Women’s Rights Facing Hypermasculinist Leadership: Implementing the Women,Peace and Security Agenda Under a Populist-Nationalist Regime

Populist-nationalist ideologies pose a threat to women’s rights. This article examines to what extent national institutionalisation of international frameworks promoting women’s rights can weather the misogynistic political climate accompanying the global rise of populist nationalism. The post-2016 situation in the Philippines offers a testing ground for this problem due to the co-existence of President Duterte’s hypermasculinist national leadership with a strong history of institutionalisation of the UN’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Drawing from an analysis of WPS policy and institutions in the Philippines between 2009 and 2019 and from field research and interviews with government agencies, local civil society organisations and international partners, this article argues that the WPS agenda will likely survive in the hostile environment. But it also finds that institutionalisation alone does not guarantee successful implementation. While the WPS agenda may ostensibly remain a national priority under populist-nationalist regimes, its progression has been halted.

     

The ‘private plot’ in Soviet agriculture

The paper examines the main components of Mexican agrarian populism, and the attractions of the populist position in the light of the current crisis within the Mexican agricultural sector. It is suggested that the ‘campesinistas’ (agrarian populists) have incorporated various aspects of marxist analysis, but have nevertheless emphasised ways in which their approach pans company with that of most marxists in Latin America. According to writers like Gustavo Esteva, perhaps the leading ‘campesinista’, the peasant economy in the process of developing can co‐exist with capitalism for a protracted period, and considerable doubt exists as to whether the peasant economy is ‘ultimately’ inconsistent with capitalist development. The agrarian populists look to the peasantry in Mexico as a vehicle for rural development, believing that a better understanding of the internal logic of peasant production might facilitate an alternative series of policy measures. The weaknesses of the ‘campesinista’ position are explored, and doubts expressed about the viability of the populist stance as long as Mexico has the option of importing basic foodcrops.     

Åkesson at Almedalen: Intersectional Tensions and Normalization of Populist Radical Right Discourse in Sweden

This study analyses the populist radical right discourse of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD), examining how Jimmie Åkesson, the SD chairperson, conceptualized gendered social positions in the folkhem ([Swedish] people’s home) in his annual speeches in Almedalen, since the SD entered the Swedish Parliament in 2010 to date. Attention is being paid to whose voices are allowed to come forth and in which manner this is done, and to how inequalities intersecting gender and ethnicity are explained and reproduced, as means to normalize populist radical right discourse in Sweden. Theoretically, the study rests on the conceptualization of the populist radical right as a thin-centred ideology, which is contingently adapted to national politics, to which it ads “intersectionality from above” as a specific analytical perspective. The discourse-historical approach (DHA) provides the methodological tools for the analysis and facilitates its contextual positioning. The article contributes analytically to the field, shedding light on how, in the context of populist radical right discourse, welfare chauvinist appeals are employed formally to acknowledge the importance of gender equality in Sweden, and are used as a device to contour two antithetic entities: the supposedly gender-equal Swedish ethnic majority as the opposite of the allegedly deeply patriarchal migrant Other. The article also contributes empirically to the study of the populist radical right in Sweden. It provides a more nuanced picture of the party’s ideological transformations in what is envisaged to be their ideological normalization—from fringe nationalism (antidemocratic national socialism) and outright racism to welfare chauvinism and cultural racism (Islamophobic exclusionary nationalism) in conservative clothing.     

Peasant essentialism and the Agrarian question in the Colombian Andes

Our Daily Bread: The Peasant Question and Family Farming in the Colombian Andes, by Nola Reinhardt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Pp.xv + 308. US$35.

This review article considers a number of problems which arise from an incorrect theorisation of the agrarian question. Instead of a transformation in which some peasants become small capitalists and others de facto workers, rural change is said to involve an absolute opposition: in economic terms the whole peasantry either dissolves or persists. Since the former is clearly not the case, the continued existence of peasants in Colombia is attributed by the book under review to their economic efficiency. Its essentialist framework therefore conceptualises all peasants as a uniform body of commodity producers, rather than as internally differentiated strata incorporating disparate class elements. In contrast to this neo‐populist approach, it is suggested here that capitalist peasants and de facto proletarians are indeed present — but not recognised as such ‐ in the context studied.     

