The Routledge Handbook of Social Change [First edition] 2022009345, 2022009346, 9780815365471, 9781032313818, 9781351261562

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL CHANGE

The Routledge Handbook of Social Change provides an interdisciplinary primer to the intellectual approaches that hold the key to understanding the complexity of social change in the twenty-first century. We live in a world of intense social transformation, economic uncertainty, cultural innovations, and political turmoil. Established understandings of issues of well-being, development, democratisation, progress, and sustainability are being rethought both in academic scholarship and through everyday practice, organisation, and mobilisation. The contributors to this handbook provide state-of-the-art introductions to current thinking on central conceptual and methodological approaches to the analysis of the transformations shaping economies, polities, and societies. Topics covered include social movements, NGOs, the changing nature of the state, environmental politics, human rights, anti-globalism, pandemic emergencies, post-Brexit politics, the politics of resilience, new technologies, and the proliferation of progressive and reactionary forms of identity politics. Drawing on disciplines including anthropology, human geography, political sociology, and development studies, this is a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to researching key issues raised by the challenge of making sense of the twenty-first century futures. Richard Ballard is a Principal Researcher at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (a partnership between the provincial government of Gauteng, the University of Johannesburg and the University of the Witwatersrand) and a visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. He is a geographer with a focus on social and spatial transformation in South Africa. Clive Barnett was a Professor of Geography and Social Theory at the University of Exeter, UK. His most recent book is The priority of injustice: locating democracy in critical theory (2017).

 


   

   

   
 

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Edited by Richard Ballard and Clive Barnett

Cover image: ‘Thirst’ by Alastair McLachlan First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Richard Ballard and Clive Barnett; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Richard Ballard and Clive Barnett to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ballard, Richard, 1972- editor. | Barnett, Clive, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of social change / edited by Richard Ballard and Clive Barnett. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022009345 (print) | LCCN 2022009346 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815365471 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032313818 (paperback) | ISBN 9781351261562 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Social change. Classification: LCC HM831 .R6778 2023 (print) | LCC HM831 (ebook) | DDC 303.4--dc23/eng/20220301 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009345 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009346 ISBN: 978-0-8153-6547-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-31381-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-26156-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562 Typeset in Bembo by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

CONTENTS

Illustrations Contributors Preface Acknowledgements

viii ix xiii xiv

1 Apprehensions of Social Change Richard Ballard and Clive Barnett

1

PART I

Living in a world of change

17

2 Reactionary Anti-Globalism: The Crisis of Globalisation Matthew Sparke

19

3 The Production of Surplus Populations: Informality, Marginality, and Labour Nik Theodore

34

4 The Anthropocene: Representations of Change on ‘The Human Planet’ Noel Castree

42

5 Ecologies of Infrastructure: Materialities of Metabolic Change Pushpa Arabindoo

53

6 White Victimhood: Weaponising Identity and Resistance to Social Change Nicky Falkof

67

7 Using Rights: European Migrant-Citizens in Brexitland Kuba Jablonowski

77

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Contents

8 The COVID-19 Pandemic: Capitalism, Ecosystem Crisis, and the Political Economy of Disaster Bue Rübner Hansen

87

PART II

Modes of change

99

9 Reform and Revolution: Dialectics of Causation Donagh Davis

101

10 Crisis and Change: The Contested Politics of Constructing Crises John Clarke

117

11 Structural Stories: On the Transformational Dynamics of Context Clive Barnett

129

12 Innovation at the Limits of Social Change: Uncertainty and Design in the Anthropocene Lauren Rickards, Kevin Grove, and Stephanie Wakefield

142

13 Prefiguration: Imaginaries Beyond Revolution and the State Anthony Ince

154

14 Catastrophe as Usual: Learning to Live with Extremity Nigel Clark

166

PART III

Agents of change

179

15 The State: Catching Sight of an Agent and Object of Change Glyn Williams

181

16 NGOs as Change Agents: Being and Doing Change Diana Mitlin

191

17 Parties: The Fall and Rise of Mass Party Politics Nick Clarke

207

18 The Economy: Metaphors and Models of Social Change Siân Butcher

219

19 Knowledge: Wellbeing in Global Public Policy Jessica Pykett

232

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Contents

20 Technology: Determinism, Automation, and Mediation Sam Kinsley

244

21 The People: Between Populism and the Masses Anna Selmeczi

254

22 Citizen Action: Participation and Making Claims Charlotte Lemanski

267

23 Activism: Activist Identities beyond Social Movements Daniel Conway

279

PART IV

Approaching social change

293

24 Imaginations of Power: Analysing Possibilities of Change Kiara Worth

295

25 Everyday Resistance: Theorising how the ‘Weak’ change the World Richard Ballard

303

26 Contentious Politics: Politics as Claims-Making Clare Saunders

315

27 Civil Resistance: Theorising the Force of Nonviolent Action Jonathan Pinckney

326

28 Collective Action: Assembling Concerns Gerda Roelvink

337

29 Eventful Infrastructures: Contingencies of Socio-Material Change Anders Blok

347

30 Practices of Social Change: Approaching Political Action Through Practice Theory Daniel Welch and Luke Yates

361

Index

373

vii

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 2.1 Showing increasing in-country wealth inequalities in 10 countries 2.2 Updated ‘elephant-chart’ of global income changes 1980–2016 5.1a Strategy for development based on ring roads and radial routes as originally proposed in the Madras Metropolitan Plan 1971–91 5.1b Chennai Peripheral Ring Road development proposal based on a 2018 feasibility study by Japan International Cooperation Agency 5.2 Outer Ring Road (Phase 1) under construction 5.3 Design proposals produced by students using six metabolic agents (air, water, soil, vegetation, food, and waste) ecologically re-imagining ORR as an infrastructural object 24.1 Gaventa’s power cube 29.1 The Ladegaard stream being channelised, a. 1930 (no official date) 29.2 The anti-road demonstration, April 1, 1968 29.3 The June 2, 2011 cloudburst, road on top of Ladegaard stream

26 26 54 55 57

61 299 352 353 356

Table 16.1

NGO personas

194

viii

CONTRIBUTORS

Editors Richard Ballard is a Principal Researcher at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (a partnership between the provincial government of Gauteng, the University of Johannesburg and the University of the Witwatersrand) and a visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. He is a geographer with a focus on social and spatial transformation in South Africa. Clive Barnett was a Professor of Geography and Social Theory at the University of Exeter, UK. His most recent book is The priority of injustice: locating democracy in critical theory (2017).

Contributors Pushpa Arabindoo is an Associate Professor in Geography and Urban Design at the Department of Geography, University College London (UCL). She is a co-convenor of the MSc Urban Studies programme as well as a co-director of UCL Urban Laboratory. Anders Blok is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He currently researches civic engagement with urban natures. He has published widely in the fields of science and technology studies (STS), urban studies, environmental sociology, and social theory. Siân Butcher is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and GIS at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, researching the political economy of development for a growing middle class in South Africa. Noel Castree is a Professor of Society and Environment at the University of Technology Sydney, and Professor of Geography at Manchester University, England. His research interests include the societal role of expertise about global environmental change; the political economy of environmental change; the broader relationships between people and their environments; and the governance of universities and other knowledge producing institutions.

ix

Contributors

Nigel Clark is a Professor of Human Geography at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman nature (2011) and (with Bronislaw Szerszynski) Planetary social thought: the Anthropocene challenge to the social sciences (2021). John Clarke is a Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the Open University, UK. His work has explored conflicts over welfare, state, and nation and he is currently working on the conjunctural analysis of ‘turbulent times’. Nick Clarke is an Associate Professor of Human Geography at the University of Southampton. He studies governance and citizenship, including local government and urban policy. His latest book is The good politician: folk theories, political interaction, and the rise of anti-politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018, with Will Jennings, Jonathan Moss, and Gerry Stoker). Daniel Conway is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster. His current work focuses on the politics of Pride, LGBTQ+ rights and activism. His previous work includes Masculinities, militarisation and the end conscription campaign: war resistance in apartheid South Africa (Manchester University Press and Wits University Press, 2012) and Migration, space and transnational identities: the British in South Africa (with Pauline Leonard, Palgrave, 2014). Donagh Davis is a social scientist specialising in political instability. He teaches at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), and is a contributor/consultant at Seshat, the Global History Databank. Nicky Falkof is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her primary research focus considers issues of race, anxiety and the urban in contemporary South African media. Kevin Grove is an Associate Professor of Geography at Florida International University. His research blends political geography, cultural geography, and environmental security studies to explore the politics of emergency management and resilience in the Anthropocene. He is the author of Resilience (Routledge, 2018) and co-editor of Resilience in the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2020). Anthony Ince is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Cardiff University. He primarily focuses on the politics of everyday life, bringing geography into conversation with political philosophy through a range of empirical subjects. His current work focuses on the political geographies of fascism and anti-fascism. Kuba Jablonowski is a Research Fellow in the Geography Department at Exeter University, UK. He researches political agency and rights claims, currently in the context of digital governance of borders and migration. His work draws on collaborative, ethnographic, and engaged methodologies. Sam Kinsley is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geographies at the University of Exeter. He researches the way in which technologies and technical practices are designed and imagined and what this tells us about how we experience and imagine society and space.

x

Contributors

Charlotte Lemanski is a Professor of Urban Geography in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. Her research explores inequality within the southern city through the lens of housing, infrastructure, governance, and citizenship, primarily in South Africa and India. Diana Mitlin is an activist scholar working at the University of Manchester. She has worked with urban social movements to understand the ways in which urban development can address issues of inequality and injustice. Jonathan Pinckney is a Senior Researcher for the Program on Nonviolent Action at the United States Institute of Peace, and the author of From dissent to democracy: the promise and peril of civil resistance transitions from Oxford University Press. Jessica Pykett is a social and political geographer with research interests in citizenship, governance, and political subjectivities. Her research has focused on affective and emotional techniques of governance, the influence of neuroscience and behavioural science on public policy and economic theory, and urban well-being. Lauren Rickards is charged with enabling innovation as Director of the Urban Futures platform at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Melbourne, Australia. She brings a critical human geography lens to this work and her current research on emergent climate change responses in universities and beyond. Gerda Roelvink is an adjunct fellow at Western Sydney University. Her research expertise is in the fields of diverse and community economies. She is the author of Building dignified worlds: geographies of collective action and co-editor of Making other worlds possible: performing diverse economies (both University of Minnesota Press). Bue Rübner Hansen is a sociologist, intellectual historian, and social movement researcher at the University of Jena. He is an editor of Viewpoint Magazine, and works on questions around ecology, social reproduction, and interest formation. Clare Saunders is a Professor in Politics in the Environment and Sustainability Institute on the Penryn campus of the University of Exeter. Her most recent books are Environmental networks and social movement theory (Bloomsbury, 2013), and, edited with Bert Klandermans, When citizens talk about politics (Routledge, 2019). She is also co-editor in chief of Social Movement Studies. Anna Selmeczi is a Lecturer at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. Her research is grounded in social and political theory and focuses on the connections between orders of urban space and knowledge production. Matthew Sparke is a Professor of Politics at the University of California Santa Cruz. The author of In the Space of Theory (University of Minnesota Press) and Introducing Globalization (Wiley-Blackwell), his recent work concerns the embodiment of market-led globalisation and austerity in global ill-health and biological sub-citizenship.

xi

Contributors

Nik Theodore is a Professor and Head of the Department of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago. The focus of his labour market research is on how processes of industrial change rework patterns of inequality within urban economies. Stephanie Wakefield is an urban geographer whose work critically analyses the technical, political, and philosophical transformations of urban life in the Anthropocene. She is currently Director and Assistant Professor of Human Ecology at Life University. Kiara Worth is a social researcher, interested in how power influences decisions made in the pursuit of sustainability. Kiara tracks the global negotiations on environment and development with the International Institute of Sustainable Development and specialises in communicating stories from the sustainability movement. Daniel Welch is a Lecturer in Sociology and the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester, UK. His research engages in novel articulations between social theory, consumption studies, social futures, and economic and cultural sociology. Glyn Williams is a Reader in International Development and Planning, University of Sheffield, and Honorary Associate Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. His research focuses on the interaction between development programmes, governance practices, and citizenship in the Global South. Luke Yates is a Lecturer in Sociology and the Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester. His work looks at collective action, politics, everyday consumption practices, and the new digital economy.

xii

PREFACE

Clive Barnett, 1968–2021 One of the great joys of editing a book is that it re-animates long-standing academic friendships and creates new ones. It has been my honour to edit this book with Clive Barnett, a process that brought us into regular contact over the last five years as we shaped the proposal, expanded the grouping of fellow travellers, and developed the text. Just a few weeks after we submitted the final manuscript, Clive died unexpectedly at the age of 53, leaving his, family, friends, and academic community devastated. Being a scholar was one of Clive’s superpowers. He wrote a remarkable set of contributions on a wide variety of themes: neoliberalism, media and democracy, the history of geography, ethics and consumption, responsibility for others, injustice, postcolonialism, governmentality, radical democracy, the urban agenda, and environmental politics. He loved research and writing – and was good at it – because he was intensely curious about people and society. He was a prodigious reader and had an enviable command over many fields. It was Clive who suggested ‘social change’ as the field of interest for this Handbook. He explored this theme in his 2017 book The priority of injustice, in which he observed that many accounts of politics gravitated towards the ‘extraordinary action’ of ‘privileged historical agents’ setting off ‘dramatic events’ and ‘wholesale transformation’. For Clive, social change is profane rather than sacred; it is part of the ‘ordinary rhythms in which politics is routinely experienced and known’. He sought, in a sense, to democratise our theories of change so that we might recognise that ‘capacities for creative action’ are ‘more widely disbursed’ than occupied squares and other celebrated moments of change. Another of Clive’s superpowers was his capacity to support others on their own scholarly journeys. Notwithstanding his formidable intellect, he engaged with kindness, patience, and great humour. He generally held back in order to hear what others had to say. For those paralysed by the seeming impossibility of their projects, he provided an infectious sense of possibility. The contributors of this volume express our deepest appreciation for Clive, for his scholarship, and for connecting us together in this book. Richard Ballard, February 2022

xiii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We want to thank Andrew Mould at Routledge for encouraging the development of this collection, and all of the members of the editorial team at Routledge, including Egle Zigaite and Claire Maloney, for their help with getting the book into proper shape for publication. Perhaps unusually for a volume of this sort, all of the draft chapters were read by two anonymous reviewers. We would like to thank both reviewers for their suggestions to both editors and to authors, and also thank the Gauteng City-Regional Observatory (GCRO) for resources to support this process of peer review. Finally, the editors would like to thank all the authors for their commitment and creativity in writing their respective chapters, and for their patience and support throughout the process of putting this volume together.

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1 APPREHENSIONS OF SOCIAL CHANGE Richard Ballard and Clive Barnett

Living in a world of change We live in a world of intense social transformation, economic uncertainty, cultural innovation, and political turmoil. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have been marked by a series of historically important events, including the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the global financial crash of 2007–2008, the Arab Spring of 2011, and the COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2020. The optimism associated with ‘The End of History’ ushered in by the end of the Cold War has been supplanted by the darker moods associated with the rise of authoritarian populisms, democratic backsliding, and the entrenchment of inequality. At the same time, social norms have been transformed in ways that would have been unimaginable just two decades ago. In many countries of the world, gay marriage is now legalised and the presence of openly gay and lesbian people in public life is normalised. Around the world, the politics of LGBTQ+ identities have become central to new struggles for human rights. These sorts of developments also provoke new forms of reactionary response, including revanchist forms of nationalism and exclusionary identity politics. Not only in these forms of reactionary politics, but also in the emergence of new struggles around themes of decoloniality, historical memorialisation, land restoration, or Black Lives Matter, the force of legacies inherited from the past is made newly manifest. In amongst all these events, longerterm trends and tendencies have generated new challenges: Climate Change, as a potentially irreversible turning point in the life of the planet; for example, the urbanisation of human population; the reorientation of geopolitics attendant on the ascendancy of China as a global power; and the rise of artificial intelligence. And it is often imputed that all this change is happening at an ever-quickening pace. History itself sometimes seems to be accelerating, consequences are concatenating around the world more speedily, and one crisis is stacking up on top of the next ever more quickly. Of course, these sort of characterisations of our turbulent times are common enough tropes of academic analysis, news coverage, and public commentary. They share various rhetorical features: a tendency to think that historical change is indeed punctuated by dramatic events; for example, a sense of how the past resonates in the present; a tendency to presume that change is either progressive or retrogressive; particular ways of projecting forward into the future; and more or less rosy, more or less dystopian visions of where current processes might DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-1

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Richard Ballard and Clive Barnett

lead. Narrating change, in short, involves varied ways of apprehending the present moment, that is, of trying to capture the essence of what is happening now in registers that express a combination of anxiety and anticipation. It turns out that narrating change through various genres of representation itself has a history. According to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck (2004), the narrative ‘temporalization’ of historical experience emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century. Koselleck identified in this period the ways in which previously static distinctions between the past, the present, and the future became complicated by a sense of the differential tempos of change. It is this development of a more differentiated sense of multiple temporalities that, for Koselleck, ushers in modernity as both a distinctive ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’. Modernity, from this perspective, is characterised by a disjunction between the past (now experienced as tradition) and the future (now experienced as an unpredictable horizon of possibility). The very idea that the passing of time has meaning – direction, causes, and consequences – is, in short, a function of particular styles of representation (see Osborne 1995, White 1990). The purpose of this Handbook is not to provide a comprehensive overview of the dynamics of change in the twenty-first century. No collection of essays could claim to be encyclopaedic in its coverage of issues, places, and approaches. Instead, this Handbook offers a series of selective entry points for further inquiry into social change. What connects the different chapters and provides the collection its intellectual bearing is an acknowledgement of the generic qualities of any and all apprehensions of the dynamics of social life. Above all, the focus of this Handbook is on the complex, sometimes hubristic and sometimes paradoxical relationship between the idea that the world we live in is changing on the one hand, and the imperatives that people feel that the world needs to change and be changed. This relationship – between a changing world and changing the world – is one way of characterising the vocation of modern social analysis across many disciplines. It is a relationship that inheres in the range of figures through which academic analysis hopes to articulate knowledge with fields of action – from policy expert to activist academic, from advocate to educator. One strand of social analysis emphasises the degree to which change happens in long term, unpredictable, non-linear, and perhaps even automatic ways. But even when at its most ‘deterministic’ or ‘structuralist’, social analysis is oriented by a concern to discern the potential scope and limits of human agency to deliberately bring about future changes. We might think, then, of different traditions of social analysis as characterised by their own distinctive ‘chronopolitics’, that is, by particular images of time and temporality that orient practices of empirical inquiry, conceptualisation, and theory formation (cf. Wallis 1970). All of the chapters in this Handbook seek to disclose the chronopolitics that defines selected intellectual debates concerned with making sense of the dynamics of social change. Making sense of what sorts of changes are happening, why, and what they mean is an elementary concern of social analysis. It is a constitutive object of conceptualisation and empirical investigation in social science and the humanities. The essays collected for this Handbook were commissioned with a view to providing provocations for thinking further about how social change is conceptualised, investigated, and assessed in various traditions of thought inquiry. Accordingly, the chapters in this collection have been organised into four parts: living in a world of change, referring to the social and material transitions that populate contemporary discourse on change; modes of change, referring to the images of time that underlie specific fields of debates and analysis; questions of agency, referring to the different ways in which the relationships between deliberate efforts to bring about change interact with unintended consequences, unforeseen circumstances, and emergent processes; and approaches to social 2

Apprehensions of Social Change

change, referring to the range of conceptual and methodological paradigms for the analysis and evaluation of social change. These sections serve as a device for grouping chapters, but they also invoke core themes that are germane to the volume as a whole, which we will elaborate further in the remainder of this introductory chapter.

Modes of change The lesson from Koselleck’s work is that social change can be ‘temporalized’, given shape and meaning, by different generic frameworks. Discussions of social change are framed by figures of grassroots or bottom-up insurgency, or by images of top-down leadership, by images of dramatic crisis or long-term trends, or by cyclical patterns, or by ideas of legacies and inheritances from the past, or by transitions, developments, and progress. Each of these and many other temporal figures encapsulate a series of associations and implications that can be unpacked. For example, one of the most powerful temporal imaginations of the early part of the twenty-first century, evident across all sorts of fields of academic inquiry and public debate, is derived from fields of Complex Systems Theory (Byrne and Callaghan 2013). From this perspective, change is an effect of non-linear dynamics, of slow accretions of effects that generate emergent properties and that may at some stage trigger more or less dramatic ‘tipping points’. It is an imagination that one finds in the proliferation of discourses of resilience, an idea applied to questions of environmental sustainability, disaster relief preparedness, or personal well-being (Pugh 2021). And the idea of resilience has certain family resemblances with other temporal imaginations, for example, with the theme of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ developed in fields of natural history or with the theme of ‘spontaneous order’ in the work of Friedrich Hayek. An image of systems consisting of many parts, connected together through complex feedback loops, can in turn support different visions of agency. Ideas of resilience, for example, are very explicitly related to specific theories of the motivated intervention in all sorts of systems (Brown 2012). By contrast, Hayek’s account of the emergent properties of markets systems bolstered an explicitly laissez-faire norm of non-intervention (see Lewis 2012). Marxism is perhaps the intellectual tradition in which the relationship between images of time and questions of agency is most consistently debated. Karl Marx’s own thought provided an account both of the long-term, secular trends that accounted for the development of capitalism (and projected forwards to its inevitable demise), and an explicit vision of the form of purposive, organised, and strategic agency through which history itself could be tamed and harnessed to progressive ends. The ‘historicism’ ascribed to Marx’s thought has been thought of as a fatal flaw by some. But Marx bequeathed a complex view of history which combined continuities and discontinuities, of forward momentum combined with cyclical repetition (see Lefort 1986). The simplistic projection of a deterministic imagination onto Marxist thought belies the most significant legacy of that tradition for social thought, which is its emphasis on antagonism, conflict, and struggle as the central motor of historical change (see Touraine 1977). The conceptual issues at the heart of debates about Marxism and history illustrate the ways in which debates about social change are never merely descriptive or explanatory – they are always charged with normative issues to do with what sort of change should be fostered, how and who should pursue change, and how to evaluate changes that have been bought more or less deliberatively. It is around these normative issues that different traditions of political thought are normally differentiated. Conservatism is, by definition, concerned with the maintenance of certain core values through time; liberalism is often associated with visions of incremental change; and radical thought is most often characterised by its attachments to 3

Richard Ballard and Clive Barnett

images of fundamental change. Sometimes such change is imagined as all-encompassing, total transformation of whole social formations, ‘the world turned upside down’; sometimes it is imagined as a granular, ubiquitous process of ‘small acts’ that over time effect fundamental changes in norms, patterns of conduct, or social relations; sometimes such change is imagined in properly ‘utopian’ form, projected forwards to a more or less just-out-of-reach future moment. There are, then, a range of conceptual and normative questions at stake when considering the temporal imaginations of change at work in different traditions of thought. From amongst all of the questions, four interrelated themes run through and across the chapters in this Handbook. The first is the question of how the weight of the past is figured in accounts of social change. This is a central theme in Marxism, for example, and in psychoanalysis. But it is in strands of postcolonial thought that this issue has been most forcefully asserted as bearing on the core assumptions of social theory. If modern thought is, as Koselleck suggested, defined by distinctive genres for apprehending the relations between past, present, and future – in terms of ideas of progress, or crisis, or utopia, or decline – then these ideas have all been associated with claims about how certain people and places are either ‘pre-modern’, ‘traditional’, ‘developing’, or simply ‘outside of history’ completely (see Fabian 1983). Images of societies arrayed along a single linear curve of historical development have been constitutive to all sorts of intellectual fields and academic disciplines (see Blaut 1993, Chakravorty 2000). And that is why one aspect of the historical significance of twentieth-century movements against colonialism and imperialism lies in challenging historicist, developmentalist ideas of time as a singularly progressive and ordered whole. Debates about postcolonialism and decoloniality explicitly problematise linear ideas of a past that has been consigned to the past and of futures that are unburdened by what has gone before. Precisely because ideas of the modern, of development, and of history itself have been so closely enmeshed in the geopolitics of colonial dispossession, capitalist appropriation, and cultural imperialism, the question of how to imagine the nature of change is a central concern of these theoretical debates. In turn, these fields of debate are essential reference points for any consideration of issues of social change. Not least, they raise the question of how to imagine the ways in which newness emerges in the world (see Bhabha 1994, pp. 212–235). For example, Achille Mbembe argues that the importance of Franz Fanon’s work lies in how his analysis of colonialism, anti-colonialism, and decolonialism came to centre on concepts of time and selfcreation – of ‘starting anew’: ‘The reason is that colonization in its essence was a fundamental negation of time. From the colonial point of view, natives were not simply people without a past and without a history. They were radically located outside of time’ (Mbembe 2021, p. 53). For Mbembe, the history of African decolonisation and postcolonialism can be understood as a struggle between dynamics of ‘reduplication and repetition, but without difference’, in which the spirit of colonial pasts persists like a dead weight, versus genuinely ‘constitutive difference’ that inaugurates newness (Mbembe 2021, p. 52). In contrast to images of clear and decisive breaks implied by the ‘de-’ of decolonisation or the ‘post-’ of postcolonialism, Mbembe gleans in contemporary African cultural debates ‘a return of deep history as the best way to elucidate the conditions under which the new emerges’ (Mbembe 2021, pp. 84–85). Mbembe’s emphasis on locating ‘the apparent newness of the present conjuncture within longer, deeper histories’ (Mbembe 2021, pp. 84–85) connects to the second theme that runs through the collection of essays in this Handbook. The reference to the idea of ‘conjuncture’ raises the question of how to think about the relationship between the drawn-out temporalities of trends, processes, and tendencies on the one hand, and the episodic temporalities of events on the other (see also Abbott 2001). Writing in the 1960s, Michel Foucault (1972, p. 3), 4

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perhaps the single most influential recent theorist of different ways of apprehending the historicity of historical time, identified a move away from narrative styles of historical research that focussed on a succession of events: For many years now historians have preferred to turn their attention to long periods, as if, beneath the shifts and changes of political events, they were trying to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the irreversible processes, the constant readjustments, the underlying tendencies that gather force, and are then suddenly reversed after centuries of continuity, the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the great silent, motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events. Foucault is here setting in place the terms for a contrast here between a style of analysis of the longue durée, associated most famously with the Annales school of French historiography, and his own style of analysis. Foucault’s ‘method’, across its various iterations, was inextricably linked to the questions of how to imagine the nature of change. He stands as a key theorist of themes of the event, of ruptures, and discontinuities (Michon 2002). But these themes are not presented as a return to the comforts of narrative historiography. Rather, Foucault outlines an account, not least in his emphasis on tracing genealogies rather than recovering origins, of the centrality of contingency to the analysis of social change. Contingency is of course a core theme across different strands of social thought (see Shapiro 2007, Koopman 2011). Contingency is rather too often taken merely as a synonym for ‘arbitrary’, and thereby is a concept too often trapped within a series of conceptual dualisms that contrast contingency to the necessary or the essential or the natural. In the wake of Foucault’s work, the theme of contingency is better thought of as cutting across contrasts between law-like predictability and random chance: it implies a mode of analysis focussed on understanding the dependent and unpredictable relations between events and developments ‘that did not have to be’ and the conditions, environments, and situations that facilitated their happening (see Gould 1989, pp. 277–291). The relationship between long-term dynamics of social change and more event-full imagination is a constant one across all sorts of fields of academic research and public debate. It related to the third theme running through this Handbook, which is a concern with understandings of the rhythm and speed of social change. Here, it is possible to distinguish between two broad images. In a classic image of revolutionary change, over time a series of long-term trends and developments build-up the conditions for a dramatic moment of revolutionary rupture in which, all at once, and quite quickly, whole social formations are overturned, and for a short period the rhythm of change itself seems to accelerate and intensify. This eschatological image of the pace and rhythm of change continues to cast an influential shadow over discussions of social change. It can be contrasted with what we might think of as an image of secular change, along the lines presented by Charles Taylor (2003, p. 30) in his account of the emergence of distinctly modern social imaginaries: What I’m calling the long march is a process whereby new practices, or modifications of old ones, either developed through improvisation among certain groups and strata of the population (e.g., the public sphere among educated elites in the eighteenth century, trade unions among workers in the nineteenth); or else were launched by elites in such a way as to recruit a larger and larger base (e.g., the Jacobin organization of the sections in Paris). Alternatively, in the course of their slow development and ramification, a set of practices gradually changed their meaning for people, and 5

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hence helped to constitute a new social imaginary (the ‘economy’). The result in all these cases was a profound transformation of the social imaginary in Western societies, and thus of the world in which we live. Taylor provides here an image of how fundamental transformations happen slowly, as the outcome of myriad accretions of intentional human agency interacting with structural conditions and environmental circumstances, and therefore without being the outcome of deliberate, concerted strategy. And while certainly departing from the images of heroic performance associated with a revolutionary imaginary, this view of how change comes about also informs a distinctive account of political agency with an estimable radical pedigree of its own (see Goldfarb 2007). The three themes discussed so far – reckoning with the weight of the past; the relationships between events and processes; and the speed of change – are all thrown into new perspective by the emergence in the twenty-first century social thought of a quite distinctive temporal imaginary. It is an imaginary marked by the prominence of a set of temporal figures that depart significantly from a historicist vocabulary of development, progress, reform, and revolution that shaped canonical modern social theory. In this new grammar of social change, the emphasis is placed on ideas such as adaptation, emergence, mitigation, resilience, sustainability, and transition. While drawing on a tradition of evolutionary thought that can be traced back to the nineteenth century, this temporal imaginary nevertheless represents a shift in the image of time through which social change is represented as a possibility. It is an imaginary visible perhaps most clearly in the proliferation of concern with the theme of resilience that we have already touched on above. This is an idea that is sometimes accused of being irredeemably conservative in its imagination of the possibilities of change. This accusation tends to ignore the degree to which the very meaning of resilience has itself been reconstructed to focus on the transformative dynamics of system resilience (see DeVerteuil and Golubchikov 2016). Beyond these debates about the more or less conservative, more or less transformational connotations of ideas of resilience, there is a more fundamental conceptual shift at work in the temporal imaginary of resilience. It is an imaginary that re-centres the analysis of change on intimations of vulnerability, disaster, and catastrophe. In a sense, it is a genuinely apprehensive image of social change, one centred on efforts to anticipate a series of emergencies. For some commentators, we have entered into a whole new phase of history in which political programmes are marked by ‘the displacement of an approach that sought to avoid or insure against future hazard and risk, by a regime of catastrophe management that judges the perils to be both potentially devastating and unavoidable’ (Amin 2012, p. 101). The move to programmes of mitigation, preparedness, and recovery is often presented as having potentially dark political implications: The focus now is on addressing the unknown in a warlike fashion, through detailed monitoring and intervention, aided by elaborate technologies of surveillance and control, clear cartographies of the inside and outside, active engineering of public moods and sentiments, a public culture of emergency, and easy suspension of the rules and standards of democracy in the name of securing communal well-being. (Amin 2012, pp. 123–124) But this emergent temporal imaginary is just as often presented as harbouring new possibilities for engaged agency, ones centred on themes such as repair (Spelman 2002), experimentation 6

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(Green 2016), and hope (Solnit 2016). As with other imaginaries of change, then, the catastrophic grammars of emergency, resilience, and vulnerability project ahead of themselves a vision of change as something that happens to people in ways that also opens up new possibilities for thinking about how to make change happen.

Agents of change The themes discussed previously under the theme of Modes of Change can be thought of as so many accounts of the temporal ‘shape’ of social change. These same themes invite a series of questions of how to think about the agents of social change. We have already seen how some accounts of the shape of change open up considerable room for imagining change as the outcome of deliberate, strategic interventions. Other accounts locate the effects of intentional human agency in a more dispersed realm of slow, granular change. And still others appear to reduce the scope for action to a matter of coping, adjusting, perhaps just surviving. Across these different images of agency, there is an inextricable link between descriptive or explanatory accounts and normative questions. What is at stake in accounts of both the modes and agents of change are a set of questions about whether and how things can be changed for the better, and of how to assess whether and when that sort of change is possible or has been attained. Another way of thinking about these questions is in terms of the posited relationship between change as a process and change as an outcome, as a realised state of affairs. This relationship is again perhaps best exemplified by the complex history of debates about strategy at the heart of Marxist thought. Marxism can be thought of as a tradition focussed on a threefold relationship between a sought-after outcome (the full realisation of human potential freed from the shackles of exploitation), a specific form of agency (organised, deliberate and strategic collective action by the working class), and an image of change itself (the revolutionary seizure of state power). There are, of course, a wide variety of ways of framing this set of relationships, from Leninist vanguardism, Gramscian hegemony, to the autonomista imaginations championed by Antonio Negri. But for our purposes, the key thing to emphasise is how these different elements are ‘temporalized’. This connection is explicitly addressed in the reconstruction of radical utopianism developed by the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright (2010), in an account that builds on a systematic reckoning with the deeply compromised history of radical, and specifically Marxist, account of social change. Wright identifies three logics of social transformation: ruptural, interstitial, and symbiotic. These map on, roughly, to socialist, anarchist, and social democratic visions (Wright 2010, pp. 308–365). These images of change are related to different models of political agency (from organised class politics to social movements to popular coalitions), to different images of political strategy (from frontal attack on state, acting outside the state, and using the state), to different logics of confronting capital (from ignoring capital to collaborating with capitalism), and finally, to three different models of success (based on ideas of victory in war, ecological competition, and evolution). Across this stylised division of three imaginations of political time, there is in fact a starker division between views which focus on decisive rupture and system change, and views which envisage metamorphosis without a moment of system rupture (the interstitial and symbiotic approaches are versions of the latter) (Wright 2010, pp. 303–305). And underlying this division is a contrast between two visions of how the parts of the social world are related to each other: a vision in which those parts are woven tightly together into a pattern of centred totality, and a vision in which the parts are related in a more unpredictable and non-linear manner. 7

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Wright’s own preferred vision of social changes is one that depends on the interplay between unintended consequences and deliberative actions: The actual trajectory of large-scale social change that we observe in history is the result of the interaction of two kinds of change-generating processes: first, the cumulative unintended by-products of the actions of people operating under existing social relations, and second, the cumulative intended effects of conscious projects of social change by people acting strategically to transform those social relations. (Wright 2010, p. 298) Wright’s focus on the relationship between deliberate projects and unintended consequences leads to a specific account of the agency of social change, one focussed on thinking of political change in relation to the theme of experimentation (see also Fung and Wright 2003). Rather than assuming that what is required is a roadmap or an alternative utopian image, Wright suggests, ‘perhaps the best we can do is to think of the project of emancipatory social change as a voyage of exploration’ (Wright 2010, p. 108). No doubt Wright’s account of agency and social change will not appeal to everyone. We present it here because it illustrates so clearly the close conceptual connection between images of agency and images of the temporality of social change. There are, in fact, a set of overlapping conceptual distinctions around which discussions of agency and social change revolve. First, the idea of agency is often associated with a contrast between structure and agency, a staple of theme of modern social theory (Sewell 1992). The meaning of this relationship is often taken to refer simply to the relative balance between the determinations of action by structural factors and the scope for voluntary discretion by human agents. This is a relationship overlain with questions about whether and how social life is amenable to forms of explanation modelled on the natural sciences, or whether they require alternative forms of analysis (see Martin 2011). The normative stake in debates about structure and agency is the question of whether human action can be thought of as a medium for deliberate social change. This is the second theme through which issues of agency are trailed in this collection. And while agency has often been taken as a necessary condition for accounting for change, a central focus of recent reconstructions of the concept of agency in social theory, in the otherwise very different work of Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour for example, has been on how agency often functions as a medium of reproduction, order, and stability. Here, one can see how discussions of agency entail a further set of questions about scale: there is no reason to suppose that an affirmation of intentional, purposive, and reflective capacities for action by participants in social practices should be tethered to images of large-scale social transformation projects. The issue of the scales at which actions are integrated and concatenate links to a third conceptual theme running through discussions of agency, one that has already been mentioned in relation to Wright’s account of social transformation – the relationship between the deliberate, purposive and intentional factors shaping action and the unanticipated effects of any such action. This, too, is a staple theme of modern thought, going back to Adam Smith’s analysis of the ‘hidden hand’ through to Robert Merton’s account of ‘unintended consequences’ and Kenneth Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’. Across these and other strands of thought, a formative concern of social theory is how to conceptualise the relationship between myriad small actions and larger scale, cumulative, or aggregate outcomes. And running through these concerns is a fundamental difference in images of ‘the social’ itself: a difference between methodological individualists who posit that large-scale patterns can be reduced to the 8

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micro-factors motivating individual actors, and forms of holism in which causal significance is ascribed to more fully social phenomenon such as relationships, practices, or structures (e.g., Archer 2000, Elster 1989). Finally, recent social science has focussed attention on the status of various forms of so-called ‘non-human’ agency (Sayes 2014). The topic of non-human agency has been inflected by forms of philosophical vitalism and ontological materialism so that it is most often associated with assertions of the agency of material objects or, somewhat differently, with the agency of nonhuman life. The expansion of the range of entities to which agency can be ascribed also depends on a conceptual narrowing of the meaning of that idea. The multi-dimensional problem of the relationships between purposive action, conditions, and resources, on the one hand, and unintended consequences on the other hand is rendered passé by reducing the concept of agency to a synonym for ‘having an effect’ or ‘bringing about change’. It is this move that enables ‘agency’ to be extended in new directions and applied in novel ways. In these strands of work, agency is made manifest by tracing chains of cause and effect, where these might range all the way from the collapse of complex infrastructural systems (e.g., Bennett 2005) to the mundane maintenance or repair of everyday routines (Barry 2013). In certain respects, in their emphasis on the thoroughly associational qualities of social life, these approaches can be considered as further variations on long-standing debates about the status of concepts such as ‘structure’ and ‘system’ in social analysis, and in particular debates about the status of collective actors such as classes, firms, or states. There are two key issues raised by these recent debates about non-human agency that relate to the central theme of this Handbook, making sense of social change. Both not only loop back to older debates about agency, but also help to clarify what is most at stake in longstanding theoretical debates about that idea. First, beyond the knock-down headlines about the ‘agency’ of this or that material object or non-human animal, the real import of such work is to refine a sense of distributed agency (see Enfield and Kockelman 2017). Following from this emphasis, secondly, questions of agency are displaced away from a set of concerns with wilful intention towards a set of concerns with relations of accountability. In view of these two issues, it is best not to think that debates about agency hinge on the problem of deciding upon the correct ontology. If one returns to the canonical work in actor-network theory and science and technology studies (e.g., Woolgar 1996), what one finds is a series of narratives of morally treacherous fields in which all sorts of actions for which people, or firms, or other organisations might find themselves being held responsible, turn out to be caused by factors that are strictly beyond their intention or control. And in re-describing agency as both distributed and woven into chains of accountability, discussions of non-human agency further underline the complex, multiple, and layered temporalities through which social change can be apprehended, explained, and evaluated.

Approaching social change As the preceding discussion of the temporal imaginations of change and the accounts of agents of change indicates, there is no single approach to the analysis and explanation of social change (see also Krznaric 2007). Nor is the aim of this Handbook to provide some kind of synthesis between different approaches. It does provide an overview of some of the most influential strands of thought concerned with these issues, and in so doing we hope it provides a sense of the range of methodological, conceptual, and normative issues associated with the analysis of social change. Amongst the approaches explicitly discussed are theories of social movements, accounts of everyday resistance, theories of collective action, theories of power, and practice 9

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theories. These and other approaches to social change anchoring different chapters focus on specific types of agency, deploy different methodologies, and think of change in relation to different temporal and spatial scales. There are, in turn, different normative imaginations shaping traditions of scholarship, including ideas of fairness, inclusion, participation, emancipation, material improvement, or spiritual transformation. Across all of the chapters in this Handbook, emphasis is upon the importance of addressing the temporal imaginations and causal understandings through which change is presented in order to draw into view the ways in which the formal dimensions of change (in terms of rupture, incremental change, or reproduction) are related to substantive normative ideas of what makes change ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary’. In short, all of the chapters in this Handbook are situated in particular intellectual paradigms and reflect particular intellectual commitments. The perspectives provided in this collection are necessarily partial, in the sense that the chapters all come from somewhere, reflecting specific concerns and commitments of their authors. The aim of the collection is not to provide complete coverage, but to open up lines of questioning. The Handbook of Social Change is not best approached as a ‘How To’ guide! Rather, it is presented as something to think with, providing a series of provocations to further discussion, argument, and inquiry. If there is an overarching vision to this Handbook, one that has shaped our focus in commissioning and editing the individual chapters, it is to be found in the pluralism of approaches and issues through which social change shows up as an object of curiosity in this collection of essays. The chapters move from a series of discussions of emblematic events or aspects of contemporary patterns of social change (Living in a World of Change) on to a consideration of the different temporal imaginations and rhetorical tropes through which social change is described, understood, and evaluated, from images of totalising rupture through to smallscale incremental aggregation (Modes of Change); on to treatments of the different agents and forms of agency prioritised in different fields of inquiry (Agents of Change); and finally a set of overviews of selected traditions of scholarship on social change with a focus on how concepts, methods, and forms of normative evaluation are tied together (Approaching Social Change). We hardly imagine that this book will be read sequentially, from front to back. Nor are any of these organising refrains restricted to particular sections – so, for example, issues of agency are discussed in all chapters, just as all chapters reflect upon specific approaches to the analysis of social change. Nevertheless, we hope this way of organising the chapters serves to explicitly identify the distinct forms of questioning that can serve as an entry point for further inquiry.

Synopsis of chapters Part I: Living in a world of change The chapters in Part I each address an example of a contemporary event, issue, or trend that provides an entry point for the analytical themes that run through the whole volume. In Chapter 2, Reactionary anti-globalism, Matthew Sparke discusses the emergence of a rightwing politics of anti-globalism over the last two decades, associated with the rise of forms of ultra-nationalism, embittered populism, and reassertions of xenophobic and exclusionary sovereignty. He conceptualises these reactionary developments as the morbid symptoms of the crisis of ‘Globalization’, the process that dominated discussions of social change in the 1990s and 2000s. These revanchist responses reveal that the political inflection given to the experiences of increasing inequalities, insecurities, and instabilities generated by globalisation are far from necessarily progressive in their form or content. Nik Theodore, in Chapter 3, 10

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The production of surplus populations, considers the significance of forms of economic development that thrive on in formal and insecure labour markets. The growth of a global precariat is, he suggests, indicative of both a structural change in the dynamics of capital accumulation and an epistemological challenge to received theories of capitalism. The emergence of these new relationships between precarious labour and accumulation is shaped by the complex interactions of multiple processes, Theodore argues, including migration, urbanisation, and informality. In Chapter 4, The Anthropocene, Noel Castree traces the emergence of this keyword of twenty-first century global discourses. The problematisation of the Anthropocene redefines understandings of the scale, speed, and drivers of social change. The concept of the Anthropocene also transforms the meanings associated with ‘the human’, at once inflating humanity into a force of geological transformation, while deflating models of purposive and intentional human agency by emphasising the dynamism of biophysical systems beyond human control. The theme of non-human agency, broadly conceived, runs across many of the chapters in this volume, and is a focus of Pushpa Arabindoo’s discussion in Chapter 5, Ecologies of infrastructure. Drawing on a case study from Chennai, she discusses the image of change associated with the rise of ‘infrastrucutrualism’ in fields of economic policy in development planning. Infrastructural investments are also often presented as crucial to driving ecological transitions and to addressing socio-economic inequalities. Emphasising the imbrication of specific infrastructure projects in wider ecosystems, Arabindoo indicates that multiple forms of non-human agency and materiality intersect in shaping the unexpected outcomes of programmes designed to transform economic systems and social life in more sustainable pathways. In Chapter 6, White victimhood, Nicky Falkof discusses the contemporary rise of forms of white supremacist politics. She suggests that this form of reactionary politics involves the appropriation of discourses of victimhood more often associated with progressive, emancipatory, and liberation movements. The analysis of Falkof examines the efforts to resist what are seen by some as unwelcome social changes that threaten existing hierarchies and patterns of privilege. Brexit, the political upheaval wrought by the UK’s decision to withdraw from the European Union (EU) in 2016, might be seen as another example of that sort of reactionary politics. In Chapter 7, Using rights, Kuba Jablonowski discusses how this process engulfed citizens of the EU legally resident in the UK in a new landscape of legal political uncertainty. He shows how the vulnerabilities generated by Brexit have generated a new proactive politics of rights-claims that is contributing to the development of new patterns of movement building, identity formation, and citizen-state engagement. Like other emergent issues addressed in Part I, in Chapter 8, The COVID-19 pandemic, Bue Rübner Hansen addresses a crisis, the shape and consequences of which are likely to unfold in ways that cannot yet be foreseen. He focuses on how the pandemic that started in 2020 was produced by social processes, including patterns of mobility and inequality as well as ecological degradation, and how it has thrown open the future shape and purposes of state-led policy interventions.

Part II: Modes of change The chapters in Part II of the Handbook explore the different temporal imaginations through which social change can be described, understood, and evaluated. These range from images of total rupture through to small-scale incremental aggregations. In Chapter 9, Reform and revolution, Donagh Davis provides a genealogy of what is perhaps the single most resilient 11

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conceptual opposition in debates about the nature of social change. Tracing the intimate connection between proponents of reform and advocates of more fundamental revolutionary change, he identifies the ways in which models of political strategy have been shaped not only by conceptual debates about the sources of inequality or injustice, but also by different normative visions of sought-after outcomes and practical calculations of what is possible. Closely associated with these debates about reform and revolution, the concept of crisis has been central to how the possibility of deliberately shaping social change has been imagined, and is the focus of John Clarke’s discussion in Chapter 10, Crisis and change. His focus is on the persuasive work that claims about crisis can play in shaping political processes. Often thought of as the condition of progressive political mobilisation, the manufacture of a sense of crisis can just as often be used to bolster the forms of reactionary politics trailed in chapters in Part I. Crises can be seen as temporary interruptions to otherwise durable systems, or as moments of opportunity for fundamental change. And any simple inference of the political significance of a crisis is complicated by the way in which a crisis in one field interacts with crises in other systems – a theme shared across many other chapters. Continuing the focus on core concepts of social analysis, in Chapter 11, Structural stories, Clive Barnett considers different ways in which ideas of structure have been used to imagine the dynamics of social change. Structures are often identified as the root causes of injustice, and therefore the rightful focus of programmes of totalising transformation. Barnett elaborates on a distinctive programmatic account of the contextual dynamics of social change, one which challenges the ‘structure fetishism’ that continues to shape a wide range of critical social theories. The theme of how the conditions of human action can be exceeded and transformed is also the focus of Chapter 12, Innovation at the limits of social change. Lauren Rickards, Kevin Grove, and Stephanie Wakefield argue that innovation is often an emergent phenomenon, as people find new paths and create new possibilities where there were none before. It is also a capacity of non-human systems, and therefore understanding innovation is crucial to grasping the dynamism of the planetary challenges that are the object of concern of so many contemporary efforts to deliberately transform economic, social, and environmental processes. The emergent dimensions of social change are also a focus of Chapter 13, Prefiguration, in which Ant Ince explores the genealogy of the idea that successful movements should enact in their present practices the changes they seek to bring about in the future. An idea strongly associated with anarchist political thought, prefigurative transformation challenges visions of political change focussed on images of wholesale revolutionary transformation of state institutions. Drawing together themes from across other chapters in this Part, in Chapter 14, Catastrophe as usual, Nigel Clark explores the recurring attraction to the idea of external catastrophes as offering the opportunity to achieve fundamental ruptures in political orders. The investment in rupture as an ideal of political change might represent an indifference to the genuine harm and damage associated with catastrophic events. Clark argues that rather than thinking of catastrophes as exceptional or extreme events that disrupt and challenge orderly patterns, they might be better thought of as routine aspects of ordinary life. Developing the theme of ‘catastrophic ordinariness’, Clark suggests that deliberate efforts at social change are often responses to the unexpected.

Part III: Agents of change The themes considered in Part II, focussing on the images of rhythm, speed, and shape of social change, raise a set of further issues about the nature of agency: who and what brings 12

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about change? These issues are closely connected to a related set of questions about the object of social change, questions about what should be changed: is it the state, or the economy, or collective identity, or environmental processes, or personal happiness? This is the focus of the chapters in Part III. In Chapter 15, The state, Glyn Williams discusses the ways in which the state has often been thought of as the privileged agent and object of social change. Whether in optimistic visions, or in darker critiques, the state is often seen as an omnipotent centre of power. Williams argues for a more nuanced view of state practices, as arenas of contestation woven into wider networks of interdependence with other actors. This perspective enables a more realistic estimation of the roles played by state agencies in processes of social change. In Chapter 16, NGOs as change agents, Diana Mitlin pursues a similar analytical strategy of conceptual unpacking in outlining the varied roles played by non-governmental actors in fields of global development. She identifies four distinct roles – innovators, educators, alliance builders, and service providers – to draw into view the ways in which the agency of NGOs is always shaped by their interactions with states, civil society, and capital. In Chapter 17, Parties, Nick Clarke explores the changing status accorded to another model of collective action. Once presented as the model of democratic agency, capable of mobilising mass constituencies and realising their interests in the form of policies and programmes, the ‘decline’ of parties has more recently been taken as both indicative of and caused by wider social trends. Narrower models of parties as machines for winning elections are viewed as further fuelling disaffection with liberal democratic norms. But Clarke also gleans the emergence of newer forms ‘movement parties’, suggesting that straightforward narratives of rise and fall of parties need to be rethought. The following three chapters each address what we might think of as anonymous mediums of political agency. In Chapter 18, The economy, Siân Butcher considers the different ways in which not only economic processes have been viewed as drivers of social change, but also how economies are differently thought of as objects of deliberate programmes of change. She explores a series of models and metaphors through which the agency of economic processes has been represented, from images of deep structural complexity through to visions that open up possibilities for proactive reshaping of economic life. The idea that knowledge is the key to social change is so widespread as to be almost taken for granted. In Chapter 19, Knowledge, Jessica Pykett examines some of the distinctive ways in which the relationship between knowledge and action is framed in contemporary policy discourses. Using the example of the rise of behaviour change policies as a case study, she explores how forms of expert knowledge have framed new surfaces for intervening in social life, in this case by seeking to shape and reshape the most personal and intimate aspects of people’s behaviour – their feelings of happiness. The practices explored by Pykett often generate worries about people being manipulated without being fully aware of what is being done to them. This same theme is central to the discussion in Chapter 20, Technology. In this chapter, Sam Kinsey discusses the range of hopes and fears invested in the idea of ‘technology’, which have a long history and have been revived in current debates about artificial intelligence and social media. Rather than counterposing the human to the technological, he considers the ways in which the materiality and automaticity often ascribed to seemingly inhuman technologies can be thought of as thoroughly human attributes, implying a refigured image of ‘the human’ as constituted by relations of dependence, mediation, and vulnerability. The final three chapters of Part III consider different versions of the very human figures who often populate our visions of social change. In Chapter 21, The people, Anna Selmeczi discusses the ambivalent representation of ‘the people’ in political thought. Whereas mass mobilisations and popular movements are sometimes thought of as the very embodiment 13

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of democratic or even revolutionary virtue, under the spectre of populism, the people are just as often seen as threats to liberal order and as harbouring resentful or reactionary tendencies. In exploring these competing representations, Selmeczi shows how debates about the people inevitably revolve around normative notions of the means and ends of political change. Charlotte Lemanski, in Chapter 22, Citizen action, considers how far inclusive and participatory practices of citizen engagement actually achieve genuine social change. Using examples for Cape Town and Delhi, she suggests that real change very often arises from the unanticipated side effects of participatory programmes. Finally, in Chapter 23, Activism, Daniel Conway focuses attention on the people who do social change – activists. He suggests that activism is often conflated with social movement mobilisation, thereby obscuring the range of motivations that shape people’s commitments to the work and pleasures of activism. From this perspective, the ends of activist agency are expanded to include not only obviously political goals but also issues such as the maintenance of personal integrity, networks of friendship, and identity building – suggesting in turn a much more complex sense of the temporalities of change engendered by activism.

Part IV: Approaching social change The final set of chapters focus on various traditions of research and scholarship explicitly concerned with explaining social change. A range of conceptual and methodological paradigms are discussed, and new horizons and emerging syntheses are identified. In Chapter 24, Imaginations of power, Kiara Worth makes the case that understanding how power works is a crucial condition for any analysis of the scope for transformational action. While theories of power are a staple feature of academic debates in certain disciplines, her discussion elaborates on the distinctive form of conceptual analysis developed in practice-facing fields of development studies. Here, different concepts of power are deployed to discern the limits and opportunities for meaningful change in particular fields of practice. Similar themes of understanding constraints in order to glean the possibilities of creative action are at the centre of Richard Ballard’s discussion in Chapter 25, Everyday resistance. He discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the influential account of ‘weapons of the weak’ developed by the anthropologist James Scott, which challenged the tendency of structural accounts of domination to reduce ordinary people to passive victims. Ballard shows how the development of this perspective served as a kind of corrective response to established paradigms, and how in turn it has been subjected to criticism for itself closing off avenues of analysis. Debates about the everyday resistance paradigm therefore serve as a case study of how theoretical work on social change develops through a dynamic of dialogue and critique within and across competing perspectives. In Chapter 26, Contentious politics, Clare Saunders provides a critical appreciation of one of the most influential paradigms of political analysis. The contentious politics research programme has been central to the analysis of social movements, and provides a capacious image of politics as a process of claims-making. It is a tradition that focuses on comparative analysis and focuses in particular on certain sorts of protest events and occasions of mass mobilisation. It has been effective in identifying common mechanisms that help to generate episodes of contention, and is particularly attuned to how strategies of organisation and contention travel across contexts. A related tradition of thought, also concerned with the dynamics of collective action in generating political transformations, is discussed in Chapter 27, Civil resistance. Jonathan Pinckney discusses the theories of non-violent political action, central to the Civil Rights movement in the United States, to the anti-apartheid movement, and 14

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more recently the so-called Arab Spring. While its practical significance is widely recognised, Pinckney seeks to elaborate on the theoretical significance of this tradition of thought, not least by considering the particular forms of force associated with avowedly non-violent styles of action. Gerda Roelvink, in Chapter 28, Collective action, engages critically with the paradigms discussed in these two preceding chapters, developing a poststructural account of collective action that focuses upon post-human and hybrid assemblages. Emerging from debates about alternative economic strategies, the approach she discusses broadens out the sense of the where and how of political action. Concerns with stretching the meaning of collective action are also central to the final two chapters of the volume. In Chapter 29, Eventful infrastructures, Anders Blok picks up themes discussed in a number of other chapters, elaborating on ideas of material agency derived from actor-network theory and science and technology studies. He argues that the dominant images of infrastructure – durability and persistence and stability – need to be supplemented by a view of the always present potential for eventful disruptions and transformations. Once again, this chapter illustrates the ways in which deliberate attempts to configure change are always dependent on wider relationships, uncertain consequences, and surprising developments. Finally, in Chapter 30, Practices of social change, Daniel Welch and Luke Yates explore the potential of combining insights from theories of practice (most often concerned with the mundane dynamics of everyday ordering activities) and theories of contentious politics concerned with more explicitly political processes of activism and mobilisation. As with other chapters throughout the volume, their discussion underscores the importance of opening up to analysis the ways in which deliberate efforts to enact social change are enabled, conditioned, and constrained by networks of relationships that mean that the shape of the future is always open rather than predetermined.

References Abbott, A., 2001. Time matters: on theory and method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Amin, A., 2012. Land of strangers. Cambridge: Polity Press. Archer, M., 2000. For structure: its reality, properties and powers. Sociological Review, 48 (3), 464−472. Barry, A., 2013. Material politics: disputes along the pipeline. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Bennett, J., 2005. The agency of assemblages and the North American Blackout. Public Culture, 17 (3), 445−466. Bhabha, H., 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge. Blaut, J., 1993. The colonizer’s model of the world: geographical diffusionism and Eurocentric history. New York: Guilford Press. Brown, K., 2012. Policy discourses of resilience. In: M. Pelling, D. Manuel Navarette, and M. Redclift, eds. Climate change and the crisis of capitalism. Abingdon: Routledge, 37−50. Byrne, D. and Callaghan, G., 2013. Complexity theory and the social sciences: the state of the art. London: Routledge. Chakravorty, D., 2000. Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. DeVerteuil, G. and Golubchikov, O., 2016. Can resilience be redeemed? Resilience as a metaphor for change, not against change. City, 20 (1), 143−151. Elster, J. 1989., Nuts and bolts for the social sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Enfield, N.J. and Kockelman, P., eds. 2017. Distributed agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fabian, J., 1983. Time and the other. New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, M., 1972. The archaeology of knowledge. London: Tavistock Publications. Fung, A. and Wright, E.O., 2003. Deepening democracy: institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance. London: Verso. Goldfarb, J., 2007. The politics of small things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gould, S.J., 1989. Wonderful life: the Burgess Shale and the nature of history. New York: W.W. Norton. Green, D., 2016. How change happens. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Richard Ballard and Clive Barnett Koopman, C., 2011. Foucault across the disciplines: introductory notes on contingency in critical inquiry. History of the Human Sciences, 24 (4), 1−12. Koselleck, R., 2004. Futures past: on the semantics of historical time. New York: Columbia University Press. Krznaric, R., 2007. How change happens: interdisciplinary perspectives for human development. Nairobi: Oxfam. Lefort, C., 1986. The political forms of modern society: bureaucracy, democracy, totalitarianism. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Lewis, P., 2012. Notions of order and process in Hayek: the significance of emergence. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 39 (4), 1167−1190. Martin, J.L., 2011. The explanation of social action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mbembe, A., 2021. Out of the dark night: essays on decolonization. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Michon, P., 2002. Strata, blocks, pieces, spirals, elastics and verticals: six figures of time in Michel Foucault. Time and Society, 11 (2–3), 163–192. Osborne, P., 1995. The politics of time: modernity and avant-garde. London: Verso. Pugh, J., 2021. Resilience. In: V. Das and D. Fassin, eds. Words and worlds: a lexicon for dark times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 225−242. Sayes, E., 2014. Actor-network theory and methodology: just what does it mean to say that nonhumans have agency? Social Studies of Science, 44 (1), 134–149. Sewell, W., 1992. A theory of structure: duality, agency, and transformation. American Journal of Sociology, 98 (1), 1–29. Shapiro, I., 2007. Political contingency: studying the unexpected, the accidental, and the unforeseen. New York: NYU Press. Solnit, R., 2016. Hope in the dark: untold histories, wild possibilities. Edinburgh: Canongate. Spelman, E., 2002. Repair: the impulse to restore in a fragile world. Boston: Beacon Press. Taylor, C., 2003. Modern social imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Touraine, A., 1977. The self-production of society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wallis, G.W., 1970. Chronopolitics: the impact of time perspectives on the dynamics of change. Social Forces, 49 (1), 102−108. White, H., 1990. The content of the form: narrative discourse and historical representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Woolgar, S., 1996. Science and technology studies and the renewal of social theory. In: S.P. Turner, ed. Social theory and sociology: the classics and beyond. Oxford: Blackwell, 235–255. Wright, E.O., 2010. Envisioning real utopias. London: Verso.

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PART I

Living in a world of change

 


   

   

   
 

2 REACTIONARY ANTI-GLOBALISM The Crisis of Globalisation Matthew Sparke ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’. (Gramsci 1971[1930], p. 276) Reactionary anti-globalism is on the march globally. Intersecting with ultra-nationalism, embittered populism, xenophobic racism, police-state authoritarianism, show-man sexism, science-denying anti-environmentalism, and border-building calls for the reassertion of sovereignty, it is now crossing borders as prominently as the managerial globalists and vulnerable migrants that its agitators target for repudiation and rejection. Amidst the global spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus in 2020–21, it has also led to the repeated depiction of the disease as a foreign threat, prompting more ultra-nationalism, including so-called vaccine nationalism, as a dominant global response while simultaneously undermining efforts at more cooperative global health coordination. This chapter seeks to examine these reactionary developments as symptoms of global social changes – morbid symptoms in Antonio Gramsci’s all too telling terms – that together have led to a crisis of Globalisation. By spelling Globalisation here with a capital ‘G’ I seek to build on arguments made elsewhere about the need to distinguish the dominant pro-market political discourse of Globalisation that became globally hegemonic around the turn of the new millennium from all the material global ties – economic ties, social ties, cultural ties, political ties, migration ties, communicational ties, ecological ties, disease ties, and so on – that continue to comprise not only the underlying but also notably uneven interdependencies of actually existing (lower case ‘g’) globalisation (Sparke 2013a and 2018a). Making this textual distinction at the outset of the new millennium made it possible to explore the ways in which the ‘capital G’ political discourse of Globalisation was tied to the hegemonic steering of actually existing globalisation in the direction of evermore influential forms of market rule. Myths about Globalisation inaugurating an inevitable, flat and borderless market regime could be examined thus as naturalising supposedly unstoppable market rule. Even as its repeated invocation by politicians underlined how such market rule actually depended on far from inevitable processes of political advocacy and authorisation, the argument that ‘There Was No Alternative’ to Globalisation’s levelling effects kept being made by ‘TINA’-touts advocating market-based and market-expanding global integration. DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-3

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Today more myth-making about ‘capital G’ Globalisation continues, but it has changed in tone from the Panglossian patter of the past. Instead, it is now a predominantly backlash mythmaking that turns anything identified as ‘Global’ into some sort of frightening supernatural spectre threatening the nation (Sheppard 2020). For entangled reasons that this chapter seeks to disentangle, the resulting scare-mongering and exaggerations about Globalisation still continue to serve the interests of capitalist elites. However, rather than naturalising market rule, Globalisation is now increasingly invoked by reactionary anti-globalists to supernaturalise foreign threats – which is also why polling data about some enduring support for economic globalisation is less salient than the politicisation of Globalisation in denunciatory backlash narratives and representations (Walter 2021). The crisis of the discourse of Globalisation has coincided in this way with a re-direction of much of the anger and anxiety at the social changes caused by globalised market rule into anger and anxiety with foreigners and foreign things, including with cosmopolitan elites, multicultural managerial classes, and green technologies such as wind farms, but also and especially with impoverished migrants and refugees (Hogan and Haltinner 2015, Miller-Idriss 2019). To be sure, the resulting turns towards nativism and populism cannot be reduced to grievances with the social changes associated with the globalisation (lower case g) of market rule previously promoted with appeals to Globalisation (capital G). Country-specific histories of nationalism, racism, sexism, and antielitism all need to be explored to make sense of particular national articulations of populist and nativist grievance. The transnational spread of reactionary civilisational narratives about declining white Christian male dominance also at once contributes to and complicates the supernaturalisation of foreign threats in anti-Globalist discourse (Segura-Ballar 2021). This chapter is not therefore arguing that ‘anti-globalism’ is a stand-alone explanation of the wider shifts towards reactionary politics around the world. But unlike appeals to ‘populism’ and ‘nativism’ that too often function as over-reaching ahistorical and naturalising explanations, ‘anti-globalism’ as an analytical term better brings into focus material aspects of our contemporary global hegemonic upheaval that are causally connected to the global social changes of globalisation, especially when the latter is understood – as it is here – in terms of increasing, increasingly impactful, and increasingly intertwined forms of market interdependency and market rule (Colantone and Stanig 2019, Mansfield et al. 2021, Sparke 2013a). It is precisely these material market forces that the cultural politics of reactionary anti-globalism tends to obscure. Reworked by reactionaries, today’s anti-globalist redirection of anger and anxiety about globalised social change has led to some of the same sorts of ‘morbid symptoms’ of hegemony in crisis that Antonio Gramsci saw in the early twentieth-century political turmoil set in motion by socio-economic change. These damaging political-economic symptoms have most recently made the world all the more vulnerable to the material morbidity and mortality inflicted by the real and devastatingly globalised pandemic of COVID (Sparke and Williams 2021). Ardent anti-globalists have not only racialised the virus as a foreign threat. At the same time, their racism has commonly combined with libertarian anti-lockdown and anti-science agitation to fashion newly nihilistic norms of nationalism that appeal to ideas about the survival of the fittest to justify the sacrifice of sub-citizens and non-citizens in a misguided disaster-capitalist pursuit of national ‘herd immunity’ (Bourgeron 2021, Lopez and Neely 2021). The disproportionate deaths and devastation experienced in minoritised and migrant communities of colour have thereby been effectively deemed ‘non-herd’, another sign of the structural racism and white supremacist revanchism with which anti-globalism has widely intersected. But long before the cruelties of this COVID conjuncture and all its intersectional inequalities in vulnerability and instigations of resistance, struggles over hegemony were 20

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unleashed by the social changes that pro-market Globalisation discourse served to legitimate as part of actually existing globalisation.

Interregna today For Gramsci, writing in his Prison Notebooks in 1930, the social changes at issue related to the global depression that had followed the financial crash of 1929, and the resulting struggle over the political sympathies of the unemployed and socially distressed masses, including the masses left unprotected by the limitations of what the Italian Marxist famously theorised from his prison as Fordism. The morbid symptoms in this early twentieth-century ‘interregnum’ consisted of both the damage done to national democracies by the rise of fascism and by what Gramsci saw as the premature moves of Comintern ultra-leftism away from political struggle with the fascists (Achcar 2017). Today’s global conjuncture is clearly quite different, itself a huge historical shift that reflects social changes driven by capitalist globalisation towards much greater global interdependency with diverse international, flexible, and so-called postFordist divisions of labour (Fraser 2019, Sheppard 2020). Unleashed by these changes and the legal and financial infrastructures they have created for the corporate commandeering of public property and intellectual property (IP) on a global scale, more recent socioeconomic changes have also involved the global expansion of ‘winner takes all’ monopolies along with the expansion and entrenchment of overlapping rentier and reputational regimes (Christophers 2020, Davies 2021, Dayen 2020, Giridharadas, 2019). From old-fashioned real estate monopolies, to new software monopolies, tech-data monopolies, media monopolies, and pharmaceutical monopolies, the associated monopolisation trends tend to be more focused on seizing, enclosing, and monetising the commons than on the falling profits to be made from exploiting people as workers directly (Hardt and Negri 2019). They also increasingly seem to be taking anti-competitive behaviour in the direction of monopolising the actual infrastructures of the market place, effectively taking over control of whole platforms in ways that elude older anti-trust concerns with pricing as a metric of consumer welfare (Khan 2016). Having been naturalised and justified by official economists at the start of the new millennium as ‘new economy’ regimes for producing new goods at negligible marginal costs (Delong and Summers 2001), monopolies have also gone on to be heralded by capitalist visionaries as the winning strategy for global value capture in a world where old-fashioned capitalist competition is supposedly ‘for losers’ (Thiel 2014). Monopolists today have nevertheless co-evolved politically with anti-globalist ultranationalism despite the border-crossing global reach of the new economy monopolies they are building. In reality, and in concert with the rising influence of global finance (and the relentlessly globalising efforts of investors to escape the limits of accumulation at the national scale), these monopolies have expanded novel platforms for price-gouging, information control, regulatory arbitrage, tax avoidance, and political corruption on an unprecedented global scale. They have also thereby created distinctly globalised networks for value capture compared to the more nationally contained bases of political-economic hegemony analysed by Gramsci. But while today’s monopolists do need transnational legal protections to keep competition at bay, they do not necessarily need to have ongoing international cooperation and rule-making to secure their monopoly rents – thanks in no small part to the global rule sets such as the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that preceding generations of Globalists already pursued and secured in the name of safeguarding Globalisation (Slobodian 2018). This helps explain in turn why many of today’s more monopolistic capitalist elites are also colluding with ultra-nationalist 21

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anti-globalism in ways that are hauntingly reminiscent of early twentieth-century fascism (Bessner and Sparke 2017, Foster and Chowdhury 2019, Giroux 2018, Harvey 2019, Monbiot 2019). Once monopoly value capture is legally expanded and entrenched across borders, monopolists can more easily abdicate from traditional capitalist commitments to international cooperation and cosmopolitan openness. As a result, they can mix support for anti-globalism that helps free them from regulations and taxes at the same time as still capturing value transnationally. To come to terms with these especially contradictory symptoms of hegemony in crisis, it therefore remains useful to follow Gramsci and pay attention to the shifting discourses of political common sense in our current interregna. In some ways the shift to a backlash discourse about ‘capital G’ Globalisation appears like an ideological capsizal of the former hegemonic common-sense about its ‘end of History’ inevitability and benefits. For Francis Fukuyama, the liberal commentator most closely associated with advancing ‘end of History’ arguments at the end of the Cold War, it is the economic shortcomings of neoliberalism – reckless deregulation, alienating consumerism, and wholesale public asset privatisation – that have all conspired to undermine older models of liberalism, thereby turning Globalisation into the dirty word scorned by illiberal populists (Fukuyama 2020). But as insightful as this is as a critique of market fundamentalism, it downplays the continuities in how Globalisation has been mythologised in ways that obscure the underlying capitalist power relations of actually existing globalisation. After all, liberals and neoliberals alike have shared in similarly boosterish myth-making about Globalisation leading to the global advance of the rule of law while downplaying the widespread association of global market integration with authoritarianism, oligarchical coups, and violent dispossession. Today’s reactionary anti-liberals effectively continue this myth-making and simplification. However, they also invert it in ways that shift blame (and obscure ongoing oligarchical gain) with their own brand of misleading camera obscura anti-globalism – an anti-globalism that is widely interpreted as populist even as it reduces the demos of ‘the people’ to the model and affective mood of the dissatisfied customer (Lebow 2019). The reactionary populist backlash certainly represents a crisis of confidence in the visions of an inexorable, borderless Globalisation of increasing inclusion, opportunity, and prosperity for all. More than this, it also reflects real social changes of increasing inequality, instability, and insecurity that have torn asunder the Panglossian pictures of inclusive prosperity, stability, and security previously embedded in depictions of Globalisation at the turn of the millennium. But even as its populist appeal indexes the changes and problems of actually existing globalisation under market rule, the anti-globalist mythologisation of Globalisation remains deeply misleading. Instead of charting global social connections and changes in ways that help highlight power relations and processes, it targets social scapegoats and racialises others imagined as enemies with a geopolitics of fear and blame. This is why it can be used so easily to deflect critical attention from the world’s wealthiest people and their increasingly monopolistic systems of value capture. Herein lies a central contradiction of our contemporary interregna. Instead of targeting the billionaires, oligarchs, and plutocrats who have benefited most from market rule, and instead of addressing the globalised market relations and monopolies on which they rely, the morbid myths of reactionary anti-globalism have turned diverse others into targets, including especially racially marked ‘others’ and foreigners who can be aligned and maligned with ‘globalism’ (and global disease) on the basis of racialised identity. Resentments of the ultra-rich still circulate, but the class politics of resistance or revolution that they might have mobilised in other moments is diverted (albeit incompletely) into an ultra-nationalist politics of revanchism, repression, and racism that twists anti-elitism into reactionary arguments against 22

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science, against professional expertise, and against what is widely reviled by anti-globalists as ‘politically correct’ multi-culturalism. In this context, ideas about defending the nation and ‘deglobalisation’ can be delinked from critiques of market forces and, however contradictorily, articulated with demands for deregulation and ‘freedom’ from the rules designed to advance global human rights, health rights, and environmental protection (or at least climate crisis adaptation) across borders. As a result, reactionary anti-globalism has steered the crisis of Globalisation in a way that protects and preserves the market rule of actually existing globalisation. It undermines more democratic transnational efforts to address global market failures – such as World Health Organization (WHO) efforts to address failures in global vaccine access; or the Paris agreement to address the climate crisis – even as it is animated by an anti-Globalist anxiety and anger provoked by globalised market rule. The contradiction at the heart of today’s reactionary anti-globalism can also be looked at in terms of the ties and tensions between its two sides. On the one side, its global spread and coordination reflects global discontent with the social changes set in motion by globalised market rule. On the other side, its evolution has also involved ongoing, influential, and deeply co-supportive ties between anti-globalist leaders and representatives of the global capitalist class who deployed the discourse of Globalisation to legitimate market rule in the first place. Leaders like Donald Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil have been able thus to have their anti-globalist cake while still managing to eat it, so to speak, at elite investor-class meetings, including meetings with other national heads of state who similarly avow anti-globalist nationalism at home alongside the accommodation and deregulation of economic elites abroad. Even as they assert that they will reverse the damage done by Globalisation and Globalists, therefore, they have continued to pursue most of the same pro-market policies, including deregulation for business, tax cuts for the wealthy, austerity for the poor, and deunionisation for workers, alongside the protection of IP monopolies, and the privatisation of public services and the commons. These are the same pro-market policies that have driven so many of the social changes involved in undermining confidence in Globalisation as a hegemonic vision of market-led globalisation, and yet, with a morbid twist, anti-globalist leaders now pursue them in the name of taking back national control. Indeed, freed from the fiction of pro-market Globalisation serving the greater global good, they have in many cases doubled down on the elitism and extremism of pro-market policy-making to the benefit of ever more exclusive investor-class interests. To come to terms with this hugely consequential political pivot and all its internal contradictions, research on the actual social changes under market-led globalisation is crucial.

Global social changes driving the crisis of Globalisation Three especially influential and interrelated patterns of social change can all be traced back to the ways in which actually existing globalisation has transformed societies by expanding and entrenching the pro-market politics and practices advanced under the banner of Globalisation. Put simply, these three social changes consist of increasing in-country inequality, increasing personal insecurity, and increasing international instability. They are social transformations that have been associated the world over with market-led globalisation, and their repeated experience across more intensely globalised societies has in turn provoked anti-Globalism and the backlash against Globalisation. To understand why means asking and answering two key questions: How, contrary to the promises of Globalisation discourse, did the actual globalisation of market ties and market rules lead to these material social changes of increasing inequality, instability, and insecurity? And how has the resulting disillusionment and 23

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resentment been captured in turn by a morbid backlash politics of scapegoating stand-ins for Globalisation in ways that obfuscate anew the globalised capitalist hegemony of market ties and market rule that today’s anti-globalists still tend to protect and promote? Let us now consider each of these questions in turn. According to Oxfam’s 2020 annual report on global inequalities, the world’s richest 1% have more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people, and the world’s 2,153 billionaires own more wealth between them than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60% of the planet’s population (Oxfam, 2020). By the start of 2020 the worldwide number of so-called ultrahigh net worth individuals (UHNWIs) – those with assets of more than $30 m (£26.5 m) – totalled over 500,000, with over half of them concentrated in the United States (Neate, 2020). Reports on both the conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption of UHNWIs indicate in turn that to reduce taxes much of their wealth is funnelled into offshore tax havens, private schools, private jets, luxury homes, and super yachts (Neate, 2019). These reports include the evermore revealing revelations of the so-called ‘Panama Papers’, ‘Paradise Papers’, and ‘Pandora papers’ that continue to show how the ultra-rich are able to hide and move their wealth offshore, often using trusts and shell companies to avoid taxes (Agyemang, 2021). At the other end of the global wealth spectrum, other communities do not pay taxes because they hardly earn or own anything at all. The World Bank has estimated that almost 50% of the global population lives on less than $5.50 a day, and that the annual rate of poverty reduction has halved since 2013 (World Bank 2018). This was not the direction of global growth and development forecast by pro-market promoters of Globalisation at the World Bank itself, and nor has their argument that ‘wealthier is healthier’ worked out very well in practice either (Pritchett and Summers 1996). Instead, homelessness, food insecurity, and other poor living conditions associated with mass poverty and austerity have led to devastating ill health and suffering, shortening lives around the world and leading in the same post-Fordist America that has over half of the world’s UHNWIs to increasing ‘deaths of despair’ – commonly by suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses – among those without college degrees (Case and Deaton 2020, Chetty et al. 2016, Sparke 2017, Stuckler and Basu 2013, WHO 2008). The 2020 COVID pandemic has in turn exposed, exploited, and exacerbated many of the same inequalities alongside those produced by systemic racism, creating extreme variations in vulnerability as well as the dangerous exposure of all those forced to work or live in ‘petri-dish’ spaces of precarity – including gig economy jobs, cramped farmworker housing, slums, homeless camps, and prisons (Sparke and Anguelov 2020, Sparke and Williams 2021). Exacerbated further by the effects of interrelated climate crises, food crises, and water crises, as well as by the enduring extra-economic oppression of systemic sexism, racism, and religious violence, these same inequalities tied to globalised interdependencies have led to both personal insecurities and geopolitical instabilities at the same time. Linked as they are to the market rule of actually existing globalisation, these intensifying inequalities, instabilities, and insecurities were most often ignored or obscured in the gospel of Globalisation. A rising tide of global prosperity was supposed to lift all boats, not just super yachts. The much touted ‘level playing field’ of free trade was supposed to bring down borders and increase economic opportunity for all, not just for those flying flat in private executive jets. And while political stability was meant to arrive along with McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises, personal security was supposedly assured to any consumer anywhere who took up the globalised invitation to become a self-responsible and self-capitalising entrepreneur of their self. It was not as if the boosters of the Globalisation metanarrative saw it as an entirely free ride to the nirvana of free enterprise. Both individuals and governments were supposed to subject themselves to market discipline. Subordination to 24

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credit-scoring, market rankings, and relentless competition in almost every area of social life was the advertised price of opportunity. And for policy-makers the discipline of competing for investment demanded donning an all too familiar, one-size-fits-all, policy straitjacket of pro-market reform. The rule set was as regulative as it was regularly repeated by TINA-touts. Liberalise trade, deregulate business, privatise the public-sector, and flexibilise labour, advised the gurus of Globalisation, all the while adopting austerity in health services, education, and welfare in order to pay for reductions in redistributive taxation without risking inflation. But as restrictive as this straitjacketing rule set was, for boosters like Thomas Friedman it was also still a glowingly ‘golden straitjacket’ that promised prosperity and economic opportunity for all. To fit into the Golden Straitjacket a country must either adopt, or be seen as moving toward, the following golden rules: making the private sector the primary engine of its economic growth, maintaining a low rate of inflation and price stability, shrinking the size of its state bureaucracy, maintaining as close to a balanced budget as possible, if not a surplus, eliminating and lowering tariffs on imported goods, removing restrictions on foreign investment, deregulating its economy to promote as much domestic competition as possible, eliminating government corruption, subsidies and kickbacks as much as possible, opening its banking and telecommunications systems to private ownership and competition, and allowing its citizens to choose from an array of competing pension options and foreign run pension and mutual funds. When you stitch all of these pieces together you have the Golden Straitjacket. (Friedman 1999, p. 103) The experience of market integration in the world of actually existing globalisation has clearly proved far less golden and much more uneven than the ‘flat world’ envisioned by Friedman – an inconvenient outcome that even he has been increasingly forced to acknowledge by the ‘big reveal’ of the COVID catastrophe (Friedman 2020, McNamara and Newman 2020). To be sure, there has been phenomenal growth, and the global distribution of the resulting wealth has reduced certain forms of international inequality even as in-country inequalities have grown and the gaps have widened between the billionaires and the world’s bottom billons. Credit Suisse’s 2019 global wealth report underlined in this respect how the rise of China has played an outsized role in global wealth growth (Credit Suisse 2019). But the pattern of value capture by elites in communist China has also been replicated elsewhere too across both emerging economies and older centres of global economic growth, with the wealthiest 10% in every country capturing ever larger shares of national wealth (Credit Suisse 2019). As these trends accelerated through the first year of the COVID pandemic, the global wealth report (Credit Suisse 2021) has shown growing wealth inequality in nearly all of the world’s largest economies (indexed by the changing country Gini coefficient between 2000 and 2020) with only slight declines in Japan and Germany (see Figure 2.1). If we turn from wealth to income, here too the predominant pattern globally is of ever larger shares of total national income going to the top 10%, and yet even larger shares going to the top 1%. Reciprocally, the bottom 50% of most national populations has been losing its share of national income from the 1980s onwards. The most comprehensive data on these trends is provided online by the World Inequality Database (WID at https://wid.world/). This data shows that the United States has seen far more consistent and steeper inequality increases than the United Kingdom, which has seen more than France where the wealthiest have not gained so much, but where French elites still capture more than the 1% in China where the inequalities were starting from a much lower level but are nevertheless now growing fast. 25

Matthew Sparke Increasing Wealth Inequality in 10 Countries, 2000–2020 Gini Index Of Wealth Inequality

95 90 85 80 75 70 65 60 55 50 2000

2005 Brazil

2010 Russia

United Kingdom

2015 United States

China

France

2019 India

2020

Germany

Italy

Japan

Figure 2.1 Showing increasing in-country wealth inequalities in 10 countries Source: Based on data from the Global Wealth Report 2021 (Credit Suisse 2021).

Despite these differences, there is also a clear global convergence towards more income capture in countries by the wealthiest 1%. At the same time, as the ranks of the Asian middle class have grown, there has also been a connected but distinctly de-converging trend towards the loss of income by the lower middle classes of deindustrialising wealthy countries. This has led to the remarkable ‘elephant-shaped’ chart of changes over time in the income captured by different percentiles of the overall global income distribution (Lakner and Milanovic 2016). Updated more recently by other scholars of global inequality with still closer attention to the income captured by the upper reaches of the top 1% percentile, the elephant graph now shows an even more over-extended ‘trunk’ of income growth going to the world’s very richest (Alvaredo et al. 2018, see Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 Updated ‘elephant-chart’ of global income changes 1980–2016 Source: Based on data from Alvaredo et al. (2018).

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What this chart shows is the relative gain in real GDP income per capita (y-axis) across the global income distribution (shown in percentiles on the x-axis) between 1980 and 2016 – the key recent period of rapid economic globalisation. Over this time period, people paid roughly between the 20th percentile and 40th percentile of the global income distribution experienced significant real income growth. These populations are comprised largely of the growing middle classes in rapidly industrialising and globally integrating Asia, and the growth in income in these populations has also simultaneously served to lower betweencountry inequality on the global stage (Milanovic 2018). Meanwhile, the chart shows that there has been much lower real income growth for those close to the middle of the global income distribution between the 55th percentile and 90th percentile. These are the ‘squeezed’ bottom 90% of Europe, North America, and other countries where deindustrialisation, the offshoring of jobs, and a decline into gig economy precarity have led to stagnating incomes (Standing 2014). Finally, on the far right of the graph, we see the elephant’s trunk and with it the elephant in the room of vast value capture by the world wealthiest 1%. Perhaps more than any other evidence of the social changes induced by actually existing globalisation, it is this chart that helps explain why there has been a crisis in Globalisation as a discourse promising prosperity for all. Instead of a new and flat world order with golden riches flowing to all those disciplined by market rule, it documents extraordinarily uneven development. It also serves to summarise the net outcome of increases in in-country inequalities being layered on top of significant decreases in certain international inequalities between the West and the rising Asian economies. More than this, the graph’s two peaks – the elephant’s trunk and its head – further show what is at stake in the misdirection of reactionary anti-globalism. Rather than focus on the underlying processes of value capture, and rather than address the income growth of global elites, today’s anti-liberal reactionaries have provided a voice and vehicle for discontent amongst the declining lower and middle classes of the west by blaming racialised others, including Asian others, for taking income away. We will turn in a moment to the significant geopolitical instabilities involved in attacks on the rise of Asia, and on China in particular. These were a notable aspect of Trump’s campaign to ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA), and to a lesser extent have also been a staple of reactionary anti-Globalism in Europe and Australia too. But more important in terms of explaining the rise of this reactionary anti-Globalism in the first place have been other domestic social welfare changes closely tied to the widening wealth gaps and shifts in global income gains (Bisbee et al. 2020). These social changes are best summarised under the umbrella title of increasing insecurity. They are changes that have widely amplified the anxieties associated with increasing wealth and income inequalities, but they are distinct in having been mediated more directly by policy-making and widely tied in this way to the arguments made by policy-makers about the pro-market policies required in order to adjust to big G Globalisation. They include all the roll-backs in social protections justified in the name of making countries more competitive, more business friendly and more market disciplined. Cuts to social welfare programs, health-care, housing, education, and other public services were all made in this way across the western world in the name of boarding the juggernaut of Globalisation. It has been the resulting withdrawal of social protection that has left so many people with stagnating incomes also terribly insecure – not least of all in relation to educational access and associated forms of class mobility – and it has been these same insecurities that have contributed so centrally to the backlash discourse against Globalisation and Globalists. Clearly more than just globalising insecurity has enabled today’s morbid symptoms of crisis to spread far and wide. The anti-Globalist backlash has undoubtedly been amplified by 27

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the ways in which social media and innovations in platform capitalism have allowed for an explosion in identity politics and identity-defined political movements seeking very different and evermore siloed forms of recognition (Davies 2021, Lebow 2019). At the same time, recent research shows that the impact of education on class in the context of globalisation has led to a widespread realignment of political cleavages that have played a role too. On the one side, progressive left-leaning parties have increasingly embraced the diverse identities, interests, aspirations, and electoral support of more highly educated populations at the expense of older allegiances with working classes – a transformation that is context contingent and, for example, especially pronounced in the United States and the United Kingdom while less developed in countries such as Ireland and Portugal (Gethin et al. 2021a). On the other side, by alienating poorly educated voters from traditional leftist parties and electoral engagement, this same party-political shift on the left towards the social, cultural and environmental concerns of more educated voters appears to have simultaneously helped inspire the reciprocal rise in popularity of the reactionary anti-globalists among the less educated. Indeed, faced with a choice between increasingly elite-oriented parties on both the left and the right – between what Gethin and colleagues describe as the ‘Brahmin Left’ and ‘Merchant Right’ (Gethin et al. 2021b) – less educated populations appear increasingly drawn to the ‘Merchant Right’ parties that are themselves now newly figure-headed by anti-Globalist reactionaries, or what might therefore perhaps better be cast as a ‘Monopoly-Reactionary Right’ that elevates border-building over actual merchant rights. Of course, those rendered most precarious by the withdrawal of social protections and the contingentification of the post-Fordist workforce are not necessarily drawn to reactionary anti-Globalism and ultra-nationalism. Many other responses and protest movements from the left – such as the Occupy struggles that developed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis – have taken a radically democratic and notably globalised approach to resisting and rejecting the discourse of inevitable Globalisation (Hardt and Negri 2019). Misnamed ‘antiglobalisation’ movements, they have nevertheless been clearly and consistently critical of the hegemonic common sense that there is no alternative to market rule, economic inequality, and the withdrawal of social protections under Globalisation (Sparke 2013a). In the face of globalised dispossession, the inhabitants of Occupy encampments around the world demanded localised repossession of the commons, and yet they also did so inspired by a geographic imagination of the commons as a global commons, as a single precarious planetary ecosystem, and as a deeply interconnected global body politic (Sparke 2013b). In line with arguments long-developed by World Social Forum participants against World Economic Forum advocacy of Globalisation, they saw opportunities for local activism to connect thus with a global struggle to re-socialise the global economy and to refuse the ongoing economisation of global society. But despite this globalisation of social justice struggles from below, few of these activist efforts have successfully articulated their counter-hegemonic projects with national electoral politics, the explicitly socialist anti-neoliberal support shown for Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn notwithstanding. By contrast, reactionary anti-Globalism has been more effective at articulating into and alongside national electoral politics, and can itself be traced back to nationalistic responses to the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. In the United States, the Tea Party movement was especially effective in creating a political infrastructure with enduring ties to traditional Republican party operations that articulated frustrations about the handling of the financial crisis by globalist elites with a xenophobic and nostalgic nationalism (Guardino and Snyder 2012). It was this same infrastructure and outlook that then became the vehicle for Trump’s brand of reactionary anti-Globalism to establish widespread support from lower middle class 28

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white communities in America (Narayan 2017, Patenaude 2019). Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the conservative side of the Brexit movement had roots going back to the development of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the aftermath of the global recession, a party that articulated discontent about the handling of the great recession by elites in Westminster, Brussels, and Frankfurt with a xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and anti-EU platform (Ford and Goodwin 2014). It is important to underline that rather like the ultra-nationalism of fascistic movements in the early twentieth century, these brands of reactionary anti-Globalism have not been especially attractive to those most disenfranchised by increasing inequality and the loss of social protections (Bessner and Sparke 2017). Instead, it seems that the appeal of today’s ultra-nationalism is greater among the global North’s lower middle classes, especially among poorly educated but racially privileged white communities who feel they are losing their racial privileges and losing out to global elites and border-crossing immigrants at the same time (Davis 2020). We therefore have to look beyond the framing of reactionary anti-globalism as an eruption of ‘populism’ among the huddled masses. Reporting on Trump voters in the 2020 general election in the United States, for example, Mike Davis explains that focusing on ‘big, angry and ignorant white people in MAGA hats baying at the moon’ distracts from the material landscapes of middle-class middle America where reactionary rhetoric really reflects everyday social life. ‘Two social landscapes are particularly important for such an investigation’, Davis argues: ‘first, the ‘Micropolises’, smaller non-union, culturally conservative cities of the Midwest and South; and second, ‘Exurbia’, the affluent white migration into rural counties at the edge of major metropolises’. Focusing on such places leads Davis in turn to see how backlash anti-Globalism articulates middle class angst about economic decline and unemployment with fears of falling behind anything and anyone deemed foreign and unpatriotic. They also seem to be people and places for whom the racist rhetoric of reactionary leaders closely resonates with pronounced disregard for the conventions of corporate cosmopolitanism. One of the more remarkable achievements of reactionary anti-Globalism is that its leaders’ unabashed unwillingness to abide by the cosmopolitan values of corporate multiculturalism has not led to any kind of critique of corporate value capture itself. Their identitarian turn towards the reaffirmation of nation has not been matched by the reregulation of business (with only a few geopolitically-motivated restrictions on Chinese trade in America under Trump to which we return below in the conclusion). Thus, despite drawing considerable support from public discontent with the inequalities and insecurities of globalising market rule, reactionary anti-Globalism’s appeals to ultra-nationalism have not challenged the actual transnational business practices of globalising firms. Indeed, looked at from the side of globalised business and finance, identitarian anti-Globalism has helped re-direct anger and anxiety about inequality and insecurity that might have been articulated against global corporations, turning it instead against people of colour, immigrants and foreigners. Looked at especially through the lens of corporate monopoly, even the attacks on inter-state agreements by reactionary anti-Globalists like Trump can be considered useful in this way. Collecting rents on monopolised markets and all the new market platforms they have created, they have less need for the regulative state and the public investments it has traditionally made in the infrastructures and accords of orderly capitalist reproduction. For the same reason they find common cause with disillusioned populists who just want to disrupt business as usual in order to start, in Trump’s words, ‘winning again’. There is in this sense a kind of mutualism of monopoly at the heart of anti-Globalism, a mutualism that is many ways self-reinforcing. Monopolies expanded and entrenched globally thanks to global free trade deals. In turn the protections they granted global corporations have helped produce discontented masses 29

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who are drawn to a kind of anti-Globalism that ends up allowing market monopolies to keep on expanding unregulated and under-taxed. ‘It is no coincidence’, as the UK journalist George Monbiot has underlined, ‘that most of the newspapers promoting the nativist agenda, whipping up hatred against immigrants and thundering about sovereignty, are owned by billionaire tax exiles, living offshore’ (Monbiot 2019).

Conclusion All of the transformational trends outlined here suggest that the crisis of Globalisation represented by the rise of reactionary anti-Globalism does not mean we are seeing a fullblown crisis of globalised capitalism. Even amidst the shocks to the systems of global trade and global value capture inflicted by COVID, it has been remarkable how capitalist growth has continued (albeit evermore unevenly and with huge supply chain disruptions). Global finance and stock markets recovered during 2020 based on the readiness of central banks and legislatures to ease interest rates, increase government borrowing, and intervene to save vulnerable economic sectors, asset classes, and their investors. These outcomes all illustrate how forms of pro-market state-making have endured despite journalistic speculation that the sudden spate of state interventions signals the ‘death of neoliberalism’ (Avineri 2020, Cherkaoui 2020, Lent 2020). By buying into a simplistic Globalisation metanarrative associating neoliberalism with the death of the nation-state, such reporting too quickly forgets the historic and ongoing dependence of market rule on national state authorisation, including the authority invoked by so many states to pursue pro-market policies in the name of their nation competing more effectively amidst the so-called inevitability of Globalisation (Šumonja 2020). However, the more authoritarian tendencies in pro-market governance adopted by many states in the context of COVID have still nevertheless created all sorts of morbid symptoms of Globalisation in crisis, including many sovereigntist symptoms that further indicate that our unstable interregnum is riven by border-building divisions that (with developments such as Brexit) are forcing further fragmentation in the global liberal order. One intensifying example is the geopolitical confrontation with Asia, and especially with China articulated in Trump’s ‘America First’ assertions and continued in Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ boasts about challenging China’s rise. This really has forced a material intervention in the trans-Pacific circuits of globalised business, and, while there remain all sorts of work-arounds developed in response to Trump’s tariffs and trade war tactics against Huawei, TikTok, and other leading Chinese firms, this sub-plot of the crisis in Globalisation looks set to grow into a geopolitical crisis that undermines actually existing economic globalisation in profound ways. Under Biden, the tensions clearly continue with China, with Australia, and other trans-Pacific trading partners being increasingly drawn in along with the United Kingdom and, thanks to the international upheavals of the so-called ‘Aukus deal’ (a 2021 trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States) even France too through a forced reassessment of where Europe now stands in relation to (and, in some disenchanted European framings, in between) the United States and China. At the very least these tensions signal the crisis of the post-Cold War geoeconomic metanarrative that Globalisation in the form of economic integration is the basis of planetary peace. In its place we are seeing a return in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom of geopolitical discourses about containment and inevitable great powers conflict, all the while the geoeconomic framing of inevitable peace through rulesbased Globalisation has been taken up by China itself as an emergent hegemonic contender (Sparke 2018b). 30

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Yet other crises of Globalisation are coming in the form of far more globalised threats to life on the planet. Not least of all, COVID-19 has exacerbated many of the inequalities and insecurities surveyed in this chapter, showing that a globalised pandemic that cries out for globalised cooperation has only generated another woeful crisis in global governance and global health coordination (Sparke and Williams 2021). In much the same way, but operating over a longer time frame, global climate crisis is characterised by even more catastrophic contradictions. As problems that really are examples of actually existing globalisation, these crises illustrate the inadequacies of Globalisation discourse as much as they make manifest the damaging morbid symptoms of anti-Globalism as an utterly hopeless and damaging response. New forms of more cooperative global governance in the face of these crises have not yet been developed, notwithstanding nascent signs of climate-crisis-induced cooperation between global cities (Gordon 2020). In the absence of rebirthing through cooperation, we instead see all too much embodied morbidity and mortality as well as an impending plutocratic convergence globally (Milanovic 2020). This is where the crisis of Globalisation has taken us so far, but where we go next remains open to diverse forms of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggle.

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Reactionary Anti-Globalism Milanovic, B., 2020. The clash of capitalisms: the real fight for the global economy’s future. Foreign Affairs, January/February, 10–21. Miller-Idriss, C., 2019. The global dimensions of populist nationalism. The International Spectator, 54 (2), 17–34. Monbiot, G., 2019. From Trump to Johnson, nationalists are on the rise – backed by billionaire oligarchs [online], The Guardian, 26 July, Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2019/jul/26/trump-johnson-nationalists-billionaire-oligarchs [Accessed 11 October 2021]. Narayan, J., 2017. The wages of whiteness in the absence of wages: racial capitalism, reactionary intercommunalism and the rise of Trumpism. Third World Quarterly, 38 (11), 2482–2500. Neate, R., 2019. Superyachts and private jets: spending of corrupt super-rich revealed [online], The Guardian, 23 October, Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/ oct/24/superyachts-and-private-jets-spending-of-corrupt-super-rich-revealed [Downloaded 11 October 2021]. Neate, R., 2020. The super-rich: another 31,000 people join the ultra-wealthy elite [online], The Guardian, 4 March, Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/mar/04/thesuper-rich-another-31000-people-join-the-ultra-wealthy-elite [Accessed 11 October 2021]. Oxfam, 2020. Time to care: unpaid and underpaid care work and the global inequality crisis [online]. Oxford: Oxfam, Available from: https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/time-care [Accessed 11 October 2021]. Patenaude III, W., 2019. Modern American populism: analyzing the economics behind the ‘silent majority,’ the Tea Party, and Trumpism. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 78 (3), 787–834. Pritchett, L. and Summers, L.H., 1996. Wealthier is healthier. Journal of Human Resources, 31 (4), 841–868. Segura-Ballar, G., 2021. Defending ‘Western’ values: reactionary neoliberalism in the Americas. Comparative Literature and Culture, 23 (1). Sheppard, E., 2020. What’s next? Trump, Johnson, and globalizing capitalism. Economy and Space, 52 (4), 679–687. Slobodian, Q., 2018. Globalists: the end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sparke, M., 2013a. Introducing globalization: ties, tensions and uneven integration. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Sparke, M., 2013b. From global dispossession to local repossession: towards a worldly cultural geography of Occupy activism. In: N.C. Johnson, R.H. Schein, and J. Winders, eds. The WileyBlackwell companion to cultural geography. Chichester: Wiley, 387–408. Sparke, M., 2017. Austerity and the embodiment of neoliberalism as ill-health: towards a theory of biological sub-citizenship. Social Science and Medicine, 187, 287–295. Sparke, M., 2018a. Teaching globalisations. In: R.C. Kloosterman, V. Mamadouh, and P. Terhorst, eds. Handbook on the geographies of globalisations. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 422–434. Sparke, M., 2018b, Globalizing capitalism and the dialectics of geopolitics and geoeconomics. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 50 (2), 484–489. Sparke, M. and Anguelov, D., 2020. Contextualising coronavirus geographically. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45 (3), 498–508. Sparke, M. and Williams, O., 2021. Neoliberal disease: COVID-19, co-pathogenesis and global health insecurities, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 54 (1), 15–32. Standing, G., 2014. A precariat charter: from denizens to citizens. London: Bloomsbury. Stuckler, D. and Basu, S., 2013. The body economic: why austerity kills. New York: Basic Books. Šumonja, M., 2020. Neoliberalism is not dead – on political implications of Covid-19. Capital & Class, 45 (2), 215–227. Thiel, P., 2014. Competition is for losers [online], Wall Street Journal, 12 September, Available from: https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 [Accessed 11 October 2021]. Walter, S., 2021. The backlash against globalization. Annual Review of Political Science, 24, 421–442. WHO, 2008. Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health. Geneva: World Health Organization. World Bank, 2018. Poverty and shared prosperity 2018: piecing together the poverty puzzle [Online]. Washington: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Available from: https:// www.worldbank.org/en/publication/poverty-and-shared-prosperity [Accessed 11 October 2021].

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3 THE PRODUCTION OF SURPLUS POPULATIONS Informality, Marginality, and Labour Nik Theodore Introduction: working without wages For six years Thabo worked the night shift. Every evening, as darkness fell on the NorthWest province of South Africa, he and his brother would walk from the informal settlement where they lived and climb the chain-link fence that bordered the towering municipal landfill where each day refuse from neighbouring areas was dumped by garbage trucks. Thabo worked through the night to sort all manner of household waste in search of recyclable materials, mainly plastics, cardboard, and metals. Before sunrise he would hoist his collection over the fence and drag it several kilometres to a recycling centre where it would be sold. This illicit work entailed many risks: unexpected encounters with rats, snakes, and other dangerous animals; sharp objects, unstable terrain, and other safety hazards; and the need to evade authorities who could charge him with trespassing. Fortunately, a recent change in landfill regulations eliminated the need to work at night. Thabo, along with his brother and more than a dozen other informal recyclers, was granted permission to enter the landfill site. Thabo now not only works atop the landfill, he resides there as well in a makeshift dwelling. Thabo is part of a vast global precariat – recyclers, day labourers, street vendors, and others who survive at the margins of economies that have proven incapable of generating sufficient employment. This is both a structural and epistemological change; structural insofar as there are far more workers than there are waged jobs, and epistemological in that this structural change troubles many of the key assumptions of development studies and workforce development interventions. While stable employment remains a norm for policymakers, development agencies, and indeed jobseekers themselves, countless workers instead are employed on a short-term, insecure, and poorly remunerated basis. The growing oversupply of workers for the jobs available worldwide means that the very idea of holding a regular, permanent job has become an unattainable aspiration for a vast population of underemployed workers. The expansion of informal economies in cities around the world raises questions regarding the relationship between rising informality, population growth through in-migration, and wider processes of urbanisation. In many emerging economies, industrial restructuring is reconfiguring labour-market opportunities, as the growth of precarious work has become a 34

DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-4

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worldwide phenomenon. Informal employment has become a key relay of capitalist accumulation, one that transfers value ‘upstream’ in the employment relationship to the owners of capital and away from a contingently employed workforce that is left to contend with systemic uncertainty and material hardships. Yet, despite the inadequacies of informal employment, this workforce continues to grow, driven in part by the destruction of livelihood opportunities in rural areas and in other places where employment prospects are poor. It is now possible to speak of a recursive dynamic between informalisation and urbanisation: largescale population increases support the development of robust informal sectors, while large informal sectors hold promise for increasing numbers of jobseekers who in turn are drawn to cities in the hope of a better life. This promise, however, too often is unrealised. Faced with inadequate employment prospects in cities, in many parts of Africa, Asia, and South America, new migrants, along with existing unemployed populations, are channelled into substandard housing leading to growth in informal settlements that offer little in terms of adequate housing or jobs. The result is that urban informality and urbanisation have become tethered, evolving in close conjunction. Recent research on economic informality has productively challenged early conceptualisations of an informal sector that is separate and distinct from globalising capitalist relations, and it has revealed the structural articulations that exist between informal economic activities and those of the more regulated, mainstream economy (Roy 2005, Simone 2001, Tabak and Crichlow 2000). By highlighting the ways in which ‘capitalism produces informality’ (Mooshammer 2015, p. 25), this research has shown how circuits of value link informal activities that lie beyond the regulatory reach of the state with formal activities that are subject to the state’s regulatory oversight. In most industries, these circuits of value are organised through global(ising) value chains that connect producers and consumers, and encompass core functions of capitalist economies including production, distribution, sales, and the disposal of waste (Gidwani 2015, Werner 2016). Contingent workers can be found at various points along these value chains, their employment closely calibrated to the rhythms of product markets. In such cases, relative surplus populations are (adversely) incorporated into capitalist relations. At the same time, because these workers are employed on an as-needed basis, contingent work itself relieves capital of a share of the costs labour’s social reproduction. These costs must instead be borne by the workforce and whatever support systems that exist, and they represent a massive transfer of value to capital through the workings of the labour market. But there is more to this story. Local economies are dynamic and subject to the vicissitudes of business cycles, shocks caused by environmental calamities, and disruptive processes of creative destruction as industries and regions undergo restructuring. Increasingly, workers who have been rendered superfluous by labour-displacing economic change are finding themselves partitioned to the informal economy, a sphere that is barely capable of sustaining life, one that absorbs growing masses of underemployed workers despite its limited capacity to adequately support social reproduction. Moreover, the growth of economic informality may be implicated in the spread of inequality-inducing forms of development, the creation and expansion of economic buffer zones that, rather than offering sustainable livelihoods, even for a brief time, transfer the costs and risks of economic uncertainty from capital to workers, households, and communities. Informality is proliferating in urban areas, raising the spectre of a growing urban precariat that is disconnected from both formal wage labour and the agrarian economies upon which many had previously relied. These surplus populations – this surplus labour – face extraordinary struggles in urban economies. From the vantage point of South Africa, this essay 35

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examines the production of surplus labour through an exploration of how informality, migration, and urbanisation have combined to relegate large segments of the working-age population to the peripheries of urban economies. The next section considers the question of surplus populations within a South African economy that is beset by mass unemployment and uneven geographical development. Day labourers are the focus of the section that follows, which examines a growing niche of informal employment on the edges of the mainstream economy. Day-labour markets absorb unemployed workers, but their incorporation into the economy is incomplete and fraught with inadequacies and instabilities. The penultimate section elaborates what I term the informality-migration-urbanisation nexus, a set of intersecting and mutually reinforcing processes that have contributed to the pathdependent growth of surplus populations. The essay concludes by introducing the question of whether the emergent labour force we are witnessing is not just one of relative – but absolute – surplus.

Producing surplus labour South Africa has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. Since 2000 the official unemployment rate has exceeded 20%, rising to 34.4% in 2021. Using an expanded definition of unemployment that includes discouraged jobseekers, in the second quarter of 2021, a staggering 44.4% of the working-age population – some 11.9 million people – were either unemployed or had discontinued their job searches because of their poor employment prospects. Moreover, approximately two-thirds of all unemployed persons have been without a job for one year or more. In summing up the situation, the World Bank (2015, p. 39) concluded, ‘Insufficient job creation has left South Africa’s unskilled or semi-skilled and its youth facing the prospect of long-term joblessness…’, problems made worse by ‘spatial disparities that see many of South Africa’s unemployed living in townships and informal settlements far removed from urban centers, and limited opportunities in the informal economy…’. The creation of surplus labour – segments of the labour force that have been rendered superfluous to capital accumulation, except to the extent that the presence of a reserve army of the unemployed can enable capitalist expansion while also serving to discipline workers’ demands – is endemic to capitalism. Reflecting on the century-long dynamics of the industrial revolution, Marx (1867 [1992], p. 590) observed, ‘it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces … a relatively redundant population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus-population’. Marx described surplus populations as taking three forms: (1) a ‘floating’ labour force comprised workers who were unemployed due to the cyclical rhythms of the economy or as a result of technological change; (2) a ‘latent’ population employed in low-wage agricultural production, always at risk of displacement and ‘thus constantly flowing’ and swelling the ranks of the urbanised workforce (601); and (3) a ‘stagnant’ population that ‘forms a part of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment’, a labour pool that ‘furnishes to capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power’ (602). Surplus populations, therefore, do not arise from a single source of change within the economy, and the boundaries between their forms are shifting and porous. Gidwani’s (2015, p. 16) apt characterisation of these instabilities is one of ‘spatiotemporal flux in and hence tenuousness of capital’s embrace’. This underscores the uncertainty associated with the production of labour surpluses, with much of the costs of economic change being displaced, across time and space, onto populations that are neither compensated for bearing such burdens nor able to do so in ways that secure livelihoods or sustain lives. 36

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On the corner: day labour in South Africa To describe the stagnant, surplus population as an ‘inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power’, as Marx (1867 [1992], p. 602) did, is to describe biopolitical condition in which capital exerts power over wage labourers through indirect means of control rooted within capital-labour relations. Facing the compulsion of economic necessity and the unforgiving discipline of mass unemployment, the structurally underemployed must contend with wages and earnings that fall below subsistence levels. This condition is a central aspect of contemporary modes of capitalist accumulation and, in South Africa and many other countries, it also is implicated in patterns of urbanisation. Day labourers, on-call workers in the informal economy who comprise a significant share of South Africa’s stagnant population, endure systemic uncertainty since their employment agreements are unsecured and the demand for their labour is highly variable. The difficulties they face originate on the demand side of the labour market; the size of day labour workforce has closely tracked changes in South Africa’s unemployment rate and nearly half of day labourers report they have never held a stable job (Theodore et al. 2015). The spread of informality has had far-reaching implications for the structure and dynamics of labour markets. Day labour renders formerly fixed labour costs variable and extends managerial control over job tasks and the pace of work. More fundamentally, it disrupts collective structures within the workplace, and pushes wages and workers back out into (daily) competition (Peck and Theodore 2012). Under strong macroeconomic conditions, the instability and insecurity of day labour will drive earnings below the prevailing market wage for stably employed workers. Under weak economic conditions in which unemployment rates are elevated, the downward pull of contingent work can drag earnings below the level necessary for humane social reproduction. With few alternatives outside of waged work and the heightened exposure to market pressures that informal employment places on the supply-side of the labour market, day labourers’ bargaining position is eroded and their resultant earnings fall to levels that are insufficient to meet the demands of daily life. It is estimated that more than 90% of day labourers in Tshwane (Pretoria), for example, have earnings that place them and their dependents below the poverty threshold (Theodore et al. 2017). Under these conditions, day-labour markets have become distorted, with wages governed largely by workers’ vulnerabilities rather than by their skills, productivity, or the requirements of social reproduction.

The informality-migration-urbanisation nexus In South Africa, informality has emerged in the shadow of mass unemployment, as the ongoing restructuring of the economy has fuelled roiling processes of uneven development resulting in large numbers of workers being made redundant in various sectors, including agricultural production, mining, and segments of manufacturing. With few means of subsistence outside of waged labour, unemployed workers have crowded into informal labour markets beset by hypercompetition and heightened insecurity. Du Toit and Neves (2014, p. 834) estimate that nearly half of all South African households are sustained through income earned at the edges of the mainstream economy by workers employed as agricultural labourers, domestic workers, landless or land-poor rural inhabitants, or underemployed workers engaged in informal economic activity in urban areas. Early assessments of economic informality tended to describe a distinct economic sector whose activities are not regulated by the state. The size and scope of this sector vary, depending 37

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on macroeconomic conditions and the extent to which the state regulates economic activity. Such depictions tended to be firmly embedded within a modernisation narrative which posits that as economies move along a path of development, ultimately becoming ‘advanced economies’, pre-modern economic forms, such as petty trading, casual labour and other informal relations, will be subsumed into the mainstream economy and eliminated or transformed (Quijano 2000). It is now widely accepted that many of these propositions are incorrect. Rigid distinctions between the formal and informal have given way to more nuanced understandings of the integral role informal activities play in supporting corporatised segments of the economy (Castells and Portes 1989). Likewise, it follows that characterisations that frame informality as an anachronistic, pre-modern set of economic relations are inapposite and that informal activities should be regarded as a key feature of contemporary capitalist economies (Tabak and Crichlow 2000). The South African economy is characterised by vast regional disparities in investment and employment. In the former ‘homelands’ to which large numbers of Africans had been displaced under apartheid, long-running processes of ‘jobless de-agrarianization’ (du Toit 2009) – the loss of livelihood opportunities as a result of the restructuring of agricultural economies – were catalysed by rural underdevelopment and land dispossession, both of which historically were aimed at advancing the socioeconomic constitution of Black rural residents as a supply of cheap labour for industrial development (Wolpe 1972). Under these conditions, rural-to-urban migration was a necessary livelihood strategy, and internal labour migration became a key component of the workings of the South African economy (Ramphele 1993, Wentzel and Tlabela 2006). A reciprocal relationship developed, though it was one that cannot be said to have advantaged the African majority. On the one hand, the urbanisation of rural jobseekers contributed to the economic viability of rural communities through the provision of remittances to the communities of origin, while on the other hand households’ reliance on rural subsistence practices enabled urban life in the face of inadequate employment opportunities. Remittance amounts might be lower than anticipated, but household survival could be achieved, albeit at punishingly low levels, through self-help and family support within rural communities. In short, throughout the apartheid era, geographically distended connections between rural and urban livelihoods were central to the maintenance of wage levels that were below the costs of social reproduction. Wolpe (1972, p. 434, italics in original) noted this, writing that because migrant workers have access to means of subsistence from sources other than wage labour (i.e., subsistence agriculture), ‘capital is able to pay the worker below the cost of his [or her] reproduction … and it becomes possible to fix wages at the level of subsistence of the individual worker’. As a result, wage floors did not reflect the true costs of social reproduction, leaving households geographically ‘stretched’ between rural and urban areas and mired in poverty. Internal migrants are not the only jobseekers who have been drawn to South African cities in search of work. Large numbers of foreign-born migrants have arrived in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and other cities, though reliable statistics on the absolute size of the immigrant population do not exist. The World Bank (2011) estimates that more than 1.8 million immigrants are living in South Africa, with the top sending countries being the neighbouring nations of Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Botswana. Many of these immigrants reside in South Africa without authorisation. Inhabiting the liminal spaces of the city, unauthorised immigrants must navigate urban areas and their economies in highly circumscribed ways (Kihato 2013), often finding opportunities within informal economies where labour standards are low. The absence of effective 38

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government enforcement of labour standards creates perverse incentives: it aligns with immigrants’ need to remain undetected while bolstering the resolve of employers to maintain profitability through cost cutting and labour exploitation. As a result, the size of low-wage sectors of local economies increases, even as conditions within them deteriorate. This in turn has shaped patterns of urbanisation (see Pieterse 2014). The spread of informal employment, with its low wages and instability, has meant that the urban precariat struggles to pay for food, housing, and healthcare. With the need to rein in everyday costs and with housing often representing the largest expense, many informally employed workers reside in makeshift dwellings. Informalisation of employment is thus linked to informalisation of housing and the precariousness of social reproduction and everyday life among surplus populations.

Conclusion: from relative to absolute labour surpluses? This essay has examined the production of surplus labour by exploring the interrelationships between informality, migration, and emergent forms of urbanisation in South Africa. As in many parts of the world, the benefits of growth have not reached the poorest in South Africa, and soaring unemployment rates have left many eking out a living on the margins of the economy. Day labourers are among these surplus populations. Hypercompetitive conditions mean that day-labour markets are governed by a perverse dynamic centred on the economic desperation of workers, and processes of wage setting and job allocation are disconnected in all but the most brutish ways from the daily requirements of life. In the early 2000s it was not uncommon to see informal hiring sites dotting the landscape of the largely rural Limpopo Province. Nor was it unusual to see men walking along the roadside, making the journey south to Johannesburg. They would stop periodically along the way to pick up a day’s work before again setting off towards the city. These men could be said to be ‘day labouring’ their way to Johannesburg in the hope that their employment prospects would improve. Upon arrival, however, they would face already-crowded job markets that were unable to absorb labour surpluses. Unfortunately, a return to the roadside job markets would provide little respite from their unemployment. Informal hiring sites too were overcrowded and work, when it could be found, was poorly paid. The question for these day labourers is how to make do under such circumstances. A more searching question, however, is whether day labourers might be so detached from the mainstream economy that even their presence ceases to be functional for capitalism. Marx’s depictions of floating, latent, and stagnant populations portray surplus labour as adversely incorporated into capitalist economies – but incorporated nonetheless. In the short run, a reserve army of the unemployed will depress wage demands and otherwise discipline the active labour force. Over the long run, surplus populations enable bursts of capitalist expansion by constituting an available labour supply that can be readily drawn upon if and when the need arises. This suggests that prospects remain for the periodic absorption of labour surpluses, and with it reductions in the material hardships borne by these populations. However, in South Africa, as in an increasing number of countries where economic informality is on the rise, the modality of informal employment has resulted in the systemic distancing of day labourers from the regular workings of the economy. Although a few employers benefit from hiring day labourers at below-market wages, the fact that day labourers are employed, on average, just 1.2 days per week (Theodore et al. 2017) casts doubt on whether this contingent workforce is meaningfully incorporated into the economy. As a result, for many day labourers, the distancing they experience more closely resembles their structural exclusion from employment. Furthermore, in the context of effective unemployment rates 39

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that now persistently exceed 30%, day labourers’ presence as a stagnant labour pool available to enable capitalist growth is wholly redundant – in short, they appear to have ceased to constitute a relative surplus population and instead have become part of an absolute surplus labour force. The developments described here may be having enduring consequences for patterns of urbanisation in South Africa and other countries experiencing the twin problems of high unemployment and rising informality. The expansion of livelihood opportunities has been incommensurate with the scale of international and internal migration to major cities, which in turn has contributed to the spread of informal settlements in urban and peri-urban areas where the underemployed subsist on meagre incomes but where conditions of this subsistence are demonstrably inadequate. The linkages between increasing economic informality and increasing housing informality appear to be mutually reinforcing, heightening the risk of not only the further expansion of informal settlements but also the growth of geographically concentrated surplus populations that have few realistic prospects of socially sustainable incorporation into local economies.

References Castells, M. and Portes A., 1989. World underneath: the origins, dynamics, and effects of the informal economy. In: A. Portes, M. Castells, and L.A. Benton, eds. The informal economy. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 11–37. du Toit, A., 2009. Adverse incorporation and agrarian policy in South Africa [online]. Conference paper presented at Escaping poverty traps: connecting the chronically poor to economic growth 26–27 February, Washington, D.C. Available from: http://repository.uwc.ac.za/xmlui/handle/10566/65. du Toit, A. and Neves D., 2014. The government of poverty and the arts of survival: mobile and recombinant strategies at the margins of the South African economy. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 41 (5), 833–853. Gidwani, V., 2015. The work of waste: inside India’s infra-economy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40 (4), 575–595. Kihato, C.W., 2013. Migrant women of Johannesburg: life in an in-between city. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Marx, K., 1867 [1992]. Capital volume 1: a critical analysis of capitalist production. New York: International Publishers. Mooshammer, H., 2015. Other markets: sites and processes of economic pressure. In: P. Mörtenböck, H. et al., eds. Informal market worlds: reader. Rotterdam: NAI010 Publishers. Peck, J. and Theodore N., 2012. Politicizing contingent work: countering neoliberal labor market regulation … from the bottom up? South Atlantic Quarterly, 111 (4), 741–761. Pieterse, E., 2014. How can we transcend slum urbanism in Africa? [online]. UN-Habitat. Available at: http:// unhabitat.org/how-can-we-transcend-slum-urbanism-in-africa-edgar-pieterse-universityof-cape-town/ [Accessed 30 September 2021]. Quijano, A., 2000. The growing significance of reciprocity from below: marginality and informality under debate. In: F. Tabak and M.A. Crichlow, eds. Informalization: process and structure. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 133–165. Ramphele, M., 1993. A bed called home: life in the migrant labour hostels of Cape Town. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Roy, A., 2005. Urban informality: toward an epistemology of planning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 71 (2), 147–158. Simone, A.M., 2001. Straddling the divides: remaking associational life in the informal African city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25 (1), 102–117. Tabak, F. and Crichlow, M.A., eds., 2000. Informalization: process and structure. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Theodore, N., et al., 2015. Day labor, informality and vulnerability in the United States and South Africa. International Journal of Manpower, 36 (6), 807–823.

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The Production of Surplus Populations Theodore, N., et al., 2017. The socioeconomic incorporation of immigrant and native-born day labourers in Tshwane, South Africa. International Migration, 55 (1), 142–156. Wentzel, M. and Tlabela, K., 2006. Historical background to South African migration. In: P. Kok, et al., eds. Migration in South and Southern Africa. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 71–96. Werner, M., 2016. Global displacements: the making of uneven development in the Caribbean. Oxford: Wiley. Wolpe, H., 1972. Capitalism and cheap labour-power in South Africa: from segregation to apartheid. Economy and Society, 1 (4), 425–456. World Bank, 2011. The migration and remittances factbook. Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank. World Bank, 2015. South Africa economic update: jobs and South Africa’s changing demographics. Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank.

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4 THE ANTHROPOCENE Representations of Change on ‘The Human Planet’ Noel Castree

It is understandable why ‘the Anthropocene’ has been so successful as a signifier: [it is] popular and scientific, horrifying and promising, potentially radical yet utterly reactionary. (Swyngedouw and Ernstson 2018, p. 15) At the turn of the millennium, ‘the Anthropocene’ was a neologism coined by a Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, and a freshwater biologist, Eugene Stoermer. In 2000 the duo hypothesised that the human impact on the Earth’s surface was already so great that it was tipping the planet towards a new geological epoch – something only normally possible because of very large-scale natural forces, such as the meteorite whose atmospheric effects eliminated the dinosaurs over 60 million years ago. Two decades on, the Anthropocene is a buzzword that might soon become a keyword – and not only in various geoscience disciplines. Keywords, as cultural critic Raymond Williams (1976) argued, are ones with the power to alter societal discourse and practice. Starting at the margins (or in a metaphorical enclave), they in time assume centrality, though their meanings are contested along the way as various people seek to solidify them in order to suit their economic, political, or other interests. Unlike buzzwords, keywords ‘stick’. No longer a term used only in the geosciences, the Anthropocene is today being widely discussed in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts. It also enjoys a degree of prominence in the news media, giving it exposure to sections of the global public, to business leaders, and to many politicians. The Anthropocene is one of the most profound ideas about change ever to have been invented. It poses large and deep questions about the causes, rates, and effects of change, as well as normative ones about the ‘who, what and when?’ of appropriate responses to change. It directly links social change with biophysical change, from the micro- to the macro-scale and back again. It thereby brings the geosciences into a direct relationship with the various ‘people disciplines’, such as economics, history, and anthropology. It is a ‘totalising’ concept, such that those who may eventually ‘fix’ its meanings will probably exert considerable influence on the pace, direction, and goals of future social change, as well as on its biophysical conditions of possibility. In the meantime, it is assuredly a contested concept: emerging disagreements over its proper meaning and significance tell a story of rival perspectives on the drivers, impacts, and outcomes of change. At present, and as we shall see, these disagreements are largely 42

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confined to the research community across the disciplines – though their wider dynamics can, to some degree, be foreseen with reference to the career of the ‘sustainable development’ concept over the last 30 years. Since the Bruntland Report popularised that concept in 1987, its radical message about the need for coincident changes to production, consumption, transportation, and waste disposal seem barely to have reduced the human impact on Earth (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). It is a keyword whose potential vision of future change has been narrowed and neutred over time. Will be same fate befall ‘the Anthropocene’?

