HUNGER IN NORTHERN CHAD Hunger und Herrschaft: Vorkoloniale und frühe koloniale Hungerkrisen im Nordtschad. By ASTRID MEIER. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995. Pp. 304. No price given (ISBN 3-515-06729-9).

1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-177
Author(s):  
ROBERT BUIJTENHUIJS
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Natural Factors ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
University Of Zurich ◽  
The University ◽  
Political Economic

This book, a doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Zürich in 1994, takes as its starting point the modern idea that hunger and famine are not fatalities determined by nature. Basing herself on the example of Northern Chad during the final pre-colonial decades and the first decades of French colonial rule, the author argues rather that famines, although partly caused by natural factors, reflect the political, economic and social conditions of the societies in which they take place. Famines, she claims, reflect power relations and the violence that sometimes flows from them.

Form as Weapon: the Political Function of Song in Urban Zimbabwean Theatre

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-154
Author(s):  
Martin Rohmer
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Cultural Management ◽  
Political Function ◽  
Humboldt University ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

In Zimbabwean society, what may not be spoken sometimes becomes acceptable in song – whether to avoid social taboos and enable a wife to complain against her mother-in-law, or in broadening the boundaries of political protest. In this article, Martin Rohmer looks back to the ways in which song enabled forms of protest against forced labour and other aspects of colonial rule – in times of outward compliance as well as of direct struggle – and considers how urban theatre groups in independent Zimbabwe have adapted the tradition to their own, contemporary ends. Martin Rohmer spent almost two years studying Zimbabwean theatre when a research assistant at the University of Bayreuth, and completed his doctorate on Theatre and Performance in Zimbabwe at the Humboldt University, Berlin, in 1997. Since then he has been working in the field of cultural management for the Young Artists' Festival in Bayreuth. The present paper was first presented at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in San Francisco in November 1996.

scholarly journals Narrating technonatures: discourses of biotechnology in a neoliberal era

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Myles Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Economic

This article considers the role played by discourses of nature in structuring the cultural politics of anti-GMO activism. It argues that such discourses have been successful rhetorical tools for activists because they mobilize widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural and human worlds. However, these discourses hold dubious political implications. In valorizing the natural as a source of essential truth, natural purity discourses fail to challenge how naturalizations have been used to legitimize sexist, racist and colonial systems of injustice and oppression. Rather, they revitalize the discursive purchase of appeals to nature as a justification for the status quo, indirectly reinforcing existing power relations. Moreover, these discourses fail to challenge the critical though contingent reality of GMOs' location within the wider framework of neoliberal social relations. Fortunately, appeals to natural purity have not been the only effective strategy for opposing GMOs. Activist campaigns that directly target the political economic implications of GMOs within the context of neoliberalism have also had successes without resorting to appeals to the purity of nature. The successes of these campaigns suggest that while nature-culture dualisms remain politically effective normative groundings, concerns over equity, farmers' rights, and democracy retain potential as ideological terrains in the struggle for social justice.

Neokoloniale Strukturen in der internationalen Klimapolitik

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lea Rahman
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Political Economic

Climate change is not just one of the main problems of this century, it rather is a matter of justice: It was particularly caused by western industrialized countries and now hits all states bit by bit – regardless of the question of guilt. The author studies how states struggle for solutions and binding rules at the annual Climate Change conferences and which of the proposals have prevailed. Using approaches of the postcolonial theory, she examines which power relations that are tracing back to colonialism still exist at the political, economic and epistemic level.

scholarly journals Foucault in Tunisia: The encounter with intolerable power

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 492-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Medien
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Teaching Philosophy ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The University

In September 1966, 10 years after Tunisia officially gained independence from French colonial rule, Michel Foucault took up a three-year secondment, teaching philosophy at the University of Tunis. This article offers an account of the time that Foucault spent in Tunisia, documenting his involvement in the anti-imperial, anti-authoritarian struggles that were taking place, and detailing his organizing against the carceral Tunisian state. Through this account, it is argued that Foucault’s entrance into political activism, and his associated work in developing a new analytic of power, was fundamentally motivated by his encounter with the neocolonial operatives of power that he witnessed and resisted while in Tunisia. In tracing the anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles taking place concurrent to Foucault’s development of his analytic of power, albeit struggles that are shown to not take centre stage in his subsequent works, this article concludes by suggesting that taking seriously the scholar-activist archive presented may offer us a set of radical Foucauldian tools for resistance.

Entre désécularisation et resacralisation: Bouddhistes laïcs, temples et organisations philanthropiques en Chine

2009 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Laliberté
Keyword(s):  
Social Services ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Social Utility ◽  
The Political ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Party State

The author looks into the revival of Buddhist philanthropy in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the last decade. It seeks to tackle the wider question of the social utility of religion in the eyes of the political authorities and to assess the extent to which recent debates on secularization theory may be relevant to the Chinese situation. The emergence of Buddhist philanthropy is coinciding with considerable changes in political, economic and social conditions, characterized by state disengagement from the provision of social services. The author describes various organizations offering assistance to the poor, as well as certain services related to healthcare and education. Yet this rise in Buddhist philanthropy should not be seen as evidence of a “resacralization” process in China because the communist Party-State continues its policy of manifest secularization.

