Sociology
In this short reflection, my thoughts are organised around five situations where, as far as I see it, Souths and Easts entangle. In other words, I will reflect on critique, thoughts and ideas of the authors in this book in relation to situations of our time that bump up against my own concerns. These are to do with my struggles to understand (1) the persistent coloniality of our time, (2) the cultural and economic cheapening of subaltern populations, (3) the disconnecting of people from publics, (4) the weaponisation of culture and (5) the limiting of dissent through cultural claims and expert interventions particularly in our universities. I will engage with the Souths and Easts method as the authors do, and with reference to their ideas, to think through these situations which are all core concerns of the book as a whole.
This chapter examines the struggle of France and Russia over Chad and the appeal to Russia in the protests against the Military rule in Chad in 2021 to 2022. France, through its colonial ties with Chad, is imposing itself on the security front through its military base, which has been in place since 1939. Meanwhile, Russia is looking for ways and means to establish itself in Chad through political, security and association networks. Russia has thus become an object of fantasy and concern for Chadian and international actors as an alternative to the legacies of French colonial power. The historical legacies of international socialism in the form of cultural and economic cooperation with the Soviet Union since 1966 play a decisive role in enhancing the image of Russia on the political, economic and scientific levels. The chapter analyses the protests against the long-term military presence of the French army in Chad as well as support for Russia’s growing interest in establishing itself as supposedly an anti-colonial geopolitical power. It reflects on the implications of such competing imperialisms in shaping political futures in the African continent.
This chapter argues that Europeanisation and promises of a liberal, transborder and post-national Europe not only obscure different forms of violence but also make violence possible. I suggest that the analytical lens of infrastructures, as complex and contradictory systems, helps make sense of Europeanisation as an entanglement of enduring, spatialised harm on the one hand and disperse, atmospheric harm on the other. This argument is outlined in two cases. The first case shows how imaginaries of the future that arise from the EU’s promises of connectivity and technopolitical assemblages of the European transport corridor system expose Europeanisation as a violent promise and produce SEE as a space of waiting. The second case draws from the analysis of the EU’s infrastructural investments in SEE to show how roads, highways, paths and railway tracks work in conjunction with the spatialised abjection of SEE and become mouldable as potentially violent.
The book explores the violence enacted on Europe’s many internal and external Souths and Easts through forms of political, cultural, security and development-related Europeanisation. The twelve contributions, from both academics and artists, employ the analytical lenses of stratified subalternities and graded racialisation to examine the relational politics binding historical and imagined Souths and Easts. The contributions shed light on the heterogeneous manifestations of violence, including infrastructure interventions and border politics in the Balkans, border governance and counterinsurgency in the Saharo-Sahel and Mediterranean, the policing of Roma camps in Southern Europe, and land and agrarian dispossession in Ukraine. The collection proposes inter-referencing between South and East as a space of political possibilities emerging through and despite the violence of Europeanisation.
Over the past two decades, the Mediterranean and the Sahelo-Sahara have seen levels of violence that are unprecedented in the recent history of these two regions. While the Mediterranean was converted into a mass grave post-2015, the Sahel has become home to mass civilian fatalities and displacement triggered by an evolving counterinsurgency campaign. This chapter conceptualises the mass violence, death and instability that mark both the Mediterranean and the Sahelo-Sahara as manifestations of a collapse in European hegemony across these regions. This breakdown creates openings to view what is typically obscured in times of unchallenged hegemony. The chapter highlights two such openings. The first concerns an expanded geography of the Sahelo-Sahara and the Mediterranean and the second a reconnected history of these two regions. The former means countering a colonial geography that treats the Mediterranean and the Sahelo-Sahara as distinct and discretely bounded entities. The latter, meanwhile, traces this colonial geography’s genealogy, relaying the precolonial co-constitution of these two regions and the gradual shift toward asymmetry generated by the emergence of a new world-systemic centre in the Atlantic at the turn of the fifteenth century. In light of this expanded geography and reconnected history, contemporary border violence in the Mediterranean and political violence in the Sahel each appear to be symptoms of the breakdown in Europe’s exclusive dominance over the Global South.
In this chapter, Mihaela Drăgan discusses the challenges she faces as a Roma actress in European theatre and as a co-founder of the Roma feminist theatre company Giuvlipen from Bucharest. Mihaela examines the depiction of the ‘Roma exception’ in mass media starting from her own story and how this portrayal contributes to the landscape of the Roma artists and the institutional framework of neglecting Roma theatre and art.
