Grassroots Politics Research Articles

‘Trusting the Lord, Conquering the Land’: Pentecostals, Landless Movement and Grassroots Politics from Dilma Rousseff to Jair Bolsonaro

One dominant narrative of the recent Brazilian crisis elaborated by scholars explains it as the result of a (lost) battle of secularist and progressive forces against religious and conservative ones. This paper challenges such a Manichaean viewpoint, by approaching grassroots politics in the context of critical events from Dilma Rousseff's impeachment to Jair Bolsonaro's victory in the 2018 presidential elections, from an ethnographic perspective. Drawing on fieldwork among Pentecostal families involved in the Landless Workers Movement, this paper argues that looking at moral reciprocity as well as power relations may help us to move beyond dichotomous stereotypes and analytical frameworks such as ‘patronage’ or ‘populism’.

Locating the Muslim Women in Grassroots Politics: An empirical study in the district of Purulia, West Bengal

Locating the Muslim Women in Grassroots Politics: An empirical study in the district of Purulia, West Bengal

Political Performances of Control During COVID-19: Controlling and Contesting Democracy in Germany

Drawing from interpretive, namely discursive-performative approaches to both institutional and grassroots (populist) politics, this article explores political performances and counter-performances of control in Germany during the so-called first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methodologically, the article constructs a comparative analytical framework including three cases from both within and outside of the federal institutional structure of Germany: at the institutional level, the cases comprise Angela Merkel, long-term federal Chancellor of Germany, and Michael Kretschmer, the regional Governor of the state of Saxony; at the grassroots level, the selected case is the populist protest movement “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident” (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, PEGIDA). Based on original empirical data generated using the toolkit of qualitative-interpretive methodology, notably online ethnography, the comparative analysis focuses on a few key counter-performances of control, among them a TV address (Merkel), a visit to an “anti-lockdown” demonstration (Kretschmer), and virtual protest events (PEGIDA). Emphasizing the performed, dynamic, and contested character of political control in Germany in spring 2020, the empirical analysis yields the following results: first, it sheds light on the different political styles of performing and contesting institutional control, including the habitus, modes, and (emotional) tones of the communication of the performers, and the scripts, stages, intended audiences as (imagined) constituencies, and modalities of transmission of their performances. Second, the discourse-theoretical perspective of the analysis reveals that political performances of control were closely linked to articulations of democracy as an empty signifier, and to claims for safeguarding democratic principles as such. Third, the article demonstrates the value of interpretive approaches to politics to generate more nuanced understandings of the relationships between the pandemic, democracy, and populism in a situation of an ultimate lack of control.

‘The Community’ as a Multivocal Concept: Everyday Urban Life and Grassroots Politics in Caracas’ Informal Neighbourhoods

ABSTRACT This article analyses the multivocal meanings of the concept ‘the community’ as embedded and employed in everyday- and political discourses in working class and shantytown neighbourhoods (barrios) in the capital city of Caracas, Venezuela. Set in the context of the late Hugo Chávez’ presidency (1999–2013), I explore how ‘community’ variously referred to socio-territorial space or to emerging and contested notions of political community, and how the different meanings were imbricated. I focus on how experiments with bottom-up democracy foregrounded popular sector communities as essential to the construction of ‘Bolivarian’ Venezuela, and trace contemporary notions of ‘community’ back to the Venezuelan state’s earlier nation building projects, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century. Through engaging with anthropological debates about the challenges attached to the term ‘community’, I argue that valuable ethnographic insights can be gained through unpacking how ‘community’ is invoked in different contexts and by different actors.

