Words and actions: Italian ultras and neo-fascism

Over the past two decades the link – perceived and actual – between political extremism and football fans has been the subject of academic, political, and policing debate. It is not rare to witness manifestations of intolerance and ideological statements referring to regional, national and international issues at football stadia. In Italian football stadia, political representation has been evident for decades; politics has been integral to all realms of Italian society and culture since the origin of the nation. As one of the most significant Italian cultural practices, football has not been an exception. This combination of theory and action inspires thousands of young male football supporters. The football stadium might thus be interpreted as a twenty-first century social Agorá, where political opinions – otherwise ghettoized in society – can be freely expressed in pursuit of a wider consensus. This paper explores the under-researched milieu of neo-fascist ideology as displayed in contemporary Italian football stadia. Contributing original material and employing as conceptual frameworks the New Consensus Theory on fascism and the works of Julius Evola and Georges Sorel, this analysis hypothesizes that the neo-fascist tenets manifested by the ideologically-oriented ‘ultras’ fan groups, may be understood as both a consequence of, and a resistance against the dominant socio-cultural and political values of contemporary Italy. The research conducted between 2003–2007 sought to evaluate two internationally renowned ultras groups located in the Italian capital of Rome: the Boys of AS Roma and the Irriducibili of SS Lazio who enact their performances on their respective ‘curve’ [football terraces] of the city's Olympic stadium. Utilizing the ethnographic method, unique access was achieved in a notoriously difficult research milieu bringing the researcher into the social-cultural world of the participants and to the echelons of the extra-parliamentary Italian far right. Research sought to uncover the groups’ social interactions, values, and political beliefs, as a way of contributing to an understanding of both the Italian ultras of the twenty-first century and indeed the wider political milieu of the modern nation-state of Italy.     

Contained mobility and the racialization of poverty in Europe: the Roma at the development–security nexus

ABSTRACT

This paper starts from the observation that, since the collapse of eastern European state socialism, the Roma have become the subject and target of Europe-wide development programs and discourses, while, at the same time, they have been problematized in terms of social, public and national security. Due to the ways in which development and security have ambiguously come together in Europe’s recent history, I will argue that the living conditions of the poorest among the Roma have not only worsened, but also, and more fundamentally, the divide between Europe’s rich and poor has become seriously racialized and almost unbridgeable. I explain how the bio- and geopolitical conditions under which development and security have merged in Europe’s engagement with the Roma have led to a situation in which the official aim of Roma-related development programs – the improvement of their living conditions and life chances – tends to result in a dreadlock.     

Muslimness as a political formation: an inquiry into Muslim presence

ABSTRACT

In this article, I undertake an investigation into the political significance of Islam and Muslimness. By doing so, I aim to underscore the primacy of Islam’s ontological (constitutive) nature and its irreducibility to any of its ontic (empirical) articulations. This project necessitates the recovery of the political as the moment of the formation of a collective order and community, irreducible to any of its material expressions (e.g. territorial or institutional unity). Thus, the article renounces the objectivity of the secular grammar which fixes, essentializes, and reduces Muslimness to being merely ‘religious’ as opposed to ‘political’. By contrast, it attempts to retrieve Islam’s basic condition of existence and hence emancipate it from the confines of the Western epistemic structure. Toward that end, the article presents a deconstructive analysis of Islam as an autonomous universe of meaning inaugurated by the event of the Divine Revelation to Prophet Muhammad as its originary moment. By doing so, I also emphasize the primacy of Muslimness as a political subjectivity, whose unity and autonomy is contingent upon the drawing of its most universal boundaries and the exclusion of an outside – a function, I argue, which had historically been fulfilled by the mechanism of the caliphate. Finally, the article discusses an alternative conceptualization of diaspora in order to come to grips with the political implications of Muslimness in the post-caliphate world order.     

Adulteration of pure native blood by aliens? mixed race kapya in colonial and post-Colonial Myanmar

ABSTRACT

Colonization may be viewed not only as loss of sovereignty and territory but also of ‘purity’ of a native race to an alien power. After the British colonized Burma in the late nineteenth century, they brought in Chinese and Indians to the sparsely populated colony as labour for new administrative and economic activities. Intermarriage, mainly between native Burmese women and men of alien races – British, European, Chinese and Indian – was thus inevitable. Mixed-race peoples – kapya in Burmese – were then born out of these relationships, and their identities became a key political issue in colonial Burma. Importantly, all natives, foreigners, and kapya were British subjects at that time. Independent Burma from 1948 through 1962 was not expressly anti-foreigner/kapya; working to naturalize those who had overstayed or remained. However, the Ne Win government from 1962 through 1988 was openly against ex-foreigner and kapya citizens, passing a new citizenship act in 1982 to downgrade their citizenship to a second class tier. The Myanmar Citizenship Law (1982), which remains in force, has downgraded the legal, political and social stature of ex-foreigner and kapya citizens. A more problematic and racist term thway-nhaw or ‘adulterated’ race has come to the fore, being used in official law-like language in recent years and highlighting the racist roots of the Myanmar Citizenship Law.     

