Absorbing pressure: Bodily 鈥榯ension鈥 in a changing Himalayan world

Nikita SimpsonLeave a comment

The Gaddi community of the Indian Himalayas experience the present as fraught with various, entangled pressures 鈥 pressure to ensure upward social mobility and inclusion in India鈥檚 middle class, pressure to secure stable domestic incomes, pressure to maintain sexual and gendered propriety. Written by , this piece examines how such pressures are not evenly distributed across the community but are absorbed by particular people through the experience of bodily and mental 鈥榯ension鈥. 鈥榯ension鈥, Simpson argues, both registers these pressures in the body, and allows people to push back against them, issuing a particular and paradoxical account of power and the body.

A view of the Dhaula Dhar range from below. Photograph by the author.

The Gaddi people, who inhabit the lower foothills of the Indian Himalayan Dhaula Dhar range, experienced a number of structural transformations in the past century. An ecological crisis, precipitated by neo-colonial environmental policies, has dramatically shifted their landscape. They have given up their traditional agro-pastoral livelihood in favour of waged labour as pastures and properties in Himalayan foothills have become enclosed.聽 Hierarchies of caste and social status have become unyoked from livelihood practices. They have shifted their religious practice from Shaivite animism toward more muscular Hindu mainstream religion. Their practices of kinship and marriage have become increasingly nuclearized, dependent on a. As a result of these changes, the Gaddi community experience the present as fraught with various, entangled pressures 鈥 pressure to ensure upward social mobility and inclusion in India鈥檚 middle class, pressure to secure stable domestic incomes in a boom-and-bust entrepreneurial economy, pressure to maintain sexual and gendered propriety in an increasingly politicised public sphere.

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The Ideal Amount of Work and Leisure

Hritic GautamLeave a comment

Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys, has attracted significant attention for his in which he advises Indian youth to work 70 hours a week to contribute to the nation鈥檚 growth. Mr. Murthy,  who also happens to be the father-in-law of the UK鈥檚 Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, supports his advice by drawing parallels to the post-war recoveries of Germany and Japan. He suggests that Indian corporate leaders should similarly consider increasing employees鈥 working hours to enhance productivity

In my view, Mr. Murthy鈥檚 advice is ignorant and misinformed at best, or highly malicious at worst. In either case, it is profoundly misguided. In this blog, we will critically assess his statement, examining both its intent and factual accuracy. This discussion will also lead to broader reflections on the themes of work and leisure

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Degrowth and the Global South: remarks on the twin problem of structural interdependencies

Claudius Graebner1 Comment

By Claudius Gr盲bner-Radkowitsch and Birte Strunk

The degrowth movement is a radical attempt to challenge our current economic system, arguing that its excessive focus on economic growth will ultimately harm people and planet. It has recently gained increasing attention, not only because it has found its way into mainstream political debates (see, for example, the at the European Parliament), but also because related research projects have won prestigious international funding awards (see, for example, ). However, as you may have noticed, these events are mainly taking place in the Global North. The concept as such was also originally developed in the Global North. At the same time, the movement is strongly committed to the idea of global justice and a decolonization of relations between the Global North and South.

This begs the question: What is the role of the Global South in the contemporary degrowth discourse? To what extent does the discourse take into account Southern perspectives? Does it think that the South should also degrow, or is Northern degrowth mainly seen as a self-prescription? And to what extent does the degrowth community reflect on the implications of Northern degrowth for the Global South? To answer these questions, we have taken stock of . But before we go into the details of what we found and what we make of it, let us briefly outline what degrowth is all about.

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Neoclassical Economics and Urban Planning: A Contentious Theoretical and Policy Making Relationship

ngarzacsudheduLeave a comment

Neoclassical economics 鈥 and contemporary extensions of it 鈥 has an outsized presence in academic and policy making circuits. This position of privilege builds upon more than a century of theoretical development, comprising the contemporary 鈥渕ainstream鈥 of economic science. The characteristics and rise of this mainstream, determined in many cases by means beyond pure intellectual merit, has been regularly documented in the existing scholarship.

Economic imperialism has been one of the results of mainstream dominance, and its academic impact on other social sciences has been widely documented, including their corresponding areas of policy making. In this regard, I present here an approach to the problematic relationship between Neoclassical Urban Economics and Urban Planning. These are two related social science disciplines, which however have very different epistemologies and approaches to policy advice.

The main difference between academic mainstream Economics and Urban Planning is methodological, in terms of what is considered a valid approach to scientific knowledge. Economics builds upon logical positivism; it first performs deductive theory construction that 鈥渄escribes鈥 reality, and then subsequently tests its theoretical predictions, which in some cases (not all the cases) lead to policy prescriptions. In contrast, Urban Planning is an action-oriented and problem-solving scientific discipline. It inductively produces normative theory, which explicitly shows the analyst鈥檚 point of view regarding the topic and how to intervene on it (public policy advice).

Mainstream Economics is in essence defined by the method and theoretical approach, not by the topic (the economy). This allows it to engage with a wide variety of topics, one of them being the spatial analysis of the built environment, which is also the topic of academic Urban Planning.

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The city of the evicted: lives under pressure in the margins of an urban fantasy in Benin

Jo毛l Noret1 Comment

by Jo毛l Noret & Narcisse M. Yedji

Since 2017, Cotonou 鈥 the economic capital of Benin 鈥 has witnessed several urban development projects. Aiming to showcase the city as the new face of a new Benin, attractive to both businessmen and tourists, the plans have involved extensive tarmacking projects, the development of the city鈥檚 first shopping malls, the rebuilding of several markets to 鈥榤odern鈥 standards, the erection of emblematic statues 鈥 notably that of 鈥樷, branded as an ode to feminine courage and a national emblem 鈥, and the design of a new coast line. The urban poor have paid a disproportionate price in the implementation of this new 鈥 that is, a shiny urban renovation project disconnected from the sociological realities of the city and from the needs of whole swathes of its population, especially in the urban precariat.

