Publikationen

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.

This IQAS special issue on “Knowledge on the Move” critically examines the circulation of knowledge in Asia, seeking to understand what kind of knowledge moves, where and when, and why and how it does or did so. It addresses the dynamics of global epistemic frameworks, intellectual problematisation, and everyday knowing, emphasizing that knowledge systems connect people across nations and regions.

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.

The Peruvian Constitution expressly rejects any form of discrimination and, on the contrary, favours the promotion of human rights in the training of police officers. Despite this, I argue that police training, in particular the Peruvian National Police Officers’ College curriculum, approved in 2014, reproduces racist patterns and promotes discriminatory practices.

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.

The contributors of this issue offer ways to think through the relationships between research ethics, power, violence, inequalities, institutions and pedagogy in various volatile research contexts and institutional frameworks.

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.

Armed rebellion has grown in the anglophone regions of Cameroon since civilian protests were suppressed in 2016/17 by the majority francophone state. This paper explores how the moral economy of violence makes intelligible a different motivational structure: one where people act first-and-foremost for the interest of a collective cause that ensures group survival. The authors argue that when actors contravene this collectivist logic, their acts occur outside of the moral economy of violence.

The contributors of this issue offer ways to think through the relationships between research ethics, power, violence, inequalities, institutions and pedagogy in various volatile research contexts and institutional frameworks.

Cameroon’s Anglophone regions have been in a state of violent unrest since October 2016 which resulted in more than 765,000 displaced civilians, who fled to the Francophone parts of the country or to neighbouring Nigeria. Adama Ousmanou sheds light on life of those in the Far North of Cameroon, which since 2013 has been significantly affected by violence perpetrated by the Islamic terrorist organisation Boko Haram itself.

This Special Issue presents a series of insightful papers across a range of empirical sites that illuminate not only that profound change is underway with the (uncertain) rise of China and the global reach of its infrastructural projects amidst planetary phase shift, but also how that is currently unfolding.

Michaela Pelican et al. recently published a paper that adds an additional perspective by exploring the so-far underrepresented voices of members of the Mbororo ethnic minority who, individually and collectively, have been targeted by extreme speech and acts of violence by the separatist forces.