Political Horizon Research Articles

Trabajo interprofesional en Chile Impactos de la racionalidad neoliberal y los horizontes de la justicia social

Se presentan los resultados generales de una investigación sobre trabajo interprofesional en la implementación de programas sociales, discutiéndolos a la luz de los impactos de la racionalidad neoliberal y desde una perspectiva que pone las discusiones sobre justicia social como un horizonte político insoslayable en el momento actual. Basado en la aplicación de un diseño mixto de investigación, incluyendo técnicas de producción de datos cuantitativas y cualitativas, los resultados del estudio sugieren que el trabajo interprofesional presenta una serie de nudos críticos que se relacionan con esta racionalidad neoliberal: las condiciones laborales inestables, sobrecargadas y precarias de las/os profesionales, la confianza excesiva en su capacidad emprendedora, la construcción de un estatus desigual entre las profesiones y la reproducción de lógicas individualistas y competitivas en las prácticas cotidianas.

Animal Politics: advocating for full access to health care for companion animals

Conceived by the ideas of several personalities and in permanent expansion, the field of animal ethics has been able to blur and redefine the limits of the moral community, incorporating non-human animals. But even though we are witnessing how moral anthropocentrism is entering into the category of mental scheme from a past era, unfortunately it continues to be responsible for drawing the political horizon of animals. Therefore, the challenge is to pay attention from the political and legal world to the growing public sensitivity towards animals. Thus, what is presented here constitutes a simple attempt to provide a better political scenario for them. Based on the animal rights theory of Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, pursuing a meaningful interspecies political community requires identifying what kind of actions can be expected to bring that desired situation. Consequently, improving access to health care for companion animals should be seen as a step forward in that direction.

Stuart Hall and the Freedom of Diaspora

Stuart Hall and the Freedom of Diaspora

Life path and the formation of scientific and political horizons of the scientisr-mechanic, minister of finance of the Russian empire I. A. Vyshegradsky

The article briefly describes the life path, as well as the history of the formation of the horizons of the famous Russian scientist-mechanic, professor, Minister of Finance of the Russian Empire Ivan Alekseevich Vyshnegradsky.
 By 1862, Ivan Alekseevich had already visited several European countries and received the title of professor. From the same year, Vyshnegradsky’s activity began at the St. Petersburg Practical Technological Institute, in which he lectured on mechanical theory of heat and the theory of steam engines, was appointed a member of the study committee.On his initiative, the Department of Metal and Wood Technology was restored. In 1871, a mechanical laboratory was founded at the institute for scientific research on the resistance of building materials and for hydraulics experiments.In 1875, Vyshnegradsky was appointed director of the institute, continuing his teaching activities. Among the machines he designed: an automatic press for the manufacture of prismatic powder, lifting machines, a press for testing materials, a mechanical material handler (for a river port), etc. 
 Features of economic policy of I. A. Vyshnegradsky consisted in the desire to increase the gold reserve of the empire and increase Russia's influence on the international economy and politics.For him, the most important and only task was the visible improvement of Russian finance in a short time. Favorable conditions were artificially created for heavy industry, which became a priority among the interests of the Ministry of Finance, often to the detriment of the interests of all agriculture.Under Vyshnegradsky, the export of Russian bread more than doubled. Stimulated the export of not only surplus bread, but also part of the necessary stocks of peasants. As a minister, he led the redemption of unprofitable railways, undertook control and financial (1889-1890) and tariff (1889) reforms in the railway sector.Conducted the conversion of state (external and internal) loans, which helped to reduce payments on public debt, lower interest, streamline public debt.

Unsettling Existence

This article addresses land acknowledgement in contemporary Indigenous performance to illustrate how the invocation of Lakota cultural knowledge animates the contradictions of existence. The Native American Medicine Garden (NAMG) on the University of Minnesota campus, and Cânté Sütá-Francis Bettelyoun's (Lakota Oglala) pedagogy, informs the overarching conundrum with the ontological turn in academia, that is - how to ally with non-extractive knowledges in a way that isn't extractive? Through participant-observation at the NAMG, drawn from 2016-2019, I identify how Bettelyoun invokes Lakota cultural knowledge to set the conditions for participation by bringing attention to settler-colonial relations with the environment, and illuminate alternative modes of human-environment interactions. I ask how NAMG, surrounded by genetically modified organism (GMO) testing fields on a research university, unsettles logics of existence by applying pressure to the ‘agrilogistic' promise to ‘eliminate fear, anxiety, and contradiction… by reducing existence to sheer quantity’ (Morton). I approach this inquiry by thinking from the political and philosophical horizons made possible by Cânté Sütá-Francis Bettelyoun (Lakota Oglala) to consider how the Native American Medicine Garden functions as a performance paradigm. To illustrate the idea of thinking from the garden I outline how the conditions are set for participatory and tactile engagements with place, juxtaposing theory with ethnographic vignettes. I then turn to a discussion of relationality within the garden and the only ever partial connections scholars of settler ancestry have to Lakota cultural knowledge. As I respond to Morton's thoughts on mono-culture and noncontradiction, the inquiry will circle back to the initial acknowledgement - the land on which I live, work, and study - to honour the Dakhóta and Anishinaabeg histories and contemporary actions allowing me - a settler of German and Polish ancestry - to be unsettled about where I stand.

