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Anna Balazs: War, displacement, and cultural heritage: reflections on a workshop

Image 1: Screenshot from the Mariupol Memory Park website

“On the form, I ticked that I had got enough pads. I ticked that I had been instructed. I ticked that I had applied for microloans, more than once. I ticked that I had been encouraged. I ticked that I had nowhere to live. I ticked that I had nowhere to study. I ticked that I had nowhere to go. I ticked that I had nothing to lose. I ticked that I didn’t mind the NGO using my personal data for their future projects.”

This quote is an excerpt from a Sashko Protyah short story, where a citizen of Mozambique makes a deal with a people smuggler. The business offers an innovative method of (post)human trafficking, promising to turn their clients from the Global South into a bird, and flying them to European shores, where they can regain human form and continue their way to the European Union. To her ill fortune, the protagonist reaches European land in Mariupol, Ukraine, in the spring of 2022, when the Russian invasion of the city was in full force. Eventually, she manages to escape with a group of volunteers who evacuate pets from the occupied territory, but her transformation fails, and she is caught in a netherworld between being animal and human, with no acceptable form, identity or document to prove her belonging to any official entity. Falling through the cracks of state assistance, she is approached by humanitarian NGOs that work in the conflict zone and recruit vulnerable people for well-worded but questionable development projects. In the end, the protagonist is hired in an “apocalypse theme park” that recreates the siege of Mariupol as an infotainment experience, engaging the visitors with authentic scenarios of explosions, looting, and no running water.

The author of the short story, Sashko Protyah from the Freefilmerz art collective was one of the speakers at the workshop “REMEMBERING / RECLAIMING / RECONSTRUCTING SPACE: Working with local heritage in times of war and displacement” I organized at the University of St Andrews as a knowledge exchange event during my ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship., The workshop invited Ukrainian cultural practitioners working with precarious heritage during the Russian invasion to share their experiences with a group of international researchers studying similar topics. Besides broadening our knowledge about pragmatic aspects of heritage work in the context of war, the short lectures delivered by Ukrainian participants highlighted a set of ethical issues equally relevant in the work of ethnographers and other researchers working with vulnerable communities.

Protyah talked about his experience of creating Mariupol Memory Park, an online archive that commemorates and celebrate life in Mariupol. The website collects testaments about the city from a variety of authors in different genres, all of them affectionate while reflecting the multivocality of urban life and the complicated emotions elicited by the place. As Sashko pointed out, and his short story addresses in a critical self-reflexive manner, one of the major risks of creating this kind of archives is the exploitation of traumatic memories. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, refugees from Mariupol and other places have been asked on countless occasions by journalists, researchers, NGO workers and others to share their experiences of war and displacement for various projects. While these conversations require significant temporal and emotional investment from the participants and can have a re-traumatizing effect, interlocutors are rarely compensated or offered psychological support. The dynamics of this exchange reflect a deeper running process that Asia Bazdyrieva (2022) termed the “resourcification of Ukraine”, referring to the continuing tendency of Western and Soviet geopolitical thinking to reduce Ukrainian land and people to a “resource that qualifies for a long list of services.”

The idea of resourcification, when applied to people, recalls long-standing conversations in anthropology regarding the inequality of researcher and interlocutor. Even in times more peaceful than the current moment, academics need to confront the dilemma of waving goodbye to our interlocutors and returning to Western institutions to advance our careers using the knowledge they have shared with us, leaving them with… what exactly? In a context of war or other forms of violence, this situation gets complicated by concerns about personal safety, stigmatization and psychological trauma, reiterating the question: on what ground do we expect people to share their most difficult life experiences with us? How do we make participation beneficial for them in the short as well as the long term? What is our role as researchers in a time when the communities we work with are fighting for survival?

Image 2: Screenshot from the online workshop (image courtesy of Victoria Donovan)

While in certain cases, interlocutors think about sharing traumatic experiences as a politically or psychologically important act of giving a testament or gaining recognition of the injustices they have suffered (see Veena Das’ essay “Our work to cry: Your work to listen” (Das 1990)), the expectations of the research relationship can also become a source of frustration to the members of “over-researched and underserved” (Yotebieng 2020) communities.

Mariupol Memory Park addresses the problem of exploitation by commissioning new works to construct an archive, shifting the emphasis from the extraction of painful memories to the process of creation and reflection. Contributors retain the agency to tell their story in a way they feel appropriate instead of being used as information sources or credibility props in someone else’s project. Importantly, they are all paid for their work from the funding received by Western European NGOs and government research agencies.

In anthropological practice, financial compensation for research participation is rarely used due to issues around voluntary consent and authenticity of information. However, this should not discourage academics from contemplating the place of money in supporting interlocutors, especially in a time when communities face the ongoing existential threat of war and genocide. One way to do this is acknowledging the role of participants as co-creators and channelling institutional funding to financially honour their contribution. Another avenue might involve collaborative projects with local organizations using research funding from Western institutions. Area studies professor Victoria Donovan (2023) evokes the figure of the “trickster” to propose a strategy for academics to facilitate this process within the often rigid institutional hierarchies, suggesting “using the power (and, crucially, the funding) that we are assigned to manifest the changes that we want to see.”

Image 3: Screenshot from the City in the Suitcase website

Approaching the theme of collaboration from another angle, Kateryna Filonova from Mariupol Local History Museum and Iryna Sklokina from Lviv Center for Urban History presented during the workshop their initiative City in the Suitcase: Saved (Family) Archives. The project addresses the problem of museum heritage lost in the war due to physical destruction, looting, and the logistical problems created by relocating whole museums from the occupied territories. Attempting an alternative route to reconstruct lost local heritage, the curators published a call inviting residents from occupied cities of Eastern Ukraine to share their family photography collections. The call, while it received valuable material, had a relatively low response rate. Having worked with IDPs from the Donbas since 2014, Kateryna from Mariupol Local History Museum remarked that this was more or less expected: the experience of the previous ten years suggests that people who need to flee in a hurry do not prioritize taking family albums. As a result, the call received less material from Mariupol, and more from other places where residents had more time to prepare evacuation. The other limitation of the entries is related to the specific status of digital media in contemporary conflicts. While digital data becomes more important in conditions of material destruction and displacement, as people are often left with their phone memory as their only source of personal photos, phones and social media accounts were thoroughly examined by Russians at the military checkpoints. As a result, several people had to delete their photos and apps on the road, and many of them got locked out of their accounts, losing access even to the digital memories they had left.

In the end, the project received eighteen collections of family photography from different cities of Eastern Ukraine. The material collected this way offers “an alternative history of the Donbas”, featuring elements of Ukrainian culture, the democratic movement of the 1990s, as well as the pro-Ukrainian and Anti-Maidan demonstrations of 2014. Discussing the potential of representing “history from below”, Iryna emphasized the importance of reflexivity in their curatorial practice. Archives are instruments of power, and the decisions made by the archivist determine what story will be told for future generations of historians and the public. In the case of personal collections, the curators paid extra attention to avoid imposing their own interpretations while processing the data according to archival standards. To achieve this, they employed what they call a “non-institutional approach to documenting”, archiving what respondents chose to include and annotating the material in a continuous conversation with the owners of the photos. At the same time, they emphasized that the owners’ interpretation was also situated, reflecting their current position in relation to the post-independence political history of Ukraine.

Lessons from the project City in a Suitcase reiterate the idea that there is no “view from nowhere” during the creation of an archive (Zeitlyn 2012), making it inevitable to reflect on the position of each stakeholder. For an anthropologist, such an approach evokes familiar debates on reflexivity in social research. Both in archival and anthropological practice, discussions on reflexivity question the neutrality of knowledge produced within a hegemonic system of institutions by members of privileged social groups (Al-Masri et al. 2021). Restructuring the research process into an act of co-production, as it happened with the contributors of the photo archive, offers a way to decolonize the hierarchical relationship between the knower/known (Casagrande 2022).

Image 4: Screenshot from Contemporary History of Ukraine by Oksana Kazmina

The last major theme emerging during the workshop was the relationship of traumatic memories and global heritage regimes. The “apocalypse theme park” described in Sashko’s short story is an exaggerated version of memory parks that turn places of collective trauma into profitable tourist attractions, disregarding the needs of the affected communities (Meskell 2002). As Sashko said, similar projects are already taking place in relation to Mariupol, and it is important to speak up against the commodification of people’s loss and sorrow. However, as it was abundantly demonstrated in recent years in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere, the destruction of cultural heritage is not simply a by-product of contemporary warfare, but an integral part of genocide and cultural erasure (Tsymbalyuk 2022). The “dark heritage” of such cynical and calculated destruction demands a tactful approach of representation that allows the world to learn about what happened while prioritizing the needs of community members. Discussing the case of the 9/11 memorial in Manhattan, Lynn Meskell observes a growing “desire for grounded materiality” (Meskell 2002) in a moment when the broader public collectively encountered the experience of a virtually broadcasted, real time terror attack for the first time. The present context of urbicide and displacement can evoke a similar longing for tangible markers of commemoration, presenting the challenge to find new ways of representation that avoid commodification and the creation of genocide-disneylands.

The work of Oksana Kazmina, another member of the Freefilmerz art collective, offers a possible answer to this dilemma. Contemporary History of Ukraine is a series of “performative walks” composed of digital media fragments: video footage, online maps, zoom recordings and photos are combined on the screen to (re)construct landscapes of memory. In the virtual walk created for the workshop, Oksana explores the transformative potential of the “yebenya”, a concept denoting a place of abandonment and decay in the East European urban typology. Walking through the ruins of a former Soviet pioneer camp in a coastal village near Mariupol in 2018, she contemplates the role of these material structures in making sense of the past and our own place in it. “Maybe we did need these places of abandonment, which are also traces of how things used to be. We needed them to be conserved like this for us to come here and look in the mirror.” Similarly, to the debris of Soviet urban infrastructure, material traces of violence have a potential beyond erasure or sensationalism: approached with care, they can serve as an object of reflection in the difficult process of making sense of experiences that should have never occurred.

The initial aim of the workshop was to explore the strategies Ukrainian cultural workers use to address unprecedented experiences of destruction, displacement and trauma. The resulting dialogue about extractive humanitarianism, the commodification of traumatic heritage, and the politics of representation has shown alarming resonance with the geopolitical developments of the recent weeks. As I am finalizing this text, the Trump government has stopped all military and most of the humanitarian aid to Ukraine, while working out the details of a blatantly late-colonialist and exploitative rare minerals deal that would push the country further into economic deprivation. The projects presented during the workshop are highly critical regarding the role of Western assistance in local cultural practice. In the current circumstances, their critique offers a constructive alternative to the deliberate dismantling of vital support networks in the region.

The workshop was supported by ESRC UK (grant ID: ES/X006182/1). Video lectures by Ukrainian participants were commissioned and each speaker was paid an honorarium for their work. Many thanks to Sarah and Sandra from the Research Administration team of School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies at University of St Andrews for their help.

Anna Balazs is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University, Stockholm. She received her PhD in social anthropology at the University of Manchester in 2020. Her work focuses on the infrastructural and cultural legacies of socialism in Eastern European cities, and the temporalities of geopolitical conflict in Ukraine. The present text was written during the ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of St Andrews, UK.

References

Al-Masri, Muzna, Samar Kanafani, Lamia Moghnieh, Helena Nassif, Elizabeth Saleh, and Zina Sawaf. 2021. ‘On Reflexivity in Ethnographic Practice and Knowledge Production: Thoughts from the Arab Region’. Commoning Ethnography 4 (1): 5–22. https://doi.org/10.26686/ce.v4i1.6516.

Casagrande, Olivia. 2022. ‘Introduction: Ethnographic Scenario, Emplaced Imaginations and a Political Aesthetic’. In Performing the Jumbled City: Subversive Aesthetics and Anticolonial Indigeneity in Santiago de Chile. Manchester UK: Manchester University Press.

Das, Veena. 1990. ‘Our Work to Cry: Your Work to Listen’. In Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, 345-399. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Meskell, Lynn. 2002. ‘Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology’. Anthropological Quarterly 75 (3): 557–74.

Tsymbalyuk, Darya. 2022. ‘Erasure: Russian Imperialism, My Research on Donbas, and I’. Kajet Digital (blog). 15 June 2022. https://kajetjournal.com/2022/06/15/darya-tsymbalyuk-erasure-russian-imperialism-my-research-on-donbas/.

Zeitlyn, David. 2012. ‘Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates’. Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (Volume 41, 2012): 461–80. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721.

Cite as: Balazs, Anna 2025. “War, displacement, and cultural heritage: reflections on a workshop” Focaalblog 18 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/03/18/anna-balazs-war-displacement-and-cultural-heritage-reflections-on-a-workshop/

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Dr. Kristina Jonutytė: Ethnographic research of minoritised groups in increasingly remote settings: A roundtable discussion

One of the main strengths of ethnographic methodologies is immersed, long-term research, which enables in-depth learning and a holistic vision of a given issue. Restricted or volatile access to ethnographic field sites thus presents not just practical difficulties but it raises a host of important methodological, epistemological, ethical and other questions.

A roundtable discussion at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin brought together scholars working in the fields of anthropology and area studies sharing their experiences of conducting ethnographic research in places that appear increasingly inaccessible due to political conflicts, war and rigid authoritarian regimes. In such contexts, the study of minoritized populations (ethnic, religious) is often particularly unwelcome by the dominating regimes, as they may experience rigid security policies, second-class citizenship, and even persecution. At the same time, the predicament of minoritized groups may thus require greater outside visibility and scrutiny.

Roundtable participants discussed the contexts of contemporary Russia, China, and places in Central Asia such as Tajikistan, which had been relatively accessible for various forms of social scientific research but this has changed in recent years because of shifting domestic and international politics. These places, like many others around the world, can be thought of as “increasingly remote”, referring both to their relative inaccessibility to certain kinds of research as well as to the social and political processes that construct such remoteness (Harms et al 2014). Remoteness here is not an absolute category, but a relative and changing one, related to one’s positionality, perspective, power, and other factors, as well as related to processes of marginalization and minoritization. We are particularly interested in what this “return of remoteness” (Saxer and Andersson 2019) means for ethnographic research. How can scholars continue doing research in/on such settings? How are they being affected (professionally, personally) by the changing circumstances? What are the ethical challenges of such studies, especially with regard to the personal safety of research partners? And what political responsibilities does it entail for anthropologists and area studies scholars who do research in politically sensitive settings?

