Session Title:

Everyday Geographies of the State

Session Affiliation:

Political Geography Research Group

Session Organiser(s):

Alex Jeffrey (Newcastle University)

Joe Painter (Durham University)

Session 1 Chair:

Joe Painter (Durham University)

Session Abstract:

Following the global financial crisis and beginnings of an economic recession, there have been numerous calls for increased state intervention in the economy and regulation of financial markets. This renewed concern with mundane questions of economic management initially seems in stark contrast with recent state policy agendas dominated by security concerns, and the ‘war on terror’. However, as recent work in political geography and other disciplines has demonstrated, all kinds of state practices in diverse national contexts have banal, prosaic and quotidian elements, and it often precisely the most routinised and everyday forms of state actions that are the most effective and powerful. The session will explore these everyday geographies of the state. In doing so we will look to open a conversation between political geography and anthropology, tracing the spaces, practices, subjectivities and materialities through which the idea of the state is conveyed and lived. This session will focus both on the involvement of the state in everyday life and on the everyday life of the state.

Session: 1

Paper 1

Title:

Researching the 'little things' of statehood: the material and the mundane in the study of the Tibetan government-in-exile

Author(s):

Fiona McConnell (Queen Mary, University of London)

Presenter:

Fiona McConnell (Queen Mary, University of London)

Abstract:

In a short exposition on theoretical trends within critical geopolitics, Nigel Thrift (2000) makes a persuasive argument for a shift towards the ‘little things’: the mundane objects, people and words which constitute international politics. This parallel agenda for critical geopolitics is theoretically convincing, providing a critique of critical geopolitics’ fixation with discourse, representation and textuality and offering a (re) focus on everyday stories, materiality and the formal structures of political power. However, Thrift offers no suggestions as to how this approach can be followed through methodologically: how can we go about researching, documenting and analysing these ‘little things’? This paper offers an empirical example of how such an approach might be implemented ‘in the field’ and puts forward its benefits and limitations as both a methodological practice and a theoretical intervention. The Tibetan government-in-exile - a political entity which performs a number of state-like functions and operates with partial de facto sovereignty yet no legal recognition or jurisdiction over territory - is a case which fundamentally challenges realist interpretations of sovereignty and conventional understandings of the relationship between sovereignty and territory. This paper will focus on the methodological challenges of researching the papers, practices and people associated with questions of the legitimation and recognition of the Tibetan government-in-exile and its ‘citizens’, with attention paid to the identity documents, databases, civil servants, certificates, archives, letters of recommendation and verification, signatures, signage, officials, representatives, letterheads, forms, files, photographs and choice of terminology through which this state-which-is-not-a-state is constituted and its legal personality negotiated.

Paper 2

Title:

Performing Participatory Citizenship: the everyday state and poverty alleviation programmes in contemporary India.

Author(s):

Delampady Narayana (Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, India)

Dwaipayan Bhattacharrya (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, India)

Presenter:

Glyn Williams, Binitha Thampi, Sailaja Nandigama (University of Sheffield)

Abstract:

Despite nearly two decades of neo-liberalism, the state remains an important figure within lives of many in India, not least through its actions in the contested arena of poverty alleviation. ‘The poor’ have long been the target of government programmes, bringing in to being asymmetric relationships between an expanding array of state personnel and their governed populations (Chatterjee, 2004). More recent Indian poverty alleviation efforts have envisaged poor people as playing a more active role in their own ‘uplift’, participating in the design and implementation of projects undertaken under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGP), or organising themselves into self-help groups under the Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY). Ideas underpinning these programmes, of developing poor people’s entrepreneurial potential, ‘voice’ and social capital, and of ‘making state institutions more responsive to poor people’ (World Bank, 2001), echo wider trends in the governance of poverty throughout the Global South. They also require the state and its poorer citizens to meet within an array of ‘invited spaces of participation’ (Cornwall and Coelho, 2006), such as village open meetings, that are intended to challenge existing modes of interaction.

This paper, based around recent fieldwork, evaluates the effects of performing participatory citizenship within the NREGP and SGSY from the perspective of different economically and politically marginalised groups in Kerala and West Bengal. It will highlight the exclusions and hidden costs that such performances entail for these groups, and the wider contradictions and potential for democratic change engaging with poverty alleviation programmes holds for them.

