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International political economy and international political sociology meet in Jakarta: Feminist research agendas seen through everyday life
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This intervention shares images and stories from the women evictees in Jakarta who collectively give voice to the psychic, physical, and material injuries inflicted by state dispossession in the city. Engaging Ann Laura Stoler's (2013) language to expose the politics of ruination and preservation, we illustrate the gendered nature of the remaking of life on the most wasted of urban landscapes. The focus of this piece is Kampung Akuarium, a neighborhood violently evicted in April 2016 as part of a broader evictions regime in Jakarta under the governorship of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, popularly known as Ahok. In the aftermath, Kampung Akuarium became the most restive of Jakarta's landscapes as residents returned to make claims for justice and compensation, and to remake their lives directly on the rubble of their old homes in defiance of the city government. Flanked by the preserved warehouses of the VOC, the ruined neighbourhood ultimately became a site where colonial histories, state- and capital-inflicted expropriation and ruination, and gendered forms of injury and struggle all found material modes of expression alongside one another.
The landscape of Guahan/Guam, an organized unincorporated territory of the USA and the largest and southernmost island of the Mariana Islands archipelago, is visibly marked by chain link fences that enclose land taken for use by the US military. This US military presence on Guam is evidence of a long military colonial history that has stressed, particularly under US rule, the importance of the island's strategic location. The ‘fence,’ a frequently used but rarely defined expression, refers to a multiplicity of lines, most of which recreate a dichotomous view of military/local relations, and help to make invisible the complex web of identities that go through, over, and beyond its real and imagined spaces. Working from an understanding that theory must be grounded in experience, this article draws on interviews to explore the multiple meanings of the fence. It focuses on the ways the colonized, militarized, and gendered spaces of the fence promote US values, interests, and security concerns but also mark points of resistance to militarization and colonization. Exploring the ways colonization and militarization are played out on the bodies of those who live and work on the island, the article concludes that tearing down the ‘fence’ must include both demilitarization and decolonization, but in ways that transcend, rather than reproduce its present gendered and dichotomous spaces.
The dispossession of urban communities across class and racial lines is a global phenomenon linked to the expansion of international investment in the development of ‘exemplary’ city space. However, city evictions are also historically-informed and gendered processes which are continuous with past colonial and postcolonial urban rationalisation projects. Drawing on testimonies of women evictees in Jakarta, as well as interviews with public housing managers, this article details the gendered nature of the rationalisation of urban life in the context of a contemporary evictions regime. We argue that the rationalisation of urban space serves to sharpen the gender order by placing material constraints on women’s roles, limiting their economic activities, and defining them as hygiene-responsible housewives. Further, and in turn, the limited provision of ‘rusunawa’ public housing, which we show to be a gendered spatial and social transition informed by state doctrine on the family, provides the state with justification for dispossession itself. Finally, women’s everyday acts of refusal and resistance show not only that kampung forms of social life continue to be preserved in Jakarta, but also that rationalisation itself is a negotiated and contingent process.
International relations (IR) feminists have significantly impacted the way we analyze the world and power. The project/process that has led to the separation/specialization of feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist global political economy (FGPE) does not constitute progress but instead ends up embodying forms of violence that erase the materialist bases of our intellectual labor’s divisions (Agathangelou 1997), the historical and social constitution of our formations as intellectuals and subjects. This amnesiac approach evades our personal lives and colludes with those forces that allow for the violence that comes with abstraction. These “worrisome signs” should be explained if we are to move FSS and FGPE beyond a “merger” (Allison 2015) that speaks only to some issues and some humans in the global theater.
Notions of value, reproduction, and security—concepts and practices—are both “security” and “economy” concerns. From a slave/post/neo/ colonial practice’s point of view, normativized ideas—value, primitive accumulation, reproduction, militarization, (in)security—are interrupted
and stretched. Our understanding of violence becomes broader. Articulating a decolonial/feminist/queer compositional reading, I problematize this entrenched divide of FGPE/FSS research program. This reading interrupts normative global reproductions of meaning and value across time, asking new political questions that attend to the
highest stake of politics: existence. It places untimely moments/products in poetic relationship and generates possibilities of meaning and value
for an existence otherwise.
What does taking dead bodies seriously tell us about the state of global security studies? Dead bodies play different roles in conventional, human, and critical security studies and thus thinking about them opens conversations among these different approaches. This paper pushes further to argue that scholars should think about the global dead as an analytical category. It demonstrates that doing so will allow us to rethink the measurement of war casualties, and examine the assumptions embedded in quantitative casualty data, the ethnography of these numbers, and the politics of representing them. Establishing the dead as an analytical category also widens the lens of dead body management to examine how dead bodies are not only objects but also subjects of security. This should lead us to ask about the politics behind how they are secured and governed, as well as the political and legal structures in place to manage them. Corpses matter for how we define security and they matter a great deal for a wide variety of security behavior. Up until now, security scholars have treated them implicitly but we can understand much more about the politics of the dead if we make them an explicit category of study.
A rural poor woman wants to withdraw from the microcredit scheme, but her husband slaps her when she even suggests not renewing her loan.
While feminists usually try to ground the meanings that they study, theorizing the mundane or the everyday may very well represent a detour—or even a dead end—if bread-and-butter issues related to the security and economic well-being of ordinary women and men are ignored. What value does feminist theorizing (even if it draws from women's lived experiences) have in war-affected contexts where meeting immediate needs is paramount? At what point does the theorizing of the body under such circumstances become a means to satisfying intellectual fetishes? Theorizing the everyday is messy because it has to contend with the immediate social setting in which popular culture is inseparable from the economic materiality of the conditions of oppression.
Garbage is stuff that matters: the generation, disposal, and management of waste represent some of the most visceral flows in our society. Yet most international scholars continue to regard it as trivial to focus on the mundane practices and menial materiality associated with managing rubbish. Contra this dissociation, and through an analytics of assemblages, I argue that international theory can (and nowadays must) encompass both the grand designs of diplomacy and the mundane cosmopolitics of everyday life. In the everyday, the “international” is embodied, performed, and domesticated. I chart these multi-scalar connections as they unfold in Sydney, Australia, demonstrating how a focus on a global challenge such as climate change has been redefining the mundane realities of waste management.
Introduction: Situating Gender Scholarship in International Political Economy
- Juanita Elias
- Adrienne Roberts
Juanita Elias and Adrienne Roberts, 'Introduction: Situating Gender Scholarship in
International Political Economy', in Adrienne Roberts and Juanita Elias (eds), Handbook on
the International Political Economy of Gender (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018), pp. 1-20.
Re)Framing the Relationship between Discourse
- Hudson
Hudson, '(Re)Framing the Relationship between Discourse', p. 415.
The Condition of Market Emergence in Indonesia: Coloniality as Exclusion and Translation
- Lisa Tilley
Lisa Tilley, 'The Condition of Market Emergence in Indonesia: Coloniality as Exclusion and
Translation' (PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, Coventry, 2017).
The Everyday Political Economy of Southeast Asia
See also: Juanita Elias and Lena Rethel (eds), The Everyday Political Economy of Southeast
Asia. Politics and Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).