Race in the Anthropocene: Coloniality, Disavowal and the Black Horizon
... Here, we seek to expand upon our initial presentation of 'Abyssal Geography' (Chandler & Pugh, 2023aPugh & Chandler, 2023; see also Dekeyser, 2023b;Grove, 2023;Phillip-Durham, 2023;Philogene Heron, 2023), and subsequent discussions of the importance of the figurative nature of abyssal work (Carter-White et al., 2024;Chandler & Pugh, 2024;Gfoellner, 2024;Jellis, 2024;Lesutis, 2024;Pohl, 2024;Puente-Lozano, 2024). The purpose of this paper is to explore negative approaches and the stakes involved in the 'metapolitical' (Chipato & Chandler, 2024) framing of the abyssal approach. The distinction between these approaches is at the heart of debate and discussion of questions of ontology in critical Black studies (see Hart, 2020, for a useful overview) and we seek to draw on some of this discussion in this paper. ...
... 173-174; see also Pugh, 2023b, for the lure of the unavailable world for algorithmic governance). Thus, perhaps counterintuitively, the emphasis on the negative, on non-relation and the unknowable, crucial to the project of the undoing or the unmaking of the subject, becomes generative for new forms of governance (Chipato & Chandler, 2024;Pande et al., 2019). By bringing in nonontology and non-relation as unobtainable forces in the world, these approaches risk appearing little different to the relational approaches they critique, which also seek to enable the human subject to think beyond the reductive categories of understanding of a modernist ontology. ...
... Working otherwise, Abyssal Geography seeks to expose Human Geography as an irreconcilably modern project, committed to moving beyond the limits of 'thinkability'. As we have drawn out in this paper, ours is a 'metapolitical' critique (Chipato & Chandler, 2024): a politics not of otherwise worlds, but of problematisation, committed to ending assumptions of world and subject rather than enriching them. ...
The ‘relational turn’ has been widely embraced in Human Geography and related fields over the last couple of decades as an alternative to the hubris of modern and colonial reasoning. Yet, increasingly, concerns over the extent that contempo- rary conceptualisations are overly ‘generative’, ‘productivist’ and ‘affirmational’ has come to the fore. There is significant interest in the possibilities for more negative understandings, highlighting failure, attrition, voiding, exhaustion, im- potentiality, incompleteness and attributes of ‘non-relation’. We draw out how, to date, most of these approaches have developed a hermeneutic approach, seeking to bring the negative and the non-relational into the world as forces of disrup- tion and refusal, holding open other possibilities of knowing and being in the world and enabling alternative political imaginaries. This paper seeks to out- line an alternative mode of critique, one that places both relational and negative approaches under the scrutiny of an ‘abyssal’ approach. Here, after Fanon, the world violently forged into the global colour line is bifurcated via the construc- tion of the modern subject, capable of reading itself as a subject in the world and through Human Geography as a field of study. In this always already antiblack world, the goal of ‘Abyssal Geography’ is not to continue worlding the modern subject in new ways, but to analyse and critique the mechanisms and shifts in critical thought through which Human Geography continues to salvage and to redeem the purchase of the modern subject and the world.
Taking aesthetics as a racial regime of modernity, the focus of Bradley’s Anteaesthetics is experiments in Black art which are not ‘worlding but an illimitable descent made to come before the world’. With a powerful introduction reflecting upon Nina Simone at the Montreal Jazz festival, and chapters which take us through 19th-century paintings, cinema, texts, video installations, and digital art, Anteaesthetics forces us to encounter the horror, beauty, and racially gendered dimensions of a negative inhabitation substantiated through the absolutely dispossessive field of worlding aesthetic refrains. Working against the grain of debate, aesthetics is not generatively enrolled for the modern subject possessed of ontological security to productively world itself in new ways. Rather, Anteaesthetics enables us to critically interrogate how investing in aesthetics requires working with the negative, taking an uncompromising stance towards aesthetics as a constitutive force of the ongoing violent legacies of modernity.
International studies scholarship has benefitted from insights from anthropology, peace and conflict studies, geography, and other disciplines to craft a thoughtful set of reflections and considerations for researchers to take with them “into the field” when they embark on “fieldwork.” In this essay, we map out a history of critical approaches to fieldwork, starting with the encounters that initially encouraged reflection on the positionality of the researcher and the power dynamics of research. Building on decolonial feminist scholarship, we show how a commitment to reflexive practice “in the field” has developed further, through a reflection on the self as a researcher and on “the field” as a construct. This ethical and political commitment prompts a rethinking of key concepts in fieldwork (and research more generally), including those of “the researcher,” “the research participant” (or “population”), “expertise,” and what constitutes “data” and “knowledge.” We argue that a preferable approach to critical fieldwork is grounded in feminist and decolonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist politics. This approach is committed not just to reflecting critically on “the field” and the interactions of the researcher within it but also to challenging the divisions, exclusions, and structures of oppression that sustain the separations between “here” and “there,” “researcher” and “researched,” and “knower" and “known.”
