From ‘Constructing Socialism’ to a ‘Socialist-oriented Market Economy’ in Contemporary Vietnam: A Critique of Ideologies

Abstract

In power, the Vietnamese Communist Party has experienced three ‘moments’ of growth, each with some differences of detail and of meanings: ‘traditional communism’; the transition from a planned to a market economy in the 1980s; and, since 1992, a ‘socialist-oriented market economy’. For each, the article discusses the ideologically defined nature of change; intentionality—‘how growth was to happen’; and the quantitative data used. It suggests that critiques throughout the period have engaged with the intentionality issue: in the first moment, by isolating the socialist relations of production within socialist construction as the cause of difficulties; more recently, by engaging with the lack of effective policy despite contemporary ideology's unreliable belief in policy as key to growth.     

Confounded but Complacent: Accounting for How the State Sees Responses to Its Housing Intervention in Johannesburg

Abstract

The South African state’s ‘will to improve’ poor people’s lives through free home-ownership is unsettled by subsequent unauthorised housing usage and adaptions. Despite insight into and empathy for these non-compliant activities amongst some state housing practitioners, the dominant state position is to denounce them without analysing their drivers and significance. This position is enabled by the state’s selective use of knowledge, confidence in the housing project as is, and avoidance of discomforting signals. The ‘will to improve’ is not matched by a deep ‘will to know’, in part because the capacity to act under difficult circumstances is argued to depend on a form of ‘not knowing’.     

Russian-speaking Belarusian Nationalism: An Ethnolinguistic Identity Without a Language?

Abstract

This essay examines the development of a form of Russian-speaking Belarusian national identity. While Belarus’s early post-Soviet nationalists relied upon Belarusian as the central pillar of national identity, this has been challenged by more ‘pragmatic’ nationalists using the ‘language of the people’, namely, Russian. Analysing history textbooks and popular history books that represent three key identity projects in Belarus, this study sheds light on the specific programmatic ideas of a new Russian-speaking Belarusian nationalism. Despite the emergence of the geopolitically-motivated Russian World (Russkii Mir) concept, some Russian-speaking nationalists have articulated a programme that paradoxically draws upon Russian neo-Eurasianist thought, but which is simultaneously anti-Russian.     

Transcultural body spaces: re-inventing and performing headwrap practice among young Congolese women in London

ABSTRACT

This article examines embodied representation of race, ethnicity, and gender, questioning ideas of cultural appropriation. Using the London-based Congolese transnational fashion brand Kiyana Wraps as a case study, the article addresses how young Congolese designers re-invent their cultural heritage to conceive the label stylisation and construct meanings of Blackness/Africanness. The article also explores the brand’s social spaces, where the headwrap ritual is used by different actors to perform hybrid identities. In addition, wearing the headwrap reveals symbolic metaphors of empowerment, through which intertwined ‘feminist’ and ‘feminine’ identities are evoked. The paper examines how Congolese women are creatively taking inspiration from the environment of London to produce innovative fashion trajectories as lived socio-cultural experiences. It argues how the headwrap ritual signifies an aesthetic and material process through which specific racial and ethnic boundaries are transcended, fabricating transcultural body spaces which encompass individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds.     

The Concepts of State and Society in Defining Russia’s Domestic Political Unity: A Research Note

Abstract

Vladimir Putin’s long period in power has so far raised scant discussion about the political concepts that underpin real state and societal unity, and especially about the domestic political implications of these concepts. Despite this, key concepts of his political regime, such as ‘sovereignty’ and ‘sovereign democracy’, have frequently been used in Russian political discourse. This essay examines the way the current Russian administration has used concepts that stress strong societal unity, and the creation of a stable state and societal unity to support the development of real functioning dynamics in the society. It charts the shift from ‘sovereign democracy’ to ‘sovereignty’ around 2011–2012 as a key discursive concept in moving towards a more isolationist international stand and consolidating Putin’s power by emphasising Russia’s unique political tradition, which requires a strong leader as the basis of national unity and to ensure Russian sovereignty.     

