The Fiction of Formalization

2021 ◽  
pp. 144-160
Author(s):  
Michael B. Dwyer
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Sugar Plantation ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Global Land ◽  
Per Se

This chapter explores the regulatory fictions of presumably fixed administrative categories in the vastly different context of rural Cambodia. It examines the work of property formalization in the country, through processes of titling and concession making associated with the global land rush of the late 2000s. Through an impressive cartographic deconstruction of Cambodia's uneven geography of formalization as well as the land allocations for a private sugar plantation, the chapter illustrates that this formalization fix operates more as a promise than a reality. It shifts to discuss the discursive work that renders formalization logical, legal, and hegemonic. The chapter then explores the bureaucratic work that gives it a subnational geography, and ends with the political work of enforcing it at the margins where hegemony breaks down and conflicts erupt with those who openly question its fictions. The chapter argues that the goal is not to argue against formalization per se, but to denaturalize it so that its powers can be put to work in better ways.

The implications of, and opposition to, the methods and theories of John Wansbrough1

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert Berg
Keyword(s):  
Methodological Approach ◽  
The Political ◽  
Salvation History ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Muslim Scholars

This article serves as an introduction to Wansbrough's methods and theories for the study of the Qur¸dn, its Tafsīr, the Sīra, and other early Islamic texts. Muslim and most non-Muslim scholars work within essentially the same framework: one which reads the literature of early Islam as history. Wansbrough has demonstrated that what these sources provide is not history per se, but salvation history, and that methods appropriate for the study of this genre are not source critical but literary critical. Through the application of these methods Wansbrough has postulated theories, which, if correct, radically alter our understanding of Islamic origins. Islamicists have tended to fixate on these theories at the expense of the methodological approach from which they are derived. Judging by the arguments raised thus far by these opponents of Wansbrough, I suggest that their aversion to his work stems as much from the unwillingness of Islamicists to accept the uncertainty inherent in his methods and the political incorrectness associated with his theories as from their theoretical conservatism and methodological naivete.

Turkey’s failed coup as an ‘ongoing media event’ and the formation of public affect

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ergin Bulut ◽  
Başak Can
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
National Unity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
The Media ◽  
Pedagogical Relationship ◽  
Media Event ◽  
Coup Attempt

Following the coup attempt in Turkey, former Gulenists made appearances on various television channels and disclosed intimate and spectacular information regarding their past activities. We ask: what is the political work of these televised disclosures? In answering this question, we situate the coup within the media event literature and examine the intimate work of these televised disclosures performed as part of a media event. The disclosures we examine were extremely spectacular statements that worked to reconstruct a highly divided and polarized society through an intimate language. Consequently, these television performances had two functions: ideological and affective. First, these disclosures and television shows chose to foreground sensation and therefore mystified the illegal networks that historically prepared the coup. Second, using a language of regret and apology, these disclosures aimed to teach the audience how to be purified and good citizens through a mediated, pedagogical relationship. Within the vulnerable context of a hegemonic crisis, these disclosures intended to form their own publics where citizens were invited to sympathize with those who made mistakes in the past, ultimately aiming to create national unity and reconciliation.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 215-229
Author(s):  
Frédéric Mérand
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
The Political ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
Political Controversy ◽  
Collective Reading ◽  
Collective Experience

This book’s ethnographic narrative ends with a description of the last months of the Moscovici cabinet, which dissolves as he and his collaborators look for new opportunities, while the incoming Commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen is engulfed in political controversy and Brexit negotiations. Exiting fieldwork through a collective reading of the book manuscript, I discuss the methodological challenges of embedded observation, while the Moscos take stock of their collective experience. What did the political commissioner and his staff achieve? What were the limits of political work? The conclusion is an opportunity to reflect on Juncker’s “Political Commission” experiment and on what it means to do politics in the European Union.

Toward an Alternative Explanation for the Resource Curse: Natural Resources, Immigration, and Democratization

2011 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 689-718 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. Bearce ◽  
Jennifer A. Laks Hutnick
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Negative Relationship ◽  
Resource Curse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Significant Negative Relationship ◽  
Political Resource ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Rich Countries

Why do many resource-rich countries maintain autocratic political regimes? The authors’ proposed answer focuses on the causal effect of labor imports, or immigration. Using the logic offered by Acemoglu and Robinson’s democratization model, the authors posit that immigration makes democratization less likely because it facilitates redistributive concessions to appease the population within an autocratic regime. This immigration argument applies directly to the political resource curse since many resource-rich countries tend to also be labor scarce, leading them to import foreign laborers. Consistent with this understanding, the authors find a statistically significant negative relationship between net immigration per capita and democratization in future periods. Their results also show that when controlling for this immigration effect, the standard resource curse variables lose significance in a democratization model. This latter result suggests that much of the so-called resource curse stems not from resource endowments per se but rather from the labor imports related to resource production.

Feminist Art and the Political Imagination

Hypatia ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 189-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Mullin
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Art ◽  
Feminist Art ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Political Works ◽  
The Aesthetic

Activist and political art works, particularly feminist ones, are frequently either dis-missed for their illegitimate combination of the aesthetic and the political, or embraced as chiefly political works. Flawed conceptions of politics and the imagination are responsible for that dismissal. An understanding of the imagination is developed that allows us to see how political work and political explorations may inform the artistic imagination.

State as Illusion?

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Watts
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Fiscal Federalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
Business World ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Political Cultures ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
History Of

Abstract Moral Economies of Corruption is an important intervention, and Steven Pierce provides an alternative way of viewing the long history of anticorruption programs in Nigeria. As Michael J. Watts' contribution discusses, there are a number of dangers that lurk in the discursive and performative orientation of the book. Sometimes the shifting character of what constitutes corruption produces less a systematic account of corruption than a history of shifting political cultures (much of which has, of course, been covered in a variety of ways by scholars of Nigeria). But if the purpose is to see the work that corruption undertakes, then it would also require a careful and granular accounting of the shifting pacts, coalitions, and political cartels linking the business world, the security forces, and the vast fiscal federalism composed of thirty-six states and seven-hundred-odd local government councils covering the last seven decades. The political settlements that have arisen through different conjunctures and across the turbulent history of oil busts and booms need to be clearly explicated if both state effects and the political work of corruption claims are to be fully realized.

The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872

2002 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 642
Author(s):  
Lori Merish ◽  
Lyde Cullen Sizer
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Work

scholarly journals Showing One's Colours: The political work of elections in post-war Sri Lanka

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1091-1121 ◽  
Author(s):  
BART KLEM
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
East Coast ◽  
The Political ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Group Identities ◽  
Post War

AbstractThis article analyses Sri Lanka's April 2010 parliamentary elections as they played out in the Muslim community on the east coast. The political work of elections, as the article shows, involves a lot more than the composition of government. Antagonism over group identities and boundaries are at centre stage. Elections force people to show their colours, which causes turbulence as they grapple with several, possibly contradictory, loyalties. The article argues that elections bring together different political storylines, rather than one master antagonism. It is the interaction between different narratives that paradoxically provides elections both with a sense of gravity and dignity, and with the lingering threat of rupture and disturbance.

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