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Gavin Smith: Peru: the Uncertain State

Zavaleta: “[Apparent states] appear to be Western… in all respects but somehow they are not. What misfires here is a structural concept of sovereignty that is ultimately incompatible with the condition of non-centrality in the world, at least in history such as it has occurred until now…. They have only a vague sense of self-certainty, that is identity. We can therefore also call them uncertain states.” (2018: 69 Itals mine)

In the 28 January issue of Viento Sur Pepe Mejia writes, “The dismissal of [Peruvian President] Pedro Castillo, on 7 December, was the starting signal for the organization and celebration of mobilizations that began in Puno, a territory rich in lithium and uranium and the target of large extractive companies.” (Mejia, 2023) He goes on to provide a concise summary of the situation in Peru and sets it within a brief history of the relationship between the rural people of the Andes and the Lima pitucracia on the one hand and the contracts with foreign-owned extractivist corporations that go back to the guano era on the other.[1] By contrast, in an article by Tom Phillips in the Observer two months after the outbreak of events, headed ‘My city is destroying itself’: Juliaca under siege as death toll rises in Peru’s uprising, a kind of crazed self-destruction is described as victims of ‘corruption’ burn tires and the military holes up at the airport. There’s no discussion of Peru’s history, no exposure of the contracts Mejia mentions nor the least attempt to explain to the unfamiliar reader why the re-writing of Peru’s constitution is a central demand of these people.

On the other hand, perhaps the reason the established press writes so little about Latin America’s fourth largest nation is because Peru, as such, does not really exist. Writing about Bolivia and Peru’s war with Chile from 1879 to 1884, Rene Zavaleta Mercado, ‘the Bolivian Gramsci’ as he was sometimes called, ascribed Chile’s victory to the failure of its allied adversaries to constitute coherent states, the ‘integral state’ to which Gramsci had referred. For Zavaleta the effect of the war was to produce for Chile what he called a ‘constitutive moment’ the elusive essence that may or may not bring forth a coherent national social formation, “something potent enough to interpolate an entire people….it must bring forth a replacement of beliefs, a universal substitution of loyalties, in short, a new horizon of visibility.” ([1986] 2018: 75). His historical method was to seek to identify such moments their momentary success and, so often, the failure of their promise.

Image 1: “Even despite Argentinian promises Chile outweighs Peru and Bolivia.” (Cartoonist. El Barbero. 1879; Source: Wikimedia Commons

For Peru it may be that there has never been such a constitutive moment, elusive, temporary or otherwise. Writing of the hundred years following the war the economists Thorp and Bertram subtitle their book, Peru 1890-1970 (1978) ‘an open economy’. It was a society controlled from Lima that was open for business and closed for the ninety-percent of its citizens living in the Andes or their kin struggling in the shanty towns of the capital. In the strictest sense, in the Durkheimian sense, it wasn’t even a society. Perhaps it still isn’t. Writing a quarter century after Thorp and Bertram Debbie Poole and Gerardo Renique (2003) referred to it as “the privatized state.” And here we are twenty years later with Peru scarcely ever mentioned in the European or North American press and when it is the treatment is superficial and pathetic, an ignorance of history and a kind of willful refusal to ask the kinds of questions one would need to know about an open economy and a state so privatized as to be incoherent.

Dismissing Castillo to renew the ‘surplus without a state’

Apparently, the rural working people of Peru and their kin and comunaros/as living in Lima’s shanty towns are unhappy with the school-teacher president they elected, Pedro Castillo, being declared a traitor and thrown in prison by the Congress. Why? Is there some history that might help us to understand – even quite recent history like the fact that the President of the distrusted Congress that impeached Castillo is José Daniel Williams Zapata, an ex-army general who at the rank of colonel was involved in the massacre of 61 people (23 of them children) in Accomarca back in 1985? Or still more recently, the fact that the constitution for which they want the same kind of re-working that got so much attention in the western press when it occurred in Chile, is the one Fujimori, like Pinochet before him, produced to give legal form to his authoritarian neo-liberal regime.

Meanwhile in a country so entirely open to foreign privatized interests surely more useful for the inquisitive reader than the burning of tires and the frying of a cop in his car, is the fact that 2023-24 will be the period when a vast array of the contracts Fujimori signed with foreign companies will come up, not just the extractive ones in oil, gas, copper, lithium etc. but the banks and hedge funds that financed them. There are more than 900 contracts up for renewal. Could this be newsworthy for the likes of the Observer and other western media? Apparently not. Yet, speaking of the proposed renewal of these contracts Mejia notes in the above-cited reporting from Viento Sur, “The term of the contract is generally 30 to 40 years and no one can change the term. This contract law cannot be modified for any reason. Nor can it be modified even if the people go on strike or the congressmen want to annul it.” He adds that in these contracts the ratio of the profits retained in the country to those exported is 18:82 (Mejia, 2023)

Image 2: Graphical depiction of Peru’s product exports 2019 (source: By Datawheel – Interactive Visualization: OEC – Peru Product Exports (2019) Data Source: BACI – HS6 REV. 1992 (1995 – 2019), CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107580340)

Zavaleta spoke of “Peru, the paragon of a surplus without a state.” (2018: 71) Reflecting on the elusive ‘abstract state’ that momentarily may achieve a kind of coherence in a conjunctural moment, a bedrock that might give character to subsequent national projects, Zavaleta spoke of the ‘fruitfulness’ of the surplus to produce a constitutive moment. Among other things sterility results from two factors: the inability to produce coherence when such vast amounts of surplus value are being sucked out of the social formation; and the distributive failures by the national bourgeoisie of what little is left (Zavaleta, 2018; see also Marini, 1981, 2011). Is it then possible that it is not Peru that is ’uprising’ but a variety of regions of Peru each having to deal with its own particularities: a past made up of histories of distinctive struggles not as yet combined nationally; and a present characterized by the distinct contracts each has with the capitalist firms extracting local resources be it the decades old experience with copper in the central Andes or the incubating ones around lithium in the south.

I want to put meat on the bones of such a suggestion by first describing a period I am familiar with in the central Andes when, in Zavaleta’s terms Peru failed to produce a constitutive moment, and then provide brief descriptions of the kinds of contracts that are so determinant of regional conditions from one part of the country to another.

Criollos and Montoneros

Let me turn back to that failed ‘constituent moment’ for Peru during the Pacific War of 1879 to 1884 with Chile that Zavaleta spoke of. Lima, that is to say ‘Peru’ fell ignominiously soon after the war began. But when General Caceres retreated into the central highlands a different kind of war ensued. (Manrique, 1981) Apart from anything else just who was fighting whom. On arrival in the Mantaro Valley it was in part through the influence of his cousin the hacendada Bernarda Pielago that he was able to raise a force of guerrilleros from among the pastoralists that worked in and around her properties in the highlands. In those initial days the emerging montoneros referred to Caceres as taita (familiar term: uncle); by the end, in response to a demand that they descend to the valley to report to the general, their leader sent the message, “Tell Caceres I am as much a general as he is and will be dealt with equal to equal.”[2] It’s the kind of story so familiar throughout Peruvian history, one to repeat itself again and again. Speaking of the Pacific War in the highlands in 1989 I wrote, “The war thus gave birth to a fatal combination – a self-confident peasantry and an expansionist landlord.” (Smith, 1989: 67)

Plus ça change: in the context of what we read about today, it sounds familiar: a situation in which expansionist landlords perhaps have been replaced by expansionist extractive companies. As the following paragraph makes clear it was for the highland people of the central region ‘a constitutive moment’.

[As the war wound down] the montoneros, once mobilized, remained so. But the composition of their enemy shifted. At the beginning of hostilities these montoneros were fighting the foreign invaders; at the end they fought alone against a wide range of opponents – landlords, the commercial classes of the valley, and the agents of the state [especially Caceres]. Such an experience made a profound impression on their culture of opposition, colouring their attitude toward political confrontation for the century that followed. (ibid:68)[3]

Nevertheless, the ability to divide and conquer saw the end of that moment then, as perhaps today too.

Yet in a sense the period of the montoneros has the elements of a constituent moment for the highland regions of the central Andes. When Mejia remarks of Peru’s Andean people, “No necesitan tener un título para salir a la calle y conseguir sus reivindicaciones,” he is alluding to the many times when rural people have resisted by simply occupying space: “They don’t need title deeds to go to the streets and recuperate what belongs to them.[4]” In 1948 the Huasicanchinos of the central highlands faced off against the army to occupy the lands of Hacienda Tucle and Hacienda Rio de le Virgen resulting in the concession of considerable territory by the latter hacienda. The 1956 reivindicacion in the province of Cuzco in which Hugo Blanco played a major role was written up by Eric Hobsbawm as a case of neo-feudalism. The labour relations and strategy of resistance was quite different from the 1948 confrontation in the central highlands that I had described (for the framework of resistance strategies see also Hobsbawm, 1969). Yet, it planted the seeds of widespread land occupations in Cusco in 1962. Even within regions themselves tactics differed. On the west side of the Mantaro Valley in the central Andes, the massive campaign of endurance carried out by the Huasicanchinos from 1968 to 1972 resulted in the complete occupation and destruction of Hacienda Tucle and Rio de la Virgen. (Smith 1989; 2014) Yet it differed from the insurgence around Comas to the east of the valley in the late sixties, which itself was different from that of the Tupac Amaru guerrilla close by. (Hobsbawm, 1974; Flores Galindo & Manrique, 1984) A difficulty then, in making a broad assessment of what is going on in ‘Peru’ as a whole is the persistent differences that its many Andean regions face, surfacing time and again in moments of crisis.

From guano to copper to lithium

Currently over forty mining contracts in southern Peru, almost all of them copper, have been paralyzed by popular occupations and blockages, reducing Peru’s copper output by 30% at a time, Bloomberg reports, when copper prices are at their highest. The effect is to halt any attempt at renegotiating Fujimori’s contracts this year. “About $160 million of production has been lost in 23 days of protests” it reported on 27th January. The article concludes “The unrest also jeopardizes the rollout of $53.7 billion in possible investments at a time when the world needs to accelerate decarbonization and boost minerals required for electromobility, according to BTG Pactual analyst Cesar Perez-Novoa.” (Attwood, 2023) The analyst is speaking here of course not of Peru’s longstanding role as a copper exporter but the future contracts for the extraction of lithium.

Agreements for regional resource extraction projects to fund local development such as schools, medical facilities and of course infrastructure (the latter as vital to the miners as to the communities) are pathetic from the outset and unfulfilled to the point of fiction as they unfold. The process is facilitated by mining companies like the giant four, Southern Peru, Yanacocha, Antamina, and Chinalco, signing contracts with Peru’s national police. (EarthRights International, 2019) Use of the police obviously enables the terrorization of locals but has the additional advantage that it allows for the criminal prosecution of protests stoppages and so forth rather than the more cumbersome civil cases that would otherwise be needed.

Meanwhile if brute force isn’t enough, a common practice in sidestepping social contracts of this kind is to offload one mining company to another (often a subsidiary), the conditions of the sale being the abandoning of the obligations of incomplete components an existing social contract. Meanwhile tying up issues of ownership, profit-sharing and social responsibility in lengthy legal proceedings is so common that formulaic contractual obligations to communities can be written into contracts with the full knowledge that they will be held up indefinitely in legal wrangling.  

Typical is the following: in 2021 the Macusani Yellowknife lithium extraction project, the largest in Peru, owned by Plateau Energy Metals, itself recently acquired by the Canadian American Lithium Corporation, was disputing 32 out of the 151 concessions it has in southern Peru midway between Cusco and Juliaca. Even so its CEO was able to reassure Resource World Magazine, “While it is standard practise for the legal departments of regulatory bodies in Peru to appeal rulings such as this, the company is confident that, given the strength of judgements in the past the appeals will not be successful,” assuring investors that “common sense will prevail,” and that anyway, while locked up in the courts, the company would push ahead with the mobilization of drill rigs to commence the next phase of development. (Resource World, 2022)

Meanwhile in the much older copper and zinc mines and refining centres to the north – La Oroya and Cerro de Pasco – where foreign contracts are so longstanding that social responsibility conditionalities have to be fought as rear-guard actions, the issues frequently have less to do with recently unfulfilled obligations than generations-long threats both to rural livelihoods and to the possibilities for ongoing social reproduction, in short life itself. On the one hand the pastures in the highlands proximate to those fought over by the montoneros of the past have been so poisoned or simply disappeared as a result of the smelters at La Oroya that endless legal battles for compensation are simply a way of life. On the other hand, in Cerro de Pasco, one of Peru’s main mining cities, children have high blood lead levels, anemia, learning problems, headaches, and nose bleeding leading to endless requests for medical help given that demands for better living conditions over generations have produced only minor results. (Cabral, E & M. Garro, 2020)

Image 3: The impact of mining on Cerro Pasco (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mina_cerro_pasco.jpg)

The contracts are ubiquitous from one part of Peru to another, be it the southern Andes, the new and old extractive industries of the centre and north, or the oil deposits of Amazonia. But the past histories and present experiences of resistance have their own characteristics.

As the Mexican journalist Luis Hernández Navarro remarks (2023), Peru “is a disabled State that cannot do anything, because everything has to be contracted with private companies.” He refers to Peru’s Quechua name Tawantinsuyo ‘The Four Adjoining Regions,’ And such is the case, four or myriad, Peru remains an incoherent state each of whose regions has had its distinct struggle that from time to time resulted in an all but ephemeral constitutive moment but failed to combine into a synchronous national movement.

Gavin Smith is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and has worked in South America and Western Europe.  Apart from ethnographic monographs he has published two books of essays, Confronting the present, 1999; and Intellectuals and (counter-)politics, 2014.

References Cited

Attwood, James. 2023 “Peru’s violent protests imperil 30% of its copper output.” Bloomberg Anywhere 27 Jan. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-27/protest-surge-imperils-30-of-copper-supply-in-no-2-miner-peru?leadSource=uverify%20wall Accessed 23 Feb 2023

Cabral, E & M. Garro, 2020: “The bleeding children of cerro de pasco are expecting justice.” Aliados/as: OjoPublico https://ojo-publico.com/2281/bleeding-children-cerro-de-pasco

EarthRights International, 2019: Convenios entre la Policía Nacional y las empresas extractivas en el Perú. Instituto de Defensa Legal, Lima

Flores Galindo, A. and N. Manrique, 1986: Violencia y campesinado. Instituto de Apoyo Agrario. Lima.

Hobsbawm, E.J. 1969, “A case of neo-feudalism: La Convencion, Peru” Journal of Latin American Studies 1,1: 23- 47

Hobsbawm, E.J. 1974: “Peasant land occupations” Past and Present. 62. 120-52.

Manrique 1981: Las guerrilleras indigenas en la Guerra con Chile. Centro de investigacion y capacitacion. Lima

Marini 1981, Dialectica de la dependencia Ed. Era Mexico D.F.

Marini, 2011 “La accumulacion capitalista mundial y el subimperialismo.” Revista Ola Financiera. UNAM. 4,10: 183-217

Mejia, Pepe 2023: “Un huaracazo a la oligarquia” Viento Sur 28 Jan. https://vientosur.info/un-huaracazo-a-la-oligarquia/ Accessed 23 Feb 2023.

