The Capitalocene Part II: accumulation by appropriation and the centrality of unpaid work/energy

This essay – Part II – reconceptualizes the past five centuries as the Capitalocene, the ‘age of capital’. The essay advances two interconnected arguments. First, the exploitation of labor-power depends on a more expansive process: the appropriation of unpaid work/energy delivered by ‘women, nature, and colonies’ (Mies). Second, accumulation by appropriation turns on the capacity of state–capital–science complexes to make nature legible. If the substance of abstract social labor is time, the substance of abstract social nature is space. While managerial procedures within commodity production aim to maximize productivity per quantum of labor-time, the geo-managerial capacities of states and empires identify and seek to maximize unpaid work/energy per ‘unit’ of abstract nature. Historically, successive state–capital–science complexes co-produce Cheap Natures that are located, or reproduce themselves, largely outside the cash nexus. Geo-managerialism’s preliminary forms emerged rapidly during the rise of capitalism. Its chief historical expressions comprise those processes through which capitalists and state-machineries map, identify, quantify and otherwise make natures legible to capital. A radical politics of sustainability must recognize – and seek to mobilize through – a tripartite division of work under capitalism: labor-power, unpaid human work and the work of nature as a whole.     

“Excuse Me,But Are You Raping Me Now?” Discourse and Experience in (the Grey Areas of) Sexual Violence

In feminist research on sexual violence and victimization, the relationship between discourse and experience has often been at the forefront of intense debates. Poststructuralist scholars have emphasized that the discourses used to name sexual violence may in fact perpetuate the very problem they set out to describe, by freezing women into powerless positions of rapability. Others have likened this sort of argument to anti-feminist trivialization of the pervasively gendered experiential reality to which such discourses refer, highlighting that women’s victimization is not a discursive problem. In this article, I seek to carve out a path that cuts through such polarization by exploring the multifaceted dialectical relationship between, on one hand, gendered discourses on sex and sexual violence and, on the other, people’s reported experiences of these phenomena and, in particular, of the “grey area” between sex and sexual violence. I do this by analysing autobiographical stories from the influential Swedish campaign #prataomdet (#talkaboutit), which emphasized the need for a new language that can do justice to people’s experiences of sexual violence and the grey area between sex and sexual violence.     

No more bullets for ETA: the loss of internal support as a key factor in the end of the Basque group’s campaign

The Basque separatist organisation ETA laid down its arms in 2011 after 40 years of an armed campaign for independence. It was not a consequence of political negotiations. The Basque group did not achieve its goals. Yet, it unilaterally decided to end its armed activity forever. This article analyses why and how ETA ended its armed campaign. It clarifies the events from the collapse of the last peace process in June 2007 to the announcement of the definitive end of ETA’s campaign in October 2011. It identifies the causal factors that led the Basque group towards its end. This article contends that the end of ETA’s campaign is a case of transformation triggered by its constituency’s withdrawal of support for the armed struggle. The leadership and social base of the political movement to which ETA belongs concluded that political violence was not effective anymore and, furthermore, was damaging for the Basque pro-independence movement. After an internal struggle, in which the faction advocating for exclusively political means prevailed, ETA was driven towards a unilateral abandonment of armed struggle.     

Negotiating justice: legal pluralism and gender-based violence in Liberia

The plural legal system in post-conflict Liberia expresses tensions between modern and customary institutions. This article seeks to understand how Liberians navigate choices in the plural legal system to address gender-based violence cases. By asking how and why people make the choices they do, we highlight how Liberians solve tensions between institutions, by creating flexible categories that allow them to pursue a course of action that does not compromise their ability to access social networks and resources.     

Social history, (Neo-)revisionism and mapping the 1930s Spanish left*

Revisionist historians and their Neo-Revisionist/conservative fellow travellers identify the Spanish left as the main cause of the civil war (1936–1939) that culminated in the establishment of the Franco dictatorship. Such claims are possible because these historians distort both the history of the left and the nature of social protest and mass mobilisation during these years. In part, the reliance of Neo-Revisionist/conservative historians on the methods of traditional political history – combined with their stubborn aversion to social history – makes it impossible for them to understand the left. This article argues that only through social history is it possible to comprehend the complex and shifting nature of protest dynamics in the 1930s. Indeed, many of the conflicts that played out in the political arena during these years were conditioned by structural economic problems and social tensions that resulted in diverse forms of radical contestation among the grassroots of leftist movements. Social, and indeed cultural history, are, therefore, central to any analysis of the myriad forms of these protest energies that flowed from the bottom up to shape the orientation of the leftist organisations.     

