“A Strange Industrial Order:” Indonesia’s racialized plantation ecologies and anticolonial estate worker rebellions

The plantation continues to expand across contemporary frontiers, remaking social orders and ravaging ecologies in the service of value extraction through commodity production. This article revisits the ‘strange industrial order’ of the plantation in 1950s Indonesia at a time of deep contestation in which estate workers were organizing to reinvigorate the unfulfilled goals of anticolonial struggles. Reading this moment through the anxieties of European planters in the British archive, I argue that these struggles deeply disturbed the localized racial labor order of the plantation, while also working against the extractive tributaries of the international order. Further, the article suggests that keeping alive a historical consciousness around how industrial racial regimes are produced, disturbed, and fractured is vital to countering the harms of our plantation present

Extractive investibility in historical colonial perspective: the emerging market and its antecedents in Indonesia

The term ‘emerging market’ is widely used in popular and scholarly fields to simply indicate an empirical condition of economic improvement. For Indonesia, this affirmative investor label covers economic activities including cheap commodity extraction via the plantation and the mine for the world market, despite the expropriation and ecological ruin such extraction generates. This article connects this emerging market present with the colonial past by tracing how extractive spaces and relations have been produced over time with the help of investment capital. Developing the concept of ‘extractive investibility’ in historical colonial perspective, the analysis begins by tracing Dutch East India Company (VOC) era interventions and the establishment of the Cultivation System and plantation economies on Java and Sumatra by the Dutch colonial state. The article then documents how the brief ‘Third Worldism’ interlude meaningfully challenged these colonial extractive relations. The analysis ends by detailing how the emerging market label was explicitly conceived to replace the term ‘Third World’ and continues to function as a discursive idealisation which directs capital back toward extractive spaces

The condition of market emergence in Indonesia : coloniality as exclusion and translation.

This thesis elaborates a decolonial international political economy (IPE) as a means of examining the condition of market emergence in Indonesia. It presents the term ‘emerging market’ as the contemporary organising grammar which positions Indonesia in relation to international capital flows. This condition of market emergence is further understood in historical colonial perspective as the latest mode of producing Indonesia as an investible site for international capital. My expansion of decolonial IPE is made in this thesis through the analysis of difference-based ‘exclusion’ and ‘translation’, both as vital elements of coloniality and as processes which relate to accumulation and dispossession in an ‘emerging market’ context. I go on to make the case for bringing urban and rural terminable sites of extraction into the same frame of analysis. These are understood similarly here as internal frontiers along which social groups are materially and discursively excluded from the national emerging market project and thus rendered expropriatable. I further analyse the repeated dispossession of these expropriatable groups along with other means of enacting ‘translations’, or enforced alterations in ways of being. These translations are by no means passively accepted and my analysis further demonstrates various means by which these are negotiated and contested. This thesis therefore makes contributions to the literature on decolonial thought and IPE, at the same time as presenting an original examination of Indonesia in its present moment of market emergence

Raced markets: an introduction

The central consensus among the scholars and activists who came together for the first Raced Markets Workshop in December 2015 was that ‘race’ may have begun as fiction, an invention of Europeans in the service of colonisation, however, the fiction of race became material over time, reproduced in relation to the manifold raced markets of the global political economy. Since that original workshop, and against a consolidated neoliberal capitalist context, the political rise of fascistic movements has intensified across the globe. Our collective provocation here is that this current conjuncture cannot be explained with reference to the exceptional intrusion of racism, nor the epiphenomenal status of race in relation to political economy. Instead we attend to how race functions in structural and agential ways, integrally reproducing raced markets and social conditions. Our Introduction opens this conversation for New Political Economy readers, positioning neoliberalism and the current conjuncture as the present political economic moment to be understood through a raced market frame of analysis. Our hope is that this special issue will be read as a timely intervention, referencing a long tradition of (often marginalised) thought which attends to race as productive and material, rather than confined to the ideological realm

Eco-socialism will be anti-eugenic or it will be nothing: toward equal exchange and the end of population.

In this article, we draw attention to similarities and synergies between eco-fascist and liberal forms of populationism which encourage reproductive injustices against Indigenous women and women of colour globally, increasingly in the name of climate change mitigation. Calls to intervene in the bodily and social autonomy of racialised women, at best, distract from ecological crisis and, at worst, encourage violent forms of reproductive injustice. We urge instead for an honest reckoning with the root problem of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) as the system of global extraction, which enacts environmental harm and reproductive injustice. Finally, we call for an anti-imperialist eco-socialist move towards equal exchange on a world scale to end the flow of undervalued resources from the South and to limit the contaminating activities these enable. We also stress that an anti-imperialist eco-socialism needs to be attuned to the teachings of reproductive justice movements and resistant to creeping liberal eugenicism, as much as to the overt eco-fascism which has proved so deadly in recent years

The gendered everyday political economy of Kampung eviction and resettlement in Jakarta

