In Greece, during the summer of 2021, we saw again a
proliferation of wildfires that went on for days, like in 2020. While the
climate change argument makes sense, at the same time Greece has experienced
wildfires for many decades now. In the post-dictatorial Greek popular
imaginary, fire represents the creative destruction process of a violent
disjunctive modernization, led by a quasi-illicit capitalism based on the
construction boom. Across Greece, one can hear stories about great wildfires
that flattened forests and green mountainsides only to see villas, casinos and
tourist resorts growing in their place some years later. Tied to the monolithic
emphasis on an economic growth strategy based almost entirely on tourist
services, wildfires over the last decades have facilitated the expansion of
tourist infrastructures and the built environment. The systematic exploitation
of gray areas (parathirakia/παραθυράκια) in Greek environmental law and urban
planning law have facilitated these opportunities (see Dalakoglou and Kallianos
2019). Factual or not, such arguments have been enhanced during the recent
wildfires, as many informants of the infra-demos project are noticing that
during the early years of the financial crisis (2010-2016) when real estate,
tourism and infrastructures investment saw a drop, one also witnessed a
noticeable decrease in wildfires, for the first time in decades. Although we
cannot confirm such datasets on wildfires, if one takes as case study the ways
that the state protects archaeological sites from wildfires and other risks,
there is arguably an implied link with specific shifts in the Greek state’s
touristic growth strategies.
Antiquities on Fire
In one of these usual wildfires in August 2020, some shocking news came to the attention of the Greek public. The famous Lion Gate of Mycenae, erected in 1250 BC, was set ablaze as the Greek civil protection agencies failed to protect it from a wildfire that had flared up in the area. The Greek government downplayed the issue, stating that no real damage had been done. Many local informants of Poulimenakos claimed that during the previous years there had been fire-brigade forces near the site for its protection, but they were not present that summer.
In August 2021, Greece faced perhaps the most destructive
wave of wildfires in its recent history, with more than a million acres of
forest turned into ashes. During this wave, the archaeological site of ancient
Olympia in Peloponnese was almost eradicated, with people on the site talking
about the pure luck in the guise of a change in the wind direction, which
ultimately prevented that catastrophe. The official policy of the Greek state
was to evacuate the area and protect human lives, with saving the forest or the
archeological sites seen as less of a priority. A few weeks earlier, the most
important archaeological site in the Attica region outside the Athens
metropolis, Poseidon Temple in Sounio, saw a wildfire next to the monument. It
was extinguished thanks to its proximity to the town of Lavrio, where sizeable
forces of fire brigades are stationed, yet many locals mention to Dalakoglou
that if it was not for the five-star hotel that was between the ancient temple
and the fire, they would not have saved it in time. Another wildfire entered
the national park of Sounio later in August 2021.
Figure 1: Remains of fire 1km away from the ancient temple of Sounio (on the background). Photo: D. Dalakoglou.
The Archaeology of Greece 2.0
Earlier in 2021, the Ministry of Culture caused outrage among
archaeologists of the country with its actions. To mention a few, a large public
construction project was carried out in the Acropolis of Athens to create a
large concrete walkway, which was built near the monument during the lockdown.
Many compared the construction to a fashion show stage. And the truth is that a
few months later, a luxury clothing brand arranged a show on the new cement
corridor with the Parthenon as the background for the videos and photos. A few
weeks later, Sounio was booked by the same brand for another fashion show. The
indifference that the current Ministry of Culture has shown towards ancient
sites has other facets. For example, in the summer of 2021, the Minister
announced that the entire Byzantine high street in Thessaloniki that was
discovered during the public works for the construction of Thessaloniki metro
will be removed. The Minister, an archeologist herself, would not consider the
proposals to exhibit and integrate the findings within the metro
infrastructure, which was promoted by various archaeology associations. The
promise that 92% of the site will be reconstructed on the site after the works
for the metro are completed did not convince the archaeologists. The metro and
the gentrification it will bring to various parts of the city were more
important priorities than the findings, which are significant even for a nation
with as much archaeological wealth as Greece.
Figure 2: The announcement that the Sounio temple will not be open to the public due to the photoshoot. Photo: D. Dalakoglou.
Figure 3: The Acropolis after the cement walkway was built. Photo: D. Dalakoglou.
“Greece 2.0” was what Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis,
leader of the neoliberal New Democracy party, named the country’s post-covid
recovery plan. Greece 2.0 suggests a plan oriented to all-inclusive hotels,
casinos and hip new neighborhoods, signifying a shift to a new tourism model to
appeal to different kinds of customers. The city branding and the emphasis on
this new type of tourism has been going on for some years now at the behest of
Greek tourism policymakers, targeting so-called “high quality” tourists with
big wallets. These new categories of tourists are expected to be rich enough to
buy cheap metropolitan properties to rent out on airbnb when they are not
staying there, thus gentrifying the cities, or to afford the high prices of
5-star tourist accommodation. To put it simplistically, there seems to be a
transition from the stereotypical history-aware tourist in socks and sandals
wandering around the acropolis, to new categories, with little interest in
archaeology (e.g. Western yuppies, Arab sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, and upper
classes from emerging economies).
Before the pandemic, there was a widely held idea that Greek
tourism is no longer affordable for Greeks and is thus only open to foreigners.
The drop in the real income of many Greeks since the crisis of 2010 and the
unaffordability, for most Greeks, of tourist products, especially
accommodation, has caused this gap. To put it simply, until the early 2010s,
there was expensive luxurious accommodation in the islands of Greece, but it
was not rare to also find local small units with a cost of 40-50 EUR per night,
even in the high session. Today, however, such prices are nothing but a fantasy
for many millions of Greeks, who have seen a decrease in their income since
2010. Many people in Greece wait for the state-sponsored ‘social tourism
vouchers’ in order to get a few days in one of the many touristic destinations
of the country. Yet this affects international tourism too, as the Greek
tourist product is addressed increasingly to wealthier classes who look for
five-star tourist experiences.
The Resetting of Popular Greekness
As the anthropological preoccupation with infrastructures has
taught us, things like social and cultural identities, the relation between the
state and its citizenry, and even ideology itself, are not abstract, immaterial
ideas installed in the hearts and minds of the people. A very concrete,
material basis that shapes particular socio-cultural environments is a
prerequisite for social contracts and imagined communities to be shaped. The
archeological sites in Greece served in many ways as such infrastructures, as
they secured the ideological and, in many instances, also the economic
integration of an emerging Greek middle class. As many people (not just the
wealthy elites) were profiting from the commodification of the national identity
within the touristic industry. Restaurants, hotels, stores selling souvenirs,
local and international tour operators, guides, airports, and port
infrastructures all relied to a great extent on that same materiality. The
creative imagination often has depicted with humor the image of the Greek
islander holding a ‘rooms to let’ sign in the port of their island, with
museums and archaeological sites having a significant role in this industry.
Much of the material basis of the national identity was simultaneously the main
axis of the touristic industry.
Of course, Greece is not the only polity that is abandoning
its archeological infrastructures and by extension abandoning a classic liberal
need for a minimum of social cohesion based on a common sociocultural identity.
The destruction of the Notre Dame in Paris some years ago, with the French
state failing to secure one of the most acknowledged material symbols of the
continent, marked probably the end of the western need to produce relations and
continuities with a timeline and a purpose that make sense.
What can this seeming abandonment of a certain kind of
archaeological tourism infrastructure tell us about Greece today? As the
neoliberal model deepens, the tourist industry is “liberated” from the need to link
with a collective identity. This identity traditionally functioned by
economically and socio-culturally integrating the lower classes inside Greece,
and by addressing mass tourism outside. As this link was inextricably connected
with certain material infrastructures, the indifference towards them signifies
an era in which the tourist model, and perhaps the very structure of Greek
society, will no longer be based on gaining consensus from the lower strata,
but in aggressively serving the 1%.
The neoliberal management of the world is sending collective
identities and the sense of history or geography into a state of limbo. The
aesthetics of a 5-star all-inclusive hotel on a beachfront are almost
context-free, a tourist could be pretty much in any of the 5 continents, and in
any recent decade, and have a very similar, if not the same, experience.
Similarly, the aesthetics of a New York loft, which preoccupies much of the
renovation for airbnb purposes in apartments in downtown Athens (even quoting
‘New York style loft’ in the airbnb ad), could be almost anywhere else in the Americas
or Europe. What is needed for neoliberalism is a culture of the present
expressed in constant transactions. Everything else can be surrendered to the
merciless critique of entropy.
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 will be researching 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.
Dalakoglou, D., & Kallianos, Y. (2018).
‘Eating mountains’ and ‘eating each other’: Disjunctive modernization,
infrastructural imaginaries and crisis in Greece. Political Geography, 67,
76-87.
Poulimenakos G. & Dalakoglou D. (2018). Airbnbizing Europe: mobility, property and platform capitalism. Online publication or Website, Open Democracy
Cite as: Dalakoglou, Dimitris and Georgos Poulimenakos. 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/
QAnon, Deep
State, pedophile plots, George Soros, stolen elections, 9/11 truthers, Obama
birthers, 5G penetration, the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers… We slow-working, ever
so reflective anthropologists are being inundated with one conspiracy theory
after another. A May 2021 survey reveals that 15% of Americans and 23% of those
who call themselves Republicans believe that ‘the government, media, and
financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping
pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation’ (PRRI 2021). The evil
conspirators are often termed a ‘cabal’ (a word derived from the Hebrew ‘kabbalah’/esoteric
teachings). This subversive cabal is viewed as embedded in our governments, collaborating
with the global financial elite and the Davos crowd, within the US and European
Left, the Hollywood elite, the mainstream media, and with transgender activists
and Critical Race Theory proponents, even with the West European welfare states
with their Covid-19 lockdown/vaccine policies. Cabals are the secret agents of conspiratorial
plots. To study conspiracy theory is to do cabal anthropology.
Conspiracy
theories are stigmatized knowledge. This has led some anthropologists to view
conspiracy theorists as ‘contesting’ power. Conspiracism becomes a form of
resistance by the powerless against the arrogant elites and elite institutions
(Pelkmanns and Machold 2011, Dean 2000, Fassin 2021). So, what do we anthropologists
do about the kind of stigmatized knowledge promoted by the QAnon believers? Who
assert that America is threatened by a Satanic, pedophile cult from which only
Donald Trump can save us? What do we do about the 9/11 ‘truthers’ who say that
the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by the U.S. government, or the
‘birthers’ who assert that Obama (whose mother was an anthropologist!) was born
a Muslim in Kenya? Should we
view Holocaust deniers, the Stolen Election crowd and the racist Great
Replacement adherents as ‘contestation’?
We all
like ‘speaking truth to power’, but what about those who speak untruth to power?
Are there good and bad forms of contestation? Are we anthropologists in danger of becoming what the philosopher Cassam
called ‘conspiracy apologists’? What, in fact, can we anthropologists add to
the now frantic discussion of conspiracy theories?
Theories of conspiracy versus conspiracy theory
In the
ordinary forensic sense, a conspiracy is simply a secret plot to do something
bad, such as robbing a bank or political subversion. Conspiracies require secret
plans, malevolent motives and a group of conspirators. Forensic conspiracies
are commonplace. Some succeed, others are discovered and in most cases the
plotters exposed, caught and punished. The bombing of the World Trade Center garage
in 1993, and the suicide plane hijackings of September 11, 2001 were
both forensic conspiracies.
What we
call ‘conspiracy theories’ are also secret plots, to be sure, but the plotters tend
to be all-powerful, sophisticated, and diabolical. Their project is more than
robbing a bank, tapping phones or a terrorist attack. It is nothing short of total
control and world domination. Conspiratorial plots of this kind do not occur
alone. They are connected to other plots over space and time (Illuminati,
Freemasons, Jews, Communists, Trilateral Commission, Icke’s ‘lizard people’, alien
abduction, ‘New World Order’, the Neocons, the Deep State, etc.).
Because
the conspirators are considered to be so deeply embedded among us, the work of
a conspiracy theorist is to expose their deception. The 9/11 truthers, for
example, believe that the Bin Laden-based, ‘Official Conspiracy Theory’ is one
such deception, what they call a ‘false flag operation’. They believe that the
World Trade Centers collapsed because U.S. military/intelligence organs,
perhaps helped by the Mossad, planted explosives in the buildings. Somehow, these
explosives detonated precisely when the planes flew into the buildings, and it
is assumed that a third building close by, Building no. 7, also collapsed not
due to fire but due to explosives. How and why this was done remains
unexplained.
Of
course, no conspirator has ever been found. The truthers believe that the U.S. government
decided to murder thousands of its own citizens in order to achieve some
nefarious end, presumably connected to domination of the Middle East and its
oil and to create a military/security state in the U.S. The QAnon conspiracy
theory is even more elaborate, with narratives of child kidnapping and blood libel
in a plot that has long anti-Semitic roots, but which now brings together the
Clintons, the Democratic party left, and their Hollywood friends. Whether 9/11
truth or QAnon, conspiracy theorists see themselves as ‘truth tellers’ or
‘truth-seekers’ (Toseland 2018). They are not just propounding theories; they
are on a mission.
Conspiracy theory: the state of research
Conspiracy
theory research has focused on the logical structure of conspiratorial
explanations and why these are so attractive to so many. For the cultural
theorist Michael Barkun (2014), all conspiracy theories revolve around three
premises: Nothing happens by accident, Nothing is at it seems, and Everything
is connected. Conspiracy is thus the reverse side of transparency. Anything
on the surface is false or misleading. Hence the need to look deeper in search
of the real, more significant truth. According to the philosopher Karl Popper, who
was the first to coin the idea of a ‘conspiracy theory of society’, conspiracy
theory begins with the death of God. When God was around, all disasters and misfortunes
could be attributed to this higher power. With the Enlightenment, however, disasters
and misfortunes are now blamed on human actors (secret cabals in the King’s
court), newly powerful social groups such as the Freemasons, or outsider groups
such as Jews or Roma. During the Enlightenment, conspiratorial thinking becomes
a theory of total agency (Wood 1982). Bad things happen because secret sinister
groups of people intend them to happen.
Social
psychologists have speculated on the attraction of conspiracy theory, based on
the premise that conspiratorial beliefs are a danger to society. Clearly, conspiracy
theories give believers a simple, all-encompassing explanation for adverse
developments or disasters. We obtain a ‘who’ behind a complex or chance event. For
ardent conspiracy believers, this also gives them a mission, and the chance to
enter a community of fellow believers seeking to expose the sinister cabal. The
Trump ‘stolen election’ conspiracy – whose culprits are corrupt inner city
Black voting officials, Democratic Party swindlers and evil voting machine
companies with ties to Venezuela – has now become the latest ‘cabal’. In this
narrative, political power was stolen from the American people, and Mr. Trump
will help them get it back.
Part of
the conspiracists’ mission is to connect the dots. For conspiracies do not
occur alone. The death of JFK junior, Covid-19, faked moon landings, the ‘stolen election’ plot, transgender activism,
Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory can now be related to a secret
elite and their lackeys in government, in Silicon Valley, in the media, etc. This
is the QAnon project. Outside observers have described this mission as falling
down the ‘rabbit hole’. Hence, a recent book on QAnon adherents invokes the
‘rabbit hole’ imagery no less than 22 times (Bloom and Moskalenko 2021).
The work
of the conspiracy theorists is to uncover and interpret ‘evidence’, to discover
the truth. They are truth-seekers who do research (googling) by ‘connecting the
dots’, interpreting the evidence and communicating their interpretations to
others in meetings, forums and chat rooms.
Like others involved in political advocacy projects, conspiracy
theorists – be they truthers, birthers, QAnon followers, anti-Covid activists
— are emotionally engaged and
articulate. They are ready, willing and able to promote their views and defend
the most minute points, armed with ever more evidence along. This is because
conspiracy theorists are not simply propagating ‘theories’. Their explanatory
theories are ‘unlikely’, their premises are ideological, and their mission is
political, as the philosopher Quassim Cassam has argued (2019).
The
QAnon community, heavily overlapping with ardent Trump supporters and
right-wing extremist, is typical. QAnon revolves around the cryptic tweets, called
‘drops’, issued every few weeks by ‘Q’, someone supposedly deep inside the U.S.
government (for a discussion of who Q might really be see Bloom and Moskalenko
2021, ch. 1; on QAnon see also CBS News 2020, Quandt 2018, and further
references below). These texts are then interpreted, and often associated with
tweets by Trump or his followers, and connected to signs of an impending
‘storm’ or ‘awakening’ that will come but never does (that Hillary Clinton
would be arrested, that Trump would assume power in March, now in August). The
QAnon narrative is continually expanding, with any attempts at refutation
viewed as part of the plot to destroy its followers.
Populist expertise as Latourian matters of concern; but why?
The 9/11
truthers and QAnon are forms of ‘populist expertise’. Imitating experts, they
assemble facts, assess evidence, pass on newly found explanations for enigmatic
or troubling events (Marwick and Partin 2020). If Latour and STS described the ‘social
construction of scientific facts’, we now have a populist construction of ‘alternative
facts’. Latour’s ‘matters of concern’
have outrun us (Latour 2004).
