Global Studies Unit #2

Making of Current World System

Formed by End of WW2

• Rebuilding of Europe with Marshal Plan

• Establishment of UN

• Establishment of Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Redefining Imperialism for current world system

Rhetoric or focus on teaching so they can grow themselves. Inherently places other nations lower with rhetoric of being underdeveloped and unsophisticated.

Truman’s fourth point

Start of modern way of talking about development.

• Poverty is a threat to more developed areas

• About giving knowledge, not resources itself

• Relying on belief that they are worse off

• Underdeveloped vs. Developed

• Imagines future and how we are getting everyone to where US is.

• Unlimited stage of knowledge and tech. capacity

Key of Articulating scientific knowledge.

New Institutions as idea of development emerges

• World Bank

• Technical Cooperation Administration

• International Monetary Fund

• Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development

• USAID

• UNDP

• International Atomic Energy Agency

• African Development Bank

• Asian Development Bank

Embedded Liberalism Connection

Truman speech is the moment of this. Emphasis on an activist government

UN sustainable development goals - 17

1. No Poverty

2. Zero Hunger

3. Good Health and Well-Being

4. Quality Education

5. Gender Equality

6. Clean Water and Sanitation

7. Affordable and Clean Energy

8. Decent Work and Economic Growth

9. Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure

10. Reduced Inequalities

11. Sustainable cities and communities

12. Responsible Consumption and Production

13. Climate Action

14. Life Below Water

15. Life on Land

16. Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions

17. Partnerships for the goals

What happens to the imperial project as “development” begins?

Many Colonial enforcers move to development agencies —Embedded liberalism, south absorbing shocks

Working Definition of Development

A set of practices, sometimes appearing in conflict with one another, which require —for the reproduction of society —the general transformation and destruction of the natural environment and of social relations. Its aim is to increase the production of commodities (goods and services) geared, by way of exchange, to effective demand.

Bamako - Commentary

Shows how underdevelopment can challenge wellbeing and sense of self.

• Unemployment struggles — gendered problems of man being unemployed — suicide.

• Farmer told to wait

In the trial, voices are not heard because of their situation and knowledge — voices not being treated as valid.

• How the West shuts out the south through organizations that champion “development” — isn’t actually helpful

International Community — puts countries and people on different levels.

Underdevelopment

Goal of development is the expansion of capitalism by portraying countries as underdeveloped and using that perceived lack of advancement as reason to interfere with them and continue development version of imperial project.

• Not associated with modernity and industrialization.

Technical Expertise

Shown through Truman’s 4th point. Portrays the skills of the US and the need for them to give those skills to other nations to advance them and put them on our level. Impose quality of life idea on everyone — these people are unskilled.

Class 2 ——————————

Lesotho Conflict/Problem

Lesotho had lot of aid from countries and agencies, but projects failed to meet objectives.

• World bank inventing “isolation” to justify invention.

“when you are a hammer, everything becomes a nail

World Bank Portrayal of Lesotho

Portrayed Lesotho as isolated, traditional and with a subsistence economy.

• Isolation justifies intervention

• Creates sense that we need to help

Historical Reality of Lesotho

Migrant labor to South Africa is central to livelihoods since 19th century. Lesotho was integrated in economic order of Africa

Thaba-Tseka Project (in Lesotho)

Project jointly from World Bank & Canada to decentralize governance.

Instead — Reinforced elite control and propaganda.

• Local resistance with offices burned and staff threatened.

• Major mismatch between plans and social realities

When Failure is successful

Project fails economically but succeeds bureaucratically.

Bureaucratic success is about strengthening state power (Ferguson), increasing surveillance and control, creating larger bureaucratic imprint.

Technocracy

Belief system that not only urges us to trust the work of these experts, but also, given their central importance to modern life, to turn over the tasks of social governance to them.

Concerns:

1. The belief that tech. is the key to social and material progress, even the driving force behind the development of modern civilization

2. Emphasis on instrumental methods of administrative rationalism: Strategic planning, quantitative analysis, cost-and-risk benefit analysis, formal modeling, computer simulations, systems analysis, and evidence based policymaking

Relies on solution of replacing “irrational” decision making of democratic politics with “rational” empirical/analytical methodologies of science based decision making

Rendering Technical (process)

Process by which experts translate political, social, and economic complexities into technical problems with technical solutions, thereby depoliticizing social issues and legitimizing expert intervention.