Food policy and politics: The political economy of the public distribution system in India

This article discusses the history and political economy of the Public Distribution System (PDS) in India. This food distribution programme, which dates from 1939, is meant to increase food security both at the national and the household level. Since its emergence, it has passed through several phases, the latest one starting in 1991 when India introduced a Structural Adjustment Programme. From a social constructivist perspective, this article aims at understanding (a) the most important features of this system in the various phases of its history, (b) the social processes that led to the emergence and subsequent development of distribution policy and (c) the various functions PDS has served in the course of its history. It concludes that in the most recent era, there are two contradictory tendencies (one coming from economic rationalisation, the other from populist politics) which push and pull the PDS in different directions. The latter tendency is so strong that a drastic curtailment of the food distribution programme is unlikely, despite the pleas made by those favouring cutting down subsidies and reducing the responsibility of the state.     

Neo‐populism and Marxism: The Chayanovian view of the agrarian question and its fundamental fallacy

The neo‐populist viewpoint on the agrarian question, developed in Russia from the late 19th century against Marxist theory, enjoys a modified revival in India today. The theoretical core of the neo‐populist framework consists in the idea of an economically undifferentiated, virtually homogeneous peasantry, which shows extreme stability and viability vis a vis the competition of capitalist production; and is of superior efficiency with respect to yield. There is a basic logical fallacy underlying this view, consisting in the positing of identical conditions of production for units with differing objectives of production—’subsistence’ for peasant holdings and ‘profit’ for capitalist holdings—in a situation where they coexist and are linked through markets. In fact capitalist production cannot emerge at all unless it is accompanied by a rise in output and surplus per unit area compared to petty production, which presupposes technical change. The logical necessity of differing conditions of production, implies that all the neo‐populist propositions are invalid.     

利益争议处理中调解组织和机制的十国比较

代替性纠纷解决方式(ADR)中的调解制度作为调整劳动关系、解决劳资矛盾的核心制度,其重要性日益凸显。而我国现行的利益争议调解机制尚未成熟,有待转型。目前此领域的研究多是针对外国国情,无法为我国转型提供思路。本文从国外的调解制度比较研究中借鉴比较方法,选取十个与我国有着相似经历的转型中国家和调解制度完善的发达国家,对比其调解组织和制度的特点。基于我国国情,为我国调解制度改革提出提升立法层次、完善成员设置和任命制度等政策建议。     

From Fashion Colours to Spectrum Analysis: negotiating femininities in mid-Victorian women's magazines

This article closely examines the first set of accusations in the Matthew Hopkins witch‐hunting phenomenon in early modern England by paying particular attention to the female actors. It reveals that Matthew Hopkins was not only a member of the elite group that lent credibility to the witchcraft accusations arising from within the community, but he also had kinship ties with Susan Edwards, mother of the child supposedly bewitched to death by this group of women. This impacts on the traditional historiography concerning Hopkins's role as a witch‐finder. Secondly, the evidence reveals a group of marginalized women who befriended and supported one another. It is argued that this group of independent women, meeting together without the supervision of a man, challenged the social order. Witchcraft was a social phenomenon that had the ability to satisfy many divergent needs. When multiple agendas converged, a suggestion by a cunning person could end in the execution of many victims. The author suggests that the so‐called witches' meeting was actually a prayer meeting of semi‐literate, devout women, who fell outside the parameters of the ‘godly’ community of Mistley parish. In this case, the accusations may not have spread any further than the two women who were initially suggested by the cunning woman, if it had not been for the women's group meetings.     

Adolescent depression: Why more girls?