The end of the Holocene? The Holocene is the geological epoch during which humans have multiplied and, in general terms, flourished. It’s an inter-glacial period sandwiched between the millennia of global cooling and extensive ice cover that have punctuated the Earth’s recent history. It is during this 11,700 year period that extensive social change has occurred, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, sometimes through force of circumstance but often by design. In different parts of the world, humans not only adapted to their physical environment but learnt to alter it. For instance, agriculture laid the basis for the first urban settlements in the Middle East, by allowing food surpluses to be distributed geographically and stored (Wheatley 1971). Over time, this helped more and more people to be less directly dependent on, or influenced by, the biophysical world. Indeed, in the West this process allowed very idea of ‘the social’ as a domain of relationships among people to emerge from the late eighteenth century – along with a set of distinctions designed to impose semantic order on a changing world, such as nature-culture, mind-body, urban-rural, civilised-wild, and primitive-modern. As Bruno Latour has argued in his classic book We Have Never Been Modern (1993), it was during the period of the European Enlightenment that it became possible to believe that ‘society’ was something one could study, manage, and even revolutionise. Society’s biophysical basis was progressively bracketed-off, allowing an intellectual, administrative, and political division of labour to take hold whose persistence is evidenced, for example, in the enduring ‘divide’ in my own discipline, Geography (between its human and physical components). This ‘purification’ of the social became possible, in large part, because many Western countries were very successful at utilising natural resources (e.g., for food and shelter) and mitigating the impacts of natural hazards – effectively insulating themselves from the vagaries of crop failure, epidemics, extreme weather events, and so on. The concept of the Anthropocene challenges all this. It unsettles our ‘taken-for-granted’ categories and throws grit into our established views of reality. It’s among the grandest notions of change ever proposed. It both denotes changes of unprecedented scale, scope, and magnitude and connotes the need for (some) humans to alter their modus operandi in more or less radical ways. We might say that ‘the Anthropocene’ is intended by its scientific creators and subsequent advocates to be a proverbial ‘game changer’: it signifies accelerating and expanding changes to everything in order that, in conscious and reasoned ways, humans will act so as to avoid the worst consequences of this ‘everything change’. The term’s all-encompassing quality, bridging between the social and the natural, the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, was clearly evident in one of the first publications to propose the term. The late Paul Crutzen’s now much-cited two page commentary published in Nature, entitled ‘Geology of mankind’ (2002), was provocative because it compared humanity to the ‘great forces of nature’ normally thought to be much too powerful to be affected even by a species as clever (or reckless) as homo sapiens. Implicitly, it posed the question of which people possessed such power, how they had amassed it and why they had unleashed it. Listing the many impacts of human activity on the Earth’s various 43

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spheres (the atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, pedosphere, and lithosphere), Crutzen asserted that anthropogenic climate change – arguably the defining environmental issue of the last 25 years – was but the tip of the proverbial iceberg. As he put it, in a muchcited (and complex) statement, Unless there is a global catastrophe – a meteorite impact, a world war or a pandemic – mankind (sic.) will remain a major environmental force for many millennia. A daunting task lies ahead for scientists and engineers to guide society towards environmentally sustainable management during the … Anthropocene. This will require appropriate human behaviour at all scales, and may well involve internationally accepted, large-scale geo-engineering projects, for instance to ‘optimize’ climate. At this stage, however, we are still largely treading on terra incognita. (2002, p. 24) In the years since Crutzen and Stoermer first hypothesised that the Holocene was ending because of unintended and unprecedented human impacts, a growing number of geoscientists have sought to add empirical substance and conceptual content to the Anthropocene idea. They comprise two main groups, the second less interdisciplinary than the first. One group are so-called Earth System scientists, especially those – like Crutzen – who were part of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (the IGBP). The Project brought together a wide range of geoscientists who together sought to understand the connections between the various parts of the ‘Earth System’ (e.g., the links between changes to average atmospheric temperature and ocean biogeography, ice cover, and terrestrial biomes). The IGBP has helped create a cadre of scientific synthesists and integrators who take a holistic approach to the Earth. During and since the Project (it ended in 2015), Earth System scientists have amassed considerable evidence of human actions (some more consequential than others) taking the planet away from the Holocene ‘base line’. Much of this evidence has come from improved remote sensing technologies that allow continuous monitoring of the Earth’s surface. They describe everything from altered carbon and nitrogen cycles to changes in land cover to new ocean acidity levels, and can be correlated to social data sets about escalating human numbers and activity. The authors of an early IGBP synthesis of evidence entitled Global Change and the Earth System phrased it as follows: … human-driven changes are pushing the Earth System well outside of its normal operating range … There is no evidence that the Earth System has previously experienced these types, scales, and rates of change; the Earth System is now in a no analogue situation, best referred to as a new era in the geological history of Earth, the Anthropocene. (Steffen et al. 2004, p. 81) Subsequently, these and other geoscientists have gone on to publish numerous peer review papers and book chapters that offer a running report on what, for the first time in its 4.5 billion year history, is ‘a human planet’. Several of these researchers have also sought to broadcast their message beyond the academic domain. For instance, in 2012 they organised a ‘Planet Under Pressure’ science conference in the lead-up to the United Nations second Earth Summit (sometimes called Rio+20). More recently, some have attended the annual Davos meeting of world political, economic and thought leaders in order to sound the alarm about our escalating effects on the Earth. 44

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Inspired by the efforts of Earth System scientists, a second group of researchers have also been making concerted efforts to adduce evidence of an unprecedented human impact. They are stratigraphers. Their job is to analyse the deep past by examining the content of rock layers created by surface and sub-surface processes operative over the planet’s very long history. Though not stratigraphers themselves, Crutzen and Stoermer’s choice of the suffix ‘cene’ – one widely used in geological nomenclature (e.g., the Pliocene, the Miocene, etc.) – attracted the interest of several practitioners from the mid-2000s. Subsequently, and led by Leicester University’s Jan Zalasiewicz, an Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was created to formally assess the evidence for an identifiable ‘boundary’ between the Holocene and the putative new epoch. With other 30 members, the AWG is a component of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), which is a constituent body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). The latter utilises exacting evidential standards to identify globally prevalent markers of previous significant changes to the Earth System. It is the guardian of the Geological Time Scale. The Anthropocene poses an obvious challenge to stratigraphers: there is as yet no ‘human rock layer’. This means that the search has been on for other indicators that are likely, in time, to leave an indelible imprint on the face of the Earth. Various AWG members have published dozens of papers and chapters since 2007. Recently, the Group has recommended that the Anthropocene be formally recognised as a new epoch, with a ‘base’ in the mid-twentieth century when radionuclides were spread worldwide because of multiple nuclear detonations. The recommendation is controversial because many stratigraphers maintain that the human imprint on Earth, while undoubtedly significant, simply cannot (yet) be treated as a geological question. For critics, the Anthropocene is at best an informal term useful for designating our era, but cannot possibly be an official descriptor recognised by the ICS. Even so, the AWG’s ongoing work (e.g., Zalasiewicz et al. 2019) has conferred considerable scientific legitimacy on the Anthropocene concept. It has, along with the efforts of Earth System scientists, also led to heightened news media interest in the idea. Additionally, it’s inspired some journalists and public intellectuals to author books targeted at the general reader. Examples are Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction (2015), Clive Hamilton’s Defiant Earth (2017), Diana Ackerman’s The Human Age (2015), and Nathaniel Rich’s (2021) Second Nature. These authors take the geoscientific claims about the Anthropocene seriously. They seek to identify their practical and existential consequences for present and future generations of people, as well as non-human life. Though there is considerable evidence to make the Anthropocene hypothesis plausible, its semantic power also derives from the family of concepts used to make sense of the data. In other words, the Anthropocene concept has been ‘hitched’ to other big ideas that carry a certain authority. As noted earlier, a key concept is the ‘Earth System’. Until the early 1970s, few geoscientists studied the interconnections between the hydro-, cryo-, bio-, pedo-, litho-, and atmospheres. But then pioneers like former NASA scientist James Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis (1974) suggested that these interconnections functioned to stabilise the Earth’s environment unless and until forced towards a new homeostatic state. In so doing, they drew on established ideas in systems analysis drawn from engineering, computation and other fields – ideas such as positive feedback, negative feedback, response time, recovery time, and resilience. However, through the 1970s systems thinking evolved. In particular, notions of complexity, instability, indeterminacy, chaos, and thresholds assumed far greater prominence based on discoveries in pure mathematics, ecology, and other disciplines. While stratigraphers have made little of these ideas – their job is typically to detail the outcome of Earth System change rather than the processes producing the outcome – Earth System scientists have used 45

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them routinely to frame their projections about an unfolding Anthropocene. They invite nonscientists to see the entire world through particular conceptual lenses – particular because, as cultural anthropologists remind us, they are neither universal to all societies nor neutral in their literal and connotative meanings. Two examples will suffice to illustrate this ‘conceptual mesh’ in operation First, in a 2009 Nature paper a science team led by Swedish water resource specialist Johan Rockstrom proposed that there are nine ‘planetary boundaries’ that define a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity. The paper identified risk levels for each quantifiable boundary being transgressed, taking humanity into what the team considered an ‘unsafe space’. This recalls the ‘limits to growth’ idea promoted by some experts in the 1970s which led, among other things, to government policies to control birth rates in some parts of the world. In this case, claims about the Anthropocene are linked to notions of a changing Earth System and framed by the established notion of ‘natural limits’ (figured as ‘planetary boundaries’). Second, a closely related team recently published a paper entitled ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene’ in the prestigious peer review journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science; Steffen et al. 2018). The paper warns of tipping points and irreversible thresholds and argues that ‘a stabilized Earth trajectory requires deliberate management of … the Earth System’ (p. 8258). Again, claims about the Anthropocene are here framed, and made intelligible to readers, with reference to established concepts of stability and rapid change.

A game-changing concept to describe socio-environmental change? Joel Oskeen, an American evangelical preacher, once said that ‘You can change your world by changing your words’. There is a more than a grain of truth in this statement, though how applicable it is to ‘the Anthropocene’ only time will tell. As is no doubt already clear, the concept foregrounds the need to wrestle with change in ways few others ever have or can. It is both about change and intended, itself, to be an instrument of change in ways that are almost mind-bogglingly ambitious. Bearing the imprimatur of science, the concept begs serious consideration among politicians, business leaders and citizens. Let me spell out how and why in eight points. These points encompass not only the drivers, nature and impacts of change but the very idea of what ‘change’ comprises. 1. Promiscuous human impact: The Anthropocene indicates that the sum total of human activities, be they over the last one to two centuries or (as some geoscientists would have it) since the sixteenth century (or even, according to Bill Ruddiman, the dawn of agriculture), are unintentionally altering the entire Earth System. 2. Large scale social-natural coupling: The Anthropocene concept thereby indicates that present day social change – that is, changes to economic, cultural, or political practices – must necessarily be conceived in relation to the biophysical changes they may set in motion. Thus social change is biophysical change, and vice versa; in most parts of the world, biophysical change can no longer be treated as the fixed stage upon which social change is played out. 3. Geographically multi-scalar, bi-directional socio-environmental change: It thus further indicates that this ‘coupling’ of social and biophysical change can have global impacts, even when it is occurring at local or regional scales. This is because ‘scalar effects’ cannot be readily contained any more, as the emission of greenhouse gases from point sources like power stations has long demonstrated. The spatial boundaries to large scale change are today seemingly unlimited. The metaphorical stage is bigger than ever, and is itself an actor in the drama. 46

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4. Temporally extended human impacts: Aside from highlighting the spatially extended effects of local or regional scale changes, the Anthropocene concept also foregrounds temporal teleconnections. Human activities in the recent past and the present are shown to now have very long term biophysical impacts, ones that will unfold even if humans were to cease all activity tomorrow. This means that more aspects of the future are significantly affected by the contemporary actions (and inactions) of people. The distinctions between the present, the short term, the medium term, and the far future are dissolving. These four major characteristics of the world, as depicted through the Anthropocene concept, have several major implications for thought and action in response to them as follows: 1. The differential between human power and Earthly power: The Anthropocene concept describes a disjuncture between humanity’s power to alter the Earth system and power over that system. ‘Power to’ means the ability, intended or otherwise, to influence something. ‘Power over’ goes further, and means the ability to control the thing being influenced. Earth System scientists have made much of the disjuncture in a number of publications. For example, the metaphor of ‘sleeping giants’ has been used frequently to characterise large scale future changes to the planet that humans may inadvertently cause and will not be able to reverse. An example is the huge amount of methane currently locked-up in permafrost. If most of the permafrost thaws due to anthropogenic climate change, it will add significant warming potential to the atmosphere because methane absorbs considerable amounts of solar radiation. Likewise, more acidic ocean water cannot be ‘reverse engineered’ by humans reducing greenhouse gas emissions on a time scale of less than thousands of years. 2. Acting in conditions of deep uncertainty, indeterminacy and unknowability: Next, the Anthropocene concept – particularly in the hands of Earth System scientists – emphasises the potential unknowability of serious risks to the well-being of many people and other living species. This potential ignorance about the future is a function of two things. One is the current limits to data, computational models and conceptual vocabulary: they are not adequate in an epistemic sense to the hyper-complex realities of the future. Another is the possible indeterminacy of the future. That is, the dynamics of a system as intricate as the Earth System could involve unpredictable behaviour – for instance, incremental forcings of the system, coming after decades of prior forcings, may produce a cascade of biophysical effects over a few decades that involve so many ‘tipping points’ and feedbacks they cannot be anticipated with any precision. Together, these two things mean that even the most gifted experts cannot foresee the likelihood of extremely high magnitude, large scale biophysical alterations to the Earth System, nor the precise pattern of extreme localised events caused by them, such as more intense hurricanes. 3. The need to address the most profound normative questions: Though it is a cognitive concept – it seeks to describe and explain key aspects of the past, present and future – the Anthropocene clearly has major normative implications. It’s a truism among philosophers that a statement of fact (the ‘is’) does not logically mandate one or other response (the ‘ought’). Even so, the claim that the Holocene has ended raises far-reaching normative questions (larger even than those pertaining to existing normatively-charged issues like human rights). For instance, should humans take immediate, large-scale preventative action to avoid imposing on future generations a significantly less hospitable biophysical environment? If so, which humans should be empowered or held responsible – those in the ‘developed’ world or also those in the emerging economies 47

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like China? Can and should future generations now be represented, by proxy, in our present day politics? Who gets to determine which ensemble of means (such as stratospheric aerosol injection) are to be used to avoid an ‘environmental catastrophe’? What (and whose) definitions of powerful normative concepts will guide efforts to affect the rate, scale and impacts of Earth System change – concepts like liability, justice, care, and equality? Are humanity’s current institutions and norms – such as national governments, the World Trade Organisation and private property – adequate to the challenges of the future? The list of questions goes on. 4. Connecting and balancing emotional response with reasoned action: Finally, though a scientific concept, not only does the Anthropocene have normative (value-based) implications but it also carries a strong emotional charge. Interpreted in one way, the biophysical changes it describes generate feelings of fear, ones that could lead either to urgent preventative actions or else terror and inaction in the face of overwhelming forces. Interpreted another way, the changes it describes can incite feelings of optimism and excitement about how humans will overcome the challenges rapidly coming at them. But another possibility is denial: the changes captured by the Anthropocene concept are so far beyond the range of normality that some people may hunker down and pretend nothing much is really wrong with the way many humans presently utilise the planet. Taking stock, these eight aspects of the Anthropocene idea capture its multidimensional qualities as, perhaps, the ultimate concept of change. Clearly, it’s intended to motivate deep reflection on the very parameters of change rather than simply important details about its pace, un/ evenness or impacts. It ‘speaks about’ change as well as ‘speaking for’ change and while, largely cognitive in character, it has important normative and affective implications as we have seen. Though it represents the ‘real world’ out there, in an important sense the world cannot be registered without the concept. As Mike Hulme observes of climate change, in his book Why we disagree about climate change, ‘Climate cannot be experienced through our senses …’ (2009, p. 3), which means that ‘The idea of climate change exists as much in the human mind … as it exists as an independent … physical category’ (ibid., p. 28, emphasis added). The same can be said of the Anthropocene concept. It’s a linguistic device designed to make visible phenomena that cannot otherwise be perceived by any one person or community ‘on the ground’. The reason is obvious: not only is the present day Earth System too large for people to apprehend, the global future by definition eludes the understanding of ordinary people, business leaders or politicians. Scientific experts thus enjoy (or alternatively are burdened with) a major responsibility. In filling the Anthropocene concept with empirical and semantic content they get to do what few if any other people alive get to do. The planet and its future cannot speak for themselves: they must be spoken for, and the likes of Crutzen, Zalasiewicz, and Rockstrom are doing the talking (Castree 2014).

Whose time to change, how, and to what ends? While its scientific origins may confer it with a certain authority, they are a necessary but insufficient condition for ‘the Anthropocene’ to graduate from a buzzword to a keyword of our times. This insufficiency arises for two reasons. First, the precise drivers of global environmental change not only remain debated but do not fall into the topical domain of the geosciences. For instance, while land use changes like deforestation are clearly a proximate cause of climate change, the mix of fundamental economic, political, social, and cultural 48

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causes are the focus of social science and humanities disciplines. As the scientific analysis of the Anthropocene has gained momentum since 2000, more and more analysts from the ‘people disciplines’ have debated the nature and relative contribution of these root causes. They have also sought to better understand the ‘levers of change’ required to achieve either strong reform of human affairs, or else revolutionary transformation. These researchers do not agree about the levers or about the means and ends of either reform or transformation. Nor are they ever likely to. This is because the social sciences and humanities do not adhere to a dominant analytical approach; instead, heterodoxy prevails, though less so in some disciplines (e.g., economics) than others. Heterodoxy reflects the success of academic freedom in universities, especially in Western countries: researchers have been creative and critical when engaging each other’s work, producing different paradigms and angles of vision on reality. This brings us to the second reason the Anthropocene science is by itself insufficient to produce a thought- and action-shift in the wider world. Somebody needs to speak credibly about the implications of the science for ethics and human action. Again, this is the domain of social science and the humanities, and even the arts. Analysts in human geography, philosophy, sociology, and elsewhere have begun to attend to the normative questions itemised above. The geoscientists who have so far invested the Anthropocene concept with meaning cannot address these questions. This is because the is-ought dualism is vital to sustaining the public image and legitimacy of all branches of science. This dualism, famously identified by philosopher David Hulme (1711–1776), captures the idea that statements of fact do not mandate specific actions in response to them. Science is supposed to pose questions answerable using logic and evidence, rather than value questions whose answers admit of no definitive response because they are ‘perspectival’ and ‘political’ (thus generating debate and even conflict among interlocutors). These value questions are not separate from science – for instance, geoengineering the Earth System has serious moral dimensions that may prevent it happening, but achieving moral clarity about them counts for little without the technical know-how to act within whatever moral parameters are established to govern action. But, equally, the know-how alone is insufficient to address technology’s unavoidable moral precepts and implications. The turn towards exploring what geoscientists call the ‘human dimensions’ of the Anthropocene is vital to determining the eventual impact of the Anthropocene as the grandest of change concepts. But that exploration, in the first instance at least, will not converge on a ‘best account’ of these dimensions that will command widespread assent. The Anthropocene has rapidly become a descriptive, explanatory, normative, and affective flashpoint. Assuming the geoscientists are broadly correct, a range of (mostly university-based) analysts have presented very different versions of its human dimensions. This is not because they are confused. Instead, it reflects legitimate disagreement over how to characterise the realities of the world. There is not the space to detail the various approaches to ‘human dimensions’ here – see Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016), among others, for an in-depth treatment. Let me simply illustrate the range of ways that the human causes, consequences, and implications for thought and action have been framed cognitively, normatively, and affectively (see also Dalby 2016). First, in keeping with the geoscience focus on analysing and managing the Earth System, some social scientists advocate treating ‘society’ as itself a system that, today, is endogenous to global nature (what Peter Haff [2014] called the ‘anthroposphere’). A recent article by Belinda Reyers et al. (2018) is an example: it treats the world as a synthetic, dynamic, super complex whole amenable to understanding, albeit caveated by point 2 (page 47) about indeterminacy. It presumes a single reality ‘out there’ many of whose truths can be accessed by joined-up research across the disciplines. 49

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Second, other commentators also presume a single reality exists, but argue that many people are unable to perceive its true nature and need educating. Chief among them is Australian philosopher Clive Hamilton (2017). In his book Defiant Earth and many other publications, he decries the ‘banality of our ethics’. That is, in his view Earth System change will be so profound it requires ways of thinking and feeling that challenge almost all of our accepted definitions of justice, responsibility, care, harm, and so on. For Hamilton when some people talk about a possible ‘good Anthropocene’ – as geographer Erle Ellis (2011) has optimistically done – they are engaging in dangerously wishful thinking. This is echoed by ecocentric philosopher Eileen Crist (2013), who worries that too much Anthropocene discourse is anthropocentric – it is unable to apprehend the Earth as a living entity urgently in need of love, care, and concern; it is too fixated on achieving an impossible ‘power over’ (see point 5 above). Third, attuned – like Hamilton – to the different ways the ‘reality’ of the Anthropocene can be perceived, Marxists like Jason Moore (2016) argue that the capitalist economic system has been the principal driver of Earth System change, starting in Europe 300 years ago and now operating globally. We need to name and shame this system and its chief operators – to politicise it, in other words (Swyngedouw and Ernstson 2018). In Moore’s view, only through working class mass action, in tandem with coordinated civil society protest groups, can capitalism be reformed or dismantled – this in the face of the formidable power of capitalist firms and of governments committed to the survival of capitalism, despite its destructive tendencies. Fourth, without disputing the profound impact humans are having on the Earth, some have questioned the way geoscience presents the reality of the Anthropocene. One critique has been of its ‘neo-colonial’ character, however unwitting (see, for instance, Fagan 2019). That is, when geoscientists make their grand claims about the all-encompassing human impact on the Earth it risks overlooking the ongoing local and regional decimation of non-Western ways of life (e.g., in Canada, Brazil, and Australia). These ways of life risk being further subordinated to the ‘new imperative’ to act globally and with the future in mind so as to protect all of ‘humanity’ from serious harm. Yet, if we listen, these ways of life may tell us profound things about how to live better on the Earth and overturn the ‘banal ethics’ animating too much current thinking about the global environmental crisis. The fourth response to the Anthropocene concept raises important questions about the ‘extra-scientific’ content and uses of scientific ideas. These ideas can perform political work precisely when they appear to be value free and neutral. It is thus important to acknowledge the inevitable entanglement of scientific knowledge in a range of non-scientific agendas, interests, power relationships, and cultural beliefs that relativise our assessment of whether science is a force for ‘good’ or for ‘ill’. Swedish geographer Wim Carton (2019) provides an example of this linked to the Anthropocene concept. He focuses on the idea of ‘negative emissions technologies’ (NETS), which has grown in importance among experts who design and run ‘integrated assessment models’ of the planet’s future. Though most of these technologies have not been tested at scale, the idea that they might be affects the present by offering an authoritative vision of the global future via models. NETs propose to ‘suck’ greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and are envisaged by some as a way of ‘recovering the GHG deficit’ later this century after a period ‘over-shoot’. Carton, in an analysis of recent strategy documents published by the leading oil company Shell, shows how the idea of NETS is used to justify a delay in moving away from fossil fuel use in the near future. It allows the scientific possibility of future NETS to justify not radically mitigating greenhouse gas emissions today. Carton’s paper reveals the power of words to shape action – and inaction – depending on who gets to use (or challenge) their scientific credibility. 50

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Conclusion The Anthropocene concept poses far-reaching questions about the drivers, pace, direction, and outcome of social change, hitching them to grand questions about biophysical change. Originating in science, some may be tempted to believe that in time the ‘correct’ meaning of the term, and its wider implications, can be established through further research and debate. However, as this chapter has suggested, it is arguably more fruitful to regard the Anthropocene as a concept that is ‘good to think with’. It’s a fecund focal point for discussions about what exactly needs to change in the twenty-first century, about who can or should be agents of change, and about what the goals of change ought to be. Far from being symptomatic of muddled thinking about the realities of present and future change, these discussions reflect valid disagreements about the nature of a world to come. In democracies, at least, such disagreements are supposed to be the life-blood of politics, leading to publicly legitimate actions taken by those in power. But, as Carton’s research illustrates, the economic and other stakes of avoiding a ‘bad Anthropocene’ are so high it’s almost inevitable that powerful interest groups will seek to stifle debate, especially about radical alternatives and solutions. Ironically, these groups’ commitment to business-as-usual may then all but guarantee a dystopian future that could produce just the sort of revolutionary change they very much wish to avoid (or else anarchic and violent change). But we must recognise too that even an orderly process of revolutionary change may impose enormous costs of its own: creating something genuinely new necessitates unravelling elements of the socio-ecological fabric that has helpfully blanketed many of us from serious harm so far in our lives.

References Ackerman, D., 2015. The human age: the world shaped by us. New York: W.W. Norton. Bonneuil, C., and Fressoz, J.-B., 2016. The shock of the Anthropocene. London: Verso. Carton, W., 2019. ‘Fixing’ climate by mortgaging the future. Antipode, 51 (3), 750–769. Castree, N., 2014. The Anthropocene and the environmental humanities: extending the conversation. Environmental Humanities, 5 (1), 233–260. Crist, E., 2013. On the poverty of our nomenclature. Environmental Humanities, 3 (1), 129–147. Crutzen, P., 2002. Geology of mankind. Nature, 415 (23), 23–24. Crutzen, P.J., and Stoermer, E.F., 2000. The ‘Anthropocene’. Global Change Newsletter, 41, 17–18. Dalby, S., 2016. Framing the Anthropocene. Anthropocene Review, 3 (1), 33–51. Ellis, E., 2011. Planet of no return. Breakthrough Journal, 2, 39–44. Fagan, M., 2019. On the dangers of an Anthropocene epoch. Political Geography, 70, 55–63. Haff, P., 2014. Humans and technology in the Anthropocene: six rules. The Anthropocene Review, 1 (1), 1–11. Hamilton, C., 2017. Defiant Earth. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Hulme, M., 2009. Why we disagree about climate change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kolbert, E., 2015. The sixth extinction: an unnatural history. New York, NY: Picador. Latour, B., 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lovelock, J., and Margulis, L., 1974. Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: the Gaia hypothesis. Tellus, 24 (1–2), 2–9. Moore, J., 2016. The rise of cheap nature. In: J. Moore, ed. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Oakland: PM Press, pp. 78–115. Reyers, B. et al., 2018. Social-ecological systems insights for navigating the Anthropocene. Annual Review of Environment & Resources, 43, 267–289. Rich, H., 2021. Second nature: scenes from a world remade. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rockstrom, J., et al., 2009. A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461, 24th September: 472–475. Steffen, W., et al., 2004. Global change and the Earth system. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steffen, W., et al., 2018. Trajectories of the Earth system in the Anthropocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 115 (33), 8252–8259.

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5 ECOLOGIES OF INFRASTRUCTURE Materialities of Metabolic Change Pushpa Arabindoo Long consigned to the drawing board of a master planning process that started in the 1970s, the Outer Ring Road (ORR) in metropolitan Chennai is a 62 kilometre road infrastructure project whose implementation was finally sanctioned in 2009 and realised in two phases (Phase 1 of 29.5 kilometres was completed in 2013 and Phase 2 in early 2021). Initially proposed in the first Master Plan (1971–91) for Madras Metropolitan Area, it was part of the then popular planning rationale of decongesting the city with a series of ring roads connecting Chennai’s major radial routes leading out of the ‘city centre’. It was not uncommon in the post-World War II era where a network of radial and ring roads was planned in many cities around the world, intended to address the challenge of increasing motorised transportation. They often arrived in cities of the global South through transnational traffic expertise which at times proved to be unstable translations as they sought to accommodate the realities of the city (Feniger and Kozlovsky 2021). Thus, the initial proposal of the ORR was deferred on the advice of the Structure Plan proposed by British consultants Alan Turner and Associates in 1980 even though the planning imagination of a series of ring roads connecting Chennai’s major radial routes was retained in almost all transportation infrastructure strategies in the years to come (Figure 5.1). Evolving to something more than a simple transportation apparatus spearheading the modernisation and development of the city, ORR found renewed favour in the twenty-first century when public and private interests in mega-infrastructure projects converged. It became a central feature of infrastructure investment in Chennai’s hinterland, connecting zones and corridors of capital accumulation from the South and the West as quickly and directly as possible to the port operations in the northern part of the city. Its current form is vital to a logic of bypass urbanism in the hinterland’s new terrain of speculative politics (Arabindoo 2020, Sawyer et al. 2021), now used to rewrite the relationship between the city and periphery. Thus, traffic flow as a parameter for the ORR is based on an operational logic that is not just about decongesting the city but about getting goods for global consumption from the zones of production to the points of distribution (i.e., the ports) without passing through the city. More importantly, global transport infrastructure projects aimed at facilitating a colossal flow of goods are now being designed to the unprecedented scale of planetary urbanisation (Brenner and Schmid 2015). Thus, the ORR is a massive 122 meter wide road and rail corridor covering an area of 860 hectares at a cost of US $380 million raising questions DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-6

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Figure 5.1a

Strategy for development based on ring roads and radial routes as originally proposed in the Madras Metropolitan Plan 1971–91 (Reproduced from: Rural Development and Local Administration Department, Government of Tamil Nadu, 1971)

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Figure 5.1b

Chennai Peripheral Ring Road development proposal based on a 2018 feasibility study by Japan International Cooperation Agency (Reproduced from JICA 2018)

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over whether its scope matches current economic actuality or necessity despite its aim of promoting higher capacity and speed. Even as planners continue to couch it in the modernist language of ‘decongestion’, the very fact that it includes five bridges, eight underpasses, three interchanges, eighteen pedestrian subways, three flyovers, and hundred box culverts, suggests a visual paradigm that is based on a slightly different technopolitical imaginary of infrastructure and ‘grand solutions’ (Figure 5.2). As a fantastic object that is in awe of its technical function, there are serious consequences to the realisation of this space of unimpeded circulation as witnessed during the devastating 2015 floods when the completed first phase of the ORR proved to be an unmitigated ecological disaster. With settlements and villages on either side of the ORR submerged to unforeseen levels, there was loss of innumerable lives and property, with some surrounding areas such as Mudichur registering ‘record’ number of deaths. As an overbuilt and seemingly underutilised infrastructure project, little attention had been paid to the fact that the circulatory regime of this infrastructural object of social change (Knox 2017) would drastically disrupt its surrounding ecological system (Shivakumar 2020). A project such the ORR cannot be simply read off the surface as its ‘system of substrates’ (Star 1999) penetrates deeper underneath, not only degrading the environment but also tampering the watershed of the three rivers that flow through the metropolitan area – Adyar river to the south, the Cooum river towards the middle, and the Kosasthalaiyar river in the north. Amidst an increased frequency of seasonal flooding that is just not about water-clogging and poor drainage, the 2015 floods highlighted the extent to which the ORR adversely affected the hydrology of the region (besides other ecological concerns), one that came to be irrevocably connected to this particular mode of infrastructural urbanism (Arabindoo 2016). One can be easily distracted by this technopolitical object, drawn to its technocratic and engineering worldview of efficiency and utility, and not paying enough attention to how at odds it is with socio-natural values of human life (Swyngedouw 2006). It is thus not surprising that there has been scant accountability in the few contesting narratives against the ORR in light of the 2015 floods (Shivakumar 2018). It is also possibly because the nature you encounter in this region is hardly of the bucolic kind, its wetland geographies commonly portrayed as a wasteland, an antithesis to nature, one that has evolved as much by accident as by design. Prior to the 2015 floods, amidst drastic transformations of a reckless peri-urbanisation, not much attention had been paid to area’s dwindling eco-system. Even before this particular infrastructural remaking had meddled with the region’s hydrology, its eco-system had been rapidly degrading with visible physical changes. But given preconceived imaginaries about what nature is or should be (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2012), this persistent urbanisation of nature was less apparent to the undiscerning eye which saw the marshland as inopportune, replete with development potential and resources for exploitation, not necessarily a part of nature that needs to be preserved (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2012, cf. Mukherjee 2015).1 Against a nature that is there materially but is complex, chaotic, contingent, unruly, and unpredictable, the need for a ‘stable’ infrastructural presence such as the ORR could be easily justified. Undertaking a critical review of such infrastructure projects has become a prime focus of a large scholarship, especially around ecological exigencies, with no dearth of literature highlighting the damaging effects of infrastructure. Even as the threat it poses to the livelihood and existence of human communities, animals, plants, and agrarian landscapes is real, there is nevertheless an inconclusivity to the way environmental critiques cast infrastructure as the prime culprit through debates that, despite being critical, struggle to be transformative. Many of them rarely see beyond infrastructure’s utilitarian role, content with highlighting its failure to integrate social needs and biophysical processes. Social sciences have a long legacy 56

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Figure 5.2

Outer Ring Road (Phase 1) under construction

Source: Photographs © Christophe Delory

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of deploying critiques around social change but when its tendency to decry everything gets steeped in relativism and scepticism, there is a sense of going over the same ground too many times. It results in a flatness of critique that simply declares infrastructure as an ill-structured object of undesirable social change in a kind of ineffective shorthand. In the case of the ORR, working with its ontological primacy as an infrastructural object, what is needed is an analytical tool that will allow a critical mind to perhaps not completely ignore its matters of fact but merge it into a highly complex, historically situated and richly diverse matters of concern (Latour 2004). What could be a useful foil here is less of a critique and more of a critical analysis that provides an alternative way of moving forward, and whereby we can repurpose infrastructure into its landscape through a process of ecological re-imagination that doesn’t abandon infrastructure entirely. It is in this spirit of a critic whose role is not to debunk but to assemble (Latour 2004) that I undertook a pedagogic reinterpretation of the ORR through an intensive ten-day design studio exercise in 2017 summer at a private architecture school in Chennai, conveniently situated at the beginning of the ORR. Borrowing Bélanger’s (2009) notion of landscape as infrastructure where the conventional meaning of modern infrastructure is redefined by amplifying the biophysical landscape it has historically suppressed, this exercise attempted a rethinking of infrastructure as landscape via an underlying eco-system of biotic resources, agents and services that are often underplayed and ignored against the overwhelming presence of an imposing infrastructure. Acknowledging the uneasy (dis)equilibrium between the two (infrastructure and nature/landscape), the studio’s starting point was a conviction that we can overcome infrastructure’s disregard of its natural systems even as they remain as rigid objects disconnected from their immediate environments (Lokman 2017). At the same time, in our dialectical attempt to find something mutually constitutive between infrastructures and their surrounding natures, we cannot ignore the risk that by projecting the ORR as an ecologically re-imagined entity, we might end up actually doing nothing against the object itself. But before elaborating what such an exercise produced and the challenges it faced, the next section discusses how thinking differently about infrastructure’s physical world requires us to think ecologically, one that is neither limited to a normative sense of organicity nor romanticised around notions of equilibrium and stability. Setting aside the technocratic rationale that infrastructure as objects protect humans not only from climatic fluctuations but also an uncertainty related to seasonal availability of resources, a more prudent ecological re-imagination of infrastructure draws on metabolic actants as more than metaphors to rewrite the ORR as a site of ‘natural’ intervention.

Ecological re-imaginations In his proposal for alternative, infrastructural ontologies, Bélanger (2017) evocatively presents landscape as infrastructure, a notion that has been long in incubation in terms of bringing the infrastructural object into a clear, critical, and pressing focus (cf. Strang 1996). Taking into consideration the ecological imperatives that are sidelined by the economic exigencies of urban/regional infrastructural projects, Bélanger’s (2017) ‘landscape (as) infrastructure’ involves the conceptualisation of an expanded operating system where, deploying ecology as the agent of renewal and expansion, the full complexity of biodynamic processes and resources are visualised across the entire footprint and lifecycles of infrastructure. In projecting ecology as the new engineering, he ‘argues for the strategic design of infrastructural ecologies, describing a synthetic landscape of living, biophysical systems that operate as urban infrastructures to shape and direct the future of urban economies and cultures into 58

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the twenty-first century’ (Bélanger 2017, p. 9). This might seem like wishful thinking as it re-erects nature as an artefact, subduing infrastructure, in the process, into an eco-friendly object. We often forget that what makes infrastructure an object in the first place is its materiality, one that is unfortunately and frequently articulated as a sum of non-agentic mechanistic components. If we are to reconsider the social significance of infrastructure as an object, a focus on its material agency is necessary, promoting a view of ‘objects as agents’ with a constitutive role in shaping socio-political relations via an ecological lens (Rubio 2016). Re-materialisation of infrastructure in this manner, through the province of the natural or physical world, allows the process of ecological re-imagination to transform meaningfully a techno-engineering object such as the ORR. Taking the ORR in more than an architectural sense of a ‘singular object’ (Baudrillard and Nouvel 2005), the studio considered the limits of an object-oriented ontology as it recast the ORR still as an object, albeit a metabolically productive and generative one. Beginning its enquiry into the ORR’s object-position vis-a-vis its material conditions and practices, its materiality is seen, not through mechanistic components, but via elements that are ecomaterial in a nonhuman sense (Bennett 2013). Following Ingold’s (2012) suggestion of changing focus from the ‘objectness’ of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being, the ORR is turned into a different kind of cognitive object to know the region again. This material thinking through an ‘ecologies of infrastructure’ encourages us to look for an engaged transformation of the infrastructural object instead of simply waiting for it to become redundant. There is a caution to this object power materialism where an ecological ethos might offer a more acceptable regime of value and meaning to the ORR, but its continued embeddedness in the ecosystem of its surrounding landscape epitomised historically by conflict does not necessarily ensure an alternative that is harmonious or tending towards an equilibrium. In the studio’s attempt to use the ORR in a more discerning way of knowing (and representing) the region, it was useful to remind ourselves that the discontinuities we encounter between infrastructure and landscape are not as objects per se but rather between their contexts (cf. Star and Ruhleder 1996). This clarification might seem pedantic but is still valuable as it encourages us to view their entanglements not as a double-bind but as a source of interaction, where a contextual distinction is not always relevant. It makes us question the inimical relationship assumed between infrastructure and landscape. An ecological frame, in this sense, might seem naïve in suggesting that the natural and infrastructural landscapes can occupy the same space and co-exist while performing their multiple and often conflicting functions. And yet, in going beyond providing a corrective treatment to the issue of infrastructure as a predicament in the regional landscape, it is important to explore the beginning of this new ecological thinking (Reed and Lister 2014) which departs from the usual debates of ecological distribution conflicts or laments about the loss of an ecological past. It hinges not on some grand theory or ideology but grounded practices promoting reciprocal relations between environments and societies, providing ‘simple and sometimes subversive solutions to support new attitudes and appetites for crossovers, by design, by improvisation, by coincidence, and by accident’ (Bélanger 2017, p. 71). As a ‘superscience’ geared towards bridging the divides between the natural and social sciences/humanities, ecology’s equal emphasis on the co-evolutionary, self-organising unity of social systems and the specificity of ambient ecological systems brings an added dimension to species-environment relationships (De Block 2016), encouraging a paradigm shift in managing social change to an organic, open-ended manner. There isn’t a singular understanding of ecology here but a diversity of ecologies whose plurality encourages the hybridisation of 59

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infrastructure and landscape in a more fluid manner. To disembed infrastructure from its technorationalities and re-visualise it through the medium of landscape is not about returning the region to what was there before, promoting traditional landscape practices or declaring it as some kind of a nature preservation zone. Rather it means to think of infrastructure through an environmental subjectivity where the ORR participates actively to produce a new kind of lived infrastructural ecology. Such an exercise demands that infrastructure not only break free of all kinds of disciplinary cadres (from the conventional restraints of engineering to the critical focus of geography, planning and architecture), but also become something indeterminate. As a result, this merger of the territory of urban infrastructure with the landscape of living systems involves embracing a ‘notion of change, adaptation and feedback to create hybrid infrastructures of human and non-human systems, of living and non-living entities, across a range of spatial and temporal scales’ (Lokman 2017, p. 61). Such an approach with an ability to stretch from small-scale surfaces and materials to large-scale planning requires methodological insights that go beyond classic ‘sedentary techniques’ of investigation to set up a heuristic that is focussed on both representation and intervention. This follows Knox’s (2017) recommendation for researching social processes in terms of their manifestation as infrastructure. Her preoccupation with how to analyse social change through methods that indicate change as inhering not just in social practices but in the interplay between human and non-human forms encourages us to think of infrastructure as social change through the realm of possibilities. It was in pursuit of such an optic that the format of architecture design studio proved ideal. Encompassing critical analysis alongside creative solutions, design places infrastructure as landscape in a territory of new scales, systems and synergies traversing from local to regional economies. The ability of design is not so much in terms of providing hard or soft solutions, fixed or flexible but about developing a new morphological as well as topological vocabulary for a repurposed infrastructural landscape.

A pedagogy for ‘change’ At the beginning of the summer studio exercise, a ‘field visit’ was organised, taking students on a bus ride along the ORR. From this vantage, there is an immediate realisation of its incongruence as a ‘metapragmatic object’ (Larkin 2013, p. 336). It showed the challenge of ORR being instructive as we had to look for a different register of analysis against the ones we commonly employ. The first thing to apprehend is that what is anticipated here is as much a re-design of the ORR as its un-design (Bélanger 2017). Working with ‘infrastructure as landscape’ as a live indeterminate entity set up a confrontation with the ORR, emphasising equally its physical attributes and the way its relation with its environment is organised. More importantly, there is an uncanny skill to the way design as invoked in an architectural sense draws in the large system of biophysical resources present in and around the infrastructure while devising an ecologically imminent system in its re-design. In this sense, architecture has a better track record than planning in designing productive relationships between users (human and non-human), physical objects, and ecological projects. Equipped with tactics to bring ecosystems into infrastructural networks to not mimic but model and manifest living systems, the procedure of design pursues a holistic rethinking of a natural landscape intertwined with infrastructure via re-imagined ecologies in an unchartered terrain of interactive possibilities. Challenges still persist as design finds that despite a diverse range of in-situ experimental choices, they have to contend with the patchiness and apparent ‘messiness’ of efforts to hybridise infrastructure and landscape. 60

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Conceived as a dissident design studio, its ‘unstructured’ design responses in the form of micro patches rather than overarching master plans might seem undisciplined but this pedagogic mode served particularly useful in communicating ideas about infrastructure as a landscape-making practice, acknowledging existing debates around the need for a critical ecopedagogy (Kahn 2010), and transforming the studio into a radical posthumanist pedagogic encounter. By problematising and initiating a heterodox investigation of (eco) crisis, the images and text produced by this design pedagogy are more than a nod to ecological awareness as they don’t shy away from following an initial process of unlearning if need be to avoid the trap of ending up with proposals as some kind of ‘ecological fix’. The situated practice of a design studio was a means of initiating a material analysis of the ORR as a living ecology, encompassing a vibrant mix of its different metabolic systems – vegetal, animal, and human. Through a selective use of six metabolic elements: air, water, soil, vegetation, food, and waste as what Appadurai (2015) described as ‘mediants’ or a smaller class of agentive entities, 12 student groups attempted critical design interventions revolving around nonhuman materialities, firstly deconstructing the ORR as an infrastructural object and subsequently reconstituting the very essence of its ecological role through these metabolic entities (Figure 5.3).

Figure 5.3

Design proposals produced by students using six metabolic agents (air, water, soil, vegetation, food, and waste) ecologically re-imagining ORR as an infrastructural object

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Metabolic infrastructure As a central metaphor of Marxist approach in analysing human-nature relationships, metabolism has evolved to be a deeply contested notion, assumed within such discourses to be predetermined by political economic processes. Thus, even though it has been used by critical scholarship for understanding capitalism per se (Gandy 2004, Heynen et al. 2006, Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003), when it comes to the particular reference of infrastructural life, the idea of metabolism is seen as more than ‘natural’, i.e., socio-politically mobilised and appropriated in the production of environments. With processes of metabolic change questioned over their ecological neutrality, there is a steep challenge to the way we could use metabolism as a means of rethinking infrastructure in an enabling, redistributive manner. And yet, as Demaria and Schindler (2016) in citing McFarlane (2013) explain, looking at infrastructure through a metabolic lens multiplies the potential sites of intervention, widening the objects of analysis, and the epistemology of social change. This is where design has a significant contribution to make as it employs metabolic tools, not for any kind of precise reading, but more for capturing the atmospheric qualities of landscape, as seen, imagined and ultimately (re)designed. Unlike the conventional scientific approach where metabolism is invoked in quantifiable terms of inputs and outputs, design employs metabolism to apprehend biophysical processes in their transformative sense. There are no precise logics, systems, and techniques, and neither are there absolute standards to refer against. And yet, by outlining the metabolic materiality of infrastructure, the studio exercise showed how it can be made of the very same materials as natural landscape without resorting to any kind of self-referential ‘green’ solutions. The studio demanded a careful engagement with the six metabolic processes, i.e., air, water, soil, vegetation, food, and waste, setting aside hard dichotomies between human and nonhuman forces to recompose infrastructure into what Bélanger (2017) referred to as ‘protoecologies’. It was not as easy as it sounds as there is little room for addressing the often counterintuitive and contradictory tendencies of these metabolic agents towards one other. It also meant that some of them were restrained by their popular framings – waste as detritus, water as hydrology, food as biota, etc. There was only so much that the agency of design could achieve in this context with groups struggling to surpass the limited sensibility of their interventions that could be novel but were nevertheless somewhat literal in their interpretation of their metabolic entities. With two groups working on each metabolic entity, none of the interventions could be considered as generic solutions – they are each recognisable, personal, and practical. While there is a consistency across them as they sought to connect diverse sets of parameters to one another, it was a challenge resisting the projection of ORR as an ugly artefact that needs to be humanised or beautified. Here, there was a disciplined approach in using their metabolic entity to untether infrastructure from its utilitarian roots, synthesising it into a new ecological composition where infrastructure becomes landscape and landscape becomes infrastructure.

Representations of change While a metabolic approach encourages us to excavate in, around and beneath the infrastructure, it does not automatically mean that the design alternative is entirely able to reconfigure its spatial and material condition. The studio’s consciousness of the ORR as an infrastructure is predicated not on its status as a static, single object but in a dynamic relationship with biophysical systems. In this context, most interventions as developed in the studio exercise found themselves constrained by the temptation of designing synthetic ecologies and programmable 62

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devices, falling short of illustrating how the re-design of infrastructure as landscape can structure sustained co-dependent relations between human and non-human, and organic and inorganic systems. Visualisations of these linkages were themselves not so much an issue but they were mostly small-scale demonstrations that could hardly be characterised as a radically re-designed landscape. The emphasis was thus on composite images and collages as representation rather than a concrete action of problem solving. Resisting a tendency to infuse the ORR with some kind of architectural configuration was difficult for the groups even as they were encouraged to explore daring options where infrastructure begins to display the qualities of nature that is more than ‘form’. What was feasible within a short intensive exercise was not a complete overhauling but a retrofitting of the ORR as a transformed object, at least in a semiotic sense (and as seen in the intervention of the Waste and Vegetation groups). While it was important to evoke the metabolic elements in a more than metaphorical manner, groups, more broadly, had to face the overlapping proximity between the real and the representational as they looked for potential realities within the representational possibilities of an ecological imaginary. Forgoing the need for design briefs as a way of avoiding weaker propositions, the studio encouraged the students to begin with what was essentially an ecological predicament: how do we bring the concerns of ‘ecology of matter’ into a re-materialised infrastructural object, one that is more fulfilling than a functional response but is at the same time not merely a symbolic gesture? And how do we ensure the graphic information we produce conveys its deeper meanings? Here, one of the major stumbling blocks for students of an architectural design studio is the singular focus on the object as the challenge was to see the field-object condition as more than a formal artefact in a landscape setting. In focussing on the production of a powerful image and conveying an ‘infrastructure as landscape’ narrative through one A0 poster, the emphasis was on imagination, not about ideology or utopia (although it is difficult to resist this temptation) via what Picon (2018) refers to as the imaginary-practical entities where practices and imagination are in constant interaction. Graphics in this case, by being as much geographical as architectural, rendered the proposed interventions figural in a useful sense, despite its object-oriented focus, allowing groups such as the one working on Air to produce a successful interpretation of a complex and dynamic metabolic entity. Similarly, the sub-group on Food sought to ‘unfix’ infrastructure’s material agency, in an effort to naturally re-inhabit the landscape. It was reassuring to see that techniques of aesthetics could be invoked, not in a synthetic sense of style or visual appearance but to underline a sense of commensality between infrastructure and landscape.

Conclusion For many years, the ORR was a fantasy and a desire of a political effect, steeped in a popular visual and conceptual paradigm of what it essentially means to be modern. Its undisputed relevance to the changing modes of urbanisation emphasised its indispensable position as an infrastructural object even as the enormity of its construction required a complex interplay amongst an array of actors and institutions ranging from land markets to parastatal entities, politicians, planners, engineers, and local communities. Collectively, the focus was on the realisation of the ORR as an engineering marvel with no import of its relations with the surrounding landscape, environmental clearances notwithstanding. Despite mounting concerns over the way it is proving to be an ecological catastrophe, little has been done in terms of addressing this issue, most probably because the ORR is not the only one to be blamed for turning the region into an environmental sink. It is perhaps more due to the normative paralysis that has set in place 63

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despite (or partially due to) social science’s overtly critical analysis of infrastructure. While highlighting the precarious and often annihilating relations between landscape and infrastructure is crucial, simply harping on the discrepant realities of infrastructural objects and their tendency to ignore deep-seated concerns for ecological life is not enough. Instead, as a way of countermanding the many techno-engineered imaginaries used to rework the ORR over the decades, the notion of ecological re-imagination is employed to explore how landscape and infrastructure can be embedded within each other in a mutually constitutive manner. This perspective shows how disentangling the two as separate categories risks erasing a ground reality that is much more complex than the assumed tension between the two. To avoid the dilemma of infrastructure’s object-oriented ontology where it is pitched against landscape’s radical other, what is being attempted here is something more progressive where the ORR is encouraged to re-imagine its own ecological complicity with its regional landscape in a generative manner. Here, the ORR as an object of social change is transformed in such a manner that both infrastructure and landscape co-inhabit the lived environments of human and morethan-human ecologies. Recognising the liveliness of such socio-technical systems, this chapter draws from an emerging sense of ‘lively materialities’ (Knox and Huse 2015) where infrastructure does not just acknowledge landscape but sets up creative responses in return. Thus, in line with a need for inventive thinking, a pedagogic mode of architectural design studio was chosen to reconsider the ORR’s infrastructural status where, students tackled a re-presentation of the ORR as live and indeterminate. They were encouraged to explore alternative possibilities where technological infrastructural functions sensitively accommodated the natural and the ecological, whether through explicit form or implicit function. This was more than an imitative impulse involving the design of biophysical processes as infrastructure systems and not simply about re-designing the latter as biological entities. Following the exemplar of ecological design, they instead looked for unorthodox tools, identifying metabolism as a methodological starting point to tackle the ‘great questions of ecology’ (Latour 2015, p. 21). The idea of recomposing the ORR as a conduit for the six metabolic ‘mediants’ was not only to animate it through the movement of vehicles but also birds, sediments, plants, air, water, waste, food, etc. This sense of syncing infrastructure ecologically with landscape is spatial as well as temporal requiring its participation in an ‘experimental intervention’ (Karvonen and van Heur 2014), with an emphasis on a productive impetus towards (social) change. Free from programmatic constraints, interventions produced by the students showed myriad possible configurations in which the ORR could materialise its natural relation with its landscape via metabolically articulated visualisations. Saturated by material, symbolic, and imaginary interpretations, and given the short intensive nature of this exercise, some of them might read as synthetic, with a few even coming across as mild improvisations. Incremental or radical, what they all sought was a more than ‘infrastructural fix’ where, following Mattern’s (2016) call to students repositioning them as critical-creative practitioners, they focussed on developing a different mode of infrastructural literacy, transforming harsh criticality into a sensitive generativity. In this ‘ecologies of infrastructure’ approach students were aware that their interventions might be promising but uncertain. Their often hasty assemblage of a heterogeneous set of ideas was not always effective or obvious but even in what might come across as an ineffective utopian pursuit, they were able to infuse it with a performative cadence. It allowed them to re-sensitise the ORR as an object, concerned in a prefigurative sense as much with a counter future as they were with its infrastructural present ( Jeffrey and Dyson 2020). Nevertheless, there was a remarkable maturity in the way they probed enthusiastically multiple possibilities of ORR as a quasi-object (Latour and Crawford 1993), one that is more than a simple combination of 64

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the technical and the natural. While it might sound literally ‘green’ to claim that this revealed new kinds of co(r)relation between people, land, water, animals, plants, buildings, technologies and infrastructures, ultimately when we think of social change, simply recapitulating a narrative of the unjust effects of infrastructure on its regional landscape is insufficient. We know this now. What is desirable and necessary is a less prescriptive way of confronting social change in the infrastructural world as this chapter has explored.

Note 1 There is an established discourse on ecological imaginaries of nature, particularly in the urban context which discusses these stereotypes. See, for instance, Gandy (2006).

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6 WHITE VICTIMHOOD Weaponising Identity and Resistance to Social Change Nicky Falkof

One of the more concerning manifestations of contemporary social change is the meteoric re-emergence of a visible politics of white supremacy in the west. Under the liberal ideological regimes of the mid- to late twentieth century, overt expressions of white supremacy became largely taboo, banished to the outlying edges of political discourse. Most neo-colonial white/western dominance was couched in the language of democracy, civilisation and ‘colour blindness’ (Ansell 2006), while extremist white politics were largely classified as part of a lunatic fringe. In the twenty-first century, however, such positions have resumed their creep from the margins back towards the centre of social life. Current iterations of white nationalism are profoundly visible and linked to the heart of political authority, as was made clear by the dramatic events surrounding the transfer of power in the American presidency in early 2021. The most clearly legible form of white supremacist mainstreaming is the rise of the so-called ‘alt-right’, emerging most vocally in the United States but with links to related groups and ideas in Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia and elsewhere. This white supremacist re-emergence encompasses both ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ forms of power and ideology, appearing, respectively, in conventional political and media structures and in diffuse social movements that have global reach thanks to digital networks and alternative media outlets. In the United States, the ‘contemporary resurgence of overt racism… highlights an increasingly explicit articulation between pro-white ideologies and far-right politics that has come to characterize the “Trump era”’ (Hartzell 2018, p. 7). Echoes of these tactics and beliefs can be found in the manifestos of white supremacist mass murderers as far afield as Norway and New Zealand (Berntzen and Sandberg 2014, Besley and Peters 2020). Scholars continue to produce important and timely studies of the white right that focus largely on the global north (Mondon and Winter 2020). However white supremacist politics are spread more widely, and have longer and more persistent global histories, than is sometimes mentioned. In this chapter I discuss one iteration of this ideology, in both its contemporary and historical forms, which has for decades played an important role in the collective imaginary of the global white far right. I consider the example of white victimhood in South Africa, a powerful ideological position that classifies the lives and deaths of white people as extraordinary and exceptional, demanding more outrage and more action than the lives and deaths of any other sorts of this people in this violent country. Globally the idea of the ‘white victim’ positions white people as the sufferers of gross racially-motivated injustices, in DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-7

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a startling inversion of the centuries-long trend that has seen whites benefit disproportionately from the dividends of slavery, colonialism and extractive capitalism. Theorists of whiteness have posited that much of its power lies in invisibility, in being so standard and normal that it often goes unseen (see, for example, Dyer 1997).1 However in order for whites to be positioned as victims of a ‘new’ global racial order, as is commonly held in mythologies of the far right, it is necessary for whiteness to be just not visible but hyper-visible. Within these ideologies whiteness must be seen and spoken, for it is only in overtly inhabiting an identity that people coded as white can lay claim to the benefits of extraordinary victimhood. Any move towards racial justice or reparation is rewritten as an attack on whites. Whites are seen to be the ‘oppressed victims of discrimination’ (Berbrier 2000, p. 179) while the success of individual people of colour, and the entrenchment of rights and opportunities for previously minoritised groups, are interpreted as threats. One such contemporary example, widespread in far right circles, is the theory of the ‘great replacement’, which claims that ‘policies by global liberal elites are intentionally replacing the native European populations with non-European peoples in a “genocide by substitution”’ (Bjørgo and Ravndal 2019, p. 4). As well as being a rallying call in the 2017 Charlottesville riot in the United States, far right claims about imminent ‘replacement’ by racialised others have been invoked across Europe and elsewhere to demonise Muslims and migrants from Africa and the Middle East, sometimes with extremely violent consequences (Davey and Ebner 2019). Within such affective discourses, white people’s suffering or sense of displacement, their discomfort at the success or even just the presence of people they define as outsiders, is experienced as excessive, unusual and inappropriate. White victims of crime and violence are given more public and policy attention than non-white victims; traumatic experiences undergone by whites are seen to outweigh anything suffered by other people. These tendencies are clearly evident in media coverage of crime, violence, disease and disaster.2 This chapter elaborates two instances in which the classification of particular white South Africans as extraordinary victims has intersected with powerful social change, revealing the contiguous nature of narratives of white victimhood across almost a century of South African history. The first is the moral panic around ‘poor whites’ that appeared in the 1930s, echoed in contemporary anxieties about white poverty; the second is the scare about murders of white farmers, often elided with claims of a ‘white genocide’. In both instances such panics have mirrored racial anxieties elsewhere, particularly in the United States. I argue that the idea of white South Africans as extraordinary victims has been employed for political gain at times of social change, first to entrench the segregationist policies of the apartheid state and the broader western political establishment and second to push back against the reparative impulses of the post-apartheid African National Congress (ANC) government. The historical instance of white victimhood that I discuss here is a ‘quintessential example of the intersection between segregationist philanthropy and scientific racism’ (Willoughby-Herard 2015, p. 2), while the contemporary instance provides fuel to white supremacist arguments about the failures of the post-apartheid dispensation. In both cases, contestations over the meanings of whiteness are intrinsic to processes of social change: white activists, politicians, policymakers and other ‘moral entrepreneurs’ (Becker 1995) engage identity to support or counter threats to white economic and political power. The aim of this chapter is thus twofold. First, it discusses a global south manifestation of the transnational phenomenon of far right populist upsurge, showing its imbrication in longer histories of white supremacist discourse. Second, it uses this example to foreground the way in which identity is a function and driver of social change. 68

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The ‘Poor-White’ problem in South Africa The title of this section derives from an article published in 1933 in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), then as now an internationally respected research outlet (Wiesner 1933). The article reports on a major study undertaken in 1932 by the Carnegie Corporation, a wealthy US philanthropic organisation that took it upon itself to fund a five-volume commission of enquiry into the question of white poverty, seen by ideologues in both South Africa and the United States as presenting a threat to social cohesion. The reports were ‘concerned with the analysis of poverty with a view to achieving two principal objectives: its alleviation in South Africa and the dissemination of the results as “useful” knowledge within the North and the United States in particular’ (Bell 2000, p. 482). Its interest in South Africa reveals how clearly that faraway British dominion was entwined in what Willoughby-Herard (2015) calls global or transnational whiteness.3 Much has been written about the Carnegie Commission: its logical and ideological flaws, its impact on racial narratives within South Africa and the United States, its privileging of a ‘scientific’ approach to social problems, its foundational justifications for apartheid policies, and its use of South Africa as a case study for US social engineering (see, for example, Bell 2000, Giliomee 2003, Magubane 2008, Willoughby-Herard 2015). However for my purposes here what is most important about the Commission of Investigation into the Poor White Question is the fact of its existence. The social scientists employed by the Carnegie Corporation were not tasked at looking at poverty in general – this could have been a useful study in 1930s Johannesburg, a violent, polluted, often lawless and deeply unequal mining city – but rather were asked to consider white poverty on its own, as though it were a separate category to the poverty experienced by other types of people. The conceptual foundations of the study presupposed the idea that being poor was not a normal condition for white people; white poverty was considered sufficient to merit investigation and intervention. This tactic of exceptionalising the suffering of white South Africans was motivated by Christian and colonial mythologies. Notions of race relied on the idea that whites were inherently superior to the ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ people whose land they inhabited and whose labour they used. This cosmology assumed that the hierarchy of status and work was natural rather than imposed by humans. White people were characterised as possessing superior control over the base urges that ruled the lives of other types of people (Bederman 1995). The ‘black peril’ scares that appeared across southern Africa in the early twentieth century were, like similar phenomena in the United States, predicated on the idea that white women’s purity was endangered by black men’s uncontrolled sexual urges (Ullmann 2005). (Of course, white men’s endemic sexual predation of colonised women never caused whites to panic about female victimhood.) The link between civilisation and control was essential to colonial white identity in South Africa as elsewhere, both among the dominant British and among Afrikaners, who claimed racial authority and African autochthony at the same time. White poverty, however, threatened this illusion of control. Poor people could not (and, shockingly, may not always care to) maintain the physical hygiene that was seen to be necessary for moral hygiene. Their ‘slovenly’ habits threatened the illusion that whites lived in better and healthier ways than other people. This concern with hygiene can be seen throughout E.G. Malherbe’s ethnographic photo series that accompanied the Carnegie report, images that ‘depict the production of hypervisible, stigmatised, mocked, and sentimentalised poor whites as a social identity and a social problem’ (Willoughby-Herard 2015, p. 41). Photographs show grubby, emaciated children or adults, some of whom are given a veneer of respectability by captions suggesting hard work, education and improvement. Nonetheless the images make 69

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clear, from these people’s faces, bodies, clothing and surroundings, their remove from the sanitised purity of white civilisation. This personal and social failure of hygiene presented a moral hazard, as it threatened to undermine the fictions of white dominance. If whites were not cleaner, purer, more civilised and more controlled, what happened to their claims that only they could ‘manage’ Africa? Indeed, ‘the very existence of such [poor] white people challenged the belief that the racial labour hierarchy was the result of divine order’ (Willoughby-Herard 2015, p. 41). The threat of dirt and pollution posed by poor whites was not confined to their bodies or even to their households. In inner city ghettos and slums, whites lived closely alongside black people, people of Indian and Asian origin, people of hybrid racial identity, and others drawn by or coerced into the illusory promise of the mines. Given enough time, these categories of people may well have become indistinguishable, defined as an urban underclass rather than by racial taxonomies. By living in ways and in places that were not considered properly civilised, ‘poor whites’ threatened to reveal the unstable nature of whiteness, which, rather than a fixed category that was permanent and ahistorical, was (and remains) as fluid as any other identity. Poor white people were the physical manifestations of this instability. The intimacies of poverty and suffering often made people seem less white than their skin tone, family histories, and home languages would suggest. The BMJ report states, ‘Their economic decline has been caused principally by inadequate adjustment to modern economic conditions. This has occurred especially among the older Dutch-speaking portion of the population, which has been severed from European progress and development for many generations’ (Wiesner 1933, p. 297). In this formulation, which was common to reporting on the ‘problem’, poor Afrikaners were classified as not-quite-white. There was an imperative upon more fortunate whites to ‘rescue’ them: not for the upliftment of the individual but rather to cement the boundaries of the category of whiteness. Bell writes that the commission ‘found echoes in eugenist fears held by groups within both [South Africa and the US] that white “civilisation” could decline’ (2000, p. 489). The civilising mission, as applied to poor white South Africans, was a litmus test to see whether whiteness could be protected from the threat of racial mixing. Ideas about the exceptionality of white poverty have continued into the post-apartheid period and are alive and well in twenty-first century South Africa. Writers and artists exhibit an ongoing fascination with the image of the ‘poor white’ in a way that seldom happens with other forms of poverty (see, for example, Ballen 1994, van Niekerk 1999). International media outlets and influential photojournalists report on the apparently new ‘scourge’ of white poverty in the country (O’Reilly 2010, DeVriendt 2011, Simpson 2013). Images of white people in so-called squatter camps have been circulated internationally and crop up repeatedly in memes and on message boards devoted to bewailing the ‘reverse apartheid’ that whites now face in South Africa. These claims to minority status are, of course spurious: data suggests that white people in general retain a disproportionate amount of the country’s financial resources, are over-represented in corporate positions and land ownership (Anwar 2017) and are less likely to be unemployed. In addition, as Christi Kruger (2017) has shown with her insightful ethnography of a ‘poor white’ encampment, white people living informally may actually have superior resources to the majority of the urban poor in South Africa. Thanks to a combination of state welfare grants and donations from wealthier whites, the camp Kruger studied had access to cars, digital TV subscriptions, fresh clothing, private medical care, electricity, assistance with administrative and bureaucratic issues and even black domestic labour. Far from being a new underclass created after the emergence of majority rule government, the poorer white people in this camp had family histories of poverty, violence, alcoholism and disease stretching back across generations. The ‘poor white problem’ of the 1930s was 70

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never solved, but rather made temporarily invisible during apartheid by state housing and job protection. Nonetheless contemporary images of white people living in tiny rooms, in prefabricated structures or in other precarious accommodation are used within and beyond South Africa as part of a rhetoric about existential threats to white safety. As in the 1930s, white poverty is presented as unnatural and the fault of a racist state, in an almost comical inversion of the faux-meritocratic discourse that argues that black people are poor because they are lazy and/or incompetent. The structural features of injustice are disavowed unless they impact on whites.

The myth of white genocide Beliefs about the exceptional nature of white suffering also appear within a set of contemporary discourses that are concerned with violence in South Africa. Rage and anxiety about white victims of violence sometimes segue into hysterical claims that the country is in the midst of what is being defined as a white genocide. As with the idea of the great replacement mentioned above, the trope of white genocide is not restricted to a single location. It has significant currency among far right white conspiracy theorists in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Australia, where everything from affirmative action policies to multilingualism is defined as part of a plot to weaken and destroy the white ‘nation’. Paul Jackson quotes the US neo-Nazi David Lane, from his White genocide manifesto: ‘The term “racial integration” is only a euphemism for genocide. The inevitable result of racial integration is a percentage of inter-racial matings each year, leading to extinction… This genocide is being accomplished by deliberate design’ (2015, p. 211). Here ‘genocide as an idea set out via liberal, legal definitions becomes a term used to critique a liberal political agenda’ ( Jackson 2015, p. 212). Shifting from its common connotations of violence, loss of life and targeted destruction of a particular group, genocide becomes defined as anything that threatens the dominance, comfort and (imagined) homogeneity of white people.4 Despite its claims about ‘biology’, Lane’s definition is far more concerned with culture than with bodies. Fears about white genocide are easily to apply to South Africa as a consequence of the country’s high rate of violence. South African propagators of this myth have images of actual bodies that can be displayed as part of their racial propaganda. They often refer to so-called ‘farm murders’, a term that is used to classify violent crimes aimed at white people living in rural areas, despite the fact that many of those who are killed on farms are not white and many of those who do the killing are (Walsh 2019). Farm murders provide a gruesome and easily available spectacle of white death. On Twitter, on YouTube and elsewhere in the digital public sphere, fearful and angry white South Africans share names, stories and images of white people killed on farms to perpetuate the notion that whites are victims of a planned racist genocide. In some instances these go so far into the territory of conspiracy theory that the government is accused of managing the genocide and even of setting up death squads. The visibility of white victims of crime goes some way to explaining why white South Africans have become a major symbol for the global white right: the US neo-Nazi and Klan leader David Duke, for example, has posted videos on YouTube in which he ‘[attempts] to sustain the argument that white people are being systematically killed by black people in South Africa as part of a deliberate policy that developed in the wake of the fall of the apartheid regime to destroy white culture’ ( Jackson 2015, p. 212). International actors like Duke and Peter Dutton, the Australian foreign minister who in 2018 called for fast track visas for white South African farmers (The Guardian 2018), 71

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draw much of their narrative from local far right groups. These include shadowy survivalists the Suidlanders, who journalists credit with popularising the notion in the United States (Gedye 2018); the pop star turned self-proclaimed Afrikaner nationalist hero Steve Hofmeyr, the driving force behind a 2013 campaign that aimed to ‘raise awareness’ of the alleged genocide; and the ‘minority rights’ group AfriForum, whose most recognisable spokesperson, Ernst Roets, is a favourite of Fox News in the United States. These groups do not necessarily use the term white genocide but their rhetoric is riddled with claims that whites are being targeted, attacked, murdered, pushed away and wiped out. South African genocide claims are part of a trend in which white supremacist identity politics utilise the notion of whiteness under threat to demonise a state that is dominated by black politicians. This state is seen to threaten white interests, particularly in terms of economics – moves towards land expropriation without compensation – and culture – shifts away from Afrikaans language education and changes to place names, history curricula and monuments. The names and stories of white people who are killed in rural areas are produced to further arguments about the debased status of white South Africans under the ANC government. Of course I am not suggesting that murders of white people on farms do not happen. These deaths are horrific, and the brutality that often characterises them merits major concern and state intervention. However they are not the only deaths that deserve this consideration. Defining particular murders as part of a genocide suggests that white victims of violent crime are in a separate category to all other victims; that violence perpetrated against whites is unnatural and exceptional; that whites experience a disproportionate level of violence compared to other people; that violence aimed at whites is never ‘just’ violence, but always has a political and racial component; and that this kind of violence is part of a targeted and intentional strategy to destroy white people and white society. Violence in contemporary South Africa is, unfortunately, an ongoing crisis, with extremely high rates recorded over a number of years (Africa Check 2017, 2018). Violence affects everyone in the country, whether directly, as victims or friends, family and acquaintances of victims, or indirectly, through the securitisation of public space and the impact on communities of private security infrastructure (Alden 1996, Comaroff and Comaroff 2016, p. 193). Alongside the social effects of large-scale trauma, the fear and anxiety that come with constant awareness of risk affect South Africans’ daily experiences, especially within public spaces (Dawson 2006). Contrary to the narrative of white genocide, the national problem of violence impacts all South Africans. Those propagating the genocide myth have argued that, statistically, the murders of white people on farms outweigh other homicides in South Africa. However these claims have been effectively debunked by journalists (Wilkinson 2017). Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff write that ‘extreme poverty and extreme risk’ tend always and everywhere to ‘attract’ each other. As of 2014, 13 percent of police precincts, most of them white and affluent, had homicide rates below the global average; 10 percent had zero. Conversely, 75 percent of murders were concentrated in less than quarter of the nation’s precincts, all of them poor and black. (2016, p. 153) Poverty, which in South Africa is more common to black people than to white (in terms of both population percentages and actual numbers), is a far greater predictor of victimhood than whiteness is. Notwithstanding the excessive media coverage granted to white and middle 72

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class victims (Brodie 2019), and acknowledging that crime statistics in South Africa can be questionable (Comaroff and Comaroff 2016, p. 145), we can say with certainty that whites do not experience more homicide and violent crime than other groups, and that it is possible that they may experience less. Suggestions that the excessive brutality meted out during farm murders makes them different to other killings also do not stand up to scrutiny when we consider the appalling violence that characterises the deaths of so many poor and black women, which tend to go unreported unless they are particularly spectacular (Falkof 2019). But perhaps more important than arguments about numbers and degree are the philosophical claims made by white genocide rhetoric, which insist that farm murders must be exceptional and different precisely because they happen to whites. This position was encapsulated by Hofmeyr in a television interview in 2013, when he told reporters that Afrikaners ‘are not used to being raped by other races and ethnicities’ (Praag.org 2013). This perhaps inadvertent slippage revealed many of the underpinnings of white genocide myths in South Africa and elsewhere: that violence, poverty and powerlessness are not natural to whites, that these are not things we are ‘used to’. A similar position could be seen on the (since deleted) website for the campaign led by Hofmeyr, which began with hyperbolic demands for justice and human rights but soon spilled into complaints about ‘the destruction of our infrastructure, our filthy government hospitals, our pathetic educational system, dirty dams and rivers, uninhabitable parks and public areas, dangerous neighbourhoods and filthy streets’ (Red October 2014). It appears too in one of Roets’ interviews with Fox News, in which he begins with dramatic claims about the mass murders of whites but soon moves on to concerns about white farmers losing their land (Tucker Carlson Tonight 2018). Here we can clearly see the uses of the white genocide narrative: real deaths of real people are cynically engaged as part of a political push to secure white status, lifestyle and property rights in the face of social changes that may undermine these privileges.

Conclusion Within South Africa, both historical panics around white poverty and contemporary myths of white genocide have depended on the idea that whiteness is valuable and under threat, and that action must be taken if it is to be protected. Notwithstanding the differing visibilities of whiteness in Euro-America and in the global south, this weaponisation of identity is common across locations. Groups and movements that draw on white rage and anxiety in South Africa echo and often communicate with similar forces in the United States, Australia, western Europe, Russia and elsewhere. In these and other contexts, an over-valued whiteness is aggressively displayed as part of an increase in right wing populism that aims in part to resist or roll back social change. White identity thus becomes a tool that is used to shore up existing systems of domination, violence and inequality and to repel progressive shifts or potentials for inclusion and justice. Such active and intentional invocations of the position known as ‘whiteness’ reveal that, far from being static, fixed qualities, the racial and other identities that allow us to define our communities and ourselves are a crucial part of the making, remaking or even unmaking of broader society.

Acknowledgements This chapter is based on research undertaken with the support of a Thuthuka Early Career Fellowship from the South African National Research Foundation and a Friedel Sellschop Award from the University of the Witwatersrand. 73

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Notes 1 In line with Sara Ahmed (2004) and Melissa Steyn (2001), among others, I have argued elsewhere (Falkof 2015) that whiteness can only be invisible to those who possess it, and that this invisibility is well-nigh impossible in colonial and post-colonial contexts where white settlers are a numerical minority and whiteness demands protection. 2 See, for example, coverage of a Kenyan airline stowaway whose lifeless body fell from a plane into a garden in South London in 2019. The London Times led its coverage of the death with the headline ‘Sunbather nearly hit by falling body is Oxford graduate’ (AllAfrica.com 2019), prioritising the trauma of the white suburban dweller over the death of the Kenyan migrant. 3 Imperial panics about white poverty were not restricted to southern Africa: similar concerns arose in Kenya ( Jackson 2013) and Barbados (Beckles 1988). 4 According to the United Nations, genocide is defined by the intention ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ and includes actions such as killing; serious bodily harm; living conditions designed to destroy the group; preventing births; and removing children (United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect 2018).

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White Victimhood Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J.L., 2016. The truth about crime: sovereignty, knowledge, social order. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Davey, J. and Ebner, J., 2019. ‘The great replacement’: the violent consequences of mainstreamed extremism. London: Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Dawson, A., 2006. Geography of fear: crime and the transformation of public space in South Africa. In: S. Low and N. Smith, eds. The politics of public space. New York and London: Routledge, 123–142. DeVriendt, T., 2011. Poor white photography [online]. Africa is a Country. Available from: https:// africasacountry.com/2011/12/poor-white-photography/ [Accessed 16 August 2019]. Dyer, R., 1997. White. London: Routledge. Falkof, N., 2015. Satanism and family murder in late apartheid South Africa: imagining the end of whiteness. London: Palgrave. Falkof, N., 2019. Patriarchy and power in the South African news: competing coverage of the murder of Anene Booysen. In: C. Carter, L. Steiner, and S. Allan, eds. Journalism, gender and power. Abingdon: Routledge, 159–173. Gedye, L., 2018. White genocide: how the big lie spread to the US and beyond [online]. Mail & Guardian, 23 March. Available from: https://mg.co.za/article/2018-03-23-00-radical-rightplugs-swart-gevaar/ [Accessed 19 October 2021]. Giliomee, H., 2003. The Afrikaners, biography of a people. London: Hurst and Company. Hartzell, S.L., 2018. Alt-white: conceptualizing the ‘alt-right’ as a rhetorical bridge between white nationalism and mainstream public discourse. Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, 8 (1/2), 6–25. Jackson, P., 2015. ‘White genocide’: post-war fascism and the ideological value of evoking existential conflicts. In: C. Carmichael and R.C. Maguire, eds. The Routledge history of genocide. Abingdon: Routledge, 207–226. Jackson, W., 2013. Dangers to the colony: loose women and the ‘poor white’ problem in Kenya. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 14 (2). Kruger, C., 2017. (Dis)-empowered whiteness: an ethnography of the King Edward Park. PhD thesis. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Magubane, Z., 2008. The American construction of the poor white problem in South Africa. South Atlantic Quarterly, 107 (4), 691–713. Mondon, A. and Winter, A., 2020. Reactionary democracy: how racism and the populist far right became mainstream. London: Verso Books. O’Reilly, F., 2010. Tough times for white South African squatters [online]. Reuters, 26 March. https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-whites-idUSTRE62P0UJ20100326 [Accessed 19 October 2021]. Praag.org, 2013. Steve Hofmeyr interview during Red October march, Pretoria [online]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgRdTdj76ew [Accessed 19 October 2021]. Red October [online], 2014. Available from: http://redoctober.co.za/ [Accessed 20 May 2014]. Simpson, J., 2013. Do white people have a future in South Africa? [online] BBC News, 20 May. https:// www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22554709 [Accessed 19 October 2021] Steyn, M., 2001. Whiteness just isn’t what it used to be: white identity in a changing South Africa. New York: State University of New York Press. The Guardian, 2018. South Africa demands Peter Dutton retract ‘offensive’ statement on white farmer plight [online]. The Guardian, 15 March. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/ mar/16/south-africa-peter-dutton-offensive-statement-white-farmers [Accessed 19 October 2021]. Tucker Carlson Tonight, 2018. South African farmers targeted, an interview with Ernst Roets [online]. 16 May. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dMYhLZb96Q&t=18s [Accessed 19 October 2021]. Ullmann, C., 2005. Black peril, white fear – representations of violence and race in South Africa’s English press, 1976−2002, and their influence on public opinion. PhD thesis. Universität zu Köln, Köln. United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect [online], 2018. United Nations. Available from: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml [Accessed 28 August 2018]. van Niekerk, M., 1999. Triomf. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Walsh, J., 2019. A conspiracy: how the far-right fan the flames of south Africa’s farm murders [online]. The New European. 1 August. Available from: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-newshow-far-right-fan-flames-south-africa-farm-murders-52362/ [Accessed 15 August 2019].

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Nicky Falkof Wiesner, B. P., 1933. The ‘poor-white’ problem in South Africa. British Medical Journal, 2 (3,788), 296–297. Wilkinson, K., 2017. Why calculating a farm murder rate in SA is near impossible [online]. Africa Check. Available from: https://africacheck.org/2017/05/08/analysis-calculating-farm-murder-rate-sanear-impossible/ [Accessed 28 August 2018]. Willoughby-Herard, T., 2015. Waste of a white skin: the Carnegie Corporation and the racial logic of white vulnerability. Oakland: UCLA Press.

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7 USING RIGHTS European Migrant-Citizens in Brexitland Kuba Jablonowski

Introduction: rights unsettled Maciek moved to Bristol, the largest city in the southwest of England, soon after Poland and several other Central European countries joined the European Union (EU) in 2004. He exercised the right to free movement, which allows EU citizens to settle in any member state for the purpose of work or self-employment. EU citizens who are not economically active, for example, students or pensioners, can also exercise free movement but their rights to healthcare and welfare assistance are strictly limited during the first five years of residence (European Union 2004; also see O’Brien 2017). Maciek worked from the get-go and, soon after his arrival, he opened a Central European deli with his girlfriend Ania. Together, they built up the business from scratch working with no breaks or holidays. Every Thursday, several vans full of cheese and sausage, preserves and pickles, Polish ham, Lithuanian bread, Czech beer, and so on arrive directly from Central Europe. Even though they had not found the time to visit Poland over eight years, they remain connected to Central Europe every day through their customers and suppliers. On June 23, 2016, this rhythm was disrupted by a vote in which Maciek and Ania had no say: the European referendum. It was called four decades after the United Kingdom (UK) voted by 67% to 33% to join the EU in the 1975 Accession referendum. In the 2016 referendum, British citizens were asked to decide whether to leave or remain in the EU. The result was much narrower, but equally decisive: citizens of the UK voted to leave the EU by around 52% to 48%. This became a pivotal moment in a process called Brexit, a portmanteau coined from the words ‘Britain’ and ‘exit’. It was the first time in the history of the EU that a member state voted to leave. Following a period of intense negotiations between the British Government and the European Commission, the UK withdrew from the EU on January 31, 2020. The vote to leave reified social, economic, and cultural cleavages separating the UK from the rest of the EU – as well as dividing the country on the inside (Curtice 2016). Suddenly, European migrant-citizens living in the UK found themselves in Brexitland, a landscape of alienation and vulnerability, as the referendum singled them out as a group and put a question mark over their right to stay once European free movement law no longer applies. This is

DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-8

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how Maciek described his feelings about the result in an interview conducted on the day after the vote: During the time before the referendum, so until yesterday, I felt this was my second home, and my second homeland, where you can begin to get familiar with it and feel accepted into your social group. But after the vote, I immediately felt alienated. I suppose most people felt like that. Now, going down the road, they wonder: was it this one who voted Leave, or was it that one who voted Leave? Maciek’s account of alarm and alienation echoes the initial response of other EU citizens to the referendum outcome. This response was widely studied to understand the impact of a sudden loss of rights through Brexit (Botterill et al. 2018, Guma and Jones 2018, Lulle et al. 2018). EU citizens living in the UK articulated this experience in psychosocial registers and narrated through the tropes of anxiety and uncertainty. Thus, for European migrant-citizens, Brexit raised not only questions of rights but also questions of identity. When analysed in sociopolitical registers, these tropes of identity, anxiety and uncertainty translate into three intellectual problems. Firstly, they trouble our understanding of the European right to mobility and recast it as a right to residence instead. This is because, in the accounts of citizens anxious about their status, the right to movement is inseparable from the right to settlement. Secondly, they enmesh Brexit – a geopolitical event – in everyday social relations and they show how it strained relations between friends and neighbours. Thirdly, and most importantly, they trouble the notion of having rights. They show that rights can be lost, and hence expose the undercurrent of vulnerability inherent in right regimes. Rights are never quite had, they are used. And while they are often used freely and relatively seamlessly – we do not know what rights we have exactly most of the time – they are contingent and can be lost. Rather than being inalienable, rights are seemingly on loan from political communities that collectively underwrite them. The first problem has implications for how we think about migration in the context of free movement, and the second problem has implications for our thinking about mundane dimensions of global politics. However, this chapter is mostly focussed on the third problem. It elaborates on the idea of using rights to make sense of rights-based movements for social change. When rights are thought of as ‘had’ they can remain obscure and unacknowledged, like a half-forgotten insurance policy. Thinking through losing and using rights, on the other hand, reconfigures rights as a site of political struggle. It also directs attention towards the formation of political subjects through rights-based politics. This chapter mobilises the notion of using rights to engage with the predicament of ‘the right to have rights’ articulated in the late 1940s by Hannah Arendt (1973, p. 253) to question the logics and boundaries of political belonging and recognition. Here, European migrantcitizens and Brexit become a case study in using, rather than having, rights. Reframing rights in an action-oriented register helps us move away from debates about the individual who of rights: who is allowed to have rights in principle, who has them in practice, and who does not. Instead, the chapter thinks through how questions: how rights are claimed through collective action, how they are acknowledged by the wider political community, and how all this generates collective, rights-bearing subjects in a way that the notion of having rights cannot capture. In other words, this chapter expands the frame from rights bearers and issues of political membership to processes of rights recognition and subject formation. The next section elaborates on the notion of vulnerability inherent in rights. It explores two different readings of Arendt’s discussion of the right to have rights, namely, its normative and 78

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performative interpretations. Each reading flags up a different kind of uncertainty inherent in rights, but both can be productively engaged to make sense of the European experience of Brexit. The second section explores the liminality of rights. Against the backdrop of theory that all too often detaches rights from ordinary life, this section shows the merits of investigating spatial and temporal overlaps, enactments and transitions of rights. The final section considers the question of generating collective subjects of rights through political action. Drawing on the example of a European civil rights group that emerged in Bristol in the aftermath of the EU referendum, this final section shows that losing and using rights are intertwined processes which create collective actors and generate political subjects. This points to new ways of reading Arendt, which reframe the right to have rights as a relational practice of creating and sustaining political worlds through collective action. The chapter argues that thinking about rights as something we use – rather than have – is intellectually productive not only because it makes for more robust conceptual frames, but also because it offers potential to reconcile different radical traditions in thinking about social struggles.

Vulnerability of rights When Hannah Arendt (1973, pp. 251–257) reflected on the inherent vulnerability of rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she referred to the context of rights violations in Europe in the 1940s. Multiple national minorities were denied full rights in multi-ethnic states that emerged from the turmoil of World War 1. The situation of stateless people was even worse than the plight of minorities, as they could not count on national governments to protect their rights at all. This vulnerability was fully exposed through World War 2 when millions of minority and stateless people fled continental Europe to seek refuge overseas. Many of those who did not make it perished in genocide. Arendt draws of this collective trauma to show that human rights are not absolute. Instead, they are contingent and need to be recognised by political communities in order to be secure. Arendt questions the universality of human rights and advances an idea that humanity ‘is a mark of vulnerability rather than a source of protection’ (DeGooyer et al. 2018, p. 7). In what follows, human rights can be only upheld effectively through citizenship. She also observes that this vulnerability of rights is not obvious. Rights are usually imagined through positive frames, they are seen as entitlements. In contrast, their vulnerability only reveals itself through loss, which is why many commentators described ‘the right to have rights’ as a ‘lost’ right (DeGooyer 2018, Maxwell 2018). In Arendt’s words, We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (…) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation. (Arendt 1973, p. 251) Her original account defines the right to have rights as ‘the right of every individual to belong to humanity’ (Arendt 1973, p. 253) but she does not offer much beyond that broad definition. Perhaps this is why the discussion of the right to have rights received little scholarly attention when The Origins of Totalitarianism were first published in the 1950s. However, it became more prominent in political theory in the 1990s as global politics was undergoing significant realignment in the aftermath of the Cold War and human rights seemed uncertain once again. Arendt’s account of rights was usually interpreted through normative or performative frames (DeGooyer 2018, pp. 24–32), which both signal different modes of vulnerability inherent in 79

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rights. The normative account was first articulated by Seyla Benhabib (1996). Her interpretation decoupled particular rights, understood as legal and thus functional entitlements – and the right to have such particular rights, understood as a moral and hence foundational entitlement. In what follows ‘the right’ and ‘rights’ belong to different orders: the latter can be understood as an institutional arrangement and a legal framework while the former is a principle, yet to be fully realised. Rights are vulnerable in this account because the moral entitlement to have them is negotiated and reinterpreted by national and transnational institutions and networks: judicial institutions, public bodies, and the civil society. Ultimately, this interpretation points to the need for some form of institutional sovereignty beyond nation states to uphold the rights of those failed by these states (Benhabib 2006). Until such supranational infrastructures are fully developed, rights remain vulnerable. They can only be safeguarded through membership in political communities that have the power to uphold them. Performative accounts, on the other hand, place emphasis on the lack of any external foundation for rights beyond each claim to have rights. Such claims are ‘enacted through bodily movement, assembly, action and resistance’ (Butler 2015, p. 49). They were conceptually framed as acts of citizenship by Engin Isin, who developed a comprehensive account of various actors becoming citizens through rights claims across a wide body of collaborative scholarship (see, e.g., Isin and Nielsen 2008, Isin and Saward 2013). His formulation follows Judith Butler’s work on performativity and casts the doer of rights – i.e. the rights-bearing subject – as an ephemeral device of political action. He argues that the rights-bearing subject can only exist through the deed of claiming rights. Though often critiqued for decentring the individual behind the act (Staeheli 2010), this conceptual manoeuvre underscores the emancipatory potential of acts of citizenship: if nobody is presupposed to be a rightful actor, then anyone and everyone can act and demand change. This not only brings to the fore the vulnerability and uncertainty inherent in rights, but also provides an affirmative flipside. Rights can never be had as a property but they can always be claimed through action, and those deprived of rights can bring them into existence through claims. However, such a performative enactment still depends on others for validation. Firstly, as a relational practice each enactment must be collective as it requires audience at the very least, and it is often staged with co-actors. Secondly, ‘to be successful, it must be more than a repeated claim: it must be recognised by an external power’ (DeGooyer 2018, p. 28) and that is still, most often, a nation state. Here, too, rights are ultimately shown to be vulnerable. They can only be safeguarded through recognition by political communities that have the power to validate rights claims. These are exactly the kinds of vulnerability that got exposed through Brexit. Whether rights are understood as normative orders mandated by transnational institutions, or as performative enactments dependent on others for recognition and validation, the EU referendum left rights unsettled. The right to free movement which gave mundane certainties to European migrant-citizens – to settle, seek work, build business, and start families – became uncertain. This left Maciek and millions like him anxious and bewildered. Legally, nothing changed on the June 23, 2016, and yet lives were upended as the UK entered protracted exit negotiations with the EU about the future of migrant-citizens’ rights.

Liminality of rights Individualised accounts of anxiety articulated by European migrant-citizens following the Brexit referendum point to their systemic, collective, and material substance. Lives were upended because rights were unsettled, and emotional responses to the vote reflect this sudden 80

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loss of certainty about one’s legal, social, economic, and political status. The decision to leave rejected the principle of free movement but also put a question mark over a complex set of entitlements enjoyed by millions of European migrant-citizens living in the UK and British migrant-citizens living in the EU. The right to free movement translates into practice through a number of social, economic, and political entitlements and exclusions related to welfare assistance, health services, employment standards, universal education, equal treatment, as well as electoral participation in local and European elections. These entitlements and exclusions are experienced unevenly. They are often linked with social and economic status of migrants citizens, and hence experiences of free movement display a class gradient (O’Brien 2017, Benson 2020). Still, taken together, they had underpinned the mundane rhythm of Maciek and Ania’s life in Bristol for years before they suddenly became uncertain. Maciek and Ania could still enjoy their rights in the liminal space of Brexit, but they were anxious about them and about their place in Britain. The referendum put an expiry date on their immigration status and tied it to the timeline of exit negotiations between the UK and the EU. In political theory, rights tend to play out in binary terms: one has rights or one has not. One claims rights, or one does not. What links the different readings of Arendt is that the right to have rights renders a person into a political subject; as an irreducible subject of the normative principle of membership, or a performative subject brought into being through the dialectic of enactment and recognition. In either interpretation, ‘the right to action’ precedes ‘the right to freedom’ (Arendt 1973, p. 251) in the sense that the specific content of rights is secondary to the ability to claim them – or to the act of claiming them – in the first place. In his critique of Arendt, Jacques Rancière (2004, p. 302) confronts this position and describes it as an ‘ontological trap’ because it contrasts political life with non-political bare life. He argues that the latter is clearly entangled in political process too. However, in Rancière’s view, Arendt depoliticises this ‘bare life’ to advance her arguments that everyone should have a non-negotiable right to belong to a political community. This excludes some aspects of human life from the grounds of politics and results in ‘the erasure of the political’ (Rancière 2004, p. 309) in the name of humanitarian agendas and consensual discourses, which Rancière rejects. He argues that in Arendt’s conceptual frame those deprived of rights are rendered a helpless residual of state power. As a result, her frame produces thin accounts of politics that contrast political power with depoliticised and passive bare life. Rancière’s profound critique has since been mobilised to reclaim Arendt’s account in a spirit closer to performative readings, and hence to frame the right to have rights as a political struggle in itself. Andrew Schaap, for example, has rejected the clear distinction between political power and depoliticised life to make sense of the fight for recognition by sans papiers, the undocumented people of France. Deprived of the right to have rights, they nonetheless ‘actualize their political equality’ through acting as if they had them (Schaap 2011, p. 39). Thus, the struggle over this inclusion and exclusion as political subjects is a key force animating the politics of rights. However, there are problems with this formulation too. As Iris Marion Young (1989) observed three decades ago, rights regimes not only exclude the outside but they also differentiate the inside. Therefore, Young draws attention to the complex dynamics between a polity and diverse minority groups that seek to realise inclusion and equality from within it. It would be naïve to argue that rights are experienced equally by different individuals within the same polity and that everyone can use rights equally regardless of, for example, their socio-economic positions, or their social and cultural capital. As Young (1989, p. 251) puts it, ‘economic life is not sufficiently under the control of citizens to affect the unequal status and treatment of groups’. Great liberation struggles of the twentieth century, which are still 81

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ongoing today, give testament to that as they unfolded unevenly at the intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Further, as the example of European migrant-citizens in Brexitland shows, it is often confusing who is a subject of rights and when. Alongside the sense he lost his ‘second homeland’ Maciek also articulated a sense of anxiety, suspicion, and uncertainty. This is an empirical reminder that rights often exist in liminal spaces. They remain uncertain: until government negotiations are over, until new legislation is passed, until court proceedings are decided, and so on. These liminal spaces are best analysed in the spirit of Isin’s work on rights claims, which frames them in terms of otherness or alterity, rather than the more conventional but rigid logic of inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Isin argues against treating citizens and non-citizens as discrete groups and approaching social struggles as a move from negatively charged exterior into the realm of rights. Instead, he argues that: the logics of alterity assume overlapping, fluid, contingent, dynamic, and reversible boundaries and positions, where agents engage in solidaristic strategies such as recognition and affiliation, agonistic strategies such as domination and authorisation, or alienating strategies such as disbarment across various positions within social space. (Isin 2002, p. 30) In this way, non-citizens are capable of certain types of action that result in their recognition as citizens, and Isin goes on to outline the kinds of spatial relations that can link citizens and non-citizens in ways that are mutually constitutive. Crucially, they include not only affirmative acts such as recognition but also adverse acts including domination or dismissal. Rancière opens up the ontological lock that separates political power and human life in Arendt’s work, but he replaces it with another strongly ontological distinction between subjects who have rights and those who have not. Isin, instead, underscores the processes of variability and liminality, which reconfigure the social and political space through consecutive instances of rights claims. Recognition is a possible but uncertain outcome of this process. It depends on underlying legal and institutional arrangements on the one hand, and on social, economic, and cultural positions of the actors on the other. This interpretation of rights is very close to performativity readings proposed by Butler, and it shares its singular blind spot. It fails to account for the person at the centre of political action and remains focussed on the moment of the political deed or the right claim. Even if we agree with Butler (1990, p. 142) that the doer is constructed through the deed, we are left with a question about the subject-generating aspect of rights claims. The example of sans papiers in France, that is, undocumented and rightless migrants who became a political subject through their struggle, raises this exact question (see Schaap 2011). The following and final section deals with this question by proposing that new political subjects emerge as rights are being lost and regained, dismissed, and recognised – in short, used – by communities whose boundaries are delineated in this process.

Using rights, generating subjects The vote to leave left Maciek anxious and disoriented. Many other European migrantcitizens I interviewed in Bristol in the aftermath of the referendum expressed similar feelings. However, within days from the vote, this anxiety and uncertainty started to translate into political mobilisation. On June 28, 2016, there was a pro-EU rally opposite the City Hall attended by over 2,000 people. That was a large crowd by Bristol standards, and in any case 82

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the event was bigger than pro-EU rallies I observed in the run up to the vote. Numerous EU citizens came along, often waving their national flags: Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, and Polish. Faced with losing their rights due to Brexit they were anxious, but also keen to defend them. Among them was Nicolas Hatton, an honorary consul of France in Bristol and a director at the city’s French school. Within two weeks Hatton organised a smaller meeting in a community hall in Henleaze, a leafy suburb in northern Bristol. It was initially aimed at the Francophone community, but at the last minute organisers changed the billing and invited all European migrant-citizens in Bristol to attend. When reflecting on it, Hatton said initially ‘it was all about information for the French community’ because ‘a lot of people were worried at the same time.’ Then, he said: I had this eureka moment in which I thought well, it’s not just us, it’s all Europeans. It’s Italians, Polish, Spanish, Germans. So, I changed it. (…) I tried to invite as many Europeans as possible (…). The expression was, like, we’re in the same boat, so we should unite on this. Over 200 people attended this meeting, and they all came to Bristol from different European countries at different times. At one point, all participants were asked for a show of hands to gauge the length of their residence in the UK. The count started with five years. Hands went up and mostly stayed there as organisers shouted out numbers at five-year increments. Around 15 hands started going down, but the count did not stop until 50 was called out. One hand was still firmly in the air, from a Dutch woman living in South Wales, an hour away from Bristol. Now that her husband passed away and her country voted to leave, she suddenly found herself anxious about her immigration status and driven to take action. The meeting generated a sense of togetherness through shared concern. It birthed the3million, an organisation led by Hatton and named after the estimated number of EU migrant-citizens resident in the UK. Within a year, the3million turned into a national organisation with a considerable public profile and with tens of thousands of members subscribed to its online forum. European migrant-citizens who made up the core group of activists used their rights to assemble and campaign to generate media attention. Then, during exit negotiations that followed a year later, they leveraged public attention to influence the British Government and the European Commission on a range of policy issues affecting EU citizens in the UK. Asked why migrant-citizens rallied around their European identity and used it politically only after the referendum, Hatton said: I think the refusal of the British government to grant Europeans the right to stay, that was the point. (…) People felt togetherness because together they were refused that right to stay! And, as a result, it was not about being Polish or French or anything, it was very much all Europeans here, all European citizens – we can’t guarantee your rights. So, there’s this fact of you and them, or us and them. This is consistent with emergent research approaching Europeanness as a political rallying point, and not only a cultural or social category. It shows that ‘belonging emerges as a category of tangible political relevance’ (Ranta and Nancheva 2018, p. 2) as the status of European migrant-citizens is uncertain and rights are unsettled in the Brexitland: As a response to the disruption that Brexit caused in the dynamics of belonging of EU nationals living in the UK, EU nationals appear to have begun to consolidate as 83

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a group – a collective constitution that had been much less evident before and often consciously rejected! – making recourse to their legal rights as EU citizens and their shared European identity. (Ranta and Nancheva 2018, p. 8) This points to new ways of thinking about rights and rights-bearing subjects. The loss of rights remains here as a critical juncture. It troubles the figure of a rights-bearing individual and embeds it in the context of collectively underwritten and recognised rights. However, attention is then diverted towards liminal spaces where rights are not quite yet lost (dismissed) or gained (validated) to better understand their relational and processual characteristics. It also turns thinking about political subjects on its head. Political subjectivity is not a condition of ‘having’ rights, but rather it is defined and bound by rights claims and their intersection with cultural identity. This does not entirely break up with the normative discourse of membership, but it shows that membership boundaries are leaky, hazy, and always in the making. Crucially, contemporary ways of thinking about rights try to escape the binary of having rights or not. Rights cannot be had as a property; they can only ever be used – or lost. Therefore, …‘to have’ rights means to participate staging, creating and sustaining (through protest, legislation, collective action or institution building) a common political world where the ability to legitimately claim and demand rights becomes a possibility for everyone. (Maxwell 2018, p. 48) To think about using rights instead of having them centres attention on political and social struggles rather than the substantive content of rights, as this content is constantly evolving. This conceptual shift does away with the dichotomy of rights-bearing and rightless subjects, and instead it shows how rights are used to assemble and mobilise collective actors to demand social change. The ongoing project of securing status of European migrant-citizens after Brexit emerges in this light not as an attempt to restore rights violated or lost, but as a set of practices aiming to enact rights desired.

Conclusion Drawing on the example of European migrant-citizens in Brexitland, this chapter explored conceptual tensions captured by Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the right to have rights. It advanced the notion of rights as political devices to be used, rather than property or quality to be had, in order to navigate these tensions. Such understanding reconfigures rights as a site of political struggle, where new subjects are formed through loss of rights or demands for recognition. The chapter first explored vulnerability inherent in rights, in both normative and performative perspectives, to underscore their contingent and dialogic characteristics. This showed them ‘not as inviolable possessions, but rather as fragile political achievements that are always imperfectly realized’ (Maxwell 2018, p. 48). The chapter then discussed the liminality or rights to suggest a way out of the ontological trap of essentialist readings, and spotlight rights-in-the-making as productive empirical openings. Finally, drawing on the empirical reference of the3million campaign, it showed that right claims are generative of new political subjects and new sites of struggle, even if they are articulated through the notion of loss and framed as demands for redress. 84

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Thinking about using – rather than having – rights has implications for conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches. It also has a political dimension as it offers potential to reconcile liberal perspectives on liberation and justice with other radical traditions. Rights are the backbone of the liberal discourse but the idea of using rights reframes them in three important ways. First, they become a site of collective struggle rather than an individual property in the form of status or membership. Second, they are always unevenly realised as they are enmeshed in everyday social relations and intersect with class, race, gender, and sexuality. Third, they are not assigned to pre-existing groups but rather generate new, collective political subjects which assemble and mobilise in the process of using rights. Thus, this perspective allows for evaluating the interplay of legal frameworks with the dynamic of social movements. The latter are often rights-based but their study traditionally prioritises questions of conflict, interaction, and identity (Diani 1992) over the institutional frameworks that provide the wider – and often politically productive – context for movement dynamics. The idea of using rights can also serve as a productive empirical instrument to engage with rights in liminal spaces, spaces where they are neither had or lost, and where vulnerability becomes the rallying point for mobilisation. Here, rights emerge as shared understandings which frame demands for change and birth new political subjects in the process. In the context of Brexit, such shared understandings enabled the3million to rapidly grow its membership, generate public attention around issues affecting its emergent constituency, and leverage this attention to make demands for political change. This mobilisation was possible because European migrant-citizens felt togetherness as their rights were threatened in Brexitland.

References Arendt, H., 1973. The origins of totalitarianism. Orlando: Harcourt. Benhabib, S., 1996. The reluctant modernism of Hannah Arendt. Thousand Oakes: Sage. Benhabib, S., 2006. Another cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benson, M., 2020. Brexit and the classed politics of bordering: the British in France and European belongings. Sociology, 54 (3), 501–517. Botterill, K., McCollum, D., and Tyrrell, N., 2018. Negotiating Brexit: migrant spatialities and identities in a changing Europe. Population, Space and Place, 25 (1), 1–4. Butler, J., 1990. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J., 2015. Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Boston: Harvard University Press. Curtice, J., 2016. Brexit: behind the referendum. Political Insight, 7 (2), 4–7. DeGooyer, S., 2018. The right… In: S. DeGooyer, et al., eds. The right to have rights. London: Verso, 18–38. DeGooyer, S., et al., 2018. Introduction: the right to have rights. In: S. DeGooyer, et al. eds. The right to have rights. London: Verso, 1–17. Diani, M., 1992. The concept of social movement. The Sociological Review, 40 (1), 1–25. European Union, 2004. Council Directive 2004/58/EC of 29 April 2004 on the right of citizens of the Union and their family members to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States. Official Journal of the European Union, L 158 of 30 April 2004. Guma, T., and Jones, R.D., 2018. ‘Where are we going to go now?’ European Union migrants’ experiences of hostility, anxiety, and (non-)belonging during Brexit. Population, Space and Place, 25 (1), 1–10. Isin, E.F., 2002. Being political: genealogies of citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Isin, E.F., and Nielsen, G.M., 2008. Acts of citizenship. London: Zed Books. Isin, E.F., and Saward, M. 2013. Enacting European citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lulle, A., Morosanu, L., and King, R. 2018. And then came Brexit: experiences and future plans of young EU migrants in the London region. Population, space and place, 24 (1), 1–10. Maxwell, L., 2018. …to have… In: S. DeGooyer, et al., eds. The right to have rights. London: Verso, 39–50.

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Kuba Jablonowski O’Brien, C., 2017. Unity in adversity: EU citizenship, social justice and the cautionary tale of the UK. London: Bloomsbury. Rancière, J., 2004. Who is the subject of the rights of men? South Atlantic Quarterly, 103 (2–3), 297–310. Ranta, R., and Nancheva, N., 2018. Unsettled: Brexit and European Union nationals’ sense of belonging. Population, Space and Place, 24 (1), 1–10. Schaap, A., 2011. Enacting the right to have rights: Jacques Rancière’s critique of Hannah Arendt. European Journal of Political Theory, 10 (1), 22–45. Staeheli, L.A., 2010. Political geography: where’s citizenship? Progress in Human Geography, 35 (3), 393–400. Young, I.M., 1989. Polity and group difference: a critique of the ideal of universal citizenship. Ethics, 99 (2), 250–274.

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8 THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC Capitalism, Ecosystem Crisis, and the Political Economy of Disaster Bue Rübner Hansen

In late 2019, a virus leapt from an animal to a human host, somewhere in Southern China. Six months later, the virus had killed more than half a million people, and the world economy is in the deepest recession since 1945. Some of the world’s greatest powers equipped their health workers in plastic sacks. An economy premised on ever accelerating growth was hit by rapid deceleration. Some governments paid the wages of workers who could not work, and others watched impassively as tens of millions entered unemployment. Some countries carefully avoided a second wave of infections by sustaining the first wave. Other countries suppressed the disease through hard lockdowns, only to open for tourists from countries that did not.1 How do we analyse a global crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic as it is happening? This text describes the unfolding crisis through different means of dealing with it: (political) epidemiology, political economy, and political science. These disciplines are all political in that they have not only each their object (a virus, the economy, the study of institutions), but also objectives (suppression of the virus, stabilisation of the economy and social relations, etc.). In a crisis – and in the naming of crisis – the political character of science comes to the fore: as an interested activity, situated within fields of power, always partial, often partisan, but no less ‘objective’ for that (Haraway 1988). The history of the pandemic has, at the time of writing, not yet entered the phase where uncertainties, alternative strategies, and paths recede out of view in favour of the narrow perspective of hindsight. Have vaccines suppressed the pandemic, and mass state intervention the economic disaster it threatened? Or will mutations, current and future, prolong the pandemic indefinitely, and financial woes return when furlough schemes, quantitative easing, and eviction moratoriums run out? This essay will help us clarify and connect these questions to one another, and to the unfolding ecosystems crisis. The text is structured around three layers, which are both temporal and practical. The first section explores the root problems that have led to the pandemic, and shows that while its precise origins remain unknown, COVID-19 cannot be understood as a purely natural disaster. The next three sections explore the ways the early phases of the pandemic played out in Europe and North America, from the perspectives of public health, economics, and politics. The last two sections discuss how the pandemic has reshaped the terrain of social and political struggle in the age of permanent ecological crisis. DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-9

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An endogenous shock to the world ecology Long ago, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that natural disasters were not only natural (Rousseau 1999). The case in point was the much-debated earthquake and tsunami that destroyed Lisbon in 1755. Against those who argued this was punishment by God, or the chance effect of tectonic movements, Rousseau pointed out that had the city been constructed away from the sea, or more solidly, and its society better prepared, the disaster would have been less deadly. Following this line of thought, critical vulnerability studies and critical epidemiology have long argued that ‘natural’ disasters cannot be understood without accounting for the social factors that exacerbate them (Blaikie et al. 1994, Dzingirai et al. 2017, Farmer 1996, Wisner et al. 1977). This approach invites us to see how the COVID-19 pandemic, like other pandemics, is both a natural and social disaster: if societies were less urbanised, cities were less dense, and if people travelled less, the virus that made its leap from animals to humans in South China sometime in late 2019, would have little chance of becoming pandemic. However, unlike the destruction of Lisbon, which happened without human agency, the very outbreak of the pandemic was made more likely by human activity. As many epidemiologists have shown with regards to other diseases and are beginning to show with regards to COVID-19, humans reshaping natural ecologies can greatly transform and accelerate the evolutionary development of viruses. Broadly, virologists agree there is a global trend towards more infectious diseases emerging (Smith et al. 2014). One reason is the destruction and incursion into wildlife habitats, producing Ebola, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) (Cunningham et al. 2017, Johnson et al. 2020). Another reason is industrial animal farming, implicated in Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), avian flu, swine flu, mad cow disease, and the emergence of multiresistant bacteria (Rohr et al. 2019). By encouraging dense animal populations and lowering animal immune responses through stress, these factors create pools for accelerated disease mutation. By increasing human-animal proximity, they increase the risk of zoonotic transfer of disease. COVID-19 is likely to have emerged precisely through such nature-society interactions. The search for cheap proteins and exotic food stuffs has increased the hunt for wild animal meat in China as elsewhere. Rapid urbanisation and industrialised agriculture and forestry have brought bat populations closer to human settlements, where stressed bats may shed viral matter on livestock and poultry or be caught by domestic cats or dogs. COVID may have moved from bats to humans via other species, and have gained virality in industrial animal farms, just as avian and swine flu epidemics have in the past. According to this theory, the industrial animal farms provide a dense environment that selects for viruses that can bypass the immune defences of young and healthy animals, fast enough to beat their short lifespans. The last theory is that COVID-19 might be the accidental product of gain-of-function studies of viruses, in which labs try to predict the evolutionary path of viruses in the field either by gene hacking viruses to enhance their functions or by creating lab environments conductive to accelerated evolution (Wallace 2020). Whatever the precise origin of SARS-CoV-2, all these theories agree that the pandemic is not simply a chance natural invasion of the human world. On the contrary, they suggest the pandemic has its root in the suspension of the normal ecological safeguards that limit zoonotic transfer of disease, and the risks of local epidemics becoming a pandemic. Decreases of wildlife habitat, increasing human incursion, as well as factory farming have all increased the frequency of encounters within and between animal populations and human groups. 88

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Gain-of-function medical research proceeds by increasing the potency of viruses and risks of accidental contagion. Common to all these developments is the fact that economic actors are driven and rewarded by pressures of competition to intensify extraction from wildlife, the industrialised production of meat, and the experimentation with diseases and cures. In short, at the time of writing all serious theories of the aetiology of SARS-CoV-2 require us to take into consideration the economically driven suspension of ecological safeguards. Just as importantly, the paths and speed through which the disease became pandemic also require a socio-economic explanation. In early 2020, global patterns of business travel and trade, driven by the same competitive compulsions and rewards, facilitated the rapid spread of the virus from its punctual origin in South-Central China to the entire globe (Moody 2020). In short, the question of the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic is a function of capitalist globalisation and what Jason Moore calls ‘the capitalist organisation of nature’ (Moore 2014). It makes no more sense to say that the pandemic is an exogenous shock than it does to say that global heating is caused by solar activity. The effects of the pandemic are mostly felt within human relations of interdependence. The virus spreads through relations of exchange, need, and care, and disrupts them. In the pandemic, broader ecological risks and crisis tendencies became focalised in a submicroscopic agent making someone sick, somewhere in Southern China. In the face of contagion, any discussion of the underlying socio-ecological crisis was superseded by problems of economy and public health took precedence.

Contagion and lockdown When news of the epidemic in Hubei circulated from late December 2019, North American and European states were inert and complacent, although health officials and academics had warned of a pandemic numerous times in the last decades (Davies 2020, MacKenzie 2020). First it was imagined that the supreme authoritarianism of the Chinese state would contain the pandemic, and that there was no need to seriously prepare. When the pandemic did spread, it was believed there was little to learn from China or other Asian countries who had suppressed the epidemic by less draconian means. Outside China, the initial shock was economic. The lockdowns that spiralled out from Wuhan hurt global commodity chains. With just-in-time management, companies do not have inventories that can buffer even temporary work stoppages, be they from strikes or mass contagion. But soon outbreaks in Iran and Northern Italy made clear that death containment had failed. Mass graves and health workers crying from desperation brought the point home, unevenly, to politicians and publics: a lockdown was necessary. But many governments, such as the Italian and British, dragged their feet. In Italy, the confederation of industrialists, Confindustria, lobbied to define a vast range of industries as ‘essential’ – including call centres and clothing retailers such as Sports Direct. The government, facing the third largest per capita debt load in the world and growing bond yields, had complied initially. Only after surpassing China in total deaths, and under threats of wildcat strikes at Fiat and whispers of a general strike from trade unions, did Italy begin to shut down industry. In the United Kingdom, the initial approach was to pursue ‘herd immunity’, which was soon dropped after it became clear that this line of action would result in hundreds of thousands of deaths. In the United States, meanwhile, the Trump administration stood still. The lockdowns, often initiated by the states rather than federal authorities, happened at a later point than in 89

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most other countries. Unsurprisingly, the United States and the United Kingdom soon overtook Spain and Italy in death counts. When lockdowns were instituted, they were fiercely opposed. Channelling and fuelling a wider mood, Donald Trump tweeted ‘WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM’, while Thomas Friedman, writing for the New York Times, asked: ‘Is our fight against the coronavirus worse than the disease?’ The most frank example of this reasoning came from Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, who told Fox viewers that grandparents would be willing to die to save the economy for their grandchildren. Such crass social Darwinism has long been applied to the Global South in defence of structural adjustment programmes that would sacrifice public health care for the sake of economic growth (in this respect, neoliberalism never was that different from the classical liberalism of Herbert Spencer and the late Victorian holocausts (Davis 2017)). But politically and economically, it is more difficult for democratic governments to apply necropolitical abandonment to their own populations, especially in wealthy countries, except in the case of already marginalised and racialised groups ( Jagannathan and Rai 2021, Mbembe 2008, Robertson and Travaglia 2020). Moreover, in many countries economic activity – especially spending on leisure activities – began declining before governments instituted lockdown. Thus, despite strong economic incentives to avoid shutting down large parts of the economy, including the risks of labour scarcity and an insolvency crisis, partial lockdowns were generally instituted when hospital capacity under pressure. Initially, the challenges in different countries were similar: how to deal with the health emergency, and how to handle the costs of the measures necessary to halt the disease. The latter ranged from consumers and workers spontaneously withdrawing from spaces of risk to government lockdowns of places of work, transport, and consumption. Everywhere, official lockdowns, or justified public fear in its absence, hit consumption, as people stopped going to cafés, bars and restaurants, cinemas, on cruises and holidays. Air traffic declined precipitously. Most importantly, quarantines, illness, and lockdowns withdrew a great mass of labour power from workplaces. Wildcat strikes by workers unwilling to work in hazardous conditions added to that number. Many started working from home with their children, unproductively when looking after them and painfully when ignoring them. Border closures hampered international trade and flows of migrant labour, which remain essential to food production and the health and care sector in many countries, especially in the Global North.

The pandemic insolvency crisis How bad were the economic effects? In March 2020, the financial behemoths JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs predicted US GDP in the next three months to fall 14% and 25%, respectively. They optimistically predicted a fast rebound. The economist Nouriel Roubini, famed for predicting the last financial crisis, put it boldly: ‘The risk of a New Great Depression, worse than the original – a Greater Depression – is rising by the day’ (Roubini 2020). By June, the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) World Economic Forecast predicted a 4.9% fall in global GDP by the end of the year, with an 8% fall in advanced economies, and 3% fall in emerging and developing economies (IMF 2020). Despite new, and greater waves of contagion in the Autumn and Winter of 2020, the fall in GDP was lower than projected (3.3% world, 4.7% in advanced economies), but still significantly higher than the comparable figures of the depth of the Great Recession (0.1% and 3.3%, respectively). Whatever the size of the recession, it was certainly of a different kind that of 2007–2009. 90

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In March 2020, financial markets were acting strangely. Money was flowing out of stocks – but without flowing into more secure assets like bonds or gold as they usually would (Irwin 2020). The reason money flows dried up was not that money was tied up in investments or stuck in savings, but that money simply was not there. In other words, this was not a crisis of liquidity, but of solvency. The number of companies, workers, and consumers unable to pay their debts and expenses was rising rapidly, threatening a generalised crisis of insolvency. Also financial crisis that led to the Great Recession was rooted in a solvency crisis among subprime mortgage holders in the United States, many unable to repay mortgages because of extraordinarily high oil prices. But the subprime crisis only became a truly systemic problem when it hit overleveraged banks and inter-bank lending dried up. Thus, the crisis management by central bankers and politicians reacted to the crisis of liquidity, and ignored the underlying crisis of solvency. Accordingly, no struggling mortgage holders were bailed out. The COVID-19 crisis was different and broader. The pandemic gave global capitalism a simultaneous labour scarcity and underconsumption shock, hitting demand and supply simultaneously. Unable to work during quarantines and lockdowns, firms could not produce, and workers often went without wages – unable to consume as usual. As a result, employers and employees become insolvent simultaneously, many unable to pay loans, mortgages, and rents. What resulted was a deep recession and an imminent threat of pandemic insolvency, which could have broken the global economic system. Accordingly, central bankers in North America and Europe were forced to do much more to head off financial panic than they were in 2008 (Tooze 2020a). Most dramatic was the US Federal Reserve’s policy, announced on 23 March, to buy up unlimited amounts of corporate bonds (Tooze 2020b). No matter how many trillions the US Federal Reserve and other central banks pumped into the feverish economy, it was not magically making up for the work hours that were not happening, and the goods and services that were not produced and consumed. In the words of economist James Meadway, ‘there is no amount of money that can simply conjure products into existence’ (Meadway 2020). Without production, and the resulting wages and profits, there could be no repayment of loans, and states could merely step in to prop up private debt with public debt, increasing long-term systemic risk to lower it in the short term. So commenced the struggle to reopen the economy, centring on the problem of getting workers to work and consumers to consume. On this point, faced with similar challenges, different governments reacted in diametrically opposed ways, which opened a massive fissure in the transnational policy consensus called neoliberalism. All these developments pushed many governments to supplement the 2008-style financial rescue policies, with direct transfers of money to companies and citizens. The logic of what the pandemic forced governments to do was not just different, but contrary to much of what they have practiced and preached over the last decades. Whereas crisis management after 2008 was concerned with liquidity, the key concern in the early phases of the pandemic was solvency. And this generalisation of bailouts and ‘helicopter dumps’ of money – however uneven and unequal they are – made for a very different crisis in economic, political, and moral terms. It is indeed so different, that the end of neoliberalism, announced since the last crisis, has become distinctly more possible, if not necessary.

Zombie neoliberalism and life-support Keynesianism In infecting the global economy, COVID-19 found an already weakened victim. A longerterm decline of profitability and growth (Brenner 2006) left many countries with health systems emaciated by austerity, and right-wing populist governments who tried to restore by 91

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force of will and fantasy what had eroded through the tectonic shifts of the global economy. The immune response to the last crisis – unprecedented amounts of cheap publicly backed credit – has created a huge number of zombie businesses who only survive by constantly replacing old debt with new (Banerjee and Hofmann 2018). Unsurprisingly, the pandemic has left innumerable companies unable to roll over their debts. Indebted and with slim bottom lines, companies and worker-consumers have long been unable to make buffers out of savings. The system was already vulnerable, awaiting a crisis or a miracle. Intellectually, this longerterms crisis has also weakened the old policy consensus. Already in 2010, geographer Jamie Peck suggested neoliberalism had entered a ‘zombie phase’, dead but still walking the earth, dominant, but far from hegemonic (Peck 2010). In some ways the situation is analogous to the crisis of post-war capitalism, which was given a fatal blow by the 1973 oil shock precisely because it was already weakened by falling profits and unsustainable debts. The crisis of the 1970s gravely harmed the prestige and utility of Keynesianism internationally, while some attempted to radicalise it.2 Today, the crisis is inspiring some policy makers to look for tools beyond the neoliberal playbook. In the heat of spring 2020, the sanctity of private property and fiscal restraints were briefly put aside, as the pandemic pushed or allowed authorities to do things that were hitherto considered impossible or unpalatable. In New York State, Governor Andrew Cuomo used the national guard to seize ventilators needed in New York City from private upstate hospitals. And in many cases prisoners and imprisoned migrants have been released from overcrowded facilities. In Spain, where housing rights, feminist, and municipalist movements grew massively in the Great Recession (2007– 2009), private hospitals were brought under the temporary control of the state (but not nationalised as rumours had it). In Barcelona, migrants were released from crammed detention centres, while the city government attempted to temporarily abolish homelessness by transforming the city’s convention centre into living space with individual bathroom facilities and taking over 200 tourist flats to host victims of gendered violence. In fiscal terms, concerns about government debt were put aside. Large sums were thrown directly at companies, workers and consumers. Neoliberal poster-boy and French president Emmanuel Macron extended unemployment benefits significantly and suspended gas and electricity bills. Denmark and the United Kingdom introduced a furlough scheme covering up to 80% of wages of employees threatened by layoff. Even the US Republic Party accepted issuing $1200 one-off check to millions of people. Benevolent as this scheme is, compared to the austerity regime of the last decade, it did little more than keep consumption, landlords, and mortgage owners afloat. The check was a part of the $2 trillion CARES Act, the largest stimulus package in US history, much larger than the 2009 stimulus act of $831 billion. Flooding markets with cash while output declines may seem like a recipe for stagflation, but a decade of below-target inflation initially caused fears to be suspended. Even the notoriously fiscal hawks in the German government were ultimately convinced to drop its resistance to issuing Eurobonds to prop up the Italian and Spanish economies, which if introduced a decade earlier could have done much to limit the Euro crisis. Expressing the new mood of the times, newly elected Joe Biden affirmed that ‘The biggest risk is not going too big, it’s if we go too small’ (Biden 2021). Such words and accompanying measures ignore classical neoliberal obsessions with public debt and inflation, expressing a class politics that has no essential loyalty to any school of thought or mode of governance. Governments were scrambling to find ways to avoid economic collapse. These policies were ad-hoc and designed to be short-term measures, like the doctor of Hippocratian medicine whose decision (krino) acted on the turning point (krisis) in the patient’s health 92

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(Koselleck 2006). But what they have to do often doesn’t align with their experience or sense of expertise. Forced by the pandemic, the innovations were driven more by practical concerns than by a theoretical or ideological sea change. While the spectre of the new populist left hovers in the background, new or upgraded economic measures like sick pay and quarantine transfers were not part of a new social democratic consensus so much as attempts to encourage observance of the quarantine and address the systemic risks of pandemic insolvency. Similarly, mortgage and eviction moratoriums requires updating, extra research for which there is no time in Italy and the United Kingdom have little to do with political power shifting from creditors to debtors or landlords to tenants, and everything to do with securing the stability of the systemically crucial real estate market. In other words, rather than disaster socialism (Bunch 2020) or a return of Keynesianism proper, this may be characterised as lifesupport Keynesianism 3: neither a doctrine nor a paradigm of governance, but a set of emergency measures aimed to shore up capitalist reproduction.4 But while the hegemony of neoliberalism is yet to be challenged by a new, coherent economic consensus, the pandemic has profoundly challenged its prescriptions and truisms in practical terms. This is most obvious when we look at those policies that double down on the neoliberalism by reaffirming the private responsibility of health care and unemployment, in effect forcing workers to work at the risk of the mass death of the immuno-compromised, the already sick, and the old. Such strategies to limit lockdowns to avoid economic disruption largely failed. Sweden, which kept its economy open, experienced rises in unemployment and falls in growth comparable to stricter Denmark and Norway – and much higher death tolls (Goodman 2020). The United States, with its short, uneven and half-hearted lockdowns still saw an unprecedented vertical rise in unemployment claims – adding millions to the millions of Americans without health insurance. Apart from accelerating the public health crisis, the failure to stop unemployment growth put many corporate and private debtors into default, with mass insolvency threatening to create a crisis of financial liquidity much greater than in 2008. Thus, the fact that many governments decided to close much of their economies, against the demands of business lobbies, was not so much a matter of putting economic rationality in second place, as Adam Tooze suggested at the highpoint of government intervention, as a return of pre-neoliberal insights into the political economy of public health (Tooze 2020c). The social technologies of the lockdown and quarantine go back to medieval times, and in the nineteenth century, when the scientific reflection of population health emerged as a matter of political economy, it was well-known that planned and coordinated lockdowns and quarantines would ultimately be less costly than to let an epidemic run free (de Waal 2021). The haphazard and reluctant way such lessons were accepted and the negative and unequal impact of the pandemic itself have opened up a new space of political contestation without producing an obvious new hegemonic configuration.