Marketing an imagined Muslim woman: Muslim Girl magazine and the politics of race,gender and representation

This article examines the magazine Muslim Girl (started publication 2007) and explores how the representations on the magazine's pages construct a particular type of identity for Muslim women: an ‘idealized’ Muslim woman who is both North American/Western and Muslim. Such a woman is portrayed as liberal, educated, fashionable, a ‘can-do’ woman, who is also committed to her faith. This ‘ideal’ woman is situated squarely as a neo-liberal subject in an increasingly consumerist world: she is ‘marketable’ (and marketed) as the ‘good Muslim’ (Mamdani, 2004) and is positioned as the ‘familiar stranger’ (Ahmed, 2000) in North America. This so-called ‘modern’ Muslim (read: ‘good Muslim’) is juxtaposed both against the ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim (read: ‘bad Muslim’) and the ‘normalized’ white North American subject. Against the discourse of post 9/11 nationalism and within the context of (gendered) Orientalism, this article argues that such idealized representations present easily recognizable tropes, which serve important political, ideological and cultural purposes within North American society. An analysis of these representations – and the purposes which they serve – provides an important window into the nuances of the structured discourses that seek to control and discipline the gendered Muslim body. On the one hand, the representations in Muslim Girl focus on the so-called ‘integrated North American Muslim’ – a ‘modern’ or ‘good’ Muslim – within the context of the multicultural, neo-liberal and post 9/11 nation-state. On the other hand, these representations also highlight examples of Muslim women, who seemingly remain committed to their faith and community. Such representations of hybridized North American Muslims speak powerfully to the forces – ideological, cultural, political and social – that are at play in the post 9/11 world. In analyzing the representations found in Muslim Girl, this paper provides an insight into some of these forces and their implications.     

Big fat Assyrian/Syriac weddings: rituals and marriage traditions among Middle Eastern Christians in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Weddings can be seen as ‘rites of passage’ and also as ‘symbolic struggles’ since their glamour appears to be a new indicator of status for many families, especially migrant ones. A mixture of traditional as well as reinvented wedding customs serves a community searching for ethnic identity markers that can help it to embrace all of its descendants. This article presents a case study of how Assyrian/Syriac wedding rituals and marriage traditions that are being performed and transformed in the migratory context of Sweden over the last 50 years. Among the Middle Eastern Christians, who have been emigrating from Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq since the 1960s, and which today numbers 120,000 individuals, marriage is a very serious business – a permanent union between spouses and their respective families. The purpose of the article is to analyse Assyrian/Syriac wedding rituals and to discuss how they have shaped the modern Assyrian/Syriac identity. It also explores how local marriages connect and reconnect migrants of this ethno-religious group(s) and how it differentiates them from their peers in the surrounding Swedish society – religiously, socially and even aesthetically.     

What's anger got to do with it? Towards a post-indignation pedagogy for communities in conflict

We argue that anger tends to be naturalized and normalized in social and educational theory and our goal is to problematize the too easy justification of indignation as an emotional resource in political and pedagogical work. Instead we wish to propose the broad contours of a post-indignation pedagogy as a frame for rethinking racism and redefining antiracist and dialogic pedagogy. In the first part of the paper, we offer a genealogy of anger in conflict communities; in particular, our analysis explores the emotionally saturated discourses of anger in our home countries (Australia and Cyprus). In our second move, we draw on figures such as Seneca, Buddhism and Judith Butler for reframings of anger. The reframe we are proposing interrogates two extremes – resignation to anger and resignation from anger – and proposes a ‘middle way’ between these two. Thirdly, in rejecting these two extremes, the paper speculates on possibility of pedagogies of ‘conviviality’, borrowing from Gilroy.     