Although there has been evidence for some time of a sex difference in depression, relatively little research has examined the developmental process by which women come to be at greater risk than men for depression. In this paper, the developmental pattern of depressed affect is examined over early and middle adolescence, with a special focus on the patterns of boys as compared to girls. In addition, a developmental model for mental health in adolescence is tested for its power in explaining the emergence of gender differences in depression. Longitudinal data on 335 adolescents randomly selected from two school districts were used to test the hypotheses. Results revealed that girls are at risk for developing depressed affect by 12th grade because they experienced more challenges in early adolescence than did boys. The sex difference in depressed affect at 12th grade disappears once early adolescent challenges are considered.This research was supported in part by grants MH30252/38142 to A. Petersen. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of study participants and staff. Portions of this material were presented in a symposium at the 1988 meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence, and one at the 1989 meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.Received Ph.D. from University of Chicago in 1973. Research interest in biopsychosocial development in adolescence, with a focus on sex differences in mental health.Research interests include adolescent mental health, and parent and peer relationships.Received Ph.D. in psychology from The Pennsylvania State University. Research interests include development of affective and conduct disorders, especially sex differences in these problems.     

The Krishna Baradwaj and Eric Wolf Prize 2011–2012

The political geography of environmental governance can overlap and converge with uneven agrarian change in forest frontiers subject to violent enclosures. When the governance of conservation territories converges with and reinforces enclosures, spaces can be controlled with authority and violence that places livelihoods at greater risk in the context of uneven agrarian political economies – the outcomes of which reflect ‘violent enclosures’. This paper examines how indigenous resource users negotiate the discursive and material impact of environmental governance converging with militarized-insurgent spaces as overlapping enclosures in a protected area on Palawan Island, the Philippines. Drawing on local experiences, we examine how the livelihood vulnerability arising in the local political economy is exacerbated by access and use constraints from the overlapping enclosures of environmental and military governance in the buffer zone of Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park. We argue that the seemingly less governable forest frontiers of protected areas are often the poorest, highly politicized and contested spaces of political and ecological refuge. Here, scarce forest resources are managed closely, and recalcitrant groups seek refuge as military powers frame, conflate and manage local behaviour as criminal and dangerous, merging conservation and military interventions as coercive governance. We conclude that only by critically engaging how governance processes and enclosures converge to yield structural and discursive violence – and by making this apparent to policy makers – will indigenous peoples successfully negotiate the double bind of violent enclosures in frontiers.     

Homeless Children:

Using Washington, D.C. as an exemplar of urban programs for homeless children, the authors define current service gaps and public policy failures. The article calls attention to the varied social service needs of the population and points the reader toward action steps which may channel good intentions and public interest into real and measurable change.     

Book reviews

The paper discusses two well-organized Nordic gender conferences—one in Bergen and one in Gothenburg—which, however, were remarkably different in character. While the local Norwegian conference opened windows to the world outside the Global North, the windows were kept only ajar at the national Swedish meeting.     

Invited Address: James Joyce,Alice in Wonderland,the Rolling Stones,and Criminal Careers

The study of criminal careers generally, and patterns of continuity and change in criminal offending in particular, has been a long-standing interest to social scientists across many disciplines. This article provides readers with an overview of this line of research. After an introduction to the criminal career perspective, the article presents several ‘facts’ that have emerged from criminal career studies. This material segues into a discussion of theories based on criminal careers research as well as a related discussion of the emerging methods and trends in the area. The article closes with some observations about public policy with respect to criminal careers knowledge and identifies some neglected research needs. A key summary conclusion is that the processes associated with continuity and change are not mutually exclusive, but instead are important and complimentary aspects of criminal careers research.     

