Modèles de citoyenneté et mobilisation politique des migrants en Suisse: Le rôle des cantons

La littérature récente sur la mobilisation politique des migrants a mis en évidence l'impact des modèles de citoyenneté nationaux sur celle‐ci comme structure des opportunités politiques spécifique au champ de l'immigration et des relations ethniques. Cette approche contient néanmoins des limites, particulièrement pour le cas de la Suisse caractérisée par le fédéralisme d'exécution dans le domaine de la naturalisation et de l'intégration des migrants. Ainsi, la marge de man?uvre laissée aux cantons en la matière permet de construire une typologie de modèles de citoyenneté cantonaux inspirée de la typologie nationale. L'hypothèse est que les modèles de citoyenneté cantonaux influencent la mobilisation des migrants sur le plan local en Suisse, non seulement au niveau de la participation mais également au niveau thèmes abordés. Une analyse des revendications politiques des migrants dans les cantons suisses nous permet de vérifier cette hypothèse. En effet, nous montrons que la participation et les thèmes abordés diffèrent selon les pratiques cantonales en matière de naturalisation et d'intégration des migrants.     

Contesting Mestizaje: Black Politics and Oral Traditions in Venezuela

Afro-descendant oral traditions are powerful modes of political expression that disrupt anti-black logics within Latin America's mestizaje. Scholarship on Afro-Latin American anti-racist mobilisation centres on large-scale, collective action. Instead, in this article, I examine songs and décimas, central forms of Afro-descendant cultural subjectivity. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in La Guaira state, Venezuela, I show how oral traditions are place-based forms of resistance against anti-black racism. This research calls on scholars to attend to oral traditions and their geographies as a tool of anti-racist political mobilisation.     

Issue framing and electoral violence in Ghana: a conceptual analysis

Ghana has conducted several successful elections since 1992, but the country continues to face many threats of widespread violence due to the recurrent nature of micro-level electoral violence and the existence of vulnerabilities such as political patronage, politics of exclusion, winner-takes-all electoral system and ethnic cleavages. While these factors have been used to explain the causes of electoral violence, issue framing by political elites and its connection to electoral violence have not been adequately examined. To better understand this phenomenon, this article draws on the concept of framing to underscore the argument that issue framing and reframing by political elites tend to shape micro-level electoral violence in Ghana.     

Explaining community mobilization in the city of Vilnius: a search for social capital

The article explores community mobilization in the urban environment. Specifically, it examines community organizations in Lithuania’s capital city of Vilnius. Engaging with social capital theory, the article illustrates the actual community mobilizations, their stories, collective action strategies, and reasons for mobilizing. It challenges the assumption that mobilizations rarely take place in the urban environment of Lithuania due to low civil society and a nonparticipatory culture. This article shows that when mobilizations do take place, they can be short lived but still achieve significant results.     

State-run media outlets in Central Asia: external regime legitimation through regional conflict and cooperation framing

ABSTRACT

In this article, we empirically examine how the Central Asian states apply external regime legitimation strategies to legitimize their regimes domestically. We used the Central Asia Watch Project’s data from five Central Asian state-run media outlets to examine spatial and temporal changes in regime legitimation strategies. All the Central Asian countries employed external regime legitimation strategies, but those strategies differ based on regime type. Overall, we see continuity and persistence in reporting regional cooperation but underreporting of regional conflict throughout the 2016–2017 timeframe of this study.     

The Attachment of Demonstrators to Institutional Politics: Comparing LGBTIQ Pride Marches in Argentina and Chile

Focusing on LGBTIQ demonstrations in Argentina and Chile, we study protesters' attachment to institutional politics, defined as their emotional and attitudinal connection with the political system. We show that Argentine LGBTIQ demonstrators are on average more attached to institutional politics than Chilean ones. This can be explained neither by differences between Argentines and Chileans in general, nor by demonstrators' individual characteristics. Instead, expanding the political process model, we argue that achieving a substantial part of the LGBTIQ agenda in Argentina, and limited success in Chile, contributed to build a stronger attachment to the political system among Argentine LGBTIQ demonstrators than their Chilean counterparts.     

From Utopia to Pragmatism: the Heritage of Basismo in Local Government in the Greater Buenos Aires Region1

Abstract – Contemporary municipal politics and administration in the poor outer suburbs of Buenos Aires is heavily influenced on one hand by the heritage of grassroots Peronist activism of the 1970s and on the other by the exigencies of contemporary neo-liberalism. The paper explores the tensions between these pressures.     

