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This chapter traces a textual genealogy of indirect rule as an art of government, beginning in the mid-nineteenth-century moment of imperial crisis and tracing its development through the work and writing of Arthur Gordon in Fiji and Frederick Lugard in Nigeria. It describes indirect rule as emerging from a conception of ‘native society’ that characterised a specific political rationality, working to articulate those landholding ‘native societies’ with either settler-owned plantations or British mercantile capital. The chapter emphasises the role of administrators’ writing, particularly that of Lugard, in popularising indirect rule as a mobile art of government which could be abstracted from the specificities of the colonial formation and deemed applicable as a functional and benevolent approach to distinct articulations.
helped fuel the efforts of more ‘non-political’ organisations like Oxfam, which ‘sought to recast “Biafra” as a space of victimhood, standing in isolation from the political agency of a secessionist movement’ (133). The costs of such depoliticising are by now well-known. For example, as Heerten aptly asks, ‘who, in the end, thinks a people symbolized by starving infants to be capable of creating a state?’ (139). This is the damage done when people are fed a steady diet of
incentive to tackle the political economy of precarity. Extreme food security crises represent a change in political market conditions that compel political elites to make tactical adjustments while also providing new opportunities for acquiring power or the instruments for power. Such changes in political organisation may endure well beyond the crisis. Finally, it follows that humanitarian operations are most likely to be caught up in the calculus of transactional politics in
This book argues for greater openness in the ways we approach human rights and international rights promotion, and in so doing brings some new understanding to old debates. Starting with the realities of abuse rather than the liberal architecture of rights, it casts human rights as a language for probing the political dimensions of suffering. Seen in this context, the predominant Western models of right generate a substantial but also problematic and not always emancipatory array of practices. These models are far from answering the questions about the nature of political community that are raised by the systemic infliction of suffering. Rather than a simple message from ‘us’ to ‘them’, then, rights promotion is a long and difficult conversation about the relationship between political organisations and suffering. Three case studies are explored: the Tiananmen Square massacre, East Timor's violent modern history and the circumstances of indigenous Australians. The purpose of these discussions is not to elaborate on a new theory of rights, but to work towards rights practices that are more responsive to the spectrum of injury that we inflict and endure.
6 Nexus, framework: constituting authority To see how a justifiable political framework must be constituted by citizenship, we start with Gewirth’s premise that basic levels of social and political organisation are a fundamental and compelling moral imperative. In this he draws on the Kantian view that the state of nature is not an acceptable option for human beings, since its ever-present apprehension of violence displaces all possibility of leading a tolerable life.1 Without already supposing all the specific apparatus of law, the state, and so on we can see
each territory and is made according to specific places and their geographical features, family and personal characteristics, thus becoming testimonial portraits of cosmogonic spirituality and socio-political organisation. As affirmed by Painecura, jewels are divided into puwel che jewels and gulu che jewels at a broader level, and on a smaller territorial scale, for example in the context of the gulu che territory, they can be divided into lhafkenh che , wente che , naq che , willi che and
Although Marxism and even anarchism are sometimes treated as if they are simply varieties of socialism, we consider that they have sufficiently distinctive characteristics to warrant separate treatment. Starting with Marxism, we examine Marx’s theories of history, economics and politics before discussing the controversies within Marx-inspired political organisations in the
of progress. Hence, ‘the old presuppositions of modernism are losing their hold; but no one is quite sure what new ones will replace them’.3 The ‘great debate’ in nationalism studies, captured at Warwick, is one between so-called ‘primordialists’ and ‘modernists’. Put simply, primordialists argue that the nation derives directly from a priori ethnic groups and is based on kinship ties and ancient heritage. For their part, modernists insist that the nation is an entirely novel form of identity and political organisation, which owes nothing to ethnic heritage and
, and the intensity of his critique, was largely absent in the North where the response of nationalist political organisations to the Anglo-Irish Agreement was publicly uncritical. The NCU, at a meeting held in Belfast at the end of April, congratulated the Irish government on the outcome. The return of the Treaty ports was described as an ‘instalment of the full recognition of Irish sovereignty’, while the trade and finance settlement was regarded as ‘favourable to the Irish nation’. An NCU request to the Irish government to take steps to safeguard ‘old established
Labour Party but linking up in alliance with us’. 11 In effect, that new political organisation would be a social-democratic party. The position of the social democrats within the Labour Party – of, that is, its predominantly pro-Europe, pro-NATO and pro-mixed economy moderate wing – had long been precarious. By the late 1970s they had been increasingly marginalised in the face of the revival of a fundamentalist socialism on the Labour left, assiduously promoted by Tony Benn and his supporters. With the aid of a quasi-Marxist analysis of