Rethinking Power and Authority: Symbolic Violence and Subjectivity in Nepal's Terai Forests

Recent work on authority, power and the state has opened up important avenues of inquiry into the practices and contexts through which power is exercised. Why certain forms of authority emerge as more durable and legitimate than others remains a challenge, however. In this article we bring together two bodies of thought to engage this issue, feminist theories of power and subjectivity and Bourdieu's ideas of symbolic violence, in order to explore how power and authority are reproduced and entrenched. Our purpose is to advance theorizing on power and authority in the context of contentious political situations and institutional emergence. This unusual theoretical synergy allows us to illustrate how power is exercised in relation to natural resource management and the ways in which the conflict/post‐conflict context creates institutional forms and spaces which simultaneously challenge and reinforce antecedent forms of authority. To animate our theoretical concerns, we draw on work in community‐based forestry in Nepal, with a focus on some of the conflicts that have arisen in relation to the valuable Sal forests of the Terai, or lowland plains.     

Authority over Forests: Empowerment and Subordination in Senegal's Democratic Decentralization

Senegal's 1998 forestry code transfers rights to control and allocate forest access to elected rural councils, ostensibly giving the elected authorities significant material powers with respect to which they can represent the rural population. But the Forest Service is unwilling to allow rural councils to exercise these powers. To retain control, foresters use pressure, bribes and threats while taking advantage of the inability of the rural representatives to influence actors higher up in government. They justify themselves with arguments of national good and local incompetence. The foresters ally with urban‐based forest merchants and are supported by the sub‐prefect. Despite the transfer of forest rights, the foresters continue to allocate access to lucrative forest opportunities — in this case charcoal production and exchange — to the merchants. Despite holding effective property rights over forest, such as the right to exclude others, rural councils remain marginal and rural populations remain destitute. The councils cannot represent their populations and therefore cannot gain legitimacy: they have no authority. Despite progressive new laws, the Forest Service helps to maintain Senegal's healthy urban charcoal oligopsonies, while beating back fledgling local democracy.     

Pluralising Political Forests: Unpacking “the State” by Tracing Virunga's Charcoal Chain

Peering through the lens of illegal charcoal production in the forested areas of Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, this paper makes a case for disaggregating the notion of “the state” to better capture “the political” in contemporary political forests. It argues that to identify the fluctuating importance of different dimensions of “stateness”, it is crucial to acknowledge the polymorphous socio-spatial relations that produce political forests. Thus, we draw on the notions of territory, place, scale and network (TPSN) to examine how “stateness” in Virunga has transformed under the particularisation, transnationalisation, and regionalisation of authority. This approach allows us to show how these processes do not only stem from neoliberalisation, but are also driven by, inter alia, regional warfare and non-state militarisation. The resulting complexity of the regulatory landscape turns Virunga into a space marked by a plurality of partly overlapping and partly conflicting political forests.     

Islam: Issues of Political Authority and Pluralism

Abstract

Islam and the Muslim world are very much part of the current discussions on religion and global politics. This article looks at some of the more general debates about the gradual rise of Islam in the public and political consciousness. It is not a systematic analysis of Islamic political systems or political thought nor a discussion about key thinkers of the last century. It does, however, provide a glimpse into diverse views about leadership and governance in early and more recent Islamic history. The article concentrates more on Sunni Islam though the author is well aware that this is not the normative tradition in some parts of the Muslim world. Within the context of this diversity, it looks at issues of religious diversity and how they fit into current debates about inter-religious dialogue and pluralism.     

Narco-Cattle Ranching in Political Forests

In Central America, drug traffickers are deforesting the region's remaining forests and protected areas through a process known as narco-ganadería, narco-cattle ranching. Drawing on the case study of Laguna del Tigre National Park, this article argues that narco-cattle ranching is a key driver of deforestation in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. Using ethnographic and remote-sensing methods, we describe narco-cattle ranching's money-laundering practices, its territorial dynamics, and its environmental impacts. We draw on theorisations of “political forests” to explain how drug trafficking organisations transform land use in the reserve, and along the way, remake its ecology, territories and subjects. Our work illustrates that drug policy is inextricably linked to conservation policy in the Americas. More specifically, we argue that community-based resource management improves forest and protected area residents’ abilities to resist drug-trafficking related land use change by strengthening local governance and land tenure regimes.     

Razi on Reason and Political Authority: A Study in Medieval Persian Political Thought

The Philosopher of Rey, Mohammad-e Zakariya-ye Razi and his Ismaili adversaries, Abu Hatam-e Razi and Naser-e Khosrow, share a political understanding of religion according to which religion is a theologico-political system of domination. However, they are at odds over the political philosophy appraisal of religion qua a system of authority. The paper explicates the latter disagreement in part based on Razi's and his opponents' conflicting ideas about the nature of the faculty of Reason and its distribution among men. Consequently, the paper underlines a democratic implication of Razi's thesis on the makeup of the human intellect.     

Access and Property: A Question of Power and Authority

In this introduction we argue that access and property regarding natural resources are intimately bound up with the exercise of power and authority. The process of seeking authorizations for property claims also has the effect of granting authority to the authorizing politico‐legal institution. In consequence, struggles over natural resources in an institutionally pluralist context are processes of everyday state formation. Through the discussion of this theoretical proposition we point to legitimizing practices, territoriality and violence as offering particular insights into the recursively constituted relations between struggles over access and property regarding natural resources, contestations about power and authority, and state formation.     