The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Singapore and Malaysia by Meredith L. Weiss

Reviewed by: The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Singapore and Malaysia by Meredith L. Weiss Bridget Welsh The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Singapore and Malaysia, by MEREDITH L. WEISS, NUS Press/Cornell University Press, 2020, 271 pp. ISBN 9789813251212 Meredith Weiss's Roots of Resilience is essential reading for those grappling with two persistent questions about politics in Malaysia and Singapore. First, why have [End Page 238] those in power stayed in power for so long. Second, what are the sources of change in these political systems. Both questions are timely given the ongoing transformations taking place. Malaysia has experienced three different governments in three years (2018–20), all led by different parties, and Singapore has lost ground electorally in the 2020 general election and its current leadership transition is arguably the most uncertain in history. Arguing that attention needs to move away from looking at politics as elections, Weiss's book provides her answer to these questions. She argues that the answers lie within the parties themselves, their history, the nexus with the state apparatus, including local government/party organs, and effective use of clientelism/patronage. These arguments are sound and robustly discussed as she contextualizes how both these hybrid political systems led by UMNO/BN and the PAP in Malaysia and Singapore respectively have strengthened and maintained their hold on power. Her use of archival material and interviews are both rich and carefully done, with the historical discussions the strongest in her book. The book is yet another example of Weiss's fine scholarship on Malaysian politics. Weiss's analysis both compliments and contrasts with other broad interpretations of politics that adopt a focus on party institutions. Dan Slater's Ordering Power (2010) argued that power came from the state formation process and state revenues. Edmund Terence Gomez (2018) highlighted the centralization of power and institutionalized involvement in business in his Minister of Finance Incorporated. These works share a focus on how the fusing of party and the state explain the longevity of the parties in power. Weiss's special contribution in this collection is to highlight the role of party organizations and patronage practices. Beyond her macro accounting of drivers of national politics, her analysis enriches studies of the dominant political parties in both countries, a scholarship that largely focuses on party leaders and legacies. While bringing greater depth to the analysis of the politics of Singapore and Malaysia, Weiss's analysis is still top-down. The engagement with voters, the operations of the party organizations (with their diversity) and the grassroots themselves are missing. They are acted upon rather than in a dynamic exchange. There are no meaningful voices explaining how voters or society has responded to the fusion of party, state, and patronage. As such, the discussion does not fully capture how the parties are rooted—both the expansion and contraction of the rootedness of the parties in Malaysian and Singaporean society require further elaboration. This speaks to a weakness in her analysis, its inability to effectively explain current changes taking place, as the power of both dominant parties has eroded and, in the case of Malaysia's UMNO, been displaced from power. While there is acknowledgment that the practices of patronage persist and the systems remain resilient for this reason, the top-down analytical lens leaves the reader wanting more, especially in light of the greater political instability and current tests of the resilience of the political systems. This perhaps is the subject of a subsequent study. The book appears to have been written for political scientists. The terminology and jargon speak to ongoing debates within the field and can be difficult to follow for the unfamiliar. The details in the careful accounting of political history and [End Page 239] the bold argument presented, however, make the book a valuable read and a much-needed contribution to deepen analysis of how politics in both countries are changing, now with weaker dominant parties decaying at their roots. [End Page 240] Bridget Welsh University of Nottingham Malaysia Copyright © 2021 Malaysian Branch of The Royal Asiatic Society

Movement cultures and media in grassroots politics

In the past two decades, a rising number of studies have investigated the complex relationship between the media and social movements. Within this body of research, media technologies are considere...

The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change

The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change

The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change. Intersections in Environmental Injustice. Edited by Char Miller and Jeff Crane

The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change. Intersections in Environmental Injustice. Edited by Char Miller and Jeff Crane

Lost futures? Educated youth precarity and protests in the Oromia region, Ethiopia

ABSTRACT Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the connections between young people's livelihoods, education and visions of the future in Ethiopia. It engages with educated youth's narratives of precarity, dispossession, and ‘intimate exclusions,’ discussing how development has impacted rural livelihoods. Educated youth protests in the Oromia region reveal how shortages of farmland and education play crucial roles in the conflict about sovereignty and development. Qeerroo (Oromo youth) are particularly active in the protests because they are excluded from a rural future through land grabbing and population growth as well as from a modernist development future that unequally distributes the fruits of economic growth. By politicizing educated unemployment and landlessness and connecting them to neoliberal capitalism, this article analyses the intentions of the Ethiopian state to ‘save’ its youth through economic development while youths claim to ‘lose’ their futures to generate grassroots politics. The article also draws analytical attention to why there is a need to rethink concepts like development, waithood, and rural futures.