Departing from David Theo Goldberg’s work (2009) on the regional specificities of racialisation processes, I discuss racial Eastern Europeanisation as a point of encounter of different racialising dynamics that simultaneously construct alterity and subalternity in violent ways. I rely on an ethnography of formal and informal policing of the Roma in the peripheries of Rome to conceptualise racial Eastern Europeanisation, and I discuss how three racialised figures emerged simultaneously to the postsocialist labour migration of Romanians to Western Europe. Building on previous work on the securitisation of Eastern European identities in the relational construction of (sub)alter(n)ity in Western Europe, I show how the figure of the Good Western European emerged alongside the Bad Eastern European and the Ugly Roma, constituting ambivalent stratified subalternities. I use Souths, Norths and Easts as a method, and explore at the same time my positionality as an Eastern European scholar situated in Northern Europe and doing research in Southern Europe, examining the angles afforded by this particular positionality.
Culture and heritage have figured prominently in European politics, policies and interventions. The analytical lens of heritage is particularly productive, as heritage is a significant bordering practice through which Europeanisation operates, in conjunction with other b/ordering practices and forms of violence. The chapter centres the violence of European heritage-making, including cultural interventions – such as the European Capital of Culture – that have been infrastructural to violence via their production of stratified subalternities, rankings of non-Europeanness and non-Westernness, and affective registers of stratified be/longings. While looking at Europe from the ‘margins’ in a relational manner from its Souths and Easts, from Córdoba (Andalusia, Spain) and from Sibiu (Transylvania, Romania), this chapter highlights the very conditions upon which one is allowed, or not, into the ‘European family’. Sibiu and Córdoba are mirror images – mirrored post-colonialities – of each other and can be seen as useful case studies to grasp how heritage-making and b/ordering are performed. While Spanish historiography and symbolic geographies ended up establishing Andalusia as a ‘domestic Orient’ of Spain, the towns of Saxon colonial settlers in Transylvania function as a ‘domestic Occident’ of Romania. Europeanisation produces uneven geographies of stratified subalternities through heritage (including within urban territories). To reinscribe Europeanness, multicultural, multi-ethnic and peaceful urban histories are put forward that evacuated past and present violences, while hierarchising ethnicities and places from not-quite to almost-European, depending on their proximity to an ideal of Westernness. This enables the disavowal and/or adverse incorporation of Roma and Muslim communities in Europe’s Souths and Easts.
The introduction proposes Souths and Easts as method neither as a reductive exercise of simply comparing forms of violence across Easts and Souths, nor as aiming at flattening the differences within them. Rather than comparing or simply ‘bringing to dialogue’ historical formations of Souths and Easts, the chapter address both connections and dissonances in tracing Europeanisation as violence while striving to build theory from situated knowledges. It introduces the concept of ‘stratified subalternities’ and elaborates on Soths and eats as method as a relational lens that emerges from the fractured teleology of European progress. The chapter situates the volume in the multiple cracks of knowledge production aiming to sidestep the Western metropole as a concern and a point of reference. The aim is to not simply ‘evoke’ the violence, the ‘represent and destroy’ of Europeanisation but to remain close to the materiality of its production and contestation. To do that, the introduction builds on the epistemology of doubt that allows facing violence without embracing optimism, resilience, hybridity and cultural difference. The chapter stays with the epistemic and kinetic violence producing uneven terrains and positionalities in the processes of Europeanisation presented as the only viable alternative and the synonym of ‘development’.
This chapter presents minor-to-minor epistemological and methodological relations between emerging strands in Romani studies, the Roma co-researchers’ vernacular viewpoints, theories of creolisation emerging from the Caribbean and theatre-based methods. It takes as a starting point a project aimed at ‘empowering’ Southeast European migrant Roma women through low-paid precarious labour and incorporating them into the Finnish cleaning sector, along with critical reflections on my positionality as a non-Roma Romanian mediator of this process and how that raises questions of epistemic violence. Then, together with the co-researchers, we imagine new possible avenues to creolise research based on transversal encounters and conversations across divides and hierarchies with the help of theatre-based methods. The Roma women’s perspectives, presented as lines in a co-created script, provide explanatory theoretical narratives and not just the raw material. Their relational, dynamic and radically subversive vernacular viewpoints theorise social phenomena in and of themselves. The various cracks and tensions that the ethnodrama exposes can be seen as openings from which to disrupt established ways of seeking knowledge and to imagine new possible ways of creolising both inter-subjective and cross-disciplinary dialogues. The chapter concludes with reflections on im/possibilities for co-authorship and what the women’s refusal to be named as co-authors says about the academic writing genre.