Governmentality

To cite:
Wilkins, A. 2017. Rescaling the local: Multi-academy trusts, private monopoly and statecraft in England. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49 (2), 171-185

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery as well as secure conditions for greater school autonomy.  Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance.  In some cases, monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy.  In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management.  On this account, it is argued, MATs are integral to statecraft and the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses for intervening upon specific organisations, spaces and peoples.

This essay provides an account of the role of ritual in governmentality (or the conducting of conduct) through an analysis of key texts during the period roughly from 1973 through 1981. I claim that ritual plays an essential role in Foucault's analysis of juridical forms and sovereign power as well as conduct and counter-conduct understood as features of governmentality and political rationality.

Infrastructural practices, made by the manipulations of pumps, pipes and hydraulic expertise, play a critical role in managing urban populations. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Mumbai, in this article I show how Muslim settlers in a northern suburb are being rendered abject residents of the city. Abjection isn’t not a lack of social and political entitlements, but a denial of them. As Muslim settlers are being pushed down to claim less desirable water through the deliberate inaction of city engineers and technocrats, this article shows the iterative process through which abjection is made through tenuous and contentious infrastructural connections between the government and the governed.

Das Buch verbindet zwei Schlüsselkonzepte aktueller politischer und feministischer Theorie - Intersektionalität und Gouvernementalität - mit der historischen Analyse der Problematisierung von Prostitution und ihren Regierungsweisen Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts und analysiert, welche Machtlogiken bei der Interpretation der Prostitution als Problem individueller moralischer Führung einerseits und als gesamtgesellschaftliches, politisches Problem andererseits wirkten.
Die Autorin zeigt empirisch auf, dass verschiedene gesellschaftliche Gruppen jeweils spezifisch moralisch regiert wurden und plädiert für ein politisches und prozessorientiertes Verständnis von Intersektionalität, so dass differenzierte Mechanismen der Machtausübung erfassbar werden.

There are many histories of the police as a law-enforcement institution, but no genealogy of the police as a form of power. This book provides a genealogy of the modern police by tracing the evolution of ‘police science’ and of police institutions in Europe, from the ancien régime to the early 19th century. Drawing on the theoretical path outlined by Michel Foucault at the crossroads between historical sociology, critical legal theory and critical criminology, it shows how the development of police power was an integral part of the birth of the modern state’s governmental rationalities and how police institutions were conceived as political technologies for the government and social disciplining of populations. Understanding modern police not as an institution at the service of the judiciary and the law, but as a complex political technology for governing the economic and social processes typical of modern capitalist societies, this book shows how the police have played an active role in actually shaping order, rather than merely preserving it.

¿Cómo pudo ocurrir que la institucionalización de los derechos de las mujeres posibilitara  la violación de los derechos reproductivos de las mujeres indígenas?  Esta tesis empieza con el establecimiento del PNSRPF 1996-2000 (Plan de planificación familiar) que fue parte de una campaña por los derechos de la mujer en el Perú fujimorista y causa de las esterilizaciones forzadas de más de  diez mil mujeres campesinas.  En esta tesis examino la memoria histórica del movimiento feminista peruano con el objetivo de comprender los factores que permitieron la vulnerabilidad de las campesinas dentro del marco de una campaña por los derechos de la mujer.  El movimiento feminista peruano puede mostrar tres dimensiones de los derechos humanos: los reproductivos y sexuales; los humanos y ciudadanos, y los derechos políticos.  Sin embargo, ninguno de estos  pudo responder a la condición interseccional de la identidad de las campesinas y a su exclusión inclusiva como ciudadanas.  Aun cuando se pensaba que  los derechos protegían a “todas las mujeres” o a “todos los peruanos” estos paradigmas aislaron los proyectos de derechos específicos que permitieron la invisibilidad de las campesinas.

