Subalterns and the State in the Longue Durée: Notes from “The Rebellious Century” in the Bhil Heartland

Focusing on recent debates over the ways in which subaltern groups engage with the state in India, the article proposes that it is imperative to historicise our conceptions of subaltern politics in India. More specifically, the argument is made that it is imperative to recognise that subaltern appropriations of the institutions and discourses of the state have a longer historical lineage than what is often proposed in critical work on popular resistance in rural India. The article presents a detailed analysis of Adivasi rebellions in colonial western India and argues that these took the form of a contentious negotiation of the incorporation of tribal communities into an emergent “colonial state space.” The conclusion presents a sketch of a Gramscian approach to the study of how subaltern politics proceeds in and through determinate state–society relations.publishedVersio

Social movements Research and the Movement of Movements: Studying Resistance to Neoliberal Globalisation

This article explores the state of research on the "movement of movements" against neoliberal globalisation. Starting from a general consideration of the significance of the movement and the difficulties inherent in studying it, it discusses the literature on the movement from within social movement studies, and argues that the response from social movement researchers falls short of what could be expected in terms of adequacy to the movement and its own knowledge production. It explores some effects of this failure and locates the reasons for it in the unacknowledged relationship between social movements theorising and activist theorising. The article then discusses the possible contributions that can be made by Marxist and other engaged academic writers, as well as the significance of the extensive theoretical literature generated by activists within the movement. It concludes by stating the importance of dialogue between activist and academic theorising and research in attempting to understand the movement

What Would a Marxist Theory of Social Movements Look Like?

Abstract included in text

Reading Neoliberalism as a Social Movement from Above

In this article we explore the relationship between Marxist theory and social movements, in particular how this relationship works in the specific historical period that we call the twilight of neoliberalism

India’s evolving neoliberal regime of dispossession: from the anti-SEZ movement to the farm law protests

What do the protests against the farm laws of the Modi regime tell us about the trajectory of neoliberalisation in India? In this article, we address this question through a comparative analysis of the farm law protests and movements against land dispossession that mushroomed in many parts of India in the wake of the passing of India's SEZ Act in 2005. Both movements have explicitly targeted neoliberal policies that aggressively sought to remove obstacles to capitalist accumulation. However, the two movements are separated by roughly 15 years, and in effect target two distinctly different forms of dispossession—one predominantly coercive, the other predominantly market-driven. This begs questions as to whether the emergence of the farm law protests is indexical of new shifts in Indian neoliberalism? We argue that the answer to this question is a qualified yes. Through comparison and discussion of anti-dispossession struggles and the anti-farm laws protests, carried out in dialogue with the literature on regimes of dispossession, we develop a heuristic periodisation of Indian neoliberalisation and argue that the now-repealed farm laws and the strong farmers' resistance to them are indexical of India moving towards a 'rollover' form of neoliberalism.The National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences for the project ‘Growth, Inequality and Protest in a Rising South’.https://journals.sagepub.com/home/SOBhj2023Sociolog

The political economy machinery: toward a critical anthropology of development as a contested capitalist practice

This article discusses anthropology’s current mainstream understandings of development and offers a historical materialist alternative. According to these, development was and is either a discourse-backed anti-politics machine that strengthens the power of postcolonial governments or a category of practice, a universal that generates frictions when it clashes with local historical–cultural formations. The approach proposed here reintegrates the analysis of development into the anthropological analysis of capitalism’s uneven and contested histories and practices. A reassessment of World Bank reporting on Lesotho and an analysis of the Bank’s impact on the wider policies of development in postcolonial Mauritius, one of the twentieth century’s preeminent success stories of capitalist development, underlines that development is best understood as a political economy machinery that maintains and amends contested capitalist practices in an encounter with earlier global, national, and local historical–cultural formations

Give James Ferguson a fish

When James Ferguson's Give a Man a Fish was published in 2015, it seemed to many that the anthropologist was continuing his trailblazing work in critical development research and pioneering a new imaginary for a progressive left politics of welfare. This article argues that such enthusiasm is misplaced and that we need to devote ourselves to a more rigorous and ambitious project if we are to forge a social theory for the future that holds any kind of genuinely emancipatory potential. First, the article shows how Ferguson's diagnosis of global development is analytically flawed in that it is articulated at a strictly empirical and descriptive level. As a result, Ferguson fails to probe into the underlying power relations that have generated the developmental scenario that is the context of his reflections. It then moves on to show how this absence of any sustained conceptual and analytical engagement with questions of power in the political economy of capitalism leads Ferguson to a deeply flawed argument about welfare. The article concludes with a brief reflection on what an alternative and genuinely socialist form of welfare might look like in the context of a conjuncture of sustained neoliberal crisis.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/146776602022-09-09hj2021Sociolog

Power, resistance and development in the global south: notes towards a critical research agenda

This article engages with radical critiques of the Eurocentric grammar of development discourses. I start from a position of considerable sympathy with their appreciation of the discursive dimensions of power that attach to the idiom of development and their solidarity with the oppositional projects of subaltern groups. However, this sympathy combines with a considerable degree of disagreement in terms of how the discursive power of development is understood and how the dynamics of popular resistance are theorised. As an alternative to the relatively crude postulation of development as a discursive regime that enables the West to exercise power over the Rest, I develop an argument that emphasises the multivalent character of the idiom of development and trace this multivalence to situated contestations that take place between opposing political projects that strive to shape the form and direction of social change in specific ways. Furthermore, I will argue that this contentious dynamic becomes particularly evident in those world-historical conjunctures when subaltern groups mobilize around social movement projects that destabilise hegemonic power relations in the capitalist world-system. To illustrate this point, I will provide a broad-brushed outline of three distinct ‘development regimes’ that have shaped North–South relations from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century and discuss the ways in which these regimes have been destabilised by the articulation of oppositional meanings of development articulated from below by progressive social movement projects. Finally, I draw on my own fieldwork experiences to reflect on how critical scholars can engage with movement projects that challenge the dominant directions and meanings of development in ways that can contribute to democratic deliberations within social movements

India’s pandemic : spectacle, social murder and authoritarian politics in a lockdown nation

This article maps and analyses the trajectory of India’s Covid-19 pandemic from its onset in early 2020 until the outbreak of the country’s devastating second wave a little over a year later. I begin with a critique of the lockdown policy of the right-wing Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which served as a political spectacle rather than a public health intervention. I then proceed to detail how India as a lockdown nation witnessed forms of social suffering and political repression that can only be truly understood in light of how the trajectory and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was shaped by two preexisting crises in India’s economy and polity. In conclusion, I reflect on the likely political outcomes of the pandemic, considering both the impact of its second wave, and the emergence of oppositional sociopolitical forces in the country.The National Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences and by the University of Pretoria Research Development Programme.https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rglo202022-12-07hj2021Sociolog