Permanent crisis? As 2020 became 2021, vaccines began to be rolled out among health workers, the vulnerable, and the powerful in the world’s wealthiest countries. The vaccines have greatly reduced death rates, hospitalisations, and infections. But from the beginning it was clear that they would provide no panacea to the pandemic. One serious problem is the fact that the vaccines remained inaccessible to most of the world’s poor, due to prohibitive costs and vaccine hoarding by wealthy nations. Without patent waivers and subsidies, vaccines remained unavailable to those who need it most, in particular those living in the most crowded, mutation-encouraging 93

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conditions. This has raised the possibility of the suspension of another key element in the current economic regime – the sanctity of intellectual property rights (Maxmen 2021). Even where vaccines are available, large proportions of people are reluctant to take them due to misinformation. Another problem is that no vaccine gives full protection against transmission. Vaccinated people are much less likely to get sick or be hospitalised by the virus, but they can still pass it on to the unvaccinated (Grover 2021, Pollard 2021). Against hopes that the vaccine would end the pandemic, masking and other measures against transmission may still be needed even in highly vaccinated populations. So while we are right to celebrate the vaccine’s protections of millions of vulnerable people, vaccine optimism and vaccine hoarding will leave a much larger pool in which the virus can cause harm and mutate. Whenever the pandemic is declared over by epidemiologists and politicians, the phases of lockdowns, quarantines, and curfews will have long-term effects on families, public budgets, and economic forecasts. Waves of discontent may follow in the coming years. After the crash of 2008, it took three years until social uprisings transformed the Arab World and inspired square occupations in across Europe and North America. The deep recession and austerity started to bite much earlier, but true anger and frustration only emerged on a mass scale when families’ capacities to support and accommodate the unemployed were exhausted. As any previous crisis, the pandemic has also turned people to family networks of support and dependence. During the lockdown, millions have been stuck with their families. Many relearnt how to play with their kids, some parents turned nasty. Some couples rediscovered domesticity, and domestic violence increased precipitously (Boserup et al. 2020, Piquero et al. 2021). The experience of being safe or unsafe with the family during the lockdown is likely to resurrect the idea of the family as a shelter from the world, as well as the radical critique of the family. If relations of social reproduction provide familial solutions in all crises, the question is how resilient they will be this time – and how long they will work as a pressure valve for discontent. In all likelihood, the economic shock of COVID-19 will not be temporary. Because preexisting economic weaknesses remain unresolved, international trade hampered, savings depleted, and many companies, especially in the service sector, bankrupted. It is telling that the largest immediate winners from the crisis were platform monopolies like Alphabet/ Google, Facebook, and Amazon, whose main market power lies in marketing or taking fees for facilitating market exchanges. States will emerge from the crisis more deeply indebted than before (Lu 2020). It is likely that many in the economic and political elites will continue to push for austerity once more – but given the scale of insolvency compared to the subprime defaults of 2007–2008, the recovery is likely to be fragile and austerity has depressionary effects. Economic growth has returned across developed economies, proposed up by state injections of money and saved up spending power by people who have worked from home. In short, when the patient recovers from COVID-19, it will be in a weakened form, and likely dependent on the continuation of the life-support that was meant to be temporary. We may talk about the end of the pandemic, but there may be no normal to return to, and no new normal on the horizon. This is not just a case of long COVID, in terms of health effects, mutations and continued effects on families, economies and states, but a matter of the broader ecological crisis of which the pandemic is a manifestation. While the study of the pandemic requires careful attention to the complex interaction between public health, economics, politics and the everyday of people (contagion, insolvency, unemployment and so on – see Horton 2020), we must not lose sight of the deeper causes of the pandemic: an ecological crisis that springs from the exploitative relation between the dominant organisation 94

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of human interdependence, and natural ecologies. This radical problem haunts the present. Destruction of wildlife habitats and industrial animal farming are certain to bring about new epidemics. Droughts, floods, fires, ocean acidification, and ecosystem collapse related to global warming and capitalist extractivism will continue to add to the instability of our newly multipolar world.

The stakes of the pandemic crisis Under conditions of permanent crisis, economic and public health planning becomes both more pressing and more difficult. Times like these call for an interventionist state to keep the system together, or for mutual aid and solidarity, especially among people abandoned or targeted by the state. In some areas, the legitimacy of state administration and planning will grow; in others political legitimacy will fall precipitously, leading not just to mutual aid networks, but also to attempt to build dual power (Woodbine 2020). What economic paradigm – if any – may become dominant is not clear. The prestige of Chinese-style state capitalism is growing. Keynesian and Modern Monetary Theory economists will find jobs in high places, and market socialism-with-nationalisations will continue to strengthen its position as the dominant economic doctrine on the left. Much intellectual effort will go into retrospectively justifying and providing more lasting rationales for life-support Keynesianism. Importantly, it is an open question whether the more interventionist state will be shaped by the right (in a register of control) or the left (creating spaces of freedom from wage labour and commodification of basic needs). The economic and ecological unsustainability of growth will raise hard questions of how to distribute or redistribute the losses in a non-growth world. Fascism and populist welfare chauvinism will offer the false security of disaster nationalism, national hoarding, and resource wars. Degrowth’s offer of a planned and willed exit from growth will continue to gain followers, and communist strategies will grow in importance as the surpluses that can be divided between contending classes shrink. More importantly, the problem of ecosystem crisis raises the question of ecological mode of human reproduction in the web of life. Given the scale of disaster, the demand of a liveable planet, comes to seem like a dream: biotopia meets utopia. With Max Horkheimer, we may say that we ‘do not believe that things will turn out well, but the idea that they might is of decisive importance’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2010, 43). The importance lies in staving off cynicism. But hope itself is empty, unless rooted in a force of history or one’s own practice. What will and can happen varies, as always, with context. Much will depend on how the economic, ecological, and public health crises unfold and intertwine. But relations of political, organisational, and social forces continue to matter greatly, and so do the quality and strength of our intellectual interventions. Struggle is unavoidable. The question is who will organise it and how.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this text was published on the 26th March by Novara Media, and an updated version was posted to Medium.com by the author on April 4th, 2020. 2 The best examples of this are the Swedish Social Democratic Meidner plan, and the early policies of the Mitterrand government in France. Both failed profoundly. 3 This coinage emerged in a conversation with Robert Knox and Chris O’Kane. 4 Keynes’ shared the aim of securing the stability of capitalism in times of emergency, but provided an coherent theoretical and policy framework for achieving this end (Mann 2017).

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The COVID-19 Pandemic Maxmen, A., 2021. In shock move, US backs waiving patents on COVID vaccines, Nature, 6 May. Mbembe, A., 2008. Necropolitics. In: S. Morton and S. Bygrave, eds. Foucault in an age of terror. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 152–182. Meadway, J., 2020. The anti-wartime economy [online]. Tribune, 19 March. Available from: https:// tribunemag.co.uk/2020/03/the-anti-wartime-economy [Accessed 30 November 2021]. Moody, K., 2020. How ‘just-in-time’ capitalism spread COVID-19 [online]. Spectre, 8 April. Available from: https://spectrejournal.com/how-just-in-time-capitalism-spread-covid-19/ [Accessed 30 November 2021]. Moore, J.W., 2014. Capitalism in the web of life. London: Verso. Peck, J., 2010. Zombie neoliberalism and the ambidextrous state. Theoretical Criminology, 14 (1), 104–110. Piquero, A.R., et al., 2021. Domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic – evidence from a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Criminal Justice, 74, 101806. Pollard, A., 2021. Vaccines have given us hope, but they won’t end the battle against Covid [online]. The Guardian, 4 February. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/ feb/04/vaccines-covid-virus-mutate-years [Accessed 30 November 2021]. Robertson, H. and Travaglia, J., 2020. The necropolitics of COVID-19: will the COVID-19 pandemic reshape national healthcare systems? [online]. Impact of Social Sciences Blog, 18 May. Available from: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/05/18/the-necropolitics-of-covid-19-willthe-covid-19-pandemic-reshape-national-healthcare-systems/ [Accessed 30 November 2021]. Rohr, J.R., et al., 2019. Emerging human infectious diseases and the links to global food production. Nature Sustainability, 2 (6), 445–456. Roubini, N., 2020. A greater depression? [online]. Project Syndicate, 24 March. Available from: https:// www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/coronavirus-greater-great-depression-by-nourielroubini-2020-03 [Accessed 15 August 2021]. Rousseau, J.J., 1999. Letter to Voltaire. In: R.R. Dynes, ed. The dialogue between Voltaire and Rousseau on the Lisbon earthquake: the emergence of a social science view. University of Delaware, Disaster Research Center. Smith, K.F., et al., 2014. Global rise in human infectious disease outbreaks. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 11, 20140950. Tooze, A., 2020a. How coronavirus almost brought down the global financial system [online]. The Guardian, 14 April. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/14/howcoronavirus-almost-brought-down-the-global-financial-system [Accessed 30 November 2021]. Tooze, A., 2020b. Shockwave [online]. London Review of Books, 4 April. Available from: https://www. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n08/adam-tooze/shockwave [Accessed 30 November 2021]. Tooze, A., 2020c. Coronavirus has shattered the myth that the economy must come first [online]. The Guardian, 20 March. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/ mar/20/coronavirus-myth-economy-uk-business-life-death [Accessed 30 November 2021]. Wallace, R., 2020. Dead epidemiologists. New York: Monthly Review Press. Wisner, B., O’Keefe, P., and Westgate, K., 1977. Global systems and local disasters: the untapped power of peoples’ science. Disasters, 1 (1), 47–57. Woodbine, 2020. From mutual aid to dual power in the state of emergency [Online]. ROAR Magazine, 22 March. Available from: https://roarmag.org/essays/from-mutual-aid-to-dual-power-in-thestate-of-emergency/ [Accessed 4 December 2021].

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9 REFORM AND REVOLUTION Dialectics of Causation Donagh Davis

Introduction Reform and revolution have frequently been seen in either-or terms, as rival approaches to bringing about social change. Indeed, this tendency to see some degree of mutual opposition between them has been visible since the very emergence of the modern concept of revolution, often traced to 1789 France (Sewell 1996). From this point onwards, questions over the fate of the state and social structures bequeathed by the pre-revolutionary ancien régime fuelled passionate debates between Jacobins, Girondins, and other political factions, within and outside of France’s National Assembly. This dispute would only intensify over the next 150 years or so, as their revolutionary and reformist heirs debated whether it was really possible or even desirable to supplant the system they now called capitalism, or whether it would be better simply to tame and modify it – a question which caused major splits among socialists and social democrats in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, epitomised by the polemical duels between Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg around the turn of the century. ‘Revisionists’ like Bernstein (1899) believed that certain aspects of Marx and Engels’ analysis of capitalism had been proven incorrect; that capitalism was much more supple and resilient than they had thought, and its collapse not inevitable. Thus the task for socialists and the workers’ movement was to incrementally reshape capitalism via reforms that improved the lot of the proletariat. To Luxemburg (1908) and likeminded Marxists, this was anathema: the point of the workers’ movement was not to make capitalism more palatable to the proletariat; it was to forcefully seize power in a great revolution and replace a decadent capitalism with socialism. The role of strikes and worker organising was to build class consciousness and raise the proletarian movement to the point that it could achieve that goal. In the meantime, working within the bourgeois political system to win reforms for workers could be politically useful, but any striving toward an amelioration of capitalism for its own sake was a futile distraction – especially since capitalism was expected to collapse sooner or later under the weight of its own contradictions. While Luxemburg and Bernstein are among the best-known interlocutors within the reform-versus-revolution debate, much of the Western Marxist canon would ultimately take shape in its shadow. When Luxemburg’s attempt to rerun the October Revolution in Germany was crushed in 1919, Western Marxists faced a quandary: how to countenance DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-11

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revolution amid social and political conditions patently different from those found in Russia in 1917 – when the Bolsheviks had stumbled, against all odds, into a situation where a rapid conquest of state power was possible – or indeed those described by Marx and Engels. Karl Kautsky (1918) staked out a middle ground position, harshly criticising the impetuousness of Luxemburg’s Spartacists in 1918–19, while refusing to renounce the goal of revolution as such. Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) oeuvre was run through by many of the same tensions, from his vision of revolution in the West springing from a long and painstaking ‘war of position’ (rather than simply the breakneck ‘war of maneuver’ seen in Russia), to his concept of ‘passive revolution’ – or how elites sometimes undertake significant modifications to the status quo at their own behest, unhurried by any imminent or, as it were, ‘non-passive’ revolutionary threat. As the twentieth century wore on, dilemmas around the popular front policy, the ‘historic compromise’ in Italy, Eurocommunism and other issues would reprise similar themes. Regardless of where one stands on these matters, what is at stake may seem straightforward enough. On the face of it, the reform-versus-revolution debate is about a fundamental strategic and tactical choice – namely whether those who seek social change should focus on reforming the status quo, or spurn this as so many half-measures, and bet everything on revolution instead. But in reality, that very dilemma is balanced precariously on a series of deeper questions, ambiguities, and paradoxes. One of those deeper questions is as follows: if reformist and revolutionary strategies are as mutually exclusive as some twentieth-century socialists believed, then why do reforms seem to have precipitated revolution in some historical cases? Of course, some scholars would reject the thesis that they did, even as unintended consequences. They would argue that doomed attempts at reform under, say, King Louis XVI or Tsar Nicholas II were simply ‘too little and too late’ (Goldstone 2016, p. 318), and at most decorative add-ons to the revolutionary processes already in train in those societies. Goldstone (2016) suggests that Tocqueville (1955) was wrong in identifying Louis XVI’s last-ditch reforms as causal in 1789, and that Machiavelli (1952) had been closer to the mark: Machiavelli …, not Tocqueville, best described the realities of reform when he advised rulers that they should act while still strong, if reforms are needed, and not wait for overwhelming pressures to arise—for by then ‘you are too late for harsh measures; and mild ones will not help you, for they will be considered as forced from you, and no one will be under any obligations to you for them’. Indeed, scholars such as Goldstone would go further, and point to other cases where, rather than precipitating revolution, reforms seemed to have held it off – even if such reforms were sometimes sufficiently radical as to be labelled ‘revolutionary’ by contemporaries, as in England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 (Hertzler 1997). Thus, beyond the rather general reform-versus-revolution question that we started out with, we now confront two more specific and indeed converse questions: (1) Can reform cause revolution? and (2) Can reform stop revolution in its tracks? In one way or another, these are questions about reform as a substitute or surrogate (in the sense of proxy) for revolution. But more recent events of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries force us to turn these questions on their head, and ask yet another. That is, can revolution – or at least a simulacrum of revolution – be a surrogate for reform? This may sound paradoxical, but it is not an exercise in wordplay. Rather it reflects the fact that, since the 1980s, events have transpired which exhibited many apparently ‘revolutionary’ motifs – euphoric crowds in the street singing protest songs and popping flowers in soldiers’ 102

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gun barrels, photogenic young couples kissing in front of barricades, heads of government fleeing in helicopters or resigning under duress – but which had aims that were, in a sense, decidedly ‘reformist’. An early example was 1985’s Yellow Revolution in the Philippines, which aimed at (and to some extent achieved) the democratisation of the state, rather than a thoroughgoing ‘revolutionary’ overhaul of society and economy at large (McAdam et al. 2001, pp. 107–120). This sense of ‘revolutionary form as proxy for reform’ was accentuated by the toppling of socialist governments in the East Bloc from 1989 through the early 1990s – events famously dubbed ‘refolutions’ by Timothy Garton Ash (1990, p. 14) to reflect their ambiguous blurring of the line between reform and revolution. These ‘reformist revolutions’ were not aimed at bringing about the abolition of feudalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or any other utopia – except perhaps an unselfconsciously utopian vision of perfect markets and democracy, based on a rose-tinted ideal of life in the capitalist West. Aimed at undoing the work of nominally revolutionary Marxist cadres long in power, this transnational movement was as much a rejection as an embrace of the notion of revolution. More recently, the line between reform and revolution has become even blurrier, shaping profoundly the very meaning of the word revolution in the twenty-first century. Indeed, the precedent set since 2000 by the various ‘colour revolutions’ and ‘Arab Spring revolutions’ has arguably made this relatively new notion of the ‘reforming’ or ‘democratising’ revolution the dominant sense of the term, pushing out the older sense of ‘great’ or ‘total’ or ‘social’ revolution – which Skocpol (1979, p. 4) captured in her famous definition of social revolutions as ‘rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures … accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below’. This meant epoch-defining events like the French Revolution (c. 1789), Russian Revolution (c. 1917), and Chinese Revolution (c. 1949) – and when, as recently as the early 2000s, scholars openly speculated that the era of revolutions had come to an end (Foran 2003, pp. 1–2), it was no doubt great ‘social revolutions’ like these that they had in mind. But less than two decades later, history has made a sharp volte-face. Now we hear about new ‘revolutions’ breaking out so frequently that the term has gone from something between exotic and quaint, to something almost banal. But when these contemporary ‘revolutions’ happen, the expected goal is more likely to be some kind of reform of the existing state apparatus (e.g., democratisation), or simply the removal of the incumbent at its head, than its complete collapse and replacement – let alone the radical remoulding of underlying social structures. Furthermore, when states facing supposedly revolutionary challenges today do experience something like total collapse, the direct handmaidens of such events are as likely to be missile-dispensing North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) pilots as modern-day sans-culottes. The wave of Arab ‘revolutions’ declared in 2011 is illustrative here. These achieved mixed results, and the relatively peaceful attainment of democratising reforms in Tunisia was widely hailed as the great success story of this ‘Arab Spring’. In Egypt, on the other hand, the main outcome was a personnel reshuffle at the apex of the state, along with a retrenchment of the power of the military therein. But where some of these uprisings did go the way of open conflict, several became highly militarised with the help of third-party state actors. Syria’s internal strife was compounded by regime change efforts from outside, and multiple state and nonstate actors vied with each other – frequently by proxy – in the ensuing cockpit. Control of much of the national territory was temporarily wrested from the Damascus government, but the state eventually bounced back with the help of its allies, and managed to survive. Yemen also attracted extensive foreign intervention, becoming the battleground for a host of state and non-state actors, and experiencing a humanitarian crisis even more acute than that of Syria. The Yemeni state today, such as it exists, struggles to exercise any authority – let alone realise 103

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the ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ mentioned in Weber’s (1968, p. 56) famous definition of statehood. In Libya, meanwhile, Muammar Gaddafi may have been captured and killed by a motley crew of armed ‘revolutionaries’, but they had an important assist from the NATO aircraft that blasted his convoy minutes beforehand. Indeed, long before his assailants got anywhere near him, much of Gaddafi’s governmental and military infrastructure had been destroyed from the air by the self-same NATO forces, handily empowered by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 to effectively act as the air force of the jihadi ‘revolutionaries’ on the ground. The ensuing destruction of the Libyan state was quite total, and more than ten years on it would be difficult to claim that any real state now exists there, whether by Weber’s definition or any other. These observations lead us to ask: is ‘revolution’ in its classic sense – that of the ‘great’ or ‘total’ or ‘social’ revolutions as per France c. 1789, Russia c. 1917, or China c. 1949 – now only of historical interest? Today we hear frequently – perhaps more than ever – about revolutions breaking out around the world. But are these really revolutions in the classic sense of the term? Or has the revolutionary form collapsed into reform at one end of the spectrum, and proxy inter-state conflict and regime change at the other? In fact, this question cannot be satisfactorily answered yet, because any answer would depend on the outcomes of some highly contingent processes that are still working themselves out, and which may yet have decades left to run. These outcomes will determine whether or not the global capitalist system as we know it, as well as the world order predicated upon it, can be sustained in something like its current form. If it can, then we may continue to see the occasional Libya-style state collapse – perhaps helped along by outside military and/ or paramilitary intervention, and branded ‘revolution’ for public relations purposes – and we may see many more ‘refolutions’, ‘colour revolutions’, ‘negotiated revolutions’ (Lawson 2005), and ‘tipping point revolutions’ (Collins 2013). But ‘great’, ‘total’, or ‘social’ revolutions in the classic sense may stay on the endangered species list. If, however, the proverbial ‘centre’ cannot hold, and the current order cannot sustain itself, then we may see a wave of state breakdown events to make the great social revolutions of the past look like dinner parties, to mangle Chairman Mao’s phrase. This means that the most vexing reform-versus-revolution question of all – the one that split the socialist movement in the twentieth century – is still in play. This question concerns the very viability of the global capitalist system, and whether or not it can be reformed to the point of sustainability. Some would have said that this question had been resolved by the time of the postwar era, as it became clear that the leading economic classes in capitalist states could, at a push, bring themselves to cede significant demands to workers in the interests of social peace. In hindsight, that social deal looks like it was not just a triumph of reformism, but also a dividend of revolution in a certain sense – at least indirectly. More precisely, these were the dividends that capitalists were willing to share with workers as they eyed the twin dangers of nominally revolutionary socialism spreading within the capitalist world, and nominally revolutionary socialist states on the international horizon – some of them nuclear-armed. But with that revolutionary danger no longer in evidence, this social deal, already fraying before the end of the Cold War, has by now significantly unravelled. Alas, thirty post-Cold War years of capitalist hegemony have not stabilised the system; economically, ecologically and politically it looks less stable now than ever, with even many capitalists expressing grave concerns for its long-term viability ( Jaffe 2019, Osnos 2017). Thus, in the wake of this historical turnaround, Marxists can claim with at least some degree of plausibility that perhaps they were right all along – that capitalism ultimately is irreformable, that the mid-twentieth-century social democratic deal was a historical blip, 104

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and that this state of affairs will only be transcended when capitalist states and economies begin to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions, and as revolutionary situations arise. All of the above questions would easily warrant their own dedicated article-or-book-length treatments. But in the spirit of this volume, they will be unceremoniously bundled together in what follows. Thus we will ask: whether reform has been more likely to accelerate or arrest revolutionary processes in the past; how we can make sense of contemporary processes that are dubbed ‘revolutions’, but which lead to, at best, mild reforms or personnel changes, and at worst, the collapse of the state into warlordism; and where we have landed in relation to the great reform-versus-revolution debate in its widest sense. That is: can our current ailing system be reformed? Or will it take a revolutionary crisis – perhaps greater than any previous revolutionary crisis – to be transcended?

Can reforms prevent revolution? France and England compared The short answer to the question of whether reforms promote or constrain revolution is that: ‘It depends’. Plus: ‘It’s complicated’. In the early-to-mid twentieth century, students of revolution often assumed that the right policy choices could indeed ward it off – but later scholars often took a more sceptical view (Goldstone 1980, p. 430). From the mid1970s on, various authors pointed out that the causes of revolution could not be reduced to a handful of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ policy choices here and there. Choosing the right policies and reforms might be important, but revolutions tend to emerge out of deep, long-term structural processes (Goldstone 1980, pp. 430–450). From this perspective, the tectonic shifts leading to revolutionary pressures are beyond the purview of any individual policy-maker or would-be reformer – not to mention revolutionary – however clear-sighted they may be. These scholars pointed to different kinds of underlying structural processes. Some, more or less influenced by the Marxist tradition, insisted on the fundamental importance of the gradual evolution in society’s economic base, and its implications for the relations between social classes. According to the classic Marxist formulation, as feudalism transitions to capitalism, the social power balance between the nobility and bourgeoisie also shifts, leading to long-nineteenth-centurystyle ‘bourgeois revolutions’. The eventual crisis of the bourgeois capitalist economic system, it was posited, would in turn lead to proletarian revolution, and the transition to socialism and ultimately communism. Not all revolution scholars of the era shared this Marxist vision, but many agreed that the basic emphasis on changing economic structures and attendant class struggle dynamics was important in understanding the causes of revolution. Thus Theda Skocpol, in her groundbreaking (1979) study of the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, did not break entirely from a Marxist-style emphasis on class, even if she focused more on peasants than on proletarians, and on state structures as much as economic ones. But Jack A. Goldstone (2016), the next great pioneer in the field, moved yet further away from the Marxist framework. His approach to explaining revolutions was still resolutely structural, and he saw economic, class, and state structures as essential elements in the causal mix leading to revolutionary outbreaks, but he saw an even deeper and more fundamental structural layer underlying and shaping these – namely society’s demographic structure. Economic and class dynamics mattered – and more specifically, it mattered whether society was producing enough food for people to eat, and at reasonable prices; whether tight or loose labour markets meant real wages and unemployment were high or low; and whether upward or downward social mobility was manageable, or creating major social tensions. But deep down, all of these dynamics were driven by shifting demographics. 105

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Thus in Goldstone’s demographic structural theory (DST), the causes of revolution arose fundamentally from deep, long-term, macro-level structures – difficult to discern, difficult to fully explain, and certainly difficult for policy-makers and would-be reformers to grapple with. However, Goldstone did not entirely rule out the significance of reforming actions taken by states. Deep structural processes formed the basic conditions that made revolutionary pressures more or less probable – but how individual states opted to deal with those structural pressures was another question. Thus it was possible to make a state more or less resilient to such pressures via astute policies and reforms – but it was not easy, and it was not a matter of short-term policy fixes. Goldstone (2016) illustrated this point through his comparison of France and England between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. As per other European and Eurasian countries, France and England experienced similar, and similarly timed demographic pressures in the mid-seventeenth century, late eighteenth century, and early nineteenth century. Each of these bouts led to corresponding upsurges in domestic political unrest: in the mid-seventeenth century the Fronde and the English Revolution; in the late eighteenth the French Revolution and lesser-known but significant outbreaks of political and religious ferment in Britain, including the 1768 St. George’s Fields Massacre, the 1780 Gordon Riots, the Church and King Riots of 1791, and the anti-press-gang violence of 1794;1 and later the 1820s and 1830s revolutions in France, overlapping with the Reform Crisis in England. These waves of unrest necessarily shaped state policy, but in very different ways in either country. Goldstone points out that in the most serious of these episodes, the demographically induced pressures on the economy led to state fiscal crises, precipitating revolutionary or near-revolutionary situations. But repeatedly, the English political system managed to outfoot the socio-demographic tremors, becoming more resilient for the next round. This was despite England’s demographic growth being considerably more dramatic than that of France – its population more than tripling from a paltry five million or so in 1650 to perhaps sixteen million by 1850, while France’s grew from about twenty-five million to thirty-three million in the same period (Hinde 2003, p. 183). In explaining England’s greater resilience, Goldstone (2016, p. 318) points out that while the republican regime that followed the English Revolution was a relatively unhappy and fractious affair, it did manage to increase the state’s tax take – a reform necessary to pay for ongoing war-making, which had helped to cause the 1640s revolution by undermining Crown finances. Goldstone (2016, p. 319) notes that the later ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 was neither particularly glorious nor really a revolution, but did begin to stitch together a workable consensus between monarch and parliament. A century later, the confrontation with revolutionary and then imperial France was useful in distracting a restive British public from domestic woes – but a more severe test would come with the Reform Crisis of the 1820s and early 1830s. Once again, demographic growth was moving the needle on popular unrest via pressure on wages, prices and employment in both countries. In England this manifested itself in the form of significant popular violence in the cause of electoral reform (Goldstone 2016, pp. 328–333). After a number of attempts, a Reform Bill was finally passed in both houses of parliament in 1832. This was far from universal suffrage, and in practice extended the electoral franchise from about 400,000 to perhaps 650,000, or approximately one fifth of adult males (Phillips and Wetherell 1995, pp. 413–414). But in eliminating some of the more obvious and egregious abuses of the electoral system – like abolishing ‘rotten’ or ‘pocket’ boroughs and giving representation to new urban agglomerations – it placated the public to a significant degree. Goldstone identifies this as a major historical fork in the road. Up to this point, England and France had suffered roughly comparable bouts of political unrest 106

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in response to roughly comparable upticks in demographic growth. But from this point on, England would break this cycle – the public being assuaged with timely reforms and, thanks to an economy growing and industrialising faster than anywhere else in Europe, jobs – while France remained locked in a cycle of periodic revolt.2 Goldstone directly contrasts the good sense of the reforming British statesmen of 1832 with their counterparts in France. The Reform Crisis in England came not long after France’s 1830 revolution, when Charles X had chosen a very different course to that seen in England two years later. Goldstone (2016, p. 332) suggests that if William IV had acted like Charles X, dissolving parliament and using the army against ensuing demonstrations, England might well have faced her own 1830-style revolution. Such counterfactuals are inherently debatable. But one implication of Goldstone’s analysis is clear. That is, over the course of three centuries, the governing elites of England had repeatedly been more effective than those of France in working the levers of the state to reform their way out of demographically induced, potentially revolutionary crisis – while the French had squandered opportunities to do so. According to Goldstone’s analysis, this dynamic was evident from the immediate aftermath of the Fronde onwards – hence his scepticism that much later reforms caused the 1789 revolution. Both Louis XV and XVI did attempt reforms amid growing fiscal troubles. But in Goldstone’s view, the chance to enact English-style reforms – particularly more efficient tax collection, targeting growing sectors of the economy such as trade and manufacture, rather than relatively stagnant ones like land and agriculture – had already been missed (Goldstone 2016, p. 192, p. 199, p. 207), and the damage substantially done.

The Soviet outlier: reforming all the way to state collapse Is Goldstone right to be so dismissive of the idea that there is a causal link between reform and revolution? Perhaps. But even if he is correct that the supposed link is typically an illusion of perspective, it is worth asking whether there might be any cases that buck this trend. The N is inherently small here: major revolutions and state breakdown events are relatively rare occurrences. They can also shape world history exponentially. That means every case really does matter, even if it is an outlier. It is thus worth looking again at one of the cases from the hybrid group of East Bloc ‘refolutions’ mentioned above, and arguably the greatest outlier of all – namely the collapse of the USSR. Like the other cases in this group (those of the Warsaw Pact satellite states), the scuppering of the Soviet mothership itself falls into the grey area between reform and revolution. However, in some respects it registers high on the revolutionary ‘Richter scale’, and even meets some of the key criteria of ‘social’, ‘total’, or ‘great’ revolutions. That is, the demise of the USSR was a major, sudden and unexpected state breakdown event; this crisis did not arise from an exogenous shock on the scale of a foreign invasion, but to a large extent from internal factors; and it led to a fundamental recasting of state, societal, economic, and class structures across the territory in which it occurred. If the skyrocketing mortality attributable to the collapse is taken into account, it even has a death toll to rival the most violent of the great revolutions – perhaps 2.5–3.4 million in Russia (Men et al. 2003, p. 1, Rosefielde 2001, p. 1159), compared to 9.7 million or so in the post-socialist space as a whole (UNDP 1999). In terms of causes, it is common knowledge that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforming zeal played an important part. But it is also commonly assumed that much more decisive than any particular reforms launched by Gorbachev was an underlying context of deep, widespread, chronic, and intractable structural problems afflicting the Soviet system. According to this view, the Soviet state was a 107

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case study in Byzantine, bureaucratic dysfunction, the economy a basketcase, the bloated military sucking the country’s resources dry. Meanwhile an increasingly dispirited Soviet society seethed under a cloud of police state repression. From this perspective, Gorbachev’s reforms simply opened the floodgates of discontent by removing the taboos that had erstwhile prevented open discussion of the system’s inherent unsustainability, thus speeding up its inevitable breakdown. If a conventional wisdom has by now congealed around the Soviet collapse and its purported causes, this is it. And in this story, reform plays the role of revolutionary accelerant, rather than true revolutionary cause. But as with many compelling stories, it has a complicated relationship with the world of fact. The weight of evidence for the claimed structural inevitability of the Soviet downfall is mixed at best, and was not noticed by any contemporary observers until the very end, when a shocked world finally realised that the superpower could disappear at any minute. Let us consider the supposedly intractable impasse that Gorbachev encountered upon assuming office in 1985. The Soviet budget deficit hovered around a modest 1.8% on the eve of his rise to power ( Joint Economic Committee 1993, p. 47), which stands in stark contrast to the steep fiscal cliffs we see other states careening toward prior to the outbreak of full-blown revolutionary situations.3 Average Soviet GNP growth was also about 1.8% in the pre-Gorbachev 1980s ( Joint Economic Committee 1990, p. 3), and was indeed perceived by senior Soviet officials as unacceptably low, and reflective of economic stagnation. However, bouts of low growth are anything but unusual for developed economies, especially after prolonged periods of high growth and economic expansion – as governments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and elsewhere have painfully found out – and Kotkin (2001, pp. 17–18) suggests that the sluggish economy inherited by Gorbachev in 1985 was going through a belated Soviet version of the ‘stagflation’ doldrums faced by the United States and other Western societies in the mid-1970s. To put things in perspective, the annualised growth rate of US real GDP from 1973 through 1976 was just 1.51% (Williamson 2020a), while the equivalent figure for the United Kingdom was −0.38% (Williamson 2020b). Low growth like this is a problem, but not necessarily of the state-collapsing kind. As for the Soviet military, its budget was certainly high, and it undoubtedly devoured resources. But there is little evidence for the widespread perception that the budget spiked unsustainably in the 1980s, either due to a supposed uptick in the missile race with the United States over fears of a US first strike, or the Afghan war, or both. The cost of the latter had grown to perhaps 2%–2.5% of the overall Soviet military budget by 1986, according to a 1987 CIA report – some of which would have been spent anyway (Central Intelligence Agency 1987, pp. iii–iv). As for the former, ICBMs no doubt consumed a large percentage of the Soviet military budget – estimates still vary as to how much – but some key Soviet defence insiders were sceptical that high military spending was causing the USSR’s problems, and even believed the real secret of the Soviet military budget to be its modesty relative to the American one (Harrison 2008, p. 10). Following Masliukov and Glubokov (1999, p. 105), Harrison (2008, p. 11) suggests that Soviet military spending may have peaked at 8.9% of GDP in 1988, but that this was not inordinately greater than the equivalent figures for 1980 (7.4%), 1970 (7.3%), or 1960 (7.5%). As for public sentiment, support for independence was certainly growing in some of the USSR’s fifteen constituent republics in its latter years – particularly in the Baltic and Caucasus regions. But it is not clear that majority support for dissolving the Soviet state ever existed on a Union-wide basis. As late as March 1991, when the Soviet system was already starting to crumble, a referendum held in nine of the fifteen republics (representing a large majority of the Soviet population) found 77.85% support for preserving the Union, based on a turnout 108

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of 80% (Karasik 1992, pp. 399–400). The verdict was the same in all nine of the voting republics, albeit with significant differences in vote share. This marked an apparent victory for Gorbachev’s bid to save the Union in a new and revamped form, which had been the impetus for the referendum (Kotz and Weir 2007, p. 141, 328n). Public opinion polls carried out around the same time indicate that the prospect of a transition to liberal or free market capitalism may not have been any more popular than a break-up of the Union (Kotz and Weir 2007, pp. 132–133, 326n, Times Mirror Center 1991, p. 256.). Regardless of any such public opinion, however, the fact that six Soviet republics were able to boycott the referendum shows how far the process of disintegration had already gone. Ultimately, the referendum results would matter as little as the opinion polls, and the USSR would not see out the year. But if the standard structural narrative does not explain the Soviet collapse, what does? In fact, the key structures of the Soviet system, including the economy, did begin to fall apart in the latter days of the USSR. But this happened after Gorbachev launched his reforms – not before. Thus annual GNP growth dropped from a lacklustre average of 1.8% between 1981 and 1985 to a catastrophic −12.8% in 1991 (Kotz and Weir 2007, p. 73), as the budget deficit ballooned from 1.8% in 1985 to 12%–14% in 1991 ( Joint Economic Committee 1993, p. 47). Meanwhile the very structures of the Soviet state itself were dissolving, with a wave of independence declarations by constituent Soviet republics commencing in 1990. The story of how this dramatic chain of events came to pass is complex, but it is difficult to discern any clear sign of these coming developments – even in embryonic form – prior to Gorbachev’s reforms. It is also difficult to know where to start in describing the cascading series of shocks that buffeted the Soviet economy, state, and society in the second half of the 1980s, since they rapidly blurred into a general crisis of the Soviet system that is hard to disentangle. What does seem clear is the line connecting most of these shocks to the reform agenda of Gorbachev. One of the first signs of trouble was a major fiscal hole created by Gorbachev’s clampdown on alcohol production and sales, launched in 1986, which led to a shortfall in state revenue of 28 billion roubles (or perhaps significantly more) in the space of three years (Schrad 2014, p. 281) – almost twice the cost of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan up to 1986 (CIA 1987, p. iii). In an economy without Western-style income taxes, state finances were disproportionately reliant on sales taxes and particularly the state vodka monopoly, possibly accounting for more than a quarter of state revenue in the late Soviet era (Schrad 2014, p. 11, p. 267) – a drop in which Gorbachev hoped would be offset by the higher productivity of a sober workforce, and by the redirection of consumer spending to other, more wholesome, Kremlin-approved outlets. It was not. (Although the black market did flourish.) This was merely one of the first in a series of well-meaning but ill-fated reforms, whose unintended consequences would quickly envelop Soviet society. Apart from creating a revenue shortfall, the alcohol clampdown also led to the growth of organised crime, and to shortages. A 1990s-style ‘Russian mafia’ had yet to supersede the traditional ‘vory’ criminal underworld, but many precocious early adopters got their start clearing shops of Cuban sugar and other alcohol precursors (Galeotti 2018, p. 99), while consumers were frequently poisoned by the resultant samogon (Schrad 2014, p. 282). The sugar and alcohol shortages would quickly be followed by others, as ham-fisted modifications to central planning gave state enterprises pseudo-market incentives to produce higher-profit-margin goods over basic staples (Kotz and Weir 2007, p. 79). In fact, various reforms were aimed simultaneously at democratising, decentralising, and marketising production – but succeeded only in bringing about further unintended consequences. Extra roubles were printed in order to hike wages and encourage consumption, but the concurrence of this with increasing shortages, plummeting world oil 109

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prices, and costly relief efforts following the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown and 1988 Armenian earthquake led eventually to a rapidly growing budget deficit and (initially hidden) inflationary pressure that was unprecedented in the price-controlled Soviet system (Kotz and Weir 2007, p. 79, p. 141). The USSR’s two key central planning agencies, Gosplan and Gossnab, were even abolished in July 1991, apparently in the hope that fully formed market dynamics would emerge overnight to take their place (Kotz and Weir 2007, p. 86). They did not. De facto private enterprises were also now allowed, often gaming the system by exporting cheap, price-controlled Soviet consumer goods to the Third World for handsome profits, once again exacerbating shortages and undermining the domestic economy (Kotz and Weir 2007, pp. 89–90). This new grey zone of the Soviet economy provided further opportunities for the emerging mafia to grow (Galeotti 2018, pp. 101–102), and rumours circulated of other shadowy schemes lurking behind the increasingly evident shortages (Kotz and Weir 2007, p. 77, p. 79). Opportunities for graft and corruption quickly metastasised, and paradoxically, the more turmoil Gorbachev’s reforms created, the louder grew the calls for further, increasingly radical reforms. Soon the ultimate taboo – the one that had previously discouraged intellectuals from calling for the abandonment of socialism – was smashed (Kotz and Weir 2007, pp. 65–69, 83–84). This was an unintended consequence of the political and cultural side of Gorbachev’s reforms. For while perestroika (‘restructuring’) reshaped the economy, glasnost (‘openness’) transformed the political system and civil society. Tactical considerations were not far from Gorbachev’s mind, likely fearing that some senior officials might try to depose him – the fate of previous reformer Khrushchev. Seeking an alternative political base outside the existing institutions, he sidelined the Politburo and Party Central Committee while empowering civil society, diffusing more power to the republics, and breathing new quasi-democratic life into representative bodies such as the revived Soviets and new Congress of People’s Deputies (Kotkin 2001, pp. 76–77). Little did he suspect that this opening would be filled by antiSoviet ideology and a mutinous intelligentsia. Gorbachev also made it clear to the Warsaw Pact governments that they were now on their own, leading to the tumultuous events of 1989 and 1990, and ultimately to these states peeling away from the socialist bloc. Gorbachev may have come to regret this when the Soviet republics that identified most strongly with these Central and Eastern European buffer states – namely the USSR’s Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – took advantage of their empowerment by Gorbachev’s reforms, and the ambiguous nature of the Soviet constitution, to follow the satellites’ lead, and declare their own independence from Moscow. As the chaos ratcheted up, and as the economy went into free-fall, previously loyal Communist Party bosses in other republics started to follow suit. As the unravelling of the Soviet system picked up momentum, as talk of a pivot away from state socialism became open, and as it became clear that a critical mass among the intelligentsia and professional-managerial class (AKA ‘nomenklatura’) favoured such a move – whatever about the wider populace – the sense spread that some kind of mass liquidation of public assets was imminent. Thus everyone who could do so scrambled to be in pole position for the coming privatisation – legally or otherwise – whether that meant the acquisition of factories and oil refineries in the case of managers-turned-oligarchs, or whole countries, in the case of local Party notables declaring independence for their republics. The final straw came in mid-December 1991 when the Russian republic itself, under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, seceded from the USSR – somewhat like England declaring its independence from the United Kingdom, and just as much of an oxymoron. Gorbachev was still de jure president of the USSR, but de facto president of nothing at all. Yeltsin’s self-styled Russian government appropriated what was left of many 110

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key Soviet institutions – frequently acting unilaterally and extralegally – and after some shady backroom dealings the USSR was formally dissolved in late December 1991. These events are sometimes described in terms of ‘refolution’ – but that term is ambiguous as to the relation between the ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’ components therein. If anything, the suggestion tends to be that the basic causes of the Soviet collapse were structural, like many other full-blown revolutions in history, with Gorbachev’s reforms playing only an assisting role in catalysing them. Indeed, Goldstone is surely correct that it is usually erroneous to say that reform causes revolution. However, there is some reason to think that the Soviet case may be the exception that tests this rule. The USSR did collapse in the context of a profound structural crisis. But this structural crisis was to a significant extent of Gorbachev’s own making. Prior to 1985, the USSR faced serious structural problems, but it is difficult to see any of them representing real existential threats up to this point. It was only after Gorbachev came to power that the USSR’s problems truly spun out of control. Some of this can be put down to bad luck, some to mundane errors of judgement. But there is a perplexing quality to many of Gorbachev’s decisions in this period. In systematically attacking the political and economic structures that held the USSR together, he made a profound structural crisis not just possible, but inevitable. Cases of revolution and state breakdown track fiscal crisis closely. There was no fiscal crisis in the USSR upon Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985. But there certainly was by the summer of 1991, when the Soviets were begging Western governments for a financial lifeline, selling diamonds to pay for grain imports, and secretly printing money and raiding private savings to plug a 68-billion-rouble fiscal hole caused in large part by the withholding of taxes by enterprises and republics (Zubok 2021, p. 237). Such a weakening of the Soviet state and collapse of the tax system would have been unthinkable before Gorbachev’s reforms. Creating such a profound structural crisis essentially on a whim is a remarkable feat. Losing a sixth of the world in a fit of absence of mind – and effectively ending the global communist project in the process – must count as one of the most spectacular own goals in history. This finding sits awkwardly with social scientific expectations as to how social change is supposed to work. But if it is not incorrect, it speaks to the hidden fragility of superficially robust social systems, particularly under severely inept leadership, and how easily the social ‘hardware’ can break down when the old ‘software’ (in this case socialist/communist) is swapped out for a new and vaguely-defined kind (socialism 2.0? capitalism?) overnight. It may also speak to the power of what some social scientists would call ‘micro-macro’ causal mechanisms – that is, multiple micro-level decisions or bets resulting in a certain macro-level outcome, and more specifically, that of the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ variety (Héritier 2008, p. 71) – once Party cadre saw what way the wind was blowing, and turned from loyal apparatchiks to smash-andgrab capitalists overnight.

Conclusion: reform-versus-revolution redux If it is true that the ‘revolution’ against the Soviet system and the collapse of the USSR were caused more by Gorbachev’s reforms than by underlying structural factors, what are our major takeaways from this? Do we need to revisit our theories of revolution and state breakdown, which tend to be rather structuralist in nature? Do we need to think about Gorbachev’s role in terms of ‘agency’? Or should we chalk this up as one very unusual exception to the general rules as to how social change happens, reflecting a very unusual set of historical circumstances? There is no easy answer to this question, and it is inherently debatable. But one thing is sure: if we wish to understand the terrain on which the age-old reform-versus-revolution 111

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question plays out today, then we must accept the odd fact that that very terrain is indelibly structured by the Soviet collapse – or, in a sense, by Gorbachev’s ‘agency’. While the Cold War period saw unprecedented anxiety about our chances of survival as a species, it also brought about unprecedented reductions in inequality and gains in human welfare on both sides of the Iron Curtain (Cereseto and Waitzkin 1986, World Bank 2016). Many predicted that things would only get better with the ‘End of History’ and the apparent victory of liberal capitalism over the communist challenge (Fukuyama 1992). Thirty years on, it is clear that such predictions were wildly off base. We now face existential threats of an ecological nature that were only dimly conceivable during the Cold War, as the extent of human civilisation’s disequilibrium with the natural world becomes ever starker. Indeed, given its possible origins in the encroachment of humanity ever further into wildlife habitats, the Covid-19 pandemic is suggestive of the likely complexity of future crises. Furthermore, a handful of fateful decisions by certain Western states to militarily intervene in certain Muslim-majority countries have led to a generational cycle of conventional and unconventional conflict stretching from 9/11 to ISIS and beyond, that, once again, would scarcely have been imaginable during the Cold War. On top of that, the 2008 crash threatened the kind of global crisis of capitalism that Marxists had promised was just around the corner during the Cold War, but which had never quite seemed to materialise. Some of the pundits who predicted the crash have recently warned that a 2008 redux is likely at any moment – possibly much more severe this time, since the pathologies and structural weaknesses underlying 2008 were never really dealt with, and rather allowed to fester and metastasise (Bloomberg 2018, Roubini 2020). And that was before the Covid-19 pandemic injected its particular brand of uncertainty and imbalance into the world economy, and before the inflation and shortages that had become familiar by 2022. Even Europe, which was supposed to be united by the end of the Cold War, is now synonymous with crisis and division. On its eastern flank a war rages at time of writing. Even in the ‘first world’ heartlands of the West, it is now widely accepted that life is getting worse rather than better generation on generation, as wages stagnate, decent middle-class and even blue-collar jobs dwindle, welfare states creak, housing becomes wildly unaffordable, fertility falls, human height begins to decline, and the gaps between cosmopolitan metropolises and depressed rural and rustbelt hinterlands widen. For many people in the even more chaotic spaces outside these zones, however, the increasingly decrepit West still looks attractive, and 22,842 deaths of would-be migrants to Europe were recorded on the Mediterranean route alone between January 2014 and October 2021 – probably representing less than 1% of the total number attempting the trip, and certainly an undercount (International Organization for Migration, 2021). Meanwhile, lacking a Mediterranean-style moat on its southern border, the United States has built a wall and detention camp archipelago in the desert to contain migrant flows. Far-flung Australia intercepts boatloads of migrants at sea who, if they are lucky, are disgorged into offshore holding facilities beyond the niceties of domestic law. Those fleeing the war in Ukraine are ‘welcomed’ by the West, but the scale of this latest refugee crisis is still profound. These are just some of the grave afflictions that have marked the past thirty years or so. But the point is not that these failed to be predicted by the ‘End of History’ buffs cheerleading the Soviet collapse. The point is that most of these developments would probably not have happened if not for that event. If Gorbachev had not reformed his way to a ‘revolution’ against the then world order, we would be living in a very different world. We might have very grave problems in that world, but they would to a significant extent be different problems. The 1991 Gulf War would not have happened, because the traditional Cold War balance of power would not have allowed it. (The USSR still existed during the Gulf War, but was busy tearing itself 112

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apart, while developing a pro-Western foreign policy.) If there had been no 1991 Gulf War, then there would probably have been no 2003 Iraq War. If there had been no 2003 Iraq War, then ISIS might today be a figment in the imagination of some mid-ranking Iraqi Army personnel after one too many whiskies in the officers’ mess, under the watchful gaze of Saddam’s portrait. If there had still been a Cold War-style balance of power, then NATO would not have been in a position to fold Gaddafi’s Libya. If Syria, Libya and now Afghanistan (again) had not been overrun by jihadis, then there would probably not be so many people drowning on the Mediterranean route to Europe. And if the USSR had not collapsed, Russia would not be at war with Ukraine. In short, well-placed reforms may help ward off revolutions – but when ill-thought-out ones collide with the right (or ‘wrong’) circumstances and structures, the ‘revolutionary’ possibilities flowing from this can be mindboggling. The ‘End of History’ has been considerably more tumultuous than Fukuyama predicted. But was he perhaps still right in a limited way, in spite of himself? Was he correct in the sense that the old-style, ideologically driven revolutions of the past – the French 1789s, Russian 1917s and Chinese 1949s – would not repeat themselves, whatever about more general tumult? As Zhou Enlai is purported to have remarked when asked to evaluate the French revolution, it is ‘too soon to say’. Most of the purported ‘revolutions’ of the twenty-first century have up to this point been limited political revolutions at best, rather than deeper and more thoroughgoing social revolutions – or to use Randall Collins’ (2013) terms, ‘tipping point revolutions’ rather than ‘state collapse’ revolutions. And where states have collapsed or come close thereto, it has largely been through overwhelming military and paramilitary force mobilised by other states and their intermediaries. But serious, even unprecedented structural challenges currently afflict societies the world over, leading a number of scholars to predict that the coming decades could see major nation-states collapsing of their own accord, and perhaps along with them the world system as we know it (Turchin 2012, 2013, 2016, Turchin and Korotayev 2020, Turchin et al. 2018). Thus the kinds of structural circumstances that in the past led to great revolutions may well repeat themselves in the near future. But if the examples cited in this chapter show anything, it is that structural circumstances are not everything. Firstly, the right reforms at the right time can sometimes quench revolutionary flames, while the wrong ones can fan them. However, it is worth noting that right now there is little sign of any significant reforms in the offing relevant to the acute structural impasse described above – either of the judicious, well-timed variety or the jittery, last-ditch type warned about by Machiavelli. Even in the comparatively wealthy and stable West, where increasingly polarised societies are visibly fraying under the relentless onslaught of the new normal, there is little indication of an appetite for meaningful structural reforms on the part of the oligarchic classes or the ruling political formations tied to them. The 2020s will no doubt be big on rhetoric about ‘new new deals’ and ‘FDR moments’ and ‘building back better’ – this rhetoric has already been mobilised – but there is little real indication of a 1930s-or-1940stype moment whereby economic elites might be persuaded to sacrifice significant shares of their own wealth or power in the interest of maintaining social stability. It is for this reason that the classic Marxist ‘irreformability of capitalism’ thesis, having seen some tough times, now looks arguably more plausible than ever. Secondly, objective structural circumstances may supply the kindling for revolution, but the intensity of the revolutionary flames also depends on subjective conditions such as ideology. The ideologies that fuelled many of the great revolutions of the past are now shadows of their former selves. The reform-versus-revolution question was debated by millions of socialists and social democrats in the twentieth century – whereas now such debates take place, if at all, in unfashionable micro-journals or, worse, fashionable Williamsburg brunch joints. The 113

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resurgence of these ideologies in some form should not be ruled out – nor should the passing of the mantle to other, potentially very different revolutionary ideologies (Atran 2015). But in the absence of a meaningful revolutionary vision of remaking society, it is possible for states to collapse and then simply stay collapsed indefinitely – what we might call ‘the Libya option’, but not necessarily involving military intervention from outside, if the structural crisis is severe enough. The twenty-first century may see many more Libyas before this historical cycle has worked itself out, and some of them may be in the West.

Notes 1 For relatively recent attempts to quantify the extent of political violence seen in Britain in this period, often overshadowed by other events, see Tilly (2005) and Davis and Feeney (2017). 2 Davis and Feeney (2017) point out that other factors were probably also important in maintaining political stability in Britain after 1832 in spite of exponential demographic growth. Extremely high levels of emigration plus settler-colonialism and imperial state expansion jointly formed a safety valve for excess population. For Goldstone’s response, see Goldstone (2017). 3 This is even if such fiscal crises seem to have represented necessary rather than sufficient conditions for some of history’s great revolutions (Goldstone 2016, p. 100, p. 106, pp. 193–194, pp. 198–201).

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Reform and Revolution Hertzler, J., 1997. Who dubbed it ‘the Glorious Revolution’? Albion, 19 (4), 579–585. Hinde, A., 2003. England’s population: a history since the Domesday Survey. London: Hodder Arnold. International Organization for Migration. 2021. IOM’s Missing Migrants Project [online]. Available from: https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean [Accessed 1 November 2021]. Jaffe, G., 2019. Capitalism in crisis: U.S. billionaires worry about the survival of the system that made them rich [online]. Washington Post, 21 April. Available from: https://www.washingtonpost. com/politics/capitalism-in-crisis-us-billionaires-worry-about-the-survival-of-the-system-thatmade-them-rich/2019/04/20/3e06ef90-5ed8-11e9-bfad-36a7eb36cb60_story.html [Accessed 18 October 2020]. Joint Economic Committee, 1990. Measures of Soviet gross national product in 1982 prices: a study prepared for the use of the Joint Economic Committee: Congress of the United States. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Joint Economic Committee, 1993. The former Soviet Union in transition, volume 1. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Karasik, T.W., ed., 1992. USSR facts and figures annual, volume 17. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Kautsky, K., 1918. Driving the revolution forward [online]. Translated by B. Lewis. Available from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1918/12/forward.html [Accessed 19 November 2021]. Kotkin, S., 2001. Armageddon averted: the Soviet collapse, 1970–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kotz, D. M., and Weir, F., 2007. Russia’s path from Gorbachev to Putin: the demise of the Soviet system and the new Russia. London: Routledge. Lawson, G., 2005. Negotiated revolutions: the Czech Republic, South Africa and Chile. London: Routledge. Luxemburg, R., 1908. Sozialreform oder Revolution? Leipzig: Leipziger Buchdruckerei Antiengesellschaft. Machiavelli, N., 1952. The Prince. Translated by W.K. Marriott. Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica Books. Masliukov, Iu. D., and Glubokov, E.S., 1999. Planirovanie i finansirovanie voennoi promyshlennosti v SSSR. In: A. V. Minaev, ed. Sovetskaia voennaia moshch’ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva. Moscow: Voennyi parad, 82–129. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., and Tilly, C., 2001. Dynamics of contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Men, T., et al., 2003. Russian mortality trends for 1991–2001: analysis by cause and region. British Medical Journal, 327 (7421), 964. Osnos, E., 2017. Doomsday prep for the super-rich [online]. The New Yorker, 23 January. Available from: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich? mbid=social_facebook [Accessed 18 October 2020]. Phillips, J.A. and Wetherell, C., 1995. The great Reform Act of 1832 and the political modernization of England. The American Historical Review, 100 (2), 411–436. Rosefielde, S., 2001. Premature deaths: Russia’s radical economic transition in Soviet perspective. Europe-Asia Studies, 53 (8), 1159–1176. Roubini, N., 2020. The white swans of 2020 [online]. Project Syndicate, 17 February. Available from: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/white-swan-risks-2020-by-nouriel-roubini2020-02?barrier=accesspaylog [Accessed 19 October 2020]. Schrad, M.L., 2014. Vodka politics: alcohol, autocracy, and the secret history of the Russian state. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sewell, W.H., 1996. Historical events as transformations of structure: duality, agency, and transformation. The American Journal of Sociology, 98 (1), 1−29. Skocpol, T., 1979. States and social revolutions: a comparative analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C., 2005. Popular contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, 1991. The pulse of Europe: a survey of political and social values and attitudes. Washington, DC: Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press. Tocqueville, A. de., 1955 [1856]. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Translated by S. Gilbert. New York: Doubleday. Turchin, P., 2012. Dynamics of political instability in the United States, 1780–2010. Journal of Peace Research, 49 (4), 577–591. Turchin, P., 2013. History tells us where the wealth gap leads [online]. Aeon. Available from: https:// aeon.co/essays/history-tells-us-where-the-wealth-gap-leads [Accessed 25 October 2020].

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Donagh Davis Turchin, P., 2016. Ages of discord: a structural-demographic analysis of American history. Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books. Turchin, P., et al., 2018. A history of possible futures: multipath forecasting of social breakdown, recovery, and resilience.’ Cliodynamics, 9 (2), 124−139. Turchin, P. and Korotayev, A., 2020. The 2010 structural-demographic forecast for the 2010–2020 decade: a retrospective assessment. PLoS ONE, 15 (8), e0237458. United Nations Development Programme, 1999. Human development report for Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS, 1999. New York: UNDP. Weber, M., 1968. Economy and society. New York: Bedminster. Williamson, S.H., 2020a. Annualized growth rate of various historical economic series [online]. MeasuringWorth.com. Available from: https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/growth/ growth_resultf.php?begin%5B%5D=1973&end%5B%5D=1976&beginP%5B%5D=&endP%5B% 5D=&US%5B%5D=REALGDP [Accessed 25 September 2020]. Williamson, S.H., 2020b. Annualized growth rate of various historical economic series [online]. MeasuringWorth.com. Available from: https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/growth/ growth_resultf.php?begin%5B%5D=1973&end%5B%5D=1976&beginP%5B%5D=&endP%5B% 5D=&UK%5B%5D=GDPK [Accessed 25 September 2020]. World Bank, 2016. Poverty and shared prosperity 2016: taking on inequality. Washington, DC: World Bank. Zubok, V.M., 2021. Collapse: the fall of the Soviet Union. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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10 CRISIS AND CHANGE The Contested Politics of Constructing Crises John Clarke

Crisis and change seem everywhere entangled, yet their interrelationship is far from clear. Do crises cause change? Are they the result of change? Are they moments of possibility? Or of risk? In this chapter, I will explore some aspects of these entanglements, drawing out different understandings of crises and their problematic relationship to social change. In the process, I will suggest that these intersections of crisis and change are often politically charged, although rarely in straightforward ways. First, I will consider the place of crises in the contemporary world and establish the puzzle about their relationship to social change. Second, I will consider the view that crises are, in themselves, a cause of change – creating a reaction to unsustainable conditions. That view is contrasted with a concept that crises are opportunities that may be exploited by social actors to bring about – or prevent – social changes. Third, I will move to a different conception that treats crisis as a ‘floating signifier’ – an idea or image whose meaning can be, and is, contested. In this view the idea of crisis can be mobilised for restorative or transformative political objectives. I develop this understanding through an examination of the ‘migrant crisis’ that seized much of Europe and the United States in recent years. The chapter ends by exploring how crises may proliferate in specific historical moments, bringing new social and political challenges while creating the possibility for innovative political strategies intended to deflect or defuse them.

Crisis and change: the promise/threat of crises In this chapter I will be drawing a distinction between views of crises as temporary interruptions of a normal condition (which may be restored) and views which treat crises as potentially transformative, thereby creating the possibilities of a ‘new normal’. Crises are conventionally understood as moments of disorder in a system that is normally stable. This view of crises as disorder links many types of crisis – from the medical or personal crisis, from which we hope to be returned to our pre-existing condition of well-being, to the larger scale of economic or social crisis, in which the dominant desire is usually to restore ‘business as usual’. For example, responding to the global financial crisis in 2010, the then President of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-12

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French Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, drew the following distinction in his address to the World Economic Forum in Davos: The crisis we are experiencing is not a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of the distortion of capitalism. Capitalism has always been inseparable from a value system, a civilization project, and a certain idea of mankind. Purely financial capitalism is a perversion which flouts the values of capitalism. But anti-capitalism is a dead end that is even worse. There is no solution in anticapitalism. There’s no system other than the market economy. But we will save capitalism and the market economy by radically reforming it – dare I use the word? –, by giving it a moral dimension. I know saying this will raise a lot of questions. (Sarkozy 2010) In this view, crises tend to be understood as interruptions of a normal condition: that is, they are temporary events and are accompanied by the possibility that normality can be restored. One of two things needs to happen in order to restore normality. Either the system can be self-correcting (auto-poiesic) or an intervention is needed to actively restore normal functioning. In the first case, some economists (such as Joseph Schumpeter 1989) have treated economic or financial crises as integral to the working of capitalist economic systems: they are a moment in which excess capacity or inefficiencies are expelled from the system, by the system itself. Alternatively, crises are seen to demand interventions that will restore normal functioning by rebalancing the system and dealing with the source of perturbations. But both of these variants view crises as disturbances within the system – whether the human body or the economy – whose normal functioning can be restored. There are some problems associated with thinking of crises in terms of systems, especially ones that are assumed to have a ‘normal’ condition of stable functioning. It is not always clear what the limits or boundaries of the system that is in crisis might be. If we take the financial crisis of 2007–9, is the financial system different, or separate, from the capitalist economic system? Is the capitalist economic system different from capitalist societies? What goes missing, we might ask, if we focus on a particular system – and what happens to their intersections with other systems? Secondly, there is a risk associated with presuming that systems normally function smoothly or are self-equilibrating. Might it be more productive to think of our economic, political, and social systems as inherently unstable? If we think of them as replete with contradictions, tensions, and antagonisms that require constant efforts to create stability, maintain order, and manage disturbances, then we might have a more dynamic understanding of systems in social life – and of their tendency to develop crises. However, this is not a chapter about systems, but about crises. Returning to the main argument, we can see other views of crisis that go beyond questions of system stability and focus on their implications for system change. Crises can be seen as moments of possibility in which either restoration or transformation might be achieved. In this sense, crises are viewed as a cause of change. Indeed, the emergence of a crisis indicates that ‘things cannot go on’: change is necessary for restoring normal functioning. One way of reading the earlier comments from Nicolas Sarkozy is that capitalism needed to be saved from itself: its distortions had produced a crisis that meant change was needed in order for capitalism to function properly. The defensive tone of Sarkozy’s comments points to other arguments that were taking place between 2008 and 2010 as the capitalist system seemed to be at risk of collapse. The crisis had 118

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brought the possibility of transformation into view – a transformation that formed the threat (in Sarkozy’s terms) or promise of ‘anticapitalism’: a politics that would transform rather than restore the system. That vision of capitalist crisis providing the grounds for the system’s overthrow has been central to much Marxist and socialist thinking over the years (see, for example, Harman 2010). Understanding capitalism as a continually crisis-ridden and contradiction-generating system has formed the basis of Marxist analyses of crisis. However, not all crises, even crises of capitalism, are the same. They have distinctive conditions, dynamics, and trajectories, as Andrew Gamble’s has argued: Much misunderstanding arises because of a failure to distinguish between different kinds of crisis, the term crisis being thrown around fairly indiscriminately in everyday discourse. Looked at in terms of their role in the business cycle, financial crises have long been seen as a product of the dynamism and exuberance of this kind of economy. They are an essential moment in the process of creative destruction, as Joseph Schumpeter understood, regularly sweeping away established activities and obstacles to growth, allowing new initiatives, new opportunities and new technologies to emerge. Such a process requires political underpinning and political intervention. But crises of capitalism go much further. They are intensely political in nature, and because of that they are unique events… They create the conditions for the rise of new forms of politics and policy regimes, and the rebalancing of power between states, through war or other means. Their outcomes have been new institutions, new alignments, new policies, and new ideologies…. There is nothing inevitable about the form that crises take, or about their outcomes. A crisis of capitalism does not mean the end of capitalism, or even the beginning of the end. It is rather a period in which capitalism is reorganized. (2009, p. 7) Gamble makes an important distinction between crises in capitalism (the productive, creative, restorative kind) from crises of capitalism that are disruptive of the larger system and bring new possibilities into being. It may not always be possible to tell the difference, especially within the moment when they are occurring. Indeed, the former may slide into the latter if remedies or reforms cannot be put in place: that is, the crisis might deepen from a crisis in capitalism to a crisis of capitalism. Clearly, the 2007–9 financial crisis teetered on the brink, threatening system stability – and legitimacy – before massive political, social, and economic efforts were invested in restoring ‘business as usual’. This suggests something important – that the act of distinguishing types of crisis is not simply an intellectual exercise, in which the right type can be determined by observation. Rather, establishing the character of any particular crisis is also always a political question, in which defining the crisis – and its potential resolution – is a matter of conflicting and contested conceptions (see also the discussion of politics and catastrophe in Nigel Clark’s chapter, this volume).

Seize the time? Exploiting the moment of crisis The existence of contested definitions of crisis is important. For a long time, there was a view on the left that the experience of capitalist crisis – the experience of dislocation, immiseration, and alienation – would dispose its victims towards socialist or revolutionary ways of thinking and acting. Crises of capitalism formed the conditions of possibility for creating political 119

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movements that might lead the transition to a different kind of economy. This assumption about the inherently progressive effects of capitalist crisis led the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing in the 1930s, to issue a warning about such optimistic views: It may be ruled out that immediate economic crises of themselves produce fundamental historical events; they can simply create a terrain more favourable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought, and certain ways of posing and resolving questions … (1971, p. 184) Gramsci’s famous quotation points to one way through these issues: treating the ‘immediate economic crises’ as facilitating the circulation of particular ways of thinking, such that the terrain they create has to be occupied and worked on by political forces. But how would we know which ‘modes of thought’ were most effectively enabled by a particular crisis? There was considerable optimism in 2007–9 that the financial crisis marked, if not the end of capitalism, then a possible end to neo-liberal economics and modes of thought (see the discussions in Gamble 2009, chapter 4, Peck et al. 2010). On the left, there was considerable uncertainty about the scale and character of the crisis: was it a crisis of the financial system, the virtualisation of finance, neo-liberal ideology, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘Anglo-American’ model of free markets, global finance, consumer capitalism, the oil-driven economy, or the exhaustion of growth-centred capitalism? But in what I have called ‘restorationist’ modes of thought (those seeking to recreate the conditions of ‘business as usual’), there were equally diverse and potentially contradictory conceptions of the crisis and what needed to be done. Ideas about failures of technology, excessive greed or carelessness, the susceptibility of markets to the viral spread of information or affect (anxiety, panic, etc.), failures of regulation, the lack of morality in contemporary capitalism, or even the excess of testosterone in the financial markets: all of these were offered as explanations for the crisis and as the bases for proposals for how the system might be fixed. One specific example of what might be called the political work (and the discursive practice) that goes into fostering ‘certain modes of thought’ rather than others can be found in Naomi Klein’s conceptions of the ‘shock doctrine’ and ‘disaster capitalism’ (2008). Klein argues that the current configuration of US capitalism (and its global reach) has been geared to seizing the potential that crises (natural disasters, wars, economic crises) offer for the imposition of new solutions, and for creating new alignments of power and profit. Associated with Friedmanite neo-liberalism, disaster capitalism centres on a ‘policy trinity’: ‘the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation of corporations and skeletal social spending’ (2008, p. 15). Klein’s argument is particularly interesting in two respects. First, she claims that this mode of capitalism is easier to install in the absence of democratic politics, or under authoritarian rule. For example, neoliberal policies were first introduced into Chile by Chicago School economists acting as advisors to the Pinochet dictatorship (Valdez 1995). Crises and disasters, she suggests, often involve a partial or total suspension of the ‘normal’ practices of democratic government because of the perceived state of emergency. Second, she argues that practitioners of disaster capitalism have learnt from Milton Friedman the importance of a particular form of discursive politics: In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism’s core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as the shock doctrine. He observed that ‘only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that 120

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crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until he politically impossible becomes politically inevitable’ [1982 [1962], p. ix]. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the ‘tyranny of the status quo.’ (2008, pp. 6–7) The battle of ideas, however, is not just the competitive exchange of different conceptions of crisis. Klein also points to the infrastructure that the ‘shock doctrine’ was able to rely on – a network on institutions and connections that sustained and broadcast these ideas as a systematic response to crisis. Those infrastructural conditions have been developed over a longer time frame, such that Friedman and his followers were able to build on them and then develop and disseminate their ‘mode of thought’. Grossberg (2018) has explored the way that the Right in the United States spent decades (since the 1960s) building up such apparatuses – from think tanks to news media and (increasingly) online resources – that sought to establish a new ‘common sense’ (in which entrepreneurial capitalism forms a foundation stone). Such modes of thought have also been institutionalised in supra-national organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Trade Organization (WTO). The IMF played a critical role in advising national governments how to respond to economic crises across many decades, playing a critical role in advising – and enforcing – policies of ‘structural adjustment’ in countries of the Global South (see Adepoju 1993, for example). When the 2007–9 crisis happened, conditions for the ‘shock doctrine’ were well-established and this ‘common sense’ played a significant role in resolving the 2007–9 global financial crisis in ways that restored ‘business as usual’. Public funds on an enormous scale were used by nation-states (and regional blocs such as the European Union (EU)) to shore up the interlocking national and international financial systems. Such public investments brought the financial system, and the global capitalist structure that it dominated, ‘back from the brink’, in the words of then UK Chancellor Alistair Darling (2011). There were several perverse consequences of this ‘recovery’. First, what had been a financial crisis (driven by private corporations) was effectively redefined as a ‘fiscal crisis’ of excessive government spending. This view underpinned a new international consensus that public spending needed to be severely curtailed and ‘austerity’ policies enacted. Indeed, the IMF was once again on hand to spread its message: reinventing structural adjustment as public austerity. Second, the introduction of austerity policies proved to be socially and politically disastrous, playing a part in the revival of nationalist and populist politics in many places (Maskovsky and Bjork-James 2019). Third, the public funds were used to restore the liquidity of financial institutions, rather than acting as an economic stimulus, producing the contradictory phenomena of jobless growth and economic recovery with wage stagnation. Fourth, the potential crisis of neoliberalism or global capitalism was turned into an opportunity for new levels of profitability (see, among others, Mirowski 2014). The restoration of ‘business as usual’ involved an underlying commitment to ‘restore growth’: seen as both the essential dynamic of capitalism and the necessary condition for fulfilling on capitalism’s apparently irreconcilable promises of increased private accumulation of wealth for a few and the material enrichment – through consumption – of the many. All national economies were described as striving to ‘return to growth’ by both 121

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international agencies (the IMF, World Bank, etc.) and national governments for whom the promise of growth was seen as necessary to create or maintain domestic political support (and to attract inward investment). This is the default understanding of capitalism: that it is infinitely expansive. But as evidence about environmental degradation mounts, there is an emerging tension between growth and survivability. Indeed, this tension brings another crisis sharply into view: the potential catastrophic collapse of our global climate and environment (see Nigel Clark’s chapter, this volume). The Marxist philosopher James O’Connor (1998) argued that capitalism’s ‘second contradiction’ was formed in the intersection of the drive for growth and the environmental consequences where ‘economic “success” measured in conventional GDP terms frequently leads to traffic congestion, poor air quality, groundwater pollution, stress on water reserves, and loss of landscape amenities’ (Gibbs and Kreuger 2007, p. 101). Emerging environmental politics have challenged the failure to respond to this crisis while a drive towards ‘degrowth’ economic approaches seek to transform the potentially catastrophic functioning of the global system. Here we encounter a profound tension, when restoring ‘normal functioning’ in one system (the global capitalist economy) destroys the balance a different system (the global ecology). Policies of restoring ‘business as usual’ and its core imperative towards growth have destructive effects on the very conditions of global life.

Crisis as a ‘floating signifier’ So far, I have tried to draw attention to different types of crises, different definitions of crisis and the inextricably political character of the process of defining crises. In this section, I take this line of analysis a little further by arguing that the idea of ‘crisis’ can be understood in poststructuralist terms as a ‘floating signifier’: that is, a word whose meaning not fixed, but can be situationally variable. This is a well-established understanding in Cultural Studies and its roots go back to both French philosophy (resting on Saussure’s distinction between the signifier and the signified) and Raymond Williams’ approach to ‘historical semantics’ in Keywords (1976). Where the former theorises the potential for signifiers to float, the latter stresses the ways in which historical, social, and cultural contexts determine which meanings come to be taken for granted – and how they may become contested. That is to say, the floating capacity of signifiers leads to efforts to fix and naturalise specific meanings, but the potential for other meanings always exists, even in the most apparently fixed formulations. This contestation of meanings is at the centre of political discourse, not least in the definition of crises. It is a process that is tied to questions of power. Meaning and power are barely separable as Stuart Hall’s discussion of practices of classification indicates: Until you classify things, in different ways, you can’t generate any meaning at all. So, it’s an absolutely fundamental aspect of human culture. What is, of course, important for us is when the systems of classification become the objects of the disposition of power. That’s to say when the marking of difference and similarity across a human population becomes a reason why this group is to be treated in that way and get those advantages, and that group should be treated in another. It’s the coming together of difference, or categorization of our classification and power. The use of classification as a system of power, which is really what is very profound and one then sees that across a range of different characteristics. (Hall and Jhally 1997, p. 2)

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Hall helps us think about the ways in which situations (as well as people) are classified, given meaning, and framed by the effects of power. In thinking about how crises are classified or defined, the point is that crises are not simply naturally occurring events, over which definitional struggles take place. They can also be brought into being: the process of identifying and defining a particular situation as a crisis is a form of political work. There are many examples – ranging across economic, political, social, or moral crises – in which a particular form of order or stability is declared to be at risk. For example, the behaviour of young people is recurrently defined as a threat to social stability or as destroying some imagined lost state of innocence (see, inter alia, Cohen 2011 [1972], Pearson 1983). So, crises are made up – in the double sense of that phrase: they are imagined as matters of social anxiety; and they are assembled as objects of political concern. A crisis in this sense requires political effort to summon it into being and to pull together the forces to make it an agent of change. In this sense, crises are variously anticipated, predicted, discovered, denied, calibrated, managed, resolved, and more: they are objects of continuing political fascination and a focus for intense political work (from a variety of political positions). Certainly, political parties and movements recognise the value of threats and dangers to either the existing order or the order that they believe should exist. These can be narrated, dramatised, represented as crises with a view to restoring the proper order of things or to transform it into something new. In this sense, crises teach us lessons: about how things went wrong and what needs to change. It may be more accurate to say that crises are made to speak, by different social and political actors, in order to tell us what lessons should be learned (on learning from crises, see Jessop and Knio 2019). In the following section, I deepen this view of crisis as constructed by considering one particular example. In recent years, there have been frequent dramatic announcements of a ‘migrant crisis’ or ‘refugee crisis’ in the global north as people move in the aftermath of wars, conflicts, catastrophes, and other dislocations across the global south.

Discovering the ‘migrant crisis’ Since 2015, Hungary has been said to have faced a ‘migrant crisis’ in which Hungary was represented as at risk of being overrun by waves of migrants travelling northwards. The Hungarian government campaigned vigorously within and beyond the nation about this crisis and the ‘price’ that Hungary was being asked to pay (because of the EU’s policies on refugees). The Fidesz government – defined by its Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as an exercise in ‘illiberal democracy’ – has been variously described by others as nationalist, populist, authoritarian, and autocratic. It made the definition of, and response to, the ‘migrant crisis’ a central focus of political discourse in Hungary. Cantat and Rajaram observe that: Migrants have been the subject of racist representations, underpinned by a broad range of mechanisms such as show trials, antimigrant billboard campaigns, and ‘national consultations’ on migration. The government has also developed a rhetoric that affirms a link between migration and terrorism, or the destabilization of public order. (2018, p. 182) Such representations pictured migrants as threats to Hungarian and European culture, the national and European ‘way of life’, and to Hungarian and European security. The government

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enacted laws that limit the possibility of migrant incorporation into Hungarian society, criminalising both migrants and those who might seek to assist them. Cantat and Rajaram argue that this process of discovering and defining the ‘migrant crisis’ has a number of political effects, shaping both the domestic politics of Hungary and its relationship with the EU. On the one hand, the process helps to create an image of a ‘desirable Hungarian public’ as ‘a valuable entity that must be protected’ (Cantat and Rajaram, 2018, p. 183). On the other hand, the definition of the migrant crisis enabled Orbán to make a distinction ‘between Europe, whose identity and culture he claims are based on its Christian roots, and the EU, which he stated was in the “grip of madness” over immigration’ (2018, p. 184). Hungary developed a systematic approach to the interdiction of migrants, building border fences, policing both the border and destination towns and cities intensively and deporting any migrants found within the nation’s territory (and making assisting migrants a criminal offence). By 2016, President Orbán was claiming that Hungary’s approach had become the new European ‘common sense’: [N]ow for the first time the European Union has accepted the Hungarian solution … we have prioritized border protection and the stopping of the migrant masses. … We have to stop them; our external borders must be protected and the Schengen Accord must be upheld 100 per cent by everyone. … [T]he Balkan route countries and Austria have finally taken the path of common sense… [W]hat the countries along the Balkan route and Austria are doing is in reality the Hungarian solution. They have built fences, even if they don’t call them fences; they have stopped migrants and have returned migrants. This was always the Hungarian stand. I am certain that the protection of Europe’s southern borders is impossible by any other instruments. (Orbán 2016, quoted in Cantat and Rajaram 2018, p. 185) Constructing the ‘migrant crisis’ in this way made it possible for the Orbán government to invert its perceived relationship to the EU. Hungary had been under investigation and review by the EU on several counts since the early 2000s: these included financial irregularities, anti-democratic extensions of governmental power and apparent breaches of EU legal guarantees, notably around the Rule of Law and Human Rights. However, Orbán’s claim about the migrant crisis sought to position Hungary as both the defender of Europe and as its policy ‘vanguard’, with others adopting the ‘Hungarian solution’. As migration continued, the Fidesz government found allies within the EU, not least in the Italian government led by Matteo Salvini until 2019. Cantat and Rajaram point to other effects of this dramatised crisis. Although its immediate targets were migrants attempting to enter and cross Hungary; the Fidesz government also used the narrative to attack ‘liberals’ and others within Hungary who attempted to assist or support migrants; and to draw distinctions between ‘true Magyars’ (deserving and hardworking citizens/families) and their ‘others’ (criminal, workshy, and ethnically different, seen as being embodied in the Roma in Hungary, Szombati 2018). Such distinctions mobilised popular support for the Fidesz party and enabled the government to both enact and celebrate an increasingly ‘illiberal’ or authoritarian politics: This illiberalism relies on the continuous identification of the boundaries of the legitimate political community, affirmed through the production of its ‘others’— those who do not belong. This requires the ongoing fabrication and visibilization 124

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of otherness: the discourse of a ‘migration crisis’ threatening the country is a central device for the performance of this ideology. (Cantat and Rajaram 2018, p. 186) Hungary is not the only place where migration has been turned into a national drama: the desire to close borders has been visible across different parts of Europe from the United Kingdom to Italy, and in Donald Trump’s promises to build a wall between the United States and Mexico to control migration (see, for example, Outhwaite 2019 and Jablonowski, this volume, on ‘Brexit’ and the migrant crisis, and, more generally, Brown 2010 on wall building and the quest for national sovereignty). In many cases, the ‘migrant crisis’ has been constructed in ways that feed on fears and anxieties among domestic populations and have served to attach them to increasingly authoritarian, nationalist, and nativist political programmes (see, inter alia, Maskovsky and Bjork-James 2019). At the same time, there have been multiple mobilisations in solidarity with migrants that have attempted to resist and refuse their demonisation (della Porta 2018). The ‘migrant crisis’ was only one of the crises that haunted the opening decades of the twenty-first century: it was accompanied by economic crises (not just the Financial Crash of 2007–8), political crises of diverse kinds (including growing dissent from established politics or the rise of secessionist or independence politics), the threat of terrorism, urban disorder and the deepening crises of social care, medical crises of travelling epidemics and, overshadowing them all, the unfolding crisis of the global ecology. The world seemed to be awash with crises.

The proliferation of crises The present does seem to be particularly beset by crises. It may be that we are currently more attentive to different sorts of crisis; it may be that the very word ‘crisis’ has become over-used as critics and commentators seek the means to dramatise and amplify any emerging issue. But it may also be the case that, as the financial crisis of 2008 revealed, the forms and levels of interconnectedness are now so significant to the organisation of economic, social, and political life, that crises have the capacity to proliferate, spread, connect, and disrupt with greater frequency and on expanded scales. In thinking about the relationship between crisis and social change, how should we make sense of this proliferation of crises? In particular, do they just form a disconnected series (crisis X, crisis Y, and so on)? Or are they interconnected? Over 40 years ago, a Cultural Studies analysis of Britain (Policing the Crisis) argued that there were multiple crises emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s that could be understood as connected together: First it is a crisis of and for British capitalism… Second, then, it is a crisis of the ‘relations of social forces’ engendered by this deep rupture at the economic level – a crisis in the political class struggle and in the political apparatuses….at the point where the political struggle issues into the ‘theatre of politics’, it has been experienced as a crisis of ‘Party’… Third, it has been a crisis of the State. The entry into late capitalism demands a thorough reconstruction of the capitalist state, an enlargement of its sphere, its apparatuses, its relation to civil society. … Fourth it is a crisis in political legitimacy, in social authority, in hegemony and in the forms of class struggle. This crucially touches on questions of consent and coercion. (Hall et al. 2013 [1978], pp. 310–2) 125

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This analysis underpinned a double argument in the book. First, there were multiple, intersecting crises that affected British society, leading to a loss of political consent as the postwar social and political settlements broke apart. Second, this multiple crisis was politically displaced into a problem of ‘law and order’, articulated around the fear of street crime by black youth (‘mugging’) in particular. We do not have to follow this particular argument to grasp its more general proposition: dominant groups will attempt to deflect and displace dangers and challenges in order to secure their political legitimacy, often by targeting ‘others’ as a threat to the nation, the social order, or ‘our way of life’. A crisis may be politically constructed and responded to in very different ways. But the analysis also points to the possibility that emergent crises may be linked, may have effects that multiply the conditions of crisis, and may create a more general destabilising condition that demands action of either a transformative or restorative kind. Attempts to explore intersecting crises (and their associated political forces) have accompanied the growing climate emergency. For example, Paul Street, a US historian and activist, has addressed the intersection of the ecological crisis (‘ecocide’, as he puts it) with the dynamics of a capitalism that has run out of control, and with an imperialism that exports the worst costs of the nominally global crisis to the countries of the global South. He also raises an interesting point about the naming of this crisis. Responding to an invitation to talk about ‘climate change’ he comments: Let me say as politely as I can that I don’t like the phrase ‘Climate Change.’ It’s too mild. Try Climate Catastrophe. If a giant oak tree is about to collapse on to your little house, you don’t say that you are risk of housing change. You say ‘holy shit we’re about to die and we better do something fast.’ (Street 2019) In the present, we might consider how the failings of global capitalism (and the profoundly unequal distribution of the costs and consequences of those failings) have undermined social and political consent in many places. Certainly, the emerging ‘angry politics’ have taken a variety of forms, from nationalist-populism to a youthful environmental internationalism. In turn, this ‘crisis of consent’ has created problems for national governments trying to manage the place of the nation in this unsettled global system. The role of the state, in its various local, national, supra-national forms, has been exposed to competing and contradictory pressures – towards growth, towards austerity, towards stability, towards managing decline, and more – that make it the focus of conflicting expectations. Meanwhile, the pursuit of growth everywhere exacerbates the environmental crisis as national governments and international institutions fail to control ecological degradation. These crises are not all the same, but they are interconnected. This was the underlying argument of Policing the Crisis: that a series of interconnected crises in a particular historical moment – in a ‘conjuncture’ – created a profound destabilisation of politics. In turn, that crisis of politics produced competing strategies to define, direct and manage the conjuncture, one that in Britain took a sharp rightwards turn towards a ‘law and order’ politics and from there to the emergence of Thatcherism (Hall et al. 2013 [1978]). This question of how to understand the proliferation and condensation of crises in a conjuncture remains a pressing one (see, for example, the special edition of the journal New Formations, 96–97, dedicated to ‘This Conjuncture’). As if to underline the significance of this argument, the COVID-19 pandemic appeared while this chapter was being written (see also Bue Rübner Hansen’s chapter, this volume). The pandemic intersected with (and typically worsened) other social, political, and economic 126

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crises, both internationally and nationally. Responses to it varied dramatically, shaped by prevailing national circumstances, political dispositions and governmental capacities. It also was given life by its encounters with other social dynamics. In the United Kingdom, for example, the virus’s impact was mediated by existing social inequalities, notably those affecting racialised or ethnicised minorities such that Black and other ethnic minority groups were particularly vulnerable to contracting the disease and dying from it. While the United Kingdom was debating the causes for these inequalities, the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd by US police erupted – and a potent connection was forged in the echoes of his last words: ‘I can’t breathe’. These connections forced the arguments about exactly how and when Black lives might matter further into the public domain (Clarke 2021). The present conjuncture certainly contains proliferating crises as well as diverse forms of political response – from the mobilisation of schoolchildren against climate catastrophe to a new politics of loss, rage, and fury; from US protectionism, wall and fence building to the militarisation of politics; from anti-racist and decolonising movements to the creation of new forms of solidarity and support; from militant militias to farmers’ mobilisations. Crisis and change are, indeed, intimately and inextricably entangled – but without any prescribed or pre-given direction of movement.

References Adepoju, A., ed., 1993. The impact of structural adjustment on the population of Africa. London: United Nations Population Fund and James Currey. Brown, W. 2010. Walled states, waning sovereignty. New York: Zone Books. Cantat, C. and Rajaram, P.K., 2018. The politics of refugee crisis in Hungary: b/ordering the nation and its others. In: C. Menjivar, M. Ruiz, and I. Ness, eds. The Oxford handbook of migration crises. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxford Handbooks, 180–196. Clarke, J. 2021. Following the science? Covid-19, ‘race’ and the politics of knowing. Cultural Studies, 35 (2–3), 248–256. Cohen, S. 2011 [1972]. Folk devils and moral panics. London: Routledge. Darling, A. 2011. Back from the brink: 1000 days at Number 11. London: Atlantic Books. della Porta, D., ed. 2018. Solidarity mobilizations in the ‘refugee crisis’: contentious moves. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Friedman, M., 1982 [1962]. Capitalism and freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gamble, A., 2009. The spectre at the feast: capitalist crisis and the politics of recession. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gibbs, D. and Kreuger, R., 2007. Containing the contradictions of rapid development? New economy spaces and sustainable urban development. In: R. Kreuger and D. Gibbs, eds. The sustainable development paradox: urban political economy in the United States and Europe. New York: Guilford Publications, 95–112. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the prison notebooks. Edited by G. Nowell Smith and Q. Hoare, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Grossberg, L. 2018. Under cover of chaos: Trump and the battle for the American right. London: Pluto Press. Hall, S., et al., 2013 [1978]. Policing the crisis: mugging, the state and law and order. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hall, S. and Jhally, S., 1997. Race, the floating signifier featuring Stuart Hall: a transcript. New York: Media Education Foundation. Available from: https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-HallRace-the-Floating-Signifier-Transcript.pdf [Accessed 11 February 2021]. Harman, C., 2010. Zombie capitalism: global crisis and the relevance of Marx. New York: Haymarket Books. Jessop, B., and Knio, K., eds. 2019. The pedagogy of economic, political and social crises: dynamics, construals and lessons. London and New York: Routledge. Klein, N. 2008. The shock doctrine. New York: Penguin Books. Maskovsky, J. and Bjork-James, S., eds. 2019. Beyond populism: angry politics and the twilight of neoliberalism. Morgantown, VA: West Virginia University Press. Mirowski, P., 2014. Never let a serious crisis go to waste: how neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown. London: Verso.

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John Clarke O’Connor, J., 1998. Natural causes: essays in ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford Press. Orbán, V. 2016. ‘Orbán Viktor sajtótájékoztatója az Európai Tanács ülését követően’ (Viktor Orbán’s Press Conference following the European Council’s meeting), Government of Hungary, 21 February. Outhwaite, W., 2019. Migration crisis and ‘Brexit’. In: C. Menjivar, M. Ruiz, and I. Ness, eds. The Oxford handbook of migration crises. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 92–110. Pearson, G. 1983. Hooligan: a history of respectable fears. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Peck J., Theodore N. and Brenner N. 2010. Postneoliberalism and its malcontents. Antipode, 41 (1), 94−116. Sarkozy, N. 2010. Opening speech by Nicolas Sarkozy at 40th World Economic Forum [online]. 27 January. Davos. Voltaire Network. Available from: http://www.voltairenet.org/article163780. html [Accessed 13 August 2021]. Schumpeter, J., 1989. Business cycles: a theoretical, historical and statistical analysis of the capitalist process. Philadelphia, PA: Porcupine Press (abridged reprint of 1939 two volume edition). Street, P., 2019. Climate catastrophe and extinction rebellion [online]. Monthly Review online, 19 April. Available from: https://mronline.org/2019/04/19/climate-catastrophe-and-extinctionrebellion/ [Accessed 21 February 2021]. Szombati, J.K., 2018. The revolt of the provinces: anti-Gypsyism and right-wing politics in Hungary. New York: Berghahn Books. Valdez, J., 1995. Pinochet’s economists: the Chicago School of Economics in Chile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, R., 1976. Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society. London: Fontana.

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11 STRUCTURAL STORIES On the Transformational Dynamics of Context Clive Barnett

Introduction: logical geographies of action A recurring theme of political debates is the contention that incremental or piece-meal forms of change are ‘never enough’, indeed that they distract from the need and possibility of more fundamental forms of change. It is an argument related to the claim that some forms of analysis or strategy fail to address structural issues – in the sense of getting at fundamental, interrelated root causes of injustices. Invoking ‘structure’ or ‘structural factors’ is, in fact, a default habit of social analysis. After all, understanding the stable, persistent, orderly factors that give shape and pattern to social life is the whole point of social science. The analytical focus is intertwined with a more normatively charged dimension to this focus upon structure: structures are what account for observable patterns of difference, unevenness, inequality, or injustice. As such, the idea of structure is used to refer both to factors that are difficult to change, but also, and for that very reason, to what is most in need of being changed. The idea that people are positioned in structures that account for their actions is a basic premise of social analysis, from Marx and Weber and Durkheim onwards (see Sahlins 2000, pp. 293–351). These structures might be variously conceptualised, it is true – as social relations of property, webs of meaning, patterns of resource distribution, or of the force of social norms (see Martin 2009). But in different traditions, structures are often thought of as external forces that shape people’s actions from the outside. The emphasis on excavating structural patterns gives rise to enduring debates about ‘structure and agency’. These debates are shaped by analytical and political worries that if everything people do is structured from the outside, and therefore outside of their control, then it is difficult to account for the possibility of deliberate social change. Indeed, the focus upon structures as persistent, durable patterns of constraint often supports a particular and rather narrow way of thinking about social change: as something quite dramatic, shaped by heroic actors (individual or collective), and leading to wholesale change of historical importance. Across its different varieties, structural analysis relies on a contrast between observable patterns of actions or events and unobservable mechanisms, relations, and networks (Haslanger 2016). This epistemological characteristic of structural analysis lends itself easily, although not necessarily, to a form of more politicised critical analysis, one in which a structural explanation of a phenomenon involves presenting an observable phenomenon as a symptom of an DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-13

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underlying cause. Indeed, we might suppose that some sense of the systematic patterning of social life is central to the analysis of structural injustice (see Haslanger 2015). There are two notable features of this use of structural claims as anchors for critique. First, a feature of the standard invocation of ‘structural’ causes in radical strands of social thought is that the analyst often always already knows what the causes behind observed conflicts are. Armed with a structural imagination, the analyst knows in advance that patterns of inequality or experiences of injustices are indices of some fundamental structuring causes – ‘late capitalism’, ‘neoliberalism’, ‘patriarchy’, or ‘post-politicization’. Second, structural analysis as a mode of critique often presents the very unobservable quality of structural factors – mechanisms, relations, and networks – as itself a form of suspect power. The unobservable features of social life are represented as modes for reproducing structures of injustice through ideological processes of hiding, secreting, or concealing. In more recent and revisionist strands of thinking, the assertion of the mutual imbrication of structuring causes and contingent actions leads to a re-imagination of the shape of social change. Various reformulations of the relations between structure and agency in social theory, from Giddens’s structuration theory (Giddens 1984) to Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1977) and to the development of actor network theory (Latour 2005) and field theory (Fligstein and McAdam 2012), have all drawn into focus the degree to which agency is a pervasive feature of social life and is also pivotal to the reproduction, stability, and durability of social forms. In a range of traditions, including theories of structuration, theories of practice, and theories of assemblage and ‘agencement’, the guiding theme is how action is a medium for the maintenance of forms of order. The guiding theme across these traditions is, then, of ‘the persistence of structure by means of event’ (Sahlins 1976, p. 23). The consolidation of avowedly poststructuralist paradigms of social analysis reflects an important shift in the way in which change itself is conceptualised in social theory. In all sorts of well-established paradigms of social science all the way back to the origins of classical social theory, it is taken for granted that change is an intrinsic feature of social life. The task of explaining how change manifests itself usually involves some procedure in which action is placed within a broader frame of context, conditions, or constraint (see Joas and Knöbl 2009). However, the ascendancy of post-structural theories and the associated turn to ontological modes of reasoning has seen the emergence of a very different image of change. Whether it is theories of hegemony, or of the distribution of the sensible, or of ontological politics, affective atmospheres, or of assemblage, it is presumed that the task of analysis is to account for the stabilisation, ordering, or fixing of the essential flux of life into patterns of serial reproducibility. Change, in these accounts, is extraordinary, necessarily ruptural. The overriding interpretative concern is to simply establish the very possibility of change itself. Openness to change and contestation are presented as the highest normative aspiration available to us. In this chapter, I consider the images of the structuring of social life that differentiate the political imaginations of traditions of thought. My premise is that traditions of thought are characterised by distinctive ‘logical geographies of action’ – distinctive ways of positing the relation between the conditions of agency and its actual exercise are bound up with explicitly political concerns about change (see Barnett 2019). Following an introductory discussion of the core features of structural explanations in social theory, the chapter considers the ways in which ideas of structure are sublimated in poststructuralist accounts of change. The specific focus of my discussion will be on how debates about structure, agency, and change are reformulated in Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s pragmatist conceptualisation of programmatic social change. 130

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Telling structural stories It is worth pausing a moment at the outset to consider what the idea of structure actually refers to in social science analysis. It turns out to be a rather complex, but also often underspecified idea (see Sewell 1992). There is a spatial grammar of structure-talk in social analysis (see Barnett 2017, pp. 3–7), with an emphasis on both a horizontal dimension and a vertical dimension to the idea of structure. This reflects the architectonic roots of the idea of structure and structural in modern thought (see Williams 1977, pp. 301–308), the sense of which resonates most strongly in the influential Marxist problematic of ‘base and superstructure’ (see Eagleton 2000). When saying ‘structure’, analysts are often seeking to draw attention to the connections between one set of phenomena and other factors and influences, by drawing into view the web of relationships into which actions and events are woven. Structure, in this regard, is an inherently ‘relational’ concept. It is this horizontal sense of structure that is at the heart of flourishing debates about concepts such as networks, assemblages, and fields. At the same time, however, and as already suggested, there is also a sense that these webs of relationships and networks of connections are not ordinarily visible. They must be bought into view, perhaps empirically, but also, and necessarily, through theoretical clarification. These dual qualities are captured in the account of structure once provided by the geographer David Harvey: Structures are not ‘things’ or ‘actions’ and we cannot therefore establish their existence through observation. To define elements relationally means to interpret them in a way external to direct observation. The meaning of an observable action, such as cutting a log, is established by discovering its relation to the wider structure of which it is a part. Its interpretation will vary depending upon whether we view it in relation to capitalism or socialism, or whether we place it in relationship to some quite different structure (the ecological system, for example). (Harvey 1973, p. 290) There are three noteworthy features in this succinct statement. First, it is clear that structure is a thoroughly relational concept. Second, we can see here too the idea that structural analysis involves placing observable phenomena under a new description, mediated by theoretical concepts. Again, and to be clear, this is an elementary feature of social science analysis in general. And thirdly, it is also important to underscore that this view of structure is not synonymous with a view of static, invariant, unchanging forms. Quite the contrary, the debt that this account of structure owes to the often denigrated and usually misconstrued intellectual tradition of tradition of structuralism lies in the view ‘that structures have to be defined through an understanding of the “transformation rules” that shape them’ (Harvey 1973, pp. 290–291). It is a short step from this relational view of structure to a stronger, more political inflection of the idea of structure, which I have referred to as a vertical sense of structure. Here, structure is not just something that surrounds a set of actions, but is a kind of ground or foundation whose obscurity is in certain respects motivated, and thereby serves certain interests over others (at its outer limit, this form of analysis might take a strictly reductionist form, of seeing one thing as really something else). In turn, properly structural analysis is presented, across different traditions of radical thought, as a form of explanatory demystification – the key, for example, to genuinely ‘revolutionary theory’ (see Harvey 1973, pp. 120–152). Drawing attention to the simple spatial grammar of structure-talk, shared across different traditions, helps us see that forms of structural analysis always involve the interpretative move 131

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of placing one thing into a wider context. Context, here, can refer in the broadest sense to the circumstances, settings, situations, and influences that throw actions or phenomena into new perspective. It should be said that putting things in context, as an analytical trick of social analysis, is not the preserve of avowedly ‘contextual’ forms of analysis (c.f. Hägerstrand 1984). Basic forms of ‘compositional’ analysis, in which something is treated as a dependent variable, to be explained by reference to a selection of independent variables, also involve placing phenomena in wider relations. The reason to re-describe the concept of structure in terms of context, and to present context in a capacious sense, is to draw into view the different ways in which contextual features of action can be presented: as external constraints; as enabling conditions; or as predictive factors. In suggesting that the relationship between actions and their contexts can be presented in different ways, I am proposing that we think of structural analysis as a particular type of storytelling. This is an argument made by Iris Marion Young (2002), for whom a structural form of analysis seeks to identify the factors that position people in relationships that in turn help to shape their understandings, their capacities, and their desires. On this understanding, it should be said, structure is a concept of possibility, not of necessity. If we think of ‘structure’ in this way, as a generic device for telling certain types of stories, then we no longer have to remain beholden to the moralising contrast between voluntary actions and deterministic, constraining structures. We are directed instead towards the analysis of the various possible relationships between actions and their conditions. Accordingly, we can propose that any social theory will posit some ratio between the scenes, settings, backgrounds, circumstances, or conditions of actions, on the one hand, and the events and the actors and acts enacted within and upon them on the other (see Burke 1945, pp. 3–20). In short, structural stories can present the relationship between action and its conditions in different ways. They can present these conditions as settings, as constraints, as circumstances, as events, or as situations. They can present action as tightly contained by its conditions, and actors as having little latitude for discretion; or they can present action as highly creative with extensive scope for generating innovations. But across the variation, the purpose of telling structural stories is to provide a sense that actions take on their meaning and significance in relation to wider contexts, either preceding or succeeding the action and events under consideration. Contexts are not necessarily limits, nor even conditions: they can provide actors themselves with the reference points that give purpose to life and action. Thinking of structural analysis in this way, as a genre of storytelling brings into view the ways in which different ideas of structure are associated with different images of political time. But the difference between accounts of structure, understood in this contextual sense, is also shaped by a more fundamental division between two visions of how the parts of the social world are related to each other. In one vision, parts are woven tightly together into pattern of centred totality. In another vision, parts are certainly related, but in a more open-ended, unpredictable, and non-linear manner. In the rest of this chapter, I develop a little further the imagination of the relationship between action and context that underwrites the programmatic, ‘next-steps’ imagination of change developed by Unger. In order to clarify the importance of recognising how specific ratios between action and context shape and are shaped by distinctive images of change, the next section discusses the specific sense of structure that remains operative in avowedly poststructuralist, often ‘non-representational’ styles of political thought. Here one finds an image of change that depends on a set of binary conceptual contrasts between stability and flux, ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, necessity and contingency. In turn, change is presented in the form of a punctual interruption, as a kind of pure event of rupture. The chapter then moves on to outline a different determination of the ratio between 132

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action and context. Using the work of Unger as a reference point, it provides an overview of an alternative conceptual framework for telling structural stories about possibility rather than necessity.

Sublimating structure I suggested above that one of the legacies of structuralism is a distinctively relational concept of structure. This is often overlooked in claims about the transcendence of structuralism by poststructuralism, which is indeed often celebrated as uniquely attuned to relational qualities of social life. The issue at stake is perhaps better thought of in terms of different images of the relationality of structure (see Derrida 1978), and of how these images in turn inform different understandings of the concept of ‘context’ (see Derrida 1988). The reason to dwell a little on this theme is to draw into focus the degree to which aspects of structuralist models of relations continue to shape, and to constrain, the political imagination of change in avowedly poststructuralist strands of contemporary thought. Structuralism is the name for a broad range of theoretical ideas, associated perhaps especially with linguistics and anthropology, and then extended by analogy into other fields, such as psychoanalysis and Marxism. Despite its name, and as already indicated, the defining feature of twentieth-century structuralism, and its most significant legacy, is the development of a relational imagination. For example, Harvey’s relational concept of structure discussed at the outset is explicitly indebted not just to Marxism, but also to Jean Piaget’s variation of structuralism. The other legacy of structuralism is a persistent problem with thinking about change. From the work of Ferdinand de Saussure onwards, structuralist theories revolved around an antinomy between system and use. The proposed ‘arbitrariness’ of fixed orders of semiotic relationships posited by Saussure, and translated into other fields of social analysis such as anthropology or cultural studies, means that they are resistant to any significant reordering other than by accident or chance (see Barthes 1988). The genealogy of the concept of discourse, in post-Saussurean linguistics and beyond, is indicative of the persistence of this tension. In its proper and full sense, discourse is a concept of action developed to move beyond the antinomy between system and use (see Pêcheux 1988). But in its widespread popularisation, not least in the dissemination of second-hand accounts of Michel Foucault’s work, discourse tends to be presented as just another term for ‘structure’: a system of representations and/or positions into which subjects, grammatical, or human, are more or less successfully slotted. Twentieth-century structuralism marked a decisive effort to develop social science as a distinctive field of analysis, marked off from both ‘science’ and the ‘humanities’ (see Dosse 1998). In no small part one can think of the emergence and institutionalisation of poststructuralist strands of thought as marking a kind of reactive ‘becoming philosophical’ of critical theory. It marks a moment in which social science analysis of issues of structure and agency are transposed into a thinly socialised vision of philosophical puzzles about the relationship between freedom and determinism, necessity, and contingency (see Osborne 2000). Indeed, the antinomies of structuralism not only persist in poststructuralism, they have been actively cultivated in the institutionalisation of ontological styles of theorising under the aegis of ‘Continental Philosophy’. In these styles of theory, the idea of structure is retained: it is now associated with the image of the more or less unfortunate necessity of temporarily fixing the fluid forces of becoming in the world. In turn, an image of change as rupture retains a central place in these strands of thought. Despite the disavowal of structural analysis in much contemporary critical thought, ‘post’structural approaches tend to smuggle a sense of the structuring of social life into their 133

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analyses without admitting it. They do so in so far as they focus on the analytical attention on processes of subject-formation (see Smith 1988). Subject-formation is presented as an effect of a determinative capacity to exercise power over pliant bodies by placing them in particular chains of signification; in particular spatial configurations; or, in non-representational theories, by immersing them in affectively charged atmospheres that manipulate people’s most intimate attachments and identifications. The basic intuition about the structuring of action is therefore certainly not abandoned in poststructuralist theories. It is simply sublimated into ontological narratives of being and becoming; of mere ‘politics’ and ‘the political’; of the suturing together of the social; of undecidability; of magmas of signification; and of affective atmospheres. These are all formulations in which an ontologically prior state of flux and contingency is temporarily overlain or fixed in place by some mechanism. This is the operative understanding of ‘structure’ in the imagination of change posited by poststructuralist thought and associated strands of ‘Continental Philosophy’. Theories of subjectivity-as-subjection or subjectivity-as-affectivity, often articulated in strongly ontological registers, inform a specific image of how social change is possible. These theories are internally related to the idea that ‘power’ works through naturalisation, essentialisation, and universalisation, that is, by fixing in place what is properly in flux or becoming. According to the conventions of this genre, the purpose of theoretical analysis is to constantly repeat the trick of defamiliarisation, by demonstrating the possibility of the change-ability of identities and practices that are, apparently, lived and experienced as eternal and inevitable. It is assumed in advance that subjects are formed by being ‘enframed’, by being set-in-place – before a painting, a chain of signifiers, a field of perception, a structure of address, or just absorbed by an all-encompassing atmosphere. It is also assumed that any individual or collective identity is constitutively posited against an abjected ‘Other’, so that subject-formation always appears as a form of exclusionary territorialisation. As I have suggested, this is a widely shared paradigm of analysis, a shared genre, in which it is assumed that people’s subjective dispositions are functional effects of mediated systems of centralised malevolent power. More specifically, it is a genre that provides a framework for analysing change in particular ways: any and all social practices are understood as scenes for the reproduction of various exclusions, but also as always potential sites for the creative reconfiguration of the emotional attachments and imaginary identifications before which people remain nevertheless necessarily enthralled. Across different variations, the shared presupposition is that politics (both of the sort one doesn’t approve and of the sort one hopes to support) works through changing the subject (see Barnett 2017, pp. 110–141). The traces of structuralism are most evident in the particular images of political time found in poststructuralist ontologies. It is an image of time structured around a spatialisation of openness and closure, fixity and mobility, settlement, and disruption. And this image sustains a way of thinking in which change is imagined to consist of series of punctuated equilibria: moments of dramatic and wholesale transformation of entire fields of action interrupt periods of durable and predictable routine (see Fligstein and McAdam 2012, pp. 83–86). In short, it is an image of the temporality of change that reflects the habit of thought dubbed ‘structure fetishism’ by Unger. Structure fetishism is expressed in the view of change ‘that opposes interludes of effervescence, charisma, mobilization, and energy to the ordinary reign of institutionalized routine, when, half asleep, we continue to act out the script written in the creative intervals’ (Unger 1998, p. 26). The contrast between the ordered routines of instituted organisational systems and rare events of constitution and disruption informs a temporal imagination whereby genuine political action is necessarily insurgent and insurrectional (e.g., Swyngedouw 2018). It is, in turn, a temporal imagination that underwrites the privilege 134

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accorded to specific dimensions of physical space as the primal scenes of authentically political action: spaces of demonstration, spaces of assembly, and spaces of confrontation. The sublimation of an essentially structuralist image of fixed patterns of relations overlain on ‘arbitrary’ foundations persists in the performativity of identities, ontological theories of political life, and non-representational theories of affect. Across these fields of thought, this sublimated image of structure functions as a kind of tragic necessity. Structure, order, or form, is understood as a necessary force that imposes the appearance of stability, naturalism, or universality on states of affairs that turn out to be ‘contingent’. And contingency in turn is used as a synonym for the value of changeability inferred from the critique of essentialism, foundationalism, and universalism. The sublimation of the structure in radical ontologies collapses the problem of agency into the theoretical task of identifying a singular source of negativity, excess, or disruption that allows one to posit the certainty of the possibility of change (see Barnett 2017, pp. 39–43). Although no longer couched in terms of reform versus revolution, nevertheless a temporal imagination of ongoing serial reproduction interrupted by sudden transformative events continues to exercise considerable influence on critical thought. It is an imagination that presents a sentimental vision in which rebellion might always disrupt habits and norms and routines, opening up experiences of authentic freedom, but also a tragic view in which institutional forces will inevitably clamp down again on the rebellious spirit remains a remarkably resilient image in critical analysis. To move beyond the limits of this imagination, it is necessary to think of change as an ordinary feature of life that is manifested in various ways, rather than thinking of change as a rare event that interrupts stable routines. We need, in short, to tell less melodramatic stories about the structuring of action.

Temporalities of transformation A widely shared feature of radical traditions of thought is the attachment to an image of change that depends on the view that all dimensions of life are anchored around a coherent centre (see Couldry 2011). We have seen that different mediums for the reproduction of this structured totality can be identified – ideology, or technologies of subject-formation, perhaps affective atmospheres. It is an image that is central to what Unger calls ‘deep structure’ social theory. This refers to a mode of thinking that, as already suggested, is no less evident in culturalist traditions as it is in more political-economically minded traditions. Deep structure thinking is characterised by the assumption ‘the institutional and ideological orderings of social life are indivisible systems, whose individual parts stand or fall together’ (Unger 2007, p. 183). The image of society as an integrated system, made up of indivisible parts that are tied together by a deep structural coherence, puts in place a particular way of thinking about change. On this view, politics is either about ‘temporizing reforms’ within the limits of ‘indivisible systems’, or ‘revolutionary transformation’ that replaces systems completely (2007, p. 113). The opposition between reform and revolution as well as ideas of crisis both depend on the image of society as an integrated totality, the dynamics of which are available only to theoretically privileged modes of analysis. Thinking about change beyond this totalising frame requires the development of an alternative image of the way in which the parts of the social world are related to each other. In order to glean a sense of change that relies on a different placement of the ratios between conditions and creativity, scene and action, one place to start is with the Argentinian-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel. Taking the perspective of victims of injustice as his starting point, Dussel has developed an original political theory and ethics of liberation in dialogue with 135

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various traditions of thought, including liberation theology and the discourse ethics of KarlOtto Apel and Jurgen Habermas (see Dussel 2013). Building from this ethical ground, the objective of his analysis is to identify the dynamics of transformation. He defines transformation as ‘a change in the form of the innovation of an institution or the radical transmutation of the political system in response to new interventions by the oppressed or excluded’ (Dussel 2008, pp. 111–112). Importantly, Dussel does not presume that transformation only takes the form of momentary events or dramatic ruptures. Rather than counter-posing reform and revolution, incremental change to fundamental re-foundation, Dussel’s notion of transformation names a form of action that seeks ‘to change the course of an intention, the content of a norm; to modify a possible action or institution’ (Dussel 2013, p. 394). The importance of Dussel’s vision of transformation therefore lies in the emphasis on changes that alter the course of actions. This emphasis implies a reorientation of the meaning of ‘structural’ analysis towards a focus on positioning and orientation of actions, rather than a vocabulary of constraint, limitation, and determination. Dussel provides us with an initial sense of transformation understood as an inflection of patterns of action, working on and through norms rather than through their suspension or substitution. This is an emphasis more fully developed in Unger’s anti-necessitarian social theory. Best known perhaps for helping inaugurate the critical legal studies movement in the United States, Unger has developed a social theory that provides an alternative account of everything from the transformation of personal life (Unger 2007) all the way through to market economies, international free trade and the knowledge economy (Unger 2019). Rather than evaluating the political implications of Unger’s capacious intellectual project (e.g., Anderson 1992, Dunn 1990, Kymlicka 1994), I focus here on the theoretical underlabouring that informs Unger’s account of programmatic transformation, developed in contrast to what he refers to the ‘fantastical idea of changing the whole’. The idea of structure is central to Unger’s reconstruction of social theory, building on his critique of what he calls ‘false necessity’ in radical thought. His work elaborates an account of the relationship between ‘our structure defying and structure-changing freedom’ (Unger 1998, p. 26). He seeks to move beyond the opposition between ‘reformist tinkering’ that forestalls fundamental structural change, and the image of the ‘revolutionary substitution’ of entire structures. In contrast to ‘the vulgar idea of revolution’, which posits an image of a process (the seizure of power) and an outcome (the comprehensive reconstruction of entire form of social life) (Unger 1997a, p. 84), Unger’s aim is to outline a programmatic mode of analysis (Trubek 1990). Unger’s programmatic approach relies on a shift in the temporal imagination through which change is represented: ‘Programmatic thought is sequence, not blueprint, music, not architecture’ (Unger 2007, p. 117). On this view, transformative projects are seen as ‘a direction and a series of next steps’ (2007, p. 145). This model of programmatic change combines practical acts with a sense of direction: ‘It is the combination of parts and the succession of steps, reaching far beyond the starting point, and changing along the way our understanding of our interests, ideals, and identities, that makes a reform project relatively more radical. It is the direction in which the steps take us that make it more or less democratic’ (Unger 1998, p. 19). It is a vision that presents ‘structural change’ not as a once and for all event, but as only being possible ‘piece by piece and step by step’ (Unger 2005, p. 32). Unger’s account of programmatic change therefore combines a sense of deliberate strategic action with an acknowledgement of the unpredictability of unintended consequences. The next section outlines how this vision of programmatic change depends on a distinctive conceptualisation of dynamic context.

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The dynamics of context As already argued, all social theories posit some relation or ratio between scenes, on the one hand, and actions and events. In this respect, Unger (1997a, p. 33) suggests that a key distinction between traditions of social thought is the different attitudes they display to ‘the existence of institutional and imaginative frameworks that stand apart from the routines of social life and shape these routines’. On the account of structure developed by Unger, the central concept through which this relation is presented is a particular idea of context. Context can be thought of as a principle of interpretation, both for actors involved in action, as well as for analysts observing from the outside. It is an idea that has a double reference. Reference to context works by providing a wider frame in which events and actions take on meaning and significance (the sense of context as a determinative principle); but context also refers to a sense of the openness between conditions, actions, and outcomes (see Barnett 1999). The dynamic sense of context in this double sense is crucial to Unger’s account of programmatic change. The animating principle of Unger’s own thought is that ‘everything is contextual and that all contexts can be broken’ (Unger 1997a, p. 23). This principle is important because it leads to the rejection of ‘the existentialist idea that true freedom consists in the perpetual defiance of all settled structure’. This view ‘fails to take into account both the bad news that we must live and think most of the time in a context and the good news that we can create contexts that more fully respect and encourage our context-revising freedom’ (Unger 1997a, p. 88). Unger’s reworking of themes from classical pragmatism is core to his experimental vision of the ‘negative capability’ of transcending contexts and routines (see Unger 1997b, see also West 1987). The pragmatist inflection of Unger’s vision of context-dependence and contexttranscendence is evident in his account of self-formation, which depends on a notion of the double aspect of mindedness. There is, he suggests, a modular and formulaic aspect to mind, under which ‘the mind is a zombie’ in so far as it ‘acts under the compulsion of orders’ and ‘exhausts its life in repeated moves’ (Unger 2010, p. 101). Under a second aspect, mind has become ‘spirit’, ‘if by spirit we mean the experience of not being contained or containable by any particular context of life or of thought or by any enumerable list of such contexts’ (2010, p. 101). For Unger, this double sidedness of mind expresses and helps constitute ‘a fundamental and pervasive attribute of our humanity, our transcendence over context’ (2010, p. 103). The second aspect draws into view how ‘the mind enjoys the characteristic powers of recursive infinity, nonformulaic initiative, and negative capability’ (2010, p. 101). In the structural story developed by Unger, the politics itself turns on the conflicts and struggles between these two aspects of social life, the context-preserving and context-transforming. The pragmatist trace in Unger’s thought is evident in his argument that problem-solving activity is located in both context-preserving and context-transforming situations: Some activities are moves within a framework of organization and belief that we take for granted. At the limit, the framework remains unchallenged and even invisible. We naturalize or sanctify it, treating as natural fact or sacred imperative the collective product of our own hands. Other activities are moves about the framework. Such activities change the framework the only way it ordinarily can be changed: piece by piece and step by step. (Unger 2007, p. 56)

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The pragmatist, dynamic sense of context is expressed in the pivotal distinction in Unger’s work between formative structures and formed routines (Unger 1997a, p. 6). On the kind of ‘vertical’ imagination of the structuring of social life discussed at the outset of this chapter, context-making is seen as a law-like process which functions as an external constraint on fields of observable action. For Unger, context-making does not exist on another plane at all. Formative contexts and routine activities are intimately related aspects of any field of activity. The distinction is not a stark one of different ontological layers. Unger insists that it is important to maintain a sense of ‘the relativity of the distinction between contextpreserving and context-breaking activities’ (Unger 1997a, p. 22). The distinction between formative contexts and routine actions is, in turn, crucial to differentiating between conflict and compromise within existing contexts, and conflicts over formative contexts (Unger 1997a, p. 7). Rather than presenting this difference as a stark contrast between mutually exclusive dynamics, Unger renders the difference in terms of rolling engagements with formative contexts and transformations of new routines. Nor are the routines of daily life seen as a field of consensus; they are seen by Unger as an ‘endless series of petty conflicts’. These may be ‘context-preserving disputes’, but there is no fundamental difference between these and context-transforming struggles: ‘Some circumstances encourage escalation while others discourage it. But neither the actual occurrence of this escalation nor its outcome is governed by higher-order laws’ (Unger 1997a, p. 74). In Unger’s work, then, social change is understood as a process of ‘disentrenchment’ of formative contexts, based on the idea that ‘we can change not only the content but also the force of our formative contexts: their relative immunity to challenge and their active encouragement to a structure of social division and hierarchy’ (Unger 1997a, p. 77). A fundamental premise of this argument is that formative contexts do not make up an ‘indivisible package’, as in deep structure social theory: The major institutional or imaginative components of a formative context are often changed piecemeal. Their replacement reshapes some of the deals and conflicts that reenact a scheme of social division and hierarchy and that determine the uses to which economic capital, governmental power, and scientific knowledge are put. Such revisions typically destabilize some parts of the established framework while strengthening others. (Unger 1997a, p. 78) The significance of Unger’s social theory lies therefore in a revised view of the relations between stability, conflict, destabilisation, and change. Rather than opposing formed actions and formative contexts, he argues that we need to understand how ‘the ordinary workings of a formative context make context change possible’ (Unger 1997a, p. 150). The task of the ‘radicalized pragmatism’ recommended by Unger is to shorten the distance between ‘contextpreserving’ and ‘context-transforming’ activities. And herein lies the meaning of ‘democracy’ in Unger’s thought: Society and thought can be organized to lengthen the distance between the ordinary moves we take within the established limits and the exceptional moves by which we redefine these limits. When we lengthen the distance, transformation depends on trauma: ruin becomes the condition of change. We shorten the distance by arranging our social and discursive practices so that the transformation of the structures becomes a constant extension of the way we go about our ordinary business. 138

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Transformation will become less dependent on calamity. It will be rendered banal and be sucked into our everyday experience. (2007, p. 57) Unger’s thought presents an example of an alternative logical geography of action, rooted in a form of programmatic structural analysis. This alternative approach hinges on three related themes: the idea that all action is embedded in contexts, but that those contexts are always open to transformation; a non-totalising image of the relationships between different parts of social formations, rather than assuming that component parts make up an indivisible system; and an account of transformation as a process that takes place piecemeal, step by step rather than in moments of punctual rupture.

Conclusion: telling contextual stories The common problematic of varied strands of critical social theory is the identification of the possibility of social change. This concern is shared by accounts of relational spatiality in fields like human geography and urban studies (of both Marxist and post-structuralist varieties); in theories of structuration and the flourishing field of practice theory; in movements to embrace the non- and more-than-human dimensions of social life associated with actornetwork theory and assemblage theory; in new materialisms of various sorts; as well as in explicitly politicised versions of ontological theorising. Across this range of traditions, the meaning of agency certainly shifts and mutates, sometimes having an individualistic inflection, sometimes more collective, sometimes focussing on purposive modes of action, sometimes on much more generalising ideas of ‘making a difference’, sometimes concerned to assert the scope for human agency in relation to impersonal structural forces, and sometimes concerned to delimit the scope of such action by placing agency in a wider web of entanglements, dependencies, vulnerabilities, and responsibilities. But across this variety, the recurring theoretical imperative is the affirmation of the changeability of the world. This is the guiding imperative even of the most expansive conceptualisations of agency, understood not by reference to notions of intentionality or purposive action, but to formal ideas about the capacity to bring about change (or maintain stability). I have suggested here that rather than continuing to think of analysis in terms of a contrast between observed and fundamental dynamics – an image of structure that remains latent in even post-structural or non-representational thought – it might be more rewarding to think of structural analysis as genre that is sensitive to variable ratios between scenes and the actions enacted within and upon them. I have developed this argument here through an elucidation of Roberto Unger’s work. He provides resources for a critical account of the first of these approaches, and a clear and ambitious elaboration of the alternative approach. His critique of structure fetishism is integrally related to the development of an alternative conceptual vocabulary in which the multi-dimensional contextuality of social life is given a central place. In the terms outlined at the start of the chapter, Unger develops a particular style of structural story, in which the background to events and actions is presented in ways that support a vision of experimental, programmatic change, in contrast to a melodramatic-tragic narrative of rupture and recuperation. Unger’s conceptual distinction between formative contexts and formed routines informs an argument that political conflict revolves around the tension between two aspects of life – the context-preserving and the context-transforming. In this story, existing forms can always be stretched and transformed. It is always possible to do more than merely rebel against existing contexts or create wholly new ones, since it is possible to 139

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build contexts ‘that allow more fully for their own revision than the contexts now established’ (2007, p. 103). Unger helps us see that what is most at stake in different imagined ratios between the scenes and actions of social life are contrasting views of the vocation of critical scholarship. In one version of critique, being critical is all about revealing that structures of power that always lies behind observable phenomena, through a debunking manoeuvre of defamiliarisation of one sort or another (see Latour 1997). It is assumed in this genre of storytelling that demonstrating the made-ness of phenomena – their social construction, their historical formation, or their assemblage – is equivalent to demonstrating both the possibility and the validity of changing them through wilful and deliberate social action. On this view, structures constrain a normatively valued core of freedom of action. Alternatively, being critical can be thought of more modestly, as a matter of clarifying the pressures and limits that orient possibilities of action in particular situations. On this view, the structuring of social relations is understood as an enabling condition of action, not least recursive action that seeks to reshape those very conditions.

References Anderson, P., 1992. Roberto Unger and the politics of empowerment. In: A zone of engagement. London, Verso, 130–148. Barnett, C., 1999. Deconstructing context: exposing Derrida. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24 (3), 277−293. Barnett, C., 2017. The priority of injustice: locating democracy in critical theory. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Barnett, C., 2019. Logical geographies of action: what are debates about emotions about? [online]. nonsite.org, No. 30. Available from: https://nonsite.org/the-ascent-of-affect/ [Accessed 8 December 2021]. Barthes, R., 1988. Saussure, the sign, democracy. In: The semiotic challenge. Oxford: Blackwell, 151–156. Bourdieu, P., 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burke, K., 1945. A grammar of motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Couldry, N., 2011. Unravelling the myth of the mediated center. In: G. Lynch, J. Mitchell, and A. Strhan, eds. Religion, media and culture: a reader. London: Routledge. Derrida, J., 1978. Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences. In: Writing and difference. London: Routledge, 278−294. Derrida, J., 1988. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Dosse, F., 1998. Empire of meaning: the humanization of the social sciences. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dunn, J., 1990. Unger’s Politics and the appraisal of political possibility. In: Interpreting Political Responsibility. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 71–89. Dussel, E., 2008. Twenty theses on politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dussel, E., 2013. Ethics of liberation in the age of globalization and exclusion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Eagleton, T., 2000. Base and superstructure revisited. New Literary History, 31 (2), 231–240. Fligstein, N. and McAdam, D., 2012. A theory of fields. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giddens, A., 1984. The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hägerstrand, T., 1984. Presence and absence: a look at conceptual choices and bodily necessities. Regional Studies, 18 (5), 373−380. Harvey, D., 1973. Social justice and the city. London: Edward Arnold. Haslanger, S., 2015. Social structure, narrative and explanation. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 45 (1), 1–15. Haslanger, S., 2016. What is a (social) structural explanation? Philosophical Studies, 173 (1), 113–130. Joas, H. and Knöbl, W., 2009. Social theory: twenty introductory lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kymlicka, W., 1994. Communitarianism, liberalism, and superliberalism. Critical Review, 8 (2), 263−284.