In the introduction to the volume, the editors explain the overarching aim of the volume and contextualize the main themes of its chapters. Even if the notions of biopolitics and biopower have played a crucial role in philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences over the last decades, they have been used in various and at times diverging senses, which has also produced different narratives about the history of biopolitics. The main aim of the volume is to clarify whether and to what extent the concept of biopolitics is applicable to antiquity. To answer such questions, the chapters collected in the volume address three main topics, namely the possible presence of biopolitical discourse in ancient thought, the extent to which the application of a biopolitical approach to ancient thought requires qualifications, and some influential contemporary interpretations of the relation between biopolitics and antiquity.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

Tal como tendremos ocasión de revisar, son varios los autores que reconocen en la emoción del miedo uno de los aspectos que caracterizan y modelan nuestra contemporaneidad. Sin embargo, no es solamente tal prevalencia lo que nos interesa en este texto destacar. Más allá de visibilizar  algunas de las zonas en donde el miedo se manifiesta como una dimensión  ineludible de considerar al momento de describir cómo se ha venido estructurando nuestro entramado social, lo que nos parece relevante es señalar el lugar que el miedo ocupa dentro de las actuales agendas gubernamentales.
-Iván Pincheira, "Miedo", en Mary Luz Estupiñan (Ed.), El ABC del neoliberalismo, Viña del Mar, Communes, 2016, pp. 167-182.

2000년대 이후 한국에서는 저소득층의 ‘금융배제’가 중요한 정책과제로 부상했다. 외환위기 이후 실업과 소득저하에 처한 저소득층이 사금융에 의존하며 과다채무로 고통받자, 정부는 제도권 금융기관에서 배제된 저소득·저신용층에게 ‘금융 접근권’을 보장하는 일련의 ‘금융포용’ 정책을 추진했다. 금융포용 담론은 빈곤과 불평등의 사회문제에 대해 시장을 통한 해결과 개인의 책임성을 강조하는 신자유주의 담론들의 합리성을 반영하고 있다. 이에 따라 정부는 공급 측면에서 서민금융기관의 활성화, 신용카드업과 대부업의 규제완화, 정책성 서민금융의 제공을 통해 저소득층에 대한 신용공급을 늘리고자 했으며, 수요 측면에서는 소비자 보호와 금융 역량 강화를 통해 개인의 자활을 돕고자 했다. 그리하여 2000년대 이후 개인의 대출기회는 크게 확대되었으나 이는 저소득층의 과다채무 문제를 양산하는 한편, 빈곤 문제에 대한 시장적이고 개인화된 해결을 요구하는 새로운 합리성과 기술을 정착시켰다. 요컨대 금융포용은 실질적인 시민적 권리의 보장이 아닌 오직 시장에 대한 접근권만을 강조하면서 차별적 배제와 불평등을 완화하기보다 빈곤층을 더욱 취약하고 개별화된 위험관리의 주체로 만들었다.

Since the 2000s, the ‘financial exclusion’ of low-income families has emerged as an important policy task in Korea. After the financial crisis in 1997, low-income people who faced unemployment and income decline suffered from excessive debt, relying on money laundering. The government then imposed a series of ‘financial inclusion’ policies that guarantee ‘financial access’ to the low-income brackets excluded from formal financial institutions. This financial inclusion discourse reflects the rationality of neoliberal discourses that emphasize market-based solutions and individual responsibility for social problems. The government tried to increase the credit supply to low-income people through the activation of the ordinary financial institutions, the deregulation of credit card business and lending business, and the provision of policy-based credit from the supply side. On the demand side, the government tried to help the individual self-support through consumer protection and strengthening financial capacity. Thus, since 2000s, the opportunity for individual loans has expanded greatly, but this has created a problem of excessive debt in the low-income bracket and has set new governing rationality and technologies that force personalized solutions to poverty problem. In conclusion, financial inclusion has made the poor more vulnerable and individualized risk-management subject rather than alleviating discriminatory exclusion and inequality, emphasizing only market access, not substantive civil rights.

This paper discusses business continuity management (BCM) and its role in contemporary financial institutions. BCM is a nascent disaster preparedness and recovery strategy that seeks to protect vital business operations from disruptions. The paper traces contemporary BCM back to Cold War continuity of government planning, and shows how BCM came to understand security as continuity of processes rather than integrity of goods. BCM is prominent in finance because it promises to mitigate operational risks, and it focuses on risks stemming from interdependencies in financial infrastructures. By engaging with two events that triggered continuity management in banks, Hurricane Sandy in New York City and the 'Blockupy' demonstrations in Frankfurt, the paper highlights how BCM is challenged by large-scale disasters as well as acts of public criticism.