Navarro, Luis Hernández 2023: “Movimiento popular destituyente” Viento Sur; https://vientosur.info/movimiento-popular-destituyente/

Poole, D & G. Renique, 2003: “Terror and the privatized state: a parable.” Radical History Review 83:150-63

Resource World Magazine, 2022; https://resourceworld.com/american-lithium-on-dispute-over-peruvian-concessions/ Accessed 23 Feb 2023

Smith, Gavin. 1989:  Livelihood and resistance: peasants and the politics of land in Peru. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Smith, Gavin. 2014 Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics: essays in historical realism. Berghahn. Oxford.

Thorp, R. and G. Bertram, 1978: Peru 1890-1977: growth and policy in an open economy. Columbia University Press, New York.

Zavaleta Mercado, Rene. 2018: Towards a history of the National-Popular in Bolivia 1879-1980. Trans. Anne Freeland. Seagull Books. Calcutta

[1] Pitucos/as is a familiarity used to describe the posh, lazy and shallow elite of Lima. Guano is the Quechua word for sea dung high in nitrates used for fertilizer. The so-called Guano Era during which nitrates were extracted in vast quantities by foreign companies ran from 1802 to 1884 and was a key factor in the War of the Pacific from 1879 to 1884, sometimes referred to as the Saltpetre War.

[2] This was in response to Caceres’s invitation to descend to Huancayo for a war conference. On arrival he and his lieutenants were put up against a wall and shot.

[3] The extent of the montoneros’ successful mobilization against the haciendas over the period is reflected in the number of livestock held before and after the campaign by the two largest of them. Laive: 38,000 sheep before, none after; Tucle 42,000 sheep before, 3000 after. (Smith: 1989: 74) Needless to say in the period that followed the haciendas of the central highlands, most of them owned by those who had collaborated with Chile, expanded without interruption until the 1960s

[4] There is no proper translation for reivindicaciones a term used frequently in the context of rural labourers’ occupation of lands stolen from them.

Cite as: Smith, Gavin 2023. “Peru: the Uncertain State” Focaalblog 3 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/03/03/gavin-smith-peru-the-uncertain-state/

Blog, War: New Times

Mihai Varga: Crisis-tested, yet forgotten: Family farms in wartime Ukraine

It was often said, in the course of the transition from communism to capitalism in the 1990s and 2000s, that Eastern Europeans are good at surviving. The IMF and the World Bank praised the local population’s capacity to “subsist” through small-scale agricultural production, “relieving” welfare budgets or helping shoulder the liberalization of prices. In fact, this focus on subsistence obscured a broader societal trend in much of post-communist Eurasia, the emergence of what one could term a new ‘great social divide’ between family farms and large corporate farms. Thus, on the one hand, throughout the post-communist region, local mega-corporations grew on the ruins of former collective farms to expand into world-level global producers. On the other, the region also experienced the contrasting trend of large shares of the population returning to or intensifying agricultural production to maintain their livelihoods through a combination of selling and self-consuming their products.

Farms workers harvesting the potato crop in Ukraine in 1991, Photo by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Ukraine is no exception to this trend of what the World Bank and other international organizations call the dualization of agriculture: together with Russia and Kazakhstan, Ukraine saw the emergence of some of the world’s largest agro-corporations in rural landscapes populated by millions of “subsistence” family farms. “Subsistence” though was somewhat of a romantic myth, here as much as elsewhere in the world. Rural and peri-urban populations were far more diverse than that term suggests. Few survived solely on their own produce. Rural people were getting by through a combination of self-consumption, petty entrepreneurship (selling some produce on local markets), sending family members abroad for work, and collecting meagre social benefits. Some 20% of Ukraine’s approximately four million rural households were selling more than half of their production already in the early 2000s, mostly informally. Many families have amassed enough land for participation in the same markets as corporate actors, sending produce such as soy, maize, and sunflower products to sea ports for export.

A hallmark of the approach advocated by states and international organizations vis-à-vis post-communist populations of small-scale producers was a complete break with the communist procurement system, which had been buying up the production of small farmers in order to process it in specialized units (factories). Post-socialist states have allowed that communist procurement system to collapse, and since the 1990s have either failed or explicitly refused to support family farms by means of buying up their production. They assumed that simply freeing markets for land, energy, and food would miraculously spur an entrepreneurial drive that would lead to the disbandment of collective farms and provide the cure to poverty (or at least limit it). Instead of such an entrepreneurial revolution, post-communist countries experienced in the 1990s a pattern of extreme property fragmentation, the return of small-scale farming, and the survival and transformation of the former collective farms. As of the 2000s, authorities and international organizations (the World Bank in particular) expected that land markets would “consolidate” agriculture to produce farmers more akin to Western European ones, incentivizing those “too small to grow” to sell their land and leave agriculture.

Ukraine, a latecomer to land markets liberalization, faced particularly intense criticism from the European Union, World Bank, and IMF for its agricultural land sales moratorium and finally lifted it following intense IMF and World Bank pressure in March 2020. The argument was that higher prices for agricultural products and land would drive investment and production growth. But the reality is that uncertainties over marketing possibilities, access to credit, subsidies, and leasing schemes abound. Three decades after the collapse of communism and facing a largely unprecedented combination of drought and war-induced cost increases, smallholders in Ukraine and elsewhere in post-communist Eurasia are still virtually on their own in the task of commercializing production from below. In Eastern European EU member states, many are excluded from subventions, which are usually only available to larger actors, above 1 hectare, and have no political representation. Links between corporate actors and the smallest family farms do exist. Still, these do not amount to any marketing or production support for small holders. Instead, rural households lease out their land to corporate actors in exchange for animal fodder, and market their small production surpluses locally, reaching global markets only via numerous intermediaries.

In Ukraine, the war exacerbates the divide between corporate actors and family farms; the latter, on their own in marketing their products, are facing depressed prices. Russia’s blockade of the Ukrainian Black Sea ports (until July 2022) and the occupation and destruction of the Azov Sea ports have made agricultural prices in Ukraine collapse. The impact on export routes was dramatic: before the war, trucks delivered agricultural products to the Azov and Black Sea ports, which had important storage facilities. With the blockade, export routes lengthened over several countries, alternating truck, rail, and river barges, to Danube and smaller Black Sea ports in Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania with far smaller storage capacities. Corporate actors were able to cover the associated costs and were well positioned to profit from steep world price increases; at least until July 2022, when a Russian-Ukrainian deal allowed agricultural products to leave Black Sea ports again (the Grain Initiative). The deal made world grain prices, that had doubled at the start of the war, fall. But not even the Ukrainian producers that actually reached the remaining Black Sea export facilities received world prices for their production, as few shippers risked entering Ukraine’s ports and demand premiums that pushed Ukrainian prices far below world levels.

In contrast to large exporters, Ukraine’s millions of family farms were thus confronted by the collapse of inner-country prices for export-intended goods that could not leave the country. Whatever transport and storage infrastructure is left is accessible only at exorbitant prices, and the prices on local markets for export-intended agricultural production have collapsed. In fact, in the summer of 2022, the cost of storing production was as relevant as the market price, as it became difficult to move produce around given the greatly damaged transport and storage infrastructure. Prices have varied more widely for goods intended for local consumption such as potatoes, a key staple for local survival under crisis conditions. Keeping in mind that potatoes are a favoured crop for smallholder specialization, prices went from 46% increases to the prior year to close to zero by the end of 2022, in both cases making it extremely difficult to sell production. The sudden price fall in October 2022 resulted from producers close to Russia – and Belarus seeking to sell as much as possible rather than store, fearing further attacks and disruptions. Depressed prices did not even cover the cost of seed material and according to market analysts will endanger the harvest for 2023.

The state should act as a last-resort buyer for small holders, especially for crops and products in which small farmers specialize, which are difficult to store and costlier to export. Still, such self-evident steps for which there are many workable global examples in the 20th century are not among the options that have ever been considered in the last three decades. What is also not on the table is a centralized state distribution of seeds and fertilizers. The main strategy advocated internationally for preventing hunger and helping agricultural producers get access to increasingly expensive inputs is to remove trade barriers (also for fertilizers). But this will predictably fail to tackle problems as varied as the collapse of infrastructure or speculation via agricultural derivatives which produce hunger and volatile food prices. 

The little export that Ukraine achieved in the summer of 2022 – at one fifth of its pre-war capacity – required unprecedented efforts of trans-border cooperation. Before the war, Ukraine’s grain, soy, and sunflower oil left the country to Asian and African countries by ship directly from the Ukrainian Black Sea and Azov Sea ports. From March to August 2022, Ukraine’s agricultural products had to pass three countries by truck, train, or river barges: Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania, before reaching the Black Sea. Even with the Grain Initiative corridor opening in August and the accessibility of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in and near Odessa assured, the three-country land-and-sea route stayed an important export avenue. Authorities had to repair abandoned rail tracks within three months; and expand the storage capacities of – until then – less-used Danube ports. Another new trans-border land-and-sea route now connects Ukraine via Poland by rail to the Lithuanian Baltic Sea port of Klaipeda for Western European markets.

The outcomes of such logistic efforts – as beneficial as they are to the rest of the world – deepen the local divide between export-capable corporate actors and small-scale farmers. While corporate actors have their own transport capacities (“truck fleets”) and can access export routes, the latter continue to face the dramatic situation of exploding production prices for fuel and fertilizers and collapsing prices for locally-sold produce.

Finally, while the drought in Europe drove up prices for the late 2022 and 2023 harvests, Ukrainian producers hardly benefit, as local consumers cannot pay the higher prices and imports of vegetables and fruit to counterbalance the price hikes. In summer 2022, Ukrainian traders were already replacing the lost harvests in fruits and vegetables in the Russian-occupied Kherson area – which they used to market within Ukraine – with products from Moldova and Romania (fieldwork respondents, July and August 2022).

The present-day crisis will, therefore, yet again – such as during the 1990s transition – test and reproduce the local population’s survival skills. Rather than retreating into the imagined peasant subsistence economy of the World Bank technocrats, they will struggle and combine various livelihood sources, from migration remittances and social benefits to small-scale agricultural production. As they are de facto abandoned once more by local and global politics, rural people will above all rely upon each other.

Mihai Varga is a sociologist at the Institute for East-European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. His latest book is Poverty as Subsistence. The World Bank and Pro-Poor Land Reform in Eurasia.

Cite as: Varga, Mihai 2023. “Crisis-tested, yet forgotten: Family farms in wartime Ukraine” Focaalblog 14 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/02/14/mihai-varga-crisis-tested-yet-forgotten-family-farms-in-wartime-ukraine/

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FocaalBlog: Eric Wolf, Europe, Histories, Capitalism. Where are we now?

This panel was convened by Ida Susser at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2022 – Unsettling Landscapes. It builds on the workshop Vision and Method in Anthropology: Forty Years of Eric Wolf’s ‘Europe and the People Without History’, on 23/24 September 2022, organized  in the framework of the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project at the University of Bergen by Don Kalb and Susana Narotzky.

Panel convenor: Ida Susser

Presenters: Don Kalb, Jaume Franquesa, Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Don Nonini, and Sharryn Kasmir

Disscusant: Oana Mateescu

It is forty years ago that Eric Wolf published his pathbreaking “Europe and the People Without History” (1982). The book gave an anthropological account of 500 years of European capitalist imperialism, seen from the peripheries. By doing so, it crystallized and clarified multiple debates in anthropology, history, and social theory that had marked the turbulent 60s and 70s of the last century. It was a book that in retrospect prepared the discipline brilliantly for the accelerating capitalist globalization that would mark the next fifty years.

Paradoxically, while path-breaking qua vision and method, the imminent paths opened by “Europe and the People” were almost immediately cut off. Post-structuralism, postmodernism, and “thick description” combined to destroy systemic, global, and historically explanatory visions. Such theoretical ambitions were shoved aside as “grand narratives” and delegitimized as associated with a totalizing modernism.

Under the guises of “anthropology and history” and “political economy” some of the possibilities inscribed in Wolf’s work were conserved in the 1980s and 90s. They came back to life from the 2000s onwards, carried by a younger generation, as neoliberal globalism became ever more crisis prone and new cycles of contestation were emerging. The new work, now often aligned with critical approaches in geography, focused among others on issues of labor, class, surplus populations, post-development, post-socialism, post-colonialism, austerity, new capitalist extractive and oppressive social forms, migrations, and contestations. This led to a re-uniting of  political, economic, and cultural inquiry under a larger dialectical vision and method, and it came with a renewed interest for Marxian approaches next to for example anarchist, Maussian and Polanyian ones.

What sort of questions would a Wolfian anthropology pose in the current world? What is the Wolfian take on Marx and where lies its exact value? What ought to be the role of history and comparison in the anthropological endeavor? What is the value of archival and secondary sources in anthropological research and theory, next to ethnography? If we compare the Wolfian approach to thinking big with other large scale visions in anthropology – Sahlins, Levi-Strauss, Graeber, Godelier for instance – what specificities emerge that remain overly relevant?

Cite as: FocaalBlog 2022. “Eric Wolf, Europe, Histories, Capitalism. Where are we now?” Focaalblog 22 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/12/22/focaalblog-eric-wolf-europe-histories-capitalism-where-are-we-now/

Blog, The Latin American Pink Tide

Elena Maria Reichl: End of Hell? Brazil’s Election and a Community Kitchen of the MTST

On 30/10/2022, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) of the Workers’ Party won an exceptionally close runoff election against the current far-right president of Brazil, Jair Messias Bolsonaro. For volunteers of a community kitchen (Cozinha Solidária) of the leftist Homeless Workers Movement (MTST), Lula’s victory represents an enormous relief and a hope after the long period of anxiety during the election campaign. Nevertheless, his victory does not mean “the end of hell or the entrance into paradise”, as Maria (all names are pseudonyms), one of the volunteers cooking in a Cozinha Solidária noted.

The hell she speaks of means the years of the Bolsonaro government, in which almost 700,000 people in Brazil died of Covid-19, while the president made jokes about patients with respiratory distress. Hell, moreover, means the hunger that the women themselves experience and fight in their volunteer work. In recent years, Brazil has returned to the world hunger map of the United Nations. According to the Brazilian Research Network on Food and Nutritional Sovereignty and Security, circa 30% of Brazilian households are currently food insecure. In addition to the Covid-19 pandemic, suspension of state welfare programs, inflation and price increases have led to this development. The aftermath of this period will not be over when Lula takes office early next year.

Hell and paradise are metaphors that reflect the volunteer’s worldview, which is strongly influenced by the Christian system of belief. The all-female chefs of the Cozinha Solidária where I conduct ethnographic fieldwork since March 2022 regularly frequent Catholic or Evangelical churches. Besides that, the women are also part of the political struggle for housing in demonstrations and occupations of urban land. In their everyday lives, they balance left-wing political militancy and religiosity. They are politicized through the social movement and entrenched in their peripheral community. All the kitchen’s volunteers working there currently are also mothers and most of them work or worked in paid cleaning jobs in addition to their volunteer work.  

In this article, I portray the period between the first round of voting on 2/10/2022 and the runoff. How did the cooks negotiate the fear of a second electoral victory by Jair Bolsonaro? A look at the Cozinhas Solidárias sheds light on the positioning of hunger and domestic labor within the election campaign. The perspective of the cooks’ stresses the importance of religiosity to people’s lives and political decisions. After localizing the Cozinhas Solidárias within the Homeless Workers Movement and explaining their emergence and functioning, I consider reflections and concerns about the election, starting from the perspective of the cooks, to arrive at an assessment of the consequences of the election results.

