Understanding factors impacting global priority of emergency care: a qualitative policy analysis

IntroductionThe high burden of emergency medical conditions has not been met with adequate financial and political prioritisation especially in low and middle-income countries. We examined the factors that have shaped the priority of global emergency care and highlight potential responses by emergency care advocates.MethodsWe conducted semistructured interviews with key experts in global emergency care practice, public health, health policy and advocacy. We then applied a policy framework based on political ethnography and content analysis to code for underlying themes.ResultsWe identified problem definition, coalition building, paucity of data and positioning, as the main challenges faced by emergency care advocates. Problem definition remains the key issue, with divergent ideas on what emergency care is, should be and what solutions are to be prioritised. Proponents have struggled to portray the urgency of the issue in a way that commands action from decision-makers. The lack of data further limits their effectiveness. However, there is much reason for optimism given the network’s commitment to the issue, the emerging leadership and the existence of policy windows.ConclusionTo improve global priority for emergency care, proponents should take advantage of the emerging governance structure and build consensus on definitions, generate data-driven solutions, find strategic framings and engage with non-traditional allies.

Reassembling Provincial North India

This chapter weaves together historical geography and political ethnography, rendering provincial north India within an analytical reassembly. Drawing upon Chris Bayly’s Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (2012), along with other historians of South Asia, the chapter situates the north Indian province between empire and nation, contrasting the fluvial regime of colonial and postcolonial governments. It thus arrives at the question of flood-control embankments – and their frequent breaches – as an administrative allegory for the state in mid-Ganga plains of north India. It draws our focus to the role of embankments, as artefacts of administrative and engineering ‘solutions’ to a problem they only aggravated, established the character of state-society relations in the region, and forced a relentless wave of distress migration among the landless or small-landholding castes. The chapter argues that provincial India is dumped in a gulf and bypassed via the infrastructures of global modernity amplifying spatial, economic and infrastructural slippages, which underline the precarities of provincial life.

“Still a bit uncomfortable, to be an arm of the state”: Making sense and subjects of counter-extremism in the UK and Morocco

Countering violent extremism (CVE) policies infiltrate every corner of public life, travelling across the Global North and South. However, scholars have under-analysed the perspective of those charged with CVE’s implementation, and have treated CVE in a spatial binary, implying that its operationalisations in the Global North and South are conceptually distinct. This article presents a comparative political ethnography of CVE projects framed as care provision in the field of education in Morocco and the UK. It asks, how is CVE rationalised for and by non-traditional security actors in education, such as university and NGO administrators, and how is it integrated into the ordinary across the North and the South? In both contexts, implementation does not “just” enrol those involved with care duties at their institution into the government of the “dangerous other.” It also shapes the self-governance of those transformed into hesitant security actors. This paper argues that implementers leverage the ‘normal politics’ of institutional care to implement the global counter-extremist agenda. CVE enters spaces of education globally through camouflage – it blends itself into existing understandings and practices of institutional care, whatever they may be. By working across the North and the South through similar mechanisms of sense and subject-making, CVE recruits implementers for the co-production of an expansive global geography of exclusion that locates marginalised young Muslims as global outsiders within.

Ethnographic Approaches to Contentious Politics: The What, How, and Why

How should we study contentious politics in an era rife with new forms of contention, both in the United States and abroad? The introduction to this special issue draws attention to one particularly crucial methodological tool in the study of contention: political ethnography. It showcases the ways in which ethnographic approaches can contribute to the study of contentious politics. Specifically, it argues that “what,” “how,” and “why” questions are central to the study of contention and that ethnographic methods are particularly well-suited to answering them. It also demonstrates how ethnographic methods push scholars to both expand the objects of inquiry and rethink what the relevant units of analysis might be. By uncovering hidden processes, exploring social meanings, and giving voice to unheard stories, ethnography and “ethnography-plus” approaches contribute to the study of contention and to comparative politics, writ large.

