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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
... B . Harvey 1989;Scott 1998;Hall 1988). Ein Urbanismus des Uniformen anstatt des Pluralistischen, ein Urbanismus, der beschränkt und verhindert anstatt zu eröffnen und zu ermöglichen, der immobilisiert anstatt zu mobilisieren und der Determinismus vor Offenheit und Veränderlichkeit stellt; ein Urbanismus also, der zentrale autoritäre Züge trägt. ...
... B . Harvey 1989;Scott 1998;Hall 1988) gelten beispielsweise Baron Haussmanns Stadtumbau von Paris in den 1860er-Jahren, Le Corbusiers Planungen für Paris aus den 1920er-Jahren oder die als besonders destruktiv und brutal beschriebenen Auswirkungen moderner Planungen in den "Laboratorien" europäischer Kolonien (z. B. Rabinow 1982Rabinow , 1989Wright 1991) oder den ehemals staatssozialistischen Staaten (z. ...
... B. Rabinow 1982Rabinow , 1989Wright 1991) oder den ehemals staatssozialistischen Staaten (z. B. Scott 1998). ...
Angesichts zunehmender autoritärer, illiberaler und populistischer Strömungen weltweit, nicht zuletzt auch innerhalb etablierter Demokratien, hat die Auseinandersetzung mit Autoritarismus in der interdisziplinären Stadtforschung in den letzten Jahren an Gewicht gewonnen. Diese erneute Popularität nimmt der Beitrag zum Anlass, um sich mit der Aktualität und Gewordenheit des Forschungsfeldes zu autoritärem Urbanismus auseinanderzusetzen. Der Beitrag rekonstruiert, was unter autoritärem Urbanismus verstanden und beforscht wurde und wie sich das im Lauf der Zeit entwickelt hat. Dabei arbeitet er verfestigte Vorannahmen und normative Zuschreibungen in der Beschäftigung mit autoritärem Urbanismus heraus, zeigt, wie diese entstanden sind und die Debatten seither beeinflussen, und diskutiert, wie diese einem besseren Verständnis von autoritärem Urbanismus entgegenstehen.
... While neoliberalism is often identified as the cause for the shift away from modern infrastructural thinking in the global south, the wider vision of a strong state that could finance and guide development through investments in this orthodox type of infrastructure was always fraught (Scott, 1998). Most large-scale infrastructure was funded, at least in part, through economies tightly linked to colonial exploitation and unsustainable extraction from nature. ...
... In press). This may well be seen as a positive change (high modernist planning is associated with a tremendous range of social and ecological harm, Scott, 1998), yet has also contributed to delinking infrastructural development from well-being, a point we return to below. ...
... As discussed extensively elsewhere (Lawn & Grek, 2012), a focus on QA, alongside the expansion in data production and use, and its capacity to flow across Europe (and beyond), illustrates a shift from merely using data to provide a 'state optic for governing' (Scott, 1998) into the fabrication of European education as a legible, governable policy space. In Europeanising Education, Martin Lawn and I describe the ways that the positioning of policy actors as 'policy brokers', that is people who are located in some sense at the interface between the national and the European, 'translate' the meaning of national data into policy terms in the European arena, while at the same time continuously interpret European developments in the national space. ...
This chapter discusses the rise of a market of measurement over the last decade, as IOs and other data agencies compete for the production of datasets and measures that will become most popular and thus win over other measurement ‘products’. The production of data to support comparative assessment and evaluation is one of IOs’ key organisational remits; therefore, they have vested interests in promoting the implementation of their measures over those of others. Consequently, what we observe is not collaboration towards the construction of the most robust measures but rather a navigation of the market of measurement; this has often led to conflicts and controversies over statistical data collection, as well as market ‘inefficiencies’ and contestations.
... (1 2 7). As much as "seeing like a state" in James Scott's formulation proved so important to understanding how and why state institutions imagine and produce spatial environments in often paradoxical and damaging ways (Scott, 2008), it is nevertheless impossible to speak of 'the state' as a monolithic entity producing monolithic ways of thinking and bodies of knowledge. Bureaucrats, agency officials, policy makers, politicians, and enforcement officers all constitute the diverse array of actors that create and shape environments at the behest of 'the state.' ...
How do foresters in India understand the foundational and proximate causes of negative interactions between humans and wildlife? In this article we identify five distinct epistemological orientations towards managing human-wildlife conflicts (HWC) and drivers of those conflicts among staff at differing levels of the Indian forest bureaucracy across three protected areas in the Western Ghats. Through an empirical analysis employing Q method, we analyze forester subjectivities in relation to how forests should be managed with HWC mitigation in mind. Our results suggest forester perspectives are informed by social class and rank, geography, and experience. Forester positionality and knowledge is also at times in conflict with hegemonic perspectives of forest departments and can lead to the development of tensions in how foresters think about human-wildlife relations and managing HWC. Our analysis brings together concepts of multiple environmentalities with Gramscian ideas of the incoherent individual to theorize the varying subjectivities of individual state actors in understanding, managing, and co-producing forms of HWC. In doing so, this article contributes to contemporary debates about the theorizing of subject-making in political ecology and geography through an empirical case from one of the most important megafaunal conservation landscapes in Asia.
