A Call for Help?: How Public School Principals’ Subjective Report of Institutional Weakness Relates to Disciplinary Incidents

ABSTRACT

Disciplinary incidents at U.S. public middle- and high-schools are a public policy concern. Although businesses popularly give credence to leaders’ subjective intelligence, principals’ reports of their schools’ strengths and weaknesses are questioned. To determine whether principals’ reports carry legitimacy as indicators of student offenses, the current study utilized a nationally representative survey of principals who reported on their sense of the institution and the number of disciplinary incidents in the past year (N = 1,872; replication cohort, N = 1,833). Findings showed that the more institutional shortcomings a principal endorsed, the higher total number of incidents occurred, even after controlling for institutional strength and several indicators of school crime. These findings have policy and intervention implications for improving student outcomes, and so would be of interest to funding agencies, school administrators, teachers, and parents.     

The contested nature of Afro-descendant quilombo land claims in Brazil

In Brazil, Afro-descendant quilombola communities were for the first time in history recognised as legal rights-holders to land in the 1988 constitution – 100 years after the abolition of slavery. Drawing on fieldwork in the quilombo Bombas in the state of São Paulo, and a review of relevant literature, this contribution explores the historical trajectory of the constitutional quilombo provision and how it has been translated into practice. Combining a discussion of the use of self-identification and the concepts of ‘regulation’, ‘force’, ‘market’ and ‘legitimation’ when analysing the dynamics of access and exclusion, we show how struggles over land are simultaneously enacted in controversies over the meanings of quilombola identity and its implications.     

ʽYou’re not getting rid of usʼ. Performing acts of citizenship in times of emigration

This article uses academic literature on acts of citizenship and performative citizenship to investigate the contestation, protest, and resistance actions carried out by the Marea Granate collective in defence of the citizenship rights of Spanish citizens living abroad. Marea Granate (Maroon Wave) is a transnational network of young Spanish emigrants that emerged in 2013 as a result of the recent widespread emigration provoked by the economic crisis and austerity politics in Spain. Based on their shared identity as economic exiles and demanding the right to participate in Spanish political life to change the conditions that led them to emigrate, the members of this organization have been carrying out innovative, creative citizenship acts that are breaking conventions and causing ruptures in the Spanish citizenship regime. These ‘transformative acts of recovering’, the term used to refer to Marea Granate’s demands and struggles for citizenship, have proven to be capable of being a driving force for change and also reveal the fluid and contested nature of citizenship in the contexts of austerity and emigration.     

SPLM–NCP asymmetrical power relations jeopardise the implementation of the CPA and the future of the Sudan

ABSTRACT

The political instability that has characterised Sudanese politics since independence is attributable to political exclusion, economic neglect and marginalisation. Discrimination based on religion, language and culture has constituted the main contradictions between the masses of the Sudanese people (periphery) and the politically dominant Arabised Nubians (centre) in all the different politico-ideological hues experienced by the nation. Attempts to resolve this contradiction have left the structural imbalances inherited from the colonial administration of the Sudan intact. This explains the resurgence of war, particularly in Southern Sudan. The recent peace agreements between the National Congress Party (NCP), namely the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) with the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A); the Darfur Peace Agreement with the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM) (Minawi); the Cairo Agreement with the National Democratic Alliance and the Eastern Sudan Peace Agreement with the Eastern Sudan Front, have left the NCP still in firm control of the oppressive state machinery. The CPA power-sharing protocol awarded the NCP a majority which institutionalises a power asymmetry that the NCP utilises to obstruct implementation of the CPA and delay the process of democratic transformation.

This article analyses the asymmetry in the NCP–SPLM partnership and power relationship. It assumes that the tragic death of Dr. John Garang de Mabior is a major cause of the political weakness demonstrated by the SPLM since 2005. This power imbalance jeopardises the CPA implementation and the future of the Sudan as a state.     

Dialogical approaches to struggles over recognition and distribution

This paper contrasts three non-skeptical ways of explaining and reconciling political struggles: monologue, instrumental dialogue, and a comparative dialogical approach promoted by Charles Taylor and James Tully. It surveys the work of Taylor and Tully to show three particular family resemblances: their emphasis on practice, irreducible diversity, and periodic reconciliation. These resemblances are evident in the way they employ dialogical approaches to explain struggles over recognition and distribution. They describe these as dialogical actions, and suggest that a form of dialogical comparison might reconcile their various contested demands.     

Urban commons and freedom of movement The housing struggles of recently arrived migrants in Rome

ABSTRACT

The arrival of migrants on Italian coasts following the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 has led to a multiplication of housing struggles. These struggles are widespread across the country and focus on the occupation of abandoned buildings and their transformation into collective housing spaces to provide an alternative to the formal reception system. This article will focus on the housing struggles in Rome, as the place with the highest number of occupations and the longest tradition of campaigns for the right to housing of migrants in the country. These struggles are the outcome of the encounter of recently arrived migrants with local solidarity movements and build on existing occupation movements and housing struggles. The article explores how the mobilizations over the right to housing intersect with issues such as the social appropriation of urban commons, the regeneration from below of unused areas, freedom of movement, and the contestation of Italian government policies on the relocation of migrants and refugees. The paper argues that housing struggles not only appropriate and regenerate urban commons, but also challenge the reception governance of migration and the policies of border control.     

