The war in Ukraine resuscitated a certain dangerous fascination for war. Notions such as patriotism, democratic values, the right side of history, or a new fight for freedom are mobilized as imperatives for everyone to take a side in this war. It is not surprising then that a large number of so-called foreign fighters are willing to go to Ukraine to join one side or the other.
I met a few of them recently at the Poland-Ukraine border, where I was conducting interviews with a Norwegian film crew with soldiers and foreign fighters who were either entering or exiting the war zone. Some of them actually never got to fight or be “recruited” as they lack military experience or proper motivation. It’s a mixed group of people, some of whom have spent years in the military, while others only did military service. Some have family at home waiting for them; others, no home to go back to. Some have strong ideological motivations; others are just willing to shoot at something or someone. There is also a big group of former soldiers who transitioned towards humanitarian work.
As we were crossing the border to get into Ukraine, a former US soldier told me: “The reason why many retired or former soldiers moved to humanitarian work might easily be the need for excitement.” Once you leave the military, the closest activity that can take you to the “fun zone,” as another one said, referring to the war zone in Ukraine, is humanitarian work – or, in fact, a series of other businesses mushrooming in the proximity of war, including contractors and criminal activities.
Image 1: Fighter of the Ukrainian 43rd Territorial Defense Battalion “Patriot”, photo by Алесь Усцінаў
“We are adrenaline junkies,” the former US soldier said, although he now only wants to help civilians, something he sees as “a part of my process of healing.” What many of the foreign fighters have in common is the need to find a purpose in life. But what does this say of our societies if, to search for a meaningful life, thousands are willing to go to war?
There is dominant propaganda that seems to suggest war can be conducted according to a set of acceptable, standardized and abstract rules. It puts forth an idea of a well-behaved war where only military targets are destroyed, force is not used in excess, and right and wrong are clearly defined. This rhetoric is used by governments and mass media propaganda (with the military industry celebrating) to make war more acceptable, even attractive, for the masses.
Whatever deviates from this idea of a proper and noble war is considered an exception. US soldiers torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib: an exception. German soldiers playing with a human skull in Afghanistan: an exception. The US soldier who went on a house-to-house rampage in an Afghan village, killing 16 civilians including several children with no reason: an exception. War crimes committed by Australian troops in Afghanistan: an exception. Iraqi prisoners tortured by British troops: an exception.
Similar stories are emerging in the current war in Ukraine too, even though mostly still “unconfirmed”. With the information war obfuscating the distinction between reality and fantasy, we don’t know if and when we will be able to verify videos such as one showing a Ukrainian soldier talking on the phone with the mom of a killed Russian soldier and making fun of her, or Ukrainian soldiers shooting prisoners to make them permanently injured, or news about Russian soldiers sexually assaulting women.
All exceptions? No. This is exactly what war is. Governments make big efforts to explain that these kinds of episodes don’t belong in war. They even pretend to be surprised when civilians are killed, even though systematically targeting civilians is a feature of all contemporary wars; for example, over 387,000 civilians were killed in the US post-9/11 wars alone, with more likely to die from those wars’ reverberating impacts.
The idea of a clean and efficient war is a lie. War is a chaotic universe of military strategies intertwined with inhumanity, violations, uncertainty, doubts, and deceit. In all combat zones emotions such as fear, shame, joy, excitement, surprise, anger, cruelty, and compassion co-exist.
We also know that whatever the real reasons for war, identifying the enemy is a crucial element of every call for conflict. In order to be able to kill – systematically – it is not enough to make fighters disregard the enemy, to despise him or her; it is also necessary to make them see in the foe an obstacle to a better future. For this reason, war consistently requires the transformation of a person’s identity from the status of an individual to a member of a defined, and hated enemy group.
If the only objective of war is the mere physical elimination of the enemy, then how do we explain why the torture and destruction of bodies both dead and alive is practiced with such ferocity on so many battlefields? Although in abstract terms such violence appears unimaginable, it becomes possible to visualize when the murdered or tortured are aligned with dehumanizing representations portraying them as usurpers, cowards, filthy, paltry, unfaithful, vile, disobedient – representations that travel fast in mainstream and social media. War violence is a dramatic attempt to transform, redefine and establish social boundaries; to affirm one’s own existence and deny that of the other. Therefore, the violence produced by war is not mere empirical fact, but also a form of social communication.
It follows that war cannot be simply described as the by-product of political decisions from above; it is also determined by participation and initiatives from below. This can take the form of extreme brutal violence or torture, but also as resistance to the logic of war. It is the case of the military personnel who object to being part of a specific war or mission: examples range from conscientious objection during wartime, to explicit positioning such as the case of the Fort Hood Three who refused to go to Vietnam considering that war “illegal, immoral, and unjust,” and the refusal of the Russian National Guard to go to Ukraine.
“War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves,” wrote Leo Tolstoy. But it’s like holding your breath underwater – you can’t do it for long, even if you are trained.
This text was originally published in Common Dreams.
Antonio De Lauri is a Research Professor at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, the Director of the Norwegian Centre for Humanitarian Studies, and a contributor to the Costs of War Project of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He received an ERC grant for a project on soldiering and warfare.
Cite as: De Lauri, Antonio. 2022. “The idea of a clean and efficient war is a dangerous lie.” FocaalBlog, 18 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/18/antonio-de-lauri-the-idea-of-a-clean-and-efficient-war-is-a-dangerous-lie
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past and present projects of large-scale resource extraction and subsequent “recultivation” measures to convert the land back to agricultural production or natural conservation. Lignite (or brown coal) is exploited in vast open-pit mines here – the Hambach mine not far from the city of Cologne is dubbed “Europe’s biggest hole” – “swallowing” everything from forests to villages in their way.
Coal mining – in contrast to the more authoritarian
and centralized organization of oil extraction – has been historically
associated with the development of the welfare state and the consolidation of
workers’ rights in western democracies. However, as Thomas H. Eriksen notes,
“contemporary coal mining has been restructured and reconfigured to resemble
oil drilling formally”, becoming “less labour-intensive and more
capital-intensive than in the past” (2016: 38). This neoliberal restructuring resulted
not only in the transformation of institutions of “Carbon Democracy” (Mitchell 2009),
as the conditions for workers to organize and wield influence over the means of
production were eroded, but also in declining economic dependency on the coal
industry in the Rhineland region.
Despite this decrease of economic significance in the
region, RWE, the energy company currently operating the mines, has still been considerably
involved in local politics over the past decades – not least because of its
mandate to secure the provision of cheap electricity for German industry and consumers.
To this day the state-approved “general public interest” serves as the legal
basis for the suspension of fundamental rights, making possible the
expropriation of land titles, the demolition of protected landmarks, or the
circumvention of guidelines for environmental protection for the extraction of
fossil fuels in Germany’s lignite mining regions.
Image 1: A new energy horizon after the end of the world? Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine (Picture taken by the author)
Environmental destruction and relocation of tens of thousands of people due to numerous mine expansions in the Rhineland were thus firmly connected to narratives of national progress and regional prosperity. Mourning over losses of personal possessions and feelings of belonging were relegated to the private realm, and little room was left for critical voices in the public domain.
Recently however, this hegemonic state-industry nexus has been successfully challenged by a coalition of environmentalists, citizen initiatives, radical activists and other civil society actors (despite the continued economic profitability of the coal industry, ensured by “environmental load displacement” (Hornborg 2009) and other indirect subsidies). Their demands to save the remaining forest in front of the Hambach mine effectively stopped the encroaching extractivist operation. They were supported by a government commission installed to negotiate the conditions of Germany’s energy transition, following the decision to phase out the coal industry as a national contribution toward climate change mitigation.
The prospect of a global climate crisis has therefore led to the current reevaluation of lignite mining from guarantor of wealth and stability to driver of multi-scalar uncertainties. This enabled previously marginalized actors to voice their concerns by articulating their demands in terms of these globalized discourses. Yet, the (inter-)nationally reported success of the protests around the Hambach forest was only one instance of ongoing negotiations about the pace and scale of energy transition, from the perspective of the critical civil society actors with whom I conduct research in the Rhineland.
Since this seeming breakthrough for civic participation in shaping the region’s future, numerous setbacks and scandals have occurred. These are testament to the inability of carbon-democratic institutions to deal with a crisis that challenges its basic principles of growth as progress and wage labor as key to well-being. Controversies range from the passing of a coal exit law that many critical voices interpret as a “coal extension law”, to the federal government holding back an official report that questions the energetic necessity of the energy company’s plans for mine expansion.
Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I
regularly participated in meetings of a local group of critical civil society
actors who played a decisive role in saving the forest and turning it into a
national symbol of climate activism. Their political engagement served as an
opportunity to take a closer look at the uneven futures of energy transition in
the Rhineland. As we sit in a circle in the Protestant church hall of a village
close to the Hambach mine, many of the participants share impressions of
feeling alienated from their home region by the energy company’s mining activities.
Despite being part of the majority that does not depend on the coal industry
for income, some of the locals feel their concerns were generally ignored by communal
politics, making them rather skeptical of established political institutions’
capability to develop a sustainable and equitable future for the mining region.
Nonetheless, they see the impending process of energy
transition as a window of opportunity to reconnect with their home region by
actively participating in the development of alternative future visions, beyond
institutions of representative democracy. This desire for autonomous
participation is directly linked to the affective alienation associated by some
of my interlocutors with the large-scale landscape transformation of the mining
activities, coupled with the close connection between local politics and the energy
company.
This carbon-democratic entanglement of political
institutions and energy industry experienced in everyday life in the
Rhineland’s lignite mining region probably finds its most drastic manifestation
in the practice of “creating facts” (“Fakten schaffen”), of which my
interlocutors often accuse the mining company. This expression usually refers
to the practice of producing accomplished facts which alter conditions in a way
to favor certain outcomes. Often their undeniable materiality forces other
actors to acknowledge these facts, in turn leading to the retrospective
legitimization of the outcomes of Fakten schaffen. Thus, actors with the
power and institutional support to “create facts” narrow down an otherwise ambiguous
situation potentially open to negotiation by different actors to a specific
path of options in their interest.
In this way the energy company continues the controversial destruction of almost completely relocated villages. Under Germany’s new energy policy, the company is sticking to its operating plan and regular rhythm of extraction and redevelopment, despite radically changing socioecological and energy-political parameters. While numerous critical actors unsuccessfully appeal to democratic institutions to inhibit this pursuit of enforcing prior arrangements through material destruction, the following, more ambiguous example will serve to illustrate this modus operandi of Fakten schaffen and its relation to the feeling of alienation.
Image 2: “Path dependency” – literal and figurative: Solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest (Picture taken by the author)
Thomas, an outspoken and very knowledgeable member of a local citizen initiative against coal mining, and part of the larger group of civil society actors mentioned above, gives me a ride to the train station after we participated in one of the regular protest-walks through the forest at the Hambach mine. As we pass the bridge over the railway connecting the mines with the nearby power plants, I decide to ask him about the solar panels aligning the tracks beneath us. Their sheer size hardly makes them unnoticeable, but I never paid much attention to them, except for contemplating the irony that the fossil fuel infrastructure gives room to more “sustainable” forms of energy generation here. After all, the solar panels seemed somewhat out of place next to passing trains packed with lignite. The panels simultaneously signal the out-of-time-ness of the coal industry and point to a new energy future on the horizon. But Thomas’ reaction to my question made me aware of another aspect regarding their significance for the issue of affective alienation in relation to the practice of Fakten schaffen.
Knowing that most of my interlocutors are in favor of
direct solar energy generation and having the impressive photovoltaic structure
right before our eyes, I am prepared to finally hear a success story about
civic participation in local development. Yet, Thomas is not sympathetic to the
photovoltaic project at all. He tells me it was a typical outcome of
cooperation between energy company and politics in the region.