Paper 3

Title:

Negotiating the ‘NASS Circuit’: The Banal Authority of Asylum Accommodation

Author(s):

Jonathan Darling (Durham University)

Presenter:

Jonathan Darling (Durham University)

Abstract:

Since the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, asylum seekers in the UK have been dispersed across the country to zones of accommodation on a no choice basis; with housing provision allocated through The National Asylum Support Service (NASS). This paper sets out to examine the political practices which accompany the banal allocation of asylum accommodation in Britain through considering how the work of NASS impacts the everyday lives of asylum seekers. The paper draws upon ethnographic research in Sheffield to examine how asylum seekers described their experiences of accommodation within the city and argues that throughout these accounts we see a series of banal modes of spatial regulation, allocation and authority being enacted as state practices condition their lives. The paper highlights three modes of prosaic spatial discipline. The first of these is the constant movement which accompanies housing within a mobile ‘NASS circuit’, the second is felt through the lack of autonomy given to asylum seekers within accommodation processes, and the third is their lack of control over these spaces. These three modes of state authority create an account of housing which is deliberately decoupled from a sense of homeliness or comfort, as accommodation becomes a key space through which a relation to the state and to authority is lived for asylum seekers. In the banal conditions of performing NASS policies within Sheffield, I conclude that we witness the emergence of not simply a politics of limited hospitality, but an active politics of discomfort as a mode of spatial, and social, regulation.

Paper 4

Title:

Spectral Geographies: Haunting and the Everyday State

Author(s):

Kate Coddington Senner (Syracuse University, New York)

Presenter:

Kate Coddington Senner (Syracuse University, New York)

Abstract:

The everyday work of the state necessarily involves the ordinary, prosaic lives of people, inside and outside of its often arbitrarily designated boundaries, but I argue it also involves the everyday presence of ghosts. Recent theorizing of geographies which circulate elusively, exist uncertainly, or leave traces behind, as featured in the 2008 special edition of Cultural Geographies demonstrate that, “careful attunement to the ghostly, spectral and the absent, can be a particularly powerful and emancipatory way of dealing with a number of problematics central to contemporary geographical thought.” I ground this analysis of the spectral nature of the state in ethnographic research I conducted in Seward, Alaska in 2008. Stories about small town politics, failed communication, and bureaucratic stalemates demonstrated that this postcolonial state haunts residents with apparitions of its colonial past, working within and because of the bodies of its citizens. This state influences the lives of present-day Alaskan residents through its movement through historical bodies—in the birth of children, the contagion of disease, and the baptism of souls. It is present precisely in its absence, as it singles out certain bodies for non-recognition. And the ghost of the colonial state is on the move, circulated through words, creating through innuendo and careless talk a community that still refuses to come to grips with its participation in the continued marginalization of Native Alaskan residents. Envisioning the state as both a haunting and haunted phenomenon may challenge geographers to engage with that state in new and productive ways.

Paper 5

Title:

Conveying and contesting the state: the role of CAB Service advisors

Author(s):

Rhys Jones (Aberystwyth University)

Presenter:

Rhys Jones (Aberystwyth University)

Abstract:

In this paper, I discuss the role played by the Citizens’ Advice Bureaux Service (CAB Service) in conveying the British state to its citizens. Since its inception at the outbreak of the Second World War, the CAB Service has provided support and guidance to British citizens facing all manner of welfare difficulties. In broad terms, the CAB Service has sought to convey the intricacies of the state to the British population and has acted as a significant means through which everyday forms of citizenship have been reproduced. I focus specifically on the cornerstone of this everyday relationship between the British state and its citizens; namely the CAB Service’s advisors. Drawing on interviews and documentary research, I examine how advisors’ role in helping clients to make sense of the British state. While these advisors are complicit in the British state’s efforts to promote particular kinds of behaviour amongst its citizens – particularly with regard to clients’ interactions with the welfare state – their practices also have the potential to enable clients to resist and undermine the state’s policies. In discussing these empirical issues, I seek to make broader claims about the various ways in which the state is able to affect behaviour change amongst its citizens. While research to date has focused on the potential for government policies and advertising to change individual and group behaviour, my aim in this paper is to show how key individuals within state and quasi-state organisations are important conveyors and contestors of state projects.