On the Persistence of the Japanese "History Problem": Historicism and the International Politics of History by Hitomi Koyama

Reviewed by: On the Persistence of the Japanese "History Problem": Historicism and the International Politics of History by Hitomi Koyama Hiro Saito (bio) On the Persistence of the Japanese "History Problem": Historicism and the International Politics of History. By Hitomi Koyama. Routledge, London, 2018. x, 157 pages. $155.00, cloth; $57.95, E-book. This book makes a unique contribution to the existing research on the socalled history problem in East Asia. Such uniqueness lies in the book's focus on different strands of "historicism" as the horizon of the international politics of history. Put another way, while existing research has examined the international politics of history mostly in the empirical dimension—how Japan, South Korea, China, and other relevant countries constructed and advanced their own versions of history in international relations—this book introduces a reflexive approach to critically probe the foundational assumptions of international politics itself. This novelty stems, perhaps in no small part, from Hitomi Koyama's intellectual background that combines international relations and political theory. With this unique combination of the international politics of history and the philosophy of history, the book promises to shed new light on "the persistence of the Japanese 'history problem.'" Specifically, the book thematizes and problematizes the idea of "the sovereign subject of history" that has been integral to the international politics of history. Koyama makes this analytical gambit because she believes that a historical examination of how the Japanese state and citizens grappled with the legacy of Japan's past wrongdoings is insufficient for understanding the persistence of the history problem; rather, this analytical task requires a genealogical investigation of how the Japanese state and citizens have understood "history" itself—and Japan's place in it—ever since they had embarked on "modernization" in the late nineteenth century. From this genealogical perspective, the persistence of the history problem can be understood to be ultimately inherent in the normative assumption built into the international politics of history: for Japan to be able to achieve reconciliation with Korean, Chinese, and other victims of its past wrongdoings, it should be first constituted as the sovereign subject of history, an "agent-actor" capable of taking its own actions on the stage of world history dominated by the "West" as well as taking responsibility for its past actions vis-à-vis the call of the "Asian" other. In reality, however, Japan has never been fully constituted as a unified agent-actor but always remained a divided one, fractured with internal disagreements and permeated with the perception of being the victim, at least partially, of external historical circumstances. [End Page 514] In fact, if being the sovereign subject of history is a normative requirement for reconciliation, it will inevitably create an impasse for any actor, whether a state or an individual, because such a requirement can never be empirically fulfilled. The idea of the sovereign state actor, for example, is the "organized hypocrisy" of international relations, as Stephen Krasner bluntly put it. The idea of the sovereign individual actor also begins to unravel once the distributed and networked nature of agency is recognized in light of science and technology studies. In this sense, the "sovereign subject of history" can be said to constitute the "condition of possibility and impossibility" of the international politics of history à la Jacques Derrida's paradoxical formulation. This is why the book concludes that interrogating the very idea of the sovereign subject of history may help the stakeholders in the history problem see through the impasse in which they have been trapped—and possibly reframe the problem itself in search of a new resolution. Although I greatly appreciate the book's unique perspective on the ongoing debate on the history problem, I also think it falls short of fully articulating the theoretical promise of combining the international politics of history and the philosophy of history. On the one hand, the book's analysis of the international politics of history is not international enough, for it focuses mostly on domestic politics and debates inside Japan, only minimally examining Japan's relations with South Korea, China, and other relevant countries as a cause of the history problem. On the other hand, its philosophical reflection on...

