The competition for space in urban areas due to an exponential growth of population makes derground engineering plays a crucial role in the development of cities. Urban underground infrastructures deal with variables such as cost, duration, safety, and management; faces political, social, economic and environmental issues; and guarantees future sustainability, maintenance, and energy efficiency. To do so, all these concepts and variables must be kept in mind during the whole construction process: (I) project design, (II) project construction and (III) project exploitation. This thesis aims to demonstrate how the construction cycle deals with the various impacts produced by the interaction of underground constructions with groundwater at each stage of the process, with a view to providing improved processes. During the project design previous data is collected, new data is generated, created and processed, helping to understand the context and to design the infrastructure. There are very advanced tools to store and process hydrogeological data, but most of these tools are not common in infrastructure projects. Often most of the constructions only perform the minimum legal requirement to characterize the ground: a pumping test. Therefore, there is a need to provide the constructors with a set of methods and tools to allow them to increase the quality of their hydrogeological analysis, which will allow early detection problems associated with the groundwater. The interaction of underground constructions with groundwater generates impacts. These impacts can usually be minimized by using mitigation measures. The most common impacts caused by underground constructions are the groundwater barrier effect and the groundwater pressure distribution and limitation under the bottom slab. In the literature there are many examples and designs to mitigate both groundwater barrier effect and groundwater pressure distribution impacts. However, there is no design that integrates both solutions. This thesis presents an innovative groundwater by-pass design that enables the groundwater to flow through the structure and provide a homogenous distribution of the water pressure under the bottom slab. The new integrated design was applied to the largest underground infrastructure of Barcelona: La Sagrera railway station. A hydrogeological model was implemented to test the original and the integrated designs in three different scenarios. This new solution mitigates the groundwater barrier effect and optimizes the bottom slab, considerably reducing the costs and increasing safety during the construction phase. Monitoring is required when dewatering underground constructions in order to anticipate unexpected events and preserve nearby existing structures. The most accurate and spread monitoring method to measure displacements is levelling, a pointlike surveying technique that typically allows for tens of discrete in-situ sub-millimetric measurements per squared kilometer. Another emerging technique for mapping soil deformation is the Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), which is based on SAR images acquired from orbiting satellites or by ground-based stations (GB-SAR). This remote sensing technique can provide better spatial point density than levelling, more extensive spatial coverage and cheaper acquisitions. Both satellite and ground-based SAR systems have been used and tested in a variety of analyses. However, nobody has applied this technology as a monitoring tool during construction works yet. This thesis contributes to data storing and data analysis software that implies new and significant method developments for increasing the quality of the hydrogeological analysis; it provides new approaches to address the groundwater corrective measures definition during the design stage, and it develops and applies new methods of nfrastructure monitoring using ground-based and satellite SAR sensors during the construction stage. ; Degut al creixement exponencial de la població i tenint en compte que l'espai dins les àrees urbanes és finit és, necessari la construcció d'infraestructures subterrànies. Variables com el cost, la durada, la seguretat i la gestió; els problemes polítics, socials, econòmics i ambientals; garantir la sostenibilitat futura, el manteniment i l'eficiència energètica, han d'estar presents durant totes les fases del procés constructiu: (I) fase de disseny, (II) fase de construcció, i (III) fase d'explotació. Les construccions subterrànies interactuen amb el medi subterrani, el resultat de la interacció són uns impactes en la construcció i en el medi ambient. Tots aquests impactes són avaluats al llarg del procés constructiu per tal de ser corregits o minimitzats. L'objectiu principal d'aquesta tesi és conèixer com s'avaluen els diferents impactes a cadascuna de les fas es del procés constructiu per poder així proposar millores. Durant el disseny del projecte i per tal d'entendre el context i el disseny de la infraestructura es recullen dades històriques i es generen noves dades . L'ús de la majoria d'eines hidrogeològiques no és habitual en els projectes d'infraestructures ja que la majoria caracteritzen el terreny amb una prova de bombament. Per tant, és necessari proporcionar als constructors un conjunt de mètodes i d'eines que permetin augmentar la qualitat dels seus anàlisis, per augmentar així la detecció primerenca de problemes associats a les aigües subterrànies. Els impactes produïts per la interacció de les construccions subterrànies amb les aigües subterrànies es poden minimitzar mitjançant l'ús de mesures de mitigació. Els impactes més comuns causats per construccions subterrànies són l'efecte barrera i la distribució i limitació de subpressions sota la llosa de fons. A la literatura hi ha molts dissenys que permeten mitigar l'efecte barrera i millorar la distribució de les subpressions, però no hi ha cap disseny que integri les dues solucions. Aquesta tesi presenta un disseny innovador per bypassar les aigües subterrànies a través de l'estructura proporcionant una distribució homogènia de les subpressions sota la llosa de fons. Aquesta nova solució minimitza l'efecte barrera de les aigües subterrànies i optimitza la llosa de fons, reduint considerablement els costos i augmentant la seguretat durant la fase de construcció. Quan una construcció rebaixa el nivell freàtic cal auscultar els nivells i la deformació del terreny per tal d'anticipar esdeveniments inesperats i preservar les estructures properes existents. El mètode actual més utilitzat per mesurar desplaçaments és l'anivellament, que permet avaluar in situ desenes de punts discrets amb una precisi ó submil·limètrica. Una tècnica emergent és el Radar d'Obertura Sintètica Interferomètrica (InSAR), que es basa en imatges SAR adquirides des de satèl·lits en òrbita o bé des d'estacions al terra (GB-SAR). Aquesta tècnica de detecció remota proporciona una major cobertura espacial i més econòmica que els mètodes d'auscultació tradicionals. Tot i que la tecnologia SAR s'ha utilitzat i validat en una gran varietat d'anàlisis, ningú ha aplicat encara aquesta tecnologia com a eina d'auscultació durant la construcció d'infraestructures. Aquesta tesi contribueix a: (I) millorar l'emmagatzematge i processament de dades a través de nous desenvolupaments i mètodes que permeten augmentar la qualitat de l'anàlisi hidrogeològica; (II) oferir noves formes d'anàlisi per al disseny de mesures correctores durant l'etapa de disseny; i (III) desenvolupar i aplicar nous mètodes d'auscultació d'infraestructura a través de sensors SAR (terrestres i satèl·lit) durant la fase constructiva. ; La limitación de espacio en áreas urbanas junto al crecimiento exponencial de la población, hace necesaria la construcción de infraestructuras subterráneas. Nuevos conceptos en planificación urbana junto con los avances tecnológicos en la construcción hacen posible la ejecución de infraestructuras más grandes y de más eficiencia. No obstante, variables tales como el coste, la duración, la seguridad y la gestión; los problemas políticos, sociales, económicos y ambientales; y garantizar la sostenibilidad futura, el mantenimiento y la eficiencia energética, hacen de esta ejecución un problema complejo. Por ello, todas estas variables deben estar presentes durante todo el proceso constructivo: (I) diseño del proyecto, (II) construcción del proyecto y (III) explotación del proyecto. Esta tesis tiene como objetivo principal saber cómo el ciclo constructivo (diseño del proyecto, construcción y explotación de proyectos) procesa las problemáticas inducidas por la interacción de las nuevas infraestructuras subterráneas urbanas con las aguas subterráneas para luego mejorarlo. Durante el diseño del proyecto (fase I) se recogen los datos históricos, se generan nuevos datos (pozos, pruebas de campo, muestras químicas .) y se procesa conjuntamente, lo que ayuda a entender el contexto y el diseño de la infraestructura. Existen herramientas muy avanzadas para almacenar y procesar información geológica, hidroquímica e hidrogeológica, aunque la mayoría de estas herramientas no son comunes en los proyectos de infraestructuras subterráneas ya que es común que la mayoría de las construcciones sólo se realice una prueba de bombeo para caracterizar el subsuelo. Por lo tanto, hay una necesidad de proporcionar un conjunto de métodos y de herramientas a los constructores para que puedan aumentar la calidad de su análisis (como pruebas de bombeo), para aumentar así la detección temprana de problemas asociados a las aguas subterráneas. La interacción de las construcciones subterráneas con las aguas subterráneas genera impactos. Estos impactos generalmente pueden minimizarse mediante el uso de medidas correctoras. Los impactos más comunes causados por las construcciones subterráneas son el efecto barrera (impacto en las aguas subterráneas) y la distribución y limitación de subpresiones bajo la losa de fondo (impacto en la construcción subterránea). En la literatura hay muchos ejemplos de diseños para mitigar tanto el efecto barrera y como para mejorar la distribución de las subpresiones bajo la losa de fondo. Sin embargo, no hay ningún diseño que integre ambas soluciones. Es ilógico diseñar una medida correctora sin tener en cuenta todos los factores que intervienen en el problema. Esta tesis presenta un diseño innovador de by-pass para las aguas subterráneas que permite el flujo de agua subterránea a través de la estructura a la vez que proporciona una distribución homogénea de las subpresiones bajo la losa de fondo. El nuevo diseño se ha aplicado en la infraestructura subterránea más grande de Barcelona: la futura estación de tren de La Sagrera. Se ha realizado un modelo hidrogeológico para probar los nuevos diseños en tres escenarios diferentes. Esta nueva solución mitiga el efecto barrera de las aguas subterráneas y optimiza la losa de fondo, lo que reduce considerablemente los costes y aumenta la seguridad durante la fase de construcción. Durante la construcción (fase II) se genera una gran cantidad de nuevos datos. Es necesario auscultar los niveles y la deformación del terreno cuando una construcción rebaja el freático con el fin de anticiparse a acontecimientos inesperados y a preservar las estructuras y / o edificios cercanos existentes. El método actual más usado para medir desplazamientos en el terreno es la nivelación, una técnica que permite evaluar in situ decenas de puntos discretos con una precisión sub-milimétrica. Una técnica emergente para medir la deformación del suelo es el Radar de Apertura Sintética Interferométrica (InSAR), que se basa en imágenes SAR adquiridas o bien desde satélites en órbita o bien desde estaciones en tierra (GB-SAR). Esta técnica de detección remota proporciona una mayor cobertura espacial y más barata que los métodos de auscultación tradicionales. Aunque la tecnología SAR se ha utilizado y validado en una gran variedad de análisis, nadie ha aplicado esta tecnología como una herramienta de auscultación durante la construcción de infraestructuras. Esta tesis contribuye a mejorar el almacenamiento y tratamiento de datos a través de nuevos desarrollos y métodos que permiten aumentar la calidad del análisis hidrogeológico; ofrece nuevas formas de análisis para el diseño de medidas correctoras durante la etapa de diseño; y desarrolla y aplica nuevos métodos de auscultación de infraestructura a través de sensores SAR (terrestres y satélite) durante la fase constructiva ; Postprint (published version)
In 2010, after two decades of rapid economic growth, Vietnam passed the threshold to become a lower-middle-income economy. Sustained market-oriented reforms combined with intensive efforts to integrate into the world economy are among the key drivers of this achievement. The reform of tax policy and administration has been a vital part of this transition. This is leading to a fundamental change in the composition of taxpayers, from large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and foreign-invested companies to a myriad of small and medium private enterprises. Economic transition is also leading to an equally important change in the sources of government revenue, away from cross-border trade-related taxes and revenue collection from crude oil toward a greater share of domestic tax revenue, in particular taxation of business profits, labor income, and capital gains on land. However, completing the transition to a market economy will require changes going beyond tax collection and administration procedures, and will involve changes to the tax instruments themselves. At the end of this process, Vietnam should have a set of taxes that is simple and transparent, secures a stable flow of revenues for the government, encourages an efficient allocation of resources, and does not risk constituting a source of inequality or unfairness. The purpose of the series of studies in this volume is to shed light on the issues Vietnam will be facing in the process of reforming its tax policy and administration. The studies are also expected to lead to concrete policy recommendations contributing to the preparation of key policies and legislative documents to ensure the achievement of the state budget revenue target and other tax administration reform targets in the SEDP 2011-2015. It is expected that the individual studies in this series will become useful inputs into the debate surrounding the issuance of new laws and regulations. It is also hoped that the volume will support the reform momentum in the tax policy area, leading to increased efficiency, transparency, and equity.