This sentiment echoes many civil society actors who
criticize that, being the biggest landowner there, RWE conducts itself “like the
lord of a manor” (“Gutsherrenart”), demonstrating the “feudal” excesses
of carbon democracy in the Rhineland, which regularly undermine popular desires
of stronger democratic involvement in matters of future-making. Thomas goes on
to inform me that a citizen initiative proposed a similar project a few years
ago in which the solar panels ought to be lining the highway that was relocated
closer to the village because of the encroaching mine. They had imagined the
photovoltaic structure as serving multiple other functions, such as protecting
villagers from noise and air pollution emitted by the mine and highway. While
the project gained some attention in the local press, it was not supported by
the communal administration and ultimately had to be relinquished.
Around the same time, the energy company came to an
agreement with the administration to make property available for the hitherto
largest photovoltaic project in the region, co-financed by a local bank. The
uncanny speed with which this project was realized confirmed not only the close
ties between politics and coal industry to critical actors like Thomas, but
also showed clearly how easily something can be achieved in the region when the
energy company is directly involved.
So instead of being perceived as a successful step
towards sustainable energy transition in the Rhineland’s lignite mining area,
the solar panels symbolize a failure of civic participation. They appear to Thomas
as a material (arte-)fact resulting from the dubiously close cooperation
between local politics and the energy company. Judged from a distance, this
instance of Fakten schaffen produced a material outcome in line with my
interlocutors’ desires for sustainable energy generation. However, the concrete
infrastructure stands as a monument that exemplifies how flows of innovation
are caught up in existing power relations and ultimately contribute to
consolidating the local incarnation of the state-industry nexus, even in the
face of impending coal exit.
While the lignite industry will disappear in the
foreseeable future, the longstanding history of capitalist extractivism – the main
reason for the affective alienation of a large group of people in the area –
will likely continue, no matter the source of energy. The deliberate promotion
of technoscientific development interventions carried out by experts in the
context of energy transition policies thus works to forestall the
socioecological transformation from below that Thomas and others envision as a
necessary step for politics in the Anthropocene.
Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the economic ministry’s newly adopted rhetoric of establishing a special economic zone in the area to speed up planning processes and pursue the double-bind of “green growth” (Eriksen 2016). Meanwhile, they were simultaneously hosting forums for civic participation that seem disconnected from this pursuit, because they operate at a different pace. This contradictory course of action leads many local actors to evaluate the efforts to integrate civil society into official planning processes as a mere façade, intensifying their skepticism towards institutions of carbon democracy in the region.
This brief insight into my fieldwork shows how inhabitants
that felt alienated by collusions between energy industry and political
institutions, sensed the diverging interest of politics and industry in the
context of energy transition as an opportunity to regain some autonomy over the
shaping of their region’s future. However, instances of Fakten schaffen enacted
by the state-industry nexus function to curtail this grassroots engagement, and
to (re-)connect extractive infrastructures of late industrialism (Fortun 2014)
to narratives of modernization and progress under the aegis of “green growth”.
A coalition of local actors more attuned to the
socioecological uncertainties of the Anthropocene criticizes this
carbon-democratic variant of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), and pushes for a
joint transformation of resource use and political culture in search of a
redefined “good life” for all. Rather than a utopian vision of future
prosperity, this practical engagement might be characterized as “patchy hope” (Tsing
et al. 2019) which, despite being situated and emplaced, operates between the
particular and the universal, the local and the global; aware of its own
limitations within ambiguous entanglements of politics and energy in the
Rhineland.
Felix Lussem is a research assistant and lecturer in the field of environmental anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. His doctoral research deals with shifting spatial and temporal orders in negotiations of “global crises” with a regional focus on the Rhineland’s lignite mining area. Contact: flussem2@uni-koeln.de
Bibliography
Berlant, Lauren. 2011.
Cruel Optimism. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Eriksen, Thomas H. 2016. Overheating. An
Anthropology of Accelerated Change. London: Pluto Press.
Fortun, Kim. 2014. From Latour to late industrialism. HAU:
Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 309-329.
Hornborg,
Alf. 2009. Zero-Sum World: Challenges in
Conceptualizing Environmental Load Displacement and Ecologically Unequal
Exchange in the World-System. International Journal of Comparative Sociology
50 (3-4): 237-262.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. Carbon democracy. Economy
and Society 38 (3): 399-432.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Andrew S. Mathews & Nils
Bubandt. 2019. Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History,
and the Retooling of Anthropology. Current Anthropology 60 (Supplement
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Cite as: Lussem, Felix. 2021. “Alienating ‘facts’ and uneven futures of energy transition.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/felix-lussem-alienating-facts-and-uneven-futures-of-energy-transition/
International media coverage of the February 1st military coup in Myanmar has been rather consistent. The focus, overwhelmingly, has been on the detention of State Counsellor and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, with speculations about the political machinations of Myanmar’s commander-and-chief, Min Aung Hlaing. In this way, the developing story has orbited around the theme of liberal democracy in peril, for which Suu Kyi in detention serves as synecdoche. What such a focus misses, however, is the very real threat the coup poses to millions of ordinary workers and their families across the country.
Already by late January 2021, Min Aung Hlaing had hinted of a possible coup. But still, the events of February 1st came as a shock to many inside the country and abroad. Claiming widespread voter fraud in the November 2020 elections, which delivered Aung San Suu Kyi’s ruling National League for Democracy a resounding victory, the military deployed troops to urban centres, detained Suu Kyi and other senior government officials, and declared a nationwide state of emergency this past Monday.
Online commentary has been rife with speculation. Was the coup motivated by Min Aung Hlaing’s presidential ambitions? Or was is it simply a matter of plain stupidity? The latter assertion claims plausibility on the grounds that the military itself drafted the 2008 constitution, which enshrined its role in government even before the coup by way of apportioned parliamentary seats and reserved ministerial positions. And it was a lucrative arrangement. With sprawling business interests under two expansive holding companies and other nepotistic business arrangements, the generals were collecting vast profits, much of it from mining and other extractive industries in the country’s north and northeast. Whatever the motivations behind the coup, little is certain at present. What is clear, however, is that the state of emergency has raised anxieties among the millions of workers and their families who were already struggling to get by in the industrial zones around Yangon (where I have done research since 2016) and elsewhere in the country.
Image 1: Striking garment factory workers in the Hlaingtharyar industrial zone outside Yangon (Yaung Chi Oo Workers Association, 2019).
Working class struggles
The working-class population in Yangon’s industrial zones comprises mostly former villagers pushed out of rural areas due to unmanageable debt, the infrastructural devastation of 2008’s Cyclone Nargis, and outright theft of their land by military and private business interests. As real estate speculation and elitist urban development over the past ten years drove up the cost of housing, hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving in the city were priced out of formal accommodation and turned instead to cheaper squatter housing on the city’s outskirts. Many of these new urban residents sought employment in food and other processing factories producing for the domestic market, or at garment factories producing for export. By 2018, over a million workers—mostly young women, including many squatters—were employed in garment, textile, footwear, and accessories factories in Myanmar—mostly around Yangon. In this context, workers at factories and workplaces across Yangon’s industrial zones have over the past decade organised collectively, formed unions, and gone on strike in impressive struggles against employer intransigence and outright violence. Such struggles pre-date the country’s so-called democratic transition that began in 2011, which was also the year new labour legalisation granted workers a legal right to form unions. So, while the new labour law cannot be credited with empowering workers, it did grant them greater legal space in which to organise.
Covid-19
Then Covid-19 happened. A shortage of supplies from the People’s Republic of China in February 2020 led to factory closures and an initial loss of 10,000 to 15,000 jobs, and by September, 223 factories had filed for closure, temporary closure, or redundancy following a government-mandated lockdown. Meanwhile, factory employers used the pretext of Covid-19 disruption to fire unionised workers in mass, while police intervened to break up strikes and arrest organisers. With no effective social safety net in the country, dismissed factory workers have been struggling under the pandemic—taking on further debt, reducing food consumption, and in some cases turning to sex work to support their families. And all of this was before the military coup. Indeed, the day before the military seized power, I was editing a funding report for activist friends in Yangon who had formed a sewing cooperative to support factory workers fired during Covid-19 for their union organising activities.
Another state of emergency
Under these
already grim conditions, the declared state of emergency portends even more
dire circumstances for workers and their families. A Myanmar labour activist
group, Alokthema Awlan [The Workers’ Megaphone], shared online the
results of impromptu interviews conducted on the day of the coup with
factory workers in the Hlaingtharyar industrial zone, outside Yangon. Respondents
spoke of fears of food shortages and temporary store closures, which led to
panic buying and drove up prices of basic foodstuffs.
It remains unclear what the status of Myanmar labour law will be under the state of emergency, but there is little to suggest that space for worker organising will do anything but contract. Some workers have already expressed concern that existing labour law will be abrogated or simply disregarded. To get their views on the matter (and since I am in Singapore), a Burmese labour activist friend of mine interviewed, a couple days after the coup, several women employed at garment factories in the Hlaingtharyar industrial zone. One woman, who has been active in her local workplace union, stated:
“Now that the military has taken power, I’m worried the situation will go back to the way it was before [under military rule] and that the workers won’t have any rights anymore. Also, we were told that the [legal minimum] wage was going to be increased in the coming months. The young workers were hoping for that. But now we don’t expect that there’ll be an increase. It’ll be as though we’ve lost our rights. And with the military taking power, it’ll be like it was before, and employers will oppress the workers and reduce their wages. That’s what I expect.”
Trade unions in Myanmar’s global factories
As a precedent, over the two decades of direct military rule from 1988 to 2011, trade unions were prohibited, and police violently repressed workers’ attempts to organise and bargain collectively. Even under Myanmar’s so-called democratic transition (from 2011 to the present), police regularly intervened on the side of employers to repress workers’ struggles. Factories producing for the domestic market have routinely paid below the legal minimum wage, forced employees to work overtime, employed child labour, and violated manifold workplace health and safety laws. Even garment factories producing for export have been in widespread violation of legal labour standards, notwithstanding their greater likelihood of paying the minimum wage and avoiding child labour. Under such conditions, many workers who took their grievances to the government’s industrial relations offices encountered reluctance, evasiveness, and outright collusion with employers by government appointed mediators. Said one such factory worker whom I interviewed in 2019:
“The official at the Township Conciliation Body would say just a little on the side of the workers and would say a lot on the side of the employer. I don’t think that he was trying to achieve justice… I think that the employer and the official were working together.”
“Good” liberal government versus an illiberal military?
Such egregious conditions even before the coup—for industrial workers, but also for impoverished rural dwellers and ethnic minority civilians displaced by ongoing armed conflict elsewhere in the country—raise important caveats for emerging lines of analysis that would frame recent developments in Myanmar as a struggle between a “good” liberal government ousted by an illiberal military. Such was the dominant trope in Burma analysis during the 1990s and early 2000s. It allowed NLD politicians, foreign media, and Western governments to narrowly construe popular opposition to military rule in Myanmar as a singular desire for liberal capitalism and bourgeoise democracy. Military sympathisers could then argue (not without some truth) that such elitist politics disregarded the more immediate health and livelihood concerns of ordinary people in the country—urging, instead, an approach that would ostensibly go “beyond politics to societal imperatives.”
Fighting back
To be sure, workers, unions, and labour activist have already expressed their opposition to recent events. Shortly after the coup, trade unions and labour organisations released statements condemning the military’s actions. Activists disseminated proclamations online of a country-wide campaign of civil disobedience against the reassertion of direct military rule. And by Tuesday night, a day after the coup, the banging of pots was echoing throughout urban centres as an expression of popular dissent. (Friends in the border town of Myawaddy sent me photos of their much-battered kitchenware.) More confrontational tactics are apparently in the works, including strikes by hospital workers, trade unions, and students. And crucially, industrial workers around Yangon are eager to take part in such actions. According to another garment factory worker in Hlaingtharyar whom my friend interviewed:
“Since the 1st [of February] the workers here have wanted to go out and protest. They want to go downtown and join protests. It’s like that. We feel like we can’t accept [the situation]. We all want to do that. We already voted, and then the military seized power. So, we feel that we don’t want to accept what happened. Now, everyone is sharing news on their phones and writing comments about what has happened. If our union federation decided to take some action [against the coup], then all of us workers would want to take part.”
Better lines of analysis and action
There is a sense in which these actions, coming after Suu Kyi’s call for supporters to protest the military’s seizure of power, point to a mere restoration of Myanmar’s brief experiment in bourgeois democracy, which even before the coup had been an elitist project that provided cover for the military’s rapacious resource theft, militarisation of ethnic minority areas, and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya. However, given the frustrations that many workers previously expressed about the repressive working conditions they encountered under NLD rule, current working-class dissent also reveals, I suggest, the enduring material concerns of workers and the unemployed who are struggling to get by in Yangon’s industrial zones.
Such working-class opposition cannot be contained in a liberal narrative that would read proletarian dissent as a mere statement of support for bourgeois democracy under the 2008 constitution. Greater attention to the everyday struggles of ordinary people—under the state of emergency, of course, but also under the NLD’s own elitist rule over the preceding years—would do much to avert the sort of simplistic liberal narratives that dominated international reporting on Myanmar prior to the country’s return to quasi-civilian rule a decade ago.
Stephen Campbell is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, and Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He is the author of Border Capitalism, Disrupted: Precarity and Struggle in a Southeast Asian Industrial Zone (2018), as well as numerous articles on labour issues in Myanmar and Thailand.
Cite as: Campbell, Stephen. 2021. “What can workers expect in post-coup Myanmar?” FocaalBlog, 3 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/03/stephen-campbell:-what-can-workers-expect-in-post-coup-myanmar?/
On May 31, 2020, the US exploded in protest to address the super-exploitation of racism, which has uniquely scarred its history. This was followed by international demonstrations, including massive demonstrations in Paris against police brutality, a common theme of the Gilets Jaunes, a protest starting in November 2018 that I was studying. However, this time the Paris protests included the Gilets Jaunes but focused specifically on the brutality against youth and people of color. In these important new developments, we have seen an international mobilization which may now be breaking down, or breaking through, some of the fragmentations of the working class between so-called but no longer stable working classes, the imagined middle classes also at risk of instability, and the super-exploited subjects divided by racism, sexism, colonialism, citizenship and other forms of historical subordinations.
Here I consider long-term research among street protests in France in relation to the post-Covid outrage against police brutality. Austerity policies should be seen not simply as a consequence of the Great Recession in the wake of the financial crisis but rather as the latest most destructive stage of a neoliberal assault that began worldwide in the 1970s. My ongoing research in France suggests that the mass demonstrations which began with the French Occupy movement Nuit Debout (see Susser 2016, 2017) in 2016 and continued through a variety of strikes among students, transportation workers and others until the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations of fall 2018, and finally the massive pension demonstrations of 2019/2020, represent an effort to rebalance the pendulum in the struggles against the ever more virulent neoliberal assault. These are, in the end, international processes. I suggest that the kinds of demonstrations which were emerging powerfully in France before Covid-19, are now beginning to take place in the US and elsewhere. The disastrous inequalities that were massively exposed in the unequal fatalities and economic distress caused by the pandemic (see Focaalblog: Kalb 2020, Nonini 2020) have precipitated protests that can be seen as part of an ongoing formative process.
Long-term neoliberal assault, international dimensions
Long-term neoliberal assault has precipitated the widespread destruction of a particular kind of state (Smith 2011) as well as the restructuring of global power and networks (Nonini and Susser 2020). The industrial state underwrote the corporate world by subsidizing the education, health and stability of a large proportion of workers. Twentieth century workers’ struggles established the particular forms of social reproduction originally reified in the welfare state. The idea, for example, of ‘a fair day’s wage’ encompassed the costs of the patriarchal, heterosexual family for the reproduction of men with their wives and children. However, the stable working class emerged alongside and in interaction with lower and precarious standards of reproduction for minorities, migrants and other historically subordinate groups and women, as well as the uneven development of (post) colonialism. In other words, industrial capitalism included a super-exploited working class, marked by race and gender, citizenship rights and in many cases, indigeneity (Carrier and Kalb 2015; Kasmir and Carbonella 2014; Fraser and Jaeggi 2019, Steur 2015). These groups were the subjects of distinctive historically-defined processes of inequality and they were generally excluded, especially in the United States, from the benefits of the welfare state and the class compromise.
The massive assaults of neoliberalism of the past 50 years destroyed the lives of displaced industrial workers and further devastated minority, immigrant and native communities. Under Covid-19, both in France and more drastically the US, these losses, long manifested in differential mortality rates, among others, have become immediate life and death issues.
Image 1: French Riot Police at Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)
A new working poor of displaced industrial workers compounding the super-exploitation of historically subordinated groups has been recognized in the United States and Europe since the 1990s (Susser 1996). In the shifting global power configurations, contemporary nation-states no longer protect the stability of the traditional working class. The emergence of different forms of social movements can be seen as an attempt to redress the assault on customary living conditions, life cycle security and aspirations. I would suggest that this is also an attempt to redefine workers to include the previously neglected minorities as well as new family and identity configurations. New forms of worker protection will have to consider new forms of relationships within families and new kinds of work/leisure routines to address issues that some categorize as identity politics (such as feminism and LBGT rights).
From Nuit Debout to Gilets Jaunes
After Nuit
Debout, 2016-17 in France, which was largely a big city, youth led, leftist
Occupy movement, the next major mobilization was that of the Gilets Jaunes (2018-2019). The Gilets Jaunes were recognized as a
new phenomenon as they came from the urban peripheries of Paris and throughout
the provinces. Not regarded as cosmopolitan they included many teachers,
nurses, social workers as well as truck drivers, chefs, construction workers
and service workers in general. Many Gilets Jaunes were middle aged and
some were thought to be right wing.
Although perhaps not representative, it
should be noted that the woman who sent out the first call to protest the new
fuel tax implemented by President Emmanuel Macron was an educator of color from
the urban periphery of Paris. In addition, contrary to stereotype and the
government portrayal of the demonstrations, Gilets Jaunes insisted that they
did not object to environmental concerns. They objected to a measure that targeted
for extra tax the fuel that poor people in the urban peripheries were dependent
on for their daily commutes. Protests were organized in collaboration with
climate activists to demonstrate their common concerns and the support of the
Gilets Jaunes for the environment. A frequent chant and sign stated; we care
about “the end of the month and the end of the world”.
The first email call to protest the fuel tax was put out in September 2018 but by November, when the Gilets Jaunes began to block the highways and roundabouts and gather in thousands in the streets of Paris, they were objecting to much more than the fuel tax. They were concerned with the degradations of public services, the privatization of health care and their own daily challenges as well as what they saw as the decay of democracy. These protestersfrom the urban periphery frequently described the lack of investment in public transportation outside Paris and the declining support for provincial services as illustrating the “stealing of the state.” (Susser 2020). People regarded public services as a right and saw the services as belonging to the state as paid for by their tax money and therefore belonging to them. When the state privatized a service, it was seen as ‘stealing the public money.’ The destruction of the state is manifest not only in the privatization and dismantlement of public services, but also in the crisis of daily life, the family, education, health care, the aged, the handicapped (highly visible at protests on crutches and in wheelchairs) and the students, who feel they are “losing their futures,” as one protester said to me.
Continued Gilets Jaunes resistance
Until the pension strike, which began in
September 2019, the Gilets Jaunes were the most powerful, and most
supported of a variety of movements that had emerged in France since the
austerity policies imposed in the wake of the financial crisis. They linked
many of the uprisings and strikes from different sectors (such as railroads,
teachers and health workers) and the smaller uprisings among hospital aides or
the sans-papiers as well as the climate change activists and left-wing
organizations. Not concentrated in the workplace although participating in many
disparate strikes, the Gilets Jaunes invented new methods, such as the
occupation of the ronds-points, the
building of cabanas and the freeing of toll booths. In these ways, the Gilets
Jaunes were attempting to forge a new set of resistances and generating the
support of the public from the banlieues to the provinces. The movement
was both enraged and resilient: Enraged at the loss of community and public and
social services over time, and resilient in the commoning efforts to create a
new community (Susser 2020). The Gilets Jaunes, made up of working-class
people on the urban periphery, including many pensioners and families who could
not make ends meet, were crafting an emerging oppositional bloc.
The pension protests began in September
2019, when strikers closed down the metro and the buses for a day. A few months
later, different sectors from health care workers, legal professions, social
services, educators and others, organized massive strikes and demonstrations in
the streets that continued until they were shut down by the Covid 19 epidemic
in March 2020.
Gilets Jaunes among the grassroots union members, in many ways, had forced the unions to take up more militant positions against the pension changes. As health workers, lawyers and transportation workers marched in massive protests through Paris, Gilets Jaunes could be seen populating the street protests of every profession in their distinctive yellow jackets, personal statements written in black marker on their backs. The signature song of all the pension protests was that of the Gilets Jaunes, as were many of the chants and banners. Until Paris was closed down for Covid-19 in March 2020, the Gilets Jaunes and the massive pension marches combined in different, often conflicted, ways across France, in some cities with more cooperation in time and place than others.
Image 2. Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)
In France, Nuit Debout, the Gilets Jaunes, the pension strikers and many other movements represent transformative spaces where people in the current era of financialization and globalization are struggling to work out new strategies. Activists envision horizontalist movements as an effort to develop innovative forms of protest to counteract the increasing inequality, authoritarian tendencies and hardened boundaries of the new global regime. Such progressive representation strives for inclusivity and the breakdown and recognition of established hierarchies of gender, race, immigration and class, among others. Each of these groups has to be understood in the context of their own history and social movements. The participants in Nuit Debout were not the same as the Gilets Jaunes. However, in France and elsewhere, multiple subaltern groups may be beginning to recognize themselves as part of a larger political bloc in opposition to the destruction of the welfare state and degradation of democratic representation (Kalb and Mollona 2018). Such movements are contingent and contested, reflective of the same rage against the destruction of living standards and aspirations for a generation but offering hope for more inclusive solutions.
Image 3. Protests against police brutality in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)
Before the Gilets Jaunes, in 2016/7 activists from Nuit Debout had protested the police violence often focused on young men of color in the streets. The Gilets Jaunes protested the violence of the police against their own street demonstrations for over a year. It is a crucial development that in June 2020 the Gilets Jaunes joined ranks with the protests against police brutality and racism that were rocking the world. At this conjuncture, after the shocking Covid-19 shutdown and the disproportionate deaths of people of color in France as elsewhere, the displaced workers of the urban periphery joined directly with the superexploited immigrants, refugees and previously colonized people of color from the banlieues in several unprecedented massive demonstrations.
Image 4. Gilets Jaunes protester with Black Lives Matter support message (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)
As Polanyi knew, rage against the disastrous failures of (neo)liberalism could be expressed in brutal and fascist ways (see also Maskovsky and Bjork-James 2020, Kalb and Halmai 2011). However, the protests that we see today are a hopeful sign in their inclusive progressive moments bringing together many groups who are all at risk in different ways and at different levels or aspects of exploitation. They are demanding a rebalancing of the destructive neoliberal assault of the past 50 years. They are constructing an inclusive but uneven critical community which may serve as an antidote against the growing fury which is fueling nationalism and exclusivism (see also Kalb and Mollona 2018).
Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent book is The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, co-edited with Don Nonini.
References
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Carrier, James and Don Kalb
(eds.) 2015. Anthropologies of Class:
Power, Practice and Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kalb, Don and G Halmai (eds.) 2011.
Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class:
Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe.
Vol. 15. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Kalb, Don and Massimilliano
Mollona (eds.) 2018. Worldwide
Mobilizations. New York: Berghahn Books.
Kasmir, Sharryn and August
Carbonella (eds.) 2014. Blood and Fire.
New York: Berghahn Books
Kalb, Don 2020. Covid, Crisis and the Coming Contestations. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/01/don-kalb-covid-crisis-and-the-coming-contestations/
Maskovsky, Jeff and S. Bjork-James (eds.) 2020.
Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism. Morgantown,
WV: West Virginia University Press
Nonini, Don 2020 Black Enslavement and the Coming Agro-Industrial Capital. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/03/don-nonini-black-enslavement-and-agro-industrial-capital/
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The Tumultuous Politics of Scale. New
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Steur, Luisa (2015). Class
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Poperl, Kevin and Ida Susser (1996).
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Susser, Ida (2018) Inventing a Technological Commons: Confronting the Engine of Macron, http://www.focaalblog.com/2018/04/19/kevin-poperl-and-ida-susser-inventing-a-technological-commons-confronting-the-engine-of-macron/
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Susser, Ida (2017). Commoning
in New York City, Barcelona and Paris: Notes and observations from the field. Focaal 79: 6-22.
Susser, Ida (2020, forthcoming). “They are stealing the state”: Commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France. In: Urban Ethics Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser (eds.). New York: Routledge.
Cite as: Susser, Ida. 2020. “Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries?” FocaalBlog, 3 December. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/12/03/ida-susser:-covid,-police-brutality-and-race:-are-ongoing-french-mobilizations-breaking-through-the-class-boundaries?/
This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).
On 1st March 2018, a group of protestors blocked a dual-carriageway in front of Acevedo Metro (and Metro cable line) Station in the North of Medellín, Colombia. Those who have read something about Medellín’s internationally acclaimed urban transformation in recent years will have almost definitely found their gaze drawn to the image of a cable car suspended above a tapestry of terracotta roofs that cascades down Medellín’s Aburra Valley. This image has become emblematic of a wondrous turning-point in Medellín’s contemporary urban trajectory. Once a hotbed of urban violence, state abandonment and spatial disconnection, these underprivileged peripheral neighbourhoods received state investment in bold infrastructural projects, and via the introduction of participatory governance mechanisms, now enjoy an empowering degree of protagonism in shaping Medellín’s urban future. Welcome to the ‘pro-poor’ city of Medellín.
This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).
This blog documents the politics of community leaders in an area selected for “urban renewal” in the center of the city of Recife in the northeast of Brazil. More specifically, it looks at how they position themselves regarding legally defined low-income residence areas (officially named as Special Zones of Social Interest, or ZEIS), informal land occupations (favelas or slums), and vertical gated communities (residential high-rise buildings). Community leaders operate as brokers between the interests of the urban poor, politicians, and real estate developers. They provide essential services in slums, while being dependent on the lower level bureaucracy for the provision and maintenance of these services (Koster & de Vries 2012). The role of community leaders as crucial brokers in Recife is heightened by the fact that they are democratically elected as local representatives of their Special Zone within a city-wide participatory program for slum governance.
I deploy the analytical lens of “occupancy urbanism” that narrates struggles for urban space and shelter “beyond policy and projects” (Benjamin 2007: 558). The perspective insists on seeing “the urban” as an open-ended site of encounter and “political possibility” (Benjamin 2014: 319). “Occupancy urbanism” is the term that Solomon Benjamin uses to describe the physical-political spaces that are opened-up when the urban poor occupy land, claim public services, or negotiate with the municipal bureaucracy (2007, 2008, 2014). As I explain further below, despite occupancy urbanism being a political practice of the poor, it has become useful for the powerful, especially for real estate developers and their allies.
As the poor’s “subversive politics on the ground” (Benjamin 2008: 723), “occupancy” urbanism challenges the mainstream developmentalist model of “global” urbanism. The latter abides by capitalist market mechanisms and private property, while assuming that cities in the “Global South” will follow the footsteps—or become satellites—of those in the “Global North”. Occupancy urbanism is not about policymaking and masterplanning to make cities “inclusive”, “smart”, and “World Class”. Occupancy urbanism is neither the arena of elite civil society that preaches “good governance” and forms of direct citizen participation without collective representation by community leaders. Central to occupancy urbanism is the analysis of “land and its historicity in its multiple logics” (2014: 318). The focus on various forms of “occupancy” and tenure arrangements forces us to move beyond homogenized versions of “the favela” (slum). Occupancy urbanism thus highlights internal diversity within “the slum” while “grounding the slum in the circuits of finance and real estate capitalism” (Roy 2011: 228).
Affluent private investors and developers have not only made their own agreements with community leaders and the municipal administration, but they have also benefited from the land occupations initiated by the poor. I follow Anaya Roy in calling this an “occupancy urbanism of the powerful” (2011: 230). Roy points at the existence of “development mafias, local criminal syndicates, often with global connections” (Weinstein in Roy 2011: 230). Their practices are interpenetrated with the occupancy urbanism of the poor in terms of claims to land, basic services, and embeddedness within the lower level municipal bureaucracy. While community leaders in Recife can definitely not be described as “mafias organized in criminal syndicates”, it is possible to observe the proliferation of community leaders with strong ties to real estate developers who negotiate with the municipal administration under the guise of “public consultation”. For these reasons, I consider these practices of community leaders as part of occupancy urbanism of the powerful.
In the following sections I present ethnographic examinations of two areas, Coque and Vila Imperial. My approaches to community leaders and the context in both settings has allowed me to further theorize the squatter approach to urban development that is taking place. I show how, in Recife, occupancy urbanism is “wielded differentially by different social classes in the context of urban inequality” (Roy 2011: 231). I argue that occupancy urbanism helps us to think about land development and urban politics as an interplay between various practices of “occupancy”. In this way we can gain an understanding of the creation of a highly exclusionary city. Before expanding on Coque and Vila Imperial, however, I first expand on Recife’s urban governance and offer a short description of a contestatory movement called Occupy Estelita.
Image 1: Map of the center of Recife that locates land occupations, ZEIS, Rio Mar shopping mall, New Recife project area, and (halted) social housing estates (OpenStreetMap, 2020, adapted by Sven da Silva)
Participatory urban governance
Often referred to as Brazil’s capital of inequality, Recife’s urban governance legacy includes a slum governance program, as well as a participatory planning program in which the municipal administration visits neighborhoods for consultation and deliberation. Both programs were initiated in reaction to massive land occupations by the poor in the 1970s; although these programs have lost much steam over time. Due to this strong popular movement, the military regime (1964-1985) had to shift their strategy from forced evictions for a “slum-free” city towards, what we would now call, “upgrading” for an “inclusive” city.
In 1983 a new local zoning law defined Special Zones of Social Interest (ZEIS), as “spontaneously existing and consolidated housing settlements, where special urban norms are established, in the social interest of promoting their legal regularization and their integration into the urban structure”. ZEIS, in a way, mediate the “formalization” of the “informal” city. Today there are 74 ZEIS in the city and more than half of Recife’s 1.6 million inhabitants lives in such a zone.
Approved in 1987, the PREZEIS (Plan for REgularization of ZEIS) regulates these “special urban norms”. As a complex bureaucratic system of laws and actors, the PREZEIS attempts to regulate land markets. PREZEIS prioritizes shelter over ownership rights, regulates maximum plot sizes, and limits relocation to the minimum required (de Souza, 2001). From their neoliberal perspective that favors unregulated land markets, urban investors and pro-business media see the PREZEIS as an impediment for land development and have always attempted to open up ZEIS areas for land valorization and beautification, especially those near the riverbanks or the oceanfront.
The real estate pressures on ZEIS areas intensifiedwhen Brazil began preparing to host the FIFA World Cup 2014. Presented to the public using the bombastic language of “turning Recife into a new Dubai” the highly controversial New Recife was approved by the municipal government. The project aims to construct more than ten high-rise buildings at the Estelita quay. Through an auction questioned by national prosecutors, in 2008, the New Recife construction consortium—made up of private investors—acquired a huge abandoned terrain owned by the federal government. There was no public consultation, the terrain was auctioned “for a banana price”—as neighboring community leaders commented—and there are allegations that one of the consortium members sponsored the campaigns of politicians in order to get the deal approved.
Such top-down “urban renewal” projects for the middle and upper classes were combined with participatory planning for the poor. This means that the construction of highways and shopping malls went together with contracts for the construction of housing estates for displaced families in ZEIS areas. However many of these estates have not been constructed, because the municipal administration has since 2013 discontinued the participatory planning program, leading to a major increase in the social housing deficit.
Occupy Estelita
In the aftermath of the nation-wide June 2013 protests (Mollona 2014), the social movement Occupy Estelita erupted on the political scene in 2014. Largely composed out of a middle-class group of university students and professors, architects and lawyers, the activists camped on the New Recife terrain to prevent the demolition of historic warehouses located on the construction site. Occupy Estelita has been described as the most important recent Brazilian social movement against the decay of participatory structures and the privatization of public space. Various lawsuits have so far prevented the construction of the New Recife skyscrapers.
Occupy Estelita mobilizations pressured the municipality to re-negotiate the project. Community leaders, both those in favor and against the New Recife project, jumped into the space opened up for re-negotiation. They were able to make claims for public services in land occupations with various shacks bordering the New Recife construction site along the historic train rails. Community leaders in Coque always remained divided however regarding the New Recife project. Nevertheless they are overall satisfied that the project’s redesign includes more space for leisure activities and social housing units as compensation. It still remains unclear, however, who can claim a right to the social housing units and where these will be constructed.
Coque’s leaders and projects
Coque is a ZEIS in the center of Recife where 40 thousand people live. It is located at a walking distance from the New Recife terrain. At the end of 2013, the current mayor spectacularly announced the construction of a canal crossing Coque as a basic sanitation project budgeted at R$18 million. This would go together with the construction of a social housing estate for affected families who lived in shacks on the edge of the canal. However, the social housing estate was never constructed and, instead of a house, the 150 affected families were offered very low compensations ranging from R$ 4,000 to R$ 38,000, amounts that are not sufficient to find housing near Coque.
At the same time the municipality had transferred several pieces of land to “third party” actors for urban development within Coque’s ZEIS borders. A large strip of land along the riverbanks was transferred for the construction of a Juridical hub. Ironically enough, this did not follow PREZEIS regulations.
Louro and Moises, both active in the local board of Coque within the PREZEIS, were very active in the successful resistance against the construction of the juridical hub. They are micro-entrepreneurs, born in the 1970s, and active in community groups involved in the “never-ending struggle” (luta eterna)for better living conditions in Coque. Louro works as an Uber driver and is better known as “Louro of the Pitbulls” for he breeds and takes care of pitbulls. Moises runs a stall (banca) in the city center with his wife where they sell clothes and accessories. He is better known as “Brother Moises” since he is a faithful member of the Pentecostal Assembleia de Deus. With other community leaders and groups in Coque, Louro and Moises stressed the risk of future resettlements that the New Recife project brings for Coque.
The main representative of Coque however stressed the employment opportunities that the New Recife project will generate for Coque’s residents. He formed part of a group of community entities in the vicinity of the New Recife construction site, including Cabanga and Coelhos, to demand participation within the New Recife consortium meetings. They made commercials to promote the project under the slogan “Good for You, Good for the City” and mobilized residents to support the New Recife project during public hearings in 2014. More recently they mobilized unemployed residents when the consortium started to collect résumés.
Image 2: A community leader from Coque records a pro-New Recife commercial. He argues that New Recife will bring employment opportunities for the poor and helps build a safer city, because the abandoned terrain at the Estelita quay attracts drug-traffickers. On the background the medical hub and the construction of a business tower. (Photo by Sven da Silva, 2014)
Land and housing rent prices near the new shopping malls or areas destined for vertical growth increased massively. Several new occupations emerged out of Coque. Moises and Louro initiated a new occupation just on the edge of Coque’s ZEIS parameters at the Imperial Street. Their occupation exposed the unfair compensations received by affected families of the canal in Coque. Using his own measures, yet without much exaggeration, Moises recounts:
“The compensation (indenização) is always ridiculously low. Imagine somebody living on the main street of Coque receiving R$ 40.000 as compensation, while the house is worth R$ 200.000. That is because the municipality does not pay for the land. We don’t have the land titles.”
Since the cheapest house in Coque at the time sold for R$ 50000, several families moved to distant locations outside the city center. The compensations were thus used to buy materials to construct a shack at a new land occupation. Such “occupancy urbanism” of the poor exposed high housing rent prices in Coque, despite the efforts of the PREZEIS to avoid housing rent or keep it low.
Image 3: Street in Vila Imperial in 2014 (Photo by Sven da Silva, 2014)
Vila Imperial
On paper the vacant terrain that affected residents of Coque occupied was on the name of the federal government (the União) as stated in the union heritage register (SPU). In practice, two enterprises built a wall around it to claim the terrain as theirs. On Labor Day 2014, the land occupation started, and it was baptized as Vila Imperial.
I visited Vila Imperial days after its initiation and saw how lots were being allocated with the support of a housing rights movement. Several wooden shacks had already been built and the number of people arriving to occupy lots was growing rapidly. Louro explained the occupation as follows:
“We occupy due to the pressures on housing in Coque, and the lack of assistance from City Hall (Prefeitura). But at any moment some project can arrive for the terrain. You will see how people who have invested in constructing their house lose everything again. It is a vicious circle.”
Stories of land occupations such as Vila Imperial are often contradictory and sensitive. Political rivals of Louro and Moises would speak about invasões “illegal invasions” (of private property). They see it as a form of opportunism or urban speculation of the “better off” poor who already have secured housing in Coque. They argue that the shacks are rented out again, only there to wait for resettlement money, or a speculative strategy to receive an apartment in a social housing estate. Such discourses were used by many of those in favor of the New Recife project, as justification for evictions. Louro explained the conflicting views as follows;
“People from Coque and Vila Imperial gave more body to the Occupy Estelita movement. We occupied the streets and pressured the municipality, and they supported our struggles. They for example helped us stop the eviction of 58 families through legal and design support. That is when other leaders in Coque started to call us terrorists and mentally deficient people who want to obstruct the development of the city. There now exists a big lie about opportunism at Vila Imperial intended to discredit the occupation and its organization. They say that so-and-so (fulano o tal) bought 50 lots at the occupation to rent out shacks. However, the pioneers at Vila Imperial know that nobody received more lots than anyone else.”
Four years later, Vila Imperial had electricity, water supply, and instead of wooden shacks, there were now brick houses, some of them with two floors. The land occupation is now very much considered part of Coque, yet it is not included in the ZEIS parameters. I walked through Vila Imperial with Moises again and discussed the election of Bolsonaro who had called movements that occupy land “terrorists” (Albert 2018, Eiró 2018), as well as the beginning of the sale of the first New Recife apartments, a sign that the construction will soon begin. He suddenly climbed a shaky wall and revealed:
“See those warehouses? Four upscale apartment blocks will be erected there. Nobody called us to say that this will happen, and still, it is all approved by Recife’s Urban Development Council. [NB: The majority of seats are occupied by delegates who represent the real estate sector.] The only thing that we don’t know is when they officially start and end the construction. This will have a major impact on Coque and Vila Imperial. Imagine how many cars that would be! For sure the main street of Coque will need to be widened at some point.”
Yet again an upscale project that pressures Vila Imperial and Coque. Now one that is on a stone-throwing distance. Without ZEIS protection, residents of Vila Imperial remain in constant fear of “the vicious circle”—of losing a house without sufficient compensation and starting all over again. With the decay of participatory structures and the deepening of an urban development model where investments for the poor are only “compensatory” or alleviative (paliativo), the political spaces in which community leaders like Moises and Louro can operate have become increasingly slim.
Image 4: Street in Vila Imperial in 2018 (photo by Sven da Silva, 2018)
Rethinking occupancy urbanism
Occupancy urbanism explains land occupations such as Vila Imperial and how Moises and Louro “run after things” for this “informal settlement” by claiming land and housing. At the same time, occupancy urbanism makes visible how “formal” planning such as the New Recife project similarly operates in a legal area of opaque negotiations between community leaders, political parties, developers and the municipal bureaucracy. Following Roy, I have the called the latter “occupancy urbanism of the powerful” (2011: 230).
Can we then continue to perceive occupancy urbanism as a politics of the poor that challenges neoliberal urban development projects? I have shown how Moises and Louro experience what can be called “occupancy of the powerful” as encroaching on Coque and Vila Imperial. They continuously struggle against evictions and very low resettlement compensation. This lies in stark contrast to the fact that luxury buildings get constructed through covered-up illegal means. Can we then continue to assume that Moises. Louro, and “informal” land occupations have a specific form of political agency—in and of themselves—that is able to counter occupancy urbanism of the powerful and “global” urbanism?
Therefore, I wish to caution against over-reading occupancy urbanism as the political agency of the poor. In Recife, the “occupancy urbanism by the powerful” has gained much political space as witnessed in the increased role of community leaders with close ties to the real estate developers and municipal administration. Rather than a threat or disruption to “global urbanism, land occupations and ZEIS are used as justification for the construction of skyscrapers by promising employment and social housing. And yet, the occupancy urbanism of the poor draws on collective memories of the popular movement in the 1970s in their struggles against dispossession. It must be stressed that this resulted in the PREZEIS, and that these were struggles for belonging to the city, as against resettlement to the periphery or relocation to a social housing estate.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679614).
Sven da Silva is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University (The Netherlands), and member of the ERC-funded research project “Participatory urban governance between democracy and clientelism: Brokers and (in)formal politics”.
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Cite as: da Silva, Sven. 2020. “Special Zones, Slums, and High-rise buildings: Community leaders between “occupancy urbanism” of the poor and the powerful in Recife, Brazil.” FocaalBlog, 31 July. www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/31/sven-da-silva-special-zones,-slums,-and-high-rise-buildings-community-leaders-between-occupancy-urbanism-of-the-poor-and-the-powerful-in-recife-brazil/
On 7th June 2020, the bronze statue of Edward Colston in the English city of Bristol was pulled down by Black Lives Matter protesters with a rope, rolled a short distance down the road, and dropped into the harbor with a gurgle. Colston was a merchant who became rich in the late seventeenth-century selling sugar, wine, oil, fruits, and most significantly, slaves from the West African coast (Morgan 1999). Although, rather dubiously, Colston left no written records, he became a member of the Royal African Company in 1680, rising to deputy governor in 1689, at a time when the chartered corporation held a monopoly over the West African slave trade, shipping captives to plantations in North America, the Caribbean, and Brazil (Pettigrew 2013). Colston’s memory has however endured in Bristol because of his local philanthropic works. Colston funded schools, hospitals, almshouses, workhouses, and other charitable causes, and even today his name is attached to a number of other toponyms across the city. The statue itself was erected in 1895 at the height of the British Empire as a tribute to these works—completely neglecting their own inhumane underpinnings.
Since the 1990s, Colston’s pivotal role in the slave trade has become more widely known, and calls had been growing to remove the statue, but without tangible effect. So when a wave of protests swept the world, in anger at the killing of African-American George Floyd by a white police officer, Black Lives Matter activists in the U.S. began upending confederate statues, and Colston fell as part of this iconoclastic surge, subsequently catalyzing it when the event was beamed across social media and made international headlines. At the time of writing, over 360 public objects across the world symbolizing racial hierarchies have now been removed, defaced, painted over, beheaded, and drowned.
Michael Taussig has reflected extensively on what happens when symbols are destroyed (1999). Public statues like the eighteen-foot figure of Colston contain a secret, a public secret—in his case the secret of African slavery that lay behind his reformist programme—that is revealed at the moment of their desecration. The power of this revelation is by its own nature temporary, but nevertheless extremely potent, releasing a ‘strange surplus of negative energy’ into the world (1999, 1), a magical shockwave whose strength is commensurate with the depth of the secret it exposes. When activist Jen Reid stood on top of the empty plinth later that day, spontaneously raising her arm in the Black Power salute, ‘It was like an electrical charge of power running through me’, she remembers. As news of the toppling continued to spread, the plinth stood there, pulsing, while a feverish debate developed over what should replace it.
I have been an admirer of the artist Marc Quinn since I was twelve years old. That year, 1997, I was tugged along to the epoch-defining Sensation exhibition at London’s Royal Academy. Quinn’s contribution was present alongside other so-called Young British Artists, or YBAs, a new generation of creators working under the influence of postmodernism who sought to redefine what we thought of as art. The sight of his head made entirely out of his own blood is still imprinted on my mind, an object which somehow managed to capture both the intense throb of life, at the same time as being a death-mask, a memento mori. Some years later, when I was twenty, I made sure to catch Alison Lapper Pregnant on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, the sumptuous marble form of a woman in the bloom of biological reproduction alongside a severe disability.
At 4.30am on the 15th July 2020, in the space of barely fifteen minutes, Quinn, together with Jen Reid, a Guardian journalist, and a team of crane operatives, again placed himself at the forefront of my consciousness when he installed a life-sized resin statue of Reid giving her salute on top of Colston’s empty plinth, alongside a statement on his website. But this artwork raised questions in a way that the others did not.
The statement announces that it was a ‘joint’ undertaking by Quinn and his model Reid, an act of co-creation. Their aims are stated using the collective ‘we’ and Quinn stresses that he and Reid wanted to do the installation ‘together’. In a fuller interview with the Guardian, Quinn even attempts to efface his own role entirely, when he claims that ‘Jen created the sculpture when she stood on the plinth and raised her arm in the air’. But this vision of equality is a smokescreen, and a dangerous one at that. Reid did not create the sculpture when she raised her arm on the plinth, she was experiencing life as a subject, not an object, sensing the energic power of defacement. Quinn created the sculpture with a team of craftsmen. He is a white, 56-year old man, educated at a private boarding school and later at Cambridge University, with a distinguished legacy as an artist behind him. This kind of positionality does not prevent him from being the effective ‘white ally’ that the statement claims to strive for, but true allyship cannot arise when vast differences of institutional privilege are altogether erased. He announces modestly that the sculpture is ‘an embodiment and amplification of Jen’s ideas and experiences’, and yet, after trawling newspaper articles about the installation, I remain unable to answer the most basic question of Reid’s daily occupation.
Still, the most egregious part of the statement comes when Quinn asserts that the motive for the sculpture was ‘keeping the issue of Black people’s lives and experiences in the public eye’. This is at best a delusion and at worst a deception. This issue was at the very center of the public’s dilated pupils as it watched the satisfying swivel of Colston’s tumble on repeat, something which had little to do with Quinn, and everything to do with the physical, social, and legal risks taken by activists on the ground. The terrible genius of Quinn’s move was that he won either way. Either Bristol City Council opted to retain the sculpture, in which case his work would be permanently occupying what is at present the most famous plinth in Britain, or they opted to remove it, by which point the exposure achieved through the guerilla act will have inflated its capital value beyond anything that could have been achieved through more conventional means.
Of course, this was what the YBAs were known for. Tracy Emin’s soiled bed at the same Sensation exhibition in 1997 was as much a confidence trick about whether such an object could command a re-sale value as anything else. And its apotheosis came when Damien Hirst attempted to vend a diamond-encrusted skull for £50 million, a brazen (and by some accounts unsuccessful) experiment in wealth creation. Even if, as Quinn says, the money made when A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) is eventually sold will be given directly to the causes of people in Britain of African descent, the value is not his to give. Just that philanthropic gesture echoes the uncomfortable paradoxes of Colston himself, who made his wealth in an economy of exploitation only to munificently re-gift it.
‘No formal consent has been sought for the installation’, the statement says calmly. Herein lies the most problematic aspect of the work. At the risk of simplifying a complex and multivalent phenomenon (cf. Patterson 1980), we might think of non-consent as the very epicenter of the slave relation. To be compelled into a condition when the only alternative is violence or death is the antithesis of consent as we would understand it. Enlightenment thinkers invented various moral contortions to get around this brute truth, John Locke famously arguing that as captives in a just war, the slave gave his or her consent in exchange for their life, but these can now be comprehensively dismissed. To engage in such an openly nonconsensual way with a value created by Black people, both now and historically, at a time when a genuine public discussion around slavery in Britain had just opened up, was deplorable. It need not be said that if a Black artist, or someone with less gilded credentials, had engaged in this kind of illegal action, they may not have received the same general fanfare, and may even have been criminally prosecuted.
Within just twenty-four hours the artwork was removed. Bristol has been governed, since 2016, by the first ever person of African descent to be elected to the mayoralty of a major European city, Marvin Rees, whose father is Afro-Jamaican and mother is white British. Rees set the tone within hours of the installation with a public statement, ‘There is an African proverb that says if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together. Our challenge is to take this city far’. Quinn’s unsolicited gift, which may now be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, was quietly, but firmly, rejected by Bristol City Council. This was no minor financial decision for an entity working under the pressure of a decade of austerity and the devastations of Covid-19. The profound dignity of this gesture was what Audra Simpson might call a ‘refusal’ (2014), a negation of one world for the purpose of affirming another. It was a refusal in this case to play the game of appropriation, the seizure of value. It gave hope for the future.
Vita Peacock is an anthropologist and Humboldt Fellow affiliated with LMU Munich and the Humboldt University. She is currently finalizing a manuscript based on her ethnography of the Anonymous movement, Digital Initiation Rites: The Arc of Anonymous in Britain.
References
Morgan, Kenneth. 1999. Edward
Colston and Bristol. Bristol: Bristol Branch of the Historical Association.
Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A
Comparative Study. Cambridge, [Mass.] ; London: Harvard University Press.
Pettigrew, William. A. 2013. Freedom’s Debt: The Royal
African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life
Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press.
Taussig, Michael T. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Cite as: Peacock, Vita. 2020. “The slave trader, the artist, and an empty plinth.” FocaalBlog, 29 July. www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/29/vita-peacock-the-slave-trader-the-artist-and-an-empty-plinth/
This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).
Facing family rejection and domestic violence, many transgender (trans) people leave their hometowns especially for large cities in search for greater acceptance and opportunities (Engin 2018). Due to a lack of viable financial means to support themselves and a lack of social acceptance by society, these individuals typically take shelter with urban trans communities (Zengin 2014). In the recent decades, trans communities working in the sex economy have become particularly visible in urban spaces (Çokar and Kayar 2011). However, stigma and hostility towards their gender identity, criminalization and the precarious nature of street-based sex work, punitive institutional practices, and neoliberal urban restructuring have exacerbated their marginalization. In response, trans sex workers have developed various coping and resistance strategies. However, their care networks and practices of resistance are often precarious. Although solidarity persists, violent structural forces produce tensions in their relationships, and hinder the emergence of their collective resistance. This post communicates an ethnographic research that investigates the processes through which the wider forces undermine sex workers’ collective struggles in urban Turkey.
The case study presented here is based on participant-observation and 30 in-depth interviews in an urban neighborhood of a major Turkish city. I collected data from August 2017 to August 2019, during which time I spent an average of six hours a day for six months with sex workers in the streets as they solicited clients and engaged in other everyday activities. In this context, a wide range of identities coexist under the category of “trans.” As used here, the term broadly signifies a person whose assigned sex at birth is male, and who cross-dresses or self-identifies as a woman or with a local or transnational gender-variant term. Most of my research participants self-identify either as a woman or as travesti, lubunya, trans, transseksüel, gacı, or cross-dresser.
Structural violence: Transgender lives in urban Turkey
Sevda, who self-identifies as a travesti, experienced estrangement and ostracism when she first revealed her gender identity to her family. She left her parental home and cut ties with her family members for many years. Struggling with poverty and homelessness, she moved to a larger city that offered her anonymity and enabled her to earn a living in the underground sex economy. Unable to find other employment, she had engaged in street-based sex work for 15 years when I first spoke with her. However, her labor has always been criminalized. The fines she has received for seeking clients in the street have accumulated. And since she has not had funds to pay these fines, her debt has gradually multiplied, reaching the equivalent of two-years rent. On occasion, when Sevda has been unable to earn a sufficient income in inner-city neighborhoods, where she is policed and punished, she has worked in peripheral areas, either along the highway, at bus terminals, or in industrial zones. Without peer support networks in these unsafe and isolated locations, she has faced violence, street harassment, and extortion. On several times, she has been targeted with bottles, stones, lit cigarettes, or water thrown out of car windows. When I first met Sevda, though strong and persistent, she seemed emotionally exhausted from the everyday hassles of her life.
The rights group Transgender Europe notes that “there is no safe country for transgender people.” The statistics from Turkey are particularly worrisome. According to their 2019 report, between October 2018 and October 2019, 331 trans and gender-diverse people were murdered around the world. In Europe, 33 per cent of all murders of trans people occurred in Turkey, with nearly all victims being sex workers. Trans sex workers are especially vulnerable due to the criminalization of sex work and societal transphobia. The violence they experience in Turkey is therefore a manifestation of structural violence (see Galtung 1990).
As in the case of Sevda, the overwhelming majority of trans women in Turkey pursue a livelihood in the sex economy. This is most often due to gender discrimination in the labor market—a fact that distinguishes this group from most other sex workers. In addition, although sex work is legal in Turkey, most trans individuals are excluded from selling sex legally. This is primarily due to their gender identity, but also their citizenship status and age in some cases. While Turkish law does not define prostitution as a crime, all actions required to conduct sex work outside of registered brothels are criminalized, and subject to administrative punishments (Çokar and Kayar 2011). In recent years, there have been rigorous efforts to restrict prostitution by closing down legal brothels, and pushing unregistered prostitutes out into urban peripheries, thereby reducing their visibility. These prohibitive and restrictive measures not only deprive them of safe working environments and economic and social security, but also compromise their access to formal protection channels. For example, the majority of unregistered sex workers do not hold any social security. The most vulnerable trans sex workers are those who work on the streets, or who struggle with poverty, homelessness, or health problems. These are the individuals most likely to get harmed by institutional practices, such as the criminal and administrative sanctions and policing, since many of them engage in “survival sex” (selling sex to meet subsistence needs).
Over the decades, trans communities in large cities have been targeted in collective assaults—often in the form of forced evictions—which have been supported by multiple actors, including extremist nationalist groups, the police, non-trans residents, neighborhood associations, the media, and various state institutions (Bayramoğlu 2013). On the one hand, such evictions have aimed to “cleanse” an area of nonconforming gender and sexual identities (Zengin 2014). On the other hand, they have served to remove marginalized populations, such as trans individuals, sex workers, and migrants, in order to transform low-income areas into profitable neighborhoods through the renewal and gentrification projects (Bayramoğlu 2013). For trans individuals who sell sex and live in these neighborhoods, such evictions have been a process of dispossession (Bayramoğlu 2013) and have devastated their livelihoods, social relationships, and spatial belongingness (Unsal 2015).
From structural violence to interpersonal violence
According to Masse (2014), what brings individuals together in present-day urban social movements is the struggle against precariousness, at work and in the life. Participants in such struggles not only mobilize against economic exploitation, unemployment, and poverty, but also stigmatization, marginalization, criminalization, and exclusion. At the same time, however, the very conditions of precarity, around which people at times collectively mobilize, also generate interpersonal conflicts that undermine their collective struggles. Such is the case with trans sex workers.
Picture 1. Protests were organized over the murder of a trans woman and activist, Hande Kader in 2016 (Illustrated by ttillustrations, 11.06.2020)
Anthropologists have long documented how structural violence translates into interpersonal violence in the lives of socially and economically vulnerable populations (see Auyero 2000; Bourgois 2001). According to their accounts, wider forces, such as political oppression, economic marginalization, and social inequality, produce interpersonal conflicts within marginalized populations (see Bourdieu 1998). During my fieldwork, I often witnessed sex workers quarrelling, criticizing their peers’ appearances, spreading rumors, and on rare occasions, physically assaulting each other. The reproduction of violence in one’s intimate life against oneself or one’s kin, friends, neighbors, and community may follow several paths. For instance, interpersonal violence may be a practical necessity in volatile and illegal street economies that cannot rely on law enforcement for regulation (Karandinos, Hart, Castrillo, and Bourgois 2014). Such is the case in this underground sex economy, where physical and verbal violence in part serves as a mean for social control.
A great deal of the quarrels, ingrained in the language and the culture of the larger queer population in Turkey, are taken as interactional codes among trans people. The contentious nature of these social interactions help them to bond, release tensions, and form alliances. In some cases, however, hostile comments and practices turn self-destructive, harm relationships, and undermine solidarity. A considerable number of ethnographic studies have documented the integration of violence into the moral logics of people’s everyday lives (see Anderson 1999; Bourgois 1995). Accordingly, daily practices and expressions of violence on a micro-interactional level can become normalized in public and private spheres and accepted as a commonsense way to address everyday anxieties (see Bourgois 2001). Interpersonal violence may also arise from a sense of inferiority and powerlessness, intensely experienced during daily struggles for sustenance and self-respect in a hostile world, which may in turn exert a demobilizing effect on vulnerable populations (Bourgois 2001).
Weakening of solidarities and collective resistance
Informal support networks of trans sex workers are not always available to help cope with and counter risks. Even though some sex workers are in deep financial difficulties, money and other material assistance is usually shared only within small and intimate social circles. Social fragmentation, by contrast, is visible even to an outsider. For example, having suffered from severe economic hardship and financial distress for several months, Gamze once voiced her disappointment about her considerably wealthier peers, who worked next-door, “They see my situation. Why don’t they offer any support?” On the contrary, workers commonly express distrust toward their peers. Don Kulick (1998) documented similar patterns of conflicts and distrust among travestis in Brazil. Furthermore, individuals struggling financially are sometimes blamed for their circumstances by their peers—a practice that works to legitimize the social order. In other words, members of marginalized groups may hold themselves and each other responsible for the material effects of structural violence (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), thereby hindering solidarity and collective resistance in their communities.
Among the structural elements engendering conflicts and undermining solidarity are the material pressures and tensions arising from precarious labor. In the absence of social security net and other employment, a decline in the number of clients immediately creates financial distress in the lives of many sex workers. In addition, along with a shared residential space, and the friendship and community relations that this entails, trans sex workers also share a work space in the informal sex market that they depend on for their livelihoods. However, the organization of sex labor induces competition in concentrated urban spaces, where everyone must find their own clients. At times, competition may lead to fights over “stealing” others’ clients or working spots. Especially when business is slow, the workers often take note of others’ earnings, which can give rise to heated arguments. There are also vast economic disparities among trans sex workers (Zengin 2014). For this reason, financial struggles are not typically identified as a common challenge that needs to be dealt with collectively.
The divisive and hindering effects of material pressures and competition on workers’ collective struggles have been observed in many labor settings. Significantly, in the lives of trans sex workers, financial pressures are coupled with social and political marginalization. A sense of insecurity resulting from precarious living conditions constrains community mobilization. For instance, trans communities in several neighborhoods in Turkey experienced evictions and attempts at lynching. Furthermore, due to criminalization, the threat and reality of police harassment may disrupt their lives. Given these threats, most sex workers in this neighborhood have restricted their participation especially in visible, confrontational or organized forms of resistance, including political demonstrations and physical resistance to repel the police in the neighborhood. In some cases, sex workers may even disapprove of their colleagues who are involved in contentious collective action, such as protesting a hate crime targeting their peers. Such individuals fear that organizing community mobilization could result in a decline in the number of clients or an increase in policing, thereby negatively impacting their livelihood and placing their lives at risk.
Support networks and community mobilization
In spite of being strained and ridden with contradictions, the informal networks of trans sex workers still provide support, care, and assistance, given that legal protection is limited for many of these workers (Güler 2020). As with working-class women and mothers in marginalized neighborhoods (see Edin and Lein 1997; Koch 2015; Stack 1974), relying on fictive kin for mutual aid and reciprocal exchange remains a central coping mechanism for trans people ostracized from their families of origin for reasons of gender and sexuality (see Weston 1997). In particular, those who have shared housing for many years develop intimate relationships through which they assist each other in difficult times (see Bourdieu 1996; Mauss 1954; Stack 1974).
Likewise, community-based mobilization has been an effective form of resistance against physical violence. In other words, trans sex workers heavily rely on their community for safety. For example, they stay in close contact and stand in the street in groups, warn each other about dangerous clients, coach inexperienced peers, fight back in violent attacks, and at times protest at police stations to save friends (Güler 2020). Safety is thus a pressing concern for many workers and treated as a collective responsibility.
Concluding thoughts
Transgender sex workers in Turkey live and work under difficult circumstances, including pervasive violence, punitive institutional practices, coercive policing, societal stigma and exclusion, and material pressures. On the other hand, powerful organizations promoting trans rights have emerged in recent years at a local and an international level. And trans individuals and sex workers are now more visible and vocal than ever in the streets, at universities, in formal political arenas, and in social and traditional media. In fact, this research was inspired by my admiration for their tenacious resistance to their conditions of marginality, their sense of community, and their willingness to support one another.
However, during my fieldwork, I was repeatedly made aware of rivalries and distrust, failing solidarities, and harm received from fellow peers. Although informal support systems remain crucial resources for coping with and providing a bulwark against risks, the marginalization of trans sex workers continues to constrain their collective efforts while weakening the integrity and solidarity of their communities. Moreover, despite a strong sense of shared identity, dense interpersonal networks, and close attachments among these workers, violent structural forces continue to engender interpersonal conflicts.
Similar challenges have been observed among other stigmatized populations, such as migrants, underground traders, and homeless people, whose lives often depend on the informal economy at the margins of society (see Koch 2018; Menjívar 2000). Ethnographic methods offer opportunities to explore the ways in which precarious, violent, and exclusionary structural forces condition the circumstances of socially and economically marginalized subjects while also rendering their informal networks and collective efforts precarious. To intervene and contest these economic, political, and social forces, we first need to understand the lived experiences of affected individuals.
Ezgi Güler is a PhD researcher in Social Sciences at the European University Institute. She is an urban sociologist who works on social support networks, mobilization, and resistance of sex workers.
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Cite as: Güler, Ezgi. 2020. “Trans Sex Workers’Collective Struggle in Urban Turkey.” FocaalBlog, 27 July. www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/27/ezgi-guler-trans-sex-workers-collective-struggle-in-urban-turkey/
Don Nonini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Insa Koch’s recent (2020) FOCAAL blog, “The Making of Modern Slavery in Austerity Britain,” reminds us that enslavement and the bodies of black people are profoundly interconnected, and the link to challenges to “the punitive turn” and police abuse in the UK by the Black Lives Matter movement protests are all but explicit in her piece. At the same time, other recent FOCAAL blogs have dealt with the connections between the Covid-19 pandemic and contemporary global capitalism.
Black enslavement and Covid-19 are intimately intertwined. The insurgency of Black Lives Matter during the months of May-June 2020 has its own dynamics. That said, the wide turning out of protests supporting Black Lives Matter in the streets of European cities and towns (London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Milan, Kraków, Dublin, Manchester, Munich…) demonstrates that the European left has strongly shown its ongoing antiracist solidarity with African-American struggles, seeking to come to terms with Europe’s own troubled imperial history of enslavements, and challenging its current neo-nationalist or fascist resurgence under declining neoliberal capitalism (Kalb 2020).
The links between black enslavement and Covid-19 start – and continue with – the formation of agro-industrial capitalism and its relations to transnational finance capital.
The Lash, Degraded Ecologies, Finance
There is a clear relationship between the emergence of modern enslavement and the history of a full-blown agro-industrial capitalism. The close connections between fully rationalized capitalist agrarian production, finance, and slavery are only recently becoming clear.
New research on the North American southern plantation economies shows just how advanced rationalized capitalist production was under the conditions of slavery (Baptist 2014). Beyond its monocropping ecology, “many of agribusinesses’ key innovations, in both technology and organization, originated in slavery” (Wallace 2016: 261). Slaveholders measured land only against the capacity of slave labor to transform it, setting the cotton production line in terms of “bales per hand,” with enslaved African men being “hands,” nursing mothers “half hands” and children “quarter hands.” The labor process of picking cotton was measured and held to a standard by another unit of measurement – the “lash.”
“Enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to increase their own productivity and thus push through the picking bottleneck” (Baptist 2014: 130). As Baptist further points out, “on the nineteenth century cotton frontier… enslavers extracted more production from each enslaved person every year. . . the business end of the new cotton technology was a whip” (2014: 112). Planters managed a refined rationality based on the application of the whip measured out in lashes to the backs of a slave calculated relative to their infraction – how many pounds of cotton his basket fell short of making a bale, whether or not there were impurities in it, whether one slave helped another pick her quota – in which case the former received extra lashes. Under the circumstances, the rationality of increased “labor productivity” so vaunted by economists depended straightforwardly on graduated torture – with little contribution (the cotton gin aside) from “technological innovation.”
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 culminated the violent displacement of Indian nations from the Mississippi Gulf region and transformation of their territories into “new lands” of thousands of acres ready for slave-based production (Baptist 2014: 228-229). Cotton monoculture quickly exhausted the rich soils of the South, exposed the crops to rust, rot, and worms, while plowing rows of cotton aligned to the day’s sunlight to maximize yield eroded the land and exhausted aquifers within 10 to 15 years after clearing (Wallace 2016: 266).
Due to the lack of food self-sufficiency and the seasonality of cotton harvests, indebtedness by plantation owners to Northern financiers and cotton brokers became increasingly common. By the 1830s, the cotton plantations of Mississippi, Alabama and Eastern Louisiana had adopted new forms of finance and indebtedness, when the Consolidated Association of Planters of Louisiana was established to allow their member planters to mortgage their slaves as collateral for loans from international financiers, led by the Baring Brothers and the Bank of England, that pooled investments from Europe’s finest old and new upper classes to buy the lucrative bonds issued by the Association (Baptist 2014: 245-8).
Monocropping of plants and animals, the simplification and degradation of local and regional ecologies, rapid expansion of logistics over space, reliance on finance capital for loans to expand production, and the use of enslaved degraded labor – these design features of agro-industrial capitalism have remained in effect to the present.
Meat Markets, Neo-Slave Markets
The coerced use of black labor continued after the Civil War in the cotton sharecropping economy until its decline in the 1930s. At the same time, the new agro-industrial complex of livestock production in the U.S. South – again based on the hyper-exploitation of black labor – got underway. By the 1970s, the livestock industries of intensive hog, poultry, and beef production had become thoroughly institutionalized – through vertical integration (Heffernan and Constance 1994; Stiffler 2005), increases in slaughterhouse assembly-line tempos, and incorporation of meat eating as a universal practice within the diets of the U.S. population (Schlosser 2001, 2012; Stiffler 2005). Since the 1990s the meat industries have globalized to penetrate the BRICS economies, a process facilitated by the lubrication of capital provided by hedge funds and investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs’ deal-making in the sale of Smithfield Foods to Shuanghui in China (Wallace 2016: 269-271).
Subjugated and coerced black labor has anchored and offered up surplus value through U.S. agro-industrial cotton and meat production since the end of legal slavery. Since the 1960s, rural poor African-Americans, especially women, have worked in the meat processing plants of the Midwest, Mississippi delta and Carolinas regions experiencing intensified exploitation, sexual harassment and brutalized and unsafe working conditions. By the 1990s, they were joined by immigrant Mexican and Central American workers (Nonini 2003; Stiffler 2005; Stuesse 2016), with whom white plant managers sought to set them in competition.
The Great Migration of 6 million African-Americans from 1915-1970 from the South to cities in the northern and midwestern U.S. was a form of flight from re-legalized enslavement at the hands of Jim Crow whites. Migration to the Midwest and Northeast placed large numbers of blacks at the factory doors of the Fordist industries of the North. Relegated to secondary labor markets by discrimination from white industrial labor unions during the 1950s-1970s (Cowie 2010: 236-244), black industrial workers by the 1990s, like their white counterparts, were thrown out of work by the globalization of industrial production. The only exceptions were the neo-slavery of hyper-sweated meat processing and related industrial food labor.
“Broken Windows Policing” and the Expropriation of Black Lives
The grown children and grandchildren of these laid-off black industrial workers, with more recent Latinx immigrant workers, now form both the hyper-exploited workers in the food industries (meat processing, fast foods, farm work) and situated in the cities and small towns of the South, Midwest and the Northeast, and those who are chronically unemployed and underemployed, doubly discriminated against due to their poverty (forcing them to leave school before high school graduation), and their race. Those African-Americans who have more or less steady employment also show disproportionate levels of consumer debt – from credit cards, student loans, and medically -related debt. Whether steadily employed or not, a key insight is that by and large both groups draw on the same population of urban African-Americans.
The population of urban African-Americans has the profound misfortune of living in cities recurrently subject to gentrification at the new “urban scale” of globalized real estate and finance-rentier capital (Smith 2008: 239-266). Their residence in spaces made newly desirable by gentrification by the 2000s is the obverse of the fact that up to the 1990s whites fled inner cities in large numbers for segregated suburbs, while African-Americans found themselves only able to afford to live, and only allowed to live within, housing in these redlined inner-city districts.
By the 2000s, however, real estate in these districts had become “hot properties” for global finance capital seeking new sites for safe but extraordinarily profitable rent collection and property speculation in realizing value. This trend by the 1990s was both shaped by and reinforced through the “broken window policing” that targeted unemployed and underemployed African-Americans and Latinx populations (Camp et al. 2016).
What precisely is the role of broken windows policing in the gentrification process? Put non-too-subtly, even one broken window indicates the existence of a “criminal” – an undesirable element in a neighborhood. The role of such policing is the physical removal to jails or prison, or, if that is impossible, the destruction of African-Americans whose very presence threatens the “real estate values” that the finance industry and its local allies hold dear. This goes far to explain the more than 1000 people killed by local police every year in the US, of whom more than one fourth are African-American; the one third of African-American men between ages 19-35 who are “justice involved” – in jail awaiting trial, on bail, undergoing trial, in prison, on probation or parole; and their disproportionate representation in the US’s incarcerated population, the largest per capita in the world.
Nancy Fraser (2016) observes that there is an historical dialectic between the conditions that set out “normal” exploitation of the working force, and the conditions of expropriation of the lives, labor, and property of racialized and vulnerable (e.g. immigrant) populations — as two complementary means through which the accumulation of capital can and does take place under capitalism. Fraser argues that that the new being of neoliberal global capitalism is “the expropriable-and-exploitable citizen-worker,” and that “the racialized subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits” (Fraser 2016:163).
Image 1: Black Lives Matters Protests in Durham, U.S. (Credit: Durham Workers Assembly Durham, North Carolina, with kind permission)
We can see these two modes of appropriation of surplus value in the tense interconnections between whites and the African-American population in the United States through the latter’s vexed history with respect to agro-industrial and finance capitalism. These interconnections are potentially the point of class differentiation between the increasingly precarious white “middle class” and urban African-Americans, who straddle a black employed working-class subjected to intensified exploitation on one hand, and a lumpen-proletariat subjected to police-impelled expropriation and dispossession, on the other.
Ongoing criminalization and the indebtedness of black people (the latter a tool of finance capital’s domination) are the instruments driving large numbers of urban black workers disproportionately employed in the agro-industrial food sector toward the toxic mix of indebtedness, unemployment (where employers often refuse to hire blacks holding consumer debt), bankruptcy, evictions from shelter, police “stop and frisk” harassment, enforced fines and fees levied (via police and private firms working for straitened municipalities), assault, imprisonment, and death (Wang 2018:99-192).
Don Nonini is Professor of Anthropology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent books are “Getting by”: Class and State Formation among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell, 2015), and The Tumultuous Politics of Scale: Unsettled States, Migrants, Movements in Flux, co-edited (Routledge, 2020). His most recent publication in FOCAAL is “Theorizing the Urban Housing Commons” (2017).
References
Baptist, E. E. (2014). The half has never been told : slavery and the making of American capitalism.
Camp, J. T. and C. Heatherton (2016). Policing the planet : why the policing crisis led to black lives matter.
Cowie, J. (2010). Stayin’ alive : the 1970s and the last days of the working class. New York, New Press : Distributed by Perseus Distribution.
Fraser, N. (2016). “Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies3(1): 163-178.
Harvey, D. (2018). Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. New York, Oxford University Press.
Heffernan, W. and D. H. Constance (1994). Transnational corporations and the globalization of the food system. From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food. A. Bonanno, L. Busch and e. al. Lawrence, KA, University Press of Kansas Press: 29-51.
Nonini, D. M. (2003). American neoliberalism, ‘globalization,’ and violence: Reflections from the United States and Southeast Asia. Globalization, The State, and Violence. J. Friedman. Walnut Creek, CA, Altamira Press (Rowman & Littlefield): 163-202.
Schlosser, E. ((2001), 2012). Fast food nation : the dark side of the all-American meal, with a New Afterword. Boston, MA, Mariner books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
Smith, N. and D. Harvey (2008). Uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space. Athens, University of Georgia Press.
Striffler, S. (2005). Chicken : the dangerous transformation of America’s favorite food. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Stuesse, A. Scratching out a living : Latinos, race, and work in the Deep South.
Wallace, R. (2016). Big Farms Make Big Flue: Dispatches on infectious disease, agribusiness, and the nature of science. New York, Monthly Review Press.
Wang, J. (2018). Carceral capitalism. Semiotext(e) Interventions, 21. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e).
This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).
The global trend away from rural living and towards urbanization continues unabated. This is so despite high levels of inequality, poverty and forms of exclusion that are part and parcel of city life for the many. Indeed, across the globe, growing numbers of urban dwellers struggle to meet even the most basic needs for housing, security, and income. In response to these challenges, governments have attempted to present solutions that are too often palliative, addressing merely the symptoms of inequalities rather than their causes. In a similar vein, highly mobile policies are frequently implemented under the banner of terms like “good governance,” “participation” or “crisis management” that reinforce the social exclusion of the most marginalized, often contrary to their stated intentions (Peck and Theodore 2015). Cases of such exclusion include mass evictions, the rise of gated communities, the securitization of urban spaces, shifts towards austerity measures, punitive policies of migrant populations, and the regulation of the informal sector.
As such, cities are places of multiscale struggle (Mollona 2014) where a variety of different actors, from (inter)national and local government bodies to charities, corporations, grassroots movements and citizens make competing claims of legitimacy and express visions for future living (Harvey 2003, Susser and Tonnelat 2013, Lazar 2017). Indeed, cities have become focal points for various class struggles.
Based on a panel held at the IUAES conference in Poznań, Poland, in August 2019, this collection of papers addresses both the various forms of resistance to, and the reproduction of, exclusionary urban policies. Our main ambition is to expand important conversations in anthropology on urban mobilizations emerging from Henry Lefebvre’s “right to the city” and the “production of space” via a focus on the character and persistence of urban struggles (Lefebvre 1991, Banerjee-Guha 2010, Kalb and Mollona 2018, Koster and Kolling 2019). In this post and the contributions to this feature blog, we understand the study of urban struggles as a collection of productive tensions where governance, resistance and solidarity play out in plural and often unexpected ways within global frameworks of highly unequal regimes of accumulation (Susser 2014).
Urban governance: facing challenges and reproducing inequality
Cities grow by layers of time. This is related to both population growth and changes to the built environment. The number of urban dwellers grows not merely through the reproduction of those already living in urban spaces, but through constant immigration that originates in the countryside from surrounding areas and often from much further afield (Davis 2006). Many migrants who are attracted to urban life consider the city to be full of opportunities that cannot be found elsewhere, even as they find upon arrival that their status and rights to the city are often less recognized and sometimes actively suppressed compared to those of more established populations. The steady growth of cities across the planet has created, in turn, new pressures on local government bodies to keep up with the provision of infrastructure, public goods and employment opportunities needed to meet even the most basic demands for living (Caglar and Schiller 2018).
To respond to the challenges faced by urban dwellers and the risk of social turmoil these entail, governments have come to implement a range of policies aimed at improving the urban lived environment. Governments thus tend to see larger cities both as centers where political legitimacy is built and where their ideologies and visions of the future take shape. Because of this combination, cities have also become sites of experimentation for states, where policies are tested before being rolled out more broadly. Often sold under the banner of buzzwords like “civilizing cities”, promoting “active participation”, “community building” or embarking on “crisis management”, these policies promise to improve the quality of life and built environment of the most vulnerable (Nuijten 2013, Schinkel 2010, Masco 2017). To do so, many come to rely on new forms of technocratic governance that uses the matrix of statistics and quantitative science in implementing various political and legal projects, ranging from social housing provisions to environmental policies to regeneration projects (Koch 2018).
While these various initiatives may have ostensibly democratic goals, their implementation all too often reproduces the structural conditions of exclusion that they are meant to address (Alexander, Bruun and Koch 2018). The objective or neutral language of urban initiatives disguises the complex ways in which these policies are embedded in, and further promote, capitalism’s circuits of value and accumulation. Decisions by government policy makers usually favor the segments of the population who already hold most capital in the city. Meanwhile, urban infrastructure projects and regeneration initiatives attract real estate developers and to gentrify neighborhoods (Evans 2016). Both processes are aggravated when budget cuts and austerity measures fuel the outsourcing of urban governance to third-party actors – private companies and non-governmental organizations alike – that are often unwilling and sometimes unable to adequately provide public goods.
Urban struggles as resistance and solidarity
Cities, as sites where different actors compete for legitimacy, are the locus of productive urban struggles. We use the term urban struggle to refer to the complex and varied sets of negotiations through which city dwellers, grassroots movements, activist groups and political and development brokers critically engage with the claims to legitimacy and visions for the future that are promoted by official channels. As these groups face a wide variety of problems from insufficient housing (Cohen 2014) and infrastructure to environmental hazards, they develop an equally vast repertoire of resistance strategies, tactics and responses. These include, as the contributions to this feature show, amongst others, squatting initiatives, land occupations, grassroots art exhibitions, and the expansion of informal ties that are often viewed with suspicion by the state. There is thus a constant push and pull between dispossession and resistance, austerity and solidarity, exclusion, and inclusion unfolding in urban spaces.
Image 1: Street graffiti in Recife, Brazil (Photo: Martijn Koster, 18 August 2015)
Yet, creative engagements seemingly opposed to neoliberal urban policies do not produce unequivocal forms of resistance, less even a singular anti-capitalist stance against structures of oppression (Kalb and Mollona 2018). On the contrary, ambiguities and contradictions prevail as citizens move within the same unequal processes of accumulation that frame official policies (James and Koch 2020). One example of this concerns the case of slum dwellers who aspire, above all, to become landlords and rent out rooms to even poorer slum dwellers under extractive conditions. Hence, the practices of the poor are not necessarily expressions of unequivocal solidarity and care (Palomera 2014). Likewise, social movements and grassroots initiatives, while often deploying a universal language of humanitarianism, may only benefit particular groups of urban dwellers, thus generating resentment and jealousy amongst those excluded (Wilde 2020). Urban struggles do not necessarily produce a better city, even as their spokespersons claim to speak on behalf of the most vulnerable and excluded (Gutierrez-Garza 2020).
Acknowledging the contradictions that are at the heart of urban struggles opens the space for a particular analytical lens: one that conceptualizes cities as assemblages of productive tensions where a variety of actors, groups, movements and policy makers define, and continuously compete over, the meanings of urban citizenship, “rights to the city”, and democratizing access to infrastructures and public goods. This, in turn, can help us see how social responses, including those of social movements, grassroots initiatives, and local care networks, should not be romanticized as simple expressions of political resistance. Neither, however, does such a lens lend itself to a dystopian view in which capitalism erases all alternatives. Instead, cities emerge as places of ongoing, open-ended power struggles. Ethnography, with its focus on the lived experiences of urban dwellers, is particularly well placed to capture both the moments of solidarity that continue to exist and the wider forces disabling them. The papers in this feature seek to do precisely this.
Ethnographies of urban struggles
Our blog contributions highlight urban struggles and their complicated politics in a range of settings, taking the reader from Latin American’s mega-cities to European urban centers to recent urban developments in Asia. In Mexico City, Raúl Acosta analyses how cycling activists, intent on improving the infrastructure of the city, engage in a project that uses technical expertise to put forward a moral project of improving life in the city. However, the capacity to claim such moral projects is not evenly distributed, as activists on the “periphery” – both in the spatial and the social sense of the word – find that they lack the economic and cultural capital to be heard by power holders. In Brazil, questions of resistance and power are also at the center of the urban activism practiced by the poor. Sven da Silva explores how occupancy urbanism of the poor is negotiated in the context of development projects in the fast-growing Recife, in Brazil. Here, community leaders engage in political activities to resist real state pressure and in favor of what they view as community interests. Adam Moore’s contribution presents the hopes and dreams of victims of development in Medellín, Colombia. Looking at practices of autoconstruction, he explores the ‘human cost’ of ‘urban renovations’ and challenges the hegemonic narrative about urban transformation in Medellín, which heralds the local government as exemplary in its commitment to equitable and pro-poor urban development interventions.
In Europe, struggles over governing urban populations and spaces similarly abound, bringing together a complex network of third sector organizations, private actors, Universities and state bodies. In the “policy laboratory city” of Rotterdam, frequently celebrated for its allegedly inclusive and innovative social policies, conflicting views over how to govern migrant populations have opened the space for new technologies of control. Here, Lieke van de Veer shows that the effort on the part of local groups claiming a role on the reception infrastructure of migrants often become riddled with internal tensions over funding and resources as different groups are unequally positioned to access these competitive funds. Meanwhile, in the UK, two of our blog contributions focus in more closely on questions of inequality in the city. Sarah Winkler-Reid’s work on Newcastle-Upon-Tyrne focuses on the university’s role in the network of actors influencing urban development proclaiming to create the “good city”. Here, the rapid growth of privately owned, mostly purpose-built student accommodation, create new forms of inequality in the city’s historical centre. In her contribution on the voluntarization of welfare advice in Manchester, Janne Heederik demonstrates how a withdrawal of state funding and a shift of tasks and responsibilities from government officials to citizens have transformed the landscape of welfare provision. If solidarity is the basis of the relationships between claimants and non-state advisers, they are also marked by tensions that are the result of the structural shifts austerity has imposed on the welfare system.
In all of the contributions considered thus far, concessions and gains experienced by one urban group can simultaneously constitute a loss or betrayal for another. Indeed, this insight is also key to Anne-Christine Trémon’s ethnography of the city of Shenzhen in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where the authorities’ attempts to gain the status of a “national civilized city” – a status bestowed by the PRC government in recognition of “quality of life and a higher degree of urban civilization” – have introduced new forms of inequality for migrant populations vis a vis the typically much wealthier natives. Trémon makes use of the concept of “variegated governance” to make sense of how cohabiting residents in the same territorial unit receive differential treatment depending on their respective economic valorization and the political acknowledgement of their social worth. Finally, in Ezgi Guler’s contribution on urban Turkey, we move closer to questions about the possibility of collective resistance to oppressive urban structures and policies. Yet, once more, while the transgender sex workers with whom she carried out fieldwork rely on dense networks of mutual support and care, these rarely translate into collective political action as material pressures, including financial stress, inequality, competition and stigma also make workers deeply suspicious of one another.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679614).
Raúl Acosta is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He currently carries out research on urban activism in Mexico City in a sub-project of the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded Urban Ethics Research Group. His monograph “Civil Becomings: Performative Politics in the Brazilian Amazon and the Mediterranean” examines activist and advocacy networks.
Flávio Eiró is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology and Dvelopment Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He has conducted ethnographic research on electoral politics and conditional cash transfers in Northeast Brazil, and currently works in the ERC funded project “Participatory urban governance between democracy and clientelism: Brokers and (in)formal politics”.
Insa Koch is Associate Professor in Law and Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her recently published monograph “Personalizing the State: an Anthropology of Law, Politics and Welfare in Austerity Britain” offers an ethnographic study of the crisis of democracy and urban citizenship in Britain.
Martijn Koster is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. Currently, he leads the ERC funded project “Participatory urban governance between democracy and clientelism: Brokers and (in)formal politics”.
References
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