Configuration Of Power Relations Research Articles

The Construction of Masculinity in Dagestani Male Youth Communities

Drawing on 60 in-depth interviews with adolescents and young men in Dagestan, I examine the construction of masculinity in the context of a postcolonial and peripheral society undergoing a transformation associated with deindustrialisation, urbanisation and globalisation. I focus on three male communities: freestyle wrestlers, street workout athletes and devout Muslim youth. Members of these communities develop their variants of male identity, differing in their attitudes towards violence, their view of the power of elders and their form of moral sovereignty. These versions of masculinity are supported and stabilised both by configurations of power relations and mechanisms of intragroup homosociality.

Slow Resistance: Resisting the Slow Violence of Asylum

In this article we seek to expand on the developing interest in Slow Violence and how it relates to immigration and asylum, by exploring how such violence is resisted. Following Foucault’s insight that in order to better understand power, it helps to study resistance to it, we draw on original research into acts of protest by refugees and asylum seekers in Scotland, and connect this to existing research on experiences of and resistance to the UK asylum system. In so doing we offer ‘Slow Resistance’ as a potentially useful concept with which to understand resistance not just to a particular configuration of power relations, but to a particular form of violence. The conceptual utility of Slow Resistance lies in its ability to illuminate: the particular operations of power/violence in the UK asylum system; the multiple forms of resistance to this violence/power; how these forms of resistance may be connected (thus discouraging the ‘silo-ing’ of analysing different forms of resistance); and how time is creatively engaged with by such forms of resistance. If, as has been argued, a particular challenge of slow violence is representational – how to devise arresting images and stories adequate to this form of violence – then resistance has the potential to focus our attention on it, and to gradually prepare the ground for meaningful change. While developed here in relation to the UK asylum system, slow resistance is a concept that we think can be useful in a wide range of contexts in which slow violence operates.

Infrastructures and Laws: Publics and Publicness

Infrastructures are technical-social assemblages infused in politics and power relations. They spur public action, prompting increased scholarly reference to the practices of infrastructural publics. This article explores the normative and conceptual meanings of infrastructures, publics, and infrastructural publics. It distills from political theory traditions of Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Nancy Fraser a normative ideal of publics composed of the persons subject to a particular configuration of power relations that may significantly affect their autonomy. Autonomy can be seriously affected not only by existing or planned infrastructures, with their existing or anticipating users and workers and objectors, but also by the lack of an infra-structure or by the terms of infrastructural exclusions, rationings, channelings, and fiscal impositions. Legal-institutional mechanisms provide some of the means for infrastructural publics to act and be heard, and for conflicts between or within different publics to be addressed, operationalizing legal ideas of publicness. These mechanisms are often underprovided or misaligned with infrastructure. One reason is the murkiness and insecurity of relations of infrastructural publics to legal publics constituted or framed as such by institutions and instruments of law and governance. We argue that thoughtful integration of infrastructural and legal scaling and design, accompanied by a normative aspiration to publicness, may have beneficial effects.

Hegemonising Zimbabwe? The Polity of Mbare Chimurenga Lyrics in Perpetuating Mugabe’s and ZANU-PF’s Rule

ABSTRACTThe role played by music as “popular culture” in political campaigning and in the perpetuation and sustenance of political hegemonies is a very significant one. Music and its accompaniment of dance is a common and popular channel through which political hegemonies are (re)constructed, (re)negotiated and perpetuated. In Zimbabwe the two largest political parties (ZANU-PF and MDC-T) both “own” musical ensembles who have been constantly and consistently producing political party specific lyrics as part of the utilisation of music as popular culture in the broader political discourse of electioneering and election campaigning. Musical lyrics exude attempts at the (re)construction and (re)negotiation of political meaning and reality and by extension the (re)negotiation and (re)configuration of power relations and dynamics. Selected lyrics from the ZANU-PF musical ensemble, Mbare Chimurenga Choir, are examined through the discourse linguistic theory of Appraisal. This is done by examining how the proliferation of linguistic resources that espouse politically and ideologically embedded positive attitudinal resources exhibit a perpetuation of Robert Mugabe’s rule, legacy and hegemony and by extension, that of ZANU-PF. While the analysis is largely couched within Appraisal Theory, the study also draws insights from Gramscian hegemony studies as well as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The study observes and discusses, as the context for analysis of the discourse linguistic structure of the lyrics, the political environment prevailing in Zimbabwe during the period in which analysed songs were produced. Language (the lyrics), is in this regard perceived of as a superstructural semiotic tool through which hegemonies are (re)constructed, (re)negotiated and sustained.

Gold, the State and Market Actors: Legal vs. Illegal Practices of Interaction

This article focuses on an examination of the role of the state in the development of the informal economy. Using material from unstructured interviews, the authors analyse reasons for choosing illegal strategies to overcome formal barriers to entry into the gold- mining sector. They conclude that it is not so much the height of administrative barriers as the configuration of power relations which develops when the state treats some businesses favourably compared to others that comprises the fundamental reason for the development of informal economic practices.