Taiwan and ROC: A critical analysis of President Chen Shui-bien's construction of Taiwan identity in national speeches

Names used to address Taiwan – such as taiwan and zhonghuamingguo (Republic of China [ROC]) – are symbols defining Taiwan's political realities, each with their own unique historical significance. Since his election in 2000, Taiwan's president Chen Shui-bien has had to alternate between taiwan and ROC to strike a balance among conflicting ideas about Taiwan's national identity. The act is grounded in complex political discourse dictating that Taiwan must not be seen as separate from the sinic world and simultaneously to respond to steadily rising Taiwanese consciousness. Facing intercessions by the United States and China, as well as ever-present domestic clashes, rhetorical exigency requires the president to fashion unique political discourse concerning what Taiwan is and ought to be. This study explores how these names and related expressions are used in Chen's public addresses to the nation during his two-term tenure from 2000 to 2008, and how their development reflects the struggle over Taiwan's national identity.     

Education,identity, and ideology: the Islamic movement and Moslem religious education in Israel

The Islamic Movement, which is called in Arabic Al-harakaat al-islamiyya or Al-haraka al-islamiyya, has, since its foundation in the 1970s, placed emphasis on education, especially the dissemination of the Islamic message. After the movement scored significant successes in local authority elections, its influence increased on the ideological guidelines according to which some of the Arab education system is partially or fully shaped. The article discusses the split in the movement within the State of Israel, and the differences between the southern and northern faction. It also compares Islamic education and Arab education within Israel and abroad in Europe, in countries which have large immigrant Moslem populations.

The education system that the Islamic Movement tries to develop symbolizes the complexity of the relations between it and the state authorities. They are aware that the authorities will not help in differentiation and separation and will not cease from the constant supervision of the movement's educational institutions. Therefore, their choice of a synthesis between formal and informal education or of a partition between pedagogic state education and moral study classes, is a rational, calculated choice, taking into consideration the reality of a cultural – ethnic – national minority.     

On ‘outsourcing’ the political in political science

ABSTRACT

Through a critical analysis of some of the most popular theoretical approaches in mainstream political studies, the paper draws attention to the dichotomist interpretations of the political made by political scientists in the context of social movements, either celebrating their ‘truly’ political and radical nature, or deeming them conformist and post-political. It suggests that both discourses, but especially the insistent discourse of de-politicisation by political scientists must be viewed critically as it contributes to what might be called as ‘outsourcing’ the political merely to social movements while reserving themselves the possibility of remaining politically non-engaged. In encouraging discussion on engaged scholarship in political science, the paper proposes that instead of expecting others to ‘reoccupy’ the political, political scientists should politicise themselves – and do so in a close relationship with social movements through the practices of unlearning privileges and solidarity based on the ‘ethics of sharing’, which can help to transcend the binary between political theory and political practice.     

The anti-policy of European anti-smuggling as a site of contestation in the Mediterranean migration ‘crisis’

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the European anti-smuggling agenda as an anti-policy that derives legitimacy from fighting ‘bad things’, in terms that mask political disagreement. By juxtaposing the agenda to the experiences and understandings of those whom such measures affect most directly – people migrating without authorisation to the EU – it uncovers the productivity of anti-smuggling and the political contestations surrounding it. Based on a qualitative analysis of 257 interviews carried out with 271 people who travelled – or sought to travel – across the Mediterranean Sea by boat using smuggling networks, the article highlights the complicity of governing authorities and officials with smuggling networks and practices, as well as the diversity and ambivalences of relationships between smugglers and the smuggled. Going further, the article points to the specific ways in which anti-smuggling is contested by those on the move, which expose a central political disagreement over the legitimacy of mobility across borders.     

基于“儒家民族主义”范式转向的民族认同机制研究

以建立民族国家为目标,以市场诱因为核心的政治民族主义传播范式在和平时期渐趋僵化,儒家民族主义传播范式更好地弥补了文化连续体缺失的状况,相应地带动了民族认同的强化。本文认为,转向之后应通过仪式性的特殊文化符码来复活传统文化的核心,这样才能最终完成想象共同体的构建及民族认同。     

Popular Culture and Politics: Whispers and the ‘Dramaturgy of Power’ in Kenya

Popular culture has become one of the most visible sites of critical social and political interpretation in post-colonial Africa. It is a site where an alternative public space is created and where various discourses; social, economic and political are invariably debated and negotiated. In many ways its various forms reflect, other times allegorize, fundamental transformation in society. In Kenya, a weekly newspaper column, Whispers, written by one of the country's most prolific fiction writers Wahome Mutahi, became arguably the most visible site of social, cultural and political expression for the last two decades, at a time when freedom to such expression was highly constrained by the state. The column echoed life in Kenya in all its banality but also in its distinctiveness. It interrogated a range of issues but most profoundly, the ‘performance of power’ in the country. Drawing from a pool of cultural resources and various forms of social and political culture, Whispers made legible the ambiguous interactions of ‘political performance’ in Kenya, how the subject population and the polity are all actors in a contradictory carnival of ‘mutual zombification’ which is at once empowering and disempowering. This paper engages with how fiction lays bare the intricacies of ‘political performance’ in the African postcolony using Kenya as a case study.     

