Financialization,resistance, and the question of women’s land rights

The financialization of food and agricultural land has been a critical driver of the “land-grabbing” phenomenon in the post 2007–2008 period: the potential for land to be both a productive and financial asset has driven interest in long-term land rentals and sales. Scholars and activists have highlighted the negative effects of these trends for rural populations. International institutions have promoted the recognition of land rights as a means to secure land from seizure, ensure equal participation in land acquisitions, and enable low-income populations, including women, to access credit. At the same time, activists are promoting collective land rights, customary modes of land tenure and the rights of Indigenous peoples. For activists, land reform models that promote the collective rights of peoples to govern land are critical to resisting individualized land ownership models that encourage the alienation of land. This article reviews these rights-based frameworks using a critical feminist perspective and argues that both the institutionalist and activist approaches require more nuanced understandings of gender and difference in order to effect gender-equitable change. This article concludes by mapping new feminist research directions that consider land and resources within the context of local–global processes, the global economy, intersectionality and global rights-based discourses.     

The effect of existing land tenure systems on urban land development: A case study of Kenya’s secondary towns,with emphasis on Kisumu

The Kenya Government has over a number of years pursued policies geared towards the promotion of secondary towns. Included in this strategy is the achievement of an orderly and coordinated urban land development. However, experience from these towns indicates that, planned land development has encountered a lot of bottlenecks particularly in relation to the institution of private ownership of land. This paper traces the land tenure systems that have existed in the Kenya’s secondary towns. In general, the paper examines the effects of land tenure forms on the provision of housing and the related infrastructure. The effects of existing land tenure identified include influence on housing development, influence on planned land development, cloudiness of titles, hoarding and speculation, insecurity, inflexibility and inequity. The paper concludes by making suggestions based on the observed bottlenecks that should be considered to encourage and promote systematic urban land development in secondary towns.     

Editor’s Notes

As we were editing this issue, wereceived the news that the renowned writerBing Xin had passed away. We were deeplygrieved over her death. Bing Xin, old as the century, had     

Editor’s Notes

CHINA has achieved great leaps in the 20 years since it launched itsreform. Economically it has reached a vital junction — the reform ofstate-owned enterprises. China is aiming to enable the majority of thelarge- or medium-sized state-owned enterprises to rid themselves of deficitand those serving as China's economic backbone to establish a modernenterprise system, all by the end of the century. This is the hard, urgent taskfacing the Chinese people. In this reform, women have given, and are stillgiving, an important contribution. Wang Hongming, General Manager of theShenyang Dawn Garments Group, provides a suitable focus for this issue.     

Europe’s Role in China’s Transition to Superpower Status

What can Western powers do today to ease an eventual global power shift resulting from the rise of superpowers such as China? This paper suggests that part of the answer lies in the same power-binding institutions that allowed the US to rise post WWII without threatening its allies. Continuity in the rules of the global system during a great power transition would promote stability by reducing uncertainty, as well as the extent to which material power can be used coercively. I argue that current superpowers, the EU among them, have an interest in ensuring an equitable distribution of the gains from cooperation. While distributional issues are usually treated in normative terms, they take on very real, material meaning in the context of a great power transition. With this in mind, I look at three aspects of the current global institutional framework that would benefit from reform: international trade and aid, institutional design, and institutional proliferation. In all three cases, a more equal distribution of the gains from institutions today increases the odds that those institutional arrangements will remain in the future.     

A children’s election—Dilemmas of children’s political participation

In this article, we explore how fifth graders (9–10-year-olds) and their teachers view children's participation in a parliamentary election for children arranged by Save the Children Norway in 2017. The participants draw on available discursive resources when making sense of children's political positions in society. In the discursive resources, longstanding tensions surrounding children, childhood and politics come to the surface. We conclude that although children's position in politics remains marginal, there are ways to move beyond the tensions to be able to imagine children as political actors.     

Nailing One’s Colours: Tate Britain’s Artist and Empire

Taking the view that national art museums should represent the multifarious populations they serve, this article explores racial material in Tate Britain’s high-profile exhibition Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past (2015). The exhibition gave extensive coverage to two aspects of empire: hybrid fusions and the myth of white heroism, but gave limited attention to colonization as a maximally coercive system built on racist imaginings and abuse. Through cross-examination of the exhibition’s content and absences, I explore whether Tate Britain is setting out the ‘building blocks’ for more diverse practice.     

In Laura’s House

Eaton’s images offer us an eerie dream of blistering empathy using Donna and Laura, the iconic teenage friends of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, as identificatory paths into a sexualized female psyche divided against itself by the paternal violence at the heart of an “ordinary” family. This graphic vignette is one of simultaneously poignant, radical, and therapeutic solidarity and survival, the monstrously violating figures peopling Laura Palma’s world becoming recognizable, if only for a short, privileged time, to the hitherto unspoiled eyes of her best friend Donna.     

The Adoptee’s Journey

The subject of adoption has often been mired in wishful thinking and denial. Because of the secrecy in the system, adopted children have beenforced to repress their need to know about their origins; many feel invisible because an essential part of them is unacknowledged by their adoptive parents and society. The purpose of this article is to help mental health and legal professionals, as well as those in the extended community, to see what is specific about the formation of the adoptee’s inner world. It introduces the concept of cumulative adoption trauma and discusses the adoptee's need to dissociate feelings of loss, grief and anger. The struggle to form a coherent sense of selfmay eventually lead to the adoptee's need to search out the birth parents in order to integrate the past and the present and move on into the future.     

Vygotsky’s Anomalous Spinozism

Abstract

This article exposes sources and influences of Spinoza in some of Vygotsky’s works, keeping in mind its meaning for the creation of a “new man” in Soviet Socialism. We try to understand the features of Vygotsky´s reading of Spinoza in an active dialogue with contemporary studies of 17th-century philosophy and its consequences for a materialist psychology. In this direction, we discuss references to Spinoza done by Vygotsky in the context of the latter’s argumentative style as well as studies of Engels, Plekhanov and Deborin as possible sources in Vygotsky´s approach to Spinoza. Paraphrasing Negri´s take on Spinoza as the “wild anomaly” of the 17th-century, we argue that Vygotsky performed an anomalous reading of Spinoza. In spite of the similarities with Deborin´s view of the modern philosopher, Vygotsky had plans that were more ambitious for Spinozist materialism and determinism. We trace the anomalous way in that the latter´s materialism reveals itself as one of randomness and contingency, against a rigidly structured projection of state, society, or model of human beings. We cannot figure out exactly which “model of man“ Vygotsky had in mind in his take on Spinoza, but we are able to recognize some core aspects in his reasoning. Roughly, these include the unity between mind and body, which can take the most diverse forms in the common body of multitude; the bases of consciousness in the affection; the integration, in the psychological systems, of affect, will, and desire; and the Spinozan ethics as a reference to life.