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- Convenors:
-
Theodoros Rakopoulos
(University of Oslo)
Leandros Fischer
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- Discussant:
-
Olga Demetriou
(University of Durham)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel traces vernacular statecraft, seen as the performance of practices historically belonging to abstract institutions, by non-state actors we encounter in the field (brokers, experts, "influencers", voters, etc), reviewing grassroots statecraft to understand how interpersonal states work.
Long Abstract:
Who are building the languages of the state in contemporary societies? And how can we engage them ethnographically? The riddle on the state’s presence for anthropologists continues, in an era where we cannot decide whether we are experiencing the neoliberal aftermath of the acclaimed state’s roll back or if we are witnessing a pandemic-induced more interventionist role for the state. This panel calls for reviewing the various ways in which we can trace state functions in the everyday, performed not necessarily by state agents, but by other constituents of what Gramsci defined as “civil society”. Some of these facilitations for the smooth performance of the state can be done by “experts”: Brokers, middlemen, advisors as well as journalists, academics and paramilitaries are one example of such “experts”. An attention to patronage and clientelism covered some of that pre-neoliberal personification of state function, while a current attention to bureaucracy covers yet another. However, other modes of everyday state functions can be built up from below in less “professional” and more arbitrary ways – in the emic lexicon of statism or patronage, or in the vernacular languages of nationalism, race, or gender. We thus aim to trace and analyse this demotic existence of statecraft (the performance of tasks and practices historically belonging to abstract institutions by the non-state functionary people we encounter in the field). Our goal is further to put into dialogue these formations of grassroots statecraft in order to comparatively understand how personal and interpersonal states work in contemporary contexts.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Alice Stefanelli (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
NGOs are often said to enable the neoliberal roll-back of the state, yet civic associations may temporarily assume certain state functions precisely in order to disrupt, rather than ensure, the smooth unfolding of governance-as-usual, forcing state intervention in the process.
Paper long abstract:
Civil society’s intervention in public governance is largely understood by scholars to be deeply implicated in the neoliberal rolling back of the state as, by assuming some of the latter’s functions, associations fill the service provision gap that institutions have left behind. But what happens when the state was 'absent' to begin with, in Fordist-Keynesian terms, or inhabitants object to authorities’ modes of governance? What is the role of civil society then? Inverting the analytical starting point, this paper seeks to analyse NGOs’ statecraft as they intervene in institutional practices that are deemed inappropriate for public institutions and damaging for the public good.
To do so, the paper examines the work of a small Lebanese NGO who secured the reopening of Beirut’s largest publicly owned park, Horsh Beirut, and protected it from large-scale real estate development. While campaigners worked to raise awareness about the Horsh’s predicament, the NGO also actively contributed to the creation of a roadmap for its reopening, in some ways doing the municipality’s job. However, this ‘stepping in’ for the state did not facilitate the state’s disengagement but, rather, it forced a positive kind of - limited - interventionism which promoted the public's good to a much greater extent than before. In taking stock of the NGO’s motivations, strategies, and practices, the paper ultimately argues that civic associations may temporarily assume certain state functions precisely in order to disrupt, rather than ensure, the smooth unfolding of governance-as-usual.
Panos Achniotis (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses state-making and state-imagining through housing and urban regeneration in Barcelona, in a context of contestation of the state and delegitimisation of the political system.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses everyday statecraft practices and discourses through housing and urban planning in the global city of Barcelona. In a peripheral neighbourhood which is undergoing deep urban re-generation and gets ready to welcome 30 000 new residents, memorial practices with regards to its industrial past become central in the way that people envision and 'feel' the state. I contend that these kinds of stories construct in the everyday the past Francoist state at the same time that they also construct the current democratic state (with its deficiencies), by creating a narrative of the transition between the past and present, and by producing the difference between what was dictatorship and what is democracy. Through memorial practices and the city-as-archive, abstract concepts such as authoritarianism, paternalism, and democracy, acquire specific meanings and particular contestations in everyday relationships in the neighbourhood, within people and in their relationship with the institutions.
Leandros Fischer
Paper short abstract:
This paper conceptualizes the grassroots enactment of state functions during the pandemic. It argues that the failure of initiatives to create sustainable structures owes much to the adoption of an "anti-populist populism" that sought to supplement rather than create an alternative to the state.
