scholarly journals The Moluccas' Surviving Aristocracy in Indonesian Politics: Fragmentation and Land-based Political Support

PCD Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-186
Author(s):  
Bayu Dardias Kurniadi
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Land Management ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Political Support ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Economic Control ◽  
Internal Fragmentation ◽  
Depth Interviews

The article demonstrates how the Sultanate of Ternate in the Moluccas has survived in post-authoritarian Indonesian politics by analysing the political performances of the Sultan of Ternate and his immediate family members. The success of Sultan Mudaffar Syah in the political arena has contextualised the literature on land-based political economy, something that has largely been neglected. Combining in-depth interviews, observations, and document study, I argue that the Sultan's political achievements were the result of his transforming Ternate's coastal aristocracy into a land-based one, sidestepping the Basic Agrarian Law (BAL) of 1960 by transferring land management and ownership to indigenous communities while still maintaining economic control. However, his wife and children have failed politically, not only because they are not part of the traditional aristocratic structure (and thus have no control over land) but also because of internal fragmentation.

Reform and resistance: The political economy of land and planning reform in Kenya

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (6) ◽  
pp. 1164-1183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Bassett
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Land Management ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
The Political ◽  
Land Reforms ◽  
Public Land Management ◽  
Land Politics ◽  
Human Rights Movement ◽  
Land Question

In August 2010, Kenyans voted to adopt a new Constitution. Amongst its many provisions was devolved governance, which established 47 independent counties each led by a directly elected governor and legislative assembly. The Constitution also sought to address the country’s ‘land question’ by radically reworking land institutions and administration. The Constitution introduced an independent body, the National Land Commission, empowered to oversee public land management and allocation. Constitutional provisions devolved significant powers and responsibilities in land management and planning to the county level. These reforms – stressing transparency, accountability and greater community participation in land planning and administration – were intended to halt endemic corruption at the Ministry of Lands, address land injustices, enhance tenure security, and facilitate better-functioning land markets. This paper examines the unfolding institutional reform around land pursuant to the 2010 Constitution. It explores the political economy of land in Kenya by examining incentives for and impediments to institutional change toward better land management and long sought-after land justice. As with many reforms adopted throughout the Global South, Kenya’s land reforms were premised on ‘getting the incentives right’. Incentivising behaviour is extremely complicated in a sector as complex, dynamic and profitable as the land sector. The research highlights the role of urban planners, actors rarely examined in the literature on Kenya’s land politics. Kenya’s faltering land reform is a result of the internal conflicting incentives of land actors and the fact that no legal reform will be sufficient to alter entrenched behaviour without renewed pressure from a broad-based land justice/human rights movement.

scholarly journals Clean development or the development of dispossession? The political economy of wind parks in Southern Mexico

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862199176
Author(s):  
Chris Hesketh
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Southern Mexico ◽  
Alternative Pathways ◽  
Indigenous Resistance ◽  
Wind Park

Through an investigation of the political economy of wind park development in Oaxaca, southern Mexico, I explore the contested meaning of environmental justice. I contend that, despite their seemingly benign image, wind parks in Oaxaca operate within a spatially abstracted, colonial epistemology of capital-centred development. This involves a remaking of space and an appropriation of nature on behalf of capital. Concomitantly, it also involves a process of dispossession for Indigenous communities, foreclosing alternative pathways of development. I contrast this project of place-making with a subaltern-centred conception of environmental justice informed by Indigenous resistance.

scholarly journals The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas Are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi

2004 ◽  
Vol 98 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-545 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL N. POSNER
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Political Coalition ◽  
Large Groups

This paper explores the conditions under which cultural cleavages become politically salient. It does so by taking advantage of the natural experiment afforded by the division of the Chewa and Tumbuka peoples by the border between Zambia and Malawi. I document that, while the objective cultural differences between Chewas and Tumbukas on both sides of the border are identical, the political salience of the division between these communities is altogether different. I argue that this difference stems from the different sizes of the Chewa and Tumbuka communities in each country relative to each country's national political arena. In Malawi, Chewas and Tumbukas are each large groups vis-à-vis the country as a whole and, thus, serve as viable bases for political coalition-building. In Zambia, Chewas and Tumbukas are small relative to the country as a whole and, thus, not useful to mobilize as bases of political support. The analysis suggests that the political salience of a cultural cleavage depends not on the nature of the cleavage itself (since it is identical in both countries) but on the sizes of the groups it defines and whether or not they will be useful vehicles for political competition.

Family, Formation, Extra-Political Activities

2018 ◽  
pp. 308-320
Author(s):  
Iris Samotta
Keyword(s):  
Family Formation ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Professional Career

Chapter 24 examines the first three decades of Demosthenes’ life, focusing on his family and personal life, his upbringing, and the lawsuits against his guardians. Although born into a privileged family, his guardians’ neglect and scheming out of greed left Demosthenes at the mercy of other family members. It took Demosthenes several years and a large amount of stubbornness and determination to prosecute his former guardians. The chapter considers how Demosthenes’ lawsuits against his former guardians played an important role not only in securing him at least parts of his inheritance but also in laying the foundation to his prominence in Athenian society. It shows that Demosthenes’ success in the courtroom led to a professional career as a logographer, which in turn earned him the means to enter the political arena as a gifted and ambitious rhêtôr.