Image 1: Poster for roundtable discussion on 15 May 2024 (Transregional Central Asian Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin)

Methodologically, too, “increasingly remote” settings pose significant challenges. First-hand in-depth knowledge appears especially important in such contexts, while also being difficult to obtain. We thus asked: Which approaches or strategies do scholars opt for? Can remote ethnography, material culture studies, new area and mobility studies or other approaches provide substantial alternatives when in-person fieldwork is not possible? Roundtable participants reflected on how changing accessibility of their field sites has shaped their research questions and approaches.

Having started her ethnographic research in Buryatia – then part of the Soviet Union – in the late 1960s, Caroline Humphrey recalled selecting the seemingly least problematic topic of study – kinship – knowing many other issues like politics or religion were strictly off limits. However, she soon found that through kinship, she could indeed access many other important issues that could otherwise hardly be discussed, like tragic family histories due to communist policies. Over time, accessibility shifted in her field: from the initial Moscow-supervised official field visit to more informal visits in the 1970s, 1990s and early 2000s, where she found research participants to be more open about a wide range of topics, through to an officially permitted visit in the borderland region in the 2010s. Throughout these changeable circumstances, Caroline highlighted lasting friendships as key to successful fieldwork under uncertain conditions. More recently, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Buryatia has grown once again grown “remote” for fieldwork but, as Caroline suggested, it might be more accurate to say that it has been distanced from the perspective of the researcher, who chooses not to go there to ensure the safety of interlocutors. She highlighted a range of ethical challenges that have emerged doing research in the region, like choosing not to publish some of the data to protect interlocutors, highlighting a thread of fear and concealment among locals, especially minoritized groups, due to the history of repressions and their often precarious situation today. At the same time, she noted that the researcher’s position also changes over time, and with it access to various field sites, groups and resources shifts, too. Finally, Caroline noted she finds it important to keep in touch with colleagues in “increasingly remote” Russia and exchange with them professionally rather than engage in academic boycott.

Rune Steenberg’s field site in Xinjiang was rather difficult to access from the beginning of his field research in 2009, but still manageable for low-profile visits up to 2016. As China’s policies in the region grew more oppressive, in-person research for him was no longer viable. Since then, he has utilized a variety of approaches from doing Uyghur-related ethnography outside of Xinjiang, remote ethnography, textual and online research to working collaboratively with researchers, diaspora and others who could access the region in one way or another. Arguing that ethnographic research is always already limited as access is restricted by our positionality, cultural norms, and a range of other factors, Rune nonetheless believes that whenever possible, remote research should be supplementary rather than a substitute to in-person research. Currently, he leads a group project “Remote ethnography of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region”, combining a variety of remote methods to study this region inaccessible to most researchers, marked by extreme state violence and human rights violations. Through this multifaceted experience, Rune has found that remote ethnography is best as a group endeavor, multiple perspectives and approaches adding value to the whole.

Manja Stephan’s selected research topic of Muslim mobilities led her far outside of her initially selected place of study in Tajikistan. Due to the fear of Islamization, religious students she sought to do fieldwork with were increasingly marginalized and criminalized in the country, as securitization of Islam grew. As a consequence, she found translocality and mobility studies to be more suitable research approaches, rather than place-based ethnographic study. Mobility biographies she collected as part of her research led her not only to Dubai where she did in-person fieldwork with Tajik migrants, but also to places like the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia. Remoteness being a matter of power and a politically constructed condition, Manja’s fieldwork was framed by national policies, as her research participants themselves grew “remote” from mainstream Tajik life. This is one example of a situation of “authoritarianism paradox”: the more difficult it is to research a given minoritized group in an authoritarian setting, the more interest there may be in doing so, and the more necessary it is to undertake such research to draw attention to the position and voices of locals. At the same time, as in-person research in such contexts is severely limited, macro-level studies from afar, which have a tendency towards simplification, gain prominence over ethnographic research.

Conducting research in Bashkortostan, Russia, Jesko Schmoller has found his field site physically inaccessible since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since his research primarily focuses on place, exploring Muslim place-making in Bashkortostan, restricted access appeared as an especially significant obstacle. While Jesko hopes to return to in-person fieldwork when it is once again possible, for now, he found textual studies to be unexpectedly eye-opening, providing insight into important aspects of Bashkir culture and religion previously unknown to him. He found that ethnographers should ideally be working with primary texts more even if they have good field access. Initially skeptical of relying on text too heavily, he now works with original Bashkir texts, such as Ufa-published “Bashkortostan: the land of Awliya [Friends of God]”, with a focus on religion and space. In his current research, he asks: What insight can be gained into sacred space through primary texts? Can they provide insight into a growing spatial marginalization of Muslims in Russia? Can one be in proximity to sacred places via text and gain insights into local ontologies (rather than discourses) without being there in person? From a local Sufi Muslim perspective, for instance, the Bashkir sacred landscape exists on yet another plane than the physical one. May such texts be regarded a medium to gain a sense impression of this kind of concealed geography?

Like Jesko, other speakers try to approach the newfound remoteness as an opportunity rather than a limitation. Rune and Manja both recounted that when they did research with participants outside of their repressive home country, they were much more open and research was more productive. Another opportunity provided by remoteness was various local publications as noted by Jesko Schmoller and Caroline Humphrey, who noticed an increase in local publications across Russia – as perhaps also in other regions – which provide a treasure trove to anthropologists who can rely on them as data, given their preexisting in-depth knowledge of the context. Another remote method that Caroline has made use of together with David Sneath (1999) in “The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia” was remote sensing, namely using satellite photography to make visible the effects of contrasting land-use systems along the Russian-Mongolian border. While this method provided important insights into local environmental changes, Caroline stressed the difficulties involved in interpreting remote sensory data and the necessity to triangulate it with other kinds of knowledge. Rune Steenberg, too, regularly uses various kinds of remote sensing data in his research, extracting significant information even from tourists’ videos and travel accounts. He stressed that “epistemological care” is of utmost importance in remote research: transparency about the certainty of arguments made in remote ethnographic research provides an important corrective in precarious research contexts.

Moreover, Caroline argued that remote research widens the scope of ethnographic investigation, as it is no longer confined to the researcher’s physical presence. At the same time, it may become more similar to historians’ research techniques. Relatedly, Manja asked: if ethnographers lose access to in-person fieldwork and rely only on remote data, what is it that specifically ethnographic remote research contributes? To Rune, the answer lies in ethnography’s holistic approach and in the thick description that uncovers multiple layers of meaning and perspectives. This is enabled by deep immersion in a local context through ethnographic methods but if need be, one can even undertake artificial immersion away from the research area, through a period of intense engagement with local media, social media, communicating in the local language with people from there and other means. Also, “classical” ethnographic fieldwork outside of the inaccessible region is often part of remote ethnographic methodologies.

Caroline raised another important question: what can ethnographers doing remote research contribute that would differ from and add value to what the diaspora or other critical voices of the studied group are already saying? While this question requires a broader discussion, as preliminary remarks, Rune suggested that while cooperation with members of the diaspora is crucial, it is also important to note that they often have their own visions and agendas, so social scientific methodologies and analyses are a meaningful contribution. Manja added that working solely with members of the diaspora may provide little representation of the social, economic, cultural and other diversity of society in their homeland.

The role of institutions appeared as important to the speakers, all of whom strove towards strong connections on the ground rather than an official veil to their research. Yet this is not always possible, like in Caroline’s initial fieldwork, where Buryat collective farms could only be accessed with official approvals from both Moscow and the Buryat authorities. Manja spoke of a seemingly growing expectation institutions hold towards researchers to engage in “scientific diplomacy” along their research responsibilities, acting as representatives of their institutions and even nation-states in the field. These roles can be difficult to balance and even disadvantageous for some kinds of research, shaping ethnographer’s relationships in the field. Finally, Rune stressed the importance of critically engaging with the institutions we partake in, such as universities. Their growing neoliberalisation is a significant component of the broader, global political processes that reproduce the kinds of conditions for human rights abuses, surveillance, marginalisation and precarity in the places we study. Opposing structures that reproduce inequalities in our home societies is therefore important in beginning to oppose them in places of research.

Bibliography

Harms, Erik, Shafqat Hussain, and Sara Shneiderman. 2014. “Remote and edgy: new takes on old anthropological themes.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1): 361–381.

Humphrey, Caroline, and David Sneath. 1999. The end of Nomadism?: Society, state, and the environment in Inner Asia. Duke University Press.

Saxer, Martin, and Ruben Andersson. 2019. “The return of remoteness: insecurity, isolation and connectivity in the new world disorder.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 27(2): 140-155.

Dr. Kristina Jonutytė is an associate professor at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University. Her research interests lie in political anthropology and the anthropology of religion, with an ethnographic focus on Buryatia, Russia and Mongolia. The present text was prepared during a visiting fellowship at the Central Asian Seminar, Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin.

Cite as: Jonutytė, Kristina 2025. “Ethnographic research of minoritised groups in increasingly remote settings: A roundtable discussion” Focaalblog 20 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/02/20/dr-kristina-jonutyte-ethnographic-research-of-minoritised-groups-in-increasingly-remote-settings-a-roundtable-discussion/

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Christi van der Westhuizen: Necropolitics at South Africa’s Stilfontein Mine

Image 1: Derelict shaft used by so-called illegal miners in Stilfontein to access mining tunnels. Photo by Kimon de Greef

An uncaring government and a gang of unscrupulous criminals. Caught between them are people regarded as expendable – people who, pushed into a desperate situation because of poverty, turn to dangerous work that exposes them to a merciless police “service”. But then, in contrast to the aforementioned, there is also a community that tried to save lives, and non-governmental organizations trying to help on the basis of the Constitution.

The nightmare situation in which so-called illegal miners in Stilfontein in South Africa’s Northwest province found themselves, represents a perfect storm of contemporary power dynamics – not only in South Africa but across the world.

South Africa has tended in the past several years to feature in global news for all the wrong reasons. The situation at Stilfontein involved hundreds of men working illegally underground in an abandoned gold mine. The South African Police service (SAPS) blockaded the mine as part of a national operation called “Vala Umgodi”, the Zulu phrase for “close the hole”, which started in December 2023. It involves blocking the entrances to shafts to prevent provisions from reaching the miners to force them out from underground.

Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni’s aggressive statement that the miners would be “smoked out” of the mine, attracted worldwide attention even in these pitiless times. She seemingly wanted to underline that the miners would receive no help despite reports that they were starving because of the police’s purposeful blockading.

Finally, 87 bodies were brought to the surface at Stilfontein in January, and a total of 246 miners were rescued after spending several weeks underground with the dead. The rescue operation could only proceed after court actions by the community and civil society against the police. The police were at some point accused of disregarding a court order to allow food and other necessities into the mine. The Stilfontein standoff became a forced disaster with a death toll that eclipses the 2012 massacre of 34 miners at Marikana in the same province.

The actions and utterances of the police and the government were completely at odds with the central constitutional principle of human dignity in the South African Constitution, which government officials are compelled to uphold by virtue of their positions. Several years of rhetoric from government officials stigmatizing foreign Africans and promoting extreme violence against people who violate the law, irrespective of the type and circumstances of the crime committed, resulted in avoidable deaths at Stilfontein.

What makes this more outrageous, is the fact that several of the miners were underaged, that armed men kept watch over the miners, and that the situation underground may have been one of modern slavery.

The power dynamics in action at Stilfontein illustrate the massive economic shifts that have taken place over the past four decades due to the liberalization of capital flows and other policy changes associated with globalized neoliberal capitalism. The once mighty mining industry of South Africa is shrinking dramatically. Disinvestment has taken place due to a combination of factors including costs, the reduction in easily accessible mineral reserves, and government policies.

Along with liberalization and deregulation come the informalization of economic activities – a world-wide phenomenon. Alongside and intertwined with the informal economic sphere grows a shadow economy. The dividing line between legal and illegal activities becomes increasingly blurred. In the shadows, organized crime spreads its tentacles. Along with the smuggling of drugs and firearms, human trafficking gets worse. The poor, women and minors are targeted.

What makes human trafficking possible is the growing difficulty to merely survive, given current economic conditions. People grasp frantically at promises of work, only to find out in horrific ways that they have been duped. Human trafficking is aimed mostly at sexual exploitation, but at least one-fifth of victims worldwide are forced into modern slavery for labour purposes.

In addition to human trafficking, migration has skyrocketed worldwide. While the extent is frequently exaggerated in public discourse in South Africa, migration from the rest of Africa to South Africa has also increased. Starting back in the 19th century, South Africa’s mining industry was built on the backs of people from the rest of Southern Africa, especially from what is today’s Mozambique. The majority of the Stilfontein miners were Mozambicans.

Yet not all miners are foreigners. There are local people involved, as shown in media interviews with anxious family members. In the context of an economy dipping in and out of recession and an unemployment rate of over 40 percent (as per the extended definition that includes both active and inactive job seekers), options to earn a living have drastically dwindled.

No one chooses to work underground in an unsafe mine for months in life-threatening conditions. Apart from those who ended up there under false pretenses due to human trafficking, there are people who have no other way of feeding themselves. Illegal miners belong to a new underclass found worldwide: people for whom neoliberal capitalism has no use and who, due to impoverishment, are delivered into what Achille Mbembe (2019) calls “necropolitics.” This is a form of politics that makes millions of people redundant and condemns them to “death-worlds”, extreme conditions in which they become the “living-dead”.

Instead of addressing the socio-economic problems caused by neoliberal capitalism that are forcing people to seek refuge elsewhere, politicians around the world are blaming migrants. This is also how attention in South Africa is diverted away from the policy decisions that have caused current social and economic predicaments. Given that the ruling African National Congress could not muster a humane response in accordance with the Constitution’s requirement of respect for life, one would at least have expected a more sophisticated reading of the situation from a party that still engages in Marxist-Leninist analyses of social and economic conditions. But the government is adamant about its approach being correct – even as facts emerge that overturn the easy stereotypes that politicians rely on.

Crime syndicates are not separate from governments and law enforcement agencies. Politicians and the police are often implicated in organized crime. For example, Al-Jazeera investigative journalists found a direct link between Zanu-PF’s continued stranglehold on Zimbabwe and informal mining operations. The gold that workers extract in life-threatening conditions for a pittance is ultimately sold in Dubai and keeps Mnangagwa and company in opulent power and comfort.

The mine in Stilfontein where people lived underground for months, digging in the ground under armed guard, with restricted food and water, was literally transformed into a death-world by the South African police. Some corpses were well decomposed by the time they were finally removed.

This is a translated, revised and edited version of a media column that first appeared on Netwerk24.com

Christi van der Westhuizen is an associate professor at Nelson Mandela University, heading up the Research Programme at the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD). Her views are her own and do not reflect those of the university.

References

Mbembe, A. 2019. Necropolitics. Duke University Press.