Chico mendes ‐ the Defence of life

A rubber tapper (seringueiro) since his youth, Francisco Alves Mendes devoted practically all his life to the defence of the workers and people of the forest. He took part in setting up the Union of Rural Workers of Brasiléia and Xapuri (Sindicato de los Trabajadores Rurales de Brasiléia y Xapuri), the Workers’ Party (PT or Partido de los Trabajadores) in Acre, and the National Council of Rubber Tappers (Consejo Nacional de los Serin‐gueiros). In his organisational activity Chico Mendes united trade union struggles, the defence of the forest and party militancy. His work was recognised internationally, and in 1987 the United Nations conferred recognition on him as one of the most important defenders of the environment. In his struggle for the setting up of extractive reserves, Chico combined the defence of the forest with an agrarian reform reclaiming land for rubber tappers opposed to the large‐scale cattle ranching interests represented by the Rural Democratic Union. (Uniáo Democrática Ruralista or UDR ). On the 22 December 1988, Chico Mendes was murdered.     

Gandhi and India's peasants, 1917–22

The general problem raised here is peasant involvement in Afro‐Asian nationalist movements. As a case study the focus is M. K. Gandhi's attitude to and activities among Indian peasants from 1917 to 1922 and their response, firstly to his broad span of rural work for social reform and the rectification of particular peasant grievances, and then to his India‐wide passive resistance campaigns on continental issues which had no specifically rural appeal. This analysis underlines the fact that ‘India's peasants’ were no monolithic group. They differed from area to area in economic and social position and were further fragmented by the ties of religion, tribe and caste. Consequently the nature and range of their wider public awareness varied, and their relationships with Gandhi were diverse and complicated. In certain areas he attracted wide support, even adulation, particularly where he campaigned on local grievances. But peasant response to his all‐India calls for passive resistance was geographically restricted, and often dependent on a very garbled understanding of the issues at stake and the expected pay‐offs of the movement. Peasant activists were often outside Gandhi's control; and this threat to cohesion and discipline made him very ambivalent towards wide rural participation. His relationship with India's peasantry illustrated the problems any continental leader or organisation faced in trying to accommodate ‘national’ appeals and tactics to the diverse and often specifically local needs of rural groups — an accommodation which was difficult, dangerous yet essential in some degree if nationalist movements were to be broadly based.     

for reproductive justice in an era of Gates and Modi: the violence of India’s population policies

This article addresses India’s contemporary population control policies and practices as a form of gender violence perpetrated by the state and transnational actors against poor, Adivasi and Dalit women. It argues that rather than meeting the needs and demands of these women for access to safe contraception that they can control, the Indian state has targeted them for coercive mass sterilisations and unsafe injectable contraceptives. This is made possible by the long-term construction of particular women’s lives as devalued and disposable, and of their bodies as excessively fertile and therefore inimical to development and progress. It further considers how population policy is currently embedded in the neoliberal framework of development being pursued by the Indian state. In particular, it argues that the violence of population policies is being deepened as a result of three central and interrelated aspects of this framework: corporate dispossession and displacement, the intensification and extension of women’s labour for global capital, and the discourses and embodied practices of far-right Hindu supremacism. At the same time, India’s population policies cannot be understood in isolation from the global population control establishment, which is increasingly corporate-led, and from broader structures of racialised global capital accumulation. The violence of India’s contemporary population policies and the practices they produce operate at several different scales, all of which involve the construction of certain bodies as unfit to reproduce and requiring intervention and control.     

The political and social basis of regional variation in land occupations in Brazil

Land occupations led by Brazil's most dynamic social movement the Landless Workers Movement (MST) began as a regional phenomenon. The south‐east and the north‐east regions were initially the centres of land occupations. The successful occupations in these areas were influenced by the origins of the movement, their proximity to urban areas with sympathetic support networks, concentrations of landless workers and the availability of vast areas of uncultivated land. Initial land settlements led to successful occupations in adjoining areas. Conditions which led to successful organising were later systematised by the MST leaders into a national strategy. Subsequently this strategy directed social intervention in other regions and created the basis for the extension of land occupations in regions beyond their original areas of strength. The extension of successful land occupations to new areas has been based on the ‘transplantation’ of leaders and the recruitment of local cadres who have assimilated the lessons of earlier experience. The MST has been transformed from a regional to a national movement. In the process, the MST has moved from a sectoral ‘agrarian reform’ social movement to a political movement with a national political agenda.     

