Theorizing “cosmopolitan” support for indigenous people

ABSTRACT

This article presents a nuanced analysis of the role of the international support for a social movement in India, which became known as the Niyamgiri Movement. It uses the theory of normative cosmopolitanism to conduct the analysis. The Niyamgiri Movement was aimed at preventing the mining of a mountain which an indigenous community believed was sacred. The article advances theoretical insights into normative cosmopolitanism, and it also contributes to previous research on the Niyamgiri Movement in India that has not examined the role of its international supporters in sufficient detail. In the article, postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak’s theories are used to qualify the analysis of the international support for the Niyamgiri Movement in terms of normative cosmopolitanism. The concept of soft power is also discussed as an alternative theoretical lens, which could also be used to interpret the role of the governmental actors that supported the Niyamgiri Movement.     

Deconstructing gender: evidence on how programmes address gender inequalities to improve health

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that incorporating approaches to address gender inequality in programmes can lead to improved health outcomes. This article aims to deconstruct the various dimensions of gender and identify how programmes address these domains to improve health. This study draws on a broader systematic review examining the impact of gender-integrated programmes on health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. We identified 68 programmes meeting our criteria for inclusion. Our analysis found considerable variation in gender domains addressed across programmes, suggesting that more evidence is needed to understand the pathways through which gender-integrated programmes influence health.     

Juxtaposing handloom weaving and modernity: building theory through praxis

This article investigates the interaction between the processes of building development theory and development practice, arguing that theory must start with practice – and should not be top–down, starting with the ‘outside gaze’ of a supposedly detached academic or policy maker. The questions posed point to critiques of mainstream development narratives and notions of innovation through the diffusion of new technologies. The authors suggest that the assumptions embedded in mainstream development processes lead to unequal access to global and local markets, and that when they are imposed from the outside without a real understanding of the context, the development project is bound to fail. Parameters for assessing and evaluating outcomes also need to be based upon a close understanding of context – and this often comes through active involvement within it and not through being ‘detached’ and outside it. The assumption that an outside gaze is ‘objective’ is based in an implicitly colonial discourse, while building theory by being involved in the practice produces better methodologies for action and development.     

Microfinance in online space: a visual analysis of kiva.org

Microfinance practices were originally developed in offline contexts. Modern microfinance practices were based on development models for the financial and social empowerment of the poorest of poor in developing countries. Several of these practices drew from existing traditions of money lending within local communities that were reformed to be in sync with rural development and the empowerment of the underprivileged individual. In present ‘postmodern’ times, microfinance providers are using online tools in the hopes of broadening the reach and extending the advantages provided by such a model of micro-lending and micro-borrowing. In this article, we examine an online peer-to-peer lending and borrowing website, Kiva.org, which uses online social networking tools in microfinance. The study is thus a close look at the actual content of the website with a view to understanding the representational practices of online space through Internet mediated microfinance.     

From national bourgeoisie to rogues,failures and bullies: 21st century imperialism and the unravelling of the Third World

The East Asian financial crisis, the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the launching of the war on terrorism can be seen as three aspects of a single historical moment that marks the passage from one strategy of US imperialism to another. No longer based primarily on financial globalisation as the means through which the power and control of the corporations and government of the USA is extended over the world, as it was in the 1990s, US strategy is now more openly based on the direct control of productive assets and territory. This historical moment has also marked the definitive end of the idea of the Third World and its associated ideology of Third Worldism. Although this end has, of course, been repeatedly proclaimed, and contested, over the past two decades, this article argues that the idea of the Third World, and the associated ideas of development and non-alignment, were predicated upon the core concept of the national bourgeoisie and associated notions of the inherently progressive potential of nationalism. It traces the historical emergence of this idea in the work of Lenin and its subsequent trajectory during its cold war heyday. I emphasise that the idea of a united and rising Third World had a greater reality as a hope than it had as an objective historical possibility. The present moment in US imperialism is one where even that hope cannot be sustained—thus the definitive end of the idea of the Third World.     

Revolutions: a twenty-first-century perspective

Abstract

We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the actual record of revolutions in the Third World for the left. A quarter-century after the demise of the USSR, we found liberal capitalist triumphalism unwarranted. Two of the most important expectations to which it gave rise – that the world had become ‘unipolar’ and that it would enjoy a ‘peace dividend’ – remained unfulfilled. Instead, the world became multipolar and the West, led by the United States, engaged in unprecedented economic and military aggression against countries that contested its power. If this were not enough, social unrest and explosions in the First World as well as the Third underlined the relevance of revolutions. To trace their lineage, we recall capitalism’s intimate relation with revolution. It has needed revolutions to usher it into history and to usher it out. In addition to revolutions against developed capitalism, we also underline how important and necessary revolutions against nascent capitalism in various parts of the world have been. The contributions in this volume explore different parts of this lineage and vivify revolutions for our time.     

Marx’s critical political economy, ‘Marxist economics’ and actually occurring revolutions against capitalism

Abstract

Most revolutions against capitalism have occurred in ‘backward’ and Third World societies, and they have divided and disarrayed Marxisms in the West. One key reason, this paper argues, is intellectual. When, long ago, Marxists surrendered to the bourgeois challenge to Marx – neoclassical economics – developing, in place of Marx’s critical political economy, a ‘Marxist economics’, they lost touch with Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production. That analysis could illuminate how capitalism’s contradictions drive its imperialist expansionism and how and why resistance to it must, equally necessarily, take national forms. As a result, major currents of Marxism in the West either have paid attention to imperialism and anti-imperialist resistance but without Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production or have insisted that their (mistaken) conception of Marx’s analysis implies that capitalism has no necessary connection with imperialism. Neither tradition can actually develop Marxism to comprehend the actual historical record of revolutions since Marx’s time. Neither can inform new mobilisations against capitalism, whether in or outside its homelands. It is high time we return to Marx’s analysis of capitalism as value production and develop it.     

Genes and Spleens: Property, Contract, or Privacy Rights in the Human Body?

This article compares three frameworks for legal regulation of the human body. Property law systematically favors those who use the body to create commercial products. Yet contract and privacy rights cannot compete with the property paradigm, which alone affords a complete bundle of rights enforceable against the whole world. In the face of researchers' property rights, the theoretical freedom to contract and the meager interest in privacy leave those who supply body parts vulnerable to exploitation.