The Centre Decides and the Local Pays: Mandates and Politics in Local Government Financial Management in China

Abstract

In China, ‘the centre decides and the local pays’ means the central government decides on policies but requires its local subordinates to provide the financial resources. The politics of this practice implies that local government has to take different strategies to cope with the unfunded mandates with various consequences. As an empirical study framed by Niskanen’s rational choice theory and Dunleavy’s ‘bureau-shaping’ model, this paper examines how the unfunded mandates impact local government behaviour. Its main focus is the question of how the local officials respond, the extent to which they comply or resist and the techniques they use to adapt to these mandates. This paper finds when deciding how to pay the bill for the centre, local officials have to take a number of principles into consideration. They need to stick to the people-orientated principle and to finance money for salaries and operation to the extent that they can; they also have to see if the mandates are strictly implemented or popular among local people.     

‘Saving the Congo’: transnational social fields and politics of home in the Congolese diaspora

Abstract

This paper explores the diasporic ‘politics of home’ of Congolese migrants in Europe, in particular in the UK, and to a lesser extent in Belgium. We focus on the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the diasporic political sphere by examining the role of first generation activists, religious groups, as well as youth and women's organisations. Within the transnational political field, first generation leaders are in a dominant position and the involvement of other groups, such as women and young people is marginalised by their control of the diasporic ‘rules of the game’ in the Bourdieusan sense. However, the increasing involvement of Congolese women in the field of women's rights advocacy has opened up new paths of political action which can, in certain occasions, lead to transnational forms of engagement. Similarly, second generation Congolese activists are constructing a space of autonomous engagement, relying heavily on the Internet and especially on social media, some attempting to link up with wider social movements. The paper provides an understanding of the social and political construction of these different fields of diasporic engagement as well as their intersectional and dialogical relations.     

Victims,Villains, or Geopolitical Tools? Representations of Donbas Displacement in Ukrainian and Russian Government Media

Abstract

This essay examines how the Ukrainian and Russian government-owned newspapers, Uriadovyi Kurier and Rossiiskaya Gazeta, represent people displaced by the war in Donbas, analysing the political goals revealed by these publications’ attitudes towards the displaced. While the Ukrainian publication delimits the nation by distinguishing ‘real’ internally displaced people (IDPs) deserving help and ‘fake’ IDPs guilty of siphoning Ukrainian taxpayers’ money to rebel-held areas, the Russian paper foregrounds the Russian state's competence in managing displacement while silencing the displaced themselves.     

Development and the search for connection

Abstract

The stated purpose of development is often characterised by the motivation to ‘help’ – that is, to intervene in the lives of others in supportive ways. This paper argues that this perspective has obscured how development activities are also animated by its twin desire to ‘connect’. While this holds significance for development more broadly, it becomes particularly evident in a mode of assistance that has gained prominence more recently. These are privately funded, small-scale projects led by individual founders, here described as ‘citizen aid’. Based on ethnographic research among citizen aid initiatives in Cambodia, the paper argues that the relevance of ‘connecting’ has been insufficiently recognised so far. It explores different aspects of what participants mean by ‘making a connection’, including face-to-face contact, direct experience of aid activities, and their tangible efficacy. It also finds that establishing interpersonal relationships across national, ethnic and cultural differences, while potentially challenging, is a key motivation for those involved. Finally, the paper argues that acknowledging the desire to connect questions notions of the ‘distant stranger’ as the archetypical humanitarian object, highlighting the wish for familiarity and closeness as potentially just as important for motivating and directing assistance to others.     

National in Form,Putinist in Content: Minority Institutions ‘Outside Politics’

Abstract

Over the past three decades, Russia has developed a set of institutions for the management of ethno-linguistic diversity based on the principle of ‘national cultural autonomy’. This article examines the positioning of these institutions within Russian society, arguing that while state-endorsed discourses locate them within the culture sphere—treated as distinct from political processes—there is in fact an interpenetration of ‘politics’ and ‘culture’. The article identifies why these institutions position themselves within the ‘cultural sphere’ while also supporting the country’s meta-narratives on inter-ethnic tolerance and, effectively, the political status quo. Soviet legacies of inter-ethnic relations continue to be socially embedded, yet within this framework some dissenting voices are also discerned.     

