Håkan Thörn

IN BETWEEN SOCIAL ENGINEERING AND GENTRIFICATION: URBAN RESTRUCTURING, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND THE PLACE POLITICS OF OPEN SPACE

ABSTRACT: The article examines the emergence of urban countercultures and social movements in Christiania, Copenhagen, and Haga, Gothenburg in the context of the Scandinavian welfare state, from the 1970s to the present. Specifically, it investigates the relations between urban governance, gentrification processes, and social movements in the urban restructuring of Scandinavian cities. While Christiania today remains a space for counterculture, the struggle to save Haga contributed to a gentrification of the district, as it became officially “re-evaluated” and upgraded. The article examines the similarities and differences in the urban movement trajectories in these two cases, highlighting their “place politics of open space.” Cafe Moonfisher in the Freetown Christiania responds with irony to police harassments. In Copenhagen, gentrification has gone hand in hand with zero tolerance. Christiania has resisted by insisting on keeping its collective use to the property

Aid(s) Politics and Power: A Critique of Global Governance

This article provides a case study of overseas development assistance for AIDS to South African civil society; it analyses how power is exercised as well as resisted in the context of international aid. While it is argued that governance theory tends to underestimate power inequalities in the context of policy networks, this case is instead related to the theoretical debate regarding whether current global power structures can be analysed in terms of a (US-led) neo-imperialism, or whether they should rather be understood in terms of post-imperialist power constellations based on ‘regulation of self-regulation’ through market mechanisms, and with an emphasis on ‘civil society participation’. While the case demonstrates how US aid under the Bush administrations to a certain extent involved a ‘civilising mission’, it is argued that ‘regulation of self-regulation’ was the more significant form of governing AIDS aid networks, contributing to a development through which AIDS activism went through a process of ‘NGO-isation’, de-politicising the AIDS issue.1

The Meaning(s) of Solidarity: Narratives of Anti-Apartheid Activism

The global anti-apartheid movement mobilised millions of people who took part in boycotts and demonstrations. Despite the significance of the anti-apartheid movement, actual research on its nature as a transnational movement has been meagre. Most research on the anti-apartheid movement has focused on its national aspects, looking, for example, at the Australian, American, British or South African anti-apartheid movements. In this article, I argue that the most crucial aspect of this movement was its construction of transnational networks and forms of action. The central dimensions of the action forms and identification processes of the anti-apartheid struggle are analysed; historical continuities as well as discontinuities are investigated; and the movement is related to relevant political and historical contexts. The analysis is based on historical documents and interviews with 52 activists in four countries, and intends to make a contribution to the interrelated theoretical debates on (a) the relations between ‘new’ and ‘old’ social movements, and (b) transnational activist networks and social movements in a globalising world.

Conclusions: Re-Engineering the Swedish Welfare State

In this book we set out to investigate the ongoing transformations of the Swedish welfare state against the background of its twentieth-century development. We started by depicting an important event taking place in the early 1990s, when the centre-right government declared that they would implement a ‘system shift’. The neoliberal ideology inspiring this shift had already influenced the Social Democratic government’s mid-1980s economic policy, in its attempts to find a way out of the economic problems of the 1970s and the early 1980s. It was, however, not until the 1990s that an increasing number of social spheres and a substantial part of the population started to become seriously affected by the cutbacks in the public sector and the reorganization of the welfare system in Sweden, previously often perceived as a ‘model country’ in the context of welfare policy discourse.

The Stockholm Uprising in Context: Urban Social Movements in the Rise and Demise of the Swedish Welfare-State City

In May 2013, an urban uprising shook Sweden and took the whole world by surprise, as reports from international news agencies and news channels such as CNN, BBC World, Al-Jazeera and Sky News reported live from poor suburbs in Stockholm, putting in question the image of Sweden as a calm and prosperous society. Following local mobilization demanding the public investigation of a police killing, the uprisings started on the evening of 19 May in the suburb of Husby, with 12,000 inhabitants, in northern Stockholm, where approximately 100 cars were burnt on the first night. The uprising went on for five more nights, spreading to other poor Stockholm suburbs. The magnitude of attention these events received in the media throughout the week of turmoil contributed to their spread to eight smaller cities around Sweden.

