Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South Prathama Banerjee (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Whitney Russell
Keyword(s):  
Global South ◽  
The Political ◽  
Duke University

scholarly journals Decolonizing regional planning from the Global South: Active geographies and social struggles in Northeastern Brazil

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110246
Author(s):  
Federico Ferretti
Keyword(s):  
Regional Planning ◽  
Global South ◽  
Northeastern Brazil ◽  
Planning Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Literature ◽  
The South ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
Colonial Histories ◽  
Resisting Oppression

This paper addresses the engagement of critical geographers from Northeastern Brazil with regional planning, aiming at transforming society by acting on their region’s spaces. Extending and putting in relation literature on planning theory in the Global South and geographical scholarship on decoloniality, I explore new archives showing how the planning work that these geographers performed from 1957 to 1964 was an example of the ‘South’ re-elaborating and putting into practice notions arising from ‘international’ literature, such as that of ‘active geography’, and pioneering critical uses of instruments, such as mappings and statistics, that have often been associated with technocracy and political conservatism. Connected with peasants’ struggles and with a theoretical framework that is cognisant of the colonial histories and insurgent Black and indigenous traditions in the Northeast, these geographers’ works show that there is no ‘Southern Theory’ without a concrete engagement of scholars with social and political problems, one which is not limited to ‘participation’, but aims at challenging the political powers in place. Although not devoid of contradictions that are analysed here, the experiences of these Southern geographers acting in and for the South can provide precious insights into current (Northern or Southern) scholarly programmes aimed at resisting oppression.

Variegated transitions: Emerging forms of land and resource capitalism in Laos and Myanmar

2020 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2094852
Author(s):  
Miles Kenney-Lazar ◽  
SiuSue Mark
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Political System ◽  
Global South ◽  
Resource Extraction ◽  
The Political ◽  
Private Capital ◽  
Democratic Rule ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Economic Transitions

Since the mid- to late- 1980s, Laos and Myanmar (Burma) have gradually and unevenly opened their economies to capitalist relations of accumulation. Both countries have done so by granting state land concessions to private capital for resource extraction and land commodification projects, particularly since the early 2000s. Yet, resource capitalism has manifested in distinct ways in both places due to the ways in which capital has interacted with unique pre-capitalist political-economic and social relations as well as the diverse political reactions of Lao and Myanmar people to capitalist transformations. In this paper, we analyze such differences through a conceptualization of ‘variegated transitions’, an extension of the variegated capitalism framework, which investigates the political economic transitions towards capitalism in marginalized, resource extractive countries of the Global South. In Myanmar, the transition from military to democratic rule has been marked by protests and land occupations combined with center-periphery fragmentation and ongoing civil wars, all of which have led to a heavily contested process of land concession granting. In contrast, a stable, comparatively centralized political system in Laos that restrains popular protest has enabled an expanding regime of land concessions for resource extraction projects, albeit hemmed in at the edges by sporadic, localized forms of resistance and appeals to the state.

scholarly journals Screening for Erdoğanism: Television, post-truth and political fear

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-354
Author(s):  
Burçe Çelik
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Global South ◽  
The Political ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Security Threats ◽  
Production Dynamics

The majority of current political communication studies focuses on digital and social media, and overlooks the centrality of television for the production and endurance of strongman politics in the Global South. By focusing on the journalistic television productions aired during the June 2018 election period in Turkey, this article unpacks the televisual logic that is incarnated in different modalities of telling and narrating of televisual genres. I propose two main themes: the ‘political fear’ of physical and social security threats, and ‘post-truth communications’ as the main televisual idioms for a vision of the future that is either secure or chaotic, that is, with or without Erdoğan. By combining political economy, content and textual analysis, I scrutinise the production dynamics of the televisual economy and the control and content of factual segments.

The Power of Corruption

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 558-562
Author(s):  
Sandipto Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Global South ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Process ◽  
The Public ◽  
Process Thinking ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Moral Economies

Abstract The central paradox of corruption in the political life of the global South is how such a widely despised phenomenon persists so untroubled by allthe negative attention. The two books under discussion—Steven Pierce's Moral Economies of Corruption and Milan Vaishnav's When Crime Pays—demonstrate that to make sense of that paradox, one needs to go beyond the dominant legal/technocratic understanding of corruption as either private acts of illegality or failures of the civic democratic process. Thinking further with the insights offered by those books, the article sugg ests that the phenomenon of corruption can only be made sense of when placed within the matrix of political and social power relations in the global South democracies. Corruptions appear not as distortions in an idealized democratic marketplace, but in the context of maneuvers of counter-democratic power to maintain existing hierarchies of dominations against tides of democratic mobilization, not merely as a subversion of the public good, but in reaction to attempts to make goods public.

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