‘Demonstrating the Machine Guns’: Rebellion,Violence and State Formation in Early Colonial Darfur

Recent literature on British colonial rule in Africa has increasingly emphasised the ways in which relatively cautious colonial states were formed in processes of engagement and accommodation with local societies. This article uses the example of a major rebellion against colonial authority in southern Darfur in 1921 to demonstrate the ways in which these processes of local engagement might themselves feed into rebellion against state authority, rather than secure colonial rule. The rebellion was inspired by Mahdist millenarian belief, but the involvement of local societies in both the rebellion and its repression was also shaped by patterns of local rivalries into which the colonial state had entered as an additional actor. The article also reminds us, more broadly, that spectacular violence and local accommodation were not distinct modes of colonial governance but rather continually intertwined in processes of colonial state formation.     

Death-squads contemplating queers as citizens: what Colombian paramilitaries are saying

Colombian right-wing paramilitary forces aligned with the state and leftist guerrilla groups are associated with homophobic and transphobic attacks. However, the most extreme accounts of violence are attributed to the former group. Sexual and gender minorities are victimized in the ongoing internal conflict in which armed actors use attacks as a form of communicative violence meant to discipline the civilian population. At the same time, Colombian lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities are making significant advances in gaining recognition of their human rights. This article explores the space where the advance of LGBT rights confounds reactionary homophobic beliefs of illegal right-wing armed groups. I consider how concepts such as ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ shape the discourse of paramilitary forces in their account of their group's homophobic violence. Special attention is paid to the logic provided by two informants, former paramilitary members themselves, regarding the conditions under which right-wing paramilitary groups would be obliged to recognize the rights of sexual and gender minorities as citizens. The article concludes with a discussion of how the development of a sexual citizenship discourse, in place, may serve to disrupt extreme violence against sexual and gender minorities in the context of militarization and armed conflict.     

“Much in Blood and Money”: Necropolitical Ecology on the Margins of the Uganda Protectorate

Increasingly, political ecologists invoke the concept of “green grabbing” to refer to the ways in which processes of accumulation by dispossession articulate with various imperatives for environmental protection. This paper traces these contemporary processes to their roots in the colonial era, focusing on how dispossession in the name of environmental protection intersects with complex historical geographies of state formation and internal territorialisation. Drawing upon the case of Mount Elgon in Britain's Uganda Protectorate, in particular, we reconstruct the ways in which the interrelated “birth” of both conservation and transcontinental agrarian markets were intimately connected to the emergence and normalisation of the colonial state itself. In doing so, we propose the term necropolitical ecology as a framework to encompass the ways in which contemporary “green grabs” partially emerge from racialised modes of colonial appropriation, the violence of which often still lingers in agencies and institutions of environmental governance in the contemporary postcolony.     

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.     

Beach Boys Do It Too: Subculture and Commoditised Desire in a Transnational Tourist Site in Kerala,South India

This article is based on an ethnographic study of a group of Scheduled Caste (SC) male youth in a globalised tourist site in Kerala, South India, who participate in situational sexual and romantic relationships with predominantly tourist women from the global north. We first aim to expand on the “sex and romance tourism” literature of such encounters to provide an Indian context. Secondly, we aim to highlight how young men involved in such encounters undertake complex mediations of localised and global forms of consumption and commoditisation to participate in the neoliberal tourist market place. Mainly by way of a subculture known as the Jungees, we describe how young men utilise the former processes to seek economic and social mobility for themselves and their families but also to valorise and re-imagine their identity along racial, gendered, caste and class-based dimensions. Finally, we explore the young men’s articulation of a hierarchy of preferred encounters that draws on gendered, sexualised and racialised local and global imaginaries of commoditised desire(s) of tourist women from the global north. We highlight the ways in which participants actively utilise the neoliberal context to engage in a range of self-generated livelihood strategies and to contest their marginality.     

Town Twinning in Greece: Reconstructing Local Histories Through Translocal Sensory‐Affective Performances

Twinning arrangements between members and non‐members of the European Union are one of the many Euro‐symbolic measures taken with the aim of making indigenous populations “feel like citizens of Europe at the local level”. This article addresses the ways in which trans‐local projects of indoctrination, such as twinning, force indigenous peoples to reposition themselves toward what is culturally defined as local history. Its focus is on the exchange of small‐scale civilities through which partners engage themselves in sensory and affective performances of their history, and are gradually led to the reorganization of their domestic sensorium or public memory.     

