Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Allison Stuewe: Humanitarian Erasure: Marriage Practices of Iraqi Yezidi Refugees and Germany’s Integration Courses

Image: Refugee welcome centre in Hamburg, Germany, photo by Rasande Tyskar

The German governing coalition explicitly considers refugee integration to be a humanitarian project based on an obligation to care for others because of their shared humanity. Notably, however, the country’s strategies for integrating refugees are based on the notion that refugees coming to Germany lack not only the practical skills (like linguistic skills) to help them succeed in Germany but also the “right” values. The idea that refugees and their cultural differences, not German society, are the barrier to refugee success in Germany guides German integration programming. Survey data suggests, however, that refugees identify with most “German values” to an equal or stronger extent than the rest of the German population (Fuchs, Fan, and von Scheve 2021).

To compensate for this perceived (if false) deficiency, Germany’s humanitarian approach to refugee management relies on policies and programming, including federally designed integration courses, that prioritize refugee personal development to transform refugees into desirable German subjects who value the rule of law, freedom, tolerance, and equal rights. Germany’s integration strategies provide one example of how colonial taxonomies of social difference—in this case, orientalist notions of the inferior values of people from the Middle East—can produce humanitarian practice itself. While German integration courses are imagined by the state to facilitate refugee life through cultural integration, the courses do nothing to address refugee racialization or institutionalized racism in Germany. I raise the question then, based on the experiences of my Iraqi Yezidi refugee interviewees, about the degree to which integration courses re-package orientalist hierarchies into other forms of taken-for-granted, institutionalized social difference. To what extent do integration courses imply a suppression of meaningful cultural practices, like marriage practices, while leaving German racial hierarchies untouched?

The very idea of the individual refugee subject who can be taught the right values through integration policy is deeply inflected by ideas about love, sex, and marriage. Elizabeth Povinelli (2006) has called this self-making subject the “autological subject” and has argued that it, along with its false binary pair, “genealogical society,” or social constraint, are Enlightenment products tied to ideas about intimacy. Scholars have argued in multiple contexts that through the marriage of a heterosexual couple—and the state’s efforts to regulate it—political and economic subjects are made and the state is reproduced (D’Aoust 2014; de Hart 2015; Federici 2004; Foucault 1978; Stoler 2001). Notably, in my research with Iraqi Yezidis—Kurdish-speaking practitioners of an ancient monotheistic religion who are strictly endogamous—marriage is similarly critical for the reproduction of the community.

The content of the integration courses, which are administered through course providers approved by the Federal Office of Migration and Refugees, offers a concrete example of how ideas about marriage and love are bound up in the individual political subject that Germany’s refugee integration strategies aim to create. These courses, which are often a requirement for receiving social benefits or obtaining more secure legal status, are intended to improve language skills and provide information about German law and society. As outlined by the national standard curriculum for official integration courses (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge 2017), Module III teaches values like freedom and tolerance through content about family and gender roles among other topics. The curriculum names different family forms, “free choice of partner,” and the possible clash of family expectations about romantic choices as topics that should be covered.

For Yezidi refugees who have through history struggled against campaigns of forced assimilation and displacement at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, British colonizers, the Iraqi and Kurdish governments, and terrorist organizations, these integration courses are not neutral. This is particularly so as some of the dynamics of refugee management in Germany, including constraints on where refugees can live, the pressure to learn German, and acts of violence and discrimination against refugees perceived to be inadequately assimilated, seem to echo campaigns against Yezidis in Iraq. Many of my interviewees find the messages in these integration courses (that free choice of partner is valuable, for example) challenging because they seem to critique what most of my interviewees see as essential for the future of the Yezidi minority: the obligation to marry another Yezidi. The stakes for Yezidis are high; many of my informants have said to me that if too many Yezidis choose to marry outside the community, Yezidism will no longer exist in 50 or 100 years.

Marriage has emerged as an institution through which making choices informed by the appropriate values is critical for the reproduction of both Yezidism and Germany itself. The marriage choices young Yezidis make are not just acts of diplomacy balancing between the competing expectations of their families and the German state but small “intimate events” (Povinelli 2006) in the struggle for a Yezidi future. German integration programming impinges upon Yezidi practices like strict prohibitions against out-marriage that might create ‘parallel societies’, but many of my interviewees see the state’s attention to integration and indifference to threats to Yezidi cultural integrity as harbingers of possible Yezidi ethnocide by assimilation. Beyond the focus of Germany’s integration programming on values, the promise of integration raises questions for some of my interviewees. Even if integration courses do result in changes in Yezidi marriage choices or other culturally salient practices, will Yezidis be able to easily, as one of my interviewees put it, “live like Germans?” For some of my interviewees, there is the sense that even if they might be able to do so, they would not be accepted as such; perhaps the Yezidi would be gone, but the racialized refugee would remain.

Allison Stuewe is a PhD candidate in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include migration policy, intimate relationships and kinship, and historical political economy. Her current research project explores the marriage decisions of Iraqi Yezidi refugees living in Germany.

References

Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (2017), ‘Curriculum Für Einen Bundesweiten Orientierungskurs: Überarbeitete Neuauflage Für 100 UE – April 2017’, Nürnberg.

D’Aoust, A. (2014), ‘Love as Project of (Im)Mobility: Love, Sovereignty and Governmentality in Marriage Migration Management Practices’, Global Society, 28:3, 317–35.

de Hart, B. (2015), ‘Regulating Mixed Marriages through Acquisition and Loss of Citizenship’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 662:1, 170–87.

Federici, S. (2004), Caliban and the Witch (Brooklyn: Autonomedia).

Foucault, M. (1978), The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Random House).

Fuchs, L. M., Y. Fan, and C. von Scheve (2021), ‘Value Differences between Refugees and German Citizens: Insights from a Representative Survey’, International Migration, 59:5, 59–81.

Povinelli, E. A. (2006), The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham: Duke University Press).

Stoler, A. L. (2001), ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, Journal of American History, 88:3, 829–65.

Cite as: Stuewe, Allison 2024. “Humanitarian Erasure: Marriage Practices of Iraqi Yezidi Refugees and Germany’s Integration Courses” Focaalblog 8 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/08/allison-stuewe-humanitarian-erasure-marriage-practices-of-iraqi-yezidi-refugees-and-germanys-integration-courses/

Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

David Kwok Kwan Tsoi: ‘Lifeboat’ Campaign for Hong Kongers: Why is Capitalistic Agenda a Mandate for Democratic Intervention?

Image 1: Photo taken by author in 2019 at one of the Anti-Extradition Law Bill demonstrations

Since 2021, along with the British and Australian governments, the Canadian government has relaxed immigration policy for Hong Kong immigrants. This policy offers an unconventional path with lowered barriers for Hong Kongers to apply for permanent residency in Canada. Popularly framed as ‘lifeboat’ campaigns, these immigration policies directly respond to the post-2019 political situation in Hong Kong. This political contingency was instigated by the tumultuous 2019-2020 Anti-Extradition Law Bill Movement, and the subsequent implementation of National Security Law in June 2020. Against this background, the Canadian government has combined an economic narrative, i.e., Hong Kongers being economically productive, with a political narrative, i.e., human rights concern, to legitimise this ‘lifeboat’ scheme.

The Canadian ‘lifeboat’ scheme includes two pathways: Stream A and Stream B. Stream B requires candidates to have post-secondary education qualifications and one year of work experience within Canada before they apply for permanent resident status. Interestingly, the government cancelled the requirement on education qualifications on 15 August 2023, further lowering the barrier. Following Canadian activist Harsha Walia’s writing about borders (2021), I illuminate the way a democratic logic intersects with a capitalistic logic to control border mobility under the state’s purview. I seek to problematise this naturalised connection. Under the benevolent notion of democratic intervention, how does the state deploy the notions of human rights and humanitarian care to serve an economic purpose? Why do these migrants have to be first taxonomised as productive labouring subjects in order to be considered “worthy” of democratic intervention? Further, what does democracy mean within this existing liberal democratic regime?

Under the “lifeboat” policy, it is stated that “Canada shares longstanding ties with the people of Hong Kong and is concerned with the deteriorating human rights situation there. […] Canada has put in place a number of facilitative measures to help Hong Kong residents come to Canada” (Government of Canada 2021b). Clearly, human rights concern is identified as a key component to this policy. Paradoxically, it considers economic contribution rather than political risks at home as a legitimizing clause for permanent residency. In the policy, under the section “Public policy considerations”, it is stated that: “[The policy] recognises the contributions made by Hong Kong residents to Canada’s economy and social-cultural landscape through human capital, while also promoting democratic values” (Government of Canada 2021b). In another government press release issued on 4 February 2021, similar language was adopted: “The first Hong Kong residents arrived here over 150 years ago, contributing immensely to Canada’s economic, social and political life” (Government of Canada 2021a).

Border regimes serve to create differentiated entry of migrants in order to protect public interests within the border, such as job availability and welfare system. As Walia (2021, 19) suggests, borders ‘buffer against the retrenchment of universal social programs.’ In a liberal democratic regime with strict border control, citizenship is granted based on one’s expected contribution to the national economy. It is therefore not surprising that a neoliberal state rationalises immigration policies under the premise of economic calculations (Xiang 2007). Still, in this case, the economic logic is weaved into a democratic intervention in a language that renders this intersection rational, natural, and reasonable. In other words, democratic intervention is about human rights concerns—so long as it is also generative of economic benefits. To do so, the Canadian government racialises a history of Hong Kong diaspora; this taxonomises incoming Hong Kong migrants as productive labour, which becomes a strange but also naturalised prerequisite for democratic intervention.

Scholars have examined the way the global north extracts labour from the global south while imposing militarised border regimes to deter immigrants (Besteman 2019), resulting in ‘coloniality of migration’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). Nevertheless, the emigration of East Asia migrants, particularly the middle-class and the upper-middle-class, has complicated the way coloniality of migration is configured. In the case of Canadian ‘lifeboat’ campaign, I suggest that the Canadian government uses a democratic narrative to add moral fervour as they extract both skilled and unskilled labour from Hong Kong. There are two sets of repercussions. First, the democratic intervention is only enjoyed by those who are considered economically productive. Borders continue to facilitate accumulation of capital within a sovereign state. At the same time, borders preclude universal access to political refuge. Second, the democratic intervention becomes a rationalised labour extraction from East Asia to the global North.

