Paper short abstract:

The categories “refugee” and “displaced person” are important to authorities and to people in such situations. It is revealing to not separate those who could not or would not leave from those who must or do. I focus on what is refused to and by all such people to clarify current transformations

Paper long abstract:

The categories "refugee" and "displaced person" are important

to states, lawyers, and relief organizations, and of course of crucial

importance to people trying to live in these situations. But to

understand the transformative processes that are being reshaped, in

the recurrent times and places where impending tomorrows are being

made increasingly less viable for large numbers of people, it is

important not to separate those who could not or would not leave from

those who must or do. This paper uses a grasp on what is refused by

the dominant to all such people when a viable tomorrow is increasingly

denied, and what the victims themselves refuse, far beyond leaving,

Out of this can be developed an expanded sense of fields of struggle.

Not arenas of struggle - that is too neat and too bounded a concept

to grasp the expanding possibilities of evasion, resistance and

confrontation as a viable tomorrow is made to decline.

Paper short abstract:

NGOs are increasing activity across Aboriginal Australia, addressing ravages of violence and marginalisation and efforts of local people to re-empower themselves. The effects are concerning: lack of government accountability, vacuum of moral authority, and demands to conform to new subjectivities.

Paper long abstract:

Australia does not use development rhetoric in addressing the often extreme disadvantage, violence and social stress being experienced by Aboriginal peoples. To do so might suggest it was not looking after its own citizens. However, in recent years there has been a shift from the largely failed approach of direct government intervention to using a variety of non-government organisations, (seemingly) removed from government. These NGOs operate at the intersections where material, social and cultural histories have converged to produce unliveable lives. They take on various roles, addressing material, legal and cultural needs and aspirations, and may work at local, regional or national levels. They include long-standing mainstream NGOS, such as World Vision and Save the Children; philanthropists developing pet projects in education or health; and Indigenous-controlled organisations, many of which receive government funding but operate as NGOs. I focus on two effects of this movement. One is the way in which they elide government responsibility and accountability, while taking over the authority and decision making power of people at the local level. The second is the way in which they are manipulating, through conditions of support as well as non-locally controlled criteria of recognition, what constitutes 'Aboriginality'. Are they really 'empowering' as they claim, or are they the latest Trojan horse in Australia's ongoing efforts to deny its history and deny the legitimacy of difference?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the consequences of Indigenous displacement from their territories.

Paper long abstract:

Fields of Refusal: The Consequences of Failing to Act

In Canada Indigenous rights are in part defined and delimited through litigation and negotiation, but the implementation and exercising of rights are highly contentious processes, often confounded by jurisdictional contests between federal and provincial governments over fiduciary responsibilities and pervasive systemic discrimination that devalues Indigenous knowledge and favours assimilation over recognition. The legitimacy of Canadian claims of sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and their lands are being challenged through Indigenous peoples' reinvigoration of their refusal to be denied, the successful pursuit of Treaty rights litigation, and the national movement of reconciliation. In response to the negative legacy of colonization, Indigenous communities across Canada are demanding not only participation in, but control over, the decision-making and institution-building processes that influence the quality of their lives and reflect their constitutionally and Treaty protected rights as Indigenous peoples.This paper explores the consequences of Indigenous displacement from their territories and assesses the potentials of current mobilizations of Indigenous and Settler treaty obligations, the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples for addressing this deracination and in the making of viable tomorrows.

Paper short abstract:

Working from labour conflict in 2016, this paper revisits the fictive values assigned to the lives and labour of domestic service workers under the current modalities of capitalism in Hong Kong; and within the grand fiction of Philippine migration as development.

Paper long abstract:

In 2016, yet another conflict erupted in Hong Kong over the contractual regulations governing employment conditions for the city's 330,000 migrant domestic service workers; in this instance, with regards to unsafe labour practice of exterior window cleaning in high-rise apartments. Protagonists in the ensuing debate included the Philippines, home to over half the workers, migrants' rights advocates, and an association representing employers. Commencing with an examination of the workers' labour process, this paper teases out what is at stake for the various participants in this instance where social reproductive labour is devalued despite its fundamental importance to the modalities of capitalism in Hong Kong, and elsewhere in the region. While much has been written about the exploitative conditions confronting migrant domestic service workers, this paper revisits scenarios for Philippine migrant workers in light of current political and economic instabilities rendering ever more obvious the grand fiction of migration as development.

Paper short abstract:

Dans la foulée d'un certain engouement global envers les « startups » et le petit entrepreneuriat comme moteur de changement social, je poserai un regard croisé entre les aspirations et les difficultés rencontrées par de jeunes entrepreneurs européens vivant à Mexico depuis quelques années.

