Two Cheers for (Development) Anarchism

Katy Oswald

I went on holiday last week and it rained, a lot, so I had plenty of time to read. One of the books I read was ‘Two Cheers for Anarchism’, James Scott’s latest book, and it really got me thinking. First, it resonates strongly with the work the Power, Participation and Social Change team at IDS has been doing on Unruly Politics, and second, if we are to take Scott’s argument seriously, it has huge ramifications for the ‘development project’.

So what is Scott saying? He isn’t saying we should get rid of all governments and become anarchists, but he is saying that if we see like an anarchist, or adopt an ‘anarchist’s squint’ as he calls it, we will see the history of social change differently. We will see that change happens through messy political contestation and perpetual uncertainty, it is not organised, it doesn’t happen through institutions, and it often occurs through unruly acts that do not have clearly articulated demands attached to them. He acknowledges that such acts can lead to an increase in state repression, and therefore do not automatically lead to progressive social change, but his basic premise is that ‘extra-institutional protest is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for major progressive structural change’. And many of these protests will constitute illegal acts, violence and, by definition, be uncontrollable.

So what does that mean for those of us, like the researchers here at IDS, who try to not only understand social change, but somehow to influence it too? Does it mean we should all quit our jobs and go out and start a riot? Maybe, but even then we can’t be sure that it won’t mean we end up in prison and the government introduces more draconian laws against protest. But, as a researcher, it got me thinking about why Scott’s argument makes me, and many others, feel uncomfortable. Intellectually, I get it, I agree with it. But practically, and personally, I find it difficult. I find myself returning to Lenin’s question, ‘but what is to be done?’ I want to be able to know that I can act, and organise with others, and that this will make a difference, it will contribute to social change. And this made me think back to another book I read not long ago, ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’, by Alain de Botton. He talks about the idea of ‘meaningful work’, where someone can make an imaginative connection between what they have done and their impact on others. Of course, what counts as meaningful will depend upon the values of that person and the society they live in, but my values tell me that meaningful work for me is one where I can ‘make a difference’.

The challenge Scott poses us, is that this desire to know whether or not one has ‘made a difference’, is precisely what takes the all important politics out of social change. Our desire to ‘objectively’ measure whether or not a development project has been successful, for example, deprives us of the important political debate about what assumptions underlie the supposedly objective definition of ‘success’. Our desire for clear, uncontested narratives, that explain how social change happens, make us impose causation where perhaps it didn’t exist, and blind us to the disorderly, unplanned, and unpredictable acts that disrupt order and drive progressive social change.

Katy Oswald is a Research Officer at the Participation, Power and Social Change team at IDS. She can be found on Twitter: @ogmog

Bangladesh: Rana Plaza is a parable of globalisation

Naomi Hossain

The garment factory collapse in Savar in Bangladesh is a parable of globalisation. The visceral images needed to make world headlines are there, as dead and broken bodies are pulled from the rubble for a fourth and fifth day. If there are any more survivors, as the tapping sounds of life fade out, they will have endured 100 hours trapped under the concrete and steel of the profit machine of a political youth leader – which description, by the way, translates in Bangladesh as ‘thug’.

Stories of heroism and agony and the criminal apathy of officials stirred up yet another round of mass violence in Dhaka. Factories were attacked and inevitably, someone died. This is with the secular-Islamic clash surrounding the Shahbag movement for justice for war crimes still bubbling in the background. There is a domestic politics angle to Rana Plaza, including the political lessons of the 2011 minimum wage struggle, and acute pressures on garments factories to deliver after political unrest slowed production and delivery since March. Yet the story outside Bangladesh, complete with labels from the Spanish chain El Corte Inglés dangling over the rescue teams’ heads, is all about how globalisation did this. Brand globalisation has been permanently damaged.

The facts are plain enough. Young women on low pay sew clothes in a poor country to sell to young women on low pay in a rich country. The key factor is the lowness of both their pay, which fuels the ease with which safety is sacrificed and the relentlessness of the demand for cheap clothes in a world society with powerfully consumerist values. The case is testimony to the effects of globalisation:

• Demand for cheap new fashion
• Regulations ignored because of pressures to deliver goods in time; ‘lead times’ are long in Bangladesh compared to China or India, so there is a premium on speed and volume. (Not all businesses in the building made their staff come in that day: BRAC Bank, the formal banking arm of the Bangladesh-owned BRAC group, did not open because of the warnings)
• Tough times, with austerity in the North and world prices high and rising; people cannot afford not to work, is the message from the Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility research project which includes research in garments workers’ communities in Dhaka: workers would have had no real choice but to show up[1]
• Low pay and poor safety records, reflecting that the Bangladesh Readymade Garments (RMG) industry is not very productive: it has been competitive because protected by preferential trade agreements and profitable because of the large amounts of surplus labour in the nimble fingers of young women.[2]

