Steffen Jensen

“They want us out”: Urban regeneration and the limits of integration in the Danish welfare state:

This article explores how a group of Palestinian families perceive and cope with urban regeneration in Denmarks largest public housing project, Gellerupparken. The neighborhood is publicly known as a criminal hotspot, politically defined as a migrant “ghetto”, and targeted by state policies as the other in need of change. The aim of the article is to show how urban regeneration is broader than the transformation of physical space and includes the perceived need to reform residents through a host of biopolitical interventions. While most policy work aim at establishing trusting and collaborative state-citizen relations, the perspective of the residents in Gellerupparken illuminate that the social effects of urban regeneration can be seen as paradoxical ones. Although Danish gentrification policies resonate with some sections of the residents, and can even count on the active participation of many residents in the self-administration of their neighborhood, the states interventions only seem to strengthen its conflicts with other residents, as well as enhance the distance between resident groups. In this way, the article explores what we call the limits to integration as the practices of the families in our study run counter to embodied notions of Danishness within the welfare state.

Counting Torture: Towards the Translation of Robust, Useful, and Inclusive Human Rights Indicators

ABSTRACT The turn to quantified measures is part of an attempt to produce more objective and comprehensive data on human rights violations. However, the turn to numbers has also been criticised for forcing human rights into the limitations of statistical capacities. This paper examines the methodological issues involved in trying to make human rights violations count, highlighting the cyclical process of translating between the experiences of human rights violations, quantified forms of measurement and human rights norms. It draws on the particular experience of conducting household surveys on the prevalence of torture in Nairobi, Kathmandu, and Dhaka. The paper argues that torture and ill-treatment can be made to count in ways that is robust, useful, and inclusive by developing indicators that are embedded in locally specific practices and forms of participation. This means treating the process of counting as a matter of contextualisation rather than abstraction. Doing so can help produce new understandings of the implications of human rights violations.

Awkward Entanglements: Kinship, Morality and Survival in Cape Town’s Prison–township Circuit

ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore how townships and prison are linked in South Africa among criminalised populations. While the two are often described – also by residents – as belonging to radically different moral worlds, the article shows how they are entangled in often awkward and difficult, yet necessary ways. We show this by paying acute attention to kinship structures and how kin are disavowed, allowed and sometimes denied as residents find their way to prison and out again. The empirical basis of the article is long-term fieldwork in and engagement with Cape Town’s townships and their residents, many of who have experiences with prison as (former) inmates, as family to inmates, or through constant circulation of prison stories.

Epilogue: Brokers – Pawns, Disrupters, Assemblers?

Aalborg Universitet Institut for Samfundsudvikling og Planlagning, Denmark ‘I don’t like assemblage theory’, a good friend and colleague chided, as I sent him the Introduction to an edited volume that I had written (Jensen and Ronsbo 2014). ‘It just means that everything is related’. Meekly, I responded that maybe it was a bit more complicated than this. The comment, though, reflects a deeper issue around the use of theories such as assemblage, which became the newest craze a decade or so ago, not least with the publication of Collier and Ong’s seminal book (2005). This was followed by a string of really innovating publications using assemblage theory in diverse fields, like for instance Abrahamsen and Williams’ excellent analysis of security assemblages globally and in Africa (Abrahamsen and Williams 2009). Suddenly it was possible to talk about and discuss security provision as part of global networks where arms dealers, security frameworks, development aid and the crisis of masculinity were connected and could be contained within one theoretical framework through what Manuel de Landa calls ‘relations of exteriority’ (de Landa 2006). In my own work, I explored how a small women’s crisis centre in rural South Africa struggled within an assemblage that encompassed Nordic tax payers, development policies, corrupt state practices, rural gender relations and aspirations of the women of the organisation (Jensen 2014). For me and for many others, assemblage theory constituted the thrilling promise of understanding social processes beyond the local context and beyond human agency. While there are still many new contributions to assemblage theory, the excitement, my own included I must admit, might have cooled off slightly. In many ways, this special issue expresses the excitement as well as the mounting doubts about the usefulness of the theoretical apparatus. One of the more lingering critiques relates to its writing off the centrality of human agency: while a shrimp might be important as an actant, it still exists within and is rendered meaningful by all too human interests. This legitimate critique is echoed in the introduction and the contributions to the special issue, which focus on brokerage and brokers – both as an object of analysis in its own right and as a lens to understand how local processes and dynamics intertwine with global processes. The special issue does an excellent job on both accounts. The Introduction sets out the themes and discussions about brokerage in really competent ways and while I do have some hesitations or questions about the use(fullness) of assemblage theory, it also brings new ways to understand brokerage between local

This House Is Not My Own …! Temporalities in a South African Homeland

In this article I explore different competing temporalities in the former homeland of KaNgwane. While homelands are spatial entities, the geographical scars of apartheid, they are clearly also temporal entities, embodiments of apartheids temporal divisions of worlds of tradition and worlds of modernity. I refer to this temporality as the dominant homeland temporality. However, not all life is lived according to this temporality. Through the narrative and life trajectory of one man, I identify two alternative temporalities that I call ancestral and momentous temporality. In this analysis, I draw on Achille Mbembes work to suggest that temporality is a particular form of subjectivity. It relates to history and ideology but cannot be reduced to either. Furthermore, temporality as subjectivity seldom exists in the singular. In fact, as the narrative and life trajectory of the main protagonist illustrates, the different temporalities weave in and out of each other. In this way, the story echoes the complex position of the homeland and how it animates life while being remarkably absent in post-apartheid South Africa.

