Matthew Bolton

The politics of NGO registration in international protectorates: the cases of Bosnia and Iraq

Following international interventions in Bosnia-Herzegovina(1) and Iraq, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have played a central role in delivering humanitarian relief, encouraging participation in new systems of government, and advocating on behalf of marginalised groups. Although intervening agencies have framed such autonomous organisations as unquestionably virtuous, scholars have increasingly questioned the agency of NGOs, pointing to the constraining effects of funding and regulatory mechanisms. This paper contributes to this body of work by offering a detailed examination of legislation requiring NGOs to register with nascent state institutions. Drawing on case study material from Bosnia and Iraq, it argues that NGO registration should not be dismissed as a technical or legal matter, but that it should be embraced as a significant political practice embedded in relations of power. Registration legislation has increased the transparency of NGO funding origins and institutional practices, yet it has simultaneously acted as a barrier to smaller organisations and led to the transmission of international objectives through civil society entities.

Occupy Wall Street as a Palimpsest: Overview of a Dynamic Movement

What is Occupy? A “liberal tea party,”1 “a flash mobs of slackers,”2 the “Populist Movement Reborn,”3 “a paper Tyrannosaurus”?4 Seldom defined, yet relentlessly analogized, haphazard commentary on the Occupy Movement has surpassed sophisticated analysis. This means that even basic questions—how the movement works, what it means to “belong” to it, who is an “Occupier,” and why it matters—remain inadequately answered. Many observers have reacted with exasperation and incomprehension when faced with the complexity of the Movement, dismissing it because it did not fit within their preexisting notions of what politics, protest, or social movements are supposed to do. One might expect the National Review to dismiss Occupy Wall Street (OWS) as “inchoate” and “incoherent,”5 but even the New York Times’ early coverage portrayed OWS as “pantomime progressivism,” an “intellectual vacuum” whose message was “virtually impossible to decipher.”6 But dismissing a social phenomenon as incomprehensible “is not so much an explanation … as a confession that one has been unable to explain it,” a breakdown in one’s analysis, not necessarily the society one observes.7

This Space Is Occupied!: The Politics of Occupy Wall Street’s Expeditionary Architecture and De-gentrifying Urbanism

On their first day, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstrators marched past a group of individuals, dressed up and drinking champagne, gathered on the balcony of the Merchant’s Exchange building at 55 Wall Street. Footage shows the celebrants adjacent to, but securely removed from the street, mockingly toasting the protesters, photographing them, chanting “pay your share.”1 This widely disseminated video provided a convenient visualization of the Occupy Movement’s assertions: a privileged 1%, safely elevated from the tumult of the 99% struggling below, engaging in activities completely discordant with the circumstances surrounding them. But the event also illustrates how the built environment frames and mediates social interactions, how space can be inscribed with political significance and structure social interaction. Through architectural intervention—a private space elevated above the public street—antithetical activities each retained their integrity. The building operated as a “technology of separation.”2 Spatial politics underpin the Occupy Movement and have shaped its unfolding. By locating itself in an urban context contingent on a unique confluence of architectural, political, and economic factors, OWS engaged with the complex forces that produce and inscribe space, that engender, shape, and circumscribe the polis.

barricades dot net: Post-Fordist Policing in Occupied New York City

If one took literally many of the headlines in late 2011, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstrators in New York faced not human police but an array of highly violent shirts. “‘White Shirts’ of Police Dept. Take On Enforcer Role,” wrote The New York Times.3 Gothamist reported “NYPD White Shirt Uses Baton To Beat Occupy Wall Street Protesters.”4 From the blogosphere: “White Shirts Gone Wild.”5 This may seem like an insignificant instance of the media anthropomorphizing the white uniform of high-ranking New York Police Department (NYPD) officers who used violence against OWS protestors. But it actually reveals the power of the police uniform, which functions to depersonalize authority, directing accountability toward an institution, rather than a specific person.6 Indeed, it draws on Max Weber’s conception of the modern state, in which institutions, offices, rules, and regulations hold authority, rather than specific people.7 The uniform suggests that “The Police” as an entity uses force, not the individual who inhabits the clothing. As Weber conceived of it, responsibility for abuses by “White Shirts” would trace up the chain of command, eventually to the police commissioner and the mayor.

An Occupied Political Science: Concluding Reflections on Downtown Political Thinking

In at least two respects, Thomas Jefferson set the standard for the modern American university when he founded the University of Virginia (UVA). First, unlike existing universities such as Harvard or Yale, Jefferson sought to create a new, nonsectarian institution of higher learning that taught and trained leaders in science and public service and affairs rather than the law or religious doctrine. Second, Jefferson was largely responsible for UVA’s design, locating it in the “middle of nowhere.” Purchased from then president James Monroe in 1817, the tract the university sits on what was originally farmland outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. The geographical, intellectual, and architectural form of the American “campus” thus took shape. On the one hand, the pastoral center of the university (what is known as the “quad” on many campuses), framed by its academic buildings with the library as its focal point, became a place for quiet, monastic reflection. On the other, the campus itself stood in geographical isolation from the broader society, far removed from its social, political, cultural, and economic ills. It was and continues to be a peculiar combination of forces at work: the American university as a place of inquiry and knowledge, freed from the “superstitions” of the pulpit in the rational and scientific service of the “public”—yet also a “City on a Hill” in miniature, set apart from the ugly distractions of the town by physical, intellectual, cultural, and geographical boundaries.