A new sociology of nationalism: The sociology of property and nation

In this essay, I will reflect upon what has been sociology's contribution to understanding the emergence and development of nationalism and how sociology can contribute to understanding nationalism's present and future through a property rights perspective. The essay will discuss, in particular, how historical sociological analysis of property rights and property rights regimes may be central to understanding nationalism past and future. After a general and brief discussion on the current, so‐called return of nationalism, the essay starts with discussion of some late enlightenment proto‐sociologists, suggesting that these writers actually analysed some crucial early dynamics of property and sovereignty which is central to understanding nationalism. The essay then moves on to suggests why a property rights focus might be a useful perspective to understanding nationalism in the 21st century.     

Australia’s relations with the European Community in a historical perspective: an elusive partnership

ABSTRACT

In 2015, Australia and the European Union successfully negotiated a Framework Agreement. This agreement is an essential step in establishing a stronger Australia–European Union partnership and achieving closer bilateral cooperation. For years, negotiating such an agreement had proved impossible. In the 1970s, successive Australian governments showed interest in enhanced collaboration with the European Community, but the political climate for closer relations was far from encouraging. This article explains why this was the case. In doing so, it also explores how the Whitlam and Fraser governments envisaged, framed and developed Australia’s ties with the European Community in the 1970s, and asks whether a more positive approach on their part could have led to a stronger relationship. Based on recently declassified government files, this article shows that although both Whitlam and Fraser fully grasped the importance of the European Community as an emerging international actor and were willing to deepen Australia’s ties with it, significant constraints existed against enhanced bilateral cooperation. With the Common Agricultural Policy still a considerable challenge to Australian economic interests and with the European Community focused mainly on the management of its internal market, broader political considerations were inevitably relegated to the margins of Australia–European Community consultations.     

Urban commons are more‐than‐property

Urban commons are characterised in the literature as collectively shared property in the city shaped by a context of scarce resources, population density, and the interaction of strangers. In the broader commons literature, commons appears as a verb, a noun, and a process made by practices of commoning—albeit still with a focus on property. In this paper, I argue that an understanding of urban commons as more‐than‐property is needed to recognise how present but elusive urban commons are. I use examples from interviews and observations conducted at a Women's Library to discuss how the access, use, benefit, care, responsibility, and ownership of this urban commons bring it into being through particular practices of commoning. By questioning current ways of defining urban commons, urban scholars gain a grounded understanding of the role of property, and other practices, in maintaining an urban commons over time.     

From Grenfell Tower to the Home Front: Unsettling Property Norms Using a Genealogical Approach

The Grenfell fire was symbolic of an unequal urban landscape closely tied to material and aesthetic norms around property ownership and entitlement. The aim of this paper is to unsettle these norms by advancing a novel genealogical approach. Through systematic review of government archives seldom studied by property researchers, historical comparisons are mobilised to challenge the taken‐for‐granted way in which we approach property and ownership today. It is shown how, in the face of a comparable housing crisis and direct action, both Churchill's and Atlee's post‐war governments temporarily overlooked property norms by extending wartime requisitioning powers. Going further, however, the paper argues that by revisiting history, we can also rediscover a legacy of “forced entry” that might open up political possibilities in the present. By advancing a genealogical approach to ownership, the paper contributes to wider discussions around property norms, concluding that we have before (and can again) enact property differently.     

The Waikato River: Changing Properties of a Living Māori Ancestor

In Māori cosmology, rivers and other waterways are conceptualised as living ancestors, who have their own life force and spiritual strength. The special status of rivers in Māori society also explains why they are sometimes separated from other Māori claims to natural resources of which they were dispossessed in the 19th century. Until recently, Māori were often eager to contend that ownership of rivers is not their prime interest, but instead, they argued that they feel obliged and responsible to keep rivers fresh, clean, and flowing. This perspective, however, changed under the impact of a new government policy of selling shares in energy corporations that use freshwater and geothermal resources for energy production. In this paper, I provide an ethnohistorical account of the Waikato River and show how conceptions of this ‘ancestral river’ changed in the course of colonial and postcolonial history, more specifically in response to a recent shift in government policy. In 2008, a joint management agreement was signed between the government and Waikato Māori for a ‘clean and healthy river’, leaving the issue of ‘ownership’ undecided. Only two years later, however, Māori felt forced to claim ownership when the government moved to sell shares of power‐generating energy companies located along the river, which effectively transformed their ‘ancestor’ into a property object.     

