Government Hegemony Research Articles

Navigating Contested Winds: Development Visions and Anti-Politics of Wind Energy in Northern Kenya

State-led development visions and the accompanying large-scale investments at the geographical margins of Kenya rest on the potential of public–private partnerships to fast-tract sustainable development through accelerated investments. Yet, the conceptualisation, planning and implementation of these visions often deploy a depoliticising development discourse that reinforces and expands long-standing misconceptions about the margins primarily directed at pastoral livelihoods and related communal land tenure. This paper illustrates how the implementation of a wind energy project employs the corporate strategies of depoliticising both land claims and development interventions. In Northern Kenya, private sector participation in large-scale wind energy infrastructure has created a complex development apparatus in which players are empowered to undertake the accelerated investments required to shape the delivery of the Kenya Vision 2030 in the region. An analysis of corporate actors’ strategies in the implementation of the contested wind farm presents a depoliticised framing of “low-cost green energy”, representations of pastoral land tenure and corporate social responsibility strategies through which dispossession is justified and legitimised. This case underscores the extent to which corporate counterresistance is shaped by the reproduction of a historical depoliticised discourse about pastoralism and communal tenure and challenges the traditional narrative of government hegemony against local resistance to large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs).

Thinking Women, Feminism, and Muslim Identity through Bodies and Space in Turkey

Thinking Women, Feminism, and Muslim Identity through Bodies and Space in Turkey

The Corrupt Parallel Universe that Defines South Africa’s Constitutional Order and Labour Laws that Fail South Africa : Decline and Lagged Growth in a Period of Government Hegemony

This paper explores the aspects raised in the title of this paper from perspectives that need exploration because corruption has become endemic within South Africa. This corruption therefore plays a significant role in retarding the economy and development within the country. In addition the paper attempts to explore very briefly the issue of labour laws and argues that these laws have failed South Africa. All of this the paper argues has resulted in the decline of the economy by virtue of lagged growth which has resulted to certain barriers to black advancement, which has a direct co - relation to impeding necessary economic growth, which is vital to South Africa’s development and economic success in a period of global recession. All of this points to the consolidation of government hegemony in South Africa.

Seeking a Separate National Identity: The Taiwanese State, Politics and the 2007 Baseball World Cup

Through in-depth interviews and the collection of related data, this study shows that hosting mega-sports events reflects the Taiwanese government's objectives to create diplomatic status and national identity as well as to maintain the government's hegemony. In short, by hosting the Baseball World Cup, the government seeks to resolve its current crisis, to transfer the people's disappointments about the economic recession and political chaos and to regain the people's enthusiasm for baseball. In addition, the event functions as a diplomatic resource and is used to rebuild the people's patriotism and national identity.

Manipulating risk communication: Value predispositions shape public understandings of invasive species science in Hawaii

Most invasive species control programs are routine, but a small number prompt public controversy. Local value predispositions shape lay perception of the relative risks of invasive species and efforts to control them. Because control efforts are generally led by government scientists, lay perceptions of invasive species science are colored by public judgment of government credibility. This article examines the proposed release of an insect for biological control of the invasive strawberry guava tree which threatens conservation of Hawaii's forests. A local activist manipulated regulatory risk communication, appealed to local values, and persuaded some local members of the public and elected officials to oppose the insect release. This case illustrates how, in the absence of effective public engagement processes, routine scientific risk communication can be confounded by divergent knowledge taxonomies and perceptions of government hegemony.

