Zopilotes,Alacranes, y Hormigas (Vultures,Scorpions, and Ants): Animal Metaphors as Organizational Politics in a Nicaraguan Garbage Crisis

While scholars frequently frame conflicts over urban waste in terms of a politics of infrastructure, this article frames such conflicts in terms of a politics of organization. In 2008, self‐employed recyclers in and around Managua, Nicaragua blockaded local dumps in an effort to secure rights to scavenge for resellable material. Over the course of this “garbage crisis”, a material and semiotic entanglement of human labor organization with animal ecology became politically salient. At different points, recyclers were compared to ants (hormigas), vultures (zopilotes), and scorpions (alacranes). State officials, NGOs, and recyclers themselves used these animal metaphors to describe the organization of waste collection. Drawing on theories of value from political ecology and economic anthropology, as well as analysis of the deployment of these “organic” metaphors, we outline an “organizational politics” of urban waste.     

Uneven Urbanisation: Connecting Flows of Water to Flows of Labour and Capital Through Jakarta's Flood Infrastructure

This article analyses processes of uneven urbanisation by looking at flood infrastructure. Combining the conceptual frameworks of uneven development with the political ecology of urbanisation, we use flood infrastructure as a methodological device to trace the processes through which unevenness occurs within, but also far beyond, the city of Jakarta, Indonesia. We do this to show how the development of flood infrastructure in Jakarta is shaped by the logic of capitalism through mutually implicated tendencies of socionatural differentiation and equalisation. These processes render waters, resources and labour as similar across places and times to produce different spaces for different populations, within and beyond city boundaries. This theorisation reveals how the urban inequalities (re)produced by flood infrastructure are intimately linked to inequalities (re)produced through the urbanisation of the non‐city.     

Canada’s Israel Policy under Justin Trudeau: Rejecting or Reinforcing the Legacy of Stephen Harper?

Scholars of Canadian politics have noted that the Prime Minister plays a dominant role in shaping domestic and foreign policy. This article examines the role of the Prime Minister in shaping Canadian foreign policy toward Israel since 1993 and shows the central role that the Prime Minister has played on this issue. It specifically argues that Stephen Harper produced a noticeable pro-Israel shift in Canada’s policy and moved Canada away from the multilateralist approach pursued by Jean Chrétien and, to a lesser extent, Paul Martin. But this article also argues that Justin Trudeau has so far embraced a policy that largely reinforces the approach of Harper rather than rejecting it. Thus, one practical implication of the dominant role of the Prime Minister in shaping Canada’s policy toward Israel is that Canada has become more one-sided in its support of Israel in the past two decades.     

The Post-Colonial Constitutional Order of the Commonwealth Caribbean: The Endurance of the Crown and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council

ABSTRACT

Amongst Britain's former colonies the independent countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean represent something of an anomaly in so far as the majority of them remain constitutional monarchies and continue to retain the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) as their final appellate court, even though the region has had its own final appellate court – the Caribbean Court of Justice – since 2006. This is in marked contrast to Britain's former colonies in Africa and South Asia, the majority of which switched to republicanism soon after independence and at the same time abolished rights of appeal to the JCPC. This paper seeks to uncover the reasons for this anomaly by examining how the path that led to independence was shaped by a particular conception of Dominion status and by the willingness of nationalist leaders to embrace a dual identity: equal parts West Indian nationalist and Empire loyalist. It will also examine the phenomenon of the ‘postcolony’; being the persistence of the colonial order following the acquisition of constitutional independence. The paper has three aims. Firstly, to contribute to a better understanding of the impact of Dominion status and all that it symbolised in a region which is often overlooked in the scholarly literature on this topic. Secondly, better to understand the competing political forces that led three countries in the region to adopt republicanism, but inhibited its adoption elsewhere in the region. Thirdly, and finally, to enhance discussion of the complex nexus between republicanism and the abolition of rights of appeal to the JCPC where political and juridical considerations do not neatly align.     

‘The Wind has been Gathering Force’: Iain Macleod and his Policy Change on Tanganyika

This article examines the decision in May 1960 by the British colonial secretary, Iain Macleod, to accelerate dramatically the independence timetable for Tanganyika. Making extensive use of recently released archive material, it looks at the key factors behind this largely neglected but nevertheless significant episode, seeking to demonstrate that, despite Macleod's subsequent recollection of events, there was a clear policy change in May 1960; that it was for the main part external nationalist and internationalist pressures which led to the policy change; that, importantly, newly identified short-term factors of a change of heart by nationalist leader Julius Nyerere, events in Somaliland and the need to demonstrate positive Commonwealth credentials were the immediate and decisive reasons behind the acceleration; and that, in explaining the advancement, it is valuable to understand why and how individual factors contributed to the policy change and how they worked together.     

Migrants,inequalities and social research in the 1920s: The story of Two Portuguese Communities in New England

In this article, I analyse the production and reception of a 1923 social monograph on migrant communities in New England and in doing so: (1) outline an archaeology of the social sciences in the U.S., by analysing aspects of their development, dynamics, institutional politics and research agendas; (2) discuss the tensions between social, racial and cultural interpretations of inequalities in the political economy of the 1920s; (3) analyse the pervasiveness of racialist thinking in science, society and politics, its impact in the hierarchization of groups for purposes of border control, and how the targeted groups responded to it.