Category Archives: Blog
Céline Cantat: Migration struggles and the crisis of the European project
This post is part of a series on migration and the refugee crisis moderated and edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram (Central European University). In April 2015, when four boats carrying almost two thousand people consecutively sank in the Mediterranean Sea, with a combined death toll estimated at more than 1,200, the idea that Europe was experiencing […]
Ruy Llera Blanes: Revolutionary states in Luanda: “Events” and political strife in Angola
Last 11 November, Angola celebrated forty years of independence—a memorable date. However, these celebrations have been overshadowed by a movement of contestation that has turned a spotlight on the local regime’s antidemocratic governing tactics. This text explores some intricacies of this process, using an “anthropology of events” as a device to account for the increasingly […]
Raia Apostolova: Economic vs. political: Violent abstractions in Europe’s refugee crisis
This post is part of a series on migration and the refugee crisis moderated and edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram (Central European University). The “economic migrant” must leave. From Berlin’s widening of the definition of “safe country” zones and the fast execution of deportation orders, to hunters of economic migrants along the Bulgarian–Turkish border, our memory is persistently […]
Edward Simpson: The future of the rural world?
The conference “The Future of the Rural World? Africa and Asia” was hosted by SOAS, University of London during October 2015. The event marked the end of a major project funded by the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) on “restudying” village India. It also coincided with the launch of an exhibition and film […]
Carlos E. Chardón: Masking Puerto Rican state failure
With the recent default on debt payment (see Franqui Rivera and Colón-Garcia 2015), Puerto Rico became a failed state. State failure is the inability or incapacity of a government to provide services it determines are absolutely necessary to its population. Thus, if a government tries to provide services it deems necessary for its population and […]
Lisa Jahn & Sarah Molinari: New developments in Puerto Rican economic readjustment?
This commentary comes from a discussion panel hosted on Tuesday, September 8, by the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS) at the Graduate Center, CUNY, featuring the authors of the recent FocaalBlog article “Puerto Rico Is NOT Greece: Notes on the Role of Debt in US Colonialism,” Ismael García-Colón and Harry Franqui-Rivera. The authors […]
Justyna Kajta & Adam Mrozowicki: The new Polish parliament: Between the Right and the radical Right
The new parliament in Poland resembles in its makeup the one in Hungary, almost completely dominated by right-wing political parties. The Law and Justice party beat the Civic Platform party, with 37.8 percent of the vote, against 24.9 percent. The victory of Law and Justice was not surprising. It shows again that good economic growth […]
Manuela Bojadžijev & Sandro Mezzadra: “Refugee crisis” or crisis of European migration policies?
This post is part of a series on migration and the refugee crisis moderated and edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram (Central European University). “The refugee crisis in Europe is fabricated,” Prem Kumar Rajaram writes in the opening post of this series. It is certainly true that the framing of current events in terms of crisis and […]
Prem Kumar Rajaram: Beyond crisis: Rethinking the population movements at Europe’s border
This post is part of a series on migration and the refugee crisis moderated and edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram (Central European University). Crisis The refugee crisis in Europe is fabricated. Like most “crises,” the recent onset of people from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan trying to cross into the European Union is a representation. […]
Stef Jansen: Yearnings in the meantime
“Normal lives” and the state in a Sarajevo apartment complex Yearnings in the Meantime is a volume of the “Dislocations” series published by Berghahn Books. The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neo-liberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the heightened military imperialism at the […]