How to Build and Wield Business Power: The Political Economy of Pension Regulation in Chile, 1990–2018

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomás Bril-Mascarenhas ◽  
Antoine Maillet
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Theory Building ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Business Power ◽  
Political Actions ◽  
Pension Regulation ◽  
Theoretical Developments

AbstractWhat explains the remarkable resilience of pension regulation in postauthoritarian Chile, even after decades of majoritarian voter discontent and growing international and domestic criticism of Pinochet’s pioneering private capitalization system? This puzzling outcome can be understood only by looking at the combined effect of the pension industry’s long-term power-building investments and its short-term political actions to outmaneuver state and societal challengers. Engaging new theoretical developments in political economy and historical institutionalism, this study examines the long-term process by which the previously nonexistent Chilean pension industry expanded and leveraged its power during key episodes of open contestation. The analysis of pension regulation in Chile between the 1980s and the 2010s illustrates the importance of placing business power in time, motivating new rounds of theory building in the quest to address the perennial question of how business gets what it wants in the political arena.

scholarly journals For-Profit Universities in the Political Economy of Higher Education

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Pusser
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Unique Role ◽  
The Public ◽  
Higher Education Act ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Education Act

For-profit institutions loom much larger in the political economy of US higher education. In negotiations over the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the for-profit universities and their lobbying organizations have played a unique role in shaping policies affecting all higher education institutions. Can states preserve egulations that protect the public and private benefits of higher education while satisfying the profit demands of an evolving postsecondary market? As with most political contests, much will depend on the ability of a variety of postsecondary stakeholders to become involved in the political arena shaping higher education.

scholarly journals Evangelicals in the Latin American political arena: the cases of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
María Victoria Sotelo ◽  
Felipe Arocena
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
Evangelical Churches ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Intermediate Situation ◽  
The Catholic Church

AbstractThe advance of evangelical congregations in the Latin American religious scene is one of the most significant cultural transformations of the last decades. It is so because of the speed with which it has occurred, because of the important number of people involved and because of the depth with which it challenges the Catholic Church, one of the most emblematic institutions of the continent since the conquest. In this paper, we analyze one of the areas in which this religious revolution is manifesting itself in three different countries. We address the changing relationships between evangelicals and politics in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay and prove that, despite the enormous differences among these three countries, there are clear similarities in the political agendas that evangelicals support. Nevertheless, we also show the different articulations that Evangelicals have carried out in the political arena in each case. The Evangelical churches in Brazil have advanced much more in this sense than in Argentina, with Uruguay being the intermediate situation. For this, we will base ourselves on a bibliographic review of research, in statistical data from the Latinobarometer, together with specific in-depth interviews.

scholarly journals The Political Economy of Commercial Agricultural Land in Ethiopia

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-60
Author(s):  
Siyum A. Mamo ◽  
Abiot D. Habte
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The State ◽  
Leadership Role ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Agricultural Lands ◽  
Group Relations

This paper provides a critical examination of the political economy of commercial agricultural land in Ethiopia, taking a case from the peripheral State of Gambella where the Anyuaa and the Nuer ethnic groups interact. Since 2002, the government of Ethiopia has pursued a controversial investment approach that promotes large-scale investment dominated by FDI while officially denouncing the current wave of the neoliberal economic discourse. Such investment ventures in the State of Gambella have put significant agricultural lands under a long-term lease to foreign developers. The central argument of this study lies in the point that, in a political economy avenue where practices contradict official state ideology, mechanized agricultural developments face failure beyond adverse social and ecological crises. Under the guise of the political economy of development where the state takes in hand the responsibility for playing a leadership role, private developers cannot easily find a space for leverage for making productive investments. Rather, such ventures as the case of Gambella tend to institute land alienation of the rural indigenous poor who are already marginalized because of their double-peripheral positions – a manifestation of South in the South. The consequence of both inter-group relations and the environment is catastrophic. The paper concludes that the influence of (trans)national companies on indigenous communities living especially in fragile environments continues to be disconcerting whereas the conflation of the neoliberal inspiration in the peripheral regions appears to be disguising while leaving the local environment and inter-group relations at stake. Thus, the Ethiopian government should recognize the contradiction between its official ideology and the investment practices in agricultural lands overtaken by (trans)national developers.

Secrecy in Practice: How Middle Managers Promote Strategic Initiatives behind the Scenes

2021 ◽  
pp. 017084062199856
Author(s):  
Ina Toegel ◽  
Orly Levy ◽  
Karsten Jonsen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Managers ◽  
Social Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Strategic Initiatives ◽  
And Control ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Exchange Relations

In this study, we focus on secrecy within organizations and examine why and how middle managers use secrecy to explore and promote strategic initiatives. We conceptualize secrecy as a dynamic social process that unfolds in the political arena and is oriented toward gaining influence and power. It is enacted through a distinct set of practices intentionally designed to conceal and control identities, activities and information. Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews with executives who recount their experiences as middle managers, our findings indicate that middle managers tend to use secrecy under unfavourable contextual and personal conditions. Further, we find that middle managers use three key practices – selecting for enrolment, sequencing involvement and controlling information – to explore and promote strategic initiatives in secrecy. These secrecy practices enable them to influence cognition, emotions and exchange relations as they compete for attention and support. Finally, our findings suggest that secrecy can lead to two opposite outcomes. Managed carefully, secrecy enhances receptivity to strategic initiatives, but if it is mismanaged, secrecy leads to resistance and distrust.

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