Global Citizens or Faraway Viewers? São Paulo Residents Talk About the 2006 Lebanon Conflict

As the emergence of a global public sphere becomes a possibility, growing out of denser economic, political and communicative networks as well as demanded by increasingly complex international problems, questions arise about the capacity and willingness of various national publics to engage in the global debate. This paper shows the results of a news reception analysis with the public of the city of São Paulo, Brazil during the months of July–November 2006, when the Lebanon conflict was broadly covered by the Brazilian media. The paper identifies the modes of engagement with the news about the international conflict, the types of reasoning used by these publics in interpreting the news, and the types of debates and conversations they have or don’t have about the conflict. Special attention is given to the personal experience of learning about conflicts abroad and to the relationship between this experience and the construction of a new civic identity where participation in global affairs is an important element. The research shows that São Paulo residents are informed and care about international events, but to a large extent lack the resources and the spaces where they could reflect upon them. It also shows that young people tend to experience global events more intensely as part of their world than the general population.     

Industrial accumulation and living standards in the long‐run: The São Paulo industrial working class, 1930–75, part i*

This is the first of two articles attempting to contribute to the debate on trends in absolute real incomes amongst propertyless groups in semi‐industrialized countries. The empirical evidence presented in both articles is addressed to evaluating the long‐term trend in the standard of living of industrial working‐class households in one of the principal industrial centres of the capitalist periphery (the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo) between the mid‐1930s and the mid‐1970s. This first article contains a more analytical discussion of the principal factors affecting the living standards of non‐property‐owning groups in poor capitalist countries, experiencing rapid transformations within both their agricultural and industrial sectors. Following this, some of the principal problems which arise in measuring the living standards of poor people in developing countries are briefly reviewed, as well as the solutions adopted and the data sources used in this study of households in the city of São Paulo. This first article also presents some background evidence on changes over time in some of the principal characteristics of Sao Paulo working‐class households: household size, age and sex composition, labour force participation and the relative contribution of different household members to total household income.     

Development legislation in Africa

This is the second of two articles attempting to contribute to the debate on the trends in absolute real incomes amongst propertyless groups in semi‐industrialized countries. It is based on empirical data for the standard of living of industrial working‐class households in one of the principal centres of the capitalist periphery (the Brazilian city of São Paulo) between the mid‐1930s and the mid‐1970s. Evidence is presented on real earnings trends, the composition of household expenditure, food consumption, and housing standards. The results run counter to the current view of the absolute impoverishment of the great majority of the population, but also reveal unexpected changes in the composition of consumption. An attempt is made to account for the results in terms of the analytical discussion presented in Part I of this paper, which was published in the January 1983 issue of this Journal.     

Cities working together to improve urban services in developing areas: The Toronto-São Paulo example

This paper examines the structure and administrative impact of a cooperative urban development accord existing between the cities of Toronto, Canada and São Paulo, Brazil. Using a case study approach, the extent to which urban service delivery in São Paulo has been facilitated by this agreement—focusing on the critical area of emergency care provision—is examined. The paper suggests that as a form of development assistance, the type of international municipal cooperation demonstrated in the study may have considerable potential, insofar at least as possibilities for real improvement to established service delivery mechanisms in developing areas are evident.     

Civil Society’s Claims to Political Representation in Brazil

Civil society is laying claim to political representation in contemporary democracies, destabilizing long-standing ideas about democratic legitimacy. The participatory governance structures that have emerged alongside classic institutions of representative democracy encompass not only direct citizen participation but also political representation by civil society actors. Using original data from São Paulo, Brazil, we show that most of civil society actors that work for the urban poor claim political representation of their “constituency.” Theirs is more often than not an “assumed representation,” we suggest, because our data show that most lack formal members and do not select leaders through elections. Civil society actors (in contrast to political parties and labor unions) lack historically settled and politically sanctioned mechanisms to authorize and hold accountable their representation. This new layer of political representatives therefore faces a historic challenge—constructing novel notions of democratic legitimacy that can support their forms of representation. We examine what new notions of representations are emerging and trace the historic roots of the most widespread and promising that focus on remedying inequality in access to the state.     

Exchange rates in nineteenth‐century Brazil: An econometric model

This paper develops a model for the exchange rate in Brazil during the second half of the nineteenth century. The exchange rate discussion has a bearing in the sources of industrialization in Brazil. Two explanations stem from a primary export base. Whereas the ‘adverse shock argument’ links industrialization to unfavorable conditions in the external sector and exchange devaluations, the alternative approach views industrialization from the standpoint of the growth of income brought by the rise in exports. Those mechanisms are discussed. Also considered are the effects of monetary policy and the behavior of wages. The evidence shows that purchasing power parity is not enough to explain the exchange rate behavior, which clearly responded to coffee export revenues.     

