[Tps] TPS/ECPR Policy Network - Conference Announcement : “Imperialism and resultant disorder: imperatives for social justice”

[Navdeep Mathur]

Conference : “Imperialism and resultant disorder: imperatives for social 
justice”

http://www.5thiccg.org/subthemes.html

Mumbai, 3 to 7 December 2007

VENUE: TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, MUMBAI, INDIA



The primary and overarching theme of the conference will be about 
imperialism and social justice and their social 
(political-economic-cultural) and environmental (socio-ecological, 
physical) aspects. Representatives of political organisations, unions, 
and social movements will also be invited to address these inter-related 
issues.

Some thematic sessions are already in the process of being organised. 
More information will be made available through the conference web site 
( http://www.5thiccg.org/ ) as more sessions are organised. Please 
contact the organiser directly if you would like to be included.

Session Themes

Valorising regions: modernisation and land usurpation

Economic activities in the global core and periphery, in recent times, 
have undergone considerable change with a process of vertical 
uncoupling, subdivision and /or subcontracting of production. A large 
number of low skilled, standardised operations in manufacturing, 
assembling or even mining are being created with a simultaneous growth 
of specialised as well as deskilled, gender oriented jobs in various 
economic sectors. Through deskilling labour and the physical and 
functional disaggregation of various tasks in operation, the process has 
created specific ‘roles' for several regions in developing countries 
like India for serving the global economy, arranged in a hierarchical 
manner, transcending their old role, beyond low-cost, union-free labour 
environments.

In India , with less inputs and capital allotted for agricultural and 
similar operations, returns from the same have gone down. Instead of 
re-activating the economic propensity of such lands, including the rich 
and fertile, various state governments are projecting them as key 
locations for diversified global economic operations, largely 
dissociated from the resource base. Even forest lands are not spared. 
The located labour, extremely heterogeneous in age, skill, gender and 
disciplinary levels, get stuck in the region as a part of the 
place-specific devaluation process and offer wide ranging selection 
options to global economic and ancillary activities, leading to 
underpayment and devaluation of wage labour. In order to achieve the 
most by the above process, a number of special economic zones are being 
created in several states where international capital invests heavily 
with assurances from state governments on not only inexpensive labour, 
but cheap land, electricity, water and other infrastructure, facilities 
in finance like grants, tax breaks, tariff or duty reductions, flexible 
pollution control rules, less rigorous health and safety standards for 
workers. All these bring to the fore issues of landlessness, loss of 
livelihood, informalisation of jobs, displacement, homelessness and 
destitution, environmental destruction and last but not the least, 
crisis in governance that get closely linked with the policies of a 
neo-liberal regime.

The session will discuss the above issues in relation to the 
implementation and functioning of SEZs and similar areas in India and 
the resistance efforts of the people.

Contact: Swapna Banerjee-Guha, TISS, Mumbai ( sbanerjeeguha at hotmail.com )

 

Environmental justice and imperialism

Major issues covered will include social justice in regions exploited 
for mineral and other resource, the impact of warfare, policing, and 
militarism on people's health (including the imprisonment of people), 
the contribution of resource extraction regimes in different parts of 
the world to the uneven making of national states and capitalism. 
Historical examples are strongly encouraged that analyse strategies 
leading to prevention or successes against environmental injustices.

Contact : Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, engeldis at newpaltz.edu

ACME Debate: Critical Geographies in Undergraduate Teaching

A panel discussion revolving around the role and potential for teaching 
critical geographies in undergraduate education. Discussion questions 
include: What are the barriers to assuming critical viewpoints in 
teaching, where are the opportunities? Do we have a sufficient 
infrastructure to teach critical geographies in undergraduate program? 
Panel participants include leaders in critical scholarship, research 
and/or activism in geography. The context for the panel will be set by 
the planned release of a new textbook (tentatively) titled "Reader in 
Critical Geographies" Praxis(e)Press.

Organizers: Harald Bauder, Salvatore Engel-DiMauro, engeldis at newpaltz.edu
 
Subaltern Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism, situations in which people of different cultures meet 
and exchange ideas, has traditionally been associated with elite groups 
and with euro-centric political geographies. Recent oppositional 
political movements, especially those associated with resistances to 
neo-liberal globalisation, have shown, however, that cosmopolitan forms 
of political identities also shape culturally and politically subversive 
alliances and flows of information. This has energised a set of 
theoretical and political concerns with the formation of subaltern or 
insurgent cosmopolitanisms such as the forms of association developed at 
the World Social Forum. In this session we seek to engage with the 
significance of subaltern cosmopolitanism for international solidarities 
and for their impact on elite politics and on more mainstream political 
movements; the connections and networks through which subaltern 
cosmopolitan identities are produced and generated; and the importance 
of these approaches for existing explanations of place-based politics. 
In addition to rethinking the historical and contemporary impact of 
politicised forms of subaltern cosmopolitanism, we seek to evaluate the 
significance of these forms of political identity and practice for 
contemporary forms of opposition to neo-liberal globalisation.

