Cosmologies and Regionalisms from ‘Above’ and ‘Below’ in the post-cold war Americas: the Relevance of Karl Polanyi for the 21st century

Drawing on a Polanyian analysis of the land question, this article aims to analyse both Western and Indigenous cosmologies of Abya Yala—the name that indigenous peoples give to the American continent—to understand the relationship between human beings and land and nature. These cosmologies are at the heart of the way in which two distinct societies construct their regional space, one from ‘above’, the other from ‘below’, and they are therefore key to understanding today’s climate change problématique. Following this nexus it is argued that, since the end of the Cold War, a new regional ‘double-movement’, unleashed by the quest for land and natural resources has been in the making. This is a superstructural or legal battle between Western transnational regime-making and a law that originated at the ‘centre of the Earth’. The article explains both regionalisms and the dialectical interaction between them and demonstrates that Karl Polanyi’s legacy remains relevant for the 21st century.     

Large-scale land acquisitions,state authority and indigenous local communities: insights from Ethiopia

The convergence of diverse global factors – food price volatility, the increased demand for biofuels and feeds, climate change and the financialisation of commodity markets – has resulted in renewed interest in land resources, leading to a rapid expansion in the scope and scale of (trans)national acquisition of arable land across many developing countries. Much of this land is on peripheral indigenous peoples’ territories and considered a common property resource. Those most threatened are poor rural people with customary tenure systems – including indigenous ethnic minority groups, pastoralists and peasants – who need land most. In Ethiopia large areas have been leased to foreign and domestic capital for large-scale production of food and agrofuels, mainly in lowland regions where the state has historically had limited control. Much of the land offered is classified by the state and other elites as ‘unused’ or ‘underutilised’, overlooking the spatially extensive use of land in shifting cultivation and pastoralism. This threatens the land rights and livelihoods of ethnic minority indigenous communities in these lowlands. This article argues that recent large-scale land acquisitions are part of state strategy for enforcing political authority over territory and people. It examines the implications of such strategy for indigenous ethnic minority groups, focusing particularly on the Benishangul-Gumuz region.     

Performing New Values: Fashion Brands in Post-Socialist Bulgaria

In post-socialist societies, marketing and consumption play a crucial role for what is regarded as value. Assuming ‘consumer capitalism’ as an important feature of the neoliberal project, I argue that marketing theories and practices produce market societies in Eastern and Central Europe. To highlight the reflexive adaptation of ‘consumer capitalism’ by producers, marketers and consumers, this essay discusses fashion brand promotion in Bulgaria. The case studies illustrate how the transformation of modes of valuation can be understood as a process of performative modernisation and marketisation. It appears that the ‘local’ adjustment of ‘global’ concepts of marketing and consumption leads to new formations of value in spatial, temporal and subjective terms.     

Unfulfilled promises of the consultation approach: the limits to effective indigenous participation in Bolivia’s and Peru’s extractive industries

Indigenous peoples’ right to prior consultation and to informed consent represents the basis of the new global model shaping state–indigenous relations. Consultation processes promise to enable indigenous people to determine their own development and are especially promoted when extraction projects with significant socio-environmental impacts are planned on indigenous lands. In this article we draw on debates on participatory development in order to analyse the first state-led consultations in Bolivia’s and Peru’s hydrocarbon sectors (2007–14). The analysis shows that effective participation has been limited by (1) an absence of indigenous ownership of the processes; (2) indigenous groups’ difficulties defending or even articulating their own visions and demands; and (3) limited or very general outcomes. The study identifies real-life challenges, such as power asymmetries, a ‘communication hurdle’ and appropriate timing – as well as simplistic assumptions underlying the consultation approach – that account for the unfulfilled promises of this new model.     

Indigenous voices and the making of the post-2015 development agenda: the recurring tyranny of participation

This paper explores recent efforts to ensure the participation of indigenous peoples in the making of the post-2015 development agenda. It is based on an examination of the UN’s global consultation process, conducted between July 2012 and July 2013. Using discursive analysis of consultation findings and reports, we argue that the UN’s approach to participatory development represents a pretence rather than an actual shift in power from development experts to the intended beneficiaries of development. Therefore the post-2015 consultation process aptly illustrates the recurring tyranny of participation, this time at a global level, as the UN maintains control over global development goals. Recognising that it would be unjust to ignore the ability of marginalised groups to challenge the UN’s dominant narratives of development, we suggest that there is still time for indigenous voices to be heard in the build-up to the post-mdg era through ‘invited’ and ‘uninvited’ forms of participation.     