QAnon,
the 9/11 truthers, the birthers, the 5G telephone protesters, the antivaxxers
who believe a chip is being implanted in their bodies, they are Foucault run
wild. To the extent that QAnon followers and other conspiracists question
established knowledge regimes and authorities, they are certainly ‘critical’. This
generates some sympathy among those who see conspiracists as performing a
valuable function for society, what Cassam calls ‘conspiracy apologists’. But
the conspiracists’ critique is based upon a profound and yet naïve distrust of
established institutions, a resistance to any kind of falsification or data
that would contradict their ‘findings’, and a vicious anti-Semitism and racism that
the apologists tend to overlook (Byford 2015). Conspiracy theorists may be
naïve or sympatico as individual human beings, but conspiracism is a pernicious
masquerading as science.
With the rise of QAnon pedophile blood libel conspiracy, the Trumpian ‘Big Lie’ and anti-Covid protests, we now face a presumed ‘rise of conspiracism’. The fear of conspiracism, a veritable ‘conspiracy panic’ is nothing new (Bratich 2008, Thalmann 2016). Past or present, one overarching question takes center stage, a question posed by the media and addressed by various experts who view conspiratorial thinking as dangerous: Why do people believe this stuff?
The
search for an answer forms the basis for the entire conspiracy research industry,
from ERC research projects to panels among our own tribe of anthropologists
(including a panel that I co-organized at EASA in 2018), to EU policy papers
and government reports proposing various counter-conspiracy measures (Institute
for Public Affairs 2013, European Commission 2021; Önnerfors 2021). My own fascination with
conspiracism began with my research in Romania, long before 1989, where I noticed
how people believed in all kinds of outlandish rumors and conspiracies about
domestic and foreign enemies (including me as spy; Sampson 1984). I then followed
conspiracies about the EU, the Soros Mafia and the Western NGO industry, which
led me to years of following the 9/11 truthers, many of whom are older male,
end-of-career academics, taking similar positions in society as myself and
other anthropologists.
Indeed,
the 9/11 truther activists share with us in anthropology that they search for
‘evidence’. Many are familiar with the protocols of the peer reviewed journal
article; as I have argued for the pretentious
Journal of 9/11 Studies and its truther editorial board (Sampson 2010). Indeed,
conspiracy producers, consumers and conspiracy entrepreneurs are not just
lonely ‘losers’ sitting in a basement staring at a screen all day. They are
active members of a community who ‘produce content’, and keep abreast of
events, even in mainstream media. So why indeed do people believe this stuff?
Image 1: How important is it to be paranoid? A selection of readings (photo by the author)
Conspiracism
as epistemology
Early theorizing
on the ‘why’ question begins with Hofstadter (1964), who depicted conspiracy
believers as acting out a ‘paranoid style’, perhaps socially disoriented, isolated
and even cognitively disabled. Recent surveys of those arrested in the January
6th riots at the U.S. Capitol finds that a sizeable percentage of
participants have (had) a variety of mental illnesses such as anxiety,
depression and PTSD, and estrangement from their children (Bloom and Moskalenko
2021, who also highlight the propensity of ‘truther’ women for some of these
sufferings). Along with the mental instability argument, Sunstein and Vermeule
(2009) argue that conspiracism is based on a ‘crippled epistemology’. This
individualized understanding, based on the psychological or cognitive
characteristics of ‘the conspiracy believer’, or the conspiratorial mind-set, focuses
on conspiracists as somehow irrational, as overly fearful as frantically
searching for someone to blame for their personal troubles or social deroute.
Their anxiety both
reflects and results in an intense distrust of institutions, authorities, or established
science and thus a susceptibility to conspiratorial explanations of suspicious events,
disasters or other misfortunes, ranging from 9/11 to Covid-19 to Trump’s
election loss. Moreover, since they trust no institution, imploring them to ‘believe
the science’ is useless. Scientific experts and institutions are themselves
suspect. Conspiracists must do the research themselves, on the internet, encouraged
by like-minded conspiracy theorists and amateur experts who can parlay their
academic expertise from one field into another: the leading 9/11 truther, David
Ray Griffin, is a professor of religion. This distrust of authorities has a
derivative effect: conspiracists can be easily manipulated by populist
politicians (Bergmann 2018).
The conspiratorial
mindset was also depicted in a famous study by Leon Festinger and his
colleagues (1956) when they described how a UFO cult that predicted the end of the
world was only more reinforced in their belief when the disaster did not
happen. Festinger’s cognitive dissonance approach seems to be supported by the
hardcore support for Trump and his ‘stolen election’ theory, culminating in
Trump supporters’ invasion of the U.S. Congress on January 6th 2021,
and the election of QAnon supporters to political office. The consensus among
conspiracy theory researchers is that conspiracy theorists cannot be combatted
by any kind of fact-checking enterprise. People do not get converted, nor do
they see the light, simply because they are confronted with contradictory
evidence, new facts or sophisticated counter-arguments. The conspiracy mindset
is not about facts and evidence. It is about social engagement, political
projects, and belief.
The problem
with explanations of conspiracy followers as people who are somehow socially,
emotionally or cognitively disabled is that these explanations are far too
general. After all, who among us does not at times feel disempowered, confused,
uncertain, insecure or distrustful of institutions and science, most especially
in this Covid-19 era? How much should we ‘trust science’ when scientific
explanations are contested or change? If we all suffer from ‘confirmation bias’
or other such psychological syndromes, then why aren’t we all conspiracy
theorists? Could it be that a healthy scepticism about the scientific enterprise
is a core theme in the work of STS and anthropologists of policy? Are the
conspiracy theorists just another form of institutional critique? Do we regard
Holocaust deniers, Great Replacement adherents or QAnon activists as fellow
compatriots ‘contesting authority’? What indeed is the difference between an
outrageous conspiracy theory and hard-hitting critique of subtle powers and
hidden agendas in state institutions and global capitalism?
What is belief?
Let me
come back to the question of “Why people believe this stuff”?
Anyone
who has argued with a conspiracy theorist, a religious zealot or political true
believer of any kind knows that refutation of their evidence is fruitless. You
point out contrary facts or illogical arguments and your remarks are simply
cast aside as irrelevant or confirmation of the conspiracy. This is because the
conspiratorial narrative is in fact an expression of belief. The problem, then,
is not about the facts but about belief. Conspiracy theorists do not assert
claims. They express beliefs. What does it mean to believe, for example, that
Trump won the election with 70% of the vote or that the US military blew up the
World Trade Center? What is belief all about?
I
decided to re-read a bunch of anthropological analyses of belief. Virtually all
of these were written to explain religious beliefs, as when
Evans-Pritchard wrote that the Nuer ‘believe’ that twins are birds. I think
that we can fruitfully apply the discussion of religious belief to secular,
conspiratorial beliefs as well. There are obvious overlaps between religious
and conspiracy belief systems: grand forces of good and evil; an apocalyptic
reckoning some time in an imminent future; scriptures and texts that provide clues;
esoteric interpretations and discussions of what the clues mean; struggles over
orthodox and deviant interpretations; and an institutional practice in which
communities of believers seek out converts, debate skeptics, and ex-communicate
apostates and perceived heretics. The conspiratorial universe thus contains conspiracy
producers, conspiracy consumers, and even conspiracy entrepreneurs (David Icke,
Alex Jones, etc.). It includes not only true believers and former believers (read QAnon causalities on Reddit), but also
anti-conspiracists, the debunkers.
Being in
a conspiracist community involves work, or ‘research’. The 9/11 truthers, for
example, include many students and retired academics who do internet googling,
organize evidence and hold conferences, even selling truther merchandise. The
QAnon community has gatekeepers who run the web portals, moderate chatrooms,
assemble narratives, sell merchandise, and retweet the preferred interpretations.
Like any religious community, conspiracy communities have their rites and rituals.
Long before January 6th, QAnon followers were appearing at
demonstrations, recruiting followers and arguing with skeptics and debunkers. We
need to recall the very banal, anthropological insight that conspiracy theory is
not just about a bunch of random facts and a set of outlandish, unfalsifiable
beliefs. It is also a set of practices. Conspiracists do not just stare at a
screen. They do things with the screen and in real life. They search for
confirming evidence, they connect the dots, they discuss their findings with
like-minded others, they try to unmask provocateurs, etc. It’s the doing that creates
that passion and the commitment behind conspiracism. The conspiracist ‘rabbit
hole’ is not a place of isolation, it is a community. This passionate community
explain the sense of exhilaration common to many true believers. It’s so
wonderful to know the truth and to share it with others, especially after
having experienced an adverse life event or a traumatic experience (as so many
QAnon followers have, according to surveys; see Jensen and Kane 2021).
So
perhaps the anthropological discussion of beliefs can help us understand the
power of beliefs in the conspiratorial universe of truthers, birthers, QAnon
followers, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, New World Order proponents, Holocaust
deniers, alien abductionists and similar groups.
Back to Needham
In 1972,
Rodney Needham published Belief, Language and Experience, a long
philosophical treatise on belief, much of it inspired by Wittgenstein. What do
we mean, asked Needham, when we say that members of tribe X ‘believe’
something? Needham stressed that ‘statements about belief’ made by our
informants should be distinguished from belief itself. Ethnographers love
eliciting such statements, but for Needham these are the result of informants’ effort
at introspection. For Needham, statements about belief are not belief. Belief is
an inner state. This inner state may be articulated as an accepted doctrine (‘I
believe that…’), as knowledge (‘I know the truth about…’) or as an emotional
conviction (‘I believe in …’). Needham concludes that we just cannot know what
is inside people’s heads. We can elicit statements, listen to what they say, we
can observe what they do, and at best try to infer some kind of inner state
that we call ‘belief’. Yet Needham is skeptical: the concept of belief is so
vague that it should be thrown out. Needham does not believe in belief.
Pouillon
(1982), in a widely cited essay, reminds us that we must distinguish between believing
in something versus believing that something. Expressions of belief
in reveal whom we trust, who has legitimate authority, in whom we have faith.
In contrast to ‘believe in…’ believing
that is about a coherent doctrine of propositions. If belief is ultimately about
faith, the project of debunking beliefs, e.g., showing conspiracy theories to
be based on incorrect facts or illogical arguments, is beside the point. Conspiracies
are not about facts or evidence. They are about ‘beliefs in’. And we cannot
disprove beliefs. People can articulate, adjust or renounce beliefs. As such, beliefs
are tied more to emotional commitment rather than facts. Conspiracy theories,
despite the quasi-scientific label of ‘theory’, are clearly of this kind. They
are beliefs, not theories in the scientific sense.
We often
assume that conspiracy theorists articulate a coherent, fundamental set of
propositions. Yet anthropologists have shown us that people can operate with
overlapping, fragmented, alternative and contradictory belief systems, what we
now euphemize as ‘syncretism’. Hence, J. Mair reminds us that ‘[not] every
believer […] is a fundamentalist or a systematic theologian’ (2012, p. 45). Our
analysis should therefore focus not so much on what people believe but rather how
they believe. We should focus on what Mair calls ‘cultures of belief’.
Studies of religious groups reveal how people can comfortably maintain two or
more sets of beliefs that are complementary or even logically contradictory.
Numerous studies of the anthropology of Christianity describe people who are
sincerely converted Christians, but who also interact with spirits, react to
witchcraft accusations or believe in reincarnation (Stringer 1996, Robbins 2007).
While these studies have been applied largely to religious believers and
converts, they are equally valid to those who have fallen down the ‘rabbit
hole’ of QAnon, 9/11 truther, Holocaust
denial, Great Replacement, alien abduction or other conspiratorial narratives. Like
religious groups, conspiratorial communities are also full of dual,
overlapping, contrasting and conflicting belief systems. An ethnographic approach to conspiracy
theories might therefore profit from a ‘situational belief’ approach (Stringer 1996).
The focus here should be less on who assents to certain propositions (‘I
believe that…’;) and more on what kinds of truths and authorities people commit
themselves to (‘I believe in….’ ‘I have
faith in…’).
Practicing conspiracism
The
QAnon belief system has its logical fallacies. Some may fully believe in the
pedophile plot, while others focus only on the Deep State. However, they are
united in their sources of authority (Q ‘drops’ and Trump statements,
supplemented by various authoritative interpretations that are then retweeted
and discussed). Exposing the cabal is both ‘research’ and an act of faith.
Anthropological
approaches to religious belief have always included descriptions of religious
practices, rites and rituals. Conspiracy adherents are no different. They also
have their rites and rituals. They meet on line, in hundreds of web
communities. They recruit followers and argue with debunkers. And they meet in
real life at demonstrations, political meetings, in anti-vaccine gatherings, and
of course, on January 6th. Conspiracists have been busy trying to
expose the Covid vaccine chip insertion plot (led by Bill Gates). They have
been digesting the shock of Trump’s defeat; promoting the narrative of the
Stolen Election and his imminent return; reading and interpreting the QAnon clues; and fighting the regulations to
wear masks. They do the work of textual interpretation. They re-tweet and add
comments. They discuss these messages with family members, argue with skeptics,
and end up in echo chambers of like- minded conspiracists who can confirm and
reinforce their ideas.
What all
this means is that we need to show how conspiratorial belief and conspiracist practice
interact, as we have done with the study of religious beliefs and practices. Regrettably,
conspiracy theory research has tended to focus on the psycho-social
vulnerabilities of the most radical believers. Certainly, these committed conspiracists
have from emotional ‘baggage’, social isolation or violent tendencies (as the
recent QAnon studies show). But most conspiracy adherents are only partially or
borderline committed; many view conspiracy theory adherence as more of a social
activity than an all-out ideological commitment, much like church attendance
can be more a social obligation than a religious act. Second, the focus on
individual vulnerability assumes some kind of coherent ideology among
conspiracists. It ignores the way people use religious belief in creative ways,
amalgamating, adapting and converting it to strategic ends. Conspiratorial ideas
have a political message: the evil plot by the sinister outsiders, but it is
also a personal project, a voyage of discovery that gives people new meaning in
their lives as they become part of history. Both religious and conspiratorial practice
are more than acting out an ostensibly coherent set of beliefs. Our
understanding of conspiracists is best served by observing what they do: how
they are recruited, how they participate, how they recruit others, and even how
they often exit or even express regret (see again the Reddit thread for ‘QAnon Casualties’;
or the testimonies of ex-Truthers).
From how to why
Let me
close with the question of why does one become a believer? Robbins (2007)
described how some converts to Christianity are truly sincerely converted, but
we also have examples of conversion for purely strategic reasons. This
distinction between sincere and instrumental conversion may be simplistic, but
it is worth recalling when observing why people might join the QAnon, truther,
anti-vaxx or alien obduction community. We join groups for many reasons: to resolve
existential problems, to gain some control over the world, to obtain social contacts
or to re-affirm our political beliefs. Conspiracy groups seem to solve all these
tasks at the same time. Moreover, joining one conspiratorial community seems to
lead to others: QAnon people form the core of Covid denial and anti-vaccination
resistance, as well as 5G-telephone skepticism and of course, they are
enthusiastic supporters of the stolen election theory. Since belief is an inner
state that we can never really know, the best we can do as ethnographers is to
listen to statements and observe behaviors.
What
then, is a believer? Believers here don’t just read tweets. They save them,
comment on them, retweet them, discuss them, embellish them, delete them,
switch platforms, go to meetings, participate in demonstrations, buy
merchandise, and spend hours of their day looking for further clues and reinterpret
these. Their closed groups can decide to ban or unfriend others. They may have
fallen down a rabbit hole but they are also actively exploring new paths,
routes, tunnels and dead ends. Conspiracy is not just about belief; it is also about
community.
If we
are to understand conspiratorial movements like QAnon or those following the
Deep State conspiracy, we anthropologists need to promote our own insights
about what belief is all about. While Needham
argued that the concept of belief was useless for anthropology, we still need
to explain what it means to be a believer. We need to go beyond the conventional
wisdom that every conspiracy theorist suffers from some kind of cognitive
deficiency, emotional damage or social isolation. The leaders and mobilizers
may be emotional, committed, even fanatic (as so many leaders of social
movements are), but the followers and adherents are much more like us than we’d
like to admit. Resorting to a psychological explanation is not sufficient. Who
among us has not suffered from anxiety, depression, loneliness or a traumatic
event that might lead us to fall down the proverbial rabbit hole? Who among us
has not spent hours on line immersed in some incessant search to solve a puzzle?
The conspiracy followers are hardly exotic. Take away their beliefs, and they
suddenly become just like us, ordinary men and women with family obligations,
precarious jobs, worried about their future and their place in it. They are
both strange and familiar at the same time. And it is this contrast that makes
them the perfect object of anthropological scrutiny. The task of anthropology,
after all, is to show that the strange is actually familiar, and that the familiar
has its exotic elements. We need more cabal anthropology.
Cabal
anthropology might therefore provide a corrective to the journalists,
psychologists and political commentators who so often classify conspiracy theorists
as lonely, alienated souls. The narratives being promoted by conspiracists (QAnon
anti-pedophiles, Deep State, Obama birther, 9/11 truth, stolen election, New
World Order, Covid anti-vaxxers) are clearly false and pernicious. But the
issue not just about the kind of evidence they use or the doctrines they
promote. They reflect new forms of commitment. We need to understand how
‘believe that…’ interacts with ‘belief in …’
In this
sense, QAnon and other conspiracy theories are secular forms of religious
revival. The search for Satanic forces, and the premonitions of a great
reckoning led by Trump are obvious parallels with religion. Alongside this are
the conspiracy theorists’ profound mistrust in our financial institutions, elite
universities, government institutions and in scientific expertise. Lack of
trust in these institutions is why the ‘stolen election’ discourse has stayed
with us. No amount of fact checking or debunking will solve the conspiracist
wave. This is because conspiratorial thinking is not about incorrect facts or
crippled epistemologies. It’s about the power of belief and the communities of
believers. What beliefs did QAnon replace? What bonds of trust have been
dismantled in order for QAnon to move in? How could these bonds be
reconstructed? How are conspiracy communities being manipulated by unscrupulous
conspiratorial entrepreneurs and political actors? Here is an agenda for cabal
anthropology. The rabbit hole awaits.