Indigenes Wissen und Landnutzungsplanung am Beispiel eines Dorfes in Nordchina 1. Probleme der Landnutzungsplanung im heutigen China Die Planung der Landnutzung in der Volksrepublik China der neunziger Jahre ist nach der erfolgreichen Einführung des Familienverantwortlichkeitssystems mit Problemen konfron¬tiert, die eine nachhaltige Bewirtschaftung der ländlichen Ressourcen und damit eine aus¬reichende Nahrungsmittelversorgung der immer noch wachsenden Bevölkerung gefährden. Das bebaubare Land hat seit der Gründung der VR China im Jahre 1949 etwa um 10 % abgenommen, während die Bevölkerung um 100 % gewachsen ist, so dass 1996 nur noch 0,08 ha kultivierbare Fläche pro Kopf zur Verfügung stehen. Die für das Landmanagement wichtigen Ressourcen Boden und Wasser sind in den letzten Jahren nicht nur knapper ge¬worden, sondern sind auch zunehmend verschmutzt bzw. degradiert. Erosion und Deserti¬fizierung bedrohen mehr als 40 % der bebaubaren Landfläche. Die zunehmende Wasser¬knappheit in Nordchina verursacht Versorgungskrisen in großen Städten, aber auch auf dem Land. Es wird geschätzt, dass ein Viertel der Bauern in China nicht genügend Wasser für Feldbewässerung und Trinkwasserversorgung zur Verfügung hat. Die sich verschlechternden Möglichkeiten für die Bauernfamilien, landwirtschaftliche Ak-tivitäten als Haupteinnahmequelle zu nutzen, haben vor allem in Gebieten, die mit gerin¬gen Möglichkeiten zur Entwicklung nicht-landwirtschaftlicher Einkommensquellen ausge¬stattet sind, zu einer Verarmung der Landbevölkerung geführt. Die Mitte der neunziger Jahre eingeführten Erleichterungen des Aufenthaltsrechts führten wiederum dazu, dass Millionen verarmter Bauern nun in den Städten nach Arbeit suchen. Die zurückbleibenden Familienangehörigen, meist Alte, Frauen und Kinder, haben kaum noch Interesse und Möglichkeiten, die Landbewirtschaftung zu intensivieren und nachhaltig zu verbessern. Dadurch liegen in vielen Gebieten Felder brach, die zwar landwirtschaftlich genutzt wer¬den könnten, aber von den in den Dörfern/vor Ort gebliebenen Familienangehörigen nicht bewirtschaftet werden können. Die Gründe für diese Probleme Chinas im ländlichen Raum liegen vor allem in den fol¬genden Bereichen: • Die rechtliche Situation der Landbesitzverhältnisse ist ungeklärt. Im ländlichen Raum gehört der Boden zwar de jure den Kollektiven, diese wurden aber nach der Ein-führung des Familienverantwortlichkeitssystems aufgelöst und haben keinen klar defi-nierten Rechtsnachfolger. Die Bauernfamilien können das Land zwar nutzen, aber die Entscheidungen über die Nutzungsdauer und Nutzungsart werden nach wie vor von lo-kalen Kadern gefällt. Wie groß die Entscheidungsbefugnis der einzelnen Bauernfami¬lien ist, ist von Region zu Region, oft sogar von Gemeinde zu Gemeinde sehr unter-schiedlich. Generell haben in Gebieten im Osten und Süden, die industriell weiterent-wickelt sind und in denen die Landwirtschaft eine geringere Rolle spielt, lokale Ent-scheidungsträger weniger Einfluss auf Maßnahmen im Bereich der Landnutzung und – -bewirtschaftung. Die durchgeführte Fallstudie in einem Dorf in Nordchina zeigt jedoch, dass hier Entscheidungen lokaler Kader noch ein sehr großes Gewicht haben. Oft wird die von ihnen vertretene Politik kurzfristig geändert. So wurde z.B. innerhalb von fünf Jahren zweimal angeordnet, die Bewirtschaftung von Obstbäumen im Dorf von indivi-duellem Management zu kollektiven Management zu verändern. Das Vertragsland des Dorfes Liudu wird laut Unterlagen des Dorfkomitees alle drei bis fünf Jahre neu verteilt, um die Landgröße an die veränderten Familien¬größe anzupassen. Es ist dabei für die Bauernfamilien nicht klar, ob sie dasselbe Stück Land nach dieser Frist weiter bewirtschaften dürfen. So führen die rechtlichen und planerischen Unsicherheiten zu Prozessen, die durch Korruption und beliebige Machtausübung lokaler Entscheidungsträger geprägt sind. Die individuellen Landnutzer/-innen empfinden diese Prozesse als willkürlich und sind verunsichert, denn sie sehen für sich keine Einflussmöglichkeiten, die Anordnungen der Machthaber zu beeinflussen. Somit haben sie nur noch wenig Interesse an einer nachhaltigen Landbewirtschaftung. • Die Zuständigkeiten der mit Landnutzungsplanung befassten Behörden sind nicht geklärt. Die staatliche Institution für Landmanagement (SLA), die 1986 gegründet wurde, ist eine Behörde, die sich Aufgaben der Landnutzungsplanung mit anderen Fachministerien teilen muss. Das Forstministerium (SFA) ist z.B. für Landnutzungsplanung in Berg- und Waldgebieten verantwortlich, das Landwirtschaftsministerium ist für die ökologische Zonierung und Versteigerung von Grenzertragsflächen, das Bauministerium für Flächennutzungsplanung in Städten und das Ministerium für Wasserkontrolle für die Planung von Wasserflächen zuständig. Dabei kommt es zu Überlappungen, bei de¬nen dann zwei oder mehr Institutionen für ein bestimmtes Gebiet zuständig sind, bei landwirtschaftlich genutzten Bergregionen oder bei Agroforstsystemen sind z.B. sowohl das Landwirtschafts- als auch das Forstministerium für die Landnutzungsplanung zu¬ständig. Beide Institutionen verfolgen dabei unterschiedlichen Konzepte. Auf nationaler Ebene werden durch diese Fachministerien Quoten für Landflächen, die den verschiedenen Nutzungsarten zugeschrieben werden sollen, an den Staatsrat gege-ben; dieser leitet sie an die Provinzbehörden der SLA weiter. Die regionalen und loka¬len Landnutzungsplanungsbehörden sind nun dafür verantwortlich, Landnutzungskar¬ten und – -pläne zu erstellen. Sie müssen dabei zwischen nationalen Quoten und lokalen Interessen und Bedürfnissen vermitteln. Diese Aufgabe wird von vielen lokalen Mitar-beiter/-innen als unlösbar eingestuft. Außerdem verfügen die Behörden über nicht aus-reichend qualifiziertes Personal, das nicht in der Lage ist, angepasste Landnutzungs¬pläne zu erarbeiten. • Bauern und Bäuerinnen werden an Entscheidungen im Bereich Landnutzungs-planung nicht beteiligt. In den chinesischen Planungsabläufen ist eine Beteiligung der lokalen Nutzer/-innen nicht vorgesehen. Die einzige Möglichkeit, lokale Politik zu be-einflussen, besteht zur Zeit darin, an den Wahlen für die Dorfkomitees teilzunehmen. Aber auch durch dieses Instrument werden alte Machtstrukturen meist nicht beseitigt. Deshalb befinden sich die chinesischen Bauern und Bäuerinnen in der Situation, die für sie oft willkürlichen Anordnungen der lokalen Kader zu befolgen oder Nischen zu finden, in denen Strategien für ein besseres (Über)leben entwickelt werden können. Dazu ge¬hören z.B. die Entwicklung nicht-landwirtschaftlicher Einkommensmöglichkeiten oder auch Migration in die größeren Ballungszentren. Beides kann dazu führen, dass die Landbewirtschaftung vernachlässigt oder gar aufgegeben wird. 2. Die Vernachlässigung von indigenem Wissen in Entwicklungsansätzen Ein weiteres Problem im Bereich Ressourcenmanagement und Landnutzungsplanung ist, dass weltweit und auch in China die Konzepte vor allem naturwissenschaftlich-technische oder ideologische Grundlagen haben. Es wird davon ausgegangen, dass Planer/-innen und Wissenschaftler/-innen ein an Universitäten entwickeltes und damit überlegenes Wissen haben, und dieses Wissen an die "unwissenden" Landnutzer/-innen weitergegeben werden muss. Scheitern diese Entwicklungsansätze, liegt es an der "Unfähigkeit der Bau¬ern/Bäuerinnen", diese Methoden richtig anzuwenden. Die lokalen Wissenssysteme wer¬den bei diesen Konzepten nicht berücksichtigt, oft sogar zerstört. In China bildete sich während der kollektiven Phase (Anfang der fünfziger bis Mitte der achtziger Jahre) ein Wissenssystem heraus, dass sich weder an Naturwissenschaft und Technik noch an lokalem oder indigenem Wissen orientierte, sondern vor allem der kommunistischen Ideologie zu dienen hatte. Es wird deshalb in der Arbeit ideologisches Wissen genannt. Dazu gehört z. B. die Anordnung der chinesischen Führungsspitze während der Kulturrevolution, überall Getreide anzupflanzen, auch wenn die natürlichen Bedingungen dies eigentlich nicht zu¬ließen. Hier wurden die chinesischen Bauern und Bäuerinnen mit einem "Wissen" kon¬frontiert, dass weder auf Wissenschaft noch auf lokalem Know-how basierte. Die Misserfolge der technologisch-orientierten Ansätze, z.B. das Scheitern der Grünen Re-volution in vielen Teilen der Welt führte in den 80er Jahren zu einem Paradigmenwechsel, mit dem Konzepte aktuell wurden, die explizit das Wissen der Landnutzer/-innen in den Mittelpunkt des Planungsprozesses stellen (indigenes Wissen, lokales Wissen, Bauernwissen). Das Konzept von "Indigenous Technical Knowledge" stellt die Nützlich¬keit von lokalen Produktionstechniken heraus, während der Ansatz "Indigenous Knowledge Systems" versucht, lokales Wissen in einen Zusammenhang zu bringen, der kulturelle und institutionelle Aspekte sowie das Management von Wissen miteinbezieht. Der von Robert Chambers vertretene "Farmer First"-Ansatz vertritt die Ansicht, dass Bauernwissen allen anderen Wissenssystemen übergeordnet ist und deshalb die größte Rolle im Entwicklungsprozess spielt. Die vorliegende Arbeit folgt zwei in den letzten Jahren entwickelten Vorgehensweisen zum Umgang mit indigenem Wissen: der "Leiden Ethnosystems Perspective" und dem akteursorientierten Ansatz. Die Definition von indigenem Wissen hat dabei drei Komponenten: die historische Dimen¬sion, also Erforschung von geschichtlichen Prozessen, die zu der heutigen Situation geführt haben; die Untersuchung von Sichtweisen der beteiligten Akteure; und die Analyse, wie dieses Wissen außerhalb von wissenschaftlichen und ideologischen Institutionen entwickelt wurde. Die Akteure werden dabei differenziert in Hinblick auf ihre gesellschaftliche Stellung und die Relevanz ihres Wissens. Indigenes Wissen in dieser Arbeit beinhal¬tet deshalb das vorhandene Wissen der an der Landnutzungsplanung beteiligten Akteure sowie indigener Techniken der Landbewirtschaftung, die nicht durch offizielle Institutionen transportiert wurden und die in der Region bereits vor 1949 angewendet wurden (historische Komponente). Wichtig ist hierbei, dass das indigene Wis¬sen nicht als per se gut und nützlich eingestuft wird, wie es teilweise in den früheren Un¬tersuchungen über lokales Wissen geschah. Vielmehr wird untersucht, welche Relevanz das heute vorhandene indigene Wissen für Ressourcenmanagement und Landnutzungspla¬nung im heutigen China hat. Die historische Komponente des indigenen Wissens ist in China seit etwa zwei Jahrtausen¬den gut dokumentiert - im Gegensatz zu den meisten afrikanischen und südasiatischen Ge-sellschaften. Bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts hatten sich viele Landnutzungstechni¬ken kaum verändert und versetzten die chinesischen Bauern und Bäuerinnen in die Lage, dem knappen Gut Boden vergleichsweise hohe Erträge abzugewinnen. In den Zeiten der kollektiven Landbewirtschaftung von 1958 bis 1978 wurde jedoch zentral verordnet, wie das Land zu nutzen sei und welche Kulturfrüchte anzubauen waren. Dies galt auch für Fälle, wo die lokalen Bedingungen diese Nutzung gar nicht zuließen. Dadurch gerieten viele der traditionellen Methoden in Vergessenheit. Mit der wirtschaftlichen Liberalisierung in den 80er Jahren erhielten die lokalen Entschei-dungsträger und Landnutzer/-innen zwar einen größeren Einfluss auf die Planung der loka¬len Ressourcen; sie setzen nun aber andere Prioritäten, wie z.B die Erschließung nicht-landwirt-schaftlicher Einkommensmöglichkeiten. Deshalb wird das im Hinblick auf Landbewirt-schaftung vorhandene indigene Wissen immer weniger angewendet. Der offizielle chinesische landwirtschaftliche Beratungsdienst setzt seit Mitte der achtziger Jahre explizit auf Konzepte, die Wissenschaft und Technik propagandieren (tuiguang = durch Druck verbreiten) und traditionelle Denkweisen verdrängen sollen. Dadurch sowie durch die oben erwähnten Rechtsunsicherheiten wird ein Prozess, bei dem das indigene Wissen immer mehr in Vergessenheit gerät, beschleunigt. 