In sum, political discourses about human rights and democracy are instrumentalised and repackaged by the West (by which I refer to as anglophone-speaking countries) to solidify their image as the global protector of human rights, while benefiting materially from westward movement of labour and capital from the global East, which sustain their roles as the civilised Man and a civilizing force in the unfinished project of modernity (Wynter 2003).

David Kwok Kwan Tsoi is a DPhil student at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. His research examines the relationship between housing, class, and migration amid political changes in Hong Kong. He also writes about informal economy and queer politics in Hong Kong.

References

Besteman, Catherine. 2019. “Militarised Global Apartheid.” Current Anthropology 60 (19): 26–38. https://doi.org/10.1086/699280.

Government of Canada. 2021a. “Canada Launches Hong Kong Pathway that will Attract Recent Graduates and Skilled Workers with Faster Permanent Residency.” Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. 4 February 2021. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2021/02/canada-launches-hong-kong-pathway-that-will-attract-recent-graduates-and-skilled-workers-with-faster-permanent-residency.html

Government of Canada. 2021b. “Temporary public policy creating two pathways to permanent residence to facilitate the immigration of certain Hong Kong residents.” Public Policies. 8 June 2021. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/mandate/policies-operational-instructions-agreements/public-policies/hong-kong-residents-permanent-residence.html

Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación. 2018. “The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism.” Canada’s Journal on Refugees 34 (1): 16–28. https://doi.org/10.7202/1050851ar.

Walia, Harsha. 2021. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

Xiang, Biao. 2007. Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Cite as: Tsoi, David Kwok Kwan 2024. “‘Lifeboat’ Campaign for Hong Kongers: Why is Capitalistic Agenda a Mandate for Democratic Intervention?” Focaalblog 6 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/06/david-kwok-kwan-tsoi-lifeboat-campaign-for-hong-kongers-why-is-capitalistic-agenda-a-mandate-for-democratic-intervention/

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Walden Bello: The October Surprise

Foreign policy played a minor role in the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in September. The vice presidential exchange between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz on October 2 barely touched on it. Yet less than a month before the US elections on November 5, it is foreign policy that may upend the Democrats’ chances of winning.

It used to be a matter of great concern that in the run-up to the November elections, the party in power would spring a “October Surprise” or a foreign policy “crisis” that would swing the elections in its favor. The creator of the October Surprise this time around is not the party in power but an external actor and the event may end up derailing the fortunes of that party.

More and more people in the US worry about the outbreak of a regional war in the Middle East that can suck in Washington. Televised images of US naval deployments have raised fears about another war that most Americans would want to avoid. Israel’s reckless move of opening a new front in Lebanon has been the cause of the increased regional tensions. Indeed, Tel Aviv actually seeks a fight not only with Hezbollah but also with Iran because it wants to draw the US into active combat on its behalf. It’s the Israeli tail wagging the American dog with impunity.

The Biden-Harris administration brought this impending disaster on itself. Over the last year, its policy has been to pretend it is seeking peace in Gaza while shipping massive amounts of weapons enabling Israel to commit genocide. It’s a foreign policy debacle on all fronts, with Washington promising to fight to the last Ukrainian in Ukraine and to fight to the last Filipino in the South China Sea.

Not surprisingly Trump, despite his own not very pretty foreign policy record while he was president, has opportunistically painted himself as a peacenik and Harris as a warmonger. For many voters, his most memorable campaign line on foreign policy was his promise at the Republican National Convention in July that “I could stop wars with a telephone call.” It’s typical Trump bombast, but it may be effective in swinging the still uncommitted.

Parties of empire

As the Democrats’ prospects for victory become more uncertain, many in the Global South are asking themselves: Will it make a difference who wins when it comes to foreign policy? My answer to this is yes. There is no question that both Harris and Trump will aggressively promote US interests. Where they differ is in their conceptions of what the interests of the United States are and what their means of promoting these interests will be. These questions are related in turn to different visions of America’s status and role in the world.

Both the Democratic Party and the pre-Trump Republican Party have favored an expansive imperialism that has extended US corporate hegemony by force of arms. Both have mobilized the ideology of missionary democracy, or spreading the gospel of western democracy in what they consider the benighted non-western world, to legitimize imperial expansion. And at certain historical moments, like during the debate to invade Afghanistan in 2001, both have manipulated democratic hysteria to advance the ends of the empire.

The record speaks for itself. To take just the most recent examples, only one Democratic member of Congress, Barbara Lee, voted against the resolution authorizing the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the absence of evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons, the majority of Democratic Senators voted to commit US troops to the invasion of Iraq in 2002. And it was a Democratic president, Barack Obama, that led the campaign that, in brazen violation of the principle of national sovereignty, overthrew the Qaddafi government in Libya in 2011, leading eventually to the state of anarchy that has prevailed since then in that country.

Of course, there have been some variations in the ways Democrats and traditional Republicans have conducted their empire-building or empire-maintaining activities. Democrats have tended to be more “multilateral” in their approach. They have, in other words, invested more effort in marshaling the United Nations and NATO behind Washington’s imperial adventures than Republicans. They have also pushed the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to take the lead in economically disciplining countries of the global South. But the aim is simply to provide the US’s moves with more legitimacy than would a unilateral exercise of US power, that is, clothe the iron fist with a velvet glove. These are differences of style that are minor and marginal in terms of their consequences.

Critics from the Global South have rightly pointed out that Obama’s elimination of Quaddafi with the approval of the United Nations Security Council may have had more “legitimacy” than Bush’s overthrowing of Saddam Hussein via his much denigrated Coalition of the Willing, but the results have been the same: the overthrow via an exercise, largely of US power, of a legitimate government and the consequent disintegration of a society.

The great Republican exodus

Over the last few months, however, there has been an interesting phenomenon. More and more people who played key foreign policy roles in previous Republican administrations have declared their support for the Democratic candidate, first Joe Biden, now Kamala Harris. The most notable recent addition to the Democratic bandwagon is former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was one of the key architects of Bush Jr’s interventionist wars in the Middle East, who recently signed up along with daughter Liz.

There are two reasons why former foreign policy hardliners have been leaving the Republican fold. The first is that they can no longer trust Trump, who now has total control of the Republican base. In their view, Trump during his first term weakened the western alliance that Washington created over the last seventy eight years by speaking badly of allies and demanding they pay for US protection, declaring the Republican-sponsored invasion of Iraq a mistake, and crossing red lines that the US Cold War elite put in place, the most famous being his stepping across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Korea to talk to Kim Jong Un. More recently, he has repeatedly communicated implicit disapproval of US and NATO support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, while his running mate Vance, wants to eliminate aid to Kyiv altogether.

Trump, these Republican deserters feel, is not interested in sticking to the cornerstone of the bipartisan consensus that the US elite, despite their sometimes rancorous quarrels, have adhered to: expanding and maintaining a “liberal” empire via free trade and the free flow of capital–an order promoted by political canopy of multilateralism, legitimized via an economic ideology of globalization and a political ideology of liberal democracy, and defended by a western military alliance at the center of which is American power. They worry that Trump is playing to the not insignificant part of his base, personified by Vance, that is tired of bearing the costs of empire and see this as one of the key causes of America’s economic decline. They know that what makes “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) attractive to many people is its promise to build a Fortress America that is much, much less engaged with the world and focused on rebuilding the imperial heartland. They are apprehensive that under Trump, the multilateral institutions through which the US has exercised its power, NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions, would be allowed to wither away. They fear that selective, pragmatic deal-making, like the one Trump tried with Kim Jong-Un, Xi Jin Ping, and Vladimir Putin, would, instead, become the norm in US diplomacy and unilateral military action rather than allied initiatives via NATO would be the principal means to coerce and discipline the Global South.

The other reason hardline Republicans are engaging in the once despised practice of crossing party lines is that the Biden administration is now carrying out the kind of aggressive militarized foreign policy once associated with the Bush Jr administration in the Middle East in the 2000’s. Biden has given full-throated support to Israel, which the hard-line Republicans have sanctified as the only reliable ally in the Middle East, followed Bush Jr’s policy of isolating Russia by supporting Ukraine, reinvigorated NATO after Trump’s morale-sapping bad-mouthing of US allies and expanded the alliance’s reach to the Pacific, and mounted the full-blown containment of China that Bush Jr and Cheney wanted to carry out but had to shelve owing to their need to win’s Beijing’s participation in their administration’s “war on terror.”

Biden has, in fact, taken the containment of Beijing beyond Trump’s approach of curtailing trade and technology transfers by carrying out the aggressive military encirclement of China. He has done what no other American president had done since the historic 1979 Joint Communique articulating Washington’s “One China Policy,” which is to explicitly commit Washington to a military defense of Taiwan. He has ordered the US Navy to send ships through the 110-mile-wide Taiwan Strait to bait Beijing and deployed five of the US’s 11 carrier task forces to the Western Pacific. Not surprisingly, his gestures have given the green light to worrisome bellicose rhetoric from the top military brass, like the statement of Gen Mike Minihan, chief of the US Air Mobility Command, that, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”

That the Democratic party elite now has a monopoly of promoting expansive imperialism was in full display during Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech during the Democratic National Convention on August 23, when she accused Trump of abdicating American global leadership, seeking to abandon NATO, and encouraging “Putin to invade our allies” and “do whatever the hell they want.” Republican defectors like Cheney and daughter Liz could only cheer when Harris promised to make sure the US armed forces would be “the most lethal fighting force in the world” and committed herself to making sure “that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century.”

Two paradigms of empire…

In sum, what we have in contention on Nov 5 are two paradigms of empire. One is the old Democratic/Republican expansionist vision of empire that seeks to make the world safe for American capital and American hegemony. The opposing view, that of Trump and Vance, considers the empire overextended and proposes an “aggressive defensive” posture appropriate to a superpower in decline. The MAGA approach would disengage from what Trump has called “shithole countries”—meaning most of us in the Global South–and focus more on walling off the core of the empire, North America, from the outside world by radically restricting migration and trade, bringing prodigal American capital back, dispensing with what Trump considers the hypocritical exercise of extending foreign aid and exporting democracy, and abandoning with a vengeance all efforts to address the accelerating global climate crisis (preoccupation with which he considers a fetish of effete liberalism).