“Are You Married?”: Gender and Faith in Political Ethnographic Research

In this article, I look at how political ethnography can contribute to the study of religious dynamics within conservative religious communities. Based on fieldwork conducted in Tajikistan within conservative Muslim circles, I take a reflexive stance by arguing that my informants used my status as a single foreign woman to steer interactions toward those of my religious conversion and need for marriage. Their repeated efforts and our interactions exposed the depth of their religious beliefs and its precedence over other identity markers such as ethnicity and language. This close access also allowed me to witness the exclusion and distrust that conservative Muslims face from the rest of the society as well as state authorities. Ultimately, I argue that political ethnography enables the production of a more nuanced portrait of conservative Muslims communities, which are often represented as hermetic and hostile. Political ethnography can be particularly useful to investigate sensitive issues such as religious identities and their complex relations to structures of power.

Conflicts associated with migratory processes: a political perspective

The objective of the research was to discuss the conflictive nature of the migratory processes that occur in the world today. The need to adapt and solve daily problems inevitably requires the State to implement international, state and regional standards for the implementation of the rights and opportunities of migrants both in the territory of the donor country and in the territory of the recipient country. On the other hand, we see an increase in the phobia of migrants and the characteristic racism of countries where labor migration flows are increasing. In methodological terms, use was made of hermeneutics close to political ethnography. It is concluded that, for a long time, the criticism of racism has developed as a criticism of colonialism, Nazism, including anti-Semitism, and in modern times as a political criticism of migration-phobia and nationalism, in which the Racist speech and practices have found and do find obvious and complete expression. Migrant phobia is a concept that latently generates motives of political, ideological, racial, national, religious hatred, xenophobia, or hostility towards an ethnic or social group within the framework of social practices.

Uneasy Military Encounters

This book presents a historically and theoretically grounded political ethnography of the Thai military's counterinsurgency practices in the southern borderland, home to the greater part of the Malay-Muslim minority. The book argues that counterinsurgency practices mark the southern population as the racialized, religious, and gendered other of the Thai, which contributes to producing Thailand as an imperial formation: a state formation based on essentialized difference between the Thai and their others. Through a genealogical approach, the book addresses broad conceptual questions of imperial politics in a non-Western context: How can we understand imperial policing in a country that was never colonized? How is “Islam” constructed in a state that is officially secular and promotes Buddhist tolerance? What are the (historical) dynamics of imperial patriarchy in a context internationally known for its gender pluralism? The resulting ethnography excavates the imperial politics of concrete encounters between the military and the southern population in the ongoing conflict in southern Thailand.

The moral politics of LGBTI asylum: how the state deals with the SOGI framework

The article proposes a political ethnography of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) asylum founded on a fieldwork (2017–19) in an associative and activist context that supports LGBTI asylum applicants. Through the analysis of the narratives mobilized and produced during the interviews between asylum applicants and institutional agents in charge of receiving and assessing the requests for international protection, the article explores the institutional uses of the SOGI framework. The hypothesis that the article puts forward is that, far from concerning exclusively a confrontation/dispute among models of sexual orientation and gender identity, these interactions actually bring forth a logic of exchange of moral goods (vulnerability, feelings of shame and fear, identity, narratives). Given the impossibility for LGBTI asylum applicants to produce probatory documentation, this study exposes the strategies for determining legitimate from illegitimate LGBTI migrant subjects, ‘good’ from ‘bad’ migrant stories, and, therefore, the political and moral dimension of the institutional work and the grant of the right of asylum.

13. Ethnography and Participant Observation

This chapter discusses the principles of ethnography and participant observation: what they are, how (if) they became standardized as a research method, what form of evidence they constitute, and what place they occupy in the study of Politics. Participant observation has emerged as a popular research tool across the social sciences. In particular, political ethnographies are now widely carried out in a broad variety of contexts, from the study of political institutions and organizations to the investigation of social movements and informal networks, such as terrorist groups and drugs cartels. Political ethnography is also becoming a research method of choice in the field of International Relations. The chapter examines the strengths of ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on issues relating to sampling, access, key informants, and collecting observational data. It also addresses the weaknesses of ethnography, especially issues of subjectivity, reliability, and generalizability.