Migration as Social Seismograph: an Analysis of Germany’s ‘Refugee Crisis’ Controversy

This article tests the hypothesis that the attitude towards migration can be understood as a social seismograph for the degree of a society’s degree of democratisation. In this article I present my hypothesis and analyse the constellation of arguments within the public controversy following the so-called refugee crisis in Germany. I work out the internal problematics structuring the three main polarisations in this discourse. Most of the contributions analysed here are interventions rather than academic texts (albeit often authored by academics) making practical suggestions to cope with what they respectively relate to different definitions of crisis. Methodologically, this article is based on a thorough reading of essays and books and their relation to one another, with view to the current conjuncture. Understanding this ‘crisis’ after 2015 requires an approach attentive not only to the different ‘politics of polarisations’ within the public controversy but also to the real and phantasmal dimensions of the crisis. Although the figure of the refugee has began to occupy a central role in the discussion of migration policy, the debate has, I demonstrate, surprisingly little or nothing to do with migration whatsoever, but rather speak to the degree of required democratisation.     

‘Refugees Not Welcome Here’: State,Church and Civil Society Responses to the Refugee Crisis in Poland

The Polish response to the crisis that escalated across Europe in 2015, banning refugees from crossing its borders, has been one of the least welcoming in Europe. Poland has been reprimanded by the EU for its lack of solidarity with other countries that accepted refugees. The government’s response was that it does indeed welcome refugees as long as they are not Muslims, since letting Muslim refugees in would be a security risk. The figure of the Muslim terrorist posing as a refugee has become a key trope through which xenophobic nationalist politics have been employed. In this sense, Poland can be seen to be drawing particular inspiration from the Eurosceptic politics of Orbán’s Hungary while also reflecting a broader European trend towards Islamophobia in countries such as France, Germany, Sweden or the UK. This article maps responses to refugees from key public actors. It focuses on how three key players in the Polish public sphere—the Catholic Church, the State and civil society actors—responded to the looming perspective of welcoming refugees to Poland. The paper argues that the Polish response to the so-called refugee crisis should be analysed as subtext to a broader political change in the country towards nationalism that has as its goal to push out all foreign ‘invasion’. Mobilised within this are new and old manifestations of racism, suggesting that Poland’s long history of racial Othering and exclusion has not been sufficiently accounted for.     

The Things They Learned: Aspiration,Uncertainty, and Schooling in Rwanda’s Developmental State

The role of formal education in the reproduction of inequalities is well documented. Less clear is how this lens can be applied to a study of post-conflict state-building. The present study pairs policy analysis with student-centred ethnographic fieldwork to examine education policy in Rwanda. Since the end of the genocide, the government has staked its claim to legitimacy in delivering inclusive development. Its basic education policy is an entitlement programme with broad public support and designed to allow all children to attend primary and secondary school. Students found themselves caught up in a web of contradictions with important symbolic and material dimensions. They went to schools designed to improve access for the poor. But they were also poor schools, lacking in quality and associated with failure. The country’s switch from French to English was bound up in alliances of domestic power that further undermined effective teaching and learning. The basic education policy intended to highlight the government’s commitment to deliver development to all. But in absence of a sustained and effective strategy to improve quality, young people felt excluded from meaningful engagement in the education system. Whether the basic education policy constitutes inclusive development is therefore debatable.     

‘For you were strangers’: Jewish ritual,black musics,and commemorative politics in Tel Aviv’s Refugee Seder

ABSTRACT

Each Passover since 2009, hundreds of East African asylum seekers and Israeli activists have gathered for ‘Refugee Seder’, a public event to support Sudanese and Eritrean communities in Israel. Featuring a ceremonial seder meal, storytelling, speeches, and a dance party, Refugee Seder draws on age-old Jewish rituals and contemporary global black pop musics to symbolize Africans as members of the Israeli national collective. This article explores Refugee Seder’s modified commemorative practices, which engage dual narratives of Jewish nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism. I show how seder rituals enable African participants to temporarily embody a Jewish spiritual identity, and how black pop musics help publicly reframe Africans’ ‘blackness’ as a cultural asset instead of a political liability. Ultimately, I argue that Refugee Seder distills larger ideologies of identity and belonging that are deeply rooted in Israeli collective consciousness, and which shape the trajectories of ‘refugee issue’ politics and policy-making.     

State writing,subversion and citizenship in Southern Rhodesia’s state of emergency, 1959–1960

This article takes a moment of political upheaval – Southern Rhodesia’s 1959 State of Emergency – to explore the uses of writing in the remaking of state authority and citizenship. The 1950s had produced a powerful bureaucratic state, a shaky attempt at multi-racial “partnership,” and African aspirations to a citizenship able to encompass equality, rights and self-determination. The Emergency brought the tensions in these modes of government and citizenship to the fore. The article explores the working out of these tensions in two instances: the bureaucratic attempt to manage political detainees, and the police evidence used to substantiate charges of subversion on the part of nationalists in court. The article traces the limits of the state’s “lawfare” and the means by which detainees and nationalists developed new understandings of citizenship as aspirational imaginary, legal condition and practical tool, through the written word.     

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.     