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Structural Stories Latour, B., 1997. A few steps towards the anthropology of the iconoclastic gesture. Science in Context, 10 (1), 63–83. Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, J.L., 2009. Social structures. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Osborne, P., 2000. Philosophy in cultural theory. London: Routledge. Pêcheux, M., 1988. Discourse: structure or event? In: C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the interpretation of culture. London: Macmillan, 633–650. Sahlins, M., 1976. Culture and practical reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, M., 2000. Culture in practice. New York: Zone Books. Sewell, W., 1992. A theory of structure: duality, agency, and transformation. American Journal of Sociology, 98 (1), 1–29. Smith, P., 1988. Discerning the subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Swyngedouw, E., 2018. Promises of the political: insurgent cities in a post-political environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Trubek, D., 1990. Programmatic thought and the critique of the social disciplines. In: M. Perry, ed. Critique and construction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 232–241. Unger, R.M. 2010. Free trade reimagined: the world division of labour and the method of economics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Unger, R.M., 1997a. Politics: the central texts. London: Verso. Unger, R.M., 1997b. Science and politics between domesticated and radicalized pragmatism. Science in Context, 10 (1), 85−95. Unger, R.M., 1998. Democracy realized: the progressive alternative. London: Verso. Unger, R.M., 2005. What should the left propose? London: Verso. Unger, R.M., 2007. The self-awakened: pragmatism unbound. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Unger, R.M., 2019. The knowledge economy. London: Verso. West, C., 1987. Between Dewey and Gramsci: Unger’s emancipatory experimentalism. Northwestern University Law Review, 81 (4), 941–952. Williams, R., 1977. Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society. New York: Oxford University Press. Young, I.M., 2002. Lived body vs gender: reflections on social structure and subjectivity. Ratio, 15 (4), 410–428.

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12 INNOVATION AT THE LIMITS OF SOCIAL CHANGE Uncertainty and Design in the Anthropocene Lauren Rickards, Kevin Grove, and Stephanie Wakefield Everyday innovation Located outside the Morganza levee system on an old bend of the Mississippi River, workingclass fishing community Old River Landing floods yearly. During the river’s increasingly frequent floods, water inundates structures and fishing camps for weeks and sometimes months. But, rather than abandon the area, residents – some full, others part-time – have made their structures amphibious. Drawing on the region’s tradition of camps and swamp living and using modern hurricane proofing and industrial materials, they have retrofitted homes, trailers, and a bar-restaurant with support poles and Styrofoam blocks to allow their structures to rise with the water. While management agencies and experts typically deem living in flood zones dangerous, for people at Old River Landing – none of whom are experienced architects – water is simply a problem to be worked around. They drew up plans based on the weight of their structures and belongings, watched YouTube instructional videos, learned from each others’ efforts, and got parts through friends in the oil industry. Explains amphibious restaurant owner Jacques Lacour, ‘I mean, it’s a sit down with coffee and calculator kind of math. But it’s not complicated. You do the measurements. And people have been doing this since the 1800s, although I don’t think they had the advantage of Styrofoam’. In the Anthropocene, we are all outside the levee, as it were: situated outside and beyond technologies of modern security like barriers and floodwalls, as well as the strictures of modern modes of thought. But rather than the chaos authoritarians warn against, or heightened neoliberal regulation that critics warn (or embrace), beyond these barriers lies a growing interest in everyday technical practice to construct habitable worlds. In this vein, the story of Old River Landing need not be read as another example of poor peoples’ ingenuous ability to survive inevitable negative conditions imposed on them. Instead, it illustrates the possibility of freely devising the means of inhabiting the part of Earth one loves, on one’s own terms. This is a pragmatic, powerful approach to living with and also against natural forces. From this vantage point, materials like Styrofoam are seen as open to free use. In this chapter, we explore an eclectic array of situations ‘outside the levee’, including that of the world as a whole. In doing so, we suggest that innovation is increasingly posited as a catchall response. Through its historical association with designerly thinking, and before that, religion, innovation has sidestepped its bounds as a specific or exceptional form of social change 142

DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-14

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to become, instead, a universal tool – a generic problem space – for repeatedly reorienting humans to a world that increasingly feels it is slipping beyond our knowledge and control.

Innovation beyond innovators and intent Innovation as a mode of social change is typically pictured as an uneven scattering of exceptional human interventions across time and space. Innovation is envisaged against a static background, one animated by myriad processes but of a cyclical, unthinking character. In this dominant framing, someone’s successful attempt at innovation ‘adds value’ by injecting some deliberate and positive direction – by improving and activating. The tautological appeal of innovation’s ‘value add’ means that despite being framed as exceptional (new) it is now lauded as a goal for everyone and everything. All of us are now called on to be innovators in our lives. Innovation is seen to offer a solution for everything from sluggish profits to poor governance, from suboptimal sports performance to lack of career progression. Somewhat ironically for those who present themselves as Innovators, this valorisation of their craft as a solution for all ills has led to a democratisation of who counts as an innovator, ushering in a deeper and arguably unintended form of social change. Rather than innovation being seen as the product of a great inventor, or as something that comes out of a designated ‘Research and Innovation’ sector or department, innovation is becoming something that everyone is seen to have a stake and skill in (e.g., Hillgren 2013, Ingram 2015, Pamuk et al. 2014). In some quarters, the democratisation of innovation is limited to recognising the need to expand formal research and innovation processes to include various publics as ‘stakeholders’ within so-called ‘innovation systems’ and, now, what is referred to as ‘innovation ecosystems’ (e.g., Granstrand and Holgersson 2020). In other quarters, however, this move towards participatory methods has progressed past mere inclusion to actually challenge the idea that some groups are more innovative or more crucial to distributed innovation than others (Chilvers and Kearnes 2016). It is a move that parallels efforts in the related field of ‘design thinking’. While formal Design still exists, the extension of its principles into a ‘way of thinking’ has demystified the meaning of design (Manzini 2016). Design has become something that not only capital D Designers in round spectacles have a claim on, but that even children can be schooled in. The same evolution (innovation?) is apparent in thinking on innovation. As a mode of practice, innovation is also now identified in previously unexpected places such as traditional farming and government bureaucracies. Our use of the phrase ‘mode of practice’ here gestures to the understanding of practice advanced by social practice theory – one in which individual actors are decentred to bring to the fore the connected purposeful processes that they, along with an array of material entities and cultural meanings, are enrolled in (e.g., Shove and Spurling 2013). Innovation as a practice becomes a process in which the actors involved are not only diverse but backgrounded to the process itself. Dominant ideas about innovation capture its dual meaning as process and product, as verb and noun. While the recent emphasis on innovation as a process is useful in many ways, it is important not to abandon the idea of innovation as a product because it helps us see innovation as not only an increasingly widespread means of generating change, but as change itself. As such, innovation becomes freed of not only actors but of intent. It ushers in a more consequentialist lens on innovation that reveals innovation as often accidental, involuntary, and unexpected. 143

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The idea of innovation as sometimes unintentional and even involuntary resonates with the ‘theory of induced innovation’ (that was first developed by R.R. Nelson and others at the RAND Corporation), which highlights how a change in operating environment (e.g., science policy) can force people (e.g., American space scientists) to adapt and innovate. New institutional economics has reinforced this focus on context, emphasising especially the potentially enabling effect of endogenous factors such as institutional (e.g., policy) settings (Hira, A. and Hira, R. 2000). Increasingly, exogenous drivers are also recognised, fuelling many of the now common stories of ‘ordinary people’ innovating under adversity, such as the residents of Old River Landing. Such stories have been central to reclaiming innovation from elites as an inherent human capability. They have also added weight to the idea of innovation as a continual and often unconscious human practice – as a form of never-ending adaptation in an inescapably dynamic world. While notions of induced innovation downplay intent, they remain focused on human actors. If they are instead combined with insights about innovation as a practice, and pushed further to frame innovation as a general process, we start to see that the reliance on humans can dissolve. Innovation becomes something that is inherent to the world, not just the human species. Rather than just a source of materials within innovation practices, or an ‘environmental change’ driver underlying innovation among humans, the non-human realm becomes the source of innovation. Rather than exogenous to innovation, environmental change becomes integral to innovation – with far-reaching consequences for what we think of as ‘social change’. In the remainder of this chapter, we build on this argument to offer two more. First, in the following section we highlight multiple scenes of innovation that stretch from the molecular to the planetary. While vastly different in scale, these scenes all utilise innovation as a problem space. They all represent efforts to govern human-nonhuman relations in ways that manoeuvre around the limits of human knowledge and control. They indicate that we cannot think ‘social change’ without simultaneously thinking through the ways the social is bound up in the bio, the eco, the techno (see Sam Kinsley’s chapter, this volume), and the geo (see Nigel Clark’s chapter, this volume). We elaborate this argument that innovation innovates human control. We argue that the newfound interest in innovation extends the modernist compulsion towards totalising control, reworking rather than breaking from it. Key here is to understand innovation in relation to the emergence of designerly, cybernetic thinking, particularly ‘designerly’ transformations in political economy at an ontological level. What this means is that at stake in the question of innovation is the question of how we orient thought and practice in relation to the distinction between the human and non-human and what values we use to do so.

Scales and scenes of innovation Since the mid-twentieth century, the compulsion to innovate has reshaped thought and action in diverse areas of everyday life and governmental practice. Our brief overview here is by no means exhaustive, but instead identifies exemplary indications of a felt need to innovate and experiment with both self and world in an array of seemingly disconnected fields, at scales stretching from the microbial to the inter-planetary, and using components of the world stretching from the proudly artificial to the seemingly natural. What unites these diverse cases, we argue, is a common deployment of innovation as a problem space. That is, much like society (Donzelot 1991), economy (Mitchell 2002), poverty (Escobar 1995), development (Cowen and Shenton 1996), and disasters (Hewitt 1983) – and, we discuss below, design – ‘innovation’ has become a space for critically reflecting on the limits of the 144

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present and strategically intervening to create new modes of governing human-non-human relations. The demand for innovation, we suggest, is an expression of the limits of human control. Innovation names an attempt to develop new ways of sensing, knowing, and intervening in social, psychic, and environmental worlds that constantly exceed calculated human regulation. Faced with seemingly limitless anxieties, neuroses, declines, failures, and collapses, the demand to innovate is a demand to re-engage with those excessive and recalcitrant forces that constantly refuse to bend to human will. At the bodily scale, we can point to the widespread taking up of practices of health and fitness in the last decade. Here practices like natural movement, street workout, and CrossFit, or app-based practices of mindfulness or stoicism, are seen by people of diverse backgrounds as a means of improving physical and mental health, challenging neoliberal cultures of chronic disease and anxiety, and reclaiming what are considered inherent human potentials (Wakefield 2020a). In a contradictory yet similar vein, the medicalisation of psychotherapy in many Western states – particularly in the United States, but also across North America and Europe more broadly – offers a range of psychotropic medications that promises to improve psychic functioning and mental health through more explicitly artificial means of pharmacology. These innovations respond to a range of anxieties and neuroses attached to precarious life (Berardi 2017, Lazzarato 2014). The metabolic functions of the human body themselves do not avoid the demand of innovation – if recent research on designerly efforts to know and improve the complex microbiomes of our digestive systems through dietary interventions is any indication (Lorimer 2016). More than just something contained to a pill, shot or stomach, the microbiotic world is increasingly recognised as encompassing virtually the whole biosphere. As such, innovating in and through the microbiome has become part of a wider project focused on the epigenetic character of human health – one that recognises that, for better or worse, the genetic infrastructure of any of us is inseparable from our and our ancestors’ environments (Mansfield and Guthman 2015, Meloni 2019, Stallins 2012). Merged into the one problem space, innovating on the human genome and human environment thus blurs the human-nonhuman boundary while trying to manipulate it for human benefit. On an ecosystem scale, we might equally think of Pleistocene Park. The 50-square-mile geoengineering experiment by a Russian family in northeastern Siberia seeks to delay Arctic permafrost thaw by recreating Mammoth Steppe ecosystem that existed during the last glacial period. The creators of the park are engineering the plains landscape and introducing bison, oxen, and, eventually, genetically cloned woolly mammoths. Although sometimes portrayed as a ‘rewilding’ experiment, like many other rewilding projects this is an experiment within Anthropocene contexts and legacies that will produce new, unforeseen, humannature configurations (Lorimer 2016, Wakefield 2020a). Moving from the terrestrial up to the atmosphere, we find geoengineering projects such as Tianhe (Sky River), a cloud seeding effort by Chinese state-owned corporation Aerospace Science and Technology. The largest rain-engineering project ever attempted, the project aims to increase rainfall across the Tibetan Plateau in the face of recent droughts by sending small silver iodide particles on the winds into the atmosphere (Bluemling et al. 2020). Sky River is part of China’s broader exploration of weather modification techniques – efforts to ‘tame the weather’ (Chien et al. 2017) reportedly inspired by Russian rain control projects, from post-Chernobyl efforts to manage radioactive rain, to more recent efforts to prevent rain on the May Day celebration in 2016. These examples of engineering environmental systems are extreme and spectacular variants of more mundane forms of techno-ecological innovation that have seeped into environmental 145

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management over the past decades. Work on ecological restoration, for example, has long emphasised the field’s transgressively experimental nature. Restoration projects such as Montrose Point in Chicago (Gross and Hoffmann-Riem 2005) or controversial debates around the use of Natural Channel Design in stream restoration (Lave 2012) highlight how restoration blurs the boundaries between laboratory and world, and research and policy application, even as they open up the space of experiment to a wider array of actors across sciencestate-society boundaries. Importantly, this generates new sources of contestation over, for example, the development of baseline parameters that define the ‘ideal’ ecosystem that the current, ‘degraded’ system should be restored to (Gross 2010). The experimental nature of many environmental management initiatives feeds into the wider concern with the quality of environmental governance institutions that pervades work on resilience. Institutions are a classic, perhaps even defining example of artefacts that mediate relations between complex systems. Experimentation with new forms of ecological restoration is accompanied by institutional innovation aiming to facilitate adaptive management and support the particular scientific, financial, and participatory demands of ecological restoration initiatives, particularly large-scale initiatives such as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (Dengler 2007). Associated with the rise of ‘design’ that we discuss below, new institutional economists such as the late Nobel Prize-winning Elinor Ostrom, resilience ecologists and sustainability scientists assert that institutions for managing change in complex social and ecological systems cannot be derived from panaceas – that is, from one-sizefits-all (i.e., deductive, transcendentally determined) governance models such as government ownership or the market – but instead need to reflect the complex, emergent, and contextually specific preferences of diverse interest groups (E. Ostrom et al. 2007). Rather than assuming that ‘the social’ is a homogenous and unified object of expert economic knowledge whose preferences can be known and planned for in advance, new institutional economists working in fields such as public choice theory have developed a neoliberal vision of political economy organised around a pragmatic sense of the social as an emergent effect of dynamic, interrelated, and thus unpredictable individual preferences. Providing for social welfare in the face of this complex reality requires, for these thinkers, developing flexible, innovative institutional arrangements, such as polycentric governance, to facilitate adaptation and learning (Collier 2011, 2017, see also Buchanan 1959, Kiser and Ostrom 1982, V. Ostrom 1980, 1997). Many institutions at the national level have tried to adopt new institutional economicsstyle innovations. However, at the same time, the ability of national institutions to manage the complex, entangled problems of the Anthropocene, notably climate change, has been questioned, leading to innovation in the scale and form of governance itself. In particular, planetary scale global governance structures – Earth systems governance (Biermann 2014) – has been embraced because ‘a global problem demands a global approach that analyses and addresses the scope of the entire world’ (Hsiang and Mendis 2016, p. 605). Motivated by anticipation of future risks (Anderson 2010), and in contrast to the ‘down to e/Earth’ approach of much community resilience work (Rickards et al. 2018), earth systems governance attempts to ‘steer’ the planet away from existing destructive trajectories and towards a ‘Good Anthropocene’ (Neyrat 2019). Illustrative of such efforts are those of former-Stockholm Resilience Centre executive director Johan Rockström and associated Earth systems and social scientists to identify and govern the ‘planetary boundaries’ (including climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, and ocean acidification) of the planet’s ‘safe operating space’ (Rockström et al. 2009). In response to a planet on the brink (See Castree, this volume), Rockström and an international team of scientists are seeking to probe and identify the Holocene’s key earth processes and manage them in a way that maintains ‘our way of life … 146

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and how we have organised society, technology, and economies around them’ (Rockström 2009, p. 2). Along with wider international attempts to reduce carbon emissions and keep global warming below 2°C or even 1.5°C, this means governing collective ‘anthropogenic perturbations’ (Rockström 2009, p. 2) in earth processes in order to try to contain their negative effects and encourage beneficial earth system relationships and outcomes. Other proposed Earth systems governance innovations include design theorist Benjamin Bratton’s (2019) calls to guide and shape the Anthropocene’s risks and limits by designing the ‘stack’ of automated, algorithmic human-technology-planet entanglements into a new whole earth infrastructural network. For Bratton – whose New Normal lab at the Strelka Institute functions as a sandpit for some of these ideas – the Anthropocene demands that planning and design are understood in terms of co-constitutive eco-cybernetic entanglement, not human agency. Indicative of what he envisages are automated decision-making systems and Human Exclusion Zones, such as factories run by robots or parts of Earth set aside for rewilding. In particular, he calls for an automated climate mitigating planetary governance structure to reroute the currently irrational ‘stack’ towards surveillance and management of carbon flows, conservation, and production. Like smart city projects that make use of myriad ubiquitous computing technologies to sense, collect, and manage environmental data (Gabrys 2014), such proposals seek to calibrate, integrate, and manage data on and responses to temperature, emissions, or precipitation – but at a planetary scale. At the same time, as a host of key processes and infrastructures are automated, human debate and decision-making can be edited out, leaving socio-planetary flows. These planetary governance innovations exist alongside private space colonisation experiments couched as an escape hatch from an increasingly degraded Earth (Rowan 2018). Elon Musk has built and successfully tested rockets on which SpaceX intends to send humans to Mars by the mid-2020s and predicts beginning colonisation as early as 2025. Or as world’s wealthiest person Jeff Bezos recently described, with resources on Earth running out, ‘space is the only way to go’. Rather than colonising Mars, Bezos plans to build whole artificial worlds out of technology – O’Neill cylinders rotating to create artificial gravity – orbiting Earth and able to support one million people each. Some of the cylinders will be agricultural areas irrigated by drones, while some will be cities and others more recreational (Wakefield 2020b). The demand for innovation thus encompasses the artefactual human design of life-worlds that range from the scale of the microbial world of digestive systems and the psychic world of the embodied individual, to artificial peninsulas, cities, ecosystems, to steerage of the Earth as a whole and the re/creation of extra-planetary living environments. At first glance, there may appear to be little in common across these diverse scales and spaces, but as we have asserted, they all trouble conventional ideas of human control and they all illustrate the resultant rise of innovation as a problem space and as the attempted reorientation of human-nonhuman relations. In contrast to the often-lamented post-humanist humbling of the human in the face of planetary and vital excess, and in contrast to a simple materialist celebration of non-human agency, the demand for innovation marshals cybernetic techniques and designerly sensibilities to reinvigorate the modernist promise of totalising human control. We turn now to examine this relationship between innovation and design in more detail.

Situating innovation in the Anthropocene In the Anthropocene, the modernist ideal of control is being hollowed out by deep uncertainty. Rather than being abandoned, however, it is being reworked into a radically new form, one that strives to generate reflexive and self-organising adaptations – innovations – to 147

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emergent environments. Interwoven with the pervasive enthusiasm for innovation are many dimensions and versions of this new quest for some form of control, such as adaptive management, adaptive governance, and dynamic adaptive policy pathways, to name a few. Common to them is an attempt to strip back the ambition to know and understand to the more basic and versatile ambition to inform, manage and be resilient (Chandler 2018). The emergence of resilience as a governmental objective represents the adaptation of, rather than transgression of, modernist efforts to control the human and non-human other. With the Anthropocene increasingly generating a vision of planetary excess immanent to human activity, contemporary scientists, engineers, financiers, economists, developers, and self-promoters are recalibrating the foundational modernist will to truth in relation to this ontology of socio-ecological complexity. Whether at the scale of the Earth system or local ecological systems, this new ontological stance approaches the non-human as an emergent artefact amenable to reflexive cybernetic regulation. As Neyrat (2019) also detects, the shift in ideologies of modern control expressed in these visions is subtle but important. In contrast to conventional modernist control, the new innovative, flexible model of control is not based on humans imagining an ideal form and then acting on an inert nature to try to create that form in reality (in the sense of Marx’s famous distinction between the bee and the architect, or what Galarraga and Szerszynski (2012) call the ‘climate architect’ approach to geoengineering). Control here does not express the unencumbered and rational action of the will (or the intellect, or consciousness) on its corporeal other. Instead, the immanence of the Anthropocene is accepted to overwhelm human rational capacity. With consciousness immersed within complex environments in which relational effects cannot be known or predicted in advance, human attempts to bend nature to human will or regulate unintended consequences are understood to be quickly outpaced by complex feedbacks across spatial and temporal scales. What is left is experimentation and adaptability as an end in and of itself; in other words – continual and unbounded innovation. In the case of geoengineering, Galarraga and Szerszynski refer to this kind of stance on the world as the ‘climate artisan’ approach in which the focus is ‘less on the final form to be taken by the climate than on the process whereby the en-forming of climate takes place’, a process characterised by ‘recursive learning’ (Szerszynski 2017, p. 224). Concern about the basic problem of decision-making in conditions of complexity has a contemporary intensity to it, but it is not a recent phenomenon. Indeed, understanding the history of this concern is key to understanding what is at stake. Drawing on in-depth prior research (e.g., Grove 2018), we assert that much of this way of thinking can be traced back to the cybernetic behavioural scientist Herbert Simon and his contemporaries in Cold War United States and the existential threat of nuclear annihilation (Simon 1996, see also Crowther-Heyck 2005, Heyck 2015). For Simon, decision-making in the face of complexity cannot be reduced to an optimisation problem, because complex systems are, by their nature, not amenable to the total knowledge and predictive certainty that optimisation demands. Instead, it involves the ongoing pursuit of ‘satisficing’ outcomes: sub-optimal but nonetheless acceptable system states that progressively align complex, external, and ever-changing environmental conditions to an individual’s interests (Simon 1955). Achieving satisficing solutions involves a stepwise process of a targeted intervention into a complex environment, reflexively monitoring the effects of this intervention on system performance, and then adjusting the intervention in response to the previously unknowable environmental changes the intervention provoked (Simon 1996, 1997). This adaptive process gradually synthesises ‘external’ environmental conditions with the ‘interiority’ of an individual’s interests – whether this individual is a person, community, state, corporation, or some other entity that can be grasped through

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the principles of methodological individualism – and continues to do so as the environment changes (Kiser and Ostrom 1982). Key for our purposes here, Simon specified the threshold between a more or less stable interior and a complex and emergent exterior environment as the location of artifice. In his cybernetic rendering, artifice refers to any form (material or institutional) that mediates the complex relation between an individual and its surroundings with the aim of achieving moments of synergy between the inside and outside. Moreover, the process of creating artifice is, for Simon, the process of design. In his influential definition, ‘everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (Simon 1996, p. 112). Design, in essence, names the art of aligning an interior with an exterior in the absence of transcendental determinants of value. While there are today multiple and competing definitions of design that focus alternatively on, for example, designers’ subjective characteristics that allow them to exercise this art, Simon sought to render design as a scientific process of identifying and determining appropriate ‘courses of action’ to achieve satisficing solutions. In other words, Simon did not attempt to rationalise the outcome or product of a design process, but rather sought to rationalise the decision-making process itself: the decisionmaking process through which the individual reflexively and continuously adapts a complex environment to their interests. In this scientistic formulation of design, truth is no longer transcendental; it does not express an objective reality that rational human science can reveal or test in its totality. Instead, truth is now immanent and relational, an expression of the functionality of any object in relation to its environment at a given time. To know an object, after design, is not to analytically understand its objective essence, but to pragmatically apprehend its emplaced, functional essence (Buchanan 1992, Groys 2008, Foster 2002). This designerly reformulation of truth and control brings us back to the original definition of innovation. As Godin (2017) notes, originally innovation referred to a conservative return to the origin before the fall. As such, innovation gestures towards a threshold between interior and exterior: a disjointed and mismatched relation between an ideal form (the origin before the fall) and an existing situation or lived reality (the degraded existence after the fall). The topological schema of innovation thus lies at the heart of design as the art of ‘devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (Simon 1996, p. 112). Design names the process that brings about innovation, that transforms a degraded or at least altered reality into a more desired state – the secular fulfilment and realisation of the individual’s interests. But it does so in a way that inverts the directionality of innovation. As an outgrowth of the modern aesthetic, innovation is not a return to original form, but rather involves pragmatic interventions to simply push reality beyond the limits of the present. This is a practical form of Kantian critique that recognises contingency in the conditions of the present and innovates in order to progressively improve this present. Situating recent interest in innovation in relation to the history of design shines new light on the political and philosophical stakes of innovation. It helps explain what Braun (2015) identifies as a contemporary demand to experiment and innovate with the self – and with communities, ecosystems, the world as an infrastructurally-mediated whole – in ways that position innovation as a self-evident, commonsensical solution to contemporary matters of concern. In particular situating innovation in relation to design highlights continuities between the newfound concern with understanding and facilitating innovation (and ‘being’ innovative) and transformations in modern subjectivity that have been playing out over the past century. What Nietzsche famously hailed as the ‘death of God’ gestures to the collapse of a sense of self defined in relation to an ontologically detached,

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all-seeing and all-knowing transcendental being. As Boris Groys (2008) writes, the Christian ethic has long been defined by a kind of self-conscious and reflexive ‘design of the soul’ for the view and judgement of God, with salvation hanging in the balance. But the so-called death of God transformed the significance of the soul: rather than an attempt to mould the soul as an ideal image acceptable to God, the soul instead became ‘the sum of the relationships into which the human body in the world entered’ (Groys 2008, p. 2). From this perspective, the ‘design of the soul’ no longer takes place in relation to transcendent judgement, but in relation to the immanent judgmental gaze of earthly ‘others’. The modern subject, in other words, inhabits a threshold position as both object and subject of a judgmental gaze: constantly passing judgement on other humans’ self-presentation, while reflexively designing their own self-presentation in relation to others’ judgments. For Groys, this reflexive self-design is the essence of modern design: ‘Where religion once was, design has emerged. The modern subject now has a new obligation: the obligation to self-design, an aesthetic presentation as ethical subject’ (Groys 2008, p. 2). The death of God thus compels individuals to self-design, a compulsion that, for Groys and other scholars of design history and design theory, culminates in the consolidation of a modern design aesthetic in the 1919 creation of the Bauhaus design school (Baudrillard 1981, Foster 2002, Fry 2010). By stripping away ornamentation and reducing objects to their functional essence, the Bauhaus – and the modern design movement it gave birth to in fields such as product design or architecture1 – transformed the location of truth from a hidden, transcendental essence to the threshold of artifice: the functional relation between subject and world. The radical nature of the Bauhaus can be found here, in the way it attempts to make truth readily available to each and every individual: design attempts to ‘make everyone else capable of seeing the things as they are revealed in God’s gaze’ (Groys 2008, p. 3). While Simon (1996) may have famously differentiated his scientistic slant on design from more subjective and interpretive approaches held by Bauhaus-inspired architects, they nonetheless share a common concern with the quality of relation between interior and exterior, subject and world, and the way this relation is mediated by artifice. Artifice, for both Simon and the Bauhaus, is the site of the production of truth in both a complex world that is irreducible to totalising knowledge and predictive control (Simon) and a world devoid of transcendent, essentialised meaning and value (Bauhaus). Contemporary calls for innovation in the face of social and ecological complexity are thus historically conditioned by the emergence of the modern design aesthetic. The latter inscribed a will to design within the structure of not only modern subjectivity (the compulsion to self-design) but scientific practice. Through the emergence of cybernetics and complexity thinking, science is being transformed from within. Rather than innovation being a mere add-on to research (as in ‘Research and Innovation’), as an artifice at the threshold of the inside and outside of research institutions, innovation is cannibalising research and science through convergent paradigmatic, methodological and institutional changes (Grove and Rickards, 2022). For example, the ‘informational revolution’ (Canguilheim 1994) has not only recalibrated ecological science into resilience ecology, and recalibrated neo-classical economics into new institutional economics (see Chandler 2014, Collier 2017, Grove 2018), but the resultant ideas and metaphors (e.g., innovation ecosystems) are now reshaping the governance of science, academia and innovation. The demand for innovation expresses a contemporary appreciation of the world (whether in terms of guts or planets, technologies or innovation cultures) and the self as objects of artifice amenable to designerly intervention. This contemporary demand both draws on the force of the original, theological sense of innovation as a return to origin, and repurposes it for a world ‘after God’. It reflects ongoing 150

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efforts to re-centre human knowledge and practice around the ‘origin’ of truth in a complex world – where truth is now precariously and provisionally situated at the dynamic threshold between this world and any given subject.

Innovating values If truth is no longer securely lodged in the transcendence of God but at the threshold of self and world, truth loses its essentialised meaning and value. By challenging transcendentals, innovation has helped innovate values from foundational truths to an indeterminate field of ethical and political contestation. If we follow Nietzsche, who reminds us that transvaluation is ‘the capacity not only to destroy the values that descend from the transcendental realm of measure but also to create new values’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 359), then the question the destabilisation of foundational truth opens is: what new values? Flowing into the vacuum at the heart of innovation is a plethora of values that try to capture and rank the relative significance of different relations. Dominant among them is the capitalist relation (e.g., Collard and Dempsey 2017). The emergence of the Anthropocene is a clear indication that values that normalise, perpetuate, and adapt, rather than contest or dismantle, nihilistic capitalist accumulation regimes and structural injustices have proliferated, in part because of capitalism’s capacity to innovate – i.e., to not only generate but to profit from crisis (as John Clarke’s chapter on Crisis in this Handbook discusses). Thus, the innovation challenge today is to innovate away from those values that delimit most conscious applications of the term ‘innovation’ – i.e., those driven by a seemingly insatiable capitalist ‘will to innovate’. Like transcendental truth, these values themselves are actually open to innovation and transvaluation. Indeed, there is a need as well as opportunity to reorient, reprogramme, and redesign innovation to make it better fit the contemporary world. Innovation efforts today need to begin not with the purported fact that we lack the security of transcendental knowledge or meaning, but that we lack the security of a guaranteed existence. They need to face the prospect of the very greatest of social changes: the death of the social. The sort of human innovation we now need is one that is simultaneously more ambitious and more humble than an extension of the cybernetic will to control. It is more inventive and more everyday, acknowledging that the messy, recursive relations between innovation and geo-eco-social change mean that any hope of stabilising life (from the scale of microbia to the planet) relies on working with life. Reinventing innovation by transforming, in this way, the values that have animated it to date is the real social change we need.

Note 1 And even, indirectly, ecological resilience theory; see Grove (2018).

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13 PREFIGURATION Imaginaries Beyond Revolution and the State Anthony Ince

Prefiguration can be broadly defined as the practice by a group or individual of operating in the present according to the principles and values that they promote for the future functioning of society. Many approaches to social change are characterised by a distinction between their overall goals or ends, and the means of achieving said goals. In contrast, prefiguration articulates praxis as a merging of means and ends. Rather than undertaking particular organising logics as a way of achieving an end goal regardless of the extent to which they reflect the principles of that goal, the logics and principles of prefigurative politics are also an integral part of the goal itself. It is therefore at once a material mode of political organising and a distinctive way of understanding what change is and how it emerges. Contemporary considerations of the prefigurative might reference the likes of Occupy!, intentional communities, or perhaps the environmental direct action movements of the 1990s, as exemplars of how people have sought to embed within their present activities the structures, relations, or values of the world they seek to create. Earlier still, they may evoke memories of squatter communities and radical feminism in the 1970s, or 1968 uprisings across the globe. However, prefiguration as a mode of social change has a far longer trajectory, even if it was not named as such. Claimed primarily by libertarian elements of the political left, it can be identified across a much wider range of political, or non-political, affiliations, which are not typically discussed in most of the literature on prefiguration but have potential to complicate and challenge classical narratives. As a review of themes in this literature, this chapter principally focuses on these classical narratives, but there is more work to be done in exploring this wider spectrum of prefigurations. Yet, as we shall see, even within canonical left-libertarian narratives, prefiguration has a wide-ranging set of internal debates that raise fundamental questions about the nature and dynamics of power, agency, and social change. Two broad bodies of literature – social movement studies and political philosophy – form the primary intellectual fields in which prefiguration has been most widely explored. For Marianne Maeckelbergh, ‘prefigurative politics means removing the temporal distinction between the struggle in the present and a goal in the future; instead, the struggle and the goal, the real and the ideal, become one in the present’ (2011, p. 4). As such, prefiguration requires an explicit element of intentionality: one must have a fair idea – even if contested, vague, or shifting – of what kind of future is being sought. The philosopher Benjamin Franks (2018) 154

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has suggested that it is important to distinguish between prefiguration as a core element of an ideology on one hand, and as part of a strategy on the other: while many different political perspectives utilise prefiguration strategically, they may do so only instrumentally, as a means to a more fundamental end that exists independently from it. In contrast, perspectives such as anarchism or feminism consider prefiguration to be a core principle that is inseparable from other fundamental elements of their worldview. In this chapter, I explore the various origins, understandings, and articulations of prefiguration as a mode of social change. After an initial discussion on the origins and variations of prefigurative politics in practice, the chapter is organised around a series of thematic questions that cut across such distinct fields of enquiry. In doing so, the chapter emphasises grounded questions of practice and praxis, destabilising a number of often unhelpful binaries that have been erected in relation to prefiguration. Finally, I consider how prefiguration may develop new constellations of intervention in the fabric of everyday politics, especially in the context of neoliberal austerity and a resurgent far-right.

Genealogies of prefiguration While prefiguration may superficially represent a fairly coherent principle of social change, the idea has multiple origins and genealogies that lead, as we shall see, to multiple iterations in practice (Gordon 2018). Although there are other stories to be told from a less Eurocentric viewpoint, arguably the strongest and most consistent prefigurative tradition stems from European traditions of anarchism. Anarchism emerged from the split in the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) in the late nineteenth century between the supporters of Karl Marx and those who grouped around the likes of Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume, who were expelled in 1872. The latter became collectively known as anarchists. The defeat of the 1871 Paris Commune raised a fundamental disagreement among European communist movements, which lay in the relationship between the over-arching goal of a communist society and the means through which the movement might achieve it (Ross 2016). This second Paris Commune became a central focus for this debate for two reasons. Firstly, it reinforced the experience of previous revolts (notably the French Revolution, which was followed quickly by a restoration of bourgeois power) how effective the ruling class was at appropriating popular struggle and absorbing its strength back into the existing state apparatus. Secondly, it also reinforced the expectation that rebellions would be brutally crushed by the state. The dual questions of recuperation into the existing order on the one hand, and its violent disciplinary arm on the other, thus became a pivotal strategic and ideological foundation for prefigurative politics to emerge among anarchists. Those orbiting Marx and Engels believed that the organs of the present society needed to be appropriated to secure a successful revolution. In this view – which became especially popular during the emergence of state-communist governments in the twentieth century – temporary sacrifices of ideological ‘purity’ were deemed necessary to address the practical matter of preventing counterrevolution (Lenin 1992). By contrast, the anarchists believed that the crushing of the 1871 Commune showed how the state cannot be reformed – not even a state such as France, founded on ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. The continuation of logics of state rule, they argued, would simply replace one form of domination with another. It is in this context where the anarchist Bakunin wrote about Marx, Why it is that he does not perceive that the establishment … of a dictatorship which would perform in some degree the task of chief engineer of the world revolution … 155

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would suffice by itself alone to kill the revolution, or paralyse and pervert all the people’s movements? (1950, n.p.) For Bakunin, and other anarchists (see, e.g., Marshall 1992), any movement for social change must be driven by a unity of means and ends. In other words, the methods used to achieve revolution must be consistent with the intended outcome. The anarchists’ concerns about the dangers of authoritarian socialism proved prophetic in the years following the Russian Revolution in 1917, in which the Bolshevik capture of the Russian state led to new forms of tyranny. As Emma Goldman eloquently later explained, No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, […] the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES. (Goldman 1924, n.p.) Goldman’s perspective articulates a clearly prefigurative view on social change, crucially linking the end goals of political praxis to the means used. This intellectual history of what we now call prefigurative politics illustrates a key tension among different modes of social change: while there is no doubt that Marxists were competent administrators and defenders of state-socialist polities, it is questionable (to say the least) whether these systems represented the liberatory values on which their revolutions were founded. This ultimate failure to establish communism from ‘above’ became starkly apparent as the latter half of the twentieth century developed, and more libertarian forms of socialist politics that rejected both market capitalism and state socialism emerged as a result. The simultaneous blossoming of other struggles for social change – such as women’s and black liberation movements – added both energy and new organisational approaches to this shift. While there is evidence of much earlier examples (Williams 2017), the prefiguration of what Goldman called ‘new values’ played a major part in second-wave feminist thought and practice in the 1960s and 1970s, during which a range of prefigurative approaches were developed (see, e.g., Polletta 2002). This flourishing of experimental political forms also emerged alongside squatting and ‘back to the land’ movements, which sought to develop communal forms of living as futures in the present (e.g., van der Steen et al. 2014). These diverse movements were connected by their shared commitment to experimenting with forms of non-dominating social relations and organisation. Traditional hierarchical forms of political organisation (e.g., a centrally-controlled Party) were jettisoned in favour of a diversity of horizontal approaches that inspired the development of radical counter-publics. Within these movements, especially women’s liberation, prefigurative practices were used not only as living examples but also as models around which debates could be formed, as part of collectively learning and improving. In place of a centralised cadre of highly disciplined leaders, such movements encouraged all participants to develop and implement skills, ideas, and projects as a means of collectively learning how best to reflect the liberatory future they wished to create. While this prefigurative approach nurtured considerable innovation, its rejection of centralised, hierarchical structures often led to a lack of formality and structure, thereby creating opportunities for informal modes of domination to develop and entry points for practices 156

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that contradicted the principles of the group. Such practices could therefore re-enter prefigurative systems unnoticed. Famously, the pamphlet The Tyranny of Structurelessness (Freeman 1972) initiated considerable debate over the extent to which formal structures were necessary for ensuring equity and accountability within feminist collectives. This debate concerning the balance between structure and liberty has continued to this day, not only among feminists but also more broadly within the environmental movement and between different traditions of anarchism (e.g., McQuinn 2009, Wetzel 2010). This processual element highlights one of the central components of prefiguration; namely, its power as a pedagogical tool for learning and development within transformative groups and spaces. Prefiguration demands that activists apply their visions of a better world to the messy realities of life, and thereby motivates them to continually reflect and improve. Despite this long historical tradition of what we might retrospectively label as prefiguration, this specific use of the word ‘prefiguration’ is relatively new. It is therefore important, as Franks (2018) emphasises, to avoid ascribing the label of ‘prefiguration’ post hoc incorrectly to historical texts. With regard to contemporary use of the term, a number of scholars point to texts of the late 1970s, especially the libertarian Marxist Carl Boggs’ writings (e.g., 1977) on the failures of state socialism (Maeckelbergh 2011, Hammond 2015, Raekstad 2018). Boggs criticised orthodox Marxist strategies (such as Leninism and Trotskyism) that utilised the same logics and relations of the system they wished to destroy. Instead, he pointed towards a unity of instrumental and prefigurative principles that oriented struggle and organisation towards revolutionary praxis that was more consistent with the overall aim of a communist society. This effort to reconnect Marxism with a liberatory break from capitalist ways of being and relating resonates with similar leftist movements of that era. The antiauthoritarianism of the soixante-huitards of the 1968 Paris uprising, for example, was premised largely on a libertarianleaning socialism that was ‘neither Washington nor Moscow’. However, arguably the most sustained intellectual thread in Marxism, in relation to the formation of prefigurative praxis, was the autonomia (‘autonomy’) movement in Italy, emerging during the 1960s and 1970s from a grassroots movement that rejected the technocratic authoritarianism that characterised the powerful Italian Communist Party (PCI) at the time. Autonomia was also known as operaismo, or ‘workerism’, to reflect an emphasis on workers’ autonomous agency rather than the leadership of the Party or of capital (Tronti 2019). Rather than accept orders from a distant leadership that mirrored closely the logics of state and capital, autonomia created new forms of organisation at the base. In doing so, they emphasised the agency and collective intellect of the working class themselves, creating autonomous movements, social clubs, worker-led unions, and cultural institutions that embedded proto-communist forms of experimentation into their very structures and relations (Wright 2002). Crucially, this allowed the movement to engage with wider everyday relations concerning social reproduction, leading to new fronts of struggle around women’s reproductive labour and care work (e.g., Federici 1975). This approach emerged largely independently of anarchist influence, and the movement preferred the notion of autogestion (self-management) to describe their prefigurative activities. Nonetheless, clear posthoc cross-fertilisation can be identified during the global anti-capitalist movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which drew strength from both prefigurative anarchistic modes of organisation and the principles of autonomy and self-management as developed by autonomia, among others (Notes from Nowhere 2003). The global anti-capitalist movement, itself partly an outgrowth from a range of prefigurative movements of the 1990s – such as the heterodox anti-authoritarian Marxism of Zapatismo in Mexico and environmental direct action movements in the Global North – represented 157

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a convergence of geographically dispersed prefigurative rubrics from across the globe, bringing lexicons, logics and techniques from global North and South into conversation through common frameworks, epitomised by the People’s Global Action (PGA) hallmarks (e.g., Routledge 2003). PGA outlined prefigurative principles that simultaneously articulated a vision for future societal organisation and a set of operating principles for the management of collectives and ongoing struggles. In each region or context, these hallmarks were implemented differently, but they functioned as a focal point for globally dispersed movements to prefigure common values. This convergence provided a repertoire of prefigurative practices and structures on which later movements have built. Most notably, the tumultuous period following the global financial crash of 2007–2008 led to a wave of movements, epitomised by Occupy! and the Arab Spring, which were heavily focused on the occupation of prominent spaces such as public squares. These occupations of space provided opportunities for prefigurative experimentation to take place on a mass scale – including large-scale provision of infrastructures, such as food and sanitation during the iconic occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo – and often in full view of the world’s media (e.g., van de Sande 2013, Kinna et al. 2019). What we see in these movements is the importance of space in creating moments generative of prefiguration. Not only were structures of decision-making designed to prefigure envisioned future worlds but so were dimensions of everyday social reproduction such as childcare, cooking, health, and sanitation ( Jeffries 2018). For example, in the midst of economic collapse in Greece following the global financial crisis of 2008, reproductive activities were also at the forefront of both social movements and wider neighbourhood survival strategies (Arampatzi 2017). Meanwhile, the prefigurative forms that emerged in Greece influenced other struggles, such as Spain’s Indignados movement, where camps served as territories in which ‘[s]pace was not temporarily filled, but occupied, settled and transformed,’ and in doing so, people ‘recreated the means of daily reproduction’ through such camps (Asara and Kallis forthcoming, n.p.). While much of the literature and activity on prefiguration draws principally from leftist and radical schools of thought, it is also worth considering the variety of other prefigurative practices that exist beyond these relatively small milieux. For example, the long tradition of religious and faith-based prefigurations is well documented. The notion of building the Kingdom of God on Earth is a strong theme running through Christian, Islamic, and other religious teachings (e.g., Gordon 2018, pp. 4–7). The extensive charitable activities that religious groups undertake is often articulated as an effort to ask, for example, ‘what would Jesus do?’ in any given situation (Fiala 2007). In other words, in seeking to be closer to God, one must act in ways consistent with his teachings. In seeking to act in piety as an autonomous, ethical subject, religious forms of prefigurative practice tend, at least superficially, to emphasise intentionality of the individual in contrast to the explicit collectivity of political initiatives. Nonetheless, this is not to suggest that prefigurative political groups such as intentional communities do not sometimes embody a quasi-religious ethos. Moreover, there is certainly a collectivity in much religious practice. For example, the Latin American tradition of liberation theology, emerging in the midtwentieth century, sought to theologically and materially embed critical praxis, through mass social movements and community activism, into traditionally conservative Catholic teachings (Guitierrez 1988). Likewise, the Catholic Worker movement of North America created various communes and houses of hospitality to live in accordance with the unconditional charity and hospitality shown by Christ (see Coy and Douglas 1988). This collectivisation of religious prefiguration is not solely associated with antiauthoritarian or leftist denominations, 158

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but also in more orthodox, or nominally ‘apolitical’, religious activities such as some Christian monastic orders or elements of Islamic Sufism. Still more examples exist that illustrate how prefiguration has multiple expressions beyond the political left. For example, the modernist futurism of twentieth century fascism encouraged its followers to participate in the total immersion of their lives into the fascist ideal. Not only might this involve certain attitudes to daily activities such as work, fitness, and gender roles (e.g., De Grazia 2002) but also an organisational commitment to establishing fascist leadership structures into their movements (e.g., Coupland 2002). Indeed, the development of a fascist culture in Weimar Germany has been noted as a prefigurative agenda (Burns 1983), and developing cultures of practice is a common thread throughout prefigurative projects of all kinds.

Dilemmas and debates Cutting across the various prefigurations discussed in the previous section is a tension between the present and the future that allows for hear-and-now experimentation with forms, relations, and practices for the future, and to provide a practical demonstration of their efficacy for ameliorating life’s pains and enhancing its joys. Nevertheless, there are clear points of difference and disagreement among both scholars and practitioners regarding what prefiguration represents and how it is or ought to be manifested materially. The following section draws from some themes already discussed to engage with three key tensions. Specifically, spatiality, temporality, and the distinction between revolution and reform will focus the conversation on questions of how change happens through a prefigurative lens.

Spatiality and scale Prefiguration is typically understood as primarily a place-based form of political praxis, emphasising long-term, ongoing development within particular projects, collectives, or campaigns (e.g., Yates 2015, Raekstad 2018). As a number of scholars have noted with regards to occupations and squats, territorially carving out and defending spaces allows a relatively stable and bounded spatial framing to support the flourishing of prefigurative politics (e.g., Ince 2012, Halvorsen 2015). The use of space can also provide stable emotional bonds to support the development of prefigurative relations within a group (Farias 2017). Moreover, the use of place may help prefigurative projects to bridge between radical, experimental, or subcultural practices and ‘mainstream’ society through a shared sense of belonging and common frames of reference (Chatterton 2006). As a result of such affinities between prefiguration and place, it has been subject to critique by those who see it as limited in its applicability to larger scale organising. Supporters of prefiguration also recognise this risk: ‘prefigurative politics hold the risk of remaining micro-solutions and mere expressions of alternative lifestyles that lack an orientation towards the future. This, eventually, constitutes not an equivalence of means and ends, but an overemphasis on means at the expense of ends’ (Naegler 2018, p. 520). Gerhardt (2020) suggests that contemporary scholars of prefigurative politics, especially anarchists, are too bound up by poststructuralist ‘flat ontology’ that they fail to recognise that place-based prefigurative projects are ineffective in instigating large-scale social change. While this is a somewhat unhelpful caricature, a fetishisation, or romanticisation of place or the local per se is certainly problematic (Purcell 2006). Prefigurative scalar imaginaries can be quite limited, especially within emotionally charged spaces of ‘spectacular’ occupation (Permut 2016). Nevertheless, there is a wealth of historical 159

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and contemporary examples that indicate how spatially dispersed prefigurative praxis is not only possible but also can be effective. The co-operative movement is a longstanding example of the prefigurative organisation of production, as well as syndicalist and anarchosyndicalist trade unions that organise themselves in ways that seek to prefigure workers’ self-management of industry in a post-revolutionary world. Co-operatives are worker-run enterprises within a capitalist market, whereas anarcho-syndicalist unions seek a similar outcome (workers’ control) across a sufficiently generalised section of the population so as to do away with capitalism altogether. In the case of such unions, these have usually been organised formally through democratic decision-making structures; co-operatives have used a variety of methods to co-ordinate across space, from loose networks to formal confederations. In both cases, not only do they embed themselves in place, but also they have developed various configurations of regional-, national-, and global-scale organisational infrastructure (e.g., Reed and McMurty 2008, Mates 2016). Other forms of prefiguration operate globally without the need for formal structures. For example, during the global anti-capitalist movement around the turn of the twenty-first century, PGA organised prefiguratively along broadly anarchist lines through global networks to establish a set of five broad principles that guided the activities of each affiliate according to their specific geographical context. Crucial to PGA’s success was their ability to create temporary ‘convergence spaces’. Both physical and figurative, these spaces at regular global network gatherings facilitated deliberation, organisation and mobilisation, through which the diverse specificities of different places were brought into conversation to find common ground (Routledge 2003). What we see, then, is that the scalar politics of prefiguration is far from a simple either/ or choice between place-based and globally dispersed activisms. The spatial strategies of prefiguration are diverse and shaped according to the particular interface of needs and ideals in each particular context. Indeed, it is hard to find a field of prefigurative activism that has not at some point managed to scale their operations outwards across geographical distance and cultural difference with some degree of success. The challenge has often been more temporal, in which such practices and relations can be swiftly established but sustaining them over time has proven difficult.

Temporality and speed If read superficially, one could be forgiven for thinking that prefiguration can be unproblematically woven into the temporal ordering of daily life. However, the rhythms of prefigurative politics may take a range of different speeds, from the years of slow and careful deliberations when establishing an intentional community (Farias 2017) to the urgency of responding to natural disasters (crow 2011). Thus, what we might consider to be ‘ordinary’ is in fact a plurality of temporalities. As a politics of everyday life, prefiguration is a gradual project of social change. As well as ushering in a new temporal era, change necessarily takes time, and since prefiguration involves the processual development of particular structures, relations, or subjectivities, time is essential for nurturing the relevant skills and experience for this, as well as making mistakes and learning from them. Some emergent currents within radical politics, such as accelerationism and nihilism, critique this patient intentionality. Accelerationism draws from a Marxist view of history as a series of dialectical tensions that eventually produce new forms through their contradictions. Rather than identifying strategies for social change per se, its principal goal is to speed up the rate and magnitude of contradictions within capitalism, essentially, until it 160

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breaks (e.g., Williams and Srnicek 2013). Prefiguration is not usually considered compatible with accelerationism because the latter is entirely instrumental, even more so than Leninist vanguardism: the ends justify the means. Nihilism, in direct opposition to accelerationism and in response to the multitude of failed revolutions throughout history, rejects the possibility of a better future at all. In turn, if there will be no revolution then there are no ends, only means. Nihilism is a re-emergent field in anarchism, inspired principally by the pamphlets of the Italian anarchist, Renzo Novatore (1920), among others. For nihilists, prefiguration is pointless when there is no future and no direction to follow; the only moment for the political and for the possibility of liberation is the present. As such, spontaneity and illegality often form the basis of nihilist-anarchist praxis. Whereas accelerationism promotes the speeding up of time or ‘progress’, nihilism rejects it entirely, and both appear to challenge the fundamental assumptions about time and social change on which prefiguration are built. In contrast, rather than grasping at a dubious certainty of futurism or present-centrism, the ‘fuzzy’ temporalities of prefiguration in the everyday seek to embrace the messy, lived realities of change as an emergent process: it is ‘a recursive temporal framing in which events at one time are interpreted as a figure pointing to its fulfilment in later events, with the figure cast in the model of the fulfilment’ (Gordon 2018, p. 5). The seeking of fulfilment is necessarily an act that takes place in relation to the complexities of lived experience, without losing sight of the future goal. It is in this sense that Uri Gordon (2018) draws on the work of Reinhard Koselleck in foregrounding a ‘process of reassurance’ whereby activists see themselves in their small, local, and imperfect actions as aiding the forward momentum of a wider process of change. Prefiguration is positioned within this forward motion of time as both a driver (charged with a set of normative principles that one adheres to) and a technique (in terms of its capacity to nurture and develop new ways of being in practice).

Revolution and reform Given the decidedly uncertain temporalities that prefiguration thrives on, it is not surprising that it serves to trouble the boundaries between reformist and revolutionary modes of change. Particularly in contrast with orthodox Marxist (e.g., Leninist) views of revolution as a convergence of mass mobilisation combined with capitalism’s collapse under the weight of its structural contradictions, leading to a revolutionary ‘moment’, it is easy to view prefiguration as ‘reformist’ due to its emphasis on emergence over time. Indeed, some have supported prefiguration as an explicit rejection of the ‘politics of waiting’ that revolutionary politics seems to imply (Springer 2016). As an ongoing, decentred, and iterative process, prefiguration certainly has a gradual dimension to it, whereby it ‘hollows out’ structures and relations of the dominant order and replaces them with autonomous ones. Eventually, so the story goes, the autonomous forms actually become the dominant order, and the old world dissipates. This is what Naegler (2018) has called a ‘logic of subtraction’ – of taking away power from dominant forces – as opposed to a ‘logic of antagonism’ which she identifies with the revolutionary model of change. For Naegler, the two are fundamentally incompatible because they rest on contrasting ways of viewing how change works. Nonetheless, it is simplistic to view revolution and prefiguration as opposing. Taking the anarchist movement as an example, which typically recognises that prefigurative praxis is a crucial process in collectively building sufficient confidence, self-reliance, and power to instigate a revolution, and sufficient experience in democratic self-management to ensure it does not degenerate into totalitarianism (e.g., Rocker 2004). As such, and not only for anarchists 161

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(e.g., Boggs 1977), prefiguration is a process of skill development as much as it is a mode of social change, since ‘successful’ change requires some level of understanding and experience of the systems being changed. We might therefore challenge Naegler’s (2018) view that the logic of subtraction stands in opposition to antagonism, since prefiguration can certainly be compatible with revolutionary imaginaries that are antagonistic towards the dominant order. The challenge to traditional revolutionary forms of class politics posed by the growth of intersectional perspectives adds further complexity to this debate, especially in relation to the prefigurative view of change as partly a learning process. Intersectional thinkers argue that oppression is multidimensional and overlapping – incorporating dimensions such as race, class, and gender as equal and independent – and that any understanding of justice must therefore incorporate these multiple dimensions (Crenshaw 2020). If class is only one of a multitude of cross-cutting forms of oppression then prefiguration must learn and adapt to such complexities. For those who maintain a class analysis but incorporate intersectional principles (e.g., Rogue and Volcano 2012), harnessing the revolutionary agency of the working class requires an acknowledgement that multiple oppressions and privileges can operate within and beyond this mass agent of change. Anti-oppression work along lines of gender, race, and dis/ability (among others) has therefore become a substantial component of groups enacting prefigurative politics (e.g., Ishkanian and Peña Saavedra 2019). Such groups recognise that social change cannot be limited to a single dimension of prefiguration: for example, emancipation of the working class without a recognition of the distinctiveness of non-cis-male experiences is likely to lead to the reproduction of patriarchal oppressions. Taking an intersectional view, then, a singular revolutionary moment feels rather more complicated, yet so does a fully inclusive prefigurative praxis capable of a genuinely transformative ‘politics of subtraction’. It is in this sense that the gradual development of skills and experience over time is crucial in prefigurative forms of organising, since this allows space for participants to learn, develop, and inevitably make mistakes. In this regard, psychologists such as Polletta and Hoban (2016) and Permut (2016) have used social movement spaces to explore the intricate psychosocial dynamics through which prefiguration unfolds simultaneously through ‘internal’ personal affects and collective institutional relations. In becoming prefigurative – indeed, in most forms of social change – individuals develop sensibilities and subjectivities through one another: the distinctiveness of prefiguration in this sense is the conscious enfolding of means and ends into one another through these emergent relations. As Eisenstadt (2016, p. 36) argues, the prefigurative (in this case, anarchist) subject is more than simply communal. These practices can be understood not as an expression of a sovereign subject (or indeed, of a benign cooperative human nature), but as practical activities through which anarchist subjectivity is constituted (and human natures are shaped). […] Whereas prefigurative practices have traditionally been seen in rather instrumentalist terms … we might better understand them as processes through which subjects emerge. They are both practice and performance – a ‘trial run’ or ‘training’ – and, simultaneously, the ‘main event.’ Recognising the processual nature of prefiguration might also provide opportunities for finding what Chatterton (2006) has called ‘uncommon ground’, a space in which the ‘activist’ subject opens up into a dialogue with the ‘non-activist’ subject. Rather than remaining siloed by lifestyle into particular categories – of the ‘good’ activist and the ‘ignorant’ or ‘passive’ nonactivist – this kind of encounter and the uncomfortable conversations that come with it can facilitate mutual recognition of common experiences, hopes, and fears. Thus, distinguishing starkly between revolution and reform can be unhelpful, since it can undermine the much 162

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more complex relationship between quotidian interactions and revolutionary ‘moments’. Thinking of revolution not as an event but a process is a helpful way in which a careful consideration of prefiguration can influence what change (especially in its radical varieties) is and how it takes place.

Conclusion This chapter has outlined some of the key historical and conceptual dimensions of prefiguration as a mode of social change. I explained briefly how the concept emerged, before drawing out three key themes and debates that are embodied within prefigurative modes of social change. There is little doubt that prefigurative politics, through its enfolding of means and ends into one another, not only presents examples of inventive and often effective praxis but also raises important questions about the nature of change itself. Alongside challenges already mentioned, prefigurative projects also face difficulties posed by their wider social context. Operating within the matrices of that which they seek to radically transform (or entirely destroy), prefigurative initiatives are always at risk of recuperation into these systems or attack by them – often both. For example, the economic notion of sharing has in recent years demonstrated how potentially transformative principles of organisation and material distribution in the here-and-now can become utilised to generate new logics of capitalist accumulation through the internet’s technical infrastructure and the explosion of the exploitative ‘gig economy’ (e.g., O’Dwyer 2013, Ince and Hall 2017). Operating in the connections, tensions, and grey areas between the dominant order and a radically different future therefore creates very real risks – both operationally and ideologically – when seeking to prefigure alternatives in the present. Overall, the contemporary moment offers both opportunities and challenges for prefiguration. In the midst of now-entrenched austerity regimes across many contemporary states, especially in the global north, the outsourcing of services once provided by the state has brought non-state actors such as charities and community groups into the functions of governance. It could be argued that this provides opportunities for more radical, or indeed prefigurative, forms of self-organisation to emerge in the spaces and institutions from which the state has retreated (e.g., Williams et al. 2014). Equally, well-meaning groups seeking to use these opportunities can all too easily become ensnared in a service-delivery model that fails to challenge the structures or relations identified as needing change; worse still, they can be used to strengthen them (Featherstone et al. 2012). Thus, maintaining autonomy and intentionality in such contexts requires constant work. Nonetheless, in a context where many states are becoming increasingly authoritarian, prefigurative praxis can play a role in shaping everyday political landscapes, beyond, despite, and even within, the state. In the midst of a populist wave across the Global North and large parts of the Global South, rooted in a rejection of globalism and established ways of doing politics, prefigurative projects may provide opportunities for the re-establishment of self-help and community in a progressive, rather than exclusionary, framing. Indeed, one of prefiguration’s strengths lies in how it can demonstrate that alternatives are not only possible in the future but also workable in the present: providing concrete examples of whatever one seeks to prefigure can to some extent overcome barriers of imagination and trust regarding the abstract ideas that drive them. Not satisfied with simply looking for glimmers of future worlds within existing society – of becoming attuned to the ‘seeds beneath the snow’ (Ward 2011) – prefigurative projects teach us how to propagate, nurture, and expand alternative relations and practices in the here-and-now. 163

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14 CATASTROPHE AS USUAL Learning to Live with Extremity Nigel Clark

World’s end ‘Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things’ (2015, p. 1). So begins N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth fantasy series that imagines a tectonically hyperactive Earth whose inhabitants lurch from one seismic upheaval to another, culminating in geocatastrophe so monstrous that it will cause climatic chaos lasting thousands of years. The three-volume story revolves around a minority of people who have the ability to both trigger and quell geological activity – a talent for which they are forced into the role of absorbing the shocks of the volatile Earth on behalf of the rest of society. If this is a tale that speaks to the geophysical anxieties of the present, so too does it address deep-seated issues of injustice. Jemisin began writing the trilogy at the height of the targeted police violence that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. Her description of a key character leaves little doubt as to the history she has in mind: ‘he reaches forth with all the fine control that the world has brainwashed and backstabbed and brutalized out of him, and all the sensitivity that his masters have bred into him through generations of rape and coercion and highly unnatural selection’ (2015, p. 6). Images of catastrophe are all around us at the moment, in film, literature, scientific reports, on the lips and placards of our children – and keep in mind that I first wrote this prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. It’s worth remembering, however, that Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Imagination of disaster’, an inquiry into the pervasive representation of apocalyptic destruction in science fiction cinema, is over half a century old. ‘Universes become expendable. Worlds become contaminated, burnt out, exhausted, obsolete’, she muses, in tone that’s anything but dated (1966, p. 219). Sontag’s point was that fictional rehearsals of cataclysm bypassed anything remotely like social criticism, the conventions of the genre avoiding any consideration of the social and political forces that engendered the catastrophes in question. A similar argument is channelled through endless citations of Frederic Jameson’s remark ‘that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’ (2003, p. 76). But the alleged apoliticism of the catastrophic trope gets a resounding retort from Jemisin, whose characters rage against their oppression with every means at their disposal. Likewise, what many critical political thinkers have been saying about the vice-grip of compliant, individualised neoliberal subjectivities seems not to have sunk in for today’s climate change activists or those who have 166

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rapidly mobilised around the coronavirus crisis. And in the shadow of growing climate catastrophe, rising pressures for global decarbonisation, and the current global health emergency, it is not only ‘extremists’ who are beginning to think that capitalism may be in for a hell of a shake-up. Cataclysmic and apocalyptic motifs are ancient, and many of their manifestations have been and remain otherworldly in in orientation – devastation being taken as a pathway to ascend beyond earthly finitude. My concern here is more focused. I am interested in how critical thinkers – those with a more-or-less secular commitment to transforming worldly conditions – negotiate between extreme events and the possibility of human-directed societal transformation. Catastrophes, I suggest, have a slippery and contentious presence in contemporary social inquiry. This is not simply because they demand that we think the unthinkable but also because of the way that every actual or anticipated catastrophe is haunted by another kind of rupture. Radical social thought and practice, it hardly needs to be said, is deeply invested in the idea of breaks in the continuity of social existence and transitions to new and better social orders (See John Clarke, this volume). But the upheavals that are actually visited upon us, or that seem always to be gathering on the horizon, are only very rarely the ones that progressive thinkers desire and work towards. Amongst critical intellectuals, while there is considerable agreement that we live in catastrophic times, there is a great deal of disagreement about how the catastrophes that occur far too often are related to the societal discontinuities that happen not nearly often enough. Few would doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic is a catastrophe. But while this event justifiably captures so much attention, it has irrupted into worlds already brimming with situations, conditions, incidents that have also been described as catastrophic. So how bad do things have to get before they count as a catastrophe? Those who meditate on the ethical significance of catastrophes often note the inappropriateness of applying metrics to events that occasion loss and suffering. Though attentive to the ‘millions of radically endangered strangers’ who constitute the contemporary refugee crisis, Michael Dillon seeks ways of addressing this predicament ‘that would apply even if there were only one displaced, nonassignable, human being in the world’ (1999, pp. 109, 105). On the other hand, social scientific analyses have noted that in practice workable distinctions between catastrophes and accidents, emergencies, crises, or disasters are often set in place. Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster offer the following example: ‘The FEMA (US Federal Emergency Management Agency) training on risk and disaster management … differentiates catastrophes from disasters, which are considered less destructive’ (2011, p. 28; see also Adey et al. 2015). While some of the work I will be touching upon seems to conceive of the catastrophe as a specific level or magnitude of damage, my sympathies lie with styles of catastrophic thinking that approach extreme events in terms of the particular challenges to thought and action they pose – which usually involves some sense that how we theorise these events should itself be perturbed by the intensities of suffering or loss that appear before us. It is this putting into question of available or conventional ways of accounting for what sometimes happens to our worlds – rather than the scale of any particular geological upheaval – that Jean-François Lyotard is getting at when he reflects: ‘Suppose an earthquake destroys not only lives, but the instruments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly’ (1988, p. 56). Here we can identify a family resemblance between Lyotard’s sublime and a range of other invocations of extremity that includes Maurice Blanchot’s disaster (1995), Edith Wyschogrod’s cataclysm (1998), James Berger’s apocalypse (1999), and Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s ends of the world (2017). Although arising from varying contexts, such approaches share common themes. There is a sense that the events in question 167

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constitute a significant temporal break. If not necessarily unanticipated, such events overwhelm personal or societal coping mechanisms. They are traumatic, inflicting lasting wounds and irrecuperable loss. This damage not only affects lives and worlds but impacts upon the language through which realities were previously made intelligible. Through this making strange of both worlds and words, the disruptive event serves as provocation to think and act otherwise, but that incitement is perplexing because the speech it cries out for cannot yet exist. While we can attempt to conceptualise extremity along these or other lines, those who have experienced catastrophes demand of us that we witness their tribulation in all its singularity. Which is to say that catastrophes call for proper names: we are summoned to view them as befalling particular people in particular times and places, and not simply as examples of more general conditions, categories, and types. But this is far from straightforward. For as Wyschogrod impresses upon us, no sooner do we name an event than questions arise about who is to be included, how experiences that come under the denomination differ from each other, and what to do when the afflicted may themselves have been involved in acts we do not condone (1998, pp. 12–4). Rather than seeking to untangle all these issues, I want to focus on what social thinkers make of, or do with, events that are experienced as extreme. What I am curious about is the largely unspoken complicity between critical thought and the catastrophe: the shared stockin-trade we have with de-familiarisation, the making strange of the given, the taking apart of the taken-for-granted. After looking at some of the different ways in which social thinkers engage with the idea of the catastrophe, I consider historical shifts in the attribution of catastrophic status to situations and events. This leads to a consideration of how the thematisation of discontinuity in the writing of the catastrophe relates to more ordinary and ongoing efforts to reduce pain, injury, and damage in social life, raising questions about what it might mean to ‘de-exceptionalise’ extreme events. While in no way wishing to depreciate the horrors of the COVID-19 crisis, my main focus will be on the global environmental predicament: a situation that we have had longer to absorb and process, and one that will remain profoundly important whatever trajectory the current pandemic takes.

The work of catastrophe ‘For better or worse’ observes Bonnie Honig (2015, p. 624) ‘…democratic theory and practice today are enveloped in the trope of catastrophe’. There is nothing especially contentious about this claim, but the idea that democracy – concerned with what is collectively ‘doable’ – is bound up with catastrophe – the experience of the ‘unthinkable’ says something of the anxieties and frustrations of our time. What political work is catastrophe doing, we need to ask, and how helpful is this work for the task of thinking and making our social realities otherwise? Let’s start with those who take the presence of catastrophe in contemporary politics for worse, as they currently appear to be in the majority. Today we find frequent echoes of Sontag’s concern that making a spectacle out of destruction serves as a diversion from properly critical social inquiry. The point is often made that the kind of high drama that most informational or infotainment media alight upon detracts attention from the attritional grind of everyday injustice and worldly degradation. As Rob Nixon (2011, p. 3) puts it: ‘Falling bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunami have a visceral, eyecatching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even centuries, cannot match’. Isabelle Stengers (2010, p. 4) makes the related point that the most urgent task of contemporary political activity is the painstaking bringing into visibility 168

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of otherwise insensible or unimaginable problems, as opposed to embracing those more blatantly disastrous events that already ‘have the power to force unanimous recognition’. Such claims, on closer inspection, are less blanket dismissals of catastrophic themes as they are calls to be attentive to the multiple temporalities, scales and compositions of processes that do damage. There are more sweeping indictments of catastrophic motifs which contend that powerful actors the world over are deliberately promoting fear over impending disaster as a way to undermine potential political challenges – an assertion that often takes its cues from Walter Benjamin’s observation at a crisis point in the mid-twentieth century that the otherwise exceptional ‘state of emergency’ had become normalised (1969, p. 257; see also Honig 2009, pp. xv–xvi). This claim is often linked to the idea of a generalised condition of depoliticisation in which the ‘authentic’ political will to contest existing social orders is being ceaselessly eroded by the advance of techno-managerial planning. As Eric Swyngedouw (2010, p. 219) would have it: ‘apocalyptic imaginaries are extraordinarily powerful in disavowing or displacing social conflict and antagonisms’. A frequent corollary of this argument is the charge that neoliberal capitalism is ever poised to convert pervasive anxiety into new profit-making ventures (Cooper 2006, Klein 2007, see John Clarke, this volume). It’s worth pausing here and considering the stress that Swyngedouw and so many other critical thinkers put on social conflict or contestation – a weighting that has its counterpart in the axiom that ‘there is no such thing as a natural disaster’. Neil Smith (2005) performs a version of this denaturalising of disaster in the context of Hurricane Katrina: ‘In every phase and aspect of a disaster – causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction’, he declares, ‘the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus’. Whatever may have sparked the crisis, Smith wants to convince us, what we should look for in the unfolding of the extreme event is the surfacing, the becoming visible, of pre-existing states of injustice and exclusion. In other words, what catastrophes do, or should be encouraged to do, is to strip away the protective veneer of normality and expose the underlying social structural fault-lines. And so the ‘social calculus’ in question is one that has clearly been worked out in advance by left intellectuals. Read in this way, just about any conceivable or inconceivable catastrophe is open to being recuperated for progressively useful political work. To give an example, whereas many leftliberal social thinkers once viewed climate change and ecological degradation as distractions from the project of revolutionary transformation, it is now common to read these same threats as incontrovertible evidence of the necessity of such change. Far from displacing social conflict and deflecting political mobilisation, in this regard, a correctly deciphered catastrophe ought to serve as a pathway to political awakening and radical social action (See John Clarke, this volume). Along these lines, Ulrich Beck (2015, p. 77) makes the case for an ‘emancipatory catastrophism’ in which the very shock of the extreme event can prompt ‘cathartic’ new forms of awareness that reignite the possibility of ‘the transfiguration of the social and political order’. Other progressive thinkers affirm that the kinds of spontaneous nonhierarchical selforganisation that often occur during catastrophic events serve as prefigurations of alternative social worlds (see Solnit 2009). It would appear, then, that the trope of catastrophe has been appraised and set to work by critical social thinkers in a range of ways. But rather than simply concluding that catastrophes are relational – that their meaning or value shifts from one context to another – I want to dig a little deeper into the ambivalence around the question of whether extreme events do positive or pernicious political work. What’s at stake here, I suggest, goes beyond the immediate contours and effects of those situations that are diagnosed as catastrophic, or the act of making such diagnoses, and opens up questions about how we imagine that social change can or ought 169

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to occur. This brings us back to the point I made earlier that critical thought tends to invest heavily in the unsettling of apparently given or unexamined aspects of social existence, which is also the effect attributed to the catastrophe. And in this way, the tussling over the sociopolitical valence of the catastrophe draws us into questions about the different ways theorists conceive of the relationship between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the orderly and the disruptive, the familiar and the strange. It’s worth returning at this stage to those thinkers who have dwelt upon the more existential or phenomenological dimensions of the catastrophe: to Lyotard, Blanchot, Wyschogrod and fellow theorists of extremity who we met in the opening section. For what their writing serves to do is to discourage any supposition that the catastrophe can be straightforwardly set to work, for whatever end. Such thought is not averse to conceiving of the catastrophe as exposing shortfalls in the existing order – but this point is fairly obvious, for no collective can anticipate every imaginable threat. What it does find problematic is the idea that the logic of the catastrophe is to reveal a deeper, truer reality. For such reasoning assumes that both the underlying condition and its diagnosis precedes and endures the event in question. It implies that the catastrophe confirms rather than confounds our existing grids of intelligibility, that it lays waste to lives and worlds while leaving thought itself unscathed or even reinforced (Clark 2011, pp. 65–6). We might say that what these thinkers are seeking to do is to write through rather than simply about catastrophes. The catastrophe can’t just be set to work to support an existing project – even a radical one – they contend, because the very future-orientation of work or a project is undone by the event (Wyschogrod 1998, pp. 225–9). And that includes the project of thought or critique. For the catastrophe, as we saw earlier, is by definition the event that is of such contrariety that it jeopardises the language, the narratives, the theories we would otherwise reach for to make sense of it. So as Blanchot (1997, p. 103) would insist, this means that if the catastrophe does not to some degree ‘renew the language that conveys it’, we who would engage with it have not allowed ourselves to feel its full force. It is important to recall that for these thinkers, the shock of the catastrophe is much more than a matter of scale: as exemplified by Dillon’s point that a single ‘displaced, nonassignable, human being’ ought to be enough to shake up the contemporary political imagination. For the most searching catastrophic inquiry is a way of apprehending the eventfulness of the world rather than a measure of the size, speed or physical destructiveness of the events in question. Its message, above all, is an insistence on the finitude of bodies and collectivities, and a reminder that thought itself is not immune to the forces that injure flesh and devastate communities. Such sensibilities, however, need not lead us to the purity of the absolute break or the sharp contrast of normality and rupture. The idea that every community, every polity, is constructed across fault-lines of trauma and loss can be taken to suggest not only that the experiences associated with catastrophe are originary, but that they are in a certain sense immanent or endemic to ‘ordinary’ life (Wyschogrod 1998, p. xvl, Clark 2011, pp. 153–9). And in this regard, suffering injury and loss, struggling for words, feeling the frames through which we apprehend the world flex and buckle may be as much within as beyond the flow of everyday existence. We can see such logic at play in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1997), a novel which is ostensibly about the Holocaust – that proper name of catastrophe that is sometimes taken to be the epitome of total rupture and exceptionality. But without diminishing the horrors inflicted upon central Europe’s Jewish people, Michaels depicts a world in which ongoing change and upheaval, continuity and disruption appear more enfolded than opposed. ‘The present, like a landscape, is only a small part of a mysterious narrative’ she writes. ‘A narrative of catastrophe 170

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and slow accumulation’ (1997, p. 48). Honig (2009, p. xviii) sets out to do something similar with political thought. She does not deny the force or significance of extreme events, but encourages us to ‘de-exceptionalise the emergency’: to partake in the kind of thinking and practice that ‘cuts across the binary of extraordinary versus ordinary, rupture versus procedural’. Or as Jemisin (2017, p. 170) expresses a similar intuition: ‘One person’s normal is another person’s Shattering’. There is something else that Michaels and Jemisin have in common. Both authors move fluently between themes of profound social injustice and the upheavals of the Earth. Yet in neither case is the rifting of the physical world intended simply as a metaphor for social fracturing or as a device to disclose ‘underlying’ societal divisions. For Jemisin and Michaels, then, social and physical realities are equally liable to generate disturbances of varying intensities, albeit it in entangled, overlapping ways. In this regard, both authors serve as guides not only to the onto-existential dimensions of the extreme event, but to the particular conformations of catastrophe gathering on the contemporary horizon. For it indeed matters what kind of upheaval we are grappling with, I want to argue, just as it matters who is being impacted and what kinds of political responses the event incites. Concerted monitoring of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels is not the same thing as relentless surveillance of social ‘outsiders’ or ‘deviants’, just as imposing quarantine in the face of life-threatening infectious disease outbreaks is different from placing political opponents under curfew or house arrest. If assigning the specificity of a proper name to the catastrophe is important, I am suggesting, then this applies no less to the particularity of the stimuli or conditions that trigger an extreme event. And in the case of a great many contemporary challenges, the dynamics of the unfolding catastrophe bring social thought into conversation with the natural sciences. But so too do extreme events bring the knowledge practices of the West into dialogue with a wealth of other ways of knowing or experiencing the world.

Changing contours of catastrophe I have been proposing that painful, language-defying, frame-shattering experiences might be more widely distributed throughout social life than is often implied in critical thought’s putting to work of catastrophe. More ‘democratic’ distributions of the experiential dimensions of catastrophe, however, come with risks of their own. Judith Butler (1993, p. 202) pointedly asks whether such generalisations can ‘respond to the pressure to theorize the historical specificity of trauma, to provide texture for … specific exclusions, annihilations, and unthinkable losses’. Butler’s recuperation of the proper names of catastrophe also opens up the political issue of which catastrophes count or can be made to count, and whose lives are grievable. This is a problem that animates many of the responses of Indigenous, colonised, or formerly enslaved peoples to scientific narratives on global warming and Earth system change, the challenge that resounds through Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. It is the issue that Frantz Fanon (1986, p. 87) prised open over sixty years ago when he provocatively referred to the Holocaust as ‘little family quarrels’ – in this way challenging Europeans to be as disturbed by the devastation wrought by colonisation as they were of the carnage committed on their own soil. What makes the Holocaust paradigmatic of catastrophe in western discourses is not only its depth of loss and suffering but the paradox that the Reason we might turn to in order to make sense of the atrocity is profoundly implicated in its perpetration. In a related sense, the atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the sudden lurch from World War II to the Cold War nuclear arms race embroils scientific rationality – with its self-image of making the world more intelligible – in the possible extermination of all sensibility (Blanchot 1997, 171

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pp. 101–8). With the prominence of natural science in the disclosure of global environmental hazards, something of this enigma has been diluted. But in another sense, what science is now telling us about the way the Earth operates serves to extend and elaborate upon the motif of catastrophe (Clark 2017). Modern western science has its own versions of catastrophe. Catastrophism – as opposed to Uniformitarianism or gradualism – was the early nineteenth century hypothesis that the Earth had been shaped in deep time through successive geological upheavals. Overshadowed but not entirely eclipsed by the slow-moving incrementalism associated with Darwinian evolution, it was not until the latter twentieth century that catastrophic change made a full comeback in the natural sciences (Brooke 2014, pp. 1–8). Initially, the idea of ‘catastrophic shifts’ was a value neutral term that referred to any relatively rapid transition in the operating state of an ecosystem or other physical system (Scheffer et al. 2001). But a series of developments in Earth and life science increasingly pointed towards catastrophic changes that operated at the planetary scale, a theme that crystallised in the 1980s hypothesis that the Earth’s climate system had, in the past, frequently passed through abrupt transitions (Clark 2011, pp. 116–21). In the early years of the current century, the idea of the vulnerability of climate and other aspects of the Earth system to catastrophic shifts triggered by human agency – shorthanded in the Anthropocene concept – has emerged as the preeminent global figure of catastrophe (See Clark and Szerszynski 2021, Noel Castree, this volume). Catastrophe, it is important to note, is no longer simply an empirical concept in the natural sciences. The more that ‘neo-catastrophist’ Earth and life science discovers about the inherent dynamism of our planet, the more that human life appears contingent and precarious – even before we factor in human-induced perturbations to Earth systems. As Timothy Morton (2012, p. 233) elaborates, geoscience finds itself confronting ‘an abyss whose reality becomes increasingly uncanny, not less, the more scientific instruments are able to probe it’. Faced with accelerating environmental change and the increasing likelihood of human-induced abrupt transitions in Earth systems, many scientists are not only becoming ever more politicised but having to deal with the trauma of the permanent loss of life-forms or landforms around which they have constructed their working lives. In this context, as Potawatomi scholar-activist Kyle Whyte (2017, pp. 158–9) and others have suggested, there is much that western science might learn from Indigenous communities – not just about filling in ‘gaps in climate science research’ but about living on through catastrophic events. As Whyte’s comments suggest, the idea that western science might have something to learn from Indigenous thought and practice is more than an addendum or complement to globally dominant discursive frameworks. While blatant climate denial is on the retreat, the paramount status that scientifically-framed threats to Earth systems are now acquiring is being questioned in ways that are analogous to Fanon’s unsettling of the exemplariness of the Holocaust. Just as the coronavirus pandemic has reopened painful memories of past outbreaks of infectious disease, so too have theorists from Indigenous and colonised worlds been arguing that, for their people, the ending of worlds signalled by narratives of climate change and the Anthropocene has already occurred, often repeatedly. As Whyte puts it: ‘the hardships many nonIndigenous people dread most of the climate crisis are ones that Indigenous peoples have endured already due to different forms of colonialism: ecosystem collapse, species loss, economic crash, drastic relocation, and cultural disintegration’ (2018, p. 226; see also Davis and Todd 2017). Such claims challenge the right of European or western thinkers to preside over the designation of planet-scaled catastrophe (See Noel Castree, this volume). But at the same time, the logic with which Indigenous and decolonising thinkers question whether diagnosis of the 172

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planetary predicament can be entrusted to the same scientific reasoning that informed and benefitted from colonial projects can be seen as an extension of one of the classic catastrophic themes. For in condemning the way that western science has served to marginalise and disavow the knowledge practices of others, scholars and activists from colonised regions offer their own version of the idea that thought itself ought not to escape unscathed from acts of destruction in which it is implicated. Indigenous thinkers are by no means alone in questioning the proper-naming of today’s unfolding planetary catastrophe as the Anthropocene. Rather than get into debates about how best to diagnose and denominate the current geohistorical juncture, I want to consider in more depth how issues arising out of the current contouring of dangerous Earth system change and its contestations might help us to explore and develop the idea of the de-exceptionalising of catastrophe.

Living with catastrophic ordinariness In the previous section we saw how the natural sciences have been developing an idea of catastrophism that has been on a convergent course with the more philosophical concern with the vulnerability of social life to traumatic disturbance. This confluence of broadly western ways of thinking about catastrophe also finds itself increasingly in conversation with Indigenous and other colonised peoples who have endured successive waves of calamitous change. This encounter can be viewed in terms of multiplying or pluralising experiences of catastrophe. But if we are interested in thinking about the relationship between normality and extremity, we might also discern certain resonances or intersections between renewed western scientific interest in catastrophism and a world of other ways of living with and through potentially hazardous events. There are three aspects of this I want to explore. First, I would suggest that, in their own ways, the narratives of Earth system science and those of Indigenous peoples who have inhabited landscapes over extended timescales both provide insights into the way in which abrupt and gradual change are enfolded into each another. Whether disclosed by western or Indigenous sciences, deep temporal histories of ecosystems and Earth systems generally support Michaels’ intuition that ‘catastrophe and slow accumulation’ (or we might add catastrophe and slow violence) are implicated rather than opposed. Attention to the temporalities and rhythms of complex systems not only foregrounds the ongoing demands of riding out peaks and troughs but highlights the challenge of periodically enduring more encompassing forms of systemic reorganisation (Cruikshank 2005, pp. 9–12, Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2017, p. 68). Moreover, to live in intimate contact with such variability is to know that sooner or later coping mechanisms will be pushed to their limits. It matters what temporal scales we take into our purview. Situations that can be cataclysmic from the point of view of collectivities – by no means composed solely of humans – take on a tone of ordinariness when they are read through the discordant rhythms of the Earth. In this regard, the semi-autonomous communities or ‘comms’ in which much Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy are set offer a sustained rumination on political formation during times of extreme stress. Part eco-commune, part runaway slave settlement, Jemisin’s comms are not always paragons of deliberation and consensus building, though ‘impromptu councils’ have an important place (2017, p. 152, 2016). What they provide is an occasion to speculate about possible forms of community building, decision-making and provisioning under conditions in which survival depends on speedy improvisation – including mobility and resettlement. And what Jemisin also reminds us is that trauma is to be expected, such that the work of mourning 173

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and other ways of dealing with loss can be as much a part of everyday life as matters of livelihood or ongoing political altercation. The shifting configurations of catastrophe I have been sketching out indicate how important it is to cultivate the kind of politics that treats extremity as a possibility implicit in the everyday rather than as the categorical other of normality and routine. In this regard, rather than simply reading Benjamin as a theorist of the crushing, depoliticising normalisation of the ‘state of emergency’, we should also appreciate his observations on the way that everyday economic life under conditions of capitalist modernity generates waste, ruin, and loss (1969, pp. 256–8): an insight that anticipates key themes in later environmentalist discourses. Attentive to such mundane ruination, Stengers is right to insist that in attending to political issue formation we shouldn’t let big, loud events drown out the murmuring of microphysical trouble in-the-making, though it is worth remembering that disasters which ‘force recognition’ themselves tend to be incubated under conditions of obscurity or insufficient awareness. An enhanced sensitivity to the rumbling potentialities of the Earth commends us too to Roberto Unger’s insistence that ‘even without the provocation of trauma we can render our daily experience more intense even as we enhance our powers’ (2007, p. 182). Unger’s point is that were we to view our forms of democracy as being in need of constant experimentation then we might reduce the dependence of social change on the incitements of catastrophe (2007, p. 138). To put this another way, he is counselling us not to rely on upheaval, rupture and ruin to do the work of stretching the frames of the political and renewing the grammars of ethico-political expression – but to treat this as the unexceptional task of politics (see also Barnett 2017, p. 61). Which leads to the second point I want to draw out of the contact zone between different ways of dealing with worldly perturbation and stress. In worlds in which variability – including extreme and abrupt change – is acknowledged as more-or-less ordinary, politics itself may not be as ubiquitous as it often appears in critical discourses. Or rather, the line between the material practices constitutive of livelihood and the deliberative practices definitive of the political are likely to be blurred. As Andrew Barry (2010, p. 109) observes, materials become topics of political controversy and issue formation under certain circumstances: ‘only occasionally, not in general’. Extreme situations may well initiate Jemisin’s ‘impromptu councils’ – or better still, deliberation might be launched by awareness of the extremity slumbering in any context. But we should also appreciate that not all improvisations and experiments are political, and that a great deal of the work that goes into living with and through variability is not dependent upon explicit problematisation, public address, or agonistic clashes. Neither should we assume that the lack of visibility of the political implies it was once present and has now dissipated. To give an example, it has been noted that many traditional landholders use fire as a form of political resistance when their customary land use practices are under threat, especially in colonial contexts. But in a close reading of Madagascan political ecologies, Christian Kull proposes that what may actually be happening is that local people take advantage of social or political distractions to resuscitate long-established but prohibited modes of grassland and woodland management. ‘In Madagascar, more often than not, people light fires during elections or periods of unrest not to protest the state, but to take advantage of state distraction in order to renew their pastures, reduce the fuel load, or clear brush without fear of enforcement’ Kull notes (2002, p. 949). As he elaborates: ‘The observed logic and patterns of resource use strongly point to the conclusion that most fires are a straightforward livelihood practice (if at times politically savvy), and not overt protest’. Which is to say that when people are grappling with the vagaries of the world around them, we shouldn’t be too quick to conclude that their actions are 174

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primarily political. As Kull’s reference to reducing fuel loads intimates, intentional burning is an ancient and widespread means of reducing wildfire hazard, and more generally of dealing proactively with pulsing rhythms of climate and ecology. In short, selective firing of grassland and woodland in much of the world is an ordinary way of mitigating potentially disastrous environmental fluctuations, as many western ecologists have come to understand. As with much other customary land management, however, there are often deep histories of struggle and loss sedimented in routine burning practices. Learning to work with fire – including adaptation to new fire regimes when climate switches or when people migrate – is never easy (Langton 1999, p. 169). Wildfire hews to its own agenda, and to bend this in new directions usually involves lifetimes of risky experimentation (Clark 2008, 2011, pp. 174–6). This applies not only to fire. There are many contexts in which institutional repertoires and infrastructure embody hard won collective knowledge about living with volatile Earth and life processes. This is another reason why we need to be cautious about generic claims of depoliticisation, for the prioritisation of insurrectionary rupture may not be the best way of respecting the mundane material practices that are already oriented to risk and extremity. And where there are ‘long histories of having to be well-organized to adapt to seasonal and inter-annual environmental changes’ (Whyte 2017, p. 153) practitioners rarely take kindly to seeing deeply valued knowhow wrenched out of context and exposed to the harsh light of political wrangling. Having gone to some lengths to render catastrophes more worldly, to weave them into the fabric and flow of everyday socio-material existence, my third and final point takes a turn back to the ‘cosmic’ – by way of considering the questions of finitude and exposure that are at the core of truly catastrophic thinking. I have been suggesting that the contentiousness of the catastrophe and kindred terms in critical social thought is tied up with tendencies to invest deeply in temporalities of rupture and discontinuity. In response, we have looked at some different approaches that help us to see how extreme events and the way they are experienced might be de-exceptionalised by folding them back into the rhythms, tempos, singularities, and concatenations that are ordinary aspects of earthbound life. When we consider such enfolding, our own constitutive vulnerability – ‘the afflictions and perturbations we are subject to as embodied creatures’ (Turner 2006, p. 36) – is never far away. Social and political thinkers who are working to de-dramatise rupture and catastrophe draw our attention to the numerous ways that even relatively modest revisions of democratic practice can greatly reduce the risk, injury, and pain to which people are exposed. And yet, sooner or later, the catastrophic thematic must confront the fact that there are limits to the capacity to overcome suffering and loss. However much stress is put on the social conditioning of vulnerability and on the ability of judicious political action to alter these conditions, the writing of the catastrophe reminds us that the jurisdiction of the sociopolitical goes only so far. In an eloquent response to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Rebecca Solnit (2005, unpag) put it like this: The relief will be very political, in who gives how much and to whom it is given, but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to prevent. We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality that is so central a part of our own nature. We cannot wish that the seas dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates cease to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control. But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and such suffering, which leaves us with sorrow not as problem to be solved but a fact. 175

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The critical incantation that ‘there is no such thing as a natural disaster’ has been less than helpful in encouraging us to probe these outer limits of the social or the political. But some theorists have begun to give serious thought to the indeterminate zone where what is amenable to our own influence fades into the inaccessible, the immutable and the indifferent. Resonating with Solnit’s observations, Rebekah Sheldon (2016, p. 66) ponders how ‘potential catastrophe marks the limit of political resistance’, while Claire Colebrook (2011, p. 11) evokes what lies on the other side of this limit as the ‘monstrously impolitic’. In a related sense, Elizabeth Grosz (2008, p. 23) introduces the idea of ‘cosmological imponderables’ in reference to ‘forces beyond the control of life that extend life beyond itself ’. It is significant that Grosz speaks of extending life, for this reminds us that our organismic perviousness to powers beyond our willing is not just a matter of exposure to harm but of the capacity of living things to become more or other than they are now. Again, this sense that humans and other life forms are constitutively open to potentially life-changing forces beyond their control is suggestive that we shouldn’t draw sharp divides between the earthbound and the cosmological, the this-worldly and the other-worldly. But then, of course, there have long been life-ways and worldviews in which the relationship between these domains is handled in very different ways. Over recent decades, Indigenous peoples and others with deep place-based traditions have increasingly been drawing the attention of their western interlocutors to the range of ways they deal with everyday uncertainties that both can and can’t be evaded. This often includes figures – such as earth beings, spirits, ancestors – who specialise in mediating between different domains of existence (Whyte 2018; de la Cadena 2015). Not only are these moreor other-than-human entities making inroads into political arenas, there is growing intercultural appreciation of the role they can play in helping embodied, earthly beings deal with the inherent changeability of their worlds and their own inescapable vulnerability (Clark and Szerszynski 2021, pp. 160–8). These burgeoning conversations point to ways in which the motif of catastrophe can offer hinges between otherwise very different ‘ecologies of practice’ (de la Cadena 2015). Such openings onto the question of how to live with catastrophic ordinariness may turn out to be more provocative than assuming we know in advance what extreme events will reveal to us, and more generative than holding our breath for a world-transfiguring rupture.

References Adey, P., Anderson, B., and Graham, S., 2015. Introduction: governing emergencies: beyond exceptionality. Theory, Culture and Society, 32 (2), 3−17. Aradau, C. and van Munster, R., 2011. The politics of catastrophe: genealogies of the unknown. London: Routledge. Barnett, C., 2017. The priority of injustice: locating democracy in critical theory. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Barry, A., 2010. Materialist politics: metallurgy. In: B. Braun and S. Whatmore, eds. Political matter: technoscience, democracy and public life. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 89–117. Beck, U., 2015. Emancipatory catastrophism: what does it mean to climate change and risk society? Current Sociology, 63 (1), 75−88. Benjamin, W., 1969. Illuminations: essays and reflections. New York: Schocken Books. Berger, J., 1999. After the end: representations of post-apocalypse. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Blanchot, M., 1995. The writing of the disaster. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Blanchot, M., 1997. Friendship. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brooke, J., 2014. Climate change and the course of global history: a rough journey. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Catastrophe as Usual Butler, J., 1993. Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York: Routledge. Clark. N., 2008. Aboriginal cosmopolitanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, 32 (3), 737−744. Clark, N., 2011. Inhuman nature: sociable life on a dynamic planet. London: Sage. Clark, N., 2017. Anthropocene bodies, geological time and the crisis of natality. Body and Society, 23 (3), 156−180. Clark, N. and Szerszynski, B., 2021. Planetary social thought: the Anthropocene challenge to the social sciences. Cambridge: Polity Press. Colebrook, C., 2011. Matter without bodies. Derrida Today, 4 (1), 1−20. Cooper, M., 2006. Pre-empting emergence: the biological turn in the war on terror. Theory, Culture and Society, 23 (4), 113−135. Cruikshank, J., 2005. Do glaciers listen? Local knowledge, colonial encounters and social imagination. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Danowski, D. and Viveiros de Castro, E., 2017. The ends of the world. London: Polity Press. Davis, H. and Todd, Z., 2017. On the importance of a date, or decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME, 16 (4), 761–780. de la Cadena, M., 2015. Earth beings: ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dillon, M., 1999. The scandal of the refugee: some reflections on the ‘inter’ of international relations and continental thought. In: D. Campbell and M. Shapiro, eds. Moral spaces: rethinking ethics and world politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 92–124. Fanon, F., 1986. Black skin, white masks. London: Pluto Press. Grosz, E., 2008. Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the Earth. Durham: Duke University Press. Honig, B., 2009. Emergency politics: paradox, law, democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Honig, B., 2015. Public things: Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and the democratic need. Political Research Quarterly, 68 (3), 623−636. Jameson, F., 2003. Future city. New Left Review, 21, 65–79. Jemisin, N. K., 2015. The fifth season. London: Orbit. Jemisin, N. K., 2016. The obelisk gate. London: Orbit. Jemisin, N. K., 2017. The stone sky. London: Orbit. Klein, N., 2007. The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. London: Penguin. Kull, C., 2002. Madagascar aflame: landscape burning as peasant protest, resistance, or a resource management tool? Political Geography, 21 (7), 927−953. Langton, M., 1999. ‘The fire that is the centre of each family’: landscapes of the ancients. In: A. Hamblin, ed. Visions of future landscapes. Canberra: Proceedings of the Australian Academy of Science. Fenner Conference on the Environment 2.5. Lyotard, J.-F., 1988. The differend: phrases in dispute. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Michaels, A., 1997. Fugitive pieces. London: Bloomsbury. Morton, T., 2012. Ecology without the present. Oxford Literary Review, 34 (2), 229−238. Nixon, R., 2011. Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scheffer, M., et al., 2001. Catastrophic shifts in ecosystems. Nature, 413, 591−596. Sheldon, R., 2016. The child to come: life after the human catastrophe. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Smith, N., 2005. There’s no such thing as a natural disaster [online]. Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences. Available from: http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith/ [Accessed 5 June 2019]. Solnit, R., 2005. Sontag and tsunami [online]. Available from: https://www.tomdispatch.com/ post/2095/rebecca_solnit_on_sontag_and_tsunami [Accessed 5 June 2019]. Solnit, R., 2009. A paradise built in hell. New York: Penguin. Sontag, S., 1966. Against interpretation and other essays. New York: Picador. Stengers, I., 2010. Including nonhumans in political theory: opening Pandora’s box? In: B. Braun and S. Whatmore, eds. Political matter: technoscience, democracy and public life. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 3–33. Swyngedouw, E., 2010. Apocalypse forever? post-political populism and the spectre of climate change. Theory, Culture and Society, 27 (2−3), 213−232.

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Nigel Clark Turner, B., 2006. Vulnerability and human rights. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Unger, R. M., 2007. The self awakened: pragmatism unbound. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Whyte, K., 2017. Indigenous climate change studies: indigenizing futures, decolonizing the Anthropocene. English Language Notes, 55, (1−2), 153−162. Whyte, K., 2018. Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1 (1−2), 224–242. Wyschogrod, E., 1998. An ethics of remembering: history, heterology, and the nameless others. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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PART III

Agents of change

 


   

   

   
 

15 THE STATE Catching Sight of an Agent and Object of Change Glyn Williams

Introduction Although this chapter is concerned with the state as an object in flux, it begins with an account of its role as an agent of social change. The point of departure here is James C. Scott’s Seeing like a state (1998), a widely-cited and impressive book that examines the effects of combining high modernist ideas with authoritarian power. Drawing on examples that include Soviet collective farming, forced villagisation in Tanzania, and the building of Brasília, Scott’s work provides a withering critique of the state’s failures to deliver ‘schemes to improve the human condition’. Central to his argument is that the state ‘sees’ society through its own set of myopic or distorting lenses that strip out and simplify the complexity of actually-existing societies in order to make them governable. This idea of simplification is enacted through the state’s power to define and measure natural, social, and economic characteristics, and turn these into problems which require its own professional expertise to solve. For Scott, opposition to this power comes largely ‘from below’, as the contrast between the state’s visions and their dystopian ground-level effects opens up the possibility of resistance. Attempts to shoe-horn nature or human subjects into the simplifying grids through which the state represents them are doomed to failure: too much that matters has simply been written out of centralised plans. As a result, Brasília is only sustained by (and is in many senses parasitic upon) the informal settlement that grows up around the edges of the planned city, and the de facto operation of the Soviet factory or collective is dependent on the skills of ‘fixers’ who barter for spare parts or improvise solutions to unanticipated problems. Scott’s core contrast is therefore drawn between static and reductive bureaucratic ways of knowing, and mētis, defined as situated, experiential and fluid ‘local knowledge and know-how’ (p. 6). The latter is not only ignored within the ‘abridged maps’ made by the state, but also actively suppressed and undermined by it. As such, the state’s knowledge does not merely represent the world, but also attempts to reshape it in the image of its own simplifications: ‘the logic animating the project… is one of control and appropriation’ (p. 335). The debt Scott’s account owes to Foucault is only partially recognised within the book itself, and other contemporary work within planning and development has made similar arguments about the relationship between power, codified knowledge, and alternative epistemologies (see, among others, Escobar 1994, Ferguson 1994, Friedmann 1990, and Sandercock 1998, DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-18

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2003). Although Scott’s work more generally has returned to themes of resistance to power (Scott 1985, 1990) and its links to anarchism (Scott 2009, 2012), it is Seeing Like a state that has remained most widely cited, particularly for scholars of the Global South, perhaps because of the ongoing relevance of its depiction of the state in a ‘developmental’ mode of action and its unintended consequences. It also contains a call to action that resonates well with critical development scholars: to ensure that alternative ways of knowing the world can be (re)established, and to replace totalising state projects with others that are more modest in their intent, and more participatory in their operation. Due to its focus on struggles over knowledge, Seeing like a state is not really an exercise in state theory, but has nevertheless provided a powerful shorthand for a particular representation of the state. The implicit vision of the state as an object that emerges from it is that of a rational, coherent whole: a functioning, legible Weberian bureaucracy that has the power to transpose and translate ideas from its ‘commanding heights’ down to front-line officers in its ‘trenches’ (Migdal et al. 1994). The state emerges as a largely alien imposition on society in which there is ‘an elective affinity between high modernism and the interests of many state officials’ (p. 5), a combination that gives it the unified will and capability to transform the life-worlds of its subjects. Whilst this is important in the questions that it raises about the functioning of power, its view of a singular, all-powerful state is itself a simplification. It has provided an important critical vantage point from which to call out the damaging effects of high modernism in the mid-twentieth century, and of the high-handed exercise of state power that continue to shape peoples’ lives in many parts of the Global South today. It does, however, need to be questioned, as the state itself has always been both an object subject to change, and situated within societies that are themselves dynamic. Not only this, but the state as viewed from the twenty-first century often looks far more fractured, and far less potent, than the examples present within Scott’s work. To address how the state is changing as an object, I retain Scott’s concern with conscious and deliberate attempts to ‘improve’ the world, but seek to view ‘it’ as a complex and shifting amalgam of relationships, institutions and practices. Political studies has long been concerned with unpacking a multi-tiered state, and showing how it is reflexively produced by its intersection with social forces (Migdal 2001, Migdal et al. 1994), but this endeavour can also be supported by the rich and wide history of scholarship on the anthropology of the state (see, among others, the collections by Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001, Das and Poole 2004, Fuller and Bénéi 2001; and Sharma and Gupta 2006). The ethnographies of the latter tradition encourage us to look at the state through its everyday practices, and are at their most powerful where they not only see the state as ‘culturally embedded and discursively constructed’ (Sharma and Gupta 2006, p. 27), but also as intimately connected to processes that extend from the local to the global scale. Taking up this challenge means replacing the rather static and abstract state that can been seen in Scott’s work with one that is dynamic, contextualised, and co-constitutive of the spatialised relationships of which it is a part. Any such analysis must proceed through grounded examples: to illustrate the possibilities here, I draw on research on India’s developmental state over recent decades. The state in India up to the 1980s, with the ‘steel frame’ of its elite bureaucratic services and its centralised and technocratic planning, was a perhaps as good an example as any of the high modernist vision Scott so eloquently criticised. But India also illustrates well how the state has itself evolved since the later part of the twentieth century, and here I provide two snapshots of how it is responding to particular pressures: changes driven by the need to manage development in an era of globally mobile capital, and changes driven by conscious programmes of governance reform. These glimpses of the state cannot hope to exhaust the range of ways in 182

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which the state is changing. Equally, the timing and relative importance of these particular pressures, as well as their interplay with other forces, will differ greatly across different countries. Nevertheless, as I conclude, they suggest important lines of enquiry for the study of the state as an object of change, particularly in post-colonial societies.

Building the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor in Gujarat The first snapshot of the state is that of its imagination and planning of a megaproject, the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC). Stretching 1,500 kilometres from Delhi to Mumbai, the corridor aims to transform the economic and urban geography of western India through a series of planned new cities and industrial regions. It is underpinned by a vision of spatially-coordinated development of infrastructure, with new ports, airports, and dedicated rail and road links being intended to attract over $100 billion of inward investment to a series of networked economic ‘nodes’ stretched along the Corridor’s length. These include significant extensions of existing industrial areas and conurbations, and also the entirely new planned city of Dholera, which together will embody India’s aspirations of achieving ‘smart’ urbanisation. More broadly, this coordinated investment is intended to deliver a step-change in the development of industry, logistics and real estate. At its launch, it was asserted that the Corridor would double employment, triple industrial output, and quadruple exports within the project area (MCI 2007), claims intended to boost Gujarat’s development by tying this to an imagined infrastructural future (see Blok, this volume). This initially looks like a twenty-first century reincarnation and extension of the same high-modernist drive that Scott critically examines. It is clear, however, that despite the obvious parallels and continued hubris, the state’s role in enacting this vision has changed dramatically. The true Indian parallels with Scott’s examples can be found in the decades after India’s independence in 1947, which exhibited a centrally-planned push towards industrialisation. Grand industrial projects of that era included the building of dams, described by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as the ‘temples of modern India’, and steel towns such as Bhilai or Rourkela, all of which were intended to bring development and enlightenment to ‘backward’ areas. In parallel, metropolitan plans for Delhi and Kolkata, or Le Corbusier’s development of Chandigarh as the new capital of East Punjab, were experiments to reshape India’s cities to reflect the latest international ideas in planning, urban design and architecture. Such efforts represented the centrally-directed concentration of the country’s limited capital into showpieces of ‘modernisation’, and their deliberate linking of these individual sites into a narrative of development. Here, the guiding role of the central state was part of a self-conscious experiment in the production of space (Lefebvre 1991 (1974)): to be specific, in turning the somewhat fragmented territory India inherited at independence into an imagined national space (Goswami 2004). Over fifty years later, India’s return to planning megaprojects has taken a different turn, and is also driving very different forms of change to the state itself. Most obviously, an extended project of economic liberalisation that has continued since the early 1990s means that the relationship between the state and capital is dramatically different. The Nehruvian state had strong central control of investment, but limited resources on which to draw: today, India’s regional governments compete with each other for investment from capital markets within which foreign direct investment plays an increasingly important role. Second, and in contrast to post-Independence efforts to build what were largely stand-alone exemplars of modernist development, spatial integration, and economic coordination are written-in to the logic and structure of corridor-based megaprojects (see Schindler and Kanai 2019), bringing a complex 183

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scalar politics into play. As such, delivering corridor development in India today poses a range of new governance challenges, and here I use recent research with colleagues on the DMIC in Gujarat (Williams et al. 2021) to highlight three challenges for the sub-national state, and to provide some insights into the way in which this is changing state practices. The challenges are those of ‘getting the territory right’, or politically managing the land needs of a megaproject; of matching institutional capacity to ‘scaled-up’ development ambitions; and of mobilising the affective potential that these ambitions embody. The first challenge is that of providing the conditions under which parcels of land can be assembled and delivered at the pace and scale required by infrastructural megaprojects, an activity which places the State (provincial) governments at centre-stage due to India’s division of Constitutional responsibilities. The political fall-out this activity can generate was illustrated starkly in 2007, when land acquisition for a chemical hub in Nandigram, West Bengal, led to violent clashes between police and protestors, killing fourteen, and ultimately contributing to the fall of India’s longest incumbent State government. Gujarat has been keen to avoid such mistakes, and has extended a pro-developer programme of land ‘reform’ that makes it easier to transfer agricultural and common land for industrial or real estate uses. The project’s key sites have also been given the legal status of Special Investment Regions: this transfers these large investment zones out of the purview of elected local government and administers them directly through a civil servant, the Development Commissioner, bringing them closely under the control of Gujarat’s Chief Minister. Additional legislation has further reinforced the Corridor as a space of exception within Gujarat, absolving it from national provisions that seek to ensure that land development involves greater public participation and mitigation of its social costs, and these changes have been reinforced by firm suppression of activists seeking to challenge land acquisition on the ground. In terms of new institutional arrangements and competences, Gujarat has been quick to realise the importance of competing for the private investment that megaproject development entails. Rapid industrialisation over the first decades post-Independence had been driven by a dense, district-based network of local government offices dedicated to the planning and delivery of industrial estates focused on local capital and small and medium enterprises. Planning for the DMIC has effectively leapfrogged this earlier set of institutions, drawing on the cadre of spatial planners it has produced, but placing it under the control of Gujarat Infrastructure Development Board. The Board has been a key player in marketing the Gujarat as a global investment destination, and responded rapidly to the opportunity the corridor represented. It quickly revised its Blueprint for infrastructure in Gujarat, re-concentrating the Government of Gujarat’s own funding in the DMIC command area: this was intended to leverage a series of massive public-private partnerships, with a target of increasing total investment in infrastructure to over $180 billion, trebling its pre-corridor plans (GIDB 2009). What the megaproject has accelerated here is the development of a changed set of state capacities, not merely in the physical planning of development sites, but also in turning these into a range of neatly-packaged investment opportunities, and in expanding public-private partnerships into new areas of operation. Finally, territorial development schemes like the DMIC are powerful legitimating devices, promising new geographies of connection, integration and growth (also see Arabindoo, this volume). As noted above, the corridor’s headline promises are considerable, but as yet there has been limited on-the-ground delivery within Gujarat. The project’s jewel in the crown, the new city of Dholera, is a speculative gamble that may never be fully realised (Datta 2015), and our first-hand investigation of corridor-based expansion of an existing petrochemical hub found a story of local delay and dissatisfaction. Council leaders and farmers were 184

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concerned that agricultural land had been acquired for the project but remained undeveloped, promises of jobs for local workers had not materialised, and any ‘trickle down’ of benefits seemed perpetually delayed. The skill of the Gujarati state has not necessarily been to meet the expectations of corridor-led growth, but rather to mobilise them to build public support for a development model that bolsters its own legitimacy. To this extent, its ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ investment summits have not only been important in boosting the inflow of international capital, but also in creating public spectacles that promote and celebrate the State’s success (Bobbio 2012). Linking the promise of the corridor to Gujarat’s reputation for ‘ease of doing business’ has thus been part of a conscious strategy both to succeed in what is an intensified inter-State competition over the industrial and IT jobs that are central to aspirations of India’s future, but also to silence critics and dissent at home. Taken together, the responses to the governance challenges presented by this particular megaproject are perhaps indicative of wider processes of rescaling and re-purposing the state as it tries to retain management over development processes in an era of global finance. Far from Scott’s account of a commanding monolith looking at the world through reductive metrics of its own choosing, the state here is engaged in repackaging its plans for an audience of investors. At the same time, it is looking anxiously over its shoulder at its regional neighbours, who are also aiming to fix internationally mobile capital within spatially-grounded projects that will secure local economic growth, accumulation and their own legitimacy. The literature would suggest that Gujarat’s experience is far from unique: following the 2008 financial crisis capital has been chasing investment opportunities in the Global South, with infrastructure development being an important outlet for this (Hildyard 2016). The point here for critical social science is not simply to note that the state is more ‘entrepreneurial’ in its outlook as a result, but also that this is changing its operation and practices. New competences are required of it in the marketing and management of public-private partnerships, along with re-writing of rules. It should also be no surprise that the urgency to ‘close deals’ on investment supports a recentralisation of executive power, often pitting those who are shaping new developmental visions against citizens and local branches of the state that are left to deal with their fall-out.

Reforming rural governance in West Bengal The second snapshot is that of a changing state glimpsed through a conscious programme of governance reform, and to illustrate this I turn to West Bengal, in eastern India. Long before Seeing like a state was published, the theory and practice of international development had already recognised the difficulties of top-down planning, and in the 1990s a vigorous debate was ongoing about the nature and delivery of ‘good’ government (see Leftwich 1993, or Grindle 2017 and Williams 2020 for overviews). The fall of the Soviet Union temporarily removed the major geopolitical challenge to the West’s vision of liberal democracy, and gave international development agencies a previously unprecedented opportunity to seek to change the nature and quality of governance in countries of the Global South. Ideas and emphases varied greatly between donor agencies, from those that stressed human rights and democratic accountability to the World Bank’s more functional focus on administrative efficiency and service delivery. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, however, the linking of ‘good governance’ to an agenda of poverty alleviation provided a powerful legitimating drive for those seeking to reform the state. India was free of the direct pressures placed on Heavily Indebted Poor Countries to accept an externally-imposed agenda of good governance through aid conditionality over this period, but nevertheless saw some parallel, independent changes of its own. This was 185

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an era of cautious optimism in which it looked like bureaucratic, and often authoritarian, colonially-inherited governance practices might be shifting in ways that brought about a more empowered citizenry. Constitutional amendments of 1994 established elected local councils in rural and urban India as an essential third tier of government below the national and State (provincial) parliaments, a significant formal change that was supported by a range of participatory mechanisms (including Joint Forest Management Committees, Village Education Committees, and many others) being written in to everyday parts of the state’s operation (Corbridge et al. 2004). West Bengal’s own position within these wider trajectories was distinctive. It had been an early innovator in establishing a structure of elected rural councils or panchayats in 1978, but had done so under very particular conditions. Its Communist-led Left Front Government had established the panchayats not simply to drive forwards inclusive or efficient delivery of centrally-sponsored development programmes, but also as a means of cementing the Party’s control over the Bengali countryside. Academic commentators increasingly criticised the excesses of the latter, noting that significant sections of the Party were quite happy for a rather shallow performance of public participation to run alongside an increasingly ossified and partisan operation of the panchayats, as long as this continued to return the Communists to power. Election victories were indeed regularly delivered: communist dominance of local and State elections continued into the late 2000s, before Mamata Banerjee’s populist Trinamool Congress party finally gained control of the State Assembly in 2011. Debjani Dasgupta’s research (2020) provides important insights into how two separate donor-sponsored programmes, the UK Department for International Development’s Strengthening rural development (2005–11) and the World Bank’s Institutional strengthening of Gram Panchayats (2011–18), straddle this period of regime change and sought to implement very different visions of governance reform. The Strengthening rural development programme had a clear focus on capacity building among panchayat functionaries and stakeholders through an intensive programme of training. Significantly, this extended down to grassroots participatory planning processes, where citizen engagement was structured to feed into and support the actions of local government. The underlying aim here was an indigenously-produced form of empowered participatory governance (Fung and Wright 2003), with change to the state coming from a populace increasingly educated about the proper roles and operation of local government, and hence able to hold it to account. By contrast, the World Bank’s programme took a much more ‘technical’ approach to local governance reform, accelerating the implementation of improved accounting practices and the computerisation of record keeping, and integrating all local government spending through a centralised monitoring and information system. In moves reminiscent of World Bank projects elsewhere, ‘reformed’ practices were locked in through a combination of detailed procedures and strong financial incentives: only those local councils able to meet new requirements around data production and management were able to receive extended block spending grants in full. As an inevitable consequence, the time-intensive participatory processes that had underpinned the DFID-sponsored programme were stripped away under this new mode of operation that emphasised streamlined operation, formal procedure, and timely delivery. The contrasts here, and their links back to Scott’s ideas of how the state ‘sees’, were clearly illustrated by panchayat maps produced under each programme, which I encountered firsthand with Dasgupta when visiting her field sites in 2017. Talking to local council personnel about how computerisation had changed their working, we were shown a digitised map of the panchayat area. A longstanding complaint is that the spending on minor public works (such as road repair, extensions to school buildings, or the supply of tubewells for drinking 186

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water) that is a central plank of local government work was almost impossible to monitor, and hence a significant source of corruption. We were enthusiastically told that the software allowed photos to be dated, geo-referenced and tagged to their monitoring system, providing a ‘fool-proof ’ record of such projects before, during and after their completion: this allowed instantaneous and frictionless access to information for local and higher-level officials, a 20:20 vision of everything captured within this database. By contrast, when visiting a nearby panchayat, a former village development committee member proudly dusted down the detailed, hand-drawn village resource map he and his team had produced as part of the Strengthening rural development project around a decade earlier. As might have been ideally expected from an exercise based around participatory research techniques, once unrolled and displayed on the ground, the map instantly drew in a crowd of villagers eager to talk about what it showed, and their roles in its production. Representing many hours of residents’ voluntary labour, it had clearly long since lost any value within formal planning processes, but still had the power to animate impassioned discussion about the area’s condition and development needs. Dasgupta’s work not only identifies these contrasting practices and their underlying visions of what ‘good’ governance looks like: importantly, it also locates these as part of a set of complex internal battles within the state. The Strengthening rural development process was not imposed on the Communist-led government by DFID, but emerged from struggles within the party. Its Minister for rural development had for several decades been involved in experiments in participatory planning in West Bengal, but had never enjoyed the political support to scale these up. Backed by a group of like-minded senior civil servants, DFID funding gave him the opportunity to do so, and thereby demonstrate the potential of participatory planning to re-forge relationships between people, the party and the local state. It was in part the threat of losing control over their voters this implied that meant that dominant factions within the Communist party moved to reverse key elements of the programme shortly before losing power to Mamata Banerjee. For Mamata Banerjee, a populist leader with only a weak control over her grassroots party workers, the newly-started World Bank programme was a perfect fit to her political needs. Local council practices focused around streamlined and measurable activity offered the promise of ‘clean’ governance and concrete delivery. Its reforms have also had far more lasting support within the state than the earlier experiment in empowered participatory governance. While the latter embodied a vision shared by the previous Minister and the group of elite civil servants around him, its effects in opening up the internal operation of the state to detailed public interrogation caused nervousness among government officers and elected local politicians of all parties. By contrast, the World Bank project, with its strict enforcement of timelines and data management, has provided a more subtle reversal of over three decades of local councillors’ autonomy within panchayat affairs. For rank-and-file government officers, their detailed knowledge of new working practices and their control over recorded information has reinstated their power within the panchayats’ day-to-day operation, and made them enthusiastic champions of technically-focused planning. Again, these particular instances of governance reform are far from unique, and have their echoes in other studies of conscious projects to reform the state that have been playing out in many places across the Global South (Bradshaw and Linnekar 2003, Craig and Porter 2003, Li 2007). Important within this particular presentation, however, is the insight that the will, ideas, and agency of international development agencies should not necessarily placed at centre-stage. Within more simplistic anti-development accounts, donor agencies can assume almost mythic power: in Dasgupta’s research, they instead appear as resources to be drawn upon in ongoing struggles within and between different elements of the state. 187

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Conclusions As our snapshots have shown, the actually-experienced state is often a far cry from its claims of omnipotence, and its developmental ambitions are occurring under rapidly-shifting conditions. Scott to some degree anticipated this change, noting that the examples chosen within Seeing the state might seem like a ‘quaint archaeology’ of the mid-twentieth century. This was perhaps a rather unique period in which states had sufficient technological competence, combined with moments in which they could claim sufficient autonomy and legitimacy, to push forwards their own, singular views of the world. Scott’s conclusions to his book are that the contests between context-rich, experiential knowledge, and the reduction and simplification he saw embodied with the high-modernist state are, however, likely to continue. He sees grassroots, practical knowledge or mɷtis as continuing to be undervalued and undercut, but with this change now far more likely to be driven forwards by the monocular vision of international capital. The point of this chapter, however, is rather different: the state remains a powerful agent of change, and hence the importance of understanding ‘it’ as a complex amalgam of institutions continues. This means that we need to pay careful attention to the spatial imaginaries and practices of the state itself, and those aiming to change them. In India, the examples presented here suggest that this means placing the study of the state within a set of globalised relationships. If the Indian state is becoming more tech-savvy, it is also perhaps more of a handmaid to corporate capital. This in turn helps to shape its ideas about what desirable ‘development’ looks like, and these in turn owe far more to images of Dubai or Shanghai (c.f. Watson 2014) than they do to empowered participatory governance as practiced in Porto Alegre (Fung and Wright 2003). There is a lot here to temper the earlier cautious optimism that the everyday practices of the state in India might be becoming more democratic and inclusive (Corbridge et al. 2004), even before the Hindu nationalist ideological project of its current government is considered. Just in case it was needed, India’s experiences provide a powerful reminder that moves towards ‘good’ governance are neither straightforward nor irreversible. This in turn suggests a rather different form of comparative enquiry from that present within Scott’s work, and here I suggest one point of continuity and three changes. The point of continuity is to retain his focus on the state in its ‘developmental’ mode. The state’s central involvement in ‘schemes to improve the human condition’ is ongoing in the twenty-first century, and the Indian examples presented here could be multiplied across contexts internationally, and across a vast array of substantive topics, as the ambition of the Sustainable Development Goals indicate. There is, then, a rich vein of subject matter here, but methodologically, developmental projects provide particularly valuable opportunities to see how the state is changing as an object. This is partly because development projects contain explicitly expressed agendas that can be critically examined, but also because they consciously intend to drive change. Whether these projects are directed at society, or at the state itself, these are likely to bring to the surface stakes and interests that might otherwise be hidden. The differences come in moving away from Scott’s focused, but somewhat monocular, zeroing-in on the narrowness and reductionism of bureaucratic ways of knowing. If we want to bring the state as an object into view, we need to widen our analytical optics through a series of changes. First, developmental projects are very rarely singular. The process of ‘rendering technical’ (Li 2007) by the state – producing a narrowed vision of change, and a reductive understanding of the problem it first sets and then seeks to ‘solve’ for itself – is indeed an important part of its governance practices. Such projects are, as Li reminds us, almost always 188

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contested by a range of actors with interests and competing interpretations of their own. The job of the social scientist is to analyse the tensions, opportunities, and resistances that are present here, to hence to see development projects as generated by and playing out, within this multiple, complex array. Second, space and scale remain important parts of these contests. The state in Scott’s account emerges primarily as a national entity, its vision formed in the ‘commanding heights’ of its institutions, and opposed by the everyday resistance and practical knowledge of its citizens. What the examples presented here show is the importance of opening up this rather singular scalar focus. International ideas and capital are important resources to be mobilised within the state’s projects, and many of the contests over their implementation may come from within the state itself. This certainly requires greater geographical imagination within the theorisation of the actors involved, and the terrains over which these contests are fought. It also demands an openness to seeing development projects as themselves exercises in the production of space and scale. The eclipsing of local autonomy in West Bengal, or in Gujarat the reterritorialisation of economic growth around a corridor and the removal of its ‘nodes’ from local democratic oversight, are both indications of the power of state projects to reshape geographies of governance. Linking both, the final shift of perspective that is required to see a changing state more clearly is to approach these sightings with eyes genuinely open to their variety, and not blinkered by pre-written narratives. The issue here is to produce new descriptions of the state that are generative of new forms of comparison: analyses that raise questions about governance practices that have relevance within other parts of the world. The empirical specificity of any actually-existing state and its positioning within a changing world means that there are always new stories to be told. The skill lies in respecting and communicating the contextual richness from which these stories come: to relate them in ways that give them wider theoretical reach, but also to do so without funnelling our understanding of their complexity through a single viewpoint. If we fail to achieve this delicate balance, our academic representations of the state are likely to revert to describing it simply as a victim of neoliberalism, a pawn of World Bank-inspired agendas, or even as a holder of a singular way of knowing the world. These sightings of the state are themselves as likely to be distorted as the high-modernist developmental visions Scott so eloquently criticises.

Acknowledgements The research on Gujarat reported here was funded through a British Academy project, Megaprojects and the reshaping of urban futures: governance and equity in the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (Award Reference: IC160213). Debjani Dasgupta’s work on West Bengal was funded through a University of Sheffield PhD scholarship. I dedicate this chapter to the memory of Manoj Srivastava, IAS (1955–2020), and am eternally grateful for all he taught me about the Indian state.

