Politics and International Relations > European Politics
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The maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave this to the labourer’s drives for self-preservation and propagation. (Marx [1867] 1976: 718)
The capitalist mode of production gives rise to a crisis of working-class social reproduction from the outset, and continually exacerbates that crisis in the course of its development. Far from being in principle a crisis for the capitalist mode of production itself, then, crises of working-class social reproduction are the empirical effects of changes in the capitalist economy, reflecting capitalist power over the fate of the propertyless population. The inherent characteristics of the capitalist
mode of production – competition between individual capitals, uninterrupted scientific and technological revolution, an ever-increasing division of labour on local to global scales, the constant process of ‘creative destruction’ as obsolete capitalist enterprises die and new ones are born, the universalisation of commodity production, concomitant to proletarianisation and the creation of a permanent ‘reserve army of labour’, and the tendency for capital to invade and take over any form of production more ‘primitive’ than itself – all continually disrupt areas of social and economic activity within capitalist social formations and those which capitalism has not fully penetrated yet. The effect of state government policies and governance on the part of international organisations is to induce or exploit crises of working-class social reproduction in order to further the hegemony of capital over their own territory and the world market as a whole.
This article provides the reader with a theoretical framework and a method of representing cities called cartographies of infrastructural imaginations. The study employs mapping methods from the fields of architecture, urban geography and visual cultures. The research inquires about the role of cartography in the analysis of discourses that define policies of water supply, food distribution and land-use regulation, which are three environmental challenges in cities. How can we identify and situate the urban actors that attend to such challenges in cities from the Global South?
The research is empirically grounded in Mexico City, Shanghai and Bangalore, urban settlements with a history of colonial occupation in previous centuries. Their foreign interventions still shape urban imaginaries of these cities. The method of blending photographic analysis with maps aims to offer objective precision of geographical data and subjective street-level views of local stories. The intention is to understand where the infrastructural ideas come from, and how imaginaries flow to communicate visions about the development of the city. A central task here is to frame how power structures interact and represent their interests via utopian and dystopian narratives.
Transdisciplinarity is creative human agency including cognitive, intellectual and behavioural activities of individuals and groups. These activities define and are mutually defined by beliefs and ideas, knowledge and know-how, language and meanings, norms and rules, and opinions and values. The cultivation of transdisciplinary projects should embrace these cultural, social and psychological predispositions because they are core constituents of a trans-anthropo-logic. This requires transcending common research methods used in scientific studies and using scaffolding that facilitates agency, and positioning individuals and groups. However, scientists are rarely trained to pilot projects involving multiple stakeholders with different positions. This article explains why trained facilitators are needed to pilot transdisciplinary projects. They can cultivate transcendence and transgression – both analysed by the late Julie Thompson Klein – beyond the scope and purpose of common research methods. In essence, transdisciplinary practices respect different ontologies and epistemologies while incorporating ethical principles and moral values. The cultivation of transdisciplinary projects should accommodate and reduce asymmetries of power between politicians, public administrators, property owners, researchers and laypeople that are shaped by extant historical and societal variables in specific situations. Transdisciplinary projects should also apply multiple sources of quantitative data and qualitative information that represent the complexity, diversity and perhaps incommensurability of intentions, meanings, perceptions and values about specific subjects or situations. This is being achieved by innovative projects that should become beacons for change.
In 2016, by moving from armed struggle to collective reincorporation, Colombian women ex-guerrilleras of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) – the farianas – reconfigured the ‘combatant’ identity by leaving their weapons and engaging in post-war politics with their own feminist vision: insurgent feminism. Drawing upon feminist ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the north-east of Colombia in 2019 and 2022, this article has two interlinked objectives. First, through the lenses of embodiment and affects, it explores the challenges and contradictions of transiting from an armed organisation to a civilian identity for women militants. From there, the article then uses the continuum of militancy to explore the (ongoing) consolidation of farianas’ insurgent feminism and the tensions emerging in this endeavour. In doing so, the article contributes, theoretically, to the inclusion of emotions and embodiment in the theorisation of reincorporation and, empirically and politically, to the construction of knowledge and practice about insurgent feminism.