In recent years, scholars of global politics have shown that issues of race and white supremacy lie at the centre of international history, the birth of the field of International Relations, and contemporary theory. In this article, I argue that race plays an equally central role in the 21st century’s current and future crises: the set of systemic risks that includes intensifying climate change, deepening inequality, the endemic instabilities of capitalism, and migration. To make this argument, I describe the contours of the current crisis and show how racism amplifies its effects. In short, capitalism’s winners and losers and the effects of climate change fall along racial lines, amplifying both direct and indirect racial discrimination against non-white migrants and states in the Global South. These interdependent crises will shape the next 50 years of international politics and will likely perpetuate the vicious cycle of global racial inequality. Accordingly, this article presents a research agenda for all IR scholars to explore the empirical implications of race in the international system, integrate marginalised perspectives on global politics from the past and present into their scholarship, and address the most pressing political issues of the 21st century.
This article starts from the observation that practices of ‘algorithmic governmentality’ or ‘governance by data’ are reconfiguring modes of social relationality and collectivity. By building, first, on an empirical exploration of digital bordering practices, we qualify these emergent algorithmic categories as ‘clusters’—pulsing patterns distilled from disaggregated data. As fluid, modular, and ever-emergent forms of association, these ‘clusters’ defy stable expressions of collective representation and social recognition. Second, we observe that this empirical analysis resonates with accounts that diagnosed algorithmic governance as a threat to legal subjectivity and socio-political cohesion, and called for a reinvigoration of democratic values and their re-alignment with new ‘infrastructural publics’. Against this backdrop, however, we explore alternatives avenues of legal imagination by pushing in a different (somewhat opposite) direction. Against the re-inscription of liberal categories, we linger with the promise and prospect of illegibility as resistance against the foreclosure of future potentialities in algorithmic forms of subject-making. Instead of falling back on the projection of autonomous human agency and liberal subjectivity to counteract the ‘cluster’, we imagine emancipatory expressions of resistance that are enacted through fugitive, opaque, and experimental collectivities.
The contemporary era of the Anthropocene has undermined linear views of progress and development. In its wake, alternative futural imaginaries have become central to critical and decolonial accounts in the discipline of International Relations. We argue that radical imaginaries of alternative non-modern futures risk failing to account fully for the ongoing violence and exclusions of modernity. We identify two strands of Anthropocene work: firstly, the critique posed by ‘posthuman’ ontologies of relation and entanglement, seeking new modes of governance in the face of climate catastrophe; secondly, decolonial affirmative ways of being, drawn from the experiences of the dispossessed in modernity. Both these approaches to futurity seek to move beyond a modernist world to new futures. In our argument, we set out an alternative perspective, the Black Horizon, which rejects the call to imagine new productive futures, and instead focusses on the deconstruction of modernity, in search of ending the current world of antiblackness, rather than critique or affirm its existence. Thus, even though contemporary critical and decolonial approaches stress the attention to ontology, alterity and difference, in their attempts to ground alternative worlds in existing practices or knowledges, they offer salvific alternatives, whilst leaving the foundations of our current world intact.
The field of international peacebuilding increasingly recognizes that violence is not a unitary phenomenon, but an array of constraints on human flourishing spanning physical, structural, cultural, and symbolic registers. This recognition provides corollary insights that building peace requires, at the very least, the reduction of violence in its complex and interlocking forms. But despite a normative commitment to reducing diverse forms of violence, the field of international peacebuilding has struggled to address the potentials for epistemic and ontological violence following from the inherent Eurocentrism of its own disciplinary origins and orientations. As a result of its exclusion of ways of knowing and being not authorized by Western academic discourses, the theory and practice of international peacebuilding frequently presumes the universalizability of Eurocentric modes of social, political, and economic organization viewed as ontologically destructive by Indigenous and other communities that continue to suffer under conditions of global coloniality.
