Rethinking resistance under authoritarianism: civil society and non-contentious forms of contestation in post-uprisings Egypt

ABSTRACT

In 2018 President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi secured a second presidential term in a constrained political environment exacerbated by his control over the media, prosecution of journalists and activists, and his crackdown on civil society. As a result of such resilient authoritarianism, the optimism that once defined the Egyptian uprisings has turned into cynicism. This article contributes to the literature surrounding civil society and resistance in authoritarian contexts by offering an examination of the interplay between authoritarian tendencies and their resistance in post-uprisings Egypt. I argue that we should view al-Sisi’s regime as representing an authoritarian system that is not absolute, despite its soft and hard repressive methods, but one that still offers limited space for civil society organizations (CSOs) to function. This limited space importantly comprises covert resistance methods which can offer Egyptian CSOs opportunities to resist the state’s legal and extra-legal restrictions. The resistance methods considered in this article need to be understood in Gramscian terms as they encompass the limited means available by which CSOs can negotiate the terrain of hegemonic contestation under the existing authoritarian context. Given al-Sisi’s re-election and the sustained crackdown on Egyptian civil society, the need to analyse such forms of resistance is pertinent.     

Coming out in camouflage: A queer theory perspective on the strength,resilience, and resistance of lesbian,gay, bisexual,and transgender service members and veterans

ABSTRACT

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) service members have made profound contributions to the U.S. military despite serving under anti-LGBT military policies. Little is known about their everyday acts of strength and resistance, which is vital information for developing strengths-based services. This article utilizes a queer theory framework to (a) discuss LGBT military contributions and anti-LGBT military policies, (b) explore three LGBT-specific military minority stressors, and (c) identify four strategies of strength and resistance used to manage an anti-LGBT military environment. Clinical suggestions are proposed for integrating military and LGBT identities and designing interventions that blend military and LGBT cultures.     

Beyond control: the criminalization of African asylum seekers in Israel

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the discursive process of criminalization of African asylum seekers in Israel. The Israeli case illuminates the way that marginalized social groups are constructed as a criminal threat, thus becoming a focal point of moral panic. Using content analysis, in-depth interviews and observations, we assert that the criminalization of asylum seekers is facilitated by their portrayal as ‘infiltrators’ who are beyond state control. State authorities’ ostensible inability to keep asylum seekers under surveillance is dialectically constructed along two main axes: the private space axis and the public space axis. On the private space axis, the asylum seekers are portrayed as unidentified people living beyond the authorities’ field of vision whose largely unreported criminality is directed against vulnerable asylum seeker women and children in the private sphere. At the same time, asylum seekers are portrayed as a prominent, faceless and animalistic presence in public space, a presence that breaches physical-spatial borders as well as social-cultural boundaries, thereby undermining the social order. Thus, asylum seekers are viewed as conspicuously invisible. This rhetoric connects border violation with criminal activity; emphasizes the pent-up potential for violence by asylum seekers; and blurs the lines between criminal threat and security threat.     

“It was totally different than what we had before”: Perceptions of urban militarism under Rio de Janeiro’s Pacifying Policing Units

Scholars argue that military ideologies, discourses, and practices are increasingly deployed in poor urban areas to control populations deemed “dangerous.” However, very little research exists to document how residents in targeted neighborhoods experience these security interventions. This article addresses this gap by considering the case of Rio de Janeiro’s UPP Program, wherein the military police occupied several of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, or low-income marginalized neighborhoods. The intervention began in 2008 and aimed to expel drug traffickers who had controlled these areas since the 1970s and install permanent policing precincts. While many studies suggest that the urban poor tend to reject aggressive policing practices, the UPP received widespread approval by favela residents in the first years of the occupation. This article draws upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the City of God, one of the first neighborhoods occupied by the UPP, to examine the factors underlying residents’ positive assessment of the UPP. I found that support for the UPP hinged on (a) its deviation from the brutal and ineffective military interventions deployed in the past; (b) the UPP’s ability to subdue violent drug traffickers and restore public security; (c) state investments in social services and resources attributed to the occupation; and (d) the race, gender, and age profiles of participants, wherein women, the elderly, and lighter-skinned residents reported greater approval for the UPP than young Black men. Ultimately, these findings suggest that variability between security interventions, their impact on public security and social development, and demographic diversity within targeted neighborhoods must be considered if we are to fully understand how the urban poor experience militarized security interventions.     

Military,Masculinity, and Citizenship: Tensions and Contradictions in the Experience of Blue-Collar Soldiers

This article seeks to problematize the relationship between military service, masculinity, and citizenship, from the perspective of lower-class soldiers who serve in blue-collar roles in the Israeli military. Introducing class and ethnicity into the “taken for granted” equation of men, military, and the state reveals counter-hegemonic conceptions of masculinity and citizenship, and exposes tense and often contradictory relationships between them.

