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Barrio rising
Beginning in the late 1950s political leaders in Venezuela built what they celebrated as Latin America's most stable democracy. But outside the staid halls of power, in the gritty barrios of a rapidly urbanizing country, another politics was rising—unruly, contentious, and clamoring for inclusion. Based on years of archival and ethnographic research in Venezuela's largest public housing community, Barrio Rising delivers the first in-depth history of urban popular politics before the Bolivarian Revolution, providing crucial context for understanding the democracy that emerged during the presidency of Hugo Chávez. In the mid-1950s, a military government bent on modernizing Venezuela razed dozens of slums in the heart of the capital Caracas, replacing them with massive buildings to house the city's working poor. The project remained unfinished when the dictatorship fell on January 23, 1958, and in a matter of days city residents illegally occupied thousands of apartments, squatted on green spaces, and renamed the neighborhood to honor the emerging democracy: the 23 de Enero (January 23). During the next thirty years, through eviction efforts, guerrilla conflict, state violence, internal strife, and official neglect, inhabitants of el veintitrés learned to use their strategic location and symbolic tie to the promise of democracy in order to demand a better life. Granting legitimacy to the state through the vote but protesting its failings with violent street actions when necessary, they laid the foundation for an expansive understanding of democracy—both radical and electoral—whose features still resonate today. Blending rich narrative accounts with incisive analyses of urban space, politics, and everyday life, Barrio Rising offers a sweeping reinterpretation of modern Venezuelan history as seen not by its leaders but by residents of one of the country's most distinctive popular neighborhoods.
eBook
Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean
Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbeanbrings together a group of interdisciplinary scholars who analyze and document the diversity, vibrancy, and effectiveness of women's experiences and organizing in Latin America and the Caribbean during the past four decades. Most of the expressions of collective agency are analyzed in this book within the context of the neoliberal model of globalization that has seriously affected most Latin American and Caribbean women's lives in multiple ways. Contributors explore the emergence of the area's feminist movement, dictatorships of the 1970s, the Central American uprisings, the urban, grassroots organizing for better living conditions, and finally, the turn toward public policy and formal political involvement and the alternative globalization movement. Geared toward bridging cultural realities, this volume represents women's transformations, challenges, and hopes, while considering the analytical tools needed to dissect the realities, understand the alternatives, and promote gender democracy.
eBook
Diverse economies: performative practices for `other worlds
How might academic practices contribute to the exciting proliferation of economic experiments occurring worldwide in the current moment? In this paper we describe the work of a nascent research community of economic geographers and other scholars who are making the choice to bring marginalized, hidden and alternative economic activities to light in order to make them more real and more credible as objects of policy and activism. The diverse economies research program is, we argue, a performative ontological project that builds upon and draws forth a different kind of academic practice and subjectivity. Using contemporary examples, we illustrate the thinking practices of ontological reframing, re-reading for difference and cultivating creativity and we sketch out some of the productive lines of inquiry that emerge from an experimental, performative and ethical orientation to the world. The paper is accompanied by an electronic bibliography of diverse economies research with over 200 entries.
Journal Article
Partisan Publics
During the 1980s and 1990s, Brazil struggled to rebuild its
democracy after twenty years of military dictatorship, experiencing
financial crises, corruption scandals, political protest, and
intense electoral contention. In the midst of this turmoil, Ann
Mische argues in this remarkable book, youth activists of various
stripes played a vital and unrecognized role, contributing new
forms of political talk and action to Brazil's emerging
democracy.
Drawing upon extensive and rich ethnography as well as formal
network analysis, Mische tracks the lives of young activists
through intersecting political networks, including student
movements, church-based activism, political parties,
nongovernmental organizations, and business and professional
organizations. She probes the problems and possibilities they
encountered in combining partisan activism with other kinds of
civic involvement. In documenting activists' struggles to develop
cross-partisan publics of various kinds, Mische explores the
distinct styles of communication and leadership that emerged across
organizations and among individuals.
Drawing on the ideas of Habermas, Gramsci, Dewey, and
Machiavelli, Partisan Publics highlights political
communication styles and the forms of mediation and leadership they
give rise to--for democratic politics in Brazil and elsewhere.
Insightful in its discussion of culture, methodology, and theory,
Partisan Publics argues that partisanship can play a
significant role in civic life, helping to build relations and
institutions in an emerging democracy.
eBook
The Ulama in Contemporary Islam
From the cleric-led Iranian revolution to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, many people have been surprised by what they see as the modern reemergence of an antimodern phenomenon. This book helps account for the increasingly visible public role of traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars (the `ulama) across contemporary Muslim societies. Muhammad Qasim Zaman describes the transformations the centuries-old culture and tradition of the `ulama have undergone in the modern era--transformations that underlie the new religious and political activism of these scholars. In doing so, it provides a new foundation for the comparative study of Islam, politics, and religious change in the contemporary world.