As we all now know, it is the complex configurations of power/ knowledge that produce critical discourse analysis and its subjects. Subjects constituted by the constantly shifting, fragmented, multiple dynamics internal to the regimes of governmentality in which they are located, and to which there is no outside (Foucault 2008). Foucault’s notion of the self collapses dualistic understandings of an objective subject exterior to cognitive, interior processes of reasoning which can be transferred into the neutral medium of reasoned argument into ever productive techniques of power. Rather, there is no subject or individual “ontologically prior to power” (Ball & Olmedo 2012:87) since we are all caught up in contingencies of the shifting, fragmented historical present in which we are both “a constant beginning and … a constant end” (Ball & Olmedo 2012:87). As such never-completely achieved subjects, we write, and reinvent the disciplines and institutions that precede us, and without whose power relations there would be no subjects to glimpse in their fleeting moments of knowing in the historical present.  Yet, despite this knowledge of our nature as subjects of discourse, CDA approaches to textual analysis broadly assume the givenness of the discourses and ideologies expressed in language and map it on to a real world ‘out there’  (St Pierre 2013:651) whose workings as normalising regimes of truth it presupposes can be brought to light through empirical analysis. Such an ontology which “maintains a representational logic” (St Pierre 2013:651) tends by default to insert the centred humanist subject in the position of ‘researcher’, and at ‘a “panoptic remove from their [object] of criticism” (Radhakrishnan 1996:33), thus leaving the work of critical interrogation of representation incomplete. In this paper, I refer to Foucault and other ‘posts’ to locate the critical discourse analyst in his/her/their place in the “immanence of doing” (Lather 2013:635).

References
Ball, S and Olmedo, A. 2012. Care of the self, resistance and subjectivity under neoliberal governmentalities. Critical Studies in Education 54 (1): 85–96.
Foucault, M. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, translated from French by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lather, P. 2013. Methodology-21: what do we do in the afterward? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26 (6): 634–645.
Radhakrishnan, R. 1996. Diasporic Meditations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

In this paper I trace an important conceptual shift which emerged during my fieldwork with fishermen in the South West of Ireland. I begin by describing how my role as a social researcher was interpreted as a valuable 'bridge' between different (epistemological) positions, namely the fishermen and scientists. This approach rests on the belief that individual actors occupy discrete subject-positions capable of being articulated and understood within consensus-making processes. Going to sea marked, for me, a literal and metaphorical departure from this understanding. Rather than thinking of fishermen as bounded, individual subjects acting on and in a 'dumb' external world, and thus having a 'position' from which to make themselves understood, I began to attend to experiences which extended across and between people, places and things. In part two I analyze how the concept of 'continuous experience' helps us to think about experience as relational and contingent, unsettling the (governing) call to identify one's position. Attending to the ways in which experience unfolds through the immediate mattering of relations between people, places and things also allows us to move beyond explanatory modes which seek to identify how subjects are produced through particular structuring relations. In the final part of the paper I describe how the excess of sociability can suspend normal roles and relations, including those which exist between 'researcher' and 'subject'.

Article on the comparison of Gramscian and Foucauldian understandings of civil society.

Published in the book "A Panacea For all Seasons?" (Freise, Pyykkönen, Vaidelyte, eds., 2010, Nomos): http://www.amazon.de/Panacea-all-Seasons-Governance-European/dp/3832947876

This paper revisits Nicholas Grimshaw’s Eden Project in Cornwall, UK to interrogate architecture’s relation to neoliberalism. It looks to this project as a means to open a speculative approach for architectural scholarship to engage neoliberal society beyond familiar critiques thereof. Eden, I argue, coordinates its spaces, technologies and objects to project a temporality that seems to lack both past and future in favour of presenting time as continuous, homogeneous, bound to the perpetual management of the present – what I call ‘ecological time’. This project shows that, in the theatre of neoliberal governmentality, the present is the object of design, and ‘design’ becomes indistinguishable from the technological management of the world.