The struggle of autonomy and authenticity: framing the savage refugee

James Hathaway has described refugee law as ‘fundamentally oriented to the promotion of autonomy’. Borrowed from the Kantian roots of liberal rights theory, this theme has come to the fore as refugee advocates decry increasingly draconian experiments in deflection and deterrence. But what exactly does it mean for a refugee to exercise autonomy? And how is it connected to that other popular refrain – that those who arrive irregularly by boat in Australia, despite high recognition rates, are not ‘genuine’ refugees? By examining the assumptions underpinning autonomy as a contemporary political value, and working within the theoretical construct that identifies a state's ‘recognition’ of autonomy with authenticity, this article explores tensions within both public discourse on refugees and the discipline of refugee law itself. It considers how and why the refugee exercising ‘authentic’ moral agency by boarding a boat is depicted not just as a threat, but as inherently irrational (and thus not ‘authentically’ autonomous) and less ‘genuine’ (and thus virtuous) than the ‘passive’ refugee languishing in a camp overseas, awaiting ‘our’ redemptive touch. Finally, it asks whether refugee law similarly suffers from the contradictory moral promise of human rights law which places autonomy at its heart while in practice requiring that humanity be split between victim, savage and redeemer.     

Racism,militarisation and policing: police reactions to violence against Palestinian women in Israel

This article moves beyond the discussion of police racism to a broader account of the militaristic racism of policing in Israel. The highly permeable boundaries between the military, society and the political conflict all affect how violence against women is policed. Focusing on case studies of police officers' perceptions of abused Palestinian Israeli women — members of an ethnic and indigenous minority — this paper considers key features of the policing of violence against women in a militaristic context and during a continuous political conflict. Police officers' philosophies and actions in law enforcement concerning violence against women are critically scrutinised. The findings indicate that while some aspects of cultural difference between the indigenous ethnic group and the majority are relevant to policing, focusing predominantly on the ‘cultural characteristics’ or ‘ethnic traditions or rituals’ of the policed population and denying the effect of the political conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as a factor in the militarisation of policing can reinforce rather than ameliorate ethnic prejudice, racism and discrimination.     

Tracing normal lives: between stigma and the will to be Cigano

Despite the stereotyped homogenisation of the Ciganos (or Gypsies/Roma) – often perceived as poor and marginalised – many have in fact taken different personal and family life paths. Taking into account a perspective of differentiated socialisation processes, social and family contexts and frames of life experiences, the aim of this paper is to present the main results obtained from a qualitative study where in-depth interviews were conducted with Ciganos integrated in the Portuguese labour market (as employees). Our focus is on the processes of social integration, on the many revelations of social and cultural pluralism, and on Gypsy identity, centring attentions and how such identification often serves to challenge the static and hegemonic conceptions about the cultural traits and representations of this population.     

A very ‘prudent integration’: white flight,school segregation and the depoliticization of (anti-)racism

This article explores the contemporary legitimation of institutional racism resulting from the prevailing depoliticized framework of integration, which became prominent in the 1960s and is now hegemonic in political and academic debate in Europe. Integration has helped shift the focus to the supposed cultural inadequacies of ethnically marked populations, who ought to show a willingness to pursue the modern dream; simultaneously, it has invisibilized institutional racism and made an anti-racist repertoire unavailable. This argument is illustrated through a case of white flight and school segregation in a rural area in Portugal, revealing both the enduring racism against the Roma/Gypsies – suppressed and repressed throughout the last five centuries in Europe – and its depoliticization within the normal working of institutions. It draws on qualitative research with representatives from public bodies and mediating agents (e.g. teachers and social workers), as well as on analysis of the official reports by the Portuguese state and European institutions.     