The politics of convergence in Bolivia: social movements and the state

Abstract

The convergence of social movements in Bolivia was a decisive factor in bringing President Evo Morales and the Movement Towards Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, hereafter MAS) to power in 2006. Yet in recent years, this convergence has become fraught with internal tensions as the state’s extractivist development model and promises for plurinationalism and alternative forms of development reveal fundamental contradictions. This paper traces the formation of social movement alliances over time, revealing their power to effect change and their strength when there is unity in diversity. Rather than ‘neoliberalism’ which represented the injustice frame and united identity- and class-based politics during the rise of the MAS, the single greatest threat to the indigenous, peasants, originarios, women and the youth in the current context is extractivism.     

Historiography and the politics of land,identity, and belonging in the twentieth-century North Caucasus

Intercommunal, socio-economic, and political relations in the North Caucasus have historically revolved around access to this mountain region’s prized pasturage and scarce farmland. Given the centrality of the land question in the North Caucasus, it is unsurprising that historiography on land relations in the region has been highly politicized. This article examines how indigenous writing on the history of land relations in the central Caucasus – a region inhabited by today’s Kabardians, Balkars, Ossetians, Ingushes, and Karachais, and dominated by the princely confederation of Kabarda before the tsarist conquest – has been subject to wide revision in response to changes in local and national political dynamics and the emergence of ethnicized identity politics. In the late-imperial and early Soviet periods, Karachai, Balkar, and Ossetian elites-cum-historians, writing for an audience of imperial policy-makers, crafted histories to influence state policies toward land reform. By the 1930s, historians from the region tailored their histories of land relations to the prerogatives of Soviet nationality policies. The ideas contained in these histories impacted the construction of national identities in the Soviet period. Post-Soviet Karachai and Balkar intellectuals, seeking to establish new post-colonial national histories for their peoples, have reinterpreted the history of land relations in order to depict their ancestors as independent of Kabarda’s land-based dominance. This revisionism is part of the struggle of the Karachais and Balkars against their historiographical erasure, which was a product of the exclusion of the Karachais and Balkars from the family of Soviet nations during their deportation and exile to Central Asia from 1944 to 1957 and their subsequent political and cultural marginalization.     

Decentralisation,socio-territoriality and the exercise of indigenous self-governance in Bolivia

This article analyses the ‘indigenous autonomy’ being constructed in two dozen Bolivian municipalities and territories, in accordance with the 2009 Constitution. It finds that Bolivia’s 1994 decentralisation reforms, which created the country’s system of municipalities, are central to understanding the contemporary implementation of indigenous autonomy. Some indigenous people view as favourable the representative and material gains achieved by municipalisation, which helps explain why more majority-indigenous communities have not yet chosen the new option of indigenous autonomy. However, the new legal framework also limits indigenous self-governance, because territorial delimitations of the country’s municipalities are generally inconsistent with indigenous peoples’ ancestral territories. The new institutions of self-governance are legally obligated to include discrete legislative, executive and administrative functions, reflecting not indigenous norms but a municipal structure of liberal design. This study illustrates the way that indigenous self-determination may encounter obstacles where indigenous territorial jurisdictions must coincide with contemporary boundaries of colonial origins, rather than with pre-colonial territories.     

Europeanisation and post-peasant populism in Eastern Europe

On the basis of an examination of rural social structure, traditionalist narratives and an agrarian imaginary resulting from uneven development, this article investigates the forms of political mobilisation which materialise in East European politics as ‘post-peasant populism’. Focusing on grassroots mobilisation, an analysis of the annual Corpus Christi ritual in the city of Przemy?l, south-east Poland, serves as the basis for an exploration of the theme of socially sensitive post-peasant populism as an alternative to post-socialist capitalism. This populism relies on the politicisation of the rural past and is currently influenced by ‘Europeanisation’.     

