Religion,ethnicity and citizenship: demands for territorial self-determination in southern Kaduna,Nigeria

This article analyses the ‘politics of scale’ of how identity is linked to territory in the quest for self-determination by actors on the Christian side of the ethno-religious conflict in Kaduna State, Nigeria. Ethnic and political relations are framed with reference to scale, such as ‘the local’ and ‘the regional’, in ways that support claims for territorial control on an ethnic and religious basis. The experience of lack of access to the state is seen to be grounded in community identities. Furthermore, the state relates to citizens through religious and neo-customary authorities as a way to localise authority. This is connected to an idea that neo-customary institutions represent ‘the local’. It is argued in this article that these institutions are just as entangled in various constructions of scale as the state.     

Game farm conversions and the land question: unpacking present contradictions and historical continuities in farm dwellers' tenure insecurity in Cradock

This article addresses farm workers and farm dwellers' tenure insecurity and its relationship with farm conversions in the agricultural district of Cradock, located in the Eastern Cape Karoo. It argues that consequences of farm conversions for farm workers/dwellers' tenure security must be understood within the context of regional land and labour histories. Its main contention with existing positions that ‘blame’ farm conversions for increased evictions and an efflux of workers/dwellers from farms is that there is a correlative rather than causative relationship between farm conversions and farm worker/dweller displacements in the semi-arid areas. It argues that the extreme nature of the historical land question and the continued dominance of a historically white land-owning class in the semi-arid areas render farm workers/dwellers structurally vulnerable to having their residential arrangements on farms terminated at any given moment. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Cradock between 2009 and 2011, the article shows that game farm conversions tend to perpetuate existing land and power relations on farms as they have prevailed over time. However, it also argues that the distinctiveness of game farm conversions lies in their near ‘irreversibility’ as a land use form which creates more permanently securitised and sealed-off pockets of consolidated land in the countryside. These transformations increase the erosion of farm workers/dwellers' embedded social histories and cultural imprint as a labouring class on the landscape.     

Land conflict and Mayangna territorial rights in Nicaragua's Bosawás reserve

Abstract— This paper examines conflicts over land and resources in Nicaragua's Bosawás rainforest reserve between Mestizos and Mayangna Indian people. Mestizos are people of mixed Indian and European descent who speak Spanish and do not consider themselves to be Indians. Bosawás is one of the last refuges of the Mayangna indigenous group and is also the largest area of protected tropical rainforest in Central America. The Mayangna village of Sikilta, in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region, is used to illustrate the nature of land conflicts in the region. Such conflicts–between economic development and conservation, between livelihoods and conservation, and between peasant livelihoods and indigenous territorial rights–are symptomatic of rainforest areas in other parts of the world. Land conflicts in Bosawás are examined within the broader economic, political and institutional context. Potential solutions to land conflict in Sikilta are explored. The paper illustrates the complexities surrounding the demarcation and upholding of indigenous land rights. It highlights the institutional complexities and weaknesses which have allowed Sikilta's land problem to go unresolved. It is argued that until national problems of unequal access to land and unsustainable forms of forest use are addressed, communities like Sikilta will continue to suffer invasion of their land.     

Democratisation and control: fast track and local government reforms in Zimbabwe

Fast track land reform in most instances has been treated as a process only entailing the redistribution of formerly white-owned land to blacks. However, there are other deeper changes that have not yet been coherently analysed, such as the nature of local power relations and the local government system; especially the manner in which it balances the interests of traditional authority and elected authorities. The local government system in fast track areas is in a state of flux. On the one hand, there is potential for a more inclusive and participatory model of local government, and on the other hand, however, official processes through legal enactments suggest that policy craftsmen are still intent on continuing with policies that promote the establishment of two competing sites of power. This paper explores the manner in which rural local government has been treated in the literature, and how it is being re-established in the aftermath of the ‘jambanja’, a period in which the ‘rule of law’ was literally suspended. Rather than depending only on official processes, the field evidence that analyses the actual practice of local government is also utilised. The paper contributes towards a more coherent understanding of the links between the colonial state's control imperative and the post-colonial's ambition to exert similar control, albeit under different political conditions.     