... This is fitting given that agriculture (from the Latin ager 'a field' and cultura 'cultivation') is a hybrid phenomenon that embodies both nature and culture (Descola [2005] 2013; Latour 1993). In contrast to modern industrial agriculture's reliance upon specialized agricultural science (Scott 1998;Henke 2008;Fitzgerald 2010), agroecology as a field grasps that the complex ecology of this hybrid phenomenon requires a more holistic approach, along with methodological and epistemological diversity. Agroecologists often use the phrase "dialogue of knowledges" or "wisdoms" (diálogo de saberes) to refer to the kind of horizontal encounters they envision among scientists, farmers, and movement activists, whose distinctive contributions are valued and incorporated into the field's ongoing development. ...
What is agroecology’s moral vision, and what are the larger metaphysical, even theological, implications of it? Even though agroecology as a field now gathers collaborators from across the natural and social sciences, as well as members of farming communities and international movements, there remains relatively little explicit and sustained reflection upon this question. My main contention is that expanding agroecology’s dialogue of wisdoms (diálogo de saberes) to include theological traditions can address this lacuna. To show how, I explore the contribution of one particular theological tradition—Catholic social teaching—and how its account of integral ecology enables agroecologists to deepen their engagement with fundamental questions raised by their own normative commitments.
... Como suele ocurrir con los modos dominantes de intervención estatal, las categorías poblacionales condensan criterios de agregación, simplificación y estandarización (Scott, 1998) que tienen poderosos efectos de realidad, porque se traducen, entre otras cosas, en la garantía o no de derechos territoriales de las poblaciones humanas. Esos efectos también impactan decisivamente en sus expectativas, condiciones y ...
Durante décadas, la legibilidad y legalidad de las poblaciones humanas asentadas en el Sistema de Parques Nacionales Naturales (SPNN) de Colombia han sido objeto de fuertes disputas sociopolíticas. Una parte importante de este debate tiene que ver con la forma como las instituciones ambientales producen categorías y datos demográficos para caracterizar a estas poblaciones. En este artículo se propone el concepto de legibilidad selectiva para describir la forma en que las instituciones estatales vinculadas a la conservación ambiental clasifican a los habitantes de las áreas protegidas del SPNN. Este tipo particular de legibilidad convierte a ciertos grupos poblacionales en aliados de la conservación mientras que proscribe a otros como amenazas que deben ser controladas. El artículo expone las limitaciones en la sistematicidad de esas clasificaciones y censos, y explora cómo pueden obstaculizar los acuerdos participativos de conservación ambiental en un contexto en el que las estrategias de securitización han monopolizado la perspectiva de protección ambiental. A partir de una revisión documental (de normativas, políticas públicas y entrevistas), se muestra que la legibilidad selectiva que subyace al conteo de poblaciones humanas dentro de áreas protegidas es un gran reto a enfrentar para reconocer los conflictos sociales y políticos que un enfoque de conservación excluyente puede reproducir. Con ello, se reivindica la necesidad de abrir espacio a estrategias más participativas de gestión de áreas protegidas.
... The creation of the plan view, however, requires inherent processes of abstraction and simplification (Scott 1998) that deemphasize the experience and characteristics of urban form. The view from the ground, a perspective that can supply this missing information, has historically been limited to ethnographic or anecdotal approaches within disciplines of urbanism and design. ...
... Defined as the activity of extracting materials from territories or the earth and converting them into value (Bridge, 2010(Bridge, , 2011, extractivism dictates a certain way of acting in the world through processes of conquest and exploitation, erasure, and terra nullius (Dunlap & Jakobsen, 2020). It organizes, orders, divides, and separates while "seeing like a State" (Scott 1999), or in the Foucauldian sense, rendering (Boyer, 2015(Boyer, , 2019. The deployment of energy infrastructures often generates new political imaginaries of nationhood, enabling or disabling certain configurations of political power (Daggett, 2019;Mitchell, 2009). ...