In the contemporary moment of the Anthropocene there appears to be a growing consensus on the need to move beyond the key modernist binary, the Human/Nature divide. We draw out a shared understanding at work in International Relations across critical approaches in Science and Technology Studies (STS), new materialist, and material feminist fields, as well as critical Indigenous, decolonial and pluriversal thought. This is an understanding that seeks to go beyond the limits of modern epistemological and ontological assumptions of human exceptionalism. These approaches seek to rework both sides of the Human/Nature divide: to reconstitute the Human as a knowing, responsive and relational subject, no longer tainted by hierarchies of race and coloniality; while, redistributing agential capacities of responsivity, care and relation beyond the Human. Drawing from work across the broad field of critical Black studies, we flag up the limitations of these entangled, relational posthuman and more-than-human imaginaries, which can easily reproduce hierarchies of subordination and control. We suggest that another approach to the Human/Nature divide is possible, a critical perspective we call the Black Horizon, focused upon the task of deconstruction: an approach which emphasises difference rather than identity, negation rather than addition, critique rather than affirmation.
This article explores ways of decolonising Development Studies by: (1) examining the discipline’s tendencies towards what some have called ‘imperial amnesia’, that is, proclivities towards disavowing if not erasing European colonialism, most evident in 1950s–1960s Modernisation theory, but also more recently in the work of such analysts as Bruce Gilley and Nigel Biggar; (2) considering the opportunities and perils of ‘epistemic decolonisation’, that is, ways of decolonising knowledge production in the discipline, including the limits of ‘non-Eurocentric’ pedagogies; and (3) reflecting on forms of material decolonisation (e.g., the reduction of socioeconomic inequalities by improving better access to education or resisting the corporatisation of publicly funded research) that need to accompany any epistemic decolonisation for the latter to be meaningful.
The local turn in Peace Studies has raised important practical and normative questions around the ‘liberal peace’ approach that defines post-Cold War international peacebuilding. However, recent critical interventions reveal the limits of the local turn’s engagement with themes including race, gender, class, and colonialism. Engaging Indigenous authors who ground diverse conceptualizations of peace in the restitution of Indigenous land, the following discussion shows how the local turn’s theoretical framing of indigeneity risks erasing decolonial accounts of Indigenous peacebuilding in settler-colonial societies through its conceptual reliance on international intervention and normative prioritization of hybrid peace outcomes.
This article offers a novel conceptual framework to enable empirical investigation and analysis of the different ways in which contemporary data practices are entangled with colonialism. Departing from recent theorizations of the politics and political economy of data and data-driven technologies, including the theory of so-called data colonialism, I argue for a historicized and differentiated account of the colonial processes of dispossession at stake in datafication and the proliferation of data-dependent technologies. By undertaking a broad engagement with decolonial thinking, I demonstrate the need to move beyond an examination of how everyday life is datafied to be extracted like a natural resource. I show that such analogies are inapt and occlude colonial relations reproduced through datafication. Our understanding of these processes would find a firmer footing not in historical analogy, but in our colonial present. I propose that the modality of data's power lies not in the extraction of value as such, but in the interaction of orders of knowledge with orders of value. This reordering both acts as a motor of further colonial epistemic violence and creates the conditions for a new apparatus of racialized dispossession. Giving examples from migration governance, I set out its targets, objects, and operations.
Zusammenfassung [english see below]
Dekolonialität, dekoloniale Perspektiven, dekoloniale Methoden und die Dekolonisierung des Denkens sind allesamt bedeutsame Schlagwörter in den akademischen Debatten der letzten Jahre geworden. Kaum, so scheint es, führt ein Weg daran vorbei. Doch was bedeuten diese Begriffe und Konzepte eigentlich und welche Forderungen gehen mit ihnen einher? Das vorliegende Kapitel verfolgt drei Ziele: Erstens soll ein Verständnis dafür geschaffen werden, was dekoloniale Perspektiven als dekolonisierende transformative Praxis fordern und vorschlagen. Zweitens soll ein Verständnis dafür geschaffen werden, was dies innerhalb der Friedensforschung bedeutet. Drittens werden einige zentrale Punkte aufgezeigt, die angesprochen werden müssen, wenn verhindert werden soll, dass die Dekolonisierung von Friedensforschung und-Psychologie eine Metapher wird. Das Kapitel zeigt entlang von vier Dimensionen auf, wie Kolonialität sich manifestiert und welchen Mehrwert dekoloniale Perspektiven für Friedensforschung und insbesondere Friedenspsychologie dort leisten können: (a) Wissens(re)produktion, (b) Forschungsmethoden, (c) Institutionen und Strukturen sowie (d) intra-und interpersonelle Mechanismen. Alle Abschnitte werden durch Beispiele und Orientierungsfragen begleitet. Insofern bietet das Kapitel keine Blaupause, sondern appelliert daran, dekoloniale Perspektiven als eine transformatorische Praxis zu verstehen, die für den Aufbau von Frieden unerlässlich ist.
