The ‘normal and mundane practices of modernity’: Global Power Structures and the Environment

2000 ◽  
pp. 35-65
Author(s):  
Matthew Paterson
Keyword(s):  
Power Structures ◽  
Global Power

scholarly journals Local Faith Actors and the Global Compact on Refugees

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Wurtz ◽  
Olivia Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Good Practice ◽  
Global South ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Primary Research ◽  
Good Practices ◽  
Global Policy ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Global Power

Power dynamics of global decision-making have meant that local faith actors have not been frequently heard in the context of refugee response. The development of new global refugee and humanitarian frameworks gives hope that there will be greater inclusion of Southern-led, faith-based responses. A closer look, however, demonstrates discrepancies between the frameworks used in global policy processes and the realities of local faith actors in providing refugee assistance. We present primary research from distinct case studies in Mexico and Honduras, which counters much of what is assumed about local faith actors in refugee services and aid. Interventions that are considered to be examples of good practice in the global South are not always congruent with those conceptualized as good practices by the international community. Failure to recognize and integrate approaches and practices from the global South, including those led by actors inspired by faith, will ultimately continue to replicate dominant global power structures.

India as a Net Security Provider in Indo-Pacific and Implications for the Region

2021 ◽  
pp. 26-39
Author(s):  
Sufian Ullah ◽  
Zeeshan Hayat
Keyword(s):  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Regional Stability ◽  
Military Presence ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The Us ◽  
Vested Interests ◽  
The Status ◽  
Net Security ◽  
The Indian Ocean

The US determination to preserve the status-quo and consolidate its global pre-eminence as the sole superpower and China‘s objective to enhance its share in the global power structures are creating US and China great power competitors in the world, specifically in the Asia-Pacific. The initial US Asia-Pacific strategy, which the Trump administration termed as Indo-Pacific strategy, aims to contain China by increasing military presence and making counter-weights in the region. In this 'containing China‘ strategy, India is an important ally and the US sees India‘s potential in the Indian Ocean and beyond as a multiplying factor that could work towards furthering its strategic interests in the region. Therefore, in the wake of US Indo-Pacific Strategy, India portrays itself as an assertive American ally to emerge as a 'net security provider‘ that could further promote the latter‘s vested interests in the region. Hence, the active western support to India contributes to New Delhi‘s pursuit of becoming a regional hegemon. This puts other countries, including Pakistan and China, in serious security dilemma where their legitimate security interests are threatened by the Indo-US attempts to dominate the region. These trends suggest that regional stability is likely to face severe setbacks, and the countries might find themselves in serious military confrontations with each other.

scholarly journals Towards a feminist politics of mobility: U.S. Travel and immigration memoirs

Feminismo/s ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Leah Butterfield
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Feminist Geography ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Feminist And Queer Theory

This paper challenges longstanding cultural associations that link men to mobility and women to stability by outlining what I term a feminist politics of mobility. Bringing together four contemporary memoirs that foreground journeys, I explore how U.S. women embody and represent their mobility, as well as how movement shapes their relationships to global power structures and to norms of gender and sexuality. I draw on feminist geography, feminist and queer theory, memoir studies and mobility scholarship to read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love (2006), Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us (2012), Daisy Hernández’s A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2014), and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012). Highlighting the differences between these authors’ journeys as well as the patterns across them, I ultimately find that these memoirists model a feminist politics of mobility, wherein moving through space redistributes power to women and renegotiates social relations that have historically supported women’s subordination.

Power Needed for Good Not Evil

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. i-v
Author(s):  
Leah Hollis
Keyword(s):  
Power Structures ◽  
Organizational Power ◽  
The People ◽  
Global Power

Psychologists and sociologists have considered the types of leadership and organizational power used to manage and even control employees, communities, and institutions (Raven, 1958). When such dynamics emerge in the comics read across the globe, even those authors caution their protagonists and superheroes to “use power for good not evil…;” yet after reading the articles for this edition, I recognize that the Covid-19 pandemic has re-exposed global power structures and differentials. These power structures have either been used for the good of the people, or for evil to exacerbate the harmful experiences felt by disenfranchised populations.

scholarly journals African health diplomacy: obscuring power and leveraging dependency through shadow diplomacy

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma-Louise Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Focal Point ◽  
Informal Networks ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Health Diplomacy ◽  
African Health ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
Multi Stakeholder ◽  
Global Influence

Health crises pose fundamental challenges to international relations and have been a major focal point of contests for global influence, particularly in the global South, where such crises are most acute. This necessitates a focus on the arenas of global health diplomacy and the power struggles that emanate from them, including the often-overlooked agency of African actors within these arenas. Drawing upon a total of 3 months of fieldwork in 2007 and 2014 that included 68 key-informant interviews, participant observations, and informal discussions, this article interrogates the mechanics of multi-stakeholder health diplomacy in Malawi, where a near-permanent state of health crisis and underdevelopment has generated extreme dependency on external health assistance. This article conceptualises shadow diplomacy as the informal networks and channels of influence that run parallel to, but are not recognised as part of, formal diplomacy. This concept reveals how health is key to struggles for leverage by both international and local actors, giving rise to informal and subversive manifestations of diplomacy in the ‘shadows’. It enables us to understand not only how Western powers consolidate and obscure their enduring power but also how the ‘shadows’ benefit African political elites as they leverage their dependency to subvert global power structures for their own ends. It disrupts the external/internal binary of international donors/African states and reveals that these are not monolithic actors but instead comprising complex individuals with multi-faceted motivations and divided loyalties.

