Subaltern Social Movements Research Articles

Reversible Comparisons: Policing Criminality and Criminal Policing in South Africa

AbstractJohn D. Brewer’s (1994) seminal study of the South African Police claimed that structural factors would inhibit democratic reforms in law enforcement agencies, regardless of which political party controlled the public administration. Thirty years of majority rule, and a series of subsequent works (Altbeker 2005, 2007; Steinberg, 2008; Lamb 2018), demonstrate that Brewer’s thesis remains relevant. Occasional efforts at fully reconstructing state security agencies never took hold and the South African Police Service remains mired in the sordid practices of its colonial past. McMichael and Brown concur with this established narrative while Shaw’s study on vigilantism adds insightful subtleties that deromanticize subaltern social movements. All three authors tackle sharp distinctions between policing and criminality, arguing that the two processes often intertwine and are frequently interchangeable. This review article combines structural determinants of coercive law enforcement with elite political agency. Political choices made by South Africa’s ruling African National Congress reinforce criminal practices in policing and precipitate the formation of volatile vigilante organizations.

Gandhi falling … and rising

In recent years, statues of Gandhi have been attacked by a variety of radically incommensurable movements. Subaltern social movements struggling to dismantle the legacies of colonialism, slavery and apartheid have attacked Gandhi on the grounds of his alleged racism, casteism, misogyny and because he functions as a cipher for the imperialism of the contemporary Indian state and the racism of Indian society. Yet little about the case against Gandhi is new. This article explores why these arguments are being voiced now by identifying three discursive vehicles that have given them salience – decolonisation in the African academy, US-originated Afropessimism and a resurgent global Dalit movement. The article juxtaposes this global picture with the range of contradictory attitudes expressed towards Gandhi in India, where a state dominated by the neoliberal Hindu Right promotes Gandhi abroad at the same time as it sidelines him at home. Simultaneously, Gandhi is attacked by its domestic electoral base while remaining a talisman for its opponents as a symbol of an elusive communal harmony and environmentalism. In revealing how Gandhi is toppled by radically incommensurable social movements and how attitudes towards Gandhi do not map neatly onto power, the article complicates ongoing debates about decolonisation, memorialisation and heritage.

Habermas’ Colonization Thesis in the Digital Network: Pandemic Resistance in Advanced Capitalism

As scholars anticipate the structural reconfigurations arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, resistance to pandemic measures remains a site of rich discussion. While previous researchers have studied anti-mask, anti-vaccine, and anti-lockdown action, here called anti-restriction movements, as a series of actions informed by individual characteristics like psychological profiles, political leanings, or gender, this paper emphasizes how anti-restriction actions evolved into social movements articulating the antagonisms between state and subject. This paper applies Jürgen Habermas’s theory of New Social Movements (NSMs) to theorize anti-restriction movements as reactions to bureaucratic and economic regulation in cultural and private life. Habermas’s original theory assigned NSMs a radical potential in reinvigorating public political discourse and democratic processes which remains to be seen today. By contrasting the discourses of anti-restriction movements in Indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico and suburban communities in Orange County, California, this paper describes how profit-driven market algorithms steer social movements away from their radical potential towards sensationalism and misinformation. Not only do social media platforms “colonize” communication on the national level, but western countries’ control of social media platforms “digitally colonizes” peripheral countries by redirecting subaltern social movements with the hybridized discourses of imperial nations.

Critical accounting scholarship and social movements: The case of rail privatisation in Britain

This paper reflects upon how accounting academics can contribute to emancipatory social change through connecting with the agency of social movements. A review of critical accounting work on rail privatisation in Britain is conducted, and a comparison is made with other instances of accounting academics working with social movements. Past work emphasises a Bourdieusian pre-occupation with intellectual autonomy from social movements. An alternative – a Gramscian understanding of the potential for ‘organic intellectuals’ to develop subaltern consciousness – is instead proposed. This frames a discussion on the similarities and differences between critical academic accounting work with rail social movements, compared to past efforts. The central questions addressed are: What ‘value’ do accounting scholars bring to social movements, and how might we judge and learn from the ‘successes’ of our activities? Is it preferable for critical academics to maintain ‘autonomy’ from the class struggle while striving to assist subaltern social movements? Does the neoliberalisation of higher education preclude social movement-orientated praxis? And, if not, how might the constraints that it poses on our activities be overcome? It is argued that a class-orientated, political praxis is both possible and desirable in the current conjecture, but more examples and studies are needed.

Adult learning in political (un-civil) society: Anti-colonial subaltern social movement (SSM) pedagogies of place

Through a selective deployment of conceptualisations from subaltern studies, in particular the concepts of political (un-civil) society and an autonomous domain (or a people's politics that suggests the plausibility of dominance without hegemony), this article distinguishes a subaltern social movement (SSM) formation and related anti-colonial SSM pedagogies of place in rural eastern India (Orissa), from Euro-American cartographies of social movements and learning and their varied liberal-capitalist and/or collective-socialist political commitments to modernisation, industrialisation, development, globalisation and progress. The historical resilience and contemporary proliferation of SSM pedagogies in the age of empire is instructive for similar trans/local movements and anti-colonial and anti-capitalist projects of adult learning in imperial and colonial societies implicated in a politics of capitalist hegemony. The propositions advanced here are based on the author's practical and research involvements with Adivasi (original dweller) and Dalit (untouchable out-castes) SSMs since the early 1990s and a funded research engagement (2006–2009) pertaining to ‘Learning in Adivasi social movements’ in India.