Cozinhas Solidárias of the Homeless Worker’s Movement

The Homeless Workers Movement (MTST) was officially founded in 1997 as the urban counterpart of the rural reform movements of the Landless Workers Movement (MST). The first occupation took place in Campinas, a city close to São Paulo. Nowadays, the MTST is present in 13 Brazilian states, but most occupations are still concentrated in and around the city of São Paulo. The strategy of the movement is to occupy unused land in the periphery of large cities and to obtain expropriation with reference to the legally established duty of fulfilling a social function of the inner-city areas.

Victor Albert traces the history of the movement: In the first decade after its founding, it had little success with the strategies of the Landless Workers Movement. This changed, on the one hand, because of social mobilizations during the housing market crisis and the 2013/2014 World Cup, and on the other hand, primarily through cooperation with the Lula government’s state housing program Minha Casa Minha Vida. The movement was often able to obtain home ownership for the squatters through the State Program and thus acted as an agenda for identifying new building land for the state program.

During Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, which replaced the Minha Casa Minha Vida program with the Casa Verde e Amarelo loan program and classified the MTST as terrorism, their construction projects from the Minha Casa Minha Vida era continued to be completed, such as 216 apartments in São Paulo’s West Zone in March 2021.

Figure 1 Kitchen as part of occupation
Figure 1 Kitchen as part of occupation, Photo: Elena Reichl March 2022
Figure 2 Cozinha Solidária at lunch time
Figure 2 Cozinha Solidária at lunch time, Photo: Elena Reichl October 2022

The idea of Cozinhas Solidárias was already inherent in the community kitchens that are part of every land occupation of the movement.  The occupations of new land areas begin with the construction of tents made of tarpaulins and bamboo. In newly emerged occupations, community kitchens are the first shanties to be set up to nurture the squatters and provide a place of political organization and community economy. Each occupation has numerous of these kitchens, which are the heart of the groupings, the small neighborhoods within the barrack settlements. The kitchens inside the squats are primarily for the squatters who run and finance them.

What is new about the Cozinhas Solidárias is that they now address the peripheral neighborhoods outside the occupations. Diverse people from the nearby neighborhoods frequent the cozinhas solidárias, for example schoolchildren, old people, or workers at their lunchbreak. They pick up hot lunches for free that were prepared and distributed by volunteers like the women mentioned in the beginning of this article. The Cozinhas Solidárias acquire their donations in the form of money from large-scale campaigns and as crops by collaborations with, for example, supermarkets and the MST. Cozinha Solidarias’ dependence on food has brought the MST into close contact with its urban counterpart.

The Homeless Workers Movement founded the first Cozinha Solidária in São Paulo in March 2021, during the peak of the Covid-19 Pandemic, under the motto highlighted by MTST coordinator Guilherme Boulos, “we do what the government does not“. The movement now operates 31 of these kitchens throughout Brazil. By expanding to peripheral neighborhoods in general, the movement claimed a direct confrontation of the cutbacks in state welfare programs under the Bolsonaro government.

Hunger was particularly central to Lula’s election campaign, highlighting how his earlier government had helped to remove Brazil from the United Nations world hunger map, on which the country turned back after the election of Bolsonaro in 2018. In fact, it was through Bolsa Família, as Massimiliano Mollona elaborates,that this government from 2003 to 2008 reduced the population rate below the poverty line from 36 percent to 23 percent. Bolsa Família incorporated the preceding Zero Hunger “Fome Zero” program in 2003 and, as Anthony W. Pereira argues, promoted the democratization of citizenship claims through effective, relatively unbureaucratic redistribution. On the other side, Bolsonaro has introduced the social program Auxilio Brasil at the end of 2021, which is modeled on Lula’s Bolsa Familia but without any long-term strategy or monitoring and therefore has beencriticized as an election campaign method.

Before the Runoff Election

A morning a few days after the first round of voting in one of the cozinhas solidárias in the periphery of São Paulo: In addition to preparing rice, beans, chicken, and fried cassava, we talked about Bolsonaro’s visit to the Freemasons. The video is from Bolsonaro’s 2017 election campaign but gained popularity only in October 2022 via its rapid spread on social media. The context mattered little. Bolsonaro had been campaigning for votes among Freemasons and rumors were spread that he might be a member.  We chatted about the experiences some of the women had as cleaners for members of the Freemasons whom they accused of performing diabolical rituals. On the subject of religion, we also came to a remark that one of them had overheard during services in their parishes: Their pastor had announced that whoever voted for Lula would go to hell.

Ludmilla was indignant: “The place for priests is in the church. What is this about politics?” “They won’t vote for him [Jair Bolsonaro] because of the Freemasons” Retorted Maria.  Ludmilla: “I am afraid that they might do it after all.”

Jair Bolsonaro has many evangelical supporters who, as some of the cooks, consider the Freemasons a diabolical sect and hence expressed their disappointment. On a more general level, religiousness played a key role in the election campaign. Padre Kelmon, who was denied the recognition as a priest by the Catholic Church, ran for president as one of the eleven candidates of the first electoral round. He just received 0.07 % of the valid votes and was called a “folkloric candidate”. For Bolsonaro’s election campaign, his candidacy nevertheless had an important function. He supported Bolsonaro during the first TV Globo debate, to which all candidates were invited. Instead of asking critical questions, he accused Lula of wanting to establish an anti-religious dictatorship in Brazil. Lula, meanwhile, tried to win over conservative church followers through critical statements on abortion and Christian affirmations, as he recently did in a letter to evangelicals.

In the community kitchen, I hear different Christian songs sung by the women every day. “God bless you” is a common phrase used by those receiving the hot lunches, to which the cooks respond with “Amen”. Unlike the students and coordinators of the movement, for whom religion takes a back seat to communist utopias, the cooks and squatters balance left-wing political commitment and the struggle for housing with religious affiliations in their work.

A domestic worker comments on the election

For Lula’s election campaign, starvation, but also ‘gusto’, was a central theme. During this election, Lula’s repeated statement that the people must be able to eat picanha and drink beer again became famous. Ludmilla, a cook at the community kitchen before the runoff election, said she talks to Lula when she sees him on TV. “Lula, stop talking about picanha. When did I eat picanha? Lula, I cleaned the toilet of my patron [where she worked as a maid] during your government.”

Figure 3 Banner that says “First domestic worker in the Legislative Assembly of São Paulo” at the event “Women from the periphery with Lula and Haddad”, in which some cooks of Cozinha Solidária participated, Photo: Elena Maria Reichl, October 2022

Although she supports Lula, she feels unrepresented by his promises of the return of expensive barbecue after the huge price increase during the Bolsonaro regime. Actually, picanha has never been part of her lifeworld. Domestic workers, who are for the first time politically represented in Brazil, gain more political and class-consciousness. In the first round of voting, PSOL candidate, former domestic worker, and occupant of the MTST Ediane Maria, won the post of State Representative in the Legislative Assembly of the State of São Paulo as the first domestic worker to occupy this political position. Like Ludmilla, Ediane Maria had migrated to São Paulo from Brazil’s northeast to work as a domestic worker. Ediane Maria will now represent Ludmilla’s perspective in São Paulo. No easy task in a parliament where the PL, Bolsonaro’s party, won by far the most votes.

Anti PT and “anti-establishment” propaganda

The outcome was close, with Lula winning 50.9% and Bolsonaro 49.1% of the vote. Bolsonaro’s party’s most effective campaign method still seemed to be the “anti-corruption agenda” Flávio Eiró already analyzed after the 2018 election.

Although the court case that led to Lula’s conviction was annulled as illegal in 2021, opposition to Lula’s PT party because of corruption scandals remains widespread. This is despite the fact that Bolsonaro has also been accused of institutionalized corruption, namely the use of public funds in the form of secret budgets to buy approval in Congress.

Bolsonaro still manages to position himself as ‘anti-establishment’ in front of large segments of the population, who spread the slogan “PT never again” and in the aftermath of the election “crimes pay off in Brazil” on the internet. Widespread among his electorate is also a rejection of conventional media and academia. Election forecasts predicting a higher approval rating for Lula than he actually received in the first round of voting confirmed this skepticism. The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral’s decision to cut Bolsonaro’s TV time due to fake news also fuels the debate about media bias. Bolsonaro supporters were already acting violently in some cases, such as federal deputy Carla Zambelli, who a few days before the election chased a black journalist with a firearm under the pretext that he had pushed her.

The End of Hell?

During this interim period between the two votes one clearly sensed the fear that Bolsonaro might not recognize the election results, as he had already spread rumors that the ballot boxes were rigged.  On day one after the elections, while Bolsonaro remained without statement about his loss, his supporters blocked roads within the country to protest alleged electoral fraud. Attempts at electoral fraud did indeed occur, but not on the part of PT supporters: The electoral court investigates against the federal police, who blocked roads for hours in the northeast and near indigenous communities, from where most votes for Lula were expected, under the pretext of carrying out road controls.

Even without a coup, Lula’s victory will mean hard work against right-wing fronts in state and federal parliaments, but above all against what is called ‘bolsonarismo’ in society. The cooks of Cozinha Solidária are well aware of this. Nevertheless, there will be relief for their movement when Lula takes office next year. He has already announced his intention to rehabilitate the program Minha Casa, Minha Vida. Fighting hunger was moved again to the center of the political agenda. Currently, discussions are underway within the MTST to make Conzinhas Solidarias a public policy and to hire the cooks on a regular basis until the acute hunger crisis is resolved. This would mean the end of dependence on donations and volunteerism. Lula, who had already visited a Cozinha Solidária this year, nurtured hope for this possibility.

Elena Maria Reichl is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology of the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany, and member of the Project „Sorting with Care. Human Categorization in Post-Humanitarian Contact Zones“ that is part of the Collaborative Research Centre 1482 “Studies in Human Categorisation” funded by the German Research Foundation.

References:

Albert, Victor. 2018. “Brazil’s Homeless Workers’ Movement is an assertive social work organization.” FocaalBlog, 30 November. www.focaalblog.com/2018/11/30/victor-albert-brazils-homeless-workers-movement-is-an-assertive-social-work-organization

Balloussier, Anna Virginia; Seabra, Catia and Victoria Azevedo. 2022. Lula Releases Letter to Evangelicals and Rejects Abortion and Lying Pastors. Folha de São Paulo, 20 October. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2022/10/lula-releases-letter-to-evangelicals-and-rejects-abortion-and-lying-pastors.shtml

Boulos, Guilherme. 2021. “Cozinhas Solidárias: fazendo o que o governo não faz” Instituto para Reforma das Relações entre Estado e Empresa (IREE), 22 March. https://iree.org.br/cozinhas-solidarias-fazendo-o-que-o-governo-nao-faz/

Campos Lima, Eduardo. 2022 “Brazil presidential contenders slug it out over who’s the real ‘enemy’ of the church” Crux, 1 October. https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-americas/2022/10/brazil-presidential-contenders-slug-it-out-over-whos-the-real-enemy-of-the-church

Eiró, Flávio. 2018. “On Bolsonaro: Brazilian democracy at risk.” FocaalBlog, 8 November. www.focaalblog.com/2018/11/08/flavio-eiro-on-bolsonaro-brazilian-democracy-at-risk.

Extra. 2022. Padre Kelmon recebe mais de 81 mil votos pelo Brasil; relembre outros ‘candidatos folclóricos’ que marcaram eleições. Globo Extra 3 October https://extra.globo.com/noticias/politica/padre-kelmon-recebe-mais-de-81-mil-votos-pelo-brasil-relembre-outros-candidatos-folcloricos-que-marcaram-eleicoes-25582731.html

Folha de São Paulo. 2022. O que a Folha pensa: Recauchutagem ruim. Folha de São Paulo, 28 October. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/opiniao/2022/01/recauchutagem-ruim.shtml

Globo. 2022. Grupo denuncia Carla Zambelli por racismo em caso que ela apontou arma para homem em SP; ‘Eles usaram um negro pra vir em cima de mim’, diz a deputada. Globo, 29 October. https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2022/10/29/grupo-denuncia-carla-zambelli-por-racismo-em-caso-que-ela-apontou-arma-para-homem-em-sp-eles-usaram-um-negro-pra-vir-em-cima-de-mim-diz-a-deputada.ghtml

John, Tara. 2022. Brazil’s election explained: Lula and Bolsonaro face off for a second round in high stakes vote. CNN, 27 October.

Mollona, Massimiliano. 2018. “Authoritarian Brazil redux?” FocaalBlog, October 6. www.focaalblog.com/2018/10/06/massimiliano-mollona-authoritarian-brazil-redux.

Netto, Paulo Roberto. 2022. TSE cobra explicações da PRF sobre operações durante eleições após decisão. UOL, 30 October. https://noticias.uol.com.br/eleicoes/2022/10/30/tse-explicacoes-prf.htm

Pereira, Anthony W. 2015. Bolsa Família and democracy in Brazil. Third World Quarterly 36 (9): 1682-1699, doi: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1059730

Phillips, Tom. 2022. Fears Bolsonaro may not accept defeat as son cries fraud before Brazil election. The Guardian. 27 October. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/27/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-election-fraud-claim

Romani, André. 2022. Com Bolsonaro ainda em silêncio, bloqueios de caminhoneiros ganham força e se espalham pelo país. UOL Economia. 31 October https://economia.uol.com.br/noticias/reuters/2022/10/31/protestos-interditam-br-163-e-trecho-da-dutra-apos-eleicoes.htm

Rizek, Cibele and André Dal’Bó. 2015. The Growth of Brazil’s Homeless Workers’ Movement. Global Dialogue. 22 February https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/articles/the-growth-of-brazils-homeless-workers-movement Soprana, Paulo. 2022. Bolsonarists Freak Out over Video of President in Freemasonry. Folha de São Paulo. 4 October. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2022/10/bolsonarists-freak-out-over-video-of-president-in-freemasonry.shtml

Cite as: Reichl, Elena Maria 2022. “End of Hell? Brazil’s Election and a Community Kitchen of the MTST.” Focaalblog 2 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/11/02/elena-maria-reichl-end-of-hell-brazils-election-and-a-community-kitchen-of-the-mtst/

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Stephen Campbell: On the dialectics of capitalist expansion: An interview with Christopher Krupa

In April 2022, University of Pennsylvania Press published A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador, by University of Toronto anthropologist Christopher Krupa. Tracing the expansion of capitalism in the largely rural, agrarian canton of Cayambe, Krupa’s book is an historically informed ethnography of Ecuador’s cut flower industry. In the interview below, Focaalblog co-editor Stephen Campbell talks with the author about this important new monograph.

Book cover of A Feast of Flowers

Stephen Campbell: First, thank you for agreeing to talk with me about your new book. A Feast of Flowers is brilliant on many levels—most broadly as a theoretically sophisticated contribution to anthropological political economy. To start, I’d like to ask about the book’s background. Could you say a bit on how you came to this project? What were the initial research interests that led you to studying Cayambe’s cut flower industry?

