“A World Class City of Your Own!”: Civic Governmentality in Chennai,India

Abstract: This paper utilizes a critical governmentality approach to theorize the processes through which urban elites become stakeholders in the “world‐class city”. Through a case study of public consultations for urban development plans in Chennai, India, the paper explores the technologies that produce urban actors who “participate” in urban governance. Key to these technologies is a discourse of participation that privileges and normalizes citizens as urban stakeholders. The paper contributes to current explorations into the technologies of inclusion that are central to an emerging civic governmentality in South Asia. In Chennai this civic governmentality engages various segments of civil society in processes of urban governance through the mechanism of public consultation. It is through these public consultations that elites come to exert influence over urban plans and consolidate a vision and desire for the world‐class city.     

Grassroots development and upwards accountabilities: tensions in the reconstruction of Aceh's fishing industry

This article explores the tensions between aid funding and grassroots development goals in the context of post-disaster fisheries reconstruction in Aceh, Indonesia. We argue that both short- and long-term grassroots goals are distorted by upward accountability requirements which lead to unsatisfactory aid outcomes. Our analysis employs the concept of aid webs and draws on fifty-one formal interviews with stakeholders in Aceh in 2007/2008. The findings initially concentrate on the impacts of upward accountability on project cycles, with a particular focus on the problematic incorporation of private boat-building contractors and commercial values during the implementation phase. We then discuss the more subtle, long-term impacts of upward accountability on the professionalization of community institutions — in this case, the Panglima Laot Lhok. We conclude with a few observations about the hybrid institutions — combining elements of local and development cultures — that are produced within the current political economy of aid.     

Socialist statuary as post-socialist hybrids: following the statues of Dr Petru Groza in Romania

This paper is concerned with the post-socialist lives of Communist statues. While acknowledging that post-socialist transformation frequently involves searching for new identities based on the disavowal of the communist past and the de-communisation of cultural landscapes, the paper stresses the importance of exploring complex continuities from the state-socialist period. This is illustrated by a case study of the fates of three socialist-era statues of the Romanian Communist leader Dr Petru Groza which were erected in Bucharest, Deva and B?cia. The paper examines how these socialist-era statues have been de- and re-contextualised, translated and re-valued into ‘post-socialist hybrids.’ The analysis explores the complexities of the historical geographies of these statues after 1989, particularly the way that they continue to play a role in the shaping of identities, societies and politics.     

Place, national identity and post-socialist transformations: an introduction

This paper serves as an introduction to this theme issue on the topic of post-socialist identity politics surrounding nation building, national identity and nationalism. It presents an overview of the key processes of post-socialist identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU) in order to contextualise this collection of papers. This introduction outlines the key processes of identity formation and the treatment of nationalism under conditions of state-socialism, and then identifies the main processes of identity formation which have emerged in discourses surrounding nations and nationalities in post-socialist CEE and the FSU. A short account of each of the papers in the theme issue is then presented to identify the common strands of their analyses of post-socialist nationalisms.