A perda como um ganho: luto artístico em Sasha Waltz

The most recent presentation (2017) in Lisbon of Sasha Waltz & Guests with the choreography Kreatur recovers the social and political horizon of previous works. It happens through a deep understanding of what we are as species – something we seem always to forget and distort, due to not considering our inner affinities. We lack the patience and wisdom to bring the art of the potter to the art of the dancer who, in order to reach the new and the unsuspecting, makes life an inti‑ mate ordeal to which it offers breath, gesture, movement. The dancer’s ability comes from the recognition of the distant and hidden expression of what preceded him or her and which they insist on not detracting. SPACIALITY AND BODY / DEAD BODY AND LIVING BODY / BODIES’ CORALITY / REPETITION OUT OF REPETITION / PLEASURE AND TRAINING

Decent Work and Healthy Employment: A Qualitative Case Study About Colombian Millennials

The purpose of this paper is to show how a group of Colombian millennials perceive different aspects of working life and how their ideas about job satisfaction, professional expectations, and levels of autonomy are related to contemporary demands about inclusion, diversity, equity, autonomy, and control. With this objective, 167 semi-structured interviews were conducted with millennials who work at 10 Colombian companies from the manufacturing and service sectors, located in the 5 main cities of the country. With a qualitative approach in the interviews, the research team used a strategy inspired by the technique of generating visual structures associated with grounded theory. It is concluded that new generations of Colombian workers know of the importance of rewards and autonomy in work and are more critical and less passive in the face of unhealthy working conditions. At the same time, their conduct and speeches are the consequence of the characteristics of the Colombian labour market. The document responds to the need to deepen the debates on welfare and happiness in organizations and to include the demands of millennials in the reflective and political horizon of the ideas of healthy employment and decent work. In practice, this article seeks to demystify ideas about millennials in Colombia and critically contribute to reflection on intergenerational relations in organizations and salary and welfare models. As a Latin American case, it is an original contribution that avoids the common places and the frivolity with which the insertion of the new generations into the working world has been analysed.

Review: East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective, edited by Stefan Esders, Yaniv Fox, Yitzhak Hen and Laury Sarti

Stefan Esders, Yaniv Fox, Yitzhak Hen, and Laury Sarti, eds., East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 374 pp; illustrations; maps. ISBN 9781107187153. $120. Debates over the concepts of continuity and change after the end of the Roman Empire have been central to scholarship on the early medieval west for centuries. The articles in East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective refocus attention away from whether early medieval kingdoms continued or changed formerly western Roman practices or whether continued connections between western Europe and the Mediterranean were simple importations from the East. Instead, the articles, as the introduction by Yitzhak Hen and Stefan Esders suggests, examine the “complicated and multilayered social, cultural, and political relations” the Merovingian kingdoms had “with their eastern Mediterranean counterparts, that is, the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate” (3). These articles consider the wide variety of relations that connected the Mediterranean as a dynamic process: a give and take between states, communities, and individuals. Moreover, by identifying trans-Mediterranean connections, the volume encourages scholars to ask more specific questions about how these processes functioned on a local level. Delving deeper into these dynamic developments within individual post-Roman kingdoms will help us to identify what precisely changed from the early sixth to the end of the seventh centuries for the people living within them. The volume contains twenty-one articles divided into five sections: Expanding Political Horizons, Patterns of Intensification: the 580s, The Pope as a Mediterranean Player, Religious and Cultural Exchange, and Rethinking the Late Merovingians. The sections follow a rough chronological order with a thematic clustering within each section offering connections between articles. This review will discuss particular articles from each section to highlight these themes. In the first section, Yaniv Fox's “Anxiously Looking East: Burgundian Foreign Policy on the Eve of Reconquest,” examines the alliances that emerged after the …

Emancipation within Empire: an Algerian Alternative during the Era of Decolonization

Abstract This article aims at shedding new light on the salience of empire as a political idea even at the height of decolonization. It discusses why and how colonial subjects – here Muslim Algerians – would continue, when faced with a choice, to look to empires rather than nation-states. The article focuses on six women and men who, during Algeria’s war of independence, rejected the nation-state as their political horizon and imagined a decolonized empire in which they could pursue their emancipation and that of their people. These individuals pursued various political projects that would reconcile their claims for equality and cultural distinctiveness. Though a great number of pro-French supporters fought with arms alongside the French army, others fought with ideas, producing laws that would establish civil and economic equality. While historians have conventionally focused on materialist reasons to explain the loyalty of colonized peoples to imperial polities, this article considers instead the ideas and ideals that inspired the claims expressed by Muslim Algerians. Only a focus on ideas allows us to understand why people could continue to support the French imperial state despite its being disastrous for their material circumstances.