Corporate power,US drug enforcement and the repression of indigenous peoples in Latin America

Abstract

The question that motivates this article is: what are the mechanisms through which the prosecution of the drug war in Latin America lead to human rights repression? In answering this question, I theorise that drug enforcement is a coalition of actors that facilitates domestic and international consensus around prohibition as a mechanism for corporate expansion. Drug war infrastructure financing is likely to facilitate the expansion of corporate investments by resource-seeking industries that require greater land use, which encroaches on the ancestral territories of indigenous peoples. And, in response to indigenous resistance to corporate appropriation of ancestral lands, resource-seeking transnational corporations will collude with private security firms and paramilitary organisations to repress and eliminate indigenous resistance. In the process of accumulating capital in Latin America, transnational corporations, domestic security, and paramilitary organizations are the drug enforcement coalition’s mediators of terror.     

Party Politics,Political Competition and Coming to Terms with the Past in Post-Communist Hungary

This article considers processes involved in coming to terms with the past in the early years of post-communist Hungary. It addresses the impacts of ‘soft’ late socialism, ‘negotiated’ post-socialist transition, and the intense inter-party and intra-party competition in which Hungary’s first democratically elected government operated. It concludes that claims that Hungary failed to confront the past in the early 1990s miss the mark. The past was confronted openly and aggressively by political actors, but the public will, as reflected in parliamentary legislation, was in favour of measures that resonated with ‘soft’ late socialism and a smooth post-socialist transition rather than political retribution.     

Production Efficiency and Beyond: Local Determinants in Russian Privatisation

This article analyses factors influencing rural households’ decisions to remain in collectives or separate from them during Russia’s post-socialist privatisation period in the 1990s. It argues that although decisions to remain in or separate from a collective were influenced by a number of factors, the dominant one was the households’ abilities to cope with independent production. These abilities were predetermined by the extent to which production was intensified in each collective. In Siberia less labour and capital intensive husbandry based on native herding that is well - adapted to the local environment, offered better chances of establishing viable economies, and thus greater incentives to split from a collective.     

Decolonising online development studies? Emancipatory aspirations and critical reflections – a case study

Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes through online distance learning to engage practitioner-students in low-income countries. Are such initiatives providing opportunities to critically tackle social injustice, or merely ‘mirroring’ relations of global inequality and re-entrenching imperial practices? Building on recent scholarship addressing efforts to ‘decolonise development studies’ and the complex power dynamics they encounter, we reflect on this question by analysing experiences of faculty and students in a United Kingdom-based online development studies programme, focusing particularly on perspectives of development practitioner-students working from Africa. We discuss barriers to social inclusivity – including the politics of language – that shaped participation dynamics in the programme as well as debates regarding critical development course content, rethinking possibilities for bridging counter-hegemonic development scholarship with practice-oriented approaches in a range of social contexts. Our analysis unpacks key tensions in addressing intertwined institutional and pedagogic dilemmas for an agenda towards decolonising online development studies, positioning decolonisation as a necessarily unsettling and contested process that calls for greater self-reflexivity.     

Social Networks and Factor Markets: Panel Data Evidence from Ethiopia

We investigate the role of an indigenous social network in Ethiopia, the iddir, in facilitating factor market transactions among smallholder farmers. We use detailed longitudinal household survey data and employ fixed effects estimation approaches to identify the effect of iddir membership on factor market transactions among farmers. We find that joining an iddir network improves households’ access to land, labour and credit transactions. Our findings also hint that iddir networks may crowd-out borrowing from local moneylenders (locally referred as ‘Arata Abedari’), a relatively expensive credit source. These results suggest that non-market institutions can play crucial roles in facilitating market transactions.     

The Transformation of Soviet Industrial Relations and the Foundation of the Moldovan Dniester Republic

The debate about post-socialist internal conflict has overcome the ‘ethnic turn’ and increasingly focuses on actors. For the case of separatism in the Moldovan Dniester Valley, research has highlighted the crucial role of industrial factory directors. These managers mobilised their factories’ employees. To refine the knowledge of how collective conflict actors are formed, this article asks the question: what enabled directors to mobilise ‘their’ workers? The sources show that, on the one hand, the managers’ political power was rooted in typical Soviet enterprise structures; on the other, it was further strengthened by perestroika market reforms and the economic crisis entangled to them. These results suggest that separatist mobilisation and internal conflict were entangled to social transformation and functioned as a catalyst to the process of (re-)distribution of capital and power.     