Paper long abstract:

Le Mexique aspire à se classer parmi les économies mondiales « émergentes ». La ville de Mexico en particulier, de par la densité de sa population, est caractérisée par une diversité d'opportunités économiques. Tel que dans de la plupart des métropoles et villes globales, on y retrouve une promotion grandissante de l'idée de « startups ». Depuis les cinq dernières années, les espaces de coworking, les incubateurs et les accélérateurs d'entreprises y prolifèrent. Ces concepts sous-tendent une valorisation des notions d'innovation et de créativité. Bien que le sujet soit peu traité, beaucoup de jeunes adultes occidentaux vivent à Mexico et participent aux transformations de pratiques économiques et culturelles dans la ville. Plusieurs d'entre eux tentent d'y développer un projet entrepreneurial. Dans cette présentation, j'argumente que cette initiative s'accompagne d'une obligation à le faire croître. Or, ces jeunes courent le risque que les perspectives d'avenir qu'ils projettent pour leur entreprise demeurent de l'ordre du rêve. Ainsi, je discuterai des difficultés et des incertitudes que nombre d'entre eux rencontrent. L'analyse s'arrêtera sur deux dimensions culturelles issues du capitalisme « flexible » et « connexionniste », soient un certain affaiblissement du filet social et la prépondérance de l'individualité de l'entrepreneur au sein du projet. Selon mon analyse, le processus migratoire vécu par les participants renforce ces deux dimensions. Les données présentées sont tirées d'entrevues effectuées à Mexico auprès d'une quinzaine de ces entrepreneurs européens, de huit personnes actives dans le milieu de l'entrepreneuriat et des observations effectuées dans cinq lieux de coworking.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how attracting mobile capital to revitalize the stagnant economy of a disempowered border city (Turkey/Syria) were closely enmeshed with urban restructuring, land grabbing, dispossessed labor, increased debt and the war economy, within which the “culture” plays an important role.

Paper long abstract:

On the basis of empirical material about the capital restructuring of a border city (Turkey/Syria), this paper focuses on the social and "cultural" in land grabbing and labor in the value creation processes taking place in the city. It aims to show how the efforts to attract mobile capital to revitalize the stagnant economy of this disempowered city were closely enmeshed with the urban restructuring and the war economy, within which the "culture" plays an important role. It explores the entangled processes of attracting the desired capital, achieving growth, revaluing land, but also the new forms of land grabbing, impoverishment of the population and the increased city debt. It also explores how these simultaneous processes opened new possibilities for the city residents for alliances and solidarities in contentious politics. This paper calls for a multiscalar analysis of value creation (with a special emphasis on the social of re/devaluing of land and labor), which in turn necessitates the deployment of a concept of historical conjuncture.

Paper short abstract:

Individual lives in wake of Capital and State must survive through continues (re)making of livelihood and dreams. Thus, the history of garment industry and the labour in Bangladesh, its current conditions and future prospects are intricately connected with national and international policies.

Paper long abstract:

The garment industries in Bangladesh employ more than 4 million people in about 4500 factories (national and multi-national). Export earnings from the garments sector were USD 116.2 million in 1984/85 that increased to USD 24491.88 million in 2013-14. This growth of the export oriented garment industry in Bangladesh has been flourishing through investment of foreign capital since 1980s, as Multi-National Companies (MNCs) contracting production to locally owned firms and the State pursed the strategy of export-oriented industrialization. Hence, based on ethnographic information, I argue that the 'geographical mobility of capital' at the global level, which started come to Bangladesh during 1980s, initiated a process of 'accumulation by dispossession'. Further, greater levels of inequality have been created due to inherent power imbalances in the global market relations between multi-national corporations, local industries and the workers; and the benefits of this export oriented growth accumulates to those at the top of the supply chains at the expense of those at the bottom which disproportionately include women and migrant workers. I have found that the labour of the export oriented garment factories continuously (re)make and (re)map their livelihood options as well as their dreams of a 'good life'. Besides, oligarchic business corporations use and override state and international polices to exploit the labour. Therefore, I argue that, the history of the flourishing garment industry and the labour in Bangladesh, its current conditions and its future prospects are intricately connected with policies formulated at the national and even more, at the international level.

Paper short abstract:

Shifts in capitalism’s interest that bear on the state illuminate the expansion and subsequent containment of homelands movements in remote Indigenous Australia. The analysis addresses fictions of capitalism, the law, and of political economy more broadly.

