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Famine and food security: new trends and systems or politics as usual? An introduction
Get PDFOver the past decade, famine and food insecurity have increased, yet there have been few articles with a critical analysis of their social and political dynamics. This special issue of Disasters aims to revive such analysis and to provide new insights. The special issue contains eight articles, with topics ranging from the role of global politics and neoliberal strategies, to sanctions, war, settler‐colonialism, elite capture and inequalities, actions of resistance and resilience, and the challenges of famine prevention in today's global political context. The papers provide both global and local analysis, with the latter covering Kashmir, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, and Syria
The varieties of European colonialism in Central and Eastern Europe: The Polish and the Czech Cases
Get PDFThis essay examines the Polish and the Czech engagements with colonization. Whilst the present-day Poland and the Czech Republic are often perceived as nations “without colonies”, the Central European region throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries developed colonial imaginations as part of the “varieties of European colonialism” channeled towards the local needs. By focusing on individuals as well as collective entities linked to various territories in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), we re-engage the conventional discussions on colonialism from a region often considered peripheral to global colonial histories. The form of colonialism re-engaged here is intrinsic to the processes of inclusion and exclusion that continue to influence the perceptions of “race”, Europeanness, and non-Europeanness across CEE
Becoming augmented: The latent possibilities of ethnography in a pandemic
Get PDFFor all its wretched ways, COVID:19 has installed new possibilities to the way we do ethnographic research. Due to pandemic restrictions, my research on how digital activists in Sri Lanka acquire influence on social media fell into three distinct phases: (i) digital ethnography from London, (ii) datafied approaches in Helsinki and (iii) traditional fieldwork in Colombo. The article’s objective is not to provincialise the three cases, but to demonstrate how each phase is tightly bound together and serve to imagine new possibilities in research design. Vlad Glăveanu contents that ‘human beings live “amphibious” lives – at once in the realm of the actual and the possible’ to emphasis the misty line between what is real and what can be manifested by innovation and action. Not dissimilar to this amphibiousness, I argue that human beings also live ‘augmented’ lives, at once in the realm of in real life (IRL) and online spaces and experiences mediated by digital technologies. My fingers, ears and eyes, while in London, Helsinki or Colombo, were always partly submerged in digital worlds, and it was this augmentation that enabled the long-term engagement that good ethnography demands
Balkan Transits: Becoming-Other in Theo Angelopoulos’s The Suspended Step of the Stork
Get PDFIn affirming the figure of the refugee, Theo Angelopoulos’s 1991 film The Suspended Step of the Stork radically repositions the latter from its normative casting as another human being worth saving precisely because of sharing a basic likeness to oneself, to a fundamental an-other who is also a prophetic instance of a people to come. The current article argues that the film proceeds to accomplish this remarkable shift by making sovereignty itself an object of abandonment, something which turns Giorgio Agamben’s thesis regarding bare life on its head, opening the horizon up for new adventures in thought and politics. The cinematic novelty and significance of the image of the refugee furnished in Angelopoulos’s film displays deep affinities with and unacknowledged connections to the work of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in so far as it announces becoming as paramount: by offering an audiovisual elaboration of becoming-other, becoming-minoritarian, becoming-imperceptible as a pertinent response to the micro- and macro-fascisms the exclusive nature of the configuration of the political in terms of belonging (or not) to a nation state sets up, the film foregrounds the othering of the self as foundational in the pursuit of a future otherwise
The Vagaries and Volatilities of Mainstream Development Economics: A Personal Account
No full textThe evolution of mainstream development economics to its current approaches will be laid out. Emphasis will be placed on the shifting and uneven influences of the more general mainstream economics itself, developments within the global economy, the relations to development studies and interdisciplinarity, and the increasing scope of the World Bank in scholarship and policy perspectives. The different phases in the field marked from before and after the Washington Consensus will be unpicked, as will be its relationship to neoliberalism. A crucial insight is the extent to which there is a shifting and variable, but generally inconsistent, relationship between the ideology, scholarship, policy in practice and overall world visions projected by development economics
Energy price shocks, conflict inflation, and income distribution in a three-sector model