References Blom Hansen, T. and Stepputat, F., eds., 2001. Ethnographic explorations of the postcolonial state. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bobbio, T., 2012. Making Gujarat vibrant: Hindutva, development and the rise of subnationalism in India. Third World Quarterly, 33 (4), 657−672. Bradshaw, S. and Linnekar, B., 2003. Civil society responses to poverty reduction strategies in Nicaragua. Progress in Development Studies, 3 (2), 147−158.

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Glyn Williams Corbridge, S., et al., 2004. Seeing the state: governance and governmentality in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Craig, D. and Porter, D., 2003. Poverty reduction strategy papers: a new convergence. World Development, 31 (1), 53−69. Das, V. and Poole, D., eds., 2004. Anthropology in the margins of the state. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Dasgupta, D., 2020. Participatory governance reform in West Bengal: policy agendas and local responses. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield. Datta, A., 2015. New urban utopias of postcolonial India: ‘entrepreneurial urbanization’ in Dholera smart city, Gujarat. Dialogues in Human Geography, 5 (1), 3−22. Escobar, A., 1994. Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ferguson, J., 1994. The anti-politics machine: ‘development’, depoliticisation and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Friedmann, J., 1990. Empowerment: the politics of alternative development. Oxford: Blackwell. Fuller, C.J. and Bénéi, V., eds., 2001. The everyday state and society in modern India. London: C. Hurst & Co. Fung, A. and Wright, E.O., eds., 2003. Deepening democracy: institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance. London: Verso. GIDB [Gujarat Infrastructure Development Board], 2009. Review of Blueprint for Infrastructure in Gujarat (BIG 2020) – Final Report Volume 1 – Summary and Vision. Gujarat: Government of Gujarat. Goswami, M., 2004. Producing India: from colonial economy to national economy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Grindle, M., 2017. Good Governance RIP: a critique and an alternative. Governance, 30 (1), 17−22. Hildyard, N., 2016. Licensed larceny: infrastructure, financial extraction and the Global South. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lefebvre, H., 1991. The production of space. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Original French publication, 1974 La Production de l’Espace. Paris: Anthropos. Leftwich, A., 1993. Governance, democracy and development in the Third World. Third World Quarterly, 14 (3), 605−624. Li, T.M., 2007. The will to improve: governmentality, development and the practice of politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. MCI [Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Government of India], 2007. Concept paper Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor. Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion. Migdal, J., 2001. State in society: studying how states and societies transform and constitute one another. New York: Cambridge University Press. Migdal, J., Kohli, A., and Shue, V., 1994. State power and social forces: domination and transformation in the Third World. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sandercock, L., 1998. Towards cosmopolis: planning for multicultural cities. London: John Wiley & Sons. Sandercock, L., 2003. Cosmopolis II: mongrel cities in the 21st century. London: Continuum. Schindler, S. and Kanai, J.M., 2019. Getting the territory right: infrastructure-led development and the re-emergence of spatial planning strategies. Regional Studies, 55 (1), 41−51. Scott, J., 1985. Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J., 1990. Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J., 1998. Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J., 2009. The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J., 2012. Two cheers for anarchism: six easy pieces on autonomy, dignity, and meaning ful work and play. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sharma, A. and Gupta, A., 2006. The anthropology of the state: a reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Watson, V., 2014. African urban fantasies: dreams or nightmares. Environment and Urbanization, 26 (1), 215−231. Williams, G., 2020. Governance, good. In: A. Kobayashi, ed. International encyclopaedia of human geography, 2nd edition, Vol. 6. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 235–243. Williams, G., et al., 2021. Megaprojects, mirages and miracles: territorialising the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) and state restructuring in contemporary India. Territory, Politics and Governance. [Published online 15 February 2021].

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16 NGOs AS CHANGE AGENTS Being and Doing Change Diana Mitlin

Introduction This chapter explores the role and contribution of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as social change agents supporting a shift towards a more progressive world. NGOs are charitable organisations working in the field of development. Progressive – a term that is and which should be contested – is broadly defined in this chapter to mean more equitable and with an emphasis on ‘leaving no-one behind’ in terms of the distribution of development benefits. This requires more than just the redistribution of benefits (and potentially greater generation of benefits); it also requires an amplified voice for marginalised groups, their equal representation and enhanced democracy. Progressive change recognises that there are multiple challenges to be addressed including equitable economic growth, reduced exploitation in labour markets, and lower environmental costs. Achieving progressive change is not a simple process but requires both technical and professional knowledge, and debate about trade-offs and choices. I recognise both that this definition of progressive change is very broad, and (as elaborated below) that the meaning and nature of such transformation is contested. Not all NGOs are concerned with progressive change. Some seek to be apolitical, focused on, for example, humanitarian relief. Others seek to advance more conservative values and their work would not be consistent with the definition given above. While NGOs are frequently considered as a general category or sector, this is not helpful as there is considerable diversity in respect of NGO objectives, activities, and their strategies for change. In development, there is a distinction between Northern and Southern NGOs. Northern NGOs (sometimes called international NGOs) are those supporting development in the global South. Southern NGOs primarily work in the place where they are located. This distinction still broadly holds but is challenged by Southern NGOs such as BRAC have grown beyond Bangladesh to work in other countries in the global South, and Northern NGOs such as ActionAid and Oxfam who have sought to transform themselves into international networks. Some NGOs have expanded into development education in the global North. And NGOs have programming activities in the global North acknowledging considerable problems of poverty and injustice. However, for the most part the focus on the global South remains. The discussion in this chapter distinguishes between NGOs and a broader constituency of civil society organisations. Civil society is used to refer to a wide range of non-state and DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-19

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non-market groups that function in the civic realm engaging in public discourse and acting individually and collectively to address perceived needs and interests. Civil society includes registered charities, less formal grassroot organisations including social movements, faithbased organisations, agencies that represent commercial enterprises such as chambers of commerce and market trader associations, trade unions, and potentially political parties and profit-making cooperatives. This chapter maintains a primary focus on NGOs but recognises that NGOs are embedded within this wider constituency and the relationships they form with other civil society groups may be essential to their mission. NGOs are registered charities, formally constituted and generally have professional staff. They have governance procedures defined by the rules of the country in which they are registered. Typically, their Boards are formed by volunteers committed to the objectives of the organisation as stated within the constitution. As charities, these organisations have to have objectives that address the public interest. This highlights one of the core contradictions facing NGOs. Charitable registration confers privileges (generally tax exemptions) on organisations in recognise of the significance of collective citizen action to address the public good. However, their legal status is under the authority of governments, who may constrain the activities of NGOs who are critical of such governments. Governments have responded to this contradiction by having regulatory processes to monitor and control NGO activities. This contradiction challenges NGOs that understand themselves to be counter hegemonic. The general context in which NGOs are working is marked by environmental crises, political suspicion, and growing inequality. The climate emergency has brought new environmental challenges that low-income populations are poorly equipped to address. Social views may be liberalising in some places but in others vulnerable groups faced increased difficulties from rising nationalism, and local manifestations of national and global prejudices (such as islamophobia). Governments that have shifted to the right are particularly concerned about NGOs’ critical commentaries. Faced with campaigns that are critical of state policies and actions, governments have acted to restrict NGOs’ work and otherwise constrain their influence. In India, for example, Prime Minister Modi’s government has moved to control NGO advocacy through strengthening its control over the sector, and targeting local NGOs receiving foreign funding and international NGOs operating in the country (Kumar 2019). However, the context is not entirely negative. Increased human capabilities have led to many local initiatives with new technologies offering a chance to increase effectiveness through, for example, sharing data and growing public awareness. Increased education offers people a broader set of perspectives and helps to challenge conservative values. Improved connectivity enables people to have access to a wider range of ideas and experiences. Global poverty indictors have improved, although such advances are threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic. For NGOs, local patterns of development are increasingly influenced by global processes such as those related to economic growth and transformation, transnational policy mobility, and advocacy networks that seek influence over global corporations and multi-lateral agencies. NGOs benefited for many years from increased access to bilateral aid budgets to finance their activities. However, austerity policies in public management have reduced the number of staff in the bilateral development assistance agencies. This has led to further challenges with increased contracting out and the de-skilling of staffing complements that remain. At the same time the shift towards professionalised development processes and ‘metric management’ have increased the management complexities faced by NGOs seeking to provide flexible support for grassroot processes. While philanthropic donors have increased in number with more funding, the transfer of business practices encourages further changes in organisational cultures, and arguably has shifted NGOs away from being pro-poor. 192

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The substantive discussion begins in the next section with a consideration of NGO roles, functions and actions to contribute to progressive change, and contribute at a scale relevant to their own ambition. The discussion has a focus on NGOs that work in the urban context, as this corresponds to my own field of expertise. Long-recognised NGO roles – to support the work of other civil society groups and citizens in need – include acquiring and managing funds, building beneficial relations with a range of elite and powerful groups (including local government officials), technical expertise related to project and programme implementation, documentation and advocacy on behalf of the groups whose needs and interests the NGO seeks to advance, and learning and capability development across a spectrum of citizen groups. However, embedded within these roles are radically different perspectives on strategies, approaches and triggers for positive change. The following section outlines four NGO ‘personas’ to advance our understanding of the ways that NGOs mix activities to effect social change. The challenges to ‘being’ and ‘doing’ section reviews the challenges that NGOs face in their efforts to catalyse change at scale. The platitudes of ‘doing good’, ‘helping humanity’, and acting in ‘the public interest’ for ‘progressive change’ are fundamental to common understandings and legal requirements, but what this means in practice is subject to considerable internal and external contestation. The long-recognised challenges of performance, accountability and legitimacy remain. They have been joined by the challenge of autonomy both for NGOs alone and – in a significantly more complex form – within the NGO-movement alliances that have a recognised significance for NGOs seeking to support the voices and agendas of disadvantaged and marginalised citizens. These contradictions are in part a result of NGOs being relatively powerless but ambitious agencies in what might be seen as an increasingly hostile context. Other contradictions are inherent in the goal of a powerful agency seeking to empower less powerful groups. Living the ‘fine balance’ (or when the ‘fine balance’ is not a balance at all) section considers how NGOs resolve tensions that they have to manage. The last section concludes.

NGOs – ‘being’ and ‘doing’ change The diversity of NGOs types and the multiple strategies followed by NGOs has been widely recognised (see, for example, Korten’s typology (1990)). Below I outline four updated ‘personas’ to use as a heuristic device to categorise NGOs seeking social change processes. The term persona is used to refer to a way of ‘being’ in development, rather than simply ‘doing’ development. This distinguishes alternative types of agencies but puts equal emphasis on the culture of an agency in addition to the functional contribution and activities that are undertaken. In using this term, I reflect the analysis of Thomas (2008) on the significance of NGO relationships to goal achievement. The personas reflect the growth and sophistication of the NGO sector, and associated complexities. As elaborated in Table 16.1, underlying these different personas are alternative theories of change. It is possible for one NGO to follow all four personas but there are limits to this because these personas result in distinct organisational personalities, with associated public profiles and reputations. Table 16.1 introduces these personas, their core approach, theory of change, and their strategy for scaling their work. The discussion in this section below adds to Table 16.1 by exemplifying the ways in which these personas are realised. All personas – in the context of social change objectives – involve NGOs working or campaigning to change others. Hence, I have deliberately avoided progressive social change being a distinctive characteristic that is the prerogative of any single persona. 193

Table 16.1 NGO personas Strategy to scale

Innovators

NGO may be well-suited to innovation and experimentation in specific areas. This may be related to ignored topics (e.g., the climate emergency) where private sector innovation is inadequate, and/or to reaching particular groups in need that are neglected by state agencies.

Educators and informers

New understandings and information about existing problems are critical to progress. Hence there is a need to research and share knowledge to reveal new and existing process of injustice, exploitation, and marginalisation.

Adoption of innovations by a range of SPARC (SDI support NGO in India) and REALL are examples of two NGOs (respectively in the global others leads to uptake and scale. This South and global North) that innovate. SPARC does may be governments, private sector companies or even households who see this through applied research and programme-related how scarce resources can be better used. initiatives with organised communities, to improve state solutions in the shelter sector. REALL does this Innovations may also be related to through targeted investments in the low-income improved influence. housing sector to develop the market for lowermiddle and low-income income housing. Scale comes through persuading other More lobbying-based social movements and activist groups such as Greenpeace have been joined by civil society organisations to take up groups such as Extinction Rebellion to draw these identified problems as causes attention to causes that they consider to be neglected. (building a critical mass of pressure) While some might not consider these groups part of and through states and private sector companies (and sometimes households) the NGO sector, they are included here as representative of the continuing tradition to use changing policies, programmes, and information to lobby for change. practices. SDI affiliates in South Africa (housing policy reform), Organised citizens pressure the state in Kenya (shift away from informal settlement (and private sector companies) to eviction), in Pune (India) (shift from redevelopment reform policies and redistribute and relocation). Non-SDI examples including resources. NGOs help to ensure that the policy, programming, and practice WIEGO who work with women informal workers to challenge coercion against street workers, the changes address needs and interests. exclusion of waste recyclers, and the exploitation of Self-help may be a further scaling domestic workers. strategy. Service providing NGO activities have grown in scale Demonstrations of effectiveness in since the state realised the capabilities of NGOs. In reaching hard to reach populations some cases service providing NGO activities reflects and/or addressing recognised needs a co-productive approach while in other cases NGOs lead to additional funding and/or are contracted to provide services that have been replication by other providers. Note NGO provision is a scaling strategy in designed by the state. itself if NGO providers are lower-cost than government and utilities.

Alliance builder: Organised communities, citizen groups, and social movements working with social movements represent their constituencies’ needs and organisations and interests and can legitimately of marginalised make claims on the state. NGOs align with these groups. communities Service providers

Low-income populations need access to a range of essential goods and services and in the absence of the state or in the absence of appropriate and/or affordable state or market provision, NGOs should step in to provide.

Examples of scaling

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NGOs as innovators NGOs have traditionally been recognised as innovators in development, addressing the challenges that official development agencies have been insufficiently nimble or aware to take on. This role continues to be supported both by traditional funders and, in the United Kingdom, by other funders such as United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) (the state financed research commissioning agency). Reflecting a more general policy imperative to design a smaller role for the state and a greater recognition of the need for improved markets if social inclusion and poverty reduction are to be achieved, some NGOs have expanded their work on innovation to include the private sector. The most substantive – and arguably still the most controversial – has been micro-finance. These micro-finance agencies emerged from efforts, generally by NGOs, to extend financial services to those who lacked them (Dichter 1996, Solo 2008). Controversial because – it is argued – innovations has not delivered positive social change but has increased the vulnerability of the lowest income groups ( Johnson 2009, Duvendack et al. 2011). Innovation NGOs have sought to use market processes to scale efforts to reach slightly higher income groups. The role of the NGO is in developing new products and demonstrating their financial viability. Once demonstrated, those new products (it is argued) will scale because of the potential for commercial replication. An example is Reall, a United Kingdom-based NGO, that has emerged from a more traditional NGO, Homeless International (HI). Reall changed its name and strategy away from raising grants for shelter projects for the lowestincome households to changing the housing sector in the global South through demonstrating the potential of developers to reach lower middle-income and potentially low-income residents. In addition to working on the housing itself, it has also recognised the essential role of affordable housing finance (i.e., access to housing loans) to advance home ownership and improved shelter options ( Jones and Stead 2020). Such innovations demonstrate that not all positive social change – as defined at the beginning of this chapter – involves radical anticapitalist actions and changing state ideologies.

NGOs as educators and informers NGOs have long sought to use information and knowledge to challenge processes of exclusion, exploitation, and dispossession. This approach draws from a belief that a lack of knowledge explains a lack of motivation for social change and prevents citizen and state commitment and action. NGOs approach their role as educators in numerous ways with some closer to those of formal research organisations, some aligned with news outlets and media, and some using information alongside public protest to draw attention to critical issues. Populist governments, threatened by information that challenges their representations of reality, have sought to control news and information activities; see the reference to Modi in India above. One group particularly at risk has been those working on environmental issues, providing information and evidence about environmental destruction (Greenfield and Watts 2020). Alongside these threats, there continue to be NGO efforts to be educators and informers. Long-standing work is illustrated by Practical Action. Practical Action operates Practical Action Publishing, previously ITDG (Intermediate Technology Development Group) Publishing. Not only does Practical Action produce and distribute books, it also provides a technical advice service, Practical Answers. Web-based platforms such as Avaaz and 38 Degrees have sought to use the internet to inform and catalyse citizen action. Not all these campaigning organisations are NGOs, although most work with NGOs. 38 degrees, for 195

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example, collaborates with agencies such as ActionAid, Disasters Emergency Committee and the World Development Movement (Thirty eight degrees 2019). Global crises such as climate change have encouraged multi-scalar NGO activities. The Coalition for Urban Transitions, for example, targets its work providing evidence to national governments. The International Centre for Climate Change and Development focuses on advancing adaptation to climate change in Bangladesh, sharing experiences with others that are interested in learning. At the global scale the International Institute for Environment and Development is providing evidence to support global commitments, while also working with local agencies to advance measures that address the climate emergency (IIED 2019).

NGOs as alliance builders NGOs have long worked closely with social movements and other citizen organisations to represent disadvantaged groups and catalyse social change processes that address their needs and interests. They do this in recognition of the intrinsic limits of their own contribution and the significance of representative organisations. These NGOs understand that mass mobilisations are required to secure redistribution. The NGO roles are varied and include raising money and managing funds, building beneficial relations with a range of elite and powerful groups (such as government officials), providing technical expertise related to project and programme implementation, documenting the work of citizen groups, and learning and capability development within such alliances. Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) is one such example of this ‘persona’ that has gone to scale. SDI is a network of national Alliances in 33 countries which follow a common methodology and set of rituals. These Alliances seek to create new approaches to urban development, led by the residents of informal settlements, and led by women who are, in their gender-defined roles, responsible for social reproduction (Bolnick 2008, Satterthwaite and Mitlin 2014, Bolnick 2018, SDI, no date). National Alliances (involving a federation of savings groups whose members are living in informal urban settlements, a support NGO and frequently a savings and loan fund) identify new approaches to informal settlement upgrading, amplify the voices of women residents, enable them to negotiate for their priorities, and secure better urban development policies and practices through engaging with local and national governments. SDI’s Kenyan affiliate, the Muungano Alliance, have recently built on 20 years of urban action and advocacy to engage with Nairobi County and a consortium of 40 plus agencies, in order to have privately-owned Mukuru neighbourhood declared a Special Planning Area and develop a new approach to address the needs of the 100,000 plus households renting accommodation there (Lines and Makau 2018, Horn et al. 2020, Lines et al. 2020). The national government acted swiftly in the context of Covid-19 and supported some upgrading actions there in 2020 (Muungano, no date). NGOs may combine a role in education with alliance building; for example, see the work of DanChurchAid and city-based platforms of residents’ associations in Zimbabwe (We Pay You Deliver Consortium 2018). DanChurchAid is an NGO with humanitarian origins (DCA, no date) which has expanded its work to support this Zimbabwe Consortium of agencies (We Pay You Deliver Consortium 2018) to research the financing of basic services and the lack of essential service provision. This example shows how NGOs may position themselves as the catalyst for more broadly-based coalitions that seek to secure political change. NGOs with global credibility may be helpful in convening others who need to change their policies and practices, for example, action on climate change. In addition to providing knowledge to 196

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educate stakeholders, IIED have been working with the Least Developed Group of countries within the UN climate negotiations. Their role is both to contribute evidence to assist them to develop and strengthen their position, and then make the case within the UN negotiations through strategic interventions agreed with the groups that they are seeking to assist.

NGOs as service providers It is perhaps in their role as service providers that NGOs have been most criticised from within civil society by those who fear that NGOs are supporting neo-liberal approaches and failing to secure poverty reduction. One concern is that the lack of state subsidies means that services are accessed through markets and that the lowest-income residents find that they are excluded. Despite these widespread concerns, NGOs continue to take up these opportunities. However, the efforts that some NGOs have placed on influencing the government to fund inclusive programme approaches, mean that some service-providing NGOs continue to support progressive social change (Batley 2011). In Karachi, Pakistan, for example, the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) has combined support for sanitation (in the form of technical assistance in the provision of sewers), with support for communities lobbying the state for investments in trunk sewers and waste treatment plants (Hasan 2008). This offers a further example of extended ‘personas’. Recognising the need to protect communities at risk from state infrastructure investments and land grabbing, OPP staff helped to initiate and continue to support the Urban Resource Centre in Karachi. The Centre brings together professionals and organised communities to share information and knowledge about challenges and planned developments. The Centre’s vision is that through such a dialogue, positive urban transformation is more likely to be achieved. Service delivery has strengthened local representative organisations (in this case those concerned with sanitation provision) and built collectives of such organisations, while the Urban Resource Centre has facilitated a more political role for these residents’ collectives. The significance of such collective consumption for urban social movements has been recognised in both Latin America and the global North (Castells 1983). Reflecting across all four personas, whichever is adopted, NGOs need a strategy for achieving scale, i.e., increasing the reach of their work (see Table 16.1). As explored in the next section, scaling risks exacerbates core challenges that NGOs – both individually and as a sector – have long struggled to respond to.

The challenges to ‘being’ and ‘doing’ NGOs are motivated by social missions (at least in part), and often benefit from considerable public support, dedicated staff and volunteers, the moral high ground, and recognition from official development agencies and private foundations. However, NGOs have to engage with complex power relations of power and significant contestation to shift outcomes to be more equitable and/or just. This section considers how NGOs manage such challenges.

Accountabilities The complexity of NGO accountability has been widely acknowledged. NGOs have grown – as a sector and sometimes as individual agencies – because of the role they play within development (Hulme and Edwards 1997, Banks et al. 2015). However, NGOs have no easy source of funds; in both North and South are intermediaries in a chain of financial relations. The 197

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tensions in this chain of relationships have been widely acknowledged. Pressures for upward accountability, particularly in the context of fiduciary compliance, have led to concerns that NGOs are losing touch with their base, and potentially with their peers. Despite efforts to create downward and horizontal accountabilities, the prevailing funding structures and associated cultures, lead to the predominance of top-down vertical accountabilities with associated tensions. The negative implications of resource dependency have long been realised. Donors become influential through their contracting requirements whether this is through specific conditionalities or organisational cultures that encourage formalisation and professionalisation. Increasing emphasis on metrics to ensure adequate performance exacerbates this challenge. The lack of downward accountability matters because it reduces the responsiveness of NGOs to the constituencies that they seek to collaborate with and whose needs and interests they seek to address. This is particularly problematic for NGOs that make alliances with grassroot organisations and highly marginalised populations. Arguably it is the more subtle effects and the reinforcement of vertical lines of authority through these processes and the respect shown to powerful groups and individuals that is most problematic. The issue of safeguarding of NGO beneficiaries – catalysed into the public eye by Oxfam’s very evident failures (Charity Commission 2019) – have introduced a new aspect to weak accountability to core constituencies. However, there is also evidence of more positive trends. Increased awareness of the costs of over-dependence on a narrow donor base has encouraged donor diversification. Those NGOs that make alliances with social movement or other constituency-based organisations place themselves in multi-layered and sophisticated political process to reduce the influence of donor agencies, conditionalities and/or make the tensions more explicit and therefore easier to address. For example, bottom-up governance and accountability in SDI is protected through a Council of Federations that meets annually with representatives from each social movement, regional hubs that support the work of spatially proximate affiliates, and a Management Committee (primarily of Federation leaders) that is elected by the Council to guide network operations (SDI, no date). Greater awareness of significance of internal cultures and of ‘being’ an alternative development practice rather than promoting an alternative development practice has led to agency reflection and introspection. The ‘me too’ movement has added weight to longstanding complaints by those believing that change begins from within. See, for example, ActionAid’s statement (no date) about how they practice feminism which commits them to internal reforms.

Legitimacy Transformative NGOs have to engage with the need for political change. While it has been argued that the world has shifted to the era of post-politics with increasingly technical and managerial development interventions. NGO actions and objectives that fall clearly and squarely into the arena of politics demand an engagement with politicians and seek a political response. But development NGOs are vulnerable from multiple directions. Politicians dismiss professionals with radical agendas considering they lack the legitimacy associated with mass organisations whose members offer election success. NGOs may be challenged because they lack the knowledge and supposed ‘neutrality’ of academics. Earlier debates about the legitimacy and NGOs included criticisms from governments about how NGOs could be legitimate in a context in which their accountability was, at best, 198

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to themselves and in which they defined and then campaigned for the public interest with little accountability to the democratic process. As noted in the Introduction, who defines the public interest is a political process which is necessarily contested. The legitimacy of NGO activities has been challenged on the basis of charitable legislation (see, for example, a debate in the UK parliament about Oxfam’s support for certain political campaigns Hansard 1991). In some countries, NGOs have been subject to intensifying regulation in some countries when political elites in control of the state are threatened by their activities. In Kenya, for example, an Act to regulate NGOs was introduced in 1990; current efforts to revise this legislation have led to debates about how freedom of association can be protected, while standards of internal governance and integrity of purpose protected. See, for example, Jillo’s (2019) discussion of relevant laws. Further challenges about the legitimacy of NGOs work have been levelled at them – generally by those on the political left – as hostile commentators argue that they are deeply compromised by their engagement with the state. These criticisms have grown as NGOs have been contracted by governments to provide services perhaps because they are lower cost. But it is also because NGOs have been successful in their advocacy with the state, catalysing programming reforms such as the National Slum Upgrading Programme in South Africa or the Community Mortgage Program in the Philippines which include a role for NGOs (Porio et al. 2004, Fieuw 2015, Fieuw and Mitlin 2018). Both these Programmes support the upgrading of informal settlements with specific funding for NGOs to work with grassroots communities. NGO influence has also been enhanced by the transition of staff into government as state agencies recognise and recruit from the NGO sector (Lewis 2008). These practices are longstanding and current generations of NGO staff have worked in contexts where this is normality. Challenges about NGO collaboration with the state have continued alongside new challenges about NGO engagement with the market. How can an NGO both be focussed on inclusion and on market means of intervention? This challenge has advanced beyond micro-finance to a suite of NGO activities to improve access to essential goods and services. But access through the market depends on an ability to pay. Without the state subsidies that are commonplace in the global North, NGOs cannot secure inclusion. Where subsidies are available they are rarely universal; and if they are universal, they are rarely generous. If the trends for accountability are neutral or positive, the challenges of legitimacy are arguably more acute.

Effective For NGOs to be credible they must be effective. NGOs gain their formal status through charitable registration. To be credible they must advance their cause and achieve relevance at some scale. The problem of scale has permeated an NGO sector that aspires to transformative change for many decades. Without a strategy to grow and move beyond small projects (however defined) NGOs are simply charities that alleviate but do not reduce poverty and inequality. Indeed, it might be argued that in responding to immediate needs without a solution to generalise provision to all of those in need, they are exacerbating the problems they seek to address. Without scale (arguably without universality) those in need may become more fatalistic (and inactive) about their situation. In this context, poverty reduction by NGOs is an act of charity focussed on addressing the needs of a few, rather than actions to promote social justice with the more equitable sharing of resources such that basic needs and rights can be met. 199

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NGO strategies to scale their work include efforts to deepen and broaden their reach, and to enrich their provision through providing additional goods, services, and capabilities. Aware of limitations to scaling both through the market and state, NGOs have sought a further strategy. This is to influence people’s own choices, for example, encouraging them to invest in improved sanitation. However, the weakness of this approach in that it gives little recognition to the structural causes of poverty and disadvantage (McGranahan 2012). Effectiveness asks tricky questions of NGOs whatever their role. Even the questions related to how effectiveness is measured are difficult. It means NGOs must make choices about how they differentiate their own contribution from that of others (who may be their partners or those they are seeking to influence). It also means they must consider time scales over which they wish to have an impact, recognising that real change must have some effect beyond the short term. And it means that they must have the contextual awareness to predict what will affect their work and have a plan to deal with it. Unanticipated weather events may result in a flood that damages informal upgrading efforts, while a suddenly hostile government may evict street traders without compensation. Adverse political, economic and environmental change continues to throw efforts to secure equitable development trajectories off-track. The current preoccupation with presentation and representation exacerbates the challenge of understanding and realising effectiveness. It may seem more important to be seen to be effective, than to be effective. The critique against NGOs for being compromised by capitalism has been relentless. But it is evident that NGOs dependence on the state and/or market to scale their efforts may struggle to achieve the transformative change that they aspire to support. Even if they have pursued a social justice advocacy agenda with the funding of philanthropists, they are said to be at risk of adopting practices underpinned by market relations, rather than the principles of solidarity and equity (Edwards 2008). But effectiveness at scale is a considerable demand.

Autonomy As civil society agencies negotiate a path between the more powerful sectors of state and market, then the significance of autonomy must be recognised. The closer the engagement with state and market agencies that function with different goals and relational practices, the more necessary the ability of the NGO to hold to its core purpose and act with integrity. In practice, the difficulties are considerable. For urban social movements and their support NGOs, consciousness of the significance of autonomy is unlikely to be enough. These are civil society organisations that are working in a context that is highly politicised. Urban development is regulated. Even if the formal regulations are ignored there are a range of informal rules that state politicians and officials enforce. Moreover, the potential for incomegeneration – even in very low-income neighbourhoods – makes urban processes highly contested as powerful groups position themselves to exploit vulnerable populations. Social movement leaders cannot entirely disengage from these processes. And as they engage with them, then their autonomy and that of their movements may suffer. The threat to the autonomy of democratic representative local groups is within civil society as well as outside civil society particularly for those NGOs that work through alliance-building. One factor that makes partnerships between social movements and professional organisations so difficult is the social status given to professionals; movement activists may struggle to protect themselves against well-meaning advice which reduces the ability of the movement to decide for itself (Mitlin et al. 2020). Alliances between movements and support NGOs may strengthen the ability of movements to act effectively 200

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but they may weaken the self-reliance of the movement with further ramifications (Bolnick 2008). Managing these challenges is inherent to being an NGO. The next section looks at how NGOs respond to this.

Living the ‘fine balance’ (or when the ‘fine balance’ is not a balance at all) This section explores contradictions faced by NGOs in realising the personas introduced in NGOs – ‘being’ and ‘doing’ change section in the context of the identified challenges. Innovators gain legitimacy from the value of their ideas. For the most part, they are unlikely to either seek or be a direct challenge to the state; hence the state is unlikely to question their legitimacy. These NGOs are unlikely to be concerned about issues of autonomy. Their accountabilities are towards those that finance their work. Their effectiveness depends on their ability to be relevant in the development of new ideas, services, and products. The more their innovations address needs that are recognised, the more rapidly their work will be taken up. However, NGOs working on innovation are most likely to be working in those areas that are not of interest to commercial companies, i.e., they cannot rely on the market to take up the goods and services that they develop. In this context, there is a question about effectiveness and scale. The lack of controversy surrounding this role of innovator begs the question are these NGOs really involved in progressive social change which necessarily is a process that is deeply political, requiring redistribution and potentially more significant social and economic changes. Understanding the extent to which market integration can address the needs of the lowestincome and most disadvantaged groups is fundamental to efforts to reform capitalism; and along with this comes an understanding of what the market cannot provide. Market integration may reduce poverty if essential goods can be provided more cheaply (for example, solarpowered recharging for mobile phones); however, some goods are unlikely to be provided by private firms, such as solar-powered streetlights, and even with more affordable products, issues of market capture and monopolies along with exploitation working practices remain relevant. The state has an essential role in providing public infrastructure, regulating markets to prevent abuse of market power, and protecting both workers and consumers. Challenges may occur when their innovations are in areas that already have ongoing processes of state control and market dominance. For example, local economic trading schemes developed to facilitate the acquisition of goods and services by low-income people through non-monetised ‘swops’. Revenue agencies may be concerned about the lack of tax being paid. NGOs that develop technologies to facilitate citizen protest may be challenged by government, especially if funded by foreign donors. NGOs have faced substantive challenges when creating new markets in environmental services to reduce the depletion of natural resources and address climate change. In summary, innovator NGOs may make an essential contribution to new approaches and this work may be controversial depending on the products or services being developed. Educators may be challenged about their legitimacy if and when they contest state policy and practice, either directly or through alliances with activists and protest organisations. Their information may be critiqued for being partial or biased. The ability of these agencies to stand back from too close an engagement with the state as they present information and/or knowledge about critical issues protects their autonomy, but may reduce their success. Their accountability is likely to be their donors and governance structures unless they invest in formal relations with disadvantaged groups and develop alternative accountabilities. 201

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Their effectiveness may be particularly hard to attribute because they are seeking to change behaviours in groups that may deny being influenced by NGOs. Moreover, substantive policy changes are unlikely to ever be the single contribution of one group. For example, multiple NGOs have been campaigning to ensure that governments, businesses, and citizens respond to the climate emergency with more governmental commitments to action (Norton 2015). Arguably education, as a strategy, helps to catalyse a commitment to change that then requires a more direct engagement between state and civil society. An example of how knowledge and information can change outcomes is provided by SDI. Affiliate – Federations of savings groups with support NGOs use data collection to mobilise informal settlement residents and to begin a discussion with responsible local authorities who often know little about the informal settlements that they have formal jurisdiction over. This is effective way to engage state agencies who are keen to know more about informal settlements and their populations (see Chitekwe-Biti et al. 2012). Resident mobilisation helps to ensure that vulnerabilities are not exacerbated. Alliance builders gain legitimacy from their engagement with social movements and organised communities, but this may lead to criticism about their lack of neutrality. These links with the grassroots enable and require them to deal with issues of accountability; however, as noted above, they may restrict the autonomy of community groups through professionalising their approaches or drawing them too close with the state. For NGOs that are working in close collaboration with grassroots communities, the upward pressures of accountability to donors can be deeply damaging. Formalised planning processes to conform to log frames, theories of change or other modalities preferred by donors appear abstract and unfathomable by community leaders and members. Donors may limit the kinds of activities that can be financed. In one recent example, community leaders in Bulawayo attending a meeting as a part of activities funding by a Northern NGO (with the back donor being a bilateral agency) were told that they could not take part in the lunch because only the costs of youth participants could be covered. The community leaders were attending the meeting in their official capacity as partners of the project. This undermines and undervalues the contribution of the mainly women community leaders. Staff of the Southern NGO explained the problem to staff of the Northern NGO and there was greater recognition that monitoring and reporting processes need to be more sensitively designed so as not to reduce grassroots control over shared development activities. In terms of effectiveness, the literature on civil society emphasises the positive aspects of collaboration with the state (Evans 1996, Heller and Rao 2015) while being cautious about potential co-option and clientelism. Alliance builders frequently seek to secure the benefits of state collaboration. The experiences of SDI point to practical difficulties in addition to tricky political realities (Burra et al. 2018, Fieuw and Mitlin 2018). SDI affiliates have secured government adoption of their models with the support of key individuals within government. However, implementation has been delayed by excessive formalisation and undermined by a lack of commitment from state officials. Replication is prevented because State payments for NGO services and community investments are delayed for years. Such experiences challenge the understanding that innovative civil society approaches and civil society capabilities can produce synergetic impacts to state programming. Service providers. Service-providing NGOs may be seen as legitimate partners by the state. Their accountability structures are likely to be upwards to those contracting the service. Community management committees may help to dilute top-down control especially if groups are networked together to amplify their voice. There is unlikely to be an explicit interest in autonomy. However, their ability to create positive social change depends on them 202

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balancing state financing for routine provision with innovations to address shortcomings in service delivery. The Orangi Pilot Project, for example, defined an alternative model for sanitation with cost sharing between citizen and state (Hasan 2008). Again, there are limits to provision for the lowest income groups without state subsidies (Banana et al. 2015). The engagement of the SDGs with the need to improve service delivery helps them maintain a claim to legitimacy (at least at the international level) and challenges to existing practices in their localities. Effectiveness depends on their efficiency as providers and ability to manage service delivery and catalyse change.

Conclusion NGO efforts to transform outcomes traverse alternative logics of persuasion, education, coercion, and evidence. To achieve influence and advance their cause, they seek to build capabilities, and instigate and catalyse actions by private companies, states, and citizens. This chapter has used four NGO personas to illustrate the diversity of strategies used and the ways in which NGOs have sought to overcome challenges and secure their objectives. The context for their work is difficult. The market is unable to provide a solution to structural poverty and disadvantage, but it may provide a path through which some households and individuals can address their needs and secure their well-being. Innovators, educators, alliance-builders, and service-providers all make use of the market. In the water sector, for example, replacing expensive informal market options with lower cost public services can help. Training and finance to enable small enterprises to be more profitable is a further pro-market option. An NGO managed network with internal cross-subsidy arrangements that enable better-off supporting lower-income households may help the lowest income households. However, replications through the market are limited in practice. Public services are rarely cheap enough to offer universal access, and subsidy systems are insufficiently redistributive (Nauges and Whittington 2017). In a context where value is increasingly aligned to income, not only does the market fail to address structural issues, it is itself the path through which marginalisation and deprivation are determined. It is the state that can provide for a more prosperous economy through stimulating demand and other macro-economic management tools; and potentially securing more equitable outcomes through improving the productivity of low-income workers. For low-income households in the global South with weakly financed and capacitated government, there are few options. Families must secure many of their basic needs through the market. Urban residents (and those who are landless labourers in rural areas) must secure land and basic services through the market as well as secure incomes through labour markets. Given these limitations of the market, many NGOs continue to engage the state to secure the transformation they seek. That requires reforming state visions and developing their commitment and capability. NGOs may find themselves building the state from below. NGOs seek to support their core constituencies, and this may include efforts to influence the state and to enable them to provide themselves with support to address needs and improve development options. The contradictions they face are considerable. With respect to direct assistance to households there are limits on what people can do for themselves in a context of poverty, inequality, deprivation and marginalisation. With respect to supporting social movements and grassroots organisations more generally, the question has to be if NGOs can deliver empowerment from above. Inequalities in social status and related power dynamics demand that NGOs become more reflective and more strategic in their realisation of their roles. 203

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The significance of NGOs as change agents is tricky to assess. Their role frequently requires them to stand back from the limelight, allowing either the government or citizen groups to take credit for reforms. Challenges are considerable and progress is at best uneven and may be slow. Their legitimacy, accountabilities, effectiveness, and autonomy can be questioned. However, what is also evident is that the sector remains a workplace for those who seek to contribute to positive social change, and that there continue to be agencies that are seeking to renew themselves to be better able to take on the challenges that lie ahead. As demonstrated by the examples above, NGOs continue to revitalise and renew themselves to better realise their objectives.

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NGOs as Change Agents Greenfield, P. and Watts, J., 2020. Record 212 land and environment activists killed last year [online]. The Guardian, 29 July, Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/29/ record-212-land-and-environment-activists-killed-last-year [Accessed 3 December 2021]. Hansard, 1991. Charities [online]. HC DEB 20 June, 193, 576–584. Available from: https://api.parlia ment.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1991/jun/20/charities [Accessed 3 December 2021]. Hasan, A., 2008. Financing the sanitation programme of the Orangi Pilot Project – Research and Training Institute in Pakistan. Environment and Urbanization, 20 (1), 109–119. Heller, P. and Rao, V., eds., 2015. Deliberation and development: rethinking the role of voice and collective action in unequal societies. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Hulme, D. and Edwards, M., 1997. NGOs, states and donors: too close for comfort? Basingstoke: MacMillan Press. Horn, P., et al., 2020. Scaling participation in informal settlement upgrading: a documentation of community mobilisation and consultation processes in the Mukuru Special Planning Area in Nairobi, Kenya. Manchester, Global Development Institute. IIED (International Institute for Environment and Development), 2019. Least Developed Countries launch 2050 Vision for a climate-resilient future [online]. Blog post IIED, 23 September. Available from: https://www.iied.org/least-developed-countries-launch-2050-vision-for-climate-resilientfuture [Accessed 3 December 2021]. Jillo, R.A., 2019. Restrictions on foreign funding of civil society: NGO law in Kenya [online]. International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, 11 (4). Available from: https://www.icnl.org/resources/ research/ijnl/ngo-law-in-kenya [Accessed 3 December 2021]. Johnson, S., 2009. Microfinance is dead! Long live microfinance! Critical reflections on two decades of microfinance policy and practice. Enterprise Development and Microfinance, 20 (4), 291–303. Jones, A. and Stead, L., 2020. Can people on low incomes access affordable housing loans in urban Africa and Asia? Examples of innovative housing finance models from Reall’s global network. Environment and Urbanization, 32 (1), 155–174. Korten, D., 1990. Getting to the 21st century: voluntary action and the global agenda. West Hartford: Kumarian Press. Kumar, S., 2019. India: decades of hostility against NGOs have worsened under Narendra Modi. The Conversation, 1 May. Available from: https://theconversation.com/india-decades-of-hostilityagainst-ngos-have-worsened-under-narendra-modi-113300 [Accessed 3 December 2021]. Lewis, D., 2008. Crossing the boundaries between ‘Third Sector’ and state: life-work histories from the Philippines, Bangladesh and the UK. Third World Quarterly, 29 (1), 125–141. Lines, K. and Makau, J., 2018. Taking the long view: 20 years of Muungano wa Wanavijiji, the Kenyan Federation of Slum Dwellers. Environment and Urbanization, 30 (2), 407–424. Lines, K., et al., 2020. Bridging the affordability gap: towards a financing mechanism for slum upgrading at scale in Nairobi – analysing NGO experiences with local-level finance. GDI Working Paper. Manchester: University of Manchester, Global Development Institute. McGranahan, G., 2012. What is the difference between improving sanitation and selling Coca Cola? [online]. Urban Health Updates, Blogpost, 29 August. Available from: https://blogs.washplus.org/ urbanhealthupdates/2012/08/gordon-mcgranahan-what-is-the-difference-between-improvingsanitation-and-selling-coca-cola/index.html [Accessed 3 December 2021]. Mitlin, D. et al., 2020. Knowledge matters: the potential contribution of the coproduction of research. European Journal of Development Research, 32 (3), 554–559. Muungano, no date. Muungano web site [online]. Available from: https://www.muungano.net/ [Accessed 3 December 2021]. Nauges, C. and Whittington, D., 2017. Evaluating the performance of alternative municipal water tariff designs: quantifying the tradeoffs between equity, economic efficiency, and cost recovery. World Development, 91, 125–143. Norton, A., 2015. A historic agreement in Paris [online]. International Institute for Environment and Development. Blog, 14 December. Available from: https://www.iied.org/historic-agreementparis [Accessed 3 December 2021]. Porio, E., et al., 2004. The Community Mortgage Programme: an innovative social housing programme in the Philippines and its outcomes. In: D. Mitlin and D. Satterthwaite, eds. Empowering Squatter Citizen. London, Earthscan, 54–81. Satterthwaite, D. and Mitlin, D., 2014. Reducing urban poverty in the Global South. London, Routledge. SDI, no date. SDI website [online]. https://sdinet.org/ [Accessed 3 December 2021].

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17 PARTIES The Fall and Rise of Mass Party Politics Nick Clarke

Anti-party For much of the last half-century, public opinion in liberal democracies has been characterised by anti-political sentiment: a feeling of disaffection regarding the activities and institutions of what might be termed ‘formal politics’. These activities include tolerating, canvassing, listening, negotiating, and compromising, and their institutionalisation in politicians, parties, elections, parliaments, councils, and governments. By the turn of the twenty-first century, such disaffection had become much discussed by political scientists and others. For example, Robert Putnam and colleagues drew on World Values Survey (WVS) and Eurobarometer data to argue that evaluations of politicians, alignment with political parties, and confidence in political institutions were all near historic lows for many of the world’s democracies, with the same downward trends found in North America (most clearly), Western Europe (in general), and Japan (Putnam et al. 2000). To date, Pippa Norris has provided what is probably the most extensive analysis of public opinion in this area (Norris 2011). She analysed WVS data alongside numerous other datasets for the United States, Western Europe, and the rest of the democratic world, found a complicated picture of variation between countries and timeframes, but concluded that while feelings of national belonging and support for democratic values have generally not declined, trust in public office holders and confidence in state institutions have generally become weaker over time. This divergence between support for democracy as an idea or set of principles and withdrawal of support for the institutions of liberal democracy is what gives Norris her book title: Democratic deficit. My focus in this chapter is on political parties, especially those in the older liberal democracies of the United Kingdom and the United States, and, to a lesser extent, the broader ‘West’ and ‘North’. Today, many citizens appear to be disaffected with parties at least as much as any other institution of formal politics. With colleagues, I found this recently in a study of changing popular understandings of politics in the United Kingdom (Clarke et al. 2018). There seem to be two prominent storylines circulating in British society about political parties in the early twenty-first century. First, there is a line that political parties are now all the same. They are populated by career politicians who avoid political debate of the most salient issues, thus offering little choice and representation to voters. In the diaries and letters we analysed, citizens wrote of a situation in which ‘all the parties are the same’, ‘there’s DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-20

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not much difference in the parties’, and ‘there is not a great deal of choice out there’. They wrote of parties that are ‘different shades of the same color’, ‘dancing to the same tune with slight variations’, and ‘all as bad as each other’. They concluded: ‘it has become immaterial who gets the prize [i.e. wins the election] – except to the politicians themselves’. ‘A plague on all their houses!’ The second storyline is quite different in certain respects, but is equally suggestive of widespread anti-party feeling – and, viewed alongside the first storyline, is also suggestive of a situation in which political parties just cannot win. While some citizens worry that parties have become ‘all the same’, others perceive just one ‘common good’ and therefore view party politics as unnecessary. In this view, party politics becomes little more than ‘squabbling’ and ‘petty bickering’ among ‘extremist’ partisans. Such activity is thought to delay and obstruct governmental action by ‘moderate’ politicians working on behalf of ‘the people’. This latter line was captured by responses to a survey question asked by the British Election Study in 2015: ‘How much do you agree or disagree that […] parties and politicians in the UK are more concerned with fighting each other than with furthering the public interest?’. ‘Agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ was selected by 67% of respondents. Only 16% selected ‘disagree’ or ‘strongly disagree’. If anti-party sentiment is widespread in the current period, in the United Kingdom and many other democracies around the world, then what does this have to do with social change – especially the kind of social change pursued by progressives on the Left? A key theme in the literature on political disaffection is that young, well-educated citizens, who commonly selfidentify as progressive, have come to see political parties as hierarchical and elitist, and also weak (in a globalising world), and to participate as citizens in alternative ways. This theme can be traced back to Ronald Inglehart’s Silent revolution (Inglehart 1977). In that book and subsequent influential publications (e.g., Inglehart 1997), Inglehart argues that modernisation – industrialisation and economic development, combined with bureaucratisation and expansion of the welfare state – produced changes in mass worldviews. It led to the replacement of materialist values emphasising economic security by postmaterialist values emphasising quality of life and self-expression. This process of postmodernisation, for Inglehart, generated new citizens (less deferent and more confident, educated, competent), issues (the environment, abortion, gay rights, etc.), movements (the student protests of the 1960s, the peace movement, the women’s movement, etc.), and modes of participation (less elite-directed, e.g., joining or voting for a party, and more elite-challenging, e.g., demonstrating or boycotting). Another set of influential publications in this field, which both drew from and influenced Inglehart, came from Russell Dalton (see Dalton 1984, 2000a, 2004, 2009). For Dalton, an important component of modernisation is the improved educational and political skills of citizens that result from expansion of the welfare state. These alter the expectations of citizens – and especially younger citizens – regarding the democratic process. These citizens now expect more opportunities for participation than are offered by parties and elections. Having become politically assertive and sophisticated, they welcome opportunities for more direct action (e.g., protesting or volunteering). Dalton labels this process ‘cognitive mobilisation’. A third body of research deserving brief mention here is that focused on how cognitively mobilised citizens, in their pursuit of social change, have come to engage with, or disengage from, expertise. Henrik Bang develops a narrative of change that also begins with modernisation (Bang 2005, see also Marsh 2011). The move from industrial society to late-modern networked society involved economic, social, and political developments, including globalisation, individualisation, and a shift from government to governance. Some people responded to these developments by positioning themselves as ‘expert citizens’, able to participate in governance on behalf of themselves and others (e.g., as professionals working in voluntary 208

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organisations). Other people responded by disengaging from the state and expert networks, and focusing on small improvements at the local scale as ‘everyday makers’. The move described in the paragraphs above – away from long-established political institutions, especially political parties, and especially by well-educated, younger citizens interested in social change – has been much debated in recent decades. There are questions of whether it has happened, where, over what time period, and with what consequences (especially for the Left and its project of progress towards a more just society). I return to some of these questions in the sections below, but there is a final point worth making here by way of introduction. This decentring of parties – and formal politics more broadly – has often been written about by social scientists in a celebratory tone. Norris describes ‘critical citizens’ (Norris 1999) who are transforming civic engagement and reinventing political action (as demonstrations, petitions, consumer boycotts, Internet activism). The ‘democratic phoenix’ (Norris 2002) is rising from the ashes of industrial society. Michele Micheletti compares the ‘individualised collective action’ of political consumerism favourably to the ‘collectivist collective action’ of ‘traditional politics’ or liberal representative democracy (Micheletti 2003). The latter involved joining parties and voting in elections. It was bureaucratic and hierarchical. It was time-consuming and allowed little space for self-expression. Participation was largely passive, with delegated responsibility to party leaders, and so lacked a sense of urgency. By contrast, individualised collective action is informal, flexible, and egalitarian. It takes place in many settings and fits well into daily life. It is spontaneous, offers a greater sense of political efficacy, and is fulfilling. By creating new venues for political action, it offers marginalised and excluded people a pathway to political engagement. In these terms, politics and democracy are being renewed. In the rest of this chapter, against a background of widespread anti-party sentiment – and some celebration of alternatives to party – I discuss the relationship between political parties and social change. Parties are defined after Alan Ware as groups of more than one person, interacting in order to take control of the state (cf. pressure groups), and pursuing this objective by legitimate means (Ware 1996). I focus on the older liberal democracies of the United Kingdom and the United States, and, to a lesser extent, the broader ‘West’ and ‘North’, and the relationship between parties in these democracies and the kind of social change pursued by progressives on the Left. I argue that mass parties of the mid-twentieth century promised social change by mobilising participation, articulating the interests of ordinary people, aggregating those interests into programmes for government, and implementing those programmes by creating majorities or coalitions, forming governments, and enforcing party discipline and bloc voting. Citizens then withdrew from parties – as citizens became more skilled, educated, economically secure, and postmaterialist – and mass parties became replaced by catch-all parties and eventually cartel parties, which marginalised activists interested in radical change and restricted both policy competition among existing parties and entry to the party system by new parties. These institutionalised parties of recent decades have been focused less on social change and more on reproducing themselves by winning elections. However, the solution for those interested in social change is not further abandonment of party politics. There remains a need not only to articulate the interests of ordinary people – e.g., by social movement protests – but also to aggregate those interests into comprehensive and coherent programmes for government. There remains plenty to be learned from the period of mass-party dominance concerning the value of formal politics, political institutions, attention to policy detail, reforms to legislation, and so on. While there can be no simple return to the mass party model and its twentiethcentury context, there could be a renewed appreciation of how formal and informal politics interact. Formal politics provides political opportunity structures for social movements, which 209

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depend on healthy parties as targets of campaigns or powerful allies. Indeed, a new party model has emerged in recent years – the movement party – that challenges these very distinctions between formal and informal politics, party politics and social movements. Like the mass party, the movement party promises much regarding social change. Also like the mass party, it will need engagement from citizens, activists, and scholars.

Parties and social change Modern political parties emerged during the nineteenth century from a democratisation process by which citizens won rights to petition, criticise, demonstrate, assemble, choose representatives, and so on (Dahl 1971). This process worked out differently in different countries, with implications for the kinds of parties that emerged (Daalder 2001). In the United States, for example, democratisation was relatively advanced by the middle of the century, more so than processes of industrialisation and urbanisation. The resulting parties, therefore, tended to be loose associations that organised voters at the local scale. In Europe, by contrast, democratisation gathered momentum only during the second half of the century, and the parties that emerged from this different historical context tended to be more tightly organised and regionally or nationally focused. By the end of the nineteenth century, in North America, Europe, and beyond, two main kinds of party had arisen. Maurice Duverger described these as ‘cadre parties’ and ‘mass parties’ (Duverger 1963). The former were developed from within existing legislatures. Groups formed around particular leaders and common interests. Organisations were developed by political elites to secure the election of their chosen candidates. These organisations did not really want members or supporters who might demand influence over party affairs. They tended to mobilise only at election time, often using paid irregulars to staff campaigns. They tended to be organised into caucuses of political elites who controlled party affairs in their own territories and liaised occasionally with other caucuses at the national scale. Mass parties were different from cadre parties in all of these respects. They were developed from without existing legislatures by social groups excluded from or at least not represented in those legislatures. They sought a mass base, not least because they were dependent on members and supporters for income and free labour, and so mobilised both at and between elections. Members were organised into branches of the national party, with branches subject to regulation by the national party but also able to make demands of the party (especially in exchange for providing funds). It is when mass parties arrived on the scene towards the end of the nineteenth century that parties began to be seen as potential agents of social change – representing the interests of ordinary people (as opposed to elites), mobilising them, and ceding at least some control to them. Furthermore, over the next half century, mass parties in some ways became the model for all parties. Duverger called this ‘contagion from the Left’. With each expansion of the franchise, tightly organised mass parties became more and more competitive in electoral terms. The cadre parties of political elites responded by developing their own base, which required both national organisation and more involvement of members and supporters in party affairs. For these reasons, we now turn to the relationship in theory between social change and mass parties (the dominant model of political party in much of the liberal democratic world by the middle of the twentieth century). Functionalist approaches to political parties emerged in political science around this time of mass-party dominance (e.g., Almond 1960, APSA Committee on Political Parties 1950), and so tended to use the mass party as a model when describing the functions performed by 210

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parties for democracy. One of the most influential frameworks was contributed by V.O. Key, who divided party functions into those performed in the electorate, as organisations, and in government (Key 1964). In the electorate, parties simplify choices for voters, educate citizens and bring issues to their attention, generate loyalty and keep voters away from extremists, and mobilise participation. As organisations, parties recruit and screen political leaders, train political elites in the norms of democracy, articulate political interests, and aggregate political interests into a programme that is ideally both comprehensive and coherent. Finally, in government (or opposition), parties create majorities, organise government by enforcing party discipline and bloc voting, implement policy objectives, make government accountable by standing for re-election, present voters with alternatives and choice by organising dissent and opposition, and foster stability in government by occasionally replacing issues and leaders while retaining party labels. This is quite a list of party functions. For the purposes of this chapter, it is the relationship between these functions and social change that is most important. Of course, whether or not party leaders and supporters – and voters more broadly – are interested in social change determines more than anything the relationship between parties and social change. Nevertheless, some of the functions listed above would seem to facilitate social change – in theory, at least – while others appear to be more oriented in favour of social stability. Let us consider a few examples. Parties mobilise participation by citizens and articulate the political interests of these citizens. They aggregate these interests into programmes for government. If elected, they implement these programmes by creating a majority or coalition, forming a government, and enforcing party discipline and bloc voting. If a critical mass of citizens were truly interested in social change, parties – by performing these various functions – would play a crucial role in achieving that change (or, at least, the change to legislation that is often a condition of widespread, long-term social change). However, as we have seen, party functions are many and varied. Parties generate loyalty and keep voters away from extremists. They foster stability in government by retaining party labels, even as leaders or issues may change. These functions point more in the direction of stability than change (and radical change in particular). There are still other functions where the relationship to social change is just not clear in theory. For example, parties educate citizens. They train political elites. Education and training can promote change or stability, depending on their purpose, content, and style. In order to understand fully the relationship between parties and social change, then, we need to consider not only the functions of mass parties in theory, but also the way in which parties have developed and performed a variety functions in practice since the middle of the twentieth century.

Social change and parties Parties can function as agents of progressive politics and social change, but we also saw in the introductory section of this chapter how parties and their functions can themselves be shaped by broader processes of social change. Modernisation produced postmodern citizens. These citizens, better educated and more secure in economic terms, adopted postmaterial values. As critical citizens in a globalising world, they looked away from parties and towards new opportunities for more direct political action. There is plenty of evidence for this turn away from parties during the second half of the twentieth century. Considering public identification with parties across the established democracies of the OECD since 1950, Dalton (2000b) found a general picture of partisan dealignment, especially among better-educated and younger citizens. Considering party enrolment figures and claims of party membership across the same 211

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time period and set of countries, Susan Scarrow found a similar pattern of decline – though she notes how this decline was perhaps unsurprising, given the baseline was the high point of mass party dominance in the period immediately following the Second World War (Scarrow 2000). There is also plenty of evidence that party membership continued to decline in the first decade of the twenty-first century, both in Europe (van Biezen et al. 2012) and worldwide (Whiteley 2011). Cognitive mobilisation is usually offered as the primary explanation for this general picture. Other explanations frequently offered include the rise of mass media, which now cover at least some of the information-provision function once performed by parties; the poor conduct of politicians and parties, and reporting of that conduct by increasingly cynical journalists; and the rise of special interest groups, which now cover at least some of the representation-of-interests function once performed by parties (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000a, Diamond and Gunther 2001). How have parties responded to these social changes? And how have they responded to other relevant changes of the last half-century – like the rise of public opinion polling and media advertising, which makes campaigning less labour intensive and more capital intensive (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000a)? As economies and societies have changed, the mass party form has become less dominant and other party forms have come to the foreground. In the 1960s, Otto Kirchheimer described a seemingly new and increasingly common type of party: the ‘catch-all party’ (Kirchheimer 1966). Catch-all parties targeted the growing number of dealigned voters – a group that potentially could grow to the size of the population itself – by locating on the perceived centre-ground (of Anthony Downs’ ideological spectrum) and competing for votes primarily on the meta-issue of governmental competence. Such parties developed campaigning strategies that relied less on the decreasing supply of party members and supporters, and more on communication with voters by new technologies and media forms. As catch-all parties turned away from their founding ideologies and sought a more direct link between leaders and voters, they commonly found themselves in dispute with remaining party activists. These activists were marginalised by ‘democratisation’ strategies that worked to depower party congresses and empower less radical members, for example through mass-membership consultations and ballots. Ultimately, many activists exited from these changing parties and looked elsewhere for opportunities to participate and effect social change. If the catch-all party appeared to be eclipsing the mass party from the 1960s, then, for Katz and Mair (1995), another party form appeared to be eclipsing the catch-all party from the 1990s. This was the ‘cartel party’. Across 12 countries in Western Europe and North America, Katz and Mair observed a series of changes. First, parties were moving towards the state. They were becoming more dependent on rules and laws (regarding publicity, campaigning, broadcasting, etc.), more clearly defined by their institutional roles (e.g., in government), and more dependent on state subventions and access to state machinery. Second, if parties were moving towards the state, they were moving away from society – as witnessed in declining party membership, partisan alignment, and electoral turnout. Third, shaped by the same rules, laws, roles, and funding opportunities, parties were beginning to resemble one another in terms of their communication strategies, sources of finance, experience of public office, and so on. Fourth, unable to rely on donations from supporters anymore, yet needing to pay for expensive campaigning by television and other media, parties appeared to be cooperating with each other to produce this beneficial environment of state funding opportunities for parties. To Katz and Mair, this cooperation looked rather like collusion – especially when it involved behaviours like restricting policy competition to issues on which the mainstream parties were relatively strong (compared to smaller parties trying to break into the party system) – and gave them their label of ‘cartel parties’. 212

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On the face of it, none of these developments look particularly positive from the perspective of parties and social change. In catch-all parties, activists interested in radical change were marginalised. Cartel parties have worked to protect their positions by restricting policy competition between the existing parties and also entry to the party system by new parties. Both catch-all parties and cartel parties – which, of course, are ideal types and best used as lenses through which to view and bring into focus different aspects of twenty-first century parties – are institutionalised versions of the political party (Panebianco 1988), where the means of reproducing themselves by winning elections have become the ends (replacing other ends, such as social change). The question of what has happened to parties, and if there has been some fall or decline from a golden age of mass parties and social change around the middle of the last century, has been much debated in recent years. Some commentators have approached the question from the perspective of all the functions that parties are meant to perform in theory. Having done so, they have argued that we are not witnessing the decline of parties, but rather just a change to the roles played by parties for democracies. In the terms of Bartolini and Mair (2001), parties no longer perform representative functions very well (e.g., mobilisation of the citizenry or articulation of interests) but still perform procedural and institutional functions (e.g., recruiting political leaders and organising government). However, Bartolini and Mair proceed by posing a slightly different set of questions: if parties no longer perform representative functions, are those functions being performed by other agents; and if not, what are the consequences for democracy (and, we might add, democratic attempts to bring about social change)? For Bartolini and Mair, writing around the turn of the twenty-first century, the answer to these questions was not yet clear. Other scholars have been less equivocal in their responses. Reporting from the new democracies (countries that have democratised since 1974), Philippe Schmitter concluded that parties are not performing many of their traditional party functions, including both representative and procedural-institutional functions, and these functions are not being performed by alternative actors either (Schmitter 2001). Interest associations and social movements are generally trusted by citizens, but they do not aggregate interests into comprehensive and coherent programmes, let alone nominate candidates or form governments. The quality of democracy, therefore, appears to be suffering in these countries. A similar conclusion was reached by Charles Pattie and colleagues regarding the much older democracy of the United Kingdom (Pattie et al. 2004). Their audit found citizens contracting out political participation to special interest and advocacy groups by donating funds (‘chequebook citizenship’) or purchasing products (‘consumer citizenship’). These groups perform the function of interest articulation quite adequately, but they do not aggregate interests in the way that parties traditionally have done. Instead, they seek to maximise benefits for their group while spreading the costs to everyone. The result of this ‘atomised citizenship’ is a fragmented political system in which everyone seeks to win benefits and avoid costs. Demands on the state increase but these include demands that taxes do not increase. Policy-making becomes gridlocked and citizens withdraw even further from the activities and institutions of formal politics. Dalton and Wattenberg (2000b) had a name for this emerging situation of interest articulation without interest aggregation. They called it ‘hyper-democracy’, when interests get voiced by various groups and media – seemingly more than ever before – but do not get translated into general programmes, coherent public policy, and government productive of good outcomes for citizens. This is what mass parties were at least meant to do in theory back in the middle of the twentieth century. It was one of the processes by which social change became legislated for during that period. 213

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Back to the future? Given the consequences of hyper-democracy for progressive politics, recent discussion of parties and democracy by those on the Left has often looked back to previous times and what can be learned from them. If parties have moved away from society and towards the state, largely because critical citizens have moved away from parties, and such ‘mutual withdrawal’ (Mair 2013) threatens democratic projects of social change, then perhaps citizens need to be reintroduced to parties and the value of political institutions and formal politics in general. Richard Rorty provided one of the first examples of such an intervention (Rorty 1997). Focusing on the history of the Left in the United States, he identified two categories. The pre-1960s Reformist Left worked for social justice within the system, seeking to correct what seemed wrong with America by reforms to legislation. By contrast, the New Left of the period since the 1960s views the system through lenses including the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, and sees a deeply flawed system requiring not reform but revolution. Faced by this overwhelming requirement, Rorty finds those on the New Left retreating from policy detail and political strategy to abstract philosophy and theory. He criticises them for seeing the state, democracy, and formal politics not as pragmatic means by which urgent economic needs and injustices might be addressed immediately, but as problematic ends that over time should be replaced by alternative forms. Amin and Thrift (2013) provide another example that shares none of Rorty’s disdain for identity politics or Foucauldian approaches to power, but shares his view that currently the Left is struggling to promote social change in the direction of equality, justice, and the common good, and may have something to learn from the past – whether the German socialist movement led by Bebel and Kautsky, or the origins of Swedish social democracy, or the British women’s movement, or the Progressive movement in the United States. For Amin and Thrift, members of these largely successful movements were skilled in certain ‘arts of the political’ in a way that members of current movements on the Left are not. One of these arts of the political is practical competence, or organisation, or statecraft. This is how disagreements get built into political machines. It is how perceptions, preferences, and identities get shaped over a sustained period of time. It is how the Left might sustain momentum and cement gains. For Amin and Thrift, disaffected citizens need to rediscover the value of institutions, including political parties (though not necessarily the cadre, mass, catch-all, or cartel party form). A final and most recent example comes from Mark Lilla, who responds to the crisis of liberalism he sees represented by Donald Trump’s election to President by revisiting many of Rorty’s themes, including the history of the American Left and the limitations of identity politics (Lilla 2017). The historical narrative comes in three parts. First was ‘the Roosevelt dispensation’, running from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society of the 1960s, when liberals offered a vision of America as a collective enterprise in which citizens guarded one another against hardship and risk. Then came ‘the Reagan dispensation’, when the New Right offered a vision of America made up of individuals, families, businesses, and small communities all freed from the shackles of the state. The Left’s response provides the target for the final part of Lilla’s narrative. No alternative vision of America was offered. Liberals withdrew from political institutions to universities and campus towns, and practised an identity politics focused on smaller and smaller groups. They gave up on the hard work of persuasion, appealing to majorities, consensus-building, winning elections, and exercising power in a way that cannot be easily reversed by Republican governors. What does Lilla propose instead? He advocates: an emphasis on citizenship (a shared political status) over 214

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group or personal identity; democratic persuasion (visiting and listening) over self-expression; and, most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, institutional politics over movement politics – with parties included as one element of institutional politics (the slow, tedious, patient, incremental work of consultation, negotiation, and compromise). Where does all this leave us? In this era of Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism, which for some represent a backlash against social and cultural change (Norris and Inglehart 2018), one does not have to agree with Rorty and Lilla on philosophy and theory, identity politics, or American political history to recognise value in the above calls for a renewed focus by progressives on institutions, parties, winning elections, and reforming legislation. But such a position begs a number of clarifications. My argument in this concluding section is not for a simple pendulum swing back to parties from interest groups, social movements, and various forms of direct action. It is that we should celebrate neither critical citizens, who by some measures constitute only small proportions of national populations that have not been growing significantly for decades (Stoker et al. 2011), nor mass parties of the midtwentieth century – which do not belong, could not be recreated, and would not have the same consequences in our current era of relative affluence, educational opportunities, individualism, and global interdependence. To achieve social change in the direction of equality and justice, my argument is that progressives need a renewed appreciation of how informal and formal politics interact. This call is for a more balanced political culture on the Left. It is time to move beyond ‘denunciatory analyses’ of neoliberalism; beyond a politics of denouncement and resistance, organised around ‘the antis’ of anti-neoliberalism, anti-globalisation, anti-imperialism, and so on (Ferguson 2009). Doing so involves addressing ‘the question of government’ (Ferguson 2009). It is time to move beyond what Foucault called ‘state phobia’ (Hannah 2016): a view of states as inherently oppressive and controlling. Formal political institutions gather knowledge for not only security purposes but also welfare purposes, often in response to demands from interest groups and social movements that certain problems be made visible and amenable to action (e.g., gender inequality or environmental destruction). It is time to follow Richard Sennett in learning to see large institutions – including political parties, parliaments, and governments – less as bureaucratic iron cages that constrain freedom, and more as resources that might be used in the pursuit of various positive freedoms (Sennett 2006). A balance must be struck, then, but between what? Almond and Verba (1963) offer the categories of active participants (who raise issues and make demands) and passive subjects (who are open to persuasion and compromise). Inspired by Almond and Verba, Dalton (2009) offers the categories of engaged citizenship (that is assertive and leads to responsive government) and duty-based citizenship (that is allegiant and tolerant, and stops responsive government from becoming gridlocked by a divided citizenry). In David Held’s terms, the balance here is between models of direct, participatory, and deliberative democracy (emphasising participation, argument, debate) and liberal and representative democracy – emphasising representation, accountability, and the translation of multiple individual and group interests into a workable public interest (Held 2006). If this all seems a little abstract, the mid-range theory found in studies of social movements and contentious politics might help (see Saunders, this volume). Social change usually begins with situated experiences of injustice (Barnett 2017). These may lead people towards direct action, but they may lead people towards campaigns targeted at those better placed to address the injustice. Since the late eighteenth century, such targets have included parties, parliaments, and governments (Tilly 2004). And such campaigning has tended to be successful when these 215

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targets have been secure in their legitimacy and sympathetic to the demands being made. This is what Charles Tilly, Sydney Tarrow, and others mean by the ‘political opportunity structure’ of social movements (see Tarrow 1998). In this view, social movements depend on healthy parties as targets of campaigns and powerful allies, especially when parties are able to win elections, create majorities or coalitions, organise governments, and implement policies. Dalton (2009, p. 167) has commented of engaged citizens: ‘One might not have to protest so frequently if a more sympathetic government was elected in the first place’. We might add that protests often succeed when targeted at healthy and sympathetic parties – the construction and maintenance of which continues to be necessary for projects of social change. Finally, if we need a renewed appreciation of how formal and informal politics interact, certain developments in Europe over the last decade or so look promising (in this regard, at least). Indeed, the rise of ‘movement parties’ like SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and M5S in Italy suggests that categories of formal and informal politics – or parties and social movements – are being scrambled. Donatella della Porta and colleagues define movement parties as hybrids of parties and social movements (della Porta et al. 2017). They share organisational elements (membership and/or funding), frames (so the party becomes the instrument for implementing the movement’s claims), and repertoires of action (incorporating not only electoral politics but also protests, demonstrations, occupations, civil disobedience, and so on). For della Porta and colleagues, the movement party represents a new organisational model – a reaction to moves from the mass party to the catch-all party, and from the catch-all party to the cartel party, each of which put more distance between parties and society. Like these other party forms, however, movement parties face their own dilemmas and must navigate between innovative and conventional strategies, radical and moderate programmes, movement and parliamentary politics. These parties – and parties in general – deserve continued attention as they navigate these dilemmas over the coming years.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Jane Wills, Sam Halvorsen, the editors, and two referees for kindly providing comments on early versions of the chapter. All errors and weaknesses remain my responsibility.

References Almond, G.A., 1960. Introduction: a functional approach to comparative politics. In: G.A. Almond and J.S. Coleman, eds. The politics of developing areas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 3–64. Almond, G.A. and Verba, S., 1963. The civic culture: political attitudes and democracy in five nations. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Amin, A. and Thrift, N., 2013. Arts of the political: new openings for the left. Durham: Duke University Press. APSA Committee on Political Parties, 1950. Toward a more responsible two-party system: a report of the Committee on Political Parties. American Political Science Association, 44 (3), Part 2, Supplement. Bang, H., 2005. Among everyday makers and expert citizens. In: J. Newman, ed. Remaking governance: peoples, politics, and the public sphere. Bristol: Policy Press, 159–179. Barnett, C., 2017. The priority of injustice: locating democracy in critical theory. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Bartolini, S. and Mair, P., 2001. Challenges to contemporary political parties. In: L. Diamond and R. Gunther, eds. Political parties and democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 327–344. Clarke, N., et al., 2018. The good politician: folk theories, political interaction, and the rise of anti-politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Parties Daalder, H., 2001. The rise of parties in Western democracies. In: L. Diamond and R. Gunther, eds. Political parties and democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 40–51. Dahl, R.A., 1971. Polyarchy: participation and opposition. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dalton, R.J., 1984. Cognitive mobilisation and partisan dealignment in advanced industrial democracies. The Journal of Politics, 46 (1), 264–284. Dalton, R.J., 2000a. Value change and democracy. In: S.J. Pharr and R.D. Putnam, eds. Disaffected democracies: what’s troubling the tri-lateral countries? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 252–269. Dalton, R.J., 2000b. The decline of party identification. In: R.J. Dalton and M.P. Wattenberg, eds. Parties without partisans: political change in advanced industrial democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19–36. Dalton, R.J., 2004. Democratic challenges, democratic choices: the erosion of political support in advanced industrial democracies. Washington: CQ Press. Dalton, R.J., 2009. The good citizen: how a younger generation is reshaping American politics. Revised Edition. Washington: CQ Press. Dalton, R.J. and Wattenberg, M.P., 2000a. Unthinkable democracy: political change in advanced industrial democracies. In: R.J. Dalton and M.P. Wattenberg, eds. Parties without partisans: political change in advanced industrial democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3–18. Dalton, R.J. and Wattenberg, M.P., 2000b. Partisan change and the democratic process. In: R.J. Dalton and M.P. Wattenberg, eds. Parties without partisans: political change in advanced industrial democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 261–285. della Porta, D., et al., 2017. Movement parties against austerity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Diamond, L. and Gunther, R., 2001. Introduction. In: L. Diamond and R. Gunther, eds. Political parties and democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ix–xxxiv. Duverger, M., 1963. Political parties. New York: Wiley. Ferguson, J., 2009. The uses of neoliberalism. Antipode, 41 (S1), 166–184. Hannah, M.G., 2016. State knowledge and recurring patterns of state phobia: from fascism to postpolitics. Progress in Human Geography, 40 (4), 476–494. Held, D., 2006. Models of democracy, Third Edition. Cambridge: Polity. Inglehart, R., 1977. The silent revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Inglehart, R., 1997. Modernization and postmodernization: cultural, economic, and political change in 43 countries. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Katz, R. and Mair, P., 1995. Changing models of party organization and party democracy: the emergence of the cartel party. Party Politics, 1, 5–28. Key, V.O., 1964. Politics, parties, and pressure groups. Fifth Edition. New York: Crowell. Kirchheimer, O., 1966. The transformation of the Western European party systems. In: J. LaPalombara and M Weiner, eds. Political parties and political development. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 177–200. Lilla, M., 2017. The once and future liberal: after identity politics. New York: HarperCollins. Mair, P., 2013. Ruling the void: the hollowing out of western democracy. London: Verso. Marsh, D., 2011. Late modernity and the changing nature of politics: two cheers for Henrik Bang. Critical Policy Studies, 5 (1), 73–89. Micheletti, M., 2003. Political virtue and shopping: individuals, consumerism, and collective action. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Norris, P., 1999. Introduction: the growth of critical citizens? In: P. Norris, ed. Critical citizens: global support for democratic governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–30. Norris, P., 2002. Democratic phoenix: reinventing political activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norris, P., 2011. Democratic deficit: critical citizens revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norris, P. and Inglehart, R., 2018. Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and the rise of authoritarian populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panebianco, A., 1988. Political parties: organization and power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pattie, C., Seyd, P., and Whiteley, P., 2004. Citizenship in Britain: values, participation, and democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, R.D., Pharr, S.J., and Dalton, R.J., 2000. Introduction: what’s troubling the trilateral democracies? In: S.J. Pharr and R.D. Putnam, eds. Disaffected democracies: what’s troubling the trilateral countries? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 3–30. Rorty, R., 1997. Achieving our country: leftist thought in twentieth-century America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Nick Clarke Scarrow, S.E., 2000. Parties without members? Party organization in a changing electoral environment. In: R.J. Dalton and M.P. Wattenberg, eds. Parties without partisans: political change in advanced industrial democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 79–101. Schmitter, P.C., 2001. Parties are not what they once were. In: L. Diamond and R. Gunther, eds. Political parties and democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 67–89. Sennett, R., 2006. The culture of the new capitalism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stoker, G., et al., 2011. Prospects for citizenship. London: Bloomsbury. Tarrow, S., 1998. Power in movement: social movements and contentious politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C., 2004. Social movements, 1768–2004. Boulder: Paradigm. van Biezen, I., Mair, P., and Poguntke, T., 2012. Going, going… gone? The decline of party membership in contemporary Europe. European Journal of Political Research, 51, 24–56. Ware, A., 1996. Political parties and party systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whiteley, P.F., 2011. Is the party over? The decline of party activism and membership across the democratic world. Party Politics, 17 (1), 21–44.

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18 THE ECONOMY Metaphors and Models of Social Change Siân Butcher

Introduction ‘When you connect pipelines, economies flow’ announces one of the extra-large bank advertisements pasted along the passages of OR Tambo International Airport, South Africa’s ‘gateway to Africa’. This advertisement’s ‘plug and play’ image of economies – as something that can be stopped and started, controlled and catalysed with the press of a button or the connection of a pipe – is a popular one. The much-invoked ‘magic bullet’ is part of this family. It’s a technocratic and concrete vision, with known actions and material things that can be engineered into place to produce knowable outcomes. It is also a seductive vision: of course we desire such knowability and the bullets or pipes or buttons to get ‘economies flow[ing]’. Especially in a context like South Africa’s where I write from, its combination of low economic growth and outright recession blamed for the failure of the postapartheid project to reduce deep and racialised poverty and growing inequality. Having a button to push to keep the lights on – quite literally in the current moment of rolling blackouts – and hold the fragile social fabric together is what everyone is after. Buttons aside, who is doing the pushing or the connecting of the pipes, with what agency? The catalyser in the bank’s advertisement relies on a sleight of hand: ‘when you connect’. A ‘you’ who is both appealingly universal, but also discrete from its object of intervention. This is part of the objectification of ‘economies’ as discrete entities, fed by technical and measurable inflows and outflows that keep things moving. And to what end? Movement is what we’re after. Flow is good; its unspoken other – stasis – not. But what flows and for who, and with what externalities for who else? These are the kinds of critical questions that are growing in response to the generalised condition of ‘self-devouring growth’ (Livingston 2019) that now poses existential threats to our planet and all its life forms. We can longer safely assume1 nor pursue 3% growth in gross domestic product (GDP) per annum (Harvey 2010). Despite its hegemony in airport advertisements, national growth plans, and the halls of Davos, the pipes-flow-growth model is not the only vision of ‘the economy’ and how to ‘make it work’. Although with fewer billboards, we can track other ways of ‘seeing’ the economy, coming out of different theoretical traditions, historical examples, and projects that mobilise these for different kinds of social change. DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-21

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Inspired by Susan Buck-Morss’ (1995) ‘Envisioning Capital’, Mitchell’s (1998) ‘Fixing the Economy’, and Gibson-Graham et al.’s (2013) ‘Reframing the Economy’, this chapter tracks mainstream, reformist and alternative ‘ways of seeing’ the economy, in recursive relationship to ways of acting. For Gibson-Graham et al., ‘[t]he practice of reframing is central to social and political transformation’, ‘and new reframings are continually emerging’ (2013, p. 8 and 9). For some of these ways of seeing, the economy is an object through which to maintain and protect the status quo. For others, it is an object through which to radically overhaul society. Both of these share an activist project. For still others, the economy is an object of compromise and strategy, in which certain restructurings are scaled back, others pushed for or ground conceded as shaped by the balance of power and opportunities within a shifting Overton window (the range of policies considered palatable in mainstream society and public discourse). For still other others, the economy is not an object at all. It could be a ‘platform’ (Guyer 2004) from which various activities are ‘launched’ or performed to get everyday things done. Or it could be a background that cannot be directly influenced – it is the technical fabric of our lives that has to be got at by different means – or the foundation that structures all social relations and is in turn structured by those. Or it is a construction, produced through social and political processes (Mitchell 2002), or the discipline of economics itself (MacKenzie et al. 2007). The following chapter relies on scholarship from critical political economy, science and technology studies, heterodox economics, economic geography (Marxian, post-Marxist and feminist), economic anthropology and sociology, and critical development studies. Throughout, I privilege examples from the southern and African context, particularly from South Africa. As the dust of social change through Constitutional law and ‘the right sort of capitalism’ (Freund 2009, p. 9) begins to un/settle, South Africa offers an object lesson in contested ways of seeing and intervening in and through ‘the economy’.

The economy as machine The ‘image of the economy as a machine has prevailed throughout the twentieth century’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, p. 2) and currently ‘governs our lives’ (p. 1). The machine’s logic is based on ‘turning natural resources into base materials and products for sale through a series of value-adding steps’ (Stahel 2016, p. 436) which can be measured. For historical materialists, those value-adding steps are through human labour. In this linear, productivist vision, the goal is to maximise output and value of that. This usually requires increasing inputs of natural resources and labour, constant technological innovation, and increasing demand for outputs. Societies, socio-natures, and ideologies have been fundamentally re-shaped to increase both inputs and outputs. The input-output image of the economy precedes the twentieth century. Eighteenth century classical political economy, colonialism and modernisation’s development projects, and post-war neoclassical economics (Buck-Morss 1995, Mitchell 1998) worked hard to produce and consolidate the idea of the economy as a self-contained black-box of production, distribution, and consumption. The right pre-conditions for this economy’s catalysis, or ‘take off’, had to be engineered; Rostow’s modernisation theory being the mid-century’s most persuasive machinic retrospective and template. This modelled the stages for evolving ‘traditional societies’ and economies into modern ones through commodity production beyond subsistence for external markets, infrastructural and technological development, and new social values around mobility and consumption (Sheppard et al. 2009), often with the ‘help’ of colonialism. A key precondition for this evolution was the establishment of the nation-state. However, talk 220

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of ‘national economies’ as the primary containers of economic activity, rather than a household practice of economy, is a relatively recent one (Mitchell 2002). ‘National’ economies have also been enmeshed and engaged with many other places at other scales, long before the much hyped globalisation of the last 40 years. The collection of data about these national machines, usually in the form of GDP, gross national product (GNP), inflation rates, etc., has been a major modern preoccupation, such that the causal argument now made is that better data leads to better economies ( Jerven 2013). These machines start to justify their own existence, becoming their own imperative – they must be kept running to do their job, not because they are intrinsically valuable or better than others. Their servicing requires experts, who in turn are vested in the maintenance of the machine, and therefore, themselves. Theoretically, such an internally-regulating machine would only require a periodic ‘service’ by experts: tightening a valve here, replacing a widget there. In practice, a vast coterie of professional specialists is invested in maintaining the machine economy. These are largely economists, but also bankers, consultants, planners, ‘development practitioners’, etc. For the rest of us, the economy as machine is seemingly out of our hands. We are ostensible cogs within it, ‘work[ing] to consume’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). This blackboxing of the economy as machine has legitimised ‘rule by experts’ (Mitchell 2002), or as Easterly (2014) more critically puts it, the ‘tyranny of experts’. We cannot separate this machinic image from capitalism. In fact, the reproduction of capitalism has depended heavily on what Fred Block calls ‘the capitalist illusion’: the economy as ‘autonomous, coherent, and regulated by its own internal logics’ (Block 2018, p. 2) – a machine. This illusion has relied on ‘disembedding’ the economy (Polanyi 2001) from the social and ecological relations that sustain it. The change envisioned by this machine then is to facilitate the increased conversion of social and ecological life into objectified, commodified ‘inputs’ for the economy’s maximalist maxim, and build a consensus around this: uniting society in their pursuit of growth as the basis of wealth, sustainability and the satiation of our desires. Classical economists spoke of the virtuous circle of growth – how some growth led to more growth and more prosperity, through the positive feedback loop of capital formation, increased productivity, rising incomes, increased savings, etc. (Nurske 1953 cited Martinussen 1997). A self-fulfilling prophecy based on assumptions of reinvestment and the bedrock of growth that would achieve Rostow’s linear path to economic take-off. Whether that growth is found in comparative advantage, agglomeration or endogenous processes, and if it takes the form of growth in production or consumption or exchange; trickle-down or inclusion; led by the market or a developmental state, is all up for debate. Market-led growth – leaving the economy to the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces – has been a particularly active project of social change since the 1970s when right-wing politicians and neoclassical economist pushbacks against state ‘interference’ grew in power in hegemonic places (Hall 1979). They fought to instantiate the argument that if capitalism is regulated by its own internal logics, any external interference reduces efficiency of the machine (GibsonGraham et al. 2013, Block 2018), justifying new forms of deregulation, rollbacks of social protections and public expenditures (called ‘structural adjustment’ in the developing world, and ‘reducing the welfare state’ in the developed), and rollouts of new commodifications and common sense about the ‘free market’ (Peck and Tickell 2002). This is neoliberalisation, to use a more common shorthand. However, the apparently unregulated machine economy has a tendency to overheat, as Marxist analyses of its predisposition to crises, particularly of overproduction, have demonstrated. Nor does it operate evenly. Economic growth and development have often 221

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been lumpy. For scholars of uneven development, this is no accident: underinvestment and disinvestment in certain places and processes is required to prop up investment in others (Peck 2017). The benefits of growth are also uneven: we have examples of rapid growth in GDP, with no reduction in inequality, unemployment or poverty rates (Arndt et al. 2016, Sumner 2017), or growing inequality rather than Kuznet’s assumed reduction of income inequality with higher per capita income. One proposal for reducing the machine economy’s uneven effects has been ‘inclusive growth’ (Ncube 2015, OECD 2017, World Economic Forum 2017). Older versions include pro-poor growth, defined either as concomitant growth with an absolute drop in poverty rates, or more relatively as growing poor people’s share of income at a greater rate than the wealthy’s – i.e., also reducing inequality (Ranieri and Ramos 2013). Beset by definitional variation, in South Africa inclusive growth pundits argue that we cannot first grow the economy and expect its crumbs to ‘trickle-down’, or to grow the economy and then distribute it: rather, underrepresented individuals and firms need to participate in the economy from the outset (National Treasury 2017). Their increased ‘economic participation’ will ‘allow for greater benefit-sharing that results in a more equitable distribution of the benefits of economic growth’ (Banda et al. 2015, p. 8). Postapartheid policy has worked at this through ‘black economic empowerment’ (policies incentivising existing businesses to increase levels of black ownership, shareholding and management) and competition policy and cartel watchdogs working to deconcentrate monopolised industries through regulation, penalty, and support for new market entrants (Roberts et al. 2019). Despite this commitment, the project of black economic empowerment in its current form has had limited success in changing the face of the South African economy, let alone content. Black ownership of reporting firms sits at just less than 30% (B-BBEE Commission 2020). More than 96% of entities listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange remain white-owned (B-BBEE Commission 2020). Despite the changing demographics of corporate boards and management, levels of inequality and poverty are deepening (Webster and Francis 2019). Bringing the ‘informal economy’ into the formal – through formalisation, upgrading, or eradication – has been another curative for dealing with the machine economy’s dualism, with particular energy since the 1990s across much of the global South. The ‘look’ and aesthetics of a modern ‘formal’ economy are increasingly part of how governance works (Ghertner 2015). Projects of Dubaisation, with glistening sky-scrapers and constructed landscapes, are acts of ‘symbolic power’ (Acuto 2010), but also economic performances. If one looks like an investor safe-haven, one might become it. Yet, incorporation, inclusion, integration into the ‘formal’ economy does not necessarily empower people, as researchers of adverse incorporation point out (Hickey and du Toit 2013). The terms of incorporation need to be scrutinised – how much equity and control do people have in these incorporations – and to who’s benefit. The incorporation of previously unemployed or informal workers on exploitative terms can create new precarities for most and more profit for a few (Samson 2007, Ballard et al. 2021). Incorporation is also based on a false dualism, argue critical political economists, disregarding the mutually constitutive nature of those ‘two economies’, and the subsidisation of the one by the other (Bond 2007, Sanyal 2007). Still, informal traders, workers, and squatters continue to claim material space, demand more equitable terms and work at strategic alliances to redistribute surpluses (Benjamin 2008, Bénit-Gbaffou 2016, Bhan 2019). Progressive planners and street bureaucrats find ways to work around or even enable better conditions for informal practices (Rubin 2018). At the continental scale, the ‘industrialising Africa’ agenda coming out of institutions such as the African Development Bank and some African states argues that production is key to 222

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realising economic growth’s social promise, and will allow Africa to follow in the footsteps of East Asia’s newly industrialised countries (NICs) (Fofack 2014).2 Within this productivist, rather than extractivist, focus, there are options to follow a more dualistic path (highlypaid highly-skilled jobs in some sectors alongside low-wage, low-skills jobs in others, like clothing manufacture) – the path of ‘inclusive dualism’ Nattrass and Seekings (2019) call it – or a living wage for all path: the International Labour Organisation and many trade unions’ stance. For others, scaling up is the answer: freeing exchange or trade at the continental scale will reduce the blockages and bureaucracy and hence costs of intra-African trade (in goods, notably, not so much human capital!). The newly-ratified African Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA) is a move in this direction (African Union 2018). A more critical analysis sees ACFTA disproportionately benefitting regional hegemons Nigeria and South Africa, and their corporations with continental footprints already (South Africa’s supermarket chains will profit more from a Free Trade Area than local farmers for example). However, growing production and exchange are no good without effective demand. Here, the consuming ‘middle classes’, with their increased levels of demand for goods and services, are seen as drivers of economic growth (African Development Bank 2011), despite their real vulnerabilities to poverty in practice (Zizzamia et al. 2016). Others have called for social change within the machine economy through distribution rather than production-oriented action. Questions around who gets what, based on what claims to ‘rightful shares’ of the surplus, are at the heart of Southern African political economy and political demands at present, argues James Ferguson (2015). This reflects a context with chronic and structural unemployment hovering between 30% and 40%; increasing wage gaps between white collar, highly skilled workers and everyone else (Seekings and Nattrass 2015); low wages for the working poor (PACSA 2017) and a greater distribution of the surplus going from wages to profits (Barchiesi 2009) and top income earners even in a period of low growth (Hundenborn et al. 2019). Upending the common development adage that we need to teach more people to fish for themselves rather than relying on handing out fish, ‘what is needed most’ Ferguson (2015) argues ‘is neither more fish nor more fishermen and -women but rather better ways of making sure that the abundant yield of this global industry gets properly spread around to those who are, at present, not getting their share’ (p. 38). This requires a focus on distributive justice. In South African policy, we see this project of social change operationalised to some degree through progressive taxation, the social wage package, debates around land reform, and ‘service delivery’,3 and calls for a universal basic income grant and wealth tax to redistribute the historical surplus (Soudien et al. 2019) as well as counteract increasing inequality through financialised wealth, not just wage income (Piketty 2017). However, state commitment and capacity to manage these distributive channels are key (Ferguson 2015, p. 209) and increasingly under question in the South African context (Hassim 2008, Palmer et al. 2017, Phadi and Pearson 2017). And there are limits to any project based on continued growth. Capitalism’s relentless pursuit of surplus value comes at great social and ecological cost, what Julie Livingston (2019) calls ‘self-devouring growth’. Its commodification and enclosure of nature, labour, and time is propelling ecological suicide through both the depletion of natural resources and exuding toxic outputs (Klein 2015). Its hierarchies of space, race, class, and gender violently mark certain bodies and spaces as waste and waste-able (Gidwani and Reddy 2011, Werner 2011), justifying the robberies of colonialism’s ‘primitive accumulation’, new forms of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ of various commons (Harvey 2003), or ‘accumulation by displacement’ (Leitner and Sheppard 2017) from sites newly valued under capitalism’s see-saw of investment and disinvestment (Peck 2017). At the same time, processes of commodification and 223

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enclosure are never complete nor uncontested (Lazzarini 2020), unfolding dynamically and contextually, rather than universally (Ong 2006). Economic ‘expertise’ is questioned (Pow 2018, Cinnamon 2019); alternative economies and practices of commoning pursued (Daya and Authar 2012, Paudel 2016); the exploitative terms of ‘adverse incorporation’ (Hickey and du Toit 2013) or being reduced to ‘bare life’ as surplus labour refused (Mususa 2010, Du Toit and Neves 2014, Chen et al. 2016). These contestations point to ways of seeing the economy within ‘the social whole’, in relation to normative, rather than only quantitative, questions (Buck-Morss 1995, p. 466). Below, I sketch some popular reformist and then more radical ways of seeing the economy and enacting change through it.

Reforming the economy as machine: greening the ecosystem, building circular economies A reformist vision, increasingly punted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), World Bank and United Nations, aims for ‘greener economies’ based on a more organic, systems approach to the economy. In 1993 in the journal Futures for example, Hodgson (1993) argued for ‘the economy as an organism – not a machine’. In the Arabic language, this is how the economy is conceptualised (Domaradzki 2016). Drawing on biology, the organism metaphor offers an apparently more complex, dynamic model. Organisms are living things, ranging from simple to complex, requiring a supply of raw materials to metabolise, convert to energy and survive. They also process waste and reproduce. Rather than a discrete, isolated entity, an organism as defined by the Oxford Dictionary is ‘a system consisting of parts that depend on each other’. Approaching the economy as system allows more room for these interdependent and dynamic relationships, and how its parts evolve to fulfil their specialist functions or niches. Systems thinking is key to both natural science and engineering, and new disciplines that sit on the boundaries of economics such as ecological economics and industrial ecology. Greening inputs and outputs, with the use of renewable energy and carbon capture (UNEP 2011), are argued to produce a more sustainable and ‘resilient’ economic system that can withstand shocks of various kinds. For some critics though, green economies are still driven by dangerous growth logics, no matter their more sustainable credentials, often co-opted by machinic, capitalist interests (Cock 2014). Also important to both organismic and machinic economies are their internal, self-regulating laws (Block 2018) and assumed tendency towards equilibrium, or convergence as it is called in neoclassical economics. Natural systems tend towards equilibrium through feedback loops. Similarly, convergence economics argues that no economy will sustain vast inequalities or uneven development for long (Peck 2017): if left to their own self-regulating systems, equilibrium will prevail. Economies, however, are not naturally occurring systems. Equilibrium is not assured. Machines can overheat or break; organisms can go into destructive overdrive (cancerous growth (Livingston 2019)). There is more evidence for divergence under the current economic system than convergence. This is because economies are not self-organised, discrete organisms, but constructed, intervened in and embedded in wider social systems (Vidal and Peck 2012, Werner et al. 2017). Spatial targeting of areas of divergence is a policy recommendation that recognises this (Cheruiyot and Mushongera 2018). Although also interested in positive feedback loops, the circular economy does not focus so much on growth’s circle than a wider imagination of what counts – or more specifically, where economic value is produced. In close proximity to the ecosystem approach to the economy, it is modelled on nature’s own cycles (water, carbon) and principles of ‘sufficiency’ rather 224

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than expansion, in which ‘discards become resources for others’, rather than disposed of as in current practices of production and consumption (Stahel 2016). A ‘circular economy’ would turn goods that are at the end of their service life into resources for others, closing loops in industrial ecosystems and minimizing waste … It would change economic logic because it replaces production with sufficiency: reuse what you can, recycle what cannot be reused, repair what is broken, remanufacture what cannot be repaired. (Stahel 2016, p. 435) Economy as circle offers a quite different way of seeing the economy and concomitant social change, one that connects the lives and afterlives of inputs, and outputs and externalities. The latter become inputs – both in their valued form and their waste – and so the cycle repeats itself. Compelling in its simplicity, sustainability researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers have latched onto the circular economy – although not fully enough for some of its advocates (Stahel 2016). At multiple scales, it offers a way of moving to a lower carbon economy. Second, a strategy for dealing with waste through re-purposing of waste and by-products. Circular economy discourse has been attached in particular to recycling and reuse processes, for example, reclamation of municipal solid waste by informal reclaimers in Johannesburg (Wits University 2019), all the way to corporate leasing strategies of usually discarded commodities such as lightbulbs. This is because the circular economy rests on notions of ‘stewardship’, rather than ownership (Stahel 2016). One stewards a good from one phase of its life cycle to another, perhaps undertaken by a new steward. Each works to maximise value in those different phases. Along with new technology for ‘de-polymeriz[ing], de-alloy[ing], de-laminat[ing]’, etc. (Stahel 2016, p. 437), human labour and skill is fundamental – one cannot just throw money into the input-output machine. According to Stahel (2016), more Research and Development is required to get us down to recycling at the atom level. The circular economy intersects with moves away from a productionist focus to a more reproductionist one, and could be pushed further in these directions to avoid becoming a techno-fix for industrial transition. The circular economy’s notion of stewardship finds common cause with new attention to maintenance in economic and everyday practice (Mattern 2018), which draws on feminist ethics of care, and also resonates with Global South scholarship, where repair rather than construction is a primary modality of social and economic life (Bhan 2019). However, what is included in the ‘circle’ of the circular economy could do with some broadening – as calls for a more inclusive circular economy have noted.

Reframing and reformatting the economy: recognising icebergs, resourcing community economies, changing foundations This critique resonates with feminist and post-Marxian arguments for a fundamental reframing of what counts as ‘economic’. Units of output, levels of capital investment, shareholder value, GDP, GNP, formal employment numbers, etc., are often just the tip of the economy’s ‘iceberg’, Gibson-Graham et al. (2013) argue. The rest of the iceberg encompasses all sorts of economic activities, from housework to volunteering, illegal exchanges to sharing common resources. Such reframing is key to undoing ‘the capitalist illusion’ and imagining alternatives to the machine economy beyond democratising or greening it. 225

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For feminist political economy, there are two ways of understanding the iceberg’s invisibilities (Collard and Dempsey 2020). The activities rendered invisible and ‘unproductive’ are raced and gendered in ways that reduce their apparent value to the economy, while they fundamentally subsidise the ‘productive’, ‘visible’ economy, often through superexploitation (Mies 1986 in Collard and Dempsey 2020). These activities of social reproduction are thoroughly constitutive of capitalist production, and are not ‘outside’ it in any way. Until capitalism itself is undone, the interim struggle is to have these activities recognised, valued and remunerated more equitably – for example, through wages for housework campaigns (Federici 2020). The other reading of the iceberg is that which is below the surface offers examples of the kinds of activities that ‘contribute to our well-bring’ and ‘keep[…] us afloat as a society’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, p. 10 and 11). Cataloguing all the activities that go into the iceberg take us beyond a ‘capitalocentric’ vision (Gibson-Graham 2006), where only capitalist activities count, and where we are reduced to passive recipients of economic decision-making by politicians and ‘experts’. Seeing the economy as this kind of iceberg works to ‘reframe’ the economy, and therefore ourselves, as one in which we are all participant every day, with ethical decisions to make about how to ‘take back the economy’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, also see Roelvink, this volume). They propose community economies – ‘economies in which ethical negotiations around our interdependency with each other and the environment are put center stage’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, p. 13), in which we ‘make and share a commons’ (p. 130), distributing surplus to enrich social and environmental health, rather than profit. There is a different notion of agency and collectivity here, proferred in examples of economic actions such as living wage campaigns, experiments with community currencies, timebanks, establishing worker-owned cooperatives, prioritising regenerative (rather than speculative) financing, etc. Community economies also lie at the heart of degrowth, an alternative quite contrary to machine and eco-system approaches to the economy. Distinctly ecological in its orientation, with similarities to Latin America’s Buen Vivir or radical ecological democracy – Ecological Swaraj – from India (Kothari et al. 2014), degrowth advocates for ‘societies liv[ing] within their ecological means, with open, localised economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions. Such societies will no longer have to “grow or die”’ (Research and Degrowth 2017). The kinds of social change this would require especially in the Global North are dramatic. But perhaps the new agenda of the democratic left in the United States, the Green New Deal, offers one potential mainstreaming of this in the machine’s heartland (Klein 2020). Degrowth in its fullest sense would require changing the mode of production – capitalism – altogether. Marxists have long argued that only a transformation in the mode of production and therefore the social relations between classes, between people and nature, and between people and themselves ‘really constitutes development’ (Mabogunje 1981, p. 43). And thus, this can be one of the most complex forms of social change to bring about through the economy. While working towards this anti-capitalist transformation, one can propose an ‘interim politics’ of change. For the geographers Derickson and MacKinnon (2015), that interim politics is one of building resourcefulness – beyond survival and resilience to disaster – through resourcing people and communities for self-determination. Those resources can be in the form of time (time to organise life differently, through shared childcare for example), space (for public gatherings), material resources (funding), and epistemic resources (practical and theoretical knowledge, as well as indigenous and technical) (Derickson 2016). This resourcing for self-determination ‘in the meantime’ shares tenets with other calls for providing the ‘urban staples’ (Amin 2013) and forms of re-commoning for communities to 226

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draw on (whether through municipalisation, public service provision, access to land, etc.). This has been described as the ‘foundational economy’: ‘the infrastructure of public services for social consumption that allows everyday life’ (Foundational Economy Collective 2018). Securing those goods and services that matter to communities at the local and regional scale, and universal quality and access therein, is what public and economic policy should be all about they argue, rather than privatising provision, contingent on individual income to buy them or even taxation from income to fund them (Foundational Economy Collective 2018). Refocusing on foundational consumption, instead of GDP growth, market freedom and financial returns, requires an enlarging of the technical, narrow visions of the economy that have become predominant under machine thinking especially since the 1970s. This reframing would allow us to live well collectively, as economic models based on individual income falter in the wage-stagnant North and job-scarce South (Foundational Economy Collective 2018).

Conclusion The great marvel is that once a scientific object is ‘discovered’ (invented), it takes on agency. The economy is now seen to act in the world; it causes events, creates effects. Because the economy is not found as an empirical object among other worldly things, in order for it to be ‘seen’ by the human perceptual apparatus it has to undergo a process, crucial for science, of representational mapping. (Buck-Morss 1995, pp. 439–440) This chapter has tracked some of those ‘representational mappings’ through its selected (not exhaustive) visions of the economy to understand how different ways of seeing the economy shape ways of imagining and enacting social change through it. The most predominant – the economy as machine – pursues change as society learning to be economic (and capitalist), prioritising growth and the machine’s continuity above all else. Growth is argued to produce greater societal equilibrium through natural feedback loops, or, more progressively, as greater wealth that could be redistributed and potentially propoor. With the growing disequilibriums of inequality and global warming, reformists are working to green the machine, or reuse and revalue growth’s waste and externalities through circular economies. Alternative visions instead seek social change through the economy by considering other modes of production – other foundations – beyond capitalism; or completely shifting what counts as ‘economic’ to include the myriad practices of everyday life that sustain ‘the economy’ and how we can better support different forms of labour, distribution of the surplus and sharing of the commons. They are interested in critiquing and providing new metaphors beyond the machine because, as Shannon Mattern (2017) puts it, Why should we care about debunking obviously false metaphors? It matters because the metaphors give rise to technical models, which inform design processes, which in turn shape knowledges and politics, not to mention material [places].

Acknowledgements Thanks to the editors and the anonymous reviewer for their careful engagement with my draft chapters, and generously sharing ideas on how to simplify its organisation and sharpen its contributions. 227

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Notes 1 As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, growth and business-as-usual cannot be assured. This chapter was written before the pandemic. 2 In contrast, Rwanda has pursued a path of digital development (Georgieva 2018) within a service economy model instead of manufacturing (Behuria and Goodfellow 2019). Its post-genocide reconstruction plan prioritises high-speed internet and IT training, with economic growth hovering around the impressive 8th percentile. 3 These are about the provision of public goods and their accessibility across classes (physically and socially), and how externalities of development are shared among classes (Mabogunje 1981).

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19 KNOWLEDGE Wellbeing in Global Public Policy Jessica Pykett

Introduction The aim of this chapter is to investigate the process by which knowledge about happiness and its relation to behaviour is constructed as a target of governance. It examines some points of tension and conflict, and suggests new ways of thinking about wellbeing through the lenses of emotional culture, behaviour, and change. It argues that the spaces in between individual and collective approaches to wellbeing can be fruitful as a basis for understanding and driving social change. It compares two global movements for change in the field of wellbeing public policies in order to learn from the differences between them with respect to their use of knowledge and insight. On the 20th of September 2018 at Fordham University in New York, a new movement was launched with the intention to transform global economic thinking on sustainability and wellbeing. The Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) is a collective network of organisations made up of NGOs across Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Africa. Aiming to engage global business leaders, faith groups, academics, civil society, and government actors in radically rethinking the prevailing neoliberal economic system ten years after the global financial crisis, WE-All proposed that it is time to unblock impediments to advancing the wellbeing agenda, and to recognise the inadequacy of the current economic system for ensuring ‘shared wellbeing on a healthy planet’ (WEAll 2019, p. 21). Some months before, in February 2018, the launch event of the Global Happiness Council was held at the World Government Summit in Dubai. This marked the inauguration of a global network of researchers, policy makers, technologists, and wellbeing entrepreneurs who produce an annual report aimed at governments, to demonstrate successful wellbeing policy initiatives and case studies from around the world, including in education, health, personal happiness, workplaces, and city design/management. Like the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, the Council argued for the need to move beyond the idea that increased wealth will lead to improved happiness over time (after economist, Richard Easterlin’s ‘Easterlin Paradox’ (1973)). Both have argued that government action on happiness is required to address the wealth inequalities and environmental destruction produced by globalisation. However, the solutions proposed by these global networks are very different and the reasoning follows opposing pathways. For WEAll it is the economic system that needs to be radically overhauled, whilst for the Global Happiness Council, measurement and intervention in happiness are the key to addressing these global problems. 232

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Policy reports produced by the Global Happiness Council place an emphasis on the behavioural changes, everyday behaviours, behavioural therapies, and behavioural tools which can impact on happiness. These are linked with pursuing the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. They celebrate governments who are ‘studying the impact of their public policies on the happiness of their residents, using the cutting-edge instruments of modern psychological science’ (The Global Council for Happiness and Wellbeing 2019, p. 8). This focus raises two key questions. First, to what extent is the path to global sustainability, wellbeing, and progress a matter of changing behaviour and mindsets? And second, why are the rather minimal – and yet paradoxically – far-reaching ideals (for human wellbeing, for sustainability, for the collective health of people and planet) regarded as in urgent need of political justification, global co-ordination, and fundamental change?

Governing global emotions: critical perspectives on happiness as an individualised object of social change It is worth first establishing how the chapter deals with some key terms which remain notoriously contested in academic and policy literature, carry with them key normative values, and have commonplace meanings in everyday language. Notwithstanding enormous variability in the way ‘happiness’ and ‘wellbeing’ are understood, happiness tends to have quite straightforward meanings in Western, post-industrialised and highly individualised societies. It can mean that someone feels a state of pleasure, feels good, content, or satisfied – either at a particular moment, or as a summary evaluation of how life is going, on the whole. Yet particular definitions, such as happiness as a life goal, encouraged by life coaches, positivity gurus, corporate wellness initiatives, or workplace wellbeing schemes have also been strongly criticised (Binkley 2011, Davies 2015, Frawley 2015, Ecclestone 2017). In light of this ambiguity of terms, there have been considerable efforts by national statistical authorities and international bodies such as the European Parliament, and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to resolve centuries of philosophical debates and to narrowly define and render happiness and wellbeing measurable, as the next section details. The focus of much public policy debate over the past decade has been on subjective, as opposed to objective wellbeing. Objective wellbeing includes quality of life indicators and people’s material circumstances, such as economic resources, health, job security and satisfaction, environmental and housing quality, social support and levels of civic trust, education level, and so on. Subjective wellbeing – as judged by individuals themselves – is similarly multi-faceted, and often split into three aspects: hedonic, eudaimonic, and evaluative wellbeing. The hedonic component is concerned with happiness as an affective experience; a perception of immediate pleasure. Eudaimonia is an ancient Greek term used by psychologists today to refer to cognitive aspects of wellbeing, including sense of purpose in life, or feeling that life is worthwhile or virtuous over the longer term. Evaluative wellbeing, sometimes referred to as life satisfaction, requires a retrospective assessment of the direction of one’s life, in contrast to the fleeting experience of happiness. These three pillars of subjective wellbeing all involve individual, internal knowledge of oneself (appraisal) – albeit we are supposed to have firmer (truer) and more immediate access to our own hedonic feelings than eudaimonia. In sum, it is no easy task to define – let alone measure – happiness, subjective or objective wellbeing, or quality of life, and so most indexes comprise of multiple indicators. These definitional challenges are compounded by the additional problem of having no fundamental science to tell us how to relatively balance the 233

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significance of hedonic, eudaimonic and evaluative wellbeing. Rather, such weightings are dependent on the context and purpose of measuring happiness. And yet, the past decade has witnessed the emergence of new forms of knowledge about happiness. A new ‘science of happiness’ (Layard 2011, Myers and Diener 2018) and ‘science of wellbeing’ (Diener 2009) have been established, which distinguish between the environmental influences, personality and genetic ‘set points’ of our happiness (Easterlin 2003, Diener et al. 2009). A considerable body of work is also concerned with explaining differences in happiness between countries (Blanchflower and Oswald 2011, Helliwell et al. 2015, Clark 2018). Key to this work has been the development of large scale representative national and international surveys which ask questions about life evaluation, positive and negative affect, and whether respondents feel their life has purpose (Ryff and Singer 2008, Dolan et al. 2011). In becoming an established statistical measure, a specific definition of happiness informed by behavioural economics, neuroscience, positive psychology, and biological psychology has become increasingly influential. Meanwhile, quality of life, objective wellbeing, and social indicators research appear to have been gradually overshadowed in terms of their profile in policy debates, though they remain commonplace in policy practice. The object of ‘behavioural happiness’ has come to dominate the field of happiness economics, and connections between the disciplinary backgrounds, normative claims, and practical applications of behavioural and wellbeing public policies are beginning to be elaborated (Fabian and Pykett 2021). Behavioural happiness centres on the individual as the prime unit of analysis, attempts to delineate the necessary social components for optimising subjective wellbeing, and highlights how we can modify our behaviours to shape these factors. Its dominance has implications for the kind of radical social and economic change envisaged by the contemporary wellbeing movement. The next section examines the instantiation of behavioural happiness as a concept. It outlines how its constituent parts are identified and measured. It draws on ideas from political geography to examine how such knowledge about happiness and wellbeing is actively used to promote them as goals for local, national, and international public policy.

Geographies of governing emotions Understanding the political and social significance of happiness and wellbeing benefits from analysis of how these emotional states are measured, mapped, and governed. Governance theories are helpful in establishing how the emotions of happiness and conceptualisation of wellbeing have been defined and transformed in the current era while Science and Technology Studies methods are useful in demonstrating the ‘instantiation’ and ‘contextification’ of dominant framings of emotions and emotional management (Pickersgill 2019, p. 630). Instantiation refers to how particular ways of knowing translate abstract concepts into concrete objects, while contextification highlights what Pickersgill terms a shift ‘from content to context’. Here we can say that the specific knowledge practices outlined above transform behavioural happiness from an emergent phenomenon to a set of implicit values and standards which underpin the means by which emotions can be governed. Geographical theories of emotional governance are particularly well-suited to outlining how feelings and emotions circulate in different places and spaces. They can show how emotions are mobilised at different scales – from self-management to techniques of governing whole populations (Gagen 2015, Pykett and Enright 2016, Jupp et al. 2017). Cultural and philosophical studies explore how emotions can act as currency which can stand in for particular values or even smuggle in pernicious, anti-egalitarian social norms, and exclusionary categorisations (Ahmed 2004). Seemingly 234

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quite personal, embodied feelings can confirm or contest national or international ‘structures of feeling’, ‘intimate geo-politics’, or expose uneven emotional landscapes and experiences (Pain and Staeheli 2014, Anderson 2016). These studies in the emerging geographies of emotional governance can usefully investigate the conditions of possibility in which happiness and wellbeing are set to work on the redefinition and resolution of social problems in particular spaces and institutions. This approach has successfully been employed to explore happiness as a dispositif, ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’ to achieve a ‘strategic function’ (Foucault 1977, cited in Greco and Stenner 2013, p. 2). Addressing the governance of emotions as a mechanism of power, its defining feature ‘is precisely the feature of splitting the subject from their world; of treating feelings and desires as purely internal, individual and subjective affairs’ (Greco and Stenner 2013, p. 4). For instance, psychometric survey instruments try to account for the importance of social relationships by using individual perceptions of neighbourliness, social networks, or degree of isolation, often using proxy measures which can be easily quantified and compared. However, these measures do not capture the intangible effects that emerge from community or society as themselves active variables (Atkinson et al. 2017, p. 5). The methodological emphasis of these disciplinary knowledges on enumeration shapes the ‘administrative measures’ and ‘scientific statements’ through which happiness becomes an effective governmental technology. The enumeration of subjective wellbeing exemplified by happiness surveys opens the door for treating individual behaviour as a surface for social change. Yet these individual self-reports of happiness do not pre-exist their measurement. As Ruppert (2012, p. 128) highlights it is the deployment and circulation of metrics itself which creates individualised identities, and targeted, as opposed to collectivised, interventions. The knowledge practices involved in production, standardisation, and governance of emotional metrics are thus worthy of scholarly attention. By critically questioning the ontological status of key terms (in this case, happiness and wellbeing), we can consider them as artefacts of specific geographical and historical circumstances (Atkinson 2013, Smith and Reid 2017, Holmes and McKenzie 2018). This genealogical method acts as a counterpoint to scientific approaches to happiness and wellbeing because it regards the tools and techniques of happiness measurement not as neutrally scientific but as objects to be analysed through research. Unlike the science of happiness, a contextualising method does not only search for its Greek or Utilitarian philosophical origins, but identifies the categorical, discursive, and practical processes by which happiness is put to work in the present context. Given the great enthusiasm for and cost of investing in wellbeing data and research, it is important to examine how happiness measurement itself can shape culture, subjectivity, emotional identity, and the parameters of governance. By approaching the science of happiness as performative in this way – in the sense that its conventions, definitions, declarations, and descriptions actually enact or instantiate the ‘happy’ subjects which it seeks to measure – we can consider how this emotion plays a central role in the reasons, mechanisms and outcomes of contemporary forms of governance.

The rise of behavioural happiness The inauguration of the Global Happiness Council in 2018 marked over a decade of work on the international policy and development stage. In 2008 the French Government created a commission led by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi on the Measurement 235

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of Economic Performance and Social Progression. Their report set out to establish more relevant statistical indicators of social progress, which pay due regard to how high levels of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) could mask environmental degradation, inequality, unsustainable growth, and poor citizen and social wellbeing (Stiglitz et al. 2009, p. 8). This Commission built on an earlier conference hosted in Brussels in 2007 by the European Commission, European Parliament, Club of Rome, OECD, and the World Wildlife Fund (European Commission 2007) which led to a 2011 European Parliament Resolution on GDP and Beyond – Measuring progress in a Changing World (European Parliament 2011). The Resolution was the first intergovernmental commitment to ‘measure quality of life in societies’ and recognition that ‘achieving and sustaining quality of life involves important, consensual factors such as health, education, culture, employment, housing, environmental conditions etc’. The Resolution proposed to use the European Quality of Life Survey to gather a broad suite of objective and subjective quality of life data to shape policy and decision making, not least ‘including happiness, life satisfaction, optimism about the future’ (European Parliament 2011). Around the same time, United Nations (UN) Resolution 65/309 invited its member states to ‘pursue the elaboration of additional measures that better capture the importance of the pursuit of happiness and well-being in development with a view to guiding their public policies’ (United Nations 2011, p. 1), and this was positioned directly in relation to the Millennium Development Goals.

Economising happiness Despite this early interest in the material conditions for happiness, within economics a focus on welfare and development has arguably been superseded by the dominance of behavioural economics and happiness economics. These disciplines have closely aligned histories, with Richard Easterlin being a highly influential figure in both. He was a researcher at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California in the 1970s, and later was amongst the first economists to pay attention to subjective wellbeing statistics (Easterlin 2004, p. 18, Clark 2018 p. 245). The search for robust, valid, and replicable measures of subjective wellbeing has been the subject of several decades of research in happiness studies, reflecting a growing relationship between economists and psychologists. There is a methodological emphasis either on large scale representative surveys asking questions about attitudes, values, and self-perceptions of subjective wellbeing, or on econometric regression modelling techniques. These set out to identify correlations between objective wellbeing indicators (e.g., material and economic circumstances, health, environmental, quality of life factors) and demographic composition, with happiness as the dependent variable of interest. However there is currently little agreement as to how these kind of components should be weighted, what the causal chains might be, or how generalisable they may be between different national contexts. Instead, within happiness economics there is some reliance on not defining wellbeing – developing instead indicators of wellbeing, through public consultation and through subjective wellbeing questions that allow respondents themselves to consider wellbeing in their own terms – though crucially the questions asked do not get at what these terms might be. Indeed the measurement of subjective wellbeing itself is seen as a solution to the specific problem of how best to decide which indicators and domains should be included on national wellbeing measurement frameworks: We cannot be certain whether a set of social indicators covers all the important facets of life, nor can we be certain how to combine and weight those interdependent 236

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facets. Subjective well-being accounts provide a summative measure of quality of life and weight the facets according to their impact on people’s experience. (Diener et al. 2015, p. 234) These techniques of measurement are accompanied by the aforementioned claims that wellbeing can and should be reduced to sets of standardised indicators in order that it be made to matter within economic development frameworks. The idea that being and living well can only matter if they are made quantifiable, however apparently pragmatic, is a contested claim – relying on its repetition and common-sense appeal. Indeed researchers of wellbeing public policies have argued that the development of national wellbeing measures and international guidelines (those of OECD, UN, World Bank and Eurostat) results not from pure evidence but from the close relationships between such organisations (Bache and Reardon 2013). The effect of which is that ‘what is being offered is a technocratic and reductionist programme which collapses “wellbeing” into the statistical relation of a closed set of metrics’ (Jenkins 2016, p. 108).

Internalising happiness Subjective wellbeing has been economised by the research disciplines, evidence, and methods used to shape global public policy agendas aiming to move beyond GDP to measure and compare national progress. But as previously mentioned, there has also been a shift towards the behavioural dimensions of subjective wellbeing, which emphasises using subjective wellbeing to predict future behaviours (Clark 2018, p. 258), or conversely the behavioural changes necessary to improve wellbeing (Dolan 2014). Increasingly too, economists are drawn to neurobiological and genetic explanations for happiness including: how the U shaped pattern of subjective wellbeing and age (younger and older people have higher recorded subjective wellbeing) might be shared with Great Apes (Weiss et al., cited in Clark 2018, p. 248); how we have genetic ‘set points’, inheriting 80% of our subjective wellbeing (Lykken and Tellegen 1996); propositions that nations closely linked to Danish genetic heritage might be happier (Sgroi et al. 2017); or neuroimaging research on psychological resilience, neural circuits of positive emotion and biological links between generosity and wellbeing (Davidson and Schuyler 2015, p. 89). Whilst these latter neuroscientific and genetic knowledge developments are somewhat at odds with a focus on observable behaviours, this is not widely seen as a contradiction within happiness and behavioural economics. Indeed, a behavioural definition has taken hold within the global public policy agenda on measuring and improving subjective wellbeing, in which wellbeing is described ‘in terms of the feelings, experiences and sentiments arising from what people do and how they think’ (Dolan et al. 2017, p. 3, emphasis added). This definition supports a policy prerogative that is aimed at making or breaking habits and shaping conditional, learned behaviours. Behavioural scientist Paul Dolan’s research has influenced how institutions and networks such as the UK’s What Works Centre for Wellbeing, the UK Office for National Statistics and the Global Happiness Council think about happiness. This approach is described as bringing ‘the latest insights from happiness research and behavioural science to bear directly on the questions of what you are trying to achieve (more happiness) and how you can bring it about (by behaving differently)’ (Dolan 2014, p. x). Emphasising the automaticity of the decision-making process and humans’ finite attentional resources in this way suggests how our life choices should be shaped by the best available advice from economists and behavioural scientists: ‘the key here is to organize your life in ways so that you can go with the grain of your human nature and be happier without having to think too hard about it. This is happiness by design’ (Dolan 2014, p. xx). There 237

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is an assertion that ‘if you are not as happy as you could be, then you must be misallocating your attention’ (Dolan 2014, p. xviii). The logical conclusion of this account is expressed by another member of the Global Happiness Council, whose longitudinal models of ‘hedonic adaptation’ (the tendency to get used new circumstances to the extent that they no longer affect subjective wellbeing) find that happiness is best achieved through ‘volitional control’ rather than changing your circumstances. Recommendations include cultivating ‘habits of mind’ such as gratitude, self-reflection, following motives consistent with our values, optimism and counting one’s blessings (Sheldon and Lyubomirsky 2006). In order to expand our scope beyond individual behavioural accounts of happiness, it is useful to consider how emotions are produced and experienced intersubjectively, and this line of thought is now being perused in interdisciplinary research on community wellbeing (Kudrna et al. 2022). This can help in putting emotions into context, in light of materially uneven socio-economic landscapes that emerge in specific times and spaces. The following section explores the way in which a wider range of humanities scholarship can extend our analyses of the politics and economics of behavioural happiness, not least in providing nuanced understandings of regulation, progress, reform, and revolution.

Historicising happiness measurement The methodological precepts of behavioural happiness, as I have outlined, are focused on an econometric and statistical analysis of sample populations, based on definitions of subjective wellbeing provided by the discipline of happiness economics, and sometimes genetic and neuroscientific knowledge about human behaviour and emotional expression. The stated aim of national governments in deploying these methods is to intervene in the happiness of populations at an individual level. In order to be able to do so, they must first quantify an intersubjective and relational process which is shaped by a large and interacting range of contextual and demographic factors; the ‘taking place’ of wellbeing (Smith and Reid 2017). These enumerations are then used to envisage public policies centred on lifestyle choices, shaping decision-making contexts, configuring spatial arrangements to promote wellbeing and changing our embodied habits and attentions. This policy approach is driven by what happiness economics data tells us will enhance our lives, according to the normative values expressed by the populations being surveyed on their self-reported happiness levels. Some approaches discussed below, and which originate in the humanities, in literary and historical accounts, provide an alternative perspective beyond the behavioural sciences on the situated nature of these dimensions of embodied politics. They are instructive for several reasons. First, they indicate how the knowledge practices, objects, and materialities of defining, enumerating, measuring, and representing happiness are central to the production of individualised identities. This in turn helps to explain why individual behaviour has come to be seen as the central focus for government intervention and social action on wellbeing. Second, historical accounts can strengthen our analysis of collective emotional cultures, the social role of emotions and their regulation. Third, a fine-grained analysis of the terminology and political uses of behaviour and habits highlights the power dynamics between emotional governance, agency, and social change.