The lesson here is that there is ultimately no accountability in the global economy. The factory owners have been arrested and may do a little time. But this is unsatisfactory, when Primark and others gain the benefits of these pressures on workers’ lives, without paying the costs. When workers in the global export chains, mostly young women, have serious grievances about their work conditions, who is listening? How can working in the global market mean you lose your inalienable human rights to safety? How then can the human rights of global export workers be assured? ‘Compliance’ is not enough; there must now be enforcement. Until the public authorities can supply this, the workers will continue to revolt.

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[1] First year results from Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility, Squeezed, is out on May 14^th.

[2] See Mushtaq Khan, ‘Vulnerabilities in Market-led Growth Strategies and Challenges for Governance’, 2008. http://r4d.dfid.gov.uk/PDF/Outputs/Nem_Misc/Growth-Vulnerabilities.pdf. This is common enough in the global export sectors; see Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson, ‘“Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers”: An Analysis of Women’s Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing’, Feminist Review, 7 (1981), 87–107.

Naomi Hossain is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Read other recent blog posts by Naomi Hossain:

• I’m (still) hungry mum: the return of Care
• Bangladesh is revolting, again
• Prices that bounce
• No gong for Cameron’s Hunger Summit

Bangladesh is revolting, again

Naomi Hossain

Anyone with a Bangladesh connection remains fixated on the two week occupation of Shahbag junction and the wider movement it has spawned. Shahbag, in case you missed it, is a mass movement protesting that Jamaat-e-Islami leader Abdul Quader Mollah got off too lightly with a life sentence on February 5th for convictions that link him to mass murders and child rape during the 1971 war of liberation from Pakistan; justice has long been delayed, and now most people think, it has been denied, too (as novelist Tahmima Anam explained last week . Even Mollah reckons he got off lightly: his infamous two-fingered gesture when leaving the courtroom will go down in history as the first hand gesture to launch a mass movement.

The need for justice for the genocide of 1971 is so glaring that most Bangladeshis choose to overlook the problems in the misleadingly-named International Crimes Tribunal (its mandate is domestic, not international; see http://bangladeshwarcrimes.blogspot.co.uk/). As the party that won the war (but arguably not the peace) for Bangladesh, the Government was only too pleased to change the law yesterday, allowing it to appeal decisions of the Tribunal it disagreed with.

Shahbag is being feted as the return of the spirit of ’71, and it has many of the qualities of that wonderful tragic time: cross-class, secular, youthful, nationalistic, idealistic (bar the pro-hanging bit). It probably will mark a shift in Bangladeshi political culture, as middle class and elite young people are getting a crash course in street politics they won’t unlearn in a hurry. There is a lot of social media and good visuals, all of which matter a lot in 21st century protest. And at a time when the organized religious right has stolen popular revolutions across the Middle East, it is sheer joy to see Jamaat on the backfoot. This is partly catharsis postponed: the Pakistan ‘tilt’ in US foreign policy and other reasons best known to the international community meant they discouraged a process of transitional justice 40 years ago, when it would have made most sense. War-torn, aid-dependent and starving, Bangladesh was in no position to insist back then. So the injustices of the war and postwar period were institutionalized in some of our more unique political pathologies, the personalized animosity between The Two Begums included.

So all in, there is a lot to like about Shahbag. It feels like something fresh. In fact the only audible ambivalence – other than among the fundies and war criminals – is among the good governance / human rights types, who see patterns we don’t like. The pro-hanging stance is a source of some discomfort. Mollah’s crimes would test the softest-hearted liberal’s views on capital punishment, yet it is probably the main reason the international media found Shahbag hard to make sense of. Two robust yet telling arguments are made in support of hanging. One is that the argument against capital punishment is a separate debate: this argument is that the crimes of Mollah et al merit the highest punishment under the law, which happens to be hanging. A second is that in a country in which every aspect of life is party politicized, Mollah and his gang would only have to wait for the government to change (which it does regularly) to get their release. So they need to be hanged to ensure they get the punishment they have earned. This was a reasonable enough argument before the Government changed the law to allow appeals; now it has changed the law, it is surely watertight.