Contesting austerity, de-centring the state: Anti-politics and the political horizon of the urban

This article draws novel links between ‘anti-politics’, austerity and a political horizon centred on the urban. Research on anti-politics often invokes a binary understanding of a politics of and within the state and an anti-politics at a distance from or hostile towards the state. This article argues that in the context of austerity, this binary loses traction. Austerity has intensified the transformation towards networked forms of governance within which the state becomes a more hybrid entity of contradictory ideals and practices. Austerity not only calls into question the legitimacy of formal politics because of its devastating social outcomes, it also disaggregates the political authority of the state and opens up a particularly urban terrain of politics. We capture this development by examining the intersections between the local state and the urban field of politics. Looking across the struggles against austerity in Europe, and focusing in more detail on housing politics in Berlin, we assert that the urban is important not only as a setting (as typically argued) but also as the basis for a different rationality of political action in and against austerity. In the context of austerity struggles, state authority becomes ever more contingent and other, more urban, forms of politics advance. In sum, the article contributes to a spatial reading of (anti-)politics against austerity, points to the de-centring of the state in transformative political projects and emphasizes the analytical purchase of a distinctly urban perspective on contemporary politics in Europe.

Rerum Novarum: Theological Reasoning for the Public Sphere?

Contemporary Catholic Social Teaching has increasingly come to bear on the moral and political horizons of our interdependent lives, seeking to address the nature and purpose of our common striving for human flourishing. Frequently, Rerum Novarum is identified as an origin point for CST as a distinctive thread within the deeper tradition of Catholic theology attentive to justice and the common good. The focus on justice in labour practices, especially living wages and social participation, demonstrates its contemporary relevance, but can it contribute to the public debate on such issues, beyond the framework of its particular convictions? This article suggests that Rerum Novarum offers theological reasoning in and for the public sphere by way of its insistence on the social bond as foundation and task; the role of political and cultural plurality in formation and action; and a rich vision of public life as morally participatory for all.

Repensando la identidad de la mano de los feminismos a la búsqueda de nuevas alianzas

At times like today's institutional crisis, feminism might have the potential to become a core asset on the political horizon. I line with this, bridges between different feminisms should be built. Rethinking identity by taking on board the intertwined multiple loyalties might help establish new alliances among the different feminist approaches. Such alliances would strengthen feminist demands even more.

Re-remembering Third Worldism: An Affirmative Critique of National Liberation in Algeria

This article re-examines Third Worldism as a political ideology, with a specific focus on a number of Algerian intellectuals. By taking Algeria as a privileged locus of investigation, the discussion zooms into a specific context of Third Worldism, the Algerian War and the decade after, therefore focusing on the period between the 1950s and the 1970s. Here I understand Third Worldism to mean more than the instantiation of the postcolonial state through anticolonial liberation struggles. Rather, I take into consideration (Algerian) voices that push against the rigid boundaries of methodological nationalism and postcolonial theory. By embracing the ethos of ‘affirmative critique,’ the analysis aims to bring to light those ‘forgotten, hidden or invisible acts of critique’ that expose under-currents of Third Worldism not usually discussed or engaged. Thus, I engage writings of rarely considered Third World intellectuals, such as Kateb Yacine, Jean Amrouche, Jean Senac. These are all Algerian intellectuals; the reason behind this focus is the following: their involvement in Algeria’s decolonization struggles translated into translocal solidarity with other decolonization projects, whether in Vietnam or in Palestine. Aside from gesturing toward a translocal spatiality, their writings also embody a more genuine retrieval of dignity by the colonized, and an alternative memory of a different Algerian nation, intrinsically plural and hospitable to difference. Put differently, these voices both attempt a kind of diagnosis (however partial and incomplete) for the reductionism into which the Third World liberation state (inevitably) fell, while suggesting an alternative political horizon that comes closer to Fanon’s idea of ‘national consciousness’, especially in its attention to the ‘international dimension.’1

Engineers of the human soul: readers, writers, and their political education

ABSTRACTIn the light of recent attempts to construct ‘literature pedagogy’ for cosmopolitan, ‘globalizing’, political ends, this article provides here some stark reminders about the educational, not to say political, risks of confining the aims and purposes of literature to the aims and purposes of politics, or using a literary-political aesthetic as pedagogy. Such confinement occurs when literature pedagogy is put in the service of political doctrine. Even when this is undertaken through the guise of seemingly laudable moral intentions – to serve, for example, Enlightenment-derived goals of equality, fraternity, justice, or their modern guise of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism – the well-intentioned ethical premises of such literature pedagogy, it is argued, limits political horizons, narrows educational outlooks and reduces aesthetics to ideology. Drawing on a variety of historical exemplars, the article details a range of attempts politically to educate and influence readers and writers through literature. Deriving its title from Stalin’s diktat that artists should be ‘engineers of the human soul’, the article argues for an opening out not a closing down of hermeneutical horizons.