In this article I explore how the child welfare system in Australia is a basis of governmentality, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with 35 women resettled in Australia as refugees originating from African countries. Although the explicit aim of the child welfare system is to protect children from a risk of significant harm, the findings presented here suggest that such systems can concurrently operate to evaluate, monitor, and demand behavioural change from women who are the subject of intervention in accordance with logics of white neoliberal motherhood, in which parental merit is measured through, and problematised by, factors of racialisation, assumptions of cultural difference, counter-heteronormativity, and socioeconomic marginalisation. I argue that the child welfare system not only operates to protect children, but can also function as an instrument to govern women to 'fit' with an idealised standard of citizenship in Australia. Thereby supplanting maternal guardianship with the mandate of government institutions, operations of child welfare position the paternalistic authority of the state as absolute and render mothers who do not conform to white neoliberal motherhood as vulnerable to intervention. Motherhood is an arena in which national anxieties are imagined and played out on the bodies of women and the formation of families. Tensions concerning who is considered a 'good' mother, how the 'right' parenting is conducted, and what constitutes as a 'proper' family not only attach hierarchical frameworks of merit to motherhood and family, but also express – and co-constitute – shared anxieties about race and nationhood) emphasises, nationhood is not static: and it is through the bodies of women and their experiences of motherhood particular formations of civic belonging are both natur-alised and excluded. Drawing on research conducted with women from African refugee backgrounds who have experienced the removal of a child through the child welfare system in Australia, in this article I describe how 'good' citizenship is realised through formations of state governance over family life and, particularly, through the kinds of expectations that are attached to 'good' motherhood.

This study investigates expansion of the field of cyber security in relation to governing of the Internet in Turkey within the last decade. It argues that security rationality is becoming the dominant diagram in evaluating problems and solutions associated with the Internet. It shows that cyber security is instrumental in expansion of forms of power associated with security objective through a discourse of risk and danger, institutional restructuring, law making, and most importantly, technical practices. Technical practices, for they have a indirect relation with the infrastructure of internet communications, represents a reflexive quality, which makes cyber security field element of a distinct strategy of power, in the intersection of government, technology and security.

This paper examines how international development funding and accountability requirements are implicated in the so-called disarticulation of a social movement. Based on field studies in Guatemala and El Salvador, we show and explain the way accountability requirements, which encompass management and accounting, legal, and financial technologies, constitute the field of international development through the regulation of heterogeneous social movement organizations. We highlight how accountability enables a form of governance that makes possible the emergence of entities (with specific attributes), while restricting others. Our analysis has implications for governmentality studies that have examined the interrelation of assemblages by analyzing how these interrelations are operationalized at the field level through the Deleuze-and-Guattari-inspired processes of territorialization, coding, and overcoding.

When Eric Hobsbawm wrote about the rise of nations and nationalism in the 1980s, he envisioned it to be of decreasing significance as globalization continued to undermine the importance of nation-states (1992). Rather than waning in significance, the world has instead seen a "global rise in nationalism" (Bieber 2018, 520). The study of nations and nationalism, and its intersections with politics, economics, and aesthetics, remains a key subject for scholars who take seriously the implications of struggles over power, territory, and cultural practices. Dance studies has long cast light on how nations are reproduced through aesthetic and kinesthetic practices (Reed 2010, Shapiro 2004, McNeill 1997). Today, when nationalism and nationalist resurgences stand center stage in global politics, dance and performance scholars are compelled to examine the complex ways by which the nation impacts movement aesthetics. For this issue, we specifically challenged our contributors to search for narratives, spaces, and practitioners that could shed light on movement aesthetics in the context of the nation. The diversity of nations and stories that we present in this collection foregrounds how dance and performance become important projects of the nation, controlling memory, history, and populations-by linking geopolitics to the bodies of practitioners. In our call for essays, we chose two phrases, "the shadow of the nation" and "the umbra and penumbra of the nation" with deliberativeness, as we recognize that nations cast long shadows and act both in the umbra of cartographies and the penumbra of memory and ideas. The long shadow of the nation engenders dangers in how it unevenly confers rights and excludes unwanted subjects while holding a monopoly on violence. Our authors and their interlocutors describe how governments apply varying valences to art forms, marginalizing those deemed less civilized, impure, or scandalous, favoring instead "high" or "classicalized" art forms. Once again, the umbra and the penumbra are important, because when light shines on one art, another finds itself in the shadows.

From the Special Issue: Dance Under the Shadow of the Nation

A growing literature demonstrates the significance of aesthetics within processes of world-class city making, as decisions about who gets to live and work in the city are increasingly made on the basis of codes of appearance. However, less attention has been paid to how such codes are (re)produced and (re)directed by informal workers and their organisations in everyday practice. Drawing upon a multisided ethnography in Kampala and Delhi, this paper explores the ways in which market vendors and waste collectors have responded to the proliferation of three aesthetic technologies: the identity card, the uniform, and the code of conduct. We show that workers have appropriated these technologies in creative ways in order to defend their livelihoods against the threat of displacement. However, this act of appropriation has come at the cost of the exclusion of the more vulnerable workers, who now find their activities policed not only by the state but also by a range of non-state organisations. These findings contribute to debates on labour organisation and world-class city making by demonstrating the ways in which aesthetic rationalities emerge through an encounter with the tactics of everyday life.

