Postcolonial Governmentalities Workshop Programme 2015

SPATIAL PRACTICES OF POSTCOLONIAL GOVERNANCE

INEQUALITIES, EXCLUSIONS AND POTENTIALS

WORKSHOP PROGRAMME1-2 September 2015, Cardiff University

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Spatial Practices of Postcolonial Governance Workshop:

Inequalities, Exclusions and Potentials1st-2nd September 2015, Cardiff University

This series of workshops is inspired by the need for further collaboration between academics to understand how both governmentality and postcolonial approaches are key to understanding contemporary governance.

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s writings, governmentality offers a conceptual framework to analyse how contemporary governance functions not solely through states but through multiple tactics and means that regulate the conduct of individuals and institutions by setting up standards of behaviour according to neoliberal rationalities. A postcolonial approach to governmentality exposes the (post)colonial logics that reproduce neoliberalism, the role of postcolonial sites and practices in shaping neoliberal governance, and the inequalities embedded within it insofar as its standards of conduct determine which subjects are privileged and excluded. In particular, postcolonial perspectives show how neoliberal governance can be both productive and repressive, functioning to impose a fixed code of conduct and to objectify (gendered, racialized, sexualized) ‘others’ as part of its project of improvement.

Spatial practices of governance were used as a colonial tool to regulate populations in multiple ways, from the control of migration to the demarcation and spatial restriction of groups according to categories of race and religion. These practices resonate today through the institutionalisation of surveillance mechanisms, exclusionary urban gentrification, and migration policies that secure the movement of populations within and across borders. Examining these urban technologies of regulation can help us understand the power dynamics that shape various transnational inequalities and social divisions. These spatial practices of governance also draw on and reflect complex political landscapes that influence processes of identity-formation, shaping meanings of citizenship and notions of difference. At the same time, in discussing governance, we must consider the negotiations of power that emerge through forms of resistance and counter-conduct in relation to these unequal spatial practices. Finally, while spatial governance is often critically discussed as an undesirable exertion of authority, this should not foreclose the productive, and indeed emancipatory, potentials of governance.

Key Speakers: The keynote speech will be delivered by Joanne Sharp (University of Glasgow) and the workshop will conclude with a roundtable chaired by Ambreena Manji (Cardiff University) with panelists that include Paul Bowman (Cardiff University), Mark Jackson (Bristol), Laura Routley (Newcastle University), Simon Philpott (Newcastle University) and Robbie Shilliam (QMUL).

This workshop is co-sponsored by the Poststructural Politics (PPWG),Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) and Africa Working Groups from the British International Studies Association (BISA), and Cardiff University’s School of Law and Politics.

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Workshop ProgrammeDay 1 - Tuesday September 1st


9.30 am Arrival: Coffee and Registration

10.00 am Opening keynote: Joanne Sharp (University of Glasgow)The challenges of postcolonial governance: space, scale and identity in Nyerere’s Tanzania

11.00 am Coffee break

11.30 am Panel 1: Development: Enclosures and foreclosures

Mara Duer (University of Warwick), Rachel Tate (University of Leicester), Ray Chan (Cardiff University)

Discussant: Ambreena Manji (Cardiff University)Chair: Christian Bueger (Cardiff University)

1.00 pm Lunch

2.00 pm Panel 2: Ambiguous sites and subjects

Joe Turner (University of Sheffield), Nivi Manchanda (University of Cambridge), Jera Lego (International Christian University)

Discussant: Jutta Weldes (University of Bristol)Chair: Simon Philpott (Newcastle University)

3.30 pm Tea break

4.00 pm Concepts and methods café

5.30 pm Drinks reception, followed by dinner


Workshop ProgrammeDay 2 - Wednesday September 2nd

9.30 am Coffee reception

10.00 am Panel 3: The limits of political agency Javed Wani (RHUL), Nawal Mustafa (LSE), Mark Jackson (University of Bristol)Discussant: John Harrington (Cardiff University)Chair: Paul Bowman (Cardiff University)

11.30 am Coffee break

12.00 pm Speaker: Omar Nagati (CLUSTER Cairo)

Alternative modes of urban governmentality in post-revolution Cairo: Examples of CLUSTER’s projects 2012-2015.

1.00 pm Lunch

2.00 pm Panel 4: Bodies, violences and exclusions

Lisa Tilley (Warwick University), Laura Routley (Newcastle University), Simon Philpott (Newcastle University), Grace Musila (Stellenbosch University)

Discussant: Robbie Shilliam (QMUL)Chair: Jutta Weldes (University of Bristol)

3.30 pm Tea break

4.00 pm Roundtable Laura Routley (Newcastle University), Simon Philpott (Newcastle University), Robbie Shilliam (QMUL), Paul Bowman (Cardiff University) and Mark Jackson (University of Bristol)Chair: Ambreena Manji (Cardiff University)

5.30 pm Drinks reception



Workshop VenueThe workshop will be held in Room 1.28 of the Law Building, Cardiff University (Museum Ave, CF10 3AX), #28 on the map.

