This chapter focuses on five areas for activism and policy work that can be key levers to the implementation of a psychology-informed progressivism. These are concrete ways of implementing the cooperative principles discussed in Chapter 6. Action points for each strategy are given – for both policymakers and laypeople. The first strategy is positive parenting: a way of supporting the wellbeing and capacity for cooperation of children and young people. The second strategy, social and emotional learning, extends the development of these skills into the school environment. Nonviolent communication is a set of guidelines by which all people can relate to others – particularly in situations of conflict – in more constructive and cooperative ways. An emotionally intelligent politics extends these principles of intra and interpersonal cooperation to the political arena, proposing that progressives adopt a politics of understanding rather than a politics of blame. The development of a wellbeing economy is a nation-wide means of putting wellbeing at the centre of a progressive agenda. Through mapping these strategies out, the chapter demonstrates what a rounded and integrated progressive agenda might look like: one that can support positive change in psychological as well as socio-economic ways.
We live in troubled times: COVID-19, police racism and climate change are just some of the challenges we are currently facing. Never has there been such a need for a new politic – nor such an opportunity for one.
To create a world in which people thrive, we need to know what thriving is. Over the past century, psychotherapy – and its parent discipline, psychology – has built up a rich, vibrant and highly practical understanding of human wellbeing and distress. This book shows why we need, and can create, a progressive politics that is profoundly informed by insights from the psychotherapeutic and psychological domain, moving us from a politics of blame to a politics of understanding.
In this vision of the world – surrounded by a culture of radical acceptance – all individuals can live fulfilling lives. We need progressive political forces to develop greater understandings of psychological needs and processes; and to work with others in a spirit of collaboration, dialogue and respect.
This chapter discusses the development of the socialist humanist tradition: an international movement that advocated a humanistic psychological reading of Karl Marx’s work. In doing so, this chapter shows the depth, richness, and complexity of analysis that can be achieved by integrating humanistic psychology into a progressive political base, and provides a means of introducing several of the key principles for the present book. A discussion of the limitations of socialist humanism also helps to identify some of the challenges that a psychology-informed progressivism needs to overcome. The chapter begins by discussing the background for the development of socialist humanism: a reaction to totalitarian, dogmatic interpretations of Marx. It then introduces the model of human being that the socialist humanists developed – as agentic, in-the-world, and directional – and how capitalism creates the conditions in which there is alienation from this basic nature. The creation of ‘false needs’ – as articulated by Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School – is then described, and how people can become blinded to this process through ‘false consciousness’. The chapter concludes with limitations of socialist humanism – that it can be elitist; and that it lacks a more in-depth, contemporary psychological understanding – which the present book strives to overcome.
The aim of this chapter is to describe a comprehensive, detailed, and contemporary psychological framework that can serve as the basis for a progressive vision for society. This framework is based on the principle of psychological equality: that we should try to understand others as human beings like ourselves, with needs and wants that are understandable within that person’s context. This leads on to the principle of ‘directionality’: that human beings are always actively striving to fulfil certain needs and wants. This is an understanding of human beings in terms of motivation and purpose. Drawing on such contemporary psychological models as Bill Powers’s ‘control theory’, the chapter then shows how these needs and wants can be conceptualised as existing in a hierarchy, from the things that we are most fundamentally striving for down to the more context-dependent means through which we might try to get there. This leads on to a critical discussion of the most fundamental needs and wants that all human beings may be considered to have (physiological needs, safety, pleasure, growth, relatedness, autonomy, self-worth, and meaning/values).
Building on the previous analysis (Chapter 3), the aim of this chapter is to provide a means of conceptualising wellbeing and distress that can underpin a psychology-informed progressivism. The chapter begins by defining psychological wellbeing in terms of the realisation of fundamental needs and wants – with distress as the failure to realise such directions. The chapter then discusses four reasons why these failures may come about: the first due to ‘external’ (that is, socioeconomic) restrictions; and the subsequent three due to more ‘internal’, psychological problems: internal conflicts, ineffective means of realising our highest-order needs and wants, and unrealistic expectations. In this way, the chapter indicates how greater wellbeing can be brought about by both external, sociopolitical changes; and by internal, psychological changes. By demonstrating the centrality of cooperation, at an internal level, to psychological thriving, this chapter lays the groundwork for developing common, intra- and interpersonal principles for good functioning.