As far as the exercise of force is concerned, the MAGA approach would most likely be in the Israeli style of periodic unilateral strikes against selected enemies outside the wall to keep them off balance, without consulting any allies or giving a damn for whatever havoc they cause.

Too late

As far as we in the Global South are concerned, these two visions of empire are unappetizing. But one of them will prevail on November 5, and it is increasingly likely that that paradigm is Trump’s.

Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, the Democratic Party’s weak point was inflation. Now the ravages of mega-hurricane Helene and Israel’s risky provocations in the Middle East have fused with inflation to create the perfect storm for them and an increasingly likely victory of Donald Trump on November 5. Coming into the last phase of the campaign, the Democrats could no longer do anything about inflation, and Helene was an ”act of God.” But they could have leashed Israel, as most of the world demanded. Now it’s too late.

Will Trump be able to stamp out the wars of the Biden era with just one telephone call? That is very unlikely, and even two won’t do it. But what the world will be treated to will likely be what was the signature of his foreign policy during his first term: unpredictability.

This text first appeared on Meer and it is reproduced here with the author’s permission.

Walden Bello is currently the honorary senior research fellow at the Sociology Department of the State University of New York at Binghamton and Chair of the Board of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.

Cite as: Bello, Walden 2024. “The October Surprise” Focaalblog 1 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/01/walden-bello-the-october-surprise/

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Marc Edelman: Make America Think Again

Image: White Sulphur Springs, NY, photo by author

MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN. That’s the bumper sticker on my friend’s pickup and that’s what I hope for. I like evidence and data, and I detest TV talking heads, “alternative facts,” and political zealots of all stripes. I want people to think about policies and how these will affect them.

Many of my rural upstate New York neighbors plan to vote Republican in November. Their reasons vary. Most express dismay at high food and gas prices. Many say they pay too much in taxes. Some have a chip on their shoulder about “elites,” “city people,” and educated snobs who look down on them and lack “real” skills but somehow seem to make money anyway. A handful subscribes to outlandish conspiracy theories.

Few, if any, have perused or even heard of Project 2025, the policy recommendations for a second Trump Administration that the Heritage Foundation and some 100 conservative lobbies and think tanks designed and that critics view as a blueprint for a far-right authoritarian regime and unbridled corporate rule. Project 2025 aims to deepen the swamp by replacing civil servants and expert technocrats in every government agency with MAGA loyalists — a corrupt spoils system, in other words. Trump, of course, says that he has “no idea” who is behind Project 2025 and that he knows “nothing” about it. He also remarked that he “disagreed” with some of the things in it, which he slammed as “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

Let’s MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN. If Trump knows “nothing” about Project 2025, which several of his leading advisors and more than 100 former staffers authored, how can he “disagree” with some of the “ridiculous and abysmal” things in it?

Let’s MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN about how Project 2025’s prescriptions will impact my neighbors’ concerns. I shop for my family, so I know food price inflation is significant, even if it is slowing and even if prominent affluent pundits pooh-pooh it. Much of the problem relates to extreme concentration in the food and grocery industries and to corporations locking in pandemic-era price surges and staging stock buybacks to jack up share prices for their directors (Project 2025 on p. 696, in a typical pro-corporate segment, recommends repealing the stock buyback excise tax). Food system (and other) monopolies deny consumers the lower prices of a genuine, competitive market system. Maybe we should think about antitrust prosecution for giant grocery chains or in meat and poultry packing. Regulation, after all, is just law enforcement for corporations, which is why Project 2025 wants to do away with it.

Ask yourself who works in meat and poultry packinghouses and doing stoop labor in the fields. Do you think that deporting 20 million undocumented people — the actual number is almost certainly much less — will make food prices go up or down? Do you think that eliminating most agricultural subsidies, including those for crop insurance, as Project 2025 recommends (pp. 295-97), will make food prices go up or down? Do you think slapping baseline tariffs on all imports, as the GOP Platform promises, will make your cost of living go up or down? While we’re at it, let’s think about who does much of the grunt work in construction. Thirty percent of the construction workforce are foreign-born, many probably undocumented. Will mass deportations make housing prices go up or down? Will we Americans, with our historically low 4 percent unemployment rate, immediately step in and fill all those jobs cutting up chickens, harvesting lettuce, and installing flooring?

And gas? Let’s MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN. Gas prices peaked in July 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They were very low in 2020 during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic because nobody was driving anywhere. Very few market actors, apart from the largest oil companies and the Saudi royal family, have enough heft to influence prices. And the US is now producing more petroleum than any other country in history and is largely self-sufficient. Whether or not that’s good for the climate is another question. But let’s THINK before eating up whatever the talking heads feed us.

Let’s MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN about high taxes. Trump’s sole legislative accomplishment during his first term was a package of tax cuts that mainly benefited the mega-rich and that added $2.5 trillion to the national debt. When the rich and corporations don’t pay their fair share, you and I must pay more. When tax bases dwindle, communities spiral downward and provide fewer and worse services. Is that what you want? Maybe those tax giveaways to the rich weren’t such a brilliant idea.

Few of my neighbors who are allergic to taxes are aware that flows of federal funds to rural areas greatly exceed the taxes that those areas pay. This obliviousness to the invisible subsidies that we receive reinforces the fantasies of self-sufficiency and individualism that so many of my neighbors embrace and to which Trump deftly panders. Like it or not, we are partly living off the teat of high-income urban taxpayers.

Let’s MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN about those pesky “city people.” Yes, many look down their noses at smalltown and rural America. If you don’t believe me, read White Rural Rage, a much-discussed holier-than-thou bestseller that purports to explain benighted white country people to self-important urban elites. Like Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, it is mostly a blaming the victim book. The victims of rural deindustrialization, corporate looting, financial restructuring, and the demise of Main Street businesses, that is, though it doesn’t analyze these forces much.

Let’s MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN about Project 2025. Do you really think it’s a good idea to eliminate the Department of Education (p. 319) when so many of our young people must acquire knowledge and skills for navigating the complicated twenty-first century and when so much of our population lacks media literacy and is easily taken in by crackpot conspiracy hucksters? How about dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration? LET’S MAKE AMERICA THINK about whether that Project 2025 recommendation (pp. 133-34) will make us safer in today’s conflictual world. With an aging population, do you think it’s a great idea to cut Medicare funding, as Project 2025 also recommends? If you hope to have a dignified retirement, do you think privatizing Social Security (p. 605) will raise or lower your benefits?

There’s so much more in Project 2025 that AMERICA OUGHT TO THINK ABOUT AGAIN, as well as in the Republican Party’s 2024 Platform, a document whose 20 key points are so disconnected from evidence and data and so calculated to produce fear and anger that they inspire astonishment in anyone who hopes to MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN. Project 2025 and the GOP Platform are a masterplan for undermining reproductive rights, women’s rights, labor rights, voting rights, civil rights, immigrants’ rights, and LGBTQ+ rights, and freedom of speech, assembly and thought. In plain view, they aim to entrench corporate domination, despoil our environment, decimate our schools, and ruin our health. That’s not MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, is it?

I’m optimistic, though. A lot of people around here like to say, “Do your own research.” Mostly they just mean googling stuff and reading the first few links their personal algorithm serves up. But if they begin to THINK just a little bit more and dig a little bit deeper, I’m confident they’ll see through the smoke and mirrors, the snake oil salesmen, and the bread and circuses. If they don’t — and if we don’t MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN — we’ll be in for a hard ride.

This article first appeared in The River Reporter and it is republished here with the author’s permission.

Marc Edelman is professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. 

Cite as: Edelman, Marc 2024. “Make America Think Again” Focaalblog 1 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/01/marc-edelman-make-america-think-again/

Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Anne-Meike Fechter and Eileen May: Taxonomies of Difference and Inclusion: Notes From ‘Other’ Humanitarianisms

Items donated to people fleeing from fights on the border of Thailand, Kayin State, photo by Jacqueline Hpway

The call for looking at taxonomies of difference in global humanitarianism is a powerful reminder to consider how differences—as well as, we argue, affinities—shape humanitarian practices. Prompted by research with people displaced by violent conflict in the Myanmar borderlands near Thailand, we propose alternative perspectives. First, we suggest that the lens of ‘taxonomies of difference’ can be applied productively to humanitarianism itself. Beyond invoking a singular global humanitarianism, we are calling attention to what is often presented as an un-questioned standard. This is humanitarianism in its highly institutionalised form, often led by organisations from the Global North. This version of humanitarianism offers insights on how taxonomies such as of race, whiteness and more specifically antiblackness, materialise. While such inquiries are overdue, here we suggest that taxonomies of humanitarianisms which forefront such singular form, deserve questioning themselves.

Based on the findings from a larger research project specifically engaging with displacement-affected communities in Myanmar, it emerged that in geographical areas that were harder to reach for international organisations, for practical and political reasons, or where these had recently vacated a humanitarian space, a range of other humanitarian practices became visible. These include locally based civil society groups who step in to support internally displaced people (IDPs) through fundraising, donations, and providing emergency supplies. More broadly, it became clear that due to decades-long conflict, in several locations there were groups of people who had been displaced in earlier periods who were now, to some extent, providing short-term as well as longer-term resources to others including land, or setting up education centres for children and young people. There was thus not necessarily a clear division between those who were considered settled and those who were displaced. At the same time, there was not a hard line between beneficiaries or recipients on the one hand, and those supplying short-term aid on the other. While not all those who experienced displacement in the past support others, there is a fluidity between having been in need oneself, and, once in a more stable position, donating resources to new arrivals. One might understand such practices as vernacular, local, or everyday humanitarianism (Fechter, 2023). Irrespective of nomenclature, they unsettle a taxonomy of humanitarianism which centres the global North-dominated as a default form.