Organisers: Dave Featherstone, Department of Geography, University of 
Liverpool Email: djfeath at liverpool.ac.uk
Aaron Pollack, División de Desarrollo Sustentable, Universidad 
Intercultural del Estado de México Email:aapollack at gmail.com

 

Challenging the hegemonies in education: Creating spaces for multiple 
modes of expression within science and technology education

Education, a potentially rich experience in meaning making and 
expression within communities, has increasingly become restrictive, 
reduced, diluted, rigid, commoditized, centralized and autocratically 
controlled. Humans have a variety of modes of expression of thoughts and 
feelings; and diverse communication practices, artistic and aesthetic 
visions, musical emotions, technical and architectural designs. This 
diversity in productions is multiplied by the differences of gender, 
cultures, languages, technologies, arts, music, etc. T here is an 
additional issue of cognitive pluralism in the field of education. 
Cognitive content as well as cognitive processes depend on artefacts and 
tools of the culture including language and technology. Technological 
design, tool making and tool use are all best understood as a dynamic 
interplay between individuals, their society and their environment, at 
various levels of interaction within different space and time 
situations. In a sense technology can be seen as a metaphor for human 
evolution through processes that links our environment and body, our 
doing and being.

The proposed session argues for a pluralistic approach to science and 
technology education and makes a case for a less mechanistic and more 
humanistic science education. It advocates a perception of technology 
that values cooperative and collaborative work, multiple expressions and 
multiplicity of creative and locally valued productions, that is less a 
handmaiden of science or its inevitable applications. The session will 
also address the difficulties of implementing educational practices 
aiming at the formation and support of multi-expressive subjects – 
students and teachers – in the face of challenges of the hegemonic 
global networks.

Contact address: Chitra Natarajan, chitran at hbcse.tifr.res.in

 

Marginalized on the street: experiences, performances and strategies of 
street workers in the global north and south

As gaps between the rich and poor grow, the number of those who find 
themselves working on the streets continues to rise. This workshop will 
explore issues surrounding those who work in the urban informal sector 
(i.e., street vendors, beggars, waste pickers, street performers, sex 
workers, street children), drawing from examples in both the Global 
North and South. It will be an opportunity to unravel myths, share 
experiences and uncover strategies pertinent to the lives and struggles 
of informal sector street workers. Among others, themes could include: 
ethnographic enquiries into everyday life; the role of the state at 
various scales; resistance, activist, and entrepreneurial strategies; 
and gendered, racialized asnd sexualized politics of the streets.

Contact: Kate Swanson, kate.swanson at ges.gla.ac.uk or Lorena Muñoz, 
lmunoz at usc.edu

 

Transformative politics for migrant workers?

The aim of this panel is to bring together migrant workers and movements 
with practitioners, campaigners, labour organisers, policy influencers 
and academics to discuss and reflect on the experiences of those who 
migrate for work; both within and between southern and northern 
countries. Migrant labour is predominantly focused in the least 
prestigious, remunerated, protected, enriching and secure parts of the 
labour-scape. Migrant work tends to be low-paid, sub-contracted, 
flexible, casual, seasonal/temporary and informal sector based. Such 
workers often experience gross exploitation and what have been called 
forms of modern slavery. While such treatment is not new for working 
classes, many argue that the vulnerability modern migrant labourers are 
feeling in the 21 st century is qualitatively different because it 
involves a combination of intensifying trajectories of neoliberalism, 
globalisation, neo-colonialism, patriarchy, racism and racialised border 
controls. This panel will consider the labouring experiences of migrant 
workers, and also crucially discuss strategies and agencies of migrants' 
resistance to hegemonic power in order to increase the power they have 
over their own lives. As such we hope to immerse ourselves in a 
discussion of transformative and emancipatory politics for social 
justice amongst migrant workers.