‘Spirits of migration’ meet the ‘migration of spirits’ among the Akan Diaspora in Amsterdam,The Netherlands

Abstract

The aim of this research was to find out what the most popular films among the Akan in southeast Amsterdam (The Netherlands) are and how these films are used by this West African diaspora in the formation of a new religious identity after their migration to Europe. The outcome of this research is that the most popular films among the Akan are those with Pentecostal-Charismatic proselytizing messages. The Akan use these films to create an ‘imagined diasporic community’ to remain culturally connected to West Africa. The second most popular films are those of an Akan indigenous religious nature. However, because the name of these films does not fit with the newly acquired European Christian identity of the Akan people in the diaspora, they have slightly changed the name of these movies to ‘cultural films’ in order to overcome the contradiction between over three centuries of ‘Akan spirits of migration’ to Europe with the recent ‘migration of spirits’ via Ghanaian films.     

Trafficking of Ethiopian women to Europe – making choices,taking risks,and implications

ABSTRACT

This piece focuses on the Ethiopian women victims of trafficking – the agency of these women in the whole trafficking process, and issues of choice – ‘trying a chance’, or just taking a risk to get out of poverty or difficult social circumstances, considering that they are lured, tricked, coerced, or even forced into the hands of traffickers by a wide range of circumstances and people, including family and friends. Traffickers target girls with economic, social, and family problems. Most of the trafficking of women and girls from Ethiopia is carried out through the use of service ‘agencies’ and human smugglers who facilitate the process of migration through a number of routes. Many of those who use the ‘desert route’ often begin from Sudan to North Africa from where they cross to Europe. The data for this contribution were generated in a study – ‘Captured in Flight: Experiences of violence among African women in Sweden’ – funded by the Swedish crime prevention agency (Brottsoffermyndgheten). The research for the project has been carried out in Sweden, but the women whose case studies are presented here have been in the Middle East, Turkey, Italy, Finland, and Greece before coming to Sweden.     

Islamist Political Orientations among Central Asian Youth

Abstract

There is a widespread fear that Islamist and ‘extremist’ orientations are gaining strength in Central Asia, particularly among younger people. This article, examining data from a 2011–2012 survey in the region, finds little evidence to support this proposition. While there is sizeable support for some Islamist beliefs, age is not a strong predictor of such orientations. Interestingly, assertions that Central Asian youth are more likely to feel marginalised or dissatisfied with current socio-economic conditions also do not appear to hold. Overall, rural residence and low education stand out as better predictors, with various socio-economic and political assessments having mixed effects.     

The Cost of Empowerment: Multiple Sources of Women’s Debt in Rural India

Abstract

Poor women borrow from multiple sources. This study examines whether the source of debt matters for women’s role in household financial decisions. Drawing on a household survey from rural Tamil Nadu, we categorise women’s loans along the lines of accessibility and formality into ‘planned loans’ and ‘instant loans’. We find that ‘instant loans’ support women’s bargaining power in various types of household financial decisions, whereas ‘planned loans’ have no impact. This surprising result is better understood when the nature of ‘instant loans’ is examined – these are frequently usurious, involve coercive enforcement methods and are considered socially debasing. Hence women who use them perform a convenient role for their households and in return gain some negotiating power.     

Maintaining disorder: the micropolitics of drugs policy in Iran

Abstract

This article analyses the ways in which the state ‘treats’ addiction among precarious drug (ab)users in Iran. While most Muslim-majority as well as some Western states have been reluctant to adopt harm reduction measures, the Islamic Republic of Iran has done so on a nationwide scale and through a sophisticated system of welfare intervention. Additionally, it has introduced devices of management of ‘addiction’ (the ‘camps’) that defy statist modes of punishment and private violence. What legal and ethical framework has this new situation engendered? And what does this new situation tell us about the governmentality of the state? Through a combination of historical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, the article analyses the paradigm of government of the Iranian state with regard to disorder as embodied by the lives of poor drug (ab)users.     

