“At That Time We Were Intimidated on All Sides”: Residues of the Malayan Emergency as a Conjunctural Episode of Dispossession

ABSTRACT:

This article proposes that the Emergency counterinsurgency campaign of the British colonial state should be viewed as a conjunctural episode of dispossession of Malayan laboring people. Conjunctural episodes of dispossession of working people through state violence and racialized rhetoric emerge as a response to crises in capitalist accumulation occurring at multiple and overlapping scales of capitalist systems – the imperial, the national/colonial, and the local/regional. During these episodes state and capitalist strategies destroy political organizations and solidarities among laboring people and demoralize them over long periods of time, through processes simultaneously material and semiotic. Employing new theorizations of the global anthropology of labor, this article first examines the postwar and Emergency years when the multiethnic and industry-wide bases of Malayan trade unions were destroyed while an estimated half a million working people were forcibly concentrated in so-called New Villages. This had the effect of suppressing a discourse of class and class struggle in favor of a dominant discourse of ethnic conflict. In an effort to articulate class struggle despite the presence of this dominant discourse of essential ethnic difference this essay examines the formation of a new working men's “society” in 1978–1980 and a dispute between truck drivers and truck owners in northern Malaysia.     

Collaborative Decision-Making in Emergency and Disaster Management

Decision-making in emergencies requires non-traditional approach and tools characterized by non-hierarchical structure and flexibility. The dynamic environment of disasters makes it imperative to invest in inter-sector and inter-agency cooperation and coordination. Focusing on the Emergency Management Assistance Compact's (EMAC) response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, this article examines the decision-making structure of the agreement. EMAC is an inter-state mutual aid agreement that facilitates sharing of resources during and after disasters. While EMAC's overall decision-making performance was relatively satisfactory and flawless, investment in communication, trust-building, and eradication of inter-agency value differences and discrepancies is imperative.     

群体性突发事件争夺优先行动权的演化情景分析

针对群体性突发事件潜伏期强势和弱势社会群体争夺优先行动权的冲突问题,构建了固定信号成本和差额比例信号成本的信号博弈模型,提供了一种避免矛盾激化诱发群体性突发事件的冲突协调机制。社会群体是否在冲突的潜伏期通过社会关系网络等发送信号占据优先行动权,取决于发送可信信号的最低临界成本、优先行动获得的额外收益和不同社会群体对于信号成本的评价系数(即承受能力)。根据分离均衡的临界条件,相应地得出群体性突发事件的四种演化情景。结合我国近年来发生的17起群体性突发事件案例,分析了群体性突发事件潜伏期四种演化情景的各自特征和实现演化路径的必要条件。