Chris Krupa: Thanks for your kind words about the book, Stephen. I know this is an ethnographic cliché, but I actually didn’t begin this project with the intention of studying the cut flower industry, at least not directly. Since the mid-90s, I’d been spending time living in indigenous communities around Cayambe and had become fascinated with both the political work of territorialized communities and the technical details of indigenous agrarian practice. I was invested in the debates occurring in Marxist anthropology at the time about rural societies, things like the articulation of modes of production and simple commodity production literatures, and was always keeping an eye on the massive export plantation sector then starting to engulf the whole region.

I started trying to map out the complex ways in which any one thing I was interested in—a community, let’s say, or a small plot of commercial onions—was becoming intelligible only as one part of a complex and dynamic social formation that included things like flower plantations and foreign currency markets in them. I found that no matter how I composed this map, capital always seemed to enter my analysis as a kind of disruptive externality, turning the anthropological project into a rather obvious moral tabulation of the violence effected by capitalist expansion, something one could do well enough without much ethnographic or historical research at all.

At the time, we were getting a lot of really competent studies of indigenous political practice in Ecuador by scholars who quite explicitly positioned their scholarship as a contribution to a kind of radical democracy project of expanding the presence of indigenous activism, something that joined with similar projects in other parts of the world. The more time I spent with these movements, the more curious I became about our opponents, which also resonated with the questions the activist-intellectuals I was living and working with were posing to me.

What we didn’t have, and don’t often get, I think, when the terms of contestation are so neatly drawn, are in-depth studies of how power actually works in a historically-specific social formation. This is particularly true, I think, of capital, especially when the dynamics of local capitalist practice seem to express broader patterns going on worldwide, such as, in this case, the expansion of labor-extensive production systems in the Global South dedicated to making specialized goods for Northern consumers.

Through a series of accidents, I managed to get invited to do research inside a flower plantation, which led to further invitations (after many, many refusals), and which kind of opened up this completely bewildering insider’s view of how wealth is made in a place like rural Ecuador today. This was something that the indigenous federations and communities I was aligned with and living in were far more interested in than anything I might have to say about what they were doing. Figuring this out became a major part of my research and took me well over a decade to really piece together, as Part I of the book tracks. It also, I think, tells a different kind of story about how rapid capitalist expansion happened in places like the indigenous highlands of Ecuador in the late 20th century.

SC: The book covers a lot of ground—from a global history of financialisation since the 20th century, to a survey of Ecuadorian race thinking, to industrial psychology, to workplace labour processes. The unifying thread running through the book, however, in my reading, is the dialectics of capitalist expansion. Would that be a fair gloss of the book’s overall conceptual contribution? Or how would you most succinctly state the book’s primary theoretical concerns?

CK: That works. One thing I really wanted to do with the book was provide a deep ethnographic account of primitive accumulation, one that could at least aspire to treating primitive accumulation with all the nuance evident in Marx’s retheorization of it. The crucial thing for me was to address with equal complexity the two inseparable processes Marx identifies as making up primitive accumulation. On the one hand, there are the brute material processes under-girding the consolidation of capitalist class relations and the increasingly narrow organization of these relations and their reproductive capacities around emergent forms of commodity production and capital accumulation. On the other hand, there is the assemblage of a new register of history that reconfigures historical positionings like past, present, and future or then/now distinctions or senses of historical arc and momentum, as well as frames of historical action and intervention, around these material transformations such that broader issues of being and becoming and so on can’t but be inflected with one’s positioning in a new capitalist historicity. There’s been a tendency to emphasize the first of these processes over the second and to reduce everything in that to somewhat shorthanded notions of dispossession, with land theft or things matching the metaphysics of property seizure becoming the iconic, foundational, scene of capitalist arising.

In northern Ecuador, the juridical weight of its rural community system has rendered indigenous land unavailable for capitalist expropriation, and the whole history of land ownership is an important part of the story. But more than that, the constellation of actors and forces and interests that came together in rapidly developing this plantation system in and around indigenous territories in northern Ecuador (which turned the country from a non-producer of commercial flowers to the third largest global exporter of them in only a few years) was infinitely greater than what can be explained by a single violently explosive event like a land grab. It involved all the forces you mention, Stephen, and I wanted to be able to trace out the interactions between these in detail to really outline what this part of primitive accumulation, the first set of processes I mention above, really looked like in this one case, as a model for how such things might be coming together in other parts of the world.

Because so much of this information is secret or not publicly available or just hard to get is probably why we tend to get rather truncated stories of capitalist process—and why it also took me over ten years to write this part of the book. But attending to the other part of this, capital’s interventions into historical production, is equally important because it allows us to see how the people directing these processes situate them in a local reality—what they imagine that to be, why they think it is that way, and how the work they are doing will intervene into that. It is where the foundational logics of capitalist accumulation get de-abstracted, rendered socially specific and concrete, and shape the way that very human component of primitive accumulation—turning people who aren’t wage workers into them—gets actualized and justified in one way or another. And it is where questions arising in our attention to the first set of processes—like, in my case, why the science of industrial psychology figures so prominently in shaping plantation labor systems and securitizing the borders between capital’s inside and outside—get answered. So, all of this, this expanded definition of primitive accumulation and its attendant ethnographic critique of capitalist historicity, is perhaps what I’d say shapes any conceptual or theoretical contributions the book may offer.

SC: You’ve framed your book as a contribution to understanding post-colonial capitalism in general. But you also delve, in much detail, into the specificity of Cayambe’s cut flower industry and its situatedness in Ecuadorian history and in Ecuadorian race thinking. Is there something particular about this case that renders it especially helpful in illuminating the workings of post-colonial capitalism more broadly?

CK:  Yes, I think there is but I should probably clarify what I mean by “postcolonial capitalism”. This is a term of specification not generalization. On the one hand, it is meant to push for a specification of the components of a given capitalist system that draw their force from their invocation of frameworks devised to advance or stabilize a prior colonial system. This involves a pluralization of both capitalism and colonialism and the tracing out of historical continuities between these in their unique historical assemblages.

For instance, it matters a good deal that the Spanish conquest of the northern Andes did not advance through a singularly genocidal agenda and that it wasn’t just the land, as a potentially vacant resource, that was valued. Indigenous people were needed, as both tribute-paying subjects and as workers in the Crown’s labor drafts, in mining operations throughout the colonial Andes, on the agrarian and domestic operations of settlers, and in all kinds of jobs that settlers wanted done for them. The violence of conquest regularly returned to the question of how to fold indigenous subjects most productively into dominant economic and political agendas and reap value from that way.

This orientation comes to define the ways hacienda complexes operated when they took over the entire rural Andes and absorbed indigenous populations into them as resident peons after Independence. And this sets up a particular approach to capitalist development in the 20th century, which itself builds on over 100 years of dominant political thinking in Ecuador that united questions of economy and race, of capitalist expansion and indigeneity, into a single question that then shapes the capitalist-expansion-as-indigenous-salvation script organizing plantation hiring practices, labor processes, and so on, as I discuss throughout the book. So that’s one part of what I mean, which is a kind of broad methodological orientation.

The other part is more specific, in that I use the term “postcolonial capitalism” to characterize a form of capitalism that folds a certain claim to historical intervention into its operational rationality, specifically presenting itself and its expansion as curative of the lingering colonial residues haunting the present. In other words, I don’t use the term “postcolonial” here as an objective descriptor—obviously, if I were to try to locate the mis-en-scene of capitalist arising in highland Ecuador, it could certainly be debated whether “postcolonial” is most effective for capturing its complex temporal register. Similarly, if I were trying to offer a political perspective on that same process, it is open to debate if postcoloniality would best capture that.

Instead, I use the term here to identify what might be called an ideological framework appropriated by capital itself to position itself historically and to overlay the violence of expansion with a claim, drawing on ideas about progressive futurity and temporal momentum, to beneficent social good. Here, the colonial legacy up for grabs is indigenous abjection, the equation of indigeneity with misery and exclusion, and even the relevance of racializing terms like indigeneity at all. Capital’s claim is to finally get over all this—this is what its expansion promises. “Postcolonial capitalism” points to the interactive co-existence of these contradictory processes—the appropriation of colonial residues into the core operational procedures of an expanding capitalist system and the claim that this system is uniquely qualified to eradicate colonial residues from the places it expands into.  

SC: The term “racial capitalism” appears in the book’s introduction, though it’s not a concept to which you explicitly return. Yet, the dialectics of race and capitalism is definitely one of the book’s central concerns. How would you situate your book in relation to the growing literature on racial capitalism? What do you see as your book’s primary contribution to this literature?

CK: Right, well as I’ve said above, one of the core historical threads running through the book is the deep connections between the economic and racial sciences and agendas in Ecuador, and of political projects fusing the two together as a pretext for various sorts of interventions into indigenous territories. By the early 20th century, the idea of “capitalism” in Ecuador becomes hard to think outside of its figuration as a liberating force for highland indigenous people bound in different ways to hacienda enclosures. Capitalism emerges as the solution to what was referred to as the “Indian Problem,” and today’s flower plantations are heirs to this mission. The ethnographic work inside flower plantations in the latter chapters of the book show how this agenda is set in motion in plantation labour systems.

But at another level, I’ve been admittedly quite influenced by the ways early American contributors to the literature on racial capitalism based their use of the concept on a searing critique of the millennialism under-girding conventional capitalist history. Their re-tracing of the rise of capitalist class relations out of post-abolition efforts to continue the economic structure of slavery opens up a pretty important discussion of the inherently racializing character of the location “labour” itself. It also points to our need to continually ferret out the historically specific ways that capitalism disguises the violence inherent to its routine operations. As I show in the book, the social work of primitive accumulation rests entirely on both of these processes in its historical reconstruction of the pre-labouring poor as marked by forms of consequential and often essentialized difference that are progressively overcome by their proletarianization. This is a central narrative trope inherent to primitive accumulation as a genre of elite historicity.

SC: Race is central to your theorisation of post-colonial capitalism. Yet, it struck me that the large white and mestizo populations of Latin America distinguish this region from most post-colonial countries in Asian and Africa. Is that a relevant distinction to make? Would you nonetheless say that the dialectics of race and capitalism that you trace in the book play out similarly in post-colonial contexts elsewhere in the global South?

CK: I can’t answer that question, but I think that’s the sort of fine-grained ethnographic and historical question that I hoped to offer one more source of inspiration for with this book.

SC: One thing that stood out for me was how deeply Hegelian the book is. You write, for example, of “the plantation as an object constituted by relations with forces outside it,” of “the flower as negation,” of narrative frames “located neither entirely inside nor outside” the domain of capital, of “mediation between inner and outer worlds,” of a site of knowledge creation “dialectically related to its opposite,” and of a form of capital accumulation “whose ‘outside is essential,’ of its essence.” This Hegelian dimension is not explicitly named as such in the book. Could you elaborate on how an understanding of Hegelian logic informed your research analysis and writing? Was this an approach you had in mind before you started the project, or was it something that developed over the course of research and writing?

CK: Good catch, Stephen. Guilty. I think one of the most consequential things I did during my graduate training was participate in a slow, page-by-page, group reading, led by Neil Larsen, of Hegel’s Phenomenology, followed immediately by doing the same with Capital V.1. I also, having received zero training in field methods during my graduate education, brought Bertell Ollman’s Alienation with me to the field and used that as my field methods training instead. It’s all there, I suppose, in Ollman’s Hegelian reading of Marx’s method, and it’s striking how well that book works as a primer in ethnographic methodology if you’re interested in the sort of things you and I might be interested in.

Ollman’s reading of Marx centers on his dialectical phenomenology, his radical critique of the object, his explosion of metaphysical notions of presence, and of suchness being an effect of overlapping webs of relations, which logically exist prior to and become determinate of things themselves. How to set all this in dynamic motion as an ethnographer? was a question I asked myself throughout fieldwork and there were a lot of missteps in it along the way. Writing the book, I think I was best able to work through this in the chapters on interiority, especially in the overlaps between notions of psychological interiority that can only be grasped through processes of exteriorization like projection, capital’s outwardly expansive dynamics that only work through processes of interiorizing its externalities, the shifting spatial dynamics codifying capitalist/non-capitalist locations, and the scientific efforts to construct a profile of the inner life of indigenous people as preludes to various forms of external intervention upon them.

SC: One of the recurring themes in your discussion of post-colonial capitalism is the notion of difference. Difference has also been a key theme in the anthropology of capitalism that is influenced by J.K. Gibson Graham. Yet, whereas Gibson-Graham, and the anthropologists whom they’ve influenced, employ a Deleuzian notion of autonomous difference, your book advances an explicitly relational understanding of difference—specifically, of differences that are “internally related.” Would you say that this is a relevant distinction to make? Could you elaborate on your understanding of difference, especially as it pertains to the theorisation of capitalist expansion?

CK: Let me answer this in a slightly different way than I think you might intend. The book is an anthropological critique of political economy and its topic is capitalism. I am not interested in attempting a general theory of something like difference, though I do draw from some of my teachers who were. Difference enters the analytic because it was there from the start. There from the start because the lineage I trace of capitalist thought in Ecuador, right up to the present, begins with, and never ceases to ponder, the question of what the imposition of things like free labour contracts or monetary remuneration of hourly wages or disciplined, routinized labour routines, or regularized working hours might mean for effecting a (spiritual, moral, political) transformation of indigenous society.

The reverse was also true—at a certain point in the late 1800s, questions about what indigenous people are, why they are that way, how they might become different, and so on, get completely entwined with questions about the ways these markers of indigenous difference are determined by the hacienda enclosures to which they are imagined to be universally bound, stimulating the question of what, then, would become of indigenous people, and indigeneity itself as a category of difference, were the haciendas to be replaced by capitalist forms of production. There from the start also because primitive accumulation, as a genre, locates the foundational act of capitalist emergence in an encounter with difference, that is, with a description of a population retroactively constituted as pre-labour and defined by certain features that are magically transformed through their absorption into the project of capitalist expansion. Those originary features are bad or pathological, their transformed conditions are good or curative. This is a pretty standard trope in primitive accumulation’s narrative form, as I said earlier.

To follow your distinction, an “autonomous” notion of difference is as central to capitalist method as a “relational” one is to its critique. The urban and rural poor are so because they are given to sloth and the wasteful expenditure of time, says the former. Time thrift only marks the pre-labouring subject with difference because their potential labour-power is being valued in measured temporal units for your profit, says the latter, who addresses the former as a predator. Difference is there from the start. So is its critique.

SC: To close, could you say a bit about what are you working on now? What is your next project?

CK: I’m currently writing an anthropological history of the late Cold War years in Ecuador, focusing on the way a small guerrilla movement was used by the proto-neoliberal state to justify an expansive campaign of terror. It’s also about the Cold War prison and the intimate solidarities of revolutionary practice, and attempts to do all this through an analytic method that I associate with older Marxist literary criticism.

SC: Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. I encourage interested readers of this interview to check out the full book, which is available at the University of Pennsylvania Press website, and elsewhere.

Christopher Krupa is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto (Scarborough). He has researched and written on Andean Ecuador for over 15 years. He is co-editor (with David Nugent) of State Theory and Andean Politics: New Approaches to the Study of Rule (2015), and author of A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador (2022).

Cite as: Campbell, Stephen. 2022. “On the dialectics of capitalist expansion: An interview with Christopher Krupa.” Focaalblog 6 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/10/06/stephen-campbell-on-the-dialectics-of-capitalist-expansion-an-interview-with-christopher-krupa/

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Mahmudul H. Sumon: What do we learn from hybrid governance in Bangladesh’s garments sector?