Such vernacular or everyday forms, beyond their ethnographic or empirical significance, hold the possibility of revisiting which taxonomies of difference matter in other humanitarianisms. As outlined in the other contributions, taxonomies centred on anti-Blackness, for example, define categories of exclusion, in stark contrast to what is sometimes presented as the impartiality and all-encompassing ‘humanity’ of global humanitarianism. Among displaced communities, we found that taxonomies of difference certainly matter. This can be in terms of ethnic as well as faith groups. The latter can constitute axes of exclusion, as in the case of one resettlement site which strongly favoured Buddhist faith groups, as opposed to Muslim ones. At the same time, some of these also create of grounds for inclusion. Indeed, a strong driver for humanitarian activity and resource-sharing evolved around taxonomies of affinity, perceived or constructed similarity, and shared biographies. For example, among ethnic Karen groups, Christian church networks, within Myanmar, across the border with Thailand, and further afield, became a significant source of donations. This was especially prominent during festive periods such as Christmas, or Karen New Year. Further, sharing food and resources among displaced people of common geographical origin mattered, as well as on grounds of shared ethnicity. The latter was formalised through ethnic armed organisations, their social welfare units and humanitarian efforts—aimed at, but not exclusively so, fellow ethnic community members. Similarly, substantial humanitarian support is being raised and facilitated through well-documented diaspora networks.

In sum, thinking through taxonomies of difference offers a much-needed opportunity to consider what shapes humanitarian practices, acknowledging that such re-assessment includes taxonomies of humanitarianism itself, as well as how people select, ignore, include or support others according to matrices of difference as well as affinity.

Anne-Meike Fechter is Professor of Anthropology and International Development in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK. She currently works on informal aid among displaced people in Myanmar. Her most recent book is Everyday Humanitarianism in Cambodia (Manchester University Press, 2023).

Eileen May is a research fellow at the Covenant Development Institute in Myanmar and is a PhD student in Human Rights and Peace Studies at Mahidol University in Thailand.

References

Fechter, A.-M. 2023. Everyday Humanitarianism in Cambodia: Challenging Scales and Making Relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Cite as: Fechter, Anne-Meike & May, Eileen 2024. “Taxonomies of Difference and Inclusion: Notes From ‘Other’ Humanitarianisms” Focaalblog 28 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/10/28/anne-meike-fechter-and-eileen-may-taxonomies-of-difference-and-inclusion-notes-from-other-humanitarianisms/

Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Malay Firoz and Pedro Silva Rocha Lima: Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Exhibition view of Joseph Kosuth’ installation One and three Frames at Castelli Gallery December 8, 2015 – March 13, 2016

Humanitarian action is marked by a striking disjunction between the universalising humanist vocabulary that undergirds its ethical commitments, and the taxonomies of racialised difference that govern its dispensation of moral concern and material aid. This disjunction is not merely indicative of the inevitable discontinuity between principle and practice. Rather, the valuation of the human as a suffering body—shorn of race, gender, ethnicity, and other identifying markers of the social—precipitates an epistemic ignorance towards racialised difference that in fact consolidates and reinforces difference. After all, as Polly Pallister-Wilkins (2021) suggests, drawing on Sylvia Wynter, the figure of the human is itself a “genre of being” inseparable from the Western colonial metaphysics which instituted it. The “human” in this formulation is a differentiated rather than universal category, such that humanitarian empathy for “distant others” is not simply a moral calling but a politically filtered and calibrated gesture. Yet, humanitarian studies has often reproduced the aid industry’s liberal terms of self-representation by eliding the tangible and structuring effects of racialised difference in humanitarian action. Where such questions are raised, as Adia Benton argues, they are addressed “at the level of discourse, glossing racial hierarchies simply in terms of race masquerading as cultural difference, rather than explicitly in terms of racialized practices and identifications” (2016, 269; emphasis original).

An oft-repeated objection to the analytical centring of race alleges that doing so reproduces an American-centric conceptual apparatus that may misrecognize axes of difference in other contexts. White supremacy has an undoubtedly ugly resonance in American politics, such that calls to decolonise fields of inquiry are routinely occasioned by stochastic and spectacular acts of white supremacist violence in the US. However, it is well established that categories of race were integral to the epistemic encounters which constituted the modern world, and continue to suture what Lisa Lowe (2015) calls “the intimacies of four continents” (da Silva 2007; Robinson 2000; Wynter 2003). The global virality of racial justice movements such as Black Lives Matter is precisely emblematic of their translatability as a political claim, even if the demands and constituencies they serve are inexorably contextual. Moreover, it is striking that such concerns about the parochial provenance of concepts are rarely posed to European canonical theory (Weheliye 2014). Much intellectual labour is expended, for instance, to map Marxian or Foucauldian categories onto historicities beyond European modernity, yet such improvisatory migrations are rarely afforded to other, more insurrectionist knowledge traditions. This form of epistemic ignorance is itself inescapably within the racial, or as Charles Mills calls it, a “white epistemology of ignorance” (2007, 35).

The essays in this collection stage the question of difference for the field of humanitarian studies. They demonstrate how humanitarianism’s moral valuation of life, while invoking the ideal of a purportedly shared humanity, is ultimately embedded in and filtered through social orders differentiated along lines of race, gender, nationality and power—what Adia Benton in the afterword to this collection calls the “humanitarian vernacular.” Benton’s proposed analytical focus on the humanitarian vernacular is, in part, a play on words referencing Anne-Meike Fechter and Eileen May’s essay in this collection, which analyses aid work by local actors in Myanmar as a form of “vernacular humanitarianism” that stands outside of the institutionalised framework of Western humanitarianism. Fechter and May use the case of Myanmar to argue that we should think of the aid sector in the plural—as “humanitarianisms”—to reflect the diversity of actors and values that orient aid work globally. They posit that this also allows us to consider other principles and moral motivations behind humanitarian efforts that are not normally considered “humanitarian” by Western-led organisations, including for instance ideals of affinity and shared biography.

Within refugee resettlement regimes, we also see how difference may be deemed undesirable when it is framed as a barrier to integration (Allison Stuewe), or, conversely, how difference may be welcomed when specific categories of refugees align with the political or economic interests of a host state (David Tsoi). Tsoi’s and Stuewe’s contributions to this collection challenge the mythical ideal of refuge granted solely on the basis of shared humanity; instead, the refugee or migrant must conform to specific criteria that make them deserving or desirable to the state. Finally, Patricia Ward and Ezgi Güner tackle the intimate workings of race in humanitarian labour. In Jordan, Ward argues that local consultants represent a form of racialised expertise capable of “fast-fixing” last-minute evaluations and reports that INGOs and UN agencies cannot complete on their own. These fast-fixers, whose career prospects are limited by the opportunities available to “local staff,” reject the positional authority of “expats” by stressing the local as the true home of humanitarian dispositions. Güner meanwhile skilfully analyses discourses of sameness espoused by Turkish humanitarians in Africa south of the Sahara. Here, much like their Western counterpart, the Muslim humanitarian appears as a white saviour aiding the prototypical Black African in need of help, while advancing a specifically Ottoman-Islamic pedigree of white supremacy in Turkey.

Taken together, the essays in this collection offer various instantiations of what it means to think with difference as an analytical framework, a theoretical posture, and an empirical object. If humanitarianism is anchored in an invocation of being human, these essays suggest that difference does not merely constrain such universalist ambitions, but rather, is constitutive of humanitarianism’s vernacular grammars, and thereby, constitutive of humanitarianism itself. Following in this stead, more research is needed on the way taxonomies of difference are internally striated and situated in tension with one another. By posing the question of how antiblackness in particular, rather than white saviourism in general, organises the determination of humanitarian entitlements, further work may reveal the patterned morphologies of difference that reproduce themselves across diverse scales and temporalities.

Malay Firoz is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the politics of “resilience-based” approaches to humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon, and explores the intersections between humanitarianism, ethics, and forced migration in the Middle East.

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima is a Lecturer in Disaster Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. He researches how humanitarian logics and values travel from war and crisis settings to the context of ongoing chronic urban violence in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is also interested in related topics of the state, normality, relations, and humour.

References

Benton, Adia. 2016. “African Expatriates and Race in the Anthropology of Humanitarianism.” Critical African Studies 8 (3): 266–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2016.1244956.

Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mills, Charles W. 2007. “White Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 11–38. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Pallister-Wilkins, Polly. 2021. “Saving the Souls of White Folk: Humanitarianism as White Supremacy.” Security Dialogue 52 (S): 98–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211024419.

Robinson, Cedric. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Silva, Denise Ferreira da. 2007. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Weheliye, Alexander. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

Cite as: Firoz, Malay & Silva Rocha Lima, Pedro 2024. “Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism” Focaalblog 23 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/10/23/malay-firoz-and-pedro-silva-rocha-lima-taxonomies-of-difference-in-global-humanitarianism/

Blog

József Böröcz: Out of Place

Spectators at the final concert of the World Social Forum, Mumbai 2004 (author: Claudio Riccio, https://www.flickr.com/photos/ilriccio/135304963/in/photostream/)

From Andheri to Goregaon—it’s five kilometers. Half an hour by Ambassador in the north Mumbai traffic. Windows down—through them, the usual fumes: chai, wood smoke, diesel exhaust. Plus, the blinding, crunchy, almost chewable dust of the industrial area, a landscape half abandoned, half under-construction. Taxiwala grows edgy—why, Toma can’t fathom. Dumps passengers on an impulse: “New Standard Engineering Grounds”, he says, “ahead.” Ahead it is, indeed—a twenty-minute walk. Add the heat to the scents and more of the dust.

About twenty paces in the queue for registration at the entrance stood the founder of world-systems analysis. He was invited to the event to address the crowd. Toma missed him somehow, couldn’t say “hi.”

There was no category for Toma at the event. He was hoping for “attendee” or “participant,” but—no, no such thing. He became, thanks to the helpful student worker at the registration desk, a “delegate.” The best she could do. So it said on the vibrantly designed tag, hanging from Toma’s neck. Two names: Toma and country.

Speaking of which, he is from two countries, at least. One of those is a titanic, the other a dinghy. She chose the dinghy for him. Upon exit at the end of a long day, another nice person at the same desk confirmed—there were no other “delegates” from country dinghy.

Toma had given a lot of thought to the very idea of this jamboree. How do you organize a “social forum”—for the world, no less, without an underlying theme—other than, supposedly, a vague call for resistance, so to speak, to global capital? And what does it do to that event of resistance that it is sponsored by major multinational corporations? Mind you, a counter-event, held just across the highway, asserted that exact critique. The two events together seemed to “cover” much of the political left of south Asia.

Indeed, how to be “anti-Davos?” besides, what do they do in Davos in the first place? Toma had no idea. The Mumbai event turned out to be a pageantry of all the worthwhile causes good people could think of. Attendance was expected to be 75 thousand. Conversation on the ground went up to as high as 130.000 “delegates” from 130 countries.