Abstract
Decoloniality, decolonial perspectives, decolonial methods and the decolonization of thought have all become significant buzzwords in the academic debates of recent years. What do these terms and concepts mean, and what demands do they entail for peace studies and activism? This chapter pursues three goals: First, to create an understanding of what decolonial perspectives argue and propose as a transformative decolonizing practice. Second, to create an understanding of what this means within peace studies. Third, to highlight some topics that should be addressed to avoid that decolonizing peace studies and peace psychology becomes a metaphor. The chapter discusses along four dimensions how coloniality is reflected there and what added value decolonial perspectives can provide for peace research and peace psychology: (a) knowledge (re)production, (b) research methods, (c) institutions and structures, and (d) intra-and interpersonal mechanisms. All sections are accompanied by examples and orientation questions. In this respect, the chapter does not offer a blueprint but appeals to understand decolonial perspectives as a transformational practice that is imperative for engaging in peace research and practice.
Within emerging fields of research focusing on neuro‐urbanism, neuro‐geographies, and biosociality, few studies have experimented with using these emerging methods to research socio‐spatial life in communities that suffer high levels of violence and other socio‐spatial injustices. Extending nonrepresentational accounts of the body, emotions, and affect, this paper discusses an experimental geography‐neuroscience collaboration working in a favela of Rio de Janeiro to explore the embodied urban emotions and affects of violently bordered urban communities. Extending an emphasis on nonrepresentational, corporeal spatial practices to a study of women living in Brazil's favelas, we use electrodermal activity (EDA) biosensors to propose a novel methodological and analytical approach that focuses on forms of affective debilitation and resilience. Theoretically, we draw on biopolitical theory and border theory to propose a method that avoids oppositions between biopolitical and necropolitical accounts of borders.The aim of the research, conducted in June 2016, is to understand levels of affective debilitation or resilience amongst women living in the Mare Complex of favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Using a wearable biosensor, we took measures of electrodermal activity of 8 women as they undertook one of their routine, everyday journeys within the favela. We also conducted an hour‐long qualitative interview with each participant. We find that for all our participants, navigating the favela's violent border spaces subjects their bodies to very high levels of affective and cognitive demand. Whilst some women responded to this with stress reactions that created acute levels of affective debilitation, others responded very strongly, showing exceptionally high levels of affective resilience. Our research highlights the affective labour required of women to co‐construct urban borders, and emphasizes their agency and forms of everyday resistance in shaping the favela's affective atmospheres.
The lure of an unavailable world is becoming increasingly prominent in Geography and related disciplines. The concern is that much research today remains affirmational – still grasping and instrumentalising being and relation – and that, whilst no doubt modified in such developments as the relational and ontological turns, this nevertheless continues the legacies of the modern episteme in new ways. Indeed, there is a marked momentum, across the social sciences and humanities, from cultural geography (Bissell et al, 2021) to computer (Galloway, 2022) and Black studies (Harney and Moten, 2021), to read the reduction of the world to available ontic and ontological cuts and distinctions as a form of violence. In response, tropes of the non‐relational, non‐ontological, the negative, nothingness, the void, absence, and the abyss, for examples – what could be called ‘unavailable geographies’ – are of growing appeal and interest. This paper, foregrounding the importance of tracking how the material forces of history are read as enabling for the emergence of any new problem space, provides a distinctive pathway into this sense of a critical shift in Western critique. By way of an illustrative example, it focuses upon how the proliferation of logistics (broadly framed here as the logic of obtaining the world by way of cuts and distinctions, from metric culture, to identity politics, to the grasping of ontology and relation) is increasingly understood to open‐up the power of an undifferentiating reality; one which expands and deepens the unavailable world as a problem space for critique. Thus, whilst Geographers, like many others, are currently critiquing dominant approaches for being too affirmational, the key argument of this paper is that we should also be taking one step back, asking: why now, and through what broader forces of history, the lure of an unavailable world today?
The aim of this essay is to engage in an extended conversation with the book, Universal Emancipation: Race beyond Badiou. Minneapolis, Min.: University of Minnesota Press, 2020, written by Elisabeth Paquette. First, we present the book in a standard book review style. Then we discuss Paquette’s argument, according to which she claims Alain Badiou’s philosophy is “Eurocentric” and ultimately blind to “race” as understood within the framework of contemporary North American Critical Race Theory. We then go on to set the bases for a critical assessment of her claims, arguing that Paquette’s framework is too culturally restrictive to fully account for the state of postcolonial studies in France today and that this restriction leads her to misinterpret Badiou. Notwithstanding her misinterpretations, we argue that through the selection and dependence on secondary sources, Paquette’s strategy is not incidental. Instead, she misrepresents Badiou by deliberately ignoring the distinctions in his philosophical system regarding the relationship between philosophy and the political.
