Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis – serie

Since 9/11 ideas of security have focused in part on the development of ungovernable spaces. Important debates are now being had over the nature, impacts, and outcomes of the numerous policy statements made by northern governments, NGOs, and international institutions that view the merging of security with development as both unproblematic and progressive. This volume addresses this new security–development nexus and investigates internal institutional logics, as well as the operation of policy, its dangers, resistances and complicity with other local and national social processes. Drawing on detailed ethnography, the contributors offer new vantage points to understand the workings of multiple, intersecting, and conflicting power structures, which whilst local, are tied to non-local systems and operate across time. This volume is a necessary critique and extension of key themes integral to the security– development nexus debate, highlighting the importance of a situated and substantive understanding of human security.

The relationship between migration and development is becoming an important field of study, yet the fundamentals – analytical tools, conceptual framework, political stance – are not being called into question or dialogue. This volume provides a valuable alternative perspective to the current literature as the contributors explore the contradictory discourses about migration and the role these discourses play in perpetuating inequality and a global regime of militarized surveillance. The assumptions surrounding the assymetrical transfers of resources that accompany migration are deeply skewed and continue to reflect the interests of the most powerful states and the institutions that serve their interests. Those who seek to address the morass of development failure, vitriolic attacks on immigrants, or sanguine views about migrant agency are challenged by this volume to put aside their methodological nationalism and pursue alternative pathways out of the quagmire of poverty, violence, and fear that is enveloping the globe.

Technologies of the allied warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as remote-controlled drones and night vision goggles, allow the user to “virtualize” human targets. This coincides with increased civilian casualties and a perpetuation of the very insecurity these technologies are meant to combat. This concise volume of research and reflections from different regions across Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, observes how anthropology operates as a technology of war. It tackles recent theories of humans in society colluding with imperialist claims, including anthropologists who have become  involved professionally in warfare through their knowledge of “cultures,” renamed as “human terrain systems.” The chapters link varied yet crucial domains of inquiry: from battlefields technologies, military-driven scientific policy, and economic warfare, to martyrdom cosmology shifts, media coverage of “distant” wars, and the virtualizing techniques and “war porn” soundtracks of the gaming industry.

The events of the Arab Spring presented a dramatic reconstitution of politics and the public sphere through their aesthetic and performative uses of public space. Mass demonstrations have become a new global political form, grounded in the localization of globalizing processes, institutions, and relationships. This volume delves beneath the seemingly chaotic nature of events to explore the structural dynamics underpinning popular resistance and their support or suppression. It moves beyond what has usually been defined as Arab Spring nations to include critical views on Bahrain, the Palestinian territories, and Turkey. The research and analysis presented explores not just the immediate protests, but also the historical realization, appropriation, and even institutionalization of these critical voices, as well as the role of international criminal law and legal exceptionalism in authorizing humanitarian interventions. Above all, it questions whether the revolutions have since been hijacked and the broad popular uprisings already overrun, suppressed, or usurped by the upper classes.

The January 2015 shooting at the headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and the subsequent attacks that took place in the Il-de-France region were staggeringly violent events. They sparked an enormous discussion among citizens and intellectuals from around Europe and beyond. By analyzing the effects the attacks have had in various spheres of social life, including the political, ideology, collective imaginaries, the media, and education, this collection of essays aims to serve as a contribution as well as a critical response to that discussion. The volume observes that the events being attributed to Charlie Hebdo go beyond sensationalist reports of the mainstream media, transcend the spatial confines of nation states, and lend themselves to an ever-expanding number of mutating discursive formations.

A development in anthropological theory, characterized as the 'moral turn', is gaining popularity and should be carefully considered. In examining the context, arguments, and discourse that surrounds this trend, this volume reconceptualizes the discipline of anthropology in a radical way. Contributions from anthropologists from around the world from different theoretical traditions and with expertise in a multiplicity of ethnographic areas makes this collection a provocative contribution to larger discussions not only in anthropology but the social sciences more broadly.

Austerity and structural adjustment programs are just the latest forms of neoliberal policy to have a profoundly damaging impact on the targeted populations. Yet, as the contributors to this collection argue, the recent austerity-related European crisis is not a breach of erstwhile development schemes, but a continuation of economic policies. Using historical analysis and ethnographically-grounded research, this volume shows the similarities of the European conundrum with realities outside Europe, seeing austerity in a non-Eurocentric fashion. In doing so, it offers novel insights as to how economic crises are experienced at a global level.

Does populism indicate a radical crisis in Western democratic political systems? Is it a revolt by those who feel they have too little voice in the affairs of state or are otherwise marginalized or oppressed? Or are populist movements part of the democratic process?Bringing together different anthropological experiences of current populist movements, this volume makes a timely contribution to these questions. Contrary to more conventional interpretations of populism as crisis, the authors instead recognize populism as integral to Western democratic systems. In doing so, the volume provides an important critique that exposes the exclusionary essentialisms spread by populist rhetoric while also directing attention to local views of political accountability and historical consciousness that are key to understanding this paradox of democracy.