Both pro-hanging arguments tell us something important about why Shahbag has happened, and why all other forms of important progressive change, big and small, tend to involve such unruly politics in Bangladesh. Both are arguments about the importance of rules, and both say it is important to break rules precisely because they are so important. This is the powerful logic of Bangladeshi political culture: a schizophrenic desire for order that requires the overthrow of order. All relevant examples of progressive political change – starting with the struggle against the Raj – feature a powerful sense of exceptionalism (‘this time is different’) coupled with an equally powerful desire for rules that work. In Bangladeshi politics the ‘state of exception’ is the norm, so rules are routinely broken precisely with the aim of achieving a more ordered state. A series of genuine political and economic crises through our history coupled with a political DNA imprinted with the successes of unruly politics makes this a winning repertoire it will be very hard to unlearn.

It is too early to be discerning larger meanings from Shahbag, but here is my ten takas’ worth: Shahbag will matter partly because it will reinforce the message that it is only through breaking the political (and indeed judicial) rules that progressive change can be achieved. Once again, we learn that we need a mass movement, not due process; a huge upsurge of human emotion, not rational rules or agreed, adhered-to systems or laws, if we are ever to resolve our problems. So let us hope that this time it really is different.

Naomi Hossain is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Read other recent blog posts by Naomi Hossain:

• Prices that bounce
• No gong for Cameron’s Hunger Summit
• Why inflation is so unpopular
• Why predict a riot?

Arguing about a revolution

Rosalind Eyben

Last week I was in Bolivia where I had lived ten years ago before joining IDS. When I last visited in 2008 the country fizzled with the excitement of the dramatic changes experience following the election of a social revolutionary government led by Evo Morales in 2005. It felt like being in Paris in 1789 or Petrograd in 1917. Most striking was the sight of indigenous women shopping, as of right, in the posh part of La Paz where previously the only indigenous women you saw were domestic employees or street sweepers.  It was clear then that even should the political revolution fail, there was irreversible radical social change. Four years on, this is visible everywhere. In a recent interview with the Bolivia Information Forum (recommended for keeping up to date with events in Bolivia), the General Manager of Bolivia’s principal domestic airline commented how in the past better-off indigenous people didn’t use to fly.  

‘It wasn’t a problem of purchasing power, of income, it was a problem of not feeling that it was for them. …..  All those people today take the plane. It’s very gratifying to see on a flight, any flight, people wearing traditional clothes without it being in any way unusual. A great diversity of people, reflecting this country’s make-up, is [now] flying.’

So now in 2013 I am enjoying dinner with old Bolivian friends, descendants of European settlers and ‘intellectuales’ (as you would say in Spanish). When still students in the 1970’s they were political exiles during the military dictatorship and on returning to Bolivia after the re-establishment of democracy had devoted themselves to the cause of social justice. In 2005, they had all voted for Evo Morales and the Movement for Socialism. But now most of them were angry and bitter about the Morales government, accusing it of clientelism, of authoritarianism, and incompetence. ‘Everything is in chaos’, says one of my friends. ‘It’s all a mess’. Just one person at the table seeks to present a more dispassionate, balanced analysis of both the positive changes and what is going wrong. She concurs with the messiness but wonders what else to expect when a country goes through such a major upheaval. She talks interestingly about the government’s struggles to implement a rights-based approach when its different political constituencies are struggling amongst each other for access to land and water. She notes the irony of the government’s socialist rhetoric and capitalist practice. She agrees that there is a lot of incompetence – but then what else would one expect when those now in power are having to learn how to govern after 500 years of oppression? Look at all the good that is also happening, she urges, citing the new social programmes to reduce poverty and inequality.

But the others don’t want to listen. For them, it has all gone wrong. I listen quietly but ask myself whether their sense of grievance comes from them no longer having a role in the process. Before 2005, they were the white middle class interlocutors with government for the socially excluded. Today, it is the representatives of these excluded who are running the country – and who are no longer taking my friends’ advice. Is this why they are disappointed with a new bunch of politicians who turn out not to be perfect? Is the dream of revolution more comfortable than the reality?

Participation, power and social change! It’s all happening today in Bolivia. And has left me wondering about us – the PPSC team at IDS. Not all white (though the majority of us are) but, otherwise, like my Bolivian friends, middle class progressive intellectuals and like them committed to social justice – in our case on a world, rather than a national stage. How will we feel when the people whose interests we argue for no longer want our advice and we have lost our role? Will we congratulate ourselves for the past contribution we have made? Or will we feel aggrieved that the tide of history has left us high and dry on the beach?