Enumerating subjective emotions Historians of the science of emotions have outlined the cultural specificity of the quantification of emotions. For Otniel Dror (2001, p. 373), for instance, the late nineteenth century 238

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saw a collapse in the distinction between psychology and physiology; new machines for measuring emotions created novel forms of abstraction: ‘numbers collapsed emotions into a single homogenous medium, enabling comparison, hierarchical stratification, accumulation, and compression. They facilitated the comparison of emotions experienced at different times, under different circumstances, and by different individuals’. In this way, the enumeration of emotions functioned to disembody; to re-imagine emotions through a masculinist discourse of rational science. This opened up new channels, Dror contends, for those with such expertise to know, communicate, and govern our emotions. The self-report surveys used in happiness economics are a different but comparable kind of disembodied administrative tool with machinic qualities. Such survey ‘instruments’ ask people to perceive, reflect on and themselves enumerate undefined concepts of subjective wellbeing, happiness, and the worthwhileness of life itself, in their own terms. The outcomes of these surveys are represented as ‘measures’ of happiness. This seemingly innocuous approach is challenged by accounts tracing the historical emergence of the standardised questionnaire form. Young (2017, p. 34) describes how the development of numerical questionnaires in early twentieth century America was part of concerted efforts to make psychology relevant to contemporary social issues during the inter-war years. In capturing the attitudes of people, not as individuals but in aggregate, ‘psychologists crafted an increasingly, and inescapably, attitudinal public, one only understandable – and thus governable – through the invocation of psychological expertise’. ‘Public attitudes’ research and opinion polling have become major industries which are used by political parties, lobbyists, businesses to use knowledge about popular sentiment to influence policy. Happiness surveys are an important part of this industry, providing categorisations, codifications and enumerations which lend scientific credence to the political discourses which follow. Indeed the practices of sampling in opinion polling were originally heralded as an almost magical means to by-pass the need for ascertaining the political preferences of whole populations, person-by-person (Lewis 2001, p. 26–27). They can be seen as at once democratic (sampling enabled the inclusion of people across a representative group of diverse populations) and anti-democratic, since they replace the need for the assembly of groups of people with shared matters of concern, and they distance people from technocratised representations of their own opinions. In constructing ‘public opinion’, the enumeration of preferences and subjective feelings thus involves a particular spatial biopolitics; shifting the locus of power from collectives to aggregated representations of individuals adhering to statistical norms.

Regulating emotional cultures Taking a perspective from psychoanalysis and gender studies, Lynne Segal’s book, Radical Happiness outlines why it is that a behaviourist conception of happiness has emerged in the present era, noting that ‘It is very much in tune with the zeitgeist of an era labelled as one of “turbo-charged” capitalism that most of the influential happiness researchers are behavioural economists’ (Segal 2017, p. 3). In her critique of happiness economics she highlights the surprising irony of the Easterlin Paradox so central to the discipline’s own historiography: ‘It is even more peculiar that one of the oft-repeated claims of these economists is that, above a certain level, economics has nothing to do with happiness’ (Segal 2017, p. 4). By approaching contemporary happiness through the lenses of economics, health, and medicine, she argues, we have lost a focus on what Segal terms the ‘costs of social wretchedness’, and the drivers of mental distress – unemployment, poverty, debt, social inequality. No wonder that individualised and commodified accounts of happiness and personal growth have emerged in 239

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parallel, she states, with the deepening of austerity and macroeconomic stagnation – leading to therapeutic rather than social solutions. Hence, in the measurement of happiness as a mark of a nation’s progress, we have lost sight of the need to respond to public sorrow, which she argues would be better served by measuring rates of death, disability, house prices, indebtedness, discrimination, social neglect, and inequality (Segal 2017, p. 8). Understanding this social regulation of emotions is indicative of the political economies of particular emotional cultures in their space-time contexts. For instance, historian Rachel Hewitt (2017) characterises late eighteenth century England as a period of emotional discipline rather than the ‘age of reason’ it is commonly assumed to be. She closely examines the importance of just one decade, the 1790s, in entirely re-shaping cultural interpretations of emotions, sexual relations, revolutionary passions, and political change. Hewitt shows how this decade sowed the seeds for knowledge practices which promoted the individualised emotionalism, mood management, and behavioural interventions that are emblematic of contemporary behavioural happiness. Over the course of the 1790s, a heady optimism for political revolution, sexual equality, wealth redistribution, enfranchisement, and societal progress was replaced by a severe disappointment in the violence of the French revolution, political conservatism, the collapse of the reform movement, and repression of public debate and dissent by the British government. This social atmosphere was deeply linked with scientific endeavours to ‘know’ emotions through the body and biology. Emotions thus became disconnected from subjective experience, spirituality, morality, and politics. The science of emotions emerging at that time instead sought direct measurement of emotions through novel inventions and newly engineered equipment, and the improvement of moods through pharmaceutical means. Emotions became known as nothing more than biological and neurological states, rather than the passionate political force of change they had previously been. Without this cultural revolution, the methodological and normative precepts of behavioural happiness would make no sense at all.

Emotional agency: from social to behavioural change One of the central consequences of this historical reworking of emotions spanning from the scientific practices of the 1790s, through the development of public opinion polling in the 1920s and the economisation of happiness since the 1970s has been to privatise emotions, relocating human agency away from the social sphere and public realm. This is key to appreciating why definitions and measures of happiness matter, and why we should pay keen attention to how this emotion is managed through global public policy. The behavioural sciences now play an increasingly dominant role in explaining, representing and ultimately shaping wellbeing, through behavioural public policies and policy ‘nudges’ which set out to guide citizen behaviour without restricting free choice, and which have become globally influential over the past decade (Akerlof et al. 2017, Whitehead et al. 2017). The shorthand of ‘neuroliberalism’ has been used to describe the value placed on emotional responses, social norms, cognitive heuristics and automatic, habitual behaviours by behavioural public policies (Whitehead et al. 2017). New understandings of human behaviour, free will, autonomy, and citizenship are incarnated through the policy application of the behavioural sciences. The achievement of personal wellbeing and happiness thus becomes a target of liberal governments by means of the rethinking of human subjectivity and subjective emotions. This enables liberal governments to leave intact their commitment to a neo-liberal faith in markets as the source of social equity and stability despite wide-spread acknowledgment of the failure of such markets to achieve this (Whitehead et al. 2017, p. 4). 240

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Behavioural public policies which are often rationalised in terms of their goals for future wellbeing are simultaneously posed as a solution to the negative spill-overs of neoliberalism (Whitehead et al. 2017, p. 4). Put succinctly, ‘nudge theory claims that complex social problems can be addressed through harnessing expert knowledge of patterned psychological and economic behaviour’ (Pedwell 2017, p. 66). Nudge theories and their behavioural interventions focus on habitual behaviours as the most productive avenue for social change, target non-rational forms of cognition and intervene in the relationship between human subjects as embodied beings within environments. By promoting forms of expert governance – based on the knowledge, models and assumptions of happiness economics – the relational, social, publicly contested and debated, undetermined, and interactional dynamics of habits in situ are jettisoned for the apparent predictive quality of models. This has clear implications for social change: ‘within the world of nudge theory, there is no role for social movements and political activism in processes of socio-political change, the entire public sphere is almost completely evacuated’ (Pedwell 2017, p. 85). Instead, in the behavioural re-definition of happiness, change becomes a life(style) project, directed by life coaches, experts, and choice architects. There is little room here for active citizen participation in pursuing overtly political projects of collective joy (Segal 2017). Instead the ascendance of behavioural public policy as we see in the global wellbeing policy sphere signifies the abandonment of the democratic imperative for educating citizens to increase their capacity for autonomy (Dewey, in Pedwell 2017, p. 84), and potentially closes down debate over the end goals of such interventions.

Conclusion These observations help us to reflect back on the recent emergence of a multi-faceted ‘wellbeing movement’ set out in the introduction. The Global Happiness Council is comprised largely of knowledge experts in happiness economics, behavioural economics, psychology, marketing/business, statisticians, and public policy strategists seeking global scale influence on national governments. They call forth academic evidence in pursuit of a goal to promote happiness and wellbeing, often through policies based on behavioural change. While the Global Happiness Council foregrounds the science of behaviour, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance is distinct in prioritising the social practices of change. Their stated goal is ‘the creation of a new power base to exert pressure for change at all levels of the economic system, to influence societal habits and norms, and to support the formation of an effective and dynamic global movement’ (WEAll 2019). As a collaboration of local, place-based initiatives, their emphasis is on collective power (‘connecting, organising and amplifying’), narratives of change, and building an evidence base of wellbeing economy projects to exemplify and communicate the possibilities for change, with very little reference to measurement. Following and scrutinising the relative impacts and reach of these contrasting knowledge approaches over the coming years will provide important lessons on how change happens.

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20 TECHNOLOGY Determinism, Automation, and Mediation Sam Kinsley

Introduction Technologies are, in many guises, both represented in and representations of narratives and strategies for social change. Technologies are narrated as milestones of progress and demarcations of changes – for example: as ‘ages’ and ‘revolutions’. Technologies are also figured as agents for change, not least as ‘disruption’ of a settled part of society. This chapter considers how these stories and strategies of technology as an agent and object of social change function. To undertake this exploration, the chapter has three parts, each of which addresses a question. First, I address the question of ‘what’? I argue that determining how technology is (or not) involved in social change substantially depends upon how we answer the question ‘what is a technology?’ I suggest the ‘what?’ ties to issues about how we understand what counts as technology and how it relates to ‘progress’, such as in relation to ideas of ‘high tech’ and so forth. Second, I address the question of ‘how’? Technology is storied as an agent or object of change through dominant, interrelating, fictions of society-technology relations, in particular: ‘technological determinism’. I explore how different theoretical predilections influence how we argue about what technology does, which I argue relates to understandings of ‘mediation’. Third, I address the question of ‘where’? The contexts of social change with and by technology are significant. In this chapter I briefly explore narratives of social change specifically in relation to automation. Narratives concerning technology as a mark or means of progress and as a medium or maker of truth have been argued over for centuries. Finally, this chapter argues that to ask questions about social change is, often, to variously hold in tension these competing narratives.

What is technology? Technology as an idea is beguiling in its simplicity. Simplicity in this case is disarming; it masks more than it reveals. A commonly assumed understanding of ‘technology’, as Kline (1985) observes, is ‘manufactured articles’ or ‘hardware’ – which could be anything from a pencil to a nuclear reactor. Furthermore, such a definition of technology may, perhaps understandably, reduce it to the prevailing state of the art, rather than the banal (such as the pencil), for example: where it was once ‘rocket science’ it might now be ‘artificial intelligence’. By 244

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contrast, defining ‘technology’ has also been synonymous, for millennia, with defining ‘the human’ (Heidegger 1977, Stiegler 1998), put simply: there is no ‘human’ without ‘technology’ and vice versa – what Stiegler (1998) calls ‘originary technics’. Of course, arguments over the ontological and epistemic status of technology, particularly in relation to our experience of temporality, have been rehearsed throughout recorded history. There is little point in offering a potted history here, others have produced excellent detailed discussions (for example, see: Bijker 1995, Latour 1993, 1999, Nye 2006). To wrestle with the issue of social change I want to focus on two inter-related definitions that, by different degrees, relate to suppositions about social change: technology as prosthesis and technology as mediator or a form of relation. First, technology has been variously defined as a prosthesis. For our purposes, we can think of technology-as-prosthesis as various forms of supplement to the human body. Prosthetic supplements to our bodies provide capacities we otherwise do not have. By this measure, bodies enact change (pace Mauss 1973). Understanding technology as a supplement necessarily positions it as an agent of change in our world(s) – technologies can expand and extend or, equally, control, and restrain. Bodily capacities may be ‘improved’, with prosthetic limbs or spectacles. Yet that ‘improvement’ may be predicated on assumptions about what is ‘normal’ (Sobchack 2007). Indeed, as Nelson (2001, p. 313) argues: [P]rosthetics mediate a whole series of those binaries [scholars argue] we need to think beyond, but which still tend to ground our politics and theory (self/other, body/technology, actor/ground, first world/third world, normal/disabled, global/ local, male/female, West/East, public/private). Perhaps ironically, the ‘success’ of technology-as-prosthesis is when it becomes taken-forgranted and ignored. Put another way, following philosopher Martin Heidegger, ‘successful’ technologies are ‘ready-to-hand’: we do not think about them, we just use them. The famous example is that we do not think about the hammer itself when hammering but rather think about the intended outcome. Technology understood as a prosthesis is thus, to an extent, habitually ‘invisible’. The forms of social change with which we might associate them, from communications to mobilities, are arguably only brought into relief when those technologies ‘fail’. Returning briefly to Heidegger, a technology becomes ‘present-at-hand’ when it ceases to fulfil its intended function. The hammer becomes the focus of our attention when it breaks, for example. The ability to speak at a distance with someone ceases being a tacit assumption when your cell phone does not work. The ‘prosthetic imagination’ (cf. Jain 1999, Mauss 1973) of technology in relation to social change carries with it assumptions and norms about bodily capacities that scholars have long reflected upon critically (for an overview see: Smith and Morra 2005). Furthermore, the extent to which ‘manufactured articles’ have politics has been the topic of significant debate (in particular: Winner 1980, Joerges 1999, Woolgar and Cooper 1999). To foreground and investigate the politics and values surrounding technologies leads us to consider technologies as mediators, or forms of relation. The second understanding of technology, then, is technology conceptualised as a form of relation perhaps partly in contradistinction to a ‘prosthetic imagination’. For anyone with a ‘smart’ phone, technologies can easily be understood as intermediaries between people and between people, places, and things. The uses of technology seen in this way are forms of mediation, we encounter the world with and through technology. Technology as a relation reveals the world to us. In Heidegger’s influential articulation of phenomenology, technology is a mode of ‘revealing’, the way in which what is appears to us, ‘in a definite manner that belongs to our epoch’ (Feenberg 1999, p. 3). Even so, in many ways ‘technologies’ can still be seen 245

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as mute or passive, while ‘humans’ have freedom and intentions. The qualities of how technologies connect us to the world remain in question. Returning to the ‘smart phone’, we can see how a phone, and the platforms we access through them, organise how we perceive other people, places and things by virtue of its design and how we learn to use it – how we communicate and with whom, what we can see, or not, and the norms and etiquette for its use. Technology-as-relation becomes the focus for what has been termed a ‘post-phenomenology’. Philosopher Don Ihde (2004) articulates four qualities of technology-as-relation – relations of: alterity, background, embodiment, and hermeneutics. A relation of alterity is, for Ihde, ‘technology “as” other to which I relate’ (1990, p. 107) – for example: a digital assistant such as Amazon’s ‘Alexa’ or Apple’s ‘Siri’. A background relation is those contexts in which technologies to which we relate but of which we are not consciously aware – for example: a home central heating system. An embodiment relation is, as discussed above, technology as prosthesis – spectacles, for example. A hermeneutic relation is technology as an instrument for understanding or an interface with which to interact with the world – for example: a thermometer or the buttons and switches for an oven. Across and between these forms of technology-asrelation we can appreciate a wide variety of ways in which we experience our world. Advancing this post-phenomenology, Peter-Paul Verbeek (2005) argues that Ihde’s four relations do not account for the changes that these relations bring about in and of themselves. According to Verbeek (2005) both ‘technology’ and ‘human’ become together something different in their relation. Rather than ‘reveal’ the world, technology-as-relation with the ‘human’ makes a world. As with Bruno Latour’s (2005) ‘Actor-Networks’ and Isabelle Stengers’ (2000) ‘cosmopolitics’ the ‘societies’ through which we experience social change is expanded to include ‘non-humans’. In this light, ‘technology’ does not ‘impact’ society, or passively represent change. Instead, viewed in terms of technology-as-relation, social change is a complex of interrelations not only between people but also between people and technologies (and many other things). Furthermore, the complex of social change often appears stable but should rather be considered a metastable achievement – it has a finite (but indeterminate) duration but always and already has the potential to adjust or break down. The ‘what’ question for technology can both be dismissed as simple ‘common sense’ and form the basis of complex metaphysical argument. The two interrelated understandings of technology briefly articulated in this section illustrate the ways in which the role of technology in social change may be both identified and problematised. The ‘who’ and the ‘what’ of society and of social change are not simply a cause and effect – people making changes illustrated by things – but rather the change is the relation. Following Walter Benjamin’s (1999) interpretation of history, we only recognise change, or ‘progress’, as we look backwards. Yet, there remain enduring narratives for how technology creates or reflects social change that turn the logic of historical trends towards the future, turning diagnosis into determinism.

How does technology create or reflect social change? Diagnosing determinism(s) Technology is a potent indicator by which we measure change. As Arendt (1958, p. 144) aptly observed ‘[t]ools and instruments are so intensely worldly objects that we can classify civilisations using them as criteria’. For example, the categorisation of human ‘pre-history’ into eras, such as ‘Stone Age’ or ‘Bronze Age’. We might also note the predilection for ‘revolutions’ in technology development, from the ‘industrial revolution’ of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, through proposed iterations (the ‘Fourth’ being recently popular, see Schwab 2014), and on to specific contexts – such as the ‘Silicon Revolution’ (Bondyopadhyay 1998) or 246

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‘Quantum Revolution’ (Dowling and Milburn 2003). ‘Ages’ and ‘revolutions’ all point to attempts to mark time by a perceived technological advancement. These demarcations are, following Koselleck (2004), the semiotics of narratives of temporality (on ‘epochs’ see also: Blumenburg 1983). However, it is a deceptively small conceptual step to shift from postrationally identifying historical trends of apparent technological influence to asserting technologies themselves drive economic, social or political change. In this section I want to argue for engaging with socio-technological change in terms of the normative discourse of technological ‘progress’ and reflect on the enduring power of ‘technological determinism’. Technological determinism, at its simplest, is the assertion that technological change both occurs somehow independently of social or political forces and that it causes or determines social change (see: Nye 2006, Robins and Webster 1999, Wyatt, 2008). Yet, as suggested above, there frequently seems to be a paradoxical corollary that humans have a conscious choice in the production of technology, which by implication is made by a self-determined elite. Scholars cannot simply dismiss and ignore technological determinism, as Wyatt (2008, p. 169) argues, we ‘cannot simply despair of the endurance of technological determinism and carry on’. To conduct an alternative analysis, following Wyatt, it is necessary to ‘take technological materialism more seriously, disentangle the different types, clarify the purposes for which it is used by social actors in specific circumstances’ (Wyatt 2008, p. 169). We must not entirely discount technological determinism, although we should not blithely affirm it, instead, following Wyatt (2008, cf. Bijker 1995), it is possible to chart the role ‘technological determinism’ (as a discursive trope) is performing. Wyatt’s (2008) typology of technological determinism is accordingly a useful analytical tool. There are four types of technological determinism, according to Wyatt (2008, p. 167), which are: ‘justificatory’, ‘descriptive’, ‘methodological’, and ‘normative’. ‘Justificatory’ technological determinism is described by Wyatt (2008, p. 174) as ‘the type of technological determinism used by employers to justify downsizing and reorganisation’. It is the rationale (of technological determinism) that is employed to assert the improvement of wellbeing and ‘quality of life’ through technology. It can be found in government policy, it is the logic behind claims for technologically enabled ‘efficiency savings’ in budget reviews, and can be found in strategy documents. ‘Descriptive’ technological determinism, Wyatt (2008) argues, is the characterisation of technological determinism as the ‘other’ argument, which is named, normatively judged as ‘wrong’ and simply dismissed. In a sense this is a ‘straw man’ informal fallacy – the content of the argument labelled as ‘determinism’ matters less than labelling it as such and summarily dismissing it. Wyatt suggests this is recognisable in the work of some branches of the field of science and technology studies (STS) (Wyatt suggests Mackenzie and Wajcman 1999, Misa 1988, Smith and Marx 1994). ‘Methodological’ technological determinism is what many scholars are, in fact, practising, whether via actor-network theory, social constructivism or innovation theory. Agency granted to entities considered somehow separate from ‘the human’ is narrated as complex networks of interrelations that, nonetheless, focus on those entities and assign them ‘impact’. Wyatt’s provocation is ‘that our guilty secret in STS is that we are really all technological determinists. If we were not, we would have no object of analysis; our raison d’être would disappear’ (Wyatt 2008, p. 175). Finally, ‘normative’ technological determinism is the supposition of technology that has become so big that it is no longer subject to human/social control. ‘Normative’ technological determinism is the ‘autonomous technology’ of Winner (1977). ‘Meta’ narratives, such as forms of technological determinism, are, to borrow a word, ‘macromyopia’ (Barlow 2004, p. 181): an over-emphasis on the short-term and under-emphasis on the long-term. ‘Macromyopic’ determinisms are a form of disciplinary apparatus. Such 247

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wide-reaching but short-term ‘meta’ narratives, intentionally or not, regulate expectations of the future. Something like a ‘universal’ historical stance remains implicit in the ways in which ‘progress’ is discussed and recorded as, in some way, technologically determined. A ‘better’ world will be achieved, if not determined, by progressive technological advancement. Narratives of ‘determinism’ continue to be seductive. I contend that it is still broadly true, as Winner asserted, that there is a ‘curious paradox that plagues almost all discussions of technological change’ (1977, p. 46). On the one hand there is the belief that technological development progresses under its own inertia ‘resists any limitation, and has the character of self-propelling, self-sustaining, ineluctable flow’ (Winner 1977, p. 46). At the same time there is a parallel but entwined belief that human beings are masters of their own technological destiny, that humans have a ‘conscious choice in the matter and that they are responsible for choices made at each step in the sequence of change’ (Winner 1977, p. 46). This paradoxical state, indirectly inferred by many (cf. Marx 1981, Ellul 1964, Galbraith 1974), is the condition of ‘modernity’. ‘Modernity’ comes in as many versions as there are commentators and scholars invoking it, yet all its definitions point, in one way or another, to social change intimately tied to technological ‘progress’. The adjective ‘modern’ designates a new regime, an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time. When the word ‘modern’ ‘modernisation’, or ‘modernity’ appears, we are defining, by contrast, an archaic and stable past. Furthermore, and following Latour (1993), the word is used to constitute and perpetuate a quarrel where there are winners and losers, the ‘Moderns’ (following Latour 1993) and others. Latour states that ‘“Modern” is thus doubly asymmetrical: it designates a break in the passage of time, and it designates a combat in which there are victors and vanquished’ (Latour 1993, p. 10). ‘Modernity’ is thus a rationale for regulating the understanding of the passage of time as linear. As Winner (1977, p. 46) suggests, ‘modernity’ in simple terms, ‘means “all of those changes that distinguish the modern world from the traditional societies”’. A range of twentieth century scholars attempted to articulate (pseudo) scientific ‘laws’ dictating processes of linear progress determined by technological development (examples include Apter 1965, Ellul 1964). In popular culture, the enduring power of ‘Moore’s Law’ – named after and posited by Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel) in 1965, which contends that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit (e.g., a central processor for a computer) doubles about every 18 months – has been the foundation for grandiose claims of the eventual eclipse of humanity by artificial intelligence (see Kurzweil 2005). How technology creates or reflects social change is variously storied but perhaps the most influential narrative, the story of ‘modernity’, is best understood as ‘technological determinism’. Whether in hyperbolic claims for the transcendence of machine intelligence or in more mundane claims for efficiency savings, technology is frequently and sometimes forcefully narrated as the determinant of social change. Following Wyatt (2008), rather than attempt to dismissively ‘debunk’ determinism we can productively treat these narratives as one of the many relations contributing to the ongoing constitution of our present. Change is not separate from our analysis, but rather intimately includes, and indeed is affected by, how we narrate it.

Where does technology influence or show social change? The case of automation Technology as both the apparent benchmark and harbinger of change produces a short circuit in the supposed progress from ‘cause’ to ‘effect’. ‘Solutions’ are affirmed before problems are even identified. A long-standing and significant example is the ways in which we think about automation. On the one hand, there are clear instances of incremental automation of 248

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mundane or, perhaps, undesirable forms of labour – such as the answering machine and the washing machine. On the other hand, there is a tension between widespread envisioning of an ‘automated future’ and the power of such visions, and those proposing them, over ongoing projects to automate various aspects of contemporary life. Journalist Evgeny Morozov (2013) calls this ‘solutionism’ – technologies are proposed as ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ that are only considered as such by the developers. A desire for compelling visions of a future improved by technology brings with it a risk of ceding power over that future to technology companies. Thus, automation is both a contemporary and enduring concern. The perceived social changes brought about by automation are imagined at least as much as they are found in practice. Rather than dismiss these imaginings as unworthy of scrutiny I want to take them seriously. Some actors have significant interests or investment in their imagining. These are variously for reasons of financial investment, influence and power. This is, in part, about a sense of supposed ‘thought leadership’, not least by management consultancies (Sturdy and Morgan 2018). Consultancies move ‘matters of concern’ from general discussion and debate into the realm of certainty. The ‘operative verb tense in projections’, Winner (2004, p. 37) argues, ‘is will. These things will happen’. Predictions about automation and futures of work fall within a more-or-less proximate future. They lie within the lifetimes of many of those already of working age and if not then certainly within the scope of their children. This is perhaps reasonable – we want to know about our future not an abstract one. This also lends a certain urgency to what is anticipated, and with that can come some pushback. As Michael (2000, p. 25) argues ‘A near future can warrant swift action, but it can also attract the accusation that it is no more than opportunism on the part of the actor who gains from some sort of “scare” or other’. Even so, ‘scares’ about job losses to automation seem to periodically gain traction. In so doing there is a revitalisation of the determinism concerning automation. The common sense that ‘the robots are coming’, that ‘we will all be out of jobs’, takes hold. What is more: it is possible to trace how this takes place. A simple search of British national newspapers reveals the ways in which alarming stories about job losses due to automation gain momentum. For example, search results for ‘automation’ and ‘robots’ reveals that between September 2017 and August 2018 left-leaning broadsheet The Guardian, in particular, published at least 22 articles about the potential loss of jobs within the next fifteen years1. The majority of these are based, in whole or in part, upon either marketing materials for those selling the technologies concerned or on management consultants’ reports. Eight of the pieces reported or responded the findings of the management consultancy PWC’s UK Economic Outlook reports of 2017 and 2018. These featured prominent analyses concerning the ‘risks’ of artificial intelligence and automation. Similar reports by Deloitte and others also feature as sources for national broadcaster and newspaper pieces covering the issue. We can further unpick how these ideas about jobs displacement take hold and travel by following the references and sources used. In an article on The Guardian website on 16th October 2017 their Economics Editor claims that automation ‘will affect one in five jobs’ and furthermore that ‘workers in [the former UK] shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s constituency face [the] highest risk of being replaced by robots’ (Eliott 2017). Not only then is certainty enacted in determining ‘the future’ of the risk of wide-scale technological unemployment but also the beginnings of a ‘future present’ is laid out by specifying a context and a particular scale – in the form of McDonnell’s constituency. The article reiterates the findings of a report by Future Advocacy, a think tank on the left of centre that is pushing a particular focus on ‘AI’, which (literally) maps the relative risks by sector for unemployment caused by automation in the United Kingdom. This is presented with some powerful choropleth maps visualising the relative risks. The report achieves this 249

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geographical granularity by using UK Office for National Statistics data of employment per sector at the constituency level and applying national-level relative risk statistics for job losses due to automation produced by PWC in their Economic Outlook Report March 2017. Between the article and two reports are the latter two steps in the movement of the narrative. There are two transformations: from ‘may’, a probability, to ‘will’, a certainty; and from national to local scale. A further step can be charted from private sector management consultants to public sector academics. In the PWC reports, as well as a 2015 report (titled “The Robots are Coming”) by Deloitte there are frequent references to other sources upon which their own analyses are based. These are principally two papers: Arntz et al. (2016) and Frey and Osborne (2013). The debate between these papers unravels the certainty of the ‘present future’ of the Guardian article, at a distance now of three translations, insofar as the idea of whole roles being displaced or replaced by automation is in doubt. Instead, these academic analyses focus on ‘tasks’ being automated, because, as Arntz et al. (2016, p.4) argue: focusing on jobs ‘might lead to an overestimation of job automatibility, as occupations labelled as high-risk occupations often still contain a substantial share of tasks that are hard to automate’. The ways in which the ideas around a particular future of work travel, the work the ideas do themselves and the work that translation enacts upon them all matters to how publics variously negotiate what changes are being enacted and how to prepare for changes they are told will come. The formulation of a future as the future does political work (Pitts et al. 2018): enabling certain forms of powerful rhetoric, for example, around a ‘fourth industrial revolution’ (Schwab 2014). Determinism has a discursive power over the ‘common sense’ and arguably elides the persistent contradictions of capitalism (pace Harvey 2014). Benanav (2020) argues that we incorrectly attribute unemployment to automation, when it is better attributed to long term economic processes not directly caused by automation. By the same token, management consultancies garner power through narratives of determinism to propose a ‘future present’ as a problem for which there is a solution to be sold, as Sturdy and Morgan (2018) argue. Perhaps too often, arguments around automation and futures of work accept narratives such as that offered here as the premise for debate, making them the ‘common sense’, rather than question them. How we construct and receive ‘truths’ about our futures of work is political and demands political action.

Summary Technologies are figured as milestones of progress – from ‘ages’ to ‘revolutions’ – and as both constitutive of and an existential threat to humans. This chapter has considered how ‘technology’ has often been thought of as both an agent and an object of social change. A central argument in the chapter is that technologies are, in many guises, both represented in and representations of narratives and strategies for social change. The chapter considered how these stories and strategies of technology as an agent and object of social change function. We have explored this in three parts, framed as three questions: ‘what?’, ‘how?’, and ‘where?’. First, I argued that determining how technology is (or not) involved in social change substantially depends upon how we answer the question ‘what is a technology?’ The ‘what?’ strongly relates to what and how we understand what counts as technology and how it relates to ‘progress’ – not least in relation to ideas of ‘disruption’ and ‘high tech’. Second, I considered the question of ‘how’? Important here is the argument that technology is storied as an agent or object of change through dominant, interrelating, fictions of society-technology relations, in particular: ‘technological determinism’. I argued the ‘how’ relates to the influence of different 250

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theoretical predilections on how we argue what technology does. Third, I examined question of ‘where’? The contexts of social change with and by technology are significant and this was explored in this chapter specifically in relation to stories about automation in the United Kingdom. Narratives concerning technology as a mark or means of progress and as a medium or maker of truth have been argued over for centuries. It is all too easy to submit to the simplifying narratives, to adopt the arguments of large corporations and governments about the good or ills that technology can and does bring to society. Whereas there undoubtedly good and bad contexts to our uses of technology, I argue we need not uncritically adopt narratives that are overly simplistic, reactionary or ‘boosterism’. To ask questions about social change is, often, to variously hold in tension these competing narratives. The relationships between ideas about technology and conceptualisations of mediation are a productive lens for critically engaging with narrative of technological change. The ‘who’ and the ‘what’ of society and technology, and of social change, are not simply a cause and effect – people making changes illustrated by things – but rather the change is the relation. Social change is not separate from our analysis, but rather intimately includes, and indeed is affected by, how we narrate it. Often, arguments around change in society related to technology considered as ‘disruption’, ‘impacts’, or ‘revolution’ accept simplified narratives created by those with particular interests as the premise for debate, making them the ‘common sense’, rather than question them. The figure of the technology innovator is often lauded as a ‘maverick’, a figure with license, following the fabled former Facebook internal motto, to ‘move fast and break things’ (Taplin 2017). How we construct and receive ‘truths’ about changes to our society – not least in terms of technology and work – is political. As governments and organisations across the world increasingly acknowledge, the changes enabled and prevented by technologies and those who develop, sell and use them is central to contemporary politics – from automation and the ‘gig economy’ to identity theft and ‘fake news’. The scope and significance of our construction and reception of ‘truths’ in relation to technology and society demands political awareness and, ultimately, political action.

Note 1 These approximate numbers are derived from exploratory searches using the key terms ‘automation’ and ‘robot’ and are intended for illustrative purposes rather than as definitive data.

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Technology Stiegler, B., 1998. Technics and time, 1: the fault of Epimetheus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sturdy, A. and Morgan, G., 2018. Management consultancies: inventing the future [online]. Futures of Work, 1. 5 September. Available from: https://futuresofwork.co.uk/2018/09/05/managementconsultancies-inventing-the-future-2/ [Accessed 23 November 2021]. Taplin, J., 2017. Move fast and break things: how Facebook, Google, and Amazon cornered culture and undermined democracy. New York, NY: Little Brown. Verbeek, P.P., 2005. What things do: philosophical reflections on technology, agency, and design. Trans. R.P. Crease, Pittsburgh, PN: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Winner, L., 1977. Autonomous technology: technics-out-of-control as theme in political thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Winner, L., 1980. The artefacts have politics? Daedulus, 109 (1), 121–136. Winner, L., 2004. Sow’s ears from silk purses: the strange alchemy of technological visionaries. In: M. Sturken, D. Thomas, and S.J. Ball-Rokeach, eds. Technological visions: the hopes and fears that shape new technologies. Philadelphia, NJ: Temple University Press, 34–347. Woolgar, S. and Cooper, G., 1999. Do artefacts have ambivalence? Moses’ bridges, winners bridges and urban legends in S&TS. Social Studies of Science, 29 (3), 433–449. Wyatt, S., 2008. Technological determinism is dead; long live technological determinism. In: E.J. Hackett, et al., eds. The handbook of science and technology studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 165–180.

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21 THE PEOPLE Between Populism and the Masses Anna Selmeczi

Introduction: the problem with ‘the people’ If one had to identify the most significant political trend of the twenty-first century, it would likely be the global spread of populism. In the Philippines, Poland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and the United States, to name only a few, heads of states with thinly disguised authoritarian inclinations have kept gaining more power, claiming to speak for the people and challenge supposed or real elites.1 Just as definitively, however, revolutions and mass movements rocked the political establishment of numerous countries across the planet during the first two decades of the century. From Tunisia to Canada and the Ukraine to Nigeria, hundreds of thousands voiced their collective refusal ‘to be governed like that’ (Foucault 2007b, p. 44). Despite their vastly different political agendas, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and climate activist Greta Thunberg both joined millions who claimed to enact democracy in the name of the people. Placed side-by-side, the spectre of populism and the wave of popular mobilisation throw light on an intriguing ambiguity of the referents of ‘the people’ as political agents. Correspondingly, they invoke two diametrically opposed schools of political thought. For one, people’s politics, alias populism, carries fundamentally negative connotations (see, e.g., Eaton 2019). Populism implies the subsumption of ‘reasonable’ political rationalities and prudent governance to propagandistic ideas and measures that resonate with the supposedly unrefined, even misguided, sentiments of the majority. The demagogue’s power, it is believed, lies in amplifying these sentiments. Certainly, demagogy, ‘the underside of democracy’ (Panizza 2005), with its roots in the Greek word combining ‘leading’ (agogos) and the ‘people’ (demos), refers to discourse and action shaped by ‘popular desires and prejudices’ and mirrors the etymology of populism, that is derived from the Latin populus for ‘people’ (Oxford English Dictionary n.d.). In this view, then, populism and its audience, the people, embody a major threat to the balance of power between the governed and those who govern; it is truly ‘the shadow of representative democracy’ (Riofrancos 2018, n.p.). Conversely, for the second broad approach to the people as protagonists of social-political change, the re-articulation of the majority as ‘the people’ is the very moment of democracy at work. Much less often cited in mainstream media than voices decrying populism, proponents of this view celebrate the agonism inherent to politics (see, e.g., Mouffe 2018).2 Here, the 254

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equilibrium between claiming and relinquishing power is always precarious, and that precisely is the lifeblood of the shared existence of human animals. Whether identifying it with ‘the poor’ (Kalyvas 2019) or, instead, positing the fundamental empirical instability of the category (Rancière 1999), for this approach, the event of the people’s declarative emergence as a collective political actor is both proof and guarantee of genuinely democratic politics. As Ernesto Laclau (2005, p. 153), one of the key thinkers of this strand of critical theory argues, ‘the political operation par excellence is always going to be the construction of a “people”’.3 Taking its cue from the latter strand of thought, this chapter is threaded on the idea that ‘the people’ does not have a stable referent and suggests that interrogating this instability of meaning, and the ways that is mobilised in the political realm, gives insight into the limits and possibilities of social change in contemporary political orders. Especially at a time when concerns about the increasing appeal of populist leaders around the world are intensifying, radical philosophy’s proposition of the inherent unfixability of the name of the people offers a useful lens for a critical reading of the political stage. Focused on any particular political juncture where the validity of popular politics is being contested, what that lens allows us to see are crucial mechanisms that draw the boundaries of the proper political subject and define those who do not fit in – mechanisms that are thus telling of who and what is considered to be threatening to the given social order (Hall 1998, Rancière 2016). This chapter, then, hopes to serve as an invitation to the continued interrogation of the place of this fundamental yet most taken-for-granted collective noun in our imaginaries of social and political change. Starting with an elaboration of the inherent ambiguity of ‘the people’, the first section centres on a core question of liberal democracies that this ambiguity exposes. Here, I draw from the political discourse of post-apartheid South Africa to show how that question plays out in the relationship between the people and the state. Moving on to transformative moments of politics that take shape in the performance of ‘the people’, I examine the political role of two defining characteristics of the people: their ‘poverty’ and their numerical majority in any society. Together, these two threads unfold the initial paradox of the construction of this collective subject as a threat to democratic rule.

The people as the demos/the people as the plebes What accounts for the fact that in modern and contemporary politics the people, that is, the primary referents of sovereign power can invoke such contradictory approaches as the ones sketched above? What feeds the recurrent tension between the operation of democratic institutions and the multiple versions of populist politics? Or, put simply, how is it possible that populism can be both the spectre and the promise of democracy; that, in Francisco Panizza’s (2005, p. 15) words, the image of the people ‘can be both dangerous and noble?’ As Giorgio Agamben (1998, p. 176) suggests, this dualism bears a clear reflection in the semantic ambiguity of the word ‘people’ in most modern European languages: beyond the constitutive subject of the polity (the People), ‘“people” also always indicates the poor, the disinherited, the excluded’. To get a better understanding of this recurring People/people polysemy, it is helpful to recall that for the founding theorists of the ideal constitution in the occidental tradition, rule by the demos was certainly not the most preferred order (Rancière 2007). Indeed, Aristotle (1999) drew the circle of those capable of governing well rather tightly. Sharing his teacher Plato’s mistrust in those Athenian citizens who were free but without wealth or social rank, he believed that their lack of social status and resources would prevent the majority of the demos to think and act in the name of the common good (see Rancière 1999). Just like the 255

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wealthy few would subsume the common good to their own interests in an oligarchy, the poor majority would not be able to abstract from their own situation either (Lintott 1992). To avert the risk of tyranny rooted in this tension between common citizens’ political freedom and their supposed social boundedness, Aristotle devised a complex set of practical measures to keep them at a distance from the spaces of democracy (see Aristotle 1999 Book IV, 1292b and Rancière 1999). This way, securing against the actualisation of the demos’s majority in the practice of rule, democracy could be moderated and ultimately regarded as a good constitution. For many centuries following the demise of Athenian democracy, the fundamental political paradox arising from the demos’s coincidence with the poor rarely surfaced. ‘The people’ simply named the plebs whose right to partake in government was impeded by their rank as the lowest stratum of society and who were, by those higher up, seen as intellectually, culturally and socio-economically inferior to ‘civilised society’ (Panizza 2005, p. 14). The People/people ambiguity that Agamben points to gained new life with the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries roaring through much of the globe from Haiti to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With monarchic rule delegitimised and popular sovereignty becoming the constitutive principle of political order in nation-states that formed in the wake of revolutions, democracy gradually acquired its still unmatched status as the ideal regime in public discourse and political thought. And yet, the intriguing question regarding the place of the demos remains. What is more, with the dawn of modernity it had become even more complicated. The French Revolution was a major turning point of modern politics because, Hannah Arendt (1990) argues, it was then that the people (le peuple), in the sense of the poor suffering masses, emerged from the socio-political lowliness of previous ages and erupted onto the political stage. For her, this completely redefined the nature of political life. Carried by revolutionary leaders’ sentiment of compassion, from then on, the wellbeing of the people as the poor came to define the ‘general will’ (Arendt 1990). At the same time, with the elevation of democracy as the right order, Andreas Kalyvas (2019) argues, the very fact that the free but propertyless were the original agents of democracy had been erased. In other words, the incorporation of the people’s welfare into the reason of state – the phenomenon that Arendt (1958) referred to as the emergence of the social question and Michel Foucault (1978) famously termed biopolitics – coincided with ‘the gradual disappearance of the people’ (Kalyvas 2019, p. 540). In political terms, then, the distinction between the rich and the poor once again seized to define the right to participate in government and dissolved in the category of citizenry (Panizza 2005). Contemporaneously, as societal wellbeing became the nation-state’s responsibility and the development of social sciences and economics made this imperative both thinkable and actionable, the new collective subject of ‘society’ (Arendt 1958) or the ‘population’ (Foucault 2003) accompanied that of citizenry in the discourse of governmental reason. By the time welfare societies in the post-World War 2 west managed to significantly reduce the extent of poverty, the collective political agency of the poor was pushed to the margins of the discourse on liberal democracy. Nevertheless, whether in the west where ‘the people’ tends to be rendered as ‘ordinary people’ instead of ‘the poor’, or in most countries of the global south where given the legacy of colonialism the poor are still the majority, ‘the poor’ as the figure of the unthinking plebs and thus the playthings of populism are very much present in political imaginaries across all continents.4 Indeed, the work of the People/people/(and now/ population) ambiguity lies precisely in how the boundaries of their referents shift according to the supposed interest of the society as a whole (see Foucault 2003). 256

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The transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa offers an uncommonly clear view on the mechanics of this dynamic political semantics. In 1996, two years into the new dispensation, the government was navigating a shift from a redistributive macroeconomic strategy to one that limited social spending in line with the (neo-)liberal paradigm and centred growth through macroeconomic stability (Bond 2000, Hart 2008, 2014, Bundy 2014, Selmeczi 2015). The governing African National Congress (ANC), facing resistance to this move from its coalition partners, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), published ‘The State and Social Transformation’, a document that spelt out the party’s assessment of the state-society relationship (ANC 1996). The full weight of the puzzle that the ANC found itself grappling with at this juncture is conveyed in this sentence of the statement: ‘Where the people are no longer the enemy of the state, the question arises as to what role the people play with regard to state matters’ (ANC 1996). Of course, the people were no longer the enemy of the state because the liberation struggle that they had waged was victorious and they have become the constitutive subject of the democratic state. In other words, their role in relation to state matters is not a question of political order but of governmental practice and is located right in the realm of the People/ people ambiguity. It is not simply that the ANC had to ‘reconcile the history of popular politics and mass mobilisation with the institutions of liberal democracy’ ( Johnson 2002, p. 221); this was not just a matter of institutional fit. That becomes visible if we rewind a little further and track the elite re-evaluation of mass mobilisation that started many years before the official fall of white minority rule. One of the major political shifts that defined the outcome of the transition to democracy was the emergence and eventual dominance of the discourse of reform and transformation that coincided with the gradual delegitimisation of anti-apartheid popular politics (Neocosmos 1999, Selmeczi 2015). It was becoming clear already in the mid-1980s that the image of post-apartheid South Africa invoked by the Freedom Charter’s proclamation – ‘The People Shall Govern’ – was rather different from the one that financial institutions’ scenario-planning exercises drew up (Mayekiso 1993, Bond 2000). As the latter made its way into the new government’s programme, a parallel shift in the ANC’s approach to popular politics could be observed. Crucially, it was now constructed as itself transitory and thereby redundant once the ANC took the helm ( Johnson 2002). Further, the party now saw mass action as destructive and destabilising – a marked change that is unmistakably mirrored in the resignification of ‘ungovernability’ from a weapon of the liberation struggle to a synonym of disorder. Given the socio-spatial order of racial apartheid, such supposed disorder was easily localised in black townships and attributed to the ‘underclass’ within this discourse (Mayekiso 1993, Selmeczi 2015). Bolstered by corporate-funded research that associated the ‘culture of violence’ of townships with a ‘culture of poverty’, by the time it formed its first government, the ANC’s position was overlaid by the stigmatisation and pathologisation of mass mobilisation and protest. That, in turn, explains why the ANC’s puzzle is resolved by a clear-cut articulation of the right kind of politics with appropriate actors and responsibilities in the sentence that follows the previous quote: ‘The issue turns on the combination of expertise and professionalism concentrated in the democratic state and the capacity for popular mobilisation which resides within the trade unions and the genuinely representative nongovernmental popular organisations’ (ANC 1996). It is right in this move of delineating proper politics from destructive mass action, in this implicit iteration of the historic distinction between those who are supposed to govern and those who are not, that we can capture the political work of the People/people ambiguity. 257

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Just as the ‘rioting mobs’ of nineteenth century uprisings were identified as the ‘the plebs’ of preceding centuries and condemned as barbaric and uncivilised (Panizza 2005), the civics of the late 1980s and early 1990s were juxtaposed to reasonable citizens and deemed destructive and short-sighted in political commentary and scholarship alike. (Of course, projects of colonialism similarly discredited the popular politics of those they colonised (Spivak 1988, 2005).) The triumph of popular sovereignty, then, necessarily brings along its ‘dark shadow’, one that still seems to trace the shape of Plato’s monstrous image of the demos. Yet, beyond this resonance with ‘the classical fear of popular rule’ (Hindess 1997, p. 264), the position elaborated in ‘The State and Social Transformation’ also speaks of the particular threat that the people pose to contemporary liberal democracies. Demophobia (Neocosmos 2017) seems ever more prevalent in liberal democracies for at least two reasons, both at play in the trajectory of the South African transition. First, evidenced in Mbeki’s reference to expertise and professionalism is the liberal insistence on preserving the autonomy of governmental reason and thereby good governance. Liberalism as a paradigm of political rationality (that is distinct albeit certainly not independent of liberalism as a political philosophy) is built around the imperative of governing through freedom (Foucault 2007a, 2008). Its core tenet is that the security of the state and the wellbeing of the population are guaranteed by the health of the self-regulating market. Liberal government therefore constantly balances the risk of ‘governing too much’ and the imperative of tending to the wellbeing of the population (Foucault 2008, p. 19). Second, a paradigmatic political legacy of the French Revolution was, of course, the evolution of socialism, especially as formulated in Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s work. I cannot attempt to do justice here to socialism’s enormous historical impact, central to which is the very role it attributes to the collective political agency of ‘the poor’ as the working class (see, e.g., Neocosmos 2017, Ch. 10). What certainly has to be noted in this discussion, however, is the Marxist-socialist take on the state’s responsibility in relation to political freedom and societal needs. For liberalism, the practice of individual freedoms is gauged against the freedom of economic dynamics such as competition, with social wellbeing as the supposed outcome. By contrast, for Marx, equality in terms of political rights is nil without access to the material conditions of good life; freedom and socio-economic inequality cannot co-exist (see Arendt 1990). As such, the default socialist position is precisely the presumption at the heart of the classics’ fear of democracy: that poor people would think their being equal in freedom means that they should be equal in all other respects too (Lintott 1992). Looking at the ANC’s puzzle regarding the role of the people from this perspective, the high stakes of containing popular mobilisation are even more palpable. Faced with the then still vibrant legacy of the civics’ political praxis that was built through organisations of participatory democracy, the ANC, as all governments of contemporary liberal democracies, had to navigate a constitutional order where ‘the people are simply free like the rest’ (Rancière 1999, p. 8, original emphasis). What is more, it also had to grapple with the political weight of the socialist tradition that fundamentally shaped the ‘popular and national struggle’ against apartheid (Cobbett et al. 1987). This too, albeit to geographically varying degrees, has its resonance for present-day liberal democracies elsewhere, as they are all framed by a conception of the state that had been shaped by the politicisation of societal welfare both in the sense of biopolitics and the revolutionary tradition of the Left. As such, most contemporary governments have their own version of the ANC’s question, likely along the lines of this one: ‘how to reconcile the government of a state consisting of free people with a minimum of politically oriented interference in the autonomous rationality of government’ (Hindess 1997, p. 264)? 258

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This then is the significance of the People/people ambiguity’s various mobilisations, and the discourse of populism is one of those. In Mudde and Kaltwasser’s (2017, p. 6) definition, ‘populism argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people’. When read through the People/people ambiguity, for liberal governments, populism, like socialism, presents a threat because it equates the People as the constitutive subject with the people as the poor. The spectre of populism, in turn, functions as a means to render that equation as nonsensical. Much like Aristotle’s practical measures to pre-empt the demos from actively and directly participating in government, then, the mainstream critique of populism is a response to liberal democratic regimes’ persistent challenge to redirect and contain the freedom of the people (Selmeczi 2015). The people are feared because their submission is always ‘a precarious practical accomplishment’ (Hindess 1997, p. 266). Especially so at a time when interrelated economic, environmental, social and now health crises and the multitude of popular mobilisation against anti-black racism, police violence and the economic and political elite’s neglect of the climate emergency leave no doubt that the (neo-)liberal paradigm is failing the majority of the globe’s inhabitants.

The people as a performance of the political body If the chapter so far has discussed the semantic ambiguity of the people’s name as it is mobilised by those who govern so as to define the proper subject and place of popular politics, here I would like to hook into the second approach outlined in the introduction and explore the implications of thinking of the appropriation of ‘the people’ as a political event that upsets such definitions. To recall, as opposed to the public discourse on populism that vilifies the people as the plebs, and even to socialism that assumes an almost complete overlap between ‘the people’ and the poor, the radical philosophy approach argues that the ‘the people’ is an empty signifier, it has no stable referent (Laclau 2005). Rather, the name gets momentarily attached to those who take it and thereby demonstrate that they belong to the community of equals, that they are part of the collective they are not supposed to fit (Rancière 1999). In this sense, the declarative act of claiming the name of ‘the people’ and the emergence of the constitutive political subject coincide (Derrida 1986, Butler 2016). Marking distinct political moments, ‘We, the people’ chants from Tahrir Square, ‘We are the 99%’ banners of the Occupy Movement, or Greta Thunberg’s ‘We, the people’ proclamation at the 2019 United Nations Climate Conference are all performative rearticulations of the demos that unsettle the given relationship between the governed and those who govern. For the first ANC government, despite attempts like those spelt out in ‘The State and Social Transformation’ to fix the place and scope of popular mobilisation, such moments of performative rearticulation doubtless arrived by the late 1990s and early 2000s.5 ‘We are the poors’ is a slogan Ashwin Desai (2002) chose as the title of his account of community struggles in post-apartheid South Africa – by 2002 there were enough of these struggles just in Chatsworth, Durban to fill a book. Although resistant organising started reluctantly given that people found it dissonant to oppose the government of liberation, by the mid2000s social mobilisation reached a level of intensity and diversity that could not be ignored (Ballard, Habib, and Valodia 2006, Hart 2014). The governing party’s response, especially the discourse of its reaction in the earliest period of post-apartheid popular contention, offers unmistakable cues for a key concern of this chapter: how do ‘the people’ and ‘the poor’ feature in constructions of the ideal and actual political subjects of democracy? More particularly, what defines the relationship between the attempts of containing the freedom of the people and the responsibility of attending to the needs of the population? 259

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In the very same document that poses the cited question about the people’s place in relation to the democratic state, the ANC (1996; emphasis added) labels then budding instances of resistant mobilisation as ‘counterrevolutionary’, and claims that the ‘instinct towards “economism” on the part of ordinary workers has to be confronted through the positioning of the legitimate material demands and expectations of these workers within the wider context of the defence of the democratic gains as represented by the establishment of the democratic state’. In simpler terms, the statement juxtaposes ‘valid’ needs and demands with those driven by irrational (i.e., instinctive) expectations that, as such, exceed the bounds of the democratic order. Here, the ‘scientific approach of the democratic movement’ is set against the ‘subjective’ interests of ordinary people (ANC 1996). Significantly, this language articulates a dual gesture of reducing political action to interest-driven demands and discrediting some needs while legitimising those that fit the limits of governmental rationality. Of course, this is not a new move. As we have seen earlier, during the evolution of modern modes of government that the age of revolutions set off, the political inclusion of ‘the people’ (and thus the emergence of the contemporary notion of citizenry) was complemented by rendering their welfare (as the collective subject of the population) as a matter of state politics. It is precisely due to this doubling of the governed majority’s inclusion, that the distinction between legitimate and irrational material demands and expectations becomes imperative from the perspective of government. No wonder, that the ANC’s charge of ‘economism’ echoes the ancient discourse of reducing popular politics to ‘a politics of the belly’ (Kalyvas 2019, p. 548). Harking back to the age-old fear that the free majority would only act in their own interests should they be given the power to rule, this phrase expressively conveys the sentiment that those who are free but without rank or property cannot think beyond their biological and material needs. It seems, then, that the ideal democratic subject takes shape in the overlap between the citizenry and the population and is a collective that has but ‘legitimate’ needs and expectations, unlike the people who are limited by their ‘subjective’ needs. As Foucault puts it: ‘…[T]he people is those who, refusing to be the population, disrupt the system’ (Foucault 2007a, p. 66, see also Selmeczi 2009). Thinking about the place of the majority’s needs in contemporary post-colonial states, Partha Chatterjee (2004) mobilises Foucault’s ideas to offer an original assessment of how Western institutions of modern democracy operate in ‘most of the world’. Very much in line with the dual pressures on liberal governance discussed earlier, he distinguishes between two threads of problematisation: one ‘connecting civil society to the nation-state founded on popular sovereignty and granting equal rights to citizens’, and the other ‘connecting populations to governmental agencies pursuing multiple policies of security and welfare’ (Chatterjee 2004, p. 37). The first thread, Chatterjee argues using the example of post-independence India, is the domain of citizens (in this chapter’s vocabulary, the People), while the second takes place in a realm that he refers to as ‘political society’ and is populated by inhabitants who are not considered as proper members of civil society by the state (Chatterjee 2004). Drawing on a Marxist critique of liberal political institutions and rights, he points to property relations as the crucial difference between members of civil society and the political society. In actually existing liberal democracies, rights can only be accessed by the propertied class, therefore civil society ‘is demographically limited’ (Chatterjee 2004, p. 39). As such, and due to the legacy of capitalist imperialism, equal members of the political community they might be in principle, the majority of people in post-colonial societies have no means to enact their political freedoms as citizens. Rather, Chatterjee continues, the poor majority’s relationship to the state is defined through their needs as parts of the population that has to be taken care of and, in turn, they are attended to via networks of power and modes of engagement that tend to 260

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operate outside the purview of democratic institutions – often both in terms of visibility and legality. In this order, we could conclude, the People as the constituent subject and the people as the poor are practically disambiguated. There is significant value to Chatterjee’s argumentation for the concerns of this discussion. First, in explaining the People/people bifurcation in post-colonial democracies, it spells out the actual resolution of the ANC’s puzzle: not fitting the representative organisations of the civil society, popular mobilisation is played out elsewhere, beyond the institutions dedicated to representing the people. As such, political interference in the autonomy of governmental reason is indeed minimised. Second, Chatterjee doubtless gives a good sense of the most common issues at the heart of popular struggles that, precariously embedded in complex relations of power, are waged against the backdrop of spatial segregation and extreme inequality. Surely, then, he speaks of the politics of the poor, yet, I argue, not of ‘We are the poors’. In his spatialised distinction between the politics of citizens (civil society) versus the politics of the population (political society), Chatterjee does not leave room for moments when the governmental order is unsettled precisely by collapsing the distinction between those two; moments when the politics of the poor is the demonstrative embodiment of the demos.6 Thus, to push further the interrogation of how mobilisations of the People/people ambiguity work to delineate proper from improper politics and political subjects, we have to look beyond the boundaries of ‘political society’ and reconsider the place of material needs in relation to democratic politics. Popular protests of the recent past help us do so. As mentioned at the beginning, the early 2010s saw a historic wave of revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East that led to the ousting of authoritarian leaders in many states of the ‘Arab Uprisings’ and subsequently spread to several countries in Europe and the Americas, where it ignited mass protests.7 A common feature across these sites of mass political action from Kyiv, Ukraine to Sanaa, Yemen and Montréal, Canada were large demonstrations in symbolic central city squares. Beyond embodying the sheer numerical majority of the people, these uprisings, albeit in different ways, threw new light on questions of human needs and popular politics, of form and substance of protest, and of private and public. Indeed, the event that sparked the wave of insurgency in late 2010 in Tunisia in itself complicates these binaries. Mohammed Bouazizi’s act of self-immolation in the town of Sidi Bouzid was his publicly staged tragic response to the humiliation of an encounter with the state apparatus: because he didn’t have a permit, the local police confiscated the cart he used to sell fruit and vegetables to sustain himself and his family. Collective outrage about the mere injustice that led up to this event could quickly ripple through the region surrounding Sidi Bouzid and trigger nationwide protests and unrest because it resonated with the everyday experience of the majority of Tunisians under the rule of president Bin Ali: the experience of police brutality, price hikes, various forms of oppression and unfreedom, food shortages, and corruption (Sadiki 2014b, Zemni 2014). And it was for the same reason that the Arab Uprisings inspired ordinary people in so many other cities and countries. Protests everywhere were fuelled by a widely shared sense of indignation about the detachment of the governing elite from the governed majority’s plight (see, e.g., Pereira-Zazo and Torres 2019). For Judith Butler (2011, 2012), whose recent work on street politics and the performance of precariousness is crucial for the remainder of the chapter, this wave of protests arose from and exposed the destruction of a social bond: the social bond of interdependency. At the centre of her argument is the consideration that, as humans who are bound to live an embodied life, we all depend on the support of other bodies and systems of material and immaterial infrastructure. In that, our lives are defined by a shared precariousness. Even the quintessentially political moment of a collective subject’s self-articulation through the speech act of ‘We, the 261

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people’ requires the body to vocalise those words and, of course, mass protests are assemblies of bodies in streets and spaces that form part of infrastructural systems that sustain those very bodies (Butler 2012, 2016). The assemblies and, in particular, the protest movements’ occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo and Zuccotti Park in New York City, among other such places, reconstituted the bond of interdependency that their governments broke. They did so in prefiguring the life that they were fighting for through the coordination of these occupations (Butler 2012); the horizontal organisation of collective life-sustenance (e.g., food provision, medical care, cleaning, and ablutions) and political activism (e.g., speeches, decision-making and teaching and learning), and the exhilarating joy of finding community in emancipation (see, e.g., Kassir 2015). This indivisibility of political action and biological existence presents a major challenge to any reductive conception of the politics of needs, especially given its public and performative nature. Protestors formed and organised these occupations, and thus placed in plain view the physiology of collective resistance, in the most public of places, at the heart of their cities, whilst constituting themselves as the public, the people, the majority that is no longer willing to relinquish their freedom and submit to the rule of their governments. Glancing back at post-apartheid protest movements from this vantage point, it becomes clear that ‘We are the poors’ vocalised the same outcry over the violation of the social bond of liberation. Abahlali baseMjondolo (Zulu for ‘people who live in the shacks’), the largest shack-dwellers’ movement of democratic South Africa, similarly sprung from an event shaped by the collective experience of betrayal. Like the Chatsworth civics, only a few years later, Abahlali emerged in Durban through struggling for a dignified life in the city. Before even forming the movement, residents of the Kennedy Road settlement staged their first protest in reaction to a broken promise: although they were told that a piece of land next to the settlement will be developed for low-cost housing and allocated to them, when the works began and some residents inquired, they learnt that instead of their houses, a brick factory would be built on the piece of land (Abahlali 2006). ‘That betrayal mobilised people’, and several hundred Kennedy Road residents blocked Umgeni Road, the stretch of highway below the settlement (Zikode 2005, p. 2). The police soon arrived, violently dispersed the blockade and arrested fourteen protesters on the charge of public violence. The following day a group of residents – members of the then nascent movement – gathered in front of the police station where the fourteen were held. Protesting, they argued that ‘[i]f they are criminal then we are all criminal’, so either the fourteen should be released or the entire community arrested (Abahlali 2006, p. 1). Recalling the event, S’bu Zikode, later the chairperson of Abahlali, posed a direct challenge to the state’s deployment of the name of the people: ‘They say we committed public violence but against which public? If we are not the public then who is the public and who are we?’ (quoted in Pithouse 2005, p. 15). The sense of betrayal that Abahlali’s narrative exposes, just like those expressed in the popular uprisings of the 2010s, is crucial for understanding how the public refusal of the dehumanising conditions of unsupported life challenges governmental constructions of the collective political subject. As noted before, popular visions of the post-apartheid era that propelled the liberation struggle and still directly influenced Abahlali’s and the Chatsworth civics’ resistance alike, were honed in the egalitarian and participatory praxis of the late apartheid struggles, where direct democracy in grassroots mobilisation allowed people to take ‘control over all areas of daily existence – from national policy to housing, from schooling to working conditions, from transport to consumption of food’ (Morobe 1987, p. 82). Merely a few years after liberation and amidst the reality of ever-increasing unemployment, inequality and hardship, in the vocabulary of struggle ‘The People Shall Govern’ still implied that the freedom and equality of all were synonymous with ‘a better life for all’. The Chatsworth 262

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civics’ ‘We are the poors’ and Zikode’s ‘we are the public’ address the democratic state’s effective undoing of this synonymity, an undoing of the social bond that implies a vastly different approach to the state’s responsibility towards the free but poor majority than what the anti-apartheid struggle envisioned. Alongside declarations like ‘We are the people’ and ‘We are here’ sounded in other times and places (see Kassir 2015), those declarations signal moments when the breakdown of the social bond is exposed through the act of claiming the name of ‘the people’. Enacting the equivalence of ordinary people with the constitutive subject of democracy, collectives voicing these slogans challenge the terms of their inclusion in the order of shared life and contest the meaning of freedom and equality. Denoting material demands as much as they are political, these mobilisations of ‘the people’ contest the order that defines whose life is supported and whose life is not. As statements like ‘we know that we are not supposed to be living the way we do’ aptly point out, that is the same order as the one that determines who is supposed to be intelligent enough to recognise the dehumanising injustice of such definitions (Zikode in Abahlali 2006, p. 7).8 In turn, these both coincide with the order that ties together ignorance and the sheer numerical majority of the people. The notion of populism keeps reinforcing this coincidence because, as Rancière notes, it ‘constructs a people characterised by the formidable alloy of a capacity – the brute force of great number – and an incapacity – the ignorance attributed to that same great number’ (2016, p. 102). Resignifying the force of the majority’s great number, such mass demonstrations, as public performances of the political body, work to expose the differential distribution of precariousness. It is, they reveal, an outrageous function of social, economic, and political norms and institutions that, in socio-economically stratified societies (like most human societies at present) some get to deny their own precariousness, despite their dependence on the very precariousness of others. In the same move that, through claiming the name of the people, protesters enact their equal freedom and expose the baselessness of the governing minority’s rule over them, they enact the shared vulnerability of human life, and unveil the baselessness of the order that considers them expendable. Taking this dual move seriously means that the task is not to secure against the demands of popular politics or ‘the politics of the belly’, as the anti-populist discourse would have it, but to question the conditions that produce that label and determine who gets to wield it.

Conclusion The point of departure for this chapter was a juxtaposition of two approaches to the agency of ‘the people:’ those of anti-populism and radical philosophy. Where one sees the politics of the people as a threat to the democratic order and governmental reason, the other centres them as the fundamental agents of democracy. Both approaches, the one implicitly and the other very much expressly, hinge on the instability of the name of ‘the people’. As ubiquitous as this name is, it never has a stable referent. Thus, the central aim of the discussion above was to examine the political work of this instability. What can we learn about the people as agents of social and political change if we take a closer look at the semantic ambiguity of their name that, as Giorgio Agamben observes, always refers both to the holders of sovereign power and the poor masses? In this chapter, I focused on two fundamentally interrelated responses. The ambiguity of ‘the people’ is put to work to continuously delineate proper and improper politics and thereby mask the precariousness of a given social and political order firstly as the arbitrary distribution of freedom to participate in political rule and, secondly, as the arbitrary distribution of the conditions of a liveable life. 263

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As I tried to show by relying on a by no means exhaustive reading of the place of the people in democracy in the first section and demonstrative protest movements in the second, the common anti-populist construction of the people as the poor and ignorant majority is thus a means of pre-empting the emergence of the people as the community of free equals with the capacity to unmask the arbitrariness of such orders. Of course, this was not meant to present an apology of ‘populism’ – the regimes and political leaders that tend to be referred to as populist are certainly not ones that this text seeks to foreground. Rather, as mentioned at the outset, the invitation here was to question the myriad ways in which the name of the people is deployed, claimed, and reclaimed, with connotations of both emancipation and derogation. The mere fact that these have co-existed for many centuries speaks volumes about the organisation of humanity’s shared life and how that organisation is sustained or changed.

Notes 1 The proliferation of scholarly work on populism is a good indication of this trend: see, e.g., Moffitt (2016), Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017), de la Torre (2018) and a most recent work discussing populism in the time of the global Covid-19 pandemic (Axford 2021). 2 The notion of agonism (as opposed to antagonism) centres conflict and debate or struggle as a key dynamic in democratic politics. It entails the respect between opponents and emphatically cautions against seeing their relationship constructed as enemies (see Connolly 1991). 3 For reflections on recent waves of popular mobilisation from this Leftist or radical philosophy approach (see, e.g., Badiou et al. 2016, Eklundh and Knott 2020). 4 I thank one of the chapter’s anonymous reviewers for helping me articulate this point. 5 See Ballard et al. (2006, 2) for a thorough analysis of the context and conditions of this unusually quick end to the post-transition ‘political honeymoon’. 6 I build this argument on Selmeczi (2012). 7 Over the past decade many excellent accounts of these historic events became available (see, e.g., Gitlin 2012, Bowen 2013, Sadiki 2014a, Ancelovici et al. 2016, Pereira-Zazo and Torres 2019). 8 See Nagar (2019) and Selmeczi (2012) for more on collective resistance to the coinciding forces of social, political, and epistemic marginalisation.

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22 CITIZEN ACTION Participation and Making Claims Charlotte Lemanski

Introduction This chapter explores the roles played by ordinary people to bring about social change through both institutional and informal channels. Framed by the concepts of invited and invented spaces of participatory governance, the chapter uses empirical examples from India and South Africa to highlight the diverse range of ways in which citizens act individually and collectively to challenge the normative structures and expectations from within which social lives function. In using the language of ‘citizen’ it is important to clarify that this is not employed as a restrictive term that refers only to those with a legal claim to citizenship (e.g., in terms of immigration status). Rather, ‘citizen’ is employed as an inclusive term that covers all those who, by virtue of inhabitancy, have some form of contractual relationship with, and expectations of, the state. While historically there has been legal distinction between citizens and denizens, with the latter recognised as alien inhabitants with citizen-esque rights, I prefer universal adoption of ‘citizen’ for all inhabitants in order to acknowledge citizenship as primarily an active role rather than a legal status. In this chapter, the focus of inhabitancy is at the scale of the city, and on the relations between states (at multiple scales) and citizens in terms of claims over public services and goods. State-citizen relationships are inherently about determining the nature of the public realm – in terms of rights, responsibilities, and expectations – and this public realm is largely mediated through two spheres: material goods/ services and political participation. This material-political manifestation of citizenship is particularly evident at the urban scale, in terms of claims to basic services (e.g., housing, water, sanitation, electricity) alongside claims for public participation in decision-making processes. For example, Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) famous distinction between civil and political society effectively divides inhabitants according to material status and capacity to engage in public politics. And this connection between accessing material ‘things’ (e.g., property and services), and the capacity of citizens to claim their political ‘rights’, is well established in the literature (e.g., Roy 2003, Holston 2008, Lemanski 2020). While this chapter focuses on the material and political sphere of citizen action at the urban scale using examples from the global South, the discussion has wider resonance beyond this context.

DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-25

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Participatory urban governance As is well known, more than half of the world’s population now live in urban areas (United Nations 2018). The majority of this contemporary expansion – both in terms of the number of people living in cities and towns, as well as the growth of these urban areas – is occurring not in Britain, Europe, or America, but in the global south, with expansion over the past decade particularly rapid in both Asia and Africa (Parnell and Pieterse 2014, United Nations 2018). These processes of urbanisation offer both opportunities and practical problems for both those living in urban areas, as well as the individuals and institutions involved in governing them. The significant challenges of governing cities and providing basic services to rapidly expanding populations in Africa and Asia, in the context of weak financial and institutional capacity, alongside the political narratives of neoliberal state withdrawal, are often framed by an agenda of governance and participation. Urban governance (as opposed to the institutional mechanics of government) has become a global agenda, evident in cities as diverse as Manchester, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Delhi, and refers to a process whereby municipal decision-making is a participatory collaboration between the various different societal actors (e.g., elected decision-makers, communities, private firms). Consequently, governance is about relationships between the state, the private sector and civil society, revealing how power flows between these actors to determine resource allocation (Hydén et al. 2004, p.16). It is within this contested and uneven space of governance – where the tensions, complexities, power inequalities, and information asymmetries between multiple actors are demonstrated – that the discussion in this chapter is located, with a specific focus on participatory forms of governance. A key element of urban governance in the contemporary neoliberal context has been the promotion of public participation, bringing the voices of citizens into municipal decision-making processes. While the conceptual origins of participatory urban governance are traced to Robert Chambers’ (1983) promotion of participatory approaches to rural development practice, it has become a mainstream urban practice. In addition to the neoliberal agenda for state retraction, one of the primary justifications for participatory approaches to urban governance is the idea that by including citizens and civil society in decision-making, the result will be a more just and inclusive city, where the voices of all citizens are heard and acted on. For example, the United Nations Habitat Global Campaign on Urban Governance, which seeks to eradicate poverty through improved urban governance, is predicated on the principle that inclusive participatory decision-making, where vulnerable groups are explicitly included in governance processes, can result in a just and inclusive urban space (United Nations, 2002). Despite the popularity of the participatory concept and practice (e.g., in development projects, and as a form of urban governance), there exist significant concerns and criticisms about the way it functions in practice, and its limited potential to deliver significant societal change (e.g., Cooke and Kothari 2001, Hickey and Mohan 2004). Within development discourse, these critiques address two core concerns. First, the logistical pragmatics of establishing participatory programmes that genuinely include a plurality of citizen voices, rather than falling prey to elite capture. Second, the limited capacity of participatory programmes designed by the state to bring about the types of structural or institutional transformative justice required to deliver inclusive cities. In fact, critics argue that participation (particularly when state-led) can de-politicise rather than empower participants by legitimising and mainstreaming the voices of those who already have most power. In other words, elite capture is not merely an accidental by-product of poorly-implemented participatory governance, but 268

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inherent in its design. In recognising these structural constraints, this chapter uses two case studies to question whether participatory approaches can be transformative and empowering (for example, if implemented as part of a radical political project of institutional change), or whether marginalisation and exclusion are inevitable outcomes. Recognising the many criticisms of (particularly state-led) participation, it is nevertheless possible for the actions of citizens to influence improvements to individual and collective conditions. Consequently, the focus of the chapter is primarily on citizens rather than institutions per se, exploring the capacity of citizens to function as active agents (rather than passive beneficiaries) working in collaboration (and sometimes contestation) with government to govern the cities in which they live and work. Primarily, the chapter explores two diverse practices of participatory governance in order to examine whether such processes can bring about inclusive forms of citizen engagement that transform urban citizens (with implications for processes and institutions) in ways that broaden the distribution of social benefits. Concurrently, the chapter explores how governance practices that (de)legitimise certain types of citizens and actions can effectively contribute to a narrow interpretation of who is a ‘good’ citizen engaging in ‘appropriate’ actions. This is framed by questioning whether a broader interpretation of citizen action can counter the potential for participation to be exclusive. In other words, the chapter asks whether who citizens are, and how they engage with the state, can be the primary determinant for effecting change.

State-led vs. citizen-led citizen action Andrea Cornwall’s (2002, 2004) distinction between invited and invented forms of participatory governance provides a useful heuristic tool for analysing different types of participatory governance. Invited spaces are the dominant form of participatory governance discussed in the literature (Sinwell 2010), representing participative procedures that are established through top-down processes, for example, by the state, in which citizens are requested to participate – either individually or collectively via civil society organisations (for more on collective action see Roelvink, this volume). These forms of participatory governance are created and managed by the state at multiple scales; for example, participatory spaces may be devised and legally mandated by central government, but they are typically managed by local elected (e.g., councillors) and non-elected (e.g., civil servants) representatives. Cornwall and Gaventa (2001, p. i) demonstrate how invited spaces can provide an opportunity for citizens to become active ‘makers and shapers’ rather than passive ‘users and choosers’ of services by providing opportunities to engage with the state, for example, by participating in decisionmaking about the distribution of resources and local planning. The Bhagidari process in Delhi that is explored later in this chapter is an example of invited participatory governance. In contrast, invented forms of participatory governance refer to more grassroots-led forms of participation and civic/political mobilisation that are largely demonstrated by collective action functioning in confrontation (rather than concertation) with authorities, and invented processes primarily challenge (rather than work alongside) dominant power relationships (Sinwell 2010). Housing adaptations in Cape Town are explored later in the chapter as an example of citizen action that is initiated by citizens and often not welcomed by the state. While the everyday diversity of forms of citizen action are clearly more complex and nuanced than a simplistic binary, and indeed many mobilisation strategies and civic associations straddle both the invited and invented, as well as beyond, this framework provides a useful shorthand for distinguishing between different participatory formats, particularly in understanding the role of the state and its relationship with civil society. 269

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In exploring the capacity of participatory processes to transform citizens and society, it is crucial to explore the role of the state in determining which citizens and which actions are legitimate (i.e., are able to ‘participate’), and therefore have their voices contribute to societal and institutional change. Using the two empirical case studies, the chapter questions whether participatory mechanisms can offer a space for citizens to determine the shape of their citizenship activism (Cornwall and Gaventa 2001), or whether the role of the state in dictating the terms of acceptable citizen action constrains participants into structures that primarily serve the purposes of the state (Swyngedouw 2005). Having introduced the broad concepts and critiques related to participatory governance as forms of institutional (invited) and non-institutional (invented) citizen action, the chapter now introduces two very different empirical examples of citizen action, that can each be broadly framed as state-led citizen action (Bhagidari, Delhi) and citizen-led citizen action (housing adaptations, Cape Town). Through these case studies, the chapter explores the role of the state, and questions the different ways in which some citizen voices are undermined and exploited by these processes, but also the ways in which citizen action can bypass state-led participatory spaces to create alternative spaces of radical disruption. These alternative citizen-led spaces of citizen action can be both loud and performative (e.g., violent and peaceful protests), as well as more quiet and everyday (e.g., changes to the built environment), and yet both challenge the authority of the state (and other institutions) in sometimes very effective ways (for more on nonviolent action see Pinckney, this volume).

Delhi’s Bhagidari: an invited process of state-led citizen action India’s cities have experienced vast and rapid urbanisation over the past three decades that have outstripped government capacity to provide infrastructure and services to meet the needs of urban populations. In practice, this has also contributed to a widening of the gap between India’s well-established urban middle-classes, predominantly living in new and existing residential areas with in-house connections to water, sanitation and electricity; and the urban poor, living in ‘slum’ areas where access to basic services and the legal right to reside are both highly insecure. Taking the example of Delhi, where rapid and ongoing urbanisation has followed these trends, this section explores a specific urban participatory governance programme, the Bhagidari scheme. Launched in 2000 to bring together residents and policymakers in determining resource allocation in the city, Bhagidari is an example of a state-led form of ‘invited’ citizen action, in which the state has played a crucial role in determining who and what are ‘appropriate’ citizens and ‘legitimate’ issues. Introduced as a flagship programme by Delhi’s then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, the scheme was a key pillar of her three-term tenure (1998–2013), and its legacies continue to dominate participatory governance in Delhi. Defining itself as a ‘citizen–government partnership’ (Bhagidari means ‘partnership’ in Hindi), the scheme was introduced in order to involve Delhites in tackling their city’s problems. Bhagidari provided regular platforms for residents and city representatives to meet and work collaboratively to find solutions to city-wide issues, with a primary focus on urban services. Through regular three-day workshops, each focused on a specific theme (e.g., the environment, transport, water), citizens had the opportunity to meet a wide range of city officials responsible for specific urban services, and to discuss their respective views on each theme. While a small number of elected politicians attended each workshop, and the entire process was initiated and led by Delhi’s Chief Minister, in practice participation was largely between citizens and bureaucrats (rather than elected officials per se). This reflects the sectoral focus of workshops, with officials responsible for specific government departments invited to 270

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participate, as well as effectively acknowledging that in India unelected civil servants often have more capacity to initiate and sustain urban change than elected politicians. Participants were split into small groups to facilitate discussion, with the entire process led by an independent consultancy in order to limit domination by specific individuals or sectors. Through this process, participants were expected to work collaboratively to identify consensual solutions to the city’s core problems. Bhagidari has been highly praised and received numerous awards as an example of a radically innovative state-led initiative to govern in ways that value the insights and expertise of both citizens and the state (at multiple tiers). However, despite recognition that Bhagidari has decentralised democracy by bringing the state closer to citizens, there are significant criticisms of the process, specifically focused on the role of the state in determining which citizens and topics are valued as appropriate to contribute to decision-making in Delhi. The core of these criticisms is directed at the narrow criteria for citizen inclusion in the scheme, and the subsequent focus on ‘city issues’ that were in fact ‘middle-class issues’. Bhagidari accessed citizens primarily through Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) situated in legal ‘authorized’ zones identified as residential in the Delhi master plan. Market Trade Associations were also invited as a mechanism to include private sector voices. RWAs are non-profit neighbourhood-based associations dominant in urban middle-class suburbs, funded by subscriptions from property owners in the neighbourhood (Ghertner 2011). Consequently, Bhagidari not only interpreted ‘the citizen’ as synonymous with a singular type of resident, but also gave legitimacy to middle-class expertise on the city’s needs. As a result, the topics promoted tended to reflect middle-class concerns (for example, one output of Bhagidari was increased ‘green’ spaces in the city) and home-owner perspectives on the city (e.g., another Bhagidari output was the prevention of slum encroachment). In effect, this not only excluded the voices of citizens living in slums and unauthorised areas (as well as tenants in authorised areas), but also implied that their perspective on the city’s needs (e.g., provision of tenure security and access to service and infrastructure) were illegitimate because by living in residential areas that were not ‘authorised’, they were ineligible to participate in the Bhagidari scheme. Furthermore, by enabling middle-class citizens to interact with city officials and find out how the city operates, Bhagidari indirectly functioned as a means for some citizens and RWAs to extend their interests beyond neighbourhood-level issues, transforming themselves into interest groups that were awarded privileged access to the media and the courts. These federations of RWAs effectively used this platform to promote a middle-class agenda in city politics, whereby ‘proper’ citizenship has become implicitly restricted to those functioning within the city’s formal structures (e.g., in terms of residential status). While Bhagidari later extended to include RWAs in unauthorised colonies (Lemanski and Tawa Lama-Rewal 2013), this was not universally implemented (Bhan 2014), and citizens residing in slums and resettlement areas remained excluded. Furthermore, the property-based eligibility for participation in the scheme effectively served to legitimise property ownership as the primary requirement for citizenship. Consequently, Asher Ghertner (2011, p. 504) has critiqued Bhagidari for ‘gentrifying participation’ and re-structuring governance processes to legitimise widespread slum demolitions. Ultimately, this has encouraged a two-tier form of differentiated citizenship whereby only some citizens (and their needs) are deemed suitable and legitimate to act and participate in decision-making about the city, while others are rendered illegitimate actors not only in urban governance processes but in terms of their right to reside in the city. Bhagidari’s emphasis on collaborative consensus-building as the foundational mainstay of participative governance echoes the emerging recognition within Anglo-American urban planning at that time, that interaction between institutional actors and social groups was necessary to ensure socially just and inclusionary planning outcomes and processes (e.g., 271

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Healey 1997). While it was anticipated that fragmentary societies and institutional frameworks could potentially undermine participatory planning processes (e.g., Healey 1996), subsequent planning scholarship has revealed the limitations and perverse outcomes of the collaborative process itself (e.g., Bond 2011, Hillier 2003, Ploger 2004). By constructing a binary of consensus and antagonism, the ideal of consensus is easily ‘co-opted and captured by political interests [to] … tame [the] antagonistic participation of citizens’ (Legacy 2017, p. 426). In the Delhi case, even within the exclusionary basis of who could participate in the Bhagidari process, the reliance on ‘consensus-based’ decision-making with technocratic officials (rather than politicians) effectively served to depoliticise the process by framing proposed solutions as ‘rational’ and ‘technical’, rather than open to contestation and debate. Consequently, even if participants had wanted to raise complex questions and/or use the process as a platform to challenge structural inequalities, the emphasis on consensus-based outcome-driven decisionmaking actively de-legitimised dissent. This reveals how the state’s reliance on participatory governance to produce outcomes (not engage in political debate per se) silences diversity and complexity, and depoliticizes ‘democracy’ though a sugar-coated form of ‘citizen action’. The example of the Bhagidari scheme reveals the ways in which state-led processes of citizen action can have the effect of propelling and legitimising the agendas of some citizens, issues, and methods at the expense of others. In this example, the state is not presented as a monolithic entity, but an assemblage of various unelected officials (largely technocrats) adhering to an exclusionary format that while established and monitored by elected politicians, was easily embraced by a tier of officials who share the middle-class characteristics of those playing the ‘citizen’ role. What this highlights is that while it’s unsurprising that in a state-led process of participation the elected state determines which citizens, issues, and participatory methods are deemed ‘legitimate’, unelected state officials then function as (potentially unwitting) grounded arbitrators in maintaining and perpetuating these identity markers and processes. Furthermore, the differentiated ways in which the state enacts exclusionary forms of participation has profound impacts not just on the nature of urban governance and participation, but on who is materially and politically capable of residing in the city. Unsurprisingly, a city designed and maintained by middle-class citizens and bureaucrats is overwhelmingly hostile to the aspirations, needs and practices of other demographic groups (Ghertner 2011). This is particularly acute in the contemporary context of COVID-19, where the impacts of pandemic restrictions are highly uneven and have exacerbated existing inequalities (de Groot and Lemanski 2021). Therefore, excluding the voices of the poor from institutional decisionmaking processes will have profound impacts on future urban landscapes. However, as the subsequent example reveals, the state continues to play a similar role as the arbitrator of civic legitimacy even in response to more embryonic citizen-led forms of citizen action. While Bhagidari represents only a single case study of state-led citizen action, the literature is rife with similar examples of the ways in which state-led participatory strategies are not only ‘captured’ to promote elite agendas, but serve to institutionalise and legitimise the exclusion of those on the socio-economic margins (e.g., Cooke and Kothari 2001, Mansuri and Rao 2004, Platteau 2004, Rigon 2014).

Cape Town’s housing adaptations: an invented process of citizen-led citizen action While the India example represents a case where some citizens are formally invited to engage with decision-making via platforms initiated and managed by the state, there are also multiple cases where citizens create their own platforms as the means for bringing about social change. 272

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To illustrate this, I use an example from my current research on citizen-led adaptations to public housing in Cape Town, South Africa. This example demonstrates a form of citizeninitiated and -led citizen action that is ‘invented’ in the sense that it is an everyday individual and collective response to the limitations of public housing design and delivery, but to which the state has responded by vilifying citizens as immoral and their actions as illegitimate. South Africa’s post-apartheid governments have prioritised the provision of housing and infrastructure (water, electricity, sanitation) as a core means to overcome the inequalities of the past, and as a materialisation of the new era of universal citizenship (Lemanski 2011, 2019, 2020). Since 1994, the state has provided up to 4 million subsidised housing opportunities to households on extremely low incomes, primarily comprising homeownership of a newly-constructed brick-built house that includes networked access to water, electricity, sanitation, and solid waste management (Huchzermeyer 2003, Tissington 2011). Houses are mostly single-storey and detached (ranging in size from 25 m 2 to 40 m 2, depending on location and era of construction), although more recent construction includes doublestorey, semi-detached, and terraced styles (Charlton and Meth 2017). While this represents a significant quantity of housing subsidised by the state, providing accommodation for over 13 million people (nearly one-quarter of the population), there are widespread criticisms regarding the quality of housing delivered. Specifically, houses are tiny (particularly those delivered in the early stages), typically one-bedroomed and therefore far too small to accommodate a nuclear family, let alone the extended families of many low-income communities; and were built to low construction standards that over time have resulted in leaks, crumbling walls, damp and dry rot (Lemanski 2009, 2011, 2014). Furthermore, the peripheral location of subsidised housing settlements, far from basic amenities and employment opportunities, has effectively sentenced low-income households to living in slum communities, albeit as homeowners (Gilbert 2004, Charlton 2014). While recent policy discussions recognise the fiscal unsustainability of continuing the housing policy in this form (Cross 2013), the scale of previous construction ensures that South Africa’s urban landscape and everyday modes of urban life for the urban poor remain dominated by public housing. Over the past two decades I have conducted research in a single state-subsidised housing settlement in Cape Town, and during this time have witnessed the extent of housing adaptations made by citizens (sometimes by themselves, sometimes by employing labourers). This public housing settlement was constructed in 1999, consisting at first of tiny onebedroomed semi-detached houses which, over time, have been transformed via a diversity of single- and double-storey brick-built extensions, alongside the proliferation of corrugated zinc structures situated in the yards of houses. In a 2016 quantitative survey, I identified that two-thirds of original houses in this settlement contain backyard ‘informal’ structures (average of 3 structures per yard), while the remaining one-third of houses have some form of brick-built extension (mostly single-storey). What these data indicate is that the physical adaptation of public housing is not an atypical or isolated case, but represents the standard response to the provision of public housing. In qualitative interviews, residents expressed a wide range of explanations for taking action to adapt the house provided by the state, largely focused on the need for additional space and income in order to survive. There are 8 people living here – 4 children and 4 adults - it’s me and my wife, my sister, my daughter, my son, my mother, my brother’s son [sic]. I did the extension four years ago because we don’t have enough space … We just had this small room when we came here. (Homeowner, 26 March 2016) 273

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The bungalows [backyard dwellings] - it’s a help out … It’s helping the person in the home and in the bungalow as well. (Homeowner, 18 March 2016) I’m unemployed and we are struggling and my wife is unemployed. If I was employed we wouldn’t have it [a backyard shack] … but I don’t want to rob people for money, so I must have it. (Homeowner, 21 September 2006) As these quotes demonstrate, the rationale for citizen-led housing adaptations is a direct response to a housing policy and design that does not meet beneficiaries’ needs in terms of house size, alongside the unsurprising need for additional income to support the costs of homeownership amongst a cohort of beneficiaries explicitly selected based on extremely low income. While the state delivery of subsidised housing did envisage that citizens would upgrade and extend their original houses (e.g., in the settlement that I researched, all housing beneficiaries were awarded pre-approved plans for a three-roomed extension), the types of extensions that have emerged (often informal in terms of materials used and planning processes bypassed) conflict with state expectations, and occupants are vilified for their actions. For example, it is common to see media headlines and government speeches declaring housing beneficiaries as immoral, ungrateful, and illegal for destroying public goods by using their houses in ways unintended by the state (Lemanski 2009). The dual concerns of the state centre on the legitimacy of who occupies the house, and whether houses are used ‘correctly’ (Charlton 2013, p. 15). For the state, only original beneficiaries are legitimate occupants, and incorrect uses include selling houses, non-residential uses (e.g., running a shop or a crèche), and informal modes of densification (e.g., backyard dwellings, extensions that contravene planning regulations). This is neatly summed by a public official’s comment that ‘the government builds houses for people to live in, not to rent or erect shacks in their yards’ (Gordon and Nell 2006, p. 52). However, state condemnation is largely restricted to verbal criticism, and the threatened disciplinary measures for citizens who sell their subsidised houses never materialised in practice (Mail and Guardian 2015; Charlton, 2013). This Cape Town example demonstrates how citizen-led adaptations to the built environment of public housing function as an everyday and relatively mundane form of citizen action in response to the limitations of state-expectations of welfare consumption. This resonates with the extensive urban research on incremental citizen-led informal housing consolidation across the global south, which documents how urban dwellers’ activities frequently conflict with the state’s normative expectations for land use and housing occupation (e.g., Van Noorloos et al. 2020). In the Cape Town case this is not a formal ‘protest’ per se, but represents a form of citizen action that indirectly challenges the authority of the state by undermining both the original welfare product (i.e., the size, design, and materials of the small brick-built house), as well as the state’s explicit opposition to subsidised houses being used to generate income and to perpetuate informal modes of living. In effect, by taking citizen action to adapt the original house in ways that largely bypass formal planning regulations and use non-approved materials, the state’s emphasis on housing delivery as a mechanism to eradicate informality is challenged. Furthermore, citizens’ actions are indirectly highlighting the failure of the state’s welfare provision in terms of both the product and the process. There are parallels between this South African example of citizen action via the built environment and James Holston and Teresa Caldeira’s research in urban Brazil, in which they highlight how citizens invade peripheral land and ‘auto-construct’ (Caldeira 2017) houses as a 274

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form of ‘insurgent citizenship’ (Holston 2008) to claim the rights they are routinely denied. Their analysis is rooted in the concept of ‘disjunctive citizenship’ (Holston 2008), recognising that there is frequently significant divergence between the universality of citizenship rights provided in law, and the uneven capacity of all citizens to access and demonstrate these rights, particularly in the distribution of infrastructure. This resonates with the conceptualisation of citizenship as material-political employed at the outset of this chapter. This notion of citizenship as material-political is particularly evident where the provision of legal tenure and/ or housing rights is explicitly politicised as leverage for electoral votes (e.g., Karaman 2008, Lemanski and Tawa Lama-Rewal 2013). In the Cape Town example, the state has provided citizenship rights in material-political form (i.e., housing and services for new citizens), but beneficiaries’ interpretation of their rights in relation to that material-political form reveal significant ‘disjuncture’ or ‘conflicting rationality’ between the state and citizens in terms of expectations and practices (Watson, 2003). In many ways, it is unsurprising that the state does not condone citizen actions that undermine the state’s material welfare provision and political processes. However, it is in the granularity of divergences in understanding this material-political notion of citizenship that the roots of the state-citizen disjuncture can be identified. For while citizens view their actions as legitimate in the context of a material product that does not meet their needs, and a political process from which they feel excluded; the state perceives housing adaptations as an illegitimate citizen action that represents citizens’ failure to embrace the state’s vision of a ‘good’ material-political citizen. This is encapsulated by a comment from municipal planning official who told me ‘the City invests so much money, but they’re frustrated by how people respond’ (11 February 2019 interview). In other words, the state views people’s actions (in this case, housing adaptations), and the consequent pressure from high population numbers on urban infrastructure, as the key driver of urban problems, whereas citizens blame the limitations of a state product (housing) and process (lack of participation). In this context, what initially appears to be a relatively mundane form of everyday citizen-led citizen action that indirectly undermines the state, has become a highly contested and politicised process that reveals the disjunctive nature of citizenship. Furthermore, by interpreting ‘how people respond’ as the problem, the state continues to play a core role in determining who is an appropriate citizen to engage in everyday practices of urban governance, and what issues and participatory methods are legitimate.

Conclusion This chapter explores citizen action in the context of the state-citizen relationship, focused on how citizens make material and political claims through both formal institutional and informal everyday channels. Using case studies from India and South Africa, the chapter critically explores whether state-led and citizen-led forms of citizen action can empower citizens and transform cities to become more just and inclusionary spaces without (re)creating forms of inequality and marginalisation. While the case studies represent very divergent participatory processes: from Delhi’s stateinitiated Bhagidari scheme, to which middle-class homeowners and municipal officials were invited to develop consensual solutions to city problems, to the dynamic and inventive ways in which low-income beneficiaries of state-subsidised housing in Cape Town adapt their welfare product to better suit their needs; the role of the state in (de)legitimising citizens, actions, and issues is common. In the state-initiated, -led and sanctioned participatory process of Bhagidari, it is hardly surprising that state representatives (from elected politicians to non-elected technocrats) determine, in explicit and implicit ways, who can participate, and 275

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how their voices are managed. In this context, the state (across multiple tiers) plays a key role in excluding those not deemed to comply with the state’s vision of appropriate citizenship (Miraftab 2004). While the role of the state may initially appear diminished in the context of citizen-led forms of citizen action, the Cape Town example of housing adaptations reveals how the state can still play a key role in criticising and punishing citizens for participating in what the state views as inappropriate and illegitimate forms of citizen action. It is therefore evident that the state plays a crucial role in facilitating participation and empowering citizens, while at the same time delegitimising and excluding others, even in forms of citizen action that are not state-initiated. In both empirical examples, the state has questioned the legitimacy of both citizens and their actions, prioritising the identities and issues associated with propertied citizens in ways that effectively exclude the urban poor from decision-making and imply their citizenship rights and actions are illegitimate. However, the use of these two case studies should not be taken to mean that citizen-led bottom-up forms of citizen action are necessarily more likely to contribute to the establishment of a just and inclusive city, or that the state is always exclusionary. In fact, participatory processes of citizen action, whether state-led or citizen-led, are repeatedly reinvented over time. For example, even the state-led Bhagidari scheme, which was widely critiqued for being exclusionary, eventually evolved to include lower-income (not slum-dwellers) residents of unauthorised colonies (Lemanski and Tawa Lama-Rewal, 2013). Furthermore, Ferguson’s (2015) provocation suggests that welfare distribution (which I interpret as both material and political) should not be a static one-way transfer from the benevolent state to needy citizens, but a basic citizen right that provokes and sustains citizen action to adapt both the welfare product (whether it is housing or participation in state-led governance processes) and the state-citizen relationship. Consequently, it is the relationship between citizens and the state that is essential for the effective functioning of (citizen-led and state-led) citizen action, rather than that either state-led or citizen-led forms are inherently superior/ inferior. However, as the chapter has revealed, there is frequently state-citizen disjuncture in terms of the expectations and practices of each stakeholder in relation to the other. It is therefore essential to focus on strengthening citizenship, so that the state and citizens can work towards acknowledging and understanding the views and practices of the other, as a means to co-producing a just and inclusive city (Lemanski 2020). In the Delhi case, this might involve the state encouraging (both invited and excluded) citizens to re-make state-led participatory processes into formats that better suit the city’s diversity. And in the Cape Town case, this could mean advocating for a state that can find ways to actively support (e.g., through bulk infrastructure upgrading) rather than condemn vernacular productions of space. To conclude, this chapter has highlighted that citizen action, whether state-led or citizen-led, is inherently a material-political process of state-citizen exclusion and inclusion.

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23 ACTIVISM Activist Identities beyond Social Movements Daniel Conway

Introduction As Extinction Rebellion environmental protestors disrupt cities across the world, Black Lives Matter activists challenge racism in multiple forms and the #MeToo movement uses digital activism to further longstanding feminist campaigns against sexual violence, there is plenty of evidence to support the claim that we live in an ‘age of activism’ (White 2010). However, I could also argue the exact opposite. Contemporary forms of activism, unlike their predecessors, often do not engage directly with state power, have produced (as of yet) little evidence of legal or political change and arguably rely on ephemeral practices such as online ‘clicktivism’ (White 2010) and self-serving ‘celebrity activism’ (Cole et al. 2015). These contrasting arguments provoke questions of what it means to be an activist and to do activism. As this chapter will discuss, the literature on social movements focuses on activism as part of social movements, with collective, goals strategies, identities, and a clear target for protest. There are many different forms of activist practice. There are also many different ways in which individuals and groups identify as activists, and also consider others to be activists. How do we conceptualise these different forms of activism and activist identities and how should we assess their effectiveness? Is it enough to sign an online petition, tweet (or retweet) a protest statement, or wear a protest t-shirt to be an activist? Or does activism require longstanding commitment, stepping outside everyday routines, and to participate in public and disruptive protest? This raises questions of what differentiates between different kinds of activism and activist identity. Conceptualising activism as an identity that can change and be constructed in more than just acts of protest requires different questions, a broader understanding of political action and community building and an interest in the relationship between activism, empathy, and life experience. This chapter will reconsider the traditional conceptualisation of activism, mainly via the contentious politics model in social movement studies, and argue that more recent feminist and queer critiques and practices of activism can help us to better conceptualise activism as an identity and practice. Considering the practice of activism and the embodied activist poses questions for where the boundaries of this identity exist, if at all, how activism takes place in the everyday and how activist identity can change over time and context. The chapter then considers the changing spaces for activism, including the web and the challenges for researchers when considering regressive activism. DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-26

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Conceptualising activism and social movements The majority of academic literature on social movements focuses on the dynamics of the movement itself and conceptualises activism as a practice influenced and bound by these movements. It also frames activism as being focused on state and powerful elites in order to effect change (McAdam et al. 2001). Essentially, these analyses are interested in activism that uses protest to achieve its goals; protest that is the result of predominantly non-violent direct action that disrupts the routines of both opponents and bystanders and persuades or coerces the targets of such protest to adopt the goals and priorities of the social movement (Tarrow 1998, McAdam et al. 2005, Taylor and Dyke 2004, Della Porta and Diani 2010). These ‘contentious politics’ (Taylor et al. 2009) models consider activism as protest and assume high levels of commitment from activists. Indeed, Tilly (1999) has argued that social movements are best analysed not as groups or organisations, but as collections of protest events and contentious performances. Such protests are presumed to be the result of deliberate, intentional decisions taken by disaffected people in order to gain rights or protest against an opponent. This conception of activism pays particular interest to the strategic choices taken by social movements (Keck and Sikkink 1998), expressed also as the ‘tactics’ (Rucht 1990) and ‘repertoires of action’ (Della Porta and Diani 2010). As Saunders explains (in this volume), these contentious politics approaches have expanded social movement studies from focusing exclusively on strategy, to considering the effects of action by movements and the political opportunities for doing so. Saunders also outlines the criticisms of the contentious politics model, namely that it lacks conceptual clarity, is difficult to apply to real world protest movements and also that it is disinterested in what happens outside the period between contentious public protests. Contentious politics (which is also described as political process theory) approaches have also been criticised for focusing too exclusively on movements, under valuing the multiplicity of activist practices and for choosing certain variables of analysis over others. Bevington and Dixon (2005) argue that political process theories of social movements overemphasise the structural factors that frame political opportunities for social movement mobilisation. They also argue that academic social movement theorists have not paid sufficient attention to the actual experiences, interests or needs of activists. As a result, activists themselves seldom read, or find useful, contemporary academic theorising about activism (Bevington and Dixon 2005). Taylor and Dyke (2004, p. 268) believe that by exclusively focusing on collective public protest, social movement scholars have often relied too heavily on media accounts of such protests, accounts that may be biased, and that also obscure everyday forms of activism. Maiguashca (2011, p. 538), writing about the feminist global justice movement, is critical of contentious politics perspectives about activism in social movements, arguing that ‘it unnecessarily limits our political imagination … as it unintentionally circumscribes what counts as political action’. Maiguashca argues that it is not always clear what protest actually means from these perspectives, and that activists, as individual actors, are considered in overly simple and reductive terms. Maiguashca also argues that not all forms of activism and advocacy are protest. Considering activism exclusively through the lens of social movements and acts of contentious protest can be reductive and can obscure the motivations, identities, and behaviours of individual activists. An example of everyday activism that doesn’t neatly fit into the contentious politics model is the 1980s international anti-apartheid movement that held a number of protests and advertising campaigns encouraging consumers in Europe and North America to boycott South African produce. This and the widely reported State of Emergency in South Africa had a significant effect on public behaviour. In 1986, 27% of British people admitted to not buying 280

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South African products for political and moral reasons (Conway, D. 2018, p. 48). These respondents were not necessarily members of the anti-apartheid, or indeed of any, social movement. These were private, individual consumer choices that may or may not have been influenced by the boycott adverts and took place while shopping. These everyday consumer choices were taken with, presumably, aims to effect political change and express solidarity. Consumer boycotts did put pressure on companies operating in South Africa, as well as having a significant impact on the agricultural and wine industries in South Africa  (Conway, D. 2018). This example supports the claim that theorising about social movements and activism needs to conceptualise protest in broad and complex terms and think about activism both within and beyond the confines of social movements. The complexity and multiplicity of activism makes assessing the outcomes and impacts of activism and protest difficult. Activism can have multiple outcomes, both intended and unintended. These include political and policy outcomes, mobilisation outcomes and cultural outcomes that can be interconnected and difficult to ascribe cause and effect (Taylor and Dyke 2004 p. 277). Forms of protest and activism can also have long lasting internal and private impacts, unrelated to the public goals of the movement. For example, Taylor et al. (2009) found that one of the key outcomes of the Californian same sex marriage campaign was mobilising and engaging individuals, as committed activists, over long time periods. Modes of activism and protest can be ‘unsuccessful’ in that they did not immediately meet their stated aims, but they can be ‘successful’ in developing new forms of activist practice, influencing other movements over the longer term, or highlighting and politicising an issue that otherwise would have remained out of public consciousness. For example, the women protestors at the Greenham Common Peace Camp were unsuccessful in their aim to remove the US Greenham Common Air Base from the United Kingdom during the Cold War, or in preventing the deployment of nuclear missiles at it. They did make the issue the subject of high profile debate in the media, galvanised tens of thousands of women as protestors, contributed to the development of feminist thought and organising and many of the women activists continued with other forms of activism and political participation (Roseneil 1994, 2000, Fairhall 2006, Pettitt 2006). Thus the Greenham Common Peace Camp’s outcomes are complex, multifaceted and continue to manifest in multiple ways. Assessing activist impacts is also difficult because not all activism seeks short-term or easily measurable outcomes. Not all activist practices are for an external audience; they can be for the empowerment, well-being or solidarity building for the activists themselves (Gamson 1995, Eschle and Maiguashca 2007). Assessing activism’s efficacy should therefore be approached with caution and an understanding of the complexity and multiple roles activist practice can take. The rise of new forms of protest movement across North America and Europe, from the 1960s onwards, led to a reconceptualisation by scholars of activism and protest, away from the class based models of social organising, such as in trade unions. This led to definitions of ‘new social movements’ where activism was concerned about identity and lifestyle, rather than material conditions. Gender, sexuality, and race, questions of universal human rights, and transnational issues, such as the environment and social justice became and have remained the focus of such movements (Melucci 1985; Nash 1999). The civil rights movement, women’s movement, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) rights movement, and environmental movement often exist as loose collections of activists and organisations that interact, cross over and influence each other. These ‘life politics’ (Giddens 1991, p. 214) movements enable individuals to take decisions about themselves and their lives. New social movements combine public protest, but also private acts, such as buying ethical and environmentally friendly products, or living radically different lifestyles, creating and sustaining alternative 281

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communities, and focus as much on changing culture, as achieving broader political, social, and legal change. Conceptualising cultural practices and performances as being forms of activism has become a key consideration when analysing new social movements. These forms of activism seek to change culture and this further complicates the assessment of activism and social movements. For example, cultural rituals, symbols, identities, and performances have been used by women’s movements and LGBT activists to contest and reformulate patriarchy and heteronormativity (Taylor and Dyke 2004, Taylor et al. 2009). LGBT Pride parades are an example of a form of activism that seeks to change (and challenge) mainstream heterosexual culture through visibility, community building and advocacy, as well as develop and sustain LGBT sub-cultures (Bruce 2016, Conway, D., 2022). Since the 1970s, Pride parades have made legal and political demands, but these are difficult to separate from Prides’ cultural roles in creating and sustaining LGBT communities and developing LGBT culture, raising visible and changing social attitudes. The history of LGBT activism in Europe and North America suggests there is a symbiosis between cultural, political, and legal change. Pride and groups like HIV protest and advocacy group ACT UP helped create and sustain communities that provided mutual support and affirmation for LGBT individuals, irrespective of public opinion or homophobic political and legal frameworks, alongside protesting for legal and political change. Bruce argues that Pride’s main achievement has been to raise the cultural visibility and change social attitudes towards LGBT communities and this has enabled legal and political change to occur (Bruce 2016). ACT UP helped develop new understandings of queer community and identity, as well as innovative tactics for creating visibility and protesting (Gould 2002, Schulman 2021). Considering activism in broader and more holistic terms – combining internal, community-building roles with social, political, and cultural change – moves beyond the focus of contentious politics or political process theory models of social movements. Considering activist practice as combining both overt political demands, as well as personal lifestyle choices, creating new forms of community and of value, is therefore important when conceptualising activism as a set of political, legal, social and cultural practices.

Feminist analysis of activism Feminist analysis of activism and of women’s movements, in particular, place emphasis on considering activism as premised on personal life histories, subjectivities and on the everyday. Conceptualising activism from these broader perspectives requires us to focus on how individuals draw from their life histories, identities, and experiences of injustice in order to become activists, considering the ‘emotional’ dynamics of activism ( Jasper 1998), as well as the multiple activities and practices that activism can include. For example, Maiguashca, analysing the feminist anti-globalisation movement, argues that it is not actually a unitary or coherent global movement and that the forms of activism exhibited, including solidarity building and collective empowerment, do not fit the models offered by the contentious politics social movement literature (2011). The feminist anti-globalisation movement demonstrates an ‘intricate array of dynamic and context specific practices’ (Maiguashca 2011, p. 539) that are often not directly aimed at states or power brokers and involve innovative activist actions, such as kiss-ins, that are not easily explained using rationalist frameworks. Women activists draw from their own life experiences, try to support each other and enact activist practices that are not framed as adversarial conflicts defined by winning or losing. Rather, they seek to develop self-esteem, raise consciousness, and advance the emotional wellbeing of those 282

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involved (Eschle and Maiguashca 2007). Maiguashca calls these multiple forms of activist practices as ‘praxis’ and defines them as ‘an ongoing, dynamic process of social struggle, waged by those seeking to challenge oppression in their everyday lives and animated by a vision of an alternative social order’ (Maiguashca 2011, p. 543). As well as being premised on grassroots organising and ‘behind the scenes’ social support activities, a key aspect of this activist praxis is articulating a critique of globalised capitalism from a feminist perspective and offering an alternative vision of post-capitalist, or at least a more just and inclusive, future. These discourses seek to make visible the injustices, and forms of gendered and racialised marginalisation, enacted by globalisation, but also serves to motivate and sustain activists (Maiguashca 2011, Conway, J.M. 2017). Exploring the history and experiences of the women’s and LGBT rights movement can help us understand how individuals identify injustice in their lives, make broader connections with power imbalances in society and become motivated to actively demand change (Meyer 2014). Plummer (1994, 2003) writes that contemporary feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) rights activism draws from the lineage of activism for political and legal rights but ‘takes it further’ (Plummer 1994, p. 151) with activism that centres on ‘intimate citizenship’. This intimate citizenship draws from a ‘life politics’ that premises activism ‘about our most intimate desire, pleasures, and new ways of being in the world’ (Plummer 2003, pp. 38–39). The motivation to become an activist connects to how individuals live and want to live life, how identities are claimed, expressed and recognised. Intimate citizenship looks at the decisions people have to make over the control (or not) over one’s body, feelings, relationships; access (or not) to representations, public spaces, etc; and socially grounded choices (or not) about identities, gender experiences, erotic experiences. It does not imply one model, one pattern, one way. (Plummer 2003, p. 14) This concept of intimate citizenship captures how identities can frame and motivate activism and how activism is expressed in the world today.

What does it mean to be an activist? There is some consideration of activist identity by the literature on social movements. This mainly focuses on the role of movements in shaping the ‘collective’ identity of activists and the shared understanding of what the movement stands for, borne out of common interests, solidarity, and experiences (Melucci 1985, Stryker et al. 2000, Tarrow 1998, Taylor and Dyke 2004). This collective identity is considered as a necessary precondition for social movements to take collective action. There is an acknowledgement that individual activists’ identities can shape the collective identity of social movements and be the cause of disagreement and debate within movements (Klandermans 1997, Stryker et al. 2000). Following post-structuralism (Butler 1999), identity is considered as an unstable and shifting: ‘There is no unified subject performing acts of resistance; rather, resistance acts are constitutive of an always incomplete subject, and are marked by strategic rationality, irony and contradiction’ (Eschle and Maiguashca 2007, p. 292). Therefore, any shared collective identity or solidarity within a social movement is not drawn from pre-existing, set identities, but are constructed from shared perspectives or experiences of injustice, interpersonal relationships and empathy (Eschle and Maiguashca 2007). Activists’ motivations, identities, and the complexities of 283

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activism in all its forms draw from individual life histories, experiences, and affective experience of feeling and emotions. Emotions of anger, shock, fear, hope, excitement, love, pride, and empathy motivate activists, frame campaign messages and define activist praxis ( Jasper 1998, Taylor and Dyke 2004, p. 370). This web of emotions, experiences, histories, and relationships become key to motivating, inspiring, and sustaining activism and shape activist identities (Millward and Takhar 2019). Social movements play an ongoing role in defining activism and also identity, although this is a continually evolving and variable process. Acting collectively in social movements engenders ‘the pleasures of protest’ which include ‘being with people one likes. Other pleasures arise from the joys of collective activities, such as losing oneself in collective motion or song’ ( Jasper 1998, p. 418). Participating in large protests, parades, marches, sit ins, and other collective forms of activism ‘can be an exhilarating and empowering experience that functions both to mobilize individual commitment and strengthen movement organisations’ (Taylor and Dyke 2004, p. 281). Involvement in such activities can draw individuals into movements, and make individuals self-identify as activists, sometimes for the first time in their lives. Crossley (1999), drawing from Bourdieu’s concepts of social capital and habitus, argues that activists possess ‘protest capital’ and can develop a ‘radical habitus’ through previous experiences of activism, community involvement and daily routines. For Crossley (1999), this ‘protest capital’ must be continually sustained by what he terms ‘working utopias’. These ‘utopias’ are created and sustained by activities, people, meetings or places where activists can go to reflect, share ideas, recharge, feel inspired, and satisfied by their involvement in activism. Activism and activist identity therefore emerges and develops over time from shared experiences of protest and other forms of activism with others, and needs to be continually sustained and reaffirmed. It is therefore a continuous and evolving process and individuals can have flexible and changing relationships and identifications with activism and activist identity. Activism is influenced by and shapes an individual’s identity, but activism inevitably shapes individual identity as an activist, specifically the ongoing self-identification by an individual as being an activist. As with other forms of identity, self-identifying, or being perceived as an activist is not a stable or fixed occurrence. What does it mean to be an activist? The dictionary definition of an activist is ‘a person engaged in or advocating vigorous political activity; an active campaigner’ (OED Online 2020). There are many people who would self-identify and be perceived to be activists using this definition. However, there are people who for moral, ethical, personal, and political reasons campaign, or take a stand on an issue, or against a perceived injustice, who do not self-identify, or are perceived, as being an activist. Contrastingly, there may be individuals who do self-identify as being an activist, or doing activism, and others may doubt the veracity of their claim, or their genuine commitment or efforts for their cause. Martin (2007, p. 19) argues that activism is a practice that ‘goes beyond what is conventional or routine’ although ‘what counts as activism depends on what is conventional’. This definition is particularly relevant for contemporary forms of activism, where individuals may not necessarily have a relationship with a broader social movement, or may conduct new forms of activisms individually, such as in the case of digital/online activism. Activism, as a self-proclaimed identity, also becomes an important focus of enquiry when figures ranging from Hollywood actors, royalty, pop stars, corporate executives, academics, and other public figures claim to be activists and to be doing activism (Fuqua 2011, Tsaliki et al. 2011, Wheeler 2013, Bennett 2014, Cole et al. 2015, Roelvink in this volume). Activist identities can shift across time and context. This is particularly noteworthy when the overarching goals of social movements are achieved, or when the context in which they campaigned is radically transformed. For example, when activists who campaigned for 284

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democracy and social justice in authoritarian contexts achieve their goals, what happens to their activist identities? I researched the white South African anti-apartheid activists of the End Conscription Campaign. For some, this was a campaign firmly rooted in the apartheid past and a part of their lives that they remained proud of, but had moved on from. For others, their activist histories and identities were an important part of their claims for recognition, differentiation and reward in the new South Africa. They felt they had been sidelined in the democratic era by the focus on black South Africans who had fought and campaigned to end apartheid. They wanted to be acknowledged and celebrated for their contribution the Liberation Struggle and viewed retelling their history of activism and continued to selfidentify as activists as a means of achieving this recognition (Conway, D. 2012, 2016). In some instances, this became part of a broader political and social process that articulated problematic discourses of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa. As Falkoff discusses (in this volume), the claim of ‘white victimhood’ in contemporary South Africa has been a key challenge to progressive social and political change. More broadly, discourses of ‘white talk’ (Steyn 2001, Steyn and Foster 2008) comprise of white liberal claims that ostensibly embrace the values of the new South Africa and eschew racism, but create social narratives of truth centred on the perspectives and material interests of white people (Steyn 2001, 2012, Steyn and Foster 2008, Conway, D. 2016). Therefore, activist identity was invoked as marker of progressiveness and evidence of anti-racism, yet it contributed to the broader obscuring of ongoing racial privilege and prejudice. For this reason, some former members of the End Conscription Campaign were highly sensitive to academic critique or assessment, and deeply invested in presenting their activist pasts in heroic and unproblematic terms (Conway, D, 2016). In South Africa, the construction and articulation of activist identities has become part of broader political and social processes, where certain actors claim legitimacy, right to agency and deflection from critique and accountability dependent on how they reproduce their activist pasts and present activist identities.

The changing roles, representations, and spaces of activism The social, political, and legal landscape in many societies has changed considerably since new social movements arose in the 1960s. Women’s, LGBT and anti-racist activists have achieved significant legal and political progress across Europe, North America and elsewhere. This has created new opportunities, but also dilemmas and controversy about what the purpose and targets of contemporary activists should be and the extent to which social movement goals have actually been universally achieved. The increasing adoption of longstanding women’s, LGBT and anti-racist social movements’ demands by governments and institutions has led to concerns about the potential co-optation of activist agendas and the professionalisation, or ‘NGO-ization’ (Abu-Assab et al. 2020) of certain kinds of activism. McRobbie (2008), for example, cautions that feminist progress has been achieved for certain groups in UK society, such as white, well-educated women, but not for other groups of women. Yet many women (and men) in the United Kingdom consider the goals of the women’s movement to have been fully realised. McRobbie also argues that even where progress can be discerned, it has been framed around neoliberal conceptions of identity and progress (see also Conway, D. 2021, Duggan 2004). For McRobbie, belief in the achievement of feminist, or LGBT, or anti-racist goals has obscured ongoing inequalities and created an inaccurate ‘post-feminist’ belief that there is no longer any need for feminist activism (2008). In LGBTQ+ politics, Ahmed (2012) and Ward (2008) argue that the adoption of diversity and inclusion policies by state and corporate institutions has given an illusion of progress, 285

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and has created career opportunities for privileged, well-educated, and often white diversity and inclusion professionals, who have then marginalised the experiences and needs of the very communities they claim to speak on behalf of. For example, in Ward’s case study of the organisation of Los Angeles Pride, she documents the evolution of a Pride parade that was initially organised by working class, Latinx LGBTQ+ activists, to one that was organised by middle class, white diversity professionals who marginalised working class and Latinx grassroots activists (2008). Schulman, an ACT UP activist and writer, believes that the shift from radical LGBT grassroots activism for social justice, to the celebration of rights ostensibly achieved, marks a process of spatial, political, and social ‘gentrification’ (Schulman 2013). This gentrification was aided by the literal deaths of AIDS activists, an erasure of their histories and activism and a new politics of LGBT identities framed around privilege, conservatism and neoliberalism (Schulman 2013). These tensions are evident in Pride parades in North America, Europe and South Africa, where corporate and institutional participants are often contested and protested against by queer activists, who organise ‘alternative’ Pride parades that oppose the involvement of business and state organisations in LGBT activism (Conway, D. 2022, Wodenshek n.d.). Similarly, critics have pointed to how social justice activists’ discourses, about women’s and LGBT rights, are now also articulated by states and international agencies in the Global North and that these institutional discourses reproduce new colonial hierarchies of civilisation and progress (Rao 2020), impose Western identity categories and exclude local activists in the Global South (Massad 2002, Abu-Assab et al. 2020) and have been used to simplify and obscure ongoing unjust or abusive practices by the Global North (Schulman 2012, Rao 2020). New tensions and dilemmas have emerged about activist identities and tactics now that states, institutions and corporations increasingly claim to be on the side of social justice and forms of activism have been professionalised. As the examples discussed above demonstrate, even activism from ostensibly progressive bases can have a regressive racial, class, or gendered politics. However, activism can have openly regressive aims including racist white supremacists (Blee 2017, Mondon and Winter 2020), anti-feminist men’s rights movements ( Jordan 2019) and ‘alt’ or extreme-right activism (Green 2019). This poses a question for how we understand the relationship between researchers of activism and researchers as activists. In this volume, Roelvink writes about researchers as activists and the importance of work that ‘thinks through and thinks with’ activists and social movements. However, researchers’ beliefs may not align with activists’ aims and activism and social movement politics are not necessarily socially and politically progressive. This may require researchers to be critical and questioning of activists’ selfnarratives. As Blee found when interviewing activists from the Ku Klux Klan, evidence about social activism can be ‘unsavory, dangerous, or deliberately deceptive’ (Blee 1993, p. 596) and as previously discussed, my work on the white South African anti-apartheid activists found that self-narratives were framed to emphasise heroism and obscure ongoing racial exclusion (Conway, D. 2016). For Griffin (1991), uncovering racist and other forms of exclusionary narratives is imperative in order to not also be complicit as a researcher. As Skeggs (2001) contends, the fundamental question is ‘in whose interests?’ do we write. Regressive activism can pose challenges for researchers and it is important to not become complicit in and reproducing exclusionary knowledge, and write to illuminate underlying tensions, marginalisation and silences within social movements. A further consideration for conceptualising the definitions and boundaries of activism and activist identity, are the spaces and means by which activism takes place in the contemporary world. Transnational social movements, the globalisation of media, the web, and the associated role of online social media have had significant impacts on the forms and locations 286

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protest and advocacy can take place. The web, in particular, changes and broadens what is included in the everyday and how communities are formed. As Juris argues, activism now operates in ‘transnational fields of meaning, where action images, discourses and tactics flow from one continent to another via worldwide communication networks in real time’ (2004, pp. 345–346). Social media platforms, particularly Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and messaging apps, such as Whatsapp, have had significant impacts on the organising, dissemination, and impact of protest movements in contexts ranging from the culture of sexism and sexual violence in the film and television industry, to political protests from Tunisia to Hong Kong (Lotan et al. 2011, Wulf et al. 2013, Lee et al. 2017). The web has also enabled new forms of digital activism and enhanced some more traditional forms, such as the online petition platform Change.org and the use of twitter by #MeToo anti-sexual harassment and feminist campaigning (Manikonda et al. 2018, Mendes et al. 2018). The web has allowed people from high profile public figures and celebrities, to hitherto private individuals, to publicly protest and participate in broader forms of political and social advocacy, without having to necessarily physically participate in protest at all. When considering the web as a space for activism, the complexities of assessing activist identities, definitions and impacts come to the fore. Despite the huge significance of these technological changes for activism and social movements, there is not universal online access and Halford and Savage (2010) argue that new categories and intersections of exclusion have been created. The opportunities for activism and political participation afforded by the growth of the worldwide web are widely debated. Castells (2012) argues that this reinvigorates participatory democracy. Gerbaudo (2012, p. 96) contends the web creates a new online space for the ‘politics of the street’. Whereas others contend it has led to a decline of politicisation and of meaningful activism, coining the phrase ‘slacktivism’ or ‘clicktivism’ as an ersatz version of activism (Morozov 2009, Gladwell 2010, White 2010). As with other forms of activism, where the line between meaningful and perfunctory forms of activism can be drawn is debatable. Web based activism can be effective in creating and sustaining communities, creating alternative political and social groupings, and can intersect with and aid forms of physical protest and activism outside of the web, but it can bear no or very loose relations with social and political movements. The web has also been the foremost site for regressive activism and extremist views. While Barack Obama used social media to launch a grassroots funding and mass mobilisation campaign that led him to the Presidency, Donald Trump’s brand of authoritarian populism was fomented in multiple alt or extreme-right web forums and sexist, racist, and homophobic online abuse (Green 2019, Millward and Takhar 2019). Regressive online activism, such as the anti-vaccination (anti-vaxxer) movement has primarily used the web as a means of international community building, co-construction of shared beliefs, and recruitment (Green 2017). Web based activism creates new spaces for activism and potentially for the formation of activist identities and communities. Considering the web as a space for activism reaffirms the importance of conceptualising social movements, activism and activist identity in complex, multiple, and intersectional terms.

Conclusion Activism and activists have been mainly considered by the academic literature on social movements. The contentious politics approach does explore activist motivations, collective identities, and modes of action, but it also exclusively focuses on protest and conceptualises activists as being broadly rational and unitary actors. It is important to consider activist identities as multiple, intersectional and as changing across time and context. Activism should 287

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also be conceptualised as more than exclusively protest. The emotional, supportive and communal roles of activism also need to be acknowledged. As do the complex relationship activism relates to individual identities and life histories. Feminist, post-structural and queer perspectives offer a revealing conceptualisation of activism and activist identity. Both feminist and queer theory broadens our understanding of activism from being just an antagonistic and oppositional practice to one that can include self-affirmation, mutual support, cultural practice and visibility, and playful and joyful social, cultural, and political actions. Conceptualising activism as an identity, one that is proclaimed, perceived, or even eschewed, raises questions about activist practice and what it means to do activism. Activist identity draws from and intersects with other identities and can change and shift across the life course. Activist identity, like activism itself, has to be sustained and developed and this is often done through the affective relationships with other activists and the communal experiences of doing activism. The construction and articulation of activist histories can contribute to broader social power relations, where making claims for visibility, reward, and status because of contribution to past, or present, struggles can advance broader questions of social justice, or they can obscure and inhibit them. The advance of gender, LGBTQ+ and racial rights across many societies raises new questions about the opportunities, risks, and consequences for activists when these rights are perceived as being ‘won’, or co-opted by powerful institutions and mainstreamed by capitalism. Activism should not be a rigidly defined practice. Activism is a practice that goes beyond the everyday and conventional, but activism can also take place in the everyday, with choices about shopping and lifestyle being part of activist praxis. Any analysis of activism should pay close attention to individual identity, life histories and consider activist praxis in the broadest of terms. Finally, activism should be situated in its broader socio-political and spatial contexts. Researchers should not presuppose that activism is always progressive and for social justice, or always take activists’ claims at face value, and researching regressive forms of activism poses challenges. The significance of technological advances, particularly the influence of the web and other digital technologies, have enabled new forms of activism and enhanced some older forms, such as petitioning, but have instated new forms of marginalisation and the possibility for shallow and transient political engagement. Assessing whether we live in a new age of activism, who becomes an activist and why and how best to make a progressive impact on the world is of increasing importance given the challenging times in which we live.