Rape as a Weapon of War(riors): The Militarisation of Sexual Violence in the United States, 1990–2000

This article uses a transnational feminist lens to examine how accusations of sexual violence were mobilised by the United States (US) government to justify military intervention at the same time that the US military failed to address sexual violence perpetrated by and against its own service members. Drawing upon an archive of civilian representations ranging from the New York Times to G.I. Jane, the author explores US interventions in the Persian Gulf, Haiti and the former Yugoslavia alongside sexual assaults committed by servicemen at the Tailhook Convention, on Okinawa and at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. This article draws connections between feminism and neo‐imperialism, between Cold War and War on Terror ideologies, and between rape as a weapon of war and rape during times of ‘peace’ in order to better understand the relationships between sexual politics and geopolitics at the end of the twentieth century.     

Carrying a heavy load: Mayan women’s understandings of reparation in the aftermath of genocide

ABSTRACT

Drawing on extensive testimony from Ixil women survivors of sexual violence, the 10 May 2013 verdict in the genocide trial of former de facto Guatemalan head of state and army general Efraín Ríos Montt highlighted the perpetration of sexual violence as an integral component in the attempt to destroy the Maya Ixil as an ethnic group and thus evidence of genocide. Acknowledging that sexual violence was a weapon of genocide in Guatemala contributes to a critical analysis of how the racialized violence targeted against the country’s indigenous peoples was gendered, and enables the women and men who are survivors of these crimes to seek redress. However, narrating sexual harm within justice-seeking processes is not without complication, and trials alone cannot respond to survivors’ demands for justice and social repair. This article examines how fifty-four Maya Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Mam and Chuj women who are survivors of sexual violence make meaning of the everyday struggles to rethread their lives in the aftermath of genocide. The article uses data from a four-year participatory action research (PAR) project conducted by the authors with this group of Mayan women, including a series of workshops that used creative techniques—drawing, collage, dramatization and body sculptures—to elicit more complex and contestational stories than those emergent from a more linear narrative approach to understanding harm suffered and efforts for redress. Analysis of these data confirms that these Mayan women survivors have woven their understanding of reparation from three main threads: their experiences of loss and harm; their recognition of the Guatemalan state’s duplicity; and their protagonism in justice-seeking processes. The article concludes by arguing that women survivors' desire for repair requires attention to the deep-seated impoverishment that they highlight as the heavy load of gendered violence they carry with them.     

Neocolonial Urbanism? La Rénovation Urbaine in Paris

This paper analyses the programme of redeveloping housing estates in France overseen by the Agence Nationale de la Rénovation Urbaine (ANRU). Under this programme social housing reconstruction is undertaken in a nationally coordinated fashion in order to “valorize”, “secure” and socially “mix” estates. The paper highlights the political and neo‐colonial aspects of this programme and the wider state spatial strategies it is part of. Redevelopment projects not only further gentrifying land‐rent valorization, state rescaling and territorially stigmatizing symbolic violence; they also reorganize territorial relations of domination in multiple, also racialized, neo‐colonial and partly hegemonic ways. In a longer view, they respond to the “urban revolution” of 1968 (Garnier) and to the “anti‐colonial revolution” of independence and anti‐racist movements (Khiari). The paper builds on a framework that articulates marxist (Lefebvrean) and anti‐colonial (Fanonian) lineages while drawing on research on the neo‐colonial aspects of the French state.     

Scientific strategists in the period of mamlakhtiyut: Interaction between the academic community and political power centers

In the first decades of the State of Israel an elitist group of scientists and scholars from academic institutions organized itself into a powerful status group. Its members participated in the establishment and development of programs and processes that had a significant impact on Israeli society. The power of this group (which we term “scientific strategists”) derived from personal and institutional cooperation between its members and leading political figures who had a strong influence on its agenda. This interaction was based on mutual trust and loyalty and contributed to establishing the infrastructure for the main political tradition at that time – mamlakhtiyut (the centrality of state interests). The article examines the activities of the scientific strategists, their ability to participate in government institutions without forfeiting their academic bases, and the ways in which political leaders promoted their symbolic status, financially supported their scientific activity, and endowed them with rewards and public recognition.     

Women and economy: complex inequality in a post-industrial landscape

This article looks at the workplace, home and welfare/state to explore intergenerational, dynamic inequality experienced by women around paid work. Based in a former coalfield, it brings women's paid work centre stage and resonates with the experiences of women (and men) living and working in other post-industrial places that grew out of a particular industry, suffered the trauma of industrial closure, redundancy and job loss, and coping with a new economy shaped by low pay and insecurity. To examine the dynamic element of inequality, the article draws upon Walby's (2009, Globalisation and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities, London: Sage) theory of ‘complex inequality’ to understand intersecting regimes of oppression. The article is based on ethnographic work in East Durham, England, including repeat in-depth group discussions with 31 women aged 16–90.     