Low-carbon mega-infrastructures constitute one of the main institutional responses to climate change in India's agrarian settings, as they are imagined around features of 'greenness' and 'cleanness.' But this story entails a problematic construction of land, the reconfiguration of space for extractive development, and a complete disruption of agrarian social structures around features of exclusion and dispossession. This research adopts perspectives from political ecology to understand the persistence of class-caste relations, the legacy of coloniality, and the new citizenship regime underlying 'green' extractivism in India's low-carbon infrastructures. Wind turbines align with broad ethno-religious conceptions of Indian citizenship and space as Hindu, and their expansion over new border areas serves nationalist projects of territorial reconfiguration, cultural identity revivalism, border-making, and Muslim populations' surveillance.
... The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones. (Jacobs, 1961: 187) Aged buildings are a naturally occurring part of an organic, urban landscape, just as trees of different vintages are natural and necessary in a healthy forest by adding temporal variety to sylvan flora (Scott, 1998). As new buildings age, other things equal, their market value tends to decline, making them more affordable in a competitive land market. ...
What fosters spontaneous complexity in a city? What are the conditions that enable the emergence of complex social order? Where do effective action spaces and innovations appear and why? Chapter 3 argued that increasing the scope and design of central planning lowers the spontaneity and complexity of a city. This chapter examines in greater detail why that happens by addressing the question of how certain physical elements of a living city work together to spontaneously generate the diversity necessary for a complex urban order.
... The government doesn't want to admit that they failed. They are always ambitious to improve again in ways that a ruler should not do (Scott, 1998). Egypt and Arab countries and countries in Europe to date. ...
Social reality is a picture of phenomena that occur in society. Both in the real world and some literary works, such as in the novel Al-Karnak by Najib Mahfudz. This type of research is qualitative descriptive research, data collection techniques are reading, and note-taking strategies. Data analysis used data reduction techniques, data presentation, and conclusion. The aims of this study are: (1) To reveal the social reality of the material type depicted in Najib Mahfudz's novel Al-Karnak based on Emile Durkheim’s perspective ; (2) Revealing the social reality of the non-material type depicted in the novel Al-Karnak by Najib Mahfudz using Emile Durkheim's perspective. The results of this study are: (1) the social reality of the type of material in the novel Al-Karnak by Najib Mahfudz using Emile Durkheim’s perspective is buildings, electronics, and regulations; (2) Non-material social reality in Najib Mahfudz's novel Al-Karnak usingEmile Durkheim's perspective is morality, collective consciousness, collective representation, social currents, and collective mind.
... The government doesn't want to admit that they failed. They are always ambitious to improve again in ways that a ruler should not do (Scott, 1998). Egypt and Arab countries and countries in Europe to date. ...
This study aims to: 1) describe the form of illocutionary speech acts in drama script of Ghassan Kanfany's “Al-Baab” based on Searle's perspective; and 2) describe the function of illocutionary speech acts in drama script of Ghassan Kanfany's “Al-Baab” based on Searle's perspective. This research is a descriptive qualitative and field research. The primary data source is drama script of Al-Baab by Ghassan Kanafany and book of Searle Expression and Meaning: Study in The Theory of Speech Acts. Secondary data are articles and books of pragmatics. The data collection technique uses reading techniques and note-taking techniques. The data analysis technique uses data reduction, data display, and drawing conclusions. The results of this study are: 1) illocutionary speech acts in Ghassan Kanafany's drama script Al-baab based on Searle's perspective there are 5 forms (in 45 data), namely assertive speech acts (24 data), directive speech acts (10 data), commissive speech acts (4 data), expressive speech acts (5 data), declarative speech acts (2 data); and 2) illocutionary speech acts in Ghassan Kanafany's play Al-baab based on Searle's perspective there are 14 functions (in 45 data), namely argues (3 data), informs (12 data), explains (5 data), convinces (2 data), states (2 data), commands (6 data), prohibits (2 data), ask (2 data), refuse (1 data), promise (3 data), disappointed (3 data), angry (1 data), hate (1 data), and punish (2 data).
... All modern states organise space into overlapping political and economic zones in order to govern their occupants. Technologies for land control -that is, for the implementation of "practices that fix or consolidate forms of access, claiming, and exclusion for some time" (Peluso and Lund 2011: 668) -make territory possible (Elden 2010) and occupants' practices legible (Scott 1998). They enable states to extract revenue and monitor and manage subjects (Levi 1988;Li 2010;Vandergeest and Peluso 1995). ...
... The land titling process introduced fundamental changes in the organisation of space and local relations to the state, as well as new tensions within traditional Urarina political forms. To the extent that the titling process expressed the spatial logic of the state and its mechanisms of geographical and political legibility (Scott, 1998), it introduced a form of fixed territoriality and encouraged settlement patterns quite different to what older Urarina recall were previously the norm. Older Urarina speak of more dispersed and mobile settlement patterns in previous generations, in which communal longhouses were more common, rather than nuclear family dwellings, and individuals normally lived and moved frequently across the whole Chambira basin, something that remains relatively common. ...