“I didn’t quite realize Mumbai was this far,” a group of people chatted in a cluster that somehow ended up including Toma. “Far . . . from where?”, he interjected an old joke from Budapest. Polite amusement, a smile or two. They had an accent Toma could not quite place within the UK.

There was breathtakingly little water for so many people. Toma saw two taps on the entire grounds. Plus, there were of course the drinking water tanks provided by the municipal authority. Neither to be had without boiling. Everybody ran around, hence, with store bought drinking water in plastic bottles, half a dollar per liter—at an event that deplored, among other things, the depletion of the environment, the commercialization of a basic human necessity like drinking water, and pollution of the planet with single use plastic containers.

The Forum was a gigantic café—without tables. A global / adda. \

Toma chatted with hundreds of other “delegates,” mainly young people from Asia. Gaped at Vietnamese students parading with a two-story flag of their country. Talked with South Indian and Latin American activists fighting the good fight against Coca Cola robbing their regions of drinking water. (Or was it Pepsi? Toma can never tell those two apart.) People who organize artisanal cooperatives. Artists of all kinds. Activists for NGOs of people displaced by hydroelectric dams, airports, shopping malls. A gentleman presented a contraption that looked like an aluminum wash basin but glittering inside: It gathers the rays of the Sun to cook a meal. He demonstrated that on the spot. Toma was distracted by something, he didn’t stick around to taste it.

A man with a broad smile approached Toma. He had a mustache and was wearing gauze-thin white cotton tied around his head, a linen shirt and a dhoti. He was very interested in the status of the agrarian question in “Toma’s country.” How peasants are doing in country dinghy. It was important to him, he said, because he knows the peasantries of their two countries could learn much from each other.

Toma made a quick calculation. As far as he knows, eleven of his sixteen great-great-grandparents were born serfs. Then came the abolition of serfdom, capitalism—of Kakanien, the Habsburg variety—two world wars, fascism, holocaust and socialisms, in the plural. Then back to a neoconservative, deeply confused, angry and desperate kind of capitalism. Now everyone in Toma’s extended family lives in cities. The most sweeping form of social change in country dinghy over the last century is that there are hardly any peasants left—other than in one-step removed, virtual forms as cultural movements aim to “preserve” and “re-cycle” peasant culture, especially music and dance, in urban life. In the country of Bartók—who railed against this kind of appropriation—the culture of the peasantry is now re-used as folklorism, exoticizing the lives of the descendants of the people who created that art in the first place.

They discussed the legacies of serfdom and the “peasant question” in Soviet history. And that more-than-half of the peoples of south Asia that hover precariously between peasant near-self-sufficiency and market-driven farming. How the average Indian peasant walks to polling stations to be able to cast a vote. Two hours, both ways. GMO seed. Child malnutrition. Toma’s new comrade had read Chayanov enthusiastically and mentioned Lenin a couple of times. He gave Toma a card. “Secretary General of the Peasant Trade Union Confederation of India.”

There was visible discomfort—among the Europeans. Not so much because of the heat or the dust. Two other things. One was unspoken but Toma felt it. The weirdness of standing out: Their head loomed above almost everyone else in the great sea of global “delegates.” Comrades in terms of politics, moral values, aesthetics, all the good things, with their pink and sweating heads sticking out. Because of their infrequency at the event, they seemed to feel on display. It’s not just that there was staring—there is much more of that on a tram in Kolkata or in a bus in Delhi. They came here to swim in the sea of comrades from the global south, after all. To be in the company of the like-minded from the rest-of-the-world. That was the whole point. There they are now, this is it.

The truly unpleasant thing was realizing that they had not even thought about the possibility of feeling strange. Their own reaction seemed to be a genuine surprise to them. They may well have traveled outside Europe before. But that’s not like this. They saw crowds in Istanbul or Cairo. But this is not that. The crowds on earlier trips were at a distance. Possibly behind windows of buses, or hotel lobbies. Here, everyone is so exposed to a truly intense mix of languages—bodily and spoken—that it is easy to feel lost. More body-to-body contact on a January afternoon than they have in an average year. And all that is driven by rules they don’t quite understand. They could, of course have read about those rules—but they didn’t quite think of it. It didn’t occur to them.

Losing the ability to sort everything out—who is who and what is what—they could neither wipe the discomfort away nor give it a name. For, that might be considered “rude”. . . Too honest. Not to mention admitting defeat, the thought that this corporeal idea of solidarity is not working for them.

There was, then, the second discomfort— and that one was indeed spoken of very much. A metaphor for all other metaphors.

“Child labor.”

The horror.

Who could be in favor of child labor? The abysmal life. The barefoot, scantily dressed, small bodies toiling in the crowd. “They should be in school.”

Mind you, at the event, begging was not allowed. Panhandlers were chased away by the private jawans, armed with long batons, very eager to use them, stationed visibly at each entrance. Toma wondered to what extent the jawans-with-truncheons “solution” to “the begging problem” was cleared with the organizing committee—whose charge it was to assure the event stayed on course toward its haughty goals of global equality. For sure, the clubs were used in the outside world—the world that these seventy-five thousand to one hundred and thirty thousand people all came to protest.

“Are the beatings OK if they happen outside the gates?” Toma is asking questions like that. “I could never bear being on that Organizing Committee.”

There was, however, plenty of tea and coffee on offer everywhere, brought to everyone—a little more to the “delegates” with lower levels of melanin, a skin color situation the hot beverage workers were very familiar with. Mumbai is a truly tourism-infested city. Those delegates might even give a 100% tip on the 5-rupee price—for the tea poured from large pots to small throwaway plastic cups, a nice counterpoint to the event protesting plastic pollution. All that service was rendered by tiny, unbearably cute children.

It struck Toma, as he stood there, amidst all the chatter about child labor, that the conversation never went past the initial revulsion and moral panic. All those people, supposedly the best the global north has produced, armed with sharp critiques of hydrocarbon colonialism, or global militarism, or product chains, using their privileged access to knowledge for the best possible political purpose, had a hard time discerning what it is that they are looking at when they see five-six-year-old proletarians doing truly labor-intensive service. For them. That the children’s toil might be supporting the ambitious strategies—of rising above the rural survival threshold—of entire families in a village a stone’s throw away. That the 100% tip—the generous transfer of 14 instead of 7 dollar-cents in exchange for a small cup of tea—will teach those children, and their adult relatives, that they should be selling tea for the rest of their lives. To low-melanin strangers.

That is where the global critique came to a complete halt. Right at the line around the European “delegates’” own global selves. The thought of the violence of their own retirement portfolios, amplified by the privileges bestowed upon them by their melanin-deficiency, just didn’t seem to come to them. They had spent the equivalent of ten, twenty times each of those children’s extended families’ total annual income—just flying to Mumbai.

“Was I the only person having those thoughts?”, Toma ponders today. Maybe they also had them—and filed them along with all other instances of discomfort, under a rubric labeled “not-to-be-talked-about.”

The plenary session took place on the maidan—a meadow the size of several football fields. It consisted of a large stage before a giant audience space, the latter covered with industrial tarp sheets tied together, a quilt to seat the righteous of the world. An enormous navy-blue arena of plastic—encircled, once the crowd descended on it, by layers upon layers of sandals, shoes, flip-flops. Footwear of all kinds. As if entering a person’s home, or a temple, the participants took off and left “outside” their foot covering. A show of respect. And keeping the oilcloth perhaps a tiny bit less dusty.

A group of ten-fifteen Italian students arrived, chatting merrily. Guessing from the clothes, on a return leg of a roundtrip flight between Milan and Kathmandu. Locs, woven sacks, the works. Asserting the power of a supposedly righteous kind of appropriation galore. Leaving their shoes on, they entered the field. The crowd opened for them, forming a human alley. They took the offer matter-of-factly, went right to the middle, and sat down. Shoes on, soles facing outward. The crowd absorbed them. Toma lost sight of them.

Speeches: politicians, progressive intellectuals, strongly encouraging the audience that “we should do more.” Toma is not sure who the “we” is, and more of what. Then came Junoon, a politically engaged band from Pakistan. Performing in India. A geopolitical first. Palpable excitement overall and an exuberant audience response, especially among the crowd from the Subcontinent.

On the last day, the shift of the jawans-with-the-truncheons at the gates ended at six pm. The World Forum became even more social, with the arrival of a thousand or so panhandlers through the now un-jawan-ed, truncheons-free gates. Likely not the sociality the organizers had in mind.

Toma flew back to country dinghy from Mumbai two days later. At the airport, he was selected for a “detailed customs check” by a gentleman dressed in an immaculate white uniform. He took Toma to a separate room—his luggage had already been placed on a table. The officer reached into Toma’s now-open suitcase and, with the gesture of a magician, he pulled out Toma’s tag—Toma’s name and country dinghy—and asked, “you like that kind of thing?”

A rhetorical question. The officer turned to his men and quipped, half-Hindi-half-English—Toma could make it out, the officer probably wanted it that way—how Toma came here “to allay his White guilt”. A real joker. Polite giggles from the men to their superior officer, fixed stares at Toma. He liberated Toma from his remaining rupees. A “processing fee,” he winked. He tossed a small tip to the man who “handled” Toma’s suitcase. The rest disappeared into his uniform. Very politely he walked Toma to his gate, doing small talk in a self-ironical tone. He had a truly sharp and witty sense of humor.

By the time Toma arrived at his gate he learned that his seat got re-assigned. On board he realized he was sitting next to a passenger who kept talking to him nervously throughout the entire eight-hour flight.

The World Social Forum has never returned to Mumbai.

Rumor has it—it’s the child labor.

The World Social Forum (WSF) is a global social movement organized as an open environment, a meeting space for activists, NGOs and progressive social movements committed to democracy, equality and preservation of the planet, in opposition to the “World Economic Forum”—the meetings of owners and management of big capital and top brass of the world’s most powerful states held annually in Davos, Switzerland. The first WSF meeting was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001. The event in Mumbai, India—held twenty years ago—was the first time WSF had its global assembly outside Brazil.