• Paradigm for how to view the world

Techno managerialism (governing philosophy)

The belief and practice that societal and environmental challenges should be governed through expert knowledge, technological solutions, and bureaucratic management, thereby depoliticizing decision-making and marginalizing democratic, ethical, and social considerations.

• Challenges should be governed by expert knowledge

The anti-politics machine (application example)

A system that transforms political struggles into technical problems.

Mechanisms:

• Frames Poverty as technical deficiency

• Depoliticizes aid and legitimizes intervention

• Expands bureaucratic reach

Changing domains to maintain authority.

Subsistence Economy

Economy that produces enough for the people within it to live. About meeting basic needs.

Does Development Work? → What work does development do?

More useful to direct this to people more specifically. Development is not about “universal progress” that Truman was looking towards.

What should “they” do x2 (ferguson)

“They” the state — recognize that gov. is made up of people who have interests, not robots. Better policy recommendation based on people’s interests

“They” the people — Lots of different kinds of people, not one definition of what people should want or progress towards. People are trying to maximize their capabilities.

Who is Ferguson’s “We”?

• No meaningful collective

• Could be “we academics” or “we who are invested in the improvement in living conditions for the global south”

What Should be done (Ferguson)

• We should recognize going through states or international organizations is a choice between local hegemony or global hegemony

• We should be critical of larger systems that suggest they are the locus of change

• We should remember that critique and calls for doing better are integral to the system

Ferguson’s suggestions - are the only choice getting hands dirty or remaining in ivory tower?

If you have skills to understand systems, you have more options for the actions you take.

• Political participation one’s own society (ex: anti-apartheid) - how do my actions shape the world by creating or limiting responsibilities for others?

• Engagements with counter-hegemonic social forces(may not be needed, not necessarily easy)

• Empowerment arises from local struggles: Unions, women’s associations, resistance.

• Role of intellectuals: critique, solidarity, local autonomy

Change comes when critique has been played out in the real - Foucault

Good Intentions

People’s sense of things.

Productive Discomfort

recognize that new information may challenge deeply held beliefs, but this is a good thing. Emotions are pre-social and inherent to our being, but we’ve been shaped into desiring subjects where our emotions are an important part of who we are.

Class #3 ———————-

USAID sequence

• USAID provided assistance to about 130 countries - low and lower-middle income countries got a lot

Shut down:

Critiques of USAID, but critics were still horrified when it shut down.

1. Aid freeze —stop work orders

2. Mass administrative leaves

3. Workforce reduction and transfer to state department

4. Formal dissolution

Phatic Labor & Social Infrastructure

Re-thinking work, value, and empowerment.

What Counts as work?

• Wage Labor (productive)

• Domestic Labor (reproductive)

• Emotional Labor

• Socializing and Gossip

• Networking and relationship maintenance

Productive Labor

Wage Labor

Reproductive Labor

Domestic Labor. Helps the productive labor function and focuses on care. Labor to create more labor — the workforce.

Phatic Labor

The work involved in creating and maintaining social relationships that enable the circulation of information, trust, and economic value. Includes everyday communicative practices that generate communicative infrastructure.

Malinowski on Phatic Communication and Labor

language maintains social ties

Elyachar on Phatic Communication and Labor

everyday sociality creates channels

Phatic Communion

Consumption done to establish and maintain relationships

Phatic Communion to Phatic Labor

Phatic Labor produces communicative infrastructure that enables circulation of value.

Phatic Labor Process

1. Visiting/Gossip/Social Ties

2. Communicative Channels

3. Social Infrastructure

4. Circulation of Information, Trust, Money, and Value

Microfinance (1990s)

• Reframed poverty as an individual entrepreneurial problem

• Treated poverty as a lack of credit\

• Emphasized individual initiative over structural reform

• Positioned women as reliable financial actors (more likely to invest in families and community, pay back loan

Helped Financialize the informal economy. Responsibility norm, internalizes issues.

Women’s empowerment discourse

• Empowerment discourse shifted attention away from: Land reform, Labor rights, structural adjustment policies, State disinvestment

• Toward: Individual self-improvement, entrepreneurial initiative, capacity building

Network Model

• Nodes

• Relationships

• Personal ties

Infrastructure Model

• Channels

• Durable pathways

• Enable large-scale circulation

Wasta

Relational mediation. Using networks created from semiotic communities to gain things. Ethical behaviors. Hedging Connections.

Case Studies

Shows phatic labor at work. Infrastructure emerging from informal economy and networks created from phatic labor.

Semiotic Commons

Spaces where you have shared communicative system. You understand each other’s terminology and language.