Agrarian transition in the southern Philippines: more than poverty,dispossession, and violence

ABSTRACT

On the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, scholars have documented a precarious land tenure, livelihood, and security situation for many smallholders. Agrarian political economy studies provide insightful analyses of the underlying causes of much poverty and violence on the island. Less attention has been given to cases of smallholder success. This article proposes that conditions for smallholder farming, even among ethnic minority groups, are more varied across the island than the literature suggests. In upland villages of north-central Mindanao, agrarian transition is a multi-directional process that produces different outcomes among households, kin groups, and villages. The main case study is a thriving mixed swidden and fixed field Maranao-Muslim farming village. Almost all the households in the village have successfully claimed land as their own and diversified and improved their livelihoods in recent times. To explain these positive outcomes, the article uses a relational approach and draws on anthropological literature on kinship, land tenure, and place to assess the bargaining power of smallholders in land deals. A stronger cross-fertilization of key insights in agrarian political economy and anthropological literature on kinship enriches the debate on agrarian transition in the southern Philippines.     

Economic liberalism and the Philippine telecom industry

It may be important and even necessary to build a free and fair market competition environment, which could encourage industrial innovation and increase the long-term social benefits of development. However, there is a need for a stronger and more autonomous state authority to settle and safeguard the liberalized market. Since state protection of the market fattens the monopoly company, the liberalization policy should be linked with state efforts to undo the previous monopoly structure. This article argues that specific industrial development, or national economic development in general, may rely more on the intrinsic characteristic of the state rather than on the economic paradigm per se, i.e., statist or neo-liberalist. Furthermore, the improvement of social welfare may depend more on the power structure among political players rather than on the political system itself whether authoritarian or democratic     

Agrarian and social change in a Javanese village

This article examines rural economic changes in a Javanese village since the introduction of the Green Revolution. Special focus is placed on rural labour market and on the structure of land tenure. It will be shown that cropping intensification, expanding work opportunities in the non-agricultural sector, the longer periods of education and the formation of a more rigid boundary between agricultural and non-agricultural work have helped to decrease pressure on the rural labor market. It will be argued in the latter part of this article that a pessimistic view of profitability in rice cultivation, coupled with rising land prices, has provided a condition in which capital investment in the agricultural sector is not thought of as the best option and consequently, the structure of land tenure has not experienced a substantial change after the Green Revolution.     

Facebook,Contestation and Poor People’s Politics: Spanning the Urban–Rural Divide in Cambodia?

Rural internet use, although still limited, is growing, raising the question of how rural people are using social media politically. As a vehicle of communication that permits the rapid transmission of information, images and text across space and connections between dispersed networks of individuals, does technological advance in rural areas presage significant political transformations? This article investigates this question in the light of a poor result for the Cambodian People’s Party in the 2013 elections, and the subsequent banning of the main opposition party, before the 2018 elections. Expanding internet use in rural areas has linked relatively quiescent rural Cambodians for the first time to networks of information about militant urban movements of the poor. Rural Cambodians are responding to this opportunity through strategies of quiet encroachment in cyberspace. This has had real effects on the nature of the relationship between the dominant party and the rural population and suggests the declining utility of the election-winning strategy used by the party since 1993. However, the extent of this virtual information revolution is limited, since neither the urban nor rural poor are mapping out new online political strategies, agendas or identities that can push Cambodia’s sclerotic politics in new directions.     

LAND,LIVELIHOODS, AND REMITTANCES

This article seeks to draw connections between a political ecology of global investment in resource sector development and a culturally informed understanding of rural out-migration across the Lao–Thai border. The author highlights how the departures of rural youth for wage labor in Thailand and the remittances they return to sending villages are becoming important for understanding agrarian transformations in Laos today. In the first section the author introduces the contemporary context of cross-border migrations across the Lao–Thai Mekong border. The second section shifts focus to a village in Laos's central Khammouane Province, where extended field research was conducted between 2006 and 2009. In this village, youth out-migration to Thailand has become a widespread phenomenon, with nearly every household involved. The segmented cultural and gendered features of this migration and its salience for understanding contemporary transformations in this locale invite a broadening of agrarian studies analysis. The final section expands upon how political ecology can provide such a broader analysis by drawing attention to how extractive resource projects affect local tenure rights and livelihoods, with significant rents captured by the state and resource firms. By making these connections, the author argues there are coercive underpinnings to contemporary Mekong migrations, which may be linked to governance problems in the Lao resource sector.     

