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- Convenors:
-
Ziga Podgornik-Jakil
(European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder))
Saskia Jaschek (Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies)
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- Format:
- Workshop
- Transfers:
- Closed for transfers
Short Abstract:
The workshop explores the political beyond state politics and focuses on how the political is cultivated in activism and everyday life. It aims to explore how alternative political forms can challenge existing political systems and offer us new ideas and tensions for thinking about the commons.
Long Abstract:
The concept of the political is often used by both researchers and activists to refer to the realm that extends beyond the politics of the modern state. From the feminist statement “the personal is political” to political activism that advocates the creation of self-organized communities independent of state structures, the political also seems to be wherever there is resistance to some form of injustice. In this way, the political refers not only to the various forms of organizing daily life and managing resources, but also to an attitude towards one's own way of life and coexistence with others.
The aim of this workshop is to deal empirically with the concept of the political and to examine the various forms of being political and acting politically. It seeks to answer the following questions: How do informal and established forms of governance interact? Where, when, and how does the political intertwine with the personal? What are the relationships and differences between the political as an external analytical category and as an emic and lived experience of the people we study? What methodological and theoretical approaches can expand or crystalize our understanding of the political? How can the political be thought beyond the human subject?
By approaching these questions through an examination of the different meanings and experiences people have of the political, the speakers will think analytically about the concept and show how different political forms and experiences bring new ideas and tensions in prefiguring new counter-hegemonic forms of commons.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork with a prefigurative intentional community in Athens, this paper explores the elusive boundaries between micropolitics and care as perceived by community members who do not consider themselves political activists.
Contribution long abstract:
Based on fieldwork with self-organised activist groups in central Athens, this proposal aims to reflect on heterogenous definitions of “the political” among the inhabitants of a squatted neighbourhood. The more than 400 activists, refugees and international solidarians who cohabit in 8 squatted apartment blocks and sustain a self-managed infrastructure ranging from childcare to a bakery understand themselves as a struggle community united in prefigurative and antiauthoritarian ideals. However, while some of them perceive themselves as “political people”, making political commitment into an important part of their personhood, others joined the neighbourhood out of precariousness and neither embrace any particular ideological affiliation nor think of themselves as militants, though they do share a basic agreement with the community’s principles.
Speaking to long-term inhabitants of the neighbourhood whose life stories and subjectivities aligned with the second rather than the first group, we found them to be extremely committed to the coordination of everyday tasks such as obtaining food or cleaning collective spaces. In this context, they became deeply involved in micropolitical work related e. g. to transmitting commitment culture or revising potentially unjust systems of distribution of labour or goods inside the community. Rather than politics, which they associated with assemblies and demonstrations, they understood these responsibilities as acts of care towards the common way of life and the shared physical space in which it was housed. As ethnographers, this invites us to rethink our own conceptual divisions between activism, everyday resistance and care work when doing research with prefigurative intentional communities.
Contribution short abstract:
The paper looks at self-organised energy infrastructure as political organisation beyond the state, based on fieldwork in Northern Pakistan. It argues that both, marginalisation and mobilisation evolve around the provision of basic services, questioning how everyday energy practices become political
Contribution long abstract:
This paper analyses the political role of access to electricity in a context of political marginalisation and chronical electricity shortage (20h of load-shedding/blackouts) in Aliabad, Northern Pakistan. The relevance of infrastructure for producing ‘the state’ and political subjectivities has been highlighted (cf. Anand 2017), yet its importance for non-state political organisation remains rather unexplored. Based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2023 in Aliabad (in the Pakistani part of Kashmir), I explore how electricity provisioning gets politicised in (biopolitical) promises, but also through self-organisation that attempts to go beyond state-building and neoliberal entrepreneurship. The paper follows electricity as it triggers large-scale protests and road-blocks, and is being used to web patronage networks. Who gets the conspicuous 24h-supply connections (‘special lines’), and who has to pay electricity bills show political affiliations and social inequalities. However, these dynamics are never pre-determined, since ‘community-led’ hydropower projects have emerged, and international development agencies were investing in private solar powerplants, while projects by state authorities were perceived mostly with hostility and mistrust.