Who owns a cuisine? The grassroots politics of Japanese food in Europe

Culinary borrowings are so common as to seem trivial, and yet they are consequential for many of the actors concerned. People’s livelihoods, professional status, and social identity may be tied to their stake in the defining boundaries of culinary cultures. When dominant groups or powerful actors such as multinational corporate chains adopt or reinvent the cuisine of weaker and marginal groups, it may be regarded as cultural appropriation. However, the definition of the situation becomes more complicated when multiple weak and marginal actors compete over ownership of a cuisine. This article discusses how Japanese and other Asian migrant actors participate in grassroots culinary politics surrounding definitions and uses of Japanese cuisine in the context of a Japanese food boom in Europe. It shows how the “borrowed power” of one migrant group may threaten the status and even livelihoods of the foundational stakeholders in a culinary field.

Review: The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change

Review: The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change

Countering depoliticized representations of Syrian women: memories of dictatorship from pre-war Syria

This article engages in a critical analysis of authoritarian rule in pre-war Syria by examining the accounts of sixty-eight Syrian refugee women who were displaced in different areas of Lebanon in 2014. While participants’ ideas are informed by their experiences of war and refugeehood, an exploration of their memories of the pre-war period reveals that economic welfare is a key determinant to the formation of their political opinions on dictatorship in ‘peace’ time. Drawing on feminist research that endeavours to reposition women in the domain of the political, the article argues that political agency must not be conceived only in terms of political activism but, rather, as a distinctive trait of politically inactive women who live under dictatorship. By using a broader conceptualization of the political that does not confine political subjectivity to the realm of formal and/or grassroots politics, the article seeks to recast political agency on Syrian refugee women whose understandings of the political is often silenced by disempowering orientalist representations.

Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America by Darren Dochuk

Reviewed by: Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America by Darren Dochuk Mark Stoll Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America. By Darren Dochuk. (New York: Basic Books, 2019. Pp. 674. Notes, bibliography, index.) Darren Dochuk, author of the highly readable blockbuster From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (W. W. Norton, 2011), has followed up with another well-written doorstop, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America. Anointed with Oil sets out to tell "the religious biography of a natural resource with outsized— and seemingly otherworldly—importance" (9). Dochuk traces the history of the American petroleum business from Edwin Drake's first well in Pennsylvania through the turn of the twenty-first century. He seeks to show an affinity of wildcatters for a certain individualist style of Protestantism, along with the tensions between the major oil companies and the wildcatters, and how oil and Christianity combined to foster a divisive American politics. Dochuk tells his story through the interwoven lives of a number of major oil figures, all with deep religious convictions: John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Rockefeller dynasty; Lyman Stewart of Union Oil; the Pew family of Sun Oil; and a handful of such independent oilmen as H. L. Hunt, Robert Kerr, Jake Simmons, and a few minor characters. The book's structure is episodic and chronological. Each chapter tells a relatively [End Page 221] self-contained story that connects to the others through individuals and their families, companies, and broader themes. Dochuk is a gifted storyteller. Chapters begin in the early oil fields of Pennsylvania and describe the rise of John D. Rockefeller. Wildcatters, whom Rockefeller pushed out of business, headed west of the Mississippi, a region that conventional wisdom said held no oil, and where they mixed with chance-takers from the South. In Texas, they discovered the immense Spindletop oil field, then quickly spread through East Texas into Oklahoma or headed to California. Contrasting the chance-taking, individualistic, conservative religion of wildcatters with the liberal Protestant leanings of the Rockefellers, Dochuk turns his focus to the Middle East, where several sons of American missionaries worked for American and (occasionally) European oil interests as intermediaries with Muslim Arabs. Later chapters delve into the growing presence of Israel, the denouement of the Rockefeller family saga, and wildcatters' support for libertarian politics and evangelical Protestantism. Only the prologue and two of the twelve chapters focus on Texas, although Texas oilmen figure prominently in many chapters. Individually, chapters are engaging, but the book as a whole lacks a compelling narrative. The Middle East chapters feel disconnected, for example. Dochuk creates a plausible explanation for a wildcat religion, but his choice to concentrate on individual stories does not allow the reader to form an overall impression: Were deeply religious oilmen typical or exceptional? How important was region? That Western Pennsylvania, birthplace of the oil industry, spawned no highly conservative John Birch-style political movements suggests that such movements were very likely linked to Texas and the Southwest rather than endemic to the industry, just as Dochuk's first, region-focused book suggested. Categories need clarification. Dochuk's wildcat religion, for example, is theologically unspecific—Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and sometimes Pentecostal. Is wildcat religion Protestant, then? But without prologue or explanation, Jewish and Catholic wildcatters like Jacob Blaustein, Rudolf Sonneborn, and Ignatius O'Shaughnessy walk on stage. How do they fit, exactly? Moreover, Dochuk never speaks of a "wildcatter Islam," although authors like political theorist Timothy Mitchell have posited an alliance of convenience among oil companies, authoritarian regimes, and extreme Islam. Finally, in light of the considerable detail in Dochuk's account of the early oil industry, the powerful influence of oil money on the growth of conservative evangelicalism and of right-wing politics is rushed. He could have given us much more on this potent combination. For all that, Dochuk's deeply researched history of the neglected relationship between religion and oil makes a major contribution to the histories of the American oil business, religion, and politics, and it provides a [End Page 222] valuable introduction to many of its...