... Building on this understanding, some scholars have distinguished informality from illegality (Polese, 2018). Polese et al. (2019) suggested that while both operate outside of state control, illegal practices contravene legal codes and informal practices may not necessarily be illegal but are concealed from the state, since according to Scott (2020) in his seminal book Seeing Like a State, the state can only "see" what falls within its apparatus of classifications, maps and metrics. ...
Purpose
The distinction between formality and informality has been a topic central for many scholarly fields. Without rejecting the usefulness of this distinction, the authors argued that instead of analyzing an empirical situation in terms of what is formal and what is informal, it could sometimes be fruitful to focus on what is stable and what is fluid.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper reports the results of review and analysis of secondary sources on the distinction between formality and informality, followed by a conceptualization of an alternative distinction between fluidity and stability. This conceptualization was inspired by a science and technology studies (STS) understanding of relations, and was assessed through applying it to a case of patient organizations’ participation in patient councils in Russia.
Findings
Stability and fluidity do not map neatly into formality and informality; rather, the stability and fluidity cut across these categories. The authors propose a view of both stability and fluidity as kinds of relations between elements of the societal fabric. The distinction proposed here could be especially fruitful when applied to analyses of (1) complex bureaucracies where formal requirements are extensive and potentially in conflict with each other and (2) oppressive situations where significant power imbalances exist.
Originality/value
Instead of providing yet another line of demarcation between formality and informality, this paper proposes a shift in attention to what is stable and what is fluid. This novel distinction can help not only in discerning how things actually work but also in bringing to the fore hitherto unnoticed forms of creativity, responsiveness and inclusion.
... This restructuring of space occurs in conjunction with transformations that occur in geographic imaginaries. A geographic imaginary is a set of beliefs or ideas held about a place that, when materialized in social practices, shape the way in which those places are perceived (Scott 1999;Zusman 2013). Geographic imaginaries result largely from the environmental, cultural, economic, and geopolitical narratives circulated by powerful actors and manifest through territorialities that are superimposed on one another over time, revealing competing ideological and discursive formations (Peet and Watts 1996). ...
In this chapter, we pose that tourism participates in a process of reterritorialization, in dialogue with past and present dynamics of deterritorialization, and arises from the actions of diverse powers that constrain Indigenous agency. We discuss tourism both as a window that reveals the tensions between environmentalconservation and Indigenous territorial rights and as a socio-political process that could resolve them. Methodologically, this work reflects extensive bibliographical review, document analysis, and fieldwork that has been conducted through numerous periodic stays in Quinquén and other Pewenche communities. First, we explore a theoretical perspective of the production of geographical imaginaries and its applications in Northern Patagonia. Next, we analyze the dual processes of exploitation/protection of the Araucaria, contextualizing them within the framework of the territorial dispossession that affected the Pewenche in the upper basin of the Bío-Bío River, an area of Chile located in the mountainous communes of Lonquimay, in the Araucanía Region, and Alto Bío-Bío, in the Bío-Bío Region, where 54% and 83% of the population identify themselves as Pewenche, respectively. This chapter continues with consideration of the Quinquén territory of northern Chilean Patagonia, where the Pewenche struggle for the Araucaria tree has resulted in a tourism development project.
... Utopic purgatory shows how any border is in fact a materialized historical claim to violence that is intertwined and mystified with law. Borders enclose space and time in state-centric terms (Scott 1998) exemplified by methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Schiller 2002) and the territorial trap (Agnew 1994) which stipulate that modernity only dwells within sovereign territoriality, and all that falls outside those borders is the brute and violent state of nature (Walker 2015). Sanctuary, on the other hand, borrows a different form of history but from a history, nonetheless. ...
Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In their separate contributions, sasha skaidra and R. Guy Emerson each elaborate on how Benjamin’s classic illuminates contemporary understandings of the politics of life and (violent) death globally. skaidra takes the Sanctuary City movement in Europe and North America as a focus. Arguing that Sanctuary politics is limited in its capacity to challenge borders in-of-themselves because the movement is caught in a false antinomy between natural and positive law that Benjamin critiques, skaidra’s contribution proposes a critique of borders that emulates Benjamin’s method which isolates violence from the mystification of legal theory. Whereas migrant justice movements threaten the state order by challenging Westphalian notions of time, Sanctuary operates like a purgatory wherein a potential messianic migrant figure could herald the end of state borders. skaidra proposes the idea of utopic purgatory as a means to isolate how Sanctuary Cities contribute to and limit a critique of borders. In the second sole-authored contribution to this section of the forum, Emerson rereads Benjamin in relation to Foucault by thinking biopower through criteria irreducible to official qualifications on life or the efficient management of populations. As a pure means without ends, violence for Benjamin cannot confirm anything external to it, be it the protection of life that comes after its elimination elsewhere or the regulation of life that follows the suppression of alterity. Instead, for Emerson, violent biopower, as pure, manifests a deadly order that immediately strikes life in a manner too abrupt to confirm rule or regulate populations. The result is a criterion for understanding both violence and life in biopower that maintains its distance from official intentions.
