On the promise and perils of citizenship: heuristic concepts,Zimbabwean example

Increasingly, struggles in the name of citizenship inspire and catch the imagination and support of individuals and groups found in a variety of locales within a nation as well as transnational spaces. At the same time, their consequences may be quite different from the assumptions and dreams of those involved in perpetuating and imagining these struggles. To analyse how new social citizenship claims can embolden and channel struggles in particular directions with varied results – the promise and perils of citizenship more broadly – I suggest that one should pay attention to the promulgators of such visions of citizenship, the techniques of promoting their claims and the cultural politics and political economies of belonging in the locales of mobilization. Drawing on an ethnographic example of a farm labour struggle in the late 1990s in Zimbabwe, I explore the importance of attending to wider shifts in the political importance of citizenship as well as its entanglement in particular localities. Through examining how farm workers are situated through such struggles, I show the promise and limits of citizenship in addressing social justice concerns of a group historically marginalized through racialized, classed and gendered processes.     

Introduction: citizenship as inhabitance? Migrant housing squats versus institutional accommodation

ABSTRACT

This special issue focuses on migrants’ self-organised strategies in relation to housing in Europe, namely the collective squatting of vacant buildings and land. In particular, the contributions to this special issue differentiate between shelter provided in state-run or humanitarian camps and squatted homes. Migrants squats are an essential part of the ‘corridors of solidarity’ that are being created throughout Europe, where grassroots social movements engaged in anti-racist, anarchist and anti-authoritarian politics coalesce with migrants in devising non-institutional responses to the violence of border regimes. In these spaces contentious politics and everyday social reproduction uproot racist and xenophobic regimes. The struggles emerging in these spaces disrupt host-guest relations, which often perpetuate state-imposed hierarchies and humanitarian disciplining technologies. Moreover, the solidarities and collaborations between undocumented and documented activists challenge hitherto prevailing notions of citizenship and social movements, as well as current articulations of the common. These radical spaces enable possibilities for inhabitance beyond, against and within citizenship, which do not only reverse forms of exclusion and repression, but produce ungovernable resources, alliances and subjectivities that prefigure more livable spaces for all. Therefore, these struggles are interpreted here as forms of commoning, as they constitute autonomous socio-political infrastructures and networks of solidarity beyond and against the state and humanitarian provision     

Global Protesters Versus Global Elites: Are Direct Action and Deliberative Politics Compatible?1

In this article I examine the legitimacy of direct action in relation to liberal deliberative norms and global institutions (World Bank, World Trade Organization, etc.). Because the deliberative processes of these institutions are illegitimate according to the theory of deliberative politics, the activists of the movement for global justice are legitimate to confront these institutions. Moreover, confrontational action in itself may have a deliberative value for at least seven reasons: (1) initiating deliberation (agenda-setting); (2) enlarging participation; (3) enlarging representation; (4) disseminating information and arguments (publicity); (5) stimulating imagination; (6) pushing for action; (7) re-opening deliberations. Finally, social movements such as the movement for global justice may be seen themselves as deliberative arenas. Thus, those who seek to evaluate the legitimacy of direct actions need to take into consideration the deliberative nature of the process through which activists decide which means may be more efficient in order to repair defects in the official deliberative process, and promote equality, liberty, and justice.     

The politics-violence frontier

ABSTRACT

This article analyses how early twenty-first century political activists in Italy construct the frontier between politics and violence. It puts these constructions into the context of more conventionally theoretical accounts of violence and politics. Analysis of internet discourse published by left/anarchist bloggers and group members focusses on how activists criticize the conventional view that electoral politics is non-violent, and endorse the view that violence is politics’ main means. This means that the role of violence in oppositional politics then has to be negotiated. Discourse analysis shows how ideas of resistance, and anti-state force, are articulated in such a way as to draw distinctions between us and them, and their politics and ours. The article discusses the significance of these articulations of the politics-violence distinction for the construction of political agency, and for the justification of forms of political action, seeking to show that boundary work is fundamental to political agency.     

Green Politics and the New Class: Selfishness or Virtue?