Based on in-depth interviews, I argue that blue-collar Israeli soldiers simultaneously accept and challenge the hegemonic Zionist conceptions of both masculinity and citizenship. Unlike the combat soldiers, blue-collar soldiers demonstrate gender and national identities that are not anchored in military life. Rather, these soldiers present an alternative version of “home-based masculinity,” which grants the family superiority over the military and the state. This masculinity is expressed through two recurring themes: ongoing resistance to military discipline and authority, and an emphasis on the role of the provider over the role of the soldier. Through these daily military practices, the soldiers express their rejection of the republican “principle of contribution” as a criterion to one's belonging to the collective. However, their conception of citizenship emphasizes a militant ethno-national discourse. The discrepancy between their antimilitaristic practices and their militant patriotism reflects their ambivalent socio-political location in Israeli society between their preferred location as Jews and their marginal location as Mizrachim of lower classes. These ambivalent identities reveal that a mutual affirming connection between the military, masculinity, and the state exists only for hegemonic groups. For non-hegemonic groups, the relationship between masculinity, military, and citizenship is ridden with conflicts and inner contradictions.     

Roads,tribes, and identity in Northeast India

ABSTRACT

Along with military expeditions and social and anthropological surveys, road-building projects were prominent strategies of the British in India when it came to dealing with tribes and territorialization of the frontier regions. Roads for territorial expansion and resource extraction were the core agenda of the colonial project in Northeast India. The post-colonial Indian state on the other hand built roads in the region for securing the borders, promoting national integration, and linking external markets. This article posits that road building has always been an act of power, which has at different times been aimed at smoothening relationships, securing borders, (dis)connecting people, enabling trade, creating spaces of contestation, or diluting boundaries between varied ethnic groups. The article analyzed the colonial state-making project through road construction and linked to the contemporary Indian state approach to infrastructure development in tribal-dominated areas of Northeast India.     

‘Germany Has Become Mohammedan’: Insurgency,Long-Distance Travel,and the Singapore Mutiny, 1915

Abstract

The mutiny that took place in Singapore in February 1915 is usually dismissed as a footnote in the history of empire. One reason why it is marginalized is because the mutiny does not conform to a politics that seeks the formation of an independent territorial nation-state as its inevitable conclusion. This article returns to that initial moment of insurgency to argue that the mutiny offers a unique window into the political imaginaries of British Indian soldiers, seen as military migrant workers. A close reading of soldiers’ letters against the Rowlatt Committee's Sedition Report suggests a politics of equality and emancipation uncontaminated by the desire for national liberation. Two kinds of insurgency thus become visible: international space as an unsettled zone of attraction and desire and a nascent political subjectivity that rejects the disciplines of imperial military labor. The primary causes of these transformations, I argue, are the insurgent effects of long-distance travel.     

From free womb to criminalized woman: fertility control in Brazilian slavery and freedom

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the abolition of slavery affected the prosecution of abortion and infanticide in Rio de Janeiro. Analysing judicial documents, criminal and civil legislation, and travel writings, it demonstrates that the state did not prosecute enslaved women for fertility control due to the contradictory legal status of their bodies as both property and person. After abolition, the state prosecuted all women, but particularly poor women of colour, for these crimes. The article argues that as patriarchal control over women’s reproductive capabilities moved from the private to the public sphere, fertility control became a central axis on which the state articulated gendered and racialized power.     

Necropenology: conquering new bodies,psychics, and territories of death in East Jerusalem

ABSTRACT

In theorising penal politics, this article investigates the marking of the colonised through an analysis of state violence over dead bodies. Delving into and describing the political scene in which the state – through its courts, law, military, and police – leaves dead bodies bleeding after death, withholds them in carceral refrigerators, and tortures their communities, uncovers what I define as necropenology. Developed from the voices of Jerusalemite families whose children were imprisoned after death, this paper argues that expanding spaces of carcerality, criminalising those who are already dead, and penetrating Palestinian spaces of mourning, illustrates new modes of penology, a necropenology. Necropenology conquers new bodies, psychics, and territories in life and in death through the performance of power that marks both dead and living bodies as disposable. Jerusalemite families articulate first-hand how this form of power strips control of one’s own emotions, inscribes indignities, and keeps the colonised as dangerous entities, always on trial in death and when dead.     

