Cities on the agenda: Urban governance and sustainable development

Urbanization is a defining trait of the 21st century, and cities are decisive for the future of sustainable development. This has been recognized internationally through the definition of a stand-alone goal for sustainable urban development, the SDG 11. Cities represent extremely serious problems, but they also offer huge potentials for changing the course of action on climate change and other challenges. A new DIIS report takes stock of the field of sustainable urban development and the implications for how Denmark´s international engagement could strengthen its focus on cities as part of the SDG agenda. It looks at the state of the art in research on urban governance and sustainable development; it maps current trends and actors in the global political arena for sustainable urban development; and it includes a case study of Jakarta to show how the politics of sustainable development play out in a dynamic but flood-prone megacity. The report recommends that the Danish Government takes the SDG 11 as an occasion to focus on cities as part of Danish support for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. A focus on cities allows a range of Danish actors to engage in international cooperation, including municipalities, public utilities and the private sector. Urban governance is a key challenge and the pervasive informality and fragmented authority of many cities have to be taken into account. In particular intermediate and smaller cities with high population growth need strategic international engagement, and special attention should be given to cities that have become safe havens for displaced populations in areas of conflict

LYNCHNING: EN SVØBE FOR MENNESKEHEDEN

The article explores the phenomenon of mob violence in predominatly Mayan towns in rural Guatemala. Since 1996, more than 100 people have been killed by crowds in rural towns. The victims have usually been young men accused of often minor criminal acts, or representatives of the state trying to protect the victims. The occurrence of mob violence coincides roughly with the area where the army organized civil self-defence patrols during the civil war from 1981-96 as part of the national security counterinsurgency program. The post-conflict transition has paradoxically brought security back to the top of the political agenda as political violence has been substituted and overshadowed by violence related to drug trafficking and other forms of criminality. The article shows how mob violence has been interpreted in the context of postconflict transformations where the elimination of violence and violent conflicts has been addressed as an object of development, and suggests that we, in addition to common sociological interpretations, may understand lynchings as an exclusive practice of communal sovereignty within a transnational political field of politics of in/security. &nbsp

Corporealities of violence in Southern and Eastern Africa

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Disavowing 'the' prison

This chapter confronts the idea of ‘the’ prison, that is, prison as a fixed entity. However hard we, that is, prison scholars including ourselves, seek to deconstruct and critique specific aspects of confinement, there is a tendency to slip into a default position that envisions the prison as something given and pre-understood. When it comes to prison our imagination seems to clog up. It is the political solution to its own failure, and the preferred metaphor for its own representation

Synthesis report: Civil-military relations in international operations. A Danish perspective

This report synthesizes the studies undertaken as part of the Danish government's initiative to strengthen the concerted civil and military planning and action in connection with peace supporting operations, with emphasis on the Danish engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. It looks at how coherence is sought across three different but interlinked dimensions: across the institutions of the Danish government; Danish harmonization with other international actors; and Danish (and international) alignment with local and national actors

Integrated national approaches to international operations: The cases of Denmark, UK, and the Netherlands

As part of a larger study of how to improve Danish concerted civil and military planning and action, this sub-report looks at the national approaches of Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK. On the basis of available documents and interviews, the report analyzes the concepts, policies and structures that each has developed, as well as the drivers of and the problems with the processes involved

Anthropology and the enigma of the state

This chapter provides an inventory of ‘the anthropology of the state’. It starts from the insight that the anthropology of the state drew considerably more on scholars of political science, political philosophy and sociology than on political anthropology. The ‘theoretical genealogies’ of the field challenged the taken-for-grantedness of the state as a ‘distinct, fixed and unitary entity’ operating outside and above society. The chapter concludes that the state as an idea of transcendental political authority and a centralizing organizational practice is not withering away, as observers in the 1990s suggested, but rather is transforming. The strongest contribution of political anthropology in grasping the manifold transformative processes is to combine rich ethnographic studies of this blurriness and the fragmentation of states with analyses of underlying rationales