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PART IV

Approaching social change

 


   

   

   
 

24 IMAGINATIONS OF POWER Analysing Possibilities of Change Kiara Worth

Introduction Against a global backdrop of political instability, environmental crises, global health pandemics, increasing disparities between the wealthy and the poor, and rising socioeconomic vulnerability, the world is in urgent need of transformational change. But how does that change come about? The potential for eliciting change requires an understanding of the nature of power, how it operates, and how it can be used to influence decisions. Participation, inclusion, citizenship, and empowerment have become buzzwords of change advocates as citizens increasingly engage in the emerging spaces and opportunities for policy processes. But questions remain as to whether this has evoked a real shift in power, of whether these initiatives have simply re-legitimised the status quo (Cornwall and Brock 2005, Gaventa 2005, Hunjan and Pettit 2011). While the rhetoric of participation and citizen engagement has been broadly accepted, participation at large has failed to constitute an effective strategy for social change (Biggs 1995, Cleaver 1999). It is clear that creating institutional arrangements for participation will not necessarily result in greater inclusion or change. Rather, much will depend on the power relations that influence participation and there is an increasing need to engage with and understand power dynamics. The chapter starts by outlining different accounts of power in mainstream social theory. It then moves on to consider the significance of paradigms of ‘power analysis’ in critical development studies, focussing in particular on the Power Cube model presented by John Gaventa (2005) as a framework for understanding the nature of power.

Understanding power The idea of power is one of the most ancient and omnipresent discussions in philosophy and social thought, with a parade of great names from Plato and Aristotle to Machiavelli and Hobbes to Pareto, Weber, and Foucault devoting their energies to understanding power. Despite this wealth of contribution, the concept of power remains ‘essentially contested’ (Lukes 1974, p. 34), open to markedly different interpretations. It is possible to distinguish between theories of power in terms of some basic conceptual distinctions (see also Barnett 2017, 25–30, Roland 1993). First, and perhaps most commonly, many theories focus on ‘power over’, referring to the ability of some actors to affect the actions and thoughts of others. Second, some approaches DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-28

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emphasise the idea of ‘power to’, emphasising the capacities to act and exercise agency. Third, ‘power with’ refers to the synergy that can emerge through partnerships and collaboration with others, the finding of common ground to build collective strength (see Gaventa 2006, Miller et al. 2006, Pettit 2010, Hunjan and Pettit 2011, Acosta and Pettit 2013). Cutting across these distinctions are fundamental conceptual differences, between, for example, viewing power in terms of resources that can be possessed, or in terms of networks of relations (see Allen 2016). But these distinctions and differentiations should not be thought of as stark, mutually exclusive categorisations. They are better thought of as tools with which to approach the analysis of power. So, for example, the distributive view of power as domination, of power as something wielded by some over others, might well imply forms of cooperation amongst actors to achieve shared goals and realise common interests. In short, the analysis patterns of domination, or the reproduction of advantage, as well as struggles for emancipation or redistribution, require an understanding of the intersection of different aspects of power relations – how ‘powers-to’ are mobilised through capacities to cooperate (‘power-with’) to pursue efforts to get other actors to act in ways that they might not otherwise be inclined to do. As we have seen, power is often seen as something ‘possessed’ by certain actors and not by others. It is often viewed negatively, associated with domination, manipulation, and force, and because power is unequally distributed, it is often associated with conflict (Batliwala 1993, VeneKlasen and Miller 2007, Pettit 2010). The notion that some people have more power than others is one of the hallmark characteristics of our human existence. This is the core idea of the ‘power over’ view, most famously discussed in the account of the ‘three faces’ of power provided by Steven Lukes (1974). Lukes considered how power ranges from the visible forms of power such as conflict or the control of resources, to the more hidden forms of power such as influence and agenda-setting, to the invisible forms of power that relate to hegemony and social compliance through shaping identities and subjectivities. The idea of power having these different ‘faces’ is rooted in a conception of ‘power over’, or power as domination. The first ‘face’ of power refers to the way in which some actors have the ability to get others to do what they might not otherwise do (Dahl 1957). Power in this view is understood as the product of conflicts, controlled by the exploitation of resources to effect behaviour. Decisionmaking is a focal point of investigation, and power is understood in relation to the question of ‘who participates, who gains and loses, and who prevails in decision-making’ (Polsby 1963, p. 235). The second ‘face’ of power refers to the ability that some actors might have to prevent issues and actors from joining the discussion in the first place. Power is not only reflected in the embodiment of concrete actions or decisions, but also in the extent to which barriers to air conflicts are created or reinforced, often seen as ‘non-decision-making’ (Bachrach and Baratz 1970, p. 642). Although there is a clear distinction between the first and second faces of power, both ideas are characterised by a conflictual relationship between agents advancing their selfdefined interests against the interests of others. Lukes’ (1974, p. 25) proposed third ‘face’ of power refers to the ways in which systems can be ‘mobilised, recreated and reinforced in ways that are neither consciously chosen nor the intended result of particular individuals’ choices’. Lukes suggested that through the socially structured and culturally patterned behaviour of groups and the practices of institutions, those in power prevented conflicts from arising by influencing consciousness and awareness of the grievances that shaped them. For that reason, focussing only on observable conflicts and decisions was a somewhat limited way of analysing power (Lukes 1974, p. 27): 296

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Is it not the supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial? Lukes was concerned to emphasise the relationship between power and ideology, highlighting how socialised consent prevents people from questioning or envisioning any possibilities for changing these relationships or addressing injustices, and that ‘processes of socialisation, culture and ideology perpetuate exclusion and inequality by defining what is normal and acceptable’ (Acosta and Pettit 2013, p. 14). This ‘radical’ view of power that has affinities with a variety of approaches in critical social thought, including themes drawing on Gramsci’s account of hegemony and Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and social reproduction (see Bourdieu 1990, Kipfer 2002). Although subject to various criticisms (see Allen 2009, Hayward 2000), the model of power as domination that is central to Lukes’ account of the three faces of power has the advantage of identifying key mechanisms of power – the means and techniques of how power is obtained, shaped, and exercised. This suggests a more precise, practicable analytical focus than that suggested by Mann’s (2011) differentiation of ideological, military, economic, and political sources of power. From the perspectives of the first face of power, power includes among its various ‘instruments’ two fairly straightforward mechanisms – the threat of coercion and the promise of reward. If power is primarily understood by who succeeds in the resolution of key issues, different mechanisms and political resources, such as jobs, influence, votes, or threat of sanctions, can be brought into the decision-making arena, and how well those resources are wielded can determine the outcome of the game. The perspective of the second face of power adds to these resources a mobilisation of bias. Bias is wielded not only in decision-making arenas, but is also sustained through the non-decisions that suppress challenges to the interests of decision makers, which is essentially a form of de-politicisation. This can be seen in how existing norms, precedents, or rules of procedure are maintained, including discrediting those challenging authorities. From the perspective of the third face of power, the focus is on ways of shaping people’s sense of identity, necessities, and possibility. These mechanisms shape subjectivity, the social identities that define how people engage within the hierarchy of possibilities and whether this empowers or disempowers action. These are mechanisms that render competing interests as invisible. Understanding different mechanisms of power is central to conducting power analyses, which seeks to explain how and why power operates in the way it does. It is through this sort of analysis that possibilities for challenging hegemonic power relations can be identified, opening new entry points for transformational action.

Analysing the possibilities of power Creating change and pursuing transformational development means changing the configurations of power, particularly those that operate through relations of domination. Changing power relations to make them more inclusive or pro-poor, as example, requires a clear understanding of how power operates within a given context, and this is the aim of power analysis. Analysing power is about deepening our understanding of social problems, navigating the different dimensions of power to understand how issues are shaped and what can be undertaken to achieve the desired social change (Hunjan and Pettit 2011, Acosta and 297

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Pettit 2013). Failure to deal with the complexities of power can lead to poor strategic choices and missed opportunities, and the ‘missing link of power’ (VeneKlasen 2007, p. 40) is increasingly stressed as a key factor undermining change efforts (VeneKlasen and Miller 2007). Power analysis plays an important role in assessing approaches to achieving change and can be undertaken by using a series of frameworks that help to interpret power in different ways. As such, power analysis can be a tool to understand the power dynamics within given situations, identifying positive forms of power that can be mobilised to claim or enter spaces and challenge forms of power, within and across levels of engagement (Pettit 2013). The methods for conducting power analyses vary considerably depending on their applied context and range from individual exercises for community development initiatives to national analyses that inform country strategies. At a community level, the range of tools is extensive, offering an assortment of techniques to discuss often personal and sensitive relationships to power. For example, in Critical webs of power and change, Chapman et al. (2005) suggest analysing power by identifying and mapping major actors and their real and expressed interests, where primary targets are decision-makers with the power to address an issue, and secondary targets are individuals without power, yet are close to the primary target. In the Power flower, VeneKlasen and Miller (2007) look at the more personal relationships an individual has with those in power and describes dominant social identities both collectively and individually. In contrast, in a Combined approach to political economy and power analysis, a book aimed at international development strategists, Acosta and Pettit (2013) offer tools for examining institutional and economic power relations between domestic and international, government and non-governmental actors. Similarly, Pettit’s (2013) Power analysis: a practical guide, is addressed to development practitioners working at a national level and operating within power dynamics that influence development strategies aimed at actualising national government policies. A key theme emerging from across this literature in development studies is the idea that the analysis of power requires an examination of the intersection of different dimensions and scales of power. It is this form of analysis that is core to the work of John Gaventa, and specifically to the framework enshrined in his model of the Power Cube.

The Power Cube Gaventa’s Power Cube model (see Figure 24.1) suggests that citizen action is shaped, bounded, and enabled by three dimensions that require further analysis: by the forms of power operative in a particular field; by the places and levels of power, referring to the geographical scales at which power relations are organised; and in relation to the spaces of engagement that are available for citizen action. The power cube represents a dynamic account of how power operates and offers a means of evaluating the intersection of aspects of power relations in order to identify the transformative possibilities of participation in various spaces (Luttrell et al. 2007). The first focus of power analysis suggested by the Power Cube model is upon the forms of power, and here Gaventa closely follows Lukes’ model of ‘three faces’ of power (see also Digeser 1992). Accordingly, analysis of visible forms of power focuses on the conventional understanding of power negotiated through formal rules, structures, institutions, and processes. Second, attention to hidden power focuses on the control over decision-making, on the way the powerful maintain their influence through the mobilisation of bias and how they control the agenda of decision-making to often exclude the concerns of less powerful groups. Hidden forms of power will take into account elements such as knowledge, the control of information, and the use of symbols to influence decision-making. The third aspect 298

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Place

Global

National

Claimed/created Local

Invited Closed Visible

Hidden

s

ce

a Sp

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Power

Figure 24.1

Gaventa’s power cube

Source: Gaventa (2005).

of analysis focuses on invisible forms of power, attending to how people view their place in society in ways that prevent existing power relations from being questioned. The emphasis on invisible form of power incorporates notions of identity, particularly how people’s location and sense of belonging has influenced their consciousness and perceptions of their interests (Dixon and Durrheim 2000, Woodward 2005), and how the dominant may systematically distort these perceptions of interests. A core focus of the broader field of analysis from which Gaventa’s model emerges is not just with forms of power, but with identifying where social, political, and economic power resides (Cornwall 2008). One aspect of this question, and the second dimension of the Power Cube, focuses on the relations between local, national, and global arenas as locations of power (see Place in Figure 24.1). Understanding the interaction between these places and levels of power is important because the possibilities for citizen action and community engagement will be affected by whether and how power is legitimised nationally, how it is scaled downwards to localities, and how it is distributed across global scales. The differentiation of analysis across these scales is important because the aim is not only to help build participatory action at different levels, but also to ‘promote the democratic and accountable vertical links across actors at each level’ (Gaventa 2005, p. 14). It is the aim that is crucial to the third aspect of the Power Cube model, the analysis and assessment of the potential for agency that inheres in various spaces of engagement. Gaventa describes these as ‘opportunities, moments and channels where citizens can act to potentially affect policies, discourses, decisions and relationships which affect their lives’ (Gaventa 2005, p. 11). While spaces of engagement can offer opportunity for citizen engagement, they are also limited by their own boundaries – spaces are bounded yet permeable areas (Hickey and Mohan 2005). In this respect, power is understood as the ‘network of social boundaries that delimit fields of possible action’ (Hayward 1991, p. 2). For this reason, 299

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spaces of engagement are never neutral; since institutions are the embodiment of power, the spaces created by them are inherently political in nature (Cornwall 2002, Mohanty 2004). When analysing power, it is important to determine how the practices of participation were created, with whose interests, and under what terms of engagement. Accordingly, Gaventa identifies three types of spaces of engagement. First, there are provided or ‘closed spaces’, spaces controlled by an elite group where decisions are made without the need for broader consultation or involvement. Many decision-making spaces are closed and many civil society efforts focus on opening up these spaces to accommodate for greater public involvement, transparency, and accountability. Second, those in power might create ‘invited spaces’ for outsiders to share opinions, often as a result of an attempt to increase legitimacy or due to external pressure. Third, ‘created spaces’ emerge when less powerful actors act more autonomously to claim a space either from or against those in power. These spaces provide a chance for marginalised, poor or excluded actors to develop their own agendas and create solidarity without the influence of power holders – to cultivate forms of ‘power-to’ and ‘power-with’ through which to challenge and transform existing power relations of domination (see also Chambers 2006). By developing conceptual distinctions between these three elements of the operation of power, the Power Cube model provides a more nuanced account of how forms of ‘powerover’ actually operate in practice. It does so in order to allow for the exploration of how laws and institutions may be perpetuating recessive norms and values, but also to identify opportunities for genuinely transformative action. While there is a tendency for the boxes in the model to be applied as static categories, the value of the Power Cube approach framework lies in its ability to promote critical reflection about the relationships involved, not simply to categorise the relationships present. The Power Cube should be seen as an ‘illustration of concepts and sets of relationships that are constantly changing and dynamic – the spaces of engagement and forms of power are constantly shifting and in relation to each other’ (Gaventa 2005, p. 19, 2006). Transformational change requires a critical examination of the beliefs, systems, and institutions that govern decision-making, and therefore analysing power using Gaventa’s model offers the opportunity to identify new possibilities for challenging hegemonic power relations. For practitioners of social change, this type of power analysis opens new entry points for analysing the possibilities for transformational change.

Conclusion In order to adequately respond to the socio-economic challenges faced today, transformational change is needed. This chapter has argued that a critical examination of the beliefs, systems, and institutions that govern decision-making is an essential element of the analysis of power relations. Identifying the possibilities for change requires an understanding of the nature of power, how it operates, and how it can be used to influence decisions. It has been argued that Gaventa’s Power Cube model is an effective tool for analysing the relationships between existing power relations and the possibilities of changing those relationships. Gaventa suggests citizen action is shaped by three things: the forms of power, the places and levels at which power operates, and the spaces of engagement. Using this tool enables practitioners to critically reflect on how power dynamics are constantly shifting in relation to each other. It is an approach that enables theories of power developed in academic debates, including canonical models of the three faces of power, to be translated into modes of analysis oriented

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to identifying real potentials for engaged agency, and thereby contributing to the pursuit of transformational change.

References Acosta, A.M. and Pettit, J., 2013. Practice guide: a combined approach to political economy and power analysis. Discussion note prepared for the Swiss Development Cooperation. Work in progress paper: SDC-IDS Contribution Providing Support to SDC’s Democratization, Decentralization and Local Governance Network, (May), 23. Allen, J., 2016. Topologies of power. London: Sage. Allen, J., 2009. Three spaces of power: territory, networks, plus a topological twist in the tale of domination and authority. Journal of Power, 2 (2), 197–212. Bachrach, P. and Baratz, M.S., 1970. Power and poverty: theory and practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barnett, C., 2017. The priority of injustice: locating democracy in critical theory. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Batliwala, S., 1993. Women’s empowerment in South Asia: concepts and practices. New Delhi: Asian Pacific Bureau of Adult Education. Biggs, S., 1995. Participatory technology development: a critique of the new orthodoxy. Durban: Olive. Bourdieu, P., 1990. The logic of practice. 6th edition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chambers, R., 2006. Transforming power: from zero-sum to win-win? IDS Bulletin, 37 (6), 99–110. Chapman, J., et al., 2005. Critical webs of power and change. Resource pack for planning, reflection and learning in people-centred advocacy. Johannesburg: ActionAid International. Cleaver, F., 1999. Paradoxes of participation: questioning participatory approaches to development. Journal of International Development, 11 (4), 597–612. Cornwall, A., 2002. Making spaces, changing places: situating participation in development. Working Paper 170. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Cornwall, A., 2008. Unpacking ‘participation’ models: meanings and practices. Community Development Journal, 43 (3), 269–283. Cornwall, A. and Brock, K., 2005. What do buzzwords do for development policy? A critical look at ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘poverty reduction’. Third World Quarterly, 26 (7), 1043–1060. Dahl, R., 1957. The concept of power. Behavioral Science, 2 (3), 201–215. Digeser, P., 1992. The fourth face of power. The Journal of Politics, 54 (4), 977–1007. Dixon, J. and Durrheim, K., 2000. Displacing place-identity: a discursive approach to locating self and other. British Journal of Social Psychology, 39 (1), 27–44. Gaventa, J., 2005. Reflections on the uses of the ‘power cube’ approach for analyzing the spaces, places and dynamics of civil society participation and engagement. Sussex: MFP Breed Network. Gaventa, J., 2006. Finding the spaces for change: a power analysis. IDS Bulletin, 37 (6), 23–33. Hayward, C. R., 2000. De-facing power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hayward, C.R., 1991. De-facing power. Polity, 31 (1), 1–22. Hickey, S. and Mohan, G., 2005. Relocating participation within a radical politics of development. Development and Change, 36 (2), 237–262. Hunjan, R. and Pettit, J., 2011. Power: a practical guide for facilitating social change. Fife: Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. Kipfer, S., 2002. Urbanization, everyday life and the survival of capitalism: Lefebvre, Gramsci and the problematic of hegemony. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 13 (2), 117–149. Lukes, S., 1974. Power: a radical view. London: British Sociological Association. Luttrell, C., et al., 2007. The Power Cube explained. Empowerment note 3. The poverty-wellbeing platform. Mann, M., 2011. Power in the twenty-first century. Cambridge: Polity Press. Miller, V., et al. 2006. Making change happen: Power [online], 3. Just associates. Available from: https:// www.powercube.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/making_change_happen_3.pdf [Accessed 9 December 2021]. Mohanty, R., 2004. Linkages, conflicts and dynamics: institutional spaces and participation in local forest management in India. IDS Bulletin, 35 (2), 26–32.

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25 EVERYDAY RESISTANCE Theorising how the ‘Weak’ change the World Richard Ballard

Introduction In his 1985 text Weapons of the weak, James Scott proposed a way to rethink prevailing understandings of resistance. His research on peasants in Malaysia argued that we should not limit our understanding of resistance to instances of open rebellion, and that we should recognise the ways that subordinate people individually assert their interests. Their ordinary weapons included ‘foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on’ (Scott 1985, p. xvi). Scott argued that, compared to open rebellion, practices of everyday resistance are, in many contexts, more ‘significant and … effective over the long run’ (Scott 1985, p. xvi). He described everyday resistance as a kind of class struggle and considered it a social movement even though it has ‘no formal organization, no formal leaders, no manifestoes, no dues, no name, and no banner’ (Scott 1985, p. 35). Along with other sources of inspiration, these ideas set off a vast line of research, showing that supposedly ‘weak’ people – such as peasants, slaves, workers, women, indigenous peoples, beneficiaries of development, targets of peacebuilding, informal traders, and slum dwellers – can in fact shape their worlds and the world more generally. For all the enthusiasm with which this thesis has been met, it has also functioned as a lightning rod for further debate. Adherents of everyday resistance defined resistance with respect to the political consciousness behind the conduct of subordinate people, with certain intentions elevating low-key insubordination to the status of class struggle. Many others on the left define resistance with respect to its political implications and suggested that individualised ‘resistance’ is not capable, on its own terms, of altering the social position of subordinate people (e.g., Katz 2004). It is instructive to revisit these fault lines for the purposes of this volume because they are indicative of quite different paradigms of social change and political agency. Scott accepted many of the limitations of everyday resistance from the outset, but questioned the possibility of collectivised resistance and social change as idealised in many varieties of the left. He countered that even if everyday resistance seems disappointing for those who seek collective resistance, actually existing resistance does not assume the form of open rebellions. More recent studies on the everyday tend to be less fixated on whether or not subordinate people can use insubordination to sufficiently redeem themselves from their unjust DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-29

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predicaments (e.g., Holston 2008, Bayat 2010, Simone 2011, Streule et al. 2020). They recognise that the consciousness, conduct, and outcomes of society’s disenfranchised populations are heterogeneous and contradictory, and that they cannot be idealised as something akin to class struggle or a social movement. The intentions of marginalised people might not always be counter-hegemonic as such, but the everyday sphere is nevertheless implicated in enormous social transitions, producing societies that elites or authorities would not have chosen. And even though marginalised do have sway over the course of events, this does not, in itself, resolve social justice imperatives. The first part of this chapter presents the concept of everyday resistance as the intersection of four claims: that oppressed people do have agency, that their agency can be individual rather than collective, that change is achieved autonomously by subordinate groups rather than through the state, and that acts of resistance are defined through intentions. The second part examines reactions to everyday resistance, showing that its efforts to correct for the conceptual passivity of oppressed people are something of an overcorrection in that it presumes resistance to be a default condition of the everyday sphere. It shows how the everyday sphere has been the object of ongoing interest, but many contemporary studies on the everyday do not seek a linear relationship between intentionality and outcomes.

Theorising everyday resistance This section locates the concept of everyday resistance within four key claims. In developing each of these claims, the concept of everyday resistance is aligned to broader literatures, meaning that each claim is not unique to the theory, and many who have responded critically to it are sympathetic to at least some of its core claims even if they do not sign up to the full combination.

Claim 1: oppressed people do have agency One of the most widespread tropes of the social sciences is that marginalised people do have agency. For example, in the words of de Certeau, dominated people are not ‘passive or docile’ and ‘[e]veryday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others’ (de Certeau 1984, p. xii). Formulations along these lines have echoed through the decades. To take a more recent example, Gupta stresses the ‘importance of writing against an anthropology of abjectness’ by recognising that people ‘were not just passive or docile victims and did not consider or represent themselves as such’ (Gupta 2012, p. 25). We might understand such assertions as a reaction to what Ortner terms ‘theories of “constraint”’ that characterised strands of social science thinking until the 1970s. These theories understood that ‘[h]uman behavior was shaped, molded, ordered, and defined by external social and cultural forces and formations: by culture, by mental structures, by capitalism’ (Ortner 2006, p. 1). In reaction to this, the trope of agency emerged, in which studies sought to give agency back. The historian Lynn Thomas characterises this move as ‘agency as argument’ (2016, p. 326). This revisionism within the social sciences coincided with resurgent liberalism from the 1970s, which, from an entirely different ideological vantage, also championed the paradox of the meek prevailing against the strong. Liberals argue that power and choice should not be the preserve of a limited elite. Power was not absolute, and ‘Davids’ could vanquish ‘Goliaths’ (e.g., Gladwell 2013). Liberalism anticipates that, once overbearing states and autocrats are out of the way, there is a generalised capacity of individuals to take responsibility ‘for their own fate’ (Li 2009, p. 81). C.K. Prahalad’s book The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid: eradicating 304

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poverty through profits opens with the following argument: ‘[i]f we stop thinking of the poor as victims or as a burden and start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up’ (2005, p. 1, see Roy 2010 for a critical commentary). For historical materialists, the capacity of individuals to find paths to personal wellbeing in the terms set out by liberalism did not, in fact, exist for large populations. Classical Marxism imagined a very different kind of agency. What marginalised groups most needed was to acquire an awareness of the unjust terms to which they were being subjected and to take action to replace the unfair status quo with a fair one. The genesis of social change is the manifestation of a class for itself, members of the proletariat who understand that they are being exploited and organise to dismember exploitative economic relationships. However, as Marx recognised from the outset, this outcome was not inevitable. Exploited groups could be mystified by a false consciousness which causes them, paradoxically, to believe that their oppression was legitimate. Even if they understood the unfairness to which they were being subjected, they may consent to it because it is pragmatic for them to do so (Gramsci 1971). The result is a class in itself, a set of exploited individuals that is yet to become a self-aware political force. When collective action is absent, despite conditions that would imply the need for it, historical materialists might assume the absence of a politicised class for itself, and the presence of an apolitical class in itself. This paralysed large numbers of people, rendering them unable (in theory) of responding to the injustices heaped upon them. In the west, history-from-below Marxisms sought to recover the place of marginal people in accounts historical change from the 1960s (Thompson 1966). In the colonial and postcolonial world, subaltern studies developed a parallel project from the 1980s, arguing that historical accounts had focused so intently on elites that they had neglected a vast swathe of important non-elite actors (Guha 1982). The ideas of Foucault, too, had been used to argue that power was a generalised property across society (Cresswell 2000). And an increasingly humanist left regarded struggles by the oppressed ‘to recover their lost sense of humanity’ as a profound response to processes of dehumanisation (Freire 2005, p. 44). It was in this milieu that Scott questioned what he understood to be the prevailing assumptions by Marxists that dominated groups would be fatalist and passive (also see Sivaramakrishnan 2005). Scott argued that Antonio Gramsci’s ideas, written in the early 1930s, ‘have been invoked to account for lower-class quiescence, particularly in rural societies’ (1985, p. 39). Against this thinking he argued that dominated groups were alive to their predicament and they were taking action. To be sure, Scott’s characterisation of Gramsci’s thinking does not do justice to the rich explorations of consciousness and political action by Gramsci (1971) and many of those who were inspired by him. Nevertheless, Scott understood his project as breaking with expectations that the normal political mode of peasants would be one of quiescence. In order to achieve this argument, he developed a second claim that challenged standing notions of resistance.

Claim 2: the agency of oppressed people can be individual rather than collective Scott argued that the reason that much of the left had failed to recognise the agency of subordinate people is that they considered resistance to be collective by definition, and therefore defined out the many forms of resistance that were not collective. The central place of collective action in accounts of social change stems from the logic that individuals – by themselves – are powerless, but they could amplify their power by pooling and coordinating their efforts in a collective. Workers could flex their political muscle by striking, thereby exposing the 305

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vulnerability of their employers and raising the possibility of overthrowing bourgeois rule altogether. Some today continue to seek a ‘unity of will and purpose around a global socialist project’ (Neilson 2018, p. 290). Beyond transitions to socialism, radical collectives seem instrumental in many historical transitions. Revolutions in France and America in the late 1700s inaugurated democracy itself. In the twentieth century, civil disobedience and direct action extended voting rights to groups that had been excluded on the basis of their gender or race. Liberation movements encouraged the departure of colonial rulers. Collective action in the present generation mobilises against autocratic regimes and has elevated social and policy debates on economic inequality, marriage equality, police violence against racial minorities, sexual assault, biodiversity loss, and climate change. The weight of these and countless other examples draw an association between people power and collective action. Yet, interest in collectives can itself constitute a kind of political fetishism (Denning 2021). Scott (1985) argued that we over-accentuate the role of actors in events such as revolutions, rebellions and insurrections, presuming with hindsight that those involved knew that they would upend the social order and redirect history (see also Kerkvliet 2009, Welch and Yates, this volume). He proposed that we should understand such events as the outcomes of many contingencies rather than the result of the will of heroic figures of history. Moreover, as writers on everyday agency recognise, open political mobilisation is not always possible. Slaves and peasants would be crushed if they engaged in ‘open defiance’ (Scott 2012, p. 11). Authoritarian governments such as the Brazil’s military dictatorship of 1964–1985 (Holston 2008) and various undemocratic regimes in North Africa and the Middle East render activism both ineffective and dangerous (Bayat 2010). Many societies are relatively free of open collective dissent for long stretches of time. Yet, according to everyday resistance authors, the absence of such moments does not mean that there was an absence of vernacular critique of, or resistance to, the status quo. Given what they saw as the tendency to over-attribute social change to collective action, and that political organising is simply not possible in many contexts, writers on everyday resistance urge us to recognise more disbursed kinds of people power. The power of the powerful is not absolute; those supposedly under their control can evade this control in various ways. They can drag their feet, or pretend to comply when they are not fully complying (Scott 1985). Peasants plant crops other than those stipulated by authorities, or farm using methods other than officially sanctioned methods. When authorities plan for a stabilised working class, workers opt for casualised or informal work to retain some control over their work life. Workers skip days of work. Marginalised people can sabotage the plans of employers or authorities. They can steal. Those with low incomes find ways to ensure their own survival, by improvising and getting by. They produce counterfeit documents in order to access opportunities generated by the state. Residents squat on land that they have not formally purchased or rented. They construct homes for which they do not have formal approval. They set up enterprises in locations where they have no permission to trade. As a result, the intentions of employers, politicians, officials, and other elites to control the way in which peasants farm, how workers work, where people live and trade, can be rendered unenforceable. This is not to say that these elites might not try to force their will, and they certainly do at times. But they might also, equally, rewrite their rules, turn a blind eye, or just give up. For proponents of everyday resistance, what is characteristic of these activities is that they are individual and private rather than collective and coordinated. They are ‘outside the visible spectrum of what usually passes for political activity’ (Scott 2012, p. xx), and ‘[t]hey require little or no coordination or planning; they often represent a form of individual self-help; and 306

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they typically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority or with elite norms’ (Scott 1985, p. 29). Outwardly, in fact, they are often sufficiently compliant with rules to avoid falling foul of them. As such, individualised resistance is generally covert. Moreover, their politics is not one primarily directed at trying to reform or replace the state. In this lies the third claim of theories of everyday resistance.

Claim 3: change is realised autonomously Many frameworks of political contestation anticipate organised popular pressure leading to social reconfigurations, for example, installing a new political regime that would bring about a just society, or by influencing the existing state to follow fairer policies. Although popular pressure is integral, so too is an authority that would act on behalf of popular forces to bring about a more equitable distribution of society’s burdens and benefits. These understandings of social change have been the subject of much debate between various ideological positions of the left. Roberto Unger, the theorist of radical democracy, argued against the idea that change would be deferred to a moment when the present unjust society would be replaced by a future just society (Unger 2001, see Barnett, this volume). He and other radical democrats believed that social change would be a permanent struggle rather than a once-off event, and that the struggle for justice should occur across many fronts in the present society. Anarchist frameworks, meanwhile, do not hang their understanding of social change only on the replacement of an unjust state with a just one, or in bending existing states to be fairer. Rather they consider everyday life to be an important site for social change, for example, where subordinate people lead lives that are autonomous from the social processes that marginalise them (see Ince, this volume). Scott (2012) identifies himself as an anarchist, and therefore does not idealise social change as a regime change or transforming state behaviour to be more just. Rather, social change is a grassroots, bottom-up, everyday process. He expresses disillusionment with revolutions, arguing that to the limited extent that they are possible, they are very often not emancipatory (Scott 2013). He does not see states as the champions of social justice; they parasitise everyday life in order to serve their own interests (see Williams, this volume). Even with supposedly progressive intentions, he claims that states have immiserising effects on ordinary people because their central plans oversimplify complex societies. He valorises self-government and admired a hundred million people of the uplands of southeast Asia for evading full incorporation into nation-states (Scott 2009). These ideas can be situated within anti-statist tendencies within the left in general, which understood the influence of states as necessarily dystopic, and saw the locus of social progress as the popular, grassroots, and everyday sphere. Scott argues that ‘seeing like an anarchist’ allows us to notice things that would otherwise escape us (Scott 2012, p. xii). We would recognise, for example, that marginalised individuals engage in ‘cooperation without hierarchy or state rule’ and they have – like anarchists – a ‘tolerance for confusion and improvisation that accompanies social learning, and confidence in spontaneous cooperation and reciprocity’. In this model, resistance is not a calculated politics, led by a vanguard, to overthrow the source of domination per se (Sivaramakrishnan 2005). Nevertheless it is ‘a distinctive behaviour with far reaching implications’ (Scott 1985, p. 38). It contributes to change insofar as it renegotiates norms and adjusts the balance of power in immediate relationships. It provides a degree of friction and redefines their paths of least resistance. Subordinate people can ‘nibble away’ at policies by simply ignoring them, evading them or doing something other than what is prescribed by them (Scott 1985, p. xvi). Holloway argues that, ‘social change is not produced by activists, however important activism 307

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may (or may not) be in the process. Social change is rather the outcome of the barely visible transformation of the daily activities of millions of people’ (Holloway 2010, p. 12). To be sure, politically desirable outcomes from everyday resistance are not inevitable. Scott argued that attempts by peasants ‘to “nibble away” may backfire, they may marginally alleviate exploitation, they may force a renegotiation of the limits of appropriation, they may change the course of subsequent development, and they may more rarely help bring the system down’ (Scott 1985, p. 301). Resistance is not defined by the realisation of intentions per se. As Chandra puts it ‘resistance may, as we know all too well, fail to alter existing social arrangements in particular instances, but the failure of resistance ought to be differentiated from the failure to resist’ (Chandra 2015, p. 565). This points us to the fourth claim of the theory, which is that it defines resistance through intentions.

Claim 4: acts of resistance are defined through intentions For Scott, acts are defined as resistance insofar as there is ‘evidence for the intention behind the act’ (Scott 1985, p. 290). Accordingly, resistance can be defined in terms of any act(s) by member(s) of a subordinate class that is or are intended either to mitigate or deny claims (for example, rents, taxes, prestige) made on that class by superordinate classes (for example, landlords, large farmers, the state) or to advance its own claims (for example, work, land, charity, respect) vis-a-vis those superordinate classes. (Scott 1985, p. 290) This emphasis on the intentionality of action is widely shared amongst theorists of resistance. For example, according to Routledge, resistance is ‘any action, imbued with intent, that attempts to challenge, change, or retain particular circumstances relating to societal relations, processes, and/or institutions’ (Routledge 1997, cited in Meth 2010). Kerkvliet states that resistance ‘involves intentionally contesting claims by people in superordinate positions or intentionally advancing claims at odds with what superiors want’ (Kerkvliet 2009, p. 233). And, according to Chandra, to resist is to ‘minimally apprehend the conditions of one’s subordination, to endure or withstand those conditions in everyday life, and to act with sufficient intention and purpose to negotiate power relations from below in order to rework them in a more favourable or emancipatory direction’ (Chandra 2015, p. 566). Scott differentiated between intentions that can be acted upon and those that are not practical, at least for the time being. Whereas a person may dream of a ‘millennial kingdom of justice may never occur’, their most immediate and practical purpose is to survive (Scott 1985, p. 38). Everyday activities such as survival help Scott write against the implications of a passive class in itself, insisting that ‘[h]owever partial or imperfect their understanding of the situation, [the exploited] are gifted with intentions and values and purposefulness that condition their acts’ (Scott 1985, p. 38). These ideas found resonance in fields such as post-development. Escobar stated that we should allow for the possibility that a survival strategy might also be a ‘political strategy that challenges the social order’ (Escobar 1995, p. 187).

Reactions to, and critiques of, the theory of everyday resistance The claims of everyday resistance – in combination or by themselves – have been debated extensively. The second part of this chapter summarises three kinds of reactions: first, that scholars’ expectations of resistance are, in part, a projection of scholars’ own hopes; second, 308

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that everyday resistance does not offer an adequate politics for transcending fundamental causes of injustice; and third, that defining resistance through intentionality flattens the complex connections between intentions, actions, and outcomes.

Reaction I: wishful thinking Everyday resistance is part of a broad set of frameworks that promise a corrective: to recognise the agency of the supposedly powerless people and to elevate forgotten history-makers in accounts of social change. However in doing so, critics feel that such efforts can romanticise the resilience of subordinate people. For example, in the field of urban studies, Ananya Roy (2011) is troubled by the way in slums have been described in up-beat terms. This is not to deny the importance of conferring recognition ‘on spaces of poverty and forms of popular agency that often remain invisible and neglected in the archives and annals of urban theory’ (Roy 2011, p. 224). However, where the subaltern once marked ‘the limits of archival recognition’, this figure now functions as, necessarily, an ‘agent of change’ (Roy 2011, p. 227). Narratives of subaltern urbanism conclude too readily that the thriving life of informal districts somehow provides an answer to the moral challenge of these poor residential areas. She notes that these areas, and their inhabitants, do not only require recognition. As Spivak established in her response to subaltern studies, the discovery of ‘politically canny subalterns’ (Spivak 1988, p. 275) can tell us less about those represented in the research and more about the sensibilities and inclinations of their authors (also see Barnett 1997). Spivak was suspicious of the ‘the first-world intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves’ (Spivak 1988, p. 292). The archives do not in fact give us very good access to forgotten voices, and – to the extent that they can be unearthed – they are drowned out by the ‘ontological certainties’ of those who represent subalterns (Griffiths 2018, p. 304, also see Spivak 2005). Imaginaries of resistance do not simply correct for past myopia, they overcorrect insofar as they will there to be resistance, agency, or power. The wishful thinking of those seeking to reanimate the subaltern can put words in their mouths and infer meaning to their actions. Mbembe questions the assumption that ‘economic and material conditions of existence find an automatic reflection and expression in a subject’s consciousness’, and notes the way in which everything is considered said once it has been shown that … the dominated … have a rich and complex consciousness; that they are capable of challenging their oppression; and that power, far from being total, is endlessly contested, deflated, and reappropriated by its ‘targets.’ (Mbembe 2001, p. 5) In a similar vein, Johnson argues that although the analysis of agency has done important work in his field of social history and slavery studies, he is concerned by efforts to ‘give slaves back their agency’ (2003, p. 114). This displays a kind of ‘good will’ on the part of those using these tropes, often white, who wish to redeem the oppressed, black slaves, and indeed to redeem the present moment of the ‘sins of the past’ ( Johnson 2003, p. 121). He concludes that some historians are fixated on the way in which slaves were agents within their own lives and they conflate any activity by slaves with resistance, even though they remained enslaved. Johnson asks, ‘when historians argue that day-to-day resistance posed an “implicit threat” to the system of slavery they leave answered the question of how isolated acts of sabotage and subterfuge might have grown into an explicit threat to slavery’ ( Johnson 2003, p. 116). The 309

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ontological certainties of researchers are not limited to the search for counter hegemonic resistance. Historiography on slavery can reflect a ‘liberal notion of self hood’ – characterised by ‘independence’, ‘choice’, and ‘self-determination’ ( Johnson 2003, p. 115). These reactions reveal the way in which efforts to correct for past blindness can introduce new blindness. One essentialism – that the poor are passive – is replaced with another essentialism – the poor resist (Bayat 2010). In its efforts to pronounce subalterns not-justpassive-victims and identify distinctive behaviours that qualify as resistance, these narratives can once again flatten the heterogeneity of the consciousness and conduct of subalterns (Spivak 1988, Roy 2011). Even to the extent that subordinate people are demonstrably insubordinate, many critics have noted that this does not do enough to provide real costs for elites that would transform society. This is developed in the second set of reactions.

Reaction II: insubordination does not amount to a complete change project The emphasis on intentionality in everyday resistance suggests a knowing response from those bearing the burdens of society. However, although this is analogous to a class for itself with respect to the consciousness of actors, those who use the notion of a class for itself in more conventional ways would stress the importance of a collaborative effort to confront oppression and exploitation. Such frameworks define resistance not only through intentions, but also through their capacity to bring about social change. Henri Lefebvre anticipated this in a discussion on the shanty towns of Latin America. On one hand, spaces that are appropriated by working class urban populations ‘manifest a social life far more intense than the bourgeois districts of the cities’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 373), and even though these are deprived and unplanned spaces they ‘so effectively order their space – houses, walls, public spaces – as to elicit a nervous admiration’ (Lefebvre 1991, pp. 373–374). Their existence appears to generate an externality to the bourgeois city where there is a resistance. However, he continues, ‘[t]his impression is nonetheless mistaken’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 374) because dominant space (the kind of space produced by capitalism) has the capacity to contain, neutralise, and absorb these originally external spaces. Resistance and agency, in other words, is significant not only with respect to where it comes from – the intentionality of actors – but what it can do. In her response to everyday resistance, the geographer Cindi Katz argued that a great deal of the activity counted as everyday resistance is ‘simply not enough to transform the social relations of oppression and exploitation that are the cornerstone of so many people’s daily lives’ (Katz 2004, p. 241). This is a point that Scott conceded from the outset, but for Katz, this raises the question of whether survival activities should be considered resistance at all. She proposes a broader vocabulary for everyday conduct. People engage in ‘resilience’, finding ways of getting by despite processes that undermine their ability to get by. Although people are able to sustain themselves through these acts of resilience, these acts also help ‘sustain capitalist accumulation elsewhere’ (Katz 2004, p. 245). Alongside resilience, Katz proposes that people also engage in projects of ‘reworking’, in which they recognise the ‘problematic conditions’ (Katz 2004, p. 247) to which they are being subjected and engage in efforts to make their lives more workable. These have the effect of redistributing resources and ameliorating the structural constraints on their lives without necessarily challenging hegemonic arrangements. For Katz, resistance specifically refers to practices that ‘draw on and produce a critical consciousness to confront and redress historically and geographically specific conditions of oppression and exploitation’ (Katz 2004, p. 251). These acts are more specific than surviving against the odds or modest reforms and, as such, are ‘rare’. 310

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Other critics have pointed out that the frame of everyday resistance can distract from recognising organised forms of politics. Hart (1991) notes that Scott fails to understand the gendered nature of class formation in his research context, and thus misses the way in which women do in fact organise themselves collectively to assert their interests. Johnson (2003) argues that historiography that tried to give slaves their agency neglects the possibility that slaves might have wanted more revolutionary political projects. Brass (2012) objected to Scott’s argument (2009) that large swathes of people living in the highlands of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, China, and northeastern India were functionally independent from the states within whose formal territories they lived. The agency of the marginalised is very often not, as Scott would have it, a declaration of independence from the state, but an effort to get the state to do more for them. Aside from these empirical lapses, many on the left are not willing to abandon the normative importance of a state that can respond to the biopolitical imperative of keeping millions of people in an interdependent society alive and well. More recent generations of writers on the everyday have recognised that ‘the largely atomistic and localist strategies of the disenfranchised, despite their advantages, render a search for social justice in the broader, national sense poorly served’ (Bayat 2000, p. 544), because, although power is distributed in many parts of society, it is uneven. As Bayat puts it, ‘like it or not, the state does matter’ (Bayat 2000, p. 544) because it concentrates power, and has a disproportionate capacity to produce both justice and injustice that cannot be tamed by individualised acts of resistance. He argues that it is too simplistic to assume that coping strategies are a kind of resistance. Self-help activities that do not impose any significant costs on autocratic regimes, for example, may be welcomed by them.

Reaction III: the everyday beyond resistance The humanist zeitgeist that everyday resistance helped to promote has translated into a significant interest within the social sciences in the popular sphere. While some of this literature continues to use the category of resistance, many more recent studies are less invested in its applicability. The process of getting by can generate important social changes, whether or not it is driven by a counter-hegemonic consciousness. As Bayat points out, the illegal tapping of electricity by poor people causes ‘significant changes in the urban structure, social policy and the actor’s own lives’, even though is not done to ‘express their defiance vis-à-vis the authorities’ (Bayat 2000, p. 543). For Bayat, this not evidence of a social movement. Broader gains are unintended insofar as social changes result from the aggregate effect of many individual actions rather than from the vantage of a politically enlightened consciousness. This kind of outcome improves the life chances of those who engage in it by redistributing, from below, access to social goods, services, public space, and opportunities. The ‘quiet encroachment’ that Bayat describes is not motivated as a ‘deliberate political act’ (Bayat 2000, p. 547), although he suggests that those who have gained through such encroachment may engage in collective action to defend it if these gains are threatened. Efforts to shoehorn survival into the category of resistance, or to re-categorise it as resilience, have given way to analyses that account for the contradictory nature of survival. As Appadurai puts it, ‘the poor are neither simple dupes nor secret revolutionaries. They are survivors’ (Appadurai 2013, p. 192). Their strategic engagement with the options before them is ambivalent, conducted at times with hostility or irony towards dominant norms and, at other times, ‘deep moral attachment’ to them (Appadurai 2013, p. 192). Similarly, in his study of ‘insurgent citizens’ in Brazil, Holston recognises that agency does not only amount to 311

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resistance, it also ‘produces entrenchment, persistence, and inertia’ (Holston 2008, p. 13). He argues that ‘possibilities of entrenchment, insurgence, persistence, and resistance’ should not be situated ‘in the consciousness of individual agents’. Disruptions of the status quo are emergent rather than chosen, and are entwined with processes that reproduce the status quo. The initially illegal and informal occupation of land in Brazil by large populations has transformed social belonging in cities from below. The claims of these occupiers are broadly aligned to dominant values such as citizenship. Nevertheless this has resulted in an important social change: elite efforts to narrow the application of citizenship have been broken open, and citizenship has been mobilised to improve possibilities for ever wider populations. Literature on structure, agency and practice suggests that this process of breaking open a constraint does not come about because those subjected to it oppose it, but rather that they shift the terms of constraints through their practice. This literature has argued for nonlinear relationships between intentions, conduct and outcomes. In practice theory, as Ortner explains, ‘[a]gency is not some natural or originary will; it takes shape as specific desires and intentions within a matrix of subjectivity – of (culturally constituted) feelings, thoughts, and meanings’ (Ortner 2006, p. 110). Even those intentions that tick the box of apparent vernacular counter-hegemonic consciousness are produced through socialisation, language, and systems of meaning (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992). Rather than the figure of a ‘heroic individual – The Agent – up against a Borg-like entity called “Structure”’, we have countless individuals producing the structure through their everyday practice (Ortner 2006, p. 130). There are social rules and conventions, but these are not set exclusively by those who position themselves as elites or authorities. De facto rules invalidate de jure laws if everyday practices render official policy unenforceable. This pluralises norm-making, for example, on who may use space and how (Simone 2011). Governments might dislike informality, but the sheer volume of informal traders or informal land occupiers can them to give up trying to remove them and even to rewrite the law. Occupiers do not influence policy because they collaborated and tabled a request for a change in policy, rather they are getting on with their lives in ways that happen not to be fully compliant with official expectations (Caldeira 2017). The implications of this are contradictory. On one hand, the informal autoconstruction of urban areas can entail collective forms of self-organisation that have the ‘potential to challenge hegemonic practices of the production of space, which are mainly based on market mechanisms and/or state strategies’ (Streule et al. 2020, p. 15). It might, on the other, be driven by hegemonic processes such as commodification (Karaman et al. 2020). Vast districts of many cities around the world are being produced by low-income residents as a result of countless individual decisions following a heterogeneous array of motivations and practices, with contradictory implications (see Lemanski, this volume).

Conclusion The value of the concept of everyday resistance, for the purposes of this volume, is the way in which it opens up debate on social change. Are subordinate people powerless to respond to their situation or do they have ways of responding to unfair social structures? Do such responses have to be in the form of collective action or can they take place on an individual basis? Should these responses be directed at replacing or transforming the state to ensure that it does a better job of recognising marginalised people and ensuring distributional fairness, or should marginalised groups pursue a path of self-governance? Is resistance defined through the intentions of actors or through the possible outcomes of their actions? How does society change even when actors are driven by apolitical intentions? 312

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Rather than adjudicating between different answers, we might rather use them to recognise both the insights and limits of each within a pluralistic frame. We can acknowledge both that seemingly ‘weak’ people have agency, and to recognise that, to borrowing the wording of Bob Jessop, actors have ‘differential capacities’ to change structures ( Jessop 2001, p. 1223). We can recognise too the heterogeneous intentions of actors, which might include, but are not limited to, the intention ‘mitigate or deny the claims’ of superordinate groups. And we can acknowledge complex causal relationships between intentions, actions, and outcomes, with some profound social transitions being unintended. This debate is important, furthermore, for acknowledging the existence and role of different kinds of projections by those of us articulating narratives of social change. In this we learn a great deal about the narratives that attract us, as authors and readers. It underscores both the limits of learning across difference and distance, and the importance of striving to learn across difference and distance nevertheless.

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26 CONTENTIOUS POLITICS Politics as Claims-Making Clare Saunders

Introduction On 1st April 2019, eleven nearly naked protesters superglued themselves to the windows of the House of Commons public gallery, London. Their protest interrupted a parliamentary debate about the United Kingdom’s terms of exit from the European Union. The naked parts of their bodies were emblazoned with slogans emphasising the urgency of climate change, such as ‘for all life’. The protesters told the press that Brexit is much less important than the existential threat that climate change poses to life on earth (Elgot 2019). The protesters were an affinity group of Extinction Rebellion (XR), an activist network that aims: for government to adopt a climate emergency; for reduction of biodiversity loss; for greenhouse gas emissions to be eliminated to net zero by 2025; and for government to create and be guided by a citizens’ assembly on climate change (Extinction Rebellion 2018). Later that month tens of thousands of XR protesters engaged in 10-days of non-violent civil disobedience bringing parts of the capital city to a standstill. The protests used established repertoires with innovations. Roads were blocked; impromptu street occupations/street parties broke out; the headquarters of oil company, Shell, was damaged to the tune of £6,000; Heathrow airport was disrupted; ‘die-ins’ were staged; and others even chained themselves to Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s home (BBC 2019). Citizens from many different walks of life participated in the protest, reportedly even Jeremy Clarkson, ex-Top Gear presenter, renowned for his love of gas guzzling cars. XR has spread to multiple other countries, including Australia, India, South America, the Solomon Isles, and Spain (Griffin 2019). The British state responded with significant police deployment, including arresting many protesters and charging of hundreds of them. Remarkably, by June 2019, Theresa May’s otherwise failing Conservative government committed to reducing the UK’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. Furthermore, one of XR’s founder members, Gail Bradbrook, was invited to give evidence to a Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) department Select Committee that was considering the feasibility and need for making faster and deeper cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. What is contentious politics? Contentious politics involves acts of resistance against another claims-maker in a non-conventional form protest, riots, and revolutions each count. And why start a chapter about contentious politics with this account? First, introducing a chapter DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-30

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or book with a recent contentious episode is standard in the work of Sydney Tarrow and the late Charles Tilly, two founder members of the ‘contentious politics’ approach. Second, this episode provides the basis for an argument about the relevance of the contentious politics to understanding contemporary contention. It stresses the need to merge different aspects of social movement theory. Social movement theory has been concerned with understanding how collective action results from a combination of understanding grievances, resources, political opportunities, and framing, each of which are featured in this account. A shared grievance of XR activists is the threat to life on earth as we know it. Resources were brought to bear in terms of volunteers willing to take relatively high risk activism (McAdam 1989). The activists took advantage of divisions in the elite over Brexit in order to bring a different – more universalising – concern to politicians’ attention. And the debate is framed by activists as one that needs urgent government attention. Such an eclectic theoretical approach is beneficial because it allows us to focus on both strategic and normative dimensions of movements, as well as the range of different actors that are involved with or interact with social movements. I proceed as follows. First, I introduce the main aims and aspirations of the contentious politics research programme, particularly through the lens of three books written by key authors of the approach: Dynamics of contention (McAdam et al. 2001), Contentious politics, Tilly and Tarrow (2015), and Contentious performances (Tilly 2008). Second, I apply this approach to XR. Third, I offer a critique of the approach, bearing in mind how it might be improved and that no theoretical framework for the study of contention will be universally appealing to scholars.

The contentious politics research programme McAdam’s (2001) preface to Silence and voice in the study of contentious politics provide us with an account of the roots of the contentious politics approach. McAdam (2001) reports how he and Tarrow become increasingly concerned about the narrowness of social movement research in the 1990s. They subsequently began extensive dialogue with others to recognise the fruitfulness of studying different types of contention – from riots, revolutions, and civil wars through to more placid social movements – together. The result was Silence and voice, wherein ‘silences’ referred to concepts that had been neglected by social movement scholars, but had been recognised by scholars studying other forms of contentious politics. Enter Dynamics of contention. This hugely ambitious book, sought to take a mechanistic approach to the study of contention. The key research questions, broadly, were ‘what allows contentious episodes to emerge and fade, and what shapes their repertoire?’. Contentious politics was defined as: Episodic, public, collective interaction among makes or claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or party to the claims and (b) the claims would, if realized affect the interests of at least one of the claimants. (McAdam et al. 2001, p. 5, Tilly and Tarrow 2015, p. 7) McAdam et al. (2001) criticised the classic social movement agenda – which focused on mobilisation, resources, and political processes – for stasis – claiming it had overlooked interactions among actors and had reduced movements’ complexity to strategic calculation. This assessment was a little unfair on some scholars who had already moved beyond the bounds of classic social movement theorising (e.g., Diani 1995 on interactions, Taylor 1989 on non-strategic actions, and Lofland 1993 who took a broad view of social movements). Nonetheless, there 316

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was probably not a single body of work that had addressed all three of their criticisms at once. They proposed two key solutions to resolving the problems they identified with existing theories. First, they insisted ‘on the uselessness of choosing [one] among culturalist, rationalist and structuralist approaches to contentious politics’ (p. 305), instead taking a strategy of employing ‘insights from all three where we found them useful’ (p. 305). Second, they sought to identify causal mechanisms that can explain a whole series of forms of political contention, that they call ‘contentious politics’. Mechanisms are only a part of their story in relation to causality. Mechanisms concatenate into processes that result in spells of contention. Using very rich paired comparisons of very different episodes, they show that a set of mechanisms are evident across a broad range of forms of contention. Thus concatenation (or not) of mechanisms in different combinations results in processes thought to give shape and form to contention, that is facilitated or supressed by political opportunities. ‘Processes’ combine environmental, cognitive and relational mechanisms (McAdam and Tarrow 2010, p. 531) and are defined as ‘regular sequences of … mechanisms that produce similar (generally more complex and contingent) transformations of those elements’ (McAdam et al. 2001, p. 24). The process of polarisation, for example, is defined as the ‘widening of political and social space between claimants in a contentious episode and the gravitation of previously uncommitted or moderate actors towards one, the other, or both extremes’ (p. 322). This process, ‘combines mechanisms of opportunity/threat spirals, competition, category formation and the omnipresent brokerage’ (McAdam et al. 2001, p. 322). Opportunity/threat spirals consist of sequences of political changes that are interpreted by challengers, resulting in collective action followed by the counteraction of members of the polity, causing future political changes. Competition involves different factions trying to gain allies and outbid competitors, as presupposed by resource mobilisation theory. Category formation creates divisions between a ‘we’ and a ‘them’, rather like in theorising about collective identity (Saunders 2008). And brokerage is the linking of two social sites that puts the previously disconnected into contact with one another. Let me provide an example of the role of mechanisms in shaping a particular episode. McAdam et al. (2001) use their approach to reveal why contention led to civil war during the American Revolution in the 1800s, but to a peaceful transition to democracy in Spain in 1973. They identify four common mechanisms in both cases: brokerage (defined above); identity shift, the moving of identity markers; radicalisation, ‘increasing contradictions at one or both extremes of a political continuum’ that ‘drive political actors between the extremes into clear alliance’ (p. 189); and convergence whereby more radical actors make the demands of others appear acceptable to policymakers. They conclude that the relational mechanisms ‘combined with very different environmental mechanisms to produce divergent outcomes’ (p. 162). In the US case, brokerage existed only within oppositional forces, whereas in Spain it was across challengers and members. Identities of US challengers and members were juxtaposed, whereas there was identity shift among Spanish members. They found radicalisation of views in the United States, but convergence towards the middle ground in Spain. Many felt bewildered by the Dynamics of Contention due to the complexity and depth of argumentation. It was a stroke of genius, but the vocabulary of mechanisms and processes was novel to many. The rich paired comparisons of episodes of contention made reading it coverto-cover incredibly interesting, but not a task to be scoffed at. In response, Tilly and Tarrow (2008, and updated in 2015) provided a simpler version of their argument in, Contentious Politics. Even the definition of contentious politics was simplified to ‘people struggling with each other over which political programme will prevail’ (Tarrow 2015, p. 4). The number of mechanisms discussed is limited, with more focus on 317

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the three most important mechanisms that shape the emergence of contention: brokerage (explained above); diffusion – the spreading of contention or issues; and coordinated action – ‘mutual signalling and parallel making of claims on the same object’ (Tarrow 2015, p. 30). Other mechanisms sustain or curtail contention over time, such as: social appropriation, when usually non-political groups take up an issue; boundary activism, involving new boundaries between challengers and targets; certification, which is the support of an external body like the church; identify shift, when new identities emerge or re-emerge; competition among rival organisations; and escalation and radicalisation as action moves from the more mundane and routine to the more vigorous. These mechanisms, also introduced in the Dynamics of Contention, are easier to grasp in Contentious Politics. Social bases and political contexts are intervening variables between combinations of mechanisms and more-or-less predictable forms of action (Tilly and Tarrow 2015, p. 22). They identify four types of regimes with proclivity to generate different types of contention. Democratic high capacity regimes are most likely to result in social movements, democratic low capacity regimes tend to foster coups or linguistic, religious, or ethnic group conflict. Undemocratic high capacity regimes, in contrast, are home to brief clandestine actions. Regime types and political opportunity structures dictate whether states will tolerate, prescribe or forbid certain behaviours, leading to contained contention where it is tolerated, but to transgressive contention where it is not. Hybrid regimes are illustrated to have the most unpredictable combinations of contention and outcomes, as in Ireland (historically), IsraelPalestine, and in the Middle East where the so-called Arab Spring has largely been reversed (except for Tunisia, where democracy is most successful, but still work in progress). The chapter on social movements in Contentious Politics, among other things, compares the failure to sustain action and win policy gains in 1950s Poland, compared to success in the 1980s. In contrast to the 1950s, the 1980s witnessed the emergence of social movement bases – movement organisations and networks, participants, cultural artefacts, memories, and traditions. Support from the Catholic Church, provided certification. Both of these facilitated diffusion and scale shift. The Solidarity movement successfully used widespread disruptive strikes combined with a more traditional social movement repertoire of demonstrations and occupations. When Solidarity came into power as the Solidarity Party in 1989, the movement disintegrated. The Polish Solidarity movement had a national locus, but Tilly and Tarrow (2015) sought to explain how some of their mechanisms operate transnationally. Among other things, they illustrate how international controversies can become domesticated, how national controversies can diffuse internationally and how information technologies allow for transnational brokerage. Overall, the programme suggests that mechanisms combine into similar sequences and conditions, shaped by regimes and political opportunities. Contentious politics reacts to governmental action, but is also shaped by it. There is dynamic interplay between all actors involved. This final point is illustrated also in Tilly’s (2008) Contentious Performances. Before applying the contentious politics programme to XR, let us first visit the main arguments of Contentious Performances (Tilly 2008). The key concept is the ‘repertoire’, which, in its ‘strong’ variant dictates the types of actions that contenders draw upon, like theatre performances, with only small innovations (Tilly 2008, p. 15). Actors involved in contention draw on existing repertoires to the extent that the scope of actions they undertake are almost predictable. One of Tilly’s main tasks in Contentious Performances is to use descriptions and sophisticated content analysis (protest event analysis and subject-object-verb sequences) to understand why the repertoire of contention in Britain shifted from one archetype to another from eighteenth to 318

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nineteenth century Britain. The eighteenth century involved gatherings outside the residences of wrong-doers, appropriating and reselling grain, looting and arson, targeted action against local enemies with the assistance of powerful patrons, and the use of symbolism – each with some variation across places shaped by local situations. By the nineteenth century, special interest groups were relatively common. These organised public meetings and mounted direct challenges to public authorities. Actions were carefully planned, resulting in repertoires that could be transferred more easily from place-to-place. Among other things, the shift towards this new dominant social movement repertoire is explained by the adaptation of parades and funeral processions to demonstrations, the centralisation of power making local targets less useful, and state accommodation of demonstrations and interest groups increasingly seen as a reasonable political participation. How can we apply this research programme to XR?

An application of the contentious politics programme to Extinction Rebellion The contentious politics programme invites that we see the recent XR episode of contention as an outcome of mechanisms and processes. Methodologically, it might require charting trends in climate action, and working out what is responsible for peaks and troughs; perhaps comparing across regimes to check for identified mechanisms. The absence of such an in-depth analysis in this chapter might, therefore, make it appear superficial. Yet, on the other hand, it has the advantage of illustrating the intuitive appeal of the approach. Let’s begin with the notion of repertoires. The XR protests have adopted what we might call the ‘civil disobedience repertoire’ of direct action in British environmentalism. Super gluing, (semi-)nudity, occupations, blockades, street parties, affinity groups, etc. have been conducted in the living memory of many activists. This repertoire is used when protesters deem there to be a sense of urgency and when standard democratic channels for participation have failed to deliver change. Multi-targeted days of action also have a recent history. In this sense, Tilly’s (2008) notion of repertoires resonates strongly with XR, through the mechanism of emulation. There has also been diffusion of aims and actions to other countries. One of the most fascinating aspects of recent climate activism in Britain is its relative success at changing government discourse in recognition of the need to massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Britain (even if not to XR’s standards). Also novel is the access that direct activists have had to decision-makers. The contentious politics programme helps us to understand how this has come about. The mechanisms of social appropriation (non-political groups have taken up the cause), brokerage (new networks have formed across challengers and the polity) and certification (respected organisations and individuals have supported it) have given XR momentum and prestige. XR continues to organise significant actions, illustrating that the relative acceptance of its demands has not dampened its activism. Another interesting feature of XR is that it has triggered a counter-movement from a network called 5G Awareness and an associated Facebook page entitled ‘XR is a scam’. The countermovement argues that the founders of XR are not genuine rebels, they are instead intent on supporting the roll out of 5G and the ‘Internet of Things’. Concerns are raised about human health, ecology and domination of human lives. Some suspect that XR is an attempt to weed out the morally worthy by giving them a criminal record. Others suggest that XR is an attempt to funnel activists into pre-formed movements disarming them from tackling fresh concerns like 5G. Some of the arguments might seem rather far-fetched, but the countermovement activity provides an illustration of the process of polarisation. The process of polarisation, for example, is defined as the ‘widening of political and social space between claimants in a contentious episode and the gravitation of previously uncommitted or moderate actors 319

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towards one, the other, or both extremes’ (p.322). An opportunity to get climate change on the agenda is seen as a threat to stopping 5G. Category formation is also evident. Those believing XR is a scam say ‘they’ are not really rebels, ‘they’ want to support the digital agenda. Thus, the two campaigns exist in competition for attention.

Evaluating the contentious politics programme McAdam and Tarrow (2010, p. 530) themselves admit that, ‘When it appeared in 2001, Dynamics of Contention was hardly greeted with universal acclaim by the fraternity of social movement scholars.’ This might be partly due to a long standing tendency to engage in ‘theory bashing’ (Lofland 1993) in social movement research. In theory bashing we might sometimes do damage to others’ approaches by making them fit an unfair caricature (Killian 1983, p. 4). Joining in the chorus of criticism, my critique centres on the programme’s apparent lack of focus and its unintended structural bent. Previously (Saunders 2013) I have critiqued the programme for being too linear, for lacking conceptual clarity and for its unclear guidance on how to apply it to one’s own research. These days I find my criticism of linearity inappropriate because of the dynamism in the stories between contenders and the state. I also find the concepts and methodological guidance a bit clearer, after repeated reading, although some reservations remain. Tilly and Tarrow (2015) have added fairly extensive methodological appendices to Contentious Politics and Tilly (2008) provides repeated step-by-step guidance. If there is a complaint to be made about the methodological guidance in Tilly (2008) it is simply that the guidelines are repeated so frequently that it is tiresome if reading the entire book. In response to criticism, the authors have had the modesty to admit that ‘part of the fault was … our own’ (McAdam and Tarrow 2010, p. 350), noting that the Dynamics of contention was not theoretically specific, that they looked at too many case studies across a broad array of regime types and that they bombarded readers with 21 pages of references and over 20 mechanisms which they ‘tossed off with little attempt at explanation or operationalization’ (McAdam and Tarrow 2010, p. 350). Let us visit some criticisms in more detail.

Broad but narrow: a state focus? The attempt to craft a convincing research programme to shape the entire field of contentious politics has been viewed as an undesirable attempt to dominate the field (Flacks 2003). This might not have been the authors’ intention, but there are two negative consequences. First, in seeking to explain everything about contentious politics, important aspects for the study of social movements have inevitably fallen by the wayside. The emphasis is largely on episodes of contention, which means that the lens is turned away from the fascinating lulls between intense periods of activity, when different but equally interesting dynamics are at play. Community- and individual-level processes of social change of the sort that Welch and Yates (this volume) talk about are entirely overlooked. Although McAdam et al. (2001) attempt to reorient their study away from episodes to mechanisms and processes, they end up trying to understand only the mechanisms that (sometimes) lead to processes that (always it seems) result in episodes. The absence of research on periods of latency means also that they effectively lack a control group in which there is no contention with which to compare their cases of contention. Should the mechanisms they identify be present outside of periods of contention then their claim to have identified causality is exaggerated. Second, making comparisons across very different types of contention leads to unbalanced treatment of cases causing what we might call chalk-and-cheese like comparisons. The 320

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question of how a regime changes (e.g., democratises) is a very different one from how a social movement repertoire emerges. Moreover, this is reflected in some seemingly odd methodological choices, particularly in relation to how episodes are ‘chopped up’ into manageable chunks of time for study, evident in the different time frames analysed. For example, the period 1985–1990 is showcased for Soule’s (1995) work on shanty-town protests for divestment against apartheid; whereas much longer periods of time are used to discuss de-democratisation (e.g., 1966–1983 in Argentina). Another criticism is that the approach is state-centric. This latter charge, however, might rest partly on a misunderstanding of the approach. Tilly and Tarrow (2015) take a broad view of politics, arguing that politics affects us at all levels ranging from big events like whether the country decides to go to war, to very individualised actions like whether we obtain a driving licence. Thus, contentious politics does not need to be triggered by or be directed at the state. Instead it is involved at some level even if only indirectly through policing. What is deemed (il)legitimate by the state will certainly shape the willingness of individuals, groups, organisations, and networks to engage in particular repertoires. In Tilly’s (2008, p. 7) words: ‘let me rule out a possible misunderstanding at once. Restriction of contentious politics to claims making that somehow involves governments by no means implies that governments must figure as the makers or receivers of contentious claims’. Nonetheless, this is an easy misinterpretation to make. The strong social movement repertoire that Tilly (2008) identifies has a state focus at its heart. He argues that routinisation of the social movement repertoire came in part from centralisation of power and the state’s tolerance to public displays of worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment. Therefore, Tilly’s own caricature of a social movement repertoire does, indeed, lead to some side-lining of cultural, lifestyle, and consumer movements. Mische and Tilly (2003) defended McAdam et al.’s (2001) apparent ignorance of contention targeted elsewhere than the state. They stated that the original authors of the Dynamics of Contention simply needed to find a way to delineate the study. Understandably, ‘the exposition would become unmanageable if we said we’re looking at every form of contention everywhere’ (Mische and Tilly 2003, p. 90). This is a good justification, but why not look at a range of forms of social movement instead of broadening out to include other forms of contention? Although they claimed to build in cognitive mechanisms that speak to cultural elements of social movement theory, their presentation of them has been criticised for being ‘patently structural’ (Platt 2004, p. 112), and for belittling human agency ( Jasper 2010, p. 968). As Platt (2004, p. 113) explains, ‘having theoretically attributed cultural agency … to activists in theory …they cannot shut down their volition by tying them to structural networks or by capriciously reclaiming the structural determination of their thinking and consciousness’.

Conceptual issues Conceptual issues with the approach centre on definitions and the role of mechanisms and processes. According to Jasper (2010, p. 967), ‘The main weakness was how the authors defined – or didn’t define – mechanisms’. The authors themselves admit that calling mechanisms ‘events’ was confusing. In a subsequent rendition (McAdam and Tarrow [2011. p. 4], emphasis added), they replace ‘a delimited class of events …’ with ‘delimited changes …’ in their definition of a mechanism. This, however, does not solve a more fundamental set of problems. The treatment of mechanisms and processes is confusing. Mechanisms are often posited as independent rather than intervening variables. Processes and mechanisms are sometimes treated synonymously. Mechanisms sometimes coalesce into processes, and sometimes 321

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they seem to work alone (see the paired comparison of the American and Spanish revolutions that I briefly discussed above). Furthermore, the score of mechanisms listed are not mutually exclusive; in the case of the successful Yellow Revolution in the Philippines against the Marcos dictatorship, their discussion of what they call ‘social appropriation’ appears to differ little from what they elsewhere call ‘brokerage’. The process of ‘polarisation’ is indistinct from ‘category shift’, which involves identities coalescing and the categorisation of social groups into a distinct ‘we’ and ‘them’. To add to the confusion, processes (rather than mechanisms) sometimes lead to other processes. For example, the process of scale-shift is thought to lead to the process of parliamentarisation. This results in mixing of the structural and agential levels, not to mention the organisational level. As Welskopp (2004, p. 128) notes with reference to the process of ‘identity shift’: it is by no means clear how, at which level, and when ‘identity shift’ occurs and how it can be wrought into a broad social movement. Are we facing micro-processes that accumulate into macro dynamics? Are we looking for macro-effects of microchange? Do we explain macro-processes by microfoundations? McAdam et al. (2001) leave these as open questions. Perhaps more fundamentally, McAdam et al. (2001) seem to come close to ‘mechanism talk’ (Norkus 2005), which involves using mechanisms as magic bullets to explain things that do not fit standard theories. Along these lines, Hedström and Ylikoski (2010, p. 56) had the following appraisal of Tilly’s (2001) work: Despite his inspiring empirical work, his general discussions of mechanism based explanation (e.g. Tilly 2001) left something to be desired. One gets the strong impression that he used the notion of mechanism as a label to refer to the kind of processes that he for other reasons was interested in. Moreover, it is sometimes difficult to disentangle the forms of contention from the mechanisms that lead to them. The three most common mechanisms, remember, are brokerage, diffusion, and coordinated action. These lead to a variety of forms of contentious politics, which sits at the intersection of politics, contention, and collective action. It is impossible for collective action to occur without coordinated action, and the interactions among actors that are also part-and-parcel of the definition of social movements cannot exist without brokerage. Thus, we have something of a tautology at play.

Methodological issues Potential methodological objections centre on deployment of competing research logics; the nature of evidence assembled, including reliance on secondary sources; and on how one approaches the production of analysable sequences of contentious performances known as episodes. Tarrow and Tilly (2015) ask themselves which processes exist, whether they explain particular forms of contention, whether they work across a variety of forms of contention, and whether certain processes appear more in one regime than another. There is a variety of different analytical strategies at play: single episodes of contention, case comparisons, and both inductive and deductive identification of mechanisms, to name a few. This makes the book a very challenging read for anyone who is an epistemological purist. Indeed, Tilly (2008, p. 39) recognised that the approach is built on ‘some risky epistemological and ontological wagers’ 322

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around the sources used, the extent to which causality can be identified and in relation to the generation of valid histories. In relation to criticisms about the production of valid histories, it is important to point out that narratives of episodes of contention are compiled with reliance on others’ accounts of those episodes. The secondary accounts they refer to could have a peculiar historiographical bent that may miss allusion to mechanisms that did actually play a role in generating contention. Moreover, some illustrative case studies make use of longitudinal data from protest event analysis (of varying lengths), whereas others have stronger accounts of actors in power. The variation stems in part from the chalk-and-cheese comparisons I mention earlier, but also from unequal analysis of cases that are included to show the relevance of the same mechanisms. Conceptual confusion combines with reliance on secondary sources to make it difficult to understand how McAdam et al. identified mechanisms (Flacks 2003, p. 101). This leads to suspicion that they found traces of their mechanisms in cases with which they were familiar and then retrofitted them onto other cases of contention. There is nothing wrong with posthoc or deductive analysis, as such. However, this is exactly the sort of scholarship they are critical of in the Dynamics book. As Tilly stated in interview with Mische (Mische and Tilly 2003, p.85), for example: ‘People would match a set of events to the elements of a conceptual model … we say, this isn’t supposed to be happening. We’re supposed to be explaining these phenomena.’ In a 2008 article, McAdam et al. seek to redress this by offering ‘concrete demonstrations concerning how to identify coherent mechanisms’ (309). However, their proposed methodology remains difficult to follow. They give examples of three methodological processes and end up recommending triangulation. One of the three methods involves use of systematic event analysis to understand the process of scale-shift. Note the unhelpful shift here from trying to identify mechanisms to the actual practice of trying to understand them. In this example, Tilly identified 1,500 verbs describing action in the process of parliamentarisation in the United Kingdom. These were regrouped into 46 categories and also 8 very generic categories. McAdam et al. (2008) go on to state that: With varying directness, the verbs serve as indicators for mechanisms of contention. In a given paired relationship, for example, an increase in the frequency of attack verbs indicates that ‘polarization’ is occurring, while an increase in the frequency of support verbs indicates that ‘co-ordinated action’ is gaining ground. (312) In any case, support verbs can indicate tacit support, which does not always manifest in coordinated action, as they presume.

Conclusions If the contentious politics programme has so many criticisms, why use it to understand an episode like XR, or at all? We should do well to remember that all movement theories come under the cosh for at least one of the following reasons: ontological underpinnings, epistemology, the trade-off between quality and quantity or the foci. The classic social movement theories of collective behaviour, resource mobilisation, political opportunities/processes, and new social movements have limitations of scope, generalisability, and linearity. The contentious politics research programme pushes at these existing limitations. The scope is widened, generalisability is not claimed but the search for common mechanisms across very different 323

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types of contention hints at it, and there is dynamism in the longitudinal approach: charting how different actors from movements, state and society interact to produce interesting new outcomes. Moreover, the approach is open to a wide range of methodological approaches from historiography and protest event analysis and more. The reason for taking the contentious politics approach seriously is because there are few serious rivals that have these additional advantages. Yet more could be done to improve the contentious politics approach, particularly around claims of causation and the utility of the work – why does it matter what causes contention if we do not know what makes it successful? If the language of mechanisms is to be retained, then a more truly mechanistic and causally oriented approach should be deployed. It does not take much unpacking of the work of McAdam et al. (2001) to identify the real causality in this research programme. More than anything, it seems that it is regimes and political opportunity structures that allow what they currently label as mechanisms to lead to different outcomes across different countries. The emphasis of the contentious politics programme is on what it is that allows contention to emerge and to be sustained. At times, the language also slips into what can be done to make the acts succeed, but this is mere slippage. The demands upon today’s academics – to produce research and teaching with impact – requires that we also use a dynamic approach to the study of contention to begin to understand how to help worthy actors to make a better impact to improve the world for everyone. This would involve not retrospective tracing of mechanisms to outcomes, but forecasting, monitoring and supporting activism. Let us now return to XR. There is no other single research programme able to help provide so many insights into the recent episodes of climate action erupting around the world as the contentious politics one. The activists’ interlocutions with the state, the sparking of countermovements, the range of actions undertaken, the diffusion of the movement around the world and their relative success in the face of elite divisions over Brexit are all adequately covered. The main reservation I have in applying the contentious politics research programme to XR lies in my own uncertainties about where this should go methodologically and in regards to the (unintended) relatively state-centric focus of the contentious politics research programme. XR and other climate activism, to be successful, needs to resonate with individuals, groups, organisations, networks, artisans, corporations, public relations experts, local/parish councils, regional government, government ministries, national government, international governance organisations, and more at multiple levels. It also need to find a way to take on board the concerns that some have about 5G technology that should not compete with it or undermine it, but allow it to become more encompassing. Although the contentious politics programme does not preclude the targeting of multiple centres of cultural, social, and political power, it is certainly the case that the strong social movement repertoire – challenging the state in shows of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment – is too constrained to address the climate change challenge.

References BBC, 2019. Extinction Rebellion protests: what happened? [online]. 25 April. Available from: https:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-48051776 [Accessed 12 July 2019]. Diani, M., 1995. Green networks: a structural analysis of the Italian environmental movement. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Elgot, J., 2019. Semi-naked protesters disrupt Brexit debate [online] The Guardian. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/01/semi-naked-climate-protesters-disruptbrexit-debate [Accessed 12 July 2019].

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Contentious Politics Extinction Rebellion, 2018. Our demands [online]. Available from: https://rebellion.earth/the-truth/ demands/[Accessed 16 July 2019]. Flacks, R., 2003. Review of the dynamics of contention. Social Movement Studies, 2 (1), 103–109. Griffin, A., 2019. Extinction Rebellion: who are the climate change activists and what are their aims? [online]. Independent, 17 April 2019. Available from: https://www.independent.co.uk/environ ment/extinction-rebellion-protest-climate-change-who-london-global-warming-a8875151. html [Accessed 12 September 2019]. Hedström, P. and Ylikoski, P., 2010. Causal mechanisms in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology, 36 (1), 49–60. Jasper, J., 2010. Social movement theory today: toward a theory of action? Sociological Compass, 4 (11), 965–976. Killian, L.M., 1983. Review of Doug McAdam: political process and the development of black insurgency, 1930–70. Critical Mass Bulletin, 8 (2), 1–5. Lofland, J., 1993. Theory-bashing and answer improving in the study of social movements. American Sociologist, 24 (2), 37–58. McAdam, D., 1989. The biographical consequences of activism. American Sociological Review, 54 (5), 744–760. McAdam, D., 2001. Preface. In: R.R. Aminzade, et al. eds. Silence and voice in the study of contentious politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xi–xiii. McAdam, D. and Tarrow, S., 2010. Ballots and barricades: on the reciprocal relationship between elections and movements. Perspectives on Politics, 8 (2), 529–542. McAdam, D. and Tarrow, S., 2011. Dynamics of contention ten years on. Mobilization, 16 (1), 1–10. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S. and Tilly, C., 2001. Dynamics of contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McAdam, D., Tilly, C., and Tarrow, S., 2008. Methods for measuring mechanisms of contention. Qualitative Sociology, 31 (4), 307–331. Mische, A. and Tilly, C., 2003. Interventions: dynamics of contention. Social Movement Studies, 2 (1), 85–96. Norkus, K., 2005. Mechanisms as miracle makers: the rise and inconsistencies of the ‘mechanismic approach’. History and Theory, 44 (3), 348–372. Platt, G. M., 2004. Review essay: unifying social movement theories. Qualitative Sociology, 27 (1), 107–116. Saunders, C., 2008. Double edged swords: collective identity and solidarity in the environment movement. British Journal of Sociology, 59 (2), 227–253. Saunders, C., 2013. Environmental networks and social movement theory. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press. Soule, S., 1995. The diffusion of an unsuccessful innovation: the case of the shantytown protest tactic. The Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Sciences, 566 (1), 120–134. Tarrow, S., 2015. Preface. In: C. Tilly and S. Tarrow, Contentious politics, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xi–xv. Tarrow, S. and Tilly, C., 2015. Contentious politics, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, V., 1989. Social movement continuity: the women’s movement in abeyance. American Sociological Review, 54 (5), 761–775. Tilly, C., 2001. Mechanisms in political processes. Annual Review of Political Science, 4, 21–41. Tilly. C., 2008. Contentious performances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly. C. and Tarrow, S., 2008. Contentious Politics, 1st edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tilly. C. and Tarrow, S., 2015. Contentious Politics, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Welskopp, T., 2004. Crossing the boundaries? Dynamics of Contention viewed from the angle of a comparative historian. International Review of Social History, 49 (1), 122–131.

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27 CIVIL RESISTANCE Theorising the Force of Nonviolent Action Jonathan Pinckney

Introduction1 In 594 BC, the Roman Plebeians (the city’s lower social classes) faced a crisis. Wars against Rome’s neighbours had decimated their numbers. They had requested that Rome’s government, led by the aristocratic Roman Senate, institute a city-wide debt forgiveness program to ease the costs of war. Yet the Senate, closely tied with moneylending interests, refused, and instead ordered the Plebeians back into military service. Many among the Plebeians argued that the appropriate response was a violent uprising against the Senate, and the assassination of the two Roman Consuls, the heads of the Senatorial government. After some deliberation, the Plebeians took a different route. Instead of violently clashing with the Senate, they withdrew from Rome and camped outside the city, refusing to continue both service to the state or even the simple patterns of daily life until the Senate granted their demands. The withdrawal paralyzed Rome, making the Senators fear the city’s vulnerability to foreign attack. After only a few days, the Senate sent a representative to negotiate with the Plebeians, in the end granting them political representation in the Senate to protect their interests, an institution that lasted over four hundred years (Sharp 1973, Howes 2015). These events from more than two and half millennia ago are one of the earliest recorded examples of nonviolent action 2: organised, extra-institutional political action without the use of violence, and they illustrate the potential of nonviolent action, even in an environment wildly different from modernity, to achieve meaningful, enduring social change. World history is full of such examples for the close observer, from the first labour strike in history in Ancient Egypt (Edgerton 1951), to the women of the Haudenosaunee confederation in North America restricting males’ access to sex and supplies to compel them to give women veto power over waging war (Steiner 1968). Nonviolent action has played either a central or secondary role in almost all major political transformations of recent history, from the American Revolution (Conser et al. 1986) to the Arab Spring (Roberts et al. 2016). Comprehensive data collection efforts indicate that this trend is only rising, as violent revolutions become less and less frequent and nonviolent ones become more frequent (Chenoweth 2015). Yet despite its long history and growing frequency, there have been few attempts to bring together the knowledge of scholars and activists into systematic analyses of the causes, dynamics, and consequences of nonviolent 326

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action. The scientific study of nonviolent action remains in its infancy, despite important early contributions from thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi and Gene Sharp (1973, 2005). In this chapter I examine nonviolent action as a force for social change. I trace the emerging academic literature on nonviolent action, from its early antecedents in religion and philosophy to a recent explosion of interest in examining nonviolent action using the tools of social science. I begin by defining nonviolent action, outline the history of the study of nonviolent action, discuss what we know about nonviolent action’s capacity to achieve social change, and some areas in which our knowledge of nonviolent action remains limited.

Defining nonviolent action Following the literature, I define nonviolent action as a practice constituted by three core elements: It is the (1) organised application of political force, (2) outside the normal avenues of politics, and (3) without the use or threat of physical violence.3 First, nonviolent action is an organised application of political force. It is action which is intended to explicitly or implicitly coerce an opponent to do something they otherwise would not do. The practitioner of nonviolent action, like the Roman Plebeians, withdraws a good that their opponent would like to retain, or imposes a cost that their opponent would like to avoid. The application of force can involve economic relationships, as in strikes or boycotts; social relationships, as in shunning or ostracism; or symbolic or cultural elements, as in most forms of public demonstrations or protest. Nonviolent action always has communicative elements but is not purely communicative. It directly imposes costs on its opponent. Nonviolent action as I am describing it here is also political, meaning it is concerned with a society’s authoritative allocation of values (Easton 1954). Its typical targets are governments but need not be so. Political struggles often target corporations, social institutions, or private individuals. What makes them political is their concern with changing the allocation of social goods in a community larger than the personal. Second, nonviolent action takes place outside of the normal avenues of politics. It is often, though not necessarily, illegal. The key thing separating nonviolent action from conventional politics is not that it breaks laws, but that it challenges regular norms and procedures. It is unexpected and abnormal, refusing to play by the rules of the current political game, typically because its proponents do not have faith in those rules to address their grievances. This means that nonviolent action is a preferred tactic of the powerless, or those who face significant disadvantages in their political environment.4 It stands in contrast to tactics for achieving social change through existing institutional avenues, such as party politics, political lobbying, or judicial activism. Social movements often employ these institutional tactics as a complement to nonviolent action, but their strategic logics are distinct. Third and finally, nonviolent action does not involve the use or threat of physical violence.5 To be nonviolent action, a tactic cannot involve the intentional physical harm of another human being.6 Political violence follows a distinct logic: threats to an opponent’s or their supporters’ bodily integrity compel the other to meet one’s demands. This logic can operate through both physical harm or the threat of harm (for instance, by carrying weapons). It rests on manipulating the basic human desire for physical safety. One can compel power holders to give up power by either killing them or showing one’s willingness and ability to kill them through killing their soldiers and supporters. The understanding of power is primarily material.7 327

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In contrast, nonviolent action rests on an intersubjective understanding of power. Political power is not a material attribute of certain individuals. Rather individuals and groups gain and maintain power through their positioning in complex social systems (see Martin 2012, pp. 70–71). The continuation of these systems – and thus the continuation of any individual’s power – requires that a critical mass of their participants believe in the system or are afraid of the costs of withdrawing from the system and thus cooperate in its operation. Even those who are disadvantaged or oppressed by the system almost always play a crucial role in keeping it functioning. This theory has been developed specifically in regard to nonviolent action by Gene Sharp in his seminal work The politics of nonviolent action (1973).8 Yet similar insights can be found across many social and political theorists, for instance in Gramsci’s (1971) discussion of hegemony. As Simon (1991, p. 22) writes in a discussion of Gramsci: ‘Hegemony is a relation, not of domination by means of force, but of consent by means of political and ideological leadership. It is the organisation of consent’. This understanding of power also has important parallels in Foucault (1980) and Arendt (1969). What the theory of nonviolent action contributes is to take the intersubjectivity of power from the abstract realm of social theory and propose a set of strategic responses and specific tactics to achieve transformation available to those facing oppression under specific political and social orders. Nonviolent action often follows well-known and understood tactical repertoires, such as the protest march, the labour strike, and the boycott. Yet the range of possible nonviolent action tactics goes well beyond this. Gene Sharp (1973) has categorised nearly 200 distinct nonviolent tactics, and even this is simply an empirical tally rather than a theoretically bounded set. A recent effort by Michael Beer (2021) to modernise Sharp’s list expanded this number to over 300. As the structures of power in which nonviolent action take place change, so the tactics through which practitioners of nonviolent action also change to challenge them. For example, the growth of the internet and the increasing weaving of digital environments into the structures of power in modern life have led to an entirely new set of digital resistance tactics (Wray 1999). Nonviolent action is distinct from pacifism.9 Pacifism is ‘the ideological assertion that war and violence should be rejected in political and personal life … the belief that it is morally wrong to participate in killing for any reason’ (Howes 2013, pp. 427–428). Nonviolent action may or may not be motivated by pacifism. While much of the early theorising on the potential political efficacy of nonviolent action comes from pacifist thinkers (see below) few modern practitioners of nonviolent action explicitly invoke pacifism in their struggles. Nonviolent action is also distinct from any political agenda or ideology. While many of the best-known cases of nonviolent action have pursued progressive goals such as decolonisation, democratisation, or social justice, the same tactical repertoire can also be applied for goals and aims that run counter to the fashioning of a just and peaceful society (e.g., Sombatpoonsiri 2018). Saying that a movement employs nonviolent action in this framework is an empirical claim about its primary tactics and should not be interpreted as an endorsement of its goals.

The study of nonviolent action The techniques of nonviolent action have almost all developed organically within communities struggling to achieve political change. Many scholars have examined the nature of warfare in depth, but historically there have been few dedicated scholars of nonviolent action. Some of the first systematic attempts to identify and understand nonviolent action emerged in the nineteenth century with pacifist thinkers who approached nonviolent action as a moral 328

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or religious imperative. Early thinkers such as Thoreau (1849/2016), Adin Ballou (1910), and Tolstoy (1894) theorised both about the moral necessity of engaging in nonviolent action and the practical methods through which it might bring about social change. Mahatma Gandhi was both the great systematiser of these early insights as well as one of the first to put them into practice, organising his various campaigns in South Africa and colonial India around a unified theory of nonviolent action as satyagraha, or the ‘power of truth’. Gandhi’s own voluminous writings (Gandhi 1958) are a gold mine of thinking on the theory and practice of nonviolent action. While Gandhi did not write a single systematic treatment on the subject, many such systematic treatments have been written by others, both contemporarily with Gandhi and after his death (see, for example, Shridharani 1939, Bondurant 1958, Iyer 1973). Gene Sharp is a second touchstone of the modern study of nonviolent action. In his seminal Politics of nonviolent action, Sharp (1973) laid the theoretical groundwork for a systematic understanding of how nonviolent action achieves political change. He drew on many historic political theorists to break down the ‘monolithic’ theory of power, emphasising the ability of those made ‘powerless’ by systems of domination to undermine those systems through noncooperation. Sharp called for the tactics and strategies of nonviolent action to be subjected to the same rigorous analytical scrutiny through which military tactics and strategy have been refined for centuries. He performed some of this early research himself, for instance by examining the potential for nonviolent action against military coups (Sharp and Jenkins 2003), and in pro-democracy movements in dictatorships (Sharp 1994). The explosion of social movements in the 1960s, most prominently the US civil rights movements, which drew on Gandhi, helped spur growth in this area of research. The antiCommunist uprisings in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1980s and early 1990s then cemented nonviolent action as a core area of concern for scholars interested in transformative political and social change. Much of the earlier work on nonviolent action consisted of case study examinations of individual cases, drawing lessons from the experiences of particular movements (Zunes et al. 1999, Roberts and Ash 2009). Some seminal works such as Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler’s (1994) Strategic nonviolent conflict, Kurt Schock’s (2005) Unarmed insurrections, or Sharon Nepstad’s (2011) Nonviolent revolutions took this approach a step further, comparing several cases to gain broader insights into the factors that influenced nonviolent action campaigns’ dynamics and outcomes. The 2011 publication of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s book Why civil resistance works significantly expanded the nonviolent action literature’s focus. Chenoweth and Stephan gathered data on over 300 violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 that had ‘maximalist’ goals of changing a regime, creating a new state, or ending a military occupation. Their central finding was that the nonviolent campaigns achieved their stated goals roughly 50% of the time, nearly twice as frequently as the violent campaigns. The key factor separating the two, Chenoweth and Stephan argued, was participation. While violent campaigns tended to be relatively small and dominated by young men, nonviolent campaigns tended to have much higher levels of participation and appeal to all segments of society. This made it easier for nonviolent movements to induce defections from their opponents, leading to the breakdown of their opponents’ power structures. Coming just as the uprisings of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ in the Middle East captured world attention, Chenoweth and Stephan’s book sparked a major expansion in scholarly interest in nonviolent action. There was also a methodological shift from the almost exclusively qualitative research that preceded it to a rich mix of both qualitative and quantitative studies. For example, scholars have used new datasets10 on nonviolent action movements to 329

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the factors leading to the onset of major nonviolent action campaigns (Braithwaite et al. 2015, Butcher and Svensson 2016, Karakaya 2016, Thurber 2018, Dahlum 2019), the dynamics of nonviolent action (Sutton et al. 2014, Pinckney 2016, Belgioioso 2018, Petrova 2019), and its outcomes (Celestino and Gleditsch 2013, Bayer et al. 2016, Pinckney 2018). The literature on nonviolent action has remained closely linked with developments in the world outside, focusing on efforts by politicians, activists, and ordinary people to wield the tools of nonviolent action to achieve social change. How well has it performed in achieving this?

Nonviolent action and social change As illustrated by the example that opened this chapter, nonviolent action has long been a force for social change. Its recent rise to scholarly prominence has more to do with a historical limitation in the attention and focus of scholars as well as the active subjugation of such knowledge by cultures and political systems that valorise the use of violence. Scholars have increasingly recovered the history of nonviolent action’s role in social change (Bartkowski 2013). This expansive history implies a similarly expansive set of areas of social change brought about by or connected to nonviolent action. I focus on three areas of impact from recent history that are well-established in the literature and relevant to central political questions of our time. The first is the move from dictatorship to democracy. The second is the protection of human rights. The third is counterweight to the excesses of global capitalism. The connection between nonviolent action and democratisation is the best-known and best studied of these three. Scholars have long acknowledged that democratic transitions are often driven by popular pressure (Boix 2003, Acemoglu and Robinson 2005). More recent work has sought to disentangle the specific effects of nonviolent action by comparing political transitions in which primarily nonviolent tactics predominated the pre-transition struggle with those in which it did not. The results, robust across multiple quantitative studies, indicate a strong democratising effect (e.g., Karatnycky and Ackerman 2005, Johnstad 2010, Bayer et al. 2016, Pinckney 2018). Nonviolent action has played a role in almost all transitions from authoritarianism to democracy in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Pinckney 2020). Nonviolent action was at the forefront of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Countries that achieved independence from their colonial rulers primarily through nonviolent action have been much more likely to establish long-term sustainable democracies than those that achieved independence through violent rebellions (Garcia-Ponce and Wantchekon 2017). The democratising trend continued through the so-called ‘third wave of democratization’, beginning with movements such as the Carnation Revolution in Portugal through anti-military rule movements in Latin America, anti-Communist movements in Eastern Europe, and the ‘Colour Revolutions’ of the early 2000s in the former Soviet Union. The protection and expansion of human rights has also been pushed forward by nonviolent action. The civil rights movement in the United States is perhaps best-known example of this (McAdam 1982, Garrow 1986) but there are many more. Women’s right to vote in many Western countries was achieved through concerted campaigns of primarily nonviolent action (Rosen 1974, Holton 1986). And bringing about democracy through nonviolent action appears to have a protective effect on freedoms of expression and association (Bethke and Pinckney 2019). Nonviolent action has also been at the heart of movements to protect economic rights and push back against the excesses of global capitalism, and perhaps even ‘the most promising method for moving beyond capitalism to a more humane social and economic system’ 330

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(Martin 2001, p. 7). One of the foundational tools of nonviolent action is the labour strike, which has its origins in workers’ struggles for dignity and decent working conditions. Nonviolent action has also been at the forefront of many struggles for land reform such as the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil and Ekta Parishad in India (Schock 2015). It has also played an important role in many struggles to protect the social safety net and oppose privatisation of essential public resources (Harris 2003). In addition to these three areas, nonviolent action has played an important role in the environmental movement, in anti-war movements (Nepstad 2004), and in many other struggles for positive social change. Nonviolent action is a central tool of any major political struggle by those left behind by established political systems to fight for greater freedom and justice, though as mentioned above, nonviolent action is not necessarily connected with such struggles, and its tools have sometimes been employed for more regressive political change. The above examples focus on nonviolent action’s demonstrated capability of achieving concrete political change. Yet it is important to emphasise that the connection between nonviolent action and social change goes well beyond its ability to bring about political change. Even when political opportunities may not allow for concrete political changes, nonviolent action can serve an important socialisation role, changing the activists themselves, building new communities, raising awareness of issues, and laying the groundwork for future political change (Nepstad 2008).

New frontiers in the study of nonviolent action There is still much that we do not know about nonviolent action. I focus on two questions, one that is currently a significant area of debate and one that is ‘just over the horizon’ of scholarly attention but likely to become increasingly important in coming years. Unsurprisingly, nonviolent resistance movements tend to occur at moments of significant social and political ferment. This means not only that one must tread carefully when making definitive statements about their causes, but also that they co-occur with numerous other forms of political action. Riots, and even violent insurgencies frequently take place at the same times and places as nonviolent action movements, and sometimes even within movements that espouse principles of nonviolence. There is significant debate over whether this violence is harmful, beneficial, or simply incidental to nonviolent action. Drawing on Sharp, many have argued that violence alongside nonviolent action harms movements’ effectiveness by legitimising repression against them and reducing their participatory advantage (Ackerman and DuVall 2006). Others have argued that violent or disruptive movement elements benefit nonviolent action movements (Haines 1984, Kadivar and Ketchley 2018, Case 2019). And at least some forms of contemporaneous violence, such as concurrent armed insurgencies, appear to have little to no effect on the success of nonviolent action movements (Chenoweth and Schock 2015). More research is urgently needed to do the difficult work of teasing apart these relationships. The choice to engage in violent or nonviolent action may arise contingently, driven by emotional factors or situational dynamics. Yet many movements actively discuss and choose between primarily violent or nonviolent action (Thurber 2019), or debate the question of ‘diversity of tactics’, that is acceptance of a range of both violent and nonviolent tactics in movements for social change (Conway 2003). The second question comes from the possibilities that may soon be available to scholars of nonviolent action. Thanks to improvements in computing power and the wide availability 331

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of both traditional and social media, scholars have increasing access to fine-grained, detailed information on the times and places in which nonviolent action occurs. These new data, tied with machine learning algorithms able to parse subtle patterns in massive data sources, may soon give scholars the ability to forecast incidents of nonviolent action with a high degree of accuracy and specificity, a task that to date has been very difficult (Chenoweth and Ulfelder 2017), but is becoming increasingly feasible (Pinckney and RezaeeDaryakenari 2022). No doubt such advances will significantly increase our understanding of nonviolent action and may provide as-yet unpredictable insights that will be useful to those seeking to achieve social change. Yet this ability to forecast raises significant ethical questions. While big data can empower forces of social change, it can also suppress them. To repressive governments and others interested in suppressing social change, the ability to reliably forecast nonviolent action will be a significant advantage. Scholars interested in this question should carefully consider the ethical implications and potential misuses of their work.

Conclusion In February 2019, protesters in the Algerian towns of Bordj Bou Arreridj and Kherrata began protesting their long-time authoritarian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s plan to run for a fifth term in office. The prognosis for the protesters was not optimistic. Eight years before Bouteflika had skilfully weathered the political storm of the Arab Spring through a canny mix of repression and liberal distribution of the country’s oil wealth. While Bouteflika himself had suffered a stroke and was in very poor health his regime was propped up by long-time political insiders who held tightly to the reins of power. Yet within weeks protest exploded across the country, growing into demonstrations of millions. Bouteflika tried to stave off the inevitable, promising not to run for re-election if he would be allowed to finish his term. It was not enough. On April 2, as he neared his twentieth anniversary of coming to power, Bouteflika resigned as president of Algeria. Only weeks later, a similar movement in Sudan ended the presidency of Sudan’s brutal dictator, Omar al-Bashir. While many challenges remain in both these countries, including the threat of renewed authoritarianism in Sudan after a 2021 military coup, the uprisings of 2019 have already brought about change that many would have previously thought impossible. Algeria and Sudan are not exceptional. Indeed, recent years have seen an explosion of nonviolent action movements, perhaps the largest in world history (Chenoweth 2020). The current time seems ripe for citizens around the world to use nonviolent action to face the challenges of authoritarian resurgence, rampant inequality, and accelerating climate change. Success is never guaranteed, and any movement that faces entrenched power structures will face setbacks, yet the testimony from the Roman forum to the streets of Algiers and Khartoum speaks to nonviolent action’s transformative power even in the most challenging circumstances. While many questions remain, a growing literature has shown repeatedly that nonviolent action can play an important role in ending oppressive political systems, improving the rights and freedoms in nominally democratic systems, and countering some of the worst excesses of global capitalism. Thus, in any consideration of the forces that can lead to social change, nonviolent action must play a central part.

Notes 1 The opinions expressed in this chapter are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the United States Institute of Peace.

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Civil Resistance 2 The academic literature and popular discussions of nonviolent action often employ several cognate terms such as ‘nonviolent resistance,’ ‘civil resistance,’ ‘passive resistance,’ or simply ‘nonviolence’. There are fine-grained distinctions between these terms, but for the most part they may be used interchangeably. 3 There are several similar definitions in other recent works on the subject. For instance, Gene Sharp defines nonviolent action as ‘a technique of socio-political action for applying power in a conflict without the use of violence’ (Sharp 1999, p. 567). See also Chenoweth and Stephan (2011, pp. 11–12) or Roberts and Ash (2009, pp. 2–3). For a contrasting central idea of nonviolent resistance see Vinthagen (2015). 4 This characteristic means the same action may or may not be nonviolent action based on context. The same protest march may be an ordinary part of politics in a developed democracy or a bold act of resistance in a repressive dictatorship. 5 There is an important level of analysis question here. When one is discussing individual actions, it is fair to apply a close to absolute standard distinguishing nonviolent from violent, along the lines of what is described in this paragraph. However, when one is discussing entire social movements or revolutionary uprisings, I argue it is more reasonable to consider the movement or uprising’s primary method of action. For instance, it is still meaningful to contrast the primarily violent Maoist revolution in China with the primarily nonviolent Gandhian independence movement in India even though the Maoists organised actions that would fall into the typical repertoire of nonviolent action and the Indian independence movement involved many incidents of violence. For more on parsing this distinction see Chenoweth and Stephan (2011, pp. 11–13) or Pinckney (2016, pp. 16–17). 6 There is debate among scholars and activists to what extent this might extend to damaging property or engaging in other actions that don’t involve direct bodily harm (Boserup and Mack 1975). 7 Though certain theorists of political violence also focus on the communicative and intersubjective aspects of violence. Fanon (1963) is the central touchstone here. 8 Gandhi also developed similar insights as inspiration for his campaigns of nonviolent action. 9 Some key sources in the literature on nonviolent action refer to a distinction between ‘principled nonviolence’, i.e., nonviolent action motivated by pacifism, and ‘pragmatic nonviolence’, i.e., nonviolent action motivated by a belief in nonviolent action’s political efficacy (Burrowes 1996, Nepstad 2015). 10 The various iterations of Chenoweth’s Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) data project (Chenoweth and Lewis 2013, Chenoweth et al. 2018) have been the most commonly employed, but others have leveraged information on peaceful protests in sources such as the Social Conflict Analysis Database (Salehyan et al. 2012) or the mass mobilisation database (Clark and Regan 2019).

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Jonathan Pinckney Bondurant, J.V., 1958. Conquest of violence: the Gandhian philosophy of conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Boserup, A. and Mack, A., 1975. War without weapons: non-violence in national defence. New York: Schocken Books. Braithwaite, A., Braithwaite, J.M., and Kucik, J., 2015. The conditioning effect of protest history on the emulation of nonviolent conflict. Journal of Peace Research, 52 (6), 697–711. Burrowes, R.J., 1996. The strategy of nonviolent defense: a Gandhian approach. New York, NY: SUNY Press. Butcher, C. and Svensson, I., 2016. Manufacturing dissent: modernization and the onset of major nonviolent resistance campaigns. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 60 (2), 311–339. Case, B.S., 2019. Nonviolent civil resistance: beyond violence and nonviolence in the age of street rebellion. In: H. Johnston, ed. Social movements, nonviolent resistance, and the state. New York, NY: Routledge, 190–210. Celestino, M.R. and Gleditsch, K.S., 2013. Fresh carnations or all thorn, no rose? Nonviolent campaigns and transitions in autocracies. Journal of Peace Research, 50 (3), 385–400. Chenoweth, E., 2015. Trends in civil resistance and authoritarian responses. In: M. Burrows and M.J. Stephen, eds. Is authoritarianism staging a comeback? Washington, DC: The Atlantic Council, 53–62. Chenoweth, E., 2020. The future of nonviolent resistance. Journal of Democracy, 31 (3), 69–84. Chenoweth, E. and Lewis, O.A., 2013. Unpacking nonviolent campaigns: introducing the NAVCO 2.0 dataset. Journal of Peace Research, 50 (3), 415–423. Chenoweth, E., Pinckney, J., and Lewis, O., 2018. Days of rage: introducing the NAVCO 3.0 dataset. Journal of Peace Research, 55 (4), 524–534. Chenoweth, E. and Schock, K., 2015. Do contemporaneous armed challenges affect the outcomes of mass nonviolent campaigns? Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 20 (4), 427–451. Chenoweth, E. and Stephan, M.J., 2011. Why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Chenoweth, E. and Ulfelder, J., 2017. Can structural conditions explain the onset of nonviolent uprisings? Journal of Conflict Resolution, 61 (2), 298–324. Clark, D. and Regan, P., 2019. Mass mobilization protest data [online]. Harvard Dataverse. Available from: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HTTWYL [Accessed 19 June 2019]. Conser, W.H., et al., 1986. Resistance, politics, and the American struggle for independence, 1765–1775. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Conway, J., 2003. Civil resistance and the diversity of tactics in the anti-globalization movement: problems of violence, silence, and solidarity in activist politics. Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 41 (2/3), 28. Dahlum, S., 2019. Students in the streets: education and nonviolent protest. Comparative Political Studies, 52 (2), 277–309. Easton, D., 1954. The political system. New York, NY: Alfred A Knopf. Edgerton, W.F., 1951. The strikes in Ramses III’s twenty-ninth year. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 10 (3), 137–145. Fanon, F., 1963. The wretched of the Earth. New York, NY: Grove Weidenfeld. Foucault, M., 1980. Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977. New York, NY: Pantheon. Gandhi, M.K., 1958. The collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, 100 Vols. New Delhi: Government of India Publications Division. Garcia-Ponce, O. and Wantchekon, L., 2017. Critical junctures: independence movements and democracy in Africa [online]. Working Paper. Available from: http://omargarciaponce.com/wp-content/ uploads/2013/07/critical_ junctures_may_2017.pdf [Accessed 3 December 2021]. Garrow, D.J., 1986. Bearing the cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the southern Christian leadership conference. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Gramsci, A., 1971. Selections from the prison notebooks. London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart. Haines, H.H., 1984. Black radicalization and the funding of civil rights: 1957–1970. Social Problems, 32 (1), 31–43. Harris, R.L., 2003. Popular resistance to globalization and neoliberalism in Latin America. Journal of Developing Societies, 19 (2–3), 365–426. Holton, S.S., 1986. Feminism and democracy: women’s suffrage and reform politics in Britain, 1900–1918. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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Civil Resistance Howes, D.E., 2013. The failure of pacifism and the success of nonviolence. Perspectives on Politics, 11 (2), 427–446. Howes, D.E., 2015. Defending freedom with civil resistance in the early Roman Republic. In: K. Schock, ed. Civil resistance: comparative perspectives on nonviolent struggle. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 203–226. Iyer, R.N., 1973. The moral and political thought of Mahatma Gandhi. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Johnstad, P.G., 2010. Nonviolent democratization: a sensitivity analysis of how transition mode and violence impact the durability of democracy. Peace & Change, 35 (3), 464–482. Kadivar, M.A. and Ketchley, N., 2018. Sticks, stones, and Molotov cocktails: unarmed collective violence and democratization. Socius, 4, 1–16. Karakaya, S., 2016. Globalization and contentious politics: a comparative analysis of nonviolent and violent campaigns. Conflict Management and Peace Science, 35 (4), 315–335. Karatnycky, A. and Ackerman, P., 2005. How freedom is won: from civic resistance to durable democracy. Washington, DC: Freedom House. Martin, B., 2001. Nonviolence versus capitalism. London: War Resisters’ International. Martin, G.R.R., 2012. A clash of kings. New York, NY: Bantam Books. McAdam, D., 1982. Political process and the development of black insurgency, 1930–1970. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nepstad, S.E., 2004. Persistent resistance: commitment and community in the Plowshares movement. Social Problems, 51 (1), 43–60. Nepstad, S.E., 2008. Religion and war resistance in the Plowshares movement. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Nepstad, S.E., 2011. Nonviolent revolutions: civil resistance in the late 20th century. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Nepstad, S.E., 2015. Nonviolent struggle: theories, strategies, and dynamics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Petrova, M.G., 2019. What matters is who supports you: diaspora and foreign states as external supporters and militants’ adoption of nonviolence. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 63 (9), 2155–2179. Pinckney, J., 2016. Making or breaking nonviolent discipline. Washington, DC: ICNC Press. Pinckney, J., 2018. When civil resistance succeeds: building democracy after popular nonviolent uprisings. Washington, DC: ICNC Press. Pinckney, J., 2020. From dissent to democracy: the promise and perils of civil resistance transitions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Pinckney, J. and RezaeeDaryakenari, B., 2022. When the levee breaks: an ensemble forecasting model of violent and nonviolent resistance. International Interactions (Online First). Roberts, A. and Ash, T.G., 2009. Civil resistance and power politics: the experience of non-violent action from Gandhi to the present. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Roberts, A., et al., 2016. Civil resistance in the Arab Spring: triumphs and disasters. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Rosen, A., 1974. Rise up, women! The militant campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903–1914. London, UK: Routledge. Salehyan, I., et al., 2012. Social conflict in Africa: a new database. International Interactions, 38 (4), 503–511. Schock, K., 2005. Unarmed insurrections: people power movements in nondemocracies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Schock, K., 2015. Rightful radical resistance: mass mobilization and land struggles in India and Brazil. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 20 (4), 493–515. Sharp, G., 1973. The politics of nonviolent action. Boston, MA: Porter Sargent. Sharp, G., 1994. From dictatorship to democracy: a conceptual framework for liberation. Boston, MA: The Albert Einstein Institution. Sharp, G., 1999. Nonviolent action. In: L. Kurtz and J.E. Turpin, eds. Encyclopedia of violence, peace, and conflict. New York, NY: Academic Press. 567–574. Sharp, G., 2005. Waging nonviolent struggle: 20th century practice and 21st century potential. Boston, MA: Porter Sargent. Sharp, G. and Jenkins, B., 2003. The anti-coup. Boston, MA: Albert Einstein Institution.

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28 COLLECTIVE ACTION Assembling Concerns Gerda Roelvink

Introduction: a post-structural view of collective action A post-structural view of collective action is distinctive from other approaches, including those presented in this volume (see the chapters on contentious politics and non-violent action). The most obvious distinction is from what might be called ‘traditional’ or structural Marxism, which has a clear political subject (the working class), object of oppression to be overthrown (capitalism), and path to transformation (revolution). Here the task of research is to uncover the workings to capitalism to aid political struggle against the ‘system’ (GibsonGraham 2006a). This kind of research is grounded in a form of epistemological realism (Roelvink 2020). In contrast, a post-structuralist perspective makes no essentialist claims about the nature of social movements or political collectives and sees knowledge as an active participant in the making of the world it represents. This approach stems from theory showing how positions of dominance (masculinity, capitalocentrism, heteronormativity, and so on) are performed and re-performed through representation, bodies, technologies, networks, and importantly including research and knowledge (see, for example, Butler 1990, Callon 2007). In these performances of dominance lie opportunities for the world to be otherwise, for slippage and excess from which new possibilities can emerge for different forms of living (St. Martin et al. 2015, p. 6). From this perspective the task of research is to work on these openings in order to help movements in the realisation of new possibilities; to produce a different ontology without making any essentialist claims about an ultimate foundation (St. Martin et al. 2015). This perspective of collective action is advanced in the diverse economies field of research, pioneered by J.K. Gibson-Graham and her students (see Roelvink et al. 2015). This research works with social movements in a struggle against capitalocentrism, a powerful discourse which performs capitalism as ‘the economy’, with all economic difference assumed within or explained through capitalism. Diverse economies research performs economic difference outside of this capitalist framing. Here capitalist class relations are only a small part of a much larger diverse economy and their relationship to these practices and forms is contingent or loose rather than structurally determined (St. Martin et al. 2015). This research is part of a much wider collective effort to create and support alternative economies, which I explore in this chapter. The kind of collective action that I examine, then, is enacted by movements DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-32

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sharing a commitment to making ‘livelihoods’ that are ‘socially and environmentally just’ (Miller 2019 and Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). This might include, for example, food sovereignty alliances, eco-villages, community supported agriculture, alternative forms of currency, and more. One of the first things to note about these movements and their associated research is their diversity within and between each other. We cannot assume, for example, that their political economic agendas will be centred on capitalism, the working class, the nation state, and immediate total revolution. Nor does ideology explain the methods that movements employ. One would find it hard to describe their association as a singular identity. Instead these movements seem to associate a diverse range of participants around common concerns. Slow food is a well-known example of the movements undertaking the kind of collective action I examine here (see Roelvink 2016 for a more detailed discussion on this movement and markets). Originating in Italy, the aim of slow food is to ‘prevent the disappearance of local food cultures and traditions, counteract the rise of fast life and combat people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from and how our food choices affect the world around us’ (Slow Food, No Date a). To do so slow food brings together consumers and producers of food while addressing varying concerns associated with food, from biodiversity to the maintenance of ‘gastronomic’ cultures and traditions. The actions and achievements of slow food are global, diffuse, and difficult to pin point. However, one example of a slow food project is ‘Slow Food for Africa: 10,000 gardens to cultivate the future’ which aims to create gardens across Africa based on the principles of sustainable agriculture. These garden projects gather together activists, local gardeners, traditional fruit and vegetables, seeds, local markets, restaurants, and more (see Slow Food, No Date b). In May 2014 over 1200 gardens had been created and by the beginning of 2019 this number had increased to 3132 (Slow Food for Africa). The World Social Forum movement is another good example. Beginning as an annual meeting for social movements opposed to neoliberalism in Brazil, the World Social Forum is now held at different times and multiple locations around the world and canvases a huge range of contemporary issues, such as the solidarity economy and the environment. While the World Social Forum brings together many different social movements, its Charter of Principles clearly states that ‘it does not intend to be a body representing world civil society’ (see World Social Forum of Transformative Economies, No Date). Nor does this collective action end with the Forum meetings; with the motto, ‘another world is possible’, the World Social Forum has become a ‘permanent process of seeking and building alternatives, which cannot be reduced to the events supporting it’ (Soulard, 2017). In addition, the World Social Forum refuses to meet demands outside and within the Forum for a single manifesto (where one universal system of rule – neoliberalism – is to be modified or replaced with another) and is a site where a range of experiences are shared and new visions for the future are created. These experiences include a wide range of people, many of which represent the experiences of other species and the environment. These two different examples have some similar characteristics. They both decentre the human as the sole ‘actor’ and place a great deal of importance on the wide range of other actors involved in bringing about change, including science and technologies, other species, diverse knowledge, and more. The goals of these movements vary depending on their particular concerns and their actions are dynamic, related to a specific issue at the time. The politics of these movements is also distinctive in that it is explicitly connected to knowledge and how it is enacted (to ontology). These movements show the economy is not simply capitalist but instead is full of a range of economic process and forms, which once released can become possibilities for action (see Gibson-Graham 2006b). Finally, and related, in both movements mentioned above research plays an important role and extends well beyond traditional 338

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confines of the academy to be practiced by activists and those directly affected by a particular concern. This chapter elaborates on these characteristics and the theoretical tools with which to explore them. In doing so, I hope to show collective action as a useful lens with which to view the diverse movements making ‘other worlds possible’ (St. Martin et al. 2015), as well as to contribute to their various experimentations. I begin by exploring why it is difficult to call these movements social movements before moving on to offer the idea of collectives centred on concern as an alternative frame.

Rethinking the social It is common place to think about the economy, environment, and other spheres as discrete parts of life with their own laws and logics (Miller and Gibson-Graham 2019). However, these conventional categories have been rejected by many social movements and their researchers as they are seen as spheres which set up the ontological frameworks of our lives and thereby restrict what is possible (Miller 2019). Likewise, once described by social scientists as ‘social movements’, the collective action I outline here is no longer seen to be separated from other sectors of society, either in terms of membership or the domain of action. The social has lost its distinctiveness. If we were to use the term ‘social’ movements to talk about collective action, then, it would be much more useful to adopt the Latourian (2005b, p. 5, original emphasis) sense of the social as ‘what is glued together by many other types of connectors’. From this perspective, it is the kind of association that is important when examining movements, as well as the possibilities of assemblage and re-assemblage with a variety of participants (Latour 2005b). The term collective becomes very useful in this context because it directs our attention to the relationality of the association and makes no assumptions about who or what takes part or for what purpose. This emphasis on relationality and connectivity is, in fact, very important to movements seeking out more ethical forms of living with others. Social researchers have picked up on these terms to show how movements can overcome the modernist division between the social and natural worlds and related binary oppositional thinking whereby one term is positioned as superior to, and master of, the other (such as in the case of society/nature) (see Gibson-Graham 2011, Plumwood 2002 and Weir 2009). In her work with traditional owners in Australia, for example, Jessica Weir (2009) offers the term connectivity as a response to this kind of thinking. Drawing from ecology, connectivity relates to interconnected relationships across species and plants, where it is the connection that is important rather than just ‘the substance of what which is connected’ (Weir 2009, p. 47). Weir pushes this further to include humans within this ecological understanding of connectivity, as well as extending the agency of humans, even sentience, to other species and nature. Building on this work, Gibson-Graham (2011) suggests that connectivity based on a recognition of ‘coexistence’ can be adopted as a strategy to generate and extend relationships of care and love been species. Gibson-Graham (2011, p. 3) also draws on Jane Bennett’s ‘“vital materialism” in which humans and nonhumans alike are “material configurations”’. This perspective privileges the shared materiality of all life as a form of connection, as well as highlighting how agency is shared across a collective of material life. This work extends the idea of collective association to a wide range of species, natures, and things, opening up further what makes a collective and suggesting that action needs to be thought of in the context of the collective. It also opens up to question the kind of connections that we might want to foster. It is not only the social sphere that has been challenged by ideas of association and connection. The distinctions between the economy, the environment and the social, shown for some time 339

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to be produced rather than ‘natural’ (Callon 2007, Mitchell 1998), have also been put into question by activists and researchers exploring economic ethics (Miller 2019). This work shows that if we are going to make ethical decisions about our economic lives then we need to look at our relationships with others outside the social sphere, especially to those placed within the category of the environment. Offering a radical new vision of economy with which to do this, ‘ecological livelihoods’, Ethan Miller and J.K. Gibson-Graham (2019) argue that we need to take responsibility for the ways in which our living is interwoven with others through interdependent relationships. In doing so, Miller and Gibson-Graham draw attention to the responsibilities that come with particular kinds of association. This work provides further insight, then, into the kind of associations that are important in collective action as well as opening up a space in which these associations can be explored and negotiated. This is a space in which ethics becomes a way of relating to others within the collective.

Concerns Just as our understanding of the social as a separate sphere falls away in a post-structural approach, so too has the idea of movement, along with related ideas of progress and teleological development. With shifts in thinking about the social has come questions about the goal of movements, which appear to be heterogeneous (Latour et al. 2018). What is it, then, that brings so many different people, species, and things together and what are they fighting for? Latour (2004, 2005a), Callon and Rabeharisoa (2003), and others working in the tradition of Actor-Network Theory have introduced the concept of ‘matters of concern’ and related idea of ‘concern groups’ to talk about collectives and their aims. Latour (2004) develops the idea of matters of concern by contrasting it with ‘matters of fact’. A matter of fact occurs when the controversy and debate over a thing has been settled so that it appears ‘natural’ or is simply explained as a social construct. This, Latour argues, takes us away from the thing itself. Latour is interested in the difference it makes to see things as matters of concern. Matters of concern are ‘gatherings’. Humans, other species, technologies, and all sorts of things come together around matters of concern, with the word matter used here to draw attention to the materiality of concerns and complex relationships and history that thing has (Latour 2004, Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Environment-economy issues are excellent examples of such concerns, such as pollution and other matters that have typically been seen by economists as market overflows. A key difference between matters of fact and concern is the politics they enable; transformation is only possible with matters of concern (on which I will expand under the topic of politics below). Taking the idea of matters of concern further, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) suggests that we also talk about matters of care and thereby push those gathered around the concern a step further to take a stake in these matters, to care for them. Matters of care is more active than concern; those assembled are not only concerned but they also care as an ‘ethically and politically charged practice’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, p. 42). Matters of concern are cared for by a range of people, other species, the environment, and things assembled together in concern groups (Callon and Rabeharisoa 2003). The association between the members of these groups is concern not identity, class, species, or any other unifying principle (Rodríguez-Giralt et al. 2018). This makes for an unpredictable and hybrid group, with Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) raising the question of how those concerned by through their fundamental opposition to any action or change might be considered in relation to the collective (Puig de la Bellacasa’s uses Latour’s example of concern centred on the sport utility vehicle, SUV, and those against environmentalist action towards SUVs). Earlier I mentioned the similarities or connections between members (materiality and care based on 340

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the recognition of shared coexistence). In addition to this kind of connection, groups form around specific political concerns and possibilities for the world to be different. As Israel Rodríguez-Giralt et al. (2018, p. 261) note, ‘The focus on controversies, conflicts, crises and disasters is indicative of an interest in situations in which epistemological and even ontological certainties collapse’. The World Social Forum is an excellent example of this. Originally launched in opposition to globalisation and imperialism, the Forum now is now an exploratory space for not only democratic practices but also for experiments in living in solidarity with each other and the planet, with a solidarity economy formed within many of the forum meetings.

Action It makes more sense in this context to focus our attention on action rather than a movement (and certainly rather than individual actors (see Miller 2020)). The aim of the kind of collective action I am interested in here is to generate new possibilities. This lends itself to an understanding of action as performative and the world as non-essentialist and overdetermined (St. Martin et al. 2015). Collectives make performative interventions through their discursive statements about the world, such as in diverse economies development projects which show the economy is full of diverse capitalist, alternative and non-capitalist practices and enterprises (Gibson-Graham 2006b). This work has opened up a range of new economic possibilities previously limited by capitaliocentric thinking (where everything is seen to be part of and constrained by a capitalist system). It is, however, the boarder collective that is central to the performative force of action (Roelvink 2016). As Callon (2007, p. 319) notes, discourse ‘cannot exist … without describable socio-technical devices that produce events described by singular statements’ (see also St. Martin et al. 2015, p. 7). In other words, we cannot say something is true without a socio-technical device that produces that which we are referring to: ‘When I say “this thread breaks,” I am referring to all the actions that cause the break in the thread and that cause my statement to be true, to actually happen (or not)’ (Callon 2007, p. 319). Callon describes this boarder process as performation, ‘whereby sociotechnical arrangements are enacted, to constitute so many ecological niches within and between which statements and models circulate and are true or at least enjoy a high degree of verisimilitude’ (Callon 2007, p. 330). In the case of diverse economies development projects, the realisation of the discourse of the diverse economy has involved universities, an international network of researchers, aid agencies, NGOs, action research, technologies of various kinds from those involved in fisheries (e.g., GPS), farming (e.g., soil testing) to tea making, and so on (for an interesting parallel see Ince, this volume). Today discourse of diverse economies circulates through the diverse economies research network and the Community Economies Institute, where it holds a high degree of validity, and out into Universities and non-government organisations. Action can thus be understood as performative and a collective result of the assemblage, which is always somewhat uncertain and momentary due to its hybrid and changing composition (Rodríguez-Giralt et al. 2018). What we see as action has a large part to do with how these shifting associations are framed (Callon 1998, 2005, Roelvink 2016). In the case of markets, for example, action is made possible by the inclusion and exclusion of particular relationships in market frames so that a transaction can occur (Callon 1998, 2005). Rather than taking a stance of direct opposition to the ‘neoliberal market’, thereby strengthening the discursive power neoliberalism holds, we can see concern groups gathered around a market actually intervening in how markets are framed and thus how they work (Roelvink 2016). Concern groups, for example, can add issues to be considered in market transactions thereby 341

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slowing down transactions and, potentially, introducing an ethical pause. This might be by politicising the issue of car emission in the automobile industry (see Callon 2005) or drawing attention to environmental standards, labour conditions and animal welfare in the clothing industry (for example, see Good on You, No Date). In seeking change to such ‘business as usual’, collective action is ultimately political.