Suburbia under siege: Low‐income housing and racial conflict in metropolitan Kansas City, 1970–1990

This article examines racial conflicts over efforts to build low‐income government‐subsidized housing in Kansas City suburbs from 1970 to 1990. Drawing on public documents, housing reports and analyses, and local newspaper accounts, I examine how suburban residents have reacted to and organized against government attempts to construct housing for low‐income people outside the inner city. I argue that the mobilization of suburban Whites against low‐income housing has been due to the perceived threat state‐led integration efforts have posed to White privileged access to, and control over, suburban housing practices (i.e., single‐family homeownership, racially exclusive neighborhoods, etc.). An analysis of the racial conflicts and struggles over housing integration illustrates the social construction of White racial identity and the constructed identity of the suburban homeowner. In conclusion, I discuss how single‐family homeownership, a fundamental characteristic of American suburbs, imputes distinct social meaning to urban space and serves as a basis of political mobilization along racial lines.     

Silence‐breaking butterfly effect: Resistance towards the military within #MeToo

Systemic violence against women in the military has existed for decades, but they have mostly refrained from public resistance. However, in the context of the #MeToo movement in Sweden, 1768 women published a call for an end to violence and sexual harassment in the military. We analyse this call as a public resistance effort against the military and find that #MeToo is: (i) challenging the norms of the hyper‐masculine military organization, making resistance towards it visible; and (ii) resisting the practices of sexual harassment and lack of responsibility in the military organization. The military organization is questioned when it comes to norms and practices, but there are variations in whether the social order of the military is truly challenged. Still, the call highlights the fragmentation of this ‘last bastion of masculinity’. More research is needed on the erosion of the militarized norms and practices and the effects of the call.     

Cruising,space and surveillance: decolonizing sexuality in Singapore

ABSTRACT

The policing of homosexuality in Singapore through legislation and public policy are imbued with colonial legacies that have enshrined heteronormative values within its public sphere. However, communities within new online spaces in Singapore disrupt the heteronormative surveillance efforts deployed by the state within public, family and political landscapes. Through an analysis of a local online forum dedicated to cruising this article unpacks how local gay men resist, negotiate and deploy surveillance techniques to navigate these heteronormative structures and cruise safely in Singapore. This article demonstrates how online spaces have become part of an everyday resistance that characterize modern-day efforts to decolonize sexuality in Singapore.     

REPRODUCING REGIMES OF IMPUNITY

In India, the phrase ‘fake encounter’ refers to the extrajudicial killing of a civilian followed by the official claim that the victim was a Pakistani infiltrator killed in a legitimate military encounter with police or army forces. This article explores the widespread pattern of fake encounters in Kashmir Valley in order to shed light on the processes through which violence and terror become fictionalized and fantastic, with Kashmiri bodies gaining a heightened visibility in a falsified form within a cultural imaginary of national security interests and public safety concerns. Identifying Kashmir Valley as a state of exception, I examine how the suspension of the rule of law gives rise to new agents and hierarchies of power and authority and new patterns of criminalization and paramilitarization throughout Kashmiri society. I also consider how the informalized practices of forced disappearance, fictionalized terror, and impunity for violence are produced and reproduced through the strategic manufacturing of public consent for violence against Kashmiris throughout Indian society at large.     

“Backstage Autonomy”: Religious-Zionist State Widows in Second Marriages Manage Competing Expectations

ABSTRACT

The article examines the coping mechanisms of state widows belonging to Israel’s Religious-Zionist sector, whose husbands died at an early age either during military service or in terrorist attacks. While the national bereaved community’s collective unconscious expects the widows to dedicate their lives to institutionalized commemoration of their dead husband, Jewish tradition expects them to remarry to rehabilitate their family and children. The widows who were studied seemed to manage the competing expectations successfully: they remarried and maintained a happy family life while entrusting commemoration to the bereaved parents, who are still part of their extended family. The findings point to successful manipulation of the patriarchy of both communities to which they belong, achieving individualization that offers freedom in the private sphere—what we call “Backstage Autonomy”—while perpetuating hegemony on the public level on the Front Stage.     

Ventriloquism,racism and the politics of decoloniality in Ecuador

ABSTRACT

This article discusses two forms of discrimination against indigenous people: ventriloquism and open racism, and argues that a transition from paternalism to open intolerance has taken place in Ecuador in the context of governmental emphasis on natural resource extraction. Ventriloquism, when non-Indians speak for indigenous people, is analysed through the Sumak Kawsay (Good Living) policies of the government of Rafael Correa (2007–2017). Public racism is examined by looking at government repression against indigenous leaders and communities and Presidential speeches. The article concludes that the state’s ventriloquist and racist discourses and practices are equally rooted in the country’s colonial past. These findings are contrasted with the writings of scholars that have called the government of Mr. Correa decolonizing. The article examines the ways in which decolonial theorists informed and promoted the policies of this regime, and argues that decolonial scholars have been insufficiently self-critical and reflective of their own complicity with the state’s repressive project vis-à-vis indigenous communities.     