Cite as: Westhuizen, Christi van der 2025. “Necropolitics at South Africa’s Stilfontein Mine” Focaalblog 3 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/02/03/christi-van-der-westhuizen-necropolitics-at-south-africas-stilfontein-mine/

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Mona-Lisa Wareka, Fiona McCormack & Bronwyn Isaacs: Alternative Anthropologies: Kete Aronui from the Waikato

As three anthropologists working at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, Aotearoa (New Zealand), we experience anthropology in our daily work in the context of our local histories, communities and politics. While many anthropologists are familiar with the critiques of anthropology that play out in the USA or Europe, the narratives and practices of anthropology from places such as New Zealand are less well known. We argue that these local, diverse experiences of anthropology can enlarge our international understandings and imaginations of what anthropology can be, as well as the challenges it may face.

Anthropologists working in New Zealand today face the same plethora of academic pressures as those found in their counterparts in North America, Britain and Europe; pressures instigated by decades of neoliberal reform, managerialism, and the impact of new entrepreneurial and corporate models of universities that shape everyday identities and social relationships (Shore 2010). Similarly, the critique of anthropology as a discipline rooted in colonial imperatives and practices, resounds in a society whose imperial history and settler colonial present continues to imprint on educational institutions, pedagogy and research. In New Zealand, no neat historical trajectory marks a path from extractive research, wherein Indigenous knowledge and ways of life are pottled for export to the empire’s core, to one based on mutuality, co-creation and the indigenisation of anthropological knowledge.

A Long-Term Entanglement

Anthropology in Aotearoa (a Māori name for New Zealand), however, also has its own distinct history that shapes its practices. Importantly, Anthropology in Aotearoa has never been exclusively for a Pākehā (New Zealand European) or non-Māori audience. Undoubtedly, the origins of the discipline lie in the British School of Social Anthropology, and with it, accompanying theories and methodologies that have been determined as largely Eurocentric and at times, blatantly racist. Tsosie (2017) highlights that the cultural constructions of Indigenous peoples in colonial-era anthropology has an ongoing influence on legislation and federal policy that has often harmed, displaced or dehumanised First Nations groups (in the context of North America). Yet, it can also be argued that there is an increasing attempt to acknowledge the harms caused by colonial anthropological inquiry to colonised Indigenous peoples, and such a move is also apace in Aotearoa.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ethnographers such as Elsdon Best, Percy Smith, and Edward Treagear significantly contributed to the body of knowledge on Māori culture and life during the early years of colonisation. They also constructed narratives that would later be deemed harmful and disingenuous to Māori; for example, Treagear’s (1885) The Aryan Maori, which claimed that Māori and British Europeans were of shared Aryan ancestry and that colonisation was more of a ‘family reunion’ between kin. Treagar and Smith are also notably for aiding in the formation of The Polynesian Society, an organisation of mainly Pākehā amateur anthropologists, which had a number of Māori members and more Te Reo Māori speaking Pākehā members in its formative years than at any other point in its history (Clayworth, 2014).

Māori were often considered the ‘subject’ in early anthropological studies, yet the discipline also seemed to attract Māori scholars including Sir Peter (Te Rangihīroa) Buck, Mākareti Papakura, and Maharaia Winiata; while Āpirana Ngata (a prominent Māori leader and politician) was also an optimistic proponent of anthropology. To Ngata and Buck especially, anthropology was a significant discipline through which Māoritanga (Māori culture) could be preserved as well as a tool for political regeneration (Kahotea 2006). Kahotea, observing that no other colonised peoples engaged with anthropology as early as Māori, points to the strategic nature of this deployment; rather than challenging colonial power imbalances, anthropology was a tool for forging a place for Māori within a drastically changed social, economic and political environment.

The origin of anthropology was associated with Western imperial expansion into new worlds, and explanation of the peoples and cultures they encountered back to the west. Ngata and Te Rangihiroa saw anthropology as a tool for cultural recovery and for expressing and maintaining a deeply held sense of identity and cultural being… (Kahotea 2006:6)

Indeed, Ngata’s use of anthropological kinship theory to understand the colonising other, is an early exercise in decolonial anthropology. Some 100 years ago, Ngata made a critical connection between kinship and ways of owning, associating European kinship, a “rapid lopping off” of receding relatives, with a system of inheritance and succession to property rooted primarily in exclusivity. Conversely, he visualised Māori kinship as made up of vertical, horizontal, and oblique relationships, radiating from a common ancestor or a group of common ancestors, a circle of relatives. Ngata then links this kinship patterning to Māori communal systems, wherein the inheritance of rights, privileges and property is traced though both maternal and paternal links, noting that this evokes a tendency to embrace rather than exclude, “those related by blood” (Ngata & Ngata 2019). These observations on property and kinship are relevant to contemporary Māori claims for recognition of colonial alienations of their land and sea territories.

Contributing to our Kete Aronui

Māori Studies emerged as a separate discipline in Universities during the 1970s (a decade later than teacher’s colleges implemented Māori studies), separating from Anthropology following the Māori cultural Renaissance in the 1970s-80s. Webster (1998), commenting on this disciplinary split, posits that anthropology was perceived to not fully support Māori initiatives and to displace Māori peoples as the ‘true’ experts of their own culture. In recent decades, however, anthropology in Aotearoa has made a renewed commitment to uplifting Māori voices, highlighting relevant local issues, involving Māori peoples at all levels of research, and placing an emphasis on Kaupapa Māori (Māori-centred research methodologies), Te Tiriti-centric (centred on the ‘Treaty of Waitangi’) or co-governance research methodologies. Indeed, the whakapapa (genealogy) of anthropology in Aotearoa for Māori means that for many, it continues to persist alongside Māori studies, rather than in competition with it. Māori perspectives in anthropology not only enrich the discipline, but enable Māori anthropologists to acquire helpful tools to walk consciously ‘between two worlds’, Te Ao Māori (the Māori worldview) and Te Ao Pākehā (the western worldview). An ability to walk consciously is a struggle faced daily by many Māori, particularly those in academic institutions. Māori Anthropologists do this, while reconfiguring learnings from the discipline to promote the interests of their respective kin groups – whānau, hapū and iwi – an active attempt, we suggest, to decolonise anthropology.

Waikato Anthropology

The University of Waikato is physically situated on land that was illegally confiscated by the British Crown from iwi Māori (tribes) (in particular, Ngāti Wairere and Ngāti Hauā) following extensive wars between Māori and European colonists in the mid 19th century. The Māori King movement, Te Kīngitanga, emerged within the Waikato region in 1858, its aim to provide a national forum for politically uniting Māori in their confrontations with the Crown. The position of Ariki (paramount chief) has been continuously held in the Waikato Region by descendants of the first king, Pōtatau Te Wherowhero and is currently held by University of Waikato graduate, Ngā Wai Hono i te Pō. This history has significant bearing on how the University operates. In the mid 1990s the University’s land was returned to Waikato Tainui (the local iwi), who in turn agreed to lease the land back to the University. At this time, the University changed its motto and crest and increasingly adopted Māori symbols.

Over time, it has introduced a suite of special events (eg, Kīngitanga Day), infrastructure (such as the new Pā – a student, office and collective hub drawing on Māori architectural design and aesthetic features) and ceremonies that celebrate a partnership with Māori. All new staff undertake training in the history of Te Tiriti (also known by its English interpretation, The Treaty of Waitangi) and the University’s obligations to honour Te Tiriti in terms of recognising Māori sovereignty. This bureaucratic recognition of Māori and particularly, Waikato Tainui, does not rid the University of institutional racism or alter the arguably neoliberal decision making and partisan politics of senior leadership. Waikato Māori history does however provide a widely known political narrative against which everyday teaching, research and administrative practices take place.

Waikato anthropology was shaped more directly by Ngapare Hopa who became head of the department in 1994. Hopa, a Māori doctoral graduate of Oxford University, played an important role in advocating for anthropology to be active in everyday political activism and made New Zealand politics, especially Indigenous politics, a tangible issue for the discipline. While the economic insecurity and political disenfranchisement of Māori were Hopa’s key areas of focus, she was also influenced by previous generations of social science activism, such as Sol Tax’s work on self-determination and action research among the Meswaki Native Americans (Hopa 1988).

When Hopa returned to New Zealand in 1986, she did so with a political perspective on anthropological work which would offer a distinct challenge to most leading New Zealand anthropology of that time; in the mid 1980s New Zealand anthropology was working predominantly within culturalist and functionalist paradigms. Hopa wrote, “Whereas anthropologists have frequently returned from their vision quests to write about ‘their people’ and to somewhat romanticize the value and nobility of tribal life, some ‘native’ anthropologists like myself, raised in tribal contexts, have returned from a different vision quest, to ‘our people’ in response to their call and the clarion call of radical anthropologists for the need to decolonize the discipline” (1988:3). Hopa (2015) also fiercely criticised the “the competitive university environment” which prioritised publications and practical degrees before engaged action, quality education and the “wellbeing of our people”.

Competing legacies and histories of New Zealand anthropology, from the colonist’s desire to categorise savage and disappearing peoples, to early Māori scholars direct work within, and challenge to, the discipline from the early 20th century, was brought into a clearer theoretical debate in the 1990s. During this period, some anthropologists of European backgrounds ceased working with Māori communities altogether, accepting the request of some Māori academics that only Māori do research with Māori. Most famously, Linda Tuhiwai Smith who rose to become the Dean of the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies at Waikato, like Hopa, directly criticised the work of anthropologists (among others) who undertook an unethical and hierarchical approach to research with Māori. Tuhiwai Smith (1999) called for decolonised research methodologies that would be shaped by Māori and benefit Māori instead of primarily benefiting the career of the researcher.

Professor Smith’s exit from Waikato University in 2020 occurred in the context of broader accusations of ongoing institutional racism, specifically its treatment of Indigenous staff. The demands for a decolonised research process she initiated, however, ultimately affected both institutional ethics processes and research funding bodies across the country. The primary research funding bodies demand that all research that affect Māori demonstrate their benefit to Māori and justify how Māori tikanga (protocol, customs) and knowledge be upheld. Indeed, all research conducted by New Zealand based academics in Aotearoa requires acknowledgement of Vision Mātauranga, that is, unlocking the “innovation potential of Māori knowledge, resources and people”. For Anthropologists from outside of New Zealand who wish to undertake field research in Aotearoa, the national Anthropological Association ASAANZ (Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa New Zealand) urges compliance with its ethical principles and offers an ethics review service..

Political history has ongoing effects in terms of everyday anthropological practice. In the Waikato, anthropological “subjects” are part of the daily life in which anthropologists practice. Many students majoring in Anthropology or doing Masters or PhD degrees at the University of Waikato are Māori or are Indigenous cousins from the Pacific region. We find that many students are politically active and are not afraid to push for decolonial research and the acknowledgement of Māori sovereignty. Similar to the ongoing relationships between anthropologists and research communities in South America, as described by Restrepo and Escobar (2005), for those who do research with Māori communities, relationships with research “subjects” are ongoing. Interview informants include respected political leaders who themselves may also be respected leaders in the academic space. Anthropology seminars at Waikato University provide a space for diverse stakeholders including Māori activists and students, Pacific scholars, and academics of European ethnicity to meet in a space that is intentionally focused on community. Indeed, in anthropology seminars, community is a priority over academic innovation, even as the latter is significantly valued. We hope that these practices push back against “disciplinary genealogies and boundaries” and “normalizing machines that preclude the enablement of different anthropological practices and knowledge worldwide” (Restrepo & Escobar 2005:104).

From Indigenous Scholars to Indigenous Students: Mona-Lisa Wareka

As a Māori anthropologist (Ngātiwai, Ngāti Rereahu), the disciplinary training I, Mona, have received provides me with the tools to reconnect with my ethnic identity in a meaningful way, whilst also opportuning a space to share that sentiment with upcoming Māori and Pasifika students as a tutor and lecturer. As with Professor Ngapare Hopa, in learning about other cultures and the parallel struggles of former settler colonies, anthropology has critically enriched my understanding of my own culture and inspires me to look towards cross-cultural connections between Indigenous peoples. Throughout my university career, I have observed anthropologists at Waikato foster myself and other Māori and Pasifika (Pacific Island-descent) students, and bring awareness to issues relevant to the Pacific, including academic staff presenting evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal on behalf of hapū (tribal kin groups), participating in hīkoi (marches) and protests, and promoting Te Tiriti-centric research in Aotearoa; these are not acts of performative allyship, but a genuine practice of mutuality and cooperation. This academic environment, alongside the ability to culturally reconnect and become a pou (ritual post) for my whānau (extended family), has significantly influenced my academic career trajectory as a first-in-family tertiary student.

The appeal of anthropology to Māori and Pasifika students lies in several factors that I have identified in the past eight years as a student and as a member of the teaching staff at the University of Waikato. BIPOC students enjoy, and perform discernibly better, when there is authentic representation within the classroom, especially when the curriculum is additionally supportive of Indigenous worldviews, experiences, and knowledge systems within the learning process (Kowlessar and Thomas 2021). In the third-year of my undergraduate degree, I became a tutor for undergraduate anthropology classes, and during my current PhD journey, I have taken on the role of teaching fellow, lecturing a large first-year course employing anthropological approaches to interpret the cultural history of Aotearoa and its relation to the wider Pacific. Many students – particularly of Māori, Pasifika, Pākehā (non-Māori Europeans) descent – have expressed their enjoyment of the subject matter and content, and further acknowledge anthropology’s ability to foster and validate their own cultural experiences in the world. At the same time, this fostering can also be perceived as an active preservation of the discipline’s whakapapa (genealogy) in Aotearoa, inspiring students to assert their own sense of tino rangatiratanga (self-determination/sovereignty). Anthropologists in the University of Waikato Anthropology programme emphasise the importance of nurturing Indigenous students’ ability to critically explore their own cultural identities, history, knowledge systems and actively engage in politics of change. This kaupapa (principle) is felt by students, which is in turn reflected in their significant enrolment in anthropology degrees at the University of Waikato.

Anthropology in Aotearoa: local and global

In the context of New Zealand’s tertiary institutions, local metrics for measuring and evaluating academic performance, however, continue to entrench the hierarchy of disciplinary knowledge for Euro-American markets over and above anthropology at/for home. Indeed, the idea of New Zealand anthropology as peripheral to that produced in imperial centres, that its significance is confined to national or regional concerns, is also periodically voiced by our international colleagues. Keith Hart, for instance, in a 2016 workshop in SOAS contemplating the contemporary relevance of The Gift (sponsored by the journal HAU), commented in frustration, “The point … is not so we can learn about the fucking Māori.” This, we argue, is an unfortunate distinction. Perhaps the point is not to learn about, but rather with, “the Māori”.