A larger copy of the map and key may also be found here http://www.law.cf.ac.uk/enrolment/ug/Location%20Guide.pdf


http://www.law.cf.ac.uk/enrolment/ug/Location%20Guide.pdf


Venue Details Travel TaxisLocal taxi firms include:Capital Taxis: 029 20 777 777Dragon Taxis: 029 20 333 333Premier Taxis: 029 20 555 555

TrainsThe closest train station is Cardiff Central.

For those coming to the workshop directly from the train station, the campus is a 20 minute walk away. Take St Mary's St, turn right on Queen St and then left on Park Place.

Emergency InformationUK Emergency numbersEmergency services: Call either 999 or 112 NHS 111 service: Call 111 if you need medical help fast but it’s not a 999 emergency

HospitalUniversity Hospital of Wales (UHW)Health ParkCardiff CF14 4XWTelephone: 029 2074 7747

For a full list of hospitals, see http://www.cardiffandvaleuhb.wales.nhs.uk/our-hospitals



http://www.cardiffandvaleuhb.wales.nhs.uk/our-hospitals

BiographiesKeynote speakerJoanne SharpGlasgow University

Jo Sharp is Professor of Geography at the University of Glasgow. She is a feminist political geographer whose research has focused around critical and popular geopolitics and, more recently, is exploring the intersections between postcolonialism and geopolitics. She also has research interests around knowledge, power and development, and has undertaken fieldwork in Tanzania, Egypt and Scotland. Her books include Condensing the Cold War (Minnesota, 2000), Geographies of Postcolonialism (Sage, 2009), The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics (edited with Klaus Dodds and Merje Kuus, 2013), Geopolitics: An Introductory Reader (edited with Jason Dittmer, 2014) and The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography (edited with John Agnew, Virginie Mamadouh and Anna Secor, 2015). For more information see http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/ges/staff/joannesharp/

ConvenorElisa Wynne-HughesCardiff University

Elisa's research is motivated by a concern to better understand the social construction, positioning and governance of subjects through everyday (popular culture) practices, most recently examining the politics of Western tourism in Cairo. Building from this research she is writing a politicised guidebook, The Political Planet, Cairo, to encourage more inclusive tourism visions and policies. She is also working on projects that examine how popular representations of street harassment in Cairo reinforce international and Egyptian security policies that target ‘bad’ Arab/Muslim males as (sexually) threatening. Finally, she is examining the tactics of transnational stop street harassment groups. She analyses the potentially emancipatory and exclusionary potentials of their everyday governance and security strategies.



http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/ges/staff/joannesharp/

ConvenorTerri-Anne TeoUniversity of Bristol

Terri-Anne Teo is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol, UK. Her thesis examines the theory of multiculturalism in the context of Singapore by interrogating the social relations and processes of meaning-making within visual, material and spatial dimensions. She is interested in the research areas of identity politics, poststructuralist thought and postcolonial scholarship. In 2014, she was a visiting scholar and research assistant at Singapore Management University’s School of Social Sciences.

Roundtable discussant/Panel ChairPaul BowmanCardiff University

Paul Bowman teaches media and cultural studies at Cardiff University. He is author of numerous books, including Martial Arts Studies (2015), Reading Rey Chow (2013), Beyond Bruce Lee (2013), Culture and the Media (2011), Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010), Deconstructing Popular Culture (2008) and Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies (2007). He has also edited several books, including Rancière and Film (2012), The Rey Chow Reader (2010), Reading Rancière (2009) and The Truth of Žižek (2006). He has edited issues of journals such as Parallax, Social Semiotics, Postcolonial Studies, and Educational Philosophy & Theory, and is the founding editor of two online open access journals: JOMEC Journal (2012-) and Martial Arts Studies (2015-). He is also Editor in Chief of Cardiff University Press, and is currently writing a book entitled Mythologies of Martial Arts.



Panel chairChristian Bueger Cardiff University

Christian Bueger is Reader in International Relations at Cardiff University. He obtained his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy (2010). His fields of research are Security Studies, International Political Sociology, International Organizations and Sociology of Science and Expertise. His current research is on maritime security, piracy and global governance in the frame of the project "Counter-Piracy Governance - A Praxiographic Analysis" funded by a Future Research Leader grant of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council [ES/K008358/1]. He is also one of the lead investigators of the Lessons Learned Consortium of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (http://www.lessonsfrompiracy.net), an associate editor of the European Journal of International Security (Cambridge UP) and a co-editor of Piracy-studies.org – The Research Portal for Maritime Security (http://piracy-studies.org). His recent publications include International Practice Theory: New Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) co-authored with Frank Gadinger, and “Making things known: Epistemic Practice, the United Nations and the Translation of Piracy”, International Political Sociology 9(1), 1-19, 2015. Further information is available at http://bueger.info

Panel discussantJohn HarringtonCardiff University

John Harrington is Professor of Global Health Law at Cardiff School of Law and Politics. He has published widely on medical law, using methods of rhetorical analysis and cultural studies to link developments in the law to their broader social and institutional context. His current project focusses on the translation of international health norms into national legal order, with particular reference to developments in Kenya. Publications include Towards a Rhetoric of Medical Law (forthcoming Routledge), Global Governance of HIV/AIDS: Intellectual Property and Access to Essential Medicines (ed Elgar 2012) and Global Health and Human Rights: Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (ed Routledge 2010).