Global and local models of governance in interaction: configurations of power in Upper Guinea Coast societies

ABSTRACT

This paper studies emerging power configurations in Upper Guinea Coast societies which result from contemporary interactions of global and local models of governance. With empirical data on shifting meanings of chieftaincy and control of land, changing tax regimes and the rising importance of youth in domestic politics, modifications of legitimate authority across time are contrasted with the effects of international interventions and global discourses on socio-political change. Some of these interventions accelerate, others accentuate or counteract processes of change within local power configurations. Only by carefully considering the innate malleability of local concepts of authority, history, and tradition can contemporary processes of change be identified as either mere reconfigurations or genuinely new configurations of power.     

Governing Domestic Worker Migration in Southeast Asia: Public–Private Partnerships,Regulatory Grey Zones and the Household

ABSTRACT

Focussing on the example of domestic worker migration, this article seeks to explore the regulatory regimes that control the flow of migrants across Southeast Asia. Although at first glance this appears to be a deeply statist regime, the aim of this article is to complicate this picture and to look at the role that private power and authority places in shaping migration governance. The article focusses on three interrelated issues: (i) how states have increasingly come to regulate migration via partnership arrangements with private sector actors; (ii) how these partnership arrangements are emblematic of broader processes of state transformation that take shape within the complex governance practices surrounding domestic worker migration in Southeast Asia; (iii) how a focus on the micro-processes of domestic worker governance (that is, how migrant worker bodies are constructed and disciplined) also highlights the significance of private actors in this aspect of governance.     

The Right Turn in India: Authoritarianism,Populism and Neoliberalisation

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the growth of authoritarian forms of politics in India should be seen in the context of a long-term crisis of the state as successive governments have been unable to establish legitimacy for the policies of neoliberalisation that have been pursued since the 1990s. These policies contributed to the fracturing of dominant modes of political incorporation. The previous Congress Party-led government’s mode of crisis management – which it dubbed, inclusive growth – failed to create new forms of political incorporation by addressing long-term structural problems in India’s political economy, such as jobless growth, and gave rise to new problems, such as large-scale corruption scandals. Subsequently, it increasingly developed what Nicos Poulantzas called, “authoritarian statist” tendencies to marginalise dissent within a framework of constitutional democracy. The current Bharatiya Janata Party-led government’s mode of crisis management builds on these authoritarian statist tendencies but has sought to build legitimacy for these tendencies and neoliberalisation through an appeal to authoritarian populism. This seeks to harness popular discontent against elite corruption with majoritarianism to create an antagonism between the “Hindu people” and a “corrupt elite” that panders to minorities.     

Hiroshima poems by Toge Sankichi

Abstract

Extract

Gail Omvedt's piece, ostensibly on the World Bank, is actually an argument for liberalization as opposed to statist regimes. The following lines responding to her piece concern this larger issue. While sharing her critique of the dependency theory as well as some of her negative views on statist regimes, I have basic differences with her on a number of points in her discourse.     

Decolonisation and comparative land reform with a special focus on Africa

Abstract

One of the principles guiding the establishment of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963 was the need to eradicate colonialism and to ensure the total emancipation of African territories and its peoples. The African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights adopted in 1981 grants all peoples the right to self-determination, through which to freely determine their political status and pursue their social and economic development. The last two African countries to gain independence from apartheid and white minority rule, namely Namibia and South Africa, have taken different approaches to land and tenure reform. The year 2013 marked 100 years since the enactment of the Natives Land Act 27 of 1913 in South Africa that led to the indigenous majority population having access to only 13% of the land while the white minority had access to 87% of the land. The year 1913 is also the current cut-off point for recognising land claims. The South African government has recently taken initiatives aimed at improving the pace of land reform, which currently stand at 5% of the land being transferred to black South Africans against a target of delivering 30% by 2014. While the government has called for patience in this regard, some urgent intervention is required, lest South Africans lose patience and undertake land invasions on a sustained basis.     

Do social networks bridge political divides? The analysis of VKontakte social network communication in Ukraine

New electronic forms of political communication have become increasingly popular in countries with weak democratic institutions. The effectiveness of these new forms of association in altering political behavior, however, remains uncertain even in developed democratic regimes. This paper investigates connections between regional variation in electoral behavior and regional distribution of electronic social networks in the case of Ukraine's polarized and institutionally unstable democracy. Our analysis of online networks shows that, somewhat contrary to conventional wisdom, electronic communication does not bridge political divides. This finding casts doubt on the effectiveness of online forms of political communication as a source of behavioral change.     