Vaccine production, national security anxieties and the unstable state in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana María Carrillo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Security ◽  
Vaccine Development ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Unstable State ◽  
Vaccine Production ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter deals with the development and production of vaccines in Mexico from the last third of the nineteenth century to 1989, when the erosion of this sector began. Along with discussing Mexican’s physicians’ reception of discoveries in microbiology and immunology, it points out the existence of a network of relationships between Mexican institutions and others around the world. The chapter shows that vaccine development and production did not follow a constant ascendant path, but that it also suffered declines and regressions. It describes the field’s achievements and limitations, and reveals its relationships with the political, economic, and social conditions of the country in different historical moments. Finally, it evaluates the importance of attaining national self-sufficiency in vaccine development and production for the building of the state in pre- and post-revolutionary Mexico, and seeks to provide some answers to the questions of how and why the erosion of this strategic field occurred.

scholarly journals The Rising Powers and Globalization: Structural Change to the Global System Between 1965 and 2005

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay Marie Jacobs ◽  
Ronan Van Rossem
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Rising Powers ◽  
Vast Number ◽  
Global System ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The World ◽  
Military Networks ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Significant Attention

This article sets out to critically assess the increasingly prevalent claims of rapidly changing global power relations under influence of the ‘rising powers’ and ‘globalization’. Our main contention is that current analyses of countries’ degree of global power (especially for the BRICS) has been dominated by the control over resources approach that, though gauging power potential, insufficiently takes into account how this potential is converted into actual global might. By drawing on a unique and extensive dataset comprising of a wide array of political, economic and military networks for a vast number of countries between 1965 and 2005, we aim to 1) reassess alleged changes in the structure of the world-system since 1965 and 2) to analyze whether these changes can be attributed to ‘globalization’. Significant attention is paid to the trajectories of the BRICS and to the possibly divergent structural evolutions of the political and economic dimensions that constitute the system. Our results show that despite a certain degree of power convergence between countries at the sub-top of the system, overall, divergence continues to take place between the most and least powerful, and stratification is reproduced. Globalization is further shown to exacerbate this trend, though its effect differs on the political and economic dimensions of the system. Overall, though the traditional ‘core powers’ might have to share their power with newcomer China in the future, this hardly heralds a new age in which the global system of power relations are converging to the extent that stratification is being undermined.

scholarly journals Voices of the Governed: towards a theory of the translocal

Organization ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Mineral Resources ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
The Political ◽  
Market State ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
Development State ◽  
Political Economic

In this article I want to interrogate the political, economic, and social conditions that enable the extraction of natural and mineral resources from Indigenous and rural communities in Africa, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific. The end of direct colonialism and the emergence of the development state did not necessarily translate into forms of local sovereignty for these communities who bore the brunt of development. I describe the emergence of resource wars in the postcolonial era and how organizational technologies of extraction, exclusion and expulsion lead to dispossession and death. I conclude by discussing possibilities of resistance and develop the notion of translocal resistance where local actors most affected by development are able to forge a series of temporary coalitions with international and national groups in an attempt to promote some form of participatory democracy. The article advance debates on postcolonialism by developing theoretical insights from translocal modes of resistance that open up new analytical spaces marked by particular configurations of market, state and civil society actors.

scholarly journals Bulgaria’s geopolitical and geoeconomic reorientation (1989–2019)

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 12-23
Author(s):  
Valentin Mihaylov
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Distribution Of Power ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Near Future

Until the late 1980s and the dawn of the end of the Eastern Bloc, communist Bulgaria was considered to be the closest ally of the Soviet Union. Now, 30 years later, the Bulgarian state has been integrated into the main Euro-Atlantic organisations. Taking these radical changes as its starting point, this article outlines the process and consequences of post-1989 geopolitical and geoeconomic reorientation of Bulgaria. The aim was also to present the main geopolitical challenges in Bulgaria’s relations with Russia and Turkey. These states have been influencing the political, economic and cultural development of Bulgaria for centuries. The effects of their influence have remained problematic to this day. As Bulgaria remains a country with a complex geopolitical position, it continues its twentieth-century strategy and tries to maintain balance between its own national interest and the influence of the main centres of power. The author draws particular attention to the fact that the model based on the variability of geopolitical priorities was once again confirmed in the analysed period. This model is not only based on pragmatism in relations with the outside world, which is traditional for the Bulgarian political elite, but is also dependant on the temporary distribution of power within the Balkan geopolitical knot. It seems that the model will continue to be valid, at least in the near future.

scholarly journals DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES OF CENTRAL ASIA

2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
М.К. Tulekova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Direct Impact ◽  
Demographic Development ◽  
Demographic Situation ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
Result Analysis ◽  
Political Economic

The article describes the demographic development of the new independent countries of Central Asia, its specificity and similarity. Analyzing the direct impact of the political, economic and social development of Central Asia on the demographic situation in the country after the collapse of the USSR, the factors influencing the stabilization of migration processes in the country as a result. . Analysis of social conditions affected by the growth of wages, with a description of the factors influencing the demographic development of modern Central Asia. Keywords: demography, migration, exile, promil.

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