Image 1: Rotorua activation in November 2024 as part of the recent hikoi protest march against the Treaty Principle Bill being introduced in the NZ parliament by the ACT party (photo Mona-Lisa Wareka)

What is specific about Anthropology from New Zealand is the prominence of Māori as founding ancestors and their critical role in shaping its maturation, both from inside and outside of the discipline’s boundaries. The relationships forged with Māori – as students, teachers, colleagues, researcher and researched – provide an up and close critique of anthropological theories and methods, a pragmatic response to attempts to reify Indigenous culture and ways of life and generate lines of solidarity. In turn, anthropology provides some Māori with another gateway for participation in their respective hapū and iwi by utilising their learned anthropological skills to actively participate and advocate for relevant social and political change (Kahotea 2006). The ability to intervene theoretically in contemporary debates, grounded in the tradition of comparative research and notions of the universality of human experiences, is very much alive in New Zealand Anthropology. This global reach is combined with a deep commitment to local concerns.

In Aotearoa, the effects of colonial violence on Indigenous people are everywhere to be observed – in the unbudging disparities in health, education, employment, housing, suicide rates, infant mortality, life expectancy, and more. The advance of climate demise is also exacerbating existing lines of inequality, threatening Māori material culture and relationships with non-human kin. Since the new coalition government was elected in October 2023, New Zealand has witnessed a full pronged attack on its public health, education, welfare and environmental protections; a free market onslaught more accelerated than the neoliberalisation of New Zealand in the late 1980s. That this is now combined with moves to dismantle hard won Indigenous rights and recognitions and indeed deny colonial history, is of serious concern. As a national organisation, ASAANZ is actively confronting this challenge.

Mona-Lisa Wareka is a PhD candidate at the University of Waikato. Her PhD research studies Māori cultural values of conservation, wellbeing and Indigenous autonomy.

Dr. Fiona McCormack is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Waikato. Her research is based in marine and economic anthropology, drawing on field research from Aotearoa, Hawaii, Ireland and Iceland.

Dr. Bronwyn Isaacs is a lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Waikato. She specialises in the anthropology of labour, visual media and nationalism.

References

Ngata, Apirana., & Ngata, Wayne. (2019). The terminology of whakapapa. The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 128(1), 19-42.

Shore, Cris. (2010). Beyond the multiversity: Neoliberalism and the rise of the schizophrenic university. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 18(1), 15-29.

Kowlessar, K., & Thomas, C. (2021). “This space is not for me”: BIPOC identities in

academic spaces. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 58(3), 1-3.

Kahotea, Des Tatana. (2006). The ‘native informant’ anthropologists as kaupapa Māori research. MAI Review 1(1), 1-9.

Clayworth, Peter. (2014). ‘Anthropology and archaeology – ‘Salvage anthropology’ and the birth of professionalism’, Te Ara – the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand. http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/mi/anthropology-and-archaeology/page-3 (accessed 18 November 2024).

Tsosie, Rebecca. (2017). Indigenous peoples, anthropology, and the legacy of epistemic injustice. In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (pp. 356-369). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315212043.

Webster, Steven. (1998). Patrons of Maori Culture; Power, Theory, and Ideology in the Maori

Renaissance. Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press.

Hopa, Ngapara Kaihina. 1988 Hopa, N. K. 1988. The Anthropologist as Tribal Advocate, American Anthropological Association, Phoenix, Arizona, November 1988, Centre for Maaori studies and research. University of Waikato, New Zealand.

Cite as: Wareka, Mona-Lisa, McCormack, Fiona and Isaacs, Bronwyn 2025. “Alternative Anthropologies: Kete Aronui from the Waikato” Focaalblog 23 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/01/23/mona-lisa-wareka-fiona-mccormack-bronwyn-isaacs-alternative-anthropologies-kete-aronui-from-the-waikato/

Art and Visual Anthropology, AVA General Posts, Blog

Görkem Akgöz: “The Sad Truth” Then and Now: Pasts and Presents of Danish Refugee Policy

This text was originally published in Swedish in Arbetar Historia (No.191-192, 2024). Special thanks to the editors for granting permission to republish.

In 2015, during the peak of what became known as the “refugee crisis,” global attention turned towards an unexpected actor: Denmark. Long regarded as a liberal refuge and one of the first signatories of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, Denmark experienced a significant policy shift under the ruling Social Democrats. i The country implemented some of the world’s strictest refugee policies, becoming the first nation to mandate that even resettled refugees must eventually return to their home countries.

Sjælsmark and Kærshovedgård, two semi-open “departure centres” established in 2013 to process rejected asylum-seekers, paradoxically became temporary residences for refugees who had already been granted permission to remain in Denmark. These deportation centres, which subject non-deported individuals to indefinite waits under conditions that verge on de facto incarceration, have become pivotal sites in Denmark’s deportation-focused asylum policy.

Danish migration scholar and documentary director Helle Stenum’s latest documentary, The Sad Truth (2023), takes viewers through the gates of these camps while situating them within Denmark’s broader historical context. The film focuses on young Syrian women confined to these camps, grappling with a harsh ultimatum: return to their war-torn homeland or remain indefinitely in a state of uncertainty. By interweaving their struggles with historical accounts of Danish deportation practices—such as the expulsion of Jews in the 1930s and the treatment of German war refugees between 1945-47—Stenum raises profound questions about historical memory: who gets to tell these stories, who is remembered, and who is forgotten? At its heart, the documentary interrogates the concept of agency, connecting past and present experiences.

Image 1: Screenshot from the Vimeo website for “The Sad Truth”; where the movie can be rented for viewing (see: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thesadtruth)

This interrogation of agency plays out in several layers throughout the film, both in the personal experiences of the refugees and the broader political discourse. At the highest political levels, Danish prime ministers invoke refugee issues in their New Year messages, reducing complex human experiences to numbers in debates about national challenges. Next, these numbers gain a face. We meet the young refugee women awaiting their fate in prison-like deportation camps, their circumstances shaped by constraints that limit their agency. Yet, through their stories of resilience and hope, we see the enduring power of personal narratives to illuminate the human cost of political decisions. White Danish activists represent another form of agency, using their privilege to amplify marginalized voices and challenge dominant narratives. Among the refugees, Rahima Abdullah’s journey reflects a dynamic and evolving agency. Initially impressed by Denmark’s commitment to the rule of law, her disillusionment grows as she witnesses its violations first-hand.

Finally, the film highlights the agency of two older female historians, Kirsten Lylloff and Lone Rünitz, who wrestle with the challenges of confronting uncomfortable historical truths.ii One of them poignantly reflects on the backlash that arises when challenging a nation’s self-image, saying, “A bird does not shit in its own nest.” This sentiment about the difficulty of critiquing one’s own country echoes a broader public discomfort with such discussions. A recent Washington Post opinion piece captures this shift in Danish politics, titled “How Progressive Denmark Became the Face of the Anti-Migration Left.”iii The article chronicles Denmark’s dramatic turn in refugee politics, noting, “Denmark was not always like this. Thirty years ago, the country was relatively open and welcoming, with strong protections for asylum seekers and refugees. But that started to change in the 1990s, as the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the far-right Danish People’s Party proved politically potent.”

To this, our two historians might reply in present-day social media jargon: “Hold my beer! We need to go much further back than that to understand what’s happening now!” This is where the film’s second storyline comes in—the research of Lylloff and Rünitz on Denmark’s treatment of Jews in the 1930s and German war refugees between 1945-47, which provides crucial historical context to the contemporary refugee debate.

When the historians speak in the documentary, their presence closely aligns with what is often called the expository documentary format.iv This style typically features an authoritative voice-over or a historian presenting directly to the camera, acting as both narrator and objective assessor of evidence. However, Lylloff and Rünitz offer more than just authoritative voices. Their involvement goes beyond simply providing historical facts; they bring personal and professional insights into the conversation, adding depth and complexity to the film’s exploration of Denmark’s current refugee policies.

We first see these two women casually sitting on a bench, engaged in conversation with each other, sharing the personal and professional costs of their academic research. This intimate exchange adds a layer of depth to their authoritative roles, making them more relatable and humanized. In addition, another historian makes her presence felt in the film, though her face remains unseen—Helle Stenum herself. Through her academic writing and documentaries, including those that address the legacies of Danish colonialism, Stenum exposes her country’s troubling historical and contemporary record.v

In “The Sad Truth,” Stenum undertakes a challenging task—a diachronic historical comparison—that many historians are usually hesitant to pursue given the clear and significant structural and contextual differences between the late 1930s and the mid-2010s. Academically, the contemporary European (so-called) refugee crisis has not received sufficient historical contextualization. Historical analyses have been slow to integrate into refugee studies, a relatively new field dominated by social scientists with largely presentist concerns.vi However, outside academia, such comparisons have been made in public and political debates. 

A notable example comes from Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who, in the autumn of 2015, during the height of the so-called refugee crisis, warned of the dangers of “amnesia.” In an interview with The Guardian, Al Hussein argued that contemporary public rhetoric about refugees echoed that used by Western leaders in the late 1930s.vii It is this amnesia that the two Danish historians are trying to confront by telling the stories of Jewish and German war refugees. “Both politicians and ordinary Danes have incredibly short-term memories,” says one of them. As I watched, I found myself answering back, “Well, which nation doesn’t?” But it is not only public forgetting or historical amnesia at stake here. A Danish retiree affiliated with Grandparents for Asylum, a coalition of activists who support refugees, offers another perspective. She notes that many Danes she encounters remain unaware—or unwilling to acknowledge—what is happening. “When I tell them what we are doing, people don’t believe me,” she says. “They say, ‘But we Danes don’t treat people like that.’” viii So, what we’re dealing with is not just public forgetting of the past, but also a wilful ignorance of the present.

But where lies the distinction between the two? How do these two forces intertwine in the everyday lives of those affected by them? The documentary poignantly links two refugees from different time periods through a powerful scene: Syrian refugee Rahima touching the Stolpersteine, the stumbling stone marking the home of German Jew Ruth Niedrig, who was handed over to the Gestapo by Danish authorities. This gesture made me wonder: Did Stenum have the chance to show this scene to Rahima and other Syrian refugees? If so, how did they react? What was Rahima’s understanding of this history? Given her initial view of Denmark as a bastion of the rule of law, how did she respond to the historical context unfolding before her?

Though both Ruth and Rahima have grappled with profound uncertainties during their time in Denmark—navigating what can be described as the Danish limbo—their experiences are rooted in vastly different historical contexts, both politically and economically. In 1930s Denmark, amid post-Depression economic hardship and widespread unemployment, concerns about refugees draining social policy resources were widespread. By contrast, Rahima and her fellow Syrian refugees arrived during a period of economic prosperity, within the context of a strong welfare state. Yet, how did a country with a tradition of social solidarity gradually adopt an anti-refugee stance? How did this tradition evolve into a protectionist and xenophobic form of welfare-state patriotism? The film starkly illustrates this shift, particularly when the Danish Minister of Migration proudly references the Danish welfare state tradition in defence of the new refugee policy at the European Parliament.

The discourse of welfare-state patriotism transcends racial, religious, and cultural boundaries, feeding into broader debates about immigrant integration into Danish society. Central to these discussions are concerns about immigrants’ socioeconomic status, their employment in low-pay jobs, and their reliance on social benefits. Refugees are often depicted within this narrative as a burden—requiring substantial long-term investment from the state, while struggling to enter the labour market effectively. As such, the aim of the current Danish refugee and asylum policyseems twofold: to pressure those already in the country into accepting voluntary return, while simultaneously sending a loud and clear message: “Don’t think about coming to Denmark.” But, then, who is this message truly directed at?

The influx of largely extra-European refugees raised concerns about the potential long-term impact of mostly young Middle Eastern males on the social stability of European democracies. In 2012, sociologist Sara Farris coined the term “femonationalism” to describe the alignment between nationalist ideologies and certain feminist ideas, particularly when driven by xenophobic motivations.ix Farris documents how some European right-wing parties and self-identified feminists exploit women’s rights and gender equality principles to justify discriminatory practices against Muslim and non-Western immigrants.

I raise this concept here for two reasons. First, femonationalism is particularly relevant to Stenum’s documentary, which selectively portrays only female refugees, despite Denmark’s ostensibly non-gender-discriminatory refugee policy. This selective portrayal invites an exploration of its implications within the context of femonationalism and the institutionalization of gendered integration policies. Second, in 2019, the Danish prime minister declared a goal of “zero asylum seekers.” However, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Denmark accepted Ukrainian refugees. Danish authorities and NGOs actively assisted these refugees, ensuring their integration into Danish society. What does this shift reveal about the political and societal consequences of categorizing, labelling, and stereotyping refugees?

As we continue to witness devastating acts of state-induced violence, most recently in Palestine, which flagrantly breach international law, the questions raised by Stenum’s documentary take on even greater urgency. Her work forces us to reckon not only with the memory of historical injustices but also with the present moment—where the way we treat refugees is inextricably tied to political ideologies, societal perceptions, and economic realities. This film serves as both a reminder and a challenge, asking us to confront the uncomfortable truths about how we view those who seek refuge, particularly when their needs clash with the dominant narratives of national identity and security. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” x Stenum’s documentary pushes us to recognize these images, to reckon with the past, and to engage with the present in ways that are both reflective and responsive to the demands of justice and humanity.

i During the Nazi occupation of Denmark, many Danish people played a crucial role in one of the largest and most exceptional rescue operations of the Holocaust, famously saving the lives of the vast majority of Jews living in Denmark, including several hundred German and “stateless Jews,” by helping them escape to Sweden. Levine, Paul A. 2011. “Sweden’s Complicated Neutrality and the Rescue of Danish Jewry.” In The Routledge History of the Holocaust, edited by Jonathan C. Friedman, 305-314. New York: Routledge.

ii See, for example, Lylloff, Kirsten. “Dødsårsager for tyske flygtningebørn i 1945 [Causes of death of German refugee children in 1945].” Ugeskr Laeger, vol. 162, no. 9, 2000; Rünitz, Lone. “Denmark’s Response to the Nazi Expulsion Policy, 1938-39.” Holocaust Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 2005.

iii Rauhala, Emily. “How Progressive Denmark Became the Face of the Anti-Migration Left.” Washington Post, April 6, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/06/denmark-zero-asylum-refugees/. Accessed June 20, 2024. It is important to note that in this context, “the left” specifically refers to the Social Democratic Party. However, two parties to the left of the Social Democrats, which currently hold 24 out of 179 seats in parliament, are highly critical of the Social Democrats’ position on this issue. These parties advocate for a more “humanistic” approach to refugee policy and are poised to gain significant support, according to recent polls. Special thanks to Lars Kjølhede Christensen for bringing this point to my attention.

iv Bell, Desmond. “Documentary Film and the Poetics of History.” Journal of Media Practice, vol. 12, no. 1, 2011, p. 9.

v Stenum’s award-winning documentary “We Carry It Within Us” (2017) examines Denmark’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and explores how the colonial past continues to shape contemporary media, art, museums, education, and wealth distribution, alongside various practices of remembering and forgetting.

vi Ahonen, Pertti. “Europe and Refugees: 1938 and 2015-16.” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 52, no. 2-3, 2018, p. 137.

vii Jones, Sam. “Refugee Rhetoric Echoes 1938 Summit Before Holocaust, UN Official Warns.” The Guardian, October 14, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/oct/14/refugee-rhetoric-echoes-1938-summit-before-holocaust-un-official-warns. Accessed June 20, 2024.

viii Rauhala, “How Progressive Denmark.”

ix Farris, Sara. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press, 2017.

x Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2003, p. 391.