The contradictions of neo-extractivism and social policy: the role of raw material exports in the Brazilian political crisis

This article explores how contradictory development tendencies within Brazil’s primary sector have contributed to the country’s enduring political crisis. I show that President Rousseff, when dealing with declining royalty payments from natural resource exports and a decrease in tax revenue from imports, financed social policies in ways that her opponents branded as unconstitutional to remove her from power. After documenting the central players within the political crisis, namely those who have been under investigation in Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash), I illustrate how the ongoing corruption scandals plaguing Brazil have their roots in the country’s raw material export industries.     

Fair trade slippages and Vietnam gaps: the ideological fantasies of fair trade coffee

Fair trade coffee sales have boomed since the late 1980s, making it one of the most recognised forms of ‘ethical consumerism’ in the world. Around the same time exports of lower quality coffee beans from Vietnam also boomed, launching Vietnam from an insignificant coffee exporter to the world’s second largest with historically unprecedented speed. These disparate projects have had significant impacts on thousands of farmers – with Vietnam’s new class of coffee producers representing three and a half times the number of coffee families certified by fair trade. Northern actors, however, have given far more public and positive attention to fair trade. This article will argue that this difference does not stem from a strictly objective appraisal of the relative merits and shortcomings of each project, but from the compatibility of fair trade with ‘free trade’ and its emotionally charged ideological fantasies. This includes unconscious beliefs and desires around individualism, voluntarism, democracy and the affirmation of the exaggerated power of Northern consumers – as opposed to the Southern agency and complicated collective action implied by Vietnamese coffee statecraft.     

Soviet Cinema, 1929–41: The Development of Industry and Infrastructure

This article explores the development of the Soviet film industry in the 1920s and 1930s and argues that the rise of Soviet cinema as an industry was hampered by a lack of technical equipment and the know-how to produce this, and that the USSR struggled to achieve independence in the production of equipment for film production and demonstration throughout the 1930s. The article examines the technical and economic aspects of film production in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. It explores the extent of ‘cinefication’, especially in terms of the lack of technology for sound film. It scrutinises the distribution and demonstration systems for films, making comparisons to the US industry. It argues that fewer films were produced in the USSR, thus offering a limited choice to Soviet audiences; at the same time new films were distributed with an insufficient number of copies, so that the rise of Soviet film as an industry was hampered. The article demonstrates the absence of an infrastructure and an industry to produce the technical equipment for film production and demonstration (film stock, cameras, sound equipment were all important) making the industry dependent on the West.     

Protest Patterns in Provincial Russia: a Paired Comparison of Company Towns

Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia implemented reforms aimed at transitioning to a market economy and devolving power to regional and municipal levels of government. Although it is well known that these reforms created significant uncertainty, economic crises, and protest, most existing studies do not explore the considerable variation in protest patterns across localities. This article asks why, despite similar pressures, some cities have experienced protests that are consistently larger and more intense than others. Focusing on the context of the many company towns that emerged during Soviet industrialization, I construct a paired comparison of two average-sized company towns using process tracing through interviews and archival documents. This article also employs an original protest database created through newspaper analysis that tracks not only the instances of protest but also protest size, demands, and targets. What emerges are two pathways that explain the divergent protest structures in the two company towns studied. In Cherepovets, a city that is less dependent on the central state, local elites pursued strategies of co-optation and suppression, limiting the opportunity structure for contentious politics to small-scale, local protests. In Komsomolsk-na-Amure, a city where the primary industry is in decline and dependent on support from the center, local elites converged with opposition groups to improve their bargaining position vis-à-vis the central government; this produced protests that were larger and more extreme and targeted the system as a whole.     

‘SAFEGUARDING NATIONAL CREDIBILITY’: FOUNDING THE BANK OF CHINA IN 1912

Abstract

The Bank of China led China’s modern-style banks during the Republican era, supporting the Chinese state through war and peace and financing China’s industrialization in the first half of the twentieth century. This article explores the founding of this institution in 1912 in the context of building the modern Chinese nation state following the 1911 Revolution. It argues that the events that made possible the Bank of China’s founding illustrate the contingent nature of state building. Furthermore, emphasis is on the critical relationship between finance and political legitimacy in state building. The article also shows how the creation of an institution such as the Bank of China, which was originally intended to be the new Republic’s central bank, gave the fledgling state the opportunity to support the transfer of legal rights in regime change.     

Managers’ innovations in a social work context

The paper draws on a research study concerned with innovations reported and ‘claimed’ by individual social work managers in a large Scottish local authority. Analysis of the data, in the context of social work during the legislative and regulatory flux of the 1980s and early 1990s, took as its starting point the relationship between the focal innovations and various strategic policies and directions established within the authority. Within this setting the researchers provide a more general interpretation of the processes through which innovations are prompted, developed and realised in organisations.     