3. Die Feldforschung: Lokales Wissen in einem nordchinesischem Bergdorf Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurde von 1993 bis 1997 in dem Bergdorf Liudu an der Grenze zwi-schen dem administrativen Gebiet Beijings zur Provinz Hebei eine Feldforschung mit par-tizipativen Erhebungsmethoden durchgeführt, bei der untersucht werden sollte, welche Formen von indigenem Wissen vorhanden sind, welche Rolle sie für die Landnutzungspla¬nung spielen können und wer die beteiligten Akteure sind. Dabei wurden die folgenden historischen Wissensbestände gefunden, die heute noch ange-wendet werden und die für eine dörfliche Landnutzungsplanung relevant sein können: • landwirtschaftliche Techniken, die eine optimale Raumausnutzung ermöglichen, z. B. Mischkulturen und Agroforstsysteme, werden nach wie vor angewendet, • geomantische Leitlinien (feng shui) werden als Indikatoren für Landnutzungsentschei-dungen genutzt, • die Prinzipien von yin und yang werden auf landwirtschaftliche Flächen angewendet und die Nutzung entsprechend ausgerichtet, • die Dimensionen von Landverteilung entsprechend der legalistischen und konfuzianischen Auffassung von entweder Landkonzentration oder egalistischer Landvertei¬lung sind in den Denkansätzen der Entscheidungsträger nach wie vor vorhanden. Es wurden außerdem lokale Akteure identifiziert, die im Management und Transport von indigenem Wissen eine besondere Rolle spielen: • lokale Expert/-innen (xiangtu rencai) als Träger und Übermittler von traditionellem Wissen im Bereich Landbewirtschaftung. Sie ergänzen und ersetzen teilweise den staatlichen Beratungsdienst, • der Geomantikexperte (feng shui shifu). Er wurde vor der Kulturrevolution und wird nun wieder verstärkt von der Dorfbevölkerung konsultiert, um Ratschläge bei der An¬lage von neuen Wohn- und Nutzgebäuden und dem Standort von Grabanlagen zu ge¬ben, • lokale Innovator/-innen, die neue Techniken der Landbewirtschaftung entwickeln, ohne dass diese durch offizielle Beratungsdienste initiiert wurden, • lokale Institutionen, z.B. das Dorfkomitee, das von den Dorfbewohner/-innen als ihre wichtigste Institution angesehen wird. Die Institution "Dorfkomitee" wurde zwar in der kollektiven Zeit gegründet, kann nun aber relativ frei gewählt werden und fällt wich¬tige Entscheidungen im Bereich der dörflichen Landnutzungsplanung, • Bauern und Bäuerinnen, die ihren Geschlechterrollen entsprechend die Landbewirtschaftung durchführen. Alle Informanten und Informantinnen gaben an, dass sie ihr landwirt¬schaftliches Wissen zum größten Teil mit ihren Verwandten und Nachbarn austauschen und nicht durch den offiziellen Beratungsdienst erhalten. Die Erhebungen haben allerdings gezeigt, dass die historischen Wissenssysteme und ihre Träger auch nach der Auflösung des kollektiven Bewirtschaftungssystems weiterhin an Bedeutung verloren haben. Z.B. konnte beim letzten Feldaufenthalt 1997 beobachtet werden, dass Mischfruchtsysteme und die Prinzipien von yin und yang kaum noch angewendet werden. Sie wurden hauptsächlich im traditionellen Trockenfeldbau eingesetzt, und die Bearbeitung dieser Felder wird von der Dorfbevölkerung als zu mühsam und ineffektiv angesehen, weil sich einerseits die dort angebauten Produkte nicht vermarkten lassen und andererseits genügend Le¬bensmittel auf lokalen Märkten zu teilweise subventionierten Preisen gekauft werden kön¬nen. Das Interesse richtet sich deshalb nun auf nicht-landwirtschaftliche Einkommens¬möglichkeiten. Es ist deshalb schwierig einzuschätzen, inwieweit das indige¬ne Wissens zu einer nachhaltigen Landnutzung beitragen kann, da sie in den Augen der lokalen Bevölkerung immer mehr an Bedeutung verliert. Außerdem sind die Gegen¬wartsprobleme im Bereich Ressourcenmanagement so massiv, z. B. die Wasser- und Bo¬denverschmutzung durch Industrieemissionen und Agrochemikalien, dass historische An¬sätze hier keine Lösung bieten können. Es wurde jedoch festgestellt, dass Bauern und Bäuerinnen in der Lage sind, neue Landbe-wirtschaftungsstrategien zu entwickeln, wenn sie merken, dass ihre Lebensumwelt z.B. durch die Verknappung natürlicher Ressourcen unmittelbar bedroht ist und ihre bisherigen Wirtschaftsweisen keine Perspektiven mehr bieten. Dabei spielten die naturwissenschaft¬lich-technisch und ideologisch geprägten Institutionen wie z. B. der offizielle landwirt¬schaftliche Beratungsdienst oder andere staatliche Institutionen keine Rolle. Es handelt sich also um endogene Innovationen. 4. Schlussfolgerungen Es wird deshalb vorgeschlagen, dass die Definition von indigenem Wissen erweitert wird um die Komponente der Fähigkeit zu Innovationen, die Antworten auf die Gegenwartspro¬bleme beinhalten. Dabei werden die entsprechenden Lösungsansätze von den Betroffenen selbst entwickelt, die entsprechenden Planungsinstitutionen können dann aber die Fortfüh¬rung und Umsetzung der Ansätze unterstützen. Gegebenenfalls werden sie erweitert und verbessert; z. B. kann die Verbesserung trockenheitsresistenter Getreidesorten in For¬schungslaboren durchgeführt werden, wenn sie auf Experimenten der Bauern beruht und diese an der Fortführung der Entwicklung beteiligt werden. Im Bereich Landnutzungsplanung können neue Ideen der Landnutzer/-innen aufgegriffen und in einen übergeordneten Planungszusammenhang gebracht werden. Dabei bietet das Instrument der Geographischen Informationssysteme (GIS), ursprünglich ein rein techni¬sches Instrument, Möglichkeiten, die Landnutzer/-innen in den Planungsdialog miteinzu¬beziehen. Dazu wurde ein Konzept entwickelt, das eine Integration von wissenschaftlich-technischem Wissen und indigenem Wissen in der Landnutzungsplanung ermöglicht. Gegliedert in 15 Schritte wird eine Planung dargelegt, die zwei Feldaufenthalte, bei denen partizipative Methoden angewendet werden, den Dialog mit den entsprechenden Planungsbehörden, partizipative Planungsaktivitäten auf höheren Ebenen, die Einbettung der partizipativ erhobenen Informationen in ein GIS, Vorschläge für die Implementierung sowie partizipative Monitoringaktivitäten beinhaltet. Die Schwerpunkte liegen dabei auf der Einschätzung des spezifischen Wissens der unterschiedlichen Akteure, der Verbesse¬rung von schwachen Schnittstellen der beteiligten Institutionen und der Konzentration auf die spezifischen Probleme der Landnutzungsplanung in China. ; The thesis analyses the need for the integration of indigenous knowledge into rural land use planning concepts, based on an example from a mountainous region in rural Northern China. The definition of indigenous knowledge comprises three components: research on the historical dimension, investigation of the present views of the people concerned with land use planning and the analysis about knowledge generation outside scientific institutions. The historical component in China is well documented with traditional cultivation techniques and ancient visions of nature. Many of these techniques remained unchanged until the beginning of the 20th century and enabled the land users to receive relatively high yields in a sustainable way. During the time of collective land management 1958-1978, however, it was centrally planned and ordered how land should be used and which crops should be cultivated following the socialist ideology and without considering local and historical perspectives. This promotion of this "ideological" knowledge with its top-down approaches has thus resulted in neglecting traditional techniques and the application of indigenous knowledge. Following the economic liberalization at the beginning of the 1980s, land users and local decision makers could then have a wider influence on the use of land resources and on how to cultivate their fields. However, in many regions in China, agricultural activities have been no longer economically viable and this leads to a non-agricultural use of land which is often not sustainable. The official agricultural extension service focuses now on modern science and technology, but still follows a top-down approach (tuiguang= push and spread). The legal situation of land tenure is still unclear so that many land users are not motivated to use sustainable and traditional methods on their land plots. In this process, indigenous knowledge has been further losing its importance. The second part of the thesis presents the views of the land users in the case study of Liudu Village, Fangshan County on the border between Beijing and Hebei Province. Using participatory appraisal methods it was revealed that some traditional techniques such as mixed cropping and agro-forestry systems are still applied; that geomantic principles (feng shui) sometimes influence land use decisions; that the principle of yin and yang are used on agricultural fields and that decision makers still follow the historical conflict of Confucian and legalist land distribution. However, these applications remain sporadic and cannot significantly contribute to solutions of modern problems i.e. water and soil pollution through massive chemical emissions. Nevertheless the findings show that local people are able to carry out their innovations outside the official scientific extension service and different from traditional techniques if their own environment is threatened. This includes breeding of larger animals which is both ecomically attractive and sustainable because the night soil can be used as manure. Especially old people have concepts on how to use land in a sustainable way. Newly generated knowledge can therefore provide answers to the present problems, if they are integrated into scientific and official approaches of land use planning and land management. In order to achieve a sustainable use of land, the ideas of the land users should be considered and put into a higher level planning context. Useful instruments for this are Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Originally purely technical, they offer a range of possibilities to integrate the views of local actors. The thesis develops a concept of 15 planning steps for participatory land use planning based on a combination of indigenous and modern knowledge.