Homelands as Frontiers: Apartheid's Loose Ends – An Introduction

In this Introduction we discuss the apparent erasure of the homelands from the social imagination of post-apartheid South Africa. We ask what has become of the homelands and reflect on the lives of those millions that still inhabit former homeland areas. In order to explore this, we tentatively evoke and develop the terms ‘frontier’ and ‘the loose ends of apartheid’. We understand the concept of the frontier not as margin or the end; rather the homelands as frontier should be understood not as a stage of the past, but as intense zones of contestation, where the future of post-apartheid South Africa will, in part, be determined. ‘Loose ends’ refers to the many unresolved questions that are being negotiated in these zones of contestation. This Introduction falls into three parts. First, through a brief historical analysis, we depart from what we, drawing on Cherryl Walker, call the master narrative of loss and restoration, in which ‘homelands’ signalled loss and ‘post-apartheid’ a restoration. Secondly, we turn to some of the policy initiatives taken to erase the homeland past, which, ironically, often reproduced them. Third, through the different contributions, we account for the great variety of life and loose ends in the homelands today. It is our contention that only through addressing the loose ends in their complexity and ambiguity can we hope to address the legacies of the homelands in a way that may pave the way to different futures.

Between illegality and recognition: Exploring sacrificial violence in a Manila brotherhood

This article explores how poor, young men in a Manila relocation site enter into a brotherhood as a means to claim recognition from dominant society. It argues that by joining the brotherhood, which emanates out of a Greekletter fraternity tradition in US and Philippine universities, the young men establish a link to people and networks in power. Drawing on ritual and religious sacrifice theory, the article illustrates how sacrificial violence in initiation rites becomes a performance of worth. This performance of valour and worth do indeed reach dominant society. After exploring the initiation ritual of the young men the article then turns to explore the nature of the Philippine elite. This analysis suggests that while there are several, often competing strands within elite politics (legalistic, moralistic and clientelist), the efforts of the young men end up confirming and reproducing the elite and their own marginalization as unruly, uncouth goons of political machines.

Corporealities of violence: rape and the shimmering of embodied and material categories in South Africa

In this paper, I explore the relationship between categorization of bodies, materiality and the spaces they occupy in relation to rape and sexual violence in Cape Town. What kinds of corporealities are called forth as a result of violence and what effects might we imagine in terms of reterritorializing the body in law, in politics and in social science, to mention but a few fields? In order to capture the radical instability of bodies, identities and spaces that, although constitutive, are radicalized in relation to especially sexual violence, I invoke the concept of shimmering. Bodies, identities and spaces are constantly moving in and out of focus – shimmering – as different groups attempt to stabilize particular truths and readings. However, the paper argues, these attempts are constantly undermined by the inability to capture excess (material and discursive) which then turns in to disgust – about acts sexual violence and about the compromised female body. While the paper is empirically based on three cases of gang rape in Cape Town, the ambition is to explore the haunted relationship between corporeality, categories and violence more generally.

Youth Violence: Sources and Solutions in South Africa

publications are omitted from the ‘updated’ bibliography, which could have been better organised to avoid repetition. Important personalities, notably absent from earlier editions, are still missing. David Rubadiri, for example, does not feature in the A to Z, despite playing a significant role in the nationalist struggle. Previous dictionaries in the series have been criticised for over-weighting the A to Z section towards the contemporary era. More encouragingly, Kalinga includes a suitably detailed and lengthy section on pre-colonial Malawi (his area of expertise), striking a fair balance with the colonial and postcolonial periods. There is perhaps a heavier focus on politics rather than culture. Surprisingly, the popular Chewa association, the Nyau society (or gule wamkulu – big dance) does not feature as an entry of its own. Instead, it is mentioned in the broader section on ‘music and dance’ (p. 326). Overall, the dictionary serves as a useful introduction and reference book for readers new to Malawian history. But as for providing an up-to-date account of Malawi’s current political profile, the book is already obsolete. Since publication Malawi has undergone significant political change and a dramatic shift of power. Former president Bingu wa Mutharika, whose reputation had turned from progressive reformer to intolerant autocrat since his re-election in 2009, died unexpectedly in April 2012. Several days of confusion ensued before he was succeeded by the Vice-President Joyce Banda, whom Mutharika had expelled from his ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the cabinet, in 2010. Joyce Banda’s entry in the dictionary is brief, although her difficult relationship with Mutharika, after she spoke out against the nomination of his brother, Peter Mutharika as the next presidential candidate, is noted. Successful business woman and pioneer of women’s and children’s rights, Joyce Banda has made history by becoming the first female head of state in the region, and the second in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus far, Banda has not hesitated to repeal repressive laws implemented by her predecessor, and to speak out on controversial issues, such as gay rights. The change has already been hailed by some as Malawi’s new dawn.