Görkem Akgöz is a research fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Her main research interests are global labour history, political economy, and women and gender history. She is the author of In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey(Brill, 2024). She is the co-chair of the Labour Network of the European Social Science History Conference, the co-coordinator of the Workplaces: Pasts and Presents working group of the European Labour History Network, and a member of the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History. More information can be found at www.gorkemakgoz.com.

Cite as: Akgöz, Görkem 2025. “’The Sad Truth’ Then and Now: Pasts and Presents of Danish Refugee Policy” Focaalblog 8 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/01/08/gorkem-akgoz-the-sad-truth-then-and-now-pasts-and-presents-of-danish-refugee-policy/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Alexandrine Royer: ‘In Kigali, life is expensive’: how everyday inflation talk gives voice to political and class frustrations 

Image 1: Food vendors at Kigali’s central Kimironko market, photo by author

I encountered the phrase ‘in Kigali, life is expensive’ everywhere during my 15 months of fieldwork within the tech ecosystem of Rwanda. Official government figures stated that the price of common food staples had increased by 35% but residents estimated it to be much higher. Gas, electricity and housing prices were also soaring. My interlocutors asked whether I knew the cost of potatoes, bus transport, and rent, wondering if as a muzungu (white foreigner), I was shielded from these economic pressures. In Rwanda, where politics is an uneasy and potentially threatening topic, inflation was a shared device through which individuals across social classes could comfortably voice critiques of rising social and class inequality. I build on Amri’s (2023) concept of ‘inflation-talk’ to argue that small talk on the rising cost of living, with its outward apolitical nature and indefinite causes, provided a safe discursive space for disclosing class and political frustrations.

When I asked around the tech ecosystem why life in Kigali was getting so expensive, responses generally converged around the hypothesized causes of inflation, such as the war in Ukraine, low local agricultural productivity, and the continuous devaluation of the Rwandan franc. As one person commented, ‘there’s huge inequality now. The rich get richer, and the market follows the haves’. The rising inequality in Rwanda sat awkwardly with the Government of Rwanda’s confirmation of the country’s teleological trajectory towards becoming a prosperous ICT-based economy as outlined in the guiding policy document Vision 2050. During tech conferences, held in nicely air-conditioned halls with swanky Afro-fusion decorations, international delegates and heads of state would praise President Paul Kagame for his vision in transforming Rwanda from a country once torn apart by genocidal violence towards becoming a continental leader for ICT development. Yet, outside such spaces, interlocutors commented on how the rising cost of living made their participation in this tech universe more difficult. Founders let go of staff, cancelled their coworking memberships and confessed their worries about possible consequences for their social and business reputations.

In the economic literature, financial crises and a rapid rise in food prices are frequently correlated with civic action and social unrest (see Bellemare 2015). But very few of my interlocutors in Kigali openly criticized the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), Rwanda’s ruling party for the past 30 years. Returnee diaspora, which made up a sizeable portion of the tech ecosystem, would actively participate in the online defence of president Kagame, most virulently on X, with hashtags such as #TeamPK. Following the announcement on 15 July 2024 of Kagame’s re-election with 99% of the vote, Rwandans were quick to defend the results after Human Rights Watch reported a lack of genuine political competition. As one tweet stated, “Rwanda is a sovereign country and its President doesn’t have anything to answer to Western colonisers trying to impose their so called order on it…”. The RPF’s post-genocide ‘Ndi Umunyarwanda’ (Kinyarwanda for ‘I am Rwandan’) strategy of national reconciliation criminalized references to ethnic identity and further obliged Rwandans to reject all forms of social division (Purdeková & Mwambari 2022) to embrace a front of unity. Lists of permissible and forbidden citizen behaviours were pasted on the walls of schools and at the entrance of villages. Talking negatively about the country was identified as subject to discipline and punishment. Publicly voicing political critiques could result in accusations of anti-patriotism or worse, of harbouring genocidal ideologies.

In studies of Rwanda, scholars, most notably Thomson (2013), have sought to identify through James C. Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’ (1985) instances of resistance towards the Rwandan state. Yet, as Rollason (2019) underscores, such studies pre-suppose defiance in citizens’ engagements with authorities and reify a division between the ruling and the ruled. Yet, many of my interlocutors, like Rollason’s, navigated the same social circles as government functionaries and held varying levels of political privilege gained through patronage or familial connections. In private conversations, they expressed an ambivalence towards the country’s politics rather than a stark opposition or deference to power. Some Rwandans expressed continued indebtedness to Kagame for allowing their families’ return, whilst other African nationals saw restricted political freedom as part of a trade-off for government effectiveness, saying ‘here at least you know where the money is going’. Paul Kagame’s presidency was part of an accepted order that could just as easily be toppled over. As a friend related, ‘everyone here says that they are for the president. But the last president, before the genocide, he also got 99% of the vote’. There was a longer history of dissimulation in Rwanda and maintaining an image of stability in contrast to its more turbulent neighbours.

It is in this climate of ‘quiet insecurity’ (Grant 2015) that conversations about the cost of living, first described in apolitical economic terms as concerns over rising food prices or other essentials, became an avenue by which people voice political and class frustrations. When housesitting for friends in a predominantly expat neighbourhood, I was approached by their cleaner, Hope, who asked whether I was looking for additional house help. I awkwardly replied no but promised to keep an ear out. Mopping the floors of the study, Hope would occasionally pause to volunteer bits of her familial history. She narrated the loss of her father and siblings during the genocide, with herself and surviving members fleeing to Uganda before eventually settling back in Kigali in the early 2000s. Hope struggled to cover her monthly rent and feared eviction. As usual for discussions on politics in Rwanda, she began with praise for the President to avoid reproach before delving into frustrations. She said, “I like Kagame because he saved many people, but Rwanda has too many rules…working three days a week is not enough, the cost of food in Rwanda is now very high. I support my mother…. It’s very difficult being poor in Rwanda, the genocide was not nice, very sad. In Uganda, the poor can sell food on the street, the women can make money, but in Rwanda it’s illegal, you can get into big trouble…” Hope was referring to the RPF’s criminalization of hawking, petty trading and street food vending (Finn 2017). Such measures aimed at making Kigali a ‘clean and modern city’ constrained the urban poor’s ability to multiple hustles and weather rising costs.

More privileged Rwandans also felt government policies were often out of touch with the socio-economic realities of most Kigalians. I met up with a founder friend over lunch, Shema, who recounted how his startup had experienced some recent financial setbacks. He mentioned that the new school budgets introduced by the Ministry of Education were barely adjusted for inflation, leaving little room for schools to spend on ed-tech products. School directors were more concerned with retaining quality teaching staff than investing in e-learning. As Shema explained, “the cost of Irish potatoes for one 1kg has now gone up to 1500 Rwf [approx. 1.50 USD] but the average salary for a teacher in Rwanda is now 70 000 Rwf [approx. 70 USD], how can people afford that?”

Being the youngest child of a single-parent household, Shema was proud of how he had risen from kitchen staff to managerial positions in the hospitality industry before dedicating himself to his startup. He felt the city’s rich kids, who often occupied key positions in the Presidential office, would likely not understand his, or his clients’, financial struggles: “It’s almost as if these guys are not Rwandans, they can sometimes barely speak Kinyarwanda and in their summers, they go on vacation to France or the US or Canada…these guys have probably never shopped at Nymirambo market, they go and get their groceries from Sawa Citi or Simba [supermarket chains]… They are the ones who then go study abroad and come back and make policies, but they don’t know what life is like in Rwanda. You know Claire Kamanzi [CEO of Rwanda Development Board], she wasn’t even in Rwanda before, how can they know the country, they only know about it from reading reports…”. Picking up on his comments, I inquired further as to what needs to change in Rwanda, to which he replied, “it would be if the system was for the masses, here it is the elites who in charge”. As reflected in the conversation with Shema, talk on the felt effects of inflation opened a portal to discussions on middle-class and elite urban divides and how such schisms mapped onto political decision-making.

The rising cost-of-living further hindered my interlocutors’ aspirations to attain or preserve middle-class living in Kigali and its accompanying social norms. Like Nairobi’s peri-urban population studied by Lockwood (2020), current socio-economic inequalities in Kigali were not seen as a permanent condition, but as part of a challenge to ‘make it’ and achieve the standard of living possessed by others. Foreign entrepreneurs from the Global North could weather the franc’s continuous devaluation and primarily resided in upmarket neighbourhoods.

But local young founders, predominantly men, complained about how it was now impossible to save for a house within your twenties, adding that girls now were more interested in dating older men with money. Male homeownership in Rwanda remained a prerequisite for marriage and the social transition to adulthood. Many mentioned how their irregular incomes had caused issues with their girlfriends, as they cynically joked that ‘it was becoming too expensive to adult’. Some were equally forced to relocate to neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Kigali and expressed feeling squeezed out of the city. Economic pressure further caused a series of aches and pains, as colleagues and entrepreneurs complained of burnout, fatigue and anxiety.

In a context where politics is laden with couched terms, speaking on inflation and its felt effects allowed interlocutors to share pointed political critiques and reveal class-based social tensions. The cost-of-living crisis threatened the aspirational livelihoods of my predominantly middle-class interlocutors and undid the image of a prosperous nation that the government endeavoured to maintain. For my interlocutors, commentary on inflation did not stand alone; it provided a means of contextualizing and reflecting on the socio-economic, gendered and political make-up of life in post-genocide Kigali and its resultant inequalities. It further opened questions on who would ultimately profit from the country’s push towards modernization.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Alexandrine Royer is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her work centres on digital economies, startup culture and development practices in East Africa, with a focus on Rwanda.

References

Bellemare, M. F. (2015). Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Social Unrest. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 97(1), 1–21.

Grant, A. M. (2015). ‘Quiet Insecurity and Quiet Agency in Post-Genocide Rwanda’. Ethnofoor 27(2): 15-36

Finn, B. (2017). Quietly Chasing Kigali: Young Men and the Intolerance of Informality in Rwanda’s Capital City. Urban Forum (Johannesburg), 29(2), 205-218.

Lockwood, P. (2020). The Greedy Eaters: A moral politics of continuity and consumption in urbanising central Kenya [Apollo – University of Cambridge Repository]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.65545

Purdeková, A. & D. Mwambari (2022) Post-genocide identity politics and colonial durabilities in Rwanda, Critical African Studies, 14:1, 19-37, DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1938404

Rollason, W. (2019) ‘Motorbike People Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets’. Lanham: Lexington Books. 

Thomson, S. 2013. Whispering Truth to Power: Everyday Resistance to Reconciliation in Postgenocide Rwanda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Cite as: Royer, Alexandrine 2024. “‘In Kigali, life is expensive’: how everyday inflation talk gives voice to political and class frustrations” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/alexandrine-royer-in-kigali-life-is-expensivehow-everyday-inflation-talk-gives-voice-to-political-and-class-frustrations/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Steffen Köhn: Tokens of survival: the rise of crypto gaming in Cuba’s inflationary economy

Image 1: Screenshot of elTOQUE’s daily listing of average exchange rates for various currencies and cryptocurrencies on the informal market as of August 28th, 2024

Cuba is currently facing one of its most severe economic crises in decades. The island nation is contending with the compounded effects of a global pandemic, tightening U.S. sanctions, and its own mismanaged monetary reforms, all of which have created a perfect storm of high inflation, scarcity, and social unrest. As the Cuban peso (CUP) loses value at a rapid pace, Cubans are increasingly turning to alternative currencies and unconventional economic activities to survive. Among these, play-to-earn crypto games like Axie Infinity have emerged as an unexpected source of income, offering a connection to the global digital economy for those who do not have access to remittances from abroad. However, the game’s economic model, which requires significant initial investment and relies heavily on exploitative “scholarship” arrangements, ended up reinforcing pre-existing social inequalities rather than addressing them. Moreover, Axie Infinity faced severe inflation issues itself, with the in-game currency devaluing rapidly due to an oversupply. Over time, its structure began to resemble the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme, where new investments were needed to sustain returns for existing players. This forced players to navigate an increasingly unstable digital economy, where opportunities for profit were outweighed by rising risks.

To understand the emergence of play-to-earn games as a significant economic practice in Cuba, we must first grasp the current economic landscape. Cuba’s economy has been hit hard by several overlapping crises. The Covid-19 pandemic brought tourism—the country’s economic backbone—to a near standstill. Concurrently, U.S. sanctions, particularly those tightened under the Trump administration, restricted remittances, cut off access to international financial systems, and further isolated Cuba from global financial flows.

Internally, the Cuban government’s decision to implement the Ordenamiento Monetario in January 2021—intended as a comprehensive monetary reform—eliminated the longstanding dual currency system that had kept the economy afloat. Before this reform, the Cuban peso (CUP) was used for domestic transactions and salaries, while the dollar-pegged convertible peso (CUC) was used for tourism, luxury goods, and international trade, which allowed the government to control access to foreign currency and manage economic disparities. By making the CUP the sole legal tender and devaluing it against the U.S. dollar, the reform triggered runaway inflation. The artificially low exchange rate of the CUP against the dollar could not be sustained, leading to a spiraling devaluation of the national currency.

Amid the financial turmoil, many Cubans are turning to alternative currencies to protect their savings in more stable forms and to manage everyday transactions. Cryptocurrencies, particularly USDT, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar and (theoretically) backed by dollar reserves, have gained significant popularity as a tool for receiving remittances and facilitating cross-border payments. Meanwhile, digital credits—ranging from balances on apps like Zelle and Tropipay to phone credits—emerged as vital tools within Cuba’s expanding informal economy. During the pandemic, the Cuban government introduced its own digital currency, the moneda libremente convertible (MLC), pegged to the dollar and meant to serve as a substitute for foreign currency in state-run stores selling essential goods. The MLC was specifically designed to capture hard currency for the state, as it could only be acquired through foreign currency deposits or remittances. However, as its acceptance became limited to a shrinking number of outlets and a thriving black market developed for exchanging MLC into other currencies, its value eroded, declining sharply against both the U.S. dollar and digital credits denominated in dollars on payment apps.