Steven Sampson is professor emeritus at the Department of Social Anthropology, Lund University (Steven.sampson@soc.Lu.se). He has done research on Romania and the Balkans, NGOs, the anti-corruption industry, conspiracy theory and business ethics. For a list of his publications with open access see: https://www.soc.lu.se/steven-sampson.
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Cite as: Sampson, Steven. 2021. “Cabal Anthropology – or whether the anthropology of belief helps us understand conspiracism.” FocaalBlog, 13 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/09/13/steven-sampson-cabal-anthropology
In 2021 a modest long-haired Sakha man named Alexander Gabyshev was arrested at his family compound on the outskirts of Yakutsk in an unprecedented for Sakha Republic (Yakutia) show-of-force featuring nine police cars and over 50 police. For the third time in two years, he was subjected to involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Some analysts see this medicalized punishment, increasingly common in President Putin’s 4th term, as a return to the politicized use of clinics that had been prevalent against dissidents in the Soviet period. Alexander’s hair was cut, and his dignity demeaned. By April, his health had seriously deteriorated, allegedly through use of debilitating drugs, and his sister feared for his life. A private video of his arrest (possibly filmed by a sympathetic Sakha policeman) shows police overwhelming him in bed as if they were expecting a wild animal; he was forced to the floor bleeding, and handcuffed. Official media claimed he had resisted arrest using a traditional Sakha knife, but this is not evident on the video. By May, a trial in Yakutsk affirmed the legality of his arrest, and a further criminal case was brought against him using the Russian criminal code article 280 against extremism. Appeals are pending, including one accepted by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
What had elicited such official vehemence
against an opposition figure who had dared to critique President Putin but
whose powers and influence were relatively minor, compared to prominent
Russians like Aleksei Naval’ny? How did a localized movement in far-from-Moscow
Siberia become well-known across Russia and beyond?
In his 2018–2019 meteoric rise to national
and international attention, Alexander Prokopievich Gabyshev, also called
“Shaman Alexander,” “Sasha shaman,” and “Sania,” came to mean many things to
many people. For some, he is a potent symbol of protest against a corrupt
regime led by a president he calls “a demon.” For others, he has become a
coopted tool in some part of the government’s diabolical security system, set
to attract followers so that they can be exposed and repressed. Some feel he is
a “brave fellow” (molodets),
“speaking truth to power” in a refreshingly articulate voice devoid of egotism.
Others see him as misguided and psychologically unstable, made “crazy” by a
tragic life that includes the death of his beloved wife before they could have
children. Some accept him into the Sakha shamanic tradition, arguing his
suffering and two–three years spent in the taiga after his wife’s death qualify
him as a leader and healer who endured “spirit torture” in order to serve
others. Others, including some Sakha and Buryat shamans, reject him as a
charlatan whose education as an historian was wasted when he became a welder,
street cleaner, and plumber.
These and many other
interpretations are debated by my Russian and non-Russian friends with a
passion that at minimum reveals he has touched a nerve in Russia’s body
politic. It is worth describing how Alexander, born in 1968, describes himself
and his mission as a “warrior shaman” before analyzing his significance and his
peril.
Alexander’s Movement
Picture
Alexander on foot pushing a gurney and surrounded by well-wishers, walking a
mountainous highway before being arrested by masked armed police for
“extremism” in September 2019. Among over a hundred internet video clips of
Alexander’s epic journey from Yakutsk to Ulan-Ude via Chita, is an interview
from Shaman on the Move! (June 12, 2019):
I asked, beseeched God, to give me witness and insight….I went into the taiga [after my wife had died of a dreadful disease ten years ago]….It is hard for a Yakut [Sakha person] to live off the land, not regularly eating meat and fish….I came out of the forest a warrior shaman….To the people of Russia, I say “choose for yourself a normal leader,… young, competent”….To the leaders of the regions, I say “take care of your local people and the issues they care about and give them freedom.”…To the people, I say “don’t be afraid of that freedom.” We are endlessly paying, paying out….Will our resources last for our grandchildren? Not at the rate we are going… Give simple people bank credit.. . Let everyone have free education and the chance to choose their careers freely.. . There should not be prisons….But we in Russia [rossiiane] have not achieved this yet, far from it…Our prisons are terrifying….At least make the prisons humane…. For our small businesses, let them flourish before taking taxes from them. Just take taxes from the big, rich businesses….For our agriculture, do not take taxes from people with only a few cows….Take from only the big agro-business enterprises.[1]
In this interview and others, Alexander made
clear he is patriotic, a citizen of Russia, who wants to purify its leadership.
“Let the world want to be like us in Russia,” he proclaimed, “We need young,
free, open leadership.” While he explains that “for a shaman, authority is
anathema,” he has praised the relatively young and dynamic head of Sakha
Republic: “Aisen [Nikolaev] is a simple person at heart who wants to defend his
people, but he is constrained, under the fear of the demon in power [in the
Kremlin].” Alexander acknowledges the route he has chosen is difficult, and
that many will try to stop him. Indeed he began his “march to Moscow” three
separate times, once in 2018 and twice in 2019, including after his arrest when
he temporarily slipped away from house arrest in December 2019, was rearrested
and fined.
Alexander’s 2021
arrest, described in the opening paragraph, was hastened by his refusal to
cooperate with medical personnel as a psychiatric outpatient, and further
provoked when he announced he would once again try to reach Moscow, this time
on a white horse with a caravan of followers. His video announcement of the new
plans, with a photo of him galloping on his white horse carrying an old Sakha
warrior’s standard, mentioned that he would begin his Spring renewal journey by
visiting the sacred lands of his ancestors in the Viliui (Suntar) territories,
“source of my strength.” He encouraged followers to join him, since “truth is
with us.”[2] A multiethnic group of followers launched plans to gather
sympathizers in a marathon car, van and bus motorcade. Their route was
designated to pass through the sacred Altai Mountains region of Southern
Siberia. What had begun as a quirky political action on foot acquired the
character of a media-savvy pilgrimage.
At moments of peak
rhetoric, Alexander often explained that “for freedom you need to struggle.”
Into 2021, he hoped to achieve his goal of reaching Red Square to perform his
“exorcism ritual.” But his arrests and re-confinement in a psychiatric clinic
under punishing “close observation” conditions make that increasingly unlikely,
especially given massive crackdowns on all of President Putin’s opponents,
including Aleksei Naval’ny and his many supporters. One of Alexander’s most
telling early barbs critiqued the “political intelligentsia,” who hold “too
many meetings” and do not accomplish enough. He told them: “It is time to stop
deceiving us.” Yet he repeated in many interviews that numerous politicians in
Russia, across the political spectrum, would be better alternatives than the
current occupant of the Kremlin.
Among Alexander’s most controversial actions before he was arrested was a rally and ritual held in Chita in July 2019, on a microphone-equipped stage under the banner “Return the Town and Country to the People.” After watching the soft-spoken and articulate Alexander on the internet for months, I was amazed to see him adopt a more crowd-rousing style, asking hundreds of diverse multiethnic demonstrators to chant, “That is the law” (Eto zakon!) even before he told them what they would be answering in a “call and response” exchange. He bellowed, “give us self-determination,” and the crowd answered, “That is the law.” He cried, “give us freedom to choose our local administrations,” and the crowd answered, “That is the law.” His finale included “Putin has no control over you! Live free!” Only after this rally did I begin to wonder who, if anyone, was coaching him and why. Had he changed in the process of walking, gaining loyal followers, and talking to myriad media? The rally, with crowd estimates from seven hundred to one thousand, had been organized by the local Communist Party opposition. Local Russian Orthodox authorities denounced it and suggested that Alexander was psychologically unwell. Alexander himself simply said, after his arrest, “It is impossible to sit home when a demon is in the Kremlin.”
How and why was
Alexander using discourses of demonology? He seemed to be articulating Russian
and Sakha beliefs in a society that can be undermined by evil out of control.
When he first emerged from the forest, he built a small chapel-memorial in
honor of his beloved wife and talked in rhetoric that made connections as much
to Russian Orthodoxy as to shamanic tradition. He wore eclectic t-shirts,
including one that referenced Cuba and another the petroglyph horse-and-rider
seal of the Sakha Republic. Once he began his trek, he wore a particularly
striking t-shirt eventually mass-produced for his followers. Called “Arrive and
Exorcise,” it was made for him by the Novosibirsk artist Konstantin Eremenko
and rendered his face onto an icon-like halo.
Image 1: Shaman Alexander in t-shirt called “Arrive and Exorcise” by K. Eremenko, December 16, 2019. Used with permission by Konstantin Eremenko.
Another popular image depicts Alexander as an angel with wings. He has called himself a “Holy Fool,” correlating his brazen actions and protest ideology directly to a Russian iurodivy tradition that enabled poor, dirty, beggar-like tricksters to speak disrespectful truths to tsars. His appeals to God were ambiguous—purposely referencing the God of Orthodoxy and the Sky Gods of the Turkic Heavens (Tengri) in his speeches. During his trek, and in some of his interviews, he has had paint on his face, a thunderbolt zigzag under his eyes and across the bridge of his nose that he calls a “sign of lightning,” derived from his spiritual awakening after meditation in the forest. He has claimed, as a “warrior shaman,” that he is fated to harness spirit power to heal social ills. While his emphasis has been on social ills that begin with the top leadership, he also has been willing to pray and place healing hands on the head of a Buryat woman complaining of chronic headaches, who afterwards joyously pronounced herself cured.
During his trek, on camera and off at
evening campsites, Alexander fed the fire spirit pure white milk products,
especially kumys (fermented mare’s
milk), while offering prayers in the Sakha “white shaman” tradition that he
hoped to bring to Red Square for a benevolent ritual not only of exorcism but
of forgiveness and blessing. He chanted: “Go, Go, Vladimir Vladimirovich
[Putin]. Go of your own free will . . . Only God can judge you. Urui
Aikhal!” He expressed pride that some of the Sakha female shamans and elders
have blessed his endeavor.
Resonance and Danger
Russian observers, including well-known politicians and eclectic citizens commenting online or on camera, have had wildly divergent reactions to Alexander, sometimes laughing and mocking his naïve, provincial, or perceived weirdo (chudak) persona. But some take him seriously, including the opposition politician Leonid Gozman, President of the All-Russia movement Union of Just Forces. Leonid, admiring Alexander’s bravery, sees significance in how many supporters fed and sheltered him along his nearly two-thousand-kilometer trek before he was arrested. Rather than resenting him for insulting Russia’s wealthy and powerful president, whose survey ratings have plummeted, Alexander’s followers rallied and protected him with a base broader than many opposition politicians have been able to pull together.
As elsewhere in Russia,
civic society mobilizers, whether for ecology protests, anti-corruption
campaigns or other causes, are becoming savvy at hiding and sharing
leadership. By 2021, Alexander had
become one of many imprisoned oppositionists, whose numbers throughout Russia
have swelled beyond the prisoners of conscience documented when the great
physicist Andrei Sakharov was exiled to Gorky in 1985.[3]
Alexander, despite being subdued beyond recognition after multiple arrests, has affirmed that he was hoping for “neither chaos nor revolution, [since] this is the twenty-first century.” He advocates for his followers an “open world, [of ] peace, freedom and solidarity,” one where all people believing in benevolent “higher forces” can find them. His significance is that he is one of the credible politicized spiritual leaders to emerge from Russia in the post-Soviet period, when in the past twenty years the costs of independent leadership have become increasingly dire, self-sacrifice is increasingly necessary, and multi-leveled community building with horizontal interconnections is increasingly risky.
Whether or not
defined as religious or shamanic, the bravery and force of individuals willing
to risk everything to change social conditions is awesome, transcending and
human wherever we find it. Far from insane, these maverick societal
shape-changers, tricksters and healers may represent our best
power-diversifying hopes against systems that pull in directions of
authoritarian repression. Perhaps once-populist power consolidating leaders
like Vladimir Putin, who warily watch their public opinion ratings, are
insecure enough to understand the deep systemic weaknesses that oppositionists
like Alexander Gabyshev and Alexei Naval’ny expose, using very different styles
along a sacred-secular continuum. President Putin’s insecurities magnify the
importance of all political opposition, creating vortexes of violence and
dangers of martyrdom in the name of stability.
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer is a Faculty Fellow in the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. At Georgetown since 1987, she is co-founder of the Indigenous Studies Working Group https://indigeneity.georgetown.edu and has taught as Research Professor in the School of Foreign Service and anthropology departments. She is editor of the Taylor and Francis translation journal Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia and is author or editor of six books on Russia and Siberia, including Galvanizing Nostalgia: Indigeneity and Sovereignty in Siberia (Cornell University Press, 2021).
The
space where I live and work is described and prescribed by its past, by what it
no longer is: post-Yugoslav, post-socialist, post-conflict,
some even claim post-colonial. This world is rarely framed in terms of
what it is or what it might become. Stef Jansen in his
ethnography of residents in a block of flats in Sarajevo wrote of „yearnings in
the Dayton meantime“ (Jensen, 2015), capturing a liminal space framed by a
craving for the possibility of hope and the seeming impossibility of ‘returning
to normal’ within the dystopian governance arrangements in Bosnia-Herzegovina
deriving from the Dayton Peace Agreement of December 1995. In focusing on
Bosnia-Herzegovina here, I reflect on the temporalities of (failed) external
political engineering, the proliferation of (failed) projects and the
performative practices of everyday life, refusing a deterministic narrative of
the absence of hope without talking up the possibilities of repoliticisation.
The
governance arrangements that have been in place in Bosnia-Herzegovina since Dayton,
drawn up by a team of young United States lawyers, are at the centre of the
problem. Somewhat successful as a peace agreement, albeit one that more or less
froze the status quo and allowed the main ethno-nationalist political parties
that had fuelled the conflict to continue business as usual, it makes governance
of the state almost impossible. A recurring Bosnian joke is that everyone
considers the constitution laid down in the agreement as unworkable but, of
course, no one can agree on what to replace it with. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a
sovereign federal state, with a three-person Presidency and a rotating
President, based on what is referred to as “the ethnic key” with members
elected from Serbian-Orthodox, Bosniak-Muslim and Croatian-Catholic
constituencies. It remains a kind of semi-protectorate with many powers vested in
the Office of the High Representative, merged in 2009 with the EU
Representative’s office. It has a Central Bank that is carefully regulated and
there are a small number of symbolic Ministries and agencies at Federal level albeit
with very little power. Most power is vested in the two entities Republika
Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina – there is also an
autonomous Brčko District (total population 93,000) with its own foreign
administrator as the parties could not agree which entity the town should
belong to. The Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina is itself divided into ten
Cantons each of which has a Cantonal Governor and a full cabinet of Ministers.
If we just take health and social policy as one example, there is no Federal
Law, there are entity laws, and each Canton also passes its own Law.
Furthermore, financing is a municipal responsibility so that rights can vary
from one small part of the country to another. This means there are some 140
Ministries across the country, each with a Minister, a deputy, a couple of
Assistants, a large staff, many advisors, and a large number of official cars.
Bosnia-Herzegovina
remains something of a ‘crowded playground’ in which we find a proliferation of
diverse actors – Sarajevo was often referred to as ‘acronym city’ as all manner
of international organisations, NGOs, think tanks, agencies, consultants
(‘insultants’ in local parlance) and policy entrepreneurs had a presence there
(Stubbs, 2015). Indeed, as post-conflict aid money dwindled, the Sarajevo
central office would usually be the last to close, existing on scraps from the
donor table. Sometimes, as what became euphemistically known as an ‘exit strategy’,
an international NGO would create its own FrankeNGO, a local spin-off, with no
certainty as to what kind of monster might emerge. The distortions of an
immediate post-conflict economy could be observed at both a macro-level
(estimates of donor aid making up 15% of total GDP were being sprayed around a
while ago) and at the micro-level. You would be significantly better off as,
say, a university professor if you could retreat to your weekend house full-time
and rent your inner-city apartment to an NGO for an office or a flat for its
staff. You could also make ends meet by receiving honoraria from all manner of
agencies for writing reports, even those of questionable quality and
originality. Still, today, the crowded playground is populated and dominated by
all manner of flexians, in Janine Wedel’s terms (Wedel, 2009), blurring
boundaries between the public and the private, the national and the international,
the state and the non-state, and more. In crowded flex land, it is the army of
intermediaries, brokers, translators (literal and metaphorical), operating in
the cracks and interstices of governance, and almost completely
non-transparent, that possess the real power.