The predominantly new middle-class social composition of the green movement has become a matter of increasing interest in the wake of the success of green parties and the growth of an international green movement. This paper considers the concept of the 'new class' in relation to two explanations for the social composition of the green movement. The class-interest argument seeks to show that green politics is a means of furthering either middle-class or new-class interests while the 'new childhood' argument claims that the development of the green movement is the result of the spread of post-material values, the main bearers of which are the new class. Against these arguments a more comprehensive explanation is presented, which focuses on the education of the new class and its relative structural autonomy from the production process.     

Guardians of the environment in Canada’s Chemical Valley

Citizens of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation fight for justice with their bodies at the frontlines of daily toxic exposure. This paper examines struggles for environmental and reproductive justice in the polluted heart of Canada’s ‘Chemical Valley’. These are as struggles over life, land and knowledge. Based upon community-engaged qualitative research, from a participatory action research approach, including field immersion, participant observation and 35 in-depth interviews with First Nations residents, I document the Aamjiwnaang First Nation’s citizens’ activities and practices on the ground as they cope with the impact of their contaminated surroundings on their health and habitat. This community-engaged scholarship lens brings into view the lived experiences and ongoing practices of resistance by the Anishinabek citizens who are surrounded by Chemical Valley. I situate these struggles within the green citizenship literature to assess three blind spots of green governmentality: greening citizenship, lifestyle blame and Western dualisms. I discuss the multiple edges of ecological citizenship and argue that citizens are simultaneously bound up within disciplinary power relations and place-based belonging. This place, although polluted, is crucial to practices of relational Anishinabek citizenship and the identity of indigenous citizens who call this place both ‘prison and home’.     

Foucault and the Telos of Power

In this paper, I argue that the unique contributions of Foucault’s late work to critical social theory can be identified in the ways in which power relations are refined as the material condition of “politics” as distinguished from that of law, where “politics”: (a) includes both competitive and goal-oriented strategic actions and interactions, (b) excludes the coercive technologies of law embodied in State institutions, (c) presupposes “incomplete” reciprocity between actors engaged in directing others, (d) always entails modes of revealing truth and acting upon the self. By contextualising the break between pastoral power and direction in the 1979–1980 lectures, I show how for the late Foucault, power relations constitute the material condition of “politics” precisely because, unlike relations of control or coercion, their aims and objectives remain open to the possibility of building new relationships and potentially more “political” forms of social action. I conclude by situating this major distinction within Foucault’s unfulfilled project to study the “military dimension” of society, and the relevance and urgency of this project for contemporary struggles against new forms of militarism and austerity.     

Through a Glass Darkly: Afrocentrism,War, and World Politics

While the two dominant Eurocentric paradigms of world politics, realism and idealism, place greater emphasis on power and regime type, respectively, in their analyses of war, a recently promulgated Afrocentric paradigm of world politics suggests that cultural characteristics of states are significantly associated with the likelihood of interstate war. Drawing on these competing perspectives, I conduct a data analysis of the relationship between cultural homogeneity and interstate conflict in order to determine the extent to which Afrocentric theses on international conflict are borne out empirically. I find that cultural factors are significant correlates of interstate war as Afrocentrists suggest, although realist and idealist factors are more strongly associated with the likelihood of interstate war. In addition, the findings suggest that multiculturalism—especially ethnic diversity—is a more auspicious path for interstate peace.     

Comparative Green Politics: Beyond the European Context?

It is argued that there are significant differences between green electoral politics in Europe and green developments in the affluent non-European west, and that these are such that, despite the greater political formalization of the green movement in Western Europe, there is a sense in which North American and Antipodean developments are ultimately more fundamental than those that have occurred in Europe. Loosely adopting explanatory categories employed by Rudig and Lowe in a Political Studies article, we examine evidence under four sub-heads: electoral thresholds; the historical legacy of the environment movement; the different contextual roles played by the anti-nuclear movement and wilderness experience, and ecology, Marxism and the new left.     

‘How Do You Think I Feel? It's My Country’: Belonging,Entitlement and the Politics of Immigration

Current debates around immigration are informed by hierarchies of belonging, with some groups seen to belong more, and therefore deserve more, than others. This link between belonging and entitlement has been predominantly analysed in relation to struggles over access to key material benefits, such as jobs, housing, healthcare and so on. This paper will argue that these struggles also point to the continuing relevance of nationhood to many people's sense of self, community and place and the value that comes from being positioned, and recognised, as part of a group that lies at the heart of national life and culture. In other words, the ‘politics of immigration’ is about the anxieties and concerns of those who no longer feel ‘at home’ in what they consider to be ‘their’ country.     

