Shalini Randeria

The State of Globalization: Legal Plurality, Overlapping Sovereignties and Ambiguous Alliances between Civil Society and the Cunning State in India

The successful global diffusion of formal democracy has gone hand in hand with the hollowing out of its substance. Ever more realms of domestic public policy are removed from the purview of national legislative deliberation and insulated from popular scrutiny. Rhetoric of accountability has accompanied the increasing unaccountability of international financial and trade organizations, transnational corporations as well as of states and NGOs. The new architecture of global governance characterized by legal plurality and overlapping sovereignties has facilitated a game of ‘passing the blame’ among these four actors. There is a curious ambivalence in current debates on globalization about the role of the state, which is conceived of as both central and marginal. Globalization is seen to be marked by the decline of both the external and the internal sovereignty of the state. Contrary to such a view, it will be argued here that the state is both an agent and an object of globalization. Although inadequate, the state remains indispensable as its laws and policies play a key role in transposing neo-liberal agendas to the national and local levels. If in the age of globalization and of economic Empire, political violence has been replaced by legal violence, resistance to it is also articulated in the language of law. This paper focuses on the dynamic of legal politics against impoverishment and dispossession caused by the new global designs of intellectual property protection, biodiversity conservation and privatization of the commons in India. The case studies in this paper point to the emergence of intertwined structures of rule, overlapping sovereignties and complex processes of legal transnationalization that have reconfigured the relations between law, state, and territoriality. If welfare states were concerned with the redistribution of risk and resources, cunning states seek to redistribute responsibility. Sensitivity to the history of colonialism would be an important corrective to the presentism and Westerncentrism of analyses of (legal) globalization.

Cunning states and unaccountable international institutions: Legal plurality, social movements and rights of local communities to common property resources

The paper analyses the new architecture of global governance which is characterised by unaccountable international institutions and scattered sovereignties. It examines the dilemmas of civil society actors (social movements and NGOs) involved in protecting the rights of local communities through strategic issue-based alliances with the state or the World Bank, whose legitimacy they question in other contexts. The cunning state remains a central actor in selectively transposing neoliberal policies to the national terrain and capitalises on its perceived weakness in order to render itself unaccountable to its citizens. The argument draws on empirical material from India around conflicts over the patenting of genetic resources, biodiversity conservation, forced displacement and privatisation of common property resources.

GLOBAL DESIGNS AND LOCAL LIFEWORLDS

The new language and practices of globalized environmental governance have a complex colonial genealogy. This case study delineates postcolonial continuities and shifts in regulatory, documentary and enforcement practices of biodiversity conservation and wildlife protection in India. Based on ethnographic material from the Gir forest, it analyses the twin processes of nature-making and state-building from the social and territorial margins of the state. These arbitrary and repressive practices involve a complex interplay of state laws, World Bank credit conditionalities and various sets of international norms advocated by conservationist and community-based human rights NGOs. Some dilemmas of a decolonization of the imagination in the South are considered with regard to trajectories of globalization of law.

Politics of the Urban Poor: Aesthetics, Ethics, Volatility, Precarity An Introduction to Supplement 11

Based on longitudinal ethnographic work, the authors of this special issue on the politics of the urban poor examine how regional events as well as scholarly traditions in these places have influenced the way the categories of the urban poor and of politics have emerged in both scholarly and public discourse. As the discussions that follow make clear, the relation between urban processes and city forms is a volatile one, and this volatility in turn has a decisive effect on how the poor emerge as political actors. Further, liberal forms of citizenship are but one form among others that become materialized through the claims that the poor make on the state. More importantly, the essays show that the socialities that undergird the lives of the poor are constantly being shaped by the experiences of precarity that go beyond material scarcity.

Rechtspluralismus und überlappende Souveränitäten: Globalisierung und der »listige Staat« in Indien

The article addresses the issues of legal plurality, overlapping sovereignties, the consequent fragmentation of state action and the increasing unaccountability of international financial and trade organizations, transnational corporations as well as of states and NGOs which characterize the new architecture of global governance. It will be argued that the widely prevalent diagnosis of the irrelevance of the state and an erosion of its sovereignty overlooks the continued importance of the state as its laws and policies play a key role in transposing neo-liberal agendas to the national and local levels. The article introduces the idea of the cunning state in an attempt to shift the focus of study from a consideration of state (in)capacity measured against a Western ideal to a delineation of state strategies. It is argued that whereas weak states lack the capacity to protect the interests of vulnerable citizens, cunning states show strength or weakness depending on the domestic interests at stake. The paper focuses on the dynamic of legal politics against impoverishment and dispossession caused by the new global designs of intellectual property protection, biodiversity conservation and privatisation of the commons in India. The case studies point to the emergence of intertwined structures of rule, overlapping sovereignties and complex processes of legal transnationalisation that have reconfigured the relations between law, state, and territoriality. They also reveal pragmatic issue-based alliances between civil society and the state. Finally, they point to the need to ground the study of globalisation in a fine-grained ethnography, linking the little to the large and to explore the specificity of various trajectories of legal plurality and its transnationalisation in particular contexts and cases.