Unlike much of the secondary literature on Shakespeare, "Immanent Shakespeares: Politics, Performance, and Pedagogy" labors less to determine what Shakespearean texts might mean than to explore the cultural work these texts do while working in conjunction with contemporary institutions of learning and technologies of performance. Shakespeare studies too often takes the determination (or destabilization) of meaning as its telos, even when it's largely informed by performance criticism. This project sets meaning aside to focus on how Shakespeare's textuality gets mobilized through performance in order to produce material effects--effects that exceed and shape semantic meaning. Semantic and hermeneutic vocabularies leave performance scholars very few terms with which they might interrogate performance's most salient features: duration, embodiment, light, discipline or affect. Making and coming to terms with what Shakespeare can do inevitably involves refiguring the relationship between Shakespeare's text and performance practices. In the dissertation, I argue that the field of Shakespeare studies too often figures the difference between textuality and performance spatially . These spatial models figure performance in prepositional relation to textuality: performances arise from the text or are interpretations of textuality. Performance has largely been understood as an interpretation of a Shakespearean meaning residing within a static (albeit polysemic) textuality. On stage or on screen, performance is continually represented as exterior to--and is considered over-determined by--textuality. My project, instead, figures the difference between stage/screen and page in terms of time. This move, from figures of space to figures of time, forces a reconsideration of many disciplinary assumptions (in literary, film and performance studies). Cultural studies' spatializing tendency, inseparable from the way it often figures difference (as "difference between" two discrete identities), is rooted in a long history of transcendental dialectics. Textuality and performance are framed, spatially, in terms of transcendence (even when stage-centered criticism tries to invert this relation, prioritizing performance, it nevertheless continues to understand difference within a transcendental relation). My project moves from a transcendental, spatial understanding of difference to one rooted in immanent, temporal duration. Giorgio Agamben recently identified "two different trajectories in contemporary French philosophy, both of which pass through Heidegger: a trajectory of transcendence , which includes Levinas and Derrida and goes back through Hussurl to Kant; and a trajectory of immanence , which includes Foucault and Deleuze, and goes back through Nietzsche to Spinoza." The dissertation works throughout to illustrate how this shift--from transcendental, spatial constraint to immanent, temporal production--allows for more nuanced discussions of elements constitutive of performance. The project considers Shakespearean performance within a variety of institutional arenas; different chapters consider reading practices, teaching practices, student performance, theatrical enactment, and new (and old) media engagement. This approach entails a series of interlocking, close, rhetorical readings of particular performances, theatrical/filmic/video/digital media technologies, arts/educational legislation, as well as the institutional discourses accompanying each. These close readings work to refigure the problem of textuality and performance in civic, aesthetic and pedagogical discourses; each chapter, subsequent to this refiguration, ends by proposing innovative, practice-based solutions. In Chapter One, I build on the critique of spatialized understandings of text and performance outlined in the introduction in order to argue that the humanities' figuration of difference and power (alongside attendant assumptions about the relationship between self and structure) continues to hide more than it reveals about culture, history, power and performance. In the chapter, I argue for and illustrate what an alternative, immanent critique might look like. The chapter focuses on two "objects" (a methodological term which seems to point to how performance is always already spatialized): 1) a "radical" or "transgressive" performance of Macbush , a contemporary re-imagining of Macbeth , and 2) a seemingly co-opted, official, "normative" performance of Macbeth sponsored by Boeing, the "right-wing" NEA, and the US Department of Defense. The chapter examines these two ostensibly opposed productions by rehearsing a dialectical or "transcendental" critique and using a common (hackneyed) reading of de Certeau's strategy/tactic distinction--one which emphasizes and prioritizes de Certeau's interest in space. I then complicate this reading by showing how de Certeau's figuration of power and performance within the panoptic city already includes an inclination towards an immanent understanding of power's circulation--one that emphasizes time and complicates the spatial cartographies upon which dialectical movement finds its ground and proper "identity." Through this immanent reading, I argue that dialectical understandings of culture and power rely upon a particular way of understanding the priority of space, one strengthened by Cold War discourses of cultural fronts and quantitative, incursive movements through homogenous space (both Macbeth and Bush, in prioritizing the stability of space over the contingencies of time, make this same tragic flaw in different ways). Ultimately, I argue that an immanent understanding of culture and power corresponds with contemporary changes in the shape of Empire and new ways of conceptualizing the flows of global capital, ways rooted in performance's duration and affect. Further, this immanent reading (and the shape of Empire and history correlative to this approach) highlights the dangers of the Left's reliance upon historical analogies that flatten important differences between Vietnam and Iraq or between Bush and Macbeth. Chapter Two develops the notion of immanent critique by revisiting dualistic notions of self and structure in film theory and performance studies. In this chapter, I look at the spatial arrangement of spectators, specific media, and apparatuses of projection. Through a reading of Prospero's Books , a 1991 "new media" film using proto-HDTV technologies and bourgeoning CGI graphics software, this chapter looks at film's ability, through these technologies, to trouble film theory's traditionally spatial understanding of filmic semiotics and the spectator's relation to the (transcendent) filmic apparatus. This chapter introduces an immanent performance theory to film theory by offering a new reading of the latter's key texts--from Munsterberg and Armheim, to Balazs and Metz, to Benjamin's Artwork essay--highlighting along the way each theorist's relation to the "immanent turn" in cultural studies. Key here will be the role each theorist gives to temporal relations. Particularly useful in rethinking the spectator's relationship to the (new or old media) apparatus is Benjamin's notion of "creative innervation"--a term he uses to show how the spectator's body is productively enlivened, rather than negatively determined, by a technological apparatus which becomes, for him or her, a prosthesis. This chapter puts Benjamin into contact with Deleuze to sketch out what an immanent model of reception might entail once traditional notions of the filmic apparatus' (over-) determinism have collapsed. This immanent understanding of filmic reception--a productive reception modeled in Prospero's Books --builds upon various notions of "pseudopresences" and theories of "affective faciality/physiognomy" sketched out by twentieth century film theorists in order to rethink the presence/absence binary and the various ways in which this binary gets unevenly mapped onto the disciplines of theatre and film. Chapter Three looks at how changing technologies continue to reconstitute the disciplinary gulf between film and theatre. In this chapter, I look at two interlocking performances: Richard Burton's 1964 Electronovision Hamlet and the Wooster Group's "new media" Hamlet . Working with Deleuze's idea of "the theatre of repetition," and continuing to work with Walter Benjamin's notion of "creative innervation," this chapter examines the technologies of repetition each Hamlet employs in order to read, write, and perform with the pre-recorded yet affective and "pseudopresent" specters of history. In July of 1964, three performances of the Burton-Gielgud Hamlet were recorded and edited together thanks to "miracle of Electronovision." The resulting "Theatrofilm" was then screened for two days in over one thousand theaters in order to give audiences the "liveness" of a Broadway show right in their own local theater. Recently, the Wooster Group has been staging another version of Hamlet , one that utilizes the Isadora and Final Cut Pro platforms to digitally remix and reframe the Burton-Gielgud production as an historical background upon which the company acts. Onstage, The Wooster Group imitates the 1964 Hamlet gesture for gesture in what the group likens to an archeological reconstruction, but I argue for an alternate figuration, one that is less spatial and more temporal in its figuration of history. This chapter uses these two performances (and their contemporary technologies) to ask how the so-called "new" media differently mediate our relationship with the past. I argue that new technological interfaces enable us to engage in historiographical research on stages and screens in ways that are singularly durational and within registers that are incommensurate to the textual historiographies of journals and monographs. Each of the Hamlet productions I treat figures a relation to history, treating the past as an interactive ensemble of images that are engageable yet immutably scripted. Chapter Four begins my engagement with critical pedagogy as I attempt to rework Freirean accounts of the classroom as a space of cultural contradiction and potential "liberation." The chapter asks how we might instead see classroom practices as productive of political, economic and ethical behaviors. Since the 1980s, critical pedagogy has rallied for the inclusion of "hip hop in the classroom" as part of a culturally relevant, Freirean model of connecting language with the lived experience of inner-city youth. But the movement begins to achieve success at the very moment hip hop begins losing its geographic specificity. Recently, a number of programs ("Shakespeare is Hip Hop," "Shakespeare: the Remix," and "Shakespeare in Urban Slang") have sought to connect Shakespeare and hip hop as a way of bridging the divide between the spaces of high and low culture. In this chapter, I examine the strange effects of local, culturally specific pedagogical practices fusing Shakespeare and hip hop which--like the music itself--have been removed, practiced and copied outside of what was once their "proper" space. What happens when suburban youth are asked by their teachers to perform Macbeth in hip hop vernacular? YouTube abounds with blackface Shakespeare. More importantly, though, the chapter rethinks intercultural borrowing and how the logic of "appropriation" falsely frames culture as private property at the same time that young people who identify with remix culture increasingly strive for a "creative commons" and continually challenge the spatial proprieties of culture. This chapter puts the "culture wars" into dialogue with the "copyright wars" and argues that, in a world where the line between public and private properties and spaces is increasingly blurred by virtual glocalities, digital rights management software and copyleft legal theories, cultural studies needs to rethink the spatial logic of cultural appropriation. Chapter Five brings immanent critique to the space of the classroom by examining another the Shakespeare teaching docudrama. These films, both fictional and documentary, chronicle "successful" pedagogues and the at-risk students whose lives they transform. In this chapter, I look at a few of these films alongside the No Child Left Behind Act's legislation on "character education." Performing a genealogy of the "character education movement" from the Greeks to 21st century US contexts, this chapter looks at the way in which Shakespearean repetitions operate to construct both a particularly American Shakespeare as well as a particularly American characterization of the student body. Centering on Prince Hal's Saint Crispin's Day speech, this chapter also explores the way in which discourses of national "character" and their corresponding pedagogies rely upon a particularly vertical (patrilineal, spatial, transcendental) notion of repetition and differentiation, one which might be refigured by Hardt and Negri's notion of how the immanent multitude operates in time. This chapter moves from the performance of character to a notion of "performing character." Much as earlier chapters refigured text/performance or apparatus/performance oppositions, this chapter shows how dialectical pedagogies might give way to durational, embodied performance pedagogies. The dissertation's concluding chapter, its post-script, uses the pedants of Love's Labour's Lost to engage in an interdisciplinary genealogy of the geek. I focus on three figures of the student body's relation to technology (the bookworm, the computer nerd, and the drama queen) in order to better understand how the "geek" has gained increased importance as a category of social difference and exclusion. The conclusion asks: How does the alterity of the geek historically produce and trouble the mutual exclusivity of love and labor , humans and machines, males and females, the curricular and the extracurricular, and/or the physical and the metaphysical? As a means of overcoming learning's alienation from the social, the dissertation concludes by introducing a "geek chic" performance pedagogy. This pedagogy uses training in digital video editing to include the social, and often virtual, extracurricular lives of students. Through editing their own performances (as they often already do within the world of social networking sites), students will rehearse the behaviors, gestures, expressions and temporal movements that constitute what we perceive as character. By examining these "character effects," students are trained to understand character differently--less as an originary space or cause of performance and more as a legible effect of performative behavior.