This report is the result of a collaborative partnership between the University of Warwick’s Department of Politics and International Studies and Universitas Indonesia’s Centre for Elections and Political Party (CEPP). The research was funded by the British Council’s Newton Fund under an Institutional Links Grant (project reference 217195589). The project had two complementary streams (a) to conduct research into the gender impact of urban resettlement schemes for the poor in Jakarta and to develop policy recommendations that sought to address issues arising from the research; and (b) to develop an academic partnership that would better develop links between UK and Indonesian academic institutions. This report focuses on the research into urban resettlement

GSTP1 DNA Methylation and Expression Status Is Indicative of 5-aza-2′-Deoxycytidine Efficacy in Human Prostate Cancer Cells

DNA methylation plays an important role in carcinogenesis and the reversibility of this epigenetic modification makes it a potential therapeutic target. To date, DNA methyltransferase inhibitors (DNMTi) have not demonstrated clinical efficacy in prostate cancer, with one of the major obstacles being the inability to monitor drug activity during the trial. Given the high frequency and specificity of GSTP1 DNA methylation in prostate cancer, we investigated whether GSTP1 is a useful marker of DNMTi treatment efficacy. LNCaP prostate cancer cells were treated with 5-aza-2′-deoxycytidine (5-aza-CdR) either with a single high dose (5–20 µM), every alternate day (0.1–10 µM) or daily (0.005–2.5 µM). A daily treatment regimen with 5-aza-CdR was optimal, with significant suppression of cell proliferation achieved with doses of 0.05 µM or greater (p<0.0001) and induction of cell death from 0.5 µM (p<0.0001). In contrast, treatment with a single high dose of 20 µM 5-aza-CdR inhibited cell proliferation but was not able to induce cell death. Demethylation of GSTP1 was observed with doses of 5-aza-CdR that induced significant suppression of cell proliferation (≥0.05 µM). Re-expression of the GSTP1 protein was observed only at doses of 5-aza-CdR (≥0.5 µM) associated with induction of cell death. Treatment of LNCaP cells with a more stable DNMTi, Zebularine required at least a 100-fold higher dose (≥50 µM) to inhibit proliferation and was less potent in inducing cell death, which corresponded to a lack of GSTP1 protein re-expression. We have shown that GSTP1 DNA methylation and protein expression status is correlated with DNMTi treatment response in prostate cancer cells. Since GSTP1 is methylated in nearly all prostate cancers, our results warrant its testing as a marker of epigenetic therapy response in future clinical trials. We conclude that the DNA methylation and protein expression status of GSTP1 are good indicators of DNMTi efficacy

A research and evaluation capacity building model in Western Australia

Evaluation of public health programs, services and policies is increasingly required to demonstrate effectiveness. Funding constraints necessitate that existing programs, services and policies be evaluated and their findings disseminated. Evidence-informed practice and policy is also desirable to maximise investments in public health. Partnerships between public health researchers, service providers and policymakers can help address evaluation knowledge and skills gaps. The Western Australian Sexual Health and Blood-borne Virus Applied Research and Evaluation Network (SiREN) aims to build research and evaluation capacity in the sexual health and blood-borne virus sector in Western Australia (WA). Partners’ perspectives of the SiREN model after 2 years were explored. Qualitative written responses from service providers, policymakers and researchers about the SiREN model were analysed thematically. Service providers reported that participation in SiREN prompted them to consider evaluation earlier in the planning process and increased their appreciation of the value of evaluation. Policymakers noted benefits of the model in generating local evidence and highlighting local issues of importance for consideration at a national level. Researchers identified challenges communicating the services available through SiREN and the time investment needed to develop effective collaborative partnerships. Stronger engagement between public health researchers, service providers and policymakers through collaborative partnerships has the potential to improve evidence generation and evidence translation. These outcomes require long-term funding and commitment from all partners to develop and maintain partnerships. Ongoing monitoring and evaluation can ensure the partnership remains responsive to the needs of key stakeholders. The findings are applicable to many sectors

Small glutamine-rich tetratricopeptide repeat-containing protein alpha (SGTA) ablation limits offspring viability and growth in mice

Small glutamine-rich tetratricopeptide repeat-containing protein α (SGTA) has been implicated as a co-chaperone and regulator of androgen and growth hormone receptor (AR, GHR) signalling. We investigated the functional consequences of partial and full Sgta ablation in vivo using Cre-lox Sgta-null mice. Sgta+/− breeders generated viable Sgta−/− offspring, but at less than Mendelian expectancy. Sgta−/− breeders were subfertile with small litters and higher neonatal death (P < 0.02). Body size was significantly and proportionately smaller in male and female Sgta−/− (vs WT, Sgta+/− P < 0.001) from d19. Serum IGF-1 levels were genotype- and sex-dependent. Food intake, muscle and bone mass and adiposity were unchanged in Sgta−/−. Vital and sex organs had normal relative weight, morphology and histology, although certain androgen-sensitive measures such as penis and preputial size, and testis descent, were greater in Sgta−/−. Expression of AR and its targets remained largely unchanged, although AR localisation was genotype- and tissue-dependent. Generally expression of other TPR-containing proteins was unchanged. In conclusion, this thorough investigation of SGTA-null mutation reports a mild phenotype of reduced body size. The model’s full potential likely will be realised by genetic crosses with other models to interrogate the role of SGTA in the many diseases in which it has been implicated