Political Views (Asynchronous Session)
Featured Stoning the State: The Pathalgadi Movement of Jharkhand, India as a Case Study in Messy Anti-globalization View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pratik Raghu
Since 2017, adivasi (South Asian Indigenous) communities in Jharkhand, India have put up large stone slabs known as pathals at their village entrances. These pathals reaffirm their independence from the Jharkhandi and Indian states and their opposition to the extraction of coveted resources on their lands by corporations and state authorities. Participating communities have established their own self-defense committees, banks, and schools, defying calls for assimilation through development. The Pathalgadi Movement, as it has become known, illustrates the complexities of contemporary anti-globalization: a far cry from the respectable professionalized trappings of the World Social Forum, it shows how Indigenous and otherwise oppressed populations across the world are combating the mounting crises of neoliberal extractivism, dispossession, and displacement and accompanying state repression and societal marginalization, at the same time as this resistance is replete with contradictions that could prove its undoing. This paper details the insights into messy anti-globalization offered by the Pathalgadi Movement. Drawing upon interviews with Jharkhandi activists and numerous news reports, it contends that the Movement emerged as a response to rampant neoliberal Hindu nationalism, embodying a collective alternative that Arturo Escobar describes in terms of ontological politics. Due in no small part to the Movement's subversion of liberal rationality, Jharkhandi civil society has generally lagged behind its maneuvers, if not expressing open hostility to its militant reinterpretation of adivasi tradition. However, these maneuvers are not purely emancipatory: while useful for confounding state authorities, the Movement's ideological amorphousness threatens to undermine the construction of a broader revolutionary project.
Oral Testimonies of Partition Survivors - Decolonization and Migration View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sujata Chowdhury
The year is being celebrated as the 75th year of India’s independence. India’s triumphant moment of decolonization however remains forever marred by the tragedy of Partition. More than 14 million people were displaced from lands they had inhabited for millennia and over 2 million lives were estimated to have perished in the process of the migration journey and the ensuing ethnic violence. While macro-political studies of Partition have been undertaken, micro-level effects of partition on refugees have remained largely unnoticed. In this study, oral history interviews collected through online questionnaire and focused interview of 75 witnesses of 15th August 1947 are examined and an account of their migration is interpreted by descriptive analysis methods. This paper reflects an understanding of the phenomenon of migration through a South Asian perspective and documents sociological, cultural, economic, and personal dimensions of one of the largest forced migration events in the history of humankind. While the hastily executed cartographic fragmentation of India left a deep imprint of uncertainty about the migrant’s statehood, despite tremendous hardship, the testimonies of the partition refugees reaffirm a shared conviction in a democratic society endowed with civil liberties.
Populist Authoritarianism: The Rise of Trump and Erdogan View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Selin Ece Guner
Even though there are many differences between U.S and Turkish politics, current leaders of these countries have various similarities. Specifically, today both are leaders of highly polarized societies. In this paper I address the following question: Are these two leaders the causal factors in creating polarization or are they the consequences of polarization that is already present in respective societies? In order to understand this question, it is important to analyze why people of these two different cases elected their respective politicians. In this study, using Mill’s most different systems method, I argue that preceding economic crisis, grievance based politics and outsider status might be strong factors that resulted in a shift from class-based politics to value-based politics in both countries, leading to the elections of Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. I also argue that value-based politics tend to over-lap with populist authoritarian policies, which further the polarization of the respective societies.
Transatlantic Masculine Identities between the Refugee Crisis, Covid, and the War in Ukraine
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Johann JK Reusch
The post-WW II peace effort initiated a cultural shift that aimed to downplay identity politics tied to nationalism and masculinity. The European response to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine appears to have reversed these efforts radically. With a focus on Germany, this paper argues that the point of "epochal turn," as the German Chancellor has coined it, had occurred already slowly through sociocultural developments that can be linked hegemonically to aggressive populist developments in the US where they culminated in the forceful occupation of the Capitol. Related public abandonment of normative nonviolent forms of communication in the US, intersecting with xenophobia and ethnic discrimination, and aggressive resistance to vaccination policies, influenced and transformed German ideals of male identity in the public sphere beyond populist groups. It simultaneously established public displays of aggressive behaviour that reverberated with the equally aggressive culmination of Russian and US rhetoric and foreign policy, and Ukrainian nationalism. Situating the argument in a framework of masculinity studies, a changing perception across the gender spectrum of transatlantic male identity ideals emerges as a foundation for popular support of European engagement beyond merely humanitarian support of the Ukraine.
How Are Skills Formed in Hierarchical Market Economies?: Institutional Arrangements in Malaysia and Thailand View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jaewon Kim
The aggregate of skills is without doubt a fundamental source of socio-economic progress, and the unprecedent structural changes of our time have accompanied heightened pressure for higher-level skills. Skills, however, are in large part the product of deliberate investment by a variety of actors including employers and states. Skills being influenced by the institutional context further suggests that as much as the forms and levels of skills are heterogeneous, skill formation systems and processes hugely differ by state. Therefore, we can assume that the national vocational education and training (VET) system is not developed in isolation merely within the educational domain, but rather shaped jointly by a state’s unique political-economic environment and various labour market dynamics. The divergent political economy of vocational skill formation has been rigorously examined focusing particularly on advanced capitalist economies. Both theoretical and empirical research on the political economy of skill formation of developing economies, however, is surprisingly scarce. The case study of Thailand and Malaysia, the most rapidly growing economies in Southeast Asia, shows that they share similar features of skill formation generally observed in a liberal skill regime in terms of the state’s emphasis on general education and low public commitment and passive involvement of firms in the development and management of initial VET. On the other hand, their institutional setup exhibits some distinctive features of hierarchical market-type skill formation as multinational enterprises play a significant role in the process of skill formation in initial vocational training in the first stages of employment career.
Locating the ‘Global’ in Singapore’s Smart Nation Initiative : Technology in Public Imaginings of Singapore View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Benjamin Choo
In his seminal 1972 ‘global city’ speech, Singapore’s Foreign Minister S. Rajaratnam argued that the world was Singapore’s economic hinterland. Since then, the ‘global city’ has become an integral component of Singapore’s self-identity. Indeed, it has been noted that Rajaratnam’s vision prefigured the later development of academic ‘global city’ concepts. However, in recent years, this identity has had to share public discursive space with Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative. The latter has become no less dominant in Singapore’s self-image than older longstanding identities. This paper interrogates the intersection and the tensions between Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative and its ‘global city’ identity. At the same time, this paper hopes to shed some light on the degree of overlap between the broader ‘smart city’ and ‘global city’ concepts. There is not much literature at present that specifically interrogates the intersection between the ‘smart city’ and ‘global city’ concepts. But this intersection is worth exploring for the very simple reason that there could be tensions between the multiple goals and self-images pursued by ambitious cities. For example, it has been shown that the ‘smart city’ concept does not completely map onto the ‘sustainable city’ concept. The pursuit of one particular urban objective may thus work to the detriment of the pursuit of another. Finally, this paper also highlights the value of allowing history to inform attempts to determine the degree and the nature of the intersection and the tensions between the ‘smart city’ and the ‘global city’ concepts.