Author's introductionIssues surrounding what has variously been defined as 'global', 'international' or 'transnational' forms of 'organized crime' are a frequent staple of globalization crisis talk and are frequently used to justify the emergence and elaboration of transnational policing capacities. How well does this functional explanation account for these related sets of phenomena? What are the particular organizational and institutional characteristics of transnational policing institutions? What counts as transnational organised crime? How does the apparent dialectic between transnational organised crime and transnational policing relate to broader issues of global governance? How do the practices of transnational policing relate to the structure of global society more generally? Sociological questions about global crime and policing turn out to be fundamental questions about the nature of the world system.Author recommendsSheptycki, J. (ed.) 2000. Issues in Transnational Policing. London: Routledge, ISBN 0‐415‐19260‐9.This pioneering book opened up the sociology of transnational policing. The book contains chapters by leading scholars in the sociology of policing and is the first to consider the consequences of globalization specific to the institutions of policing. Chapters consider a number of important emerging issues in relation to transnational policing. The introduction attends to the definitions of the book's central terms: 'policing' and 'transnational'. It also provides a typology relating to the field of policing that has had major implications for the understanding of policing accountability under transnational conditions. The first chapter, by Les Johnston, considers the emergence of transnational private security, by mapping the global security market. Chapter two, by Jean‐Paul Brodeur, provides empirical insights into the workings of legal due process in complex transnational criminal enquiries raising questions about the accountability structures in the coming 'age of transnational high policing'. Chapter three, by Didier Bigo, traces the emergence of liaison officer networks across the European policing field. Frank Gregory charts the historical rise of private criminality as a matter of international concern in chapter four, while James Sheptycki undertakes a descriptive analysis of the global system for policing money in chapter five. In chapter six, Peter Manning considers various aspects of policing and technology under conditions of transnationalisation, paying some considerable attention to the policing of 'new social spaces'– that is the rise of so‐called 'cyberspace'. Chapter seven, by James Sheptycki, is a concluding chapter which considers the historical case of the 'international war on drugs' held to be the 'paradigm example of transnational policing'.Sheptycki, J. and A. Wardak (eds) 2004. Transnational and Comparative Criminology. London: Routledge, ISBN 978‐1‐904385‐05‐9.This book advocates that contemporary criminology be both transnational and comparative. The introduction describes the field of criminology by placing it in a global context. One key question is how academic criminologists can cope with the difficulties of cultural relativism in fostering a comparative and transnational view of the field. The book is broken into four sections. In the first, a variety of comparative studies are considered. Difficulties in measuring trends in comparative crime statistics across national jurisdictions, techniques for doing so and the interpretation of such data are all considered. The use of qualitative data in comparative studies is also considered. The authors advocate the combination of different types of data in a 'second best' approach to the interpretation of transnational and other types of crime. In the second section, a variety of 'area studies' are considered. These are: West Africa, Southern Africa, Singapore, China and Saudi Arabia. These chapters each offer extended transnational and comparative treatment of issues of crime, crime definition and crime control in their respective regions. Section 3 deals with specific transnational crime control issues that have been identified. Four separate chapters consider transnational organized crime, transnational white collar crime, transnational corruption in the EU and international sex‐trafficking in the EU. The final section considers transnational control responses to transnational crime and the book concludes with a chapter on reflexivity in the academic study of crime, crime definition and crime control.Goldsmith, A. and J. Sheptycki (eds) 2007. Crafting Transnational Policing. Oxford: Hart Publishing, ISBN‐10: 1841137766.The notion that police around the world share a distinctive outlook has been established, as has the assumption that police must co‐operate internationally if they are to respond effectively to the crime and insecurity associated with the transnational condition. Yet the possibility of developing a genuinely transnational policecraft seems negligible. It is possible to discuss in ideal terms such notions as transnational ethics, global social justice and the like but what, practically speaking, could be meant by a transnational constabulary ethic? Arguably, the situated nature of policing means that there is no such thing as a common transnational policecraft and hence no possibility of an overarching ethic for the constabulary. Liberal democratic theories of policing are also ill‐adapted to the global conditions that are the consequence of prevailing neo‐liberal governmental logics. This book presents a collection of essays that are the results of a workshop at the Onati Institute for the Sociology of Law entitled: Transnational Policing and the Constabulary Ethic. It provides descriptive accounts of transnational policing in a variety of regional settings around the world but grounds the analysis in debates about what would constitute good policing under transnational conditions.Sheptycki, J. 2008. 'Transnationalism, Orientalism and Crime.'Asian Journal of Criminology, 3: 13–35. DOI: 10.1007/s11417-008-9049-0The article asks the question: how applicable are European and North American criminological theories to the situation in Asia? It takes a transnational and comparative perspective in relating contemporary and historical trends in crime, crime definition and crime control in a variety of Asian countries that comprise the so‐called Confucian sphere. It provides a criminological critique of the 'Asian values debate' and, through an analysis of trends in crime, crime definition and crime control in China and Japan, of organised crime across the region, as well as selected examples of state‐organised crime, seeks to provide a perspective on the developing criminological discourses of 'the Orient'. The paper argues that, although cultural aspects are important and interesting in understanding the crime situation in the region, ultimately it is changes in politics and governance, economy and society that are most efficacious in explaining current criminological trends and developments.Sheptycki, J. 2007. 'High Policing in the Security Control Society.'Policing 1(1): 70–9, Oxford University Press.This article considers the nature and practice of high policing in the security control society. It looks at the effects of the new information technologies on the organization of policing–intelligence and argues that a number of 'organizational pathologies' have arisen that make the functioning of security intelligence processes in high policing deeply problematic. The article also looks at the changing context of policing and argues that the circuits of the security–intelligence apparatus are woven into, and help to compose, the panic scenes of the security control society. Seen this way, the habits of high policing are not the governance of crisis, but rather governance through crisis. An alternative paradigm is suggested, viz. the human security paradigm, and the paper concludes that, unless senior ranking policing officers – the police intelligentsia'– adopt new ways of thinking, the already existing organizational pathologies of the security–intelligence system are likely to continue undermining efforts at fostering security.Sheptycki, J. 2007. 'Criminology and the Transnational Condition: A Contribution to International Political Sociology.'International Political Sociology 1: 391–405.This article contributes to international political sociology and the further enhancement of the interdisciplinary study of the global system by introducing the vocabulary of critical criminology into the discourse. It suggests that the contemporary global system is ripe with existential anxieties that are symptoms of momentous historical change and it argues that, for good or for ill, issues of crime definition and control have become central to the transnational condition. As a consequence, criminological theories should be introduced into theoretical discussions about the nature of the contemporary global scene. Such conceptual thinking is vital, given the centrality of the language of criminal threats in the language of global governance and the language of governance globally.Online materialsThe Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces http://www.dcaf.ch/ Small Arms Survey http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/ One World Trust http://www.oneworldtrust.org/ Open Society Institute http://www.soros.org/ The Jack and Mae Nathanson Centre on transnational human rights, crime and security http://nathanson.osgoode.yorku.ca/ The drug policy alliance network http://www.drugpolicy.org/homepage.cfm The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/html.cfm/index190EN.html The Environmental Investigation Agency http://www.eia‐international.org/ Corporate Watch http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/ SyllabusTopics for lecture and discussion I Introduction and overview Definitions, problems and issues: What is policing? What is crime? What do the terms internationalisation, globalisation and transnationalisation refer to? What consequences follow from a world‐system without world policing?Outside reading:Castells, M. The Rise of the Network Society, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell (1996).Held, D., A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraon 1999. The Global Transformations Reader. Cambridge: Polity Press.Held, D. 2003. Cosmopolitanism, a Defence. Cambridge: Polity.Sklair, L. 2001. The Transnational Capitalist Class. Oxford: Blackwell. II Issues in comparative criminology What is crime and how to academic criminologists study in comparative perspective? The use and abuse of statistics in understanding crime cross‐nationally, cross‐culturally and cross‐jurisdictionally. The uses of qualitative data in interpreting problems in comparative criminology. The comparative study of crime and the emerging world system.Outside reading:Hofstede, Geert 2001. Culture's Consequences, Comparing Values, Behaviours, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations. Beverly Hills: Sage.Reichel, P. 2007. Comparative Criminal Justice Systems, a Topic Approach. Harlow: Pearson Education. III Issues in transnational criminology What is transnational about transnational crime? How are transnational crime problems defined and prioritized? How are transnational crime problems measured and evaluated? What do we know about the various types of transnational crime?Outside reading:Beare, M. 2004. Critical Reflections on Transnational Organized Crime, Money Laundering and Corruption. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Edwards, A. and P. Gill 2004. Transnational Organised Crime; Perspectives on Global Security. London: Routledge.Reichel, P. 2005. Handbook of Transnational Crime and Justice. London: Sage. IV Issues in transnational policing Who are the transnational police? What is Interpol? What do transnational police agents do? How are transnational policing priorities set? Under conditions of transnationalisation, what is the relationship between law and policing?Outside reading:Anderson, M. et al. 1995. Policing the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Andreas, P. and T. Snyder. Wall Around the West. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.Andreas, P. and E. Nadelmann 2006. Policing the Globe; Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Ratcliffe, J. 2004. Strategic Thinking in Criminal Intelligence. NSW: Federation Press.Focus questions
What challenges do researchers interested in comparative criminology face and why? What are comparative and transnational criminology and how are they different? With reference to the contemporary period, can you think of practical elements, themes or questions that are common to both? What is transnational policing and how can it be made accountable to the global commonwealth? What are the practices that feature most prominently in transnational discourses about contemporary policing and how are these understood from a human rights, civil liberties or human security point of view? What does the study of transnational crime and policing reveal about the nature and character of the world system?
Project ideasBased on knowledge acquired from this course, choose a topic in transnational or comparative criminology and create a briefing portfolio. The portfolio will consist of four items: (i) three page statement of purpose; (ii) annotated bibliography; (iii) poster and presentation; and (iv) written essay. As part of the project, students should prepare a poster presentation (approx. 18″× 24″) detailing the chosen topic through the display of quantitative and qualitative types of data together with key concepts, case‐study vignettes, maps and pictures. Students will give an oral presentation based on their poster and create an annotated bibliography and write a short essay on their chosen topic based on the feedback they receive. Some suggested topics: comparative study of gun‐homicide in two or more countries/cultures; comparative study of rape and sexual assault in two or more countries/cultures; comparative student of family violence in two or more countries/cultures; environmental organized crime; policing the global money system; policing and the global drug prohibition regime; controlling piracy on the high seas – then and now; transnational crimes of the powerful and the powerless; policing, tourism and crime; corporate crime and state crime – spot the difference.
Brazil grew 2.4 percent per year on average in the last 25 years-somewhat less than Latin America, a good deal less than the world, far less than the emerging countries of Asia in the same period, and indeed far less than Brazil itself in previous decades. If anything stands out favorably in recent Brazilian experience, it is not growth but stabilization and the successful opening of the economy. The purpose of this paper is more modest. It is limited to setting out the authors' particular view of recent efforts to consolidate democracy in Brazil while controlling inflation and resuming economic growth. At the same time the paper presents, as objectively as possible, some thoughts on the limits but also the relevance of action by political leaders to set a course and circumvent obstacles to that process. Here and there, the paper refers to the experiences of other Latin American countries, especially Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, not to offer a full fledged comparative analysis but merely to note contrasts and similarities that may shed light on the peculiarities of the Brazilian case and suggest themes for a more wide-ranging exchange of views.
The Czech authorities invited the World Bank to provide an independent evaluation of the Government's draft plan for the merger of the Tax and Customs Administrations, and with an eye on the eventual integration of the collection of social contributions into a newly created revenue authority. In Volume I of this report, we present a preliminary examination of the Government's draft plan for tax and customs merger. Volume II does a preliminary assessment of the issues relating to integrating collection of social contributions within the tax administration.The assessment of the Government's plan in this report is intended to assist the Government in taking a more informed decision on this issue based on lessons learned from international experience. Integration and fundamental reforms are complex processes and require adequate time, financial resources and careful management of the change process itself in order to be successful. In the report, we have pointed out the key challenges and risks and how these can be overcome. We have flagged the major issues that the Government must consider, and highlighted the challenges that the Government must be aware of when designing the establishment of a modern, unified revenue administration. We have recommended a medium term strategy that will take into consideration the key issues and concerns.
The Silk Route Between Past and Present. A Paradigm Beyond Space and Time. On the threshold of the third millennium, in an atmosphere of anachronisms and contradictions, dominated and conditioned by scientific and technological discoveries, new ideas seem to take flight whilst regional barriers and territorial boundaries are collapsing to give way to a new form of comprehensiveness. Sharing ideas and intellectual stimuli, amalgamating cultural elements circulating along its intertwining branches, the Silk Route has more than once given life to new scientific forms, cultural and intellectual systems and, amongst these, artistic shapes and religious syncretism. The "Silk Route", which, with its articulated network of twisting routes and sub-routes, even now well represents the challenging paradigm of a new age yet standing at its threshold.
A paradigm beyond time and space. The following paper aims at focusing on the Silk Route's Religious-Cultural dimension in the middle-inner Asia of the 13th-15th Centuries, when, whatever may have happened regarding local realms and rulers, it played the role of junction and meeting point of different worlds and their civilisations. Even now we are confronted with a political trend that is at once and the same time a cultural current; emanating from the past, it is re-linking Europe and Asia and, re-uniting territories with their individual and traditional cultural forms, is shaping a renewed kaleidoscopic framework. We are confronted with new forces deeply rooted in the past, which, emanating from the far eastern fringes of Asia, by the second decade of the 21st century have reached the far western fringes of Europe, dynamics that are not only 'economics' and 'scientific technologies' but also thought, religion, and other intellectual values. These forces are heir of past times, nevertheless they endure in the present and are the active lively projection of a future time…though still largely to be understood and matured. A vision of life and universe where speculative and religious values coexist with astounding technological and scientific discoveries in a global dimension without space and time.
At the verge of this millennium, the Information and Communication Revolution has given life with its advanced technologies to a new space conditioned and dominated by no-distances. And this space with its always-evolving scientific discoveries today involves the society in its entirety (what is commonly named as "global space" actually symbolised by the Silk Route), endeavours to amalgamate it creating new links between civil and political society and positioning them in a new military dimension. New forms and structures that are rapidly evolving in search of some balance between technological development and preservation of ancient traditions, which might make possible social and economic justice, yet an utopia more than a reality. However, both (social and economic justice) form the ideological basis of order and stability, anxiously pursued by the young generation in search of an economic and speculative order where stability, security (hard and soft security) and religious structures should in their turn become the platform of new political-institutional structures.
Be that as it may, this is not a new phenomenon. Technological advancements are astoundingly new, but not the process and its aims. We are confronted with a phenomenon that has already occurred in more than one historic phase. Epochal phases. That is the human search for economic and social justice, and their framing into new conceptual schemes. And within this ratio, it would be unrealistic to ignore an additional key-factor. It would be unrealistic to deny that Religion has always been a major player. It has been at the basis of more than one revolution, it has represented the culturalpolitical response to foreign challenges, it has legitimised military action, it has given life to new spaces and political systems, it has filled with its pathos cultural and political voids. It has given to Mankind and Universe a new centrality, creating a new space within which Man and Mankind, History and Philosophy, Cosmos and Universe with their laws meet and merge in new systems and structural orders. The World and its Destiny, core of lively debates, conditioned by the eternal dialectic between economics and society, between society and religion, between science and technology on the one hand, and religion on the other, between formal ratio and ideologies or myths, which underline with their voice the eternal antithesis between cultures and civilisations.