http://bueger.info


Roundtable discussant/PanelistMark Jackson University of Bristol

Mark Jackson is Senior Lecturer of Postcolonial Geographies in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. A University Research Fellow for 2015-16, he is currently working on a project called 'Re-thinking Postcolonial Critique after Posthumanism'. The project involves two books, one an edited volume on postcolonial theory, posthumanism and political ontology, and the other a monograph exploring the implications of the ontological turn for postcolonial critique. Mark is the series editor for a new Routledge Research series called 'Research in New Postcolonialisms' launched in the Spring of 2105. Mark has a background in philosophy, sociological theory, and urbanism. He teaches and contributes to units on postcolonial geography, critical political economy, political ecology, philosophy, postcolonial urbanism, and qualitative methodology. He supervises a number of PhD students whose work ranges across such fields as: post-structuralist theory, materiality, postcolonial performativity, postsecular urbanism, the Anthropocene, and political ecology.

Panel discussant/Roundtable chairAmbreena ManjiCardiff University

Ambreena Manji is Professor of Land Law and Development in the School of Law and Politics. Ambreena’s reputation for research leadership was established during her tenure as the Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA), a British Academy research institute in Nairobi. She held this seconded position between 2010 and 2014. In this capacity, she was responsible for the strategic direction of a multidisciplinary research institute supporting researchers in archaeology, history, political science. Kiswahili studies, anthropology, law and literature. She was responsible for initiating a series of innovative research programmes across Eastern Africa and oversaw a widening of the BIEA’s subject reach. Ambreena’s research projects are characterised by three main methodological approaches. Firstly, they pay attention not only to the content and development of doctrinal law but also to its broader social and political context and to the complex relations between them. Thus, her work on land law is widened to take account of the implications for law of such factors as global governance, changing financial markets and national political struggles. Secondly, her research is interdisciplinary in methodology. Her interpretation of legal materials draws on literary theory, historical studies and political economy. Thirdly, her work has



sought to develop materialist feminist perspectives on law and development. Specifically, it has examined women's central position as providers of productive and reproductive labour. Recent publications have been on the topics of the right to the city, infrastucture and road building in Eastern Africa, the politics of corruption, land law reform, constitutional change, care labour and international development law. Ambreena has advised a number of international organisations, including the FAO and UNDP. Most recently she has been nominated by the Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) to act as expert adviser to the Habitat III conference being held in Quito, Ecuador in 2016. She is Vice-President (2016-2018) and President designate (2018-2020) of the African Studies Association UK (ASAUK).

Methods café facilitator/Panelist Grace MusilaStellenbosche Univesrity

Grace A. Musila teaches at the English department at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She holds a PhD in African Literature; and her research interests include East and Southern African literatures, popular culture and gender studies. Her work has been published in various journals, including Journal of Commonwealth Literatures, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Research in African Literatures, Africa Insight, Social Identities and Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She has also co-edited [with James Ogude and Dina Ligaga] an essay collection titled Rethinking Eastern African Literary and Intellectual Landscapes (Africa World Press, 2012). She is currently writing a monograph on the 1988 murder of British tourist Julie Ward at the Maasai Game Reserve in Kenya. The book is a multidisciplinary portrait of the multiple strands of ideas and interests that were inscribed on the Julie Ward murder and what these reveal about cultural productions of truth, knowledge and social imaginaries in Kenya and Britain.



SpeakerOmar NagatiCLUSTER Cairo

Omar Nagati is a practicing architect and urban planner who currently lives in Cairo. Having studied at UBC, Vancouver and UC Berkeley, Nagati adopts an interdisciplinary approach to urban history and design, and engages in a comparative analysis of the question of urban informality in developing countries. He teaches part-time Urban Design Studio at the MSA University in Giza and has recently cofounded CLUSTER, a new platform for critical urban research and design init iat ives downtown Cairo. clustercairo.org.

Roundtable discussant/Panel Chair/PanelistSimon PhilpottNewcastle University

Simon Philpott is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Newcastle University. His research interests are focused on popular culture with work in progress focused on documentary film and the politics of genocide, institutional racism in Australian football, discourses of cheating in international cricket and the construction of Islam and Muslims in electronic games.

Roundtable discussant/PanelistLaura RoutleyNewcastle University

Laura Routley is a Lecturer in African and Postcolonial Politics at Newcastle University. She completed her PhD in International Politics at Aberystwyth University in 2010. Her book Negotiating Corruption: NGOs, Governance and Hybridity in West Africa is published with Routledge's Interventions Series and available from December 2015. Her new project examines the conceptualisation of rehabilitation in the postcolonial Ghanaian prison.



Panel discussant/Roundtable discussantRobbie Shilliam Queen Mary University of London

Robbie Shilliam is Reader in International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. He is author of The Black Pacific (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2015) and co-editor of Race and Racism in International Relations (Routledge, 2014).