Pedagogy from and for Social Movements: A Conversation Between Theory and Practice

Much radical writing on academia is grounded in a mystified view of knowledge in which an ecosocialist pedagogy would be “theory from above.” This article argues for a different understanding of knowledge as materially situated in social and ecological relationships; oriented towards practice; developmental and contested from below, demystifying third-level education from the perspective of movement-generated knowledge. Concretely, this means starting from participants’ existing praxis and “learning from each other’s struggles”—using “frozen” movement theory and activist experience—to move towards a wider, more radical understanding. In Ireland such pedagogy is rooted in working-class community self-organising, rural environmental justice alliances, women’s and GLTBQ activism, and the anti-capitalist “movement of movements,” encapsulating Audre Lorde’s dictum, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” The article focusses in particular on a “Masters for activists.” The course supports movement participants to deepen and develop their activist practice but also to situate it within these wider and more radical understandings and emancipatory alliances. Taking movement praxis—rather than “contemplative” knowledge—as a starting point raises very different questions about theory and practice, forms and distribution of knowledge and the purpose and shape of learning.     

Radicalizing the Immigrant Debate in the United States: A Call for Open Borders and Global Human Rights

This study raises the question of “who” instead of “what” regarding the problem of collective memories in East Asia. To do so, I review the vicissitudes of the memories of two events, the Nanjing Massacre and the Comfort Women, which are now firmly entrenched in popular memories as the core Japanese atrocities against her neighbors during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Pacific War (1941–1945). By prioritizing political subjects who can remember or forget—both as performative practices—I argue that history is the very central field of political struggles, not merely a tool for mobilization, in East Asia and the (re)emergence of the memories of the Nanjing Massacre and the Comfort Women in the international scene is more a function of the new subject formation in China and Korea than an un-mediated outcome of unearthed historical facts.     

Explaining right‐wing terrorism and violence in Western Europe: Grievances,opportunities and polarisation

What explains cross‐national variation of right‐wing terrorism and violence (RTV)? This question remains largely unanswered in existing research on the extreme right because (1) events data suitable for cross‐national comparisons have been lacking, and (2) existing analyses fail to capture RTV's causal complexity, which involve multiple causal paths (equifinality) comprising causal conditions that become sufficient for the outcome only in combination (conjunctural causation). To help fill these gaps, this article uses new events data in a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) research design, aiming to explain variation in the extent of RTV in 18 West European countries between 1990 and 2015. In doing so, the article identifies two ‘causal recipes’ that consistently distinguish countries with extensive RTV experience from those with low or moderate RTV experience. The first (North European) recipe involves the combination of high immigration, low electoral support for anti‐immigration (radical right) parties, and extensive public repression of radical right actors and opinions. The second (South European) recipe involves the combination of socioeconomic hardship, authoritarian legacies, and extensive left‐wing terrorism and militancy. Notably, both recipes contain elements of ‘grievances’ and ‘opportunities’, suggesting that these two theories, which are conventionally seen as contrasting, may be more fruitfully seen as complementary. Furthermore, a highly polarised conflict between far right activists and their enemies represents a third necessary condition for extensive RTV to occur. The article concludes by highlighting the paradox that countermeasures intended to constrain radical right politics appear to fuel extreme right violence, while countermeasures that may constrain extreme right violence would imply an advancement of radical right politics.     

House organ

“A vast, depopulated coutry; a low density of automobiles, which are propelled by a type of gas with little sulphur; windy cities with no thermal inversions; a fairly recent genocide of dissident intellectuals and political activists; an even more recent economic collapse; a fragmented and quarrelsome left; a current government economic policy which assures stability at the price of decreased wagest less job security and increased unemployment — all these ingredients serve to suggest that red-green politics are not exactly booming in Argentina.“     

Look Back in Anger: Hemophilia and AIDS Activism in the International Tainted-Blood Crisis

During the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic devastated the hemophiliac population. It also fostered the emergence of hemophilia activists, who have had a profound effect on policy and politics in scores of nations. Drawing on case studies of 11 countries, this article examines the impact of this emerging interest group on politics and policy outcomes. In addition, it compares the strategies adopted by hemophilia activists and gay activists, specifically the reliance on victimization or rights as the premise of demands for public support. Although the article focuses on community mobilization around AIDS, it speaks more generally to the growing international impact of interest group (or identity) politics on policy.     