Slave trading and slave resistance in the Indian Ocean world: the case of early eighteenth-century Bengal

ABSTRACT

This article examines slave trading and slave resistance in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the English East India Company (EIC) settlements in early eighteenth-century Bengal. VOC and EIC officials exported slaves from Bengal, but also imported slaves from all over the Indian Ocean littoral. The various acts of resistance by settlement slaves show that these slaves utilized their cultural backgrounds as well as their knowledge of diverse cultural and political milieus of early eighteenth-century Bengal in creating a cosmopolitan culture of resistance. These dynamics of slave trading and resistance place Bengal within a trans-regional, Indian Ocean network of slavery.     

Incorporation and Gated Communities in the Greater Metro-Los Angeles Region as a Model of Privatization of Residential Communities

ABSTRACT

The privatization of urban public space has accelerated through the closing, redesign, and policing of public parks and plazas, the development of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) that monitor and control local streets and parks, and the transfer of public air rights for the building of corporate plazas ostensibly open to the public. In the suburbs, privatization also takes the form of conservation easements that restrict access to public lands, the creation of shopping malls and new town centers relocated within these private commercial developments, and the building of gated residential communities. Accompanying this expansion of private interests are changes in strategies of governance and regional differences in how local governments and residents are encouraging private encroachment on public space. This article focuses this third set of privatization practices by discussing how gated communities manipulate municipal and town planning laws to control public space and tax dollars. To accomplish this task, I discuss the emergence of gated communities as a new form of privatization of urban/suburban space and then tease out the legal and institutional underpinnings of this spatial governance. The geography of gated communities in greater metro-Los Angeles region and their use of the strategy of incorporation to capture public taxes for private use is employed as a model for understanding the future of gating in the United States. The Los Angeles model is then compared to current gating patterns in urban and suburban gated communities in New York and Texas. These manipulations of private land use controls in the United States are not necessarily new, but with gating there is an accelerating trend away from governmental and public control of land use toward an increased reliance on privately created controls. The consequences of this shift toward privatization of land use control is an impoverishment of the public realm and access to public resources, especially public space.     

Drugs,the state and global change: A contemporary European perspective

Abstract

This article examines the issue of illicit drug control across three broad levels of analysis. On one level, it examines the nature of the response to a ‘global phenomenon’ and its impact on national sovereignty. On a second level, it considers emergent state forms and practices and their relationship to global changes; and, thirdly, it grounds the analysis temporally and empirically in the contemporary European Union (focusing on the issues raised in relation to an emergent European Police Office, better known as Europol). The complex, evolving and essentially fragmented character of state power is placed in the context of the classic state functions of authority and control. This is set against the growing transnational role of expert knowledge in policy‐making, and concludes with an assessment of the political implications that can be drawn from analysis of this complex set of factors.     

Abandoned negatives,Themeless Parks: images of contemporary China in two photographic projects

Abstract

This article juxtaposes two photographic projects to illustrate ways of perceiving everyday space in contemporary China: on the one hand, ‘Silvermine Project’ (2009–2013), by French collector and editor Thomas Sauvin, recycles a vast collection of abandoned film negatives from the 1980s to the early 2000s, and subsequently ‘curates’ these amateur images into the frame of a quasi-ethnographic approach. On the other hand, Hong Kong photographer Dustin Shum’s ‘Themeless Parks’ (2008) presents a series images of public parks in Chinese cities and towns. The two projects propose different readings of the ‘postsocialist’ condition in contemporary China. While the domestic shots curated by Sauvin actively mobilise individual and national identities in private and public spaces, Shum’s compositions of shape, colour and architectural density reveal a highly orchestrated ‘China’ that pre-empts the emergence of an individual identity. This paper analyses the textual articulations of individuality, space, and temporality in the two projects.     

'I've Seen Changes'

Abstract

This article examines the political efficacy and effectiveness of American Indian and Hispanic women leaders in New Mexico. Using qualitative data from personal interviews with 50 grassroots activists and public officials involved in state, local, and/or tribal politics, I address the following research questions: Do American Indian and Hispanic grassroots activists and public officials perceive themselves as politically efficacious? How do their perceptions of efficacy differ? How effective are these activists and officials at influencing public policy and politics in New Mexico? The findings indicate that there are greater similarities among grassroots activists and public officials, as well as among Native and Hispanic women leaders, than might be expected from readings of classic political science literature. More importantly, while the majority of the leaders feel personally efficacious, there is substantial evidence of their impact both at the organizational level and in the larger political arena of state, local, and tribal politics.