Central
to failed futures is ‘the project’ as an
organizational form; a managerial-bureaucratic process; a funding
modality and a practice of governmentality. ‘Projectification’ is a peculiar
assemblage of repertoires, processes and practices, drawing together material,
human, and non-human resources, calculative logics, consisting of temporalised
stages that, whilst highly contingent, serve to technocratise and depoliticise
the lifeworld and, in mundane ways, reproduce the everyday techniques of
neoliberalism (Scott, 2021). Projects operate at variegated speeds across
multiple sites and scales. They also come in waves or clusters: in
Bosnia-Herzegovina the first wave of ‘stand-alone’ projects was notable for
their sheer arbitrary diversity, short time scales, and rapid shifts from one
theme or target group to another. The
second wave were ‘pilot projects’ – as I was told in the late 1990s “Bosnia has
many pilots but no aeroplanes”. ‘Pilots’ were meant to have the potential to be
‘scaled up’ and become sustainable; that is to become long-term or permanent
features of the governance landscape. In a third wave, more explicit systemic
reform was prioritised, through ‘projects of strategic support’, aiding
Ministries and agencies to plan, implement and evaluate reforms, and introduce
new laws and regulations. Such projects were brought closer to centres of
policy making whilst also keeping a distance through sub-contracting arrangements,
a range of ‘implementing partners’ and, not unusually, the creation of new
parallel agencies, often with a chameleon-like character, to ‘drive reform’ and
‘bypass’ those likely to stand in the way of ‘progress’. A number of donors invested
a great deal in agencies that, often, became empty shells, literally and
figuratively.
Bosnia-Herzegovina
is marked by the absence of the kind of statecraft that provides what Jansen
refers to as ‘grids’, institutional frameworks that calibrate and order
individual, household and community concerns, providing a modicum of basic
orientation in terms of what to expect from the authorities. The state, along
with the family, is ‘semi-absent’, with state practices highly uneven, often
indifferent, or else over-punitive (Hromadžić, 2015). A study of mothers of
children with disabilities points to the erratic, ambiguous, fraught,
provisional, contingent, unpredictable, even ‘mysterious’ nature of care
services. Surviving, for anyone reliant on state support, is a constant
struggle to gain access to the right people who, if you are lucky, if all the
pieces fall into place, might offer help that is as far away from a structured,
system-based, ‘right’ as it is possible to get (Brković, 2017). One
conceptual entry point here is the ‘semi-periphery’, a deeply contradictory space, promoting ‘rapid modernization’ in conditions of deindustrialization,
desecularisation, repatriarchalisation and anti-intellectualism (Blagojević, 2009). Reforms are simultaneously
accepted and opposed, imitated and rejected, in thin, degridded, structural conditions.
Quite
deliberately, I want to end this essay in two alternative ways. In one, the
longing for normalcy breeds a kind of passivity, a resignation if you wish, an
erosion of the capacity to aspire and, at best, an ironic dismissal of the
absurdity of governing practices. The phrase bit će bolje can often be
heard uttered by South Slavic speakers but it means the exact opposite of its
literal translation – ‘things will get better’. This is captured in a quote
from Ivo Andrić’s novel Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina),
published in 1945, describing local responses to attempts by the
Austro-Hungarian Empire to modernise the town of Višegrad in the late 19th
century:
“The newcomers were never at peace; they allowed no one else to be at peace. It seemed that they were resolved with their impalpable but ever more noticeable web of laws, regulations and orders to embrace all forms of life … and to change and alter everything … Old ideas and old values clashed with the new ones, merged with them or existed side by side, as if waiting to see which would outlive which. … The people resisted every innovation but did not go to extremes, for to most of them life was always more important and more urgent than the forms by which they lived.” (Andrić, 1995: 135)
Nebojša
Šaviha Valha (2013) discusses the phenomena of raja, referring to one’s
interlocking circles of trusted friends, often based around an activity (coffee
raja, skiing raja, hiking raja, …), where one can be oneself and practice zajebancia,
enjoying oneself in an uninhibited way. For Šaviha-Valha, raja is seen
by many Sarajevans, and Bosnians more generally, as that which was held onto
against all odds during the conflict and subsequently becomes a kind of
auto-ironic way of both critiquing the absurdities of the political elite but,
in the end, resting on that critique and settling for raja as quotidian
survival.
For my alternative ending, it is worth noting that as of 8 June 2021, Bosnia-Herzegovina had the third highest rate of COVID deaths per million population in the world, behind only Peru and Hungary. The first wave of the pandemic was marked by a corruption scandal in which a fruit-processing company with close links to political leaders secured a lucrative contract to import ventilators from China that proved to be deficient. Today’s Bosnia-Herzegovina is also policing the border with the EU and is a major holding centre for refugees and asylum seekers held in appalling conditions, many of whom have been violently pushed back by Croatian and Bosnian authorities. Localised acts of solidarity with the asylum seekers do still occur but not on the scale of responses along the so-called ‘Balkan route’ in 2015, when a kind of inter-generational geopolitics of solidarity saw grassroots activities offering practical and political support to migrants from Libya, Syria and elsewhere.
These
actions followed on from protests in February 2013, termed bebalucija when,
after a law on personal identification numbers was declared unconstitutional,
politicians from the major nationalist parties failed to reach agreement on a
new law meaning that new-born babies could not obtain a passport nor a health
insurance number. In a sense, it was precisely the absurdity of an impasse over
personal IDs that triggered the anger of the protesters, reaching a crescendo
when a three-month old child died in June 2013 because she was not allowed to
enter neighbouring Serbia for treatment. Later, several days of rioting began
in the industrial city of Tuzla in February 2014 when workers from several
factories who had lost their jobs clashed with police outside the Cantonal
Government building. The unrest spread to many other towns and cities, mainly
in the Federation and, although widely reported to have ‘run out of steam’ they
remain important for the experiment of direct democracy through plenums that
lives on today across the post-Yugoslav space. I will not try to formulate some principles regarding the
relationship between the everyday and the political in terms of which ending is
more likely. As Stuart Hall remarked (Hall, 2007: 279), such things are always “open
to the play of contingency”.
Paul Stubbs is a UK-born sociologist who has lived and worked in
the post-Yugoslav space since 1993. He is Senior Research Fellow in the
Institute of Economics, Zagreb and a former Co-President of the Association for
the Anthropology of Policy of the American Anthropological Association. His
edited book on Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement is due to be
published in 2022.
References
Andrić,
Ivo. 1995. The Bridge Over the Drina. London: Harvill.
Blagojević,
Marina. 2009. Knowledge Production at the Semi-Periphery: A Gender
Perspective, Belgrade: Institute for Criminological and Sociological
Research.
Brković, Čarna. 2017. Managing Ambiguity: How Clientlism, Citizenship and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, New York: Berghahn Books.
Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Epilogue: through the prism of fan intellectual life,” in Brian Meeks and Stuart Hall (eds.) Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: the thought of Stuart Hall, London: Laerence & Wushart: 269-291.
Hromadžić, Azra. 2015. “Loving Labor: Work, Care and Entrepreneurial Citizenship in a Bosnian Town,” in Stef Jansen et al. eds. Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Farnham: Ashgate.
Jansen, Stef. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex, New York: Berghahn Books.
Stubbs, Paul. 2015. “Performing Reform in South East Europe: consultancy, translation and flexible agency”, in John Clarke et al Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage, Bristol: Policy Press: 65-94.
Šaviha
Valha, Nebojša. 2013. Raja: Ironijski aspekt svakodnevne komunikacije u
Bosni i Herzegovini i raja kao strategija života. Zagreb: Jesenski i Turk.
Wedel, Janine. 2009. Shadow Elite, New York: Basic Books.
Cite as: Stubbs, Paul. 2021. “Liminal Temporalities of Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” FocaalBlog, 17 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/06/17/paul-stubbs-liminal-temporalities-of-hope-in-bosnia-herzegovina/.
For the first time since El Salvador’s mid-20th century military dictatorship, a single political party dominates both the legislative and executive branches of the government, and by all accounts aims to control the judiciary soon as well. The Nuevas Ideas or “New Ideas” party, the political vehicle of populist president Nayib Bukele, recently used its new supermajority in the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly to unconstitutionally expel five supreme court judges. It will soon replace them with new appointees, presumably picked by Bukele, in a move that social movement activists are denouncing as a “technical coup.”
Unlike the military dictatorships that dominated
El Salvador up until its bloody civil war, however, Bukele’s government is
nominally democratic. Bukele was elected president in 2018 and will serve a
five-year term, after which he is supposed to leave office for good.
Legislative and municipal elections in El Salvador delivered his party, branded
distinctively with a bold “N” the stands for both “Nuevas Ideas” and
“Nayib”, a resounding majority.
The elections marginalized both the centre-left FMLN, former communist guerrillas, and the traditional right ARENA, anti-communists organized by former military junta members. Bukele claimed to have “turned the page” on the postwar two-party system that characterized El Salvador’s political reality following the 1992 Peace Accords. Bukele has repeatedly claimed that he is “neither left nor right” and described both sides of the country’s bloody civil war as equally criminal, despite evidence to the contrary.
Yet in spite of a nominal democratic mandate (problematized by mass abstentionism in recent Salvadoran elections) and a post-ideological veneer, Bukele has much in common with other right-wing authoritarians in the region, such as Jair Bolsanaro – whose son and advisor tweeted supportively of the sacking of the supreme court. The instrumentalization of legislative proceedings to consolidate power also bears similarity to the tactic of lawfare used in Brazil and elsewhere by the Latin American far right. Bukele’s tendency to both issue government decrees and launch harassment campaigns against his perceived enemies via twitter has also prompted comparisons to Donald Trump.
Bukele has political power, and all signs suggest that the repressive elements of the state stand behind him – in some cases, literally, as when he stormed the legislature last year, attempting to force the assembly to approve his Territorial Control Plan and secretive US$109 million loan to upgrade the country’s police armaments. Yet in the name of security and order, he needs to consolidate more.
Speaking in the aftermath of the move to overturn the judiciary, a participant told me, “This is a strategy that could be regionalized.” The move is consistent with the strategy of “autogolpe” or “self-coup” used by other civilian governments with close military ties to kneecap and paralyze opposition, often in the name of rooting out designated enemies. Turkish president and fellow right-wing populist Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have attempted a similar strategy in 2016, and if Eduardo Bolsanaro’s comments are any indication, there is potentially appetite for it in Brazil.
Bonapartism, Bukeleism
Bukele’s personalist leadership, claims to be post-ideological, and appeals to an abstract Salvadoran people, all reflect what Italian communist Antonio Gramsci called “caesarism,” or what Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, called Bonapartism. Like these historical regimes, Bukele’s rise was precipitated by a crisis. El Salvador is a microcosm of the global economic, ecological, health, political and social crises that have prompted a meteoric rise of right-wing populism around the world.
Gramsci called these conditions, which can precipitate reaction or revolution, organic crises. Organic crises usually lead to a rejection of established political parties, economic policies, and value systems. Such crises are transnational in their origins but also intimately local. El Salvador’s domestic crisis reflects global and regional trends of collapsing party systems, increased securitization, and growing disaffection with globalization and accumulation-by-dispossession. Using the framework of an organic crisis, my research situates the rise of right-wing populism in Central America within the global rise of populism.
For populism experts in the liberal tradition, like Cas Mudde and Cristobal Kaltwasser, populism signals a degeneration of the health of liberal democracy and liberal institutions. Populism’s emphasis on majoritarianism leaves little room for liberal pluralism and reduces politics to a Schmittian dichotomy of “friends” and “enemies.” On the other hand, following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, some on the Left see the rise of populism as a positive, calling for socialists to seize the “populist moment” to rally “the people” to a left-populism.
Both these perspectives focus on the ideological anatomy of populism, tracing its political reasoning and descriptive effects. This is insufficient to explain Bukele. On the one hand, if we rely on liberal accounts of populism, we end up reproducing simplistic narratives of democratic backslide and the Latin caudillo. On the other hand, Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive analysis fails to make a link between the “superstructural” language of nation, sovereignty, order, and belonging that we find in right-wing populism, and the world of production, finance, and recessions.
El Salvador’s organic crisis
Bukele and his party, Nuevas Ideas, emerged out of the 2011 indignados protests, named after the Spanish mobilizations of the same name. While initially buoying the left, middle-class Salvadoran indignadosquickly became disillusioned by the FMLN. Bukele, an ex-FMLNista himself, in many ways capitalizes on the unfulfilled anti-corruption demands of the indignados. His response in office to this crisis, though punitive, also reflects this popular disillusionment with the postwar Salvadoran political system.
Out-migration has for the past three decades acted as a kind of release valve for social pressures in Central America, pushing peasants and workers dispossessed by capitalist development north towards the United States and buoying Central American economies with billions in remittances. But as William Robinson points out, mounting ecological, social, and economic dispossession, combined with slumping economic growth and rising foreign debt (even before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has only made the slump worse), and a labour market unable to absorb the remaining dispossessed population, have pushed the region towards implosion.
Organic crises lay bare fundamental contradictions in the system that the ruling classes are unable to resolve, provoking resorts to open force. Central American countries, aided by the United States through the Alliance for Prosperity and Regional Security Initiative, have responded to simmering unrest and growing social movements with escalating violence and repression. Military and police aid nominally supports anti-gang efforts and the regularization of immigration—favourite talking points of Bukele.
While in neighbouring Guatemala this stewing crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has escalated into anti-systemic protests, Bukele has kept a lid on the pot through a mix of emergency welfare provisions and increasing militarization. Bukele’s mixing of highly-publicized social supports and punitive populism is again a consistent Bonapartist strategy of weathering the interregnum by attempting to simultaneously reconcile and repress social conflict.
Image 1: Bukele receives the baton of command from the Armed Forces of El Salvador at an official event. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Crisis, protection, and sovereignty
Even as they are assailed by COVID-19 deaths, right-wing populists in Latin America are rebounding, signaling a potential future for right-wing populism in the ‘post-COVID’ world. Sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo recently argued that post-COVID politics will be defined by the theme of ‘protection’ – from epidemics, from climate change, from crime and instability. Don Kalb has argued on this blog that current protection measures are facilitating the formation of a new ‘techno-capital’ post-COVID regime of accumulation with new kinds of contestations.
Bukele’s El Salvador foreshadows a possible post-COVID political environment dominated by right-wing populism. Like his preceding controversial actions, Bukele’s autogolpe is being justified with a mix of militaristic and pseudo-religious language—demonizing his enemies and framing the fight against corruption and organized crime in terms of literal warfare to secure the sovereignty of the country.
Throughout the Global South, pandemic measures that prioritize repression over healthcare and bolster existing over-policing have led to the peripheralization of neighbourhoods and the stripping of meaningful citizenship from villainized populations. In the context of widespread dispossession in El Salvador, the state’s longstanding mano duro approach to crime, and now Bukele’s autogolpe, these measures signal an even more repressive kind of capital accumulation coming out of the COVID crisis.
Bukele also benefits from a demoralized left that has strained relationships with its base and social movements. El Salvador is thus also a cautionary tale when it comes to simplistic calls for a left alternative – be it to reclaim populism or reclaim the politics of protection. The marginalization of the leftist FMLN is not for lack of trying to appropriate populist or protectionist language – the outgoing FMLN government of Salvador Sanchez Ceren also attempted to combine punitive anti-crime legislation with progressive social programs, as well as symbolic gestures like refusing to take up residence in the presidential palace, converting it into a public venue.
The late Ralph Sprenkels and Hillary Goodfriend have both pointed out that the FMLN’s collapse was not due to being inadequately populist, but rather due to frayed internal organization, clientelism and corruption, and a strategy in power that prioritized pragmatism over a transformational program. Enthusiasm for left-populism or left-protectionism should thus be tempered by a serious diagnosis of the organizations, from grassroots to party leaderships, that are supposed to carry a left alternative to power.
Social struggles persist outside the FMLN, however. Bukele’s hostile attacks on public sector employees have prompted strikes, and at the time of writing, protests against the autogolpe, hunger movements and other mobilizations are beginning to make cracks in what Bukele insists is his popular mandate. Whether Bukele’s right-wing populism will totter like it has in neighbouring Guatemala or whether his autogolpe will consolidate a new authoritarian state remains an open question, one worthy of attention for anthropologists interested in the new contours and contestations of the present moment.
Abram Lutes is a graduate researcher at the Carleton University Institute of Political Economy in Ottawa, Canada. His research interests include Gramscian theory, world-systems theory, social movements, and populism. At the time of writing, he is conducting digital fieldwork on El Salvador and Guatemala.
Antonini, Francesca. 2020. The Concepts
of Bonapartism and Caesarism from Marx to Gramsci. Caesarism and
Bonapartism in Gramsci. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004441828_002.
Gusterson, Hugh. 2017. “From Brexit to
Trump: Anthropology and the Rise of Nationalist Populism.” American
Ethnologist 44 (2): 209–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12469.
Rey-Araujo, Pedro. 2019. “Grounding
Populism upon Political Economy: Organic Crises in Social Structures of
Accumulation Theory.” Science & Society 83 (January): 10–36. https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2019.83.1.10.
Rodrik, Dani. 2018. “Populism and the
Economics of Globalization.” Journal of International Business Policy 1
(1–2): 12–33. https://doi.org/10.1057/s42214-018-0001-4.
Torrez, Clara
Guardado, and Ellen Moodie. 2020. “La Línea, Los Indignados, and the
Post-Postwar Generation in El Salvador.” The
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
25 (4): 590–609. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12498.