Paper long abstract:

In Australia's Northern Territory, self-determination for remote Indigenous people mainly has consisted in land rights and a homelands movement now frustrated by bipartisan neo-liberal policies. The frame for this discussion is the expansion and subsequent containment of self-determination by initial and ongoing primitive accumulations of land and its resources, first to the benefit of agricultural interests and, more recently, trans-national mining corporations. Indeed, a major dimension of land rights has been state-imposed procedures for negotiations over land which facilitates mineral extraction by the corporations. Nonetheless, these measures promoted a homelands movement including local Indigenous governance, stopped in its tracks by two further shifts in global capitalism. From the 1940s on, one was the decline in agricultural employment due to technological change and, in relative terms, the increasing importance of mining. The other, from the 1980s on was the effect of Bretton-Woods' demise on an economy geared to trade in commodities. Banks were deregulated and rising debt at all levels placed pressure on governments. A neo-liberal turn brought aggressive cost-cutting in many areas, including Indigenous affairs. The post-war social democratic initiatives that culminated in land rights acts are now on hold as youth incarceration escalates. This paper discusses various fictions including 'settlement,' 'property ownership' and 'the market,' as well as 'sovereignty' and 'self-determination' within the context of a capitalist state. For remote Indigenous youth, a final fiction (of political economy) is the centrality of 'work.' Indigenous youth are disaffected as much as 'unemployed,' a circumstance with both positive and hurtful effects.

Paper short abstract:

One of capitalism’s key fictions is that despite the miseries that the working population experience in other areas of life, the food it consumes, at least, is “cheap.” But what if capital accumulation around food now is encountering physico- material limits in capital’s appropriation of nature?

Paper long abstract:

One of contemporary capitalism's key fictions is that, despite the miseries that the working population has inflicted upon it in other areas of life, the food it consumes, at least, is "cheap." As long as the majority of the population is able to buy sufficient food at affordable prices, capitalism, while not seen as admirable, is at least viewed as tolerable. However as EP Thompson's (1971) "Moral Economy of the English Crowd" indicated, capitalist and state legitimacies are thrown into question when this becomes impossible for a large proportion of the working population.

The question this paper poses is: What explains the logics of capital accumulation around food and food prices, and thus the legitimacy of capital and the state, in the contemporary period? Is this logic endogenous to the periodic crises of over-production (in food as in other commodities) to which industrial capital is prone, as Marx argued, or is this logic connected to the interrelationship between such crises and physico-material limits in the appropriation by capitalist agriculture of "nature," which some scholars argue are, over la longue durée, now being manifested (e.g. Moore 2015)? If the former thesis prevails then we have capitalist "business as usual"; however, if the latter thesis is more convincing, as argued here, then we may be seeing the end of a "Long 20th Century" of "cheap food," which has significant implications not only for capitalist and state hegemonies, but also for the survival of urban populations, among whom demand for food is concentrated.

Paper short abstract:

This paper offers a critical; Marxist reading of the Trump victory in the November 2016 presidential election. It looks at the relationship between flexible forms of globalized accumulation and politics as entertainment/entertainment politics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on two sets of linked fictions: the economic fiction of stability for the majority in an internationalized and neoliberalized economy; and the political fiction of a grand leader who promises to "make America great again." The paper argues that the destabilization wrought since Fordism began to give way to flexible accumulation paved the way for the "politics as entertainment" that promises to characterize the Trump presidency. The paper draws from Marxist theory, ethnography, journalism, and personal experience. In particular, it will include close readings of books such as Hillbilly Elegy (Vance) and Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (Hochschild).

Paper short abstract:

Financialization tied to oil dependence contributed to the Greek debt crisis. This manipulation by multinational and local elites, exacerbated debt and energy poverty. I argue that debt linked to fossil fuel access is “imperial rent, and therefore “odious.”

Paper long abstract:

Challenges maintaining small electric grids on its many islands, isolated from the mainland grid, has led Greece (and many other island and peninsular nations) to rely heavily on oil shipped through ports to generate electricity. This dependency has contributed to energy poverty, structural inequities and financial crises. In recent decades, multinational corporate elites, in league with local officials, learned to game this vulnerability of oil dependency to generate short term profits through investments in industries like shipping, tourism and over-priced fossil fuel projects. I draw on historical economic data, social science and media, to illustrate this relationship and compare the Greek case with other oil-dependent, highly indebted states or territories, including other European "PIIGS" states and Puerto Rico. I examine the concept of "imperialist rent" -- monopoly superprofits that derive from structural inequities (which I argue is "odious debt") -- for analyzing fossil fuel debt under petrocapitalism. Renewable energy holds promise for more equitable development, but the recent solar scale-up in Greece provides a counter-narrative in which elite profit-seeking, boosted by incentives to meet EU emissions cuts, fostered high debt accrual and poorly designed projects which benefit a monopoly utility more than energy-poor citizens. The abuse and poor regulation of carbon offset funds in Greece, coupled with other cases of fraud and manipulation in the European Trading System, hold important lessons for the coming financialization that will accompany carbon trading in other parts of the world.