Informação institucionalizada e materializada como documento

A pesquisa indaga sobre os caminhos para viabilizar uma construção conceitual acerca da materialidade e da institucionalidade da informação, fenômenos concernentes à transformação do objeto em documento. Objetiva (a) fundamentar e (b) sintetizar caminhos para a investigação dos fenômenos; e (c) edificar um quadro de articulações conceituais sobre a informação materializada e institucionalizada como documento. Para tanto, lançou mão de revisão de literatura, estabelecendo vínculos interdisciplinares, epistemológicos e políticos, tocantes às ciências da documentação e da informação. A pesquisa empregou, ademais, elementos teórico-metodológicos de Imre Lakatos como subsídio para a proposição de um programa de investigação, estruturante para o ordenamento e a articulação das escolhas teórico-metodológicas. Contando com contribuições de obras de Habermas, Foucault, Weber e Bourdieu, tais escolhas perpassam fundamentações de “pretensões de validade, práticas discursivas e horizontes políticos”, de “materialidade sociocultural, simbólico-burocrática e políticas de informação”, do “objeto-suporte e materialidade de ações e práticas informacionais” e dos “contextos epistemológico e políticos: materialidade/institucionalidade/representação”. Os caminhos e as articulações conceituais culminaram no núcleo do programa, a partir do qual se pode observar que o documento é um valor informacional que se atribui ao objeto, ou seja, é o produto da significação ou da função atribuída a uma coisa em determinada institucionalidade. Assim, a materialidade do documento transcende a fisicalidade da informação num suporte, à medida que todo documento: (a) representa algo e pode ser representado; (b) é uma expressão simbólica de poder/saber. Por fim, o documento é um produto de ações e práticas sociais, sendo definido por institucionalidades da informação as quais têm o acesso e as condições de atuação condicionadas por perspectivas de materialidade.

With or without class: Resolving Marx’s Janus-faced interpretation of worker-owned cooperatives

To shed light on polarized perspectives regarding the virtues or downfalls of worker cooperatives among variants of Marxists, this article focuses on Marx’s own Janus-faced analysis of worker cooperatives. Marx had great faith in the radical potential of worker cooperatives, properly organized and politically oriented, but he also was greatly critical of the tendency of cooperatives to shrink their political horizons and become isolated from broader labor movements. Although thinkers in the Marxist tradition criticize worker cooperatives when they operate as isolated circles of ‘collective capitalists’ within the existing capitalist system, Marx himself saw important potential in the cooperative movement, to the extent that it was integrated into broader campaigns for social change. Marx believed that cooperatives could help point the way to an alternative system of free and equal producers, and could prompt radical imaginings among their advocates, but only to the extent that cooperative practitioners recognized the need for class-conscious, industrial scale organizing of workers against the capitalist system. In the end, Marx did not so much focus on promoting a certain type of labor organization as being most conducive to transformation (e.g. worker cooperatives or labor unions). Rather, he focused more on the importance of class consciousness within labor organizing, and on the development of radicalized class consciousness among workers, whether through the expansion of labor unions, worker cooperatives, or any other institution of worker empowerment. It is the nature of a labor institution’s focus on developing and sustaining class consciousness, not the nature of the labor institution itself (i.e. cooperative or union), that Marx believed to most powerfully shape the radical or degenerative tendencies of local forms of labor activism.