Rosalind Eyben is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and her Twitter account is: @rosalindeyben

Previous blog posts by Rosalind Eyben:

• The power of results and evidence artefacts
• What keeps unpaid care off development agendas?
• The 0.7% target debate should not distract us from considering the quality of aid
• Care work should be at the heart of a people-centred economy

Eleven predictions for Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood (if they continue to remain in power)

Mariz Tadros

Television viewers and newspaper readers following the political scene in Egypt may have been struck by the most recent spate of violence involving pro-President Morsi Muslim Brotherhood followers who launched a brutal attack on peaceful demonstrators which left five dead and hundreds injured.

What happened? What went wrong? The truth of the matter is that any reading of the recent political thinking from the Muslim Brotherhood (forget about the public relations interviews) suggests that this is just the beginning.  The worst is yet to come. In case some are wondering whether this is too gloomy, please note that all the evidence we have suggests some of the predictions below (number 4-9) are already coming to life.

Here are my predictions:

1: The Muslim Brotherhood, supported by other Islamist factions,  will secure the needed majority vote for passing the constitution-  even when all non-Islamist political forces boycott the referendum. We will see a repeat of the referendum on the proposed amendments to the constitution that we witnessed in March 2011, in which the Brothers (and other Islamists) mobilized a Muslim majority poor population to mark the green circle if they loved their religion (green being symbolic of Islam) and black if they wanted to follow the infidels and their religious leaders (Christian Orthodox priests in Egypt wear a black turban-like head gear).

2: The Brothers and the Salafis will win the parliamentary elections which will be neither free or fair, as religion will be used instrumentally to the maximum effect, propped up by welfare services and backed by direct vote purchasing. However, the parliamentary elections will meet the West’s satisfaction of being a milestone onto democracratization because the Islamists would have won via the ballot boxes.

3: The new parliament will issue legislation of a political nature that enables further monopolisation of power into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. It will also issue legislation of an ideological nature to deepen the Islamization of state and society by introducing new laws and revoking old ones, all under the banner of endorsing Shariah-compliance.

4. There will be a “cleansing” of the judiciary of all elements within it that are not friendly to the Muslim Brotherhood regime. This will be achieved through so-called constitutional and legal means. Instead, new graduates of Shariah school from Al-Azhar University (one of the Sunni world’s largest establishments) will be appointed as judges in their hundreds. Gradually, women judges will either be appointed to administrative non- judicial tasks or they will be “encouraged” to take up early retirement

5. The margin of separation between the executive, the judicial and the legislative will narrow increasingly, such that there will be a synchronization of agendas to endorse the Islamist state. Facilitating and catalyzing such a merger will be led by the new class of ulama (religious scholars) who will play a more behind-the-scenes role at first,  beginning but that will become increasingly open afterwards.

6. The opposition and its key leaders will be subject to intense vilification (and possibly tried) for being antagonistic towards the implementation of God’s laws and being disrespectful towards the Muslim ruler. Eventually the more confrontational leftist political parties will be dissolved under the premise that their normative framework is in defiance with the Shariah.

7. Women’s rights will shrink considerably. More young girls will be given in marriage before or in early puberty and in poor areas sex trafficking will increase. This will be covered under the mantra of marriage, which will in some instances increase polygamy. The percentage of women in leadership positions at all levels of governance will diminish and violence against women will increase under various guises.

8. Religious pluralism will be a thing of the past. More religious cleansing of the country’s ten percent Christian population will happen, through the expulsion of people from their villages and towns. Increasingly, the Islamists will mobilise people to “weed out” undesirables and present them for trial for insulting Islam and his prophet Mohamed.

9. Poverty will continue to grow, but Egypt will become an increasingly “sadaqa society”, to use Deniz Kandiyoti’s term. A sadaqa society is premised on the practice of Islamic charity where aid is distributed to the needy and faithful. The culture of the poor being the objects of religious-inspired benevolence rather than citizens with entitlements will become increasingly diffuse.

10. Independent media outlets (in particular satellite broadcasting) will be subject to increasing repression and some will be closed down. The freedom of the press will shrink considerably and in some instances, the government will not have to do anything about it – the Muslim Brotherhood militias will assume the responsibility of intimidating and threatening media professionals sufficiently such that they either quit or self-censor.

11 Finally – and this may possibly lead to a toppling of the regime – the Muslim Brotherhood will announce war with Israel. In order to do that, they could not (and would not) rely on the state of the Egyptian army. Resorting to other regional forces will be necessary and all kinds of military alliances will be made. This may seem unlikely now in view of Morsi’s brokering of the ceasefire in Gaza and his cosy relationship with the US government, but that will eventually change.