The Politics of Vigilance in Southeastern Nigeria

This article argues that governance can be best analysed within modes of vigilance. Where recent work on the post‐colonial state has emphasized the symbolic and practical constitution of the state through surveillance and spatialization, so in counterpoint, this analysis illustrates that social engagement with the state is based on conceptions of vigilance and practices of counter‐surveillance with both spatial and temporal dimensions. Drawing on an ethnography of Annang youth associations in southeastern Nigeria, this analysis outlines how the micro‐politics of vigilance are based on knowledge of the states' patrimonial ‘ways of operating’ and processes which define internal, localized rights, registers and styles of action. This argument is based on an analysis of popular responses to disorder which contribute to an ‘insurgent’ construction of the public realm in which groups marginalized and excluded challenge the logic, locations, patterns of discourse and constructions of the public good.     

Democracy and Islamist Violence: Lessons from Post‐Mubarak Egypt

This article explores the contentious relation between the absence of democracy in the Middle East and the use of armed violence by Islamist groups in light of the Arab Spring. Its main objective is to decipher the evolving positions of former and current groups who used or promoted violence and to relate them to broader academic debates on violence and democracy on the one hand, and deradicalization on the other. This research demonstrates that the large majority of former Islamist militants in Egypt reject any sort of violence in post‐Mubarak Egypt, even if they have not all renounced their religious legitimization of violence in the past. Second, it reveals that even if they maintain a religious opposition to democracy in Egypt, the opening of political opportunities and their progressive joining of the political process has favorably led most of them to accept democratic practices in reality. Third, it adds that the voice of those currently promoting violence in Egypt has been marginalized and that their main alternative has been the promotion of armed violence in Syria; and last, it stresses two potential security threats unrelated to the opening of political opportunities in post‐Mubarak Egypt and to the general debate on democracy and violence. First, local grievances in Sinai have led to violence in the past and are still to be dealt with. Second, the current political deadlock can potentially lead to localized and specific armed activities that could start a cycle of violence. This research is based on field research in Egypt and uses repeated interviews of leaders and members of the two main former militant groups, al‐Jama?ah al‐Islamiyya (the Islamic Group) and Jama? al‐Jihad (the Jihad Group) as well as interviews with militants of the salafi jihadi trend and their supporters in Cairo.     

Marie Redonnet's L'Accord de paix: The question of resistance and the turn-of-the-millennium novel

This article discusses how Marie Redonnet's 2000 novel L'Accord de paix addresses the question of resisting the ideology of turn-of-the-millennium consumer society. It takes its bearings from Redonnet's explicit points de repère (Genet's travesty of the symbolic order, Debord's integrated spectacle and Sartrean engagement) and from the intersection of her critical works with Cixous's criture féminine and Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires. The discussion identifies how L'Accord de paix converges with and diverges from these writers' differing conceptions of agency, and how Redonnet self-reflexively seeks to counter appropriation by the order she seeks to oppose. Situating the questions of misogyny and difference within the question of resisting turn-of-the-millennium symbolic violence, it reveals a literary commitment that simultaneously harnesses the legacy of the past and makes a travesty of the market-driven symbolic order of the present. The article argues that by transmitting the responsibility for resistance from writer to readers, Redonnet inscribes in storytelling a hope for discovering new bearings for the future.     

Sexualized violence and the gendered commodification of the animal body in Pacific Northwest US dairy production

This article draws on a case study of bovine life in the US dairy industry to observe the power relations and violent networks of commodification involved. I use the terms gendered commodification and sexualized violence to understand the lives of animals in the industry and the discourses that are employed to reproduce its practices. Focusing on sex and gender, concepts which have long been classic in feminist geography, this article explores the sexually violent commodification of both female and male animals in dairy production. In addition to the ways in which both are exploited for their productive and reproductive capacities, male animals are also discursively conceptualized as perpetrators of the violence against the females. This article engages with geographies of the body and animal geographies in order to extend geographies of the body to other-than-human bodies and in order to feature the body more prevalently in animal geographies. This attention to the animal body ultimately reveals the pervasiveness of sexual violence and the consequences of gendered commodification for both nonhuman and human others.     