The Personal Is Political Yet Again: Bringing Struggles between Gender Equality and Gendered Next of Kin onto the Feminist Agenda

In spite of feminist criticism of the welfare state, Norwegian society is frequently perceived as gender-equal. As a truism of public discourse, gender equality affirms a neoliberal understanding of individuals as able to act independently and to freely choose their course in life. This article disrupts that truism with an analysis of a transitional process that occurred to a seemingly free and gender-equal married woman whose everyday life took an unexpected turn at the age of 50 when her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Using an abductive method, we construct a narrative with this woman as the main character. We then use the narrative as an optical device for scrutinizing encounters between the notions “free and gender-equal woman” and “gendered next of kin”, analysing the situated becoming of gender and understanding the encounters’ potential for agency and resistance. The inquiry brings a pattern of gendered encounters into being, demonstrating how a seemingly free and gender-equal woman’s strength and independence become subordinating weaknesses in encounters with the welfare state. This paradox raises questions about the politics of everyday life in a presumably gender-equal society, brings new struggles onto the feminist agenda, and demands that the personal becomes political yet again.     

A stolen revolution: popular class mobilisation in Burkina Faso

ABSTRACT

The political history of Burkina Faso since the formal end of its colonisation is characterised by vibrant mass mobilisation by largely Marxist-oriented labour unions and their allies, namely organisations from the human rights, student, and youth movements. This article traces the development of social mobilisation and protest in Burkina Faso through six historical phases since 1960, including the recent regime change in 2014 that has frequently been referred to as a ‘revolution’. It is argued that the relative success of mass mobilisation in Burkina Faso can be explained through the concept of the unity of the popular classes, building on the basic idea that organised labour and other segments of exploited classes are not distinct from one another.

Abbreviations: ANEB: Association Nationale des Etudiants Burkinabé; CCVC: Coalition nationale de lutte Contre la Vie Chère, la corruption, la fraude, l’impunité et pour les libertés; CDAIP: Coordination des comités de Défense et d’Approfondissement des acquis de l’Insurrection Populaire; CDP: Congrès pour la Démocratie et le Progrès; CDR: Comités de Défense de la Révolution; CGT-B: Confédération Générale du Travail du Burkina; CBTB: Confédération Nationale des Travailleurs du Burkina; CSB: Confédération Syndicale Burkinabé; FO-UNSL: Force Ouvrière – Union Nationale des Syndicats Libres; MBDHP: Mouvement Burkinabé des Droits de l’Homme et des Peuples; MPP: Mouvement du Peuple pour le Progrès; ODJ: Organisation Démocratique de la Jeunesse du Burkina Faso; ONSL: Organisation Nationale des Syndicats Libres; PAI: Parti Africain de l’Indépendance; PCRV: Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire Voltaïque; RSP: Régiment de Sécurité Présidentielle; UAS: Unité d’Action Syndicale; UGEB: Union Générale des Etudiants Burkinabé; UNIR/PS: Union pour la Renaissance/Parti Sankariste; UNSTB: Union Syndicale des Travailleurs du Burkina Faso     

The land question,land grabbing and agriculture in Africa

Abstract

Land grabbing has emerged as a form of production and export of food and biofuels in the Third World by enterprises owned by foreign governments and business entities. Large tracts of land are either leased or sold to these enterprises cheaply by the state, usually with the argument that such land is empty and needs to be put to good use. But land grabbing dates back to colonial times, thus substantially shaping the political economy of such countries as South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe. It is therefore fitting at this conjuncture to discuss land grabbing in its holistic and historical context, noting that smallholding agriculture juxtaposed against large scale commercial farming will for a long time define agrarian class struggles, the character of the state and the project of nation building.

Over the last decade or so land distribution in Zimbabwe by the Mugabe government was assumed to be heading for disaster. Recent information, however, reveals that productivity has improved, tobacco exports are improving and smallholders accessing affordable farm input and markets while getting a fair reward for their labour behave no differently from large scale commercial farmers. In the final analysis the issue of equity and poverty elimination needs to be central in addressing the land and agriculture question in Africa.     

Introduction: citizenship as inhabitance? Migrant housing squats versus institutional accommodation

ABSTRACT

This special issue focuses on migrants’ self-organised strategies in relation to housing in Europe, namely the collective squatting of vacant buildings and land. In particular, the contributions to this special issue differentiate between shelter provided in state-run or humanitarian camps and squatted homes. Migrants squats are an essential part of the ‘corridors of solidarity’ that are being created throughout Europe, where grassroots social movements engaged in anti-racist, anarchist and anti-authoritarian politics coalesce with migrants in devising non-institutional responses to the violence of border regimes. In these spaces contentious politics and everyday social reproduction uproot racist and xenophobic regimes. The struggles emerging in these spaces disrupt host-guest relations, which often perpetuate state-imposed hierarchies and humanitarian disciplining technologies. Moreover, the solidarities and collaborations between undocumented and documented activists challenge hitherto prevailing notions of citizenship and social movements, as well as current articulations of the common. These radical spaces enable possibilities for inhabitance beyond, against and within citizenship, which do not only reverse forms of exclusion and repression, but produce ungovernable resources, alliances and subjectivities that prefigure more livable spaces for all. Therefore, these struggles are interpreted here as forms of commoning, as they constitute autonomous socio-political infrastructures and networks of solidarity beyond and against the state and humanitarian provision