Political Imagination Research Articles

The Political Imagination of the ‘Lost Decade’

The Political Imagination of the ‘Lost Decade’

Ambivalent citizenship: political cynicism, community engagement and belonging among youth in Brazil

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the role of urban peripheries in creating political imaginaries and understandings of citizenship among children and grandchildren of insurgent citizens in urban Northeast Brazil. The analysis draws on data collected through 10 ethnographically informed focus groups with youth between 18 and 35. The article argues that, contrary to beliefs that young people are apathetic about politics or enthusiastic to engage in progressive social movements, youth have an ambivalent relationship with the state, informed by everyday encounters with precarious infrastructure, awareness of previous forms of collective action that determines their civic engagement, and feelings of belonging to home communities. The article suggests revisiting the concept of insurgent citizenship considering new socio-political changes that framed the lives of young people living in urban peripheries in the past two decades in Brazil and proposes ambivalence as a productive theoretical angle to make sense of ruptures and discontinuities in political practices.

INCLUSION, ELIGIBILITY AND FORFEITURE

One of the buzzwords of today is ‘inclusion’. But the idea that everyone should be ‘included’ is a mistake, thoughtlessly reproduced by many. This holds in the private sphere, as well as in the institutional settings of the public sphere. There is very little conceptual analysis of the term, although there is plenty of literature on ‘social inclusion’ and the political vision of including the marginalized. My aim is to show that there are constraints on inclusion – particularly in institutional settings. Participation in social life is a kaleidoscope of inclusion and exclusion practices; this makes social life possible. Without inclusion/exclusion practices social life would be chaotic – if not impossible. Even philosophy journals have submission criteria which permit exclusion: e.g. the paper must not be under consideration by any other journal. Thus, exclusion is not per se a denial of someone’s dignity or a failure to recognize them as a fellow human being. The aim of this short essay is to raise awareness about inclusion and two of its constraints (eligibility and forfeiture), thereby starting a long overdue debate in the humanities.

The multivocality of the nation: political imagination and transformation in the emergence of African Nationalism

AbstractAt key moments in history, political understanding and action are irrevocably transformed. What makes such moments of transformation possible? This article examines the emergence of African nationalism in South Africa, following the multivocal appeal to African nationhood made by proto-nationalist leaders and intellectuals. In doing so I examine how new political imagination can reconfigure the structure of political relations and create powerful new possibilities for political organizing and action. African proto-nationalist leaders were ‘intermediary intellectuals’ who used African nationhood to speak to three different political logics of their key audiences: a ‘progressive nationhood’ to their white colonial audience, a ‘unifying nationhood’ to their missionary-educated African audience, and a ‘traditional nationhood’ to their rural African audience. African nationhood thus had a multivocal appeal which allowed proto-nationalist leaders to bring otherwise divided audiences to support a common political project. By bridging these divided communities, proto-nationalist leaders were able to combine resources and strategies from once separated domains into novel forms of political power. Transformation in political understanding was thus a critical enabler of innovation in organization and action because it built a political project where new connections between African and colonial worlds were made politically ‘thinkable’. Speaking to the scholarship on political repertoires and the sociology of anti-colonial intellectuals, this study has broader implications for the role political ideas play in political transformation.

Solidarity and broadening the practices of action research

We live in a world of runaway global social inequality and immanent planetary ecological collapse and action research is more necessary than ever. Solidarity across countries, regions, classes, and ecosystems is the only way out of these linked crises caused by neoliberal capitalism. Action research is a vibrant and heterogeneous set of democratic practices capable of addressing many of these dilemmas. Action researchers have for generations largely been content to develop their own approaches independently and the attempts to create better integrated global action research networks have yet to show the needed success. This essay argues that the lack of collaboration and solidarity across the whole spectrum of action research is an unaffordable luxury. Living up to our own ethical and political commitments, we need to find ways to treat the diversity among our own practices and political visions as sources of strength and dynamism. Beyond this, together we need to make a concerted effort to link with other groups and networks promoting fairness, democracy, sustainability and solidarity because the future without these collaborations is unsustainable.

Was the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission an act of dispossession?

AbstractThe Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) has been described as one of the most comprehensive regional and national governance structures for Indigenous people in Australia. This paper looks briefly at its operational life between 1990 and 2005 and focusses on its abolition, arguing that this was an act of dispossession. The ATSIC was, for its time, a remarkable achievement for both the nation state and Indigenous people. Acting as an institution to both represent and deliver services to Indigenous people, the ATSIC model was, and could have remained, a powerful organisation for enacting critical change. Constructed and then removed by the nation state, the ATSIC's abolition dispossessed Indigenous people of a political framework dedicated to organising an Indigenous collective voice. This dispossession, different from earlier waves of dispossession from land, resources and cultural freedoms, can be understood by the application of critical Indigenous institutional analysis. Through its own structure and electoral representation, the ATSIC had made visible the quest for self‐determination and gave Indigenous people decision‐making powers not since replicated. Redirecting ATSIC's limited decision making back to government exposed the illusion of control. The ATSIC's abolition left a void in the growing capability of Indigenous people to self‐determine and a gaping hole in Australia's national political imagination.

