Paper short abstract:

Trust and distrust are aspects that contribute to the democratic exercise in municipal governance, involving institutions and actors. My paper is based on an ethnography conducted in the municipality of Beira in Mozambique, where I interacted with street vendors.

Paper long abstract:

In principle, trust is an important factor that conditions democratic practice. People’s trust in the institutions and political elites directly involved in the governance is one central aspect, whereas trust among fellow citizens, is another. In this paper, I will explore people’s distrust in municipal governance as articulated in the specific context of the city of Beira in Mozambique where socioeconomically disadvantaged citizens look with suspicion at the political elites in power, as well as at the public institutions they run. Such a distrust in turn presents important challenges to the democratic practices. The paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork, notably conversations with Beira street vendors as well as different local narratives of the history of the ruling party FRELIMO. First, I present street vendors’ reflections on ethnicity, notably the discrimination that they perceive are practiced by people of the Ndau ethnicity, to which the Mayor belongs, in relation to other ethnicities. Second, I describe local narratives on how in Beira FRELIMO’s political opponents were targets of persecution and intimidation. The central argument is that distrust in municipal governance as observed among street vendors in Beira seems to result from the combination of factors pertaining to ethnicity and history, as well as to the everyday experience of marginalization.

Paper short abstract:

As part of a research examining the vulnerabilities to HIV and aids of black people in continental France, we show how global inequality in the face of HIV and aids fuels the continuous exclusion of people living with HIV and Aids (PLWHA) from some African and Caribbean immigrant communities.

Paper long abstract:

*Introduction*

This communication is part of a doctoral research examining the vulnerabilities to HIV and aids of people considered black in continental France, whether natives or immigrants. We questioned key life dimensions, such as the material conditions of existence, the social and sexual networks and access to healthcare and HIV prevention.

*Results and discussion*

The exclusion of people living with HIV and Aids (PLWHA) in all spheres of life impacts their quality of life and health-related outcomes. On the field, Individuals and Professionals alike reported an exacerbated stigma of PLWHA by immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, invoking “cultural” arguments.

Actually, interviewees who expressed the strongest rejection of PLWHA shared an intense fear of HIV borne out of their perceived powerlessness against the illness. Indeed, those who had spent their adult life in high prevalence communities with uncertain access to treatment were more likely to avoid contact with PLWHA whereas those aware of the therapeutic possibilities expressed more tolerance towards them.

*Conclusion*

To understand stigma against PLWHA, it is indispensable to understand the context in which individuals constructed their image of the illness and its sufferers. Since, the initial commercialization of ARV in 1996, the continuous exposure to aids-related deaths has been both geographically and sociologically situated: hence in our case, the exclusion of PLWHA is inseparable from a context of global inequality.

Paper short abstract:

Rudňany, is a former mining town with the impoverished Roma ethnic groups bearing an uneven burden of the adverse environmental impacts of industrial activity. The paper outlines a pattern of the Roma marginalization against the background of the processes of economic restructuring in the 1990s.

Paper long abstract:

Rudňany, a former mining town in eastern Slovakia, is a case of environmental injustice, with the impoverished Roma ethnic groups bearing an uneven burden of the adverse environmental impacts of industrial activity. The greatest development of Rudňany took place after 1945, when a new industrial plant for the processing of complex iron ores was built here. The town experienced a dramatic economic decline after 1990 as a result of economic restructuring after the fall of socialist regime. Nowadays, a group of approximately two thousand ethnic Roma live in substandard conditions in shacks located on the outskirts of the town, on the sites of former mining tunnels, where they are threatened by landslides and contamination by toxic waste, from mining waste heaps that surround one of the Roma settlements.

In this paper, based on combination of research methods (archives and ethnographic field research), we examine historical economic and political context that has resulted in uneven distribution of environmental harms. We study interethnic relations and the power asymmetries that have shaped the lives of Roma in the village. We were interested particularly in access to decision-making and the copying strategies of the local Roma. The paper concludes with outlining of a more general pattern of the Roma marginalization against the background of the processes of economic restructuring that led to the decline of former mining towns in eastern Slovakia in the 1990s.