The paper first shows how access to electricity relates to the continuous marginalisation of the region of Gilgit-Baltistan as not constitutionally-recognised part of Pakistan. Secondly, I discuss self-organisation around electricity production and informal line-tapping as instances of protest and (hidden) resistance. I argue that access to electricity becomes a key arena for political contestations, building on notions of the common/community which are induced by neoliberal paradigms and yet have the potential to transcend both state and individualistic responsibility.
Contribution short abstract:
This study investigates how macroeconomic policies by Iran and Afghanistan have transformed Lake Hamoun’s ecology. By exacerbating drought, political tensions, and resource overuse, these policies have spurred water scarcity, sandstorms, and migration, reshaping Sistan's social fabric.
Contribution long abstract:
Political tensions between Iran and Afghanistan profoundly shape the environment and daily lives of those residing in the Sistan region. Following Afghanistan’s separation from Iran under the Treaty of Herat, disputes over water allocation from the Helmand River—a critical source feeding Lake Hamoun—have intensified. Despite agreements like the 1973 treaty, Afghanistan's non-compliance, influenced by political and environmental factors, has restricted Iran’s water share, exacerbating environmental degradation in Sistan.
This study examines the interplay between macro-political decisions and environmental changes in Lake Hamoun, alongside the identity transformations experienced by Sistan’s residents. Through historical analysis and interviews with both local inhabitants and migrants, this research addresses three key questions: How do macro-political phenomena manifest in the environmental context of Lake Hamoun? How do Sistan’s residents perceive and navigate these changes in their daily lives? And how do macro politics, environmental conditions, and social experiences interact?
By exploring these questions, the research sheds light on the cascading effects of political relations on water scarcity, economic hardships, migration, and sandstorms, revealing their profound impact on the social and individual identities of the Sistan region's people. This work underscores the urgent need to address these intertwined challenges to ensure the ecological and social resilience of Lake Hamoun and its communities.
Contribution short abstract:
Since before the ongoing coup, Myanmar digital rights activists have drawn out the politics of social media platforms while also trying to prefigure a new way of being political across entrenched divides. I show the interactions between formal platform politics and political activism.
Contribution long abstract:
Access to digital networks has spelled both a lifeline and an avenue for surveillance to Myanmar digital rights activists. Online spaces have allowed activists both before and after the coup started in 2021 to stay connected with one another and build a network for their political work. Holding social media companies to account for the way they build and moderate online spaces, the activists also try to prefigure accountability amongst themselves. They themselves shied away from calling their work political because the term implies personal interests and entrenched division where they seek to build common ground.
In their political activities, the politics of those activists is personal insofar as their interactions and how they deal with one another in responsible ways has been extensively commented and acted upon. Yet, they have also had to deal with various state actors who engage them openly and clandestinely. To know and educate them has been a major goal before the coup started in 2021. They have had to act in an environment where political self-organisation has been claimed by various groups across the country. Beyond those formal actirs, there have also been companies, particularly social media platforms, that have regulated common spaces, for which digital rights activists have tried to hold them to account. I show how those ways of being political interact with one another.
Contribution short abstract:
Contradicting truths about post-fossil futures are often at the root of political conflict over the energy transition. This paper analyses how state and resistance are engaged in a political struggle that produces both truths on nuclear power and new demarcations between state and non-state.
Contribution long abstract:
In the Netherlands, a combination of right wing politics, political turmoil around wind parks and the hope for a painless solution to the climate crisis, have opened up new avenues for nuclear power. The Dutch government is now planning to add two to four new nuclear power stations. This has led to a revival of the anti-nuclear movement, both locally by inhabitants who fear the nuclearisation of their surroundings and nationally by environmentalists.
Contested truths play a very important role in the present political fight over this project. This paper analyses how the political fight over these straddles both sides of state and non-state politics. On the one hand the state tries to use participatory decision making to depoliticize citizens, making them part of the state while denying them statehood. On the other hand, the resistance links the personal and intimate lives of local inhabitants to the political of the anti-nuclear movement. Local inhabitants fear the everyday realities of their rural land being industrialized and their village being overrun by workmen and trucks. The national anti-nuclear movement sees the building of new nuclear power stations as bad climate policy next to their old worries about nuclear waste and safety. Linking the two in a number of different ways repoliticises local concerns and provides statehood to local inhabitants in a prefigurative strategy for democratic decision making. As such the political struggle over nuclear energy shows how state and non-state are intimately related and the constantly changing result of politic contestation.
