Miriam Wenner

University of Göttingen | GAUG · Department of Human Geography

Fair Trade is a normative concept for creating more "just" trading relations between producers in the Global South and consumers in the Global North. It aims to foster the sustainable development of producers through instruments like minimum prices, long-term partnerships, and labor and environmental standards. However, as a market based instrument...

Miriam Wenner widmet sich in ihrem Beitrag den Zusammenhängen zwischen Ethnizität und Raum, die sich in dem Phänomen des Ethnoregionalismus spiegeln. Basierend auf einem Fallbeispiel der sozialen Bewegung für »Gorkhaland« aus Nord-Indien untersucht sie wie durch die Verknüpfung gruppenbezogener Identitäten mit einem bestimmten Raum machtvolle raube...

This paper enhances social movement studies by offering a strongly relational understanding of leader-follower relations for a better understanding of social movement mobilisation. It offers a conceptual framework around leadership styles, conflicts over roles, and normative moral values. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and intensive interactions...

This article analyses the relationships between legitimacy, leadership and stability of hybrid orders in spaces of contested state authority. Complementing studies on public authority, the analysis builds on the observation that hybrid orders are often violent and unstable. The article goes beyond the one-sided views of legitimacy that focus on the...

The paper explores the role of moral values for the functioning of tea cooperatives and outlines the importance of moral values for understanding broader processes of development.

This paper seeks to understand how elites utilize toponyms to either underscore territorial claims and belonging to a nation or to undermine those claims. Analyzing the names of the Nepali flatlands, Tarai and Madhes with a focus on the latter, it shows how ambivalent meanings attached to the toponyms became instrumental in symbolic resistance agai...

Hinweise zur Erstellung von Hausarbeiten und Arbeit mit wissenschaftlicher Literatur

This paper explores the relationship between de facto sovereign violence and order in spaces of contested authority. Here, so-called “informal sovereigns” imbued with the power to kill and punish with impunity can act either as rebels against, or as chosen mediators for, a weak government. This paper takes this ambivalent relationship between infor...

The Indian tea economy is undergoing acute transformations, with the divestment of tea companies from plantations leaving thousands of plantation workers jobless, and small tea growers struggling with a general lack of knowledge and their dependency on bought leaf factories and intermediaries. A review of the current trends in the Indian tea market...

Fairtrade translated. Power relations in the global production network of certified Darjeeling tea Fairtrade is a powerful idea that travels from its conception in the Global North to producers in the Global South (and back). Drawing on the case of Fairtrade certified Darjeeling tea, we show how the change of the initial idea results in a strengthe...

This paper is concerned with the relationships between virtue, immorality and politics as they are defined, contested and negotiated within the space of a movement for statehood. Based on the observation that in South Asia “politics” is associated with corrupt and selfish behaviour, I explore how political leaders in Darjeeling present themselves a...

This paper explores the effects of moral pluralism and moral conflict on political conduct and subjectivities. Challenging cultural relativist and monist positions, but going beyond a solely pragmatist reading of South Asian politics, it displays how actors navigate between conflicting roles, domains, commitments, and values. These contradictions,...

This paper asks how political actors utilize idealized imaginations of virtue and morality in struggles over authority and legitimacy and how space figures in these. Against the backdrop of the movement for a Union State Gorkhaland in Darjeeling/India, I analyze how leaders of contending regional political parties struggle for the leadership of the...

626 be anything but, and the image of real estate as an inexhaustible source of profit took a big dent. In this way, the landscapes of accumulation at Gurgaon and elsewhere tell of the power of global finance to shape markets and city space-but they also tell of the limitations of that power. This important and fairly sobering point finds a worthy...

A brief contribution for The Caravan that explorse the relations between party politics and social movements as playing out in the most recent agitation for Gorkhaland in Darjeeling.

Book review: Rituals of ethnicity. Thangmi identities between India and Nepal. By Sara Shneiderman

In: Cafe Dissensus, December 2015, http://cafedissensus.com/2015/12/04/whither-labour-shortfalls-of-the-ethnic-discourse-in-darjeeling/

In: Nicolas Schlitz et al. (Eds.): Aktuelle Forschungsbeiträge zu Südasien: 6. Jahrestagung des AK Südasien, 22./23. Januar 2016, Osnabrück, Heidelberg ; Berlin: CrossAsia-eBooks, 2016 (Geographien Südasiens, Band 5). DOI: 10.11588/xabooks.158.198

Die Stärkung sozialer Bewegungen und Dezentralisierung werden oftmals als Wege zu weniger Korruption und mehr politischer Mitbestimmung gesehen. Das Beispiel von Darjeeling, einem Distrikt im Norden Westbengalens, zeigt jedoch das Gegenteil. Hier verhindern seit fast drei Dekaden regionale Parteien die Verbesserungen des demokratischen Klimas. Sie...

Contrary to the concerns of tea plantation labourers, who emphasised their hopes for an improvement of their positions in (or outside of) the tea industry, and gave equal importance to the material and symbolic dimensions of Gorkhaland, political leaders of the ruling Gorkha Janmutki Morcha (GJM) seemed to ignore such aspirations.

This paper asks how contending political leaders legitimize their authority in a competitive authoritarian regime. It contends that ‘legitimization through patronage’ is an important means of convincing the public of the rightfulness of a leader’s authority when ‘ideology-based normative legitimacy’ is declining and the formal electoral route is no...

Contrary to assumptions about the dualist relationship between region and nation, I propose to understand both as simultaneously emerging. An analysis of the rhetoric of the “Gorkhaland” movement that demands a separate union state in India to be carved out of West Bengal demonstrates that although the movement challenges the distribution of power...

Soziale Kämpfe in peripheren Weltregionen werden zunehmend mit raumtheoretischen Kategorien analysiert. Räume unterliegen gesellschaftlichen Konflikten um die Nutzung von Ressourcen, um kulturelle und diskursive Zuschreibungen (etwa „indigener“ Räume und „angestammter“ Territorien), um politische Aneignung und Kontrolle, eng verbunden mit der Ausüb...