Global production networks, as we know today, have repeatedly failed to ensure the rights of workers and their health and safety. These failings have been exposed time and again whenever there has been a disaster. To address these failings, transnational activists have long been arguing for various types of multi-sectoral initiatives (MSIs) in global supply chains that involve private companies, trade union networks from both the global south and north, and national governments. Against this general backdrop and the emergence of some types of MSIs, questions for labor rights activists and critical researchers have become pertinent. What should be our position on transnational regulatory mechanisms or hybrid mechanisms in the “upstream” of the supply chains? What kind of organizational and legal relations should such regimes have; especially so vis-à-vis the state in which they operate? Could such agreements improve workplace health and safety? What role could they have in ensuring workers’ rights?

In this brief essay, I particularly focus on Bangladesh’s ready-made garment industry (RMG) and discuss the plight of one such MSI; the Bangladesh Accord that came into effect after two cataclysmic industrial disasters, namely the Tazreen fire and Rana Plaza building collapse. While thinking through some of the questions, I show that this much-coveted initiative, developed and imagined in the transnational spheres of activism, has faced resistance from key stakeholders of the RMG sector in Bangladesh (i.e., the BGMEA, the representatives of garments employer’s association). I argue that the country’s business elite associated with the RMG sector has been instrumental in facilitating the transformation of the Accord into a national corporate venture, making sure that their interests are protected. In the absence of any political will from the state (in the neoliberal order political will perhaps is an outdated idea), I contend that hybrid governance initiatives are somewhat destined to fail given the government’s strong dependence on the business class for its export earnings (i.e., the state business nexus). The story of Bangladesh Accord’s rise and fall or its continued existence under a new name precisely points to the strong leverage that the country’s business class enjoy over the state.

The emergence of the Bangladesh Accord

The Bangladesh Accord is a legally binding agreement between global brands and retailers on the one hand  and IndustriALL Global Union, UNI Global Union, and their Bangladesh-based affiliate unions on the other hand. The signatories aim to work towards a safe and healthy garment and textile industry in Bangladesh. It came into effect after two cataclysmic events, namely the Tazreen Factory fire (2012) and the Rana Plaza building collapse (2013), which killed 119 and 1134 workers respectively and injured many more. Over 220 companies signed the five-year Accord, and by May 2018 the work of the Bangladesh Accord had achieved significant progress for safer workplaces that covered millions of Bangladeshi garment workers. To maintain and expand the progress achieved under the 2013 Accord, over 190 brands and retailers signed the 2018 Transition Accord with the global unions, a renewed agreement that entered into effect on 1 June 2018.

Some international rights organizations and campaign groups have been instrumental in materializing the Accord in Bangladesh. Many believed it would provide a unique opportunity for a collaboration between national and international rights groups and labor rights organizations on the one hand and international retailers and brands on the other hand to begin a ‘fire and building’ inspection regime in Bangladesh. For labor-rights activists working in the global north, a legally binding agreement between brands and trade unions had been a long-standing demand to transition from the previous voluntary standard for garment production to a “binding” standard.

Activists chanting slogans for punishment of all the accused owners of garment factories starting from the Saraka fire (1990s) to Tazreen fire and Rana Plaza collapse (2013) in Dhaka on May-Day 2013 (photo by Mahmudul H. Sumon)

In design, the Accord is best understood as multi-stakeholder-oriented, with scopes for the participation of activists and civil society, both national and transnational.

Although private governance has been a timeworn mechanism in the garment export sector and has been in use for many years in different forms to assess supplier conduct, scholars have noted some differences between private governance and the newly installed Bangladesh Accord. The Accord has been an experiment in “co-governed private regulation” that included global union federations in addition to foreign brands and had the potential to challenge the relations of power between labor and employers.

The stated objective of the Bangladesh Accord has been to introduce an inspection regime aiming for “a safe and sustainable Bangladeshi Ready-Made Garments (“RMG”) industry in which no worker needs to fear fires, building collapses, or other accidents that could be prevented with reasonable health and safety measures” (quoted from the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh text dated May 13, 2013). However, the said inspections have been limited to factories from where the signatory brands of the Accord sourced their products. The Accord had built-in training programs for what it called the workers’ “empowerment” and “awareness” and had plans for the sustainability of the project.

A look back at the period immediately after the Rana Plaza disaster reveals that when it comes to labor reforms, the Bangladeshi government (i.e., the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Labour and Employment) mostly reacted to the situation, responding foremost to the demands put forward by the European Union and the USA. Curiously, the US embassy in Dhaka made a lot of the noises to bring in changes in the labor law for issues such as freedom of association of the workers and easing rules for the EPZs so that worker’s rights were protected. On the face of it, the government complied with these demands, as reflected in amendments to the Bangladesh Labour Law in 2013 (which first came into effect in 2006). In government documents, the main concern for these amendments was slated as “workers’ safety, welfare, and rights and promoting trade unionism and collective bargaining”. The National Occupational Health and Safety Policy was also adopted by the government in 2013. In total, the government reported 76 amended sections and 8 new sections incorporated in the Bangladesh Labour Act. The government also changed the EPZ legislation and introduced rights to unionization which were previously withheld.

The BGMEA smear campaign against the Bangladesh Accord

In the first five years of its mandate, the Bangladesh Accord secured a remediation process for a good number of factories and was deemed “successful” by transnational observers. But as time elapsed and the disaster faded from international public memory it became apparent that the remediation requirements enforced by the Accord administration were not welcomed by factory owners and particularly not by the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA). More and more “voices” that criticized the Accord appeared in public discussions, pamphlets, and workshops organized by the factory owning elite and their representatives in Dhaka.

The BGMEA is the trade body that looks after the interests of local capitalists in the sector. It enjoys leverage over the government because of the export earnings from garment manufacturing. Their semi-clandestine campaign against the Accord indicates new safety procedures were not easy to flout and turned out to be a “costly” endeavor for local factory owners. Industry leaders showed detest for the new mechanisms publicly in newspaper op-eds. During a workshop organized by an international non-governmental organization working in Dhaka, one owner of a group of factories with an important position in the BGMEA demanded that factory owners should have the option for “self-governance” (statement from the managing director of a renowned group of industries in a day-long policy event space organized by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), Dhaka (n.d.), personal observation). 

There is clear evidence to suggest that throughout the implementation period of the Accord, the relationship between the BGMEA and the Accord enforcement teams deteriorated. Important representatives of the government evaluated the Accord’s new governance regime as “interfering” with the state’s affairs. At one roundtable discussion held in Dhaka in July 2018, an official from the Ministry of Labour and Employment stated that they were willing to cancel the Accord’s provisions for good. It is worthwhile to note that during the implementation period of the Accord, the opinions expressed by the Minister of Commerce closely matched those of the BGMEA and the business elite of the country. Enforcement of the Accord has been dubbed as “excesses” by a government key spokesperson, indicating how the government simply dovetailed BGMEA on matters of workplace safety. While the BGMEA’s detest for the Accord perfectly fits with the logic of capitalism in the garment sector, what should we make of the government’s detest for the Accord?

The links between government and BGMEA

As the Accord’s tenure drew to a close and an extension was on the table, the friction came out in the open. After news reports that the BGMEA was committed to bringing all the “different regimes” of governance under one roof, the association developed a proposal to this effect for government approval. As recent as August 2019 the BGMEA is on record to have brought allegations against the Accord for its “going alone” policy even though the association committed to a cooperation between the Accord team and the BGMEA’s “local entrepreneurs and experts”. Indeed, the signatories to the Accord’s extension on 21 June 2017 agreed to continue a fire and building safety program in Bangladesh until midnight of May 31, 2021, after which the task would be handed over to a national regulatory body supported by the International Labor Organization.

In January 2020, a deal was struck between the Accord associations and the BGMEA to establish a Ready-Made Garment Sustainability Council (RSC) which would replace the Accord and operate within the regulatory framework of the laws of Bangladesh. Some international labour rights groups and networks made allegations in a witness signatories’ brief that the RSC’s takeover of the Accord’s Bangladesh operations was an upshot of a “protracted campaign” by the Government of Bangladesh and factory owners against the Accord. Among other things, that employers’ campaign included a court case against the Accord, sued by one disgruntled garment factory owner in Dhaka.

At the inauguration of the RSC, the new initiative was praised as an unprecedented “national” supply chain initiative, adding a flair of nationalism in business. The Accord press statement on the transition said, “RSC is a newly established not-for-profit company in Bangladesh created and governed by global apparel companies, trade unions, and manufacturers.” It was officially registered on May 20, 2020, to be “a permanent safety monitoring and compliance body in the RMG sector in Bangladesh.” All the signatory companies and unions of the Accord and the BGMEA agreed to establish the RSC through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed on May 8, 2019. It was also stipulated that the “RSC will continue with factory inspections, remediation monitoring, safety training, and a safety & health complaints mechanism at the RMG factories supplying to Accord signatory companies” and that the programs “will be implemented following the protocols and procedures developed by the Accord, which have also been inherited by the RSC.” The statement further noted: 

With the transition of the Accord’s Bangladesh office and operations to the RSC, the RSC becomes the organization implementing the in-country safety inspections and programs of the legally binding 2018 Transition Accord agreement between global companies and unions. To ensure the provisions of the 2018 Transition Accord on remediation, inspections, training, and complaints programs are fully and adequately implemented, the Accord International Secretariat based in Amsterdam will cooperate with and support the RSC.

RSC released the following press release now found on its newly established website.

Today the functions of the Bangladesh offices of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh have transitioned to the RMG Sustainability Council (RSC), a permanent national [organisation] with equal representation from RMG manufacturers, global apparel companies, and trade unions representing garment workers.

The press release quoted three people representing three parties of the RSC Board of Directors. Dr. Rubana Huq, the then President of the BGMEA and industry representative on the RSC Board of Directors, said “The RSC is an unprecedented national initiative and through our collective efforts with the brands and trade unions, we will make sure that Bangladesh remains one of the safest countries to source RMG products from.” China Rahman, General Secretary of the IndustriALL Bangladesh Council and trade unions representative on the RSC Board of Directors, said, “Together with our Bangladeshi trade union affiliates, we will help ensure workers in RMG factories have safe workplaces and have access to remedy to address safety concerns and exercise the right to safe workplaces. We will work to ensure that workers […] have trust in the newly established RSC”. Roger Hubert, Regional Head for Bangladesh, Pakistan and Ethiopia for the multinational high-street retailer H&M and brand representative on the RSC Board of Directors, said: “With the establishment of the RSC, brands can continue to honour their supply chain responsibilities that they have committed to through the Accord signed with the trade unions. The RSC will provide the assurance that workplace safety will continue to be addressed throughout out Bangladeshi RMG supply chain.” Dr. Huq was categorical in stating that the RSC received its license for operation from the commerce ministry and had taken over ACCORD’s current office and offered all existing staff members to join the RSC.

Uncertain futures under corporate control

After Bangladesh Accord’s transition to a new name there has not been much in the news about ongoing activities. The Accord’s continued operation with new arrangements under the Ministry of Commerce indicates the business elite’s close ties with the ruling political party in Bangladesh. It points to the local power nexus that are at play and business interests prevailing over all other considerations, something commonly seen in literature on global production networks. For all the symbolism involved with the RSC and its “new beginnings”, it is apparent that a truce has been found for the time being. Paradoxically, the “new” developments may resemble a move towards a structural power approach to the problem at hand, where the state’s role is seen as paramount. But in the absence of any political will from the state’s ruling political block, one cannot be too hopeful.

Mahmudul H Sumon is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. He can be contacted at: sumonmahmud@juniv.edu.

Cite as: Sumon, Mahmudul H. 2022. “What do we learn from hybrid governance in Bangladesh’s garments sector?” Focaalblog, 13 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/09/14/mahmudul-h-sumon-what-do-we-learn-from-hybrid-governance-in-bangladeshs-garments-sector/

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Valentina Napolitano & Kristin Norget: Pope Francis, Reconciliation, and the State

At the end of July, a remarkable event unfolded in three distinct but significant sites in Canada. Pope Francis, the Argentinian current supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, travelled to Maskwacis, Ste. Anne de Beaupré and Iqaluit on his “penitential pilgrimage” in Turtle Island (the Indigenous name for North America), an historic visit intended to allow for “forgiveness” for the heinous acts at Catholic Residential Schools which for over almost a century (1885-1996) separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families and communities and subjected them to awful physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

The event earned some attention in the media internationally and in Canada, where it monopolized national and local airwaves and the Internet. The media drummed up popular fascination, in “will he, or won’t he?” fashion, with the potential Apology from the Pope – a possibility planted earlier this year in March when a delegation of members of 32 First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities visited the Vatican and met with the Pope to share their experience in residential schools and express the importance of a formal papal declaration of apology in their homeland. Part of the delegation’s aim was a call for the rescinding of the 1492 Treaty of Tordesillas and its accompanying “Doctrine of Discovery”, which originally endowed early Christian explorers the legal authorization to occupy and extract from a supposed ‘terra nullius’.

We draw attention to the need for anthropologists and other scholars to recognize the importance of what is at stake in this papal event as a culmination of colonial histories and processes that are not merely “religious”. While many may read the papal visit as simply an enactment by an archaic religious institution breathing its last breaths on the global stage, there is much more at work here that touches on the most pressing issues of our day concerning (self-)sovereignty, governance and decolonization, and the powerful hidden theopolitical economy of bodies, blood and soil, and the commons that underlies them. As such, this papal visit and other prominent public Church performances also invoke, implicitly though distinctly, themes familiar to many anthropologists in our thinking and research: debt and guilt, capitalism and care, denizen-ship and vulnerability.

A Pope is never a single story, nor a truly singular individual. Technically, the Pope is the Bishop of Rome, in straight lineal descent from Saint Peter, making him a unique combination of the historical person, the geopolitical configuration of the Church (as sovereign of the Vatican City State), and the liturgical, “God-manifested” investiture of the Pontificate. While many regarded the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) as marking a pivotal rejuvenation of the Church and a welcome modernizing shift toward reform and social engagement, the two pontificates that followed Vatican II dampened any such hopes. Both Pope (and now Saint) John Paul II (1978-2005) and Pope Benedict XVI (2005-2013) manifested ambiguous stances toward Indigenous people and the deep histories of violence, neglect, and exploitationin the Americas.

John Paul II, personally invested in a post-cold war politics of anti-communism, was a staunch defender of ‘human life’ as a universal value rather than something to be understood as mediated by social and cultural specificities. He travelled to some 120 countries and oversaw an unprecedented surge in the canonization of new saints, including in the Americas. Yet in this continent he also undid years of efforts by more ‘progressive’ Church factions in promoting participatory democracy, land rights advocacy, human and Indigenous rights, and in the fight against poverty and neoliberal policies of international structural adjustment – the broad canvas of programs that theologically and pastorally became known as part of the movement of Liberation Theology. John Paul II’s geopolitical orientation toward Turtle Island could be summed up by his words during a brief visit in 1984 where, in Ste. Anne de Beaupré, he stated, rather elliptically, “We know that Jesus Christ makes possible reconciliation between peoples, with all its requirements of conversion, justice and social love. If we truly believe that God created us in his image, we shall be able to accept one another with our differences and despite our limitations and our sins.” Reconciliation for this pope was thus fundamentally a repairing enabled by the sweeping of vexing “differences” and past evils under the supposedly apolitical carpet of a transcendent universal (European) catholicity.