Multicultural Market Democracy: Elites and Indigenous Movements in Contemporary Ecuador

AbstractThis paper bridges the gap between studies of subaltern social movements and elite politics by asking how political and economic elites respond to indigenous mobilisation in Ecuador. I argue that elites have developed a hegemonic project based around three core principles – multiculturalism, economic liberalism and democracy – that serves to incorporate indigenous peoples into the political system while simultaneously excluding indigenous movement demands that would undermine the political and economic sources of elite power. The paper develops this argument around a concept of what I call ‘multicultural market democracy’ based on historical analysis and in-depth interviews with 43 Ecuadorian elites.

Radical Democracy in Global Perspective: notes from the pluriverse

In this article we contrast the theoretical tradition of radical democracy developed by Chantal Mouffe with an alternative tradition of radical democracy rooted in the practices of subaltern social movements. While the former is wedded to the context and aspirations of Western modernity, the latter consists of place-based forms of ‘colonial difference’ within the Third and Fourth Worlds that are subalternised by the (aggressively globalising) modern tradition of democracy. Working within a ‘modernity/coloniality’ framework, we contrast these traditions of radical democracy along three main axes: 1) the logic of articulation among diverse struggles and movements; 2) the orientation towards, and aspirations with respect to, the state; and 3) the relation to the global scale and vision of the ‘pluriverse’.

Subaltern Social Movement (SSM) Post-Mortems of Development in India: Locating Trans-Local Activism and Radicalism

This paper expounds on an Adivasi-Dalit subalternist critique of development and compulsory modernization drawn from a participatory critical-interpretive case study developed from several episodic engagements with these groups between 2006 and 2009 in Orissa, India. This critique is advanced by the Lok Adhikar Manch (LAM), a trans-local movement network of 13 subaltern social movement groups in Orissa. These disclosures are then deployed in a critical conversation with a specific strain of Marxist scholarship in peasant studies that dismisses subaltern movements as conservative (status-quo politics in relation to capital) and as scattered anti-Marxist postmodern populisms that fail to challenge the reproduction of capitalist control of the rural hinterlands.

Adivasis (Original Dwellers) “in the way of”1 State-Corporate Development: Development dispossession and learning in social action for land and forests in India

This paper traces the kinds of learning engendered through Adivasi trans-local and local subaltern social movement (SSM) action addressing state-corporate developmental collusions, state-caste interests and the resulting dispossession of Adivasis from land, forest and their ways of life given the economic liberalization drive to exploit resources in the rural hinterlands in India since 1991. The paper draws upon insights from the author’s association with the Adivasi since 1992 and funded research into “Learning in Adivasi movements.”2

Subjects of Heritage in Urban Southern India

In this paper I deal with a recent effort, conducted jointly by corporate and voluntary bodies, to create a themed cultural environment in Chennai (formerly Madras), the capital city of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. This project, not yet completed, fuses craft center with architectural reconstruction, and is the work of upper-caste, globally connected elites. The site, Dakshina Chitra, envisions southern Indian culture and history in ways that are tied to consumerism and to elite perceptions of regional and national heritage. This effort departs from and poses a critique of the versions of culture, history, and identity that have been inscribed by the state in urban public space during the second half of the 20th century—the statues, monuments, and memorials that celebrate Tamil ethnicity as promulgated in the Dravidianist sociopolitical movement. This movement, which originated in the late 19th century, provided a platform for anticolonial and subaltern social movements. It continues in the hands of the political parties who have controlled, at different times, the government of Tamil Nadu since 1967. The competing discourses on heritage posed by these different projects are indicative of political, economic, and cultural transformations associated with liberalization that are now reconfiguring the relations between state and society in southern India. The constructions of locality and history that became visible during the anticolonial struggle of the first half of the 20th century are being challenged by alternative formulations as heritage becomes a marketable good and consumption becomes a vehicle of political participation. With this case I consider the ways that themed urban environments serve not only as indices of the changing political economy, but also as markers of changes in the cultural mediation of political subjectivity.

Locations and representations: Writing in the political present in Sarawak, East Malaysia

Since 1987, the Malaysian state of Sarawak has been the focus of a broad‐based transnational environmental campaign concerned with large‐scale mechanized logging and the dispossession of indigenous communities. In the present discussion I examine a series of concerns relating to my efforts to write a history of the Sarawak campaign. I do so as a way of elucidating the argument that taking seriously the multi‐sitedness of such research projects, particularly those that focus on subaltern social movements, demands that anthropologists and other scholars engaged in the study of such movements rethink the implications of their ethnographic presence and their efforts at representation. This in turn might have a transformative effect on their thinking about the possibility of alternative forms of ethnographic practice.