Politics Collective action involves a whole host of actors in association. In this context, collective action must be negotiated with others gathered around a concern. Participants thus need to be open to debate with others who may be very different from them. Latour describes this kind of politics through comparison with what he sees an a-political identity politics: This is probably what you call identity politics, which I would define as politics based on three elements: expression of indisputable values, affirmation of indisputable opinions, and exposition of weaponized grievances. Now those three elements are understandable, but they don’t produce politics. They render politics impossible since, by definition, engaging those elements politically means that you are ready to dispute your values, to discuss your opinions, and to abandon or at least demilitarize your grievances. (Latour et al. 2018, p. 159, original emphasis) How does such a discussion take place? Latour identities three different layers of a politics of concern based on different forms of representation (Latour 2005a, Roelvink 2016). The first is the way in which participants are represented and gathered around in discussions of the concern. Latour argues that political theory has given most attention to this kind of representation, particularly in examining the different parties gathered together in democratic politics. In contrast, in the humanities it is the discursive representation of the concern, a second form of representation, that has been privileged. Here much attention has been given to how matters of concern, such as women and the economy, are discursively (including materially, linguistically, and through ways of knowing) brought into being as subjects and spheres. Latour offers a third sense of representation as site in which these two layers of representation are brought together, which he calls the ‘Body Politik’ (Latour 2005a, p. 16). The Body Politik is a political space in which concerns and concern groups assemble. Body Politiks are diverse and might be anything from a book collection, to an international meeting like the World Social Forum, to a film (Roelvink 2016). Latour’s collection with Peter Weibel (2005) Making things public: atmospheres of democracy in which he discusses these ideas is an example itself in attempting to assemble concerns and those gathered around them in a political space. These assemblies can bring about change in a number of different ways. Importantly, out of controversies and uncertainly they facilitate the creation of new knowledge and, with this, ways of being in the world. Grappling with alternatives to neoliberalism, for example, the World Social Forum became a site for the sharing of diverse experiences in living from around the world and the creation of a discourse of economic alternatives outside of the neoliberal capitalist frame. Body Politiks, then, are sites of learning from others, and this includes embodied learning where the coming together of different participants creates opportunities for affective shifts, shifts which can interrupt conventional ways of looking at the world and generate moments for new thinking (Roelvink 2016). Body Politiks also create a site for the discussion of and response to hegemonic discourse. This might include a rejection of the 342

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discourse but also a reframing of that discourse so that it loses its power. The placement of capitalist economic relationships as part of a much larger diverse economy is a good example of such reframing. Research has an important role to play in this political action.

Researchers as activists/concern groups as researchers Research is a prominent feature in concern groups. This includes activist researchers who see their research as an intervention. Their methods include the long established method of participatory action research but also go beyond this. Seeing research as a performative intervention opens up the ways in which researchers are associated with concern groups. In diverse economies research, for example, ‘mappings are understood as more than just reflections of economic practice; they are constitutive elements in the production and maintenance of solidarity economies’ (St. Martin et al. 2015, p. 18). By helping to map fishing areas, scholar activists Robert Snyder and Kevin St. Martin (2015) are part of work to constitute a fishing community through which political concerns can be pursued, including the protection of the oceans and fish. As St. Martin, myself and Gibson (2015, p. 18) reflect, ‘In this and other emerging work, diverse economies researchers are taking responsibility for the metrics and maps they produce, repositioning them as potential actors (or actants) that participated in the performance of new diverse (and even community) economy assemblages’. The shift to thinking about movements as collectives, with an emphasis on assemblage, has played an important part in seeing research contributing in this way. So has Puig de la Bellacasa’s extension of matters of concern to care. The matters of concern approach, Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, p. 39) writes, ‘emphasizes an ethico-political dimension of that problem: respect for the concerns embodied in the things we represent [in our research] implies attention to the effects of our accounts on the life of things’. There is a risk, though, that, even when a researcher closely follows assemblages around matters of concern, they remain uninvolved, taking a ‘god’s eye view’ (p. 41). Thus Puig de la Bellacasa calls on us to return to feminist situated knowledges and emphasise matters of care: ‘Attention to concerns brings us closer to putting forward the need of a practice of care as something we can do as thinkers and knowledge creators, fostering also more awareness about what we care for and about how this contributes to mattering the word’ (p. 41). This draws attention to the stance we take as researchers. In caring for matters of concern in research we cannot accept a prior matter of fact assumptions about the world as starting point for the application and development of a strong totalising theory. Rather, moving from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’ calls on researchers to adopt an open stance that can ‘add to reality’ rather than explain it away (Latour 2004). Eve Sedgwick (2003) argues that we need to work from a reparative stance that deliberately seeks out new possibilities for the world. This means caring for the self and others through the research process. Drawing on Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), Rodríguez-Giralt et al. (2018, p. 262) argue that the matters of care approach also compels us to see concern groups ‘as knowledge-making agents in their own right’. This involves ‘Thinking with and learning from’ movements in their own terms. Researchers working with non-academic researchers may thus need to take more facilitative approach (Hwang 2020). Activist research, what Callon and Rabeharisoa (2003) describe as ‘research in the wild’, is a common characteristic of contemporary movements. Arjun Appadurai (2000, p. 3) describes research networks centred on diverse activist knowledges in place as ‘grassroots globalisation’. This is perhaps part of a larger trend in which consumers, publics and NGOs play a much larger role as stakeholders in governance (Callon and Rabeharisoa 2003, Appadurai 2000). These different knowledges come together 343

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in concern groups and challenge academic participants to accept a ‘redistribution of expertise’ (Rodríguez-Giralt et al. 2018, p. 262). Furthermore, ‘thinking with’ concern groups does not mean turning a blind eye from our own and others entanglement in power relations, such as being a privileged researcher in an academic institution, nor the entanglements of others. There is also the possibility of dissenting within; ‘“staying with” the complicities that arise, asking questions of the assumptions underpinning the collectives, and pushing back through widening the discussion to include previous excluded others’ (Dombroski, 2018, pp. 262–263 on Puig de la Bellacasa’s, 2017, distinction). In her work exploring the economic ethics in assemblages of alternative child care practices, for example, Kelly Dombroski (2018, p. 261) thinks with collectives of mothers’ bodies, ‘instruments, beds, machines, sanitary pads, wipes, milk, ointments, nappies, slings, cots, and strollers just to name a few’, shifting what was seen as individualised practices to much border collective in which interdependence is enacted. Yet, Dombroski also asks questions about the power relations enacted by the collective, in doing so broadens her work from more privileged settings in Australia and New Zealand to far west China.

Conclusion: new thinking for contemporary concerns Variously described as a concern group, assemblage or hybrid collective, the kind of collective I have explored here is best characterised as an association between all sorts of species and things. It is their concern and care for a particular thing or issue at the time that brings participants together, whether it is globalisation, food traditions, river health, fashion, or any other issue. Collectives gathered around a concern seek to bring about change and in particular new possibilities for living in the world that are specific to their concern. They enlist a range of methods to do so, from creating new discourse to employing the power of affect to create an opening for new relationships and thinking, enlisting as they do the powerful tool of research. This post-structural view of social movements corresponds to and is interwoven with other intellectual trends; here I have focused on the rethinking of the economy through a post-capitalist politics (Gibson-Graham 2006b). Today, academic and activist attention is clearly directed towards climate change and the implications of our new geological epoch of Anthropocene. This work is likely to transform the terrain of collective action once again with new concepts and understandings of human relationships with other species and the planet taking hold and being experimented with. This includes, amongst many others, Latour’s work on territorialised movements rethinking relationships with land (see Latour et al. 2018, Latour 2017) and Donna Haraway’s (2016) work on the Chthulucene, which emphases posthumanist entanglements and ‘multispecies stories’ for ‘living on a damaged planet’ (Tsing et al. 2017). This work aims to think with the movements that abound today and also to join them in their experimentations in living. Given this, collective action continues to be an exciting and thought-provoking area for examination and one through which scholars can contribute to the creation of new possibilities.

References Appadurai, A., 2000. Grassroots globalization and the research imagination. Public Culture, 12 (1), 1–19. Butler, J., 1990. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Callon, M., ed., 1998. The laws of the markets. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Callon, M., 2005. Why virtualism paves the way to political impotence: Callon replies to Miller. Economic Sociology: European Electronic Newsletter, 6 (2), 3–20.

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Collective Action Callon, M., 2007. What does it mean to say that economics is performative? In: D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, and L. Siu, eds. Do economists make markets: on the performativity of economics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 311–357. Callon, M. and Rabeharisoa, V., 2003. Research ‘in the wild’ and the shaping of new social identities. Technology in Society, 23 (2), 193–204. Dombroski, K., 2018. Thinking with, dissenting within: care-full critique for more-than-human worlds. Journal of Cultural Economy, 11 (3), 261–264. Gibson-Graham, J.K., 2006a. The end of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy with a new introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., 2006b. A post-capitalist politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., 2011. A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene. Gender, Place & Culture, 18 (1), 1–21. Gibson-Graham, J.K., Healy, S. and Cameron, J., 2013. Take back the economy: an ethical guide for transforming our communities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Good on You, No Date. Available from: https://goodonyou.eco/ [Accessed 2 September 2019]. Haraway, D., 2016. Staying with the trouble: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? In: J. Moore, ed. Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 34–76. Hwang, L., 2020. Action research for an inclusive and diverse workplace. In: K. Dombroski and J.K. Gibson-Graham, eds. The handbook of diverse economies. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 520–526. Latour, B. and Weibel, P., eds., 2005. Making things public: atmospheres of democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, B., 2004. Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30 (2), 225–248. Latour, B., 2005a. From realpolitik to dingpolitik: or how to make things public. In: B. Latour, and P. Weibel, eds. Making things public: atmospheres of democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 14–41. Latour, B., 2005b. Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B., 2017. Down to Earth: politics in the new climate regime. Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: Polity Press. Latour, B., et al., 2018. Down to earth social movements: an interview with Bruno Latour. Social Movement Studies, 17 (3), 353–361. Miller, E., 2019. Reimagining livelihoods life beyond economy, society, and environment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Miller, E., 2020. More-than-human agency: from the human economy to ecological livelihoods. In: K. Dombroski and J.K. Gibson-Graham, eds. The handbook of diverse economies. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 402–410. Miller, E. and Gibson-Graham, J.K., 2019. Thinking with interdependence: from economy/environment to ecological livelihoods. In: J. Bennett and M. Zournazi, eds. Thinking in the world: a reader. New York: Bloomsbury, 314–340. Mitchell, T., 1998. Fixing the economy. Cultural Studies, 12 (1), 82–101. Plumwood, V., 2002. Feminism and the mastery of nature. London and New York: Routledge. Puig de la Bellacasa, M., 2017. Matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rodríguez-Giralt, I., Marrero-Guillamón, I. and Milstein, D., 2018. Reassembling activism, activating assemblages: an introduction. Social Movement Studies, 17 (3), 257–268. Roelvink, G. 2020. Framing essay: diverse economies methodology. In: J.K. Gibson-Graham and K. Dombroski, eds. The handbook of diverse economies. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 453–466. Roelvink, G., 2016. Building dignified worlds: Geographies of collective action. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roelvink, G., St. Martin, K., Gibson-Graham, J.K., eds., 2015. Making other worlds possible: performing diverse economies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sedgwick, E., 2003. Touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham: Duke University Press. Slow Food, No Date a. About us [online]. Slow Food website. https://www.slowfood.com/about-us/ [Accessed 20 August 2019]

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Gerda Roelvink Slow Food, No Date b. Slow food for Africa: 10,000 gardens to cultivate the future [online]. Slow Food. Available from: https://a2e5c2y9.stackpathcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ING_Libretto_ orti_2019.pdf [Accessed 2 September 2019]. Snyder, R. and St. Martin, K., 2015. A fishery for the future: the Midcoast Fishermen’s Association and the work of economic being-in-common. In: G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin, J.K. Gibson-Graham, eds. Making other worlds possible: performing diverse economies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 26–52. Soulard, F. 2017. World Social Forum Charter of Principles [online], Foro Social Mundial De Las Migraciones 2018. Available from: https://fsmm2018.org/world-social-forum-charter-principles/?lang=en [Accessed 19 November 2021]. St. Martin, K., Roelvink, G. and Gibson-Graham, J.K., 2015. An economic politics for our times. In: G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin, J.K. Gibson-Graham, eds. Making other worlds possible: performing diverse economies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1–25. Tsing, A., et al., 2017. Arts of living on a damaged planet: ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Weir, J., 2009. Murray river country: an ecological dialogue with traditional owners. Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press. World Social Forum of Transformative Economies, No Date. Charter of principles [online]. World Social Forum of Transformative Economies. Available from: https://transformadora.org/en/ about/principles [Accessed 4 July 2022].

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29 EVENTFUL INFRASTRUCTURES Contingencies of Socio-Material Change Anders Blok

Introduction: infrastructural change in question As theories of social change themselves change, recent years has seen growing interest in the roles and capacities of material agencies to exert influence over social outcomes, in conjunction with and occasionally beyond human intentions and projects. Among other access points, materiality and technologies are central to intensified debates around infrastructures and their short- and long-term effects as both what may lend stability towards, and at times challenge, nation state-authored and other projects of authority and social ordering. As Paul Edwards (2003) and others have argued, modernity writ large was built in large part via technological infrastructures: electric light enabled new patterns of capitalist work, just as railroads enabled new patterns of long-distance trade. More recently, Timothy Mitchell (2011) has documented the centrality of oil-based infrastructures to twentieth century democracy, let alone to any contemporary reckoning with the global risks of climate change and related ecological crises. In this chapter, I discuss a range of science and technology studies (STS)-infused approaches to infrastructures and their temporal dynamics, imaginations and layering, past, present, and future. If, as Susan Leigh Star (1999) famously argued 20 years ago, infrastructures have tended to remain only the taken-for-granted backdrop to human practices and long seemed too unexciting (and ‘uneventful’) for the grand narratives told by the social-cultural sciences, such an era of infrastructural neglect seem definitively over by now. In recent years, drawing sometimes on actor-network theory (ANT), scholars in STS take part in a wider and more analytically diverse confluence of interests that have emerged around the kinds of material constraints and politics at work in trajectories of conjoint socio-technical change. Here, human geographers, anthropologists, designers, political theorists, and environmental scientists nowadays all debate, with varying intensities, how best to grasp infrastructures and their many, partly unintended effects on economies, politics, cultural, and natural landscapes (Harvey et al., 2018). In anthropologist Brian Larkin’s felicitous phrase (2013, p. 329), infrastructures are ‘matter that enable the movement of other matter’. As he goes on to note (Larkin 2013, p. 332), infrastructure has its conceptual roots (although obviously not its material beginnings) ‘in the Enlightenment idea of a world in movement and open to change where the free circulation of goods, ideas, and people created the possibility of progress’. Infrastructures are integral to the organisation of a market economy, and important parts of their continuing DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-33

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techno-political address, including not least in (so-called) developing nations, involve desires for and contestations over promises of purported modernity. This ‘heady lineage’, as Larkin dubs it, makes it difficult to disentangle an analysis of infrastructures, wherever situated, from certain affective and ideological connotations of progressive social change. Conversely, however, I argue in this chapter that to nonetheless do so, we need to forge some new and more ‘eventful’ analytical avenues. Such avenues pick up from how STS work has questioned otherwise popular notions that infrastructures like roads, sewers, and electrical powerlines would form simply the static and solid base through which things such as people, money and resources flow. While infrastructures indeed comprise architectures for circulation, thus allowing for exchange over space and time and literally undergirding diverse techno-political and power-laden strivings for efficiency and order, they are in practice never as static or as monolithic as they may seem. Infrastructures exist in layered relations to other infrastructures, to local and transnational regulations, market forces, organised practices, and everyday life; they corrode, break down and acquire accretions, and they require constant monitoring, repair, and periodic updating (Graham and Thrift 2007). Infrastructure, as Star noted (1999, p. 377), is both relational and dynamic. In the words of Spice, ‘Pipelines, like other modern infrastructures, are not events, but they are eventful […].’ (Spice 2018, p. 44). In this chapter, in short, I take Larkin’s observation as prompt for questioning the multiple temporalities of infrastructures. More specifically, I engage existing literatures on infrastructure and modernity from the point of view of how to theorise socio-technical change in more heterogeneous and ‘eventful’ ways than usual (Sewell Jr. 2005). In contrast to Paul Edwards (2003, p. 196), who regard the application of a scalar dimension to infrastructures’ time as ‘relatively straightforward’, my starting point is that differently scaled temporal processes and events intermingling in rather complicated ways in any concrete infrastructural setting. Such confluence, I argue, is subject to contingent long-term durabilities and situated shifts of direction. More specifically, I suggest three interrelated analytical avenues – of slow-moving infrastructural accretions across critical junctures; of the dynamism of technological demonstrations; and of the radical uncertainties of fraught ecological futures – along which analysts may fruitfully engage the question of how any infrastructural network undergoes and effectuates change. To illustrate this argument, I will focus in this chapter not on infrastructures tout court but rather on the more delimited domain of urban infrastructural change (e.g., Blok and Farías 2016; Blok 2018). Urban spaces have long emerged as key arenas for interrogating the economic, political, cultural, and environmental shaping and effects of contested and interconnecting local-global infrastructural landscapes (Graham and Marvin 2001, p. 8). Specifically, I draw examples from my own collaborative studies into water- and traffic-based infrastructural nexuses in Copenhagen, traceable via the so-called Ladegaard stream as an arch that moves from bacteriological concerns with sewage in the mid-nineteenth century up until today’s concern with climate adaptation in the so-called Anthropocene (see Blok et al., 2017). This setting thus allows me to think questions of infrastructural change from within the milieu of its present-day perturbations, as a vantage point from which to look back on and forward from ‘modernity’ anew.

Infrastructural accretions, critical junctures, urban histories I start out in this section by addressing what I take to be a key analytical conundrum shaping STS and other work on infrastructures, to do with how one narrates modernity’s infrastructural underpinnings in ways equally sensitive to slow-moving accretions and continuities as 348

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to critical junctures and shifts. One suitable starting point for such a reckoning is provided by Paul Edwards (2003) when he attempts to theorise the conundrum of socio-technical change in a way that both affirms and questions the close aligning of infrastructures to modernity. Infrastructures, Edwards argues, indeed co-construct the conditions of modernity. But they do so precisely to the extent that they link macro, meso, and micro scales of time, space, and social organisation in such ways as to form the (relatively) stable foundation of modern social worlds. Edwards’ argument hinges on a three-fold distinction of temporal frames. Rather than the human time-scale of hours and days (micro) or the geophysical time-scale of millennia and beyond (macro), infrastructures exist chiefly, Edwards suggests (Edwards 2003, p. 194), in historical time-scales of decades and centuries (meso). Thus, while modern infrastructures seem fragile and ephemeral things when set in geophysical time, they nevertheless change too slowly for most of us to notice within the humdrum rhythms of human time in everyday life. Because of their endurance in historical time, however, infrastructures become important forces in structuring society, including how we experience time itself. Such a recursive relation is visible, for instance, in how the telegraph enables a sense of simultaneity across spatial distances. Edwards’ multi-scalar approach to short- and long-term socio-technical change serves to put modernity itself in perspective as a rather particular techno-political form. The example given by Edwards pertains to information infrastructures and how notions of a recent ‘computer revolution’ crucially miss the continuity of information infrastructures over historical time, as defined in functional rather than technological terms. Hence, while new technologies have sprung up intermittently – from books and libraries via typewriters and punch cards in the nineteenth century to computer systems – information processing continues to be defined, Edwards argues (Edwards 2003, p. 208), by a functional logic of material production, communication, and speed, integral to the co-evolution of industrial capitalism and its infrastructures. In historical time, in short, infrastructures emerge chiefly as solutions to systemic problems of flow and control in industrial capitalism: of how to produce, transport, and sell increasing volumes of goods. Such renderings of the infrastructure-modernity link may be challenged, however, by a shift in temporal frame. Human-scale, social-constructivist analyses show how users shape and alter infrastructures, by tinkering with them and redeploying them to their own ends. Work on maintenance and repair similarly stress the ongoing-ness of such activities, as against the myth of infrastructural stability (Graham and Thrift 2007). On geological scales, conversely, one notices how infrastructures are imbricated within, rather than separate from, nature, in the shape of techno-ecological metabolisms like fuel and waste and associated outcomes like global climate change or what is now dubbed the Anthropocene (Blok and Bruun Jensen 2019). To be modern, Edwards suggests (2003, p. 222), is to ‘inhabit and traverse multiple scales of force, time, and social organization’, in processes that he describes as ‘mutual orientation’. Yet, such a scalar analytic also opens up the very real possibility that ‘modernity’ itself, along with its purported separations of society, technology and nature as upheld and stabilised by infrastructures (viz. Latour 1993), may be partly an artefact of reifying a meso-historical scale of analysis. Edwards’ attempt to develop a multi-scalar perspective on infrastructures’ temporalities and socio-technical organisation is highly laudable and analytically intriguing. It responds, one might say, to a signature move in STS approaches to provide a fundamentally relational conception of infrastructure, whereby technologies become infrastructures only in relation to organised practices with some extension in space and time (Star 1999). If anything, Edwards’ 349

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account of infrastructures’ embedding in historical time resonates here with a recurring trope of the slow rhythms, the inertia, the durability, and the obduracy of infrastructures, including urban infrastructures (see Hommels 2005). The ubiquity of infrastructures suggests a temporality of persistence (Larkin 2013) – and this is true, even as we acknowledge the active role of maintenance and repair, and the gradual changes implied by the layering of new infrastructural solutions on top of an existing base. Infrastructure is society made durable (Latour 1991). What is characteristic and unsatisfying about all such tropes, however, is their rather ‘eventless’ nature. As narrative genre, they embody versions of what Thomas Scheffer (2007), in a perceptive argument, has elsewhere called ‘process without events’. Here, ‘event’ connotes the common-place idea of a contingent and critical juncture in a wider sequence of transactions. Process-without-event approaches to temporality, in turn, ‘testify to expanding, accumulating, linear, and final developments’ (Scheffer 2007, p. 182), as narrated from an ex post position where passing moments appear only as inevitable phases towards a goal, as if processes were regulated by some larger dynamic in history. Such analytical tendencies are strong also in Edwards’ approach, although processes are seen here to unfold themselves not via one single path but according to three distinct temporal scales, in turn (over-)determined by each their organising logic (of everyday practice, industrial capitalism, and geo-socio-technical metabolisms). The correlate of such event-less process approaches, as Scheffer also notes (2007, p. 183), is to imagine perturbations, transformations, and changes only through the image of breakdown or rupture (on the problem of continuity and rupture in philosophical event-thinking from Whitehead to Deleuze and Badiou, see Fraser 2010). Indeed, historical and sociological interest in the very concept of events is often moulded in the image of ‘revolution’ (e.g., WagnerPacifici 2017). Similarly, socio-cultural writings on infrastructure exhibits its own analytical concern with notable instances of infrastructural breakdown, as manifested not least in large-scale technological disasters such as those of chemical and nuclear industrial meltdowns (e.g., Morita et al., 2013). In turn, such an obsession with catastrophic breakdown is strongly mirrored among technical professionals and their governing bodies who have come since the 1950s to adopt ‘preparedness’ and ‘resilience’ as dominant political technologies of infrastructural (non-)control in the face of catastrophic disasters and risks (Lakoff and Collier 2010). Yet, to align the sense of infrastructures’ eventful-ness too restrictedly to the image of crisis, catastrophe, and breakdown is arguably to miss the opportunity to develop an account of socio-technical change along more generally eventful lines (see John Clarke, this volume). Following William H. Sewell Jr. (2005), whom Scheffer (2007) also references, an eventful approach resonates with historians’ often implicit notion of temporality as fateful, contingent, complicated, and heterogeneous, and as unfolding at the point of intersection of multiple processes, relations, and causalities. Such temporal assumptions, Sewell Jr. argues, stand in contrast to those traces of teleological temporality still widespread in social theory, and visible also, as I have argued, in accounts of modernity and infrastructures. Conversely, rather than flux and instability per se, eventful accounts of temporality implies that the relative and varying durabilities and the specific means of stabilisation or contestation of socio-technical assemblages, via urban planning and otherwise, become prime objects of inquiry (see Blok and Farías 2016). Stability, as much as change, must be accounted for. Within STS work on infrastructures, the difference between Scheffer’s (2007, p. 178) strong processuality and strong eventfulness, respectively, may be illustrated by juxtaposing Thomas P. Hughes’ (1987) notion of the ‘technological momentum’ in nineteenth century American electricity networks to Bruno Latour’s (1996) account of the socio-technical ‘translations’ at stake in Parisian attempts since the 1970s to build a new railroad infrastructure. Hughes’ 350

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is a system analysis, predicated on how key forces of propulsion – technical, administrative, financial – come together to extend infrastructural networks. By contrast, Latour’s ANT account works in more eventful ways, paying attention to many minute-but-critical junctures in the network-building effort. Such frequently arise, Latour is clear, at the intersection of unforeseen technical difficulties, shifting ideological alliances, tensions in investment calculations, and contradictory assertions about the city’s cultural identity. For the new railroad infrastructure to stabilise therefore requires ongoing and contingent translation work (see Gerda Roelvink, this volume). Similarly, in the urban studies realm, Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin’s (2001) account of the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’ of the (Euro-American) networked city of universal access and its subsequent ‘splintering’ since the 1960s is staunchly processual, yet perhaps insufficiently eventful. Urban-infrastructural systems, Graham and Marvin show (2001, p. 8), ‘co-evolve closely in their interrelationships with urban development’ in a ‘complex and dynamic sociotechnical process’ (emphasis in original). Nevertheless, their notion of a wholesale splintering of the networked city ideal under new neoliberal pressures to privatise and commodify service provision has itself come under criticism for exhibiting an unwarranted ‘universal pessimism’ vis-à-vis more contingent and open-ended realities and events (Coutard and Guy 2007, p. 720ff ). Even tell-tale technical-neoliberal measures like prepayment metering of electricity services, Coutard and Guy argue, come with contingent and variable socio-technical causes and consequences across contexts, including when it comes to vulnerable groups. Similar contingencies are nowadays at stake in diverse ‘smart city’ projects (Mondschein et al., 2021). In light of such analytical tensions, STS-informed work on infrastructures may well want to strive for concepts and methods better able to handle what Scheffer (2007, p. 178) dubs the ‘strong interplay’ of unfolding processes and situated events, or in other words, accounts that situate events and critical junctures in ongoing processes of varying temporal stretches. Amongst other things, as Kristin Asdal argues (2012, p. 397), this would mean treating history ‘on more of the same footing as “the present”; more open-ended, with a multiple set of possible collectives’, possible socio-technical trajectories. In the realm of urban studies, for instance, the work of Matthew Gandy (2006) on ‘the bacteriological city’ nicely exemplifies such a move, inspired in part by Foucault’s description of ‘effective’ history (see Wagner-Pacifici 2017, p. 87). Here, Gandy insists on reading meso-historical developments from the early industrial era up until the 1970s through a stronger appreciation than Graham and Marvin’s of the inherent tensions and fragilities of the city’s new centralised technologies and attendant forms of government. Specifically, Gandy’s notion of the bacteriological traces a decadal trajectory of pathdependencies and critical junctures in water-related urban infrastructures. This multi-layered trajectory spans from infectious disease outbreaks in the mid-nineteenth century through sewage expansions into the early twentieth century driven by medical and engineering expertise, leading up to biology-informed concerns with waterbody pollution from sewage discharge from around the 1950s, with attendant instalment of new wastewater treatment facilities, new legal-environmental regulations, and new political contestations intensifying from the 1960s onwards. At each of these critical meso-historical junctures, Gandy (2006, p. 159) stresses, new infrastructural developments attain the quality of historical compromises amongst a range of actors and forces, including professional expertise, material-technical affordances, financial possibilities, governmental strategies, and citizens’ bodily practices. This eventful analytic, in short, brings attention to the way shifting expert-based problematisations (e.g., over hygiene) come in turn to co-construct their own subsequent critical tensions and 351

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Figure 29.1

The Ladegaard stream being channelised, a. 1930 (no official date)

Source: Museum of Copenhagen (https://kbhbilleder.dk/kbh-museum/41953).

junctures (e.g., around pollution), leading to further layers of infrastructural accretion (e.g., wastewater treatment plants) (see Meilvang 2020). The history of the Ladegaard stream in Copenhagen, to which I alluded in the introduction, might well be told in exactly such Gandy- and Foucault-inspired terms. This would trace the way the stream gradually transformed to an ‘open sewer’ (late nineteenth century), was channelised as part of sewage expansion (1920s–1960s) (Figure 29.1), became part of traffic and pollution struggles over inner-city districts from the 1960s onwards, only to re-enter public life as part of today’s climate adaptation concerns. In subsequent sections, I illustrate these latter steps in more detail. For now, what needs emphasising is the way such a narrative allows for equal sensitivity to unfolding processes and situated events, and hence to the simultaneity of slow-moving accretions and continuities together with critical junctures and partial shifts of trajectory. Compared to master narratives of the momentum and integrity of modernity’s infrastructures, as well as to corollary accounts of their spectacular disasters and breakdowns, these suggestions point, I contend, to a more eventful, situated, and heterogeneous view of those interplays of layered spatio-temporalities whereby urban and other infrastructures change.

Demonstration events: situations of infrastructural contention On Monday, April 1, 1968, a small group of maybe 20 activists clad in frogman suits would enter the lakes in inner city Copenhagen and attach banners to the lake floor reading, ‘This is where we are building a playground for adults’ (Her bygger vi legegade for de voksne) (Figure 29.2). 352

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Figure 29.2 The anti-road demonstration, April 1, 1968 Source: Erik Holmberg (source: berlingske.dk).

The ‘playground’ in question, it would have been clear to observers, referred to a three-lane highway known as the Lake Ring (Søgaden). First scheduled in the late 1950s, comprehensive plans for such a highway expansion through the inner city had already shaped expert planning and urban-political debates for long, often in an environmental register. In this context, the frogman suit demonstration called attention to how the plans would have tangible negative effects on the lakes as venerated sites of nature-based recreation. In doing so, it enacted a spectacular version of the tensions discussed above, betting on the protest form to exert its own eventfulness vis-à-vis otherwise expert-dominated urban-infrastructural accretions. As studies informed by STS has shown, demonstrations such as the one in the Copenhagen lakes works simultaneously in a political and a technical register (Barry 1999, 2002). Ever since the revolutions on the nineteenth century, public demonstrations are commonly thought to mark the emergence of ‘the masses’ as a political subject, pointing to an intolerable situation and the unacceptability of power’s exercise. Yet, as Andrew Barry argues (1999, p. 77), such acts intend also a rather more technical effect: to demonstrate a truth which it has been otherwise impossible to demonstrate in public by other means. By placing their bodies and placards in the lake water, the Copenhagen anti-road protesters partook to such a technical demonstration event; theirs was an act of pointing out to others the likelihood that environmental destruction would occur, and that a sizeable part of the lakes would be swallowed up by the highway. Such an act makes sense, in turn, against the backdrop of what Barry (2002), in a different context, calls ‘the anti-political economy’. Much of what is called politics, Barry argues, including much of urban politics, in fact has anti-political effects. This is so since, in general terms, ‘legislation and technical regulation have the effects of placing actions and objects (provisionally) outside the realm of public contestation’ (Barry 2002, p. 271), thereby rendering 353

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rules of market exchange, in particular, more regular. Barry’s anti-political economy, we might say, is also the dominant modus operandi of infrastructural politics, for most of the time and in most places. The Lake Ring highway plans, as an object of urban politics, had long traversed the various sites of Copenhagen urban technocracy, passing by planning boards, expert reviews, and administrative offices. Yet, by way of the frogman suit and similar public demonstrations, the highway emerged as a publicly visible and politicised object, with several of its detrimental and overflowing risks (pollution, demolishing of lake habitats) to the urban environment attached. What emerged via public demonstrations, in short, had the contours of a techno-political event, still in the common-place sense of a critical juncture in the unfolding of the urbaninfrastructural process and situation (Wagner-Pacifici 2017). Over the coming years, official political support for the project floundered and all plans, save a few peripheral road elements (to which I return), would come to be shelved. It clearly matters that these particular anti-road mobilisations would happen amidst the flurry of cultural and political upheavals nowadays known and named for its specific confluence in time, as ‘the events of 1968’ (see Savransky 2016, p. 155f ). Anti-road groups found allies across a broad range of local struggles, including autonomous housing communes, unions and left-wing political parties, together attaining the shape of a networked urban social movement (in the sense of Castells 1984). In the process, 50,000 citizens signed an anti-Lake Ring petition, bearing witness to how public contestation opened up infrastructural politics in a move of technical democratisation (Farías and Blok 2016). While the link between urban infrastructure and events of public demonstration has a longer history, there is arguably an important specificity to the anti-road events of 1968. They articulate with what Graham and Marvin (2001, p. 134) describe, in language previously discussed, as a ‘broader attack on the large-scale centralised technologies surrounding the modern infrastructural ideal’, driven by environmental critiques of the ‘technological society’ and its supporting claims to progress. However, just as we might want to question the analytical purchase of terms like modern infrastructural ideal when set against any specific socio-technical trajectory (as I did in the previous section), it is less than clear what blanket notions of rising environmental critiques of urban progress imply on the urban ground. After all, as Barry (2002) details, the dominant set of techno-political response to problems of urban traffic-derived air pollution has been the construction of new monitoring and information infrastructures, not reductions in car-based mobility. Before subsuming these Copenhagen events within a pre-set historical frame, then, we need to trace their scope and legacy a bit more carefully. In turn, this is arguably where we face the key analytical conundrum of any political event: while the anti-road demonstrations of 1968 indeed instantiated a transformation of the very field of the possible in local urban politics, to use Deleuzian language (see Savransky 2016), the varying scopes and consequences of such events remain inherently and by definition openended. This is so because, in the language of philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers (2000), an event is a creator of difference exerted from the middle of a field of contingent forces, the precise delineation of which belongs itself to the event’s effects. As such, a true event marks the difference or juncture between a before and an after in collective history, yet the scope of any event, Stengers asserts (Stengers 2000, p. 66f ), is part of ‘the problem posed in the future it creates’. In this sense, an event has no privileged representative, only multiple interpretations and inheritances that become themselves part of the event’s scope and collective meaning. This is also why, to stay with Stengers (2000), events like the ones in Copenhagen might well be said to have come to have multiple techno-political effects, yet cannot meaningfully 354

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be cast as having caused such effects (see also Fraser 2010). In other words, while the event has a concrete existence, this existence does not pre-determine the varying responses given to it, even while it may well create the necessity of response. Such indeed is the fate of the anti-road protests in Copenhagen in 1968, as a vast and growing range of professional, political, and public constituencies and agencies were compelled to respond to them. Most immediately, as noted, Lake Ring plans floundered amidst growing public disconcertment. Yet, as Stengers would surely affirm, the effects of an event are always also in the hands of rather more distant future inheritors, who re-appropriate the event for new problematisations. In general terms, then, to trace the contingent extension of a political event is to see ‘how it is re-invented and how it is subject to a multiplicity of interpretations across different locations’ (Mackenzie 2005, p. 397). In the case of anti-highway protests in Copenhagen, fragments of such critical traces turn out to exert themselves also across temporally farflung situations (Barry 2012). Specifically, they have come since 2017 to attach themselves to renewed controversies over the one material remnant of the otherwise defunct Lake Ring plans, an outer-city highway overpass. Incidentally, this overpass sits on top of where the last bit of the Ladegaard water-stream was channelised in the 1960s; and proponents of unearthing or ‘daylighting’ the stream have tactically sought to align their case to an agenda of overpass demolition. In the process, they have re-articulated the overpass’ history as part of what is today widely seen as a high-modernist planning mistake. Viewed over mesohistorical time, we might say, infrastructural ideals accrete and change in eventful ways along with their technologies. In sum, while it would be a mistake to view the relative success of today’s anti-overpass and pro-daylighting mobilisations as caused by their anti-road protest predecessors in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the two political situations are nevertheless tied together through active work of inheritance and re-articulation. This case thus illustrates Barry’s argument (2012, p. 331) that shifting techno-political situations of infrastructural contention come to be stitched together from fragments distributed across time and space. In turn, any particular techno-political situation, such as the one now surrounding the Ladegaard water-stream and its associated urban infrastructures, may itself be understood as a critical point of intersection and stitching between multiple eventful socio-technical processes, the evolution of each of which operate largely autonomous from the other. Continuing this line of reasoning, I turn now to unfold how this site’s imbrication into ecological crises account for much of its present-day perturbations, in ways that return us, albeit in distinct and novel ways, to themes of disaster and anticipation.

Ecological disruptions and the futures of infrastructure On July 2, 2011, a major cloudburst hit Copenhagen, leaving streets and basements flooded and causing locally unprecedented damage (Figure 29.3). In the months and years to follow, climate adaptation would climb up the ladder of priorities for policy-makers, professionals, and citizens, raising municipal investments levels in climate-proofing the city by a factor of ten (Madsen et al. 2019). At the core of such attempts stand a literal-materialist version of what STS scholar Geoffrey Bowker (1994) once called ‘infrastructural inversion’. With underground sewage capacities exposed as inadequate for the future, the collective search was on for ways of handling excess rainwater on the urban surface, as engineers and landscape architects would set about digging new rain-beds, park reservoirs, and much else besides. Meanwhile, a civic coalition emerged and gained momentum for their vision to ‘daylight’ the Ladegaard water-stream whose historical tribulations would, in the process, emerge as a public prism 355

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Figure 29.3 The June 2, 2011 cloudburst, road on top of Ladegaard stream Source: Anders Jørn Jensen (https://www.ladegaardsaaen.dk/billeder).

onto changing urban-infrastructural landscapes in times of ecological crises (as I also explore in this text). In a first approximation, the Copenhagen cloudburst is reminiscent of those debates about infrastructural breakdown previously mentioned, yet arguably it is only partially so. As part of his multi-scalar analytics, Paul Edwards (2003, p. 193) notes how ‘[e]arthquakes, tornadoes, global climate change, and other natural events represent scales of force beyond the range for which most infrastructures are, or even can be, designed’. In turn, Edwards aligns this crediblesounding claim to Ulrich Beck’s risk society diagnosis (1992), whereby the rendering commensurate of the instabilities of the natural and the socio-technical via the category of ‘risk’ would be characteristic of late-modern governance. Yet, in doing so, Edwards arguably conflates Beck’s (2009) distinction between catastrophe and risk: risk, Beck is adamant, does not mean catastrophe, but rather the anticipation of future catastrophe. When aligned to a science-backed imaginary of global climate change, the cloudburst becomes more than a materialised present event; it becomes a material-symbolic token of a threatening future dimly foretold. Beck’s diagnosis anticipates contemporary socio-cultural discussions on the Anthropocene, the purportedly new geological epoch of the present wherein ‘humanity’ writ large exert earthand geology-transforming capacities over and above other forces (Blok and Bruun Jensen 2019; see Noel Castree, this volume). Alongside the many open-ended questions raised by such a suggestion (when did the Anthropocene start? who exactly is the Anthropos? should we speak rather of the Capitalocene?), anthropologist Kregg Hetherington (2018, p. 5) is right in pointing to what makes the Anthropocene, in whichever guise, so conceptually unsettling. While there is nothing new in humans facing environmental disaster, Hetherington argues, ‘those disasters have always appeared to have an intellectual outside’, to be always located and localised elsewhere, often in ways that reiterated colonial violence or deepened vectors of class and racial inequalities. The conceit of the Anthropocene, by contrast, is ‘its claim to reach everywhere’: even while its effects are unevenly distributed, the Anthropocene ‘promise to unsettle the condition of every life’ – and, we might add, of every material infrastructure, urban and otherwise. 356

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From a temporal perspective on socio-technical change, this unsettled situation arguably entails an unprecedented level of time’s heterogeneous extension and critical implosion into contested misalignments. As Matthew Gandy (2018, p. 103) highlights, an Anthropocene sensibility, to the extent it gains public traction, adds new layers of ‘deep time’ to imaginaries and practices of urban infrastructures, placing cities ‘outside the conventional frame of historical analysis’. Concerns with an unfolding sixth mass extinction, for instance, conjures a set of previous extinctions in which over 90% of all life forms were wiped out, including during the mid-Permian period some 260 million years ago. Not unlike Edwards’ (2003) geological time-scales, yet more radically so, such deep time imaginaries serve to emphasise the fragility of those ecological interdependencies that allowed cities and their infrastructures to flourish under ‘modernity’. Tellingly, in the face of projected sea-level rises and stormsurge threats, critical architects in Copenhagen nowadays articulate a radical questioning of the city’s modernist expansion and former planners’ inabilities to respect critical ecological interdependencies. Events like the Copenhagen cloudburst thus lead to the realisation that, as Hetherington puts it in reference to Stengers (2015), what ‘humans confront as the environment […] is as much the result of infrastructural history as natural history’. Yet, what follows is not only, as Kim Fortun (2012) puts it, that ours is an age of degrading industrial infrastructure, environmental threat, and exhausted socio-technical paradigms. In the language of Beck, ours is also an age predicated on collective abilities to anticipate and circulate a set of long-term futures, such as those of global climate change and their likely localised impacts, and to bring such futures to bear on present-day urban planning situations (Blok 2017). Here, the currently unfolding controversies over the Ladegaard water-stream in Copenhagen is as much about the coordination of divergent future socio-technical anticipations as it is about the re-articulation of the many layers of urban-infrastructural history enfolded into the site. In public-political life, indeed, the stream is in many respects a partially existing object only (Bruun Jensen 2010), in the future tense – an imaginative allusion to what the socio-material city may come to look like. In sum, my expositions in this section and the chapter more generally have meant to give texture to how a multiplicity of pasts, presents, and futures flow together in the specific technopolitical situation opened up around layered urban infrastructures in the wake of ecological crises. While ‘modernity’ and its ideals of a stable arrangement of nature, society, and technology into separate domains (Latour 1993) was only ever implicated in such histories in patchy and contested ways, there is then also a sense, I argue, in which ecological crises in the (so-called) Anthropocene spell the definitive end of such modernist ideals as markers of time’s passing. Here, projected long-term global ecological crises of climate and biodiversity give rise not only to new types of infrastructural catastrophes and attendant searches for alternative techno-social paradigms. They also throw all infrastructure into a perpetual state of socio-technical unrest, in which it is no longer clear what the ‘infra-’ of infrastructure refers to, what is ground and what figure, and what kinds of relatively stable socio-technical-natural relations that would allow for new projects of infrastructuring (Blok 2018; see Nigel Clark, this volume).

Conclusion: eventful infrastructures, past and future This chapter suggests that contemporary socio-cultural debates on infrastructures amounts to the view that any adequate account of contemporary social change must reckon with the role of technical materials – and must, in turn, grapple with the particular forms of historical layering and eventfulness suggested by the social lives and liveliness of infrastructures. Reading across these debates has led me to suggest three analytical avenues along which to pursue such an 357

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agenda: first, in terms of slow-moving, decadal infrastructural accretions across critical junctures; second, by attending to the dynamic events and situations of infrastructural demonstrations and contestations; and third, by heeding the radical uncertainties over infrastructures’ futures opened up by ecological crises. Within and across these avenues, infrastructures provide key points of interdisciplinary intersection, in that STS meets here with human geography, anthropology, political theory, design, and environmental studies in re-thinking key socio-technical parameters of markets, democracies, cultures, and everyday life. Alongside this rendering and appreciation of existing work, my key contention has been to suggest the need for pushing further in the direction of more eventful accounts of infrastructures’ implication in socio-technical change. Following historian and social theorist William H. Sewell Jr. (2005), I take this to imply an analytical view of temporality as generally fateful, contingent, complicated, and heterogeneous, and as unfolding at the point of intersection of multiple processes, relations, and causalities. Further, in the language of Thomas Scheffer (2007), this means working against tendencies to provide accounts of process without events, that is, to avoid positing free-flowing forces, of ‘modernity’ and otherwise, seen to unfold themselves according to some inherent propulsion (say, of industrial capitalism’s quest for speed and circulation). That such a tendency still marks socio-cultural studies of infrastructures writ large is evidenced, I argue, by the strong presence in the literature of the counter-image of rupture, breakdown, and disaster, as if these would not merely constitute important objects of study but would provide the only analytical sense of any possible eventful-ness of infrastructures. Along such methodological lines, my chapter has sought also to wrestle the category of event away from a too-strong philosophical over-coding and place it more firmly in dialogue with standard if often implicit practices of historical narration (see Wagner-Pacifici 2017). Here, as Sewell Jr. (2005, p. 121) perceptively remarks, an eventful conception of temporality equally committed to study long-term history and more localised developments imply the need for attending to multiple processes scaled out, so to speak, according to different stretches of time. By implication, this means that ‘the temporality of the theoretical category of “event” is not self-evident but rather must be constructed theoretically in relation to the time-scale of the processes being studied’. In other words, what constitutes a sociotechnical event, as a turning point in the flow of infrastructural possibilities, must itself be established from within historical engagements with situated techno-politics. To paraphrase Isabelle Stengers (2000), events are measured by the futures they bring about, and this process remains inherently open-ended. In the face of those global ecological crises summed up in the notion of the Anthropocene, such open-endedness attains not only a theoretical but also a practical and political import. As Stengers (2015) herself suggests elsewhere, against the future-perfect tense of the Anthropocene notion and its tendency to swallow up ecological mess in one singular gesture, our best hope of avoiding the ‘coming barbarism’ pertains probably to a heterogeneous patchwork of situated civic-technical learning at the boundaries and at the ruins of failed sociotechnical paradigms (see Blok and Bruun Jensen 2019). Such will be the sites of infrastructural hope, of struggling against probability in the name of possibility, after progress’s demise.

References Asdal, K., 2012. Contexts in action – and the future of the past in STS. Science, Technology, and Human Values, 37 (4), 379–403. Barry, A., 1999. Demonstrations: sites and sights of direct action. Economy and Society, 28 (1), 75–94.

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Eventful Infrastructures Barry, A., 2002. The anti-political economy. Economy and Society, 31 (2), 268–284. Barry, A., 2012. Political situations: knowledge controversies in transnational governance. Critical Policy Studies, 6 (3), 324–336. Beck, U., 1992. Risk society: towards a new modernity. London: SAGE. Beck, U., 2009. World at risk. London: Polity Press. Blok, A. and Bruun Jensen, C., 2019. The Anthropocene event in social theory: on ways of problematizing nonhuman materiality differently. The Sociological Review, 67 (6), 1195–1211. Blok, A., 2017. Scoping endangered futures: rethinking the political aesthetics of climate change in world risk society. STS Encounters, 9 (1), 1–34. Blok, A., 2018. Infrastructuring new urban common worlds? On material politics, civic attachments, and partially existing wind turbines. In: P. Harvey, C. Bruun Jensen and A. Morita, eds. Infrastructures and social complexity. London: Routledge, 102–114. Blok, A., and Farías, I., eds., 2016. Urban cosmopolitics: agencements, assemblies, atmospheres. London: Routledge. Blok, A., et al., 2017. UTOPIA: Kort, kollektivt feltarbejde i stor skala [UTOPIA: Short, collective fieldwork in a grand scale]. Tidsskriftet Antropologi, 76, 37–54. Bowker, G., 1994. Science on the run: information management and industrial geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920–1940. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bruun Jensen, C., 2010. Ontologies for developing things: making health care futures through technology. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Castells, M., 1984. The city and the grassroots. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press. Coutard, O. and Guy, S., 2007. STS and the city: politics and practices of hope. Science, Technology, and Human Values, 32 (6), 713–734. Edwards, P., 2003. Infrastructure and modernity: force, time, and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems. In: T.J. Misa and A. Feenberg, eds. Modernity and technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 185–225. Farías, I. and Blok, A., 2016. Technical democracy as a challenge to urban studies. CITY, 20 (4), 539–548. Fortun, K., 2012. Ethnography in late industrialism. Cultural Anthropology, 27 (3), 446–464. Fraser, M., 2010. Facts, ethics and event. In: C. Bruun Jensen and K. Rödje, eds. Deleuzian intersections: science, technology, anthropology. New York: Berghahn Books, 57–82. Gandy, M., 2006. The bacteriological city and its discontents. Historical Geography, 34, 14–25. Gandy, M., 2018. Cities in deep time: bio-diversity, metabolic rift, and the urban question. CITY, 22 (1), 96–105. Graham, S. and Marvin, S., 2001. Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. London: Routledge. Graham, S. and Thrift, N., 2007. Out of order: understanding repair and maintenance. Theory, Culture and Society, 24 (3), 1–25. Harvey, P., Bruun Jensen, C., and Morita, A., eds., 2018. Infrastructures and social complexity: a companion. London: Routledge. Hetherington, K., 2018. Introduction: keywords of the Anthropocene. In: K. Hetherington, ed. Infrastructure, environment, and life in the anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 1–13. Hommels, A., 2005. Studying obduracy in the city: towards a productive fusion between technology studies and urban studies. Science, Technology, and Human Values, 30 (3), 323–351. Hughes, T.P., 1987. The evolution of large technological systems. In: W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes, and T. Pinch, eds. The social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 5182. Lakoff, A., and Collier, S.J., 2010. Infrastructure and event: the political technology of preparedness. In: B. Braun and S.J. Whatmore, eds. Political matter: technoscience, democracy, and public life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 243–266. Larkin, B., 2013. The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 327–343. Latour, B., 1991. Technology is society made durable. In: Law, J. ed. A sociology of monsters: essays on power, technology and domination. London: Routledge, 103–132. Latour, B., 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B., 1996. Aramis, or the love of technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mackenzie, A., 2005. Problematizing the technological: the object as event? Social Epistemology, 19 (4), 381–399.

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Anders Blok Madsen, H.M., Mikkelsen, P.S., and Blok, A., 2019. Framing professional climate risk knowledge: extreme weather events as drivers of adaptation innovation in Copenhagen. Environmental Science and Policy, 98, 30–38. Meilvang, M.L., 2020. Sewage system, treatment plants, ‘blue-green solutions’: professionals in the historical justifications and planning of urban wastewater infrastructures. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 8 (1), 59–80. Mitchell, T., 2011. Carbon democracy: political power in the age of oil. London: Verso. Mondschein, J., Clark-Ginsberg, A., and Kuehn, A., 2021. Smart cities as large technological systems: overcoming organizational challenges in smart cities through collective action. Sustainable Cities and Society, 67, 102730. Morita, A., Blok, A., and Kimura, S., 2013. Environmental infrastructures of emergency: the formation of a civic radiation monitoring map during the Fukushima disaster. In: R. Hindmarch, ed. Nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi: social, political and environmental issues. London: Routledge, 78–96. Savransky, M., 2016. The adventure of relevance: an ethics of social inquiry. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Scheffer, T., 2007. Event and process: an exercise in analytical ethnography. Human Studies, 30 (3), 167–197. Sewell Jr., W.H., 2005. Logics of history: social theory and social transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spice, A., 2018. Fighting invasive infrastructures: indigenous relations against pipelines. Environment and Society, 9 (1), 40–56. Star, S.L., 1999. The ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43 (3), 377–391. Stengers, I., 2000. The invention of modern science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stengers, I., 2015. In catastrophic times: resisting the coming barbarism. London: Open Humanities Press. Wagner-Pacifici, R., 2017. What is an event? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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30 PRACTICES OF SOCIAL CHANGE Approaching Political Action Through Practice Theory Daniel Welch and Luke Yates

Introduction Theories of practice offer novel conceptual resources for understanding social change. Existing practice theoretical accounts of social transformation are often articulated from the perspective of everyday life, where key empirical contributions have investigated domestic consumption and its environmental consequences. Recent work has begun to address common criticisms that practice theories are ill-equipped to address other areas, phenomena, and forms of change. These recent developments suggest avenues for further contribution of practice theory ideas to theories of social change, particularly in exploring the processes underpinning collective action (see Roelvink, this volume), understanding the everyday character of political participation (see Saunders, this volume), and conceptualising and representing large scale cultural change. This chapter debates the application of practice theories to questions of social change and explores the potential for further work in the area, with some implications for thinking through current crises. Section one briefly introduces some of the core claims common across the family of theories of practice. We then discuss empirical and theoretical work explicitly discussing change, covering examples from the sociology of consumption, the study of organisations, and theoretical work on the ontology of practices, which allow us to appraise contributions to date and their shortcomings. The third section of the chapter discusses some recent moves to address these limitations – in particular the use of practice theories in making sense of a variety of forms of collective and collective activity that are ordinarily overlooked. We argue, through discussion of the central problems of social movement studies, that this helps us understand the origins, activity, and outcomes of contentious collectives such as social movements. We do this by (1) noting the processes of forming and articulating common grievances which link and collectivise everyday experiences, (2) appreciating the variety in the ecology of groups, practices, lifestyles and institutions that compose social movements, to (3) identifying the kinds of practices which appear integral and constitutive of change itself.

DOI: 10.4324/9781351261562-34

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Core claims of theories of practice While theories of practice display a certain family resemblance the heterogeneity amongst them is routinely acknowledged. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Garfinkel, Lyotard, Bourdieu, late Foucault, Giddens, Latour, Taylor, and Butler are commonly evoked as intellectual resources, while others cast the net still further to include Marx (Nicolini 2012). Bourdieu and Giddens made critical contributions as the first generation of sociological practice theorists (Warde 2014), each exemplifying, through different conceptual armature – ‘habitus’ (e.g., Bourdieu 1990) and ‘structuration’ (Giddens 1984) – the signature ontological position of theories of practice, which claims to transcend the dualism of structure and agency. Neither, however, accorded the concept of practice itself a foundational role in explaining social phenomena, a move that was left to a second generation of theorists (see Schatzki et al. 2001, most notably Schatzki (1996, 2002) and Reckwitz (2002a, 2002b). For both Schatzki and Reckwitz, the commonality of theories of practice lies in the contention that social order and action, and therefore social change, is a feature of, and established through, the field of human practices. Opposing both the utilitarian and rational choice models of social action and order, as well as the classical sociological norm-orientated model (i.e., Durkheim and Parsons), practice theories also contrast with accounts that establish the locus of the social in: the human mind; discourse or semiosis; or intersubjectivism and interaction (Reckwitz 2002a, p. 247–49). Practice theories understand the locus of the social as the field of practices. As a corollary, practices – as opposed to, for example, individuals, discourses, or social structures – become the central conceptual unit. It is the legacy of Schatzki and Reckwitz that has been most programmatically taken up by practice theoretical developments in the study of consumption (Warde 2005, 2014, Warde et al., 2017), environmental sustainability (Shove et al. 2012, Welch and Warde 2015), organisation (Gherardi 2000, Nicolini 2012), and education (Kemmis et al. 2014). Especially in relation to consumption and environmental sustainability, practice theory is engaged both with attempting to understand changes towards the intensification of resource use in contemporary societies, to imagine alternative ways of organising practices, and to consider the kinds of interventions which might usefully address the challenges therein. All practice theories construe practices as activities exhibiting an identifiable level of organisation, for example, activities structured by rules or norms. Schatzki (2001) adds that a core conception is that practices are embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organised around shared skills and practical understandings. Practices are sets of ‘doings and sayings’ (Schatzki 2002) – they involve both ‘practical activity and its representations’ (Warde 2005, p. 134). While some theorists – notably Reckwitz (2002a, 2002b) and Shove et al. (2012) – explicitly incorporate the material aspect into the definition of ‘practice’ itself, Schatzki (2002) finds analytical advantage in separating practices (the organisation of activity) from ‘material arrangements’, or networks of material entities. In probably the most quoted definition of social practice Reckwitz suggests: A ‘practice’ (Praktik) is a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge. A practice – a way of cooking, of consuming, of working, of investigating, of taking care of oneself or of others, etc. – forms so to speak a ‘block’ whose existence necessarily depends on the 362

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existence and specific interconnectedness of these elements, and which cannot be reduced to any one of these single elements. (Reckwitz 2002a, pp. 249–50) An important contribution of contemporary theories of practice has been to parse this bewilderingly heterogeneous array of elements into an understanding of practices as nexuses of generic types of components (Warde et al. 2017). Such conceptualisations place practice elements into discrete conceptual categories. Thus Schatzki (2002, p. 86) conceives of practices as being made up of: ‘practical understandings’ (‘know how’); ‘rules’ (explicit directions, instructions, etc.); ‘teleoaffective structures’ (normatively ordered arrays of ends, orientations, and affective engagements); and ‘general understandings’, which are common to many practices and condition the manner in which practices are carried out. Shove et al.’s (2012) ‘radically simplified’ and widely reproduced model offers ‘meanings’, ‘competences’, and ‘materials’ as elements (see below). Models of generic components have allowed sociological operationalisation of the social ontology of practice (see Halkier et al. 2011). The promise of practice theory is to move beyond problematic dualisms of: structure and agency, methodological individualism and holism, determinism and voluntarism, and subject and object (Schatzki 2001, p. 10, 2002, p. 125); to ‘a novel picture of the social and human agency’ (Reckwitz 2002a, p. 244). Practice theory stands opposed to hypostatised unities (Schatzki 1996, p. 12), opposed to a view of social action and change as generated by normative systems, conceptual schemes, or cultural codes (Lizardo and Strand 2010), and to a view of social order as regularity or stability (Schatzki 2002, Rouse 2007). Lastly, the kinds of practice theories we are concerned with adhere to what is a called a flat ontology (Schatzki 2002). This is the cause of much controversy and misunderstanding. The central proposition of ‘flat ontology’ is that large scale phenomena are not fundamentally different in kind from smaller phenomena – no distinct ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ social levels exist. Within a flat ontology the social world is not structured by distinct ontological levels, as in, for example, critical realist accounts of structure and agency. This does not, pace common criticisms, mean that a practice perspective is unable to admit to social hierarchies or unable to conceptualise large scale phenomena. Rather, what are referred to as macro phenomena exist, as Schatzki puts it: ‘in and through their praxeological instantiations; that is, they exist primarily in and through the occasions when it is relevant and legitimate to characterize people and actions with macro categories’ (Schatzki 2001, p. 6): e.g., for a Head of State to speak or act on behalf of a country, or a CEO a corporation. The micro-macro distinction is often construed as one of the relationship between a given situated, local site (for example, a physical market selling fruit and vegetables) and the wider processes and linkages which provide a context to that local site (such as commodification, capitalism, and global food regimes). Practice theoretical analysis, then, necessarily attends simultaneously to both the local sites of situated practice and the ‘translocal’ contexts within which those practices are also constituted.

How do practice theories conceptualise social change? These core features of theories of practice have significant implications for the understanding of social change. Practice theories are a form of ‘process theory’. Process theories are commonly contrasted to variance theories, which explain variance in a dependent variable based on one or more independent variables and address why something happens. Process theories offer different kinds of explanations of social change to variance theories – explanations of 363

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what activities, events, and processes have led to particular outcomes and how social entities change and develop (see Schatzki 2019, p. 119f ). Theories of practice do not – or should not – offer a general ‘theory of change’ akin to those offered by, for example, evolutionary economics’ notion of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ or ‘the multi-level perspective’ of sustainability transition scholars. Practice theories assert that social change should be understood as the emergence of significant differences in practices and material arrangements (in Schatzki’s terms), and their relations to one another. Practice theories support, as Schatzki puts it, ‘an account of the social site [that] is inherently one of ceaseless movement and incessant rearrangement and reorganization’ (2002, pp. 189–90). Both changes in and the persistence of social phenomena are brought about by events and processes that practices and people are co-responsible for (Schatzki 2019). Before we elaborate this position we review the most prominent theoretical account of social change proposed by practice advocates, Shove et al.’s (2012) The dynamics of social practice: everyday life and how it changes. The book frames social change through the questions: ‘How do practices emerge, exist and die?’ and ‘How do bundles and complexes of practice form, persist and disappear?’ This phrasing highlights Shove et al.’s parsimonious conceptual vocabulary that minimises mention of agency and collectives: ‘…our model consists simply of elements, practices, practitioner-carriers and connections between them’ (Shove et al. 2012, p. 61). Explanations of changes are based on the heuristic that: ‘social practices consist of elements that are integrated when practices are enacted…[and] that practices emerge, persist and disappear as links between their defining elements are made and broken’ (Shove et al. 2012, p. 21). These elements are materials (objects, infrastructures, tools and the body), competences (background knowledge and understandings) and meanings (mental activities, emotion and motivational knowledge). The emergence, persistence, or decline of a practice – or aspects of social change – can therefore be explained, first, by changes in the combination of different elements, which are instantiated and reproduced through performances of practices themselves, in a similar way to Giddens’ (1984) conception of structuration. A second form of social change emerges from the competition between practices to ‘recruit’ practitioners and conversely their ‘defection’. For example, the twentieth century saw the rapid decline of cycling in most industrialised countries as more and more ‘practitioners’ were ‘recruited’ to driving – a trend that today cycling advocates seek to reverse. Third, there are social changes emerging from the relations between practices, through which they form loose ‘bundles’ and larger ‘complexes’: relations of coexistence, dependence and competition. Lastly, social change can occur through, drawing on Giddens (1984), ‘circuits of reproduction’, which refer not to sources of stability alone but processes of monitoring, feedback, and cross referencing. For example, dieting individuals monitor their weight through bathroom scales; aggregated data on weight feeds into trends monitored by the World Health Organization and leads to standardised tools, such as the Body Mass Index, and discourses on weight and health that feed back to individuals’ performances of dieting practice (Shove et al. 2012, p. 84); similar processes could also be related to the practices surrounding smart metering technologies. Engaging examples of changes in practice are made in the book, particularly those which have been made in greater detail in the sociology of consumption and which help explain escalating resource use, including the development of home freezing (Shove and Southerton 2000), and the increasing use of washing machines and tumble dryers. These explanations highlighted co-evolving trajectories of technologies, cultural associations, and competences. Many of the examples are abridged versions of other case studies. One of these, an extended account of change in everyday practice drawn from Hand, Shove, and Southerton (2005), and widely cited in the literature, offers an explanation for the shift from occasional bathing to daily 364

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showering as a practice. Three potential explanatory narratives are suggested – concerning technological innovation, changing cultural conventions, and the changing socio-temporal coordination of everyday practices. Each is found to be inadequate explanation in itself. The account of change is addressed in terms of how these material infrastructures, conventions and temporal orders fit together in such a way as to bring about change in everyday practice through the dynamic connections between elements of the practice. They narrate the rise of showering through the coming together of developments in plumbing, heating, and power technologies; cultural shifts in understandings of the self and body; and issues of temporal coordination, which have led to increasing demand for ‘convenience’. However, the interests and efforts of commercial collectives, such as bathroom appliance or consumer product manufacturers, in promoting those cultural expectations of cleanliness and convenience, are not mentioned. Hand et al. (2005) therefore offer a corrective to conventional actor-based accounts, but appear to exclude collective agencies from the explanation altogether. This is not atypical. The empirical illustrations in Shove et al. (2012) tend to elide acknowledgement of agency, collective projects, and strategic activity (Welch and Yates 2018). These examples include: the development of driving; the increase in television watching and its influence on family life and gardening; the development of snowboarding; changing norms around clothing that relate to air conditioning; hula-hooping; the contemporary office; the hobby of Nordic walking; and the exponential rise in home freezing since the 1970s. Each example points out changes in elements composing practices, whether materials (usually technological innovations), competences and skills needed for people to engage with them, and meanings (usually cultural associations, beliefs, and standards such as cleanliness, comfort, and convenience) (Shove 2003). Yet in producing powerful counter-narratives to conventional actor-based accounts, these practice-based accounts of change often neglect or elide the topic of purposive political projects, social struggles, strategic action, and collective agency (Welch and Warde 2015).1 This is not a necessary feature of the practice theoretical approach. The examples of Nordic walking (Shove and Pantzar 2005) and freezers (Shove and Southerton 2000) are drawn from article-length case studies where collective agencies – marketeers of Nordic walking sticks and freezer manufacturers – are properly acknowledged. These exceptions show that a practice theoretical account need not de-centre agency, the actor or strategic action entirely. Another useful illustration of this is provided by the rich work from organisation studies on ‘strategy as practice’, which looks directly at this question of how agendas are formed and how their pursuit is planned in organisations (for reviews see: Jarzabkowski and Paul Spee 2009, Vaara and Whittington 2012). The strategy as practice literature distinguishes itself by: offering closer, qualitative attention to strategic activity (‘praxis’) itself; examining how this praxis is ‘enabled and constrained by prevailing organizational and societal practices’ (Vaara and Whittington 2012, p. 285); its perspective on strategy as constituted through societal contexts beyond the organisation; and attending to various ‘practitioners’, both individuals and ‘aggregate actors’ inside and outside the organisation ( Jarzabkowski and Paul Spee 2009). Subsequent work has also discussed the compatibility of the practice ontology with further theoretically compatible and mutually enriching areas, such as social movements and fields (see Welch and Yates 2018, and below). It is notable that in his recent book length exposition of an account of social change, Schatzki (2019) elaborates an ontological account that puts human agency centre stage. While the view that ‘human activity is the principal generator of difference and change in social life’ (Schatzki 2019, p. 80) is hardly controversial, it tacks in a very different direction to the agent-less ‘strong’ practice theories exemplified by Shove et al. (2012) that elide actors and 365

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human interaction and instead emphasise or imply the causal powers of practices themselves. Schatzki (2019) recognises that such supposedly explanatory phenomena invoked by Shove et al. (2012), such as the ‘dependence’, ‘competition’, and ‘coevolution’ of practices stand for generalisations of processes embodied in ‘activity chains’ made up of the activity of individuals and collective actors. The ‘events’ that are the links in such activity chains are individuals’ and collectives’ performances of practices, which do the causal work of social change. The organisation of those practices (i.e., practical understandings, rules, teleoaffective structures, and general understandings) bears upon, or at least partially orchestrates, those events. For example, the general understandings of social movements regarding the relation of movement organisation and movement goals (e.g., prefigurative politics) normatively condition the activity of social movement members as they respond to the actions of police at protests. Thus individuals’ and collectives’ situated activity and the organisation of practices are mutually dependent.

The role of practices in understanding collective action and political conflict As argued above, the study of social change using theories of practice has focused on certain kinds of change, tending to downplay purposive political projects, social struggles, strategic action, and collective agency. But theories of practice have also drawn attention to dynamics and processes which are commonly overlooked in standard, actor-centric accounts. As argued by Meyer and Jepperson (2000, p. 100), ‘the modern social system at present is imagined to operate via fully realized and unfettered actors pursuing their goals (if under institutional ‘incentives’ and ‘constraints,’ understood as background conditions)’. This collective ‘agentic actor’ can be discerned in accounts of social change such as theories of fields (Fligstein and McAdam 2012) and in many accounts of collective action from, for example, social movement studies (see Saunders, this volume). This central paradigm of social change tends to see society and social change as an outcome of interaction and competition among a small number of powerful strategic actors. While convincing narratives of change can be delivered using this perspective, they are achieved at a cost. The construction of the utilitarian collective agent in dominant actor-centric accounts misattributes effects to formally organised collective actors; fails to differentiate among collective agencies (e.g., corporations, states and social movements); and treats everyday life, meanings, norms and materiality simply as an incidental backdrop or ‘context’: in one illustrative formulation ‘unorganised social space’ (Fligstein and McAdam 2012, p. 5). This, in turn, has the effect of mystifying the emergence of collective agencies, what they do, and the precise nature of how they help bring about social outcomes. One key move of practice theoretical approaches is to problematise the classic collective actor – a critique that is both ontological and empirical (cf. Roelvink, this volume). Elsewhere, we have suggested that collectives and collective activity can be usefully differentiated into three ideal types: bureaucratic organisations, groupings, and latent networks, which help highlight how significant collective agents emerge, as well as the way in which different types of collectives act in and on the social world (Welch and Yates 2018). Outlining these three types of collective allows us to demonstrate the compatibility of practice approaches with much existing social theoretical work on contentious action, collective identity, and approaches to social worlds and fields, as well as some ‘sustainability transitions’ research; while making the unique contribution of practice theory clearer and more expansive than simply an avatar for ‘the everyday’. The move also highlights that there is no ontological incompatibility in acknowledging collective agency and intentional strategic action with a practice theoretical 366

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account. We outline these three ideal types, before demonstrating how they and other practice theoretical concepts help in accounts of change associated with social movements. The first type of collective we call bureaucratic organisations. Bureaucratic organisations are institutionalised forms of collective that in some respects resemble the dominant model of the agentic actor (Meyer and Jepperson 2000), meaning that their contribution towards change is systematically overplayed. Bureaucratic organisations have explicit agendas, strategies through which they are pursued, and they use complex internal divisions of labour to do so. Practices (and their inseparable material arrangements) around strategy-making, planning, management, and bureaucracy allow translation across scales within organisations as well as adjacent fields and in doing so produce the conditions and contexts that allow organisations to appear to ‘act’ autonomously as agents. They might be environmental organisations or social movement organisations, or they might be states or corporations. Bureaucratic organisations can be contrasted with a second type of collective which we call groupings, which also play roles in change processes, from innovations in musical genres, fashions, sports, and language to political attitudes and demands. Such groupings include subcultures; non-institutionalised social movements; elective communities; and other groups that have sufficiently dense networks to constitute collective identity (we use collective identity in a similar way to Melucci 1996). They might better capture many of the loose networks, temporary arrangements and friendship groups that mobilise through social movements yet are not bureaucratic organisations, such as those mobilising around the recent Black Lives Matter or Fridays for the Future protests. Yet despite their prevalence and their obvious contributions to the way societies are organised, groupings are missing from prominent accounts of social change, their activity being ascribed to particular individuals within them, ignored entirely, or treated as that of a bureaucratic organisation (allowing the standard assumptions of rational and strategic behaviour to be applied). Fligstein and McAdam (2012), for example, highlight the roles of black church-goers and black university students in the significant changes that took place through the civil rights movement, but their model suggests that these groupings must be either ‘skilled social actors in strategic action fields’ – thus a form of collective actor which acts strategically as a bounded constituency – or are simply part of ‘unorganised social space’ (Fligstein and McAdam 2012, p. 5). Yet, both groups held collective identity and exhibited strong social networks, but did not act together as agents or actors. They became involved as networked constituencies with diverse understandings of the struggle, based on their recognition of the common opportunity of political enfranchisement. Missing the distinction misses the fluidity in collective activity, where people linked by identity, their location in social space, or even their co-participation in certain practices (see below), can become consequential when there is recognition of a collective threat or opportunity to their interests. This relates to the third type of collective activity, one which theories of practice have been particularly generative for understanding, which we refer to as dispersed collective activity. Dispersed collective activity ‘refers to the ways in which the socially, spatially and temporally patterned character of practices and arrangements gives rise to aggregate effects, at which point often further collective and collective-making practices develop, leading to groupings or bureaucratic organisations’ (Welch and Yates 2018, p. 11). Examples of dispersed collective activity with significant and visible effects (independent of their mutation towards groupings or bureaucratic organisations), include the ‘peak loads’ on the electricity system resulting from shared family schedules around workplaces, education, and evening meals or the rush hours of commuters arriving to and leaving work. It may be useful to refer to such virtual collectives who make up dispersed collective activity as latent networks, identified by the activity common to its members.2 Each type of collective activity and collective mentioned here, we would 367

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argue, is itself composed of a somewhat distinctive set or bundle of practices, and their activity is also contingent on the material arrangements in the form of objects, institutions, people and technology which make social life possible and which also account for the durability, reproducibility, and power relations of the everyday (Schatzki 2001, Latour 2005). These distinctions among modes of collective activity have consequences for understanding different moments in processes of change. Here we would like to discuss trajectories of contentious collective action (see Saunders, this volume), which we think most contrast with the typical practice theoretical exposition of change. We understand contentious collective action as a form of change that is particularly important given that it concerns unpredictable outcomes, innovative or non-institutionalised actors, and both public and latent forms of conflict. In social movement studies, the key approach in studying collective action interrogates: the emergence of collective agencies (usually presumed to be the ‘classic’ actor in the form of a social movement organisation, a bureaucratic movement group with some resemblance to a corporation); the struggles around those agencies orientated towards different projects or visions; and the outcomes or ‘consequences’ of these struggles. In the following section we explore each of these moments in change processes that are related to social movements, and show how the practice theoretical lens helps provide different types of answers to each question.

Practices of change? How practice theory helps explain the emergence, struggles, and ‘outcomes’ of collectives First, looking at practices helps us appreciate the emergence of grievances and social struggles from everyday life. When the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) and similar feminist organisations emerged internationally in the late 1960s (Evans 2009), their grievances, critiques, and solidarity came from a number of sources. Partly they drew on the frustrations of being marginalised in the 1960s ‘New Left’ organisations such as Students for a Democratic Society, where attempts to organise as women were regularly frustrated. This created particular anger due to the putative commitment of these groups to a very broad critique of existing forms of power that not only entailed a critique of the state but also challenged prevailing generational norms around everyday life, culture and sex (Breines 1989, Evans 2009). Interpersonal frustrations in personal experiences in homes and workplaces also animated the early discussions of consciousness-raising groups. These allowed small numbers of women, through identifying common experiences, to appreciate the structural and systematic nature of the complaints and injustices they felt. The personal was political. The simplified trajectory of second wave feminism which focuses on organisations and public street protests tends to emphasise the specific rise of movement organisations, their protests, and the legislation passed in several countries through the 1970s. But its antecedents are to be found in the experiences of a generation of women who were part of counter-cultural and political shifts through the twentieth century yet remained excluded from positions of authority and power, discriminated against and subordinate in economic terms. Injustices in practices of daily life and in other social movements help explain the emergence of the collectives that made up the second wave women’s movement. Movements draw their frames, critiques, visions, slogans, and demands from this dispersed collective activity. In the 1960s and 1970s feminist movements, socially patterned experiences that arose in practices of daily life were transformed into groupings in consciousness raising groups, and sometimes subsequently into bureaucratic organisations such as the WLM. Socially patterned experiences might be made visible through specific practices of consciousnessraising, through the making of placards which articulated grievances in the presence of 368

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others in public protests, or in other cases through the making public of individual testimonies, as in the recent Everyday Sexism project or #MeToo movements. Attention to practices is one mode of foregrounding the study of the conditions under which experiences of injustice become collective, public, framed, mobilisable, and subjectivising. This often happens via material, temporal, or spatial ‘concentrations’ of activity (Welch and Yates 2018) that transform the personal into the political and the biographical into the historical (Mills 2000 [1959]). In the case of consciousness-raising groups, this found expression in the interpersonal narrating of experience in the presence of others, usually in informal but poignantly domestic spaces. Second, processes of struggle themselves are more fully understood by appreciating the diversity in types of actor and activity at play beyond the social movement organisation and the public street demonstration, which refer to extremely historically and culturally specific forms of collective practice at the expense of others. Social movements are made up of many more collectives than the archetypical social movement organisation. They are made up of a mix of collectives with different forms of connection, including dispersed collective activity and loose groupings as well as bureaucratic collectives. The social reproduction of protest cultures themselves is often made invisible by too much emphasis on the bureaucratic organisations which front a movement, or particular kinds of organisations which focus on confrontation with elites. This is a point made, again, by much of the literature on social movement feminism (see, for example, Staggenborg 1998, Stall and Stoecker 1998), as well as in discussion of social movement community – the subcultures, scenes and spaces where identities are forged and consolidated – and of periods of ‘abeyance’ in social movements, which help explain what movements are doing when they are not on the street publicly demonstrating. In all these circumstances the practices of movement organisations might disappear, but the wider socio-cultural activity and infrastructure of the movement usually persists in other collective forms. In social movement studies these practices and interactions tend to be studied as though they are only relevant in terms of explaining persistence of activism between protest ‘waves’, but there is abundant evidence to show that they are continuous and constitutive of political action both during and between cycles of contention (Yates 2015). This relates to the third moment in processes of change around contentious collective action: outcomes. The literature on social movement consequences was historically focused on a somewhat narrow understanding of success or failure, which primarily focused on legislative changes or recognition of a challenging group (Gamson 1990). Social movement research increasingly acknowledges a wider variety of forms of change, including some of those brought to light in practice theoretical accounts. We prefer outcomes, which refer to observations of phenomena which link to a sequence or chain of prior events and connected activity (see Latour 2005, pp. 77–78, cf. Schatzki 2019). The edited collection by Bosi et al. (2016) The consequences of social movements, for example, distinguishes between biographical impacts, effects on legislation, and consequences on or through institutions. The empirical examples in the book make it clear that these categories encompass a huge variety of practices which are involved in instantiating change; and practices that must change in the course of biographical, legislative or institutional shifts. Bosi et al.’s (2016) categories also encompass the links, interactions, and sequences that appear as ‘drivers’ and ‘causes’, and the evidence of difference in practices and material arrangements that is taken as proof that something has been transformed. Such ‘practices of change’ are part of trajectories where social movements have ‘succeeded’ in the traditional sense by becoming recognised as legitimate or changing legislation. There are important practices which need to change after legislation is passed without which change 369

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is entirely ineffectual. Frank Dobbin’s (2009) Inventing equal opportunity discusses the ways through which Human Resource departments in the United States decided to put equal rights legislation from the Civil Rights act and feminist movements into practice in organisations in the United States. Dobbin argues that Human Resources not only implemented, but also determined and designed the changes in how employers treat workers, and defined how discrimination has subsequently been understood and imagined. Significant movement-driven changes in practice might also play out within institutions despite movement demands never having been met, or perhaps even articulated. For example, Joyce Bell (2014) discusses how ways of understanding racialised identity which were important in the black power movement transformed American social work practices, while similar trajectories that will not yet be visible are likely to result from the more recent BLM movement.

Conclusion This chapter has reviewed the contribution of practice theories to the understanding of social change. We have highlighted a set of areas where the social practice ontology and associated theoretical approaches – developed in particular around the sociology of consumption – have been used to describe, narrate and imagine transformations of different sorts. This revealed a set of limitations and weaknesses. Empirical examples of change using practice frameworks are not evenly distributed, tending to have been concentrated around particular shifts in ‘everyday’ and routine practices that are consequential for resource consumption, or change in organisations. Not only have practice theories rarely been applied to accounts of social change outside of these contexts, but they have also tended towards explanations that – while providing counter-narratives to received understandings of change – underplay strategic activity, politics, and collective agency. We demonstrate that there is no a priori reason for this to be the case. We do this by exploring examples around forms of change that are unpredictable, explicitly involve power relations, collective agents, strategy, and practices which are not routinised or ‘everyday’: the core questions of contentious politics. We argue that distinguishing different forms of collective activity – bureaucratic organisations, looser groupings, and the dispersed collective activity of latent actors – helps theories of collective action such as social movement studies avoid some key theoretical and empirical problems (Welch and Yates 2018). A practice theoretical approach allows for better appreciation of the processes of change associated with social movements, from the emergence of collectives, to their struggles and activity, to their outcomes. This also opens up more possibilities for how the social practice perspective can be used in imagining and researching ways of addressing contemporary crises. We would also suggest that practice approaches offer important resources towards understanding a set of under-theorised themes and phenomena relevant to social transformation. They include grassroots projects, alternative institutions and prefigurative lifestyles (Yates 2021). Fruitful lines of enquiry would lie in addressing the common understandings, teleologies, and affective engagements that play a critical role in their formation (Welch 2017; cf. Schatzki 2019, p. 45). Common understandings and teleoaffective engagements also play an important role in social change outside of these parameters, however, by forging largescale assemblages of discourse and practice more commonly understood as cultural formations (Welch and Warde 2017). Here again the resources of practice theory offer novel insights into social change, yet are so far underdeveloped. Practice theoretical research might, for example, also explore the role of imaginative engagement with visions of the future, anticipation, and projectivity in social change. Historically the social sciences have neglected the 370

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future’s critical role in the present, despite the performative role that representations and expectations of the future play in social critique and intervention, and in processes of planning and problem-solving (Abbott 2005, Mische 2009). A normatively grounded social science of transformation needs to address the role of imagined futures in social change. Lastly, practice theories have an as yet undeveloped contribution to make to political economy, and the centrally important issues of socio-economic change, through dialogue with compatible approaches in economic sociology.

Notes 1 For Schatzki’s account of collective action see Schatzki (2019, pp. 90–91). 2 We use this term differently to the latent networks of Melucci (1996).

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INDEX

Note: Page references in italics denote figures, in bold tables and with “n” endnotes. accelerationism 160–161 accountabilities, of NGOs 197–198, 201–202 Ackerman, Diana 45 Ackerman, Peter 329 Acosta, A.M. 298 ActionAid 191, 196, 198 activism 14, 279–288; boundary 318; celebrity 279; changing roles 285–287; conceptualising 280–282; feminist analysis of 282–283; regressive 279, 286–287; representations of 285–287; spaces of 285–287; Web based 287 activist identities: beyond social movements 279– 288; formation of 287; shifting across time and context 284–285; in South Africa 285 activists 280–285; AIDS 286; Black Lives Matter 279; climate change 166; LGBTQ+ 286; marginalised 209, 212; researchers as 343–344; suppression of 184; white 68; women 282, 285 Actor-Network Theory (ANT) 246, 340, 347, 351 ACT UP 282, 286 Africa: decolonisation 4; expanding populations in 268; ‘industrialising Africa’ agenda 222– 223; migrants from 68; postcolonialism 4; see also South Africa African Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA) 223 African Development Bank 222 African National Congress (ANC) 68, 257–260 AfriForum 72 Agamben, Giorgio 255–256, 263 agency: emotional 240–241; non-human 9, 11, 147; of oppressed people 304–307; and social change 8 agonism 254, 264n2

Ahmed, S. 74n1, 285 Alan Turner and Associates 53 al-Bashir, Omar 332 alliance builders: NGOs as 196–197; and social movements 202 Almond, G.A. 215 ‘alt-right’ 67 American Left 214 American Revolution 317, 326 Amin, A. 214 anarchism 155, 157, 161, 182 anarchists 155–156, 159, 161, 307 Anthropocene 11, 172–173, 344, 348–349, 356–358; and change 42; coining of term 42; design in 142–151; and emotional response 48; ‘human dimensions’ of 49; human power vs. Earthly power 47; indeterminacy of future 47; innovation in 147–151; normative implications 47–48; scientific analysis of 49; sensibility 357; uncertainity in 142–151; unknowability of serious risks 47 Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) 45 anthroposphere 49 anti-black racism 259 anticapitalism 119 anti-globalism 22; identitarian 29; and reactionary politics 20; right-wing politics of 10; see also reactionary anti-globalism anti-globalists 20–24, 27–29 anti-globalist ultra-nationalism 21 anti-party sentiment 207–210 anti-political economy 353–354 Apel, Karl-Otto 136 Appadurai, A. 61, 311, 343 Arab Spring 1, 15, 103, 158, 318, 326, 329, 332

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Index ‘Arab Uprisings’ 261 Aradau, Claudia 167 Arendt, Hannah 78–79, 81, 84, 246, 256, 328 Aristotle 255–256, 259, 295 Arntz, M. 250 Arrow, Kenneth 8 artificial intelligence 244; eclipse of humanity by 248; rise of 1; risks of 249 Asdal, Kristin 351 Ash, Timothy Garton 103 Athenian democracy 256 atomised citizenship 213 ‘Aukus deal’ 30 Australia: reactionary anti-Globalism in 27; trade war with China 30; Wellbeing Economy Alliance 232 authoritarian populism 1, 215, 287 autogestion 157 automation 248–250, 251n1; predictions about 249; risks of 249; technology and social change 248–250 autonomia (‘autonomy’) movement 157 autonomy 200–201 avian flu 88 Bakunin, Mikhail 155–156 Ballou, Adin 329 Banerjee, Mamata 186–187 Bang, Henrik 208 Barry, Andrew 174, 353–354 Bartolini, S. 213 Bayat, A. 311 Beck, Ulrich 169, 356 Beer, Michael 328 behavioural change 240–241 behavioural happiness 234; economising happiness 236–237; internalising happiness 237–238; rise of 235–238 behavioural public policies 241 Bélanger, P. 58, 62 Bell, Joyce 370 Benanav, A. 250 Benhabib, Seyla 80 Benjamin, Walter 169, 174, 246 Bennett, Jane 339 Berger, James 167 Bernstein, Eduard 101 Bevington, D. 280 Bhagidari scheme, in Delhi 275–276; ‘gentrifying participation’ in 271; process of state-led citizen action 270–272; RWAs in 271 Biden, Joe 30, 92 bi-directional socio-environmental change 46 Black Lives Matter movement 1, 127, 166, 279 Blanchot, Maurice 167, 170 Blee, K.M. 286 Block, Fred 221

Blueprint for infrastructure in Gujarat 184 ‘Body Politik’ 342 Boggs, Carl 157 Bolsonaro, Jair 23 Bouazizi, Mohammed 261 boundary activism 318 Bourdieu, P. 8, 284, 297, 362 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz 332 Bowker, Geoffrey 355 BRAC 191 ‘Brahmin Left’ 28 Brass, T. 311 Bratton, Benjamin 147 Braun, B. 149 Brexit 11, 29, 77–78, 215, 315–316; pro-EU rallies 82–83; and vulnerability of rights 80 British Medical Journal (BMJ) 69, 70 Broken Earth ( Jemisin) 166, 171, 173 brokerage 317–318, 319 Bruce, K.M. 282 Bruntland Report 43 Buck-Morss, Susan 220 Buen Vivir or radical ecological democracy 226 ‘Build Back Better’ 30 bureaucratic organisations 367, 368 Butler, J. 82, 171, 261 ‘cadre parties’ 210 Caldeira, Teresa 274 Californian same sex marriage campaign 281 Callon, M. 340, 341 Cantat, C. 123–124 Cape Town, South Africa: citizenship rights in 275; housing adaptations 269, 272–275; statesubsidised housing in 275; see also South Africa capitalism 104–105; crisis of 119–120; ‘disaster capitalism’ 120 capitalocentrism 337 CARES Act 92 Carnation Revolution 330 Carnegie Commission 69 Carnegie Corporation 69 ‘cartel parties’ 212–213 Carton, Wim 50, 51 Castells, M. 287 catastrophe 12, 166–176; changing contours of 171–173; living with catastrophic ordinariness 173–176; work of 168–171; world’s end 166–168 catastrophic ordinariness 173–176 catastrophism 169, 172–173 catch-all parties 212–213 Catholic Worker movement of North America 158 celebrity activism 279 Chambers, Robert 268 Chandra, U. 308

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Index change: agents, NGOs as 191–204; and Anthropocene 42, 46–48; behavioural 240–241; and crisis 117–127; drivers of 46–48; impacts of 46–48; nature of 46–48; pedagogy for 60–61; progressive 191, 193; representations of 62–63 Charles X, King of France 107 Charlottesville riot 68 Chatterjee, Partha 260–261, 267 Chatterton, P. 162 Chennai, and Outer Ring Road (ORR) 53–58 Chenoweth, Erica 329 China 25, 87; COVID-19 spread in 89; trade war with Australia 30; trade war with United States 30; weather modification techniques 145 Chinese Revolution 103 Church and King Riots 106 circular economies 224–225 citizen action 267–276; Cape Town’s housing adaptations 272–275; citizen-led 269–270, 272–275; Delhi’s Bhagidari 270–272; participatory urban governance 268–269; state-led 269–272; state-led vs. citizen-led 269–270 citizen-led citizen action 269–270, 272–275 citizenship: atomised 213; disjunctive 275; insurgent 275; intimate 283 civil resistance 326–332 civil rights movement 214, 281, 329–330 civil society 191–192 Clarkson, Jeremy 315 Classical Marxism 305 ‘climate artisan’ approach 148 climate change 1, 48, 126, 196, 332, 349, 356; anthropogenic 44, 47; existential threat 315; global risks of 347; narratives of 172 Club of Rome 236 Coalition for Urban Transitions 196 Cold War 1, 104, 112–113, 171, 281; nuclear arms race 171 Colebrook, Claire 176 collective action 306, 311, 312, 337–344; action in 341–342; collectivist 209; concern groups as researchers 343–344; concerns regarding 340– 341; contemporary concerns, new thinking for 344; individualised 209; and outcomes 369; and politics 342–343; post-structural view of 337–339; and practice theories 366–368; researchers as activists 343–344; and ‘social’ movements 339–340 collectives: commercial 365; feminist 157; ideal types 366–367; political 337; and practice theory 368–370; radical 306; virtual 367 Collins, Randall 113 ‘colour blindness’ 67 colour revolutions 103, 104, 330 Comaroff, Jean 72

Comaroff, John L. 72 Combined approach to political economy and power analysis (Acosta and Pettit) 298 Comintern ultra-leftism 21 community economies 225–227 Community Economies Institute 341 Community Mortgage Program, Philippines 199 Complex Systems Theory 3 ‘compositional’ analysis 132 Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) 257 Confindustria 89 conservatism 3–4, 240, 286 contentious collective action 368, 369 Contentious Performances (Tilly) 316, 318 contentious politics 280, 315–324; defined 316; research programme 316–319 Contentious Politics (Tilly and Tarrow) 316, 317–318, 320 contentious politics programme: conceptual issues 321–322; evaluating 320–323; and Extinction Rebellion 319–320; methodological issues 322–323; state focus 320–321 context: defined 137; dynamics of 137–139; -preserving situations 137–138; -transforming situations 137–138 Continental Philosophy 133–134 contingency 5, 132–135 contingent workers 35 co-operative movement 160 coordinated action 318 Corbyn, Jeremy 28, 315 Cornwall, Andrea 269 ‘cosmopolitics’ 246 COVID-19 pandemic 1, 11, 19, 31, 166, 167, 192, 228n1, 264n1, 272; and capitalist globalisation 89; contagion and lockdown 89–90; globalised 20; and global wealth report 25; insolvency crisis 90–91; Keynesianism 91–93; overview 87; stakes of 95; vaccines 93–94; and world ecology 88–89; zombie neoliberalism 91–93 crisis 12; and change 117–127; defined 117; exploiting the moment of 119–122; as ‘floating signifier’ 122–123; ‘migrant crisis’ 123–125; proliferation of 125–127; promise/threat of 117–119 critical citizens 209, 211 Critical webs of power and change (Chapman) 298 Crossley, N. 284 Crutzen, Paul 42, 43–44, 45 Cuomo, Andrew 92 Dalton, R.J. 208, 211, 213, 215, 216 DanChurchAid 196 Danowski, Deborah 167 Darling, Alistair 121

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Index Dasgupta, Debjani 186–187 Davis, Mike 29 day labourers: in South Africa 37; and surplus populations 39; and unemployment rate 37 de Certeau, M. 304 decoloniality 1, 4 ‘deep structure’ social theory 135 Defiant Earth (Hamilton) 45, 50 ‘deglobalisation’ 23 de la Torre, C. 264n1 Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), Gujarat 183–185 deliberative actions: and social change 8; and unintended consequences 8 della Porta, Donatella 216 Deloitte 249, 250 Demaria, F. 62 democracy: Athenian 256; ‘hyper-democracy’ 213; radical ecological 226 Democratic deficit (Norris) 207 demographic structural theory (DST) 106 Demophobia (Neocosmos) 258 demos, people as 255–259 Derickson, K.D. 226 Desai, Ashwin 259 ‘descriptive’ technological determinism 247 determinism: ‘descriptive’ technological 247; diagnosing 246–248; macromyopic 247; ‘methodological’ technological 247; ‘normative’ technological 247 diffusion 318, 319 Dikshit, Sheila 270 Dillon, Michael 167, 170 disaster capitalism 120 Disasters Emergency Committee 196 discursive politics 120–121 disentrenchment 138 disjunctive citizenship 275 dispersed collective activity 367, 368 Dixon, C. 280 Dobbin, Frank 370 Dolan, Paul 237 Dombroski, Kelly 344 Dror, Otniel 238–239 Duke, David 71 Dussel, Enrique 135–136 du Toit, A. 37 Dutton, Peter 71 Duverger, Maurice 210 Dyke, N.V. 280, 283 Dynamics of Contention (McAdam) 316, 317–318, 320–321 ‘Earth System’ 44, 45–46, 49; change and capitalist economic system 50 East Asia 223 Easterlin, Richard 232, 236

Easterlin Paradox 232, 239 Ebola 88 Ecological Swaraj 226 ecologies of infrastructure 53–65; ecological re-imaginations 58–60; Outer Ring Road (ORR) 53–65; pedagogy for ‘change’ 60–63; see also infrastructure economic globalisation 20, 27, 30; see also globalisation economic informality 35, 37–38, 40 economising happiness 236–237 economy 219–227; circular 224–225; community 225–227; and COVID-19 pandemic 90–91; as machine 220–224; reforming, as machine 224–225; reframing and reformatting 225– 227; zombie neoliberalism 91–93 ecosystem, greening 224–225 educators: legitimacy 201–202; NGOs as 195–196 Edwards, Paul 347, 348, 349–350, 356 Eisenstadt, N. 162 ‘elephant-chart’ of global income 26, 27 Ellis, Erle 50 emancipatory catastrophism 169 emotional agency 240–241 emotional cultures 239–240 emotions 284; global 233–235; governing 234– 235; subjective 238–239 employment 34; informal 35–36, 39; UK Office for National Statistics data of 250 End Conscription Campaign 285 Engels, Friedrich 101, 102, 155, 258 English Revolution 106 Enlai, Zhou 113 ‘Envisioning Capital’ (Buck-Morss) 220 eudaimonic wellbeing 234 Eurobarometer 207 European Commission 77, 236 European communist movements 155 European Enlightenment 43 European migrant-citizens: and Brexit referendum 80–82; right to free movement 77, 81 European Parliament 233, 236 European Quality of Life Survey 236 European Union (EU) 11, 77, 315 Eurostat 237 evaluative wellbeing 233, 234 eventful infrastructure 347–358; demonstration events 352–355; and ecological disruptions 355–357; past and future 357–358; process without events 350 Everyday Feminism project 369 everyday resistance: acts of resistance and intentions 308; agency of oppressed people 305–307; change is realised autonomously 307–308; critiques of 308–312; everyday

376

Index beyond resistance 311–312; insubordination and complete change project 310–311; oppressed people do have agency 304–305; reactions to 308–312; theorising 304–308; wishful thinking 309–310 experimental intervention 64 Extinction Rebellion (XR) 279, 315–316, 319–320 Facebook 94, 287 Fanon, Frantz 4, 171 fascism 21–22, 95, 159 feminists: analysis of activism 282–283; antiglobalisation movement 282; global justice movement 280; political economy 226 Ferguson, James 223, 276 Fitoussi, Jean-Paul 235 ‘Fixing the Economy’ (Mitchell) 220 flat ontology 363 Fligstein, N. 367 ‘floating signifier’: crisis as 122–123; defined 122 Floyd, George 127 Fordism 21 ‘formal politics’ 207, 209–210, 213–216 Fortun, Kim 357 The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid: eradicating poverty through profits (Prahalad) 304–305 Foucault, Michel 4–5, 133, 215, 256, 260, 295, 305, 328 ‘foundational economy’ 227 Franks, Benjamin 154, 157 ‘free market’ 221 French Revolution 103, 106, 155, 256, 258 Frey, C.B. 250 Friedman, Milton 120 Friedman, Thomas 25, 90 Fugitive Pieces (Michaels) 170 Fukuyama, Francis 22 Future Advocacy 249 Futures 224 Gaddafi, Muammar 104, 113 Galarraga, M. 148 Gamble, Andrew 119 Gandhi, Mahatma 327, 329, 333n8 Gandy, Matthew 351, 357 Gaventa, John 295, 298–300 gay marriage, legalisation of 1 genealogies, of prefiguration 155–159 genocide: defined 74n4; South African 72; see also white genocide geographies of governing emotions 234–235 Gerbaudo, P. 287 Gerhardt, H. 159 Ghertner, Asher 271 Gibson-Graham, J.K. 220, 225, 337, 339–340 Giddens, A. 364

Gidwani, V. 36 Global Change and the Earth System 44 global emotions, governing 233–235 global financial crash of 2007–2008 1, 158 Global Happiness Council 232–233, 235, 237–238, 241 Globalisation (capital ‘G’) 10; and global social changes 23–30; myths about 19; political discourse of 19; pro-market 21; reactionary populist backlash 22; World Economic Forum advocacy of 28 globalisation (lower case ‘g’) 19; economic 20; market-led 23; of market rule 20; of social justice 28 Global North 157, 163, 286 global public policy: and emotional management 240; and subjective wellbeing 237; wellbeing in 232–241 Global South 90, 163, 182, 185, 187, 225, 286 global/transnational whiteness 69; see also whiteness Glorious Revolution of 1688 102, 106 Godin, B. 149 Goldman, Emma 156 Goldman Sachs 90 Goldstone, J.A. 102, 105–107 Gorbachev, Mikhail 107–111 Gordon, Uri 161 Gordon Riots 106 Gosplan 110 Gossnab 110 governance theories, and emotions 234–235 gradualism 172 Graham, Stephen 351, 354 Gramsci, Antonio 19, 20, 21–22, 102, 120, 305, 328 Great Recession 91, 92 great replacement theory 68, 71 Great Society 214 Greenham Common Peace Camp 281 Green New Deal 226 Griffin, C. 286 Grosz, Elizabeth 176 groupings 368–370; defined 367; political 287; social 287 Groys, Boris 150 The Guardian 249–250 Guillaume, James 155 Gujarat: Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) 183–185; Gujarat Infrastructure Development Board 184 Gujarat Infrastructure Development Board 184 Gupta, A. 304 Habermas, Jurgen 136 Halford, S. 287 Hall, Stuart 122–123

377

Index Hamilton, Clive 45, 50 happiness: behavioural 235–238; economising 236–237; as individualised object of social change 233–235; internalising 237–238; measurement, historicising 238–241 Haraway, Donna 344 Hart, G. 311 Harvey, David 131 Hatton, Nicolas 83 Hayek, Friedrich 3 hedonic wellbeing 234 Hedström, P. 322 Heidegger, Martin 245 Held, David 215 herd immunity 20 heterodoxy 49 Hetherington, Kregg 356 Hewitt, Rachel 240 ‘historical semantics’ 122 Hoban, K. 162 Hobbes, Thomas 295 Hodgson, G.M. 224 Hofmeyr, Steve 72–73 Holocaust 170, 171 Holocene 43–46 Holston, James 274, 311 Homeless International (HI) 195 Honig, Bonnie 168, 171 Horkheimer, Max 95 Hughes, Thomas P. 350–351 Hulme, David 49 Hulme, Mike 48 The Human Age (Ackerman) 45 Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) 88 Hungary: Fidesz party 124; ‘migrant crisis’ in 123–125 Hurricane Katrina 169 ‘hyper-democracy’ 213 identitarian anti-globalism 29 identity-defined political movements 28 identity politics 1, 28, 72, 214–215, 342 Ihde, Don 246 IIED (International Institute for Environment and Development) 197 imaginaries: beyond revolution 154–163; beyond state 154–163 imaginary-practical entities 63 imaginations of power 295–301 impossibility theorem 8 inclusive dualism 223 inclusive growth 222 Indignados movement 158 induced innovation 144 informal economies 34, 38 informal employment 35, 39 informers, NGOs as 195–196

infrastructural change 347–348 infrastructure 15; accretions 348–352; and ecological disruptions 355–357; ecologies of 53–65; eventful 347–358; futures of 355–357; landscapes as 58; and modernity 347, 349; and social processes 60; STS-infused approaches to 347 infrastrucutrualism 11 Inglehart, Ronald 208 Ingold, T. 59 innovation 12; in the Anthropocene 147– 151; and anti-globalist backlash 27–28; beyond innovators and intent 143–144; democratisation of 143; induced 144; as mode of social change 143; scales and scenes of 144–147; and values 151 innovators 201; innovation beyond 143–144; NGOs as 13, 194, 195 Instagram 287 insurgent citizenship 275 internal migrants, in South Africa 38 International Centre for Climate Change and Development 196 International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) 45 International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP) 44 International Institute for Environment and Development 196 International Labour Organisation 223 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 90, 121 International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) 155 interregnum: and Comintern ultra-leftism 21; monopolies 21; twentieth-century 21–23 intervention 148–150, 155; behavioural 240–241; critical design 61; dietary 145; experimental 64; government 238; paramilitary 104; performative 341, 343; state-led policy 11 intimate citizenship 283 Inventing equal opportunity (Dobbin) 370 Iron Curtain 112 Isin, Engin 80, 82 Islamic Sufism 159 Italian Communist Party (PCI) 157 Italy: Confindustria 89; and COVID-19 pandemic 89 ITDG (Intermediate Technology Development Group) Publishing 195; see also Practical Action Publishing Jackson, Paul 71 Jameson, Frederic 166 Jasper, J. 321 Jemisin, N.K. 166, 173 Jepperson, R.L. 366 Jessop, Bob 313 Jillo, R.A. 199

378

Index Johnson, Boris 23, 254 Johnson, W. 309, 311 JP Morgan 90 Kaltwasser, C.R. 259, 264n1 Kalyvas, Andreas 256 Katz, Cindi 310 Katz, R. 212 Kautsky, Karl 102 Kerkvliet, B.J.T. 308 Key, V.O. 211 Kirchheimer, Otto 212 Klein, Naomi 120–121 Kline, S.J. 244 knowledge 232–241; and behavioural happiness 235–238; global emotions 233–235; happiness and social change 233–235; and happiness measurement 238–241 Knox, H. 60 Kolbert, Elizabeth 45 Koselleck, Reinhart 2, 3, 161, 247 Kruegler, Christopher 329 Kruger, Christi 70 Ku Klux Klan 286 Kull, Christian 174–175 Laclau, Ernesto 255 Ladegaard stream 348, 352, 352, 355, 357 landscapes: biophysical 58; as infrastructure 58–60, 63–64; socio-economic 238 Lane, David 71 Larkin, Brian 347–348 latent networks 367–368 ‘latent’ population 36 Latour, Bruno 8, 43, 246, 248, 340, 342, 350–351 Le Corbusier 183 Lefebvre, Henri 310 legitimacy: alliance builders 202–203; educators 201–202; non-governmental organisations 198–199; political 95, 125 Leninism 157 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT): Pride parades 282; rights movement 281, 283; sub-cultures 282 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+): identities 1, 283, 286, 288; rights activism 283 Levinas, Emmanuel 82 liberalism 214, 258, 304–305 libertarian-leaning socialism 157 ‘the Libya option’ 114 life-support Keynesianism 93 Lilla, Mark 214–215 Livingston, Julie 223 lockdowns: in China 89; and COVID-19 pandemic 89–90; in Italy 89; in United States 89–90, 93; see also COVID-19 pandemic

‘logic of antagonism’ 161 ‘logic of subtraction’ 161–162 Los Angeles Pride 286 Louis XV, King of France 107 Louis XVI, King of France 102, 107 Lovelock, James 45 Lukes, Steven 296–298 Luxemburg, Rosa 101 Lyotard, Jean-François 167, 170 Machiavelli, N. 102, 113, 295 machine: economy as 220–224; reforming economy as 224–225 MacKinnon, D. 226 ‘macromyopic’ determinisms 247 Macron, Emmanuel 92 mad cow disease 88 Madras Metropolitan Area 53, 54 Maeckelbergh, Marianne 154 Maiguashca, B. 280, 282–283 Mair, P. 212, 213 ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) 27 Making things public: atmospheres of democracy (Weibel) 342 Malherbe, E.G. 69 Margulis, Lynn 45 market capitalism 109, 156 market-led growth 221 Martin, B. 284 Marvin, Simon 351, 354 Marx, Karl 3, 36, 37, 101, 102, 155, 258 Marxism 3–4, 7, 133, 157; Classical 305; structural 337; traditional 337 Marxists 101–102 ‘mass parties’ 210 material configurations 339 Mattern, S. 64 Mattern, Shannon 227 May, Theresa 315 Mbeki, Thabo 258 Mbembe, Achille 4, 309 McAdam, D. 316, 317, 320–324 McDonnell, John 249 McFarlane, C. 62 McRobbie, A. 285 ‘Merchant Right’ 28 Merton, Robert 8 metabolic infrastructure 62 metaphors and models of social change 219–227 ‘methodological’ technological determinism 247 #MeToo movement 279, 369 Meyer, J.W. 366 Michael, M. 249 Michaels, Anne 170, 173 Micheletti, Michele 209 ‘micro-macro’ causal mechanisms 111

379

Index Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) 88 migrant crisis 117; in Hungary 123–125 Millennium Development Goals 236 Miller, Ethan 340 Miller, V. 298 Mische, A. 321, 323 Mitchell, T. 220 modernity 2, 248, 256, 326, 347–350, 357–358 modern thought 4, 8, 131 Modi, Narendra 192, 195 Moffitt, B. 264n1 ‘monolithic’ theory of power 329 monopolies 21–22 monopolists 21–22 Moore, Gordon 248 Moore, Jason 50, 89 ‘Moore’s Law’ 248 Morgan, G. 250 Morozov, Evgeny 249 Morton, Timothy 172 movement parties 13, 216 Mudde, C. 259, 264n1 Musk, Elon 147 Muungano Alliance 196 Naegler, L. 161, 162 nationalism: disaster 95; nihilistic norms of 20; nostalgic 28; revanchist forms of 1; vaccine 19; white 67 National Slum Upgrading Programme, South Africa 199 nativism 20 Nattrass, N. 223 natural disasters 88; and decrease of wildlife habitat 88–89; reasons for 88; Swyngedouw on 169, 176 Nature 43, 46 ‘negative emissions technologies’ (NETS) 50 negotiated revolutions 104 Negri, Antonio 7 Nehru, Jawaharlal 183 Nelson, D. 245 neoliberalism 189, 215, 241, 286, 342; in Brazil 338; death of 30; discursive power of 341; economic shortcomings of 22; potential crisis of 121; zombie 91–93 Nepstad, Sharon 329 neuroliberalism 240 Neves, D. 37 New Deal 214 ‘new economy’ regimes 21 New Left 214 New Right 214 ‘new values’ 156 Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia 102 nihilism 160–161 Nixon, Rob 168

non-governmental organisations (NGOs): accountabilities 197–198; as alliance builders 196–197, 202; autonomy 200–201; ‘being’ and ‘doing’ change 193, 197–201; as change agents 191–204; as educators 195–196, 201–202; effective 199–200; as informers 195–196; as innovators 195, 201; legitimacy 198–199; personas 194; as registered charities 192; as service providers 197, 202–203 non-human agency 9, 11, 147 nonviolent action: defined 327–328, 333n3; Ekta Parishad in India 331; and labour strike 331; Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil 331; new frontiers in study of 331–332; as organised application of political force 327; and pacifism 328; and social change 330–331; study of 328–330 Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) data project 333n10 Nonviolent revolutions (Nepstad) 329 Nordic walking 365 ‘normative’ technological determinism 247 Norris, Pippa 207, 209 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) 103–104 Northern NGOs 191, 202 Novatore, Renzo 161 Obama, Barack 287 objective wellbeing 233 Occupy Movement 158, 259 O’Connor, James 122 October Revolution 101 Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) 197, 203 Orbán, Viktor 123–124 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 211, 224, 233, 236, 237 ‘originary technics’ 245 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt) 79 Ortner, S.B. 304, 312 Osborne, M.A. 250 Oskeen, Joel 46 Ostrom, Elinor 146 outcomes: and collective action 369; defined 369 Outer Ring Road (ORR): in Chennai 53–58; critical review 56; ecological re-imaginations 58–60, 64; as ‘metapragmatic object’ 60; and object-oriented ontology 59; phase 1 57; as quasi-object 64–65; and traffic flow 53 overt racism 67 Oxfam 24, 191, 198, 199 pacifism 333n9; defined 328; and nonviolent action 328 ‘Panama Papers’ 24 ‘Pandora Papers’ 24

380

Index Panizza, Francisco 255 ‘Paradise Papers’ 24 Pareto, Vilfredo 295 Paris Agreement 23 Paris Commune 155 participatory urban governance 268–269 parties see political parties passive revolution 102 Patrick, Dan 90 Pattie, Charles 213 people 254–264; as the demos/plebes 255–259; as performance of political body 259–263; problem with 254–255 People’s Global Action (PGA) hallmarks 158, 160 Permut, M. 162 Pettit, J. 298 Piaget, Jean 133 Pickersgill, M. 234 Picon, A. 63 Plato 258, 295 plebes, people as 255–259 PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science) 46 Polish Solidarity movement 318 political bodies 259–263; see also specific terms political conflict, and practice theories 366–368 political left 154, 159, 199 ‘politically correct’ multi-culturalism 23 political parties 207–216; anti-party 207–210; back to the future 214–216; functionalist approaches to 210–211; movement 13, 216; and social change 210–213 political philosophy 154 political power 68, 81–82, 93, 324, 328 politics: as claims-making 315–324; and collective action 342–343; of concern 342; contentious 315–324; discursive 120–121 The politics of nonviolent action (Sharp) 328–329 ‘politics of subtraction’ 162 Polletta, F. 162 ‘poor-white’ problem: and international media 70; in South Africa 69–71; threat of dirt and pollution 70 populism 20, 29; authoritarian 1, 215, 287; and the masses 254–264 postcolonialism 4 postmodern citizens 211 post-structural view of collective action 337–339 power 14; analysing possibilities of 297–298; first ‘face’ of 296; Foucauldian approaches to 214; imaginations of 295–301; ‘monolithic’ theory of 329; political 68, 81–82, 93, 324, 328; Power Cube model 298–300; ‘radical’ view of 297; second ‘face’ of 296; third ‘face’ of 296; understanding 295–297

Power analysis: a practical guide (Pettit) 298 Power Cube model 295, 298–300, 299 Power flower (VeneKlasen and Miller) 298 Practical Action 195 Practical Action Publishing 195; see also ITDG (Intermediate Technology Development Group) Publishing Practical Answers 195 practice theories: and collective action 366–368; and collectives 368–370; core claims of 362–363; and political conflict 366–368; and social change 363–366 Prahalad, C.K. 304 prefiguration 154–163; contemporary considerations of 154; defined 154; dilemmas and debates 159; genealogies of 155–159; as process of skill development 162; revolution and reform 161–163; spatiality and scale 159–160; temporality and speed 160–161 prefigurative scalar imaginaries 159–160 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci) 21 process theory 363–364 process without events 350 programmatic approach 136 progressive change 191, 193 promiscuous human impact 46 ‘prosthetic imagination’ 245 protoecologies 62 public goods 228n3, 274 Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria 340, 343 punctuated equilibrium 3, 364 Putnam, Robert 207 PWC: Economic Outlook Report March 2017 250; UK Economic Outlook reports 249 ‘Quantum Revolution’ 247 Rabeharisoa, V. 340 racial integration 71 racism 20, 22, 285; anti-black 259; and Black Lives Matter activists 279; overt 67; systemic 24; xenophobic 19 radical feminism 154 Radical Happiness (Segal) 239 Rajaram, P.K. 123–124 Rancière, J. 81, 82, 263 reactionary anti-globalism 19, 29–30; in Australia 27; and crisis of Globalisation 23; cultural politics of 20; in Europe 27; myths of 22; Trump’s brand of 28–29; see also anti-globalism Reall 194, 195 Reckwitz, A. 362 recognising icebergs 225–227 ‘refolutions’ 103, 104 Reform Crisis, in England 106–107 Reformist Left 214

381

Index reformist revolutions 103 reforms/reforming: able to prevent revolutions 105–107; economy as machine 224–225; vs. revolution 102, 111–114; revolution and 161–163; rural governance in West Bengal 185–187; and state collapse 107–111 ‘Reframing the Economy’ (Gibson-Graham) 220 regressive activism 279, 286–287 researchers: as activists 343–344; concern groups as 343–344 resistance 308; see also everyday resistance revolution: imaginaries beyond 154–163; modern concept of 101; passive 102; and reforms 161–163; vs. reforms 102, 111–114; see also specific revolutions Reyers, Belinda 49 Rich, Nathaniel 45 rights 85; to free movement 77, 81; liminality of 80–82; using, and European migrant-citizens 82–84; vulnerability of 79–80 Rockström, Johan 46, 146 Rodríguez-Giralt, Israel 341 Roman Plebeians 326, 327 Rorty, Richard 214–215 Rostow, Walt 220–221 Roubini, Nouriel 90 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 88 Roy, Ananya 309 Ruddiman, Bill 46 Ruppert, E. 235 rural governance, in West Bengal 185–187 Russian Revolution 103, 156 Salvini, Matteo 124 Sanders, Bernie 28 Sarkozy, Nicolas 118 Saussure, Ferdinand de 133 Savage, M. 287 Scarrow, Susan 212 Schatzki, T. 362–363, 365 Scheffer, Thomas 350, 351, 358 Schindler, S. 62 Schmitter, Philippe 213 Schock, Kurt 329 Schulman, S. 286 science and technology studies (STS): informed work on infrastructures 351; infused approaches to infrastructure 347–348 ‘science of happiness’ 234 ‘science of wellbeing’ 234 Scott, James C. 14, 181–182, 183, 188–189, 303, 305, 306–308, 310 Second Nature (Rich) 45 Second World War 212 Sedgwick, Eve 343 Seeing like a state (Scott) 181–182, 185 Seekings, J. 223

Segal, Lynne 239 ‘self-devouring growth’ 223 Sen, Amartya 235 Sennett, Richard 215 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks 1 service providers, NGOs as 197, 202–203 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) 88 Sewell, William H., Jr. 350, 358 Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) 196 Sharp, Gene 327, 328, 329, 331, 333n3 Sheldon, Rebekah 176 Shell 50 ‘shock doctrine’ 120 Shove, E. 363–366 Silence and voice in the study of contentious politics 316 Silent revolution (Inglehart) 208 ‘Silicon Revolution’ 246 Simon, Herbert 148–149, 150 Simon, R. 328 The Sixth Extinction (Kolbert) 45 Skeggs, B. 286 Skocpol, Theda 105 slow food 338 Smith, Adam 8 Smith, Neil 169 social analysis 2 social appropriation 318, 319 social change 3, 240–241; and agency 8; apprehensive image of 6; approaching 9–10; and deliberative actions 8; global and Globalisation 23–30; happiness as individualised object of 233–235; innovation as mode of 143; metaphors and models of 219–227; and nonviolent action 330–331; and parties 210–213; practices of 361–371; and practice theories 363–366; rhythm and speed of 5; and technology 246–250; and unintended consequences 8 social Darwinism 90 socialism: libertarian-leaning 157; state 110, 156–157 social media 13, 332; and anti-globalist backlash 27–28; protest and advocacy 286–287 social movements 284; activist identities beyond 279–288; conceptualising 280–282 social movement studies 154, 279 social-natural coupling 46 social practice 8, 134, 364, 370; defined 362–363; theory 143 social transformation 7, 8 socio-environmental change 46–48 Sontag, S. 166, 168 Soule, S. 321 South Africa: activist identities in 285; colonial white identity in 69; day labour in 37; economy 38;

382

Index informality-migration-urbanisation nexus 37–39; internal migrants 38; National Slum Upgrading Programme 199; ‘poor-white’ problem in 69–71; producing surplus labour in 36; State of Emergency in 280; surplus labour in 35–36; unemployment rate in 36; and white genocide 71–73; white victimhood in 67 South African Communist Party (SACP) 257 Southern NGOs 191, 202 Spain 92, 216, 315, 317; and COVID-19 pandemic 90; Indignados movement 158 Spencer, Herbert 90 Spivak, G.C. 309 spontaneous order 3 squatter communities 154 ‘stagnant’ population 36 Stahel, W.R. 225 Star, Susan Leigh 347–348 state 181–189; as agent of social change 13; Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) 183–185; imaginaries beyond 154–163; as object of social change 13; overview 181–183; reforming rural governance in West Bengal 185–187 ‘The State and Social Transformation’ 257–259 state-led citizen action 269–272 ‘state phobia’ 215 state socialism 110, 156–157 Stengers, Isabelle 168, 246, 354–355 Stephan, Maria 329 Steyn, Melissa 74n1 St. George’s Fields Massacre 106 Stiegler, B. 245 Stiglitz, Joseph 235 Stoermer, Eugene 42, 44, 45 Strategic nonviolent conflict (Ackerman and Kruegler) 329 stratigraphers 45 Street, Paul 126 Strengthening rural development 186–187 structural analysis 129–132 structuralism 131, 133–134, 283 structural Marxism 337 structural stories 131–133 structuration 130, 139, 364 structure fetishism 12, 134 structures 12; defined 129; as relational concept 131; and social analysis 129; sublimating 133–135 Students for a Democratic Society 368 Sturdy, A. 250 subaltern urbanism 309 Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) 45 subjective emotions 238–239 subjective wellbeing 233, 237 subjectivity-as-affectivity theory 134

subjectivity-as-subjection theory 134 surplus labour: forms of 36; producing 36; relative to absolute 39–40; in South Africa 35–36 surplus populations: and capitalist expansion 39; and day labourers 39; forms of 36 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 188, 203 swine flu 88 Swyngedouw, Eric 169 systemic racism 24 Szerszynski, B. 148 Tarrow, S. 216, 316, 317, 318, 320–321 Taylor, Charles 5–6 Taylor, V. 280, 281, 283 Tea Party movement 28 technocratic authoritarianism 157 technological determinism 244, 247, 250; descriptive 247; methodological 247; normative 247; types of 247 technological momentum 350 technology 9, 13, 244–251; -as-relation 246; case of automation 248–250; creating/ reflecting social change 246–248; diagnosing determinism(s) 246–248; influencing/showing social change 248–250; and social change 248–250 temporality and speed 160–161 ‘theory of induced innovation’ 144 Thomas, A. 193 Thoreau, H.D. 329 Thrift, N. 214 Thunberg, Greta 254, 259 Tilly, C. 216, 280, 316, 317, 318, 320–321 tipping point revolutions 3, 104, 113 Tocqueville, A. de 102 Tolstoy, L. 329 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) 21 traditional Marxism 337 transformation: defined 136; and NGOs 198; temporalities of 135–136 Trinamool Congress party 186 Trotskyism 157 Trump, Donald 23, 27, 29, 30, 89–90, 125, 214, 215, 287 Twitter 71, 287 The Tyranny of Structurelessness (Freeman) 157 UK Independence Party (UKIP) 29 ultrahigh net worth individuals (UHNWIs) 24 ultra-nationalism 19, 28–29; anti-globalist 21; rise of 10 Unarmed insurrections (Schock) 329 unemployment 249–250; benefits 92; chronic 223; rise in United States 93; structural 223; in Sweden 93

383

Index unemployment rate: and day labourers 37; in South Africa 36–37, 39–40 Unger, Roberto Mangabeira 130, 132, 134, 135–136, 174, 307; context-making 137–138; formative contexts vs. formed routines 139–140 Uniformitarianism 172 unintended consequences: and deliberative actions 8; and social change 8 United Kingdom (UK): Department for International Development 186; European migrant-citizens and Brexit referendum 80–82; European migrant-citizens in 81; Office for National Statistics 237, 250; What Works Centre for Wellbeing 237; withdrawal from EU 77 United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) 195 United Nations (UN) 224, 237; Resolution 65/309 236; Sustainable Development Goals 233 United Nations Habitat Global Campaign on Urban Governance 268 United Nations Security Council Resolution 104 United States: Charlottesville riot in 68; COVID-19 spread in 89–90; lockdowns in 89–90, 93; overt racism 67; trade war with China 30 United States Institute of Peace 332n1 urban governance: participatory 268–269; and poverty eradication 268 Urban Resource Centre, Karachi 197 urban spaces 348 US Federal Reserve 91 USSR: central planning agencies 110; collapse of 107; constituent republics 108; decrease of annual GNP 109; structural crisis 111 vaccine nationalism 19 vaccines 87; COVID-19 pandemic 93–94 values: conservative 191–192; of corporate multiculturalism 29; dominant 312; and innovation 151; liberatory 156; ‘new values’ 156; normative 238; postmaterialist 208, 211; socio-natural 56 vanguardism 7, 161 van Munster, Rens 167 VeneKlasen, L. 298 Verba, S. 215 Verbeek, Peter-Paul 246 ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ investment summits 185 Vietnam War 214 vital materialism 339 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 167, 173 vulnerability of rights: Arendt on 79; and Brexit 80; normative account 80; performative accounts 80

wages 223, 226; below-market 39; and COVID19 pandemic 87, 91–92; and Reform Crisis 106; and South Africa 34–36; working without 34–36 Ward, J. 285 Ware, Alan 209 Warsaw Pact 110 Wattenberg, M.P. 213 wealth inequality 25, 26 Weapons of the weak (Scott) 303 Web based activism 287 Weber, M. 129, 295 Weberian bureaucracy 182 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour) 43 Weibel, Peter 342 Weir, Jessica 339 wellbeing: eudaimonic 234; evaluative 233, 234; in global public policy 232–241; hedonic 234; objective 233; ‘science of wellbeing’ 234; subjective 233, 237 Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) 232, 241 Welskopp, T. 322 West Bengal: local autonomy in 189; panchayats in 186–187; reforming rural governance in 185–187 Whatsapp 287 white genocide 68; and far right white conspiracy 71; myth of 71–73; and South Africa 71–73; see also genocide White genocide manifesto (Lane) 71 whiteness 68, 73, 74n1; global/transnational 69 white poverty 69–70 white South Africans 68; exceptionalising suffering of 69 white supremacists 67 white supremacy 67 ‘white victim’ 67–68 Why civil resistance works (Chenoweth and Stephan) 329 Whyte, Kyle 172 Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Hulme) 48 wildlife habitat, and natural disasters 88–89 William IV, King of United Kingdom 107 Williams, Raymond 42, 122 Willoughby-Herard, T. 69 Winner, L. 248–249 Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) 368 work of catastrophe 168–171 World Bank 24, 38, 185, 224, 237; Institutional strengthening of Gram Panchayats 186 World Development Movement 196 World Government Summit in Dubai 232 World Health Organization (WHO) 23, 364 World Inequality Database (WID) 25 World Social Forum movement 338 World Trade Organization (WTO) 21, 121

384

Index World Values Survey (WVS) 207 World War II 53, 171 World Wildlife Fund 236 Wright, Erik Olin 7–8 Wyatt, S. 247, 248 Wyschogrod, Edith 167, 168, 170 xenophobic racism 19

Yellow Revolution (1985) 103, 322 Ylikoski, P. 322 Young, Iris Marion 81, 132 Young, J.L. 239 Zalasiewicz, Jan 45 Zikode, S’bu 262–263 zombie neoliberalism 91–93

385