At the verge of the third millennium, the intellectual world is facing a new historiographical debate, into which the Religious Factor has also entered. Knowledge and the vision of the world and its new order/disorder are translated into a new philosophy of culture and history, of society and religion. Rationality, historicity of scientific knowledge, nature and experience, nature and human 'ratio', science and ethics, science and its language, science and its new aims and objectives are amongst some of the major themes of this debate. But not only this: which aims, which objectives? And within which new order that might ensure security and stability, social and economic justice? Thence, revolution and power are coming to the fore with another factor: Force and its use…a stage that, however, does not disregard dialogue and tolerance, or, as recently stated by Francesco Bergoglio, more than tolerance, "reciprocal respect". These are only 'some' amongst the main issues discussed and heard of also in the traditional culture of ordinary people.
Undoubtedly, the end of the Cold War and the well-known "global village" dealt with by Samuel Huntington, the global village with its technological revolutions, have induced to re-think our own speculative parameters, traditional paradigms and models of society and power, mankind and statehood. And once again we have been confronted with elements that might bring to new forms of sharp opposition and a global disorder. However, beyond and behind the Huntingtonian cliché of the "clash of civilizations", a new cultural current seems to take flight spurring from the roots of a traditional past, which however has not yet disappeared. The Silk Route stems out emanating from the far-eastern lands of Asia as the conceptual image, the paradigm of a conceivable new order. By merging the material, scientific-technological and economic dimension of life with a new cultural (or neo-cultural) vocation it seeks (and seems to be able) to give life to a new social body and new systemic-structural answers, a comprehensive order capable of tackling the challenges opened by the collapse of the traditional cultural parameters and the dramatic backdrop of a mere clash of civilisations.
Middle-Inner Asia of the 13th -15th Centuries: the Silk Route and its Reflection on Painting and Architectonic Forms. As just pointed out, nothing is new in the course of History. Professor Axel Berkowsky has authoritatively lingered on the Silk Route – or better "the New Silk Route" – with specific regard on practical aspects of these last decades. In the following text, I wish to linger on a past historic period, particularly fertile when confronted with the collapse of traditional values and the challenges posed by new fearful forces and their dynamics: the Mongols with their hordes (ulus) and, some later, Tamerlane with his terrible Army. Sons of the steppe and its culture, these people suddenly appeared on the stage, raced it from Mesopotamia to the north-eastern corner of Asia with their hordes and their allied tribal groups, shattered previous civilisations and imposed a new dominion, a new political-military order and new models of life. But, with their Military superiority, they also brought the codes and the ancient traditional knowledge of the nomadic world. It is misleading to watch to this epochal phase only as a phase of devastation and horrors. With their codes, Mongols and Timurids brought with them the Chinese algebraic, mathematical and scientific knowledge, and fused it with Mesopotamian mathematical and medical sciences reaching peaks of astronomical, arithmetical, numerical, geometric, algebraic theoretical and practical knowledge. They also brought with them from vital centres of religious scholarship and life a large number of theologians, pirs, traditionists and legal religious scholars with their individual religious features and systems. Shamanism, Buddhism, Muslim forms, Nestorianism and other cults vigorously practised in the mobile world of the steppe gave life to an important phase of religious culture and multifarious practices largely imbued with mystic feelings and traditional emotional states.
Then, and once again, within the global space created by the military conquests of the new-comers, the Silk Route – or more precisely, the Silk and its Routes – reorganised and revitalised trades and business, gave life to close diplomatic connections and matrimonial allegiances reinforced by a vigorous traditional chancery and official correspondence, that tightly linked Asia with Europe. Within this new global order, the Silk and its routes played the crucial role, shaped new political, institutional, scientific and intellectual formulae, gave life to new conceptual forms that – at their core – had Man and Mankind as centre of the entire Universe. We are confronted with a cultural development begun at a time when the sons of the steppe were taking over lands of the classical Arabic civilisation (like Syria, Iraq and al-Jazīra), at a time when the Iranian world was still centre of intellectual life and its social norms were still spreading over large spaces of Inner Asian territories. Visual Arts wonderfully mirror this phenomenon.
We witness a process that renovated itself 'from within' in the course of three centuries and did not stop even when the arrival of the European Powers on the Asian markets seemed to sign, with the decay and end of the traditional market economy, also the closing of the cultural interactions created by the Silk Routes of the time. Once again, Visual Arts wonderfully mirror this phenomenon: a dramatic transitional, fluid period, marked by a distinctive timeless reality, which had no longer territories well delimited by frontiers to conquer or defend.
Herewith I have dealt, as an example, with the reflection of the new conceptions of Life and Universe on visual Fine Arts in the 13th-15th centuries, specifically painting and architectonic forms. Ideological values that aimed to forge new relationships among different peoples and their individual human values, religious thinking, moral codes…and economic, scientific, technological achievements.
'Fine Arts'. Visual fine arts, in my case painting and architecture, are the mirror of feelings shared by the Lords of the time, registered by painters and architects in plastic forms, the signal of these stances to an often confused Humanity. Here, I linger on two pictorial themes: Nature and Landscape on the one hand, and Religion with its very images on the other. With regard to architectonic forms, these reflect the same conceptual paradigm shaped through technical features. By those ages, Nature and Landscape were perceived by contemporary painters and architects with formal, stylistic and technical characteristics which strongly reflected the impact with a world which lived its life in close, intimate contact with nature, a world and a culture which observed Nature and the Cosmos, and perceived them in every detail over the slow rhythmical march of days and nights, of seasons and the lunar cycles. These artistic features depict a precise image, that of a world which lives its life often at odds with nature for its very survival, a world which conditions nature or is conditioned in its turn. At that time, it was a world and a cosmic order which were often perceived by the artist in their tension with uncertainty and the blind recklessness of modern-contemporary times. However, to a closer analysis, these same artistic forms shape a celestial order which was at one and the same time a culture and a religion.
In the vast borderless space of the Euro-Asiatic steppes, cut by great rivers, broken by steep rocky mountainous chains and inhospitable desert fig.aux, the Silk succeeded in building and organising its own network of twisting routes and sub-routes, along which transited (albeit, yet still transit) caravans with their goods…but also cultural elements and their conceptual-philosophical forms. Of these latter and their syncretic imageries and dreams, the fine arts have left evocative pictures and architectonic images, which depicted a world that is the projection of a precise social and political reality and its underlying factors, such as the restlessness of a nomadic pattern of life and the culture of the Town and its urban life. Little is changed today despite the collapse of the Soviet empire and its order. Features and forms change, but in both cases they announce a different world with its order built on a robust syncretism, which is at the same time science, knowledge, harmony and religion (divine or human, or both). A world that is the projection of a precise political, social and economic reality. A reality that, at one and the same time, is the silent voice of a humanity often disregarded by contemporary writers, an 'underground world' that echoes traditional forms and their dynamics, and a no less authoritative de facto power that politically, economically and militarily conditions and dominates its times. A reality that finds an authoritative voice through the Silk Route.
Azerbaijan is a secular, majority-Shiite, oil and gas-rich country whose per-capita income quadrupled in real terms during the period 2004-10. While rising incomes have reduced poverty, steps towards a more secure, diversified economy are held back by a public sector that rests on vested interests, patronage-based incentive structures, and ingrained patterns of behavior that include significant rent extraction, particularly from the non-oil economy, with minimal checks and balances from Parliament, the private sector, and civil society. Bank engagement in Azerbaijan at the country level focused on areas which had government support. Some modest results have been achieved, even though in many cases modern laws and practices were adopted without adequate plans for implementation. At the project level, the Bank has supported the strengthening of project implementation units (PIUs) and tools for monitoring, and governance and institutional filters have signaled that Governance and Anticorruption (GAC) processes need to be embedded in the Bank projects. At the sector level, the Bank's work was highly relevant in supporting oil revenue transparency, primary education, roads, and the development of safeguards. It was substantially relevant in public financial management, and private sector development and procurement. Bank engagement was moderately relevant in decentralization, civil service reform, and accountability institutions.
Cambodia is one of the world's most open economies, sustaining high levels of growth in an environment of relatively weak governance. Emerging from a legacy of genocide and civil conflict, the country has sought to address human and social capital deficits across sectors, weaknesses in public finance, and corruption. Despite improvements in access to basic services, governance constraints persist and may threaten gains from economic integration. Over the 2004-10 period, the Bank's engagement on Governance and Anticorruption (GAC) issues in Cambodia was not defined by a single, overarching priority or entry point (such as core public sector management, natural resource management, or service delivery). Rather, the Bank was opportunistic, opting to support the government's GAC efforts across multiple sectors and institutions. The relevance of this opportunistic approach is judged to be moderately relevant. The Bank's objectives on public financial management (PFM) were highly relevant given Cambodia's nontransparent and weak public expenditure management and limited capacity. The Bank's response to sectoral governance weaknesses such as red tape, inefficiencies, and other forms of rent-seeking in customs is rated modest given the need for the government to implement its World Trade Organization commitments. The Bank's project level engagement is rated as moderately relevant. As a basis for reinstating suspended projects, portfolio-wide measures included the use of an Independent Procurement Agency (IPA) for the International Development Association (IDA) procurements, and the implementation of Good Governance Frameworks (GGF) for all IDA projects.
Sustainable investment (SI) has a strong niche foothold in Sub-Saharan Africa, anchored in the region's largest investment market, South Africa. Yet more work is needed, at policy and portfolio levels, to grow this investment theme. This report recommends measures to expand SI in Sub-Saharan Africa. It forecasts that over the next five years there will be considerable growth of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations applied to investment in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria. While these three countries form the basis of the study, the lion's share of data and observations emerged from South Africa, which is home to the continent's most developed capital markets.
In its report to the September 22, 2008 meeting of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee (AHLC), the World Bank noted that the Palestinian Authority (PA), Israel, and the international donor community made some progress on the three parallel conditions for Palestinian economic revival, albeit to different degrees. The report notes the dramatic impact of Israel s recent three-week offensive in Gaza and analyzes the variety of recovery and reconstruction schemes being explored by the donor community. We find that these have not yet led to any significant impact on the ground due to the continued closure imposed on Gaza. The devastation in Gaza, coupled with a fluid political environment in both the PA and Israel, has made it necessary for this report to revisit the fundamentals of donor support to the PA in view of the long-term goal of establishing an economically viable Palestinian state independent of external aid. Examination through this lens reveals a fundamentally flawed picture.
Timothy Mitchell on Infra-Theory, the State Effect, and the Technopolitics of Oil
This is the first in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
The unrest in the Arab world put the region firmly in the spotlights of IR. Where many scholars focus on the conflicts in relation to democratization as a local or regional dynamic, political events there do not stand in isolation from broader international relations or other—for instance economic—concerns. Among the scholars who has insisted on such broader linkages and associations that co-constitute political dynamics in the region, Timothy Mitchell stands out. The work of Mitchell has largely focused on highly specific aspects of politics and development in Egypt and the broader Middle East, such as the relations between the building of the Aswan Dam and redistribution of expertise, and the way in which the differences between coal and oil condition democratic politics. His consistently nuanced and enticing analyses have gained him a wide readership, and Mitchell's analyses powerfully resonate across qualitative politically oriented social sciences. In this Talk, Timothy Mitchell discusses, amongst others, the birth of 'the economy' as a powerful modern political phenomenon, how we can understand the state as an effect rather than an actor, and the importance of taking technicalities seriously to understand the politics of oil.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current globally oriented studies? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
I'm not myself interested in, or good at, big debates, the kinds of debates that define and drive forward an academic field. The reason for that is partly that once a topic has become a debate, it has tended to have sort of hardened into a field, in which there are two or three positions, and as a scholar you have to take one of those positions. In the days when I was first trained in Political Science and studied International Relations, that was so much my sense of the field and indeed of the whole discipline of political science. This is part of one's initially training in any field: it is laid out as a serious debate. I found this something I just could not deal with; I did not find it intellectually interesting which I think sort of stayed with me all the way through to where I am now. So although big debates are important for a certain defining and sustaining of academic fields and training new generations of students, it is not the kind of way in which I myself have tended to work. I have tended to work by moving away from what the big debates have been in a particular moment. My academic interests always started when I found something curious that interests me and that I try to begin to see in a different way.