Panel discussant/Panel chairJutta WeldesUniversity of Bristol

Jutta Weldes is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Bristol. Her main research interests are theorising everyday insecurity and everyday security practices/practitioners, critical International Relations theories, U.S. foreign policy (cold war and after), the intersections of popular culture and world politics, gender and world politics, and the transnationalisation of the state. She is currently working on a diverse set of projects including a set of papers on the global anti-street harassment movement and everyday insecurities (with Karen Desborough and Elisa Wynne-Hughes), on soft power and popular culture (with Christina Rowley) and on ‘The State as Sex Machine’, in which she investigates the global sex industry and the attendant global anti-sex trafficking regime as instances of the transnationalisation of the neo-liberal state. She is the author of Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), co-editor of Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and editor of To Seek Out New Worlds: Science Fiction and World Politics (Palgrave: 2003).



AbstractsPanel 1 - Development: Enclosures and ForeclosuresMara Duer, Rachel Tate, Ray ChanDiscussant: Ambreena ManjiChair: Christian Bueger

Enclosure and Land Production in Araucanía, Chile. A Case from the Global South

The global commodification of land is taking a new form. Previously, many rural areas lay outside the scope of state and capital, allowing local communities to interact with land in traditional ways for subsistence and social reproduction. The current phase of capitalist development has seen these places redefined as ‘marginal’ or ‘under-used’ land. But while these represent an asset for the global market, people living there represent an obstacle for development. This gives rise in the Global South to land acquisition involving the displacement of so-called ‘surplus population’ (McIntyre and Nast, 2011). In this schema, land is needed but people are not (Li, 2011). Advanced technologies of spatial governance create a new regime of bio/necropolitical enclosure, dismantling the social functions of land for local communities and further estranging them from it. Practices of enclosure are a framing mechanism through which land is incorporated into specific social spatial regimes. Since the ‘discovery’ of America, enclosure practices have simplified the continent’s land as property and resource, and, in International Relations, as terrain and territory. Other understandings of, and relations to, land have been banalised, marginalised, invisibilised – and attacked. In this paper, different regimes of enclosure (Sevilla-Buitrago, 2012) will be historicised using the key case of Araucanía in Chile as a region where land is still contested in its meaning, practices and representations. A de-colonial approach will illustrate how hierarchical and racial practices of enclosure and control work to discipline peoples and land under the colonial matrix of power (Quijano, 2010). Simultaneously, alternative forms of enclosure that resist the materialisation of the expansion of these abstract spaces will be explored.

Mara Duer is an Argentine sociologist, PhD candidate, and current holder of the Political Spaces scholarship awarded by Dr. Stuart Elden at the Politics and International Studies Department of Warwick University. On behalf of the department last year, Mara organised the conference ‘Contested Political Spaces: Urban, Land and Other Struggles’, participated in by students from Europe and Asia. From 2010-2012, Mara was beneficiary of a full scholarship from Rotary Foundation to pursue a Master in Peace Studies at the International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan. For her thesis she worked in New York City at the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ while analysing Muslim and Arab communities’ right to belong to the city. She was invited to present at the 2012 Critical Geography Conference at Chapel Hill University in North Carolina. In Argentina, Mara worked at the University of Buenos Aires as teaching assistant in Middle Eastern Sociology. In Japan, she was teaching assistance for Dr. Giorgio Shani on international relations and worked at ICU’s Social Science Research Institute as a Research Associate in Critical Security Studies.



Development Corridors: Hopes of a Trans-African Highway and Concomitant Post Colonial Limitations

Development corridors, linked closely with the notion of 'micro-regionalism',1 represent interesting and potentially promising units with which to study the effectiveness of post-colonial governance. These mega projects represent the hope of greater unity in Africa, they also dissemble the impact of historical and contemporary colonialism and neocolonialism on the continent of Africa. Using case studies this paper evaluates outcomes and analyses the economic and social implications for the Maputo Development Corridor (MDC), the first and most successful cross border development corridor in Africa. This represents a lacuna in the research, and if we as academics fail to measure and understand the level of inequality and exclusion produced within the micro-region, we not only fail to reduce inequitable outcome but all likelihood, condemn the Trans-African Highway to failure too. The three constituent parts measure and evaluate economic legacy, provide a unique insight into community-wide outcomes and finally some provide some potential amendments that seek to provide insight into development corridor strategy. Positive results are vital in this era of austerity in order for bodies to gain ODA, this paper seeks to provide evidence for them to address this. This reflective account of the MDC will then provide a prototype for the Pan African Project.

Rachel Tate graduated with a BA in Politics and Economic History in 1994 and then spent 15 years working in the tourism/hospitality industry. Since returning to education I have gained an MA in International Security and am currently a final year PhD Student at the University of Leicester in the department of Politics and International Relations. I am about to begin writing up my thesis and hope to take part in a some conferences and publish some papers over the next 12 months. I also teach in the department as an associate tutor and aim to build an academic career. My research focusses on whether spatial development corridors in southern Africa have met their founding criteria. No research has thus far measured the effectiveness of such corridor projects and as such I seek to populate this lacuna. As both SADC and the AU are heavily promoting investment into the Trans-African Highway as a magnificent development opportunity I consider my work valuable. The results have certainly been interesting. It has highlighted the many historical relationships that produced great inequalities are still present, many others are still excluded from development in even basic ways. Yet this is not straight forwards as while many academics have challenged the notion of development corridors as 'just another neo-liberal policy', they have in fact made some important changes in the lives of ordinary citizens. My paper draws on my thesis and highlights some of these key findings.