Scholars have explored how governmental agendas pursued in the name of resilience redistribute the responsibility for attending to emergencies amongst governments and communities. In this paper, we draw on two years of research with community groups responding to Covid-19 in the United Kingdom to deepen these debates concerning the effects of so-called 'responsibilization' amid appeals for resilience. Against popular claims that equate resilience to state abandonment in an era of neo-liberal reform, we argue that resilience has also prompted new forms of coordination between government and non-government community actors that in themselves are fraught with political complications warranting critical scrutiny. After years of public spending cuts, the government increasingly plays an enabler role in emergencies; orchestrating other actors rather than directly intervening themselves. This role is important to consider because it reshapes people's affective encounter with the figure of ‘the government’ when emergencies happen by sequestering the government's activities and generating feelings of government inaction. With the government's obfuscation, community actors valorise their own interpretation of 'resilience' as a way to deal with emergencies without government support, despite the government's ongoing presence. This belief in successful non-state resilience could have grave consequences if it is used to justify future government-led attempts to accelerate a long-established policy of reducing expenditure on public services, thus engendering in the future the very state abandon through which some scholars diagnose the present. Overall, the paper challenges popular conceptualisations of the re-distribution of responsibility under resilience agendas, unpacks how resilience agendas reconfigure relationships between people and governments in times of crisis and elaborates on the ramifications for public emergency governance if belief in resilience as non-state responsibility proliferates in the future.
We are currently experiencing a planetary crisis that will lead, if worst comes to worst, to the end of the entire world as we know it. Several feminist scholars have suggested that if the Earth is to stay livable for humans and nonhumans alike, the ways in which many human beings – particularly in the wealthy parts of the world, infested with Eurocentrism, (neo)colonialism, neoliberalism, and capitalism – inhabit this planet requires radical, ethical, and political transformation. In this article, we propose that feminist theory, particularly feminist posthumanities, and Black feminist and decolonial thought, together with creative practices such as writing, have much to contribute to transformative planetary activism that imagines different and other kinds of worlds and futures based on an ethical consideration of nonhuman others and collective caring for the planet.
As the concept of resilience has expanded in the social sciences, critics have lamented its neoliberal undertones. Programming focused on women affected by war is often structured around cultivating individual women’s strength and leadership, positioning women as sources of stability whose adaptability helps make their communities ‘more resilient’. Yet thinking of resilience as an individualised outcome belies the embodied and relational experiences at the core of the concept: that to become resilient is to continue standing in the face of violent, unjust systems. In this article, I draw from hundreds of interviews with women survivors of war in different contexts to illustrate patterns in the process of becoming resilient after atrocities. I show how this process is structured by a series of relationships—including of mothering, solidarity with others, and interdependence. As such, I argue for a ‘radicalisation’ of our conceptualisation of resilience and suggest that becoming resilient reflects a relational process that embodies resistance to a politic of domination.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
Violent conflict and its aftermath are pressing problems for international development. However, the results of development in conflict contexts have generally been disappointing and their preventative potential thus questionable. Lives After Violence argues that this is due to development practitioners adhering to an outdated and ineffective paradigm, which emphasises statebuilding, stabilisation and service delivery.
Through detailed analysis of ten years of case studies and quantitative survey results from conflict-affected countries (Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Uganda), this book offers original and generalisable conclusions about how lives in conflict work and upends the status quo of development practice in conflict settings by offering a set of new paradigms. These include the need to pay attention to the long-term effects of conflict on individual behaviour and decision-making, the social realities of economic life, the link between relationships and capacity and the role service delivery plays in negotiating the relationship between citizens and states in the aftermath of conflict. The book concludes with practical recommendations on how to apply and practice these new paradigms.
It is generally assumed that ‘development’ is a universal concept, understood the same way in every culture. In Africa, progress is understood differently; human relations – including ancestors and future generations tied to the land – take precedence over development. The African concept of well-being is Ubuntu (I am a person through other persons), implemented in South Africa though truth and reconciliation, Ubuntu diplomacy, jurisprudence and People First (Batho Pele) policies. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are multilaterally negotiated and claim universality but are underpinned by European modernism (individuality, growth, separation of nature and humans, etc.). To be truly inclusive of Africa, they can do more justice to Ubuntu. However, official African positions on the SDGs emphasised industry and infrastructure, and overlooked restorative justice. Ubuntu prioritises the first five social goals, equality (SDG10), inclusivity (SDG16) and partnership (SDG17). Ubuntu would change the leading SDG theme into: ‘life is mutual aid’ (horizontal Ubuntu relationship) rather than the hierarchical ‘leave no-one behind’ (developed versus developing countries). Ubuntu would replace sustainability with the ‘community of life’ and individuality with ‘collective agency’; and knowing through measuring with ‘knowing through feeling engagement with others’. It prioritises process (strategies/now) over goals (abstract future).
