onset of the Cold War interrupted. Ethnic tensions – often closely related to this incomplete national revolution – also impinge on the evolution of democracy. The ethnic tensions that emerged during the financial crises, most notably in Indonesia, have already been mentioned. But even in more peaceful ‘normal’ times, resentment at the control of political power by dominant ethnic groups in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, to name but three, undermines the legitimacy of the democratic polity. But perhaps most fundamentally, we need to revisit the question of the way
History, historians and development policy fact that certain types of natural resource exports (‘point resources’) have generated very high rents (‘excess profits’), that have in turn generated political competition and largely have accrued to people who wield political power in the exporting nations; and (c) the fact that the polities of many of the exporting nations were already fragile for other reasons. Explaining the resource curse1 It is reasonable to be concerned that, when a country begins to export large quantities of phosphates (or coltan, copper, diamonds
Hiroona offers an imaginary insider’s perspective on frontier society – that of a small island’s Chief Minister, Jerry Mole, who holds political power in the mythical Hiroona for fifteen years. The fact that Thomas’s novel parodies a serious memoir makes it a sort of mimic shadow of the two ‘real’ ones and draws attention to the specificity of the memoir as a form in which the narratorial ‘I’ guarantees
reformist political culture in state parliaments and governments. It was evident that political power could be used to modify and regulate capitalism. Although legislation could not abolish an economic system, laws which for example established a minimum wage, limited the working day, or prohibited child labour, produced significant improvements for the industrial proletariat. A fault line inside the social democratic movement was clearly discernible by the second decade of the twentieth century, between those purists who drew inspiration from the Jacobin, revolutionary
dominant modes of intimacy make borders. This views intimacy and, more specifically, family as having political power. In light of this I explore how dominant modes of socio-sexual intimacy known as ‘family’ have been central to the organisation of personhood and violence in modernity, including questions of who can/cannot move. European ideas of normative sexuality and domesticity (i.e. ‘family’) emerged within the ideologies and practices of colonial violence, 6 Bordering intimacy accumulation and dispossession, of which policing mobility through bordering was a
recent ‘disappeared’ that Farrell was tracing, a new bog body perhaps or even the peat’s own conjuring of a mortal presence: an emissary sent back to haunt or enchant? This very ambiguity makes it a fitting image with which to end. My mother might have found inspiration on the moss: a quiet space of growth at the city’s edge. I find inspiration under it, in the archaeopoetical and political power that these emergent remains have to both appal and impel. 9.1 Innocent Landscapes sequence entitled ‘Bragan’, David Farrell, 2000. All rights reserved and
-activist co-authors, build on the legacy of the “people’s professor” Dr. Steve Wing, an epidemiologist who was a founding member of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network. Throughout his life, Wing (2005, 61) was committed to the creation of a “science of environmental justice,” which he defined as “a science for the people, applied research that addresses issues of concern to communities experiencing environmental injustice, poor public health conditions, and lack of political power.” The authors carry forward Wing’s commitment to community-based participatory
exemplifies the expansion of centralized, militarized political power, in other words, which was attended by the increase in the capacity of that authority to wield various forms of personal violence; the rise of new military states, inextricably linked to the commerce in human beings, involved the increase and normalization of acute forms of interpersonal violence in the ‘domestic’ sphere, and Dahomey illustrates the pattern. Meanwhile, the widening and increasingly skilful use of firearms – especially in coastal states and societies – undoubtedly facilitated new levels of
Sotho, the Tswana, the Ndebele, the Swazi and the Pedi – and also some small states run by such peoples as the Griqua (the descendants of Afrikaners and Africans, who had gained military and political power by adopting the Whites’ guns and horses). The prolonged serious internecine conflict among the peoples of the interior (a period in the 1820s and 1830s referred to as the mfecane or lifaqane
and political forces within the country it stems from, rather than of deliberate expression of foreign policy goals. 4 Much of the struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran is often reduced to a competition between the two main branches of Islam, Sunnism vs Shiism, but the ways in which Islam is embedded into political power and governance within the two countries is diametrically different. In the case of both Saudi Arabia and Iran, ongoing domestic struggles between the role of Islam and Islamism cannot be contained, and