Cite as: Lutes, Abram. 2021. “Anatomy of an Autogolpe: On the consolidation of Nayib Bukele’s power in El Salvador.” FocaalBlog, 26 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/05/26/abram-lutes-anatomy-of-an-autogolpe-on-the-consolidation-of-nayib-bukeles-power-in-el-salvador/
‘Blue lives matter,’ says the mantra of police fragility.
The mythology about defenseless officers being hunted and killed by criminals
is indeed a powerful one, mobilized by right-wing politicians endorsed by
police unions in countries such as Brazil and the United States. In the case of
Brazil, a global reference in police terror, the narrative of police victimization
helped president Jair Bolsonaro to galvanize popular support around the
fictional image of patriotic officers (or soldiers like himself), ready to put
their lives on the line to protect citizens and save the country.
Certainly, police officers are killed in Brazil at a rate
that supersedes any other country in the hemisphere. According to the Brazilian
Forum of Public Safety, 343 officers were killed in 2018 alone, 75% of them
off-duty (FBS 2019). Although the numbers are extremely high when compared with
the United States, for instance, where 181 law enforcement agents were killed
in 2019 (NLEOMF 2020), this is a profession that, contrary to popular belief, has
very low lethality rates worldwide. Yet, even in Brazil, with astonishing
levels of officers killed on and off-duty, homicide is not the leading cause of
police death. In what seems to be a trend in Brazil and the US, the leading
cause of officers’ death is suicide (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018; Exame
2019; see also Miranda and Guimarães 2016).
While assault and killings of law enforcement officers do
occur, this real risk is part and parcel of the work they perform. In fact, it
is common-sensical that their work grants them special protection not enjoyed
by any other civilian occupation. To raise a hand against a police officer is
not only a serious felony offense, but is also quite often a lethal one. In
Brazil, when an officer is killed, dozens of poor and predominantly black youths
are killed in revenge raids such as the infamous 2006 massacre, when at least 600
youth were killed within the span of one week in response to gangs’ lethal attacks
against police stations (Mães de Maio 2018). Police even deploy assassinations in
order to pressure politicians to grant them better labor conditions.
Indeed, spreading terror has been an ‘efficient’ police strategy to gain political leverage. For instance, in February 2020, days before carnival, the Military Police of Ceará went on strike. Although the direct involvement of striking officers in the slaughter is the object of an ongoing investigation, there were several denunciations of police-linked death squads and hooded men in police patrols terrorizing the population. Coincidently or not, and repeating a pattern seen in other Brazilian contexts (see De Souza, 2016), at least two hundred individuals were killed within the span of one week (Jucá 2020; Adorno 2020). To no avail, the leftist governor Camilo Santana denounced these uses of terror as a tactic to bring the government to its knees. Widespread denunciations of human rights violations, from torture to assassinations, are consistently met with impunity in a country where at least 6,200 individuals were killed by the police in 2018 (17 deaths each day!), of which 99% were young male, favela residents and 75% were blacks (FBSP 2019).
Image 1: While the US is the leading country in incarceration rates, Brazil leads the way in the killing of Black individuals by law enforcement policies. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, within six years (2015-2020) 29, 952 civilians were killed by the Brazilian police force. Black youth account for 8 in 10 individuals killed by the police. Click here for geo-reference on the lethality of policing in Brazil.
In this following, I focus not so much on the
paradigmatic victims of police terror in societies of the African Diaspora such
as Brazil and the United States, but rather on the critical role urban
ethnographers can play in demystifying the ‘war on police’ and in advancing an insurgent
movement pushing toward police abolition in the contemporary world. Brazil is
the departure point of analysis for obvious reasons. As the country with the
highest rates of civilians killed by the police, it has, within the last few
decades, seen a proliferation of socio-anthropological studies on police
violence and police culture. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing
attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but
officers themselves have become ethnographers – or at least relied on some of
its techniques – in their attempts to provide ‘privileged’ accounts of police
praxis (e.g., França 2019; Muniz and Silva 2010; Storani 2008).
This article should be understood neither as a literature
review of the burgeoning field of police studies in Brazil (for an overview
see, Muniz et., all, 2018) nor an overview of global anthropology of policing. Instead,
I call attention to new directions in the study of policing as a colonial regime
of control that exists in urban contexts in Brazil and the USA, but is hardly unique
to those societies. Crucially, as a global project, the practice of anthropology – and police fieldwork in particular (Steinberg
2020) – cannot be dissociated from the geopolitics of empire and global
antiblackness. Enduring global
colonialism is configured and continuously reinforced by Europe/US-led regimes
of security and knowledge production. And yet, racial apartheid enforced by police
terror –homeland security? — blurs geo-ontological boundaries between global
north and global south and reasserts the afterlife of colonialism (Susser 2020;
Nonini 2020; Beaman, 2020).
How should anthropologists objectively treat police innocence
and victimhood narratives without participating in this ongoing coloniality? If,
as Anna Souhami forcefully argues, ‘the dynamics of police culture [ethnographers]
so powerfully criticis[e] are reflected in the construction of the ethnographic
process’ (2019: 207), how should we ethically write about police victimization
without (even if involuntarily) endorsing the trope of cops’ fragility? What
does the narrative of victimization engender? Finally, what should be the place
of anthropology of policing in the urgent call of black activists and black
studies to defend the dead? While studying the police (and any mainstream
institution) does not necessarily lead to uncritical alignment to power, the
antiblack animus of policing makes it extraordinarily challenging and politically
compromising for anthropologists to work with the police in the name of
ethnographic complexity and simultaneously engage with social movement’s
critique of policing-as-antiblackness (Hale, personal communication). That is
to say, the anthropology of policing, even when highly critical of policing
structure, seems to underscore a liberal reform paradigm that goes against what
the paradigmatic victims of police terror demand: defunding, dismantling and
abolishing the police state.
The Myth of Police
Fragility
There is a scene in Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe’s 2019 movie, Queen and Slim,
that is worth recuperating here. The young couple is going on their first date
when a white cop pulls them over. The minor traffic violation ends with Slim (Daniel
Kaluuya) taking the cop’s gun and shooting him dead in self-defense when the
officer fires his gun against Queen (Jodie Tuner). Slim wants to turn himself
in, but Queen (who is a lawyer) reminds him that their blackness has already
sealed their destiny. The ‘cop-killers’ go on the run through the deep South,
hoping to reach Cuba. As the video of the killing goes viral, Queen and Slim’s
story mobilizes other African Americans and images of Black Lives Matter
protests are merged with their fugitive endeavor. The scene that strikes me
features Junior, a black boy in the foreground leading a demonstration. With
fists in the air he shouts, ‘Let them go!’ When an officer tries to stop him,
he pulls the officer’s gun and shoots the officer dead.
One may speculate: What led him to such an
expected act of violence? Perhaps the painful consciousness of his blackness? Perhaps
the limited options available, within the context of ‘fugitive justice,” to stop
the “grinding machine of human flesh” policing represents? The film and the scene in particular aroused
heated debate on the nature and scope of Black resistance against police
violence in the Black Lives Matter era. Lena Waithe has called the movie ‘a
meditation on black life in America’ (King 2019). However, where the filmmakers
gave cinematic representation to an all too familiar “state of captivity”
(Wilderson 2018:58), some received the movie as a ‘war on cops’ while others
blamed it for ‘going too far left in its
implications in that black people condone, protect and are inspired by
reciprocating violence against police as a result of their experiences with law
enforcement’ (Vaughn 2019).
The “war-on-cops” rhetoric and
its attending practices in the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ movement in the United
States and its parallel (albeit diffuse) pro-cops movement in Brazil can be
read as what legal scholar Frank Rudy Cooper calls “the myth of cop fragility”.
Hecontends that such mythology draws a false equivalence between ‘blue
lives’ and ‘black lives’ by ‘reposition[ing] police officers, and whites in
general, as the new victims’ of racism (Cooper 2020: 654). In that sense, ‘white backlash better
explains Blue Lives Matter’s self-defense perspective than does the
vulnerability of police officers to attack’ (2020: 655).
By hijacking the
meanings of the black struggle for life, the police also cannibalize the terms
of the debate. This, in turn, seems to resonate in the academia’s ambivalence (unwillingness?)
in dealing with the cruelty of police power. Whereas radical social movements
and scholars lay bare the impossibility of freeing justice from its coloniality
(e.g., Best and Hartman 2005; Segato 2007; McDowell
and Fernandez 2018; Flauzina and Pires 2020), we see a proliferation of
works on police reform, or, in the case of anthropology, an investment in cops
as a new subject of inquiry whose violent work must be understood in relation
to broad social norms and power dynamics. I have nothing against the election
of cops as ethnographic subjects and indeed, such an election has been crucial
to illuminate social processes that otherwise would continue to remain obscure.
Though in a fragmented form, I take this very path in my own ethnographic work
on police brutality in São Paulo, Brazil and Cali, Colombia.
Likewise, recent groundbreaking ethnographies of policing
(I am consciously grouping scholars from distinct disciplines whose work
employs ethnography as its main methodology) have shed light on the ways in
which officers justify their work as habitus – ‘just doing their job’ – which
reflects a socially shared belief in torture and killings as a form of ordering
the chaotic social world. In racialized geographies such as the Paris’ ‘banlieues,’ Los Angeles’ ‘ghettos’ or Brazil’s
‘favelas,’ these critical ethnographies show that officers enforce sociospatial
imaginaries of belonging, entitlement and justice (Fassin 2013; Denyer-Willis 2015;
Roussell 2015). Officers also perform a peculiar form of order-making in
contested regimes of urban governance by competing local authorities such as
drug-traffickers, paramilitarism, power-brokers and so on (e.g., Salem and
Bertelsen 2020; Larkins 2013; Penglase 2012; Arias 2006). Other interventions
have accounted for the ways in which police negotiate their everyday encounters
with institutional violence and public discredit. Officers are forcefully
portrayed as political actors whose practices, emotions and subjectivities echo
broader systems of morals (Pauschinger 2020; see
also Jauregui 2014). Police and policing produce a mode of “sociability,”
an ethos, and a political rationale of governance (Karpiak 2010; Sclofsky 2016; Muniz and Albernaz 2017). Finally,
there is the call for ‘publicity, practicality and epistemic solidarity’ among
anthropologists, law enforcement agencies and larger publics to respond to the
disciplinary invitation for political engagement with pressing problems of
corruption and violence (Mutsaers et al. 2015: 788).
These and many other works (too many to be listed in a
commentary note) reflect an important anthropological contribution to demystifying
this troubling institution and the subjectivity of its agents. In the last
decade or so, it has become a consensus in the field – regardless of one’s
theoretical perspective – that policing is much more than uniformed personnel
patrolling the streets. By making
ethnographically visible what policing does and produces, ethnographers have
provided insightful understandings of mundane forms of order-making,
statecrafts and rationales of government (see Karpiak and Garriott 2018, Martin
2018, Steinberg 2020 for an overview).
My
intervention does not go against these contributions that I loosely locate
within the field of ethnographies of police. My concern here is with what
anthropology does and what anthropology produces when giving cops more voice
and space in these critical times when cities are on fire. In their edited
volume, The Anthropology of Police, editors Kevin Karpiack and Willian
Garriott ask the important questions: ‘What are the ethical and political
stakes of trying to humanize the police? Are there any grounds on which one
could even justify an approach that took up such a project of humanization over
and against one centered on cataloguing, critiquing, and decrying
police-perpetuated harms?’ (2018: 6-7). The authors answer this crucial question
by calling for the study of police as a way to challenge the discipline’s trend
to “study up” and as an attempt to understand contemporary notions of humanness
embedded in policing and security practices. To them, one cannot understand the
world and what it means to be human without understanding the work of police
(2018: 8).
In
this sense, it is argued, the risk pays-off: when attentive to one’s own
positionality, critical ethnographies of policing can shed light on important issues
such as the culture of militarism, the corrosion of democracy and the
normalization of gendered violence (Kraska 1996; Denyer-Willis 2016). I can relate
to that. My fragmented ethnographic encounters with police officers (usually
themselves from the lowest social stratum of the society they supposedly serve
and protect) gave me a first-hand understanding of how officers negotiate
apparently contradictory approaches of defending the killings of ‘criminals,’ enthusiastically
supporting a ‘new’ human rights-oriented community police, energetically detaching
themselves from the “bad cops,” and embracing a hyper-militaristic crusade to ‘save’
family and Christian values (Alves 2018).
While doing ethnography with/of police does not necessarily stand in contradiction to the ethics and promises of anthropology in solving human problems, something I have no doubt my colleagues genuinely embrace as a political project, and while we should suspend assumptions that all anthropologists must adhere to the militant/activist theoretical-methodological orientation (Harrison 1992; Hale 2008, Hale personal communication), studying the police requires one to face tough ethical questions on the troubling position of witnessing the perpetration of violence, the unintended normalization of police culture (see Souhami 2019), and the dangerous humanization of police work.
My analysis (and that of many of my
colleagues), was politically aligned with activists and empathic with
individuals embracing outlawed forms of resistance against police terror.
Still, I was constantly asked which side I was on. For instance, a black young
man, who by the time of my research in the favelas of São Paulo was making a
living in what he refers as ‘the world of crime,’ unapologetically told me I
was an asshole for being ‘too straight, too naïve, too afraid to die.’ In Cali,
Colombia, although I was considered “not kidnappable” — as the member of a
local gang laughed and joked around, perhaps demarking the difference between
my physical appearance and those of other foreign researchers usually from the
global north — I was awkwardly enough associated with the mestizo middle
class and its regime of morality that called for state violence against black
youth seen as the scapegoat of the city’s astonishing levels of violence.
Thus, my contention here is not so much to
stop studying police, but rather, to disengage from a seductive analysis of
power that, while compelling in scholarly terms and in-depth ethnographic description,
may involuntarily give voice to unethical power structures personified by the
police. Following Frank Wilderson’s assertion that police terror ‘is an ongoing
tactic of human renewal…a tactic to secure humanity’s place’ (2018:48), one
should ask what such an anthropological project of humanization entails. If we do not want our work to end up fueling
and corroborating the skepticism over a discipline with an ugly history of complicity
with oppressive power, then it is about time for an unapologetic ‘f*ck the
police!’ in studies of policing.
Maroon Anthropology
In Progressive dystopia, abolition, antiblackness and schooling in San Francisco, anthropologist Savannah Shange urges anthropologists to apply ‘the tools of our trade to the pursuit of liberation, and [to enact] the practice of willful defiance in the afterlife of slavery’ (Shange 2019: 159). Abolitionist anthropology responds to scholars law-abiding investment in policing – what she calls carceral progressivism – by refusing the promises of the liberal state and liberal academia (39-42). The imperative ‘F*ck the Police!’ could be another way of engaging with Shange’s invitation to make space for freedom in our writing and our practices. The urgency of the moment asks anthropologists to work against the police, not with the police. If nothing else, the recent urban ‘riots’ in response to the lynching of black individuals in the United States and in Brazil support my call. Individuals strangulated with knee-to-neck asphyxia, skulls broken by police boots, wounded bodies calculatedly left agonizing in the streets or tied to the police patrol and dragged through the streets, rapes, disappearances and continued extortion are some of the mundane practices of police terror that should make us pause and reflect.
Image 2: On March 14, Marielle Franco, a black feminist, human rights defender and city councilperson from the socialist party, was murdered. She was also leading the Human Rights Commission to monitor police and military abuse during the military intervention decreed by then president Michel Temer and she was vocal against paramilitary groups that control Rio’s political system. Two years after her death, the question remains: “Who ordered the killing of Marielle?” (Source: Workers Party. https://pt.org.br/caso-marielle-franco-um-ano-sem-solucao/)
Let’s be honest, as a discipline, we have failed to side significantly
with the victims of police terrorism beyond sit-in moments at conferences, open
letters, creatively designed syllabi or academic journal articles such as this
very one. Anthropologists seem to be too invested in the economy of
respectability that grants us access to institutional power ‘to engage
anthropology as a practice of abolition’ (Shange 2019: 10). Nothing can be more
illustrative of such an abysmal dissonance with this call than the political
lexicon we use to describe police terrorism itself – it is telling that the
word terror is barely articulated in the field of anthropology of police
– and people’s call to ‘burn it down’ and ‘end the f*cking world’. With one fist
in the air and a rocket in the other hand, demonstrators have denounced again
and again that ‘Brazil is a graveyard,’ ‘the US is a plantation,’ ‘police are
the new slave-catcher.’ Cities turned into a
smoking battleground, police stations stormed, patrols set on fire. What
has anthropology got to offer beyond well-crafted texts, sanitized analyses of
the moment and good intentions to decolonize the discipline? We lack rage!
Like police, and unlike workers in general, tenured
scholars (including anthropologists) have very low risk in performing their
work. Police perform what Micol Siegel forcefully calls ‘violence work’ (Siegel
2018). They are professionals that essentially deliver violence represented as a
public good. Anthropologists, I would argue, are ‘violence workers’ not only in
performing the enduring colonial project of othering, but also when taking a ‘reformist’,
‘neutral’ or distant stance on social movements that demand radical changes.
Even worse, in giving voice to police based on a pretentious technicality of
‘just’ collecting data, anthropology ends up helping to quell that struggle (see
Bedecarré 2018 for groundbreaking work on the role of white scholars in
promoting vigilante justice against Black anger). That is to say, the nature of
the violence performed by ethnographers of policing may differ in degree and
scope from police terror but, as Hortense Spillers reminds us, “we might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us”
(Spillers 1987: 68).
