This book will provide a cutting-edge, theoretically innovative, and analytically detailed response to significant developments occurring in the fields of indigenous governance.

Fleur Johns argues that the contraposition of a ‘bottom-up’ approach of politics of prototypical technique rather than the ‘top-down’ politics of the master plan or normative principle no longer seems as straightforwardly radical as it appeared when James C Scott posited the value of local knowledge or métis against grand plans of high modernization, just over 20 years ago. This paper seeks to follow Johns’ call, ‘to capture and probe some of the effects of sensibility, rationality or style widely reproduced (...) in the details of development work’. It draws upon fieldwork in Nairobi to open up a discussion of a shift in sensibility from a ‘bottom-up’ or ‘postliberal’ approach to a framing of open-ended encounter. The paper critiques this imaginary of relational encounter by engaging contemporary work in critical black studies. It suggests that the problem of critique is that it reproduces the problems of governing imaginaries, continually seeking to rework the human subject via adaptive capacities, sensitivities to difference and openness to alterity, while leaving intact the coloniality of being, the antiblack world. (shrink)

This article seeks to analyse the rise of ‘resilience ethics’, in terms of the shift in ethical approaches away from the hierarchical liberal internationalist constructions of the 1990s and towards broader and more inclusive understandings of ethical responsibility for global problems. This shift in ethical attention away from the formal international politics of inter-state relations and towards the unintended consequences of both institutional structures and the informal market choices of individuals has diversified understandings of global ethical responsibilities. It is argued (...) that the recasting of ethical responsibility in the increasingly sociological terms of unintended and indirect consequences of socio-material embeddedness constructs new ethical differentials and hierarchies of responsibility. These framings have facilitated new policy practices, recasting interventionist policy-making in terms of the growing self-awareness and reflexivity of Western actors, reframing ethical foreign policy as starting with the choices of individual citizens, and, at the same time, operating to reify the relations of the market. (shrink)

Many contemporary thinkers of the Anthropocene, who attempt to articulate a non-modern and relational ontology, all too readily dismiss critical theory inherited from the Frankfurt School for being anthropocentric, failing to acknowledge certain basic similarities. Instead, this article argues that the scaffolding of Anthropocene thinking—the recognition of the origins of the contemporary condition of ‘loss of world’ and the hope of ‘living on in the ruins’—share much with earlier critical theorists’ recognition that the Holocaust necessitated a fundamental break with the (...) past. In reading these two sets of literatures together, we suggest we can get a better grasp of the stakes involved in the contemporary crisis of critique, and in the speculative framings enabling alternative futures to come into being. (shrink)

Resilience is increasingly discussed as a key concept across many fields of international policymaking from sustainable development and climate change, insecurity, conflict and terrorism to urban and rural planning, international aid provision and the prevention of and responses to natural and man-made disasters. Edited by leading academic authorities from a number of disciplines, this is the first handbook to deal with resilience as a new conceptual approach to understanding and addressing a range of interdependent global challenges. The Handbook is divided (...) into nine sections: Introduction: contested paradigms of resilience; the challenges of resilience; governing uncertainty; resilience and neoliberalism; environmental concerns and climate change adaptation; urban planning; disaster risk reduction and response; international security and insecurity; the policy and practices of international development. Highlighting how resilience-thinking is increasingly transforming international policy-making and government and institutional practices, this book will be an indispensable source of information for students, academics and the wider public interested in resilience, international relations and international security. (shrink)

In liberal modernity, the democratic collective will of society was understood to emerge through the public and deliberative freedoms of associational life. Today, however, democratic discourse is much more focused on the formation of plural and diverse publics in the private and social sphere. In these ‘non-linear’ approaches, democracy is no longer seen to operate to constitute a collective will standing above society but as a mechanism to distribute power more evenly through the social empowerment of individuals and communities as (...) the ultimate decision-makers. Government is brought back ‘to the people’ and democracy is seen to circulate through the personal decisions made in everyday life. This article seeks to analyse the development of non-linear approaches to the political sphere, which seek to overcome the rationalist assumptions of the public/private divide, paying particular attention to the work of two key liberal theorists, John Dewey and Friedrich von Hayek. (shrink)

This article is organized in four sections. The first section introduces sensing governance in terms of the governance of effects rather than causation, focusing on the work of Bruno Latour in establishing the problematic of contingent interaction, rather than causal depth, as key to emergent effects, which can be unexpected and catastrophic. The second section considers in more depth how sensing governance enables politics by other means through putting greater emphasis on relations of interaction, rather than on ontologies of being, (...) and links the methodological approach of sensing governance closely to actor network assumptions that disavow structures of causation. The final two sections analyze how correlation works to reveal new agencies and processes of emergence and how new technologies have been deployed in this area, providing some examples of how the shift from causal relations to sensing effects has begun to alter governmental approaches. (shrink)

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the “ontological turn” in anthropology. Rather than seeing indigenous peoples as having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the ontological turn suggests that their importance lies in the fact that they constitute different worlds and “world” in a performatively different (...) way. The radical promise this view holds is that a different world already exists in potentia, the access to which is a question of ontology—of being differently: ‘being in being’ rather than thinking, acting and world-making as if we were transcendent or “possessive” modern subjects. We argue that the ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or coloni... (shrink)

The paper contrasts two readings of Cambodian politics and society, labelled by the author `Cambodge' and `Kampuchea'. The `Cambodge' reading was invented by the French in the colonial era (1863-1954). It blended the grandeur of Cambodia's past, symbolized by the Angkor ruins, with an assessment of the Cambodian people as insouciant and needful of protection. This reading persisted in the so-called `Sihanouk years' (1955-70). The `Kampuchea' reading was imposed by the Cambodian Communists (`Khmer Rouge') when they seized power in 1975. (...) It emphasized the empowerment of the poor, a conflict model of society, the predominance of politics, and a Marxist-Leninist, linear view of history. Both readings were `top-down' and now (1997) that they have been discredited (although some of their ingredients persist) a comparison between them may be of historical interest. (shrink)

A procedure targeting a few Khmer Rouge leaders seems likely in 2000, but Cambodian government control of the proceedings means that nothing like a truth commission or a wide-ranging inquiry will result.

Edited by Nieves Zúñiga García-Falces. In 15 years, the international community has been blamed for resorting too easily to the use of force on some occasions (Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo), and also it has been blamed for intervening too late or not at all in other crises (Rwanda, Bosnia and today Sudan and Congo). Even today, one of the most contested questions of international politics is the legitimacy for the use of force. David Chandler, Professor of International Relations at the University (...) of Westminster (UK) and Daniele Archibugi, a research director at National Research Council (Italy) and Professor at Birkbeck College (University of London), discuss about the use of force, how the theory and practice of warfare and humanitarian intervention have evolved in the contemporary world and the international responsibility of states. In his Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-building (Pluto Press), David Chandler has forcefully argued that Western interventions are destablizing exercises of power without responsibility. Daniele Archibugi has been equally critical of these armed interventions, although in his The Global Commonwealth of Citizens. Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton University Press), he urges for a cosmopolitan responsibility based on non-violence and inclusion. (Published: 19 May 2009) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2009, pp. 155-169. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v2i2.1974. (shrink)