Despite occupying a subordinate position in the urban context, displaced people influence how cities are evolving, and shape their morphologies and patterns of growth. Their agency here is embedded in a political economy of rent-seeking that is intertwined with international aid. This chapter outlines the multiple facets and ambiguities of the clientelistic networks that underpin these rent-seeking practices and demonstrates how urban newcomers act within and through these networks to secure their survival. The creation of settlements associated with displacement can increase the value ascribed to land. The chapter links these processes to wider insights on the development of real estate markets for domestic urban capital, which are often driven by local and diasporic investors, and which accompany the infrastructural focus of global capital penetration in contemporary African cities. Comparatively highlighting distinctive aspects of camp urbanization in Somali cities, the chapter shows how the combination of protracted violence, urban reconstruction and mass in-migration has been accompanied by cycles of forced evictions that initiate nascent forms of urban gentrification.
This conclusion ties together the analyses of the preceding chapters and further elaborates on how the findings speak to research undertaken in other global contexts where the displacement–urbanization nexus is prominent. It explains how moving back and forth between the urban settings and the wider relations in which emergent urban environments are entangled contributes to the analytical ‘worlding’ of cities at the global margins. The conclusion also reflects on how the book’s discussion of precarious urbanism could be interpreted in ongoing narrative contests around post-war urban reconstruction, and highlights how the issue of displacement connects contrasting discourses around both the violence and economic growth that underpin contemporary forms of camp urbanization in Somalia, Somaliland and beyond. It also reflects on limitations of the study and marks out important areas for future research, particularly in relation to the role of internationally supported state-building, the rise of new political actors and their influence on processes of camp urbanization.
This chapter examines the concept of displacement through a historical overview of the relationship between forced mobility and different phases and locations of violent conflict in Somalia. It outlines the historical and political context of the four cities under focus through the lens of personal experiences shared by research participants. The memories of research participants of the unfolding political fragmentation, and periods of instability in Somalia since the 1980s detail multiple reasons for flight and show how people were moving to – or back to, or between – the cities of Baidoa, Bosaso, Hargeisa and Mogadishu. Research participants describe experiences of forced mobility, how people found and negotiated places to settle in cities on arrival and their attempts to rebuild their lives in the urban environment. Although experiences of displacement and dynamics of urbanization across the four cities are diverse, the chapter shows how each city has been shaped by interrelated legacies of conflict and displacement. After a brief overview of political dynamics that have underpinned the construction, break-up and attempted reconstruction of the Somali state, the chapter focuses each of the four cities’ historical experiences of conflict-linked in-migration and the development of camp-like settlements in urban and peri-urban space.
This chapter foregrounds the intersection of social and material aspects of urban lives and examines how infrastructures mediate and differentiate urban practices. People improvise to create or fill gaps in basic infrastructure. In doing so they produce the socio-materiality of places and configure urban morphologies, which, in turn, shape their everyday bodily experiences in and of the city. Focusing on the urban margins, the chapter uses examples of sanitation, water, health and education as analytical entry points to highlight socio-ecological dynamics that produce spaces of privilege and exclusion in the city. The chapter further expands on the previous analyses of the political economy of urban in-migration and humanitarian entrepreneurship by demonstrating how infrastructural struggles are conditioned through relations of property that intersect with arrangements for security. It is again emphasized that people at the margins are active agents of urbanization, even if they themselves do not usually benefit from these contributions to city-making.
This introductory chapter frames the wider book as a critical engagement with the discursive figure of the ‘internally displaced person’ and the use of this label by various actors in the context of conflict-linked migration and urbanization. The chapter presents the methodology that underpinned the research on which its findings are based. It explains and reflects upon the use of narrative interviews, participatory photography and public exhibitions/discussions to generate insight on the nexus of displacement and urbanization from the perspectives and everyday experiences of marginalized populations living in conditions of extreme socio-economic precarity. The concept of precarious urbanism is introduced as the process by which mobile, constantly shifting patterns of arrival, settlement, camp transformation, eviction and resettlement manifest in the morphologies of the four cities under focus and shape trajectories of urban development and ways of living. The chapter explains the thematic structure of the book and the different aspects of this precarious urbanism that are analysed in each.