... In several instances, however, the practices of populations and individuals did not proceed in accordance with the plans of public water programmes and strategies, despite government interventions. Local practices of populations were more complex and antagonistic than imagined and expected (Ferguson, 1990;Scott, 1998). In terms of governmentality, the 'conduct of conduct' did not take place as intended. ...
In rural drinking water governance, the reliance on community management has permeated development programmes and water policies for decades. Moving away from a community-centric view, this paper expands the focus to a broader landscape in order to investigate how the state, citizens and other non-state actors co-produce drinking water in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. The study seeks to understand what kinds of power relations are being (re)produced among co-producing actors through the discourse of community management. The conceptualisation of power relations is undertaken by employing Foucault's governmentality perspective. As its empirical material, besides an examination of policy documents, the study utilises interviews with community Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Committees (WASHCOs), woreda (district) and regional water officials, private suppliers, NGO representatives, artisans and other actors. As a conceptual contribution, the paper makes power visible in the otherwise depoliticised literature of co-production. For governments and development practitioners, the study urges the opening up of spaces for discussion by showing how the vocabulary of community management can be appropriated to (re)produce power structures.
... Any characterization of a city, even one where you personally grew up and lived your entire life, suffers inherent limitations. The experiences of countless individuals and communities are inevitably excluded or downplayed in any attempt at universal generalization (e.g., Scott 1998). Nevertheless, comparative urban studies can potentially reveal cross-cultural and cross-temporal patterns in human settlement decisions and organization (e.g., Bettencourt et al. 2013;Ortman et al. 2013;Smith et al. 2021, concerning demographic size Copyrighted material, not for distribution 32 | Marken and Arnauld and connectivity; see also Lucero et al. 2015, concerning tropical low-density urbanism). ...
How do bureaucrats implement public policy when faced with political intermediation? This article examines this issue in the distribution of land rights to informal settlements in the municipality of São Paulo, Brazil. Land regularization is a policy established over three decades, where politicians’ requests for land titles to their constituencies play a relevant role. Based on interviews and documents, this study finds that bureaucrats adopt a twofold approach to regulate distribution: they document informal settlements, enacting eligibility criteria; then, they manage and prioritize beneficiaries, accommodating qualifying political demands. In this process, they enforce eligibility rules consistently across cases, constraining political intermediation to a rational scheme. Therefore, bureaucrats reconcile nonprogrammatic politics and policy rules by separating eligibility assessment from beneficiary selection. This paper bridges urban distributive politics and street-level bureaucracy literature by revealing that policy implementers may use technical expertise to curb political influence and negotiate conflicting interests and constraints.
It is widely accepted among political philosophers that distributive justice should be promoted by the state. This essay challenges this presumption by making two key claims. First, the state is not the only possible mechanism for attaining distributive justice. We could rely alternatively on the voluntary efforts and interactions of individuals and associations in civil society. The question of what mechanism we should rely on is a comparative and empirical one. What matters is which mechanism better promotes distributive justice. We cannot settle the question a priori in favor of the state. Second, several considerations suggest a presumption in favor of relying on civil society.
The literature on legal pluralism highlights the presence of multiple legal systems in a social field as a ‘reality’. Works on forum shopping and shopping forums inform us about the choices that disputants and forums have, in choosing forums and disputes respectively, for a favourable outcome. Drawing from my research on land disputes in the northern part of India, I argue that these legal systems are singularly insufficient to resolve contentious land disputes. Therefore, they should be seen as inadequate parts of a larger legal arena where the plurality of legal systems become a ‘necessity’. This plurality provides an answer to the difficulties faced by state and non-state legal systems in resolving land disputes. This necessity of the plurality of the legal arena in cases of land disputes should be grappled with by comprehending how land is positioned in a complex of social, political, and economic relations. Unless this position of land is grasped and addressed, a solution to land disputes seems difficult to reach. Through an ethnographic study of the accounts of a dispute between two neighbours — Ramvilas Yadav and Sanjay Sav — I show the insufficiency of both the formal legal system of the state and the non-state adjudicating mechanism of the village.
