Category Archives: Blog
Pablo Semán and Ariel Wilkis: Rebellion of the bastards: the rise of the extreme right in Argentina
The growth of extreme right-wing forces in the Argentine political process expresses the combination of global trends and specific trends associated with local political history. It also expresses the need to understand the embeddedness of these political preferences in the social experiences shaped by the generalized decline of the middle and popular classes, sedimented in […]
Ewald Engelen: Another ‘populist’ shake-up in the Netherlands: the BBB revolt
The shock among the Dutch chattering classes on 16 March was palpable. The right-populist Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) – established in 2019 by a small communications firm, bankrolled by the powerful Dutch agrifood complex and led by a former journalist for the meat industry – had in one go massively increased its vote share in the […]
Giorgos Poulimenakos & Dimitris Dalakoglou: Disaster Infrastructures and the Inverted Shock Doctrine in Greece
On March 1st 2023, an impromptu protest rally took place outside the headquarters of Greece’s only railway company, Hellenic Trains (HT). HT is the passenger carrier of the recently privatized and formerly publicly owned carrier of Hellenic Organization of Railways. The word ‘Assassins’ and the phrase ‘Your profits, our deaths’ were written on the walls […]
Tomaso Ferrando: Beyond Speculation
On May 21, 2022 the cover of The Economist left no space to the imagination: a set of skulls replaced the grains of a wheat straw, and the world was soon going to experience a ‘Coming Food Catastrophe’. Although there is no doubt that the prospect of world food security looks anything but pleasant, I […]
Gavin Smith: Peru: the Uncertain State
Zavaleta: “[Apparent states] appear to be Western… in all respects but somehow they are not. What misfires here is a structural concept of sovereignty that is ultimately incompatible with the condition of non-centrality in the world, at least in history such as it has occurred until now…. They have only a vague sense of self-certainty, […]
Mihai Varga: Crisis-tested, yet forgotten: Family farms in wartime Ukraine
It was often said, in the course of the transition from communism to capitalism in the 1990s and 2000s, that Eastern Europeans are good at surviving. The IMF and the World Bank praised the local population’s capacity to “subsist” through small-scale agricultural production, “relieving” welfare budgets or helping shoulder the liberalization of prices. In fact, […]
FocaalBlog: Eric Wolf, Europe, Histories, Capitalism. Where are we now?
This panel was convened by Ida Susser at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2022 – Unsettling Landscapes. It builds on the workshop Vision and Method in Anthropology: Forty Years of Eric Wolf’s ‘Europe and the People Without History’, on 23/24 September 2022, organized in the framework of the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project at the […]
Elena Maria Reichl: End of Hell? Brazil’s Election and a Community Kitchen of the MTST
On 30/10/2022, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) of the Workers’ Party won an exceptionally close runoff election against the current far-right president of Brazil, Jair Messias Bolsonaro. For volunteers of a community kitchen (Cozinha Solidária) of the leftist Homeless Workers Movement (MTST), Lula’s victory represents an enormous relief and a hope after the long […]
Stephen Campbell: On the dialectics of capitalist expansion: An interview with Christopher Krupa
In April 2022, University of Pennsylvania Press published A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador, by University of Toronto anthropologist Christopher Krupa. Tracing the expansion of capitalism in the largely rural, agrarian canton of Cayambe, Krupa’s book is an historically informed ethnography of Ecuador’s cut flower industry. In the interview below, […]
Mahmudul H. Sumon: What do we learn from hybrid governance in Bangladesh’s garments sector?
Global production networks, as we know today, have repeatedly failed to ensure the rights of workers and their health and safety. These failings have been exposed time and again whenever there has been a disaster. To address these failings, transnational activists have long been arguing for various types of multi-sectoral initiatives (MSIs) in global supply […]