However, I suppose with my most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011), in a sense there was a big debate going on, which was the debate about the resource curse and oil democracy. That was an old debate going back to the 70's, but had been reinvigorated by the Iraq war in 2003. But that to me is an example of the problem with big debates, because the terms in which that debate was argued back and forth—and is still argued—did not seem to make sense as a way to understand the role of energy in 20th century democratic politics. Was oil good for democracy or bad for democracy? The existing debate began with those as two different things—as a dependent or independent variable—so you would already determine things in advance that I would have wanted to open up. In general I'm not a good person for figuring out what the big debates are.
But I think, moving from International Relations as a field to 'globally oriented studies', to use your phrase, one of the biggest challenges—just on an academic level, leaving aside challenges that we face as a global community—is to learn to develop ways of seeing even what seem like the most global and most international issues, as things that are very local. Part of the problem with fields such as 'global studies', the term 'globalization', and other terms of that sort, is that they tend to define their objects of study in opposition to the local, in opposition to even national-level modes of analysis. By consequence, they assume that the actors or the forces that they're going to study must themselves be in some sense global, because that is the premise of the field. So whether it is nation states acting as world powers; whether it is capitalism understood as a global system—they have to exist on this plane of the global, on some sort of universal level, to be topics of IR and global studies. And yet, on close inspection, most of the concerns or actors central to those modes of inquiry tend to operate on quite local levels; they tend to be made up of very small agents, very particular arrangements that somehow have managed to put themselves together in ways that allow them take on this appearance and sometimes this effectiveness of things that are global. I'm very interested in taking things apart that are local, on a particular level, to understand what it is that enables such small things, such local and particular agents, to act in a way that creates the appearance of the global or the international world.
Now this relates back to the second part of your question, about substantive concerns that we face as a global community. When I was writing Carbon Democracy there was all this attention on the problem of 'creating a more democratic Middle East', as it was understood at the time of the Iraq war. It struck me that when debating this problem—of oil and democracy, of energy and democracy—we saw it as somehow specific to these countries and to the part of the world where many countries were very large-scale energy producers. We were not thinking about the fact that we are all in a sense caught up in this problem that I call carbon democracy, and that there are issues—whether it is in terms of the increasing difficulty of extracting energy from the earth, or the consequences of having extracted the carbon and put it up in the atmosphere—that we, as democracies, are very, very challenged by. Those issues—and I think in particular the concerns around climate change—when you look at them from the perspective of U.S. politics, and the inability of the U.S. even to take the relatively minor steps that other industrialized democracies have taken: this inaction suggests a larger problem of oil and democracy that needs explaining and understanding and working on and organizing about. I also think there is a whole range of contemporary issues related to energy production and consumption that revolve around the building of more egalitarian and more socially just worlds. And, again, those issues present themselves very powerfully as concerns in American politics, but are experienced in other ways in other parts of the world. I would not single out any one of them as more urgent or important than another, and I do think we still have a long struggle ahead of us here.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your approach to issues?
Well, I had a strange training as a scholar because I kept shifting fields. I actually began as a student of law and then moved into history while I was still an undergraduate, but then became interested in political theory; decided that I liked it better than political science. But by the time I arrived in political science to study for a PhD, I had become interested in politics of the Middle East. This was partly from just travelling there when I was a student growing up in England, but I also suppose in some ways the events of the seventies had really drawn attention to the region. So the first important thing that shaped me was this constant shifting of fields and disciplines, which was not to me a problem—it was rather that there was a kind of intellectual curiosity that drove me from academic field to field. And so if there was one thing that helped me arrive at where I am, it was this constant moving outside of the boundaries of one discipline and trespassing on the next one—trying to do it for long enough that they started to accept me as someone who they could debate with. And I think all along that has been important to the kind of scholarship I do; yet therefore I would say where I currently am in my thinking about my field is difficult in itself to define. But I think it is probably defined by the sense that there are many, many fields—and it is moving across them and trying to do justice to the scholarship in them, but at the same time trying to connect insights from one field with what one can do in another field. I have always tried to draw things together in that sense, a sense that one can call an interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary sensitivity.
I think the other part of what has shaped me intellectually was that, in ways I explained before, I was always drawn into the local and the particular and the specific and I was never very good at thinking at that certain level of large-scale grand theory. So having found myself in the field of Middle Eastern politics in a PhD-program, and being told that it involves studying Arabic which I was very glad to do, I then went off to spend summers in the Arab world, and later over more extended periods of time for field research. But to me, Egypt and other places I've worked—but principally Egypt—became not just a field site, but a place where I have now been going for more than 30 years and where I have developed very close ties and intellectual relationships, friendships, that I think have constantly shaped and reshaped my thinking. And even when I am reading about things that are not specifically related to Egypt—the work I do on the history of economics, or the work I have done on oil politics that are not directly connected with my research on Egypt—I am often thinking in relation to places and people and communities there that have profoundly shaped me as a scholar.
So traveling across different contexts I'd say I have not developed a kind of set of theoretical lenses I take with me. Rather, I would say I have developed a way of seeing—I would not necessarily call it 'meta', I see it as much more as sort of 'infra': much more mundane and everyday. While I have this sort of intellectual history of moving across disciplines and social sciences in an academic way, there is another sort of moving across fields, another sensibility, and that sensibility provides me with a sense of rootedness or grounding. And that is a more traditional way of moving across fields, because whether when one is writing about contemporary politics or more historically about politics, one is dealing constantly with areas of technical concern of one sort or another, with specialist knowledge. Engaging with that expert knowledge has always provided both a political grounding in specific concerns and with a kind of concern with local, real-world, struggles on the ground. So that might have been things like the transformation of irrigation in nineteenth-century Egypt, or the remaking of the system of law; or it might be the history of malaria epidemics in the twentieth century, or the relationship between those epidemics and transformations taking place in the crops that were grown; or, more recently—and more obviously—of oil and the history of energy, and the way different forms of energy are brought out of the ground. And I should mention beside those areas of technical expertise already listed, economics as well: a discipline I was never trained in, but that I realized I had to understand if I was to make sense of contemporary Egyptian politics—just as much as I had to understand agricultural hydraulics or something of the petroleum geology as a form of technical expertise that is shaping the common world.
In sum, what keeps me grounded is the idea that to really make sense of the politics of any of those fields, one has got to do one's best to sort of enter and explore the more technical level—with the closest attention that one can muster to the technical and the material dimensions of what is involved—whether it is in agricultural irrigation, building dams or combating disease. And entering this level of issues does not only mean interviewing experts but arriving at the level of understanding the disease, the parasite, the modes of its movement, the hydraulics of the river, the properties of different kinds of oil... So as you can see it is not really 'meta', it really is 'infra' in the anthropological way of staying close to the ground, staying close to processes and things and materials.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
A couple of things. I think one is precisely the thing I just mentioned in answer to your last question: that is, the kind of interest in going inside technical processes, learning about material objects, not being afraid of taking up an investigation of something that is a body of knowledge totally outside one's area of training and expertise. So, if I was advising someone or looking for a student, I would not say there is a particular skill or expertise, but rather a willingness to really get one's hands dirty with the messy technical details of an area—and that can be an area of specialist knowledge such as economics, but also technical and physical processes of, for instance, mineral extraction. I think to me this is—for the kind of work I am interested in doing—enormously important.
The other thing that I would stress in the area of globally-oriented studies, is that one could think of two ways of approaching a field of study. One is to move around the world and gather together information, often with a notion of improving things, such as development work, human rights work, international security work. This entails gathering from one's own research and from other experts in the field, with a certain notion of best practices and the state of field, and of what works, and therefore what can then be moved from one place to another as a form of expert knowledge. Some people really want that mobile knowledge, which I suppose is often associated with the ability to generalize from a particular case and to establish more universal principles about whatever the topic is. And in this case one's own expertise becomes the carrying or transmission of that expert knowledge. One saw a lot of that around the whole issue of democratization that I mentioned before in the Middle East, around the Iraq war when experts were brought in. They had done democracy elsewhere in the world and then they turned up to do it in Iraq, and again following the Arab Spring.
Against that, to me, there is another mode of learning, which is not to learn about what is happening but to learn from. So to give the example, if there is an uprising and a struggle for democracy going on in the streets of Cairo, one could try and learn about that and then make it fit one's models and classify it within a broader range of series of democratizations across the world, or one could try and learn from it, and say 'how do we rethink what the possibilities of democracy might be on the basis of what is happening?' To me those are two distinct modes of work. They are not completely mutually exclusive, but I think people are more disposed towards one or the other. I have never been disposed, or good at, the first kind and do like the second, so I would mention that as the second skill or attitude that is useful for doing this sort of work.
In which discipline or field would you situate yourself, or would we have to invent a discipline to match your work?
I like disciplines, but I do not always feel that I entirely belong to any of them. That said, I read with enormous profit the works of historians, political theorist, anthropologists, of people in the field of science and technology studies, geographers, political economists and scholars in environmental studies. There are so many different disciplines that are well organized and have their practitioners from which there is a lot to learn! But conversely, I also think, in ways I have described already, there is something to be learnt for some people from working in a much more deliberately post-disciplinary fashion. The Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department to which I have been attached here in Columbia for about five years, represents a deliberate attempt by myself and my colleagues to produce some kind of post-disciplinary space. Not in order to do away with the disciplines, but to have another place for doing theoretical work, one that is able to take advantage of not being bound by disciplinary fields, as even broad disciplines—say history—tend to restrict you with a kind of positive liberty of creating a place where you can do anything you want—as long as you do it in an archive. I quite deliberately situate myself outside of any one discipline, while continuing to learn from and trespass into the fields of many individual disciplines. They range from all of those and others, because I am here among a community of people who are also philologists; people interested in Arabic literature and the history of Islamic science; and all kinds of fields, which I also find fascinating. The first article I ever published was in the field of Arabic grammar! So I have interests that fit in a very sort of trans-disciplinary, post-disciplinary environment and I thrive on that.
Yet doing this kind of post-disciplinary work is in a practical sense actually absolutely impossible. If only for the simple fact that if it is already hardly possible to keep up with 'the literature' if one is firmly situated within one field, then one can never keep up with important developments in all the disciplines one is interested in. There are some people that manage to do this and do it justice. My information about contemporary debates in every imaginable field is so limited; I do not manage to do justice to any field. In the particular piece of research I might be engaged in, I try to get quickly up to pace on what's going on, and I often come back again and again to similar areas of research. I am currently interested in questions around the early history of international development in the 1940's and 1950's, and that is something I have worked on before, but I have come back to it and I found that the World Bank archives are now open and there is a whole new set of literatures. I had not been keeping up with all of that work. It is hard and that is why I am very bad at answering emails and doing many of the other everyday things that one is ought to do; because it always seems to me, in the evening at the computer when one ought to be catching up with emails, there is something you have come across in an article or footnotes and before you know it you are miles away and it has got nothing to do with what you were working on at the moment, but it really connects with a set of issues you have been interested in and has taken you off into contemporary work going on in law or the history of architecture… The internet has made that possible in a completely new way and some of these post-disciplinary research interests are actually a reflection of where we are with the internet and with the accessibility of scholarship in any field only just a few clicks away. Which on the one hand is fascinating, but mostly it is just a complete curse. It is the enemy of writing dissertations and finishing books and articles and everything else!
What role does expertise, which is kind of a central term in underpinning much of the diverse work or topics you do, play in the historical unfolding of modern government?
That is a big question, so let me suggest only a couple of thoughts here. One is that modern government has unfolded—especially if one thinks of government itself as a wider process than just a state—through the development of new forms of expertise, which among other things define problems and issues upon which government can operate. This can concern many things, whether it is problems of public health in the 19th or 20th century; or problems of economic development in the 20th century; or problems of energy, climate change and the environment today. Again and again government itself operates—as Foucault has taught us—simultaneously as fields of knowledge and fields of power. And the objects brought into being in this way—defined in important ways through the development of expert knowledge—become in themselves modes through which political power operates. Thanks to Foucault and many others, that is a way of thinking or field of research that has been widely developed, even though there are vast amounts of work still to do.