If
the subfield of anthropology of police wants to be coherent to the discipline’s
(incomplete) decolonizing turn, it should have no ambiguity in regarding police
‘violence’ as terror, have no doubts as to which lives are in peril in these terroristic
policing practices and refuse the false promises of reforming this colonial
institution. For ethnographers, refusing to performing ‘violence work’ may
require disloyalty to the state – including rejecting the self-policing
required by corporate academia – and instead unapologetically embrace the
position of an insurgent subject whose ‘coherence [is] shaped by political
literacy emanating from communities confronting crisis and conflict’ (see James
and Gordon 208:371).
I am
not completely sure how an insurgent anthropology of police would look (Ralph,
2020 is a powerful example of how anthropologists can use the discipline’s
tools to mobilize larger audiences against police terror). A departure point
for discussion, however, would be the intellectual humbleness to learn from the
wretched of the earth’s refusal to legitimize, ‘humanize’ and promote the
reforming of the police, not to mention the temptation to equate cop’s (real)
vulnerability to violence with the (mundane) killing of civilians. Ultimately,
those of us doing ethnography in collaboration with men and women in uniform ought
to ask ourselves how to express empathy with and mourn blue lives – since as
ethnographers we develop emotional bonds to our interlocutors even if critical
of their behaviors– and still remain critical of the regime of law that
necessitates and legitimizes the evisceration of black lives. How do we attend
to the ethical demand for all (blue) lives’ grievability while also attentive
to the ways, as some anthropologists have shown (Kurtz 2006; and Vianna et
al., 2011), the state is anthropomorphized and performed by
political agents? Are not cops’ lives, insofar as their identity are attached
to the (state) terrorism they perform, an expression of state livingness? That
is to say, blue lives are not the same as black lives because blue lives are
state lives (albeit not the only ones, a peculiar performance of state
sovereignty). There is no space for a theorization on the multiple ways the
state comes into being as a mundane practice of domination. It is enough to say
that at least in the USA and Brazil, statecraft is antiblackcraft. Indeed, the
military labor performed by the police in postcolonial contexts such as Brazil
and the United States is only made possible by the ‘politics of enmity’ (Mbembe
2003) that informs contemporary regimes of urban security. It is in the terrain
of sovereignty, thus, that one has to situate the work of policing. As Siegel and others have shown, one of the
most important realizations of state violence is the mystification of police
work as civilian as opposed to military labor. The police, the myth goes, works
under the register of citizenship to protect and serve civil society. Still,
both police and the military are one and same. The field in which police
operates is a military one, which works effectively and precisely to deploy
terror in a sanitized and legitimate way (Wooten 2020; Siegel 2018; see also Kraska
2007).
This is not a peripheral point. One has only
to consider the ways black people encounter officers in the streets as soldier
and experience policing as terror (again, asphyxiated with the knee on the
neck, dragged in the streets, dismembered and disappeared) in opposition to the
contingent violence experienced by white victims of cops’ aggression (Wilderson
2018; Alves and Vargas 2017) or by cops’ vulnerability inherent to their
profession. And yet, if the logic of enmity is what sustains the enduring
antiblack regime of terror enforced by policing, from the point of view of its
paradigmatic enemy reforming the police is absurd and praising blue lives is
insane.
How might anthropologists challenge the
asymmetric positionality of terrified police lives and always already terrifying
black beings? When one officer dies, it
is a labor accident. When an officer kills, it is part of his or her labor in
performing the state. The degrees, causality and likelihood matter here. Even
in societies such as Brazil, where the number of officers killed is extremely
high, police lives are not as in peril as conservative pundits want us to
believe. The lives of those cops eventually killed ‘in service’ are weaponized
forms of life that predict the death of black enemies. Thus, police and their
victims belong to two different registers, and if there is an ethical issue in
relativizing any death—an approach I firmly refuse –, there is equal or
even greater risk in lumping together state delinquency and retaliatory
violence by its victims.
There is no equivalence between blue lives
and black lives, and even if the call for equivalence is the order of the day in
the liberal sensibility that ‘all lives matter,’ this is not the job of
anthropology to reconcile these two positions. It is in the spirit of
anthropology’s moral and political commitment to the oppressed – a commitment that
while empathic with the powerless is also highly critical of the uses of violence
as liberatory tool — that we should insurge against this false
equivalency.
Based on her work with activists in the South
African liberation movement, Nancy Scheper-Hughes
asks, “what makes anthropology and anthropologists exempt from the human responsibility
to take an ethical (and even a political) stand on the working out of
historical events as we are privileged to witness them?” (1995:411). The author
deals with this question by highlighting the complexity of not relativizing
violence of the oppressed or taking a neutral distance from the cruelty of the
oppressor and yet, positioning one’s fieldwork as a site of struggle. She
opposes the anthropologist as a “fearless spectator” (a neutral and objective
eye) and the witness (the anthropologist as a “companheira”). The later is
positioned “inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and morally
committed being” and “accountable for what they see and what they fail to see,
how they act and how they fail to act in critical situations” (1995: 419).
If we consider current waves of demonstrations
against police terror as a historical moment that scholars committed to human
liberation cannot refuse to attend, how do we respond to this call without been
misunderstood as inciters of violenceagainst the police? Although an insurgent
anthropology should learn from different historical and ethnographic contexts
where retaliatory violence has been deployed as one legitimate tool to
counteract the brutality of power (Abufarha 2009; Cobb 2014; Umoja 2013), my
critique here is obviously not an argument for embracing
violence against cops as the way out of the current crisis of policing. I am
also not turning a blind eye to a range of political possibilities militant and
activist anthropologists already embrace in favor of empowering victims of
state-sanctioned violence as “negative-workers”, public intellectuals, or
member of advocacy groups (e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1995; Mullings 2015). Rather, informed
by a black radical tradition, I am inviting anthropologists to rebel and change
the terms of engagement with the police by questioning our (and our
discipline’s) loyalty to the carceral state.
Thus, f*ck the police! is
not a rhetorical device, but rather an ethical imperative and moral obligations
to the eviscerating lives lost by state delinquency. It is indeed an invitation
to seriously engage with the desperate call from the streets for making Black Lives
Matter. Attending to their call, on their terms, would require a deep scrutiny
on how anthropology participate in antiblackness as a socially shared practice.
It also requires us to consider how antiblackness renders legal claims for
redressing police terror quite often of little account, and what resisting
police terror means to those whose pained bodies resist legibility as victims. What
does the anthropological project of humanizing the police mean to those ontologically
placed outside Humanity? For those whose marked bodies make Queen and
Slim’s subject position – as new runaway slaves – very familiar and intimate, the
answer is quite straightforward. Fuck the police!
Acknowledgments: This
paper has benefited from generous comments from Charlie Hale, Micol Siegel,
Graham Denyer-Willis, João Vargas and Tathagatan Ravindran, as well as from
engaging audiences at the University of Colorado/ IBS Speaker Series,
University of London / Race Policing and the City Seminar, and the University
of Massachusetts/Anthropology Colloquium. I also thank Terrance Wooten and
Amanda Pinheiro for a joint-conversation on police terror during the Cities
Under Fire forum at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Don Kalb,
Patrick Neveling and Lillie Gordon provided invaluable editorial assistance. Errors
and omissions are of course mine.
Jaime A Alves teaches Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His academic interest includes urban coloniality and black spatial insurgency in Brazil and Colombia. He is the author of “The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minesotta Press, 2018). His publications can be found at https://jaimeamparoalves.weebly.com
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Cite as: Alves, Jaime A. 2021. “F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 27 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/27/jaime-a-alves-fck-the-police-murderous-cops-the-myth-of-police-fragility-and-the-case-for-an-insurgent-anthropology/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
In a little restaurant in the
midst of a foggy day, Talita served me chicken, rice, salads and a glass of
local wine. She said I was the only customer, the only person around. The
mountain area in the Viseu region in northern Portugal usually attracts tourists
for its special landscape; the granite and slate of the mountain as well as the
lush flora, interlaced with moss and lichens. But with the lockdown during the
COVID-19 crisis people stopped coming. There are not many other industries
here, the only other ones are the wine and the wind businesses, the latter of
which is huge. Talita points to the turbines on display on the top of the
cliffs, surrounding us —an infrastructural crown that towers over the valley.
“You see, we have so much wind here, it is our secret resource.” Talita explains that wind is the special,
often unknown ingredient of Portuguese wine. It plays a role as a natural
antibiotic, preserving the integrity of the vineyards without the need for preservatives
and it dries out the plants after it rains. “You can feel it in the wine.” I
sip from the glass, seeking the taste of the wind. It is not just a sensorial attempt.
I am in Portugal to trace how wind has been harnessed, and how an instrument like a green bond has served as both a financial and an energy source. As part of a larger project which looks at the development and impact of green finance from an anthropological perspective, I followed the first Chinese green bond to be issued in Europe as an ethnographic object of research. This not only sheds light on the way a green bond can be traded across boundaries but also on what its impact is on the ground. Green bonds result from the recent development of green finance, which promises to tackle the current ecological crisis with debt instruments. Similarly to conventional “vanilla” bonds, green bonds are fixed-income debt instruments whose risk is bound to the issuer profile but whose proceeds are earmarked in green infrastructure/projects that the issuer pledges to invest in (Jones et al. 2020).
Green bonds bring cheaper capital
for issuers and lower risk returns for investors by offering projects that decarbonize
infrastructures and favor energy transition. Green bonds exemplify how the
financial and the material are deeply interconnected. As I will show, this is
demonstrated by the way the auditing and certification practices that create
and “provoke” the value of the bond as a financial asset (Muniesa 2014; Birch
and Muniesa 2020) intersects with specific material conjunctures and power
hierarchies in which the bond is embedded.
Thus, this analysis explores the
way finance capital valorization is increasingly interwoven in the process of
assetization of nature, and how this is deeply implicated with the political
role of energy infrastructures as both local connective and collective devices.
It shows how at the bottom of this new green financial pyramid lies the
invisible and infinite potential of wind as energy resource (Franquesa 2018).
As green bonds are proclaimed to have an increasingly important role in
harmonizing the often-antithetical duality between sustainability and finance,
an investigation of how they unpack and are deployed on the ground seems
increasingly urgent.
Image 1: Turbine in the Portuguese countryside, Viseu. (Photo by Giulia Dal Maso, May 2020).
China’s Three Gorges in Portugal
China Three Gorges (CTG) is the state-owned enterprise behind one of the largest dams in the world, the “Three Gorges Dam”; a giant hydroelectric dam celebrated as a triumph of Chinese modern technopower. As the Chinese leader in energy provision, CTG sought ways to penetrate Europe under the encouragement of the Chinese state’s “Go Out” expansion strategy. China not only started to look beyond its borders for sources of energy and natural resources (Mohan and Urban 2019, 248), it also adopted processes of green securitization as a way to boost its position to the world’s most powerful green financial system (Bruckermann 2020) and promoted its ecological civilization (shengtai wenming) outside its borders.
CTG landed in Portugal in 2011
when the country was under the scrutiny imposed by the Troika (the
International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central
Bank) for its high government deficit. Among
other reforms, Portugal was then compelled to eliminate the country’s
growing feed-in tariff debt that compromised Portugal’s path to renewable
energy transition. If a few years earlier Portugal adhered to the EU’s 2009
renewable directive, the aim of which was toachieve 60 per cent of its
electricity generation from renewable energy sources (Andreas et al. 2019), now
it was forced to repay the debt. In the void left by the convoluted austerity
measures promoted by the Troika, Chinese state capital intervened, with CTG
obtaining a stake in the Portuguese energy sector: 21.35 per cent of shares of
the main Portuguese public utility Energias de Portugal (EDP) and 49 per cent
of EDP Renewables (a subsidiary of EDP). Effectively, CTG benefited from this forced privatization, and contributed to a new path in
Portuguese renewable energy transition, a process that the EU had encouraged
but to which it then denied support.
Thus, the CTG became the first
Chinese issuer to release a green bond denominated in Euro and certified and
listed in Europe. However, despite the layers of compliance with the EU
regulations the issuance process does not provide much information about the
nature, the location and the impact of the turbines refinanced by the bond.
Formally, the documents of the bond—the necessary dispostif for the
issuer to certify the truthfulness of its projects and to thus validate the
greenness of the bond—do not specify the location of the wind plants, but name
only the destination countries of the investment. In the case of this specific
bond, the equation of estimated reduced CO2 in wind power in
megawatts is the only formula that speaks of the sustainability of the wind
farms (Sullivan and Hannis 2017). While it is necessary to quantify the
specific number of reduced emissions through wind power, the extent to which
this equation effectively abstracts the essence of the turbines is striking, as
it de-territorializes CTG’s operations in a prospectus which was consequently
validated and certified with no assessment on the location in which these were
implemented.
The green bond, however,
effectively gave consent to CTG to inherit a government permit on the land the
windfarms were built upon, while also benefitting from the previous normative
and labor regime that built them (including the EU feed-in-tariff). In other
words, it allowed CTG to extract a rent from previously funded infrastructures,
with financial capital accruing through the expropriation of a common good in a
process of enclosure of natural resources. The municipality of Viseu had its
benefits, earning central state funds in exchange for land permits, but these
were not extensive. The clausula regulating the funds discounts the price for
land rights if the scope is to build for public interest. Furthermore, the
windfarms refinanced by CTG were just repowering old infrastructure. This
refinancing does not bring much “additionality” at a local level. As many other
large wind infrastructures in marginal areas, the ones in Viseu tended to
reproduce, if not exacerbate, relations of uneven development between rural and
urban areas, as well as public and private investments (Franquesa 2018; Bigger
and Millington 2019).
Image 2: Village surrounded by windfarms, Torres Vedras. (Photo by Giulia Dal Maso, May 2020).
On the Connectivity and
Collectivity of Green Infrastructures
Infrastructures are political entities and as such “a vantage point for rethinking politics” (Opitz and
Tellmann 2015; Larkin 2013). They determine how the green bond “hits the
ground” at a local level. Taking inspiration from Opitz and Tellmann’s (2015)
reflections on the politics of connectivity and collectivity of
infrastructures, I argue that the technological connectivity of energy
infrastructures enables relates to a notion of collectivity, which explains
their impact at local and social level. If windfarms are essential in
guaranteeing connectivity (as a source of energy provision) with the world,
they are at the same time alien to local forms of collectivity. In fact, the
specific rationalities of programming infrastructures that the green bonds
convey doesn’t have anything to do with the local and political space these
infrastructures establish. Often encouraged by austerity measures, green bonds
can become “the conduit of large capitals, often originating from afar, which
lands in local contexts with little clue on their history and specificity”
(transl. Lipari 2020; Scotti 2020). As
noted above, in their making, green bonds often do not include any information
on where the infrastructures are located, and if and how these will impact
collective communities.
Talita shows me her electricity
bill. A chart on it shows that most of her energy power comes from wind power.
She is happy about this. However, she is also angry and frustrated about
struggling to pay her bills; these are way too high. She doesn’t attribute the
high cost of her energy bills to the source of energy, which is wind, but to
the management and distribution of it. Portugal, and Viseu in particular, is
one the EU regions with the highest rate of energy poverty in the EU. Some
locals I met told me that they only use wood stoves to keep warm in winter;
electricity is too expensive.
People hold contradictory
feelings about the wind farms in their area—a mix of indignation and
appreciation. The appreciation stems from the fact that now the turbines are
considered the banner of Portugal’s success in achieving nearly 80 per cent of
renewable energy. Talita tells me she quite likes them as part of the landscape
and some tourists see them as an attraction. They signify that Portuguese
people care about their land and their country’s path to sustainability. They
also reflect a renewed “energy consensus,” which finds roots in the path
dependency between democratic power and electricity provision (see Mitchell
2017; Boyer 2019) that in Portugal partially guaranteed political legitimacy
from the Carnation revolution onwards. The indignation towards the wind farms
instead emerges in the cleavage between the wind blowing on their land and the
infrastructure that harnesses it now. While wind was once a resource people had
used for generations, benefitting the vineyards and fueling local windmills that
still dot the landscapes of Portuguese countryside—and thus directly
contributing to the community’s economic benefit—people now see the externally
financed and technologically advanced wind turbines next door as something
financially distant and out of reach.
Giulia
Dal Maso is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna. She
currently works on the topic of impact/green finance. Her earlier research was
on financialisation in postsocialist contexts; in China and Eastern Europe. She
has published in in Journal of Cultural Economy; Historical Materialism;
Social and Cultural Geography; South Atlantic Quarterly, and has a book out
on Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation: Financial Labor within the
Chinese state-finance nexus. This
article is based on research contributing to the project ‘The Hau of Finance’,
funded by ERC consolidator grant number 772544.
Bibliography
Andreas, Jan-Justus,
Charlotte Burns, and Julia Touza. 2019. ‘Portugal under Austerity: From
Financial to Renewable Crisis?’ Environmental Research Communications 1
(9): 091005. https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7620/ab3cb0
Birch, Kean, and
Fabian Muniesa.2020. Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in
Technoscientific Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bigger, Patrick, and Nate
Millington. 2019. “Getting soaked? Climate Crisis, Adaptation Fiance, and
Racialized Austerity.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and
Space 3, no. 3: 601-623.
Boyer, Dominic. 2019.
Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Bruckermann,
Charlotte. 2020. “Green Infrastructure as Financialized Utopia: Carbon offset
forests in China.” In: Chris Hann and Don Kalb (eds) Financialization:
Relational Approaches, pp. 86-110. New York; Oxford: Berghahn.
Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power struggles: dignity, value, and the renewable energy
frontier in Spain. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Larkin Brian. 2013. The Politics
and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42:
327-343.
Lipari, Samadhi. 2020. “L’Impatto Territoriale
della Transizione Energetica: un’indagine sulla filiera dell’Eolico nel
Mezzogiorno.” Le Parole e le Cose.
http://www.leparoleelecose.it/?p=40083
Opitz, Sven, and
Ute Tellmann. 2015. “Europe as infrastructure: Networking the operative
community.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 1: 171-190.
Scotti, Ivano. 2020. Vento forte. Eolico e Professioni
della Green Economy. Salerno: Orthotes.
Mitchell, Timothy.
2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso
Books.
Mohan, Giles, and
Frauke Urban. 2019. “China and Global Resources.” In The Palgrave. Handbook
of Contemporary International Political Economy, 245–61. Springer.
Muniesa, Fabian.
2014. The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn.
Routledge.
Jones, Ryan, Tom
Baker, Katherine Huet, Laurence Murphy, and Nick Lewis. 2020. “Treating
Ecological Deficit with Debt: The Practical and Political Concerns with Green
Bonds.” Geoforum 114: 49-58.
Sullivan, Sian, and Mike Hannis. 2017. “Mathematics Maybe, but Not Money.” Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal. 10.1108/AAAJ-06-2017-2963.
Cite as: Dal Maso, Giulia. 2021. “The Landing of a Chinese Green Bond in Portugal.” FocaalBlog, 13 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/13/giulia-dal-maso-the-landing-of-a-chinese-green-bond-in-portugal/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
When you enter the House of culture in Dojkinci, a small village on Stara Mountain, you are instantly amazed by its floor. The freshly painted red, green, and blue patterns revived the previously cracked ground. These traditional geometrical shapes are landmarks of ćilim – a centuries-old weaving technique of wool from sheep herds on the Stara Mountain. Few steps inside, and you are surrounded by the large photographs of nature, people, and customs characteristic of this mountain in eastern Serbia. Only a year ago the walls covered by the photographs were molded due to the damaged roof and windows. The building was empty and in decay. It became again the center of the village’s social life after
Image 1: House of Culture Dojkinci. Meeting between the villagers, the architects and the movement Let’s defend the rivers of the Stara Mountain regarding a new revitalization project (photo by the author, 2020)
the villagers together with architecture students and their teachers and the grassroots movement Odbranimo reke Stare planine (Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain) renovated this building in 2019 as an act of resistance to the threat of small hydropower plants (SHPPs). SHPPs consist of several kilometers-long pipelines, which channel water to the turbines where the electricity is produced, threatening to leave the riverbeds dry and local communities without water. The more water the pipe holds, the more electricity the turbine creates and the more profit through subsidies it brings to private investors. Thus, for the local villagers and environmental activists the pipes of SHPPs came to symbolize greed, environmental destruction, and social marginalization.
The SHPP in Dojkinci, together with almost 3000 plants in the Western Balkan countries, arose from the network of national capitalists, European banks, and the national energy sectors responding to the EU accession standards. However, Dojkinci and other villages in the Stara Mountain did not succumb to such a wide front of interests. My contribution examines how this happened. I will firstly explain how SHPPs emerged from the Serbian renewable energy (RES) market, and then describe the social responses triggered by SHPPs.
Renewables
between liberalization and water-grabbing
The
Serbian RES market emerged from the pressures for liberalizing the energy
market, the government’s resistance, and the inflows of Western European
capital. The liberalization of the energy sector in the EU candidate-countries
is part of the broad legal, economic and political compliance to EU
standards. The EU expects the Serbian energy sector to go through a double transformation.
From a state-owned system that is largely dependent on coal, the sector should
become competitive, decentralized, at least partly privatized, and promote
renewable energy. This ambitious task unifies both liberalization and energy
transition, keeping the logic of the free market as their leading principle. In
the early 2010s, the Serbian government established the foundations of the RES
market, consisting of a certification procedure for green electricity producers
and fixed-rate feed-in tariffs (FITs) guaranteeing beneficial prices for 12
years. FITs are the means of
subsidizing renewable energy production. They are paid by all citizens through
their electricity bills and transferred to the producers in a form of
subsidized electricity prices
If it had followed entirely the prescribed logic of unfettered competition, the Serbian RES market could have had severe social, political, and economic effects. The state’s monopoly could have turned into an oligopoly of European companies, with FITs pushing up the low electricity prices – repeating developments already seen in Spain (Franquesa 2018). To prevent this scenario, the government found a middle way: to establish the RES market but prevent significant changes. It limited access to FITs through technology and capacity caps. These limitations targeted large investors in wind and solar, but also local people interested in installing small numbers of solar panels on private property. Foreign investors quickly filled the quotas for wind power subsidized by FITs. Only one channel for investments remained wide open – around 800 locations for SHPPs in mountainous, often protected regions.
Investors
and authorities claimed that hydropower is identical to wind and solar sources.
The ideology of untapped hydro potentials, anchored in the socialist
technological heritage, is widespread among Serbian engineers and continuously supported
by all Serbian governments since the 2000s. The costs for planned SHPPs were
lower because expertise in the hydropower construction sector already exists
since socialism. Moreover, SHPPs technology is not as capital-intensive and
dependent on the economy of scales as larger solar and wind parks. This
combination of technological and economic factors meant that the costs were low
and that smaller investors could easily access the financial market. Alongside
the international banks and a few private investors from Western Europe, people
with close affiliation to the Serbian ruling party invested in and owned the
new SHPPs, among them, the godfather of the Serbian president. This implies
that after repaying credits for the SHPPs, the profits gained through FITs
would stay within the circles of national capitalists unlike profits from foreign-owned
wind or solar parks. The purpose of SHPPs was not
to transform the energy sector, as they only contribute to the national
electricity production with 2.5%, but rather to guarantee easy profits through
FITs.
Even though SPPSs investors were usually local capitalist, it does not mean that it has not been a lucrative opportunity also for foreign capital in the region. European financial institutions and manufacturers of hydro equipment have followed a well-established path of foreign direct investments that have transformed the political, economic, and social fabrics of the postsocialist countries. SHPPs have been a good opportunity for the Western European producers of hydro equipment to reanimate an industry drowning because of the current rush for wind and solar sources. Hydro lobbies organized conferences that connected national energy authorities, public producers of electricity, manufacturers, and financiers, to consider new fruitful investments. Foreign financial capital played a key role in supporting SHPPs in the region. Most of the credits for SHPPs in Serbia came from commercial banks such as Erste Bank, UniCredit, Banka Intesa, and Société Général. Large financial institutions like European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, together with Norwegian, Austrian, German, and Italian development banks, poured hundreds of millions of euros into greenfield hydro projects in the region (Bankwatch 2019).
In
this context, environmental and local community protection mechanisms were
hardly implemented and succumbed to the immense pressure of national and
international capital and power. The government lowered environmental standards,
allowing the RES market to turn into water-grabbing. Researchers from the University
of Belgrade identified on all inspected SHPPs malfunctioning or dry paths for
fish migration and pipes unlawfully built-in riverbeds. They argued that the
rule of “biological minimum”, which was supposed to guarantee the minimum level
of water in riverbeds to sustain the river, was conducted by experts close to
the investors and without systematic, often costly studies (Ristić et al 2018).
This “biological minimum” therefore could not limit the investors’ arithmetic
transformations of water into kWh and FITs, leaving behind dry riverbeds especially
in protected areas with high biodiversity, such as the Stara Mountain.
Struggles
against SHPPs
I
first visited the village Topli Do in the Stara Mountain in December 2019, while
the residents had been barricading the bridge in the village for three months
to stop an investor from trying to build two SHPPs on both rivers flowing
through their village. Most of them were retired people and small-scale
agricultural producers, fearing that SHPPs would disturb the underground water
that they use for drinking, as well as pollute and reduce the water in rivers
for livestock and gardens. Numerous springs and waterfalls attract many
visitors to the village, and the villagers were afraid that SHPPs would spoil
both natural exceptionality and their opportunity for supplementary incomes
through room rentals.
Image 2: Panorama of Topli Do (Photo by the author, 2019)
Residents of Topli Do and nearby villages recognized the state and investors as the main perpetrators and directed their anger towards them. But they also conveyed their existential anxieties through narratives of the “approaching global wars for water”, “international corporations stealing water”, and “extinction of their communities for settling migrants” from the Middle East who lived in a refugee camp in the nearby town of Pirot. These anxieties sprouted from the long-term sentiments of the vanishing of Serbian villages where mostly elderly people live. Decaying homes and infrastructure, closed schools, and ambulances are the material witnesses to rural flight. In this context of social degradation, the investors and local authorities promoted SHPPs as opportunities for development. The locals told me that the municipality fabricated the mandatory consultations with them, and portrayed SHPPs as benevolent water mills, and promised benefits for everyone – temporarily employed local workers and landowners near the rivers. “I wanted to bring improvement to this village which has had nothing, I brought my one million euros”, the investor in Topli Do SHPP said in a documentary film about the Topli Do barricade (Marinković 2020).
“The investor even asked us why defending the villages of the Stara Mountain when they would anyway disappear in a few years”, one activist told me. Between 2017 and 2020, the movement Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain resisted heavily SHPPs in Stara planina through protests, legal actions, and physical clashes. Through its actions, the movement connected villagers in Stara planina, academics, environmental NGOs, and international organizations with their pan-European campaigns against SHPPs in the Balkans. Finally, faced with such a broad resistance, the local municipality terminated all SHPPs in the Stara Mountain in September 2020.
Image 3: Protest banners in Topli Do: ‘A lot of money, little energy, zero fish’ and ‘For rivers to death’ (Photo by the author, 2019)
I came again to the Stara Mountain during the pandemic in October 2020, this time in Temska and Dojkinci villages. The mood was post-victorious since villages were not endangered anymore by SHPPs. The activists and locals thought about how to use the momentum and transform the symbolic capital of the river defenders into something more. They looked for financial and institutional support for infrastructure, housing, research centers, and small-scale businesses in the Stara Mountain, and the House of culture in Dojkinci was a result of these efforts. Revitalizations were both immediate reactions to the threatening devastation from SHPPs, and opportunities to demonstrate that revival of the disappearing rural communities was possible and necessary. For the locals, these renovated objects represented debt repayments to ancestors and predecessors and a promise that life in the Stara Mountain would not end, as the leader in one of the villages told me.
Unlike
in other Serbian mountains, the SHPPs paradoxically rescued the villages in the
Stara Mountain from disappearance and marginalization by reviving the local
communities and garnering the support of the Serbian civil society. Attempts to
make profits from greenwashing unexpectedly turned into a second chance for
some Serbian communities.
Whose
market, whose energy transition?
SHPPs were supposed to maintain a status quo in the energy sector – to represent a Godotian energy transition that never arrives and does not go anywhere. However, the wide social resistance turned energy transition from a techno-bureaucratic matter in to an issue decisive for society’s future. This change led to questions about who has access to the RES market, who gets benefits from it, and what role society plays in the energy transition.
These questions are becoming prominent among newly forming energy cooperatives interested in small-scale investments in solar energy. So far, they have been largely excluded from the RES market, not recognized as potential producers, and therefore unable to apply for FITs. Energy cooperatives criticize the closedness of the market to “ordinary people” and aspire to unify activism and business initiative allowing citizens to become active drivers of the energy transition and simultaneously benefit from FITs. Therefore, solar panels are trying to make their way to the roofs of urban dwellings to demonstrate sustainable and market-democratic alternatives open nominally to everyone.
While
the aspiring cooperatives are wishing for a more inclusive market, experts and
regional media specialized in energy are also calling for more and better
markets, i.e. for the usual liberalization that supposedly corrects market
distortions with improved market mechanisms. They wish for competition between big
investors with access to credit and technology, which would ensure that the
public gets measurable and less expensive electricity from renewable sources.
This belief in the market as the only vehicle of energy transition follows the
EU agenda which emphasizes decentralized, competitive, and interconnected national
markets. Public tenders and premiums will most likely be implemented in
Serbia’s new energy laws. These laws will launch a new race between large
foreign and national investors in wind and solar power.
Such
investors wish for a free, unregulated market. A free market which gives space
to big and small producers, fosters innovations and initiative. This kind of
market is seen as a more fair and sustainable solution than the one favoring SHPPs
through FITs. But whose market and energy transition will that be? And the transition
to what? The competition between large investors will hardly open substantial space
for the development of energy cooperatives. The odds for a more democratic and
just energy transition are slim if the promise of the decarbonization of the
Western Balkan countries conveys the ultimatum of oligopolies.
Dragan Djunda is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. His doctoral research analyses the investments in renewable energy in Serbia and their social effects.
Bibliography
Franquesa,
Jaume. 2018. Power Struggles: Dignity, Value, and the Renewable Energy Frontier
in Spain. Indiana University Press.
Marinković, Zorica. dir. 2020. Topli Do – donžon Stare planine” [Topli Do – donjon of the Stara
Mountain].
Ristić, Ratko, Ivan
Malušević, Siniša Polovina, Vukašin Milčanović, Boris Radić. 2018. Male hidroelektrane
derivacionog tipa: Beznačajna energetska korist i nemerljiva ekološka šteta. VODOPRIVREDA,
Vol. 50 [Derivate
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unmeasurable ecological damage].
Cite as: Djunda, Dragan. 2021. “Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/dragan-djunda-transition-to-nowhere-small-hydro-little-electricity-and-large-profits-in-serbia/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
In the past ten years, calls for a “green revolution” on the African continent have cast optimistic and promising scenarios of “leapfrogging” to mass renewable energy generation in order to meet the continent’s targets for electrification and forecast growth for energy demand. With a population expected to increase by 800 million by 2040 with rising urbanisation, the most pressing challenge for the continent in the next 20 years will be to meet growing energy demand in a context of partially-present and unreliable infrastructure (IEA 2019). Renewables have been positioned as a technological messiah of development, enabling the continent to “leapfrog” traditional models of centralized grid-based electricity distribution and to radically green its economies (IRENA 2015). The IRENA 2030 roadmap for Africa’s renewable energy, for instance, suggests that renewables could in the next 20 years constitute half of Africa’s total energy mix (IRENA 2015) – pending an estimated USD $70 billion investment a year. Yet current solar PV installed capacity on the continent only accounts for 5GW, or one percent of the global total (around 600GW) (IEA 2019). Visions of a renewable “energy renaissance” (Olopade 2015, 15) in Africa remain blighted by the current reliance and increasing dependence of African countries on imported oil and fossil-based energy use, and of the continued (and new) opportunities for oil and gas extraction. In turn, discourses of energy transition and leapfrogging, with their unilinear trajectories and singular vision of a low-carbon future, tend to obscure the local specificities and histories of energy systems like Ghana’s, for whom renewable energy, in the form of hydropower, has long been its main source of energy generation.
Image 1: Akosombo Dam. Akosombo, Ghana. 2016. Photo by author
In this post, I look at the contested politics of renewable energy in Ghana through a focus on the rise of “corporate solar” during an energy crisis. Ten years ago, shortly after the country discovered oil in large quantities along the coast of the Western Region, it embarked on an ambitious renewable energy path by passing the Renewable Energy Act (2011) (Act 832). The Act aimed to promote and develop the country’s renewable energy resources to ensure the country’s energy security, indigenous capacity and sustainable development. Ghana’s initial target was to increase the renewable electricity generation share, currently at less than one percent, to ten percent by 2020 (Sakah et al. 2017). Ghana thus positioned itself as West Africa’s new “energy frontier”, ushering in a resurgence of fossil extractivism paired with ambitious support for renewable energy technologies (Degani, Chalfin, and Cross 2020). In the midst of oil and gas discoveries, renewables have become a strategic, moving target conveniently reformulated to fit political agenda and rhetoric (Obeng-Darko 2019). For reasons of space, I will not elaborate on the ways in which new oil production came to stymie the growth of renewables. Instead, I provide a snapshot of solar power’s new corporate contours of energy privilege in Accra. I identify the emergence of a “renewable divide” in urban Ghana through the rise of “green enclaves” mostly enjoyed by corporate bodies and wealthy individuals. Building on the recent literature in the anthropology of energy challenging the “fantasy” of solar as a promise of democratic energy access (Szeman and Barney 2021), I consider how energy disparities endure under the transition to cleaner and renewable energy sources.
Moratorium
on the Future: Renewables as Stranded Assets
In
2019, at an event on renewable energy opportunities for the private sector, a
representative from the Renewable and Alternative Energy department at the
Ministry of Energy made an unpopular announcement. Referring to the 2011
Renewable Energy Act, he declared that Ghana was not only on track to meet its
target for 10% of total energy generated by renewables, but that it had met its
target “long ago”, since the Akosombo Dam, which was built in 1966 by Kwame
Nkrumah and accounts for 27% of the country’s total capacity, was technically a
source of renewable energy.
Invoking
the country’s proud history of electrification through the Akosombo Dam – a key
project in Nkrumah’s vision for African industrialization and self-sufficiency (Miescher
2014) – and its negligible contribution to global carbon emissions, he declared
the matter closed. Rather than seeking to please international conventions that
did not adequately capture Ghana’s place in the global responsibility framework
for climate change mitigation measures, he concluded that Ghana, like other
African countries, would do well to focus instead on providing enough power for
its people and industries.