In what follows, we argue that the successive waves of evictions of thousands of poor urban dwellers have pressurized in multiple ways and in the longer run already fragile existences. As neighbourhoods and livelihood were dislocated, their ex-residents were simultaneously witnessing their life chances shrinking for the foreseeable future, and faced with the traumatic aftermath of dislocated homes. A 鈥榞enerative鈥 process in itself, as Gunv贸r Jonsson recently argued on this blog about evictions in Dakar, there is no doubt that state pressure grounded in neoliberal urbanism affects the urban poor in multiple ways. The following paragraphs explore such multi-layered consequences, from degraded economic conditions to tarnished senses of one鈥檚 place in the social world.

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So, Global or International Development: Why Not Both? Marx in the Field, Planetary Immanent Development, and Centering Political Economy in Development Studies

alemezzadriLeave a comment

In a compelling new contribution in the journal Development and Change, a political economy collective led by builds a strong case against calls to 鈥渦niversalize鈥 Development Studies shifting the focus from 鈥淚nternational鈥 to 鈥淕lobal鈥 Development. Indeed, many such calls at universalization 鈥 at least in the two influential 鈥減andemic papers鈥 the collective thoroughly revises, one is main-authored by and the other by 鈥 are misguided. As convincingly argued by the collective, these calls tone down the structural historical nature of the Global North-Global South divide; they erase development paradigms and understandings from the Global South and trivialize the nature of challenges emerging from long histories of colonialization and plunder, which still regenerate along global value chains and networks, as authors like have shown, as well as distinct regimes of social reproduction and contemporary crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as I explain here and .

Yet, universalizing and globalizing are not the same thing; they can be operated in distinct ways, and through entirely different intellectual projects. Moreover, the discipline of Development Studies, in its mainstream dominant avatar, badly needs 鈥済lobalizing,鈥 given its Eurocentrism 鈥 yet in ways that center the experiences in/of the majority world; think through plural frameworks and locations; and speak to the extraordinarily diverse material realities and practices of power, inequality, and subordination across our planet. Crucially, such experiences, realities, and practices are, at once, the result of trajectories mediated by the Global North-Global South Divide, as emphasized in critical International Development frameworks, yet also always been global in nature 鈥 calling for Global Development lenses 鈥 unlike what narrow development economic theorizing heavily relying on modernization theory has and still suggest/ed. Ultimately, one may wonder: in the debate between 鈥淚nternational鈥 and 鈥淕lobal鈥 Development, why and what exactly do we need to choose?

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An acknowledgement of women鈥檚 work in economics – hits, misses, and a long road ahead

surbhi kesarLeave a comment

By and Surbhi Kesar

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 was awarded to Claudia Goldin, professor of economics at Harvard University, for 鈥渉aving advanced our understanding of women鈥檚 labour market outcomes鈥. Goldin is now one of three women who have been awarded the prize, and, more importantly, this is the first time that the prize recognises research that makes a fundamental distinction between economic outcomes of men and women. Her work makes significant contributions to both the empirical and theoretical aspects of the theme, particularly in the context of the US.

Empirically, she applied innovative ways to unearth data for women鈥檚 labour market outcomes in the US at a time when the labour force surveys only collected this information for men. This allowed her to uncover the long-term trend of economic outcomes for women. Her work revealed that there was no linear relationship between economic growth and development and the women鈥檚 labour force participation. Instead, bringing together cross-country evidence and historical data, she empirically established a U-shaped relationship between women鈥檚 employment and economic growth. This implies that at low levels of economic growth, larger share of women tend to participate in the labour market, largely in agriculture. However, with economic growth and a sectoral shift away from agriculture, women鈥檚 participation faltered. Goldin argued that the 鈥渋ncome effect鈥 — the rise in household incomes alongside economic growth along with the increasing use of technology in agricultural activities — may explain women鈥檚 initial withdrawal from employment. However, beyond a certain level of economic growth, women鈥檚 participation rose as their education levels increased and as more white-collar emerged by replacing the factory jobs that are often stigmatised for women.

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Decolonising development with Frantz Fanon

benjaminselwynLeave a comment

The great cultural theorist Stuart Hall called Frantz Fanon鈥檚 The Wretched of the Earth 鈥榯he bible of decolonisation鈥 as it encapsulated the urge for freedom across the colonial world (). Fanon illuminates how racism represented an organising principle for capitalist classes by systematically devaluing the lives of the majority of the world鈥檚 population. 鈥楩or centuries the capitalists have behaved like real war criminals in the underdeveloped world,鈥 he wrote. 鈥楧eportation, massacres, forced labour, and slavery were the primary methods used by capitalism to increase its gold and diamond reserves, and establish its wealth and power鈥 ().

One of the reasons for Fanon鈥檚 popularity among those who want to decolonise development is that he argued that post-colonial countries should forge their own paths to development rather than attempting to follow already developed countries. 鈥楾he Third World must not be content to define itself in relation to values which preceded it,鈥 he warned. 鈥橭n the contrary, the underdeveloped countries must endeavour to focus on their very own values as well as methods and style specific to them.鈥

Not only did Fanon explain the horrors inflicted by colonialism upon native populations; crucially, he also conceived of real human development as a process rooted in a collective labouring class (comprising workers and poor peasants) transcending capitalist brutality.

However these two elements of his thought 鈥 the critical identification of the violence of colonialism, and a real human developmental alternative to it 鈥 have often been disconnected by thinkers influential to the decolonial movement. This represents a dangerous misinterpretation of Fanon. It obscures his vision of a decolonised world and the social forces able to construct it.

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