scholarly journals The everyday politics of India’s “land wars” in rural eastern India

Focaal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (75) ◽  
pp. 105-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Bo Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Political ◽  
Life Domains ◽  
Eastern India ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Development Trajectory ◽  
Everyday Politics ◽  
Private Corporations

The large-scale transfer of land from rural communities to private corporations has become a defining feature of India’s development trajectory. These land transfers have given rise to a multitude of new “land wars” as dispossessed groups have struggled to retain their land. Yet while much has been written about the political economy of development that underpins this new form of dispossession, the ways in which those threatened with dispossession have sought to mobilize have to a lesser extent been subject to close ethnographic scrutiny. This article argues that an “everyday politics” perspective can enhance our understanding of India’s new land wars, using a case from Singur as the starting point. The agenda is twofold. I show how everyday life domains and sociopolitical relations pertaining to caste, class, gender, and party political loyalty were crucial to the making of the Singur movement and its politics. Second, by analyzing the movement in processual terms, I show how struggles over land can be home to a multitude of political meanings and aspirations as participants seek to use new political forums to resculpt everyday sociopolitical relations.

scholarly journals Land Deals, Wage Labour, and Everyday Politics

Land ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adwoa Yeboah Gyapong
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Oil Palm ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Land Grab ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday Politics ◽  
Settler Society ◽  
Context Specific

This article explores the question of political struggles for inclusion on an oil palm land deal in Ghana. It examines the employment dynamics and the everyday politics of rural wage workers on a transnational oil palm plantation which is located in a predominantly migrant and settler society where large-scale agricultural production has only been introduced within the past decade. It shows that, by the nature of labour organization, as well as other structural issues, workers do not benefit equally from their work on plantations. The main form of farmworkers’ political struggles in the studied case has been the ‘everyday forms of resistance’ against exploitation and for better terms of incorporation. Particularly, they express agency through acts such as absenteeism and non-compliance, as well as engaging in other productive activities which enable them to maintain their basic food sovereignty/security. Nonetheless, their multiple and individualized everyday politics are not necessarily changing the structure of social relations associated with capitalist agriculture. Overall, this paper contributes to the land grab literature by providing context specific dynamics of the impacts of, and politics around land deals, and how they are shaped by a multiplicity of factors-beyond class.

The Next ‘Spring’ is Certain to Come – and Certain to be Missed

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 382-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Witold Mucha
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Task Force ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crisis ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
To Come ◽  
International Crisis Group ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
The Impact

The Arab Spring took policymakers and academics by surprise. The starting point, the scope, nor the impact had been seen coming. This was primarily because of academics’ irrevocable belief in the stabilising power of authoritarian regimes. In light of this failing, the article will critically discuss the production of crisis knowledge on the basis of four major early warning tools. These are World Bank’s greed/grievance model, the predictive model by the Political Instability Task Force, the risk and capacity approach applied by the Failed States Index, and the International Crisis Group. The article will add to the debate in two ways. First, the analysis will show that prevention research can be biased in ways that crucially influence policymakers’ assessment of states at risk. Second, the article will argue in favour of a complementary perspective that includes the analysis of conflicts that do not erupt into large-scale violence against all odds (so-called ‘negative cases’).

scholarly journals Land Deals, Labour and Everyday Politics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adwoa Yeboah Gyapong
Keyword(s):  
Oil Palm ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Scale Production ◽  
Land Grab ◽  
The North ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday Politics ◽  
Settler Society ◽  
Context Specific

This study presents empirical evidence on the nature of the political struggles for inclusion on an oil palm land deal in Ghana. It examines the employment dynamics and the everyday politics of workers on an oil palm plantation in a predominantly migrant and settler society of the north-eastern part of Ghana, where large-scale production has only been introduced within the past decade. It shows that by the nature of labour organization, as well as other structural issues, workers do not benefit equally from the land deals and therefore express everyday forms of resistance against exploitation, and for better terms of incorporation. Particularly, they express agency through absenteeism and non-compliance, which especially, enables them to maintain their basic food sovereignty/security. Nonetheless, these everyday politics is not necessarily liberating in confronting the everyday peasant problems and unfavourable agrarian transitions associated with capitalist agriculture. Overall, this paper contributes to the land grab literature by providing context-specific dynamics of impacts and politics and how are they are shaped by a multiplicity of factors- beyond class.

