Resilience and the Mobility of Identity: Belonging and Change among Turkana Herders in Northern Kenya

Ideas of resilience are not new; they have travelled across several disciplines, stretching their original meanings to a considerable degree, turning into a 'key political category of our time' (Neocleous 2013). For the case of pastoralist groups, discussions about resilience predominantly concern the state of pastoralism as a unitary and fixed entity and its prospects for survival in a world in turmoil (climate change, diseases and epidemics, conflicts, socio-economic transformations). In this context, references to resilience generally allude to local vulnerability, purporting the need for external support. These accounts tend to ignore local voices and perceptions and neglect the role of identity, culture and change in self-presentation and everyday life. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in the northern Kenyan drylands, this article flips dominant perspectives on pastoralism and resilience, following the herders' self-definition, their construction of a shared identity and their, at times contradictory, positioning as part of a broader society. It argues that part of their resilience rests in the feeling of belonging and solidarity around a collective identity, built in opposition to urbanities along symbolic boundaries. The article however shows how such identity remains nonetheless flexible and responsive to change, disrupting dichotomies and weaving different social worlds, such as rural and urban, together. Such flexibility is also an important element of resilience for the capacity to change, stay attentive, and mobile.

“If It’s Not Femicide, It’s Still Murder”: Contestations Over Femicide in Nicaragua

Nicaragua has the dubious distinction of being one of the only countries in the world that has intentionally weakened its existing legislation penalizing the crime of femicide ( femicidio), the murder of women due to their gender. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and content analysis of over 250 newspaper articles, this study examines how these legal changes occurred and their implications for women’s access to legal justice in Nicaragua. Through an analysis of the competing claims of state officials and feminist actors, I demonstrate how femicidio became a contested legal and political category in Nicaragua, to the detriment of women’s lives.

Birthing Black Mothers

In Birthing Black Mothers Black feminist theorist Jennifer C. Nash examines how the figure of the “Black mother” has become a powerful political category. “Mothering while Black” has become synonymous with crisis as well as a site of cultural interest, empathy, fascination, and support. Cast as suffering and traumatized by their proximity to Black death—especially through medical racism and state-sanctioned police violence—Black mothers are often rendered as one-dimensional symbols of tragic heroism. In contrast, Nash examines Black mothers’ self-representations and public performances of motherhood—including Black doulas and breastfeeding advocates alongside celebrities such as Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and Michelle Obama—that are not rooted in loss. Through cultural critique and in-depth interviews, Nash acknowledges the complexities of Black motherhood outside its use as political currency. Throughout, Nash imagines a Black feminist project that refuses the lure of locating the precarity of Black life in women and instead invites readers to theorize, organize, and dream into being new modes of Black motherhood.

The Rise of Political Hatred in Twitter Conversations of Indonesian Netizens

This article discusses expressions of hatred as a political category that has become a topic of discourse among Indonesian netizens on Twitter. The Twitter conversations data used in this analysis were obtained through a Twitter thread reader application operated by DEA (Drone Emprit Academic). As a political category, hatred is considered new. It emerged as and became a conversational topic for netizens on Twitter due to various political promises President Joko Widodo has made during his campaign and has not fulfilled. Political hatred has spread extensively owing to Twitter leading to absolute freedom of expression. On Twitter, political hatred has increased because of two main clusters during the 2019 Presidential Election campaign. The two clusters represent two pairs of presidential and vice-presidential candidates, namely Joko Widodo-Ma’ruf Amin (Number 01/JKW-MA) and Prabowo Subianto-Sandiaga Uno (Number 02/PS-SU). This study may have implications on broader hatred-based political conflict. Additionally, political hatred may also have implications on the waning of the public’s function to criticize political actors and the government because criticism may be suppressed on the basis of it being an expression of hatred. This will, accordingly, turn into a new dilemma in a democratic country, between freedom of expression and potential rise of new authoritarianism.

Rethinking Radical Democracy with Butler

In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler, by inserting the issue of bodily life and bodily needs into the Arendtian political category of space of appearance, allows us to trace unusual and interesting paths in our exploration of the territory of democracy. This exploration could start from what I call a reimagining of democracy’s germinal status. By pondering Butler’s claim that the gathering of people in a public space signifies in excess of what is said, this essay focuses on the topic of vocal crowds in order to investigate the difference between plurality and mass. In particular, by revisiting texts by Elias Canetti and Roland Barthes, it explores the soundscape of an embodied plurality uttering words or chanting. Does democracy, at its core, in its germinal status, allow for the voice of plurality to enact a distinctive political performance? Is it possible to speak of a democratic pluriphony?

Liberar las migraciones: la contribución de Abdelmalek Sayad a una epistemología migrante-céntrica

The migrant category is linked to the origin of the State as the predominant political unit in the world. This is because, as Abdelmalek Sayad (2008, 2010a) pointed out, without a State, there would be no migrants, as they exist as a political category, referring to the nationals of a State who cross the borders to settle (temporarily or permanently). This functional and historical connection has had a decisive impact at the epistemological level on the discipline of migration studies, where hegemonic paradigms have used analysis categories that not only reproduced the tate framework, but have replicated principles such as coloniality, aimed at legitimizing their control over this population. The objective of this article is to propose an analytical framework on migrations that, following Sayad’s (2010a) and Fanon’s (2009) postulates, breaks with state hegemony in the definition of human mobility to point out the possibility of constructing analyses, which in contrast to the predominant State-centric approaches,start from a migrantcentric epistemology.

Substantielle Sittlichkeit

The context in which the author places the concept of substantial morality (Sittlichkeit) is the history of Athens from about 490 to 430 B.C. This facilitates the understanding of a (political) way of life that is quite foreign to us in modern times. This also makes the concept of modern post-traditional morality, which plays a central role in the discussion of Hegel today, easier to understand. The concept of morality as a political category of social interaction thus becomes more vivid. As knowledge in historical and classical philological research has advanced, not every statement of Hegel's remains as meaningful and usable. A language of one's own, which does not just shimmy from Hegel quotation to Hegel quotation, facilitates understanding.