Contact: Louise Waite, l.waite at leeds.ac.uk

Liquid city: urban infrastructure in question

The complex interactions between disease, water and urban infrastructure 
reveal that whilst the rationalized metropolis or “bacteriological city” 
may represent an abstract ideal for the organizational structure of the 
modern city it has never fully corresponded with urban realities because 
of the political and economic tensions that underlie the process of 
capitalist urbanization.  These anomalies that pervade the technological 
structure of the modern city become most strikingly represented in the 
marginal spaces of the city and in those cities that are themselves 
marginal within the global economy.  By exploring the history of water 
infrastructure beyond the metropolitan core of Europe and North America 
we can uncover fresh insights into the limitations of the 
bacteriological city as a universal model and also disentangle some of 
the political tensions underlying the introduction of technological 
networks in the capitalist city.  The modernization of urban 
infrastructure required an institutional context that could facilitate 
the flow of capital into the built environment yet this historic dynamic 
has been neglected in many studies of urban governance in the global 
South.    

Contact: Matthew Gandy, m.gandy at ucl.ac.uk

Copyleft Revolution

In the last thirty years, since the creation of internet, the role and 
significance of Information and Communication Technology have grown 
significantly, reconfiguring the spatial logic of modern society. 
However, it has not remained an equally accessed base and gone under the 
control of a few global corporations that are investing billions of 
dollars for its modernisation, impacting the process of knowledge 
construction and dissemination for a small section of the society and 
thereby transforming other fields of human creativity. As a response to 
the above hegemonistic framework, a parallel cultural and political 
movement is under way that is growing at an unprecedented pace and
influencing the way how science, software and other kinds of symbolic 
forms are created, published and distributed. Popularly known as the 
Copyleft culture, it is essentially a Free Software Movement that took 
off by an innovative use of the existing copyright and by publishing 
software under a copyleft license. This license is meant to give four 
fundamental rights to the user of the software published under the 
copyleft license: to use it for any purpose, to understand how it works, 
to make modifications, and to distribute the modifications.

One of the major outcomes of this revolution is the GNU/Linux operating 
system (popularly known by its misnomer, Linux). The copyleft movement 
is currently transforming other fields of human creativity as 
well---science, poetry, music, cinema and other symbolic forms. Of 
these, the most popular success story is Wikipedia.org, the largest 
multilingual encyclopedia of the world. There are other, not yet fully 
fructified, movements such as public library of science, open access, 
creative commons, open music, etc.

The proposed session aims at generating awareness about the Copyleft 
movement in general, and discussing its relation to science and 
education in particular. While challenging the patent and other similar 
systems, it also intends to deliberate on a new model of development of 
ICT, centered around collaboration and sharing among different communities.

Contact address : Nagarjuna G, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education 
Mumbai, India, nagarjun at gnowledge.org



Land and other resource struggles in globalising cities and countrysides

The land question; Global take-over of water supplies by the few; 
Struggles for control of the oceans and the question of over-fishing.

Contact : Blanca Ramirez, blare19 at prodigy.net.mx

 

Labour migration

Details will be forthcoming on the conference website.

Contact : Geraldine Pratt, gpratt at geog.ubc.ca

 

International pathways of critical geography

In this workshop, we would like to continue the process of assessing the 
situations of critical geographies in different national and linguistic 
contexts and their international connection.

Critical geography group Berlin

contact:ulrich.best at phil.tu-chemnitz .de

 

Social Movements, Resource Control and the Politics of Social Justice

Neoliberalism entails "accumulation by dispossession" - the usurpation 
of means of production, subsistence and reproduction that are not 
mediated by the market and their insertion into the orbits of the 
expanded reproduction of capital. Across the global North and South 
social movements vigorously oppose these modern-day enclosures of the 
commons and in the process develop forms of resource control and new 
conceptions of social justice. This session invites empirically grounded 
explorations of popular challenges to accumulation by dispossession, the 
ways in which subaltern communities reclaim and reinvent resource 
control, and how movements of the dispossessed link their contention 
over resource control to the politics of social justice across the 
global South and North.

Contact: Alf Gunvald Nilsen, alf.nilsen at nottingham.ac.uk

 

Transnational Organising

New forms of political solidarity and consciousness have begun to emerge 
in the 21 st century, as social movements, trade unions, NGOs and other 
organisations increase their spatial reach: constructing networks of 
support and solidarity for their particular struggles and participating 
with other movements in a range of actions to resist neoliberal 
globalisation. Transnational solidarities between such political actors 
seem to operate through overlapping, interacting, competing, and 
differentially placed and resourced networks.

This workshop strives to bring together activist-academics  and 
activists from a range of Indian social movements (involved in struggles 
for land, water and forest resources; against GM agriculture; and 
against neoliberal globalization) to discuss the day-to-day processes 
that underpin potential transnational collaborative practices and the 
potentials, problems and practices of transnational organizing. The 
workshop will be an opportunity for: (i) a direct exchange of 
experiences between the participants; (ii) activist-academics to learn 
from social movement activist experiences; (iii) a practical discussion 
about how to effect sustainable transnational organising and how to 
nurture collaborative practices between activists and activist-academics.