Educational infrastructure created in conditions of social exclusion: ‘Kyrgyz clubs’ for migrant children in Moscow

ABSTRACT

This article demonstrates how social exclusion affects the strategies that migrants and their children experience vis-à-vis the preschool education system of the host society. We use the example of two private institutions established in Moscow by Kyrgyz migrants to explore their role in helping integrate migrant children into the host society. I examine the role the Kyrgyz community plays in the life of labour migrants in Moscow, and why private migrant infrastructure is created today by people from this particular country, though eventually migrants from other countries use it as well. I find that in recent years migrants have been creating private infrastructure in Russia as an alternative to the public one. It replaces state institutions for migrants that are not accessible to them. Migrants also view it as one of the channels for entering the Russian society and state institutions. These centres do not so much help migrants’ children escape social isolation as compensate for the lack of adjustment programmes in Russian schools.     

Bridging social and environmental risks: the potential for an emerging environmental justice framework in South Africa

Whereas anti-apartheid social movements engaged collectively against a repressive regime, especially in actions against social injustices, post-apartheid civil society has witnessed fragmentation when it comes to engaging jointly against neoliberal risks such as poor/no service delivery, privatisation, and environmental pollution. Civil society has not linked struggles into a coherent ideology to comprehensively challenge neoliberalism and associated risks. Research has not explored the underlying elements that contribute to reinforcing fragmentation. This article reviews the literature on key social and environmental struggles in order to draw out common elements and differences that reinforce fragmentation. The paper highlights the need for social and environmental activists to engage collectively both within their respective arenas, as well as across the social and environmental divide, if an environmental justice framework is to emerge. Social movements advocating social justice could serve as a platform to incorporate environmental discourses into their struggle to assist in formulating an environmental justice framework.     

New Ways of Making and Living Politics: The Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados de Solano and the 'Movement of Movements'

This article develops a critique of liberal and social democratic conceptualisations of the political that seek to analyse contemporary social movements in Latin America, arguing that they often silence, misinterpret and/or de-legitimise new ways of living and making politics in the region. It develops an alternative conceptualisation, based upon the insights of post-structuralism and heterodox Marxism, which offers the analytic means to engage more fully with territorialised movements that politicise place, subjectivity and everyday social relations. It illustrates the potential use of such a framework with reference to the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados de Solano of Greater Buenos Aires.     

Staatsbürgerverständnis und politische Mobilisierung: Einbürgerungen in Schweizer Gemeinden

Seit längerer Zeit kommt es in der Schweiz immer wieder zu heftigen Debatten über das schweizerische Einbürgerungsverfahren und die Diskriminierung gegenüber Gesuchstellern aus gewissen Herkunftsländern. Dieser Artikel präsentiert erste Resultate einer Umfrage in 207 Schweizer Gemeinden zu den Ursachen unterschiedlicher Ablehnungsquoten von Ein­bürgerungsgesuchen auf lokaler Ebene. In der Schweiz spielen die Gemeinden eine zentrale Rolle im Einbürgerungswesen. Es soll aufgezeigt werden, dass die jeweils verfolgte lokale Einbürgerungspolitik auf kulturelle und politische Faktoren zurückgeführt werden kann. Die zentralen Hypothesen besagen, dass Einbürgerungsverfahren politische Entscheidungspro­zesse darstellen und sowohl von kulturellen und institutionellen Strukturen wie dem vorherr­schenden Staatsbürgerverständnis und den Entscheidungsmodi wie auch von mobilisierenden politischen Akteuren abhängt. Die Erteilung der Staatsbürgerschaft soll dabei als Instrument sozialer Schliessung betrachtet werden, welches in den Gemeinden unterschiedlich eingesetzt wird und das dominierende Verständnis der Staatsbürgerschaft sowie aktuelle politische Kräfteverhältnisse widerspiegelt     

Considering the Orange legacy: patterns of political participation in the Euromaidan Revolution

The proximity of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004) andEuromaidan Revolution (2014) provides an opportunity to considerwhy some individuals remain active across protest cycles whileothers defect. Many social movement scholars explain differentialparticipation in terms of micro-structural, biographical, or cognitivefactors. Others rely on rational choice theories of collective actionbased on coordination. Testing competing explanations arecomplicated because the variables included in structural andagency-based models are often the same, although the underlyingcausal mechanisms are different. In this article, I argue that thekey to understanding the role of agency and structure in protestparticipation is to relax strong assumptions about the unified natureof society and consider the multiple paths to participation. Thisapproach suggests that both structural and agency-based causalmechanisms can influence political engagement depending onindividual experiences, identities, and perceptions of events.     

Big dreams and small steps: comparative perspectives on the social movement struggle for democracy in Serbia and North Macedonia

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a comparative analysis of social movements’ characteristics and capacities to struggle against illiberal tendencies and incite political change in Serbia and North Macedonia. First, we discuss the illiberal elements of political regimes in the countries in question, Serbia and North Macedonia. Then, we provide a comprehensive overview of progressive social movements in the two countries, formed and organized as a response to different authoritarian and non-democratic tendencies. Finally, we point to some differences in their organizing, coalition-forging and issue-defining principles, which, we believe, may help to explain the relative success of social movements in North Macedonia in producing relevant political outcomes, compared to the weak political impact of social movements in Serbia. Empirical data were collected during the summer of 2018 through in-depth interviews with members of social movements in North Macedonia and Serbia.     