The Currency Black Market: A Disorderly Landscape

This monetary disorder has led to a burgeoning informal market for currency exchange, which operates largely through digital platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp. Here, Cubans negotiate the value of dollars, euros, MLC credits, and various cryptocurrencies, often using intermediaries to facilitate exchanges. elTOQUE, an independent news outlet based in Miami, has become a key player by publishing the informal exchange rates of these currencies daily. These rates are determined by bots scraping buy and sell offers from major Telegram groups, yet they remain contentious, with frequent accusations of manipulation, particularly from the Cuban government.

Image 2 : Screenshots of elTOQUE’s daily listing of average exchange rates for various currencies and cryptocurrencies on the informal market as of August 28th, 2024.

In this chaotic environment, cryptocurrencies offer another refuge from the collapsing Cuban peso, but they also introduce new complexities, particularly in converting digital assets into usable cash. Many Cubans now use stablecoins like USDT to preserve value and facilitate international payments, while digital platforms have become essential tools for managing remittances and cross-border transactions. However, the real challenge lies in bridging the gap between these digital currencies and local cash. On platforms like Telegram and Revolico, brokers facilitate exchanges from digital tokens to cash, often charging high fees and adding another layer of volatility and risk to an already unstable financial landscape.

Image 3: Listings of currency exchange offers posted in various Telegram groups

Gaming the System: How Axie Infinity Became an Economic Lifeline

Amid Cuba’s ongoing inflationary crisis, an unexpected means of accessing digital tokens emerged: play-to-earn crypto video games like Axie Infinity. Developed by the Vietnamese company Sky Mavis, Axie Infinity allows players to breed, battle, and trade digital pets known as Axies, which are unique digital assets or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) stored on the blockchain, enabling players to own, trade, and speculate with their in-game holdings. The game broke into the mainstream in many low- and lower-middle-income countries in the summer of 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It became a widespread phenomenon across much of the Global South, permitting players to earn substantial income in the game’s cryptocurrency, Smooth Love Potion (SLP). As global lockdowns cut off traditional jobs and informal income opportunities, the game (at least for a while) enabled players in countries like the Philippines, Venezuela, and Indonesia to earn hundreds of dollars per month—often well above their local median wage—and offering economic opportunities that their physical economies could not.

Image 4: Screenshot of a battle in Axie Infinity’s arena mode, where players from around the world compete using their Axies.

For thousands of Cubans, especially those without access to remittances, Axie Infinity quickly became a potential economic fallback. With traditional income sources disrupted by the pandemic and ongoing inflation, the game offers a rare opportunity to earn cryptocurrency, which can then be traded on the black market for pesos or other more stable currencies. However, participating in Axie Infinity is not without its challenges, and many Cuban players have had to navigate a complex landscape of intermediaries, scams, and volatile markets to turn their virtual earnings into real-world value.

Image 5: The study notes of an Axie Infinity scholarship holder

The entry barrier to Axie Infinity is steep. At its peak, in July 2021, even the cheapest team of three Axies required to start playing cost around $1,000—an impossible sum for most Cubans. This led to the emergence of a parallel economy where affluent players and companies, often based in wealthier countries, granted “scholarships” to aspiring players. Gaming guilds emerged on Telegram, offering training sessions and conducting entrance exams for those seeking scholarships. These scholarships involved lending Axies to players who couldn’t afford them in exchange for a share of their earnings, often up to 70 per cent. This system allowed Cuban players to participate in the game, but it also mirrored exploitative labor practices, with the scholars—typically from the Global South—bearing the brunt of the risk while the asset owners in more developed nations took the lion’s share of the profits.

Scholars were required to play for several hours every day, with their performance closely monitored—either by coaches hired by NFT owners to provide training but also to surveil them, or through surveillance software that tracked their activity. In my friend Juan’s guild, there were even two competitive leagues, and members could be relegated like football teams. Those who failed to meet performance targets were quickly replaced by other aspiring players, reinforcing a precarious labor market marked by a harsh hire-and-fire culture. In this context, Axie Infinity’s promise of decentralized and equitable opportunities increasingly resembled a new form of digital serfdom, perpetuating existing inequalities rather than alleviating them.

Trust and Mistrust in the Cuban Crypto Economy

Beyond the game itself, Cuban players encountered significant challenges when trying to convert their in-game earnings into usable currency. Due to U.S. sanctions, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance and Coinbase block users from Cuba, forcing players to depend on informal and often opaque networks for transactions. In the Telegram currency exchange groups where Cubans from across the country participate, the primary challenge was establishing trust, as no one wanted to be the first to send cryptocurrency or fiat money and risk relying on the trading partner to follow through. This led to the development of new intermediaries and trust mechanisms. To mitigate the risk of fraud, some Telegram groups set up their own escrow systems, where admins held funds from both parties for a fee until the exchange was finalized. Other groups introduced a VIP system, granting trusted status to users with multiple successful transactions who provided personal information to the group’s administrator and paid a monthly fee. While these systems offered a semblance of security, they also underscored the inherent contradictions of a supposedly “trustless” blockchain-based economy that, in reality, relied heavily on middlemen and trust-based social networks to work.

Despite the often exploitative working conditions and the complicated process of cashing out game tokens, Cuban Axie Infinity players demonstrated considerable agency in navigating these challenges. They used platforms like Discord or Telegram to create grassroots solidarity networks, actively sharing information about scholarship opportunities and educating others on gaming strategies. This sense of community and mutual support became a crucial resource for many players striving to make the most of the game’s economic opportunities.

For many Cubans, Axie Infinity also represented a rare chance to engage in the global digital economy at a time when Cuban society had only recently come online. It enabled some players to transition from mere participants to asset owners and investors by purchasing their own Axies. Many of the players I interviewed had eventually invested in the game, buying their own digital pets and exploring the speculative potential of this virtual economy. For these players, the game marked their first encounter with a global financial market, pushing them toward speculative behavior and exposing them to its inherent risks. The SLP token—like many cryptocurrencies—proved to be even more volatile than the Cuban peso, making it a highly unpredictable asset. Nevertheless, this volatility did not deter them from hoping to strike it big; rather, it underscored the precarious yet captivating nature of their engagement with digital economies.

Precarious Play

The experience of Cuban Axie Infinity players sheds light on a broader trend in the digital economy: the merging of play, work, and investment in ways that challenge traditional definitions of labor. Concepts like “gamification” (Robson 2015) and “playbor” (Kücklich 2005) have been used to describe how game-like elements are incorporated into non-game contexts to enhance engagement or extract value. However, play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity take this a step further by directly integrating financial incentives into gameplay, creating a highly speculative and precarious form of digital work.

Image 6: Screenshot from the website CoinMarketCap, showing the market trend of Axie’s highly volatile in-game cryptocurrency Smooth Love Potion (SLP).

For Cuban players, the volatility of the SLP token added another layer of uncertainty. In the early days, some players earned substantial sums, far exceeding local wages. But as new player growth slowed after the hype in the summer of 2021, the game’s revenue—and thus the value of in-game assets—plummeted. The in-game inflation began to mirror real-world inflation: the more players sought to extract value from the game without reinvesting, the faster the currency’s value declined. When North Korean hackers stole $620 million from the game’s blockchain in March 2022, the already fragile Axie economy collapsed further, leaving many players with worthless tokens (Harwell 2022).

The Fragile Promise of Blockchain

The case of Axie Infinity in Cuba exposes the limits of the promises made by blockchain evangelists (e.g. Tapscott and Tapscott 2016, Domjan et al. 2021, Kshetri 2023). Far from bringing financial inclusion and economic empowerment to the Global South, the game’s ecosystem often reproduced existing inequalities and inflationary dynamics. In theory, blockchain technology is supposed to offer a decentralized, transparent alternative to traditional financial systems. Yet, in practice, Cuban players found themselves entangled in a web of intermediaries, trust-based networks, and volatile markets, which reinforced rather than dismantled power imbalances.

The rise and fall of Axie Infinity in Cuba provides a stark reminder of the limitations and risks inherent in new digital economies. This became especially evident when Axie Infinity’s in-game inflation eventually surpassed the inflation in Cuba’s real economy that had driven many players to the game in the first place. While the game initially offered a lifeline to some, it also exposed the precarious nature of digital work, where players are subject to volatile earnings, insecure contracts, and exploitative conditions. The experience of Cuban players thus challenges the narrative that blockchain technology will bring about a more equitable global economy. Instead, these systems can easily replicate and even exacerbate existing inequalities, creating new forms of digital labor exploitation and financial speculation.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig.

Steffen Köhn is a filmmaker and associate professor of visual and multimodal anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the author of: Island In the Net. Emergent Digital Culture and its Social Consequences in Post-Castro Cuba (forthcoming with Princeton University Press) as well as Mediating Mobility. Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration (Wallflower/Columbia University Press 2016). His films have been screened at the Berlinale, Slamdance, Rotterdam International Film Festival, BFI Film Festival London, and the Word Film Festival Montreal, among others.

References

Domjan, Paul, Gavin Serkin, Brandon Thomas, John Toshack. 2021. Chain Reaction: How Blockchain Will Transform the Developing World. Basel:Springer International Publishing.

Harwell, Drew. “U.S. Links Axie Infinity Crypto Heist to North Korean Hackers.” The Washington Post, April 14, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/14/us-links-axie-crypto-heist-north-korea/.

Kshetri, Nir. 2023. Blockchain in the Global South: Opportunities and Challenges for Businesses and Societies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kücklich, Julian 2005. Precarious playbour: Modders and the digital games industry. fibreculture 5 (1): 1-5.

Robson, Karen Kirk Plangger, Jan H. Kietzmann, Ian McCarthy,and Leyland Pitt. 2015. Is it all a game? Understanding the principles of gamification. Business Horizons 58 (4): 411-420.

Tapscott, Don and Alex Tapscott. 2016. Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World. New York: Penguin.

Cite as: Köhn, Steffen 2024 “Tokens of survival: the rise of crypto gaming in Cuba’s inflationary economy” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/steffen-kohn-tokens-of-survival-the-rise-of-crypto-gaming-in-cubas-inflationary-economy/

Blog, Right-wing Populism

Pablo Semán and Ariel Wilkis: Rebellion of the bastards: the rise of the extreme right in Argentina

The growth of extreme right-wing forces in the Argentine political process expresses the combination of global trends and specific trends associated with local political history. It also expresses the need to understand the embeddedness of these political preferences in the social experiences shaped by the generalized decline of the middle and popular classes, sedimented in a long cycle of forty years and currently intensified by the derivations of the pandemic and the leaps in annual inflation in 2017 and 2021 (in which it passed, respectively, from 25% to 50% per annum and from 50% to 100% per annum).


It is impossible to deny the correspondence with those right wing processes taking place in different world regions and countries (see Engelen, 2023; Henkel et al., 2019; Kalb, 2020; Pasieka, 2018). The longer-term trend that explains these triumphs is the complex and contradictory reconfiguration of economics and politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall, if we need an iconic date. The global dynamics of capitalism no longer just erode national democracy but have started to generate alternative proposals to re-establish social order on a national scale, underwritten by the cultural fragmentation and economic discontent produced by economic (neo)liberalization.

Image 1: A 2002 demonstration against the financial “Corralito” in La Plata, Argentina, photo by Barcex

The expressions of the extreme right represent a form of illiberalism claiming political institutions at the limits of democracy that would overcome the fragmentation of national units suffering from the international mobility of capital. The accumulation of unresolved problems is changing the social structure and the political process: the rising vulnerability of working classes leads to the abandonment of traditional parties. The result is radicalizing tendencies within the elites as well as the replacement of incumbent political elites with new ‘populist’ ones.

Capitalism and democracy have become divorced from each other. Now, the crisis of the national states and their political systems has finally become politically visible, in a deep and organic sense.

What happens in Argentina or Brazil, in this context, involves patterns that are different from  the dynamics of the northern hemisphere.  In the region there are no transnational institutional aggregations such as the European Union. In Europe, the EU is both a target and a moderator of the illiberal turns in Poland, Italy or Hungary. The supranational powers, without being totally determinant, tend to moderate the character and pace of political and economic reforms. A coup d’état like those that occurred in Honduras (2009), Paraguay (2012) Bolivia (2019), or Brazil (2023) is highly improbable in Europe today.

This is due not only to a difference in the political regimes, but also to a socio-economic process that has been producing especially in South America a deep discontent among a very volatile electorate. In countries such as Brazil and Argentina, the transitions to democracy in the 1980s were accompanied by hyperinflation and external debt crises, followed by monetarist stabilization and exclusionary ‘modernization policies’ in the 1990s, followed by new compensatory policies in the 2000s. The overall result of these processes was transformation of social structures marked by the growth of inequality, the growth of economically fragile popular classes, and the polarization of the middle classes. The long cycle of social transformations in these countries has coexisted with short cycles such as the 2000s where an emerging “new” middle class experienced a social mobility. As a result, in countries such as Argentina and Brazil the states have less capacity to respond to growing popular demands, which themselves tend to be more urgent than in the global North.

Analysts have noted a rightward lurch in the political options available to Argentine voters in recent years. In the analysis, however, insufficient attention is given to the impact of the popular experience of high inflation: the constant tightening of belts, growing household debt, an inability to budget, a political tunnel vision focused exclusively on inflation, with great impact on the expectations for the future, which are  increasingly negative and desperate.

The pandemic triggered inflation in countries around the world that had experienced price stability for decades. In 2022, the war in Ukraine drove inflation even higher. The case of Argentina was exception: the country had been suffering from spiraling inflation for over a decade. After a relative drop in inflation in 2020, in which annual inflation reached 36.1%, Argentina suffered another year of high inflation (50.9%) in 2021 (INDEC, 2021). In 2022, it reached 94.8% for the year, leaving Argentina fifth on the ranking of countries with the highest inflation worldwide behind Venezuela (305.7%), Zimbabwe (244%), Lebanon (142%), and Sudan (102%) (Infobae, 2023). Local factors exacerbated the situation: a shortage of dollars (a historical problem magnified by the pandemic), the pressure from the IMF to address the fiscal deficit eliminating subsidies to public services and a monetary culture shaped by inflationary inertia contributed as well.