Nation-building and Canada's national symbolic order, 1993–2015

This article examines the symbolic construction of Canadian national identity by the 1993–2006 Liberal governments and the 2006–2015 Conservative governments. To do so, it employs the concept of a ‘national symbolic order’, which refers to the complex set of public symbols that invoke, transport, and define claims to a shared national identity. Within Canada's national symbolic order, we focus on the state's use of national symbols across two domains: Speeches from the Throne and banknotes. Our analysis shows that Canada's recent Conservative government has used both of these domains to reshape Canadian national identity in ways that accord with neo-conservative values and ideology, and that it has done so in a coherent, consistent, and comprehensive fashion. This analysis highlights the symbolic strategies employed by state actors in linking particular ideologies to their nation-building projects; these strategies span multiple political and policy spaces.     

Group Identity, Individual Creativity, and Symbolic Generation in a BaKongo Diaspora

This article applies theories of group dynamics and individual agency to past material expressions of core symbols within particular African American religious beliefs. The past creation and use of such artifacts is analyzed using theories concerning modes of symbolic expression, the interplay of dominant and nondominant religions, formation and maintenance of social group identities, and the role of individual creativity and innovation within those processes. This analysis demonstrates the ways in which facets of the core symbolic expressions of the BaKongo people of West Central Africa evolved over time and across the trans-Atlantic region.     

Violence,Social Differentiation and the Self

The article considers aspects of violence in everyday life among the Tiwi of Melville and Bathurst Islands. It briefly compares the role of violence in bureaucratically and juridically mediated forms with self-help and social regulation in Aboriginal societies, focussing on the expressive or performative aspects of violence in everyday interaction. Myers' discussion of violence among the Pintubi posits a dialectical polarity of relatedness and differentiation, corresponding with the affective poles of compassion and anger. This is compared with Sansom's account of semi-ritualized forms of violence in Aboriginal fringe-camp life, where a point of commonality in Myers' and Sansom's approaches is found: this consists of the attunement of action, of violence, self-violence and destructiveness to the witnessing public. In Tiwi life too, conflict is dynamically shaped by actors' attempts to impinge upon, to seek to arouse and in some cases to manipulate, compassion or concern in the witnessing group as defence or as a form of moral attack. Open, dramatic ‘appealing’ violence, often in the form of a more or less controlled loss of self-control, seeks to parry indirect interpersonal tension and antagonism, to reassert or restore social distance and protect or privilege important relationships from intrusive demands. However, these violent appeals in rhetorical threat, in self-violence, destructiveness or sometimes in dramatic suicidal gestures also invariably indicate extreme personal difficulty displaced into open forms of confrontation. The article proposes that the generative moment of violence for social differentiation be sought in an examination of dynamic interrelationships between individual life-history, inner group processes and their articulation with external social forms.     

Calling 911: intimate partner violence and responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era

For most of United States’ history, the state did not intervene in violence perpetrated within the home or intimate relationships. Women experiencing intimate partner violence had little recourse from state institutions for security or legal justice. This article’s inquiry centers on two policing practices – preferred arrest and evidence-based prosecution – that emerged in the 1980s to redress the state’s long history of ignoring intimate partner violence. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how these two policing practices affect the experience of citizenship for intimate partner violence survivors by showing how the state creates a distinction between ‘cooperative’ victims who support the arrest and incarceration of their abusers and ‘uncooperative’ who do not. To develop this argument, I conceptualize the policing and prosecution response to intimate partner violence as a social contract of rights and responsibilities that mediates the relationship between the state and women who experience intimate partner violence. By illustrating how the state discursively constructs ‘uncooperative’ victims as irrational, this article utilizes a feminist geographic analytic to examine the everyday discursive and material technologies that the state employs to reregulate responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era.     

Pathways of confinement: the legal constitution of carceral spaces in France’s social housing estates

This paper analyzes the enactment and evolution of article L.126 of the Code of Construction and Housing (CCH) in France and demonstrates the careful ways lawmakers have redefined ‘common areas’ in social housing estates as carceral spaces. It argues that such transformation has inserted these areas into a ‘carceral continuum’ that facilitates the arrest, prosecution and confinement of young people ‘hanging out’ in ‘common areas’. Drawing on the work of legal geographers on the co-constitutive relationship of law and space, and urban and carceral geographers exploring the criminalization of urban space and the extension of the carceral state, the paper illustrates how the pathways of confinement are legally constituted. The legal process documented here seeks to highlight the law’s meaning-making capacity and the complex legal practices – by actors and institutions located at multiple scales – which significantly condition urban practices and relationships. The analysis suggests, finally, that law’s constitutive power has limits that are brought to the fore by anti-police violence struggles. Pathways of confinement are, thus, fragile networks dependent upon the ongoing enactments, discourses, and practices by lawmakers and law-enforcers.