Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Previous theory and research on political alliances and power relations suggest that alliances between multiple excluded groups can succeed if differentially privileged subaltern constituencies communicate openly about power and hierarchy, negotiate mutual understandings of interdependence, and privilege pragmatism and flexibility over ideology and politics. By empirically analyzing SMO relations between Israeli and Palestinian political and human rights activists, this article examines a complicated case of political alliances and power relations, that between activists of a structurally dominant constituency and activists of a structurally disadvantaged constituency. I propose that, by conceptualizing, and investigating, power in both its material and discursive forms, ethnographic research can uncover the complex ways that procedural negotiation over, and discursive communication about, power dynamics in political alliances is neither guaranteed to identify power inequalities nor likely to remove them. This article demonstrates how discursive power can be reproduced within the very political and organizatioal alliances that form to resist its material instantiations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The roles of ‘knowledge and power’ and ‘knowledge as power’ in development have been increasingly gaining the attention of critical scholars as well as policy practitioners. While the former seek to articulate the way in which (global) development is constituted through power struggles which also entail struggles over knowledge in development, the latter tend to misapprehend both. That is, the discourses of development they construct render invisible that development has been historically a continuously contested practice. This is evident for example, in the continued deployment of the comparative method in the theory and practice of mainstream development analysis. Methodologically, such approaches reify spatial boundaries and operate with a temporal logic that necessarily subordinates alternative conceptions of development to that of ‘past time’ in terms of a temporalisation as ‘past, prior or primordial’. A consequence of this is the foreclosure of the possibility of articulating social struggles in challenge of the politics underpinnings this spatio-temporal fix. This paper argues that a critical engagement of this dynamic with reference to the dialectic between ‘knowledge and power’ and ‘knowledge as power’ in struggles over development can render visible the analytical and practical tensions that ensue under a continued legacy of colonial /postcolonial thinking within a reconfigured ‘international’ political economy of global development.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper identifies a significant theoretical problem with applying Habermas’ discourse ethics to politics. I argue that it is difficult to use Habermas’ thinking given his theory’s assumptions about institutions and authority. Habermas maintains that the praxis of communicative action can generate the rules needed to regulate discourse. While plausible in some arenas, I argue that this position is untenable when we consider broader political activity. In this latter case, the motivation of political actors introduces a moral dimension that Habermas’ current philosophical framework does not account for. This criticism shows the need for pairing Habermas’ theory with clearer ideas about institutional design.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Perhaps the most significant event in Cypriot politics since the war of 1974 has been the partial lifting of restrictions on the movement of Cypriots between the north and south parts of the island in April 2003 –commonly referred to as the 'opening of the border'. This event came only a month after the breakdown of UN-sponsored negotiations to solve 'the Cyprus problem' and a week after the Republic of Cyprus (in control of the southern part of the island) signed the EU accession treaty. Whereas political rhetoric on both sides of the island continues to employ a terminology now considered 'outdated', the daily crossings of thousands of Cypriots suggest a shift in popular discourse. This disjuncture points to questions regarding some of the premises on which analyses of the Cyprus conflict have been based –e.g. the extent to which nationalist rhetoric can indicate future popular action, the rigidity with which individuals espouse such rhetoric, and the simplistic understandings of coexistence on the island. This paper will seek to explore these questions through an anthropological analysis of how the Green Line has been crossed after April 2003. While focussing on the views of informants who have crossed on different occasions, it will also incorporate interviews with people differently affected by this opening. It will thus try to trace the short-term changes in Greek- and Turkish- Cypriot attitudes, official and otherwise, to the division, to the encounter with 'the other' and to rationalisations of the conflict with reference to local, national and EU politics.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Although predominantly a sociological theory, systems theory can operate more pragmatically if disentangled from the concept of society. This paper looks into the possibility of switching focus from the concept of societal differentiation to the concept of the system and its boundaries. This takes the theory into a nomadic monadology perched on the limit between ignorance and knowledge, violently internalising the environment surrounding the system and dealing with a shadow of society in its decontructed, aporetic presence. The societal environment is found within the system, in a hole of incommunicability, unsettling the system from within by its visible absence. Drawing on Luhmann, Derrida and Husserl, the paper suggests a reconceptualisation of the relation between law and its societal environment as it is further defined by the location of justice in relation to the legal system.