One Woman’s View of the Early Chinese Communist Movement: The Autobiography of Mme. Zhang Guotao

Abstract

Wei Baqun, leader of the influential Donglan Peasant Movement in southern China in the 1920s and 1930s, was attacked by his Nationalist enemies as a real and dangerous Communist long before he joined the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, some of his Communist comrades were reluctant to admit him into the Party or to recognize him as a genuine Communist even after he joined the Communist Party. But after his death, they all began to promote him as a perfect Communist. Through an analysis of Wei Baqun’s life and revolution, this article shows how controversial and conflicting perceptions of the political identity of a political leader could exert strong influence on the political career of the leader and on local and national politics in revolutionary China. The article also attempts to explain why the confusion and controversy over Wei Baqun’s identity dissipated after his death.     

Everyday Fixers as Local Heroes: A Case Study of Vital Interaction in Urban Governance

This article exemplifies the importance of viable coalitions in processes of neighbourhood development and local governance. Elaborating on the notion of the ‘everyday maker’, discovered in Danish local politics by Bang and Sörensen, this article further explores the characteristics and conditions of organising capacity, using the case of the Neighbourhood Development Corporation in the Dutch city of The Hague as a paradigmatic case. This case shows that individual actors, ‘everyday fixers’ or ‘local heroes’, can make a real difference in local politics if they are well connected to a supportive structure and if they are sensitive to the logic of the situation at hand. Context matters, sometimes impedes, but smart individuals can also make it work.     

The role of architecture in the Republic of Georgia’s European aspirations

Alignment with Europe has been a popular foreign policy objective among post-socialist nations. In the Republic of Georgia, discourse surrounding the country’s Euro-Atlantic orientation surged in the decade after the 2003 Rose Revolution. While such discourse has been examined in the context of political reforms and national security goals, this article foregrounds how it was incorporated into alterations of the built environment. Focusing on the urban transformations of the city of Batumi after the rise to power of the United National Movement government, it demonstrates how architecture served as a tool for selectively rewriting Georgia’s contemporary European identity. This article concentrates on two parallel initiatives to transform Batumi into a contemporary European city: the reconstruction of portions of the Old City and the new development along the seaside boulevard. Using evidence collected through qualitative methods, it further highlights the contradictions that emerged during this process of redevelopment and rebranding, as the state balanced initiatives for new development with other post-revolutionary state-building objectives, such as political reform and tourism-market production. Accordingly, it unpacks the various national and international politico-economic forces at play in the process of developing Batumi into the image of a contemporary European city.     

Stalinist Public or Communitarian Project? Housing Organisations and Self-Managed Canteens in Moscow's Frunze Raion

In 1929, when rationing was introduced widely across the Soviet Union, urban residents and housing organisations started to organise their own canteens at the residence level by collecting their ration books. These were called ‘self-managed canteens’ (samodeyatel'nye stolovye). Although this canteen project did not expand as expected during the food crisis of the early 1930s, the project was more successful in Moscow's Frunze raion. This was especially true of canteen No. 171, reportedly established at the initiative of housewives, which continued to operate until 1940 with a steady growth in gross sales, and which started to allocate part of its profits to local community activities. This unique case exemplifies a communitarian project by residents which might lead to a reconsideration of the ‘public’ under the Stalinist regime.     

Political and economic motivations for labor control: A comparison of Ireland, Puerto Rico, and Singapore

The global economy imposes many constraints on small economies, especially those pursuing export-oriented industrialization (EOI) through the attraction of foreign direct investment. It has been argued that the success of EOI depends on the government’s ability to meet the labor requirements of this economic model—labor peace and low wages—through labor control policies and even repression. This article compares the histories of labor control in Ireland, Puerto Rico, and Singapore, three island-nations of similarly small size and high degree of integration with the global economy. While the pressures for labor control during EOI are evident in each case, there is a great deal of variation in the strategies governments adopted to rein in organized labor. I argue that the labor control methods employed during EOI are not explained by an economic logic but by a political one inherited from an earlier period when labor control was motivated by the efforts of a dominant party to consolidate its power.     

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.     

Do street traders have the ‘right to the city’? The politics of street trader organisations in inner city Johannesburg,post-Operation Clean Sweep

Street trader organisations are paradoxical objects of study. Their claims resist being analysed through the ‘right to the city’ lens, so contested are rights to inner city spaces between multiple users, not all of them in dominant socioeconomic positions; and so ambiguous is the figure of the street trader, oppressed but also appropriating public space for profit, increasingly claiming, in neoliberalising cities, an entrepreneurial identity. In the aftermath of the 2013 ‘Operation Clean Sweep’ (in which the City of Johannesburg unsuccessfully attempted to evict street traders from its inner city), this paper unpacks the politics of street trader organisations: how they organise their constituencies, frame their claims, forge unlikely alliances and enter into disempowering conflicts in engagements with a divisive municipality.