The case of "Sophia" and the question of anarchist expropriation

The article is devoted to the analysis of the events that took place in July 1907 - the anarchists expropriated a large amount of money from the boat «Sofia» in the Black Sea. Considering this event, the author discusses the essence and role of political expropriations during the revolution of the early twentieth century, the peculiarities of the tactics of anarchist groups in Ukraine, the fate of some anarchists and their associations. For the South of Ukraine in 1906-1908 political expropriations were common. The article examinates the robbery of a steamer and a train near Odessa, a bank robbery in Odessa, a robbery of a cash register in Verkhnedneprovsk, carried by anarchists. Such actions were conducted not only by anarchists, but also by Bolsheviks, social revolutionaries and other radicals. The expropriations that were carried out by the Odessa anarchists in July-September 1907 became the last chord of the anarchist practice of «direct actions» that allowed, for some time, to restrain the political horizons of the federation of anarchist-syndicalists and communist anarchists also known as the «Working Group Anarchists in the South» (1907–1910). The theme of the discussion is a question about anarchist expropriation, which some researchers consider only as «criminal gangsterism». The article states that the money that was captured by anarchists, initially, went to purely political actions: the preparation of strikes, the printing of propaganda publications, organizational expenses and the purchase of weapons. After the expropriation on the steamer «Sofia», the anarchists sent part of the money to organize a strike of Odessa sailors and port workers, to organize acts of terror against representatives of the executive and judicial authorities. In the second half of 1907, the anarchist groups showed a tendency for self-provision of revolutionaries – spending money that was captured during the expropriation for personal needs, which led to the disappearance of money, weakening of the activities of anarchist structures, the collapse of anarchist groups. «Money depravity» has become one of the causes of the crisis in the anarchist movement and to the disintegration of individual groups. After a series of high-profile expropriations, the police sent all their forces to search for «malefactors». Many anarchists were arrested, including 14 out of 18 participants in the robbery at Sophia, several people were executed. Chasing of the police led to mass arrests and to the emigration of part of anarchists abroad.

Tondelli and the 1980s: Four Keywords for a Reassessment

This article challenges the interpretation of the 1980s in Italy as a period in which a large section of the population and, especially, the younger generation, turned away from politics and a retreated into the private sphere after the revolutionary ebullience of the 1960s and 1970s. The discussion centres around the figure of Pier Vittorio Tondelli whose collection of short stories Altri libertini (1980) inaugurated a new understanding of the cultural role of literature, and a new relationship between authors and readers. While devoid of the ideological preoccupations that characterized the protest movement(s) of the previous decades, Tondelli’s work, it is argued, is anything but escapist and rather seeks to provide a sensitive and thoughtful account of the transformations taking place in Italian society and culture during a critical decade in which Italy, like other mature Western societies, was precipitously projected into the post-Fordist phase of contemporary capitalism. From this vantage point Tondelli’s opus demonstrate the constant and sustained engagement of its author with a disorienting new world in which the contradictions between personal and collective desires and aspirations are increasingly mobilized to fuel the “society of spectacle” Guy Debord had foreseen. It can hardly be questioned that Tondelli’s struggle raises ethical issues, but it is important to see that this ethical dimension is inherently connected with a political horizon, albeit a politics of desire that traditional Marxist approaches have some difficulty identifying as politics, let alone as revolutionary politics. In order to appreciate fully the significance of Tondelli’s cultural contribution and disentangle it from the debates that it originated, the author proposes a fresh approach. Mindful of Raymond Williams’s eminent example (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 1976), the analysis focuses on four keywords that can help us traverse Tondelli’s work and identify its strengths as well as some of its weaknesses. Affect, Commitment, Postmodernism, and Theory are intersecting vectors in a reassessment that through Tondelli reopens the discussion on an entire decade, and its aftermath.

Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics

This paper describes the work of an alliance formed by three civic organisations in Mumbai to address poverty—the NGO SPARC, the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan, a cooperative representing women’s savings groups.* It highlights key features of their work which include putting the knowledge and capacity of the poor and the savings groups that they form at the core of all their work (with NGOs in a supporting role); keeping politically neutral and negotiating with whoever is in power; driving change through setting precedents (for example, a community-designed and managed toilet, a house design developed collectively by the urban poor that they can build far cheaper than public or private agencies) and using these to negotiate support and changed policies (a strategy that develops new ‘legal’ solutions on the poor’s own terms); a horizontal structure as the Alliance is underpinned by, accountable to and serves thousands of small savings groups formed mostly by poor women; community-to-community exchange visits that root innovation and learning in what urban poor groups do; and urban poor groups undertaking surveys and censuses to produce their own data about ‘slums’ which official policies lack and need) to help build partnerships with official agencies in ways that strengthen and support their own organisations. The paper notes that these are features shared with urban poor federations and alliances in other countries and it describes the international community exchanges and other links between them. These groups are internationalising themselves, creating networks of globalisation from below. Individually and collectively, they seek to demonstrate to governments (local, regional, national) and international agencies that urban poor groups are more capable than they in poverty reduction, and they also provide these agencies with strong community-based partners through which to do so. They are, or can be, instruments of deep democracy, rooted in local context and able to mediate globalising forces in ways that benefit the poor. In so doing, both within nations and globally, they are seeking to redefine what governance and governability mean.