This study challenges the conventional approach to the appropriate indicators of individual success in community courts (CCs) by exploring the different meanings that CC professionals ascribe to the term “success.” CCs conduct a non-adversarial process in which team members collaborate to provide a comprehensive rehabilitative intervention for recidivist participants. We conducted fifty-three in-depth interviews with CC personnel between 2016 and 2020. According to the interviewees, standard evaluation measures such as program completion, reduced recidivism, and systemic reduction of incarceration are necessary for evaluating these courts. Yet individual success is relative, subjective, multidimensional, and must be understood as a continuum. Therefore, it should also be measured by looking at significant processes of change that participants have undergone in various aspects of their lives. Study findings can be translated into measurable well-being indicators, moving the “what works” discourse forward to include more nuanced and diverse manifestations of success in studies evaluating specialized courts.
Much attention has been focused on how states produce knowledge about the people they govern; far less has been written about those aspects of society that states choose to keep obscure. This book makes an original contribution to understanding state ignorance by focusing on one of the most complex and contested social issues of our day: the governance of irregular migrants. Tracing the evolution of state monitoring and control of irregular migrants from the 1960s to the present day across France, Germany and the United Kingdom, the authors develop a theory of 'state ignorance', setting out three complementary ways of understanding such oversights: ignorance as omission, ignorance as strategy, and ignorance as ascription. The findings upend dominant approaches, which tend to assume that states are preoccupied with producing knowledge about their populations, and argues that states have actually been keen to sustain ignorance about their unauthorised populations.
Much attention has been focused on how states produce knowledge about the people they govern; far less has been written about those aspects of society that states choose to keep obscure. This book makes an original contribution to understanding state ignorance by focusing on one of the most complex and contested social issues of our day: the governance of irregular migrants. Tracing the evolution of state monitoring and control of irregular migrants from the 1960s to the present day across France, Germany and the United Kingdom, the authors develop a theory of 'state ignorance', setting out three complementary ways of understanding such oversights: ignorance as omission, ignorance as strategy, and ignorance as ascription. The findings upend dominant approaches, which tend to assume that states are preoccupied with producing knowledge about their populations, and argues that states have actually been keen to sustain ignorance about their unauthorised populations.
Recent debates about “green” authoritarianism have focused on the institutional features of state-led coercive environmentalism. However, the role of various non-state actors in the greening of authoritarian states has remained largely unexplored. Carrying out a case study of Vietnamese‒German development cooperation in the environmental and climate spheres, this article examines the interaction between Vietnamese state institutions and international donors. The article argues that donors play an important role in greening the state policy agenda in Vietnam by funding environmental projects and facilitating knowledge sharing. Nonetheless, donors have very limited freedom to push the political process beyond policymaking and foster meaningful policy implementation. Development practitioners in Vietnam often find themselves caught in a policymaking vacuum, where policymaking is a never-ending process and implementation remains limited. These findings raise broader questions about the effectiveness of climate-related development finance for environmental governance under authoritarian regimes.
This chapter examines the cultural and ecological significance of the institution of spirit forests among the Indigenous upland groups of the Central Annamitic Cordillera. The data were collected from two villages inhabited by Katuic-speaking shifting cultivators of the Sekong province of Laos. Spirit forests are demarcated areas in the forest that are believed to be inhabited and controlled by powerful spirits. Each spirit area is marked by cosmologically motivated taboos relating to human use. Burning and clearing forest for cultivation is categorically forbidden in such areas, accounting for the fact that most spirit areas consist of old-growth forest of high biodiversity. Any village territory tends to have a number of spirit forests, which are locally regarded as an integral part of the rotational swidden cultivation system. These spirit areas are believed to be the sources of life and fertility in the forest, allowing swidden fields to yield plentiful harvests and fallows to regenerate new forest. The Central Annamite forest landscape counts as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. My general argument in this chapter is that the traditional Katuic way of managing their forests has significantly contributed to the high biodiversity and long-term viability of this landscape. Yet, today, the Indigenous populations are being increasingly excluded from their traditional forest lands, or precluded from using them, by state forest laws and development policies, industrial forestry projects, or exclusionary conservation projects. As a result, Indigenous lifeways and livelihoods are under threat and their sustainable forest management practices are in the process of collapsing.
Much contemporary debate in environmental policy concerns the role of the state in addressing climate change and other ecological crises. This chapter addresses this question at a higher level of abstraction, appraising the conditions under which we might expect states in capitalist societies to act to prevent ecological catastrophe—or not. To do so it brings together two largely parallel debates: the first, among eco-Marxists, concerns the relationship between capitalist and ecological crises; the second, among state theorists, concerns the state’s role in capitalism. Putting these two debates together, I outline four ideal-types reflecting different combinations along two axes—one mapping whether capitalism’s destruction of nature is also self-destructive; and one mapping the degree of state autonomy from capital. I examine which kinds of state action we might expect in each case and draw out the implications for political strategy.