While focusing primarily on Pakistan, Zaman takes a broad approach that considers the Taliban and the `ulama of Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, and the southern Philippines. He shows how their religious and political discourses have evolved in often unexpected but mutually reinforcing ways to redefine and enlarge the roles the `ulama play in society. Their discourses are informed by a longstanding religious tradition, of which they see themselves as the custodians. But these discourses are equally shaped by--and contribute in significant ways to--contemporary debates in the Muslim public sphere.
This book offers the first sustained comparative perspective on the `ulama and their increasingly crucial religious and political activism. It shows how issues of religious authority are debated in contemporary Islam, how Islamic law and tradition are continuously negotiated in a rapidly changing world, and how the `ulama both react to and shape larger Islamic social trends. Introducing previously unexamined facets of religious and political thought in modern Islam, it clarifies the complex processes of religious change unfolding in the contemporary Muslim world and goes a long way toward explaining their vast social and political ramifications.
eBook
Financialisation of Valuation
This article shows that forms of analysis and calculation specific to finance are spreading, and changing valuation processes in various social settings. This perspective is used to contribute to the study of the recent transformations of capitalism, as financialisation is usually seen as marking the past three decades. After defining what is meant by \"financialised valuation,\" different examples are discussed. Recent developments concerning the valuation of assets in accounting standards and credit risk in banking regulations are used to suggest that colonisation of financial activities by financialised valuations is taking place. Other changes, concerning the valuation of social or cultural activities and environmental issues are also highlighted in order to support the hypothesis of a parallel colonisation of non-financial activities by financialised valuations. Specifically, the language of finance appears to gradually being incorporated into public policies, especially in Europe—and this trend seems to have gathered pace since the 2000s. Some interpretations are proposed to understand why public policies are seemingly increasingly reliant on financialised valuations.
Journal Article
The Rise of China's New-Type Think Tanks and the Internationalization of the State
China's government is promoting new-type think tanks. These are often treated with scepticism by Western observers, due to their lack of independence from government and operation within a controlled intellectual environment. In this article, I heed recent calls by scholars to analyze
think tanks, and how they develop, in their particular national political contexts. In China's case, this is a powerful one-party state undergoing internationalization: usually understood as increased foreign exchanges, engagement with international institutions, and rising influence globally.
In contrast, I view internationalization as the reorganizing of China's state institutions and social structure in order to integrate with the global capitalist system. Through these processes, China's policymaking community is converging with a powerful transnational class aligned with global
capitalist interests. Think tanks are implicated in these processes, and are therefore involved in shaping capitalist class dynamics within China. This is a cause for concern and debate among policy makers, regarding \"civil\" think tanks in particular, which are non-governmental and privately
funded. Drawing on interviews with Chinese think-tank scholars, and examining policy debates on the development of think tanks in Chinese academic and policy journals, I argue that the sphere of think tanks has become an important site of political contestation concerning China's internationalization
and the impact of class power on national policy making. Western observers, too often viewing independence as the key criterion for evaluating China's think tanks, miss the significance of these debates. The relations between think tanks and government institutions must be understood in this
political context.
Journal Article
Political Judgment, Fiqh al-Wāqiʿ, and the Egyptian ʿUlamāʾ's: Response to the Arab Spring (2011–2013)
Most academic accounts of the Arab Spring (ca. 2011–2013) politics of the 'ulamā' (Muslim religious scholars) explain their political stances in terms of the political ideals purportedly held by individual scholars. This article challenges this scholarly consensus through a detailed examination of the Arab Spring politics of three influential Egyptian 'ulamā' . Specifically, it demonstrates that Yusuf al-Qaraḍāwī (1926–2022), Aḥmad al-Ṭayyib (b. 1946), and 'Alī Gomaa's (b. 1952) political stances do not consistently follow any single political ideal attributed to them. Contrary to the literature, I show that al-Qaraḍāwī and al-Ṭayyib, despite their disagreements on the political situation in Egypt, took similar stances on all uprisings after the Egyptian uprising, including support for the Syrian, Libyan, and Yemeni uprisings, and their opposition to similar developments in Bahrain. I argue that their divergence regarding Egypt and their supposed inconsistency on Bahrain is primarily a result of their assessments of contemporaneous political situations and their contingent moral dilemmas. These two cases highlight an important aspect of the Islamic legal tradition that is influential in political moral deliberation: the legal maxims on balancing harms and benefits. To apply these legal maxims in concrete situations, contemporary 'ulamā' often rely on the concept of fiqh al-wāqiʿ (Islamic jurisprudence of reality), according to which contextual sociopolitical knowledge is considered as important as textual religious knowledge. Fiqh al-wāqiʿ however remains critically underdetermined, and, as this article argues, offers meager methodological tools for empirical understanding.
Journal Article