Authoritarian populism and neo-extractivism in Bolivia and Ecuador: the unresolved agrarian question and the prospects for food sovereignty as counter-hegemony

ABSTRACT

The new economic flows ushered in across the South by the rise of China in particular have permitted some to circumvent the imperial debt trap, notably the ‘pink tide’ states of Latin America. These states, exploiting this window of opportunity, have sought to revisit developmentalism by means of ‘neo-extractivism’. The populist, but now increasingly authoritarian, regimes in Bolivia and Ecuador are exemplars of this trend and have swept to power on the back of anti-neoliberal sentiment. These populist regimes in Bolivia and Ecuador articulate a sub-hegemonic discourse of national developmentalism, whilst forging alliances with counter-hegemonic groups, united by a rhetoric of anti-imperialism, indigenous revival, and livelihood principles such as buen vivir. But this rhetorical ‘master frame’ hides the class divisions and real motivations underlying populism: that of favouring neo-extractivism, principally via sub-imperial capital, to fund the ‘compensatory state’, supporting small scale commercial farmers through reformism whilst largely neglecting the counter-hegemonic aims, and reproductive crisis, of the middle/lower peasantry, and lowland indigenous groups, and their calls for food sovereignty as radical social relational change. These tensions are reflected in the marked shift from populism to authoritarian populism, as neo-extractivism accelerates to fund ‘neo-developmentalism’ whilst simultaneously eroding the livelihoods of subaltern groups, generating intensified political unrest. This paper analyses this transition to authoritarian populism particularly from the perspective of the unresolved agrarian question and the demand by subaltern groups for a radical, or counter-hegemonic, approach to food sovereignty. It speculates whether neo-extractivism’s intensifying political and ecological contradictions can foment a resurgence of counter-hegemonic mobilization towards this end.     

Food security,food sovereignty,and local challenges for transnational agrarian movements: the Honduras case

This article examines the complicated histories of two competing development tropes in postwar Honduras: food security and food sovereignty. Food security emerged as a construct intertwined with land security and national food self-sufficiency soon after the militant, peasant-led movement for national agrarian reform in the 1970s. The transnational coalition, La Vía Campesina, launched their global food sovereignty campaign in the 1990s, in part to counter the global corporate industrial agro-food system. Cultural and political analysis reveals challenges for each trope. Food security resonates with deeply held peasant understandings of seguridad for their continued social reproduction in insecure social and natural conditions. In contrast, the word sovereignty, generally understood as powers of nation states, faces semantic confusion and distance from rural actors' lives. Moreover, Honduras's national peasant unions, weakened by funding cuts and neoliberal assaults on agrarian reform, diverted by their own efforts to help establish the transnational La Vía Campesina, have been unable and, in some cases, unwilling to campaign effectively for food sovereignty. In addition, a parallel network of NGO-supported sustainable agriculture centres has largely embraced the peasant understandings of food security, while remaining skeptical of ‘mismanaged, modernist’ agrarian reform and the food sovereignty campaign. Attention turns to structural analysis of the steady decline of agriculture, economy and social life in the Honduran countryside, while also identifying potentially hopeful local-national solidarities between peasant union and sustainable agriculture leaders within the popular resistance movement to the recent military coup. This article finds that transnational agrarian movements and food campaigns tend to ignore local peasant understandings, needs, and organisations at their own peril.     

The view from below: Cuban agriculture in the ‘special period in peacetime’

This article examines the changes taking place in Cuban agriculture at the local level as a result of the demise of the socialist trading bloc and Cuba's subsequent economic crisis. Based on fieldwork in three municipalities of Cuba, the authors describe new developments in each of the three main sectors of Cuban agriculture: state farms, production co‐operatives and individual peasant producers. They conclude that the dominant trend of this period is the tendency toward decentralisation of the state farm sector ‐ culminating in the historic September 1993 decision to form production co‐operatives on the state farms — counterpoised to renewed attempts to impose greater state control over peasant producers. Overall, they find a good deal of experimentation and heterogeneity in the actual implementation of state policy at the local level.