Institutions,inculcation, and black racial identity: pigmentocracy vs. the rule of hypodescent

This research paper investigates the effect political institutions have on black racial identity. In particular, I study individual inculcation in contexts where political institutions institutionalize either of two forms of racial social structures – a pigmentocracy (the Dominican Republic), or the rule of hypodescent (the US South), and the effect such inculcation has on black racial identity. I sampled 101 respondents from the Dominican Republic and 102 from the state of Mississippi, USA. Consistent with the basic assumptions of my hypotheses, respondents in the Dominican Republic study sites showed a weaker degree of identification with blackness vis-à-vis something ‘whiter’. Nevertheless, respondents in the Dominican Republic sites demonstrated a stronger identification with blackness than what most conventional observers would have anticipated. Respondents in the Mississippi study sites showed a stronger sense of identification with blackness. Surprisingly, however, Mississippi respondents demonstrated a larger degree of neutrality than expected in their belief of being of a mixed racial heritage rather than just a black African heritage.     

Citizenship, ‘rubbished’ dissidents and local restoration of the dead – the execution of Luri political activists in south-western Iran

The paper's focus is a critical moment in the trajectory of the Islamic state in Iran, the trace of which was still discernible in the presidential election of 2009. It draws on ethnographic research among the Lurs of south-western Iran between 1979–1982 to examine the impact of the abolition of politics as contested representations at the centre on a ‘remote’ periphery. The end of a short-lived political activity, as a distinct form of power, in Iran in 1981 was earmarked by mass executions of which only 1600 had been officially counted for the period of 20 June to September 1981 (Amnesty International). The executed were guilty of expressing dissent against divine rule of which the Islamic state was an embodiment. Although the Lurs paid a less heavy penalty for this ‘crime’ than elsewhere in the country the survivors' response to the loss of a young relative in the hands of Islamic executioners was noticeably muted. The response is looked at as the restoration of the status of the dead to the executed relative whose body had been ‘rubbished’ – wrapped in an American flag and abandoned unburied in a desolate place by the Muslim executioners. The paper argues ‘rubbishing’ signified the annihilation of citizenship under the Islamic rule in which the body of the citizen is seen as harbouring ‘the most corrupt’ subject, the sinner who could not even be ‘rectified’ through a less destructive use of force – flogging and mutilation. It, therefore, had to be disposed of – ‘rubbished’. The survivors, on the other hand, by confining themselves to the symbolic return of the executed relative to the community left unacknowledged his quest for equality and liberty. By their reluctance to remember and recount the executed's words and deeds the survivors refused to grant him the ‘immortality’ of a citizen whose death outlived his destruction. The brutal suppression of political agency at the centre and its muted recognition in the periphery are explained as a negation of political power. The power entails postponing the use of force to the last resort thus allowing plurality as a human condition to be realised. Consequent on this realisation is the publicly contested opinions by many who would inevitably challenge the truths guarded by few both at the centre and periphery. It was this challenge that led the ruling mullahs to invoke the Koranic Truths to annihilate the disseminators of opinions. The unspoken citizenship of the annihilated dissidents in the periphery served in turn to reassert the Lurs' historically cherished otherness geared to the use of force. The citizenship called for a discursive inclusion of Lurs, through the use of ‘the pen’, in a wider world, by postponing the use of force. In contrast, the traditional Luri rebels relied heavily on an immediate use of force, through the celebrated ‘rifle’, to perpetuate their perceived inaccessibility. Resistance leads to emancipation, the paper argues, when the particularised subjectivity of local actors is superseded in the universal – objectified – political space in which the agent, i.e. the citizen, overrides the boundaries within which localness is reproduced.     

Too hot to handle: African Caribbean pupils and students as toxic consumers and commodities in the educational market

Secondary sources are used in this paper to highlight how African Caribbean pupils and students – the Black British-born descendants of post-war Caribbean migrants – are victims of symbolic violence, because they are denied the educational capital needed to improve their social status. Since African Caribbean children entered the 1960s British educational sector, their learning has been perceived as problematic by the State. Although assimilation, integration and multicultural education policies were implemented to supposedly address the ‘problem’ of educating Black children, subsequent government reports identified racism as a significant barrier in their education. I argue here that the contemporary marketisation of education makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between racism and competition, as causal factors of ethnic differences in educational attainment. Moreover, due to increasing private sector intervention and decreasing mediation by the State, racism is now hidden within the vicissitudes of the educational market. School exclusions and discriminatory practices in universities are viewed in this paper as major barriers to the economic success and future social mobility of Black Caribbean pupils and students. I conclude by suggesting that marketisation policies can be appropriated to ameliorate racism in education, but only if the political will to do so exists.