Postcolonial Governmentality: A Study of Spatial Control and Pig-human Relationships in Post-colonial Hong Kong (1997-2012)

Since the onset of swine flu (H1N1 flu pandemic) in 2009, pig-farming practices have raised many public health issues in different parts of the world. Global press media, pandemic monitoring agencies, and the general public keep their eyes on the spread of pig diseases. The images of pig and the pig farming industry are presented as unclean, filthy, and a host of human transmitted diseases through medical reports, scientific comments and policy documents (Emel and Urbanik 20l0; Enticott 2008; Neo, 2012). The domination of biomedical knowledge and scientific account of the transmission of swine flu further produced a monolithic public health discourse, which rationalise the governing institutions’ control on the pig animal industry in different countries (Chan, 2015). Most of the Foucauldian approaches are used to study the total institutions such as prison, hospital, and school (Smart, 2001). However, there in lack of study to examine how sanitary polices and different disciplinary techniques are applied to pig farming spaces, farmers and pigs in everyday life, producing the internalization of rules, regulations and norms (Foucault, 1991; Dean, 2010; Rose and Miller, 1992). This paper aims at employing Michel Foucault’s governmentality to examine how the License Buy Back Scheme (LBBS) and new 43 Codes of Practices (COP) becomes a spatial tactic to control the whole pig farming industry and develop a new system of sanitary regulations to produce the subjectivity of sanitary farmers in post-colonial Hong Kong.

Kin Wing Chan (Ray) is a PhD Candidate in China’s Environmental Governance and Policy at the School of Planning and Geography, Cardiff University, U.K. His research focuses on incorporating grassroots’ voices with policy analyses, investigating the material utilisation of bamboo to promote China’s sustainable development, and examining how colonial and post colonial governmentality transforms farmers’ practices Hong Kong. His recent paper (Forthcoming, June 2015) with Byron Miller, ‘Capitalist Pigs: Governmentality, Subjectivities, and the Regulation of Pig Farming in Colonial Hong Kong (1950-1970)’ will be published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space



Panel 2 - Ambiguous Sites and SubjectsJoe Turner, Nivi Manchada, Jera LegoDiscussant: Jutta WeldesChair: Simon Philpott

The Government of Family Life: Contesting the 'Domos' of British Citizenship

This paper explores how the family has emerged as unique site for the (re)production and contestation of British citizenship. It argues that whilst family has worked as both a technique and target for forms of rule, relying on certain ideals of domesticity, the familial also acts as political space making possible alternative claims to belonging. The article first explores the contemporary government of family life in the UK, with its focus on regulating the domestic space of the ‘troubled family’. This is situated as part of a broader (post)colonial history of managing certain ‘problem’ subjects and groups through 'domestifıcation' (the colonised, migrants, the ‘workless’, Irish Travellers, Roma). In its contemporary expression, neo-liberal citizenship is produced through the interlinking ideals of ‘household’, ‘domesticity’ and ‘home’ – this is highly moralised and classed assemblage which also dehumanises through the iconography of the 'failed families'. To reveal how such claims to family life are never exhaustive, the article finishes with a reading of the protests against the eviction of the Dale Farm traveller camp residents in 2011. It argues that the ‘activist’ claims to family which emerged in this event, provides a contestation of the territorialised boundaries of ‘home’/'domesticity' and performs a different claim over political life.

Joe Turner currently works as a University Teacher in International Politics at the University of Sheffield. His doctoral research examined the relationship between Citizenship and Security in the history of UK welfare and border practices. His latest research is an attempt to trace the relational logics that underpin postcolonial citizenship in Britain, in particular by exploring the historical production of ‘family life’. This works at the cross-section of political sociology and Foucauldian governmentality. Joe is currently editing a special issue on ‘(En)gendering the Political: Citizenship from the Margins’ for Citizenship Studies. He is a steering committee member of the ECPR standing group on Citizenship.



Rendering Afghanistan Legible: Discourses of State Failure and the Practices of (dis)order

The logics of coloniality and governmentality have always been inexplicably intertwined. Colonialism, in both its old and resurgent guises, has been a project not merely of domination, but crucially of restructuring lives and remaking populations. The ambivalences inherent in the colonial project become evident in the case of Afghanistan. Afghanistan can be considered a quasi-colonial state at best: colonial in its inception, it nevertheless avoided direct colonisation unlike its immediate neighbours and has achieved a mythical status as the graveyard of empires. This paper seeks to explore the applicability of colonial taxonomies of spatial governance to the Afghan experience. It argues that the discourses of ‘state failure’ have been employed specifically to grapple with the Afghan condition: a nation created but not occupied by colonial order. I interrogate the hegemonic narrative of state failure in Afghanistan in order to show the ways in which this narrative is still embedded in a racialised framework that accords European notions of spatiality and its concomitant experience of state formation primacy. I submit that the very concept of state failure, far from being a challenge to imperial practices of knowledge production, is an extension of the colonial practices of (dis)order, one that subjugates certain, usually local, knowledges and privileges other, ethnocentric ones.

Nivi Manchanda recently finished her PhD from the University of Cambridge titled: Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge Production. She was previously the Editor in Chief of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. She is co-editor (with Alex Anievas and Robbie Shilliam) of Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line, Routledge 2014.



