Cities of the Global South Keywords

Enlightenment  

an intellectual movement that took place in Europe in the 17^th and 18^th Century that explored ideas about God, reason, nature, and humanity. It framed the ways in which contemporary disciplines think of things such as the split between religion and science, ideas of  rationality,

Modernity

 refers to the historical period and cultural mindset that emerged in the West after the Enlightenment. It is characterized by secularism, scientific thinking, industrialization, urbanization, and the belief in progress.

Liberalism

an ideology committed to the individual and a society in which individuals can pursue and realize their interests.

Individual Rights and Liberties

Liberalism emphasizes the protection of individual rights and freedoms, including civil rights and human rights

Equality

 Liberals advocate for equality before the law, and many support equality of opportunity and strive for social justice.

Rule of Law

Liberalism believes in a system of laws that apply equally to everyone, ensuring fair and consistent application of justice

Limited Government

 Liberals generally favor limiting the power of government and its interference in the lives of individuals

Consent of the Governed

The legitimacy of government rests on the consent of the people it governs, often expressed through democratic processes.

Classical Liberalism

Emphasizes free markets, limited government intervention in the economy, and individual liberties, particularly economic freedom.

Social Liberalism (also known as Modern Liberalism)

Supports a regulated market economy, the expansion of civil and political rights, and a greater role for government in addressing social and economic inequalities and ensuring social welfare.

Governmentality

 the “art of governing" beyond just state power, which includes a range of institutions and practices that are used to manage populations. Unlike the use of excessive force and violent public punishment, governmentality controls citizens through the use of surveillance.

Sovereignty

involves obedience to the law of the king or central authority figure.

Biopolitics

a technology that manages the population's body as a group through indexes such as birth rate, mortality rate, and others, which are more or less linked to physical health. Biopolitics assumes that the body is problematic and therefore must be addressed through politics and power.

Assemblage

 a multiplicity, neither a part or a whole. Specifically probing the idea of the in between, the set of elements and a set of “relationships that are inseparable from each other”

Gentrification

when capitalism enters urban areas and begins restructuring said urban areas to serve capitalist interests rather than those living in the urban spaces. as a result of the gentrification process and the rising housing costs that comes with it, the working-class peoples get displaced from the cities they originally lived in

Accumulation by dispossession

 one of the main mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism.  an ongoing characteristic of neoliberal capitalism where wealth is consistently concentrated by taking away  not only the people’s but also the communities' resources. these mechanisms are what allow the rich to grow richer while depriving others of their property, overall increasing social inequality

Genealogy

genealogy is a method that uncovers the complex and often hidden factors behind the development of social systems, ideas, and institutions. (tracing down origin of ideas or human behavior) Unlike traditional history, which often presents a linear and inevitable progression, genealogy reveals how historical events and power struggles shape knowledge and societal structures. historical practices, rather than science uncovering human nature, shape our understanding of the body and behavior.

epistemology/episteme/ epistemological

a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature, origins, and limits of human knowledge. It is about finding out what justifies a belief or the mental attitude where a person accepts something as true, the justification or the evidence that makes a belief credible, and questioning the source of the knowledge which includes perception, reason, memory, experience.

The universal

A concept that suggests that there are truths and values that apply universally to all human beings, regardless of their cultural, social, or individual differences. However, critique raises the question of whether the Enlightenment’s notion of the universal can be truly applied across different cultures without imposing a biased, Eurocentric framework. The challenge remains whether the universal can encompass diverse worldviews and practices without marginalizing them.

Commodity/ commodification

external object, produced for exchange on a market. These objects are mostly measured by price rather than value. Commodification is the process of turning things that were not originally products like labor into something that can be sold, which is the process of measuring price.

Proletariat

The term "proletariat" denotes the social class of wage-earners who lack significant ownership of production means and must sell their labor to earn a living.often aligns with the working class, especially in discussions about social and economic disparities. The term embodies historical and ideological significance, frequently associated with labor movements, class struggle, and efforts toward economic equity

Bourgeoisie

It refers to the ruling class that owns the production such as factories or land, and controls the capitalist system.the bourgeoisie exploits labor and only pursues profit through a theory of surplus value. In this system, workers sell their labor like a commodity, but only receive a small part of the value they produce and the rest profit goes to the capitalist.

Class struggle

class struggle is the opposition present between different social classes such as the proletariat and capitalist classes.  The class struggle is often as a result of the imbalance of power between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, with the business owners often exploiting their workers. However, the workers and working class have strength in their numbers and can balance the scales by unionizing.

Ideology

to place the moral and political sciences on their true basis, a knowledge of our intellectual faculties. theories of ideology are divided between cognitivist and culturalist approaches. Cognitivist accounts locate ideology among ideas, beliefs, “forms of consciousness”, mental representations, or propositional attitudes. Culturalist accounts locate ideology among “forms of life”, habits, practico-symbolic schemas, or “cultural technēs

Ruination

being an act of ruining, a condition of being ruined, and a cause of it. Ruination is an act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject, and a cause of loss.But ruination is more than a process that sloughs off debris as a by-product. It is also a political project that lays waste to certain peoples, relations, and things that accumulate in specific places.

Nationalism

nationalism is not merely a political ideology, but a cultural and emotional force that creates the imagined community known as the nation. Nationalism is an imaginative act that constructs a “people” who did not previously exist, and an emotional mechanism through which individuals come to feel a voluntary sense of identity and belonging within that group. This kind of nationalism is generally based on distinguishing one’s own group from others, and it is through such distinctions and the construction of identity that the nation—as a collectively imagined political community—takes shape

Banality of Evil

a concept introduced by Hannah Arendt in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. ordinary people can become agents of evil. Evil, in this sense, arises not from radical hatred or ideological extremism, but from a lack of critical thinking and blind obedience [Wikipedia]. Thus, the banality of evil refers to the kind of wrongdoing that stems from thoughtlessness and uncritical conformity.

Anthropocene

Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch which encompasses the irreversible chemical and biological alterations humans have subjected earth to

Reification

human relations get identified as a relations between objects; a distortion of reality.Instead of seeing the people behind the labour, and the value of those people, people only see the objects produced and the capital exchanged for it. This process means that workers become alienated from the product of their labour.