József Böröcz is Professor Emeritus in Sociology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He is the author of ”’Eurowhite’ Conceit, ’Dirty White’ Ressentiment.” A recent, “reflexive sociology” interview with him about socialisms, history and ‘race’ is ”Society—Instead of Apartheid. Interview with József Böröcz.” Most of his written scholarly work can be found here.

Cite as: Böröcz, József 2024. “Out of Place” Focaalblog 14 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/10/14/jozsef-borocz-out-of-place/

Blog, Right-wing Populism

Walden Bello: The Mess in Argentina

Image 1. Javier Milei signing controversial emergency decree containing liberalization reforms on 20 December 2023. Photo by Presidency of Argentina

At the heart of Buenos Aires lies the lovely Calle Florida. The experience of walking through this street that is exclusively dedicated to pedestrians was anything but lovely though since in the one kilometer from one end to the other I was besieged—albeit politely–by some 200 men and women barking, “cambio, cambio,” competing to give me the most pesos for my dollars.

It’s a seller’s market, with the “Benjamins,” to use the term popularized by US Congressman Ilhan Omar’s term for 100 dollar notes, especially valued. When I began my walk at one end of the street, I was offered 1100 pesos to the dollar; by the time I reached the other end, the offer had climbed up to 1400. The online price that morning was 963 pesos. I thought I had a good deal, but an Argentine friend later told me I could have done better.

The Argentine Disease

The daily depreciation of the peso relative to the dollar is a key indicator of inflation, which everyone says is the country’s prime economic problem. The conventional analysis is that the uncontrolled rise of prices stems from the government’s equally uncontrolled printing of pesos to cover its budget deficit. Thus the peso has lost its function as a store of value, forcing people to resort to the black market for dollars. With the private sector hoarding dollars and international creditors hesitant to lend owing to Argentina’s having defaulted on its $323 billion sovereign foreign debt in 2020, tourists have become a prime source of dollars for ordinary Argentines and small and medium enterprises.

The inflation rate for 2023 was over 211 per cent. This was not in the order of the 3,000 per cent annual inflation rate in 1989 and 1990, but as in that earlier period, inflation has resulted in the coming to power of regimes touting radical stabilization policies. In the 1990’s, Carlos Menem, the populist Peronist turned neoliberal, famously imposed, among other stringent measures, the 1:1 peso to the dollar exchange rate. The experiment led to chaos, with the country declaring itself unable to service its sovereign debt in 2001. Last November came the turn of the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei, who has promised not only to make the dollar the medium of exchange in place of the debauched peso but to also lop off off whole ministries of government and thousands of government jobs. His controversial but winning image during the November 2023 elections was his going around with a chainsaw to symbolize his determination to radically slim down government, which he regards as a “criminal operation.”

The question on everyone’s mind is, will Milei succeed where previous regimes failed?

Milei Wields His Chainsaw

Milei has been less than a year in office, but he has taken his chainsaw to the government, as he promised. He chopped off half of the government ministries, devalued the peso by 50 per cent, and slashed fuel subsidies. That was just the beginning. In the teeth of bitter opposition in Congress and in the streets, he got his “Bases Law” passed, which would allow him to roll back workers’ rights, provide tax incentives to foreign investors in extractive industries such as mining, forestry, and energy, reduce the tax burden on the rich, and provide him with the power to declare a one-year state of economic emergency that would give him special powers to disband federal agencies and sell off about a dozen public companies. In order to get the Bases Law through Congress, Milei has postponed his plans to adopt the dollar as the national medium of exchange and “blow up” the Central Bank, as he puts it, deliberately invoking an image associated with Khmer Rouges’ destruction of the Central Bank of Cambodia when they came to power in the late 1970’s.

As anticipated, the austerity measures are leading to the contraction of the economy, with the International Monetary Fund, which has signalled its approval of Milei’s policies, expecting a 2.8 per cent decline in GDP 2024. Still, according to some polls, his approval ratings are above 50 per cent. “This shows that despite suffering in the short term, the people are willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt,” said the Argentine ambassador who gave me an unexpected 45-minute briefing when I claimed my courtesy visa to visit the country. Others, like radio personality Fernando Borroni, assert the president’s popularity ratings reflect not no much approval of him as rejection of the failed policies and personalities of the past.

Javier and Karina

Milei is perhaps the most colorful and controversial personality to come of power in Latin America in the last few years. Though he is nominally a member of a right-wing party, he has no organized political base but acquired national influence through wide exposure on television, where he poured his vitriol on ideological opponents, indeed, on anyone proposing any kind of government intervention in the economy. He is an unabashed animal lover, making sure to pay homage in his speeches to what he calls “mi hijitos de cuatro patas,” or my four-legged children. There is nothing wrong with that, but people look askance when he claims that he talks to his dead dog, Conan—named after the comics character “Conan, the Barbarian”—through a medium.

He has professional advisers, but the person who controls access to him and is said to be the power behind the throne is his younger sister, Karina Elizabeth Milei, who has been criticized for lacking any previous experience in government and having a background in business that consists mainly of selling cakes on Instagram. Still, she has elicited admiration for her micromanagement of her brother’s successful electoral campaign, prompting some to compare her to Evita Peron and Cristina Kirchner, the wife and successor of the late President Nestor Kirchner.

Mileinomics

Milei is personally quirky, and so, some say, is his economics. His intellectual hero is the radical libertarian economist Murray Rothbard. Reading an essay by Rothbard titled “Monopolies and Competition” was for Milei an experience akin to Paul’s conversion on the road of Damascus. “The article was 140 pages long,” Milei writes. “I went home to eat and began to read it. I could not stop reading, and after reading it for three hours, I said to myself, everything I had been teaching over the last 23, 24 years was wrong.” In addition to Rothbard, those in Milei’s pantheon of intellectual heroes are the paragons of neoliberal thinking, among them Friedrich Hayek, Leopold Van Mises, Milton Friedman, and Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago. (Milei has honored Lucas, Rothbard, and Friedman by naming his dogs, cloned with cells from the dead Conan, after them.)

It is not surprising that Milei condemns socialists, communists, Keynesians, and “neo-Keynesianos” like Paul Krugman. It is also not surprising that, like Friedrich Hayek, he considers the pursuit of social justice as a big mistake that is unjust and disruptive of the efficient working of the market and eventually leads to the “road to serfdom” by an all-powerful regulatory state.

What is unusual is that he includes a number of economists working in the neoclassical tradition in his sweeping condemnation of “bad influences.” Formerly an economics professor, he faults economic modelling promoted by the mathematization of economics for having led some analysts to the illusion that the market can lead to imperfect outcomes.

One fundamental tenet of neoclassical economics that elicits his ire is “Pareto Optimality,” which says that economic outcomes can be achieved that can make people better off without making anyone worse off. According to Milei, pursuit of Pareto Optimality by neoclassical economists has led them to the illusion that government action can improve market competition or make up for “market failure.”

Pareto Optimality, in his view, is the opening wedge that has led to the formulation and legitimation of other concepts such as imperfect competition, asymmetric information, public goods, and externalities—the solution or provision of which would require government intervention. The fundamental error of the economists who have generated these ideas is that they are so enamored with their models that “when their model does not reflect reality, they attribute the problem to the market instead of changing the premises of their model.”

Interfering with the operation of the market always has dangerous consequences, says Milei adamantly. Indeed, breaking up monopolies to bring about a state of perfect competition is erroneous, since monopolies, instead of being aberrations, are, in reality, positive “In fact, within a framework of free exchange, if a producer is able to capture the whole market, they have done so by satisfying the needs of consumers by providing them with a better quality product…The existence of monopolies in a context if free entry and exit is a source of progress, and the constant obsession of politicians to control them will only end up damaging the individuals they are trying to help.” In short, the market can’t make a mistake, and trying to rectify its supposed errors will only lead to a worse outcome for everyone.

Another classical economist that Milei has placed in the company of Marx, Pareto, and Keynes as an ideological baddie is Malthus, who held that the law of diminishing returns would create a situation where rapid population growth would not be supported by economic growth, leading eventually to general impoverishment. Milei claims that Malthus’s law has been disproven by the tremendous economic growth since the 19th century owing to technological advances made possible by the market, and Malthus’ only use these days is to provide intellectual support for the pro-choice movement, whose advocacy of abortion and family planning he despises.

The Opposition

Not suprisingly, Milei’s hostility has been reciprocated by the women’s movement, which fears that their successful effort to legalize abortion in 2020 will be reversed by the president.

Another sector of society that feels threatened by the new government is the human rights movement. Milei is not so much the object of hostility of human rights advocates as his vice president, Victoria Villaruel, who has defended the so-called dirty war waged by the military dictatorship of General Jorge Videla in the late seventies and early eighties that took over 30,000 lives. Villaruel, whose father and uncle were members of the military during the dictatorship, has opposed the trials of those being prosecuted for crimes against humanity and has threatened to begin investigation and prosecution of members of the Montoneros and ERP (Armed Forces of the People) accused of “terrorist crimes.” At the rallies of the two groups representing the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo that take place every Thursday afternoon at the Plaza de Mayo, participants are warned that Milei might allow Villaruel to pursue her vendetta against the memory of the disappeared.

No Counternarrative

The strongest opposition to Milei is the Peronist movement, which was the base of the governments of Nestor Kirchner, Cristina Kirchner, and Alberto Fernandez that have ruled Argentina for most of the last 24 years. It continues to have the support of some 30 per cent of the electorate. The problem is that neither Peronism nor the rest of the opposition has a counternarrative to Milei’s, admits Martin Guzman, former minister of the economy in the Peronist government of Alberto Fernandez and currently professor of economics at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University.

Two obstacles lie in the way of the formulation of such a counternarrative. One is that while Peronism is a mass populist movement, its leaders have pursued conservative policies when in power, leading to the demoralization of the base. The second, and more significant obstacle, is that “the language and policies that animated Peronism’s working class base in the mid-20th century no longer connect with today’s young workers that are engaged in the gig economy perpetuated by savage capitalism,” according to Borroni, the radio journalist.

Milei and the Youth Vote

It bears noting that the strongest supporters of Milei are male voters in the 16 to 30 age group, 68 per cent of whom said they would vote for Milei in a poll taken before the November 2023 elections. Argentines who have grown up in the last thirty years have done so in a country that has been constantly in crisis, besieged by inflation, recession, and poverty, which now engulfs an astounding 55 per cent of the population, or 25 million people. To them both the center-left governments of Kirchner and Fernandez and the center-right regime of Mauricio Macri were abject failures in turning the economy around, making them vulnerable to the inflammatory rhetoric of Milei during the 2023 elections.