Human rights and Nubian mobilisation in Egypt: towards recognition of indigeneity

How are global human rights localised in authoritarian societies? How and what human rights discourses are mobilised by indigenous peoples to further their demands? Building upon original fieldwork among Nubian activists in Egypt, this article explores the complexities regarding human rights framing through a discussion of recognition of Nubian indigeneity. The article finds that the history and political experience of Egypt’s Nubians bring about diverging opinions and also limitations as to how, and what, human rights frameworks rights claimants and their supporters are to employ. It argues that Egyptian nationalism not only affects how Nubian activists mobilise in general, but also helps explain the very limited appeals to a global discourse of human rights.     

From Third World internationalism to ‘the internationals’: the transformation of solidarity with Palestine

This paper examines the formation of the concept of ‘the internationals’ in Palestine. The post-Oslo term began to be used in the second intifada to denote white solidarity activists in the colony. In tracing the rise of the concept, the paper charts some of the ways solidarity with the Palestinian people has been domesticated under the Oslo ‘peace process’. Situating and analysing the rise of the concept of ‘the internationals’ within the assemblage of apparatuses and ideological forces inscribed during Oslo, it explains how these material structures have contributed to shifting the notion and praxis of solidarity. Taking Third World internationalist and anti-imperialist feminist practices of solidarity as its starting point, the paper historicises and theorises some of the changes that have taken place over time. It offers an anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist critique of the individualisation of solidarity and centres indigenous Palestinian perspectives. It concludes by surveying the ways Palestinians are creating alternatives and rebuilding international solidarity.     

Slovenia: The End of a Success Story? When a Partial Reform Equilibrium Turns Bad

During the Great Recession, Slovenia recorded one of the worst economic performances within the EU. Such a decline is surprising as the country was the most stable among the post-socialist states. The article individuates the root cause for the downfall in protracted reform gradualism, which resulted in an inefficient privatisation process. This locked the country into a ‘partial reform equilibrium’ where economic elites extracted rents. Following accession to the EU, the unsustainable lending practices of state-owned banks to corporate organisations and the gridlock in policymaking pushed the country into an economic and political ‘bad equilibrium’. Even though the Slovenian export sector proved to be surprisingly resilient, a massive debt overhang and a huge reform backlog are still weighing down on a healthy recovery.     

The Algerian Works of Hélène Cixous: at the Triple Intersection of European,North African and Religious Nationalisms

The theme ‘Jewish conditions and theories of nationalism’, relating particularly to the twentieth century, can be connected to Hélène Cixous the thinker, through her childhood experiences in Algeria during the Second World War. Thereafter, she would spend 10 years in a country on the verge of what some have termed a ‘civil war’ between ‘European’ inhabitants, settled multiple generations previously, and an increasingly angry, marginalised, and dispossessed (Muslim) indigenous population. Importantly, Cixous has also called on her experiences in Algeria after Algerian independence, which is extremely rare given that the vast majority of non-Muslim departures took place up until 1962. In this way, her early life history and her intellectual trajectory, positioned as a writer of gendered and then ethnic difference (from Paris), and the relationships she garnered with Algerian women in the 1990s during the dark years of violence in Algeria, as well as her subsequent process of return to Algeria against a backdrop of a narrowly defined French national identity, are at a triple intersection with the evolutions of Algerian, French and Jewish nationalisms. This paper engages with the ambiguities and tensions of Hélène Cixous’ experience of and writing about Algeria combining close analysis of her literary production with our meetings in her Parisian home.     

Silicon Valley in Eastern Slovakia? Neoliberalism,Post-Socialism and the Knowledge Economy

The essay critically examines the prospect of emulating a Silicon Valley-style regional development in the post-socialist context of East-Central Europe. It underlines the problematic nature of the Silicon Valley concept itself and examines the way in which the concept has been ‘domesticated’ in Ko?ice, a peripheral region in eastern Slovakia undergoing a painful post-socialist transformation towards the market economy. In doing so, the essay also highlights links between neoliberalism, post-socialism and the knowledge-based economy.