In contrast to his predecessor, Benedict XVI appeared more interested in the “Arab world” rather than the Americas, which he visited only briefly twice (Brazil in 2007, and Mexico in 2012, en route to Cuba). In travels to Lebanon, Syria, and Germany he worked to encourage, not always successfully, Christian-Muslimdialogue, visibly more at ease as a theologian rather than a pastor surrounded by a crowd. More generally, he had an infamous role in partly covering priestly sexual abuse before becoming Pope, but also, perhaps unknown to many, while Pope, tried to address the abuses committed within and by members of new 19th and 20th century religious Orders (such as the Congregation of the Legionaries of Christ and their founder Marcial Maciel) that had been much in the grace of John Paul II.  The “traditionalism”–in both theological orthodoxy and disposition – of this German Pope also served to bolster the “old”, pre-Reformation Orders within the church and affirmed the Christian roots of Europe and its ‘civilization’. Yet when Benedict XVI met a First Nations delegation visiting the Vatican in 2009 (headed by then National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Phil Lafontaine), the pontiff expressed a heartfelt shame and sorrow for the suffering of those living with the tragic legacy of Catholic residential schools, and blessed sacred medicine brought by delegation members. However, the Pope’s utterance of remorse took place on Vatican soil, as part of a private visit, not an act of attempted reconciliation on Turtle Island.

When Francis became Pope, however, the world expected something different. As the first Latin American Pope, with a theological and pastoral proximity to the poor and the “peripheries” (though with an unclear association with Argentina’s military regime while Provincial of the Jesuits in Buenos Aires), it was thought he could open the magisterium of the Church to an embracing of the divorced, homosexuality, the ordination of women priests, and the tackling of priestly sexual abuses, while setting in motion a concrete system of reparation. Now, amid the ninth year of his pontificate, an opening on these matters has been only partial.

Nevertheless, Pope Francis has called attention to capitalism’s “culture of waste” and our universal denizen-ship on the earth as “our common home”; in 2015 he met for over three weeks with Indigenous communities in the Amazon toward mobilizing clergy and others for an “Integral Ecology” of “pastoral, cultural, and ecological conversion” in the interests of Indigenous survival. In addition, he has pointed to the aging, “grandfather”–like nature of European societies which he urges must rejuvenate their ancient cultural values by means of new immigrant blood.

These overtures have been appreciated especially by non-Catholics, attracted by their ethically driven politics of inclusion and active collective responsibility in a time of increasing individualist populist politics world-wide. Conservative Catholics, however, have portrayed Francis as a mere pastoral figure rather than one with true theological gravitas, a breaker of traditions rather than an architect of authentic intra-church alliances. Moreover, the ambiguity of this Pope from the Americas is precisely regarding its Indigenous peoples:  they are beloved as ‘primordial’ caretakers of the earth and holders of ancestors’ wisdom yet remain trapped in the romanticizing gaze of Francis in his own embodiment of an immigrant European in the New World.

The most striking image in the just-completed Turtle Island papal pilgrimage is the frail, wheel-chaired body of Francis as the agent of avowed penitence. The popular enthrallment with the highly mediatized story of the papal visit, not just in Canada but worldwide, points to a collective desire for a punctual, perlocutionary healing, as if the spoken apology “for deplorable evil” could perform the erasure of the stubborn stain of guilt not just for the Church. In this context, the Pope as the Church’s metonymic leader becomes the proxy for non-indigenous Canadian society at large (the latter, after all, tacitly accepted the colonial assimilationist system that allowed the unspeakable abuses of Indigenous children to take place).

Indeed, at the very start of his visit this unique (as both the first Jesuit and non-European) Pope could be seen solemnly and pensively cradling his chin and mouth in his hand as if hesitant about the words he would soon be expected to utter. Later, in Maskwacis, he was enveloped in a soundscape of sacred chanting and drumming, grinning as he donned an Indigenous ceremonial headdress. The moment displayed a willful audaciousness typical of the Church, justified by the familiar theological principle of Humanitas – a vitalization of ‘cultures’ under a universal umbrella that sees all members of those Cultures as children of God. Yet, the apparent seamlessness of this harmonious scene later became undone by the raw, devastating, impromptu spectacle of a lone woman, Si Pih Ko, powerfully singing, in Cree, her fist raised to the sky, an alternative version of Canada’s national anthem known as “Our Village”, rebuking the papal presence while protesting the death of her brother in prison.  

Image 1: Chief Wilton Littlechild and Pope Francis, Maskwacis, Alberta, July 26, 2022 (photo by Guglielmo Mangiapane, Reuters; the authors are grateful for the right to publish the image here)

If, as Carl Schmitt says, all political concepts are secularized theological ones, Pope Francis’s  recurring gestures of apology for “cultural destruction” came crashing to a ground of (missed) interpellations and apologies, while he continued to offer his fragile body for a performative Church and State healing of indigenous lives ravaged by the violence of genocide – a word the pontiff spoke only when he was safely on the plane back to Rome.

Thus, the concept of reconciliation by Pope Francis was affectively mobilized through the soil, commons, soundscapes, and bodies as these hinged on the ultimate sacrifice of Christ’s crucifixion and a human/divine suffering that were, in this highly mediatized visit, notably devoid of Marian iconicity. In this framework, the singular yet communal suffering of First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples becomes part of the ‘universal’ redemptive incarnation and blood of Christ, and, by extension, the healing sovereignty of the Canadian state.

The much-anticipated apology for the methodical cruelty of educational Catholic missions, and the Catholic Church’s role in past and ongoing colonialism, cannot be understood simply through an anthropological lens of battles for and refusal of modern state (self-)sovereignty. This 2022 papal journey through Turtle Island made glaringly evident that a colonial Church infrastructure is deeply engrained in a Christianity of the modern Canadian state, as the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops made clear by orchestrating, albeit not in line with Pope Francis’s will, an estranging Eucharistic Mass performed in Latin (an archaic norm abandoned post-Vatican II) in Edmonton’s Commonwealth stadium on July 26. Throughout this visit we beheld an aging papal body answering Indigenous calls for the dis-entangling of Catholic colonial violence through his encounter with the sacred soundscape, walking the soil (even if in a wheelchair), and in his public acts of listening.

‘True’ reconciliation remains a matter of the return of stolen gifts and livelihoods, requiring a new articulation between economies of suffering and indebtedness. From the perspective of Catholic theology, indebtedness is intrinsic to the tension between guilt and debt, where guilt is the unavoidable condition of being born as human (fallen from Eden), and debt is enjoined by God’s gift of life that cannot ever be fully repaid. The tension of guilt and debt in their eternal production of indebtedness is a “vital” theological hinge and a primary force of a capitalist market that functions as a never-ending fulfillment of drives and desires. Reconciliation then is also a much-needed breaking of precisely this theological hinge

Yet, in a way that was perhaps unperceived by many, this papal visit with and beyond the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island affords the possibility that “reconciliation” is not only a matter of voicing and representation, sovereignty and its ongoing unravelling, or retribution and (unmade) apologies. It also a political, theological, and cosmological matter of a mystery of incarnation, in its particular bodily forms of fragility—a fragility now more than ever common to all living beings. As potent as this mystery of incarnation may be for healing, it may not be enough.

Valentina Napolitano is Professor of Anthropology and Connaught Scholar at the University of Toronto. Valentina Napolitano’s work weaves together anthropology, political theology, and Critical Catholic Studies.  She is currently focusing on a book on mysticism and politics in the 21st century.

Kristin Norget is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. Her current research interests are concerned with mediatization and contemporary strategies of evangelization of the Roman Catholic Church focused on Mexico and Peru. She has also published on issues of indigeneity and Catholic liberation theology in Mexico.

Cite as: Valentina Napolitano and Kristin Norget. 2022. “Pope Francis, Reconciliation, and the State.” Focaalblog, 12 August. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/08/12/valentina-napolitano-kristin-norget-pope-francis-reconciliation-and-the-state/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Don Nonini: The China Conundrum and The Current Conjuncture

Strategic Ambivalence or Disguised Conflict? China’s Reactions to Russia’s War on Ukraine and to Covid

Why does China’s response so far to the Russian invasion of Ukraine “not add up”? On one hand, China has refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has pushed its own state-controlled media to promote only pro-Russian propaganda, and even republished false reports by the Russian state media. China abstained from a UN Security Council resolution in March 2022 that condemned the Russian invasion. Meanwhile, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently announced that China and Russia “will always maintain strategic focus and steadily advance our comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era,” especially in the energy trade (Quoted in Torigian 2022). And it is an open secret that Xi Jinping gave his assent – or at the very least knew and did not demur – when he heard of Putin’s intention to invade Ukraine during the latter’s visit to Beijing at the recent Winter Olympics.

On the other hand, the same article notes that President Xi Jinping of China said that he was “pained” to see “flames of war reignited in Europe.” While not condemning the Russian invasion, China has not actively supported it, and instead has called for peace talks and “maximum restraint” (Torigian 2022). It has appealed for all parties to respect pre-existing “sovereign” borders. Nor has China so far provided much economic support to Russia, other than continuing their long-standing trade in oil and gas – nor given any military assistance. And the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, in which the PRC holds 27% decisive voting power, halted its work in Russia and Belarus in protest at the invasion of Ukraine (Torigian 2022). What’s going on?

What appears to be ambivalence or failure of the Chinese state to “get its act together”, its confused or contradictory messaging may actually reflect an internal lack of consensus toward the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine at the top of the PRC leadership. It may also indicate a current shift in the balance of power within the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party – away from the extraordinary concentration of power by President Xi Jinping toward  a willingness by other members of the Politburo to impose limits on it after his probable reelection as CCP General Secretary at the Party Congress held later in 2022. There are signs of profound dissatisfaction within these top Party circles, reflecting broader economic, social, and political contradictions within China that have emerged over the last years, as Xi has consolidated his increasingly autocratic rule, undermined adversaries, and done his part to destabilize détente with the EU and the United States.

George Soros recently went so far as to say that Xi may not be reelected to a third term as President at the Twentieth National Congress this fall. Soros stated, “Contrary to general expectations Xi Jinping may not get his coveted third term because of the mistakes he has made. But even if he does, the Politburo may not give him a free hand to select the members of the next Politburo. That would greatly reduce his power and influence and make it less likely that he will become ruler for life” (Ren 2022). 

Then, the day after Ren’s report for Bloomberg.com, we read in the New York Times of Premier Li Keqiang’s recent speech that implied (if not explicitly so) that Xi’s “zero Covid” policies have led to a catastrophic slowdown in the Chinese economy – during the first three months of 2022 there has been a decline in the Chinese GDP rate of growth to 4.8%, well below the official target of 5.5%. This has been precipitated by a two-month lockdown ordered by Xi that brought the everyday life and economic activity of an infuriated population of Shanghai to a standstill for more than two months, as well as episodic lockdowns in other cities which stopped assembly lines, trapped workers, interrupted the movement of goods and confined millions of Chinese to their homes. At a teleconference to more than 100,000 officials across China, Li announced “We must seize the time window and strive to bring the economy back to the normal track” (P. Mazur and A. Stevenson, New York Times, May 26, 2022).  

The key message to take home from this is that China’s #2 highest ranking official has just stepped out in public to implicitly criticize the Covid lockdown policies mandated by China’s #1 highest ranking official – President  Xi Jinping.  There are certain things that are unforgivable in the contemporary PRC, and Xi’s and his faction’s single-handed slowing of the country’s economic growth may be one of them. Whether this is the first step to Xi being ushered out the door to an honorable retirement rather than being reelected to a third presidential term remains to be seen.  

Theoretically, this example points to the importance of investigating the contradictions of illiberal Chinese capitalism that characterizes the corporate Party-oligarchic state in which it is situated.

Deconstructing Socialism’s Deconstruction, Chinese Style

Are (post-) socialist states fundamentally alike? The Chinese Communist Party and its leading intellectuals in the years in the 1990s gave this question much thought. Shambaugh (2008) demonstrates the careful attention after Tiananmen in 1989 with which high-ranking CCP cadres and intellectuals (e.g., from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, and the Central Party School) observed the changes arising from liberalization and “shock therapy” in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They observed the dogmatism of the Soviet nomenklatura, the  overreliance on heavy industry, the neglect of agriculture, and the militarization of the national economy with great interest, and reflected on this as they witnessed the USSR’s fall (Shambaugh 2008:41-86). From these observations, they drew lessons concerning the maintenance of the CCP’s power in China. Li Jingjie, director of the CASS Soviet-Eastern Institute, for example, distilled several of these: “Concentrate on productivity growth,” “be ideologically flexible and progressive,” “seek not only to strengthen confidence in the power of the state [but], more important, [the] material living standards of the people,” among other insights (quoted in Shambaugh 2008:76).

A Post-Socialist Developmental State with Chinese characteristics

What came out of these deliberations of the CCP in the late 1980s-1990s? In particular, unlike the Central and Eastern European late socialist countries, the highest circles of the CCP were determined that the party continue to maintain its ruling position within the state apparatus and organize the national economy, rather than give way to neoliberal penetration by graduates of the University of Chicago School of Economics, and those of similar ilk (Bolesta 2015:230-244).  China’s post-socialist developmental state trajectory has been similar to those of earlier capitalist states (e.g., 19th and 20th-century western Europe, the United States), while very distinct from the post-socialist political systems of Eastern Europe and Russia. Unlike what occurred in these countries, “retaining an authoritarian state was also aimed at creating a strong and capable state… the authorities have attempted to strengthen power and control… over society and the business sector” (Bolesta 2015:232). This has allowed for a gradual and highly planned set of state programs for evolving from a socialist to a capitalist economy.

Being authoritarian and illiberal, however, is not the same as being unaccountable to the “masses” of the working class, rural peasants, and since the early 2000s, the new urban professional managerial classes of China. The “attentive” party-state (Perry 2012) is above all attentive to maintaining its legitimacy among the rural population subject to dispossession, and increasingly among the growing urban middle classes and professionals whose numbers form the new base of the CCP.  Largely, as one might expect, the CCP above all seeks to maintain and increase the standard of living of both the rural and urban populations, ameliorate the environmental disasters that afflict millions of affluent urban residents, and pay specific attention to the protests of thousands of small farmers dispossessed from their land and striking workers exploited in the industrial workplaces. The party has ultimately been willing to bend when large numbers of residents display the capacity for disorder and discontent in public, led by leaders willing to face down beatings by police and to travel to Beijing to petition central cadres and high officials in ministries to redress the injustices committed against them by corrupt local officials. Responsive, yes. Democratic? Not so much.

Morphing into the Chinese Corporate Party-State

The Chinese Party-state takes the form of a corporate-oligarchic structure in that the CCP simultaneously acts as a coordinated body to maintain its power through its deployment of the wealth it extracts, particularly at its highest circles, through securing the loyalty of the population, while seeking to meet the goals of national development undertaken under the “conditionality” of post-socialism, which require playing a role within global capitalism.