Taming Islam: Studying Religion in Secular Turkey

Taming Islam: Studying Religion in Secular Turkey Kim Shively It is hard to overemphasize how politically sensitive religious education is in Turkish society. The debate over religious education, along with a few other touchstone issues, reveals much about how official conceptions of religion clash with the beliefs and practices of many religiously observant Turkish citizens. This clash became particularly clear to me as I became involved in an independent and unauthorized women’s Koran course in Sincan, a suburb of Ankara. I participated in this course in order to understand conservative religious lifestyles in Turkey, and to gain insight into the view of secularism that many pious Muslims held in Turkish society soon after the collapse of the Islamist-leaning government in 1997. The involvement in the Koran course certainly allowed me to carry out this research, but also gave me an interesting perspective from which to examine the politicization of religious knowledge and education at a rather turbulent time in Turkey’s economic and political history. To appreciate the political importance and sensitivity of religious instruction, it is necessary to understand the nature of secularism in Turkey and most especially the relationship between the Turkish state and religion. The Turkish population is overwhelmingly Muslim, but especially since the [End Page 683] fall of the Ottoman Empire and the foundation of the modern Turkish republic in 1923, Turkey’s government and major social institutions have been staunchly secular. The early Republican government, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, saw secularization as essential to the creation of a truly modern nation-state. Indeed, Kemalism (the ideology based on the doctrines of Mustafa Kemal) promotes what it considers to be secularism, along with nationalism, economic development and Westernization, as the ideological basis of the modern Turkish Republic. Many aspects of Turkish society —from education and governance to the organization of daily life— were officially secularized over a relatively short period of time. However, Turkish secularism more closely resembles French laicité than American-style secularism. Where secularism in the United States strives for a complete separation of church and state, laicism (laiklik) in Turkey strives to bring religion under the control of the state. The idea is that religion should not be in the hands of a powerful and independent cleric elite (ulema) that can rival government power, but should be brought under the control of the non-religious state, where it no longer poses a potential threat to government hegemony (Davison 2003:341; White 2002:4). As such, Turkish secularism—or laicism—does not make assumptions of religious neutrality or objectivity in the public sphere, but instead religion is tightly defined and legally subordinated to the political establishment. Religion is controlled by a branch of government, the Directorate of Religious Affairs, whose main task, according to the 1982 Turkish constitution, is to regulate Islam, especially its public expressions, such that it guarantees that these expressions accord with the needs of the state (Yavuz 2000:29; Yılmaz 2005:388). Controlling religious education is, of course, an essential method of “domesticating” religion and guaranteeing that it remains relatively harmless. Over the course of the Westernizing reforms in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, education became more and more secular (Mardin 1993:350–353). Since the founding of the modern Turkish republic in 1923, compulsory general education has been secular, ending once and for all the influences of the traditional Ottoman medreses, or religious schools. The new Republican government put all education under the control of the Ministry of Education, developing a unified curriculum and educational system that would articulate a particular cultural and moral identity—a Turkish identity—to be shared by the (Turkish) citizens of the new nation (Kaplan 2006:39). This identity included a very particular [End Page 684] interpretation of Islam that was encoded in official religious educational practices and institutions, while alternative interpretations were condemned and often declared illegal by the Turkish government. Yet many members of Turkish society have found the government treatment of religion in education to be problematic for many reasons that I will explore in this paper, and they have attempted to establish alternative forms of religious education outside the official channels. The Sincan Koran course...