This inflationary dynamic intensifies the erosion of politics by multiplying the mismatch between social demands and state capacities. At this point it is necessary to underline the socio-political element that is part of the inflationary dynamics. The trade unions in the first Peronism (1946-1956), and the trade unions and social organizations in the later Peronism that was part of the “progressive wave” of the 2000s, have been the political agency of social and economic protections that guaranteed welfare levels for the working class. The flip side of these arrangements has been a lack of foreign exchange earnings (external restriction is the constant of the Argentine economy since the middle of the last century) to sustain them. Nor did the unions and social organizations have the necessary political strength to transform the performance of the economy. The scarcity of foreign exchange has turned the dollar price over time into the anchor of all prices in the economy without it being a dollarized economy in the strict sense of the term (Luzzi and Wilkis, 2023). The chronic devaluations of the Argentine peso – and the concomitant inflation – are the short term escape from the structural contradiction between strong working class forces on the one hand and an economic organization that hollows out their effective power at the same time.  

At the time of writing these notes and six months before the presidential elections, the libertarian candidate Javier Milei has a vote intention of around 20-25%. He is the main promoter of the dollarization of the Argentine economy. It is in this context that the rise of candidate Milei can be understood.  His position implies the rejection of “everything that is there” and its replacement by a utopian free competition that rewards the best without the parasitic intervention of the state. This program of denunciation channels towards the Right the multiple contemporary dissatisfactions. On the one hand, it is not clear at this stage of the electoral process that Milei will either triumph or just survive as a candidate. On the other hand, it is clear that he has extended the possibilities of political articulation so that other candidates, who perhaps have more potential, can follow his path. It reflects the popular exhaustion with inflation, relegating to a second place demands that used to occupy a central place in the public agenda, such as unemployment or insecurity. Dollarization continues and completes the exclusionary and polarizing dynamics of the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s. The promise of a stable currency is going to have a very high social cost.

The neo-liberal demands that after the 2001 crisis in Argentina had been left almost without an audience, are returning with a vengeance: dollarization is inevitably accompanied by demands for the privatization of institutions such as education and health care. They celebrate individual initiative and denounce the crisis of public services as of their own making. The mood of society towards the performance of the state – increasingly questioned before the pandemic, much more so by the end of it, and even more intensely after – is very favorable to the right wing libertarian privatizers: “si no me vas ayudar por lo menos no me molestes” (“if you are not going to help me, at least don’t bother me”). The promise of dollarization suits these sentiments. The U.S. dollar is a currency devoid of the arbitrariness of the Argentine state (and the governmental elite that commands it), a state that is perceived as guilty of disorganizing and worsening daily life through its inability to provide stability to the national peso. In a society in which people did the impossible to get through the long months of lockdown while weathering inflation, the pandemic left people with the distinct feeling that the state was coming up dramatically short. The controversial dynamics of an unknown virus affected the state and rendered it increasingly illegitimate. The pandemic, by damaging the civic bond of trust with the state, strengthened the anarcho-libertarian thesis.

Image 2: Javier Milei in 2014 at the World Economic Forum on Latina America in Panama City, photo by World Economic Forum

The pandemic and spiraling inflation are in Argentina intertwined processes in which sacrifice became a common currency. Argentine society emerged from the pandemic with an ideology that was family-oriented, anti-state, and anti-politics. More people had been convinced that government spending was the primary source of inflation, demanding in some cases extreme state cutbacks. The rise of right-leaning or extreme right options, the declining interest in politics, and a growing dissatisfaction with the political class all predate the pandemic and the high inflation, but the latter have profoundly accelerated existing trends.

The Right has renewed and sharpened its own repertoire of actions. During the last 12 years, a political consensus that established certain prohibitions began to be explicitly challenged: notes of racism, of vindication of the last military dictatorship, of macho vindictiveness in the face of gender agendas that many had believed to be in retreat are reborn with force in the public space. However, the growth of the Right is not only due to the ideological radicalism of some of its promoters, who have accumulated significant political capital to establish themselves as an autonomous force in relation to the mainstream right wing that governed in the period 2015-2019. That growth is also predicated on the weariness of the voters of the traditional parties (Left and Right).

Despite its cultural predominance, Peronism today in government has been losing since at least 2008 the battle for the interpretation of economic life in growing sectors of the population. A social majority, which includes part of the popular classes, identifies with its antipode in a dialectic in which the libertarian Right takes on a specific local meaning.

A great part of this electorate cannot be described as furious, pragmatic or reactive to all political positions equally. They want to improve economically, they believe in their own efforts, they demand order and market. And they do so less because of agreement with right-wing intellectuals and publicists than because of a long experience in which those right-wing ideas seem to become preferable.  There is an authoritarian liberalism which, following Richard Hoggart (1957), must be seen as a contemporary development of the subaltern classes. These, contrary to what the political elites expect, especially those of the left, embrace the Right. This is also a  reaction against the deference that the progressive forces have tried to impose on it, presuming moral superiority and capacity for leadership beyond the prosaic issues of everyday life.  Thus, the process in which inclusive consensus is dissolved clearly contains a popular reaction against the Left progressivism of the traditional Peronist leadership.

Politics in Argentina has a specific intensity that makes it more than a simple reflection of what is happening in the world. In the 1970s, few countries in the world took state terrorism as far as Argentina. In the 1980s, the trial of the defeated dictators became an exemplary case for human rights. In the 1990s, the intensity of the neoliberal experiment in the country was exceptional when compared to Brazil and Mexico in terms of the scope of privatizations and economic and financial openness. It is worth asking whether this right-wing emergence will not have the same exceptional intensity as its precedents. The antecedents are already in place.

Pablo Semán  is Professor at Universidad Nacional de San Martín and principal researcher at CONICET.

Ariel Wilkis is Professor and Dean at Escuela IDAES, Universidad de San Martín and  researcher at CONICET.

References

Engelen, Ewald 2023. “Another ‘populist’ shake-up in the Netherlands: the BBB revolt” Focaalblog 24 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/04/24/ewald-engelen-another-populist-shake-up-in-the-netherlands-the-bbb-revolt/

Henkel, Heiko, Sindre Bangstad, and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen. 2019. “The politics of affect: Anthropological perspectives on the rise of far-right and right-wing populism in the West.” FocaalBlog, 14 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2019/03/14/heiko-henkel-and-sindre-bangstad-the-politics-of-affect-anthropological-perspectives-on-the-rise-of-far-right-and-right-wing-populism-in-the-west/

Hoggart, Richard (1957) The uses of literacy: aspects of working-class life with special references to publications and entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus

INDEC (2021) “Índice Precio al Consumidor”, Vol. 6, No 1, december 2021

Infobae (2023) “La Argentina termino cuarta inflación del mundo”, 23 January 2023. https://www.infobae.com/economia/2023/01/13/la-argentina-termino-con-la-cuarta-inflacion-mas-alta-del-mundo-en-2022-detras-de-venezuela-zimbabue-y-libano/

Luzzi, Mariana and Wilkis, Ariel (2023) Dollar: How the U.S. Dollar Became a Popular Currency in Argentina (1930-2019). Alburqueque: New Mexico University Press.

Kalb, Don. 2020. “Covid, Crisis, and the Coming Contestations.” FocaalBlog, 1 June. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/01/don-kalb-covid-crisis-and-the-coming-contestations/

Pasieka, Agnieszka. 2018. “Who is afraid of fascists? The Polish independence march and the rise of the (far?) right.” FocaalBlog, 12 December. www.focaalblog.com/2018/12/12/who-is-afraid-of-fascists-the-polish-independence-march-and-the-rise-of-the-far-right.

Cite as: Semán, Pablo and Wilkis, Ariel 2023. “Rebellion of the bastards: the rise of the extreme right in Argentina” Focaalblog May 11. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/05/11/pablo-seman-and-ariel-wilkis-rebellion-of-the-bastards-the-rise-of-the-extreme-right-in-argentina

Blog, Right-wing Populism

Ewald Engelen: Another ‘populist’ shake-up in the Netherlands: the BBB revolt

The shock among the Dutch chattering classes on 16 March was palpable. The right-populist Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) – established in 2019 by a small communications firm, bankrolled by the powerful Dutch agrifood complex and led by a former journalist for the meat industry – had in one go massively increased its vote share in the country’s provincial elections. It is now the largest party in all twelve provinces, and expected to achieve the same status in Senate in April. This would give BBB huge veto power at both national and local levels, potentially bringing an already hesitant green transition programme to a standstill. Faced with this prospect, an irate commentariat has begun to denounce the farmers as enemies of green progress, and speculate that voting restrictions – on the elderly, the lower educated, those in rural constituencies – might be necessary to override their resistance.

The casus belli for the farmers’ revolt was a 2019 ruling by the Dutch Supreme Court that the government had breached its EU obligations to protect 163 natural areas against emissions from nearby agricultural activities. This prompted the centre-right coalition government, led by Mark Rutte, to impose a nationwide speed limit of 100 km/h on highways and cancel a wide array of building projects intended to alleviate supply shortages on the Dutch housing market. Yet it soon became apparent that such measures could only be a short-term stopgap, since transport and construction contributed a pittance to national nitrogen emissions while agriculture made up a whopping 46%. A structural solution would therefore have to involve a substantial reduction of livestock. The suggestion long put forward by the peripheral ‘Party for the Animals’, to slash half of the aggregate Dutch livestock by expropriating 500 to 600 major emitters, was suddenly on the table. The unthinkable had become thinkable.

Image 1: Dutch farmers protesting in The Hague in October 2019, photo by Steven Lek

The number of Dutch workers employed in agricultural activities has declined precipitously since 1945, from around 40% during the Great War to only 2% today. Yet, over the same period, the Netherlands has become the second biggest food exporter in the world after the US. Its highly capitalized meat and dairy industry plays a pivotal role in global supply chains, which makes its ecological footprint unsustainably large. Hence the gradual realization among the Dutch political class – accelerated by the Supreme Court ruling – that meeting climate goals meant reorienting the national economy. For the rural and small-town oriented Christian Democrats in the coalition that was hard to swallow; for the eco-modernist, meritocratic social liberals in the coalition (D66) this came naturally; while for Mark Rutte’s own People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, even though naturally in favor of ‘growth’, it was simply the pragmatic thing to do. As one centrist MP remarked, ‘The Netherlands can’t be the country that feeds the world while at the same time shitting itself.’

These green proposals triggered a wave of farmer protests – farmers blocking roads with their tractors, occupying squares and other public spaces, breaking into government buildings and turning up at the homes of politicians – as well as the formation of the BBB. After a brief pause during lockdown, the movement has now reached new levels of intensity. Since spring 2022, along the roads and highways leading into the forgotten parts of the Netherlands, farmers have hung innumerable inverted national flags: a symbol of their discontent, sprouting up like mushrooms after an autumnal shower.

Almost one fifth of the electorate, approximately 1.4 million people, turned out to vote for the BBB – a significantly larger number than the 180.000 farmers who comprise its core constituency. This suggests that more is at stake here than simple nimbyism. Pensioners, the vocationally trained and the precariously employed are overrepresented among the BBB’s supporters, and its largest electoral gains were in peripheral, non-urban areas which have been hit by falling public investment over a long time. Such groups have rallied around a class of farmers who present themselves as victims, but who are in fact among the most wealthy and politically well-connected in the country: one in five of them is a millionaire. It is clear that this heterogeneous bloc could only be assembled as a result of deep disenchantment with mainstream politics in the Netherlands – which has long been blighted by the arrogance and incompetence of its ruling stratum.

A number of historical factors laid the groundwork for the farmers’ movement. First, the Netherlands underwent an extremely rapid neoliberal makeover since the early 1980s, resulting in the fire sale of public services, the marketization of childcare, healthcare and higher education, a steep decline in social housing, the emergence of globalized banks and pension funds, and one of the most flexible labour markets in the EU, with one in three employees on precarious contracts. Next, the 2008 financial crisis led to one of the most expensive banking rescues in per capita terms, followed by six years of austerity which punished the poor and served to redistribute wealth from everyone else to the rich. The four lockdowns imposed between 2020 and 2022 had the same effect: workers lost their jobs, saw their incomes fall and died in greater numbers. Rising consumer prices, sparked by the war in Ukraine, subsequently pushed many Dutch households in the provinces into fuel poverty.

All this was interspersed with constant bureaucratic failures across a range of government departments: childcare, primary education, housing, the tax office, transport and gas extraction. At the same time, regressive subsidies were handed out to middle-class environmentalists to reimburse heat pumps, solar panels and Teslas, which of course only they could pre-finance. Add a constant trickle of high-handed insults about the lower classes from the putative experts who dominate public debate, and you end up with a festering and combustible mixture of resentments. The situation was finally ignited in 2019 by the mentioned court ruling, after which latent regional-cultural identifications of the provinces against the city (the ‘Randstad’, the Western urban conurbation that accommodates circa half the Dutch population) provided the raw symbolic material for the farmers’ adversarial narrative: core versus periphery, elites versus masses, vegans versus meat-eaters. With the help of some savvy political entrepreneurs, this message began to resonate far beyond the farmlands.

The French writer Houellebecq once wrote that the Netherlands is not a country but a limited liability corporation. It perfectly captures the view of Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy. For thirteen years now it has reimagined the Netherlands as a European Singapore on the Rhine. It is a form of mercantilist neoliberalism that aims to attract as much foreign capital, both financial and human, to the Netherlands as possible. The tax rule book is arranged with that goal in mind, transforming the Netherlands into one of the largest tax havens in the world. The social security regime has been redesigned to serve highly educated expats, turning the city of Amsterdam into an Anglophone outpost where shopping and dining requires one to speak English, while refugees and asylum seekers are locked away near some of the poorest villages in the Dutch outback. Public investment has been rechanneled into the shiny metropolitan areas in the West, while largely surpassing the peripheries along the German border. Last week it took me nearly four hours to go from Arnhem to Veenhuizen in the North of the Netherlands by public transportation, a distance of less than hundred miles.

As in the UK where everything goes to London and the home counties, this was legitimated by the mercantilist narrative of the triumph of the city and the creative class, peddled by hip geographers like Richard Florida and Edward Glazer, that told post-ideological, neoliberal politicians to stop backing losers and start picking winners and steer massive amounts of public funding to cities. For that is where human capital resides, so the story goes, and that is what is key to national economic success. And so it went: while hospitals, schools, fire stations and bus lines slowly but gradually disappeared from the periphery, the metropolitan core was sprinkled with massive public investments in glittering metro lines etc, Amsterdam on top.

The one that has overseen it all, Mark Rutte, who is in the race to become the longest sitting head of state in the two hundred years history of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, fits to a tee with the reckless opportunists so wonderfully described  by the New Zealand sociologist Aeron Davies (2018): Rutte is the ultimate expert in surviving the political game but totally lacks the vision that is required in times of crisis. In fact, Mark Rutte famously quipped that voters who want vision should better go to an optometrist.