The politics of decarbonization and the catalytic impact of subnational climate experiments

The Paris Agreement of 2015 marks a formal shift in global climate change governance from an international legal regime that distributes state commitments to solve a collective action problem to a catalytic mechanism to promote and facilitate transformative pathways to decarbonization. It does so through a system of nationally determined contributions, monitoring and ratcheting up of commitments, and recognition that the practice of climate governance already involved an array of actors and institutions at multiple scales. In this article, we develop a framework that focuses on the politics of decarbonization to explore policy pathways and mechanisms that can disrupt carbon lock-in through these diverse, decentralized responses. It identifies political mechanisms—normalization, capacity building, and coalition building—that contribute to the scaling and entrenchment of discrete decarbonization initiatives within or across jurisdictions, markets, and practices. The role for subnational (municipal, state/provincial) climate governance experiments in this new context is especially profound. Drawing on such cases, we illustrate the framework, demonstrate its utility, and show how its political analysis can provide insight into the relationship between climate governance experiments and the formal global response as well as the broader challenge of decarbonization.     

Activist knowledges in queer politics1

Abstract

This paper examines the politics of knowledge production in the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activism. It situates the development of LGBT activist research capacity within a broader shift towards evidence-based policy-making. The paper presents case studies of LGBT organizing from the US and Canada to demonstrate how LGBT activists utilize established social science methodologies such as statistics to claim legitimacy and render queer worlds visible in the policy process. The paper argues that this development in LGBT advocacy is marked by struggles over the kinds of queer realities that may be enacted through social scientific inquiry. The paper also explores the deployment of auditing and benchmarking in LGBT activist knowledge production. It demonstrates the way in which LGBT activists are using these privileged modes of knowledge production to produce truths regarding the nature, extent and effect of homophobia and heterosexism. The relationship between such calculative technologies and the emergence of LGBT active citizenship practices is considered. The paper concludes by emphasizing the decidedly mixed political implications of the increasing reliance on social science and calculative practices in queer activism.     

Using the Law as a ‘Harmonious Weapon’: The Ambiguities of Legal Activism in Favour of Migrant Workers in China

Abstract

Legal mobilization has spread in China over the past 20 years and is generally considered by both activists and scholars as a way to advance democracy and rule of law. Focusing on the mobilization in favour of migrant workers and on politically moderate practices, which are both more frequent and widely held as more successful, I argue to the contrary that resistance and reproduction of political domination are mutually constitutive. Public interest litigation and administrative litigation appear as new forms of political participation that constitute an internal regulation to the authoritarian regime, thus contributing to explain the regime's capacity to adapt and its durability. This article also accounts for new strategies developed by some lawyers that shun the courts and use law to ‘empower civil society’ and that thus do not contribute to structural reproduction. Though activists are struggling to turn their strategies into more institutionalized practices, they remain an ad hoc mechanism of internal control.     

The micropolitics of border struggles: migrants’ squats and inhabitance as alternatives to citizenship

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the struggles of the We Are Here movement in Amsterdam as resistance to both securitarian and humanitarian border regimes. It explores the tensions between everyday forms of commoning emerging in migrants’ squats and technologies of enclosure and capture. In the first place, the paper contends that the creation of housing squats marked an important shift in migrants’ struggles that went from acts of protest to the performance of resistance at the level of the micropolitics of borders. By squatting buildings and creating common living spaces, current struggles mobilize material, affective and political solidarities and constitute a politics of inhabitance beyond and against dependency on the state and humanitarian practices. The second part of the paper discusses the government’s attempts to repress, govern and enclose the We Are Here movement within confined fields of action. With negotiations and humanitarian concessions through the provision of emergency shelters, local authorities attempted to re-direct the movement into politics of rights and recognitions. However, these tactics did not succeed to contain the struggle in its entirety: many migrants rejected humanitarian solutions, continued to create radical home spaces through squatting, enacting a politics of inhabitance beyond citizenship.