This paper makes the case for an approach to International Relations in the Anthropocene, which draws upon resources from critical Black studies. This distinctive perspective is set out in comparison to two, more familiar, sets of critical Anthropocene thought, that have been influential in contemporary discussions of global politics. We heuristically frame these as the “Planetary” - a focus on ontology and vibrant and unruly materiality – and the “Pluriversal” - which places race and coloniality at the centre of our understanding of power and knowledge. We suggest that Planetary approaches underestimate the centrality of race and coloniality to questions of ontology and that Pluriversal approaches are often undermined by a failure to take ontology more seriously. These literatures are opposed to a third perspective, which we call the “Black Horizon”, which troubles our approach to alterity and works with a non- or para-ontological understanding of being.
This paper traces the recent trend in interdisciplinary Science and Technology Studies (STS), especially those of the Black feminist tradition, to make an argument for how its critical scholarship on data, science and knowledge production can be interpreted as manifesto-istic texts advocating for anti-essentialist solidarities. Dorothy E. Roberts’ work demonstrates how debunking essentialist categories backed by the foundationalist veneer of science must be situated at the heart of anti-racist and anti-ablest politics of co-liberation. Ruha Benjamin’s work, meanwhile, not only analyses the technologies/knowledge production practices designed to maintain the status quo, but projects a new vision of ‘retooling’ science as a means of reimagining justice in the rapidly shifting technological climate of the twenty-first century. Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick discuss human subjects often trapped in between orthodox discourses, who must then strive to reimagine/redefine their collective future through intersubjective creativity. What remains, in the end, are embodied narratives that escape reductionist logic through their welcoming of new perspectives, experiences and innovations—all of which are constantly being renewed through the arrival of new generations and diasporic traversements of ideas.
The shift of responsibility from the state and public authorities to the individual and the local level is one of the most common critiques of resilience policies. Individuals are portrayed as self-responsible entrepreneurs of their own protection. This article proposes a more nuanced reading of this process by arguing that resilience also entails an emancipatory potential. Drawing on an analysis of the German disaster management system and its structural marginalisation of care-dependent people, the article discusses the potential of resilience to make so far neglected needs visible. This visibilisation is the precondition for the recognition and, subsequently, the societal negotiation of the various needs and resources. Recognition and material redistribution may then be the yardstick for assessing the legitimacy of a shift of responsibilities that rests on the appropriate consideration of power, privileges, and abilities of the respective referent object of responsibility. Taking up the Frankfurt School's tradition of immanent critique, security scholars should not restrict themselves to exercise the necessary critique of problematic resilience policies, but engage in carving out how resilience can contribute to freeing rather than burdening the (precarious) individual.
Fleur Johns argues that the contraposition of a ‘bottom-up’ approach of politics of prototypical technique rather than the ‘top-down’ politics of the master plan or normative principle no longer seems as straightforwardly radical as it appeared when James C Scott posited the value of local knowledge or métis against grand plans of high modernization, just over 20 years ago. This paper seeks to follow Johns’ call, ‘to capture and probe some of the effects of sensibility, rationality or style widely reproduced in the details of development work’. It draws upon fieldwork in Nairobi to open up a discussion of a shift in sensibility from a ‘bottom-up’ or ‘postliberal’ approach to a framing of open-ended encounter. The paper critiques this imaginary of relational encounter by engaging contemporary work in critical black studies. It suggests that the problem of critique is that it reproduces the problems of governing imaginaries, continually seeking to rework the human subject via adaptive capacities, sensitivities to difference and openness to alterity, while leaving intact the coloniality of being, the antiblack world.
Resilience is a dominant humanitarian-development theme. Nonetheless, some humanitarian-development programmes have demonstrably negative impacts which encourage vulnerable people to actively resist these programmes. Based on 12 months ethnographic fieldwork in a Ugandan refugee settlement during 2017–18, this paper argues refugee residents articulated their refusal of humanitarian failure and corruption through active, largely non-political, resistance. I term the diverse strategies used ‘resistant resilience’, arguing that the agency central to these practices require that assumptions about resilience are reconsidered. I conclude that this refugee community’s most important resilience strategies were active resistance, demonstrating that resilience can be manifested through marginalised peoples’ desire to resist exploitation.
The article proposes a heuristic framework based on processual sociology to analyse policy interventions aimed at change within conflict contexts. Such a framework is valuable because it creates an opportunity for a more open approach to empirical research that may allow us to research evolving processes and to see things we might miss otherwise. The article aims to complement goal-oriented and predominantly relational approaches and to contribute to debates that warn against the reification of actors and structures in research. It also points to a lack of attention to politics in the analysis of policy interventions. The argument derives from a discussion of transitional justice and peacebuilding and is empirically illustrated for the context of the Tunisian transitional justice process.
