Publications

Since the Prosperity Party (PP) came to power in Ethiopia in 2018, expectations have grown that its government will revitalize Ethiopia’s sugar industry through the privatization of eight sugar factories, including plantations of several thousand hectares in peripheral areas of the country. This comes in the context of the country’s sugar estates—a central component of the state-led development strategy pursued by the Ethiopian People’s Democratic Front (EPRDF) government—suffering a succession of cost overruns, design errors and technical overhauls.

This paper draws on the project for a Mediterranean electricity ring to study questions of structural violence and exclusion. It focuses on how forms of containment at different sites of the envisaged ring connect with energy connectivities enabled by transregional electricity flows. It illustrates how seemingly local manifestations of violence at different nodes of the ring are not a testimony to the incompleteness of ongoing (energy) infrastructure projects, but instead an interconnected and distinct part of the latter.

For resource-poor countries in the MENA, the expansion of renewables represents a unique chance to overcome established geopolitical dependencies, develop employment opportunities, and pursue a long-term strategy of domestic energy security.

What promises do humanitarian infrastructures make to encourage migrants to abandon their migration projects? And how do migrants contest these promises? In order to curb EU-bound migration in the transit state Niger, the two UN agencies for migrants and refugees established support and outreach infrastructures that incentivized them to enroll in this humanitarian border and abandon migration. These infrastructural promises prompt their own contestation, because they may not be realized.

Voorstellen zijn vaak weinig meer dan gebakken lucht, menen wetenschappers

In West Africa, Germany is playing a key role in expanding the European border regime.

Externalisation has become a prominent pillar of EU migration policy. How is externalisation put into practice? What impact does it have on migrants, refugees and partner countries? What lessons can we learn for future cooperation? Brot für die Welt and misereor explore these questions in country briefs on EU Migration Partnerships with third countries.

Während die EU im Fall ukrainischer Geflüchteter schnell reagierte und Schutz gewährte, zeigte sie sich in anderen Fällen wesentlich restriktiver und schottete sich ab. Welche Mechanismen wirkten hier?

In May 2011, 20,000 people took to the streets of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatista support movement had called for a ‘march of silence’ against the government’s so-called ‘war on drugs’. Women, children, and men walked in silence, holding up banners saying “no more blood” and “we are fed up” (“estamos hasta la madre”). Their clarity about the violence not only by so-called cartels, but also by state institutions, exposes what much state theory on the ‘war on drugs’ has lacked — an idea of the state’s role.

While transregional energy infrastructure projects like the Central American Electrical Interconnection System (SIEPAC) and MedRing quite literally connect regions anew and envisage borderless energy flows, as we argue in an article recently published with Globalizations, these projects potentially prefigure politics: removing opportunities for democratic contestation, and fixing some specific energy futures in place and preventing others.

Research on authoritarian connections beyond the state requires a transregional practices approach. This special issue is an invitation to combine critical approaches to the study of authoritarian power by paying attention to spaces of contestation, authoritarian practices, as well as non-state actors and agency below and beyond the scale of the state. We focus on authoritarian practices and their spatial and temporal articulations in (1) transregional infrastructures, (2) global processes of capital accumulation and (3) nature-society relations.

In Westafrika ist Deutschland maßgeblich am Ausbau des europäischen Grenzregimes beteiligt.

Paramilitaries, crime, and tens of thousands of disappeared persons—the so-called war on drugs has perpetuated violence in Latin America, at times precisely in regions of economic growth. Legal and illegal economy are difficult to distinguish. A failure of state institutions to provide security for its citizens does not sufficiently explain this. Selective Security in the War on Drugs analyzes authoritarian neoliberalism in the war on drugs in Colombia and Mexico.

This contribution combines literature on logistics with literature on the articulation between racism and the securitization of migration. Studying security infrastructures in Mexico in conjunction with the Mesoamerican Project, a massive transnational infrastructure plan, I show how security and trade infrastructures become intertwined in what governments have called a ‘secure trade corridor’ between Colombia and the United States.

The Philippines has received continuous praise for its ‘highly developed’ migration policies and promotes those as the ‘gold standard’ for the deployment and protection of labour migrants. These policies are obviously not negotiated exclusively within the container of the nation state. In this article, I will therefore employ an analytical framework for the politics of migration policies that is multi-stakeholder and multi-level.

The global pandemic has resulted in ad hoc unilateral policies on migration, mobility and border management while at the same time emphasizing the need for global cooperation. For global governance in this field to be effective, it needs to include stakeholders beyond states and international institutions. The Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular Migration (GCM) highlights the role of those groups directly affected by global policies, i.e. migrants and their organisations.

Countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa are pursuing ambitious targets for a transition from fossil fuels to renewables. While this shift marks an important point of transition, the region’s political economy is still predominantly analysed through the prism of fossil fuels and state-centric approaches. Authoritarian power is widely understood as directly linked to the diffusion of oil revenues and the ways in which states use these to reinforce authoritarian rule.

Countries throughout the MENA are pursuing ambitious targets for a transition from fossil fuels to renewables. While the latter’s distributed nature offers a possibility for more democratic, inclusive and independent (energy) politics, transregionally connected authoritarian elites attempt to transform it into concentrated forms of political and economic power.