Diversity,Inclusion, and the Voice of Older People: Engagement and Decision-Making in Seniors’ Organizations

Seniors’ organizations play a vital role representing older people in policymaking. The impact of diversity among older people on organizations’ engagement and decision-making processes therefore has implications for democratic inclusion. Interviews were conducted with paid and voluntary managers of Australian seniors’ organizations, along with analysis of organizational documents. Findings identified issues of presence and participation and challenges inherent in inclusive deliberation, highlighting the importance of leadership. Leaders’ understandings about what drives and impedes participation, who and what is represented, and how inclusion should be practiced are vital. It is important to consider how organizations can be supported to facilitate inclusion as their constituencies grow.     

Memory, History, and Nostalgia in Berlin’s Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is devoted to telling the 2,000-year history of Jews in Germany in a stunning building designed by Daniel Libeskind. It is Germany’s premier museum devoted to Jewish history and memory, but it is expressly not a Holocaust museum and most reference to the Holocaust is architectural. In its interactive and sophisticated exhibitions, the Jewish Museum represents contemporary international trends in museology and in many ways resembles the many Holocaust and other memorial museums around the world, one of the most prominent and striking international museological trends. However, in rejecting the categorization as a memorial museum and in focusing on a celebration of German–Jewish culture and history rather than the tragedy of the Holocaust, the Jewish Museum is what we might call a countermemorial museum. As such, it challenges the new norms around the creation of memorial museums and other sites of memory to be self-reflexive meditations on the negative past and its trauma. If memorial museums emerge from a particular orientation toward the past that Jeffrey Olick calls the “politics of regret” and claims is a major characteristic of our age, then the Jewish Museum might represent a parallel trend that we can call a “politics of nostalgia.” The museum serves, in many ways, as a screen upon which present-day Germany can project an idealized image of its past, masking some of the present tensions around German national identity and ideas of German multiculturalism. At the same time, the museum often seems to be in conflict with Libeskind’s building, which is infused with Holocaust symbolism and meaning.     

Debt,Uneven Development and Capitalist Crisis in South Africa: from Moody’s macroeconomic monitoring to Marikana microfinance mashonisas

The power, vulnerability and destructiveness of financial markets are out of control in South Africa, now among the most unequal, economically volatile and protest-intensive countries worldwide. While debt made itself felt in many sites, of interest in both criticising and promoting solutions is the ‘scale jumping’ required from South Africa’s national insertion into the world financial system, entailing the Reserve Bank setting very high interest rates, in turn leading to unpayable levels of consumer debt, and at a time when microfinance is suddenly discredited as a development strategy. Macro- and micro-financial problems fused in the course of the Marikana Massacre of August 2012, reflecting the local and global powers of the Moody’s rating agency and ‘mashonisa’ loan sharks. The over-indebted Marikana mineworkers, who led a strike which catalysed many wildcat strikes elsewhere, confronted the local crisis by displacing it into the national economy. This only heightened the contradictions that Moody’s punished with its September 2012 credit-rating downgrade. Without a genuine ‘debt relief’ solution at both scales, society will continue to unravel, as financialisation reaches its limits within one of the world’s most extreme cases of uneven and combined development.     

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.     

The ‘Crisis’ in political development theory

The authors argue that high borrowing costs discourage many rural poor in low income countries from using formal loans. Borrowing costs are defined as nominal interest payments, plus borrower loan transaction costs, plus changes in the purchasing power of money. Farm level information from Bangladesh, Brazil and Colombia is presented to show that small borrowers incur substantially higher borrowing costs on formal loans than do large borrowers. It is suggested that higher nominal interest rates may induce lenders to reduce overall borrowing costs for the small and new borrower.     

China’s ‘Belt and Road’ Strategy in Eurasia and Euro-Atlanticism

The focus of this article is two-pronged. First, it highlights China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) initiative as a Eurasia-centred project that, distinct from the twentieth-century Eurasianism, aims to introduce a new comprehensive integrationist agenda to the Eurasian strategic landscape. Second, it compares the US-led Euro-Atlanticism and the emerging Eurasianism, holding that while the former has historically stressed security over development (development is seen as contingent on the establishment of a hard security regime), the latter prioritises development over security (security is viewed as contingent on the establishment of an inclusive economic regime). Thus, this research argues that, if implemented successfully, OBOR could challenge Euro-Atlanticism as the long-held normative paradigm of interstate relations by offering a systemic alternative.     

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.     

Austerity,rationing and inequity: trends in children’s and young peoples’ services expenditure in England between 2010 and 2015

This article investigates local authority (LA) trends in expenditure on Children’s and Young Peoples’ services in England between 2010 and 2015, a period of government characterised by measures of fiscal austerity. We draw on a rationing framework to contextualise the levels and trends in expenditure under observation. The article analyses trends in various groupings of expenditure, using a latent growth modelling approach to identify significant trajectories in spending across LAs with different deprivation tertile membership. We find that although some kinds of children’s and young peoples’ services expenditure have been largely maintained during this period, preventive family support and early intervention services (such as Sure Start Children’s centres) have seen substantial reductions in expenditure, in contrast to the dominant narrative that children’s services have been protected. LAs in the most deprived tertile have faced the greatest cuts, mirroring other research findings on the distribution of austerity measures.