Contact: Paul Routledge Paul.Routledge at ges.gla.ac.uk


'Political Economy of Restructuring and Gentrification in South and 
South-east  Asian cities'

'Opening up of vast land areas and development of mega projects through 
corporate / private initiatives in several large cities in South and 
South-east Asia in recent times is symbolic to the process of global 
urban restructuring. Essentially aiming at accommodating increasing 
international activities and associated infrastructure, the 
restructuring has promoted these cities as real estate settings in 
favour of large developers and elite groups, aggravated class fractions 
and marginalised the poor by legitimising repressive planning and zoning 
regulations. The recent JNURM ( Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission) 
is an example in India. The session aims to bring together concerned 
academicians and activists to discuss the politics of the above process 
and the resistance efforts experienced in such cities in South and 
South-east Asia.'

Contact address: sbanerjeeguha at hotmail.com

 

Contemporary debates in economic geography: Politics of Scale, 15 years 
later

Analysing regional and local economies and looking for the causal 
relations determining its performance implicate addressing questions of 
uneven power relations. Identifying actors and its interests and the 
geographical scale at which they operate are the critical issues in here.
Region: Is the regionalisation of national economies a desirable trend? 
The role of regional development agencies in the EU and the US: 
decentralising or centralising power?
National states: The role of national states. Hollowing out of the 
state? State power in the north and in the south. Europe turning right; 
Latin America turning left: geoeconomic (trade, TNCs location) and 
geopolitical implications.
Supranational integration: in whose interest? The EU and the regional 
economies. Free Trade Agreements: how are these negotiated and which are 
their consequences over regional economies? NAFTA, Mercosur, ASEAN. The 
future of the EU and other trading blocks.
International scale: TNCs, central capitalistic states and international 
institutions: globalisation or imperialism? TNC�s geoeconomic 
strategies and it�s participation in public policing. The future of 
the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO: what is in the agenda of central 
capitalistic states? Participation of peripheral economies in 
international negotiations: a more democratic or authoritarian order for 
the future? Inter-Capitalistic competition and central capitalistic 
states as major actors in the world economy. The purpose of this session 
is to bring together academics from the north and the south interested 
in the construction of scale debate, in seeking to address the politics 
of scale from diverse experiences.

Contact address: Jeronimo Montero, jeronimo.montero at durham.ac.uk


NEOLIBERALISM: INDIA’s NEW ECONOMIC POLICY

Neoliberalism is a policy regime furthering the interests of global 
finance capital. Neoliberal policies create a global space in which 
finance capital can range freely in search of ever-increasing profit. In 
a supposedly democratic age, financial interests must adopt the stance 
that investment is vital to a development that benefits everyone ... 
eventually. But this is merely the latest ideological disguise for a 
capitalist system that has always hidden utterly selfish intent behind a 
veil of philanthropic concern. The role of the national/local state, in 
the context of neoliberalism, is to create and preserve an institutional 
framework appropriate to such practices. It must also set up military, 
defense, police and juridical functions required to secure private 
property rights and to support freely functioning markets. The 
privatization and corporatization of public assets has been a main 
feature of the neoliberal project. The New Economic Policy introduced in 
India in 1991 included standard structural adjustment measures, as 
advocated by the IMF and World Bank, under a basically neoliberal 
approach to economic policy. Conventional interpretations see this 
program of economic liberalization as transforming the Indian economy 
and leading to a substantial increase in the rate of India’s economic 
growth. But in a country like India, growth is not enough. The question 
is who benefits from the new growth regime, and can it significantly 
improve the conditions of livelihood for India’s 800 million people with 
incomes below $2.00 a day? This session looks at international policy 
regimes and their national adoption under strategic conditions of 
economic crisis and coercion, and within longer term structural changes 
in the power calculus of global capitalism. It looks at long term growth 
tendencies, poverty and employment rates at the national level, regional 
level and local levels in India; the main growth centers – their 
economic and social structures, employment types and levels, changes in 
poverty rates, benefits and costs of rapid growth; the areas and people 
left out – their economic and social structures, employment types and 
levels, changes in poverty rates, and costs incurred from rapid growth 
elsewhere; the advantages and deficiencies of the existing policy 
regime, and similar topics. The session also makes comparisons with 
policy regimes elsewhere in the Third World, especially South Asia. And 
it suggests policy alternatives that re-direct growth towards 
development that specifically benefits poor people.

