Anarcho-cosmopolitanism: the universalisation of the equal exchange

This paper concerns itself with the values which make up what has been labelled 'ethical cosmopolitanism–�that which entails a universal scope of ethical concern. Conceptions of this ethic have underpinned the development of a 'global civil society' and associated humanitarian and activist campaigns. However, such cosmopolitan campaigns have illustrated the ways in which the dismissals of difference and importance of embeddedness have caused suffering to the supposed beneficiaries of such campaigns. This is because of the unrecognised power relations that exist between moral agents, which result in 'unequal exchanges', that is, the exchange of physical, material and mental resources from positions of unequal negotiating positions, driven by power differentials and hierarchy. A theory of the 'equal exchange' is developed upon which to base alternative cosmopolitan practices. Such a theory is grounded in Anarchist thought, which, it is argued, provides the most stringent philosophical underpinning for such a cosmopolitan theory

The relationships that bind? Power and alter-globalisation networks

Many scholars celebrate the emancipatory potential of alter-globalisation networks. This thesis tests this claim, using a case study of the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP), and analysing what the powers which constitute this network reveal about the powers of it. GCAP is one of the largest networks of its type, mobilising nearly 175 million people on a single day in 2009 via national coalitions of civil society organisations in 115 countries. The PhD research focuses on two of these national coalitions in India and Malawi, as well as GCAP's broad governance structures, and utilises semi-structured and ethnographic interviews, participant observation and documentary analysis. The data was analysed through a methodological frame of governmentality and post-governmentality literatures, to analyse the full range of discourses and agencies which construct GCAP. The thesis interrogates the agency of GCAP through an exploration of three power-related themes, namely: the relationships GCAP enacts with processes of statist and neo-liberal hegemony; how GCAP develops relations of solidarity across distance; and the manner in which GCAP constructs subjects of legitimation. The thesis finds that GCAP embodies a monitored subjectivity vis-A-vis statist and neo-liberal hegemonic power, yet also retains a monitory agency on those powers. It furthermore finds that relations of solidarity developed in GCAP between areas of structural advantage and disadvantage are imbued with both colonial and postcolonial discourses, which simultaneously buttress and contest neoliberal discourses of managerialism, resource-dependency and the fetishisation of 'the poor'. These different sets of relations construct GCAP with a contingent, contradictory, yet at times emancipatory and transcendent subjectivity. By creating a snapshot of an alter-globalisation network in diverse social contexts, this thesis reveals the ways in which the power of such networks is uneven and immanent, dependent upon confluences of the various internal and external powers which constitute them

Doing Biopolitics Differently? Radical Potential in the Post-2015 MDG and SDG Debates

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Two 'transitions': the political economy of Joyce Banda's rise to power and the related role of civil society organisations in Malawi

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Review of African Political Economy on 21/07/2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03056244.2014.90194

Genealogies of Slavery

This chapter addresses the concept of slavery, exploring its character and significance as a dark page in history, but also as a specifically criminological and zemiological problem, in the context of international law and human rights. By tracing the ambiguities of slavery in international law and international development, the harms associated with slavery are considered. Harms include both those statutorily proscribed, and those that are not, but that can still be regarded as socially destructive. Traditionally, antislavery has been considered within the parameters of abolition and criminalization. In this context recently, anti-trafficking has emerged as a key issue in contemporary anti-slavery work. While valuable, anti-trafficking is shown to have significant limitations. It advances criminalization and stigmatization of the most vulnerable and further perpetuates harm. At the same time, it identifies structural conditions like poverty, vulnerability, and “unfreedom” of movement only to put them aside. Linked to exploitation, violence and zemia, the chapter brings to the fore some crucial questions concerning the prospects of systemic theory in the investigation of slavery, that highlight the root causes of slavery, primarily poverty and inequality. Therefore, the chapter counterposes an alternative approach in which the orienting target is not abolition of slavery but advancing structural changes against social harm

Hidden politics of power and governmentality in transitional justice and peacebuilding:The problem of ‘bringing the local back in’

This paper examines ‘the local’ in peacebuilding by examining how ‘local’ transitional justice projects can become spaces of power inequalities. The paper argues that focusing on how ‘the local’ contests or interacts with ‘the international’ in peacebuilding and post-conflict contexts obscures contestations and power relations amongst different local actors, and how inequalities and power asymmetries can be entrenched and reproduced through internationally funded local projects. The paper argues that externally funded projects aimed at emancipating ‘locals’ entrench inequalities and create local elites that become complicit in governing the conduct and participation of other less empowered ‘locals’. The paper thus proposes that specific local actors—often those in charge of externally funded peacebuilding projects—should also be conceptualised as governing agents: able to discipline and regulate other local actors’ voices and their agency, and thus (re)construct ideas about what ‘the local’ is, or is not