Experimental Consensus: Negotiating with the Irrigating State in the South of Laos

Abstract

It is common to view Laos as a political culture prone to “consensus”, yet it is also true that policy is constantly changing there, often radically. If everyone is always “in consensus”, what can explain this change? I suggest that the answer is found in the particular kind of consensus at play: it is informed by a wider “experimentarian” ethic evident in rural Laos, where ideas (including the latest policies) are put to the test through practical implementation. The results of these experiments are used to validate policy change and reversal. This allows rural residents a degree of manoeuvrability in their engagements with the state that is striking given the “authoritarian” status of the current regime. It can explain and is used to justify, for instance, the oft-observed gap between policy and actual practice. This room for manoeuvre comes at the price of “playing the game”, at least for a while, of the latest policy fad, sometimes with disastrous consequences for rural livelihoods. I use the example of an irrigation project that was implemented in the south of Laos from 1999–2002 to examine “experimental consensus” at work as policy was received, engaged and eventually relinquished.     

State Spaces of Resistance: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Struggle for Land in Laos

Land grabbing has transformed rural environments across the global South, generating resistance or political reactions “from below”. In authoritarian countries like Laos, where resource investments are coercively developed and insulated from political dissent, resistance appears absent at first glance. Yet, it is occurring under the radar, largely outside transnational activist networks. In this article, we examine how resistance can protect access to rural lands in contexts where it is heavily repressed. Resistance here occurs with, rather than against the state by foregrounding the contradictions of land use and ownership within state spaces, such as competing goals of large‐scale industrial plantations versus smallholder agriculture and national forest conservation. Such contradictions are engaged by using historical, place‐based political connections to exploit the scalar frictions of a fragmented state and occupying plantation clearance sites to highlight contested lands in situ. Nonetheless, such strategies remain spatially and socially uneven amongst the Lao peasantry.     

On Authority and Political Destination: Michael Polanyi and the Threshold of Postmodernism

ABSTRACT

This study challenges a prevalent view that Aquinas's political thought develops over time on the question of legitimate resistance to tyranny. Many scholars argue that Aquinas gradually restricts the scope of legitimate political resistance and morally permissible tyrannicide. On this view Aquinas defends tyrannicide in his early Commentary on the Sentences, adds strong qualifications in the Summa Theologiae, and finally repudiates tyrannicide in De Regno. This study finds the evidence for such a development lacking and seeks to rehabilitate a long and diverse Thomistic tradition of legitimate resistance including tyrannicide. Indeed, a close reading of De Regno shows that Aquinas upholds a doctrine of political resistance and defends the legitimacy of tyrannicide under certain circumstances. Moreover, Aquinas's doctrine of political resistance is wide open and underdeveloped. Later attempts to clarify and qualify Aquinas's doctrine of political resistance, therefore, are appropriate and even necessary.     

Haunting the State: Rumours,Spectral Apparitions and the Longing for Buddhist Charisma in Laos

Buddhist ascetic monks and hermits that move largely outside of the institutional structures of the monastic order (sangha) have a long history in mainland Southeast Asia. In Lao Buddhism these figures seem to have largely disappeared, but due to their charismatic qualities they still occupy a crucial position in the social imaginary. This article explores rumours and narratives about the existence of ascetic monks and hermits in contemporary Laos. I argue that rumours about, and narratives of, spectral apparitions of these figures express a longing for Buddhist charisma that is partially rooted in Laos’ revolutionary past, and in recent social and economic changes. As Buddhist charisma can point to alternative, personalised sources of power, I argue that rumours and spectral apparitions can be interpreted as haunting, and therefore afflicting and challenging the current politics of religion of the Lao state.     

Ethnic Performance and the State in Laos: The Boun Greh Annual Festival of the Khmou

Following the 1975 revolution, the Laotian statesmen adopted a modernising discourse that targeted “backward” traditions as undesirable. But since the 1990s, authorities have mitigated this standpoint, distinguishing “good” from “bad” traditions according to their compatibility with the program of national development, and professing their will to (re)instate the former as suitable expressions of culture in a multi-ethnic nation. This is manifest everywhere from the National Constitution to TV shows and ethnic catalogues. This paper analyses the implementation of these principles through the case of the boun greh New Year festival, an invented ethnic tradition of the Khmou, the largest ethnic minority in Laos. The article demonstrates that this implementation has consequentially implied the adoption of a grammar of national ethnicity; that this official framework paradoxically allows the Khmou to articulate demands for better recognition of their group; and that this process does not mute expressions of “cultural intimacy” at variance with this matrix. The official frame of ethnicity has been eventually adopted by the Khmou, but this state effect has multiplied the layers of expressed ethnicity: it cannot be equated with a unilateral regimentation that would deprive the Khmou of their agency.     

Natural Law and Our Contemporary Institutions

Abstract

Extending recent directions in the field and informed by a renewed reading of Aquinas, we argue for a broadened sense of the natural law that radiates to social and political life, not only in the narrow form of positive law but in the life of our institutions that necessarily presume an ordering to the common good. While increasingly under the threat of privatization or bureaucratization in individualistic cultures, institutions can and do function as sites where gifts are freely given and received, shared goods articulated and debated, and friendships formed.