Adolescent Sex and Psyche in Brazil: Surveillance, Critique and Global Mental Health

Drawing on a historical ethnography conducted in Southern Brazil, this article explores how public health programs for adolescent reproductive and mental health have emerged in Brazil and begun to intersect with the growing field of “global mental health” (GMH). The story I recount begins not in the 2010s with the rapid rise of expert interest in adolescent health within GMH, but in the 1990s, the decade when young teens in Brazil were first coming into contact with practices and approaches in research, schools and clinics that have both underpinned and critiqued the production of an adolescent mental and reproductive health sub-field. In parsing what young women’s encounters with the then newly-emerging questionnaires, measurement tools, school-based programs and clinical practices came to mean to them, I use a genealogical approach to consider how histories of education reform, population control, psychoanalysis, social medicine, the transition to democracy, feminism and grass-roots politics all entered the fold, shaping the way adolescent sex-and-psyche materialized as a contested object of expertise. I end by exploring what this case can teach global mental health advocates and social theorists about practices of critique.

Religion in Coalition: Balancing Moderate and Progressive Politics in the Sydney Alliance

This article examines how the engagement of diverse religious organisations and individuals in grassroots politics impacts the nature of politics and coalition building through a case study of an urban grassroots political coalition in Australia: the Sydney Alliance. Based on eight-months of exploratory ethnographic fieldwork in one campaign team, this article argues that whilst religious organisations bring significant symbolic and institutional resources to political coalitions, and can be flexible coalition partners, they tend to moderate both conservative and progressive political tendencies within a coalition and demand focused attention from organisers and leaders to manage the coalition dynamics. This article examines the way many religious activists understand their political action to be an inherent and necessary part of their religious practice: problematizing the characterisation common in much social science literature that religious engagement in more progressive politics primarily serves political, and not religious, ends. In doing so, it shows how political action can be directed both outward towards the work, and inward towards the ‘church’.

Attack the Data: Agency, Power, and Technopolitics in South African Data Activism

This article deploys a discursive–material analytical framework to trace how perceptions of data power are constructed in urban activist circles against data’s capacity to advance grassroots political goals. By framing South African data activism practices as a form of technopolitics—a concept that foregrounds the coconstitution of politics and technology through their anchoring to normative discourses—this analysis identifies how data are enrolled to substantiate a grassroots political discourse of spatial injustice yet how, through contestation by government officials, the fragility of data as objects of grassroots political power is laid bare. This empirical study of service provision social audits in Johannesburg and Cape Town shows how governments have effectively resisted their findings by singling out the quantitative data as a weak actor, exploiting this as an opportunity to advance their own political discourse of responsibility around service provision. In revealing how grassroots power was eventually strengthened through a strategic redistribution of agencies, the article then advances a nondeterministic understanding of data power and agency as relational, partial, and provisional and enacted through the coconstitution of people, technologies, and discourses, which might resonate with other examples of data activism and further urban data assemblages. These findings add empirical weight to claims of empowerment made in the emerging fields of data activism and data justice, and they raise further important questions for geographers and others interested in the ways in which data are enrolled to enact grassroots politics, as well as the discursive–material dimensions of urban technopolitics more generally. Key Words: data determinism, data imaginary, data justice, spatial justice, technopolitics.