Session: 2

Everyday Geographies of the State II

Chair:

Alex Jeffrey (Newcastle University)

Paper 1

Title:

Affinity and the State in Tijuana’s Water Supply

Author(s):

Katharine Meehan (University of Arizona, USA)

Presenter:

Katharine Meehan (University of Arizona, USA)

Abstract:

Provision of municipal water supply is one of the most formidable challenges facing cities, especially in the global south. Patchworks of formal and informal water provision networks are common in rapidly-growing cities such as Tijuana, Mexico; however, it is unclear the degree to which informal water provision, such as rainwater harvesting, greywater reuse, and water theft, results in changing subjectivities and community dynamics relative to the State (the local water provider). Drawing on 13 months of fieldwork in Tijuana, this paper analyzes how participation in these institutions alters or enacts new patterns of State practice. Findings indicate that while harvesting and reuse provide off-grid households with the institutional tools for self-governance and autonomous political subjectivity, harvesters, in fact, are not abandoning the grid. Their practices and politics represent attempts to re-engage and reform State practice through more equitable growth planning and grid extension. Overall, these results point not toward autonomous movements, but toward social change through incremental, ephemeral, affinity-based assemblages (e.g. Day, 2006), lending empirical support to recent theoretical efforts to better understand the “flatness” and everyday political ecologies of State power.

Paper 2

Title:

Grey zones of state-building

Author(s):

Christine Schenk (University of Geneva, Switzerland and swisspeace)

Presenter:

Christine Schenk (University of Geneva, Switzerland and swisspeace)

Abstract:

State-building in post-conflict societies often under the umbrella of international operations is coined by slogans as “promoting good governance” or “contributing to peacebuilding” or “support institution making”. Less is known about what kind of programmes lie behind these slogans. In the academic literature, the entry points for state-building are largely seen from an external actors’ perspective mirroring the international intervention culture in so-called “failed” states; e.g. Fukuyama (2004) sees the entry point in institution-making while Migdal and Schlichte (2005) promote social structures and elites as the doorway for state-building.

I argue that state-building often takes place in “grey zones”. These grey zones emerge at the blurred boundaries of external actors, “civil society” actors, and “state actors” and their realms of legitimacy, henceforth the mandate and thereby the legitimacy of the national state (or its set of national state-actors) and what is authority and authenticity of international non-state actors in order to be involved in state-building. But legitimacy of state building work is also success-driven – it depends on spatial outreach and perceived fairness of state services. State building is not only about abstract “functions” and “structures” of stateness, but about the spatial penetration of stateness in its territory.

The paper combines different strands of thinking especially from political ethnography (Scott 1998, Ferguson 1994, Corbridge et al. 2002) and political geography (e. g. Painter 2006). It uses ethnographies of state-building in the reconstruction of Aceh after the tsunami, in particular internationally supported programmes on the registration of voters for the first regional election in Aceh/Indonesia and the promotion of outreach of state services in population administration. These ethnographies reveal the convoluted practices of multiple actors in building the post-tsunami state in Aceh.

Paper 3

Title:

Living the state or surviving the state? Informal socio-economic networks, ‘illegal actions’ and their importance in everyday life in Turkey and Ukraine

Author(s):

Abel Polese (University of Edinburgh)

Presenter:

Abel Polese (University of Edinburgh)

Abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork on informal actors in Turkey and Ukraine, this presentation suggests that the level of informality in a state is directly correlated with the ineffectiveness of its management. That is the more a state is unable to grant its citizens decent living standards the more the citizens will tend to create informal organizations –or even institutions-, social and economic networks, to make up for the absence of the state in some sectors.

Deconstructing the state from a monolithic entity into a number of actors, and agencies, transmitting instructions from the top to the bottom (and, possibly, provide a feedback from the bottom) it appears evident that good management of a state, state reforms or transition, are all but an easy and straightforward processes. It takes a competent political elite to issue the right instructions, competent state officers to interpret and implement them at regional, city and local level, and effective communication to create the necessary conditions for people to live a decent life.