Argentina is a proud country, but for many young Argentines, there is little these days to be proud of except perhaps Lionel Messi and the national soccer team (and even they have been tainted by a recent incident where some players were captured on video singing a racially offensive song regarding the African origins of many of those in the French national team that fought Argentina in the World Cup finals in 2022).

Destined to Fail?

Milei has promised to restore Argentina to its 19th century status as one of the richest countries in the world. But it is difficult to see how Milei will get Argentines out of their economic conundrum and restore their morale as a country. His vision is that of an Argentina of the future purged by the fire and sword of radical austerity and shorn of the “political caste and army of parasites whose only objective is to perpetuate itself in power by sucking the blood of the private sector.” The measures he is taking , however, are likely to follow the well-trodden path of similar programs in the Global South and in Greece and Eastern Europe after the 2008 financial crisis, that is, continuing economic contraction or prolonged stagnation. What is remarkable is that despite the record of unremitting failures of neoliberal programs to deliver sustained growth over the last quarter of a century, there are still intellectual and political leaders like Milei who continue to embrace them. Milei is, in fact, vulnerable to the same error he accuses neoclassical antagonists of committing: that when theory and reality diverge, it is reality that is the problem.

At some point a program of vigorous government action to trigger growth, redistribute income, and reduce poverty may perhaps become attractive again and voters may turn on Milei’s counterrevolutionary economic project. “I have no doubt that Peronism will again come to power,” asserts Borroni. “Whether it will come to power as a a genuine popular movement or in the guise of a popular movement led by the right is the question.” But will such a new and improved version of Peronism be able to finally lick Argentina’s poisonous galloping inflation while promoting growth and reducing inequality–that is the bigger question.

“Other countries have been able to control inflation. Why can’t we?,” one Argentine I interviewed asked in frustration. That same question is on everyone’s lips, but for the moment, people seem to have suspended their skepticism and given the mercurial Milei some slack.

This article is based on a recent trip the author made to Argentina that was supported by a travel grant from International Development Associates (IDEAs). It first appeared on Meer and it is reproduced here with the author’s permission.

Walden Bello is Co-chair of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South affiliated with the Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute and honorary research fellow with the Sociology Department of the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Cite as: Bello, Walden 2024. “The Mess in Argentina” Focaalblog 2 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/10/02/walden-bello-the-mess-in-argentina/

Art and Visual Anthropology, Blog

Anagha Anil: Portrait Populism: On the Communist Iconography of Kerala

Image 1: A portrait of the first chief minister of Kerala, E.M.S. Namboodiripad displayed at the
kolaya (a Ravi Varma painting could be observed on the adjacent right wall), photo by T.P. Bineesh

Communism continues to thrive both as a ubiquitous presence and a powerful electoral force in the south Indian state of Kerala. Established in 1940, the Communist Party of Kerala formed the first democratically elected government of the state in 1957. By organizing popular movements which demanded the abolition of feudalism, landlordism, and the transfer of land to its tillers, the Communist Party gained a strong foothold amongst the masses and built a solid base in rural areas from where it could not be dislodged (Fic, 1970). Today, the communist movement in Kerala, especially as represented by its dominant party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)], can be said to display tendencies of populist movements, including a cult of a leader-hero and the rhetoric of a ‘pure people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite’ (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017).

This blog looks at the perpetuation of the leader cult in Kerala through the use of commemorative portraits. Disseminated through domestic and digital spaces, these images reinforce a sense of collective identity among party workers while also invoking filial sentiments. I will be reading such negotiations utilising the idea of corpothetics or corporeal aesthetics which concerns the mobilisation of all senses for the appreciation of a text (Pinney, 2004). The concept is utilized appositely to understand the filial mode of reverence, effected by everyday embodied practices which enhance the affective potential and emotional capital of the Party. Such engagements, which are sensory/sentimental in character, play a key role in embedding the Party as an affective presence (rather than an abstract political programme) within the state of Kerala.

Portraits and Corpothetic Engagement

A discussion of the portraits of communist leaders hung in Kerala houses is necessary to properly situate the cultural context in which digital iconography is circulated and made meaningful. The part of the house which opens to the front yard is usually an open space (called kolaya or sit-out), which in many Kerala houses serves as a display area for objects such as family photographs, trophies, photos of Gods and ancestors, and other decor items, expecting public appreciation (see image 1).

The portraits of former Communist leaders are hung in the houses of party supporters in the kolaya. The kolaya thus functions as a private sphere communicating the family’s socio-cultural inclinations, ideologies, and aspirations. With their fixed frontal stance, these images can initiate an embodied interaction with the beholder, whose eye here functions not only as an organ of vision but also of touch. This notion could be explicated further by discussing how the mutuality of vision and its ensuing tactility was deployed in early mythological films. The devotee in such films would beseech the deity to interfere in moments of pain and distress. The dialogue that transpires between the two of them is cinematically represented through intermittent shots that show the eyes of the devotee and the deity. Sometimes even a ray would pass from the deity’s eye to that of the devotee, thereby liberating her/him from their suffering. Thus, within the Indian context, the eye is more than an organ of vision but also of touch (Pinney, 2004). The emotional resonance evoked by these portraits is to be contextualized in this corporeal visual culture.

Image 2: Portraits of International Communist leaders along with that of a family ancestor in former MLA (Member of Legislative Assembly) C.P Narayanan’s House, photo by author

In his study of family photographs in Kerala, Sujith Kumar Parayil (2014) demonstrates that apart from documenting the family, these photographs function as performances of the interpersonal and intimate relations between family members while also displaying their cultural capital (Parayil, 2014). He also notes how these families have a penchant for displaying the portraits of ancestors or deceased family members along with deities, thus enabling a corpothetic performance of commemoration (see image 2). Such a display is rendered corpothetic when the beholder engages with the photographs through everyday practices such as dusting, garlanding or lighting a lamp in front of the portrait.

In the Malabar region of north Kerala, where Communism emerged and continues to flourish as a formidable force, portraits, found in both Dalit and upper caste households, are often placed along with photos of Gods or ancestors, functioning as surrogates for what they represent. The portraits displayed include regional and international male leaders of the Communist movement such as E.M.S. Namboodiripad (the first chief minister of Kerala), P. Krishna Pillai, Joseph Stalin etc. along with other local leaders and ‘martyrs’ (images 1 and 2).

The reverence and admiration directed towards these portraits by the family members are performative in character, demonstrating their loyalty and affiliation towards the Party. . For instance, in image 1 the family members of the Communist family home are observed sitting in the kolaya to commemorate the ‘martyr’ Azhikodan Raghavan. A portrait of former chief minister E. M. S Namboodiripad could be seen in the background, as displayed in the kolaya. The choice of the family members to pose in the kolaya was not accidental but can be seen as a conscious decision to affirm the family’s affiliation as supporters of the Communist Party. Such transactions empower the images to exert a corrective moral eye while the visible presence of the ancestors coerces the family members to adhere to the norms and morals encoded within the family. Actions like placing the Communist portrait at a crucial spot (veranda, living room, and dining room) along with portraits of family elders (image 2) while ensuring adequate visibility, also guarantee the quotidian yet affective commemoration of the Communist movement.

Image 3: Screenshot of an Instagram post commemorating Vladimir Lenin’s death anniversary on January 21st, from the official Instagram page of CPI(M), Kerala

Communist Iconography in Social Media

Social media plays a crucial role in determining the arc of Indian politics. It played a pivotal role in facilitating the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) victory in the 2014 elections (Kanungo, 2015). A recent example would be Rahul Gandhi’s strategic choice to engage with social media vloggers and YouTubers instead of relying solely on mainstream media during his “Bharat Jodo Yatra” (Unite India March 2023).

The situation is no different with Communist parties in Kerala, with the Communist Party of India (CPI) and especially the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] that has been active on social media since 2016, following the example set by other political parties. The integration of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp into the official communication stream of government administrative institutions would be an example. However, Party officials also utilize social media to disseminate iconography in an attempt to cultivate a digital populist style. These iconographic artifacts include posters and reels which glorify the leader while foregrounding the participatory politics of the Party. An example is image 3, posted on Instagram, commemorating Vladimir Lenin by superimposing his image over a couple of other photographs where he is seen as addressing the masses or leading them on a strike. Circulated in the form of posts, tweets and stories, such expressions intensify the affective potential of left populism in Kerala while also validating its democratic appeal among the people.

Image 4: Screenshot of an Instagram post commemorating Cheemeni Massacre on 23rd of March; the Party Office of Cheemeni along with the portraits of martyrs could be seen at the top (from left: K. V Kunjikannan, P. Kunjappan, C. Koran, Aalavalathil Ambu, M. Koran), from official Instagram page of CPI(M), Kerala

These digital images also function as counterparts to the portraits discussed in the previous section. Digital posters of the Party are suffused with captions, images of a red sickle and hammer, red festoons, Party flags, etc. Image 4 is a poster commemorating the Cheemeni massacre, where five CPM members were killed by Congress workers on March 23rd1987, at the Cheemeni Party Office of Kasaragod district in Kerala. A notable aspect of this poster is how the Cheemeni Party Office, the site of the massacre, is foregrounded. With portraits of ‘martyrs’ placed on top, the image of the dilapidated Party office superimposed with a blood splash triggers associated memories of the massacre. Such a representation effectively tweaks the images’ affective value and ensuing ‘stickiness’ – that is the way in which emotions and feelings get attached to particular objects, situations, or people, influencing one’s perception and interactions over time (Ahmed 2004).

Portraits of leaders are also circulated in similar fashion after including certain extensions. An example would be an Instagram post (image 5) featuring the image of E. Balanandan, former MP, Politburo member, and secretary of the CITU (Centre of India Trade Unions). Commemorating the death anniversary of the veteran Communist leader, the poster bears a portrait of Balanandan with other iconographic artifacts in the background, such as the Communist flag and red festoons. Further, it is accompanied by a caption elaborating on the leader and his contributions to the Party. When added to the portrait, such stylizations become corpothetic as they are implemented through actual tactile engagement with the image which entails a mere swish of the finger.