This article examines the experiences of women survivors of trauma in conflict situations and how they negotiate the gendered aspects of their experiences. I argue that survivors’ responses to the conflict and its consequences can be seen as resistance. Understood as a form of resilience, this practice of resistance opens up opportunities for envisioning and working towards peacebuilding after mass violence. The discussion draws from the experiences of refugee women from the South Sudanese community living in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, survivors of the ongoing conflict in South Sudan. Focusing on the intersection of trauma, gender, resilience and conflict, and by sensitively allowing the voices of the survivors of conflict-related trauma to be heard, I explore ways in which survivors resist traditional norms in their everyday responses to the challenges they face. This exploration seeks to contribute to the continued inquiry into how to respond to conflict globally and how to build a sustainable peace through more gender-sensitive approaches to conflict-related trauma.
Against the backdrop of the contemporary crisis of faith in modern reasoning, work on islands and with island cultures has come to the fore in the development of alternative, non-Eurocentric, non-modern, ways of being and knowing. Much attention has surrounded a wide range of critical work associated with the 'ontological' or the 'relational' turn, highlighting interstitial, entangled, post-and more-than-human creative encounters of becoming. This paper examines the emergence of what we call 'abyssal thought', a related but distinctly different analytical approach drawing largely from critical Black studies. Central to abyssal approaches is the understanding of the world as ontologically inseparable from its violent forging through antiblackness. In putting coloniality at the heart of the modernist problematic , abyssal work turns to the Caribbean in particular as a gateway, door or 'punctum', a space of 'abyssal geographies', inviting a deconstruction or unmaking of the world. Exploring how, this paper draws out three key aspects of the abyssal analytic: (1) the abyssal 'subject' forged through the ontological violence of the making of the modern world, (2) the abyssal as a refusal of impositions of spatial and temporal fixities, and (3) the methodological approach of 'paraontology'. Thus, its key concerns are those of refusal, deconstruction and 'suspension' rather than of creative becoming. In distinction to relational ontologies of interstital island work, the desire is not to save or to remake understandings of the human and the world but rather to negate them.
What does freedom mean without, and despite, the state? Ida Danewid argues that state power is central to racial capitalism's violent regimes of extraction and accumulation. Tracing the global histories of four technologies of state violence: policing, bordering, wastelanding, and reproductive control, she excavates an antipolitical archive of anarchism that stretches from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the borderlands of Europe, the poisoned landscape of Ogoniland, and the queer lifeworlds of Delhi. Thinking with a rich set of scholars, organisers, and otherworldy dreamers, Danewid theorises these modes of refusal as a utopian worldmaking project which seeks not just better ways of being governed, but an end to governance in its entirety. In a time where the state remains hegemonic across the Left–Right political spectrum, Resisting Racial Capitalism calls on us to dream bolder and better in order to (un)build the world anew.
Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world’s leading social theorists to how we understand society and the ‘social ‘. Bruno Latour’s contention is that the word ‘social’, as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as ‘wooden’ or ‘steely ‘. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why ‘the social’ cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a ‘social explanations’ of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of ‘the social’ to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the ‘assemblages’ of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a ‘sociology of associations’, has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.
In The Anarchy of Black Religion, J. Kameron Carter examines the deeper philosophical, theological, and religious history that animates our times to advance a new approach to understanding religion. Drawing on the black radical tradition and black feminism, Carter explores the modern invention of religion as central to settler colonial racial technologies wherein antiblackness is a founding and guiding religious principle of the modern world. He therefore sets black religion apart from modern religion, even as it tries to include and enclose it. Carter calls this approach the black study of religion. Black religion emerges not as doctrinal, confessional, or denominational but as a set of poetic and artistic strategies of improvisatory living and gathering. Potentiating non-exclusionary belonging, black religion is anarchic, mystical, and experimental: it reveals alternative relationalities and visions of matter that can counter capitalism’s extractive, individualistic, and imperialist ideology. By enacting a black study of religion, Carter elucidates the violence of religion as the violence of modern life while also opening an alternate praxis of the sacred.