p>This paper seeks to refine scholarly thinking regarding invasive species and decolonial politics in plantation ecologies by following bamboo’s contradictory relationships to various parties on the island of Jamaica. Planters imported bamboo to Jamaica for its remarkable propensity to grow, a quality that soon let it loose on the island’s hinterlands. There, bamboo allied with a people whose flight mirrored its own: Maroons, or fugitive African and Indigenous Taino people who built autonomous communities in the island’s interior. Lately, bamboo is on the move again, precipitating an ecological “invasion” in the eyes of the island’s conservationists and an opportunity for green growth from the perspective of its business interests. These parties, though differing in many ways, both approach bamboo through an idiom of mastery with roots in the plantation and colonial forestry. Maroons, on the other hand, model a creative openness to more-than-human encounters, building relationships to bamboo that are both quotidian and sacred, salutary and trying, but which point toward Maroon autonomy. I offer the concept of fugitive ecologies to attune scholars to these patchy geographies of partial freedom Maroons build with this “invasive” collaborator at the plantation’s edges. Whereas existing paradigms within the environmental humanities tend to focus on species-level classification, fugitive ecologies allow us to see how plants and animals—native, invasive, or otherwise—can “become with” Black freedom struggles.
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The article is a preliminary effort to join neo-positive and historical institutional analysis from comparative politics with insights from discursive and phenomenological analysis. It highlights a message arising from a South Korean film related to moral–ethical dimensions and the implications of development policy. Taken in symbolic as well as empirical terms, the film proffers that economic development policy not attending to political institutional development—including correct institutional practices at the micro-level—is feeding Asia’s demons (e.g., asuras) rather than its forces of stability and (rational, democratic, participatory) political order. The film suggests that institutional atrophy and social decay may emerge from the breakdown of political institutions and participatory politics as a political system moves from rationalized institutions and practices into what the current work calls, “mafia politics.” Political ritual and political theatre are actively employed in the film in ritualized acts of the desecration of political order. The current work suggests that the analysis of symbolic representations relating to ritual politics and performativity (e.g., “political theatre”) located in certain art forms, such as international film, may be useful in studies of religion and politics, and in qualitative comparative political and historical institutional analysis more broadly.
Water schemes that rely on user (co-) ownership and collective action have been described in the irrigation sector for a long time. Still, interest in such forms of (co-) investment in the domestic/multiple use sector is more recent. To address the persisting issue of rural water service, (what has been coined) self-supply is proclaimed to be a (supposedly) low-cost, sustainable manner to attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). User (co-) investments are to be promoted and realized through the creation of an enabling policy environment and development of, and training on, low-cost technologies through government and NGO support and private sector-steered access to such technologies. In this article, we apply the Rooted Water Collectives (RWC) framework to describe two such schemes, one in South Africa and one in Switzerland. The data collection followed an action research methodology, with the main author being involved in interventions in all three schemes. We show here that these collectives create positions of purpose within societies and that what motivates people is to help themselves and contribute to the greater good of the community. This article shows that interventions to foster and sustain such collective actions that follow a neoliberal/modernist imaginary negatively affect their viability since these collectives, through their other-than-capitalist interactions, form part of and depend on an alternative imaginary. We conclude that interventions aiming to strengthen forms of collective action can only succeed if they recognize contextuality, unequal power relationships, and grass-rooted forms of interdependence and collaboration, and actively build on and work toward such alternative, more convivial imaginaries.
Why is support the radical right higher in some geographic locations than others? This article argues that what is frequently classified as the “rural” bases of radical-right support in previous research is in part the result of something different: communities that were in the historical “periphery” in the center–periphery conflicts of modern nation-state formation. Inspired by a classic state-building literature that emphasizes the prevalence of a “wealth of tongues”—or nonstandard linguistic dialects in a region—as a definition of the periphery, we use data from more than 725,000 geo-coded responses in a linguistic survey in Germany to show that voters from historically peripheral geographic communities are more likely to vote for the radical right today.
A living city is an incubator of ideas and a congenial place for entrepreneurial discovery, innovation, and economic development. Such creativity emerges from trial and error, which entails not only successes but also failure, conflict, and disappointment. Great cities, like flesh-and-blood people, can also be very unpleasant, annoying, and sometimes dangerous. Indeed, any city that aspires to greatness will have something to offend everyone. This chapter looks at the sources of these unpleasant by-products, reviews efforts by some prominent figures in modernist urban planning and design influenced by “cartesian rationalism,” and critiques them within the Jacobsian-cum-market-process framework.
In the previous chapter, we examined the limits of urban micro-interventions from a Jacobsian Market Urbanist framework. Here we use that framework to address a different but related set of questions: To what extent is it feasible to consciously plan for “urban vitality”? How much political authority is needed to accomplish this? How workable are some of the recent, imaginative proposals for city planning and rebuilding? We also analyze the nature of different kinds of rules and how they relate to the difference between “governance” and “government,” which entails digging more deeply into some of the concepts we have already been using.