Tensions of refugee politics in Europe

Electoral, welfare-state, and demographic politics are obstacles to refugees Globally, there are at least 65 million displaced persons, made up of 41 million internally displaced persons (those fleeing violence and/or persecution within their states borders), 21 million refugees (those fleeing persecution beyond those borders), and 3 million asylum seekers (1). Europe is not bearing the main brunt of the refugee crisis. Roughly 85% of the worlds refugees today are in the global South, and half of them are in countries with a per capita Gross Domestic Product of less than U.S.

Zwischen Begeisterung und Unbehagen: Ein anthropologischer Blick auf den Begriff der Kultur

5000 (2). The continent is nonetheless in the center of a political and social storm from the roughly 1,255,600 people who applied for asylum in the European Union (EU) in 2015 (3).

Colonial Complicities and Imperial Entanglements

Eine kurze Geschichte aus dem Universitatsbetrieb soll den Gegenstand des vorliegenden Aufsatzes veranschaulichen. Wir waren beide neu an einem anthropologischen Institut, als wir erfuhren, dass einer unserer neuen Kollegen vor einiger Zeit von der Stadtverwaltung mit der Entwicklung der stadtischen Integrationsleitlinien fur Migranten beauftragt worden war. Da der betreffende Kollege kein Migrationsforscher war und auch nicht vorhatte, sich in Zukunft mit Migrationsfragen naher zu beschaftigen, warf die Entscheidung der Stadt fur uns ein Ratsel auf, zumal es am benachbarten soziologischen Institut einen Lehrstuhl fur Migrationsforschung gab. Auf die Antwort sollten wir einige Monate spater zufallig stosen.

Gestaltung „staatlicher“ Policy im Schatten der Weltbank: Urbane Infrastruktur-Entwicklung, Zwangsumsiedlung und der listige Staat in Indien

Europe is literally a product of the Third World, wrote Frantz Fanon provocatively in The Wretched of the Earth.1 This brilliant insight into the mutually constitutive relationship between colonizing and colonized societies formulates a key theme of postcolonial scholarship avant la lettre. Of what possible relevance, however, could postcolonial theories be for an understanding of the past or present of Switzerland, a landlocked country in the heart of Europe, which neither possessed colonies nor pursued geopolitical interests in other regions of the world? Colonizing ambitions played little part in Swiss national identity formation, nor were imperial desires attributed to Switzerland either by other European colonizing powers or in the colonies. What makes this collection of essays unique is the very implausibility of its provocative claim to demonstrate the long shadows cast by (post)imperial formations on parts of Europe that were not colonizing societies but participated in the colonial project in a variety of ways and shared in its spoils. We see the Swiss as sojourners, not settlers, but nevertheless deeply imbricated in the imperial projects of their European neighbours overseas as they trade, proselytize, practise medicine, explore and travel or conduct anthropometric and botanical research in the colonies. Even in the absence of a colonial administrative service of their own, European empires could well offer a career for Swiss men, and occasionally women as well.

Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften

Die neue Architektur der Global Governance hat eine zunehmende Transnationalisierung der Politikgestaltung zur Folge und damit bedeutende Implikationen fur die staatliche Souveranitat und die Burgerrechte. Eine Konsequenz dieser Entwicklung ist die Transformation des Staates selbst, der teilweise transnationalisiert und privatisiert wird, was wiederum zu einer problematischen Verwasserung der Verantwortlichkeiten fuhrt. Die politischen Moglichkeiten der BurgerInnen, in diesem neuen Gefuge nationale Policies zu beeinflussen, sind hochst begrenzt, da die Verhandlungen zwischen internationalen Finanzorganisationen und Exekutivorganen der Kreditnehmerstaaten stattfinden. Somit sind sie sowohl der legislativen Deliberation als auch der offentlichen Meinungsbildung entzogen. Aufgrund der Vielzahl an offentlichen und privaten, nationalen und internationalen Akteuren, die an der Formulierung und Implementierung von soft law und Policies beteiligt sind, wenden sich die BurgerInnen in ihrem Widerstand deshalb nicht mehr nur an staatliche Gerichte, sondern vermehrt auch an internationale Instanzen. Unser Aufsatz spurt diesen vielfaltigen Verflechtungen und Grenzverschiebungen nach, welche die gegenwartige Transformation von Recht und Politik kennzeichnen. Wir zeigen die uberlappenden Souveranitaten, die Fragmentierung der Burgerrechte sowie die Folgen fur die demokratische Beschlussfassung auf, die mit der Zwangsumsiedlung im Rahmen eines von der Weltbank finanzierten Infrastrukturprojektes in Mumbai einhergingen.