But I think there is another relationship between modes of government and expertise, and this goes back to things I have been thinking about ever since I wrote an article about the theory of the state (The Limits of the State, pdf here) that was published in American Political Science Review a long time ago (1991). The point I made then, is that it is interesting to observe how one of the central aspects of modern modes of power is the way that the distinction between what is the state and what is not the state; between what is public and what is private, is constantly elaborated and redefined. So politics itself is happening not so much by some agency called 'state' or 'government' imposing its will on some other preformed object—the social, the population, the people—but rather that it concerns a series of techniques that create what I have called the effect of a state: the very distinction between what appears as a sort of structure or apparatus of power, and the objects on which that power works.
More recently one of the ways I have thought about this, is in terms of the history of the idea of the economy. Most people think of 'the economy' either as something that has always existed (and people may or may not have realized its existence) or as something that came into being with the rise of political economy and commercial society in the European 18th and 19th century. One of the things I discovered when I was doing research on the history of development, is that no economist talked routinely about an object called 'the economy' before the 1940's! I think that is a good example of the history of a mode of expertise that exists not within the operations of an apparatus of government but precisely outside of government.
If you look in detail at how the term 'the economy' was first regularly used, you find that it was in the context of governing the U.S. in the 1940's immediately after the Second World War. In the aftermath of the war there was enormous political pressure for quite a radical restructuring of American society: there were waves of strikes, demands for worker control of industries, or at least a share of management. And of course in Europe, similar demands led to new forms of economy altogether, in the building of postwar Germany and in the forms of democratic socialism that were experimented with in various parts of Western Europe. As we know, the U.S. did not follow that path. And I think part of the way in which it was steered away from that path, was by constructing the economy as the central object of government, coupled with precisely this American cultural fear of things where government did not belong. So this was radically opposed to how the Europeans related government to economy: European governments had become involved in all kinds of ways, deciding how the relation between management and labor should operate in thinking about prices and wages; instituting forms of national health insurance and health care; and the whole state management of health care itself... Now this was threatening to emerge in the U.S., and was emerging in many ways in the wartime with state control of prices and production. In order to prevent the U.S. from following the European path after the war, this object outside of government with its own experts was created: the economy. And the economists were precisely people who are not in government, but who knew the laws and regularities of economic life and could explain them to people. It is interesting to think about expertise both as something that develops within the state, but also as something that happens as a creation of objects that precisely represent what is not the state, or the sphere of government.
Your most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011) focuses on the political structures afforded, or engendered, by modes of extraction of minerals and investigates how oil was constitutes a dominant source of energy on which we depend. Can you give an example of how that works?
Let me take an example from the book even though I might have to give it in very a simplified form in order to make it work. I was interested in what appeared to be the way in which the rise of coal—the dominant source of energy in the 19th century and in the emergence of modern industrialized states—seemed to be very strongly associated with the emergence of mass democracy, whereas the rise of oil in the 20th century seemed to have if anything the opposite set of consequences for states that were highly dependent on the production of oil. I wanted to examine these relations between forms of energy and democratic politics in a way that was not simply some kind of technical- or energy determinism, because it is very easy to point to many cases that simply do not fit that pattern—and, besides, it simply would not be very interesting to begin with. But it did seem to me, that at a particular moment in the history of the emergence of industrialized countries—particularly in the late 19th century—it became possible for the first time in history and really only for a brief period, to take advantage of certain kinds of vulnerabilities and possibilities offered by the dependence on coal to organize a new kind of political agency and forms of mass politics, which successfully struggled for much more representative and egalitarian forms of democracy, roughly between the 1880's and the mid 20th century. In general terms, that story is known; but it had been told without thinking in particular about the energy itself. The energy was just present in these stories as that which made possible industrialization; industrialization made possible urbanization; therefore you had lots of workers and their consciousness must somehow have changed and made them democratic or something.
That story did not make sense to me, and that prompted me to research in detail, and drawing on the work of others who had looked even more in detail at, the history of struggles for a whole set of democratic rights. The accounts of people at the time were clear: what was distinctive was this peculiar ability to shut down an economy because of a specific vulnerability to the supply of energy. Very briefly, when I switched to telling the story in the middle of the 20th with oil, it is different: partly just because oil was a supplementary source of energy—countries and people now had a choice between different energy sources—but also because oil did not create the same points of vulnerability. There are fewer workers involved, it is a liquid, so it can be routed along different channels more easily; there is a whole set of technical properties of oil and its production that are different. That does not mean to say that the energy is determining the outcome of history or of political struggles, and I am careful to introduce examples that do not work easily one way or the other in the history of oil industry in Baku, which is much more similar to the history of coal or the oil industry in California for that matter. But you can pay attention to the technical dimensions in a certain way, and the to the sheer possibilities that arise with this enormous concentration of sources of energy—which reflects both an exponential increase in the amount of energy but also an unprecedented concentration of the sites at which energy is available and through which it flows—that you can tell a new story about democratic politics and about that moment in the history of industrialized countries, but also the subsequent history in oil-producing countries in a different way. That would be an example of how attention for technical expertise translates into a different understanding of the politics of oil.
This leads to my next question, which is how do you speak about materials or technologies without falling into the trap of either radical social reductionism or a kind of Marxist technological determinism? Do you get these accusations sometimes?
Yes, I think so, but more so from people who have not read my work and who just hear some talks about it or some secondary accounts. To me, so much of the literature that already existed on these questions around oil and democracy, or even earlier research on coal, industrialization and democracy, suffered from a kind of technical determinism because they actually did not go into the technical. They said: 'look, you've got all this oil' or 'look, you had all that coal and steam power' and out of that, in a very determinist fashion, emerged social movements or emerged political repression. This was determinist because such accounts had actually jumped over the technical side much too fast: talking about oil in the case of the resource curse literature, it was only interested in the oil once it had already become money. And once it was money, then it of course corrupts, or you buy people off, or you do not have to seek their votes. The whole question of how oil becomes money and how you put together that technical system that turns oil into forms of political power or turns coal into forms of political power, does not get opened up. And that to me makes those arguments—even though there is not much of the technical in them—technically very determinist. Because as soon as you start opening up the technical side of it, you realize there are so many ways things can go and so many different ways things can get built. Energy networks can be built in different ways and there can be different mixes of energy. Of course most of the differences are technical differences, but they are also human differences. It is precisely by being very attentive to the technical aspects of politics—like energy or anything else, it could be in agriculture, it could be in disease, it could be in any area of collective socio-technical life—that one finds the only way to get away from a certain kind of technical determinism that otherwise sort of rules us. In the economics of growth, for instance, there is this great externality of technological change that drives every sort of grand historical explanation. Technology is just something that is kept external to the explanatory model and accounts for everything else that the model cannot explain. That ends up being a terrible kind of technical determinism.
The other half of the question is how this might differ from Marxist approaches to some of these problems. I like to think that if Marx was studying oil, his approach would be very little different. Because if you read Marx himself, there is an extraordinary level of interest in the technical; that is, whether in the technical aspects of political economy as a field of knowledge in the 19th century, or in the factory as a technical space. So, conventional political economy to him was not just an ideological mask that had to be torn away so that you could reveal the true workings of capitalism. Political economy has produced a set of concepts—notions of value, notions of exchange, notions of labor—that actually formed part of the technical workings of capitalism. The factory was organized at a technical level that had very specific consequences. The trouble with a significant part of Marx's theories is that he stopped doing that kind of technical work and Marxism froze itself with a set of categories that may or may not have been relevant to a moment of 19th century capitalism. There is still a lot of interesting Marxist theory going on, and some of the contemporary Italian Marxist theory I find really interesting and profitable to read, for example. Some of the work in Marxist geography continues to be very productive. But at the same time there are aspects of my work that are different from that—such as my drawing on Foucault in understanding expertise and modes of power.
How come so many of the social sciences seem to stick so rigidly to the human or social side of the Cartesian divide? It seems to be constitutive of social science disciplines but on the other hand also radically reduces the scope of what it can actually 'see' and talk about.
I think you are right and it has never made much sense to me. I suppose I have approached it in two kinds of ways in my work. First, this kind of dualism was much more clearly an object of concern in some of the early work I published on the colonial era, including my first book, Colonising Egypt (1988), where I was trying to understand the process by which Europeans had, as it were, come to be Cartesians; had come to see the world as very neatly defined it into mind on the one hand and matter or on the other—or, as they tended to think of it, representations on the one hand and reality on the other. And I actually looked in some detail, at the technical level, at this—beginning with world exhibitions, but moving on to department stores and school systems and modern legal orders—to understand the processes by which our incredibly complicated world was engineered so as to produce the effect of this world divided into the two—of mind or representation or culture on the one hand, and reality, nature, material on the other.
Second, what were the effects, what were the repetitive practices, that made that kind of simple dualism seem so self-evident and taken for granted? All that early work still informs my current work, although I do not necessarily explore this as directly as I did. One of the things I try to do is avoid all the vocabulary that draws you into that kind of dualism. So, nowhere when I write, do I use a term like 'culture', because you are just heading straight down that Cartesian road as soon as you assume that there is some hermetic world of shared meanings—as opposed to what? As opposed to machines that do not involve instructions and all kinds of other things that we would think of as meaningful? So I just work more by avoiding some of the dualistic language; the other kind would be the entire set of debates—in almost every discipline of the social sciences—around the question of 'structure versus agency' which just doesn't seems to me particularly productive. And I have been very lucky, recently, in coming across work in the fields of science and technology studies, because it is a field of people studying machines, studying laboratories and studying people, a field that took nature itself as something to be opened-up and investigated. In taking apart these things, they realized that those kinds of dualisms made absolutely no sense. And they have done away with them in their modes of explanation quite a long time ago. So there was already a lot in my own work before I encountered Science and Technology Studies (STS) that was working in that direction; but the STS people have been at it for a long time and figured out a lot of things that I had only just discovered.
Can you explain why it seems that perhaps implicitly decolonization, or the postcolonial moment—which is understood within political science and in development literature as a radical moment of rupture in which a complete transfer of responsibility has taken place, instituted in sovereignty—is an important theme in your work?
I have actually been coming back to this in recent work, because I am currently looking again at that moment of decolonization in Egypt. The period after World War II, around the 1952 revolution and the debacle around the building and the financing of the Aswan Dam, constitutes a wonderful way to explore questions on how much change decolonization really engendered and to see how remarkably short-lived that sort of optimism about decolonization, meaning a transfer of responsibility and sovereignty, actually was. Of course decolonization did transfer responsibility and sovereignty in all kinds of ways, but then that was exactly the problem for the former colonial regimes: because, from their perspective, then, how were all the people who had profited before from things like colonialism to continue to make profits? The plan to build the High Dam at Aswan—although there has always been Egyptians interested in it—initially got going because of some German engineering firms… For them, there was no opportunity in doing any kind of this large-scale work in Europe at the time because of the dire economic situation there. But they knew that Egypt had rapidly growing revenues from the Suez Canal and so they got together with the British and the French, and said: let's put forward this scheme for a dam so that we can recycle those revenues—particularly the income from the Suez Canal, which was about to revert to Egyptian ownership—back into the pockets of the engineering firms, or of the banks that will make the loans and charge the fees. And that is where the scheme came from. Then the World Bank got involved, because it too had found it had got nothing to do in Europe in the way of development and reconstruction, so it invented this new field of development. And it became a conduit to get the Wall Street banks involved as well. And the whole thing became politicized and led to a rupture, which provided then the excuse for another group, the militarists, the MI6 people, to invade and try to overthrow Nasser. So just in the space of barely four years from that moment of decolonization, Egypt had been reinvaded by the French, the British, working with the Israelis, and had to deal with the consequences and the costs of destroyed cities and military spending. That is an example of how quickly things went wrong; but also of how part of their going wrong was in this desperate attempt by a series of European banks and engineering firms trying to recover the opportunities for a certain profit-making and business that they had enjoyed in the colonial period and now they suddenly were being deprived of.
Last question. Has your work helped you make sense of what is currently going on in Egypt and would you shine your enlightened light on that a bit? Not on the whole general situation but perhaps on parts which are overlooked or which you find particularly relevant.
May be in a couple of aspects. One of them is this kind of very uneasy and disjunctive assemblage relationship between the West and forms of political Islam. It sometimes seemed shocking and disturbing and destabilