Towards a Real Sustainable Agri‐food Security and Food Policy: Beyond the Ecological Fallacies?

The recent rises in food prices represent the ‘tip of the iceberg’ and a ‘canary in the mine’ moment for world agriculture. They are underlain by a continuing ‘race to the bottom’ and speculative process whereby systems of resource production and exploitation are continuing to rely upon ‘infinite supply’ assumptions and narrow technological solutions to ‘feeding the world’. I argue here that these conditions are leading to a dominant policy framing that tends to marginalise diverse and place‐based agro‐ecological systems by creating a new legitimacy for bio‐economic rather than eco‐economic solutions. Government and policy‐making bodies need to redefine and widen their approaches to agriculture and agri‐food in ways that recognise its social, cultural, political and spatially diverse contribution in a post‐carbon world.     

Playing the credit score game: algorithms, ‘positive’ data and the personification of financial objects

This paper is about how people are learning to ‘make themselves up’ in response to the market’s new algorithmic ways of seeing. More specifically, it explores how the self-datafication of informal financial relations is being used to affect the calculation of credit score. I argue that credit score functions as a legal technology of arbitration beset with contradictions that are giving rise to inchoate struggles over the distribution of calculative agency in consumer credit markets. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of credit building peer ‘lending circles’, the paper explores how financially marginalized groups and financial inclusion advocates are reacting to the blind spots and biases of credit-scoring algorithms through compensatory and transgressive data-generation practices.     

Do People Really Lack Knowledge About the Economy? A Reply to Facchini

Facchini uses a behavioural approach to analyse the political beliefs of French people, who he believes are ‘more or less incompetent’ in economics. In this article I focus on his premise that the public are incompetent and that therefore their views, such as being opposed to the market in the case of the French people, should be interpreted as ‘perception bias’. Other economists may echo Facchini, claiming that people who voted Leave in the UK and for Trump in the USA did so because their lack of economic knowledge contributed to an ‘anti‐foreign bias’. However, I argue here that the existing empirical research showing that people lack economic knowledge is flawed. Many economists adopt a questionable approach to the interpretation of public knowledge and the evaluation of what knowledge is important.     

It is a truly new dawn: Blacks and the politics of the postmodern age

This interpretive essay uses insights from cultural and postmodern theory, literature, history, and economics, interspersed with personal observations and narrative, to argue that the present historical ‘moment’ is ushering in a qualitatively new era for blacks. Culturally, American society is more truly inclusive of the black presence and interests—symbolized by the ‘arrival’ of Toni Morrison; the hegemony of the Westernized worldviews is weakened, creating a space for legitimate claims of difference to be actualized. While the moment is opportune for attempting to create a “cooperatively diverse” world, the altered socio-economic configuration of the new global order makes it progressively difficult for the old politics of pluralism to persist. In this essay, I argue that the emerging global order requires a shift to a new politics of recognition and a more equitable political partnership. In the main, the task is to fashion those accommodations that will enable blacks and whites (and additional Other(s)) to construct a new social and economic agenda from this new interdependence.     

Toleration,neutrality, and exemption

ABSTRACT

I focus on some controversial features of Peter Balint’s stimulating and provocative reassessment of the place of toleration in contemporary diverse societies. First, I question his argument that we must enlarge the concept of toleration to include indifference and approval if toleration is to be compatible with state neutrality. Secondly, I suggest that his idea of active neutrality of intent risks encountering the same difficulties as neutrality of outcome, although these will be mitigated the more the state’s neutrality takes a ‘hands-off’ form. Thirdly, while accepting his claim that exemptions depart from neutrality insofar as they attribute a significance to religious and conscientious convictions that they deny to mere preferences, I argue that that departure is not arbitrary and remains within the spirit of neutrality of intent.     

Can parity of self-esteem serve as the basis of the principle of linguistic territoriality?

In this paper, I argue that Philippe Van Parijs’ argument for the principle of linguistic territoriality rests upon an unexamined and unvindicated assumption, to the effect that most situations in which smaller languages are threatened by larger ones can be assimilated to ‘colonial cases’, that is to cases in which there is injustice as between the two linguistic groups, as opposed to ‘mere number cases’, that is cases in which linguistic groups of different sizes coexist in the absence of injustice. Moreover, I argue that Van Parijs underestimates the amount of coercion that will have to be applied even within linguistically defined territories in order to avoid the erosion of the smaller language.     

Denunciatory technology: forging publics through populism and secrecy

This paper theorizes contemporary institutionalized forms of denunciation, or what I call ‘denunciatory technologies’. Denunciatory technologies are mechanisms that allow citizens to report one another to the state for a wide range of wrongdoing, such as welfare fraud. The scarce literature on such initiatives relies heavily on concepts of neoliberalism to explain their emergence and operation. I first argue that a focus on neoliberalism fails to recognize these technologies as a sophisticated type of statecraft that promotes public sensibilities. I then offer a more robust account of denunciatory technologies. Rather than relying on an analysis of neoliberalism, I argue that these technologies fuse the policing of political criminals like the ‘welfare cheat’ to the very notion of ‘public good’, and refract vertical populist energies back onto the population. I conclude that, through such technologies, publics become an integral tool in their own governance.     

Invisible capitalism: political economy and the regulation of undocumented ­immigration in France

What explains the French government’s unwillingness to accept more legal immigrants or at least ignore those who enter or over-stay clandestinely? This paper answers this question by exploring the political economy and regulation of undocumented immigration in France during the 1990s. In light of a broad liberal and Marxist literature on the political economy of immigration, I argue that three ‘proximate determinants’ shape the regulation of undocumented immigration in France (a ‘Europeanized’ security agenda, ‘self-limited sovereignty’ and control of the labour market, especially informal employment). However, these proximate determinants do not necessarily excavate the social relations of power (that is political economy) which constitute the basis for policy making. I argue then that a return to the importance of the labour market (and thus the class and racial constitution of French society) is essential, but without a simple return to Marxist political economy. Instead, I suggest the value of ‘virtualism’ for carving out a new post-structuralist/‘postmodern’ political economy of immigration.     

Why should we care about competition?

Abstract

Most people believe that competitive institutions are morally acceptable, but that there are limits: a friendly competition is one thing; a life or death struggle is another. How should we think about the moral limits on competition? I argue that the limits stem from the value of human sociability, and in particular from the noninstrumental value of a form of social connectedness that I call ‘mutual affirmation.’ I contrast this idea with Rawls’s account of social union and stability. Finally, I show how these ideas provide the basis for a powerful argument in favour of social provisions for public goods: for example, a strong public health care system moderates the stakes in labour market competition, preventing the competition from descending into a life or death struggle.     

Debating the ghost of Marshall: a critique of citizenship

Significant changes to societies and the jettisoning of social rights are limiting access to conventional citizenship and fueling a new criterion by which a substantive ‘citizenship’ may now be claimed. Specifically, fame, fortune and a kind of martyrdom are, de facto, the new ways in which an individualistic approach is used to access citizenship, initiating a two-tiered system of inclusion. This article uses a Canadian context to examine the relevance of Marshall's concept of citizenship. The argument will follow in four parts. First, I review Marshall's construct of social rights and take up some of the ‘internal’ critiques of its limits. Second, I examine the gendered limits of social citizenship claims. Third, I explore what amounts to an ‘external’ critique of Marshall, i.e. thinkers like Beck who argue that the debate has moved on from how to do ‘social rights’ to an attack on the very notion of (social) rights. Finally, I propose what a citizenship without social rights concretely amounts to in the modern world.     

The observer actant in the contemporary legal discourse: a semiotic meditation*

ABSTRACT

The sensorial access to the law that a society grants to its members is underpinned by a logic of exhibition and disclosure that, in turn, results from a more abstract cultural propensity to either transparency or opacity. Through investigating the systems of signs by which the functioning of the law is either concealed to external audiences or manifested to them in a more or less spectacular way, one can gain a firmer grasp on the juridical aesthetics of a society. This semiotic approach entails two advantages: on the one hand, the possibility to compare and contrast different regimes of disclosure and secrecy in the synchronic dimension, connecting the discourse of the law with other – apparently distant – types of discourse, adopting the same aesthetics of transparency or opaqueness in other domains of social life and discursive production; on the other hand, the opportunity for a more insightful intelligence of the diachronic development of such aesthetics, so that it may be interpreted as the long-term byproduct of historical watersheds in the history of culture. The article, in particular, proposes to link the socio-pathology of anorexia with several other practices and texts of present-day culture that adopt the same rhetoric of transparency in other discursive arena, including that of law. In all these sign productions, indeed, the trend that predominates is one that, adhering to an ideology of immediacy and transparency, pretends to eliminate all filters, all hindrances, but also all material signifiers that would mar the purity of the content. Although this utopia cannot correspond to any actual semiotic state – for any content needs a material expression to be conveyed – it nevertheless exerts a powerful influence on the present time, until it manifests itself in extreme forms of ‘transparentist’ radicalism.     

Telangana and the politics of State formation in India: Recognition and accommodation in a multinational federation

This article examines the politics of State formation in India by taking up the case of Telangana. Drawing from the emerging literature on the politics of recognition and territorial accommodation in multinational federations, I argue that territorial accommodation of Telangana was made possible by the convergence of strategic interests and role of multiple actors to recognize Telangana’s distinctive territorial identity and accommodate its Statehood demand when an opportune ‘political opportunity structure’ emerged in the late 1990s till 2014. It extends the insights of ‘actor-centred’ institutionalism and contributes to an emerging literature which emphasizes the ‘multi-centred origins’ of border change and State formation in India in particular, and in multinational federations in general. By underscoring State formation as a complex process, this article cautions against a simplistic reading of the politics of State formation in India as an act of one-upmanship whereby the Centre can unilaterally make or break State borders.     

On claims of culture and duties of recognition in democratic states

One important way in which individuals and groups express their ideas and principles, and present their proposals and demands, is in the language of identity or difference. They argue that what they value and what they deserve are related to their distinctive identities. Working within the framework of a political theory of recognition, I argue in this article that particular cultural communities may have reasonable expectations that their distinctive identities receive public recognition, and that others may therefore have good reasons to give those identities such recognition. To be specific, I contend that there are distinct and complementary ways in which the state and its citizens should respond to identity-related demands for public recognition. Using terms introduced by Axel Honneth, I argue that the state should give ‘public attention’ to some cultural communities, and that citizens should show one another ‘well-meaning attention’. I conclude that both these forms of attention can be justified by reference to a new, fourth principle of recognition, so long as this is understood as a principle of political inclusion rather than one of cultural recognition.     

‘Domestic transnationalism’: legal advocacy for Mexican migrant workers' rights in Canada

Every year thousands of Mexicans travel to Canada to work in Canadian fields and greenhouses under the Mexico-Canada Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. While the programme is often praised, it has also been the subject of persistent criticism about its failure to meet certain human rights standards. In this article, we examine the legal strategies civil society advocates of migrant workers have adopted to promote migrant workers' rights in Canada. Specifically, we examine legal struggles undertaken by the United Food and Commercial Workers union to challenge Ontario government legislation that does not permit collective bargaining by farmworkers in the province. We argue that this case demonstrates that despite the fact that many of the workers involved are transnationalized, appeals to international bodies or to international human rights standards have been of limited utility in promoting their rights. Despite frequent arguments about the increased relevance of international human rights and citizenship norms and transnational human rights advocacy, in this case the national and sub-national scales remain predominant. The result, we argue, is a form of ‘domestic transnationalism’, in which domestic political actors engage in advocacy within domestic legal institutions to promote the rights of a transnational mobile labour force.     

The ASEAN Way as a symbol: an analysis of discourses on the ASEAN Norms

Has the ‘ASEAN Way’ – a set of rules of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) centered on the principle of non-interference and consensus decision-making – really established its position as an ASEAN norm? This paper aims to analyze the discourses of each ASEAN country and empirically explain their attitudes toward the norm. Specifically, I review various documentations to examine how various ASEAN diplomats have used the term ‘ASEAN Way.’ How did they come to call the principle of non-interference and consensus decision-making ‘ASEAN Way’ in the early 1990s? Why have they begun using the term negatively, as something to be reformed, in recent years? By describing the discourses on the ‘ASEAN Way’ and their changes over the years, I show that the rationality of non-interference and consensus decision-making has changed over time and shifted the positioning of the ‘ASEAN way’ as a symbol. This presents a new and empirical interpretation of the changes in ASEAN Norms.     

Accommodating toleration: on Balint’s classical liberal response to the multiculturalism challenge

ABSTRACT

Peter Balint identifies three challenges to toleration, one of which is the multiculturalism challenge. This is the charge that liberal toleration fails to accommodate minorities adequately, which requires positive recognition rather than negative toleration. I discuss his response to the multiculturalism challenge and its connection to a classical liberal view of toleration. This involves Balint’s claim that liberal neutrality should be understood as reflective and ‘difference-sensitive’, which should be realised by the state being ‘hands-off’ in the sense of withdrawing support for privileged ways of life. I argue that Balint’s classical liberal view that the state needs to be ‘hands-off’ is in need of specification and that it does not fit well with his claim that neutrality needs to be reflective and difference-sensitive.     