Rural Transformations and Democracy in Northeast Thailand

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the underlying economic, social and political processes that contributed to democratic progress in the rural areas of northeast Thailand. After the 2006 military coup villagers in the region played an important role in anti-coup activities and actively demanded for democratic rule. To defend democratic rule, villagers not only opposed military intervention but also challenged elites, who they considered had masterminded the coup. The coup was a landmark change in terms of the relationship between the highest authority in Thailand and the rural masses. According to the Thai hierarchical order, villagers are regarded as inferior who must obey the elite. Any action that does not conform to this rule is considered morally wrong and to be punished. Why did rural dwellers dare to engage openly in political action that defied the hierarchical order? To comprehend such actions the article examines structural changes in Thailand’s countryside that released villagers from traditional bonds and enabled them to engage in a new form of political mobilisation. It is argued that the emergence of a democratic movement in the rural northeast is a result of two important processes: rural socio-economic transformations and political democratisation.     

Autorität: Herrschaft ohne Zwang – Anerkennung ohne Deliberation

Alongside with democracy and justice, authority is one of the most important concepts of political thought. As authority is often understood as the unconstrained but also unquestionable acceptance of hierarchy, the relationship between authority and democracy has always been marked by tensions. Following four different chains of argument addressing authority, this article shows that this core concept is in danger of losing its precision in the attempt of dissolving those tensions in recent debates in political sciences. Either the term is used in such a broad sense that anyone can have or be assigned authority or it is identified with power in general or the legitimate power of command so that only and all the people in power have authority. Both strategies of dissolving the tensions between authority and democracy render the concept at best ambiguous and at worst diffuse or even dispensable. On the contrary, the aim of the paper is to argue for authority to be a political core category which can only maintain this position when it means something other than democratic power to act on the one hand and legitimate rule or decision-making competence, respectively, on the other.     

Conservation on contested lands: the case of Namibia's communal conservancies

Community Conservation initiatives have become widespread in several Southern African countries and have also been increasingly involved in disputes over land claims, control of resources and territorial authority. The aim of this paper is to analyse how Communal Conservancies in Namibia are being used by rural communities as tools for gaining or securing access to and control of communal land in a moment when it is perceived as increasingly scarce. Peasants, Traditional Authorities, the State and conservationists all try to influence the use that will be given to contested lands. The paper will focus on two cases: King Nehale Conservancy, a heavily populated mixed agricultural land in North-Central Namibia (Owamboland) and Nyae Nyae Conservancy, a semi-arid land inhabited by a historically marginalised population, the Ju/’hoan San. In both cases Conservancies contribute to an increased control by communities over their land, but also imply the reinforcement of the presence of the State and private capital in communal areas, and become part of the internal struggles among sections of the communities themselves.     

Battles over boundaries: the politics of territory,identity and authority in three Ugandan regions

In Uganda, contested relations between the central government and sub-national regions have, since independence, shaped state formation and national identity in fundamental ways. Today, the country is characterised by regionally uneven state presence, and distinct sub-national identities and ongoing contestation over territorial demarcations, loci of authority and political identities. This article explores the politics of territory, identity and authority in three Ugandan regions in this context, in order to analyse the implications for exclusion and conflict at the sub-national level. This involves struggles over the territorial and administrative demarcations of and within regions; the loci and scope of authority with regards to these units; struggles over access to land; and the (non-)recognition of various cultural–political identities in these regions.     

Clientelism or Something Else? Squatter Politics in Montevideo

Through the in‐depth ethnographic study of one squatter neighborhood in Montevideo and its leader's political networks, this article illustrates a successful strategy through which some squatter neighborhoods have fought for their right to the city. This consists of opportunistic, face‐to‐face relationships between squatter leaders and politicians of various factions and parties as intermediaries to get state goods, such as water, building materials, electricity, roads, and ultimately land tenure. Through this mechanism, squatters have seized political opportunities at the national and municipal levels. These opportunities were particularly high between 1989 and 2004, years of great competition for the votes of the urban poor on the periphery of the city, when the national and municipal governments belonged to opposing parties. In terms of theory, the article discusses current literature on clientelism, posing problems that make it difficult to characterize the political networks observed among squatters.