and reconfigurations of racialized territories and identity‐based property rights are all implicated in hiding the violence.     

Ecosystemic politics: Analyzing the consequences of speaking for adjacent nature on the global stage

This article introduces a conceptual framework for analysing and comparing the broader or unintended effects of cooperation anchored in border-crossing ecosystems. The importance of addressing this lacuna in our scholarship on such sub-global cooperation is underscored by research in political geography that has demonstrated how the creation of scale is an important expression of power relations and how interaction with the materiality of different kinds of spaces necessitates distinct political technologies (and thus may have distinct effects). The article introduces three key analytical angles central to policy field studies in international sociology and demonstrates their utility through a case of the Arctic/Arctic Council. These analytical angles – networks (what are the relationships shaping the field?), hierarchies (who leads and how does leadership work?), and norms for political behavior – capture key consequences and dynamics of ecosystemic politics in a concise fashion that lends itself to cross-case comparison. The Arctic case focuses on the changing network positions and roles of non-Arctic actors over time, as an initial exploration of the broader ordering effects of such forms of cooperation. The findings suggest that most non-Arctic actors have experienced a decline in their centrality in Arctic cooperation, even as the Arctic has received intensified global interest and the number of participants in Arctic Council work has increased. Further comparative work along these lines would leave us better equipped to assess whether states speaking for their own immediate environs is better – and if so, in which ways – than seeking common solutions to global challenges.     

Nonsense and possibility: ambiguity,rupture and reproduction in children’s play/ful narratives

ABSTRACT

Play has been widely acknowledged as a site of important processes in children’s lives, ranging from socialisation to subjectification. Little empirical work, however, has focused on the particular features of play that mobilise criticality and contestation, or that alternately enable the micro-politics of exclusion. This article draws on school-based research in the west of Ireland with young children from migrant and non-migrant backgrounds. Centring on understandings of generational, gendered and raced belongings, it examines children’s narratives of play and playful narratives that de/reconstruct positionings in peer contexts and in broader societal spaces. More specifically, it explores how the in-between and ambiguous character of children’s play practices and playful speech contribute to such multiple sites of becoming. It concludes with a suggestion for further adult engagement with these play/ful political practices, and for consideration of potential links to ‘large p’ politics in children’s lives.     

Imagining Shi‘ite Iran: Transnationalism and Religious Authenticity in the Muslim World

Religious authority in the Shi‘ite world is often claimed and justified by drawing on national ideologies. Examining the relations between the ruling religious elite in Iran and Lebanese Shi‘ite party of Amal and followers of the Lebanese Shi‘ite scholar Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, this article shows how the latter two actors seek to break official Iran's hegemonic claim to lead the Shi‘ite world through parody and critical narratives about the history and society of Iran. This politics of religious authenticity is not limited to debates among Shi‘ite scholars but also involves other actors such as political party members, students of religion, and pilgrims as they take part in shaping claims to seniority and authenticity in Shi‘ite tradition.     

Espacios locales y espacios trascendentales de la conversión: las Postrimerías de Carabuco y la producción performativa de epistemologías transculturales

The monumental paintings of the Postrimerías [Four Last Things] from the church of Carabuco (1684) serve as objects to study the complex dynamics of the visual and performative production of religious knowledge in a colonial contact zone. The article presents different ‘readings’ of the series that focus on possible uses and receptions of the paintings by local actors. These readings are based, on the one hand, on the idea of conceiving the series as a ‘cycle of meditation’ and product of the influences of Christian mysticism that played an important role in the ‘eschatological politics of conversion’ of the southern Andean Highlands. On the other hand, the paintings relate the eschatological message with the local hagiographic narratives of a pre-Hispanic apostle associated simultaneously with the Christian apostle Bartholomew and the Andean deity Tunupa—the most important figure of Aymara mythology. These works therefore represent objects of memory that participate in the local construction of time and space and that refer not only to Christian eschatological concepts but also to local Andean ontologies.     

Bending the body for China: the uses of acrobatics in Sino-US diplomacy during the Cold War

This paper examines how acrobatics was imbued with multiple meanings through the practices of nation-state building and international diplomacy. More specifically, the author discusses why the Chinese government chose acrobatics to facilitate the Sino-US rapprochement and the implications of this cultural diplomacy for the governments as well as the acrobats. Drawing on oral history interviews and archival data, this study demonstrates how the relationship between acrobatics and the ideas of ‘Chinese revolution’ was established, strengthened, disrupted, and finally re-modified to facilitate China’s relations with the West. This historical investigation advances the literature on performing arts and politics by exposing the political logics in the North-South exchange. As important, the analysis of acrobats’ engagement with Cold War politics evades state-centric narratives and contributes to an understanding of international diplomacy from a bottom-up perspective.     

Politics and social violence in developing democracies: Theory and evidence from Brazil

How do the political institutional features of developing democracies influence how violence occurs? Building on research showing that ‘hybrid democracies’ are more prone to social violence, this article argues that elite competition for power in the context of limited institutional oversight plays an important role in explaining violence. The framework here presents possible mechanisms linking subnational political dynamics and rates of social violence in poorly institutionalised contexts. It highlights how political competition, concentrated political power, and constraints on cooperation can create opportunity structures where violence is incentivised and the rule of law is undermined. This is examined empirically using sub-national homicide data from over 5000 Brazilian municipalities between 1997 and 2010. Findings suggest violence is greater in contexts that are highly competitive – where political actors face credible challenges and have a more tenuous grip on power – and those where power is highly concentrated – where political actors have held power for longer periods or face limited credible challenges. Findings also suggest violence varies depending on whether interactions between state and municipal government are likely to be constrained or cooperative; and are consistent with literatures emphasising the importance of structural explanations of social violence. In light of on-going democratic transitions across the globe, the article highlights the value of understanding links between institutional context, contentious politics and social violence.     

The Prophet and the Sorcerer: Becoming a Cunning-Man in Nineteenth-Century Norway

Cunning-folk offering a wide range of mostly supernatural services were a common part of European popular culture until at least the early twentieth century. Still, insight into how they established themselves as people with extraordinary abilities is limited. In this article I approach two of the best-documented cases of nineteenth-century Norwegian cunning-folk. The preacher-prophet, healer, and clairvoyant Knut Rasmussen (‘Vis-Knut’, 1792–1876) and the diviner and sorcerer Eilev Olsen (‘Spå-Eilev’, 1814–91) were ‘living legends’ who attracted clients from all over the country for more than fifty years. A wealth of historical and folkloristic sources allows us a rare glimpse into their early career stages and the dynamics by which two uneducated day labourers managed to become central actors in a local power play. An analysis of the local ‘folk religious fields’ details strategies, practices, and narratives used to cater to different factions, to convey claims of supernatural efficacy, and to create a regional market.