Neoliberal security provision: Between state practices and individual experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-246
Author(s):  
Magnus Hörnqvist
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Organizational Control ◽  
Individual Experience ◽  
Regulatory State ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Penal State

The article develops a new understanding of neoliberal security provision on the basis of available accounts of three different “states”; the penal state, the regulatory state, and the activating welfare state. I argue that these forms of state intervention provide individuals with security in the sense that anxiety is temporarily alleviated, while stabilizing the conflictual dynamic of global power structures. Marketization and organizational control account for the specifically neoliberal character. Such an understanding matters because it directs attention to the dynamic between state practices and individual experience, and the multitude of mechanisms, which not only promise but also provide security, however temporary and partial.

Biometric voter registration: A new modality of democracy assistance?

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-148
Author(s):  
Katja Lindskov Jacobsen
Keyword(s):  
Local Level ◽  
Voter Registration ◽  
Democracy Promotion ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Democracy Assistance ◽  
Politics Of Technology ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The Us ◽  
Democratic Elections ◽  
Roll Out

It has been argued that we are witnessing a retreat from democracy promotion in liberal interventionism. Focusing on the roll-out of biometric voter registration (BVR) across Africa, as supported by institutions such as the United Nations Development Programme, this article suggests that rather than a retreat we are seeing the emergence of a new and seemingly lighter approach to liberal democracy promotion. Through an analysis of the use of BVR in Kenyan elections, the article illustrates some key implications of this development. At the local level, the framing of BVR as a ‘solution’ omits important challenges to democratic elections in Kenya. At the global level, the roll-out of BVR reinforces unequal global power structures, for example by constituting an increasing number of African states as laboratories for the trialling of a technology which, due to fears of hacking, has now been rolled back in the US. To make this argument, the article combines insights from recent debates about the state of liberal interventionism, with insights from Michel Foucault and Sheila Jasanoff about the politics of technology.

In Whose Interest Do We Work? Critical Comments of a Practitioner at the Fringes of the Liberation Paradigm

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 354-367
Author(s):  
Simone Lindorfer
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Great Lakes Region ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
The People ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Urgent Task ◽  
Change Of Perspective ◽  
Psychology Of Liberation

`De-ideologizing reality' is an urgent task within the psychology of liberation. Ignacio Martín-Baró characterized it as a process of conscientization that unmasks power interests underlying knowledge production, retrieves the `original experience of the people', and returns that experience in the form of `objective data'. In contemporary humanitarian trauma work in crisis areas, however, psychology often masks global power structures and further stigmatizes and alienates `victims' from their communities and their original experience. I draw upon my work as a psychologist, theologian and freelance consultant in the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa to analyse two case studies. I use these examples to analyse and critique the underlying power discourses implied in definitions of `victimhood' in humanitarian interventions and identify contradictions that challenge liberation thinking as well as demystify feminist agendas. I conclude by calling for a change of perspective and of professional attitudes that can be realized through engaging a de-ideologizing approach towards global psychosocial trauma interventions.

The financial system: money makes the world go around

2019 ◽  
pp. 213-224
Author(s):  
Rebecca Boden
Keyword(s):  
Regulatory Control ◽  
Student Debt ◽  
Real Economy ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Financial Systems ◽  
Tax System ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Access To Data

This chapter argues that money is data reified through financial systems, which in turn constitute and reflect dominant global power structures. Financial systems have hegemonic power over the ‘real economy’, significantly affecting the everyday lives of citizens. This is less data in society but rather data as society. Financial systems comprise a myriad of interacting actors and technologies. Financialisation is enabled through escalating debt and its securitisation, by which debt is turned into a tradeable commodity. The chapter gives examples of student debt and public service provision as examples of how our social lives are now determined by the operations of data-led financial markets. The scale and complexity of financial systems’ activities makes regulatory control and democratic accountability problematic. In particular, control over or regulation of financial systems requires access to data – transparency. The chapter discusses the manipulation of Libor – an important financial data index – and the tax system to explain how data in financial systems is relatively easy to manipulate and hide. In a globalised world, the interconnectedness, speed and scale of data all conspire to make finance a ‘dark domain’.

scholarly journals Towards a feminist politics of mobility: U.S. Travel and immigration memoirs

Feminismo/s ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Leah Butterfield
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Feminist Geography ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Feminist And Queer Theory

This paper challenges longstanding cultural associations that link men to mobility and women to stability by outlining what I term a feminist politics of mobility. Bringing together four contemporary memoirs that foreground journeys, I explore how U.S. women embody and represent their mobility, as well as how movement shapes their relationships to global power structures and to norms of gender and sexuality. I draw on feminist geography, feminist and queer theory, memoir studies and mobility scholarship to read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love (2006), Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us (2012), Daisy Hernández’s A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2014), and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012). Highlighting the differences between these authors’ journeys as well as the patterns across them, I ultimately find that these memoirists model a feminist politics of mobility, wherein moving through space redistributes power to women and renegotiates social relations that have historically supported women’s subordination.

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