Critique beyond relation: The stakes of working with the negative, the void and the abyss

AbstractThe ‘relational turn’ has been widely embraced in Human Geography and related fields over the last couple of decades as an alternative to the hubris of modern and colonial reasoning. Yet, increasingly, concerns over the extent that contemporary conceptualisations are overly ‘generative’, ‘productivist’ and ‘affirmational’ has come to the fore. There is significant interest in the possibilities for more negative understandings, highlighting failure, attrition, voiding, exhaustion, impotentiality, incompleteness and attributes of ‘non‐relation’. We draw out how, to date, most of these approaches have developed a hermeneutic approach, seeking to bring the negative and the non‐relational into the world as forces of disruption and refusal, holding open other possibilities of knowing and being in the world and enabling alternative political imaginaries. This paper seeks to outline an alternative mode of critique, one that places both relational and negative approaches under the scrutiny of an ‘abyssal’ approach. Here, after Fanon, the world violently forged into the global colour line is bifurcated via the construction of the modern subject, capable of reading itself as a subject in the world and through Human Geography as a field of study. In this always already antiblack world, the goal of ‘Abyssal Geography’ is not to continue worlding the modern subject in new ways, but to analyse and critique the mechanisms and shifts in critical thought through which Human Geography continues to salvage and to redeem the purchase of the modern subject and the world.

Towards living a better future: political vision and the humanistic conscience

Fromm’s theories can help the Left overcome its collective rejection of individualism and universalism, which limit socio-political possibility, offering Left solutions to these challenges and promoting alternate perspectives. His humanistic vision shares much with humanistic and positive psychology but differs in important respects. Centrally, Fromm’s notion of emancipation emphasises both individual and societal components. He believes independent and authentic relationships are a higher expression of human potential and bring true fulfilment. Fromm identifies a creative, non-alienated character orientation that includes a ‘humanistic conscience’. Comparing authoritarian and humanistic consciences, he emphasises human potential and social and individual interdependence. Personal development must also drive social change, and vice versa. Fromm’s perspective rejects zero-sum, either/or thinking about social change vis-à-vis individual flourishing. For him, both are important, and they are related. Following Fromm’s example, the Left should stress that individualistic societies cannot satisfy individual needs. Self-fulfilment requires fairness, community and shared personal experiences.

Algorithmic Dissent: Militarized Platforms and Palestinian Political Imagination in Jerusalem

This article provides an ethnographic account of how young Palestinian Jerusalemites responded to Israeli state surveillance during the summer and fall of 2021. Threading between interviews with social media influencers, long-time activists, and everyday users who broadcast the historic uprising on the internet, the author chronicles how these youth made use of digital platforms to draw unprecedented attention to settler violence in their city in spite of intrusive monitoring and censorship by Israeli authorities. Reviewing a long history of Israeli surveillance and extending ethnographic accounts of political cynicism in Palestine, the author argues that the suspicion many Palestinians exhibit toward social media platforms is an asset. Heightened awareness of how new technologies facilitated dragnet surveillance by Israeli authorities did not silence young Jerusalemites into acquiescence to a repressive status quo. Instead, it inspired them to speak out on their own terms, safeguarding their city while dramatizing the limits of surveillance.

From Mimeographs to Self-organization

Abstract This essay unpacks how Beijing-based workers’ handbills and posters during the 1989 democracy movement functioned as a counterinstitution that enabled everyday workers to translate economic demands into political self-organization through groups like the Workers’ Autonomous Federation. In contrast to liberal dissident writing at the time by the likes of Fang Lizhi and Liu Xiaobo, workers’ organizing strategies and political vision have seldom been analyzed. The author argues that these writings represent an important effort to create an inchoate civil society under authoritarian conditions, while going beyond these conditions by empowering workers to ground a broader struggle for democracy in reorganizing the control of society and productive industries through independent politics.