Transformation Tensions in Higher Education: Equity, Efficiency, and Development

Nico Cloete and Teboho Moja Transformation Tensions in Higher Education: Equity, Efficiency, and Development H IG H ER EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA SIN CE 1994 IS braided into the bargain struck by President F. W. De Klerk and prisoner Nelson Mandela—both in terms of the baggage it carried and the promises it offered. When the new government came to power in 1994 on the basis of the “implicit bargain” (Gelb, 2001) reached between the National Party and the liberation movement led by the African National Congress (ANC), there was consensus in the government of national unity that higher education needed transformation. Not as clear was the nature of the tensions implicit in the compromises that had to be made and how the trade-offs would be negotiated. In the course of 2004 many reviews of the first decade of South African democracy were published. They can be classified into two main categories: self-congratulatory eulogies reluctantly conceding a few “challenges” that need to be addressed in the next decade, and condemnatory critiques of the new government’s readiness to sell out to Washington-led neoliberal globalization in order to promote nonracial class formation. In an attempt to avoid such position taking, this review aims to show that a combination of the politics of macro social and economic processes and historical legacies in higher education led to the emergence of a number of “transformation tensions.” In social research Vol 72 : No 3 : Fall 2005 693 this paper we identify some of these tensions and argue that problems have arisen because the tensions were not anticipated during the initial policy-making process. Two related sets of tensions in the higher education sector are identified and discussed later. The transformation of higher education and the policy decisions taken to effect it fall predominantly within the tension lines of equity and development, and equity and efficiency. These are not the only tensions; there are other veiy important pres­ sures such as the tension between leadership (steering from the top) versus participation, but these will not be the subject of this article. The tensions discussed do not imply a choice between the good and the bad because all the tension points are important. The real challenge is to prioritize and pay attention to what seems most urgent while not ignoring the other end of the tension line. EQUITY VERSUS DEVELOPMENT There was strong anticipation in South Africa, as there was in the sixties and seventies in many newly independent African countries, that higher education would contribute to social and economic devel­ opment. At the infamous Accra workshop of 1973, the Association of African Universities declared that “the university in Africa occupies too critical a position to be left alone to determine its own priorities and should therefore accept the hegemony of government” (Yesufu, 1973: 45). In many countries in Africa this line of argument was used to violate academic freedom and justify political interference, and not to provide a development agenda (Moja, Muller, and Cloete, 1996). In South Africa, the stoiy has thus far been rather different, but not unlike other countries in Africa, the government is struggling to construct a socioeconomic framework that provides appropriate signals for higher education. From the first attempts to start formulating a new policy frame­ work for postapartheid South Africa (the 1992 National Education Policy Initiative), the possibility of tension between equity and development was present in policy debate. Badat, Barends, and Wolpe (1994) reasoned 694 social research that higher education would be confronted with sets of contradictions, and that the most problematic would be the tension between equity and development. For example, it was argued that a transformed, expanded, and democratized higher education system could become more equitable in terms of access for large numbers of black students registered in cheap courses, such as the then popular biblical studies and language majors. But it was also foreseen that two problems could possibly emerge out of such a system. The first was a growth in enroll­ ment figures and a massive increase in student-to-faculty ratios with the likelihood of a drastic reduction in quality. The second problem was that the choice of cheap courses would not...

Federalism and immigration: models and trends

Although immigration policy has traditionally been considered a realm of exclusive central government authority, recent trends evidence a greater role for federal units in the area. This article summarises and evaluates those trends as they relate to immigrant rights, immigration enforcement, and immigration benefits under three basic models of federal governance: central government hegemony, cooperative federalism, and devolutionary federalism. The article concludes that affording increased discretion to subnational authorities over immigrant and immigration policy will ultimately work to the net benefit of immigrants, and that even while complete devolution remains impracticable cooperative federalism has emerged a desirable approach in the area.

Reivindicaciones urbanas y organización popular : el caso de Durango

De acuerdo con una tesis generalizada hasta mediados de los años setenta, y todavía vigente, las organizaciones de colonos e inquilinos pobres en México creen en la legitimidad de las instituciones del sistema y, en buena parte, las apoyan. Sus demandas se encuentran subordinadas y cooptadas por el Estado y rechazan la vinculación con los partidos de izquierda. En cuanto a los movimientos urbano-populares independientes, se sostiene actualmente que su número es reducido, constituyendo manifestaciones colectivas de escasa duración, con bajo nivel de politización y sin capacidad de iniciativa ni de formulación de propuestas urbanas alternativas.A través de un estudio de caso, en este artículo se somete a revisión la versión relativa a los movimientos urbanos populares autónomos, centrándose en el análisis de una organización que surgió en Durango, una ciudad de tamaño medio que posee un bajo índice de industrialización. A partir de 1972 e incorporando las experiencias de movimientos locales anteriores, el Comité de Defensa Popular (CDP) lucha por demandas tanto urbanas como políticas y culturales. El Comité está avanzando en su consolidación interna, ha brindado solidaridad y establecido alianzas con otros grupos independientes de la localidad y está desarrollando una labor importante para unificar las diferentes organizaciones independientes que reivindican demandas similares en el país. Por ello, posee una dinámica propia y una proyección política, constituyendo una de las fuerzas importantes a nivel local, ya que nuclea contingentes similares o mayores que los que integran las organizaciones paralelas del estado de Durango.El caso estudiado demuestra que la hegemonía del Estado en este terreno es modificable, que las luchas de las mayorías urbanas no deben necesariamente realizarse a través de una relación clientelista, con él y, asimismo que los movimientos urbanos populares independientes están avanzando en su estructuración interna y en sus niveles de politización.