(En)Gendering the Maoist Insurgency in India: Between Rhetoric and Reality

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts a gendered analysis of the ongoing Maoist insurgency in India, particularly focused on women’s position within the movement, the continuum of gender based violence that they experience and the potential for transformative politics. The contemporary Maoist movement in India has been informed by a stated commitment to ‘progressive’ gender politics and social transformations; in that it marks a departure from the Naxalite movement of the 60s and 70s. Yet women remain concentrated in the group’s lower ranks and are absent from leadership positions. In addition, sexual and gender based violence and discrimination within the movement further undermine the commitment of the revolution to create opportunities for transformative politics including gender justice and equality. We consider it important that women’s lived experiences of the conflict - as combatants, supporters as well as civilians affected by it - are brought to the foreground. Drawing from postcolonial feminist approaches, we reflect on the challenges and possibilities for feminist politics and ethics within the Indian Maoist movement. We conclude that the rhetoric and reality of gender equality within the Maoist movement provides a unique opportunity to further investigate and analyze the ways in which feminist activism and the women’s movement in India have alienated the concerns of marginalized women from dalit and adivasi communities.     

Labor force diversity and firm survival

We analyze the influence that the diversity of individuals, both within a firm and in the region where the firm is located, has on firm survival. We estimate a hazard model using microdata for Swedish firms for the years 2002–2013. Results show that firm-specific diversity in education, age, and gender are positively associated with firm survival. However, firm-specific diversity by place of origin is negatively associated with firm survival. Yet the cultural diversity among the inhabitants in the region where the firm is located enhances firm survival. Magnitudes of the effects vary by region and industrial sector.     

Respondent Understanding of the 1999 Referendum Question on a Reform of the New Zealand Justice System

A referendum question at the 1999 New Zealand general election resulted in a 92% 'Yes' vote in favour of reform of the New Zealand justice system. However, even supporters of the referendum conceded the question was poorly designed and open to different interpretations. To examine these interpretations, we deconstructed the referendum question into five constituent questions and tested these on a sample of potential voters. Support for the constituent questions ranged from 70% to 95%, and subsequent probing revealed that respondents' understanding and interpretation of the key concepts varied considerably. These findings emphasise that survey professionals need to be involved in designing referendum questions and that proposed questions need cognitive pre-testing to ensure they convey their intended meaning and can be understood by voters. A poorly designed question reduces the credibility of the referendum process and threatens the outcome of specific policy initiatives.     

Gender,Memory and Social Power

Two books are reviewed here, the first, by a historian of western Europe, Elisabeth van Houts, the second by a Byzantinist, Lynda Garland. Aspects of van Houts's book discussed are: the complementary roles of women and men in the production of historical writing; the role of women in the transmission of oral testimony, especially on genealogies and on property rights claimed through women; and the gender‐specificity of women's transmission of valued objects. The book's contributions to the history of the family are stressed. Lynda Garland's treatment of a series of Byzantine empresses is appreciated as informative, but criticised for lack of reference to historiography on medieval female rulership in western Europe, and insufficient analysis of structural features of the Byzantine polity. A brief conclusion reflects on gender and power in early medieval east and west.     

Border Practices,Boundaries, and the Control of Resource Access: A Case from China,Thailand and Burma

This article traces border practices along boundaries that China and Thailand share with Burma. It portrays a spectrum of small border polities, from principalities on the fringes of Southeast Asian kingdoms, through Nationalist troops in Burma following their defeat in China, to ‘drug lords’ and ‘rebel armies’. The focus here is on Akha village heads who have worked their connections in multiple directions, including into Burma, to position themselves as patrons controlling local resource access. With state appointment as border guardians, village heads become chiefs of new kinds of small border entities, protecting the border for the homeland while enabling certain illicit information, people, and goods to cross. In regions with a history of complex patronage relations, state efforts to control peripheral people, resources, and territories have in fact produced small border chiefs, with practices similar to those of frontier princes in the past.     

Light railways and the rural–urban continuum: technology, space and society in late nineteenth-century Belgium

Combining the literature on ‘city systems’ and its intermediary spatial categories with the discourse on ‘socio-technical’ hybrids, this article examines whether the early rural–urban condition in Belgium was the planned spatial outcome of infrastructure policy. More specifically, it analyzes the dialectic between the conception of light railways and the geographies of power, tracing its impact on the spatial organization of the territory. In 1911 the British sociologist Seebohm Rowntree stated that Belgium had gone further than any country in supplying its working class with gardens. The dense Belgian railway network encouraged workers to commute between land and labour, travelling from their homes in the healthy countryside to work in urban factories and mines. Despite the agricultural crisis and accelerating industrialization in nineteenth-century Belgium, infrastructure policy had resulted in a peculiar territorial balance between city and countryside by transforming agricultural labourers and farmers into industrial workers without forcing them to leave their ancestral villages. Rather than nostalgically clinging to a disappearing countryside, the government harnessed the modern technology par excellence, combining rails, steam and state management, to safeguard the country as well as to facilitate modern dynamic. Countryside preservation and accelerating industrialization were reconciled in a reshaped configuration that rendered the countryside and its inhabitants simultaneously rural and urban, traditional and modern. As most literature situates the genesis of rural–urban landscapes after the First and Second World War, this article on late-nineteenth-century Belgium adds a further facet to the recently growing international research on hybrid territories within the fields of urbanism and geography.