Lula's assault on rural patronage: Zero Hunger,ethnic mobilization and the deployment of pilgrimage

This paper explores the Workers’ Party government's attempt to use anti-poverty policy to disrupt rural patronage, and the implications of this effort for theories of patronage. I argue that state officials and race-based activists implementing President Lula's flagship ‘Zero Hunger Program’ (2003–2005) turned mundane program exercises into pilgrimage rites in an effort to build lateral solidarities among Afro-Brazilians and undermine their vertical patronage alliances. The partial success of such efforts suggests that there are circumstances in which vertical and horizontal alliances are compatible, and that investigating this compatibility entails consideration of local categories of exchange.     

商土中国及其法治建设

法律以社会为基础 ,法治建设深受特定社会性质的制约 ,有什么样的社会就有什么样的法治建设。因此 ,进行法治建设应当首先具体分析和科学认识其所依存的社会的性质。当代中国的法治建设亦然。本文通过对当前转型时期中国社会的性质进行论证界定 ,提出商土中国的概念。以此概念为中心 ,作者对中国法治建设的社会基础及可资利用的资源进行了深入的讨论     

Blurring the Distinction Between Empirical and Normative Legitimacy? A Methodological Commentary on ‘Police Legitimacy and Citizen Cooperation in China’

Asian Journal of Criminology - In a fascinating study into the nature of police legitimacy in Southern China, Sun et al. (2018) present evidence that what researchers have previously been treated...     

Comparing deep-end confinement in England & Wales and Norway

Extreme forms of custody represent the boundary points of state power. The configuration of the most restrictive corners of prison systems, and what goes on within them, is highly instructive in exposing the objectives, limits, and implications of state coercion at its most severe. Based on data collected in England & Wales and Norway, this article has two main aims. The first is to explore the degree to which “deep-end” confinement differs between jurisdictions with different penal philosophies. The second is to understand how the most extreme form of confinement in each jurisdiction differs from the more typical carceral experiences within each system and its overall penal ethos. Empirically, then, the article seeks to shine light into the deepest dominions of both prison systems, illuminating the experiential texture of extreme forms of imprisonment. It concludes by asking what can be inferred about Nordic exceptionalism, and about deep-end confinement more generally, by analyzing these domains.     

Indebted life and money culture: payday lending in the United Kingdom

Critical social scientific research holds that credit–debt is a principal economic and governing relation in contemporary economy and society, but largely neglects money’s role in indebted life. Drawing on qualitative research in the payday loan market in the United Kingdom, the paper shows that borrowers typically relate to loans in monetary rather than financial terms and incorporate them into practices of payment, spending and online banking. To analyse how indebted life is variously experienced and enacted through money, the concept of money culture is developed to refer to money’s culture, money’s meanings and money’s affects. Borrowers enter into and negotiate payday loans through a digitally mediated money culture that both mobilizes and runs counter to money’s powerful fictions as circulating universal equivalent and calculative means of account.     

Investigating Not-Knowing: Research Methodology

Phenomenology offers a unique and useful approach to understanding how people experience events or phenomena. The method is particularly instructive in exploring how youth workers experience and make sense of moments of not-knowing in the context of their professional relationships with young people. This chapter provides an introduction to phenomenological research, including its theoretical foundations and procedures. The research methods of this study, including participant recruitment, interview format, data analysis, and presentation, are included, as are the five themes associated with the experience of not knowing what to do: (a) the paralysis of stuckness, (b) features of despair, (c) humiliation and the fear of being found out, (d) questions of vocation and calling, and (e) the transition from not-knowing to knowing.     

Additional source materials on Philippine radical movements

Abstract

William Pomeroy's bibliographical essay is useful for future scholarship. I would, however, like to offer some supplementary information based upon my research and writing about radical peasant movements in the Philippines for the 1944-56 period. There is a wealth of information to explore, both in the Philippines and in the United States, and there is hope that radical movements in the Philippines will be given the proper recognition they deserve. In particular, the post-World War II Huk movement has been pictured for too long simply in terms of a counter-insurgency problem for the Philippine and United States governments. Using alternative sources, the Huks can be seen from the perspective of the participants themselves.     

Excluded Again: Village Politics at the Aid Interface

Making use of a rural household survey, we show that in villages with a stronger monopolisation of the aid interface by local élites, households are more likely excluded from all aid. Moreover, these villages have less access to aid but this tends to be insufficient for political alternatives to emerge spontaneously, mainly due to their relatively low visibility in these villages. Finally, if village members themselves manage to bring about a political change, this does not automatically improve the conditions of the most excluded. We recommend aid donors to assume a more active role in searching and selecting community representatives.