Normalizing and Mainstreaming the French Radical Right: Divergences in Leadership Communication during a Summer of Inland and Borderland Tensions

Abstract The radical right has become a central political force in most Western democracies. This process has been the result of the normalization and mainstreaming of its political leaders, discourses, and visions of society, notably involving the scapegoating of immigration and the use of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. However, the normalization and mainstreaming of radical right actors competing for the leadership of their overall political family remain an under-researched topic. The scope of the current article is to explore this phenomenon by considering the case of France, which after the United States, is the largest Western state that could potentially be ruled by a radical right president with extensive executive powers. The analysis shows that actors competing for the leadership of the radical right in a given country can generate diverging strategies of normalization and mainstreaming to secure their political distinction. Immigration and the Great Replacement constitute, respectively, a topic and a conspiracy theory that are emphasized and/or downplayed by opportunistic stakeholders weaving a web of interactions to define their comparative legitimacy and supremacy in the public sphere.

Peripheral activism: understanding the influence of California and Texas on the American Union

ABSTRACT A common conception of modern states is that central governments adopt and then enforce their desired laws on the entirety of their territory. The reverse, however, is also possible. That is, distant but prominent peripheries can influence the laws and functions of the entire territory. This article discusses the latter dynamic by considering the influence of California and Texas on US society. In the US, its member states can influence the centre vertically and horizontally. Vertical influence occurs when states directly influence the federal government – for California and Texas, this influence rests on their large number of federal representatives and their internal single party dominance. Horizontal influence occurs when states influence other states – that is, states can adopt successful laws already present in other states. A combination of the two can take place where states cooperate to then influence the centre. Together, these behaviours demonstrate peripheral activism, actions political sub-units take to stamp their preferred vision of society on their broader state. To supplement the discussion, I discuss the ideological divide between California and Texas and how they attempt to stamp their preferred vision of politics on the US.

Making All Deserts Bloom: The Racist Space/Time of UAE-Israel Collaboration

ABSTRACT Since the normalisation of political relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel, the so-called ‘desert tech’ industry has emerged as a key area of economic collaboration. Desert tech combines technological innovation with speculation and entrepreneurialism, claiming to offer lucrative yet sustainable solutions to the specific dangers of climate change in arid environments. By weaving together their respective climate and security expertise and technologies, political visions, and investment capital, Israel and the UAE promise to save arid states the world over from ecological catastrophe – making themselves and their political and territorial projects indispensable in the process. In this paper, we unravel their promethean vision of making ‘all deserts bloom’. We first situate this vision in the desert’s tangible histories of colonial environmentalism, retracing the inextricable relationship of climate science to the violent expropriation, securitisation and transformation of Indigenous life and land by white, European settlers. We then follow contemporary UAE-Israel desert-tech collaboration across the geographically expansive and historically layered sites and forms of violence that facilitate, circulate, and secure this industry’s vision of the future. In so doing, we argue that normalisation is underwritten by a racialised temporality – one that constructs desert landscapes as eternally on the threshold of climate catastrophe, erasing the deep, historical relationships of Palestinians, Bedouin and other racialised subjects to arid environments.

Disjointing state and war: defence policy as hauntology

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between state and war in defence policy. To do so it develops a hauntological vocabulary of spectrality, conjuring, and the messianic in close conversation with Derrida’s Specters of Marx. This allows for paying attention to the tensions of statehood and state–war relations, and to how they are determined. Specifically, the paper identifies three aporias signalled in Max Weber’s definition of the state—legitimate violence, community, and territory—and traces how they are addressed in two post-Cold War defence policy paradigms—expeditionary force and territorial deterrence—through two Swedish Defence Bills (2009 and 2020). The main claim concerns how these paradigms, despite their differences, disjointed the state from war by transposing questions of force and violence to the limits of the international order and by subordinating defence to instrumentalism. Traditional spectres of society, state, and the international were dislocated to domains outside statist conceptions of politics. Thus, the paper complements conventional understandings of security and defence as central to statehood by indicating a different function of defence policy and what is at stake in inheriting received political imaginations.

We Can Fix Ourselves

Scholarship on Black Consciousness in the so-called post-apartheid South Africa is not as prominent as its counterpart within the Congress tradition. The fundamental reason for this is the hegemony and pervasiveness of whiteness and its aversion to the Black Radical Tradition. Another reason is the “success” of the Congress tradition as epitomized by the ANC through its so-called negotiations to usher in an era that is compatible with its political vision of a non-racial constitutional new South Africa. It is in this sense that the intellectual and ideological marginalization of the Azanian tradition which Black Consciousness is a part of, is intimately linked to the “failure” of its political vision.Why this political and historical backdrop? This is because the book We Can Fix Ourselves: Building a better South Africa through Black Consciousness (2021) by Mosibudi Mangena under review locates itself within the philosophy of Black Consciousness in discussing the fundamental problem of the so-called new democratic South Africa.