Paper long abstract:
The Covid19 pandemic appeared to usher in a new era. Following decades of austerity, states began expanding their prerogatives to deal with the spread of the virus, while ramping up talk of new investments in infrastructure and even expropriations.
On the grassroots level, citizens in many countries began organizing, setting up online groups and neighborhood initiatives to assist vulenrable individuals, while engaging in prefigurative politics of solidarity. However, other citizens began mobilizing against the perceived curbing of individual liberties by the state. In this way, the state - the provision of social services - and an opposition to perceived excesses of the state were enacted at the grassroots level.
However, enactments emphasizing solidarity failed to build sustainable structures. This paper argues that the main reason for this was the widespread adoption of an "anti-populist"-populism that did not seek to challenge the capitalist state but to merely supplement it at the grassroots level. As such, the main political antagonism was constructed between "responsible citizens" on the one hand, and "misinformation", "anti-vaxxers" or "coronavirus deniers" on the other. Such an antagonism obscured the socioeconomic asymmetries as well as the racialized hierarchies hat characterized lockdown measures within the European and North American context. While the far right managed to hegemonize anti-lockdown protests in some European countries, some governments used lockdown measures as a way to marginalize vulnerable social groups and curb political dissent.
Axel Rudi (University of Bergen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores Iraqi Kurdistan's efforts to project 'stateliness' in relation to the personalized connections, called wasta, underpinning to Kurdistan's everyday statecraft. As such, the paper aims to question the strict division between 'external' and 'internal' sovereignty of (pseudo)states.
Paper long abstract:
In 2017, Iraqi Kurdistan held a referendum for independent statehood, which, although carried with overwhelming support, was shut down by regional and international powers. Kurdistan was thus left in an aporia of psedo-statehood, but far from reigniting the military struggle of the past, the Kurdish struggle for independence has since then doubled down on efforts to present itself as a stable, bureaucratic, and regulated polity, well suited for international investment. This renewed focus on projecting ‘stateliness’ has overshadowed the more complicated and paradoxical process of statecraft that underpins the region’s continuing struggle for sovereignty, however. This paper shows how Iraqi Kurdish efforts to present stateliness are underpinned by, and often reliant upon, informal, flexible, and personalized socio-political processes. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork in the Iraqi Kurdish region, as well as previous fieldwork from 2016-2017, the paper shows how the areas of military reorganization, acquisition of services, and allotment of justice are strongly intertwined with situated webs of personalized connections, or wasta in local nomenclature. The paper argues that just as stateliness is parasitic upon wasta, so too is wasta parasitic on stateliness, leaving Kurdistan in an aporia of psedo-statehood, from which it struggles to emerge. Theoretically, this intercedes in debates on the ‘external’ and ‘internal’ sovereignty of states, as has been the preoccupation of political science and political anthropology respectively. The paper seeks bridge these two tendencies, by illustrating how (political science’s) ‘external’ aspects of sovereignty are often profoundly intertwined with (sociology’s) ‘internal’ aspects of sovereignty, and vice versa.
Ognjen Kojanić (Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on modalities of bottom-up statecraft as related to the “last-mile” problem of the efficacy of the state. How and why do non-state agents, despite their often negative perceptions of the state, contribute to the efficacy of the state in domains that are perceived as undergoverned?
Paper long abstract:
Urban environmental activists in Belgrade, Serbia, frequently invoke the state in their everyday activities. The idea of the state is important to them even though they critically perceive the actually existing state as internally fractured and limited in its capacities because various institutions have conflicting goals and many officials are corrupt or incompetent. To achieve their goals in the domain of environmental protection, they relate to the state in multiple ways, which I group in three categories. First, activists sometimes directly appeal to and cooperate with state institutions (e.g., by reporting wrongdoing). Second, they sometimes invoke the specter of the state without actually engaging with state institutions (e.g., by negotiating with wrongdoers directly while threatening them that they may report their illegal actions). Third, they can directly oppose state institutions by invoking higher-order justifications (e.g., by blocking the implementation of certain decisions by the city government when they perceive them as unconstitutional). Although superficially different, each of these ways of relating to the state produces a similar result: the activists help extend the reach of the state into a domain where they perceive the state as not present enough. In this paper, I ask what these modalities of bottom-up statecraft tell us about the “last-mile” problem of the efficacy of the state. How and why do non-state agents, despite their often negative perceptions of the state, contribute to the efficacy of the state in domains that are perceived as undergoverned?