Governing Movements in Urban Space

In order to understand the key strategies of urban policy in the context of the Swedish welfare state, the district Haga in Gothenburg is a highly relevant case. Haga has actually played a role as a reference point for Swedish urban policy in two distinct historical phases. In the 1930s, Haga belonged to the inner-city working-class districts that were objects of a public investigation, which laid the foundation for the national housing policy during the coming decades (Karlsson 1993). In the 1970s, the state-funded ‘cultural conservation’ of the district, linked to a redefinition of the area from a ‘working-class slum’ to ‘a histori-cal neighbourhood’, became an important reference in a major turn in Swedish urban planning (Holmberg 2006).

Governing AIDS: Globalization, the State and Civil Society

The process of globalization has encouraged social scientists to re-define the concept of politics, making it less state-centred. In connection with this, the concept of ‘governance’ has emerged as a mode of re-thinking politics — in a national as well as in a global context. During the last decade, a number of works in the social sciences, including analyses of AIDS politics in a global context (e.g. Jones 2005; Soderholm 1997), have used the concept of governance in order to grasp new political developments.

Politics of responsibility: governing distant populations through civil society in Mozambique, Rwanda and South Africa

Abstract This article presents and analyses the findings of a research project on power relations in the context of development partnerships with civil society on HIV/AIDS in Mozambique, Rwanda and South Africa, and engages in a critical dialogue with governmentality analysis. It argues that contemporary neoliberal government needs to be understood as context-specific articulations of three forms of power discussed by Foucault – sovereignty, discipline and biopower – and, in the global domain, a fourth form of power – (new) imperialism. Further, the analysis demonstrates how the introduction of a ‘package of (de-)responsibilisation’ shapes CSOs’ activities so that they become competitive service providers, use evidence-based methods and produce measurable results. Addressing the issue of resistance, it shows how the transfer of responsibilities may involve tension and struggle – a politics of responsibility.

Transformations of the Swedish Welfare State: Social Engineering,Governance and Governmentality

In the early 1990s the Swedish welfare system was struck by capital flight and a national financial crisis creating severe problems for the Swedish economy. This crisis became the final blow to Swedish welfare policies as we once knew them, that is, based on Keynesian economic policies and a politically coordinated market economy with active labour market measures aimed at full employment, industrial restruc-turing and maximal economic growth; a continuous expansion of state-produced welfare services based on taxation and aimed at reducing social inequalities and individual risks through redistribution and universal public services (Benner 1997; Huber and Stephens 2001); and funded on corporatist cross-class compromises as well as knowledge-based social engineering implemented through a reform bureaucracy (Korpi 2006; Rothstein 1992, 1996; Wisselgren 2008).

The Emergence of a Global Civil Society: The Case of Anti-Apartheid

Abstract This article argues that the transnational anti-apartheid movement which, from a global perspective, must be seen as one of the most significant social movements during the post-war era, made an important contribution to the emergence and consolidation of a global civil society during this period. The transnational anti-apartheid movement lasted for more than three decades, from the late 1950s to 1994, when the first democratic elections in South Africa were held, and it had a presence on all continents. In this sense, the interactions of the anti-apartheid movement were part of the construction of a global political culture during the Cold War. Further, I argue that the history of the anti-apartheid struggle provides an important historical case for the analysis of present-day global politics, as it is evident that the present mobilization of a global civil society in relation to economic globalization and supranational political institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, has historical links to the post-war, transnational political culture of which the anti-apartheid movement formed an important part. Movement organizations, action forms and networks that were formed and developed in the anti-apartheid struggle are present in this contemporary context, making the transnational anti-apartheid movement an important historical resource for contemporary global civil society.