“Un prophète discret”

Abstract This article analyzes how the French fascist and collaborationist author Pierre Drieu la Rochelle thought critically about the forms and the functions of the modern writer-prophet. In essays dedicated to the cases of D. H. Lawrence and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as to his own ideological and literary trajectory in the interwar years, Drieu defined the true prophet as a writer of decadence, one compelled to narrate and embody the decline of the nation. By assuming this burden, the writer-prophet in turn becomes doomed to be misunderstood or ignored by his decadent contemporaries. This logic of prophecy’s ultimate failure provides a key to understanding the political and literary vision of Drieu’s autobiographical fascist bildungsroman Gilles (1939). Finally, this article considers how Drieu’s linking of prophecy and literary posterity can be seen as anticipating his recent controversial inclusion in the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Corridors of countersovereignty: Insurgency, smuggling, and post-nation-state politics in Turkey's Kurdish highlands

In Turkey's Kurdish borderlands, smugglers occasionally entered insurgent corridors, the guerrilla-controlled mountainous passages, to bypass state control. This article takes insurgent corridors to frame sovereignty as monopolization of space-making and proposes space-making as a key analytic to examine the forms of sovereignty that facilitate or undermine specific extractive practices. As a spatial form, corridors are central to the claiming and exercising sovereignty and extraction without having complete territorial control across a bounded space or the whole population in that space, the territoriality identified with nation-states. By controlling corridor space and monopolizing the traffic in them, colonial empires, nation-states, corporations, and rebel movements exercised sovereignty and extracted value that is carried or generated by corridor traffic. The insurgent corridors further complicate corridor sovereignty as the Kurdish guerillas monopolized corridor-making without monopolizing and extracting the corridor traffic under a post-nation-state political vision that favors grassroots democratized organization of mobilities and livelihoods rather than centralized exclusive authority and biopolitical governance on them. The insurgent corridors constituted what I call countersovereignty, a practice contesting not only the existing state sovereignty but also political models of nation-state sovereignty and territoriality. While anthropologists understand refusal as disengagement from actors claiming sovereign superiority, the insurgent corridor countersovereignty entailed a distinct form of political refusal that rejects mimicking state sovereignty and associated forms of biopolitical governance.

Daunted by design: creating tools of slow violence

Design today is tackling increasingly complex societal issues; however, it is also prone to instrumentalisation in this endeavour. This paper examines how design practice and solutions can become a tool for daunted managerialism, a form of slow violence that conceals, prolongs, and even reinforces the complex and interwoven sources of social and environmental harm. It argues that design problem-solution spaces are often constructed with naturalised norms and subjectivities, which can lead to design processes and outcomes that incite cruel optimism, prioritise certain harms over others, and become tools for governing precarity. This argument is illustrated with examples from different domains of design addressing complex societal issues, such as sustainable design, social design, humanitarian design, and participatory design. We propose that design outcomes should not be regarded as solutions, but as intermediaries of engagement that can facilitate sociological and political imaginations that empower society in general, and marginalised people and communities specifically, to resist and transform violent systems.

Crisis

Owing to its prominence in everyday life, media, culture, economy and politics, we follow the lead of Marie Moran in taking a keywords-as-method approach to ‘crisis’. In doing so, we explore its changing meaning from a decisive moment to something more permanent. We argue this change is because of the proliferation, proximity and visibility of numerous interlocking, converging crises that are being experienced by a greater number of people across a range of spatiotemporal scales which produces a political imagination defined by incipience. Taken together, these illuminate how the changed meaning of ‘crisis’ is both a response to, and constitutive of the material conditions of lived experience, as well as our social, cultural and political imaginaries in the contemporary moment.

Mechanic citizenship: Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and the constitution of digital citizens

Projects to integrate digital technologies into the fabric of city life depend upon specific visions of politics and technology. In the process of their realization, they re-constitute the identities, agencies, and relations of human inhabitants, re-defining what it means to be a citizen. This article draws on the idiom of co-production and framework of constitutionalism from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to analyze the coming into being of a form of citizenship with smartphone technologies in Boston in the 2010s. When the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) used newly available smartphone apps to reconfigure the connection among city residents and government, they brought into being a specific mode of citizenship. I term this mode of citizenship “mechanic” to draw attention to the qualities of passivity, infrastructure, and connectedness that characterized MONUM’s early digital citizenship projects. I argue that recognizing that the constitution of the human, and specifically of citizens, is at stake in smart city projects entails re-thinking ethical analysis in contexts of smart cities. Instead of seeking to perform ethical assessments of technological consequences (“ethics of” approach), scholars might begin with a situated analysis of how humans as citizens are constituted through smart city projects (“ethics in” approach). By identifying the political affordances and commitments of the emergent digital citizenship models, scholars can make visible alternative forms of living and engaging politically in the city.