While many democratic theorists recognise the necessity of reforming liberal democracies to keep pace with social change, they rarely consider what enables such reform. In this conceptual article, we suggest that liberal democracies are politically robust when they are able to continuously adapt and innovate how they operate when doing so is necessary to continue to serve key democratic functions. These functions include securing the empowered inclusion of those affected, collective agenda setting and will formation, and the making of joint decisions. Three current challenges highlight the urgency of adapting and innovating liberal democracies to become more politically robust: an increasingly assertive political culture, the digitalisation of political communication and increasing global interdependencies. A democratic theory of political robustness emphasises the need to strengthen the capacity of liberal democracies to adapt and innovate in response to changes, just as it helps to frame the necessary adaptations and innovations in times such as the present.
Research on women’s participation in rebellions explores why such groups recruit women members, women’s rationale for joining, their pathways into armed organisations and their experiences therein. However, women are not only mobilised into rebel activity; they are also first movers: women founded or co-founded at least nine rebellions in the post-Second World War period. How do some women overcome common gendered barriers to entry and establish armed groups? I suggest that known women founders’ pathways were facilitated in part by conditions within their social infrastructure – including political relationships, royal status or divine mandates – which supplanted typical gendered obstacles, widened non-traditional pathways into violence and bolstered their credentials among community members. However, many founders still experienced persistent sexism and gendered resistance within their own organisations. These patterns demonstrate the ephemerality of relational infrastructure and the durability of gendered orders that precede, persist and can even entrench despite opportunities created during war.
This article enquires into imaginations of ‘political masculinity’ in a Caribbean-British context and the engagement of artists with the ideologies of the political sphere and their co-construction of it. The article focuses on gendered strategies of political self-fashioning in George Lamming’s Water With Berries and Orlando Patterson’s An Absence of Ruins, which emerge from the tension between political engagement and artistic detachment that structures the work and public image of Caribbean artists and their political interpellation into the public sphere. I propose that artists manoeuvre in a political field of tension as regards citizenship, nation building and cultural authority – themselves inherently gendered concepts – by problematising the basis of black revolutionary politics as tied to essentialised codes of masculinity that in turn rest on specific ideals of cultural authority, such as the (Victorian) ‘man of letters’, the ‘peasant’ or ‘folk hero’, or a more radical political masculine blackness associated with Black Power.
Most politicians are men, yet there is a surprising lack of focus within political science on the causes and consequences of male dominance. This article outlines how political science could benefit from greater engagement with scholarship on men and masculinities. The concept of ‘political masculinities’ has focused on the importance of ‘the political’ to masculinities scholarship; we argue for extending this concept to analyse men and masculinities within political science. We identify insights from scholarship on masculinities that would deepen our understanding of power within formal political arenas. We consider how gender and politics scholarship could benefit from expanding its focus on men. We highlight feminist institutionalism as a tool for bringing masculinities into the study of political institutions. We then offer a framework for taking this research agenda forwards, showing how we can better understand male dominance by thinking about how men access, exercise, maintain and reproduce power.
As the impacts of the climate crisis are being increasingly felt, a critical part of the solution is said to be the issue of mobilising climate finance. Particularly for the Global South, climate finance is crucial for sustainable development; to simultaneously meet the challenges of the climate crisis while addressing issues around economic development, health, poverty and beyond. Yet at present, Southern progress is being held back by ongoing and evolving patterns of Northern neo-coloniality, including through finance and debt relationships. In a context where the mainstream approach to mobilising climate finance – centring private finance, derisked by the state – reflects the dominance of US-style market-based finance, climate finance in this form simply risks becoming a new mechanism by which Southern countries are exposed to new types of subordination and dependence. Instead, structural changes and policy space is required for the Global South to break away from Northern financial dependence. The Bridgetown Agenda and calls for a new Bretton Woods moment are important steps in this direction. However, in addition such countries need the ability to develop financial institutions and regulatory structures that can simultaneously direct credit towards priority areas, regulate capital flows, and develop infrastructure that is democratically owned and oriented towards the needs of public and environment.