How Capitalism Will Save Colonialism: The Privatization of Reserve Lands in Canada

This paper surveys the ways in which the First Nations Property Ownership Act (FNPOA) is the site of both tension and alliance between state, non‐state, and local Indigenous interests converging around a common agenda of land “modernization” in Canada. It is a convergence, I argue, that must be read in the context of a reorganization of society under neoliberalism. The FNPOA legislation is discursively framed to acknowledge Indigenous land rights while the bill simultaneously introduces contentious measures to individualize and municipalize the quasi‐communal land holding of reserves. The intersections of alliance around this land modernization project foreground the complex ways in which capitalism and colonialism, though inextricably tied, perform distinguishable economic processes, and how we must be attentive to the particulars of their co‐articulation with local formations of indigeneity.     

Precarious Territory: Property Law,Housing, and the Socio-Spatial Order

Most of us access shelter over land over which other people have legally sanctioned dominant interests and powers, creating systemic relations of security and vulnerability that I term precarious property. We all live inside the territory of property, but do so under different terms. Rather than thinking of the territory of property as an exclusive space of insiders and outsiders, I think of it as a relational technology that organises forms of conditional spatial access. Territorialised expressions of law play a crucial role in organising such relations through a “property space” that frames property’s participants, their interactions, their alternatives to transacting, and the meanings of property itself. Thinking territorially about precarious property offers us both analytical and ethico-political insights, I suggest.     

Arendt in the refugee camp: The political agency of world-building

Refugee camps are frequently conceived as spaces in which social and political life is reduced to biological concerns of survival or ‘bare’ life. Yet, for researchers who focus on life in the camp as it is lived, through material adaption, social negotiation and resistance, this Agambenian perspective is unsatisfactory. Instead, a relation is made apparent between practises of everyday life and the manifestation of a politics. This paper argues for the importance of Hannah Arendt's writings for a new understanding of how refugee camp inhabitants can develop and sustain political agency. First, it will highlight the relation by observations and analysis of ‘the jungle’ in Calais, France. This unofficial camp, although short-lived, has influenced a broad spectrum of research including examination of spatial political practice. Second, applying a phenomenological reading of Arendt's work, I argue that political agency emerges through the concept of world-building. World-building results from the conjunction of human activities – from the quotidian, like labour and work, to the exceptional cases of action – and their orientation towards a specific type of visibility. World-building manifests as camp inhabitants erect spaces of meaning that engage a plurality of persons, transforming them into political agents.     

Russia's Accession to the World Trade Organization

A prominent specialist on the Russian economy presents a timely assessment of Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization. The author discusses the reasons that prompted Russia to seek membership and scrutinizes the major obstacles, such as complexities of the accession process and the country's institutional malaise. An analysis of the effects of possible membership on the Russian economy is followed by a focus on Putin's first term (2000-2003) when he supported entry, and the second (2004-2007) when he lost interest. Also presented are two scenarios projecting reinvigorated pursuit of Russian membership, or abandonment of the goal. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F13, F40, O19. 1 table, 46 references.     

Factor Decomposition of Rural Income Inequalities in China

A Chinese geographer explores changes in inter-provincial rural income inequality in China since the late-1970s economic reforms by decomposing it into different component factors based on the Gini index (more specifically, into contributions by different income sources: wages, household operations, properties, and transfers). The influence of each factor on inequality changes is further decomposed into its structure effects and its real inequality effects. Quantitative analysis then makes it possible to determine the relative influence of each component on changes in rural provincial inequality over time.