scholarly journals ‘Where the state freaks out’: Gentrification, Queerspaces and activism in postwar Beirut

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802199369
Author(s):  
John Nagle
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Longitudinal Research ◽  
The State ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Sexual Citizenship ◽  
Dual Spaces ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Queer Communities

In this article I illuminate the production and erasure of Queerspaces in Beirut as part of postwar gentrification. A dual Beirut has emerged within assemblages of sectarian power, sexual citizenship and political economy. Commercial Queerspaces tacitly incorporated into the neoliberal and sectarian state exist while the ‘Queer unwanted’– spaces and people deemed transgressive to the moral order – are violently erased by state and non-state actors. These dual spaces expose the limits on life for Queer communities. To analyse these dynamics, I turn to the testimonies of LGBTQ activists in Beirut in relation to the possibilities offered by Queerspace. While activists note the exclusions – class, gender and sexuality – of commercial Queerspace that restrain political agency, they have powerfully asserted radical intersectional politics into recent revolutionary anti-sectarian waves of protest. This politics is marked by articulating Queerness as a project of connecting marginality for all excluded groups in Lebanon’s postwar order and by a queering of sectarian/neoliberal space that has hitherto cleansed undesirable LGBTQ bodies. This article draws on extensive fieldwork in Beirut (2011 to 2020), thus permitting longitudinal research of LGBTQ activism.

Political economy of conflict and peace: governmentality of participation and strategic veto in Bihar and Jharkhand, India

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Prakash
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Local Institutions ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Operational Activities ◽  
The One

This chapter analyzes dynamics of conflict in Bihar and Jharkand, and explores patterns which shape governance policies, especially in terms of political economy. The author claims that all actors involved in the conflict have the power to exercise a strategic veto, however they cannot structure the outcomes. Naxals on the one side, and state actors on the other, can exercise a strategic veto on each other’s operational activities and at the same time they limit each other in terms of policies pursued. However, the state can exercise more power in this case, as it sets terms of engagement. Prakash highlights the importance of the distribution of developmental benefits and claims that they play a central role in protracting the Naxal conflict. In order to break out of this perpetuation of the conflict, local institutions have to be strengthened, especially in terms of their ability to prioritise issues that they deem important, argues Prakash.

The Political Economy of Rural-Urban Conflict

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Topher L. McDougal
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
The State ◽  
Hierarchical Networks ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Rural And Urban Areas ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Economic Relationship ◽  
Relationship Of

In some cases of insurgency, the combat frontier is contested and erratic, as rebels target cities as their economic prey. In other cases, it is tidy and stable, seemingly representing an equilibrium in which cities are effectively protected from violent non-state actors. What factors account for these differences in the interface urban-based states and rural-based challengers? To explore this question, this book examines two regions representing two dramatically different outcomes. In West Africa (Liberia and Sierra Leone), capital cities became economic targets for rebels, who posed dire threats to the survival of the state. In Maoist India, despite an insurgent ideology aiming to overthrow the state via a strategy of progressive city capture, the combat frontier effectively firewalls cities from Maoist violence. This book argues that trade networks underpinning the economic relationship between rural and urban areas—termed “interstitial economies”—may differ dramatically in their impact on (and response to) the combat frontier. It explains rebel predatory tendencies toward cities as a function of transport networks allowing monopoly profits to be made by urban-based traders. It explains combat frontier delineation as a function of the social structure of the trade networks: hierarchical networks permit elite–elite bargains that cohere the frontier. These factors represent what might be termed respectively the “hardware” and “software” of the rural–urban economic relationship. Of interest to any student of political economy and violence, this book presents new arguments and insights about the relationships between violence and the economy, predation and production, core and periphery.

The Political Economy of Post-Independence India—A Review Article

1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 787-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akhil Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Newly Industrialized Countries ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Balance Of Forces ◽  
The Third World

Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. More like a continent than a country in its diversity, India is in some ways very similar to densely populated, predominantly rural and agricultural China, differing most perhaps in the obstinacy and depth of its poverty. In the predominant role played by the state within an essentially capitalist economy, it is closer to the model of Western social democracies than it is to either prominently ideological capitalist or socialist nation-states; like other countries in the “third world,” the state in India plays a highly interventionist developmental role. Finally, since Independence it has pursued, more successfully than most nation-states in Latin America and Asia, policies of importsubstituting industrialization and relative autarchy. In terms of its political structures, India differs from most newly industrialized countries (NICs) in that it generally continues to function as a parliamentary democracy. The federal political system creates an intriguing balance of forces between central and the regional state governments, which are often ruled by opposition parties with agendas, ideologies, and organizational structures quite different from those of the central government.