The arrival of unauthorised migrants at the shores of southern Europe has been sensationalized into a migration 'crisis' in recent years. Yet, these depictions fail to grasp migrants' experiences and fall short of addressing a more complex phenomenon. In this original ethnography, Marthe Achtnich examines migrants' journeys and economic practices underpinning mobility to recast how we think of migration. Bringing the perspectives and voices of migrants to the fore, she traces sub-Saharan migrants' journeys along one of the world's most dangerous migration routes: through the Sahara Desert, Libya, and then by boat to Malta in Europe. Examining what she calls 'mobility economies', Achtnich demonstrates how these migrant journeys become sources of profit for various actors. By focusing on migrants' long and difficult journeys, the book prompts a necessary rethinking of mobile life, economic practices under contemporary capitalism, and the complex relationship between the two.
High in the eastern Himalayan foothills, people had a unique vantage point on the British Empire. The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj presents a history of Mizoram in Northeast India told from historical Indigenous perspectives of encounters with empire from the 1890s to the 1920s. Based on a wide range of research and enriched by sources newly digitised by the author through the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, Kyle Jackson sheds new light on the complex and violent processes of how and why diverse populations of highland clans in the Indo-Burmese borderlands came to redefine themselves as Christian Mizos. By using historical Indigenous concepts and logics to approach early twentieth-century imperial encounters, Jackson guides readers into a decolonial history of Northeast India, demonstrating the value of thinking not just about the histories of colonized peoples and concepts but also with them.
In diesem Artikel stehen die Wechselwirkungen zwischen einer autoritären Präsidialregierung und dem Management von Pandemiedaten im Fokus. Ein besonderes Augenmerk liegt auf der Analyse der Datenpolitiken in diesem autoritären Kontext unter Einsatz von Hayat Eve Sığar (HES), dem türkischen Kontaktverfolgungs- und Proximitysystem sowie der dazugehörigen Anwendung. Ethnografisch werden die komplexen und sich ständig verändernden Landschaften viraler Daten erkundet. In diesem Zusammenhang wird verdeutlicht, wie die Frage der (Un-)Regierbarkeit inmitten der Pandemie durch die politische Gestaltung und Nutzung von Daten wahrgenommen, verhandelt und herausgefordert wird. Mit einem speziellen Fokus auf autoritäre Geflechte trägt dieser Beitrag zur Analyse von Datenpolitiken in digitalen, datengesättigten Gesellschaften bei. Autoritäre Geflechte, so das Argument, formen sich in Zeiten von Krisen wie der viralen Pandemie flexibel neu. Diese wirken subtil und schleichend auf die Machtverhältnisse im Zusammenhang mit Daten ein und beeinflussen die datenpolitischen Auseinandersetzungen, bleiben jedoch oft im Verborgenen.
Societies are always gathered around a particular object or an idea that serves as its totem and its driving principle. This conscious arrangement of society, especially around an ideal, has been termed in history as utopias, which consciously moulds an individual’s behaviour inhabiting it for the desired future goal. However, in the hyper-humanistic period, called by James Scott as High-modernism, we can see a drastic truncation in the scope and range of those desired future forms, limited only to economic and material wellbeing. The aim of this paper therefore is to look into an example of the utopian experiment that substantially differs from a high-modernist worldview. The paper will analyse one such futuristic spiritual experiment at Auroville and try to trace its similarities as well as its difference from the hyper-humanistic ideals of modernity.
Margins, borders, and buffers are areas of exceptional interest. In such contact zones, people who normally occupy different social worlds and often hold radically different ontological viewpoints come into close proximity or form relations based on trade or mutual antipathy for state structures. This work investigates the use of deserts, marshes, and mountains as shatter zones or regions of refuge by ancient Egyptians and those located within their empire.
This article argues that to understand housing as domestic only is a misconception. People intensify the use of their homes in ways that create substantial economic opportunities, urban services, and a range of social protections for themselves and their communities. The research presented here introduces the concept of 'space-use intensity', in fluenced by time-use surveys, Jane Jacobs's ideas on mixed-use, and the continuum approach to the informal economy, as conceptualized by Elinor Ostrom. Further, it describes the 'house interview' methodology devised to document spaceuse intensity and presents findings from houses in informal se lements in Bogotá, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, and Dakar. The data reveal that houses are less than a third residential (29 per cent), almost half of the uses are economic (47 per cent), and they provide a fair share of urban or community services (24 per cent). This visual methodology demonstrates that local governments are overlooking 83.8 per cent of the activities taking place within homes. In sum, the evidence discussed here shows that homes contribute signi ficantly to the urban economy and public services, making space-use intensity analysis instrumental in the design of eff ective housing, urban, and social protection policies.
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