Practices of assemblage and community forest management

Abstract

Governmental interventions that set out to improve the world are assembled from diverse elements – discourses, institutions, forms of expertise and social groups whose deficiencies need to be corrected, among others. In this article I advance an analytic that focuses on practices of assemblage – the on-going labour of bringing disparate elements together and forging connections between them. I identify six practices that are generic to any assemblage, whatever its specific contours: 1) forging alignments, 2) rendering technical, 3) authorizing knowledge, 4) managing failures, 5) anti-politics, and 6) reassembling. I demonstrate the power of this analytic through an extended study of community forest management. This is an assemblage that brings together an array of agents (villagers, labourers, entrepreneurs, officials, activists, aid donors, scientists) and objectives (profit, pay, livelihoods, control, property, efficiency, sustainability, conservation). Its very unwieldiness helps to sharpen analysis of how such an assemblage is, in fact, assembled, and how it has been sustained for more than thirty years, absorbing hundreds of millions of dollars in programmes from the west coast of Canada to the eastern islands of Indonesia. I do not attempt to adjudicate the rights and wrongs of this assemblage. Rather, I deploy an analytic of assemblage to explore the practices that fill the gap between the will to govern and the refractory processes that make government so difficult.     

Building ‘Community’: New Strategies of Governance in Urban China

Abstract

Under the planned economy China's urban population was largely immobile and governed through the socialist workunit (danwei). Market reforms begun in the 1980s have culminated in the last decade with a dramatic decline of the state-sector and the emergence of a more mobile, heterogeneous and economically independent urban population. In rendering the old system obsolete, these trends have led the Chinese government to rethink its strategies for urban governance. At the turn of the millennium, a new campaign to ‘build communities’ was launched throughout the nation with the objective of establishing the residential ‘community’ as the new basic unit of urban governance. This paper explores the logic behind this policy innovation and analyzes the techniques adopted to operationalize ‘community governance’.     

Popperian Peacebuilding,Policing and the Liberal Peace

Abstract

In light of the quarrelling between advocates and critics of the liberal peacebuilding agenda, this article calls for the adoption of a ‘Popperian’ approach. This approach would be one that seeks to identify and address the greatest evils to fundamental liberal principles rather than undertaking swift and sweeping liberalization projects. Tolerance is therefore advocated in all matters that fall outside of this remit in order to temper the current zeal displayed by the liberal peacebuilding agenda. The article then considers how Popperian approaches and the ideal of tolerance were lacking in the case of peacebuilding in the security sector in Timor-Leste. In failing to ensure a clear separation of police and military forces that are apolitical, loyal to the state and professional in serving the liberal democratic polity, for example, international actors inadvertently allowed a ‘great evil’ to emerge. Rather than being distracted and diluted by a sweeping range of goals, international actors should seek to work from these fundamental concepts and be prepared to negotiate on less urgent matters.     

中国城市化进程中的社区与社区警务

随着改革开放的不断深入,中国社会正在经历前所未有的社会转型和快速城市化,各种不同社区类型逐渐形成,并成为城市人居环境、城市文化、城市人文生态的主要载体。尤其是城市化进程中伴生的一些新型社区存在着各种潜在的社会问题,正不同程度地影响城市社会秩序的健康发展,而且各种不同类型社区居民在社区认同度、社区参与度以及对警察的信任度等方面呈现出不同的测量水平。探讨和研究城市化进程中社区社会资本与社区警务-e．．N的关系,对于深化社区警务理论及创新社区警务体制具有一定的积极意义。     

案例教学法在警务战术教学中的应用

警务战术案例教学法是一种以警察经典实战案例为基础的教学法,其核心在于夯实学生理论基础,提高学生独立思考和解决问题的能力,培养高素质应用型警务实战人员。文章分析了案例教学法的特点、教学地位以及适用范围,提出当前我国警务战术教学中实施案例教学法存在的问题,并给出解决方案。     

Star Power: An Experiential Learning Exercise to Foster Ecological Perspectives on Power,Privilege, and Oppression

The purpose of this article is to describe the utility of Star Power as an experiential learning exercise applied in a community psychology undergraduate course. This exercise simulates systems of power, privilege, and oppression while fostering an ecological perspective that raises students’ awareness and knowledge about power differentials within society. The simulation of trading and lawmaking works best with 18 to 35 students and takes approximately 80 minutes to conduct. This article highlights three representative student perspectives concerning their participation and experience with Star Power. Strategies for facilitating class discussion are also reported.     

The Praxis Assignment: Experiential Learning in a Large Social–Community Psychology Class

In this article, a faculty member, a graduate student teaching assistant, and four undergraduates describe their experiences with a “Day of Social Justice Praxis Assignment” as a form of experiential learning in a 120-person social-community psychology course. The faculty member lays out the goals of the course and her hopes for the specific assignment. The undergraduates reflect on their experience with the assignment, and the graduate student contextualizes how their work is reflective or not reflective of the work produced in the class and course concepts. The article ends with a critical and frank discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of the assignment.     

African American and Latino Youth and Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome

Abstract

Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) is found more frequently in inner-city African American and Latino youth than in European American youth. Previous research on PTSD and its relationship with inner-city violence, minority youth, school violence and institutionalized oppression is examined. School counselor's roles and possible interventions are discussed and an interdisciplinary collaborative model for helping students with PTSD is introduced.     

On The Receiving End: The Governance of the Police in Britain

Based on direct observation over a five‐year period, the article paints an intimate picture of how the police in Britain are governed. It analyses the complexity of the economic and political environment in which the police have to work: the insecure funding platform; the stream of initiatives, targets and official guidelines; the delicacy of handling community sensitivities; the inherent opaqueness of the national ‘tripartite’ system of governance; and the constant challenge of making balanced judgements under conflicting pressures. The central theme that runs through the article (which follows on logically from two previous articles published in Political Quarterly) is that of a ‘managerialist’ political class, with a distinctive ideology and mode of control, trying to get a policy grip on the real world of service delivery: in this instance, policing. Unlike the previous two articles, which had a top‐down focus, the emphasis here is primarily on how the thicket looks to those who have to navigate their way through it.     

Tackling invisible frontiers of global justice: an extension of Sen’s ‘Comparison View of Justice’ into IR

A central challenge of Amartya Sen’s comparative view of justice is to bring cultural diversity to bear on conceptualizing global justice, which includes building bridges across cultures that enable effective action, and rendering compatible the most beneficent of Rawlsian (or transcendental) intentions with irreducible cultural diversity. For social scientists meeting this challenge requires, first, taking account of variation of social practices in the social construction of meaning, and second, uncovering invisible frontiers of global justice that remain hidden due to conceptual or empirical oversight. The latter is especially true for contemporary International Relations (IR) theory, which assumes state actors to be the main interlocutors in the global realm, and thus precludes consideration of micro-level forms of inter-national relations (understood as interaction among all types of actors that takes place across country borders and that bears traits of national identity). Alternatively, Sen’s micro-perspectival approach offers a welcome support for pluralist approaches that both appreciate non-state access to contestation in the international arena, and account for the meaning-in-use of fundamental norms (democracy, rule of law, human rights) in different cultural and inter-national contexts.