The CCP is a heterogeneous organization with approximately 86 million members distributed territorially across the PRC, and is organized in a spatially differentiated bureaucratic hierarchy that mirrors both the official state bureaucracy and private corporate and civil-society organization bureaucracies in tens of thousands of locales. Only a broad summary of how its predatory and developmental practices interact can be given here, given the sheer size of the Chinese population, its heterogeneity, and its regional/macroregional differentiation.  

For the purposes of this essay, I  focus on two defining characteristics of the emergent Party-corporate state — the institutional dominance of large-scale state-owned enterprises managed by the highest circles of the CCP, and the shift by the local corporatist Party-state from investing in  industrial enterprises during the 1990s-2000s toward land speculation and real estate development, and its implications for rural dispossession. 

Political Crisis and Economic Stagnation

China is experiencing the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 which has led to a decline in the rate of capitalist profits, a worldwide realization crisis, the indebtedness of populations and states outside of China, widespread financial speculation in areas essential to social reproduction/human livelihoods (e.g., in energy, foodstuffs, farmland), and compounded, worsening ecological disasters arising from climate change. These global/planetary processes are ones that China’s corporate party-state will have to confront while it is managing its own internal transitions.

In the case of the CCP up to the present, this has entailed managing (and accumulating capital from) the large-scale State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) sector. According to Smith (2015:45), “Thirty-five years after the introduction of market reforms, China’s government still owns and controls the commanding heights of the economy: banking, large-scale mining and manufacturing, heavy industry, metallurgy, shipping, energy generation, petroleum and petrochemicals, heavy construction and equipment, atomic energy, aerospace, telecommunications, vehicles…, aircraft manufacturer, airlines, railways, biotechnology, military production and more.”

These leading state-owned enterprises are managed by the “princelings”, taizibang, the descendants of the first generation of the highest CCP leaders, who have become the most wealthy and powerful members of the Chinese ruling class. As Smith (2015:50) characterizes them, “princelings often are heads of giant conglomerates which themselves own dozens or even hundreds of individual SOEs. Presumably this gives them access to multiple income streams and ample opportunities to plunder the government’s ever-growing treasure.” The princelings form the upper class in the PRC.

Nonetheless, their investments now face diminishing returns as China’s industrial capacity, while still the largest in the world, is plagued by rising costs of labor and environmental controls. Chinese industry is troubled by intense competition and profit crises. Most recently, the Covid pandemic, and the state’s “zero-Covid” response to it imposed by Xi Jinping in particular — total urban lockdown as in 2021-2022 in Shanghai  and in other large cities  — has caused extended shutdowns in industrial production and long-distance supply chains, both critical for its exports.

In so far as their control over the state-owned enterprise sector constitutes the basis of their power, the relatively small Party elite of princelings faces questions about their own reproduction as capitalists and as their continued power at the highest levels of the CCP.  While most will continue to accumulate within the slowing SOE industries, they will compensate by investing capital in China’s burgeoning financial sector. Their turn away from industrial production and its basis in political power is a destabilizing force. Beyond their control over state-owned enterprises, they will continue to exert their capacity to extract rents from privately-owned capitalist enterprises, but their capacity to do so will depend upon their extended political power.  In contrast, those the princelings have targeted in the past, the owners and managers in the privately-owned capitalist sectors in services, high-tech production, and real estate, will be drawn into the middle and upper ranks of the CCP, and seek to increasingly wield power on their own. All this is taking place as economic and social destabilizations are beginning to emerge, such as the failure of large numbers of young Chinese graduates to find work, “brain drain”, flight overseas, and increasing incidences of bailan (withdrawal by discouraged youth from the labor market), which are increasingly presenting a threat to CCP legitimacy.

Under the circumstances, a tendency towards developing and assuming control of increasingly predatory Mafia-like organizations in the absence of more productive uses of their capital, presents a serious risk to the princelings and their many clients.

The Local Corporatist State: Financialization and Dispossession in Rural and Peri-urban Areas

Jean Oi (1995) describes the ways in which local entrepreneurs during the 1980s-1990s came together with local-level Party cadres and established the Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs). This represented the systematic emergence of the local entrepreneurial corporatist state around small-scale industrialization in rural and peri-urban areas. What I want to point to was the logical progression of the local corporatist state as the countryside became increasingly financialized from the mid-1990s onward. Development funds continued to be drawn from increased local tax revenues, supplemented by prioritized development funds sent down by provincial and central state agencies and state banks (So and Chu 2016: 67-69). But after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the influx of funding from central government and state banks began to turn from small-scale industrial to large-scale real estate development, and from investment in industry to speculation in land by developers with the collusion of local officials.

The pattern has been one in which farmers with lands on the edges of nearby growing rural townships found themselves (often repeatedly) facing displacement from their farmland, often with little or no financial compensation, dispossessed by party and state cadres acting in collusion with well-funded real estate developers and construction firms. Farmers resisting eviction from their lands have faced violent attacks by organized criminal gangs working with developers and protected by local officials (Vukovich 2019: 167-198).  

Much productive farmland has thus been taken out of production. Speculation in new residential and commercial real estate has led to dramatic overbuilding, while large numbers of displaced landless farmers have out-migrated to regional cities for precarious wage labor.  Vukovich (2019) writes of the rise of financial capital to a dominant position within the Chinese economy  as the expropriation of farmers’ land for urban development in thousands of periurban villages throughout the country has become the type-case for dispossession.

Vukovich notes that the process is reaching its spatial and physical limits in terms of China’s still un-expropriated farmland: “Urbanization or the pushing of surplus rural labor into the ever-expanding cities and export processing zones is likewise reaching its limits. The chief limit being that this model of growth does nothing to actually develop the countryside…Those urban jobs done by millions of migrant workers… still do not by and large pay an adequate wage for the laborers to stay” (Vukovich 2019:192). 

The consequences have been not only human but also environmental catastrophes – loss of farmland, flooding due to torrential rains on eroded lands, inadequate disposal of human and animal wastes, and lowered quality and quantity of the rural water supply.  

So far, the CCP has prevented complete disaster by allowing farmers to retain family and collective property rights in land – thus making it legally inalienable through the market — but outright confiscation is working with even greater effect. The result is the accelerating degradation in the capacity of hundreds of millions of rural farmers to continue their own reproduction. 

Making China Great Again? – The Costs of Revanchism

Returning to the ethnographic vignette that began this essay — China’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine: its apparent incoherence (as viewed from outside) cannot be understood independently of attending to the conjunction of trends and events characterizing China’s simultaneous financial, economic and environmental crises as these have intersected with the pandemic and Xi’s “Zero-Covid” response to it.  On one hand, Xi Jinping is not only a nationalist (as arguably all CCP officials are), but one who seeks  a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (zhonghua minzu weida fuxing) through a successful quest to become a “wealthy and powerful country” (fuqiang guojia) vis-à-vis the West and Japan (Heilmann 2017: 54-55). In Xi’s narrative, this recuperates China from its national humiliation (guochi) at the hands of Western and Japanese imperialisms during the 19th and 20th centuries.  Xi’s autocratic and highly ambitious strategy to accomplish this objective places him ideologically squarely alongside Putin – both sympathetic to a common quest to recover past imperial greatness and civilization vis-à-vis the West. This may well explain China’s refusal at the UN to vote to condemn Russia’s invasion, its repetition of Putin’s lies about the war in China’s state-controlled media, and to defiantly commit to continuing China’s and Russia’s longstanding trade in oil and gas. However, Xi well knows that in this liquid partnership China has the upper hand: in net terms, the tribute flows from Moscow to Beijing.   

On the other hand, Li Keqiang, a technocrat and economist by training, has since his election to Premier in 2013 been responsible for the macroeconomic management of the Chinese economy (Brown 2017: 216). His influence in the Politburo has often been overridden by Xi’s heavy-handed decisions (Heilmann 2017: 165-166, 169-170, 173-174).  However, within his scope of power, Li has been active in setting China’s policies around trade and Chinese investments overseas, where China’s commitment to “nonintervention” and its partners’ sovereignty is closely watched in Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and set against the sordid history of the IMF’s and World Bank’s interventions. Thus Li could argue successfully for China to use its decisive voting shares in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to halt the bank’s operations in Russia and Belarus, to call for peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, and to refuse to supply economic or military aid to Russia, despite Xi’s and Putin’s shared revanchist sentiments against an imperialist West. Such aid would not only have triggered economic sanctions by the U.S. and probably EU, but also suspicions of Chinese intentions among its potential trading partners in Latin America and Africa.

As to China’s response to Russia’s war on Ukraine, its incoherence-segue to-conflict between Xi and Li within the Party-state enters into critical junctions with global and temporal processes of political and economic change (Kalb and Tak 2005). Over the last decade, the profitable returns to China’s export industries have declined. Its state banks have made huge Keynesian investments in infrastructure (bullet trains, etc.) to reflate the Chinese economy. It has experienced a stock market crash in 2015 and 2021, been pushed into defensive mode by the worsening of trade and diplomatic relations with the U.S. and EU, and over the last two years has experienced large-scale failures of privately-owned real estate companies backstopped by Chinese state banks. This is where the two longer-term trends mentioned above — decline in SOE industries with resulting dangers for the princelings, and the increased dispossession of rural farmers from their land — come in. The Chinese economy has moved into a precarious state.

And then there has been Covid and Xi’s autocratic response to it.  This was a first-order economic disaster, and everyone in China knew who its author was. It was under these circumstances that Li as China’s #2 could come out from under the shadow of Xi as #1 to declare that “we must strive to bring the economy back to the normal track.” 

Since at least the end of the USSR, top CCP cadres have recognized that those fetishized GDP growth numbers matter, as does the support of the growing urban upper-middle class for the Party’s continued survival.  They recognize that “producing economic growth [is] the most powerful source of [the Party’s] legitimacy. . . [Its] failure to continue delivering a good material standard of living for people would result in its falling from power” (Brown 2016: 215).  

If the situation is now increasingly perceived by CCP leaders as a choice between the Party’s survival and Xi Jinping’s as its leader, there can be no doubt about its outcome.

References

Bolesta, A. (2015). China and post-socialist development. Bristol, England ; Chicago, Illinois, Policy Press.

Brown, K. (2016). CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping. London, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.

Heilmann, S., Ed. (2017). China’s political system. Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield.

Kalb, D. and H. Tak (2005). Critical junctions : Anthropology and history beyond the cultural turn. New York, Berghahn Books.

Oi, J. (1995). “The role of the local state in China’s transitional economy.” The China Quarterly 144: 1132-1149.

Perry , E. (2012). “The illiberal challenge of authoritarian China.” Journal of Democracy 8(2): 3-15.

Shambaugh, D. L. (2008). China’s Communist Party : Atrophy and adaptation. Washington, D.C.,Berkeley, Woodrow Wilson Center Press; University of California Press.

Smith, R. (2015). “China’s communist-capitalist ecological apocalypse.” Real-world Economics Review 71: 19-59.

So, A. Y. and Y.-W. Chu (2016). The global rise of China. Cambridge, UK, Polity Press.

Vukovich, D. F. (2019). Illiberal China: The ideological challenge of the People’s Republic of China. Singapore, Palgrave McMillan.

Don Nonini is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  He is the author and editor of numerous books, peer-reviewed articles, and chapters on the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, on local politics and food politics in the United States, and on the commons.  He can be contacted at  dnonini@email.unc.edu.

Cite as: Nonini, Don. 2022. “The China Conundrum and The Current Conjunctures of Global Capitalism.” Focaalblog, 11 July. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/07/11/don-nonini-the-china-conundrum-and-the-current-conjuncture/

Blog, Conversations on the Left

Focaalblog: New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism

Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission on Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology – IUAES, in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, and FocaalBlog, organized a conference on the 26-27 May, 2022, in Budapest, addressing the escalating crises of global capitalism.

Since 1989, processes of neoliberal globalization, financialization, the erosion of welfare states, and the decline of ‘the standard labor contract’, have produced deepening inequalities and hierarchies, long time hidden under the mantra of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Privatization, gentrification, dispossession, devaluation, and displacement have increased in a multitude of settings despite intermittent mass mobilizations, which were often seen as ‘middle class’. The undermining of democratic possibilities has reinforced the super-exploitation of diverse groups in many places. Globalization, technological speed up and the platformization of labor-markets are threatening ‘middle class’ jobs’ in North and South. Deepening exploitation of labor is increasingly intersected with aggressive rent taking by monopoly sections of capital and states. Issues of nationalism, racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia, sometimes interwoven with waves of migration, have resurfaced, in tandem with the resulting authoritarianism. Accelerating climate change is being addressed in pro-capitalist ways, likely leading to further inequalities, displacements, and challenges to survival. Global imperial rivalries are intensifying and generating new cold wars and ‘global wars’, increasingly of a purportedly ‘civilizational nature’, like the Ukrainian calamity that is playing itself out on the EU border. 

The late Immanuel Wallerstein predicted that politics in this ‘decisive era of the world-system’ will be ever more volatile as inescapable choices must be made about democratic or authoritarian solutions. Most of our problems are well known and anticipated, but narrow ideas about ‘proven causation’ and ‘concluding evidence’ paralyze any decision making on behalf of established interests, while national publics are being fed lies and deceptions, both by the technocrats and the ‘authoritarians’ and right-wing populists. Crisis moments are steadily dealt with ‘unprepared’ and in fire-fighting mode. Left wing grassroots movements are specialized on small scale practical utopias but large-scale breakthroughs for the Left seem out of reach.

If this describes roughly where we are now, what can we expect next? Can we responsibly extrapolate and speculate? What sort of a global capitalism might we be inhabiting in thirty years from now? What can we discover as its likely core tendencies, elements, and relations? What modes of resistance are people experimenting with? What are the visions and opportunities to build a more equal and just society? Where is the new counter politics, where are the new counter movements?

