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Most people find it hard to define ‘the economy’ beyond saying it is ‘to do with money’. This book explores what ‘the economy’ means to people’s lives in Brexit Britain and what goes through their minds when they hear politicians talking about it. Through research with people from a range of backgrounds in a city on the sSouth coast of England conducted between 2016 and 2018, it reveals what they understand about key aspects of ‘the economy’, including employment, austerity, trade and the economic effects of migration.
The book comes at a crucial point. There is widespread commentary that those who support Leave attach less importance to ‘the economy’ than those who support Remain. However, political scientists have neglected research into what the term ‘the economy’ means to people. This book suggests that it is a less neutral term, based on shared goals, than it has been in the past. While high- income participants, regardless of their political beliefs or referendum vote, tend to feel connected to what could be described as the official version of ‘the economy’, lower- income participants feel less connected and see both ‘the economy’ and economic expertise as ‘rigged’. These changes are not just the result of the Brexit debate but have longer- term roots. The book highlights the value of political ethnographic methods for researching nebulous concepts such as this one. It will be of interest to a general and political science audience and contributes to debates in political behaviour and political economy.
Deportation limbo traces the efforts of two Nordic welfare states, Denmark and Sweden, to address the so-called implementation gap in deportation enforcement. It offers an original, empirically grounded account of how often-futile, injurious policy measures devoted to pressuring non-deported people to leave are implemented and contested in practice. In doing so, it presents a critique of the widespread, normalised use of detention, encampment, and destitution, which routinely fail to enhance deportations while exposing deportable people to conditions that cause their premature death. The book takes the ‘deportation limbo’ as a starting point for exploring the violent nature of borders, the racial boundaries of welfare states, and the limits of state control over cross-border mobility. Building on unprecedented access to detention and deportation camps and migration offices in both countries, it presents ethnographic material capturing frontline officials’ tension-ridden efforts to regulate non-deported people using forced deportation, incarceration, encampment, and destitution. Using a continuum of state violence as the analytical lens, the book offers a uniquely comprehensive account of how the borders of Nordic welfare states are drawn through practices that subject racialised ‘others’ to expulsion, incarceration, and destitution. The book is the first to systematically document the renewed deportation turn in Denmark and Sweden, and to critically examine its implications: for the people targeted by intensified deportation measures, and for the individual officials, institutions, and societies enforcing them. It offers an important, critical contribution to current debates on the violence of deportation regimes, the politico-bureaucratic structures and practices that sustain them, and their human costs.
Since 1990 the wolf has been a protected species in Germany; killing a wolf is a crime punishable by a prison sentence of up to five years. In Eastern Germany, where the political ground is shifting to the right, locals argue that the wolves are not German but Western Polish, undeserving of protection since they have invaded Saxon territory and threatened the local way of life. Many people in Eastern Germany feel that the wolf, like the migrant, has been a problem for years, but that nobody in power is listening to them. At a time when nationalist parties are on the rise everywhere in Europe, The wolves are coming back offers an insight into the rise of Eastern German fringe political movements and agitation against both migrants and wolves by hunters, farmers, rioters and self-appointed saviours of the nation. The nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) represents the third-largest party in the German federal parliament, with representation in the vast majority of German states. It draws much of its support from regions that have been referred to as the ‘post-traumatic places’ in Eastern Germany, structured by realities of disownment, disenfranchisement and a lack of democratic infrastructure. Pates and Leser provide an account of the societal roots of a new group of radical right parties, whose existence and success we always assumed to be impossible.
produced a vocabulary for the comparative analyses of politics, represented, most importantly in his Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics (1969b). This chapter traces F. G. Bailey’s varied oeuvre to arrive at three enduring and intertwined aspects in his ethnography of politics: morality, truth, and power. Focusing mainly on his political ethnographies of Orissa
This introductory chapter provides an overview of understandings of the term ‘the economy’ in political contexts. Political scientists have always debated how important ‘the economy’ is to voters, with a strong strand of argument during the Brexit process that some voters must be foregrounding their non-economic goals. However, political scientists often take what the term actually means to people for granted. They assume most people will interpret ‘the economy’ as neoclassical economists do, as a neutral term for impersonal forces, which is also reflected in analysis of mainstream politicians’ speeches during and since the referendum. The chapter makes the case for political ethnographic empirical research to explore underlying understanding of the term. It outlines some more substantivist approaches to ‘the economy’, such as in the Polanyian tradition, which view ‘the economy’ as more rooted in human relations. The chapter previews the main finding from the empirical research in the rest of the book: that there is an income divide in how people understand the term ‘the economy’. It flags up the implications of that finding for how we categorise what is economic when studying political behaviour. It ends with a plan of the book.
Given the significant similarities and differences between the welfare states of Northern Europe and their reactions to the perceived 'refugee crisis' of 2015, the book focuses primarily on the three main cases of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. Placed in a wider Northern European context – and illustrated by those chapters that also discuss refugee experiences in Norway and the UK – the Danish, Swedish and German cases are the largest case studies of this edited volume. Thus, the book contributes to debates on the governance of non-citizens and the meaning of displacement, mobility and seeking asylum by providing interdisciplinary analyses of a largely overlooked region of the world, with two specific aims. First, we scrutinize the construction of the 2015 crisis as a response to the large influx of refugees, paying particular attention to the disciplinary discourses and bureaucratic structures that are associated with it. Second, we investigate refugees’ encounters with these bureaucratic structures and consider how these encounters shape hopes for building a new life after displacement. This allows us to show that the mobility of specific segments of the world’s population continues to be seen as a threat and a risk that has to be governed and controlled. Focusing on the Northern European context, our volume interrogates emerging policies and discourses as well as the lived experiences of bureaucratization from the perspective of individuals who find themselves the very objects of bureaucracies.
prison officers, who are tasked with enforcing detention and deportations (Bosworth, 2014 ; Borrelli, 2021 ; Walters, 2019 ). Using political ethnography as a method of inquiry, the book draws on fieldwork and interviews with key actors and organisations involved in deportation enforcement. In doing so, the book traces how deportation regimes, and the dehumanisation they are premised on, impact and reconfigure the
, April 2009 ). Colonna , Fanny , ‘ The phantom of dispossession: from The Uprooting to The Weight of the World ’, in Jane E. Goodman and Paul A. Silverstein (eds), Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments ( Lincoln, NE, and London : University of Nebraska Press , 2009 ), pp. 63–93 . Djebar , Assia , Algerian White
Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments ( Lincoln, NE : University of Nebraska Press , 2009 ), pp. 63–93 . Djebar , Assia , Algerian White (translated by David Kelley and Marjolijn de Jager ) ( New York and London : Seven Stories , 2000 ). Djebar , Assia , So Vast the Prison (translated by Betsy Wing ) ( New York and London : Seven Stories Press , 2001 ). Evans
will change. (Conversation with Steve, 2021) This book has traced the continuum of state violence mobilised in the deportation limbo in Denmark and Sweden. Following a political ethnographic approach, it has centred on the perspectives of frontline workers tasked with implementing the policies designed to pressure non-deported people to leave, and