Contribution short abstract:
In recent years, counter-data practices have emerged as critical responses to hegemonic and undemocratic data politics. By engaging with (soft-)authoritarian datascapes, this paper aims to discuss the contentious and contradictory dynamics and practices of un/communing.
Contribution long abstract:
In recent years, counter-data practices have emerged as critical responses to the extractivist, neoliberal, and undemocratic infrastructures and politics that shape the digital / data worlds. Framed as ‘data commons’ or data activism, they are embedded in complex datascapes, where various actors make often contradictory claims about the meaning, agency, and governance of and through data. In doing so, they seek to challenge and reshape the contemporary techno-data-political shifts and disjunctures. By engaging with practices of “counter-data” (D’Ignazio 2022), this paper aims to discuss the contentious and contradictory dynamics of commoning - and uncommoning. It draws on ethnographic research conducted in Turkey, a context of authoritarian governance, and examines how activists navigate the authoritarian datascapes and propose new (un-)common grounds for contentious data politics. It asks how data shape our understandings and concepts of the politics and the political, become something invested with affective attachments, resentments and hopes and relate to the collective unpredictabilities - especially, but not exclusively, in the context of (soft-)authoritarianism. At its core, this paper discusses “what competing data politics do – and how they do” (Kopper & Knox 2024) in relation to un/communing practices – and beyond. The analysis highlights alternative forms of engagement, while addressing the evolving assemblages of the political, while addressing the collective visions and challenges of uncertain and un/common data futures.
Contribution short abstract:
This presentation proposes the concept of 'elusive politics' as a theoretical framework for forms of activism in which actors deliberately avoid explicitly articulating their objective of struggle and instead utilize more subtle, elusive means of struggle.
Contribution long abstract:
This presentation proposes the concept of 'elusive politics' for forms of activism in which actors refrain from explicitly naming their goal of struggle and instead use more elusive means of struggle. The concept is explored through the ethnographic case of 'cultural activism' in Bangladesh. Secularists in Bangladesh frequently pursue their political objectives through cultural activism. While these actors are committed to the establishment of a secular, progressive, and non-communal society, they often refrain from explicitly articulating their politics due to the sensitivity of their goals. Instead, cultural performances allow them to instantiate and embody a secular ethos with transformative potential, expressed through distinct cultural genres that become recognized as secular aesthetics. While activists regard culture as a morally superior and 'purer' means to promote their political aims than party politics, which they perceive as 'dirty' and corrupt, cultural traditions are not neutral ground from which to enact secular aspirations. This presentation explores the phenomenon of acting politically while trying to avoid politics, and the reasons why people might choose comparatively elusive forms of political engagement despite their strong commitment to a cause. The discussion highlights the ethical and political ramifications of such elusive politics. By examining less tangible forms of politics, we are able to rethink the role of political messages and visibility in social movements. In doing so, it is possible to highlight the significant role, as well as contradictory implications, of aesthetics, embodiment, and gestures in political action.
Contribution short abstract:
Based on an ethnographic investigation into Pakistan's cash transfers program, this paper explores various imaginaries of the political that emerge and remain central to the ways in which people constitute, navigate and experience their relationship with the state.
Contribution long abstract:
How do various imaginaries of the political emerge and become dominant or marginal through the ways in which people constitute, navigate and experience their relationship with the state? This paper seeks to address this question by focusing on the politics of cash transfers in Pakistan. The largest social protection initiative in Pakistan's history, the Benazir Income Support Programme was introduced in 2008. It arrogated itself the goals of poverty and women empowerment: around six million households receiving the cash grants are represented by the women recognized as the primary beneficiaries. In order to improve transparency, precision targeting and curbing corruption and various forms of undesired human/political interference, the program has come to rely on digital technologies and databases, the experiments that are claimed to emulate the socalled best practices that have made cash transfers a popular global anti-poverty policy. Successive governments, and their powerful global backers and interlocutors, have claimed that these shifts are meant to affect more desirable forms of "sha'oor" [consciousness] among the poor who should see the money they receive as a matter of depersonalized forms of relating to "the state", such as the "rights" and the "citizenship". However, as I show based on ethnographic research in Pakistan's second largest city, Lahore, various forms of human mediation, socialities and relations remain central to the women beneficiaries' understanding of the money and indeed "the state" itself. Paradoxically, these ever-multiplying mediations performed at the margins of the state remain critical to the program, but also invisible, to the state.