Populism

Populism refers to forms of politics that put 'the people' at their centre, but the way 'the people' is understood varies widely. Questions of left populism have gained significant traction and engagement in the last decade - and this is a key focus of this article. While recognising the importance of Ernesto Laclau's analysis in On Populist Reason, the authors argue that his work is hindered by an overly formalist account of the political. Stuart Hall's writings on Thatcherism offer a more contextual and situated engagement with particular populist strategies, and have continuing relevance for understanding right-wing populism. Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece offer actually existing experiences of left populism. We discuss three limitations in their strategies: their 'nationed' narratives of the crisis; the relationship between the parties' leadership and grassroots politics; and the nature of their engagement with internationalist political projects. Part of the critical terms series

An Assessment of the Role of Women Group in Women Political Participation, and Economic Development in Nigeria.

The exclusion of women in politics has been identified in recent times as one of the major setbacks for economic development. Women's groups are a strong pillar for grassroots politics; and a drive for more women participating in politics at the grassroots still faces a lot of challenges, making it difficult for them to harness available opportunities for economic development. Thus, the opportunity therein for more women's participation in politics and women empowerment is yet to be exploited by the women's groups in Nigeria. This present study assesses the role of women's groups in politics, identifies their challenges and also explores its implication for economic development in Osun state, Nigeria. The study was carried out using primary data from forums and dialogues within women's groups, consisting of an average of thirty (30) members from ten (10) local government areas (LGAs) in Osun state, Nigeria. In addition, explorative methods using existing literature were also employed. Findings from the study indicate that women's groups do not have political agenda; mostly, their goals do not align with any political agenda, although their members accept appointments, and also enjoy government patronage. There was also an indication that there exists a high illiteracy rate among the members of the women's groups and most of them are not aware of existing National or International gender equality laws or affirmative action. Thus, it is difficult to participate in politics and contribute their voices to political issues. The study concludes that the present role played by women's groups at the grassroots level may not be adequate in encouraging more women's participation in politics and in influencing economic development. Thus, there is need to step up their activities and embrace political issues if they are to help more women participate and be relevant in politics. The study therefore suggests that more empowerment programs, especially in the area of decision making and participation in politics, should be targeted at women's groups at the grassroots levels by the governments and all stakeholders as a matter of priority.

Trading time and space: Grassroots negotiations in a Brazilian mining district

Participatory governance has been used to direct public budget and policy priorities. Grassroots politics also offers democratic pathways for negotiations over permits for businesses such as mining. In this paper, I focus on notions of time in policy-meetings between a mining company, the affected community in the district of Miguel Burnier, Brazil, and mediators between them – members of a municipal council for cultural heritage. I used ethnographic data to investigate whether participatory councils could abridge temporalities and offer a compromise. While the company offered improvements in quality of life in an uncertain future and the council needed to preserve local cultural heritage, residents suffered from pressing problems in the present: depopulation, pollution, and unemployment. My findings show that participation could not solve residents’ socio-economic problems efficiently, for these same problems affected their ability to voice concerns and wait for compensations. Relaxing immediate economic pressures improves the process of participation.

Challenging the representation of ethnically divided cities: perspectives from Mostar

ABSTRACTIn this introduction, we discuss the scope of the edited volume by outlining the position of Mostar within much broader academic debates on ‘ethnically divided cities’. We question the representations of such contested cities as hopeless spaces of division, and suggest to explore instead the cracks that challenge overpowering logics of partition: the self-directed attempts at inter-ethnic solidarity, grassroots movements for social justice and dignity, and the inconsistent ways people in these cities inhabit and perform ethnic identities. We also introduce the themes of this Special Issue; Divided Cities as Complex Cities; Memories, Affect and Everyday Life; and Grassroots Politics.