Radha D'Souza

Law and ‘Development’ Discourses About Water: Understanding Agency in Regime Changes

Understandings of structure-agency relations in social theory point to the ways in which social structures and social agency constrain and enable social change. What is less understood is the role of concepts and ideas that mediate the actions of social agents in structural change. For example critical responses to neo-liberal transformations from scholars and activists juxtapose states and markets as antithetical institutions. In doing so, do they mirror the conceptual frameworks of neo-liberal transformations albeit from different ends of the binaries? And, do they end up facilitating the very neo-liberal regime changes that the critical voices oppose? This wider question is examined in this chapter by interrogating two events: the setting up of World Commission on Dams in March 1997 and the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the Convention on Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses in May 1997. The two events occurred during a critical moment in the neo-liberal transformations of water regimes for the ‘Third World’ in the context of critical voices and protests for water justice and access to water. This chapter interrogates the contexts within which the two events occurred, the conceptual frameworks that informed the two discourses about the two events and the social outcomes in the water sector that followed for the ‘Third World’.

What Can Activist Scholars Learn from Rumi

The neoliberal restructuring of higher education everywhere is accompanied by a distinctive branch of knowledge known as activist scholarship. Drawing from a number of disciplines including education, sociology, social anthropology, social theory, law, and human rights, activist scholarship proclaims as its core mission Marx’s imperative that philosophy should transform the world. Activist scholars affirm human emancipation as the goal of scholarship and set themselves the task of building bridges between theory and practice. There is a spectrum of views on the theory-practice nexus. Regardless, they all share certain common grounds that affirm (1) a nexus between theory and practice; (2) a relationship between knowledge and action; (3) knowledge as a condition for emancipation and freedom; (4) the affirmation of love and solidarity for social change; (5) the importance of everyday life; and (6) the role of the activist scholar in social change. These themes form part of a long and entrenched tradition in dissident Eastern philosophies, in particular the poet-saint traditions. Here each of the themes in activist scholarship is interrogated using the works of Mawlana Jalal al Din Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet. What can activist scholars learn from Rumi?

Three actors, two geographies, one philosophy: the straightjacket of 'social movements'

This chapter argues that one reason for the intellectual crisis on the ‘left’1 since the emergence of ‘globalization’2 is their inability to develop conceptual resources to advance ideas about human emancipation, liberation and self-determination to re-envision new forms of social orders and revolutionary social transformations. ‘Globalization’ introduces a new tension in social movements. ‘Globalization’ rests on neoliberal ideology or ‘liberal triumphalism’ and widespread regime changes in the governance of capitalism (D’Souza, 2008, 2010a). These changes alter the role of social movements within a globalized social order. Liberal triumphalism expressed as ‘the end of history’ by Fukuyama, is, in turn, premised on the ‘death of communism’ following the end of the Cold War, the implosion of the Soviet Union and the rise of China as a capitalist power. These developments challenge intellectuals on the left to respond to and develop conceptual resources to meet the new challenges of liberal triumphalism

Introduction to the Special Issue: Postcolonialism, Realism, and Critical Realism

It will not be an overstatement to say that postcolonial theory remains the single most influential theoretical approach to the study of non-Western societies or the Third World, after Marxism. Trawling through past issues of JCR, and publications in various Critical Realism series by Routledge, what stands out is the absence of engagement with postcolonial theory in critical realism. Conversely, Third World Marxism has produced a sustained and engaging critique of postcolonial theory from realist perspectives, but remains, by and large, distanced from critical realism. The absence of engagement in critical realism with a theoretical orientation that has a profound influence on the way we see the Third World constitutes a problematic in its own right that calls for interrogation. My aim in this editorial is a more modest one. I propose to identify certain key concerns raised by postcolonial theory and the critique of those concerns in Third World Marxism in the hope that it will open up possibilities of a fuller, more nuanced critique of postcolonial theory in critical realism in the future. The core mission of postcolonial theory is an epistemological one. It concerns the way knowledge about the Third World, the colonized subjects, is produced, and the treatment of the Third World in Western philosophy and social theory. Gayatri Spivak, one of the main proponents of postcolonial theory together with Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, refers to the extent to

Review Essay: Justice and Governance in Dystopia

Abstract This review essay takes three very different types of books, one on new social movements, the second on global governance and the third on dystopia, to reflect on methodological questions in knowledge production for social change which is the professed aim of critical and radical scholarship. The essay reflects on the methodological problems of making connections between philosophical, sociological and empirical analyses in ways that can guide action. The treatment of facts and events, omission to consider gaps and absences in accounts of experiences, the obfuscation of the desirable and the possible in legal liberalism, problems of connecting everyday life to ontological questions of being and reality, perspectives and unity of micro and macrocosms, are some of the themes considered. The essay engages the methodological strategies that are needed to make the moves from space/time in philosophy to spatio-temporality in sociological analysis to here and now in empirical studies. It argues that all levels are interpenetrated in manifest experiences and that it is important to grasp the institutional constraints on knowledge production if knowledge is to provide guidance for transformative action.