Governing Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Thailand and Malaysia

Southeast Asia is the site of significant refugee populations: more than 150,000 in Malaysia, and anywhere between 80,000 to 110,000 in nine refugee camps on the border between Thailand and Myanmar as of March 2015. Despite this large presence, Thailand and Malaysia have neither signed the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees nor adopted national asylum frameworks. How has the refugee category been constructed and how have refugees and asylum seekers been governed in the absence of formal, legal frameworks? Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2010 and 2013, this paper considers the ambiguous socio-legal location in which refugees and asylum seekers inhabit in Thailand and Malaysia. It argues that the Thai and Malaysian states, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), nongovernment organizations (NGOs), and refugee community organizations (RCOs) are each animated by sovereign, governmental and pastoral rationalities in conducting competing and complementary programs that seek to constitute its subjects as citizens/ non-citizens, refugees/ persons-of-concern, and/or community members. This entails (re)considering the nature of sovereignty and governmentality for illiberal or semi-authoritarian states, the international government of refugees as implemented by and through the UNHCR, and the pastoral role of NGOs and RCOs in the governance of refugees.

Jera Beah H. Lego is a PhD Candidate with the Politics and International Relations Department at the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo where she is working on her dissertation problematizing the construction of the refugee category in the absence of national asylum frameworks in Thailand and Malaysia. She has an MA in Political Science from Keio University in Tokyo as well as an MA in Japanese Studies from the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. She was a Foreign Affairs Researcher at the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs’ Foreign Service Institute for five years where she handled the Japan Desk and is currently affiliated with the Social Science Research Institute at the ICU as a Research Associate.



Panel 3 - The Limits of Political Agency Javed Wani, Nawal Mustafa, Mark JacksonDiscussant: John HarringtonChair: Paul Bowman

Law as a Technology of (Post) Colonial Governance: (Mis)Government of Paper and Everyday Production of (Legal) Violence in United Provinces 1947-48

The relationship between the police and the judiciary stands at the very heart of the policies of control that enforced a certain sense of order in late colonial and early postcolonial India. Particularly, public order laws dealing with unlawful assemblies are an important component of such policies of control. While the function of the judicial appears to be clear i.e., conducting trials on the basis of evidence, the purpose of the police remains more difficult to define. Unlike the judge the policeman (or one of his superiors) has a great deal of discretion over whether or not to take action in a particular situation of public disorder/riot. But uncertainty did not wholly lie on only one side of the relationship of the two institutions. Late colonial juridical practice was prone to bureaucratic errors and shared with the police a basic disinterest in the liberty of individual persons. This paper tells the politically marginal but nevertheless highly revealing story of how a chance error during the arrest and subsequent detention of an elderly man called Peter Budge - an innocent bystander in a situation of heightened communal tensions - led to a scandal in the United Provinces administration in the year 1947-48. Budge’s case disappeared between the cracks of bad record keeping and insufficient information sharing and led to his lengthy and unlawful detention at the precise moment of India’s independence. Budge’s ordeal raises important questions about the complimentary relation between law and violence, particularly in postcolonial societies like India, and about the sometimes-fictitious nature of public order laws. On one hand, this paper will analyse certain laws in India prohibiting the use of public space in times of public ‘disorder’ and on the other, it will point out the fragility and chaos of the bureaucratic practices conducting such a control. This paper will argue – with the help of theoretical interventions from anthropology and critical legal studies – that the everyday reality of public order enforcement is key to understanding the nature and operations of the late colonial and early postcolonial state in India more widely.

Javed Iqbal Wani is currently pursuing a PhD at the Department of History, Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom. His doctoral research deals with public order laws in India and the impact they have on the Indian polity in the colonial as well as early Independent India. The title of his project is The Politics of ‘Public Order’ Laws in India (1900-1975): A Study of the Tactics of Exception. It comprises of a comparative study of the evolution and subsequent use of restrictive and repressive laws during the late colonial and the postcolonial years in India (1900- 1975), spanning more than half of the twentieth century. Before joining Royal Holloway, University of London, Javed completed M.A. (2009) & M.Phil. (2012), from the Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.



The Empire Chants Back: Spaces, Places, and the Arts of Discontent in Colonial Egypt

Governmentality studies have effectively redefined debates in IR concerning the constitutive effects of power on subjects of resistance in world politics. Although this literature has advanced our understanding of such ordering effects within transnational civil society, the contemporaneous character of such debates elides the legacy of the colonial within postcolonial practices of governance. My project focuses on the Egyptian revolution of 1919 and investigates how a civic protest politics emerged in response to a distinct configuration of colonial governmentality. This paper first examines how a civic repertoire of contention, which encompassed acts such as demonstrations, street theater, dissident poetry and music, strikes, boycotts, and petition-writing historically emerged in Egypt as nationalist activists encountered anarchist-syndicalist laborers from across the Mediterranean. The paper then investigates how the British occupation authorities from 1882 to 1919 responded to new forms of contentious politics through creating an apparatus of colonial governmentality, one which encompassed the following characteristics: 1) an open press policy which reconfigured the discursive space for nationalist and gendered discourses about communal identity; 2) centralized modes of urban policing which redefined the spatial relationship of protesters to their targets of contention, especially material sites of state power such as police stations, railways, and other urban architecture; and 3) the surveillance state to facilitate Egypt’s incorporation into the global capitalist economy. Finally, the paper discusses whether the concept of “colonial governmentality” is insufficient for understanding such processes, and asks if “assemblage thinking” is better suited for elucidating the mutual constitution between power and subjectivities in world politics.