New Modes of Governance and the Participatory Myth

One of the most common arguments about ‘new governance’ is that it is characterised by heterarchy rather than by hierarchy, creating horizontal modes of governance among a multitude of actors – public and private – involving all relevant stakeholders. Often implicitly and sometimes explicitly, this argument is linked with a normative democratic claim that praises the particular participatory features of ‘new governance’ as compared to ‘old governance’. Using as a case study European occupational health and safety policy, characterised by a shift from ‘old’ to ‘new governance’ since the 1990s, this article warns us that one should be very reluctant in making normative claims on new governance. The analysis of new governance modes such as comitology, agency networking, and social dialogue in this field shows that more horizontal and heterarchical governance does not mean automatically more participatory governance in terms of involving civil society actors and all stakeholders.     

Politics and enlightenment: Kant and Derrida on cosmopolitan responsibility

Walter Benjamin once remarked of the enterprise of translation ‘that it is nowhere’: that the labour of transcribing the sense, inflection and difference of any particular language and text must always situate the translator in a space which is neither ‘of the original, nor ‘of the language into which it is to be transcribed. This ‘non‐position’ of the translator—between the original and its analogue, between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter’, the difference and the acceptability of the text—marks the labour of translation as an ethical responsibility: that of communicating the significance of something—a gesture, a story, a custom, a tradition—which has appeared to this/our socio‐linguistic culture as strange and unfathomably alien; and to achieve this communication without annulling its strangeness, its alterity. The purpose of my comparison of Kant and Derrida's remarks on cosmopolitical responsibility therefore, is fourfold. First, I want to suggest that it is this ‘stricture’ of translation—this difficult responsibility of both judging and respecting the difference of foreign’ cultures—which marks the (non‐Kantian, non‐situated) ‘territory’ of cosmopolitical responsibility. Second, by using Kant's remarks on the relationship between the political evolution of European Enlightenment culture and a possible world confederation of sovereign states, I want to point up the hierarchies and secondarizations involved in the determination of universal standards of moral, ethical and political conduct (even if these standards are originally prosecuted as the legislative conditions of a ‘radical democracy'). Third, I want to look at the ways in which the stricture of translation has been articulated as a theory of ‘global’ responsibility—particularly in the divergent ethical and political approaches of Jurgen Habermas and Jean‐Francois Lyotard. Fourth, I want to suggest that it is Derrida's idea of a ‘dual responsibility’ of critical thought to the political and philosophical resources of European Enlightenment and to the difference of non‐European nations and cultures, that marks the difficulty (the stricture) of acting responsibly within the global economics of power, identity and legislation. I want, in other words, to show that the ‘nowhere’ of Benjamin's translator, is a ‘place’ whose possibility demands a certain ‘Kantian’ right of reflection; that is, the right to pursue the ‘transcendent’ principle of respect for the other.     

Global IR through dialogue

This article aims to address how to ensure a two-way ‘dialogue’ across ‘the West/non-West distinction’ in international studies. To this end, I first discuss three different approaches to dialogue, the Socratic, the Habermasian, and the Weberian, and clarify what kind of thing dialogue should be if it is to overcome the ‘West-non-West divide’ and transform the current ‘Western-centric’ IR into a global discipline. I argue that dialogue should be understood as reciprocal feedback from different perspectives for mutual learning. In order to achieve this goal (i.e. mutual learning), I call for an ‘instrumentalist’ approach to dialogue. To elucidate this point, I offer an empirical illustration. The focus here is on dialogue as mutual learning between Western-centric IR theory, more specifically constructivism, and the indigenous experience and knowledge of East Asia.     

The Transparency Paradox: Why Transparency Alone will not Improve Campaign Regulations

The role of new sources of data has become of increasing interest to those involved in political campaigning and a legislative focus of policy makers and regulators. Utilising Karl-Heinz Nassmacher’s ‘magic quadrangle’ of ‘accounting, practicality, sanctions and transparency’ and a case study of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 this article unpicks how successful the ‘guiding philosophy’ of transparency was in delivering increased citizen confidence in the democratic process. I ultimately argue that at the heart of all discussions about what regulation in this area should look like, an uncomfortable paradox has to be accepted: that transparency may well help to quell actual instances of malfeasance and the misuse of data, but may at the same time increase citizen distrust in democratic processes. Any regulation should consider the ways in which transparency might be implemented such that it better supports the stated legislative aims.