scholarly journals Zapatista autonomy and the making of alter-native politics

Focaal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (72) ◽  
pp. 51-63
Author(s):  
Sabrina Melenotte
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
International Aid ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Economic Dependency ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Good Government

Since 1994, the Zapatista political autonomy project has been claiming that “another world is possible”. This experience has influenced many intellectuals of contemporary radical social movements who see in the indigenous organization a new political alter-native. I will first explore some of the current theories on Zapatism and the crossing of some of authors into anarchist thought. The second part of the article draws on an ethnography conducted in the municipality of Chenalhó, in the highlands of Chiapas, to emphasize some of the everyday practices inside the self-proclaimed “autonomous municipality” of Polhó. As opposed to irenic theories on Zapatism, this article describes a peculiar process of autonomy and brings out some contradictions between the political discourse and the day-to-day practices of the autonomous power, focusing on three specific points linked to economic and political constraints in a context of political violence: the economic dependency on humanitarian aid and the “bureaucratic habitus”; the new “autonomous” leadership it involved, between “good government” and “good management”; and the internal divisions due to the return of some displaced members and the exit of international aid.

scholarly journals The humanitarian protectorate of South Sudan? Understanding insecurity for humanitarians in a political economy of aid

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-370
Author(s):  
Bram J. Jansen
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
State Building ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Security Threats ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Conflict Situations ◽  
The Everyday

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to contribute to debates about humanitarian governance and insecurity in post-conflict situations. It takes the case of South Sudan to explore the relations between humanitarian agencies, the international community, and local authorities, and the ways international and local forms of power become interrelated and contested, and to what effect. The paper is based on eight months of ethnographic research in various locations in South Sudan between 2011 and 2013, in which experiences with and approaches to insecurity among humanitarian aid actors were studied. The research found that many security threats can be understood in relation to the everyday practices of negotiating and maintaining humanitarian access. Perceiving this insecurity as violation or abuse of a moral and practical humanitarianism neglects how humanitarian aid in practice was embedded in broader state building processes. This paper posits instead that much insecurity for humanitarian actors is a symptom of the blurring of international and local forms of power, and this mediates the development of a humanitarian protectorate.

The Politics of International Aid to the Gaza Strip

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamer Qarmout ◽  
Daniel Béland
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Gaza Strip ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
International Aid ◽  
The Political ◽  
Palestinian Authority ◽  
Legislative Council ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The Gaza Strip

International aid to the Palestinian Authority is conditioned in part on democratization and good governance. However, since Hamas's victory in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections and its takeover of the Gaza Strip, aid agencies have supported the international boycott of the Hamas government. This article argues that aid agencies, by operating in Gaza while boycotting its government, subvert their mandates and serve the political interests of donors and the PA rather than the humanitarian and development needs of Gazans. As a consequence, assistance has, inadvertently and unintentionally, increased Gazans' dependence on humanitarian aid, impeded economic development, and enabled Israel to maintain its occupation and the blockade of Gaza.

Refining the Political Autonomy Account

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-154
Author(s):  
Anna Stilz
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Modern Mass ◽  
Political Decisions ◽  
Two Alternatives ◽  
Negligible Influence

This chapter extends the political autonomy theory of self-determination by responding to a variety of challenges. Is collective self-determination possible in a modern mass society, where citizens have (and can only have) a negligible influence over political decisions? How do we define the “self” in self-determination? Does self-determination require democratic governance or is it compatible with nondemocratic arrangements? Does self-determination apply only to overseas dependencies or also to internal minorities? How does it cohere with other international principles, such as territorial integrity? It also contrasts the political autonomy theory with two alternatives: the liberal nationalist theory and the peoplehood theory.

Youth and social navigation in Zimbabwe’s informal economy: ‘Don’t end up on the wrong side’

2018 ◽  
Vol 118 (472) ◽  
pp. 485-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjoke A Oosterom
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Informal Economy ◽  
Case Study Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Navigation ◽  
Wrong Side ◽  
Self Employment ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Repressive Regime

Abstract This article draws on qualitative case study research in Murewa, a rural district town in Zimbabwe, to extend the use of the concept of ‘social navigation’ from conflict-affected settings to repressive regime contexts. Through the concept of ‘the everyday’, it analyses how youth experience political violence and repression, and the tactics they use to access paid work and secure self-employment. The findings show that youth accept existing forms of political violence and repression as normal, and that the historical construction of politicized youth matters for how they understand their room for manoeuvre within it. Since partisan actors control many of the economic opportunities, social navigation is about the need to assess the political affiliation of actors that offer any economic opportunity, and the potential implications of being associated with a particular ‘side’ in the political landscape. Contrary to dominant discourses that portray youth as violent, this study shows that many will avoid relationships through which they risk being mobilized into violence.