Dérive psychose géographique

2019 ◽  
pp. 44-62
Author(s):  
Joshua Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
The Political ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Everyday Activity ◽  
Television Watching ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Mind And Body

This chapter reads Chloé Delaume’s J’habite dans la télévision [I Live in the Television] (2006), a novel that directly confronts the reader with the hegemony of commercial visual media in everyday life. Delaume takes as a starting point former TF1 CEO Patrick Le Lay’s assertion that television exists in order to ‘sell to Coca Cola…available human brain time.’ Delaume subjects herself to 22 months of constant television viewing, documenting—and attempting to resist—such effects upon her mind and body. By amplifying the everyday activity of television watching to the point of hyperbole, Delaume takes us from the ‘metanoia’ of having the polished world delivered to you on the screen, to the ‘paranoia’ and ‘dérive psychose géographique’ [drifting geographical psychosis] that results from television’s worst de-localizing and de-socializing effects. This chapter draws upon Paul Virilio’s media theory and Delaume’s own musings upon map and territory—which draw upon Deleuze and Guattari—to reveal the processes by which commercial visual media deprives its viewers of the cognitive distance vis-à-vis reality needed to forge existential territory. Delaume’s ludic novel goes to great lengths to restore this distance, and exposes the political and phallocratic regime behind television’s imposed logics in the process.

Confrontation and Conflict

2021 ◽  
pp. 60-84
Author(s):  
Dieter Gosewinkel
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Existential Dimension ◽  
Social Importance ◽  
First World

The First World War revealed an existential dimension of citizenship that remains hidden in peacetime. Hostilities between states intensify the politico-social significance of citizenship and raise awareness of citizens’ duty to put their lives at risk for the good of their home country. The war introduced an epoch in which the political and social importance of citizenship in the everyday lives of Europeans increased greatly, as did, however, its delimiting and exclusionary impact as well. The extreme depletion of the reservoir of—male—conscripts sharpened the dividing line between the sexes and, during large-scale conquests, incited conflicts between ethnic and national loyalties, between ethnicity and nationality, as was seen, for example, in the areas occupied by Germany in France and Russia. The emerging European civil war, which would become a world civil war, had one of its battlefields in the immensely contradictory and conflict-ridden history of citizenship.

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.

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.

Issue Dimensions and Cleavages: How the Russian Experience Helps Us to Look for Cross-Points

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-235
Author(s):  
Yury Korgunyuk
Keyword(s):  
Factor Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regression Analyses ◽  
Issue Salience ◽  
Empirical Base ◽  
Party Positions ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Weak Points ◽  
Alternative Methodology ◽  
Election Results

Abstract The article analyzes the weak points of the Manifesto Project’s methodology, such as its emphasis on issue salience, instead of issue positions; bringing the content of manifestos under too broad categories formulated at the beginning of the project; not quite the appropriate technique of factor analysis etc. An alternative methodology is proposed that focuses on party positions on issues which generate the largest polarization in the political space. It also enriches the empirical base of the studies and adjusts the technique of factor analysis. In order to reveal political cleavages inside these dimensions, the so called electoral cleavages (factors of territorial differences in voting for various parties) are taken as a starting point: factor loadings of parties in the electoral and political spaces are compared through correlation and regression analyses. The proposed methodology is applied to an analysis of election results in Russia (2016) and Germany (2017).

Identification of N-Substituted Triazolo-azetidines as Novel Antibacterials using pDualrep2 HTS Platform

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 346-354
Author(s):  
Yan A. Ivanenkov ◽  
Renat S. Yamidanov ◽  
Ilya A. Osterman ◽  
Petr V. Sergiev ◽  
Vladimir A. Aladinskiy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Antibacterial Activity ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Underlying Mechanism ◽  
Luciferase Assay ◽  
Reporter System ◽  
E Coli ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
High Concentrations ◽  
Mic Value

Aim and Objective: Antibiotic resistance is a serious constraint to the development of new effective antibacterials. Therefore, the discovery of the new antibacterials remains one of the main challenges in modern medicinal chemistry. This study was undertaken to identify novel molecules with antibacterial activity. Materials and Methods: Using our unique double-reporter system, in-house large-scale HTS campaign was conducted for the identification of antibacterial potency of small-molecule compounds. The construction allows us to visually assess the underlying mechanism of action. After the initial HTS and rescreen procedure, luciferase assay, C14-test, determination of MIC value and PrestoBlue test were carried out. Results: HTS rounds and rescreen campaign have revealed the antibacterial activity of a series of Nsubstituted triazolo-azetidines and their isosteric derivatives that has not been reported previously. Primary hit-molecule demonstrated a MIC value of 12.5 µg/mL against E. coli Δ tolC with signs of translation blockage and no SOS-response. Translation inhibition (26%, luciferase assay) was achieved at high concentrations up to 160 µg/mL, while no activity was found using C14-test. The compound did not demonstrate cytotoxicity in the PrestoBlue assay against a panel of eukaryotic cells. Within a series of direct structural analogues bearing the same or bioisosteric scaffold, compound 2 was found to have an improved antibacterial potency (MIC=6.25 µg/mL) close to Erythromycin (MIC=2.5-5 µg/mL) against the same strain. In contrast to the parent hit, this compound was more active and selective, and provided a robust IP position. Conclusion: N-substituted triazolo-azetidine scaffold may be used as a versatile starting point for the development of novel active and selective antibacterial compounds.

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