Even in the case of well functioning states, it has been suggested that ‘peoplization’ of the state (Jones 2007) worsen the conditions in a welfare state that may be already affected by regional differences (Putnam was the first, footing on game theory, then a number of scholars followed), however, where formal social capital is absent informal social capital (Pichler and Wallace 2007) is operating, often in conditions of apparent illegality. ‘Apparent’ because those practices may become legal as soon as they are institutionalized. Once extra payments to doctors and teachers are allowed, and taxable, the situation de facto remains the same but becomes legalized.

Where the state does not allocate sufficient funds to pay public workers, informal payments and favour exchange help to integrate meagre public salaries (Polese 2008); where the state complicates tax paying procedures and does not grant benefits to taxpayers, people will tend to fiscal fraud or underground businesses (Bovi 2003).

Turkey and Ukraine, with a number of relevant industries and uneven regional development nourishing a consistent emigration flow, have both a very high level of informal practices that can be considered harmful from a macroeconomic point of view because they are not under control of the state. Nevertheless this presentation wants to reverse the reasoning and suggesting that they exist in spite of state economic and social mismanagement but they come to consolidate because of state mismanagement.

Paper 4

Title:

Geographies of the Everyday Multicultural State: Toronto’s ‘South Asian’ Communities

Author(s):

Ishan Ashutosh (Syracuse University, USA)

Presenter:

Ishan Ashutosh (Syracuse University, USA)

Abstract:

Since the early 1970s, multiculturalism and neo-liberal immigration policies have become the frameworks in which the Canadian government classifies and manages ethnic minorities. In multiculturalism and immigration policies the quotidian aspects of the state are embodied through the experiences of migrants and minority groups. A central aspect of multiculturalism has been the formation of ‘South Asian’ subjectivities, a state-based category that represents Canada’s largest ‘visible minority’ group. But ‘South Asians’ are composed of people from different national, regional, religious, and linguistic origins, who are then brought together, or as some critics contend, homogenized, through the multicultural language of the state. In Toronto, where the majority of Canada’s South Asians reside, state categories influence the everyday lives of migrants and visible minorities in two ways that highlight the multifarious deployments of state power. Firstly, the categories of the multicultural state have become the basis for activism in combating racism and the culturalism that acts as the basis for national belonging. Secondly, the appropriation of the category South Asian by migrants necessarily entails a reformulation of the transnational subjectivities that challenge state policies on multiculturalism and social justice in Canada as well as South Asia. This paper, based on ethnographic research in Toronto, consists of an analysis of state policies and the popular discourses that create equivalencies across different communities that are then re-appropriated in the everyday lives of ‘South Asians’ in Toronto that correspond and conflict with the exigencies of the multicultural state.

Paper 5

Title:

The Pseudo State Apparatus that Penetrates and Transforms

Everyday Village Lives: The Role of Samaeul Leaders in Socio-Economic Transformation of Rural South Korea in 1970s.

Author(s):

Jung Won Sonn (University College London)

Dong-Wan Kim (Seoul National University, Republic of Korea)

Presenter:

Jung Won Sonn (University College London)

Abstract:

A structural transformation requires individuals’ changes in habitus (in Bourdieu’s sense). When an economic and social transformation is the nation state’s project, it can use administrative power but that is not always enough. In creation of new habitus, the state needs to penetrate everyday lives and find ways to be persuasive. In this paper, we look at how the state extends itself by creating a pseudo state apparatus and use it for that purpose. More specifically, we look at Saemaeul Undong, or the New Village Movement of rural South Korea in 1970 and the role that state-appointed Samaeul Leaders played. The data for the analysis come from two sources: 1) oral history by Samaeul Leaders and 2) theatre play scripts that were prepared by the state to disseminate Saemaul ideas.

Industrialisation was well under way by the late 1960s in urban South Korea, but the state’s manufacturing-oriented policies left rural areas underdeveloped. Faced with this situation, the state started Saemaul Undong and attempted to break the pre-modern behavior and self-subsistent economy and create habitus that fits the state-led industrialisation. While the local end of the bureaucracy often lawfully and unlawfully forced economic and social projects such as rebuilding of houses and change of crops, Samaeul Leaders were supposed to be persuasive by demonstrating examples, explaining the benefits of projects and appealing to emotions. This finding suggests that a pseudo state apparatus can be created when the state needs to penetrate everyday lives more thoroughly.