Rethinking the Politics of the Shift Left in Latin America: Towards a Relational Approach

The shift left in Latin American politics has revealed critical weaknesses within the dominant structural, state‐ and society‐based explanations concerning the politics of development in the region. This article argues that while elements of each remain relevant, there is a strong case for adopting a ‘relational’ frame of analysis that can capture the specific ways in which the Left came to power, and the unfolding implications for democracy and development. This relational approach focuses on how the new social and political economy basis of the new ruling coalitions and alternative geopolitical alliances shape politics and the prospects for development in the region.     

Corporate Movements in Democratic Brazil: Informal Business Networks,Civil Activism,and Political Influence

Relations between business, state, and civil society in Latin America are conventionally discussed in antagonistic or hierarchical terms. This article challenges this position, developing a qualitative case study tracing the activities of an informal network of Brazilian businesspersons that, over the last three decades, promoted an agenda of sustainability, transparency, and civil society participation. Drawing from concepts in social movement theory, it is argued that a dynamic movement‐like behaviour combining civil activism, organisational entrepreneurship, and fluid political alignment, allowed the group to establish lasting collaborative alliances with core actors in Brazilian democratic politics, and access relevant elite and policy‐making circles.     

Soldiering on: The Reagan Administration and Redemocratisation in Chile, 1983–1986

This article examines the circumstances in which the Reagan administration began to rethink its support of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and shift toward advocating a return to democratic civilian rule. It argues this shift was closely related to calculations that US interests might best be served by severing ties with the incumbent regime, but only so long as two vital interrelated issues were resolved to Washington's satisfaction: the nature of the movement likely to inherit political power, and the survival of key institutions of the autocratic Chilean state. To the extent that the incoming government did not portend a challenge to existing constitutional and economic arrangements, and to the extent that the ‘old’ military – the perceived ultimate guarantor against any kind of radical transformation – was in a position to survive the transition with its power and prerogatives intact, a ‘regime change’ could be supported, and even actively promoted. These twin concerns shaped and influenced a US commitment to democracy in Chile that was more contingent than principled, reflected in the constraints US policymakers imposed upon themselves in regard to the types of pressures they were prepared to apply to achieve their preferred outcome.     

Between the street and Aso Rock*: the role of Nigerian trade unions in popular protests

The trade unions’ instrumental role in four decades of successful popular resistance against subsidy removals is widely recognised, but insufficiently understood due to inadequate consideration of the particularities of labour. The subsidy contestations are considered a barometer of Nigerian politics, and the 2012 subsidy protests – often referred as Occupy Nigeria – was one of the largest popular mobilisations in Nigerian history. Whereas unionists described the outcome as a successful demonstration of popular sovereignty, other protesters blamed the unions for unfulfilled democratic opportunities and for succumbing to bribery. With labour theoretical perspectives, this article critically examines the trade unions’ positions, actions and relations during those protests. The article demonstrates, in practice, not only how the unions’ capacities to mobilise, strike and negotiate, were instrumental to the reinstatement of the subsidy, but also how trade unions’ agency is both enabled and constrained by labour's multiple embeddedness in state, civil society and the market.     

Rethinking Indigenous Politics: The Unnoticed Struggle for Self-Determination in Peru

Most scholars characterise Peru as a country with weak indigenous movements, whose demands would have no influence in regional and national policies, even though its socio-economic structures are similar to those of Bolivia and Ecuador, where indigenous movements are stronger. Based on fieldwork in the northern Peruvian Amazon and Lima between 2012–2013 and 2016–2018, this article argues that pro-indigenous legislation enacted as a response to strong indigenous mobilisation as well as the creation of indigenous autonomous governments in the Amazon express an unnoticed struggle for indigenous self-determination. These social phenomena also raise questions about the common assessment of the strength or weakness of indigenous movements.     

Racialisation of Immigrants at Work: Labour Mobility and Segmentation of Peruvian Migrants in Chile

This article explores the emergent racialisation of Peruvian migrants as one element conditioning the labour segregation that characterises Peruvian insertion in Chile. We understand racialisation as a process of construction of categories in which both individual and collective actors participate, and whose expression is demonstrated by the differentiation and inequality that affects the racialised group. We tackle the articulation of racial differences among individual actors, both Chilean employers and Peruvian migrant workers, to suggest that the attribution of naturalised characteristics to migrants is related to segregation, mobility, and specific trajectories in the labour market.