Roundtable on War

Taras Fedirko (University of St Andrews) Militarized civil society and the economy of war in Ukraine

Volodymyr Arthiuk (University of Oxford) The expected war: scales of conflict around Ukraine from February 2014 to February 2022

Denys Gorbach (Sciences Po) Identitarian landscapes in Ukraine before and during the war

Volodymyr Ischenko (Free University Berlin) Madman’s war? Ideology, hegemony crisis, and the dynamics of depoliticization in Russians’ support for the invasion of Ukraine

– moderated by Don Kalb (University of Bergen)

Roundtable on Migration

Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center) Migration turn and the crisis of capitalism.,

Noémi Katona (Centre for Social Science, Hungarian Academy of Sciences/Helyzet) The division of reproductive labor in global capitalism: the case of migrant care workers in Europe,

Béla Soltész (Eötvös Loránd University), “The wanted, the unwanted and the invisible. Interpreting distinctions and selectivity of Hungarian migration policy”

 Nina Glick Schiller (Manchester University), Has Migration Studies Lost Its Subject?  Migration Studies, Global Disorders, and Shared Precarities

 – moderated by Diana Szántó (Artemisszio Foundation/Polanyi Center)

Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ I

Luisa Steur (University of Amsterdam) Cuba Update

Marc Morell (University of Bergen) On transformative movements in neither authoritarian nor egalitarian but flawed paths. A Maltese illustration

Attila Antal (Eötvös Loránd University) Illiberalism as Emergency Governance

Gábor Scheiring (Bocconi University) The national-populist mutation of neoliberalism in East-Central Europe

– moderated by Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center)

Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ II

Florin Poenaru (University of Bucharest) Tanks, tankies and think-tanks. Anthropological vignettes from the Romanian garrison

Jeff Maskovsky (The City University of New York) Not Yet Fascist: The Journey from Neoliberalism to Corporate Authoritarianism of the United States

Ágnes Gagyi (University of Gothenburg) Bridge position and regime fixes: semi-peripheral contexts to “illiberalism” in Hungary

Bruno de Conti (University of Campinas) Bolsonaro: the economic agenda behind the smoke screen

– moderated by Dorottya Mendly (Corvinus University)

Roundtable on Our Futures

David Harvey (The City University of New York)

Michael Burawoy (UC Berkely)

Ida Susser (The City University of New York)

Don Kalb (University of Bergen)

 – moderated by Mary Taylor (The City University of New York)

Cite as: Focaalblog. 2022. “New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism.” Focaalblog, 5 July. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/07/05/don-kalb-new-times-confronting-the-escalating-crises-of-global-capitalism/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Céline Cantat: The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders

Since the beginning of the Russian offensive on Ukraine on February 24th, over 5 million people have registered for temporary protection programmes and other schemes across Europe. By and large, Ukrainians have been granted access to assistance, and extended legal statuses allowing them to enter and settle in EU Member States. While this unusual generosity on the part of European States should be applauded, it has given rise to a range of questions about the differentiated treatment of Ukrainians as compared to other displaced groups. A result of this configuration, the many issues surrounding the engagement with Ukrainian displacement have been mainly framed in comparative terms: How have Ukrainians been received in comparison to refugees who arrived in 2015? Why have Ukrainians been allowed to settle in Europe when there are thousands stuck at the Belarus-Polish border? Why have non-Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine been treated differently? Consequently, the public debate has been largely dominated by calls for the inclusion of Ukrainians, suddenly considered to be Europe’s own, flanked by denunciations of the EU’s selective indignation as hypocritical and racist.

Image 1: Direction sign for Ukrainians Welcome Center at Paris-Beauvais Airport (France), photo by author

Beyond official responses by states and their institutions, civilian and grassroots reactions have also been polarised across such lines. When, in early March 2022, I visited Budapest’s train stations, where a range of NGOs and networks of residents were gathering to welcome people fleeing Ukraine, the question of the specific qualities and perceived features of people arriving were central to conversations. A volunteer with a Hungarian Church NGO, pointing in the direction of a woman and her three children, stated: “Look, they are tired, they are vulnerable women and children: they are the real refugees”. He went on to explain that he also came out to help people passing through Budapest in the summer 2015 even though, according to him, many at the time were not refugees but, “migrants or Islamic terrorists”. When I highlighted that, to my knowledge, what legally identified a refugee was the conflict or persecution they were fleeing from, rather than undefined notions of worth connected to their perceived gender, age, or religion, he emphasized that some people deserved asylum while others did not. 

Clearly, the discourse reiterated by some of the volunteers in Budapest went beyond their personal feelings: it built on categories produced by the European border and asylum regime over the last three to four decades. A cornerstone of that is the meticulous construction of a separation between (deserving) refugees and (undesirable) migrants. Within the category of refugees there is a further hierarchisation of deservedness, with different types of assistance (e.g., resettlement to the EU versus humanitarian aid abroad) being extended based on racialised profiling of their capacity for integration into the imagined community of Europe. In the volatile context of the “migration crisis” declared in the region in 2015, this discourse has gained centrality in Hungary and other Central and Eastern European countries. Injunctions to distinguish between “bad migrants” and “good refugees” became articulated with local regimes of social valuation and their racialised, gendered, class- and religion-based hierarchies in the context of regional capitalist transitions. This is closely connected to their own paths of ‘Europeanisation’: former Eastern bloc countries were unequally included into its regional divisions of labour, and have themselves been subjected to, and productive of, racializing dynamics. ‘Becoming European’ has involved claims to superiority, modernity, and whiteness, which have led to the renewed marginalisation’s of various groups – both domestic and non-domestic – and has given rise to articulate forms of racism.

In other words, unequal treatment of different displaced groups is not new and does not happen in a vacuum: even if the refugee as a legal construction claims to be a universal figure, it is in reality always embedded in local social relations. Quite the opposite, a longue durée examination of the relation between states and displacement shows that it has always been a story of selective engagement: systematically, the way states engage with certain groups teaches us more about their projects and political architectures than about the displaced individuals themselves. It is therefore important to go beyond moralised assessments of Europe’s current response to Ukrainian displacement, and to reflect on how states interpellate people moving across borders in relation to specific moral and political economies, which are themselves underpinned by broader projects such as nation-building and capital accumulation. From this perspective, the questions raised by the Ukrainian displacement in Europe become: under which circumstances do states welcome or reject displaced people? How is refugee reception shaped by larger historical processes and their legacy, including state-building, capital expansion and related projects such as colonial domination? How do moral hierarchies and constructions of race, gender, class, and religion, in the receiving states and nations, structure responses to displacement? 

Statecraft and the reception spectacle

As I have argued elsewhere (Cantat 2015), the refugee as a category and a figure is shaped and made in ways that are congenial to furthering states’ aims. My point is not that formal frames overdetermine responses to displacement. Yet informal initiatives still respond to dominant discursive and political reception regimes: the space for creative responses remains moulded by their opposition and denunciation of overarching power structures. To further reflect on the parallels and contrasts between current responses to Ukrainian displacement and engagement with previous episodes of forced mobility, I will reflect on specific displacement episodes and assess how the figure of the refugee has been built historically. This historicization will help us understand the differences and similarities in states’ mechanisms of interpellation of different groups, both over time and across categories.

A classic example in recent history of how the category of the refugee has been shaped by states’ circumstances can be found in the Geneva Convention itself. Presented as a text with universal validity in order to protect people fleeing persecution, the definition of the refugee in fact (re)produces a very specific figure: that of a man fleeing the USSR in the context of the Cold War aiming to join the capitalist West. The restrictive criteria outlined in the Convention regarding refugee status constantly prove to be inadequate for providing appropriate protection to people fleeing a range of violent situations. First, of course, those fleeing economic violence and devastation, considered outside the scope of asylum. But also, those fleeing different configurations of political and social persecution that do not abide by the vision of the world underpinning the Convention.

Going back into past displacements, something which, as noted by Philip Marfleet (2007), neither historians nor refugee scholars are particularly good at for different reasons, allows us to assert yet more clearly that histories of exiles are always underpinned by states’ demands for hospitality or hostility to different groups. Besides, neither hospitality nor rejection are homogeneous circumstances, and states may often be ready to accommodate refugees without actually welcoming them, for instance by allowing people to integrate within labour markets while at the same encouraging discourses of exclusion or refusing them legal statuses and protections. Discursive constructions of displaced populations intersect both with the valuation regimes and social hierarchies that structure host states’ bio–political architectures, by which I mean regimes of race/gender/class (etc.) as articulated with the geopolitics and interstate relations of the moment.

An important example of this can be found in the stories of Huguenot displacements in the 16th and 17th centuries. The flight of 200 000 Huguenots to Geneva, Holland, and England, as they feared persecution from the French absolutist Catholic authorities of the time, is often seen as one of the earliest episodes of contemporary refuge, not because Huguenots were the first group to flee a territory due to violence, but because they were chased away by a state project and received by other states defining themselves against that. It is understood that the word “refugee” entered vernacular language for the first time during this episode. The emerging English and Dutch states promoted openness to those refugees, who came from relatively wealthy commercial backgrounds, including the slave trade, and spectacularized their welcoming attitude as a proof of their attachment to liberalism and religious freedom. This self-presentation was central to their opposition to the French absolutist state. In England, while historical sources show widespread popular hostility towards the Huguenots, the state engaged in a mass sympathy campaign, explaining to people that welcoming Huguenots was a matter of national pride and of, indeed, upholding values of tolerance.

The discourse of brotherhood was also framed in terms of religious proximity. But such categories of belonging are not static. They are insufficient for understanding reception attitudes: we need to recognize racialization, legitimization, and differentiation as dynamic and contingent processes that evolve across time and according to political circumstances. In fact, 50 years later, the Palatines, another group of Protestants fleeing Germany, was seeking refuge in England. Coming from a formally allied and Protestant state, they were received with great hostility. Many were placed in what are believed to be the first refugee camps of contemporary England, along the Thames, before being resettled to Ireland and British America. A highly polarised political debate with similar arguments as those that we now hear regarding the merits of migration and the (im)possibility of integration emerged in England at the time. This underlines that there is nothing new or specific about the unequal treatment of different displaced groups. It also shows that selective empathy tells us very little – perhaps nothing – about groups per se, their circumstances, needs or characteristics: it would be misleading to try to identify reasons for this differentiated treatment in specific qualities of individuals. What is at stake, always, in the relation between state authorities and displaced people is various forms of statecraft and state power.

The famous notion of “border spectacle”, which Nicholas de Genova (2013) has usefully mobilised to examine how exclusion is staged at the border to showcase the state as the protector of a national public that is simultaneously coalesced, has already taught us a lot about how the nation/state/citizen triad is produced in relation to displacement, exile, and borders. Similar observations can be drawn from other episodes where welcoming and hospitality become spectacularized by state authorities. Questions we must ask ourselves to understand selective empathy are never about whether people deserve a better treatment or not, but always about how their inclusion or rejection promote specific state projects at any given moment.

Ukrainian displacement and European belonging

In the case of Ukrainian displacement, discourses about Europe, whiteness, and European belonging have secured people access to reasonable reception conditions. In this context, grassroots reception practices have also been numerous, diverse, and consistent. They have been able to assert themselves publicly in ways that have been altogether forbidden and impossible in other displacement episodes, which were often characterised by the criminalisation of informal aid. This, together with the adoption of legal frameworks allowing Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine (but no other groups!) to cross EU national borders and choose where to settle, can be applauded as not only a uniquely welcoming set of policies but in fact the first properly coherent approach that the EU has ever adopted in relation to displacement. This is a welcome shift from the securitizing response usually reserved to those seeking asylum, which is not just chaotic but also, on many occasions, lethal.

There already are, however, serious issues to consider when we look at the way Ukrainians are being received in Europe. First, the activation of temporary protection schemes, has not meant access to regular (and more protective) asylum regimes. Second, across Europe, the bulk of reception work has been delegated to civilian networks and small-scale organisations. This is the result of decades of neoliberal sub-contracting of public responsibilities to private actors. This continued delegation of responsibility has meant the revival of aid networks formed in 2015: the flexibility and responsiveness of these loser structures, easily reactivated via social networks, was crucial for the execution of reception activities in the first weeks of the conflict. However, as everywhere, the capacity of civil society to fill gaps left by withdrawing states has its obvious limits. We are already seeing how the tide is turning, with volunteers becoming less willing to host the displaced in their homes and tiring from daily assistance activities. In the absence of a coordinated state response this can only deteriorate.

As we have seen in Greece for example, there is no more efficient way to turn popular sympathy into hostility than letting a situation worsen without states providing adequate support to both exiles and host communities. Importantly, while grassroots support activities do not always reproduce government categories developed by states and institutions, they always produce and navigate a sense that practising solidarity is a messy business in contexts of limited resources (Cantat 2018, 2020, 2021). Distributive dilemmas always involve representations, typologies, and moral economies, where (consciously or not) people’s deservingness is assessed by those who have to decide whom and how to help in specific contexts.

In fact, there is nothing inherently progressive to grassroots assistance as compared to state support or the formal aid sector: such initiatives follow their own politics and ethics, build specific socialities and respond to different circumstances. Often, when those circumstances are not clarified, e.g., when people are moved to help by unexamined desires to do good, informal support can fuel extremely unbalanced and unequal power relations. Those may be even more difficult to contest as they take place outside a formalised aid relation where roles are clearly defined and distributed: they might come together with powerful discourses that neutralise criticism, be it religious charity, claims to horizontality, or demands for gratitude. Even when relations are clarified, it is hard to escape combination and hybridization in solidarity practices: doing good and progressive politics usually exist together and this can make people who are the object of help very vulnerable.

This vulnerability is made more problematic because citizens of host countries have been moved into assisting Ukrainians in the name of moral imperatives, rather than because it is considered a public service that states ought to provide to people based on their statuses. If Ukrainians are now being supported in the name of some unstable construction of European belonging, then it begs the question: how long will Ukrainians remain so white? Europeanness is not a homogeneous and stable condition: the EU has produced shades of European belonging where Eastern Europe has always been seen as less belonging, less European, and somehow less legitimate – even for those countries who have become member states. The example of the Brexit campaign is just another reminder of how strong intra-European racism remains.

In the current context of the EU’s mobilisation against Russia, Ukrainians’ Europeanness is strongly asserted, but it could just as well be tempered, questioned, or sacrificed when geopolitics evolve. If so, the lack of deployment of proper state support and the overreliance on popular assistance will become highly problematic. We already see processes of differentiated inclusion unfolding with questions around the type of access that Ukrainians get to different social spheres: for instance, in Hungary, work permits are not needed for certain types of jobs where there are shortages – mostly manual, in the agrarian sector and catering, but also in IT. This in fact reiterates previous labour migration patterns whereby racialised Ukrainian labour has been allowed in the country in order to serve specific industries.

The direction in which Ukrainian instrumentality to the EU’s ideological and economic structures will evolve is far from obvious. Above all, the situation demands that we insist on the continuity of solidarity on the ground of a real grassroots internationalism and that we keep demanding public support for all displaced groups.

Céline Cantat is Visiting Lecturer in Migration Studies and Academic Director for the Masters in Environmental Policy and in Energy Transitions at the Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences Po.

This text was developed as part of the EASA fundraising webinar Humanitarian responses to the 2022 Russian war on Ukraine: anthropological perspectives, 07/06/2022, convened by Ela Drazkiewicz and Mariya Ivancheva, and co-sponsored by SIEF and AAA’s SOYUZ, Society for the Anthropology of Europe.

References

Cantat, Céline (2021) “Refugee Solidarity Along the Balkan Route”, Journal of Refugee Studies, 34 (2), 1348–1369.

Cantat, Céline (2020) “The Rise and Fall of Migration Solidarity in Belgrade”, movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies, 5 (1), http://movements-journal.org/issues/08.balkanroute/05.cantat–the-rise-and-fall-of-migration-solidarity-in-belgrade.html.

Cantat, Céline (2015) “Contesting Europeanism: Discourses and Practices of Pro-Migrant Groups in the European Union”. PhD Thesis, roar.uel.ac.uk/4618/  

Cantat, Céline (2018) “The politics of refugee solidarity in Greece: Bordered identities and political mobilization”, MigSol Working Paper, 2018/1, https://cps.ceu.edu/sites/cps.ceu.edu/files/attachment/publication/2986/cps-working-paper-migsol-d3.1-2018.pdf

De Genova, Nicholas (2013) “Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (7), 1180-1198,

Marfleet, Philip (2007) “Refugees and History: Why We Must Address the Past”, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 26 (3), 136–148.

Cite as: Cantat, Céline. 2022. “The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders.” Focaalblog, 28 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/28/celine-cantat-the-reception-spectacle-on-ukrainian-displacement-and-selective-empathy-at-europes-borders/