Nawal Mustafa is a PhD candidate in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests include global historical sociology and IR, postcolonial and poststructuralist theories, and the study of popular movements and revolutions in the Middle East. Previously, she served as a Research Analyst at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and was a Research Associate at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC. She currently serves as a Convenor for LSE's Contentious Politics doctoral workshop and has taught courses which address the role of the media and popular culture in representing protest politics and social movements.



Space, Governance, and the Problem of Matter for a Postcolonial Politics

Contemporary geographers are keen to emphasize how space is not an abstract, fixed, or natural container within which humans operate. Such a vision is, indeed, the product of, in large part, a colonialist legacy. Instead, critical geographers endeavour to explore how spatialities materially enfold processual and differentiated 'forms of appearance and modes of actuality' (Dikec, 2015:88). One consequence of this move is to read politics and agency as consequences of broader spatial ontologies than typical humanist strategies often allow. When we speak, then, of governance, its spatial practices, and resistances, it becomes necessary to incorporate, sometimes literally, political ontologies that often go unrecognised by postcolonial strategies of counter-conduct. This paper will briefly explore how the question of a postcolonial politics is increasingly being asked to broaden its materialist framework, and the implications this exploration has for conceptualising spatial governance and the legacies of colonialist practice.

Mark Jackson is Senior Lecturer of Postcolonial Geographies in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. A University Research Fellow for 2015-16, he is currently working on a project called 'Re-thinking Postcolonial Critique after Posthumanism'. The project involves two books, one an edited volume on postcolonial theory, posthumanism and political ontology, and the other a monograph exploring the implications of the ontological turn for postcolonial critique. Mark is the series editor for a new Routledge Research series called 'Research in New Postcolonialisms' launched in the Spring of 2105. Mark has a background in philosophy, sociological theory, and urbanism. He teaches and contributes to units on postcolonial geography, critical political economy, political ecology, philosophy, postcolonial urbanism, and qualitative methodology. He supervises a number of PhD students whose work ranges across such fields as: post-structuralist theory, materiality, postcolonial performativity, postsecular urbanism, the Anthropocene, and political ecology.



Panel 4 - Bodies, Violences and ExclusionsGrace Musila, Simon Philpott, Laura Routley and Lisa TilleyDiscussant: Robbie ShilliamChair: Jutta Weldes

Spatial Logics of an Assassin State

Atieno Odhiambo’s “Hegemonic Enterprises and Instrumentalities of Survival” offers a political biography of Kenya as mapped around four historical themes: “state power and who should control that power”; “the tyranny of property pitting the haves and the have-nots”; “the politics of clan and tribe, pitting insiders against outsiders [translated] into the idiom and practice of ethnic cleansing”; and “the theatre of world citizenship, which links the individual and the state to an international discourse on democracy…human rights and international laws against all forms of discrimination” (2002: 225). Interlaced in Atieno Odhiambo’s compact history of Kenya and his four strands of the country’s political biography is a recurrent motif of violence, whose bloody footprints reach back to the British colonial enterprise in Kenya, and forward to contemporary Kenya. In effect then, violence, in various shapes and guises, has been a consistent instrument of state power and its practice in Kenyan history.

This paper explores the mobilization of violence broadly, and assassination specifically, as political instruments of maintaining state order, suppressing dissent or eliminating political threats to the interests of British rule in colonial Kenya and successive regimes of personal rule in postcolonial Kenya. I explore how violence and assassination as important syllables in the grammar of state power were part of the British colonial endowment to the newly independent Kenyan government which, in turn, refined and adapted this brutal inheritance to the needs and greeds of successive post-independence regimes in Kenya to date. I anchor this discussion on four interconnected conceptual nodes: Frantz Fanon’s work on the violence of the colonial state; Mahmood Mamdani’s citizen – subject dichotomy in the colonial state; Atieno Odhiambo’s concept of the ideology of order; and Peter Ekeh’s notion of the two publics and their attendant moralities in postcolonial Africa. Across Kenya’s history of political violence and assassinations, lie distinct spatial politics which frame the violence, particularly in the shape of elite/private armies, assassinations and the disposal of the dead bodies. I am particularly intrigued by the central location of the infamous Nyayo House torture chambers in Nairobi as a hypervisible yet invisible torture capital; coupled with the repeated motif of bodies disposed in the wilderness, across the country; but which repeatedly fail to either disappear or convincingly signify natural death, as intended by the figures behind these murders.



