Beyond ethnonationalism: Transnational mobilisation and framing in Kashmir's freedom movement

Since Indian Administered Kashmir's (IAK) ‘summer of unrest’ of 2010, greater attention towards the contemporary Kashmir azadi, or freedom, movement has led to more active transnational organising by Kashmiris studying abroad as well as other young people who sympathise with this movement. Indian political elites have predominately framed the azadi movement as a separatist movement. However, this perception had not been shared by many Kashmiris who argue the territory has never legally been a part of India. The perception of being a separatist movement from outside of Kashmir has also shifted with a growing body of literature documenting human rights abuses alongside raising awareness to an international community of activists, which has led to an evolution of the azadi movement into a movement for social justice and human rights. This has been facilitated by social media spaces and heterogeneous activist groups framing their movement as aligned with other social justice movements and anti-discrimination campaigns. Framing the Kashmir self-determination movement as a human rights issue appeals to a wider spectrum of non-Kashmiri activists, especially those already involved in campaigns against the marginalisation of certain groups.     

After Utopia: Leftist imaginaries and activist politics in the postsocialist world

ABSTRACT

In this introduction to special issue ‘After Utopia: Leftist Imaginaries and Activist Politics in the Postsocialist World’, we explore the theoretical implications for thinking about activism as a form of historically situated practice in the former socialist world. Building on insights from the papers included in this issue, which draw on ethnographic research in Ukraine, Armenia, Bosnia and along the Balkan refugee route, our introduction considers both the fragility and resilience of leftist imaginaries in the aftermath of lost utopian dreams of socialism and the betrayed promises of post 1989 democratic transformation. We do so in four moves, (i) by offering a reframing of postsocialism as a problem-space of historical and political consciousness; (ii) by interrogating the figure of the activist in its self-conscious and ethnographically embedded guises; (iii) by heeding Sherry Ortner’s call to think beyond ‘dark anthropology’ and finally, (iv) by considering what it might mean to imagine, and model, political alternatives in both activist and scholarly work.     

Movements upon movements: Refugee and activist struggles to open the Balkan route to Europe

ABSTRACT

In 2015–2016, 1.2 million refugees sought safety in Europe via the Balkan Route. How, in an era of securitized borders, did this unprecedented movement of people from the global south reach the global north? Ethnographic research from two post-Yugoslav nodes along the Route—Preshevë, Serbia and Ljubljana, Slovenia—offers answers that diverge from state-centric accounts, revealing that the relationships between movements, in the sense of both migration and activism, were integral to the dynamics of the Route.     

An archive to build a future: The recovery and rediscovery of the history of socialist associations in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

This paper chronicles the ongoing efforts of several groups of Bosnian activists, artists and academics, to create archives of the often forgotten, and nowadays variously threatened, heritage of political and social life during Yugoslav socialism. Postsocialist archives in other parts of Eastern Europe have typically been motivated by the need to ‘settle accounts’ with communism, understood in this context to be a totalitarian project. By contrast, these ongoing archiving efforts in the postwar and postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina, are created in order to recuperate and repurpose the unrealized potentials of Yugoslav socialism, and to use this history to reseed contemporary political imaginaries. I show how these post-Yugoslav activist-archives are working to recover a form of transformational historical subjectivity which seems profoundly necessary in the current political moment, marked by political disenchantment and the devastating effects of the postsocialist transition.     

Chinese environmental activism and the environmental politics of rumors

Rumors are an important yet poorly understood dynamic in environmental politics, particularly regarding their role in environmental activism. Drawing on theories of rumors, environmental information governance, and environmental activism, we analyzed the eco-politics of rumors in a Chinese village that experienced rumor-fueled protests against the construction and operation of a limestone quarry. We make three arguments regarding the condition, control, and content of rumors. First, poor environmental information governance, driven by a development-first and prejudice-rich official narrative and the strategic behaviors of blame and accountability avoidance, provides an important condition for rumor formulation and circulation. Second, the generation and circulation of rumors can be understood as a collective sense-making process driven by the informal communication between external and internal sources of information. The ephemeral nature of communication and group sanctions on government supporters make it difficult for authorities to control rumors. Third, by conceptualizing rumors as information warfare against official narratives, we show that rumors can foster a sense of collective urgency, reframe a land-right protest into an environmental protest that is politically more likely to succeed, and undermine public trust in local authorities. The findings suggest that rumors are an important part of environmental politics in China because of their role in environmental activism.     

What happened to adventurous young people and their cool places?

ABSTRACT

The essay is about ‘youth full’ change, the content of which is always partial and incomplete but it is always playful in the sense that it is generative and creative. That revolutionary playfulness emanates from young people suggests an important harbinger of change that is often dismissed or feared by adults. As the world moves along dystopian axes, we ignore this palpable energy and its potential at great cost.