scholarly journals The interconnection of morality, values and legal nihilism with extremist attitudes of youth

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 74-79
Author(s):  
Oleg A. Sychev ◽  
Irina N. Protasova
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Foundations ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Political Protests ◽  
Self Transcendence

Past studies of extremist attitudes showed that along with such attitudes as nationalism, xenophobia, religious fanaticism, the tendency to justify the use of violence for political purposes is highly relevant to the problem of radicalisation. Extremist attitudes and the legitimisation of political violence can be associated with legal nihilism, as well as features of the person’s moral and value spheres. On a sample of 114 students using questionnaires of moral foundations (Jesse Graham et al.) and basic values (Shalom Schwartz), it was shown that binding moral foundations (loyalty, authority, purity) support extremist attitudes (by the questionnaire of Kirill Zlokazov) and the legitimation of political violence (by the scale of Sergey Yenikolopov and Nikolay Tsibul’skiy), while individualising moral foundations (care and fairness) and the self-transcendence values are opposed to them. Legal nihilism supports nationalist attitudes and the justification of violence in the political sphere, including the violence during political protests.

scholarly journals Localization is Self-Determination

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugo Slim
Keyword(s):  
International Organizations ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
International Aid ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Humanitarian Operations ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
Political Right

This paper gives a personal political perspective on the policy dispute about localization in the humanitarian sector to argue that localization is a realization of the political right to self-determination. It starts by describing how humanitarian aid is too international today. It then makes the case for localization as an essential process of self-determination and humanitarian citizenship. It then analyses the main political arguments used against localization by international humanitarians who are resistant to it and shows how they routinely exaggerate the necessity of international aid by misrepresenting the reality of most humanitarian operations. Finally, the paper makes three recommendations to help humanitarian reform move forwards to find a fairer balance of local, national and international organizations.

“Politics of emotion”: Everyday affective circulation of women’s resistance and grief in Kashmir

Ethnography ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146613812090793
Author(s):  
Bhavneet Kaur
Keyword(s):  
Political Conflict ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Women's Narratives ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Face

This article traces women’s narratives of the political struggle in Kashmir through the realm of ordinary, scattered, and everyday practices of resistance. It attempts to undo the narrative that overlooks the complexity of women’s lives in the face of ongoing violent political conflict; instead it argues that women in Kashmir escape easy categorization into victimhood. This article is embedded in the idea that there is something spectacular in the everydayness of lives embedded in violence; that the everyday is ruptured and layered like the memory of its people. “In Kashmir, which is a historically and politically complex quagmire of violent protests, morbid silence, and killable lives, it is through the barbed spaces of the everyday we see varied surging affects: of loss, of pain, of anger, of endurance, of fear, and of silence” (Kaur). And in this article, I locate women as the protagonists of these circulating affects, inscribing new meanings to the “political” through the politics of emotion.

scholarly journals Urban everyday politics: Politicising practices and the transformation of the here and now

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Beveridge ◽  
Philippe Koch
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Spatial Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Transformative Politics ◽  
Everyday Politics ◽  
Current Impact ◽  
Urban Conditions

This article responds to both ongoing urban practices and strands of urban theory by arguing for a (re-)turn to the everyday as a means of thinking about antagonism and political possibility. We examine how the everyday might be conceived politically and wonder what it is about the current conjuncture that is fuelling the reimagining of the political possibility of the urban. We develop the category of urban everyday politics to capture the politicised everyday practices observable in our towns and cities: collective, organised and strategic practices that articulate a political antagonism embedded in, but breaking with, urban everyday life through altering socio-spatial relations. While we make no empirical claims about the current impact of this form of politics, we assert the political potential of viewing the everyday as a source, stake and site of dissensus in current urban conditions. Politicising the urban everyday offers, we conclude, a strategy for transformative politics, one in which the state recedes from view, micropolitical action is transcended and democratic possibilities lie in the transformation of the urban here and now.

Immanence and Micropolitics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Gilliam
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Conceptual Necessity ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Pure Immanence ◽  
Alternative Understanding

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of ‘pure’ immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of ‘the political’; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or ‘micropolitical’ life of desire. He argues that here, in this ‘life’, is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately justifies the conceptual necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of ‘pure’ immanence are either apolitical or politically incoherent.

The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett's Happy Days

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Second World

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.

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