Grace A. Musila teaches at the English department at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She holds a PhD in African Literature; and her research interests include East and Southern African literatures, popular culture and gender studies. Her work has been published in various journals, including Journal of Commonwealth Literatures, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Research in African Literatures, Africa Insight, Social Identities and Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She has also co-edited [with James Ogude and Dina Ligaga] an essay collection titled Rethinking Eastern African Literary and Intellectual Landscapes (Africa World Press, 2012). She is currently writing a monograph on the 1988 murder of British tourist Julie Ward at the Maasai Game Reserve in Kenya. The book is a multidisciplinary portrait of the multiple strands of ideas and interests that were inscribed on the Julie Ward murder and what these reveal about cultural productions of truth, knowledge and social imaginaries in Kenya and Britain.

Planet of the Australians: Indigenous Athletes and Australian Football’s Sports Diplomacy.The Australian Football League (AFL) is at the forefront of tackling public racism in Australia. It hosts an annual Indigenous Round that celebrates not just the contribution of indigenous footballers to the sport but is a form of sports diplomacy that seeks to foster reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. Moreover, the AFL actively promotes the code internationally and regards the Round as an opportunity to highlight the uniqueness of Australian football and culture although these efforts are troubled by the persistence of problems in race relations in Australia. However, indigenous players increasingly use the authority of the AFL and its commitment to reconciliation to pressure the Australian government to meet its human rights obligations. One such player, Adam Goodes, racially abused by a young woman during a match in 2013, was named Australian of the year for 2014 in recognition of his work in outreach and promoting the interests of the indigenous community. However, throughout the 2015 season he has been relentlessly targeted for racial abuse by supporters of opposing clubs and is currently on leave from the sport. The AFL, non-sports bodies and the Australian government have all offered comment and interpretation of the abuse. Other indigenous footballers are also active campaigners and have established foundations to support indigenous peoples and promote their cultures. This paper undertakes an analysis of the AFL’s commitments to reconciliation by exploring strategic use of indigenous culture to counter racism in football. It highlights plasticity of indigenous symbols and icons and indigenous celebrity sports diplomacy and the ways these have been adapted over time to address anxieties about race and racism in contemporary Australia. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the extent to which AFL sponsored campaigns influence official Australian commitments to its human rights obligations.

Simon Philpott is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Newcastle University. His research interests are focused on popular culture with work in progress focused on documentary film and the politics of genocide, institutional racism in Australian football, discourses of cheating in international cricket and the construction of Islam and Muslims in electronic games.



Governmentality and the Native Question: African Subjects, Viewed Through the Prison Bars

Does governmentality travel? The applicability of the concept in the African context is debated (Joseph 2010; Death 2013). This paper explores how ‘the native question’ (Mamdani 1996) - the (forcible?) inclusion or banishment of African ‘natives’ from ‘our’ political world - continues to structure understandings of both forms of governmentality and the nature of African subjects. The paper explores how debates about governmentality in Africa become embroiled with issues of difference. This discussion is framed by the intersection and tension between Fanon and Bhabha’s conceptualisations of the colonised subject: Fanon (2008) contends that the colonised's options are to, "whiten or perish." In response, however, Bhabha (2007) highlights a third more ambivalent choice - mimicry. The paper draws out the implications of these debates for conceptualisations of African subjectivity through an examination of west African prisons. The institution of the prison is a particularly good window on the divergence of colonial forms of governance in Africa from those employed in Europe. Moreover, its institutions, practices and indeed spacial form rests on an understanding both of the nature of the subjects who are to be imprisoned and how they are to be reformed. How do governmentality and difference intersect in this case?

Laura Routley is a Lecturer in African and Postcolonial Politics at Newcastle University. She completed her PhD in International Politics at Aberystwyth University in 2010. Her book Negotiating Corruption: NGOs, Governance and Hybridity in West Africa is published with Routledge's Interventions Series and available from December 2015. Her new project examines the conceptualisation of rehabilitation in the postcolonial Ghanaian prison.



Intimacy and the Body Corporate: Governing Love in a Site of Extraction in West Papua

This paper examines the role of one extractives corporation in West Papua in the governance of love and intimacy around a site of industrial extraction. It explores how the company’s epistemic habits (the way it classifies bodies) articulate with its spatial practices, such that racialised and gendered bodies are variously excluded from, or super-included within, corporate physical space. The paper details the ways in which these corporate spatial practices have enabled the development of industrial-scale prostitution within the company’s contract area. Looking back to the ways in which Papuans have historically been subordinated on constructed hierarchies of intimate morality, the paper explores how this is rooted in the political endeavours of colonial missionaries, and in the endeavours of (post)colonial state and corporate actors which have prevented Papuans from inhabiting the defined figure of the Indonesian subject. The paper charts the unfolding of the governance of love and intimacy from the discursive construction of the immorality of Papuan polygamy to the establishment and moral acceptance of industrial prostitution appended to industrial extraction. This work draws on research conducted in Indonesia between 2013 and 2015, and includes the expressions of corporate actors and Papuan activists.

Lisa Tilley is a GEM Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick and the ULB. Her broad research agenda is built around the study of race and difference in Political Economy, and the central concern of her work is how difference (as inscribed in bodies and spaces) is related to economic subjectivity, and to processes of accumulation and dispossession.



SponsorsCardiff UniversitySchool of Law and Politics

British International Studies Association (BISA): Poststructural Politics (PPWG),Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) and Africa Working Groups



Postcolonial Governmentalities Workshop Programme 2015

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