• Shared communicative codes

• Commons of interpretive resources

Commons to Commodity

1. Phatic Labor (Commons)

2. NGO Visibility and Mapping

3. Data/Reports/Metrics

4. Corporate Entry into Payments Space

5. Potential Privatization of Channels

When it’s just informal economy, there’s no official institution, but it changes when there’s the insertion of a way to profit off of something that was originally social.

• Insertion of economic model into social infrastructure

Examples of Phatic labor in everyday life

• Housing searches

• Internships

• Bureaucratic navigation

• Social media networks

Infrastructure

enables the circulation of value

Class 4 —————————————

Epistemological Hierarchies

How we define what knowledge is valid, valued, and preferred. What kind of information from who/what is accepted or preferred.

ex: US prefers scientific knowledge

Common Official Perspective

• Theres a crisis of overgrazing, desertification, privileging biomass and evergreen plants over species diversity or other parameters

• Issues with mobility

• Attempt to restore ecological equilibrium

Aarab Perspective

• There is always something for camels to eat

• There is drought, but it’s part of the system

• Variation over time is better explanation than deterioration over time

• know lifecycle information about ephemeral plants and when best to graze

• Importance of moving often

Research on rangeland ecologies

Little evidence of permanent degradation on the majority of the rangelands studied. Where there is degradation, the noted causes were:

• Over-collecting of perennial grass species for fuel for local pottery kilns

• Over irrigation

• Politically motivated spread of cereal cultivation into marginal lands

Tragedy of the commons

If no one controls access to resources, individuals maximize personal benefit and collective goods become degraded or destroyed.

Sedentarization

Government is encouraging mobile population to be less mobile. Harder to control a mobile population.

• Move to boost state authority and control

term itself means to stay in one place for a long time.

Political Usefulness of Crisis Narrative

• Justifications for policy changes at national level.

• Generating increasing amounts of international aid money

• Expansion of dryland cereal cultivation into marginal lands.

Legitimizes state control and international funding.

policies: range “improvement, land privatization, sedentarization

Class #5 ———————————-

Sovereignty

Who gets to make the rules, enforce the rules. Who has the monopoly on legitimate violence.

How authority is legitimized

Past - Divine right of kings. Kings can rule because God chose them.

Present - Legislative/Present can rule because the people choose them and authority is derived from them.

Westphalian System

Foundation of contemporary international political system. Establishes:

1. Sovereignty

2. Territorial Integrity

3. Equality of States

4. Non-Interference

Sovereignty

States have supreme authority over their own territory and population.

Territorial Integrity

Defined boundaries establish the limits of a state’s jurisdiction.

Equality of States

Regardless of size or power, all states are legally equal under international law.

Non-Interference

One state cannot legally interfere in the domestic affairs of another state.

Key Questions about security

1. Who or what needs to be protected? (referent object)

2. From what kinds of threats do they and/or it need to be protected?

3. What needs to be done to make things secure?

Referent Object

What international security is based around. What is it focused on providing security for and at what level?

Traditional notion of security — Referent Object

State Centric — the referent object is the state, needs to be protected from other states.

• Focus on material sources of power (military and economic)

Human Security Concept — Referent Object

Concept of security is redefined to make people the referent object. Human security means safety for people from both violent and non-violent threats.

• Freedom from fear and freedom from want

UNDP’s seven types of human security (UN global development program)

1. Economic

2. Food

3. Health

4. Environmental

5. Personal

6. Community

7. Political Security

“Non-traditional” security threats

• Migration

• Global Crime

• tracking in humans

• instability in financial markets

• threats to job security

• the spread of disease

• international conflicts

Weak/Failed States

Three deficiencies:

1. Security deficiency — unable to protect their citizens

2. Participation deficiency — political participation is often absent or highly restricted, civil society tends to be absent or dysfunctional.

3. Infrastructure deficiency — often unable to collect taxes effectively, resulting in poorly maintained physical infrastructure and large donor debt.

Become a problem when they can’t target violent groups in their state and prevent their violent actions that impact the rest of the world.

• Have sovereignty, but can’t actually fulfill the functions of a state

Fukuyama’s end of history

Western liberal democracy has triumphed over all other models. World would be more secure because of democracy’s spread. Security can be attained through the promotion of democracy, development, and free markets.

Ideas as security threats: Democracy, Religion, Nationalism

Challenges to the legitimacy of the state and state system. Ideas that can cause additional security problems.