Der Ruf nach Selbstbestimmung war einst ein Aufbruchssignal der Frauenbewegung. Inzwischen ist die Forderung vielfältig kritisch reflektiert worden. In den Sozialwissenschaften wird die Vorstellung eines autonomen Selbst in den so genannten Gouvernementalitätsstudien auseinandergenommen. Wer kann hier von wem lernen?

This study aims to answer where normality ends and where exception begins in politics. This distinction is crucial to understand not only the management of populations and subjects but also the very nature of political power. To do that, I readdress concepts such as governmentality and exceptionalism using examples from the late European context: the management of “normal” data subjects and the administration of “exceptional” groups such as refugees. In light of this, the paper argues that the borderline which traditionally has separated exceptionality and governmentality is not blurred. It simply does not exist anymore. Due to the impossibility to separate those dimensions, the result is that exceptionalism can be expanded through governmentality whereas normalization seems to give an orientation to this dual phenomenon in every political decision.

Contemporary security practices rarely represent new inventions – albeit change is important to it, the security politics of today often has a very long lineage. It adapts, reworks and sometimes just rehashes old ideas and practices of policing, and is embedded in deeply entrenched, historically grown and power-laden frameworks of collective, national, local or international sense-and decision-making. This contribution to Contemporanea's Special Section on the "History of Transnational Security Management in Europe" argues that is important and useful for critical security studies to enter into a more systematic kind of dialogue with history. If, in turn, historians are willing to help in this effort and engage themselves more closely with the analytical frameworks and discussions of security scholars, then productive new academic encounters ensue.

Abstract: This article addresses shortcomings in the way that philosophers and cultural critics have considered propaganda by offering a new genealogical account. Looking at figures such as Marx, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Bourdieu, and Stanley, this article finds that their consideration of propaganda has not necessarily been wrong but has missed some of the most significant and important functions of propaganda. This text draws on archival and published materials from propagandists, most notably Edward Bernays, to elaborate a new governmentality of propaganda and public relations. Through focusing on the concept of public opinion, I argue that propaganda is best thought of as an apparatus whose function it is to construct, modify, counter, and destroy relations of force within public opinion in order to produce the subjectivities and conduct that its disseminators and their clients desire.

This article analyzes the development of Soviet scientific future studies after World War II, arguing that the field’s theory and methods undermined the certainty of the communist future and laid the foundations for a new Soviet governmentality that acknowledged the intrinsic uncertainty of future development. The emphasis on uncertainty-but also the need for more data that could freely circulate between different branches of government and hence more transparency (glasnost’)-called for radical revisions to Soviet notions of effective governance. Whereas some used future studies to criticize the actual practices of Soviet economic planning, others used this new type of expertise to extend personal influence and accumulate organizational power. Both cases, however, made it clear that Soviet governance had to accommodate the shift toward new constellations of power/knowledge in which scientific experts would play an ever-increasing role in shaping policy with regard to a fundamentally uncertain future.

Denna text ger en översikt över några centrala linjer i det moderna tänkandet om medborgarskap, med utgångspunkt i sociologen Thomas Humphrey Marshall och hans tankar om de civila, politiska och sociala rättigheternas framväxt. I förgrunden står särskilt relationen mellan medborgarskap, migration och etnicitet. Frågan om människors relation till samhället och tillhörighet till samhällsgemenskapen ställs på sin spets i den samtida migrationens tidevarv. Med den internationella migrationen utmanas etablerade konventioner om vem samhällsmedborgaren är eller bör vara. Vi framhåller särskilt distinktionen mellan formella och substantiella rättigheter som central för förståelsen av det samtida medborgarskapet. Vi uppmärksammar särskilt betydelsen av etnicitet och migration, inte minst genom att synliggöra rådande medborgar(skaps)ideal, formade utifrån föreställningar om (o)likhet på grundval av etnicitet, kultur, nation och ”ras”. De centrala tankegångarna i texten åskådliggörs genom olika exempel från det mångetniska Sverige som påvisar skillnader mellan formella och substantiella aspekter av medborgarnas civila, politiska och sociala rättigheter.