Mariz Tadros is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Read other recent blogs by Mariz Tadros:

• Fascism: the ugly face of unruly politics
• The Egyptian Revolution and the parable of the of man who occupies your house
• We, the women who revolt
• From unruly politics to ballot boxes: rethinking the terms of democratic engagement in Egypt

Fascism: the ugly face of unruly politics

Mariz Tadros

When protestors gathered in public squares in Cairo, Sanaa, Tunis, London, New York (and the list goes on) over the course of the last couple of years, there was a celebration of people power, of citizen activism on the fringes, outside the conventional channels of participation (political parties, civil society etc). Unruly politics was about the emergence of collectivities from the cracks, and their power to rupture status quos. Whether unruly politics has the power to change things for the better was always beside the point, because the focus was not on the outcome but on the acts that rupture. After the Egyptian revolution was hijacked by the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, and we began to witness a gradual encroachment on rights and freedoms, we would converse with citizens about what was happening. People would shake their heads and say “There is a limit. Never again. People now know the way to Tahrir Square and they will not bow down low again”.

But so far, the assumption is that people will rise to oppose violation of rights or demand more rights. But what about when people rise to demand the deepening of authoritarianism? What if they take to the streets to express their support for fewer rights for the citizenry?

When there was a close call between the presidential elections Ahmed Shafik and Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood mobilized thousands to take to Tahrir Square to express their support for Morsi. Rumours circulated in Egypt that if Morsi did not become President, the Muslim Brothers would turn the country into a bloodbath in revenge. It worked. People were terrified of the consequences of Morsi not winning the elections, even if they did not want him in power.

On August 11^th, 2012, President Morsi issued a “constitutional declaration” giving himself the right to issue laws and decrees, assemble and adjourn parliament, appoint all members of the government and most importantly select the Constituent Assembly members responsible for drawing Egypt’s new constitution. In essence it meant a centralization of legislative, judicial and executive powers in the person of the President. If this is not a move towards authoritarianism, then what is? Yet again, upon his announcement of the seizure of powers, the Muslim Brotherhood immediately took to the streets to defend Morsi’s moves. But defend his moves against what and against whom? Against citizens who are concerned with the policies of a leader who is usurping the rights of institutions that enjoy a high degree of legitimacy, such as the Supreme Constitutional Court? In view of the fact that Morsi already had assumed full power over the military and the Ministry of Interior, what was the point behind mobilizing his people – the Muslim Brotherhood – to rise to his defense?

Just yesterday, President Morsi announced that he is going to “cleanse” the judiciary and will grant the Constituent Assembly legitimacy even if the Supreme Constitutional Court declares its membership unconstitutional. The judiciary has been the greatest thorn in the side of the Muslim Brotherhood since their political ascendency to power. They have resisted and rebelled against the executive’s infringement on the autonomy of the judiciary and have objected to articles compromising its independence in the draft constitution. As for the Constituent Assembly membership, it is currently dominated by the Islamists (in all their streaks: the Muslim Brotherhood in power, the ultra-radical Salafis and the so-called moderates such as el Wasat comprising 67% of membership), its legitimacy has been questioned in light of its insistence on drawing the constitution through majoritarian politics rather than through reaching consensus.

Once again, a few minutes after Morsi’s announcement of another “constitutional declaration” with the above policies only serving to deepen authoritarian rules, the Muslim Brotherhood supporters took to the street to express their endorsement of the President. Again, the mobilization of the masses of Brothers (no women on the scene) is expressed in terms of positive citizen agency:  “the People want to cleanse the judiciary”.

The face of these protest suggests the use of unruly politics (at least as far as people acting collectively using the language of citizen demands is concerned) in a positive way. I beg to differ. When unruly politics is instrumentalized to promote the monopolization of power in the hands of a ruler, this can only mean inversely, a contraction of the prospects of building a democratic state. When the masses are mobilized to go to the street to express their love for a dictatorship that has only one name: fascism. Even Mubarak at the epitome of his power could not rely on the mobilization of such masses to endorse his dictatorship. The outcome of fascistic unruly politics, in the Egyptian context can only be one of two things: bringing the country onto the brinks of a civil war (if the opposition also goes to the streets to express their demands for freedom, justice and dignity once more, as at the time of the Egyptian revolution) or alternatively, the intimidation of the majority of citizens not to dare to protest or resist, because the pro-president masses are on the street.

Read other recent blogs by Mariz Tadros:

• The Egyptian Revolution and the parable of the of man who occupies your house
• We, the women who revolt
• From unruly politics to ballot boxes: rethinking the terms of democratic engagement in Egypt