Renewable energy companies’ representatives, entrepreneurs and analysts were shocked by the Minister’s backtracking commitment. That same year, as a result of overcapacity on the national grid, the government had issued a moratorium on PPAs (power purchase agreements), banning any addition to its grid until 2027. Since then, utility-scale renewable energy projects have come to a stall, leaving many with “stranded assets” and uncertainty about the future viability of large-scale solar PV and wind farms in the country. Of course, the Minister wasn’t technically wrong to claim the Akosombo Dam as a source of substantial renewable energy in the country’s electricity generation mix. To the renewable energy industry, however, it was perceived as a betrayal of the prevailing understanding that the target referred to additional capacity-building, mostly in the form of solar PVs and wind turbines.
Image 2: Painted advertisement for solar equipment. 2016. Accra, Ghana. Photo by authorImage 3: Painted advertisement for solar equipment. 2016. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author
Corporate
Solar & The Renewable Divide
The
moratorium on renewable energy PPAs exacerbated the inequalities that solar
power has created in Ghana’s energyscape. Today, the largest clients for solar
companies in Ghana are banks, hotels and factories – corporate bodies that have
the capital for upfront costs. Following the frequent blackouts during the
energy crisis that best the country in 2014-2016 (locally known as “Dumsor”),
and the steep increase in electricity tariffs, many businesses, particularly
factories in the industrial zones, switched to distributed generation, adopting
solar as a “commercial strategy” to reduce their costs of manufacturing. “Dumsor”
is Twi for “off-on”, a shorthand for the power outages that have become
increasingly common in the country; today, the word has come to index a more
general situation of disenchantment with infrastructure delivery and political
expediency. Solar energy companies were quick to capitalise on the crisis as a
business opportunity. In 2016, when I was researching Dumsor for my PhD thesis,
I spoke to the representative of an Indian solar company with a large global
presence who told me that initial investments in solar energy in Ghana prior to
the crisis had been minimal because the power sector was “too good” and “too
stable” for profit, compared to countries like Nigeria or Egypt that had more
frequent power cuts and thus a bigger potential market.
In
the turn to solar as a panacea for crisis, large corporate bodies removed their
operations from the national grid, alternating between distributed solar and
diesel-powered generator sets. This commercialization of distributed solar has
further strained the financial situation of the national utilities, heavily dependent
on industrial consumers’ revenues to subsidize residential low consumers. This
has resulted in higher electricity tariffs for urban residential consumers,
making electricity increasingly unaffordable to many. The capacity to switch to
solar during a moment of crisis revealed new forms of energy privilege that
take place outside the grid. In turn, the adoption of solar by a select elite (cf.
Günel 2021) has further exacerbated the conditions of energy inequalities and precarity
that many Accra residents live under. In the low-income neighbourhood of
Western Accra where I have been doing fieldwork since 2014, this “renewable
divide”, as we may call it, crossed two types of association. My neighbours and
interlocutors perceived rooftop solar as a luxury item unaffordable to most, or as a humanitarian good reinforcing unequal
trajectories of transition between the global North and the global South.
Here,
“corporate solar” coexists with the “developmental” deployment of small-scale
solar (in the form of solar lanterns and mini-grids) introduced by NGOs and small
social enterprises in rural areas. The parallel trajectories of corporate and
non-profit interests may appear surprising, operating as they do in divergent moral
economies. Both types of solar projects, however, are driven by the same
material, political and economic advantages of solar, as a form of cheap,
reliable and distributed generation that offers autonomy from the
inefficiencies of state infrastructure (Cross 2019, 54).
In
effect, both “developmental” and “corporate” solar contribute to what may be
called the creation of “green enclaves” in the energy landscape of Ghana,
pockets of autonomous, renewable energy that serve both corporate and
humanitarian rationales. I borrow the term “green enclave” from an engineer of
the Volta River Authority (VRA) responsible for the hydropower generation plant
at the Akosombo Dam that provides a large part of Ghana’s generation capacity. At
a convention for renewable energy in Accra in 2019, he described to me plans to
install solar panels on the roofs of Parliament, ministries, and the
residential facilities at the Akosombo dam as “the greening of our enclaves”, a
term that fittingly describes the infrastructural model of renewable energy at
large in the country. It is not surprising that the Minister who had conveniently
re-adjusted Ghana’s renewable energy target himself had solar panels installed on
his house.
In
a context of widespread energy precarity, solar in urban Ghana has exacerbated inequalities of access to reliable
and affordable electricity, creating “green”
geographies of inequality, energy security, and privilege.
Image 4: Solar panel business. 2019. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author
Conclusion:
Energy Transitions in perspective
Ghana’s case-study
has important implications for understanding energy transitions around the
world. In popular discourses of energy transitions, the replacement of fossil
fuel dependencies by renewable energy sources seems both inevitable and
imperative. Calls for a renewable energy revolution in Africa are appealing,
but they too often assume that renewables come to fill a gap, a lack, or an
evidential need – in other words, that their benefits are too self-evident to
forgo. Renewables, in this case, belong to the future – and fossil fuels to the
past. In many ways, Ghana presents an inverse scenario of this dominant model
of transition. Having powered most of its electricity needs with hydropower, it
is now switching to increased reliance on thermal power plants and an oil
economy. Further, this past of renewable energy through hydropower is today
invoked to encourage a rush for oil and gas exploitation. In discussions with
energy officials, policymakers, and the general public, I am repeatedly
reminded that “Ghana is a low emitter”, bearing no responsibility to global
greenhouse gas emissions. For a country that relied until recently entirely on
hydropower for electricity, yet currently faces issues of reliability and
affordability (Eshun and Amoako-Tuffour 2016), “sustainability” appears as a
secondary concern to more pressing issues of overcapacity and improving access
to reliable and affordable power. In turn, the adoption of renewables may not
primarily be motivated by questions of environmental ideology, but also as a convenient
(if privileged) solution to crisis. Accounting for the political potential of
renewable energy futures around the world will demand that we grapple with the
contradictory, divergent and conflicted visions and temporalities of energy
transitions, and the relations between crisis and capital, privilege and
poverty through which they come into being.
Pauline Destrée is a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. She is a member of the ERC-funded research project Energy Ethics. Her research explores energy, extraction, climate change, gender and race in Ghana.
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Jamie. 2019. “The Solar Good: Energy Ethics in Poor Markets.” Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 25 (S1): 47–66.
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Michael, Brenda Chalfin, and Jamie Cross. 2020. “Introduction: Fuelling
Capture: Africa’s Energy Frontiers.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
38 (2): 1–18.
Eshun,
Maame Esi, and Joe Amoako-Tuffour. 2016. “A Review of the Trends in Ghana’s
Power Sector.” Energy, Sustainability and Society 6 (1): 9.
Günel,
Gökçe. 2021. “Leapfrogging to Solar.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120 (1):
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Cite as: Destrée, Pauline. 2021. “Solar for the Few: Stranded Renewables and Green Enclaves in Ghana.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/pauline-destree-solar-for-the-few-stranded-renewables-and-green-enclaves-in-ghana/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past and present projects of large-scale resource extraction and subsequent “recultivation” measures to convert the land back to agricultural production or natural conservation. Lignite (or brown coal) is exploited in vast open-pit mines here – the Hambach mine not far from the city of Cologne is dubbed “Europe’s biggest hole” – “swallowing” everything from forests to villages in their way.
Coal mining – in contrast to the more authoritarian
and centralized organization of oil extraction – has been historically
associated with the development of the welfare state and the consolidation of
workers’ rights in western democracies. However, as Thomas H. Eriksen notes,
“contemporary coal mining has been restructured and reconfigured to resemble
oil drilling formally”, becoming “less labour-intensive and more
capital-intensive than in the past” (2016: 38). This neoliberal restructuring resulted
not only in the transformation of institutions of “Carbon Democracy” (Mitchell 2009),
as the conditions for workers to organize and wield influence over the means of
production were eroded, but also in declining economic dependency on the coal
industry in the Rhineland region.
Despite this decrease of economic significance in the
region, RWE, the energy company currently operating the mines, has still been considerably
involved in local politics over the past decades – not least because of its
mandate to secure the provision of cheap electricity for German industry and consumers.
To this day the state-approved “general public interest” serves as the legal
basis for the suspension of fundamental rights, making possible the
expropriation of land titles, the demolition of protected landmarks, or the
circumvention of guidelines for environmental protection for the extraction of
fossil fuels in Germany’s lignite mining regions.
Image 1: A new energy horizon after the end of the world? Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine (Picture taken by the author)
Environmental destruction and relocation of tens of thousands of people due to numerous mine expansions in the Rhineland were thus firmly connected to narratives of national progress and regional prosperity. Mourning over losses of personal possessions and feelings of belonging were relegated to the private realm, and little room was left for critical voices in the public domain.
Recently however, this hegemonic state-industry nexus has been successfully challenged by a coalition of environmentalists, citizen initiatives, radical activists and other civil society actors (despite the continued economic profitability of the coal industry, ensured by “environmental load displacement” (Hornborg 2009) and other indirect subsidies). Their demands to save the remaining forest in front of the Hambach mine effectively stopped the encroaching extractivist operation. They were supported by a government commission installed to negotiate the conditions of Germany’s energy transition, following the decision to phase out the coal industry as a national contribution toward climate change mitigation.
The prospect of a global climate crisis has therefore led to the current reevaluation of lignite mining from guarantor of wealth and stability to driver of multi-scalar uncertainties. This enabled previously marginalized actors to voice their concerns by articulating their demands in terms of these globalized discourses. Yet, the (inter-)nationally reported success of the protests around the Hambach forest was only one instance of ongoing negotiations about the pace and scale of energy transition, from the perspective of the critical civil society actors with whom I conduct research in the Rhineland.
Since this seeming breakthrough for civic participation in shaping the region’s future, numerous setbacks and scandals have occurred. These are testament to the inability of carbon-democratic institutions to deal with a crisis that challenges its basic principles of growth as progress and wage labor as key to well-being. Controversies range from the passing of a coal exit law that many critical voices interpret as a “coal extension law”, to the federal government holding back an official report that questions the energetic necessity of the energy company’s plans for mine expansion.
Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I
regularly participated in meetings of a local group of critical civil society
actors who played a decisive role in saving the forest and turning it into a
national symbol of climate activism. Their political engagement served as an
opportunity to take a closer look at the uneven futures of energy transition in
the Rhineland. As we sit in a circle in the Protestant church hall of a village
close to the Hambach mine, many of the participants share impressions of
feeling alienated from their home region by the energy company’s mining activities.
Despite being part of the majority that does not depend on the coal industry
for income, some of the locals feel their concerns were generally ignored by communal
politics, making them rather skeptical of established political institutions’
capability to develop a sustainable and equitable future for the mining region.
Nonetheless, they see the impending process of energy
transition as a window of opportunity to reconnect with their home region by
actively participating in the development of alternative future visions, beyond
institutions of representative democracy. This desire for autonomous
participation is directly linked to the affective alienation associated by some
of my interlocutors with the large-scale landscape transformation of the mining
activities, coupled with the close connection between local politics and the energy
company.
This carbon-democratic entanglement of political
institutions and energy industry experienced in everyday life in the
Rhineland’s lignite mining region probably finds its most drastic manifestation
in the practice of “creating facts” (“Fakten schaffen”), of which my
interlocutors often accuse the mining company. This expression usually refers
to the practice of producing accomplished facts which alter conditions in a way
to favor certain outcomes. Often their undeniable materiality forces other
actors to acknowledge these facts, in turn leading to the retrospective
legitimization of the outcomes of Fakten schaffen. Thus, actors with the
power and institutional support to “create facts” narrow down an otherwise ambiguous
situation potentially open to negotiation by different actors to a specific
path of options in their interest.
In this way the energy company continues the controversial destruction of almost completely relocated villages. Under Germany’s new energy policy, the company is sticking to its operating plan and regular rhythm of extraction and redevelopment, despite radically changing socioecological and energy-political parameters. While numerous critical actors unsuccessfully appeal to democratic institutions to inhibit this pursuit of enforcing prior arrangements through material destruction, the following, more ambiguous example will serve to illustrate this modus operandi of Fakten schaffen and its relation to the feeling of alienation.
Image 2: “Path dependency” – literal and figurative: Solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest (Picture taken by the author)
Thomas, an outspoken and very knowledgeable member of a local citizen initiative against coal mining, and part of the larger group of civil society actors mentioned above, gives me a ride to the train station after we participated in one of the regular protest-walks through the forest at the Hambach mine. As we pass the bridge over the railway connecting the mines with the nearby power plants, I decide to ask him about the solar panels aligning the tracks beneath us. Their sheer size hardly makes them unnoticeable, but I never paid much attention to them, except for contemplating the irony that the fossil fuel infrastructure gives room to more “sustainable” forms of energy generation here. After all, the solar panels seemed somewhat out of place next to passing trains packed with lignite. The panels simultaneously signal the out-of-time-ness of the coal industry and point to a new energy future on the horizon. But Thomas’ reaction to my question made me aware of another aspect regarding their significance for the issue of affective alienation in relation to the practice of Fakten schaffen.
Knowing that most of my interlocutors are in favor of
direct solar energy generation and having the impressive photovoltaic structure
right before our eyes, I am prepared to finally hear a success story about
civic participation in local development. Yet, Thomas is not sympathetic to the
photovoltaic project at all. He tells me it was a typical outcome of
cooperation between energy company and politics in the region.
This sentiment echoes many civil society actors who
criticize that, being the biggest landowner there, RWE conducts itself “like the
lord of a manor” (“Gutsherrenart”), demonstrating the “feudal” excesses
of carbon democracy in the Rhineland, which regularly undermine popular desires
of stronger democratic involvement in matters of future-making. Thomas goes on
to inform me that a citizen initiative proposed a similar project a few years
ago in which the solar panels ought to be lining the highway that was relocated
closer to the village because of the encroaching mine. They had imagined the
photovoltaic structure as serving multiple other functions, such as protecting
villagers from noise and air pollution emitted by the mine and highway. While
the project gained some attention in the local press, it was not supported by
the communal administration and ultimately had to be relinquished.
Around the same time, the energy company came to an
agreement with the administration to make property available for the hitherto
largest photovoltaic project in the region, co-financed by a local bank. The
uncanny speed with which this project was realized confirmed not only the close
ties between politics and coal industry to critical actors like Thomas, but
also showed clearly how easily something can be achieved in the region when the
energy company is directly involved.
So instead of being perceived as a successful step
towards sustainable energy transition in the Rhineland’s lignite mining area,
the solar panels symbolize a failure of civic participation. They appear to Thomas
as a material (arte-)fact resulting from the dubiously close cooperation
between local politics and the energy company. Judged from a distance, this
instance of Fakten schaffen produced a material outcome in line with my
interlocutors’ desires for sustainable energy generation. However, the concrete
infrastructure stands as a monument that exemplifies how flows of innovation
are caught up in existing power relations and ultimately contribute to
consolidating the local incarnation of the state-industry nexus, even in the
face of impending coal exit.
While the lignite industry will disappear in the
foreseeable future, the longstanding history of capitalist extractivism – the main
reason for the affective alienation of a large group of people in the area –
will likely continue, no matter the source of energy. The deliberate promotion
of technoscientific development interventions carried out by experts in the
context of energy transition policies thus works to forestall the
socioecological transformation from below that Thomas and others envision as a
necessary step for politics in the Anthropocene.
Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the economic ministry’s newly adopted rhetoric of establishing a special economic zone in the area to speed up planning processes and pursue the double-bind of “green growth” (Eriksen 2016). Meanwhile, they were simultaneously hosting forums for civic participation that seem disconnected from this pursuit, because they operate at a different pace. This contradictory course of action leads many local actors to evaluate the efforts to integrate civil society into official planning processes as a mere façade, intensifying their skepticism towards institutions of carbon democracy in the region.
This brief insight into my fieldwork shows how inhabitants
that felt alienated by collusions between energy industry and political
institutions, sensed the diverging interest of politics and industry in the
context of energy transition as an opportunity to regain some autonomy over the
shaping of their region’s future. However, instances of Fakten schaffen enacted
by the state-industry nexus function to curtail this grassroots engagement, and
to (re-)connect extractive infrastructures of late industrialism (Fortun 2014)
to narratives of modernization and progress under the aegis of “green growth”.
A coalition of local actors more attuned to the
socioecological uncertainties of the Anthropocene criticizes this
carbon-democratic variant of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), and pushes for a
joint transformation of resource use and political culture in search of a
redefined “good life” for all. Rather than a utopian vision of future
prosperity, this practical engagement might be characterized as “patchy hope” (Tsing
et al. 2019) which, despite being situated and emplaced, operates between the
particular and the universal, the local and the global; aware of its own
limitations within ambiguous entanglements of politics and energy in the
Rhineland.
Felix Lussem is a research assistant and lecturer in the field of environmental anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. His doctoral research deals with shifting spatial and temporal orders in negotiations of “global crises” with a regional focus on the Rhineland’s lignite mining area. Contact: flussem2@uni-koeln.de
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Cite as: Lussem, Felix. 2021. “Alienating ‘facts’ and uneven futures of energy transition.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/felix-lussem-alienating-facts-and-uneven-futures-of-energy-transition/