The problematic I want to initially explore is what would be a Foucauldian description of politics? We can look to his later works, particularly the College de France lectures, to find his work on subjectivation and ethics of the care of the self. In his lecture course, ‘The Hermeneutics of the Subject’, Foucault examines these issues and in doing so we can gain a sense of what the relationship between politics and ethics was for Foucault. I will show that Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’ can provide the key to understanding the relationships between politics and ethics. For Foucault, ethical subjectivation must be linked to politics, including notions of parrhesia as truth and freedom. By showing this was the case, Foucault could then say that we can form new subjectivities, new relationships to ourselves and others and if, or when this happens, then we can also look for a manifestation of a different kind of politics.

Aktiveringens politik beskriver och analyserar den omvandling av det svenska politiska landskapet som äger rum under decennierna kring millennieskiftet. Den svenska välfärdsmodellen har genomgått en rad djupgående förändringar. Valfrihet och eget ansvar är ledorden i den nya tidens politik. Men vilka egenskaper kännetecknar egentligen en aktiv medborgare? Hur har idealet om aktiva medborgare växt fram och hur kommer det till uttryck inom olika politikområden? Författaren lyfter fram idéer och problembeskrivningar, visioner och ideal, åtgärdsförslag och reformer som tar sikte på att skapa delaktiga och ansvarstagande demokratiska medborgare.

Polyamory. Loving More than One A biographical portrait of non-monogamous relationship cultures In the mainstream of academic Psychology, the concept of the monogamous relationship between two people is rarely called into question. The work at hand will fill a gap in this respect and should be understood as a contribution toward establishing academic openness to the concerns of polyamorous human beings. Interviews were conducted over Skype as the method of compiling data and their phenomenological premises as well as those of interaction and communication theories were reconstructed according to the narrative data analysis of Schutze (1983). The biographies of one woman and one man stand in the forefront. It holds true for both interview partners that they oriented themselves toward a monogamous relationship model and processed the same during biographically significant phases of their early adulthoods. In both cases – more noticeably in the man’s than the woman’s – the biographical...

This article critically examines the role of Islamist state discourse
and policies in the Kurdish region of Turkey. Academic works on
Islamism often address settings where Islamist movements and
political parties operate as anti-colonial and oppositional entities.
However, this article discusses how Islamist ideology has become
an instrument of governmentality to maintain and legitimize colonial
rule in the Kurdish region of Turkey under the Adalet ve
Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP). After contextualizing
the Kurdish issue as an internal colonization process
since the beginning of the Turkish Republic, the paper focuses on
the AKP period to analyse the use of an Islamic discourse of unity
and brotherhood and attempts to foster the rise of a loyal conservative
civil society among the Kurds. Thus, it argues that the
internal colonial paradigm remains fully relevant to analysis of the
Kurdish issue during the last decade and that neoliberal Islamist
governmentality should be understood as a strategy complementary
to repression, to increase popular support for the government
and marginalize opposition.

"The possibility of violence beneath a thin veneer of civil society is a fact of daily life for twenty-first-century Guatemalans, from field laborers to the president of the country. Crisis of Governance in Maya Guatemala explores the causes and consequences of governmental failure by focusing on life in two K’iche’ Maya communities in the country’s western highlands. The contributors to this volume, who lived among the villagers for some time, include both undergraduate students and distinguished scholars. They describe the ways Mayas struggle to survive and make sense of their lives, both within their communities and in relation to the politico-economic institutions of the nation and the world.

Since Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war ended in 1996, the state has been dysfunctional, the country’s economy precarious, and physical safety uncertain. The intrusion of Mexican cartels led the U.S. State Department to declare Guatemala “the epicenter of the drug threat” in Central America. Rapid cultural change, weak state governance, organized crime, pervasive corruption, and ethnic exclusion provide the backdrop for the studies in this volume.

Seven nuanced ethnographies collected here reveal the complexities of indigenous life and describe physical and cultural conflicts within and between villages, between insiders and outsiders, and between local and federal governments. Many of these essays point to a tragic irony:the communities seem largely forgotten by the government until the state seeks to capture their resources—timber, minerals, votes. Other chapters portray villages responding to criminal activity through lynch mobs and by labeling nonconformist youth as gang members. In focusing on the internal dynamics of poor, marginal communities in Guatemala, this book explores the realities of life for indigenous people on all continents who are faced with the social changes brought about by war and globalization."