Somewhere else: social connection and dislocation of Ethiopian migrants in Johannesburg

ABSTRACT

The meaning of personal relationships for Ethiopian migrants to Johannesburg is shaped by individual connections, by imported social networks that are adapted in the host city, and by the particular conditions of livelihood creation in the emerging Ethiopian entrepreneurial enclave of ‘Jeppe’. In their migration individuals experience both rupture and reconnection – with relatives, as well as through relationships and networks that constitute social capital in Johannesburg. The social world of Ethiopian migrants in this entrepreneurial enclave is complex. Many social connections and dislocations are affected by the life choices in which income generation and economic relations are the primary aim and social relations are necessarily secondary. Others are influenced by the strength of informal social networks that serve the needs of Ethiopian migrants. And, far from ‘here’ and ‘there’ being connected through the use of technology and advanced connectivity, ‘home’ and Johannesburg are experienced as quite separate and different places.     

What Generates,Constitutes and Causes Opportunity-driven Violence? The Case of West Kalimantan

Abstract

This article uses the example of West Kalimantan to show some new ways of studying opportunities for violence, contributing especially to the so-called ‘sons of the soil’ conflict debate. By showing that the opportunity structure in West Kalimantan was not primarily material, but social, related to ways to circumvent fear of and norms against violence, this article attempts to update the theoretical premises of the traditional security studies approach to obstacles to conflict and opportunities for violence. The intention is to show how socially constructed realities are relevant in offering and denying opportunities for violence, and how the study of the meanings of actions reveals ways in which opportunities for violent demonstrative argumentation are born in local conflict discourses. The case study shows how powerful narratives enable the justification of violent action and how identities and violent policies mutually constitute each other. This way the empirical evidence calls for understanding the generative and constitutive sources of violence, which are not simply mechanistic causes of conflict.     

Know thy enemy: Hizbullah, ‘terrorism’ and the politics of perception

The labelling career of the Lebanese armed group and political party Hizbullah is an interesting case with which to investigate the epistemological consequences of the politics of naming. Having found itself since its inception in the mid-1980s on the receiving end of mainly US and Israeli policy makers' and analysts' scorn for being an archetypical terrorist organisation, Hizbullah has been surprisingly successful in achieving its stated aims and in enduring the verbal and military onslaught against it. Although it is not the intention here to reduce explanations for Hizbullah's durability to discursive politics, this article suggests that both the labelling of Hizbullah as terrorist and, conversely, its identification as a ‘lebanonised’ political force that is about to make its conversion into an unarmed political party are misleading and incapable of grasping this organisation's complexities. In fact, both ‘terrorist’ and ‘lebanonised’ labels produce a quality of knowledge inferior to that produced by Hizbullah's own conceptualisation of its enemies. But most importantly, the debate on Hizbullah's alleged terrorist nature has obscured several of its traits that many should register before passing judgement on it. Our analysis shows that the variety of institutions Hizbullah has been carefully elaborating and readapting over the past two decades in Lebanon operate today as a holistic and integrated network which produce sets of values and meanings embedded in an interrelated religious and political framework—that of the wilayat al-faqih. These meanings are disseminated on a daily basis among Shi'a constituencies through the party's institutionalised networks and serve to mobilise them into ‘the society of the Resistance’ (mujtamaa’ al-muqawama), which is the foundation of the hala al-islamiyya (Islamic sphere) in Lebanon. Accordingly, any prospect of Hizbullah's transformation away from armed ‘resistance’ should be firmly placed in an analysis of its hegemony among the Shi'a of Lebanon and of the tools it uses to acquire and sustain this status.     

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AS STORYTELLING

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Making and Governing Unstable Territory: Corporate,State and Public Encounters in Johannesburg’s Mining Land, 1909–2013

Abstract

Johannesburg’s mining land has defined the city’s geography, yet remains unevenly developed and liminal in urban policy. Rather than a planning failure, I argue this is a product of state-sanctioned corporate hegemony over mining land. Through the case of Johannesburg’s biggest mining-turned-property company, the paper problematises binaries of ‘state’ and ‘market’ by drawing out the deeply historical, spatialised, political and always-more-than-human vicissitudes of this mining-urban regime. These include the mapping and unmapping that render mining land terra incognita to the state while shoring up corporate power; the multiple visions and contestations over what is to be done with the land, and finally, how different and contingent temporalities shape and limit those visions in practise.