Democracy in a Multipolar World

I have decided that the best way to address the theme of this conference, ‘Interrogating Democracy in International Relations’, is to examine the implications of my agonistic approach for envisaging what democracy could mean in a multipolar world. I will begin by presenting the basic tenets of the theoretical framework that informs my reflection on the political. It has been elaborated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, co-written with Ernesto Laclau.1 In this book we argue that the two concepts needed to grasp the nature of the political are ‘antagonism’ and ‘hegemony’. Both point to the need for acknowledging the dimension of radical negativity and the ever present possibility of antagonism which impede the full totalisation of society and foreclose the possibility of a society beyond division and power. They require coming to terms with the lack of a final ground and the undecidability that pervades every order; this means, in our vocabulary, recognising the hegemonic nature of every kind of social order and envisaging society as the product of a series of practices whose aim is to establish order in a context of contingency. The practices of articulation through which a given order is created and the meaning of social institutions is fixed are what we call ‘hegemonic practices’. Every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices. Things could always have been otherwise and every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities. It is always the expression of a particular configuration of power relations. What is at a given moment accepted as the ‘natural’ order, jointly with the common sense that accompanies it, is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices; it is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity that would be exterior to the practices that brought it into being. Every order is therefore susceptible of being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices which attempt to disarticulate it in order to install another form of hegemony. In The Return of the Political, The Democratic Paradox and On the Political I have developed this reflection on ‘the political’, understood

CITING THE RINCHIERA: THE POLITICS OF PLACE AND PUBLIC ADDRESS IN TRECENTO FLORENCE

The intention of this article is to study the significance of the raised platform, or ringhiera, of the Palazzo Pubblico in Florence as both an architectural and symbolic construct, and to examine how its physical situation and literary citation imagined it as the locus of legitimation in the context of continued political struggle within the nascent popular commune of the Trecento. The premise of the argument is that the consideration of the sociology of space provides an important tool in understanding the cultural construction of community, the socio-political configuration of power relations, the origins and maintenance of social inequality, and the possibilities for resistance. In assuming this perspective, the ringhiera of the Florentine Palazzo Pubblico is understood as neither an inert material place within and around which communal rituals and social relations revolved, nor a symbolic space which determined such activity. Rather, it is conceived as an active component in the continual redescription of ideological boundaries. An examination of the platform's liminality, therefore, is necessary, for whilst conferring legitimacy upon its occupants during periods of civic peace, it was the site where anxiety concerning the permanency of the prevailing political order was most clearly evidenced in times of political upheaval.

Collaborative alliances: the environment, women and the Africa 2000 Network

This paper reviews the work of an international environmental management project known as the Africa 2000 Network that emerged from the need to address the growing awareness of gender issues in environmentally sustainabledevelopment activities worldwide. The intention of this study was first to establish the degree of linkage between women’s needs and interests and the work of Africa 2000 Network’s national coordinators in Cameroon, Ghana, and Kenya. The second was to relate the findings of Africa 2000 Network’s (hereafter called the Network) responses to women to the current research on gender, environment and development. The third was to clarify more specifically and substantively the types of actions that have empowered the resource management roles of African women while at the same time alleviating the effects of environmental degradation. It is hoped that this investigation will begin to contribute to the formulation of strategies and structures that go beyond the mere cooptation of African women’s labour into mainstream development activities. The aim is to work towards the transformation of current configurations of power relations within the ownership and control of resources; not only between men and women but also, ultimately, between nations.

Proactive Differentiation, Sequence Restraint, and the Asymmetry of Power: A Multidimensional Analysis

A variety of factors affect the configurations of power relations and communication systems observed in human groups, only a few of which are relatively well understood. Previous research has made it clear, for instance, that the communication structure of a group may have important implications for the power structure (Bales, et al., 1951; Homans & Reiken, 1954; Leik, 1967; Gray, et al., 1968; Richardson, et al., 1969; von Broembsen, et al., 1969). Nevertheless, the kinds of effects which may be observed can be expected to vary with situational aspects confronting the group and the understanding of these factors may be crucial to the development of reasonably precise organizational theory. This paper examines a relationship involving (1) the differentiation of participation by group members in the communication process, (2) formal restraint upon the communication structure, and (3) the relative symmetry or asymmetry of interpersonal power relations measured on three separate dimensions. Previous research by Richardson, et al. (1969) indicates some features of these relationships which we shall attempt to extend here.

Measuring the Concentration of Power in Political Systems

The unequal distribution of power among the members of a political system is one of the most pervasive facts of political life. Yet, while many studies have confirmed the fact that a few members exercise disproportionate control over many others in most systems, the configurations of power relations that occur among the few have generally not been subjected to systematic comparative analysis. In a few notable empirical studies, attempts have been made to compare the exercise of power in different issue-areas and across different decisions. Comparative analyses have suffered, however, from the lack of any means to make tractable and compare, except in a qualitative way, schematic representations of power relations either in different political systems or over different issue-areas in the same system. When diagrams of power structures become complex and unwieldy, it is easiest to forget about making precise comparisons about the way power is distributed among decision-makers somehow identified as being influential in the political process.