The Covid-19 pandemic has made evident that living through a protracted global biopolitical emergency requires new theoretical reflections to make sense of what it means to govern life in a global context. As a central reference in the study of global health in International Relations (IR), biopolitical approaches have privileged a molecular-informational understanding of life as their object of governance. However, the phenomenon of global pandemic fatigue calls for a new problematisation. Experiential biopolitics is proposed here as an approach from which to recognise a limitation of biopolitical emergency governance that has resulted in a generalised feeling of exhaustion among populations subject to prolonged emergency measures. This reformulated biopolitical gaze understands human life, not only as a biological substance, but through its reflexive capacity to nurture lived experience, highlighting the entanglement of pandemic experiences and infection dynamics. The article explores experiential biopolitics through the WHO’s problematisation of pandemic fatigue. It analyses how assessing pandemic experience through behavioural insights studies enables a reflexive visibility of the pandemic event by drawing together biological and experiential variables. Subsequently, it interrogates theories of risk perception as a cornerstone in imagining the pandemic subject as a fundamentally experiential being.
While some communities appear to blossom in the wake of a disaster, others are left to struggle in the ashes. This article introduces the concept of conspicuous resilience to understand how emergent community-based recovery efforts privilege some needs while marginalizing others, contributing to uneven forms of recovery. Drawing on a qualitative case study of the deadly 2018 Montecito debris flow, an in-depth examination of emergent community-based resilience efforts is gauged next to the social construction of unmet needs. Conspicuous acts of resilience centered around gaps in social and financial support as well as desires for protection from future debris flows. In defining and addressing needs, community-based interventions mirrored existing social inequalities and uneven relationships of power, promoting a false sense of equality and a false sense of security while reinforcing private interests. In order to address the limits of conspicuous resilience, a justice-oriented politics of disaster recovery is needed.
The contributors to this volume are motivated by a common apprehension and a common hope. The apprehension was first voiced by Einstein, who lamented the inability of humanity, at the individual and social level, to keep up with the increased speed of technological change brought about by the quantum revolution. Before it was the atomic bomb. Today it is the advent of advanced quantum systems, which is already the object of intense geopolitical and commercial competition. Meanwhile, as quantum science and technology fast forward into the twenty-first century, the social sciences remain stuck in classical, nineteenth-century ways of thinking. Can such a mechanistic model of the mind and society possibly help us manage the fully realized technological potential of the quantum? That’s where the hope appears, that perhaps quantum is not just a physical science, but a human science too. This is the potential implication of dramatic recent discoveries in cognitive science and quantum biology, which suggest that subjectivity itself may be a quantum phenomenon. If so, then there will be a need for a new “quantized” human science, including international relations. At the centenary of the first quantum Gedankenexperiment in the 1920s, the book offers a diversity of explorations, speculations, and approaches for understanding geopolitics in the twenty-first century.
This book considers the ways that representations of Africa have contributed to the changing nature of British national identity. It does so by developing the concept of the African presence: the ways that references to Africa have become part of discussions within British political culture about the place of Britain in the world. Using interviews, photo archives, media coverage, advertisements, and web material, the book focuses on major Africa campaigns: the abolition of slavery, anti-apartheid, drop the debt, and Make Poverty History. Using a hybrid theoretical framework based mainly around framing, the book argues that the representation of Africa has been mainly about imagining virtuous Britishness rather than generating detailed understandings of Africa. The book develops this argument through a historical review of 200 years of Africa campaigning. It also looks more closely at recent and contemporary campaigning, opening up new issues and possibilities for campaigning: the increasing use of consumer identities, electronic media, and aspects of globalization. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in postcolonial politics, relations between Britain and Africa, and development studies.
Zoonotic pandemics shine an uncomfortable light on how human lifeways facilitate the sharing of pathogens across species. Yet our lack of acknowledgement of our shared vulnerability with those non-human animals we raise or hunt to kill and eat, whose habitats we encroach upon and destroy, whose populations we undermine and threaten, has led us to the current human health crisis. The predominant political response to zoonotic pandemic has been bordering practices of surveillance, securitisation and bodily separation. These practices reflect intra-human and species hierarchies. They also fail to acknowledge the extent to which the boundaries of species are leaky, and are continually breached. A posthumanist zoonotic politics seeks not to attempt to border the leaky boundaries of species, but rather to insist on a re-ordering of species relations towards less exploitative and extractive ways of sharing the planet with the myriad creatures that constitute our world.
Politique zoonotique : l’impossible confinement des espèces
This commentary article outlines and explores the key problem that faces anyone interested in researching and understanding what might be thought of as a recursive society. It reflects on the problem that is posed by the layering of multiple feedback loops as a result of algorithmic sorting and data processes. This article is concerned with the difficulties of understanding the social where recursive algorithmic processes have repeatedly shaped outcomes, practices, relations and actions over time. This is not just about the sinking of algorithms into the everyday, it is about the way that loop-upon-loop of data processes lead to the social world itself being recursive. This repeated looping is described here as a kind of data coiling. The article argues for a focus on recursivity and for an engagement with the conceptual problems and questions that this notion implies.