Cashless infrastructures are rapidly increasing, as credit cards, cryptocurrencies, online and mobile money, remittances, demonetization, and digitalization process replace coins and currencies around the world. Who’s Cashing In? explores how different modes of cashlessness impact, transform and challenge the everyday lives and livelihoods of local communities. Drawing from a wide range of ethnographic studies, this volume offers a concise look at how social actors and intermediaries respond to this change in the materiality of money throughout multiple regional contexts.

Extremism does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, extremism is a relative concept that often emerges in crisis situations, taking shape within the tense and contradictory relations that tie marginal spaces, state orders, and mainstream culture. This collected volume brings together leading anthropologists and cultural analysts to offer a concise look at the narratives, symbolic, and metaphoric fields related to extremism, systematizing an approach to extremism, and placing these ideologies into historical, political, and geo-systemic contexts.

Ownership of cryptocurrencies features contrasting forms of mobilization. On one hand, it denotes association with a global crowd of unrelated individual investors, which expands as it attracts more members. On the other hand, it includes participation in grassroots communities, which are generally more insular. Crypto Crowds demonstrates how this tension generates political, economic and moral realities in different cultural and geographical contexts. Pioneering in its approach to cryptocurrency trading, this volume will inspire scholars interested in the sociality of decentralized business models, boom-and-bust cycles on the blockchain, libertarian utopias and other postmodern crowding phenomena.

Numerous humanly caused destructions of just the last hundred years dwarf the World Trade Center disaster, and the attention still addressed to it may over the next few years appear disproportionate. But the significance of events is always determined by the social, political, and cultural forces that are articulated through a particular event. The attack of 9/11 was an event waiting to happen, and when it did occur the even itself became a catalyst and impetus for the changing and redirection of global realities. This volume offers provocative assessments of the reaction to the event from a variety of perspectives that will no doubt stimulate the debate on the meaning and consequences of 9/11.

The effects of globalization have led to accentuated social inequality in most first-world countries, above all the U.S. and U.K. International trade and capital flows have tended to redistribute income in ways that aggravate inequality in advanced industrialized nations where relative income levels of the salaried middle class and the working class are being eroded, resulting in a downward mobility of these classes. At the same time, unwaged forms of labor, including forced labor and slavery, in poorer regions more and more replace wage labor in developed countries. Informed by an anthropological, humanistic perspective, the contributors in this provocative volume offer critical analyses and alternative visions.

When the Enron filed the biggest bankruptcy petition in the history of the United States, if not the world, the immediate response by most politicians and financiers was that this scandal was a “failure of regulatory institutions” that can be corrected and may possibly even be a purely North American problem. However, an in-depth exploration of what happened, as undertaken in this volume, reveals that the widespread corruptions at corporate level have their roots in the transformations of socio-political conditions in the wake of an extreme fetishization of the neo-liberal market model.

The very institution of the state is widely conceived of as inseparable from war. If it constitutes peace within the borders or order of its sovereignty, this very peace may be the condition for its potential for war with those other states and social formation outside it. This volume represents different analytical standpoints and positions within global processes, inviting further discussion on contemporary realities and the development of new formations of war and violence.

As corporate practices are becoming more fused with state processes, the state itself is increasingly taking on a corporate structure, as well as a more overt oligarchic character. Evidence of this can be seen in the growing domination of political organizations and institutions by close-knit social groups (familial dynasties, closed associations, or personal networks) that seek exclusive control over economic resources.These new forms of state power that are emerging are not reducible to the past, and the nation-state, as the essays in this volume show, is giving way to a political-economic formation that has multiple state-like effects and is able to act in ways systemic with deterritorializing global processes.Exploring these processes in different concrete locations from North America to Russia, West Africa, and Australia, the authors show that current configurations of global, imperial, and state power cannot be understood without examining their relation to formations of oligarchic control. They bring us closer to an understanding of the ways in which the nation-state is being transformed by globalization.

The powerful individualist and subjectivist turn in anthropology - a turn that cannot be easily separated from larger political processes of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism - is one factor resulting in notions of the social and of society as becoming little else than empty shells of small or no analytical value.The essays presented here, all by leading anthropologists, take a variety of positions on the matter of the retreat of the social. All demonstrate that if anthropology and other social sciences are to fulfill the task of a critical understanding of the diverse realities in which we all must live, these disciplines will find it impossible to so do without a strong concept of the social.

As many scholars have argued, racism and its passions are created by and subordinated to the nation. This volume places the practices of racism at the center of analysis of so-called post-racist or multi cultural nation-states. This way, each contributor analytically treats racism and its related concepts of race, identity, culture, and naturalizing symbols of blood to highlight the manner in which governing institutions use nationalist precepts to create "races". In the end, it is racism - the actual political practices of domination - that makes "race" salient, especially in its multi-cultural and liberal-democratic form.

Indonesia, a huge secular, archipelagic nation-state in Southeast Asia, is one of the world's newest democracies. Yet little is known to outsiders about this complex and fascinating country, the home of the world's largest Muslim community and the scene of recent natural disasters and violent communal struggles. Eleven scholars provide incisive critical appraisals of the leading issues and controversies facing Indonesians as they seek to build a democratic nation that is tolerant of multicultural diversity and free from imperial domination.