The disaffection of a growing slice of the electorate is not a performative effect of media framing, as some maintain, but is based in real, material neglect. As was hammered home two days after the election results came in by a report from one of the Dutch public think tanks: there are large discrepancies in life expectancy between core and the periphery of the country as well as huge gaps in terms of wellbeing and trust in politicians (2013). The report concluded that this was the unintended effect of decades of underinvestment in the provinces: the places that, in the worldview of people like Mark Rutte, do not matter

Demography, balanced budgets, the euro, Covid-19, war, climate change: these are the imponderabilia that centrist politicians, backed by their battery of experts, have used to discipline voters into submission. Nitrogen emissions fit seamlessly into this technocratic pattern. The plan to halve livestock numbers in the Netherlands was not drawn up after a lengthy process of democratic debate; it was a summary decision made by politicians hiding behind an unaccountable judiciary and a set of scientific numbers.

Hence, it may be necessary to revise the famous observation by the German poet Heinrich Heine: ‘In Holland, everything happens fifty years late’. Here, it seems, the backlash against the green technocracy has come early (though France’s yellow vests had been there already). The Dutch (and French) conjuncture foreshadows the fate of other countries in the global north – as centrist governments, striving to assert their green credentials, begin to make heavy-handed policy reforms with major redistributive consequences. This, after forty years of neoliberal upward redistribution, and in a situation where governing elites in the preceding decade had already felt very uncertain in the face of the ‘populist’ revolts.

What Andreas Malm (2016)calls the ‘energetic regime’ of global capitalism has so far taken up most of our political attention; but as the environmental fallout of its ‘caloric regime’ becomes impossible to ignore, livestock farming (among other forms of industrial agriculture) will enter the crosshairs of governments and climate activists. Recent data from Eurostat show that livestock densities are particularly high in Denmark, Flanders, Piemonte, Galicia, Brittany, Southern Ireland and Catalonia. Soon enough, these regions will have to introduce measures similar to those currently under discussion in the Netherlands. And if the Dutch case is anything to go by, technocracy will hardly do the trick. A state that has imposed privatization, flexibilization, austerity, disinvestment and regressive environmental subsidies on its citizens for years cannot expect to be trusted when it comes to climate politics. Instead, it will have to redress the ruinous effects of these policies, while slowly building support for the green transition through a process of engagement that does not shy away from democratic disagreement and the hard work that entails.

Ewald Engelen is professor of financial geography at the University of Amsterdam and a feature writer for De Groene Amsterdammer.

This text first appeared on NLR’s Sidecar (6 April 2023).

References

Davis, Aeron. 2018. Reckless opportunists: Elites at the end of the Establishment. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.

RLI. 2023. Elke regio telt! Een nieuwe aanpak van verschillen tussen regio’s, https://www.rli.nl/publicaties/2023/advies/elke-regio-telt

Cite as: Engelen, Ewald 2023. “Another ‘populist’ shake-up in the Netherlands: the BBB revolt” Focaalblog 24 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/04/24/ewald-engelen-another-populist-shake-up-in-the-netherlands-the-bbb-revolt/

Blog

Giorgos Poulimenakos & Dimitris Dalakoglou: Disaster Infrastructures and the Inverted Shock Doctrine in Greece

On March 1st 2023, an impromptu protest rally took place outside the headquarters of Greece’s only railway company, Hellenic Trains (HT). HT is the passenger carrier of the recently privatized and formerly publicly owned carrier of Hellenic Organization of Railways. The word ‘Assassins’ and the phrase ‘Your profits, our deaths’ were written on the walls of the headquarters amidst clashes with the police.

On the morning of that day, Greece had woken up to devastating news. During the night, a passenger train headed to Thessaloniki from Athens, mostly carrying students, collided with a freight train traveling in the opposite direction. The collision was so fierce that the first two wagons were literarily pulverized, leaving 57 dead. As it turned out, an inexperienced Stationmaster with limited equipment at his disposal had manually put the two trains on the same track by mistake. For a full twelve minutes, passengers and personnel on both trains were on collision course without any human or non-human intelligence detecting it. In the following days much more serious and larger rallies and riots followed.

 ‘Mitsotakis, fuck you!’ – the original condition

The crowd, amongst others, was chanting a melodic slogan ‘Mitsotakis, fuck yοu!’. This vulgar slogan had first emerged during the big forest fires of 2021 when the wooded northern region of Evia Island and the forests of Parnitha mountain in the north of Athens had been abandoned to burn due to a peculiar “general evacuation” policy. New Democracy, the conservative governing party, had won the elections of 2019 to an extent by utilizing another horrible catastrophe, the fires of Eastern Attica in 2018. At that time, New Democracy blamed the governing SYRIZA party for failing to save the lives of the 103 who died in the fire. However, instead of trying to reinforce the civil protection infrastructures and increase the budget for fire brigades and forestry service, New Democracy has preferred to recruit a few thousand new police officers and thus enforce a heavy policing of forest fires. With the new policy, entire municipalities are evacuated by force so as to avoid deaths by all means in order to come out with a lower body count than the previous government.

The consequence of this policy of evacuation and abandonment was not only the destruction of forests, but also of agricultural land, flocks of animals, bees and entire villages that burned to ashes as nobody was there to protect them (on the fires and the archaeological heritage see Poulimenakos & Dalakoglou 2021 in FocaalBlog). As TV channels sent their crews to report from the evacuated towns and villages of Evia, someone videobombed a live broadcast and stood behind the reporter shouting, ‘Mitsotaki, fuck you!’, in a spontaneous expression of anger towards the evacuation policy that had destroyed his livelihood. Soon, “Mitsotakis, fuck you!”, became a slogan with a melody, chanted by football fans during games and by audiences at music concerts. To understand the rapid nationwide spread and popularity of this anthem, we now take a closer look at the New Democracy government record.

The Mitsotakis government had applied the same principle of minimum death tolls at any cost during the Covid-19 pandemic by enforcing one of the hardest lockdowns in the western world with curfews and severely restricted mobility under state surveillance. For many months, every citizen had to send a text message to the Ministry of Interior Affairs and give a “valid” reason before leaving their house. Defectors were heavily fined by the police. As with the forest fires, now the systematic destruction of health care infrastructures under the austerity regime imposed after the financial crash was offset by calling in the police as a civil protection mechanisms and the government’s main tool for controlling the pandemic.

“Mitsotakis, fuck you!” – the current condition

These structural continuities of policing (rather than resolving) an infrastructural crisis explain why one week after the train crash tragedy, on March 8th, Greece saw the biggest popular mobilization since the 2010-2015 era of insurrections against the imposition of structural adjustment programs by the IMF-EU-ECB troika. The main rallying cry of the protests was the phrase “text me when you get there”, a reference to the overprotective Greek family relations symbolized by frequent parental requests to send messages when travelling (even for over-30s). Now used by the protesters, the phrase is a tragic and powerful reference to mourning parents who will never receive a reply from their children who were on the train.

Image 1: Photo from one of the many demonstrations on the 8th of March. The sign reads: “text me when you get there”. Source: alphavita blogspot

The protests were so massive and persistent that they forced the Prime Minister to postpone the upcoming elections for an undetermined period. Meanwhile, the government’s political communication experts massively underestimated the train tragedy’s impact on Greek public opinion. Mitsotakis’ initial government statement blamed the accident on the stationmaster and omitted any reference to years of chronic under-investment in traffic infrastructures during the privatization of the railway company. This only increased public anger. An alliance of trade unions declared a general strike, whilst pupils occupied their schools and students their universities. Within five days, the government’s public relations experts advised Mitsotakis to accept partial responsibility to calm things down. Yet again the obnoxiousness and arrogance of the PM and his cabinet led to another PR catastrophe when Mitsotakis stated that the 57 victims of the train crash had ‘sacrificed’ themselves in order to improve national railways, flanked by the Minister for Development who called the 57 deaths ‘an opportunity’ for the country. With no time left for the government or the railway company to come up with another damage control strategy, people on social media, in neighborhoods and work places saw the train crash as an emblem of the precarization of everyday life after more than 13 years of extreme neoliberal government budget cuts.

“Don’t you dare to put the blame on an isolated human error”, or, “we live by chance in this country”, and, “this was not an accident but a murder”, were popular expressions that linked mourning and anger with a demand for exposure of underlying causes of the incident such as chronic degradation of railway infrastructures, budget cuts, staff shortages, lack of automated security systems that could correct human errors and prevent accidents. The poor state of other hard infrastructures came to light, contradicting the neoliberal mantra that service standard would skyrocket after privatizations. The German-owned airports in Greece’s peripheral cities suffer from staff and electronic equipment shortages while foreign equity investment in the Chinese-owned port of Piraeus never reached the promised level. The carefully crafted hegemonic narrative of private sector supremacy over the old state-controlled economy that had gradually gained control of hearts and minds (Mavris 2017) since the Greek crisis fell apart like a house of cards. Recent opinion polls show a reversal of political preferences with the ruling party losing significant ground amongst a general decline of trust in capitalist democracy.

Greece’s Inverted Shock Doctrine

What is happening in Greece today seems to be the exact opposite of what Naomi Klein argued in her stellar book on the “Shock doctrine” (2007). According to Klein, the severity of an immense collective trauma leads to numbness and disorientation that freezes collective action and presents excellent opportunities for the ruling classes to impose otherwise highly unpopular policies. In Greece, disorientation and numbness characterized society during the long period of inflation, privatizations, budget cuts, and impoverishment since 2008. Yet, these processes seemed abstract, confusingly linked to both local and global economic processes, and, hence, difficult to pinpoint in space and time. That vagueness certainly ended with the collective trauma of the train crash. The tragic crumble of a very material and tangible element of public transport infrastructure, similar to the earlier case of the Evia Island forest fires, turned into a metonymy for the crumbling relations between the Greek public, society, on the one hand, and the alliance of private capital and the state apparatus on the other hand. As we know from ethnographic research, “infrastructures are a principle materialization of the relationship between people (citizens and non-citizens alike) and otherwise abstract state and supra-state authorities” (Dalakoglou 2016:823). Infrastructures consist of the realm where the social contract between a state and its citizenry is taking tangible forms and is felt in the everyday life. It is the realm where the game of hegemony is most likely to be gained or challenged (Srnicek 2014).

Another crucial dimension of the conjuncture within which the massive mobilizations against the state-capital ruling class alliance now take place is that in recent weeks Greeks learned that for the first time in history residential properties are no longer protected by law from dispossession even at rather insignificant household debt levels. The Greek Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of private equity funds, allowing property auctions to redeem household loans purchased from banks as initial lenders, leaving hundreds of thousands who have struggled to repay their mortgages in despair about their future and another crucial aspect of the national social fabric in distress.

The residential house in Greece is more than bricks and mortar that put a roof over one’s head. It represents intra-generational solidarity and strong family bonds, with parents struggling to buy a house to provide economic security for their children. In other words, the house represents a form of informal social security provided by the family rather than the state. Typical to the substitution of an absent welfare state with informal family solidarity in Mediterranean societies, Greece never had significant numbers of council housing like the UK for example. Family solidarity provided a safety net in difficult times and certainly so during the recent 13-years long crisis with people in their 30s or even 40s living with their parents or grandparents.

Infinite density and the specificity of neoliberal austerity

We argue that the tragic train crash made visible the specific and tangible failure of public infrastructure and thus gave austerity specificity in time and space. The disaster encapsulates an “infinite density” of societal deadlock between the protagonists of privatization and austerity on the one hand and the very fabric of the social contract in Greece on the other hand, in which every form of social consensus is collapsing. With the neoliberal state’s privatized public services failing to fulfill the promises of upgraded public infrastructures to the benefit all and the informal forms of social reproduction gradually dismantled, the Greek nation-state moves towards a power vacuum. It is no coincidence that the majority of protesters are young people from the so-called generation z. This generations feels that all aspects of the social contract are expiring and they will not enjoy the benefits and stability of the public sector that their parents had. Instead, they will have low-paid jobs in the private sector and will probably not inherit a house to live in because they cannot afford to pay the increased inheritance taxes (Knight 2018) or because their parent’s house will be disposed by private equity funds. The train accident made shockingly evident that in today’s Greece even a routine train journey is not safe, that nobody “is there” for the people. “We live by chance in this country”, one of the protest slogans states.

Yet, a careful observer of public transport users after the train disaster sees this realization of state negligence turn into an increased care for each other. People now help older passengers and others in need on and off busses in the absence of special ramps. They talk to each other and give courage to each other for the day ahead while ranting against the government (perhaps even using the public slogans discussed in this article). “We are the infrastructures” is what we are often told during recent ethnographic research. Maybe this new confidence will create a vision of new social organization beyond the state, capital and also beyond the family. One new slogan points in this direction; “Mono o laos tha sosei ton lao” (“only people can save the people”).

References

Dalakoglou, D. (2016) “Infrastructural gap: Commons, State and Anthropology. City, 20:6, 822-831, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2016.1241524.

Dalakoglou, D. and Poulimenakos, G. (2021). “The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%.” FocaalBlog, 30 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/09/30/dimitris-dalakoglou-georgos-poulimenakos-the-past-is-on-fire/

Klein, N. (2007) The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. London: Allen Lane.

Knight , D M 2018 , “The desire for disinheritance in austerity Greece “, Focaal , vol. 80 , pp. 30-42 . https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2018.800103

Mavris, G. (2017) “The Rise of Conservatism: Political Ideologies in Greece after the Memorandum” (in Greek), available online at https://www.mavris.gr/4943/political-ideology/.

Srnicek, N. (2014) “Infrastructures and Hegemony: The Matter of Struggle” in Fall Semester. Available at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56ec53dc9f7266dd86057f72/t/581f3f704402439b560ff0b4/1478442864809/BookletNS.pdf

Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is director and PI of the research project infra-demos (funded from NWO-Vidi grant) and co-director of the Lab on Infrastructures Sustainability and the Commons.

Giorgos Poulimenakos holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology from Panteion University and a MA from University of Sussex, UK. He is currently a PhD fellow in the ERC-funded project PORTS, based in the department of social anthropology of the University of Oslo. He is investigating the increasing significance of ports and maritime logistics in globalized, contemporary capitalism through the case study of Piraeus, an emerging Greek port in the global market bought recently by Chinese interests.

Cite as: Dalakoglou, Dimitris & Poulimenakos, Giorgos 2023. “Disaster Infrastructures and the Inverted Shock Doctrine in Greece” Focaalblog 14 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/04/14/giorgos-poulimenakos-dimitris-dalakoglou-disaster-infrastructures-and-the-inverted-shock-doctrine-in-greece/