International accompaniment,reflexivity and the intelligibility of power in post-conflict Guatemala

ABSTRACT

‘International accompaniers’ use their physical presence as a form of peaceful intervention to deter political violence against local human rights defenders. Threatened members of Guatemala’s civil society have relied on accompaniment as part of their security strategy since the early 1980s. Approximately one thousand volunteers from a dozen countries have accompanied in Guatemala. International accompaniment has been a key component of the effort to prosecute former military general and president Efraín Ríos Montt and other perpetrators of mass human rights violations in Guatemala. Victim witnesses and their legal counsel have included accompaniment as part of their protection strategy since 2000. Important questions have nonetheless been raised with respect to accompaniment’s effectiveness as a tool for witness protection and the possibility that it reinforces power inequalities. This article builds on Gada Mahrouse’s critique of accompaniment and draws on Michel Foucault’s understanding of reflexivity and power. The authors use insights from two case studies to support the argument that accompaniment’s usefulness as a tool for witness protection depends on its ability to accommodate the witnesses’ position within webs of interconnected power dynamics and the multiple ways in which they conceive of security. It also depends on how intelligible these different power dynamics are to accompaniers. This argument is used to highlight how accompaniment in Guatemala is relevant for other situations where the prosecution of human rights atrocities is long term and depends on witness testimony.     

Theorizing a child–dog encounter in the slums of La Paz using post-humanistic approaches in order to disrupt universalisms in current ‘child in nature’ debates

This paper theorizes children's interspecies relation with dogs in La Paz Bolivia utilizing post-humanism and new materialism as its approach. This approach allows for the deconstructing of human–nature binaries found in discourses central to the children in nature movement. Questioning the universalizing of children's experience in nature the paper considers three propositions. Firstly, what if children were viewed as nature rather than outside of it. Secondly, can the objects or ‘things’ of nature be viewed as animated. And finally, how sensitive is the contemporary imperative to reconnect children to a romanticized more natured life, to children's diverse worldly experiences. I explore these propositions drawing on a study where I have adopted a materialist ontology and theorized using the work of [Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] and her concept of intra-action as adopted by Rautio [2013a. “Children Who Carry Stones in Their Pockets: On Autotelic Material Practices in Everyday Life.” Children's Geographies 11 (4): 394–408]. Based on my child–dog interspecies exploration, I will conclude by re-addressing the three propositions.     

Ornamentalism,Empire and Race: Indigenous Leaders and Honours in Australia and New Zealand

The imperial honours system, David Cannadine has argued, was a means for binding together ‘the British proconsular elite’ and ‘indigenous colonial elites’ throughout the settler colonies and dominions of the British Empire (Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Penguin, 2002). Yet in settler colonies like Australia and New Zealand indigenous populations were marginalised and often disregarded, and it was local white elites who became knights of St Michael and St George, the Bath and the British Empire. Focusing on Australia and New Zealand, this article explores the complex relationships Aboriginal and Māori leaders have had with honours during the twentieth century. Building upon Cannadine's analysis, I examine the ways in which indigenous leaders navigated the political complexities involved in the offer of an honour, and how their acceptance of awards was received by others, shedding light on how honours systems intersected with post-war struggles for indigenous rights in the former dominions.     

The Henequen Ports of Yucatan’s Gilded Age

Over the last two centuries, the coast has played a major role in the economy of Yucatán, and has served as a key venue in its growing engagement in the global economy. A prominent chapter in this history took place during the Gilded Age (1860–1915), which saw the emergence of a powerful plantation class whose wealth was based on meeting international demand for the fiber of the agave, or henequen plant, which was used to manufacture rope, cordage, and twine. The cultivation of this plant gave rise to hundreds of plantations, and an accompanying infrastructure of haciendas, fiber processing plants, and an extensive regional network of railways for transporting henequen to the port of Progreso, from whence it was exported to North America and Europe. As part of this infrastructure, several plantation owners laid rail lines from their haciendas to the coast and built small ports for shipping their henequen to Progreso. These ports, which are documented in these pages, represented a substantial capital outlay, and were built under the shadow of the gathering clouds of the Mexican Revolution. Viewed in retrospect, they offer an insightful perspective on the economic outlook of the Yucatecan elites in the dawn of the modern age.     

Wounded cities: Memory-work and a place-based ethics of care

What would it mean to think about cities marked by past structures of violence and exclusion as wounded but also as environments that offer its residents care? My current book in progress, Wounded Cities, focuses on creative practices and politics in Bogotá, Cape Town, Berlin, Minneapolis, and Roanoke, cities in which settlement clearances have produced spaces so steeped in oppression that the geographies of displacement continue to structure urban social relations. Precisely in and through these ‘wounded cities’, residents, artists, educators, and activists reconsider the meanings of the ‘right to the city’ and to theorizing the city more broadly. Drawing upon ethnographic research and theories from postcolonial theory, social psychiatry, social ecology, feminist political theory, and art theory, I introduce my concepts of ‘wounded city’, ‘memory-work’, and a ‘place-based ethics of care’ to retheorize urban politics. Artists and residents in wounded cities encourage political forms of witnessing to respect those who have gone before, attend to past injustices that continue to haunt contemporary cities, and create experimental communities to imagine different urban futures. I argue that a deeper appreciation of the lived, place-based experiences of inhabitants of most cities would enable planners, policy makers, and urban theorists to consider more ethical and sustainable forms of urban change than those that continue to legitimate disciplinary forms of governmentality.