Image 5: Screenshot of an Instagram post commemorating E. Balanandan’s death anniversary on January 19th, from the official Instagram page of CPI(M), Kerala

Such modifications could be read as digital articulations of corpothetic practices which until then were directed towards actual photographs. Such gestures are further amplified through actions such as commenting, sharing, and liking which has an ability to “strengthen the shared affective and political meaning-making in the community” (Hokka & Nellimarkka, 2020, 3).

The Party in everyday life

These novel forms of Communist iconography with their interactive features, invoke a new form of digital populism that requires to be performed online. Youngmi Kim (2008, 122) defines digital populism as a new type of political behaviour marked by the political use of the internet as a form of political participation as well as an instrument of mobilisation. Actuated through individualized engagements, this virtual replication of proximal empowerment (Pinney, 1997) comes across as a performance of self within the digital world. It is this performance that Schechner calls a form of public dreaming (qtd. In Papachirissi 2003, 98).

The participatory aspect of digital populism facilitates engagement of the people with the communist movement without being restricted by the constraints of formal Party lingo ridden by rigid theoretical diction. Udupa et al. (2019) highlight the significance of colloquialism in such digital interactions. Communist Parties in Kerala employ region specific and colloquial cultural references in social media. Such expressions of digital populism, which incorporate the rhetoric of the popular, facilitate the transcendence of the Party from the realm of the political to that of the affective. Nested in one’s day-to-day life, these artefacts found both in domestic spaces and social media, are crucial towards rendering the Party quotidian.

Anagha Anil is currently a PhD scholar in Cultural Studies at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Karnataka, India. Her research focuses on the corpothetics of communist iconography in contemporary Kerala. Her research interests include visual studies, popular culture and film studies.

References

Ahmed, S. 2004. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22, no. 2: 117-139.  

Fic, V. M. 1970. Kerala Yenan of India – Rise of Communist Power 1939-1969. Bombay: Nachiketa Publications.

Hokka, J. and Nelimarkka, M.. 2019 “Affective Economy of National-Populist Images: Investigating National and Transnational Online Networks through Visual Big Data.” New Media & Society, 1-23.

Kanungo, N. T. 2015 “India’s Digital Poll Battle: Political Parties and Social Media in the 16th Lok Sabha Elections.” Studies in Indian Politics 3, no. 2: 212–28,

Kim, Y. 2015 “Digital Populism in South Korea? Internet Culture and the Trouble with Direct Participation” in Digital Activism in Asia Reader, eds. N. Shah, P. Purayil Sneha and S. Chattapadhyay. Milton Keynes: Meson Press. Pp:13-126.

Mudde, C. and Kaltwasser, C. R. 2017 Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford; New York, Ny: Oxford University Press.

Parayil, S. 2014. “Family Photographs: Visual Mediation of the Social.” Critical Quarterly 56, no. 3 :1-20.

Pinney, C. 2004. Photos of the Gods: Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion Books.

Pinney, C. 1997. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Udupa, S., Venkatraman. S., and Khan, A. 2020. “‘Millennial India’: Global Digital Politics in Context.” Television & New Media 21, no. 4: 343-359

Cite as: Anil, Anagha 2024. “Portrait Populism: On the Communist Iconography of Kerala” Focaalblog 26 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/06/26/anagha-anil-portrait-populism-on-the-communist-iconography-of-kerala/

Blog

Jacob Engelberg: The Palestine solidarity encampments in Amsterdam: “We must refuse this cynical ploy” (introduced by Luisa Steur)

Image 1: Encampment at the University of Amsterdam on the 6th of May, photo by Luisa Steur

In the morning of the 6th of May, inspired by the swelling global wave of student solidarity encampments for Palestine, a group of students set up tents on a field of the University of Amsterdam Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The aim was to push university management to meet the students’ long-standing demands to disclose, divest and cut ties to Israeli institutions and thereby end the university’s complicity in genocide. At 6 pm that evening, staff was called upon to stand in solidarity and I went together with many colleagues. The atmosphere was euphoric as we had eagerly awaited a moment of collective political action to confront the ongoing bombing and starving of Gaza. Together, university management, police and the mayor of Amsterdam however decided to set the inglorious global record of being the quickest to shut down the encampment: at 3 am that night a bulldozer cleared the barricades and police violently evicted the camp.

Shocked at the police violence, a gathering was called the next day at 4 pm, in which many more students and staff showed up, in solidarity with Palestine and with our students who had suffered police violence. The gathering was full of energy and at the end of the planned speeches it turned into a demonstration of thousands marching to the inner-city campus of the university where a group of students occupied its famous “Oudemanhuispoort”. This time, the university management decided to let the encampment be for the night and set up a series of negotiations on the students’ demands.

Image 2: Clearing of the occupation of Oudemanhuispoort, photo by Luisa Steur

And yet, the next day, when these negotiations had only just started, a massive police force was again unleashed on the student protestors, this time with two bulldozers clearing the occupation. From a short distance, behind the police cordon, students and staff who had rushed to the spot chanted “you are not alone” to show their solidarity and others tried to block the police vans carrying off student activists. That Saturday, the demonstration to commemorate the 76th anniversary of the Nakba in Amsterdam attracted as many as 10.000 protestors from all walks of life.

The Monday after – the 13th of May – a walk-out was called at the campus where it all started, and many students and staff again showed up. Standing on the bridge in front of the main entrance and surrounded by students holding up poster-size images of the covers of academic books on Palestine, an impressive line-up of speakers addressed the crowd. But none received as much applause – and elicited so many tears – as Jacob Engelberg. We are honored to reproduce his speech, as he gave it, here on Focaalblog:

Toespraak van dr. Jacob Engelberg bij de walkout van het UvA-medewerkers from Jacob on Vimeo.

“Hello friends. I join you today as a Jewish anti-Zionist member of staff here at the UvA [University of Amsterdam]; I name myself as both Jewish and anti-Zionist, as dominant discourses circulating—from the Israeli state to the Dutch media to our own CvB [Executive Board]—tend to imply that we do not exist. I assure you, we are many.

I have been working with colleagues in negotiations with our CvB to demand moral action from our university in the face of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. I have been deeply inspired by the passion and the moral clarity shown by our students in their call for the university to disclose, boycott, and divest. These urgent calls have been met, however, with repression, intimidation, defamation, and violence, as the CvB refuses to negotiate in good faith, spreads lies about its own students, and then recruits the police to violently repress dissent. We will not stand for the erosion of democratic freedoms at the institution in which we teach and learn. Indeed, teaching and learning cannot take place without the democratic freedoms we hold dear.

I stand here today not only as an academic, but as a Jewish member of our university community. Much has been said about how Jewish people are feeling on campus, but always in a way that erases the presence of Jewish students and staff, including Israeli students and staff, within our Palestine solidarity work. Instead, our community is presented as monolithically Zionist, and critique of the state of Israel is rewritten as antisemitism. In Dutch media and politics, we have heard the lie that the student movement at the UvA is antisemitic. This is a characterisation unrecognisable to those, like myself, who visited the encampment and joined students in their various forms of protest. These lies efface the Jewish students and staff whose efforts in these actions have been steadfast, and who were among those brutalised by the police. The notion that these forms of violence are necessary to secure our safety is a risible distortion of the notion of safety.

I am, of course, well aware that there are many within my community aligned with Zionism, who consider it intrinsic to their Jewish identities, and who see denouncements of Israel’s actions as a threat to their very being. To the Jewish students and staff who feel afraid at the sight of Palestine solidarity protest: I believe your fear. I implore you, however, to reflect on the roots of that fear. My wager is that, like me, you were taught by figures in our communal institutions to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. I expect you might have a visceral response to seeing the Palestinian flag, to hearing the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” or even at the very mention of the word Palestine. I want you to know that these responses are the cumulative effects of years of distorted narratives about Palestine solidarity, the history of the Zionist project, and the meaning of a free Palestine. I call on you to think critically about the presuppositions we have been taught to make, to listen to the voices we have been told to ignore. The university, at its best, should be a place where you can do this work of critical reflection.

The state of Israel’s impunity depends upon the support of a terrified diaspora, whose approval is garnered through distortions of real fears of Jewish unsafety, against which Israel then positions itself as the antidote. It uses the trauma of intergenerational experiences of antisemitism, and particularly the trauma of the Shoah, to justify its actions. Let us be clear that a Jewish ethnostate that subjugates, displaces, and murders Palestinians in our name does not make anyone safe. Crucially, Israel’s cynical deployment of Jewish fear turns our attention away from where antisemitism is burgeoning in our societies: in the far-right nationalist parties gaining momentum globally; in the transnational conspiracy theories circulating centuries-old lies about our people; in the rise of neofascism that has already taken the lives of our community members as they pray in shul. Zionism turns our eyes away from where antisemitism needs to be most forcefully resisted, encouraging us, instead, to turn on our Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim siblings. We must refuse this cynical ploy.

It was in my years as an undergraduate that I first began to question the Zionist doctrines with which I had been raised. I felt many fears, among them the fear that were I to critique Zionism, I would find myself bereft of community, bereft of ethnicity, bereft of identity, bereft of culture. What I discovered, however, was a rich tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism with a legacy that stretches from the Bundist movement in Imperial Russia to the very student protests we see globally today. Jewish anti-Zionists have built and will continue to nourish Jewish communities that stand, without reservation, in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

I am grateful for the invitation to speak today and I stand beside you in the struggle for a liberated Palestine in which all can live freely under conditions of radical equality from the river to the sea. Thank you.”

Jacob Engelberg is Assistant Professor of Film, Media, and Culture at the University of Amsterdam Department of Media Studies and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. His research considers the relations between sexuality and the cinema. He has completed research into pornographic film, articulations of Jewishness in transnational cinemas, and the cinema of Ingmar Bergman.

Luisa Steur is Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Universty of Amsterdam, and Managing and Lead Editor of Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. Her research interests lie in the field of political anthropology and the anthropology of labor with a regional focus on Kerala (India) and Cuba.

Cite as: Engelberg, Jacob 2024. “The Palestine solidarity encampments in Amsterdam: “We must refuse this cynical ploy”” Focaalblog 17 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/05/17/jacob-engelberg-the-palestine-solidarity-encampments-in-amsterdam-we-must-refuse-this-cynical-ploy-introduced-by-luisa-steur/

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