A nexus between labour movement and labour movement: the Knights of Labor and the financial side of global labour history

The rise of global and transnational labour history has revolutionised the study of working-class movements and individuals and the global forces that shaped them. Some of the more mundane considerations of these movements, however, have so far been neglected in this rapidly growing field. One of the most important of these considerations was money, or in other words the financial affairs of transnational movements such as trade unions and political parties. This article is a call to write the financial side of global labour history. It focuses on a global working-class movement that is itself often neglected in the historical literature, the Knights of Labor, and their outposts in Britain and Ireland. It examines the history of the British and Irish Knights through the prism of their financial history, so far as we can reconstruct it from the scanty sources that are available. This article argues that their financial ties with the United States and a series of embezzlement cases became major causes of their decline and, ultimately, their dissolution. Finally, this article draws conclusions from the financial misadventures of the British and Irish Knights of Labor that are relevant to the study of other international working-class movements and to the writing of global labour history in general.     

Serial Domestic Abuse in Wales: An Exploratory Study Into its Definition,Prevalence, Correlates,and Management

Analysis of information held by police, probation, and third-sector organizations in Wales about 100 domestic abuse perpetrators, along with 16 practitioner interviews, provides the empirical context for a discussion of the problem of “serial domestic abuse.” Despite increased concern over the harm caused by serial abusers, different definitions and recording systems prevent a reliable estimation of the problem. This exploratory study suggests that the offending profiles of serial abusers are heterogeneous, and recommends that approaches aimed at reducing the harm caused by the “power few” domestic abusers incorporate information about serial alongside repeat and high-risk offending.     

Culture as Values or Culture in Action? Street Codes and Student Violent Offending

ABSTRACT

The authors draw on two competing cultural perspectives—culture as values and culture in action—to examine the relationship between street codes and the propensity to violently victimize others. Specifically, they explore whether individual-level and school-level street codes, net of one another, are related to 3 types of violence: assault, robbery, and sexual battery. In addition, they consider whether these effects vary according to 3 contextual characteristics: (a) the location of the offending—in school versus out of school, (b) school-level economic disadvantage, and (c) school efficacy. Three-level ordinal logistic regression models are estimated using four waves of survey data from over 3,000 students nested within 103 schools. Results provide evidence that individual-level street codes are related to violent offending in a manner that is, largely speaking, not tied to context. However, there is some evidence that the effects of school-level street codes on offending differ between outside of school and in school settings and are conditioned by levels of school disadvantage and efficacy. Overall, some support is offered for both the culture-as-values and culture-in-action perspectives.     

The identity of ‘the other’ for sexual violence victims: is there anything new in sexual violence prosecutions before the International Criminal Court?

Despite the spectacular development in the field of international criminal law, critical feminism stresses the narrow scope of the sex and gender crimes in the Rome Statute establishing the first permanent International Criminal Court. The current international criminal law discourse, as expressed by recent case law, is geared towards the protection of certain groups targeted on account of their distinctiveness within the framework of a conflict situation, and gender is not recognized as one of these group identities. The question whether international criminal law on sexual violence applies only to inter-group conflicts brings to the fore an uneasy likelihood of exclusion of some recently emergent situations where identities of the conflicting parties transcend a particular ethnicity or nationality, and where victims of sexual violence belong to the same group as their perpetrators. The article argues that, rather than the Rome Statute or newly introduced rules and regulations, a significant obstacle in developing gender justice is the narrow interpretation of sexual violence to inter-group hostilities.     

Preventive action and conflict mitigation in Nigeria’s 2015 elections

Prior to the 2015 Nigerian general elections, there were concerns that the fierce political contest would lead to electoral violence in the country. However, the elections were conducted peacefully, with fewer disputes and election-related deaths than previous elections. This study accounts for the fall in the level of electoral violence in Nigeria and discusses the lessons that Nigeria’s experience presents. It argues that the avoidance of destructive electoral disputes in Nigeria was the result of preventive action taken by the country’s electoral commission, civil society groups, and development partners. The specific preventive actions taken include innovations in election administration aimed at enhancing electoral transparency and credibility, election security measures such as early warning and peace messaging, and preventive diplomacy urging the main candidates and the political elite to embrace peace. The key lesson that can be drawn from Nigeria’s experience is that a well thought out conflict prevention strategy should be an integral part of electoral governance, especially in countries with a high risk of electoral violence.