The Saint with Indra's Sword: Khruubaa Srivichai and Buddhist Millenarianism in Northern Thailand

2014 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 681-713 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Bowie
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
The State ◽  
Capital City ◽  
The Political ◽  
Northern Thailand ◽  
Present Evidence ◽  
Modern Context ◽  
A Charge ◽  
Social Causes

AbstractDespite a growing literature revealing the presence of millenarian movements in both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist societies, scholars have been remarkably reluctant to consider the role of messianic beliefs in Buddhist societies. Khruubaa Srivichai (1878–1938) is the most famous monk of northern Thailand and is widely revered as atonbun, or saint. Althoughtonbunhas been depoliticized in the modern context, the term also refers to a savior who is an incarnation of the coming Maitreya Buddha. In 1920 Srivichai was sent under arrest to the capital city of Bangkok to face eight charges. This essay focuses on the charge that he claimed to possess the god Indra's sword. Although this charge has been widely ignored, it was in fact a charge of treason. In this essay, I argue that the treason charge should be understood within the context of Buddhist millenarianism. I note the saint/savior tropes in Srivichai's mytho-biography, describe the prevalence of millenarianism in the region, and detail the political economy of the decade of the 1910s prior to Srivichai's detention. I present evidence to show that the decade was characterized by famine, dislocation, disease, and other disasters of both natural and social causes. Such hardships would have been consistent with apocalyptic omens in the Buddhist repertoire portending the advent of Maitreya. Understanding Srivichai in this millenarian context helps to explain both the hopes of the populace and the fears of the state during that tumultuous decade.

Contested boundaries

Focaal ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 (68) ◽  
pp. 105-123
Author(s):  
Jennifer Alvey
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
The State ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
Shared Language ◽  
Border Dispute ◽  
Land Privatization ◽  
State Actors

This article examines a 20-year border dispute between two adjacent southern interior municipalities in Nicaragua. The dispute acts as window into the politics of state formation and the consolidation of the dictatorship of Anastacio Somoza García (1936–1956). This conflict was waged by locally based “state actors” who contested each other's attempts to stake and extend spatially based claims to authority. Contending parties developed a shared language of contention that I call “administrative disorder”, which tracked closely with accusations of invasion and abuse of authority. Administrative disorder discourses were representational practices that contributed to the discursive construction of the state. They were also the means by which representatives of the state sought to justify or normalize their own activities. As such, these discourses concealed political tensions rooted in patronage networks, municipal formation, land privatization, and ethnic assimilation, which shaped the contours and longevity of the dispute, but remained lurking silences in administrative disorder discourses.

Bridging the Accountability Gap in the Protection of Internally Displaced Persons: Non-State Actors Under the Kampala Convention

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Romola Adeola
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Internal Displacement ◽  
Internally Displaced Persons ◽  
African Union ◽  
Displaced Persons ◽  
Internally Displaced ◽  
Regional Landscape ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Accountability Gap ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Contemporary forms of internal displacement in Africa significantly reflect the emerging footprints of non-state actors on the regional landscape of internal displacement. In recognition of the impact of these actors in the internal displacement context, the African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa (Kampala Convention) specifically obligate states to regulate them in the prevention of arbitrary displacement. This is the central thrust of this article. This article examines the Kampala Convention from the perspective of non-state actors, considering the obligation of the state and the extent to which these actors may be held accountable, in the furtherance of protection and assistance of internally displaced persons (IDP s).

Playing through the Apocalypse: Preparing Children for Mass Disasters in Japan and Chile

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-259
Author(s):  
Chika Watanabe
Keyword(s):  
Disaster Preparedness ◽  
Nonprofit Organization ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Mass Disasters ◽  
As If

Abstract There is a growing trend to prepare children for future disasters. A Japanese nonprofit organization has developed an event called Iza! Kaeru Caravan, which includes games that teach children and their families how to survive disasters, from earthquakes to floods. Many disaster experts and government officials from other countries have now implemented the Caravan in their own contexts. Based on ethnographic research in Japan and Chile, this article shows how playful methods in disaster preparedness orient children, and by proxy their families, to accept an apocalyptic future, helping the neoliberal state buy time. Advocates of disaster preparedness in Japan and Chile accept that state actors will not come immediately to the rescue. Playful methods mobilize children and their families to take responsibility for their own survival through the subjunctive work of the “as if.” Ambiguously positioned between fun and education, playful methods of preparedness command attention from children and adults—what I call “attentive play”—as they frame and reframe the games to figure out, “Is this play?” Ultimately, the article shows that attentive play buys time for the state to temporarily defer its responsibilities to citizens, but the ambiguity of play can also exceed its ideological effects.

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