Democracy as security threat

But what problems does Fukuyama’s perception of democracy lead to? What is justified in the name of democracy and are groups being forced to do something just because the need to implement democracy justifies it because of its perceived superiority for security.

Religion as security threat

Religion is transnational, overcomes the state.

• Religion can override state authority - who are adherents most loyal to?

• Encourages people across states to engage in similar beliefs, values, and behaviors.

ex: Global Jihad

Increasing importance of religion in the political domain poses a challenge to the state.

Nationalism as security threat

Globalization drives cultural homogenization, but it simultaneously reinforces nationalist and ethnic sentiment. People feel like they need to defend and promote ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities in response to homogenizing effect of globalization.

• National borders still matter

Nationalist Conflicts

• Why are outsiders ruling us?

• Who is part of our nation?

• How should “outsiders” be treated in our state?

• Where does our territory end?

• How do we show we’re better than them?

Types of Nationalism

Ethno-Nationalism - ethnic cleansing, genocide

Successionist conflicts - ex: civil war

Ultra Nationalism and interstate war

R2P (Responsibility to Protect) Doctrine

1. States have the responsibility to protect their people

2. states have the responsibility to assist other states to protect the people of that state

3. states should be prepared to take collective action through the UN security council to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.

Other agents of security

• Bureaucracies

• Corporations

• International Organizations

• Nongovernmental organizations

• social movements

• religious organizations

• private security companies

What happens? What is being justified?

Class #6 ———————————-

Explanatory Models

framework for how someone understands something.

Culture Talk

Our explanatory models is shifting the domains of certain issues from politics to culture.

• Predilection to define cultures according to their presumed '“essential” characteristics, especially as regards politics.

• thinking of culture in political and territorial terms

• dehistoricizes construction of political subjectivities

• Looks at them as traditional people conforming to lifeless customs (literal text readings) — they had one creative moment but its in the past and gone

• Despite this traditional model, these people have abundant capacity for destruction

• Encourages collective discipline and punishment

Bad explanatory model

Good Muslim Bad Muslim

Mamdani traces culture talk to the imperial project of indirect rule. This project read resistance to imperial entities as a resistance to modernity (which the imperialist state represents) rather than the reality of it being a resistance to imperialism.

Resistance to imperialism comes from?

Explanatory model assumes that it comes from the modern/premodern designations. Other states resist because they are pre-modern and are resisting modernity.

Dehistoricizing/Decontextualizing

Justifies certain kinds of politics by placing one people/culture at their current point permanently — ignores what came before, how they progressed, and what has actually changed

Modern/Premodern designations

seperates different people by changing political issues into cultural issues and separating cultures/countries from the west by depicting them as less evolved and less advanced because their culture is different than ours.

Modern

• Makes culture

• Creative

• Constantly moving to future

• secularism/metaphorical understanding of religious texts

• change and innovation

• white man’s burden

Pre-modern

• Prisoner of culture

• destructive

• moment of creativity is over/encapsulated in ancient texts that define the civilization on a basic level

• literal reading of sacred texts (interrupts civic life)

• No history/politics/debates

• Savior must come from outside

Their resistance to imperialism is resistance to modernity — bad explanatory model. Don’t do anything creative or advancing.

• Idea that countries are behind if they don’t us secularism

Political subjectivity

How do I view myself within a political unit? Culture talk dehistoricizes the construction of political subjectivities.

Terrorism is…

Not the residue of premodern culture in modern politics.

• A modern construction, even if it harnesses one of another aspect of tradition and culture.

Modern ensemble at the service of a modern project.

Better explanatory model, rather than one that dehistoricizes and portrays it as merely the result of traditional thinking.

New explanatory model

lets us move from looking at doctrine and culture (reductive) to also understanding history and politics of a culture. How did this come into being and how is it used now?

Afghan Jihad

Actually revived by American help in the 1980s. Not some pre-modern creation, but reformed in the modern day. Cold war drive for anti-soviet partners created this

Islamist Social Movements

• Originated in 20th century in face of imperial occupation

• Aimed to rejuvenate Island as religion and a political ideology that should be integrated into all of society

• Began by calling for a supranational muslim community, but radical Islam adapted to the nation-state and sprouted different national versions of Islam

State-driven neo fundamentalist

• Conservative agenda

• Political objective is limited to implementing sharia (islamic law)

• social conservatism evidenced by opposition to female presence in public life and violent sectarianism

• Originating in efforts by unpopular regimes to legitimize power has turned supranational

Accurate intra-community schism

divided into Islamist social movements and state driven neo-fundmentalism.

Class #7 ———————-