Contact: Richard Peet, Clark University (US), Saraswati Raju, Jawaharlal 
Nehru University (India), Waquar Ahmed, Clark University (US), Jody Emel 
(Clark University (US).
 

Geography and Revolution

This session considers the question of geography and revolution. As an 
academic discipline, geography has not generally paid much attention to 
political and social revolutions. The European anarchist tradition did 
intrude into geography, via figures such as Kropotkin and Recleus, but 
not until the 1960s and 1970s was the question taken up with any 
seriousness. Then, there was a significant discussion of revolutionary 
theory and some connection to revolutionary movements, but in many 
places by the early 1980s, in the face of declining political movements 
and the neoliberal restructuring of global capitalism, revolutionary 
politics were increasingly sidelined by what can be called a post-1960s 
“politics of being” and a shift to social movements that generally 
although not entirely eschewed revolutionary politics.

The point of this session is to begin to think about the question of 
revolution again and specifically to explore the connections between 
geography and revolution. We are well atuned to the connections between 
history and revolution – revolution brings historical change in social, 
political and cultural relations – but how are we to think about 
geography and revolution? While there is some discussion too of 
geography and intellectual “revolution,” the focus here will be squarely 
on political revolution. Papers may be historical, looking at specific 
revolutions, for example the American (1776) or French (1789), the 
Russian (1917) or Cuban (1917) or else more contemporary, such as the 
Iranian or Nicaraguan revolutions of 1979, and of course many others. 
Was the anti-colonial revolt of 1857 in India a revolutionary upsurge – 
why, or why not? What are the boundaries of the term, “revolution”? Why 
do so many see revolution today as unrealistic when history teaches the 
“ineluctability” (Foucault) of revolution? – and the unrealistic nature 
of contemporary social relations of production and reproduction? How do 
we evaluate Fanon's simultaneous support for revolution yet warning 
about the possible pitfalls of specifically national liberation revolts? 
In specific casaes, how do questions of class and race, nationality and 
gender work with or against a revolutionary politics? Is the new concern 
for global warming amenable to a revolutionary politics? And if not why not?

Contact: Neil Smith, smith at gc.cuny.edu

 

Role of American Imperialism in West Asia with special reference to 
Palestine and Iraq

West Asia is currently becoming the global flashpoint, with US-Zionist 
imperialism seeking to remould the region to its liking. Israel , its 
closest ally in the region, is also seeking to destroy the Palestinian 
nation, as well as stamp out all resistance to its own apartheid 
policies inside Israel as well the Palestinian Territories it has 
occupied. The catchall slogan of "War against Terror," post 9/11, is 
providing a cover for the aggressive designs of the US-Israeli axis. 
Military strikes against Iran now loom on the horizon and the UN 
Security Council itself is being manipulated for that purpose.

It is the resistance of the people in Iraq , of the Palestinian people, 
as well as the heroic resistance by the Lebanese national forces against 
Israeli invasion that today stand in the way of US and Israeli designs 
in the region. The proposed session will discuss the history of the West 
Asian crisis and its contemporary nature, role of American Imperialism 
in its aggravation with special reference to Palestine and Iraq , 
relevance of West Asian crisis to global peace, resistance efforts and 
alternatives

This effort of organising a session on West Asia in the Critical 
Geography Conference is part of an ongoing process in India and outside 
to build a global movement on West Asia in general and Palestine in 
particular. We intend to propose a follow-up in the form of an 
international conference on Palestine in 2008 and also try and set up 
solidarity groups in India to send multiple high level delegations to 
Palestine to put pressure on Israel and USA .

Contact: varsharb at yahoo.com

 

How to solve geopolitical problems without being imperialist


The session promotes a debate on current geopolitical crisis areas 
(Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Israel/Palestine, Darfur, Iran and others). 
The aim is to deal especially with concrete issues, not just with 
theoretical discussions. Are critical geographers able to go beyond 
being “critical” and suggest concrete solutions to current geopolitical 
dynamics? For a start, critical geography could intervene more 
effectively in geopolitical crises by looking into actually lived local 
experiences in regions of geopolitical crisis, without reducing social 
organisation in a territory to the existence of a state, without 
assuming any exclusive belonging to places, and without being hoodwinked 
by institutional representations and/or superstructures. Presentations 
are invited that are concerned with formulating concrete solutions based 
on actually lived situations and apart from the involvement of the state 
and other (international) institutions.

Contact: Fabrizio Eva, university of Venice, fabrizio.eva at fastwebnet.it