Get PDFThe paper presents a model of conflict inflation to investigate the distributional effects of energy price shocks. We argue that periods of high inflation are always periods of significant redistribution of income. We analyse how such redistribution occurs along two dimensions: between workers and firms and between sectors of the economy. To study the distributional outcomes of the recent inflationary episode, we build a three-sector model comprising a domestic energy sector which provides inputs for a goods and a services sector. The model is calibrated to US sectoral data with the Method of Simulated Moments. While energy prices are set internationally, non-energy prices and nominal wages are set by firms and workers, giving rise to conflicting claims over the distribution of income. We consider three shocks that trigger inflationary distributional conflict: an energy price shock combined with demand and supply shocks to the goods sector. We find that the recent inflationary episode constitutes a price-wage rather than a wage-price spiral. The combined shocks induce non-energy firms to raise prices, which undermines real wages, and redistributes income towards firms. The sectoral demand shift towards goods in combination with pandemic-related supply bottlenecks further raises mark-ups, accelerating inflation and leading to divergence in sectoral profit margins. We compare three anti-inflationary policies: redistributing windfall profits to workers, nominal wage restraint, and aggregate demand contraction through monetary or fiscal policy. The redistribution of profits via a windfall tax is most effective in reducing inflation without reinforcing reductions in employment and labour shares
The impact of Chinese investment loans on sustainable economic development in Africa: Case studies of Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, and Zambia.
Get PDFWith China as a leading lender in many Africa countries, this thesis aimed to ascertain the impact of Chinese loans on sustainable development in Africa. We investigated 48 African countries with a focus on four sample countries namely Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, and Zambia for the period 2000-2020, using a mixed methodological approach. From the analysis, we find that the mostly used model is the China model in conjunction with the Build-Operate-Transfer project delivery model. Also, we identify two good best practice examples in Benin and Cameroon with useful insights for loan clauses scrutiny and transparency and we highlight the need for collective agency. Moreover, we find that Africa has relatively poor governance that undermines agency and leads to higher costs of borrowing. Secondly, we find that that Africa does not have a common debt accountability framework and most of the accountability frameworks at macro level are voluntary and not all countries participate in each reporting round, which presents an opportunity for a common African debt accountability framework. Thirdly, using Generalized Method of Moments, we find that Chinese loans currently have a negative impact on sustainable development in Africa and the higher the debt transparency, the higher the project benefits. Lastly, we find that recipient countries with poor governance register the highest risks. The findings suggest that for debt to be of meaningful benefit, its process from identification of projects to the utilisation of the facilities and loan amortisation must be well guided through solid policies and procedures that encourage agency, enforcement, transparency, and accountability. Therefore, we encourage recipient governments to enact relevant laws and reinforce solid governance with enforcement policies that streamline financing procedures and processes
Playgrounds of Resistance: A Patchwork Ethnography of Sex Workers’ Sociopolitical Collectivisation in South & West India
Get PDFSex workers in India have long battled singular, stereotypical representations of themselves as victim-criminals, or, as ‘key populations’ in India’s HIV/AIDS Targeted Intervention programmes since the late 1980s through the 1990s. This thesis engages with local understandings of identity and collectivity that, when tied to global misunderstandings, have inadvertently consigned Indian sex workers into globally ‘easy’ theories of neoliberal market logics. These simplifications slot their lives into words like ‘choice’, ‘victimhood’ and ‘freedom’, without understanding what that might mean for people beyond certain class-caste-economic locations. Using Patchwork Ethnography, this thesis translates my interlocutors’ life narratives, exploring connections between documentary films, sex worker led collectives and networks, identity formations, and cross-movement solidarities. I focus on everyday practices of cooperation, organising, localisation and public expression that sex workers engage in within a networked society and through undercurrents of continuous violence. Through these patches, I offer a gali (neighbourhood)-first story that focuses on cultural practices, identity and community making that moves beyond policy and law, evidencing the world-making capacity of sex workers’ collectives, expanding the language of political progress and social transformation. By pulling at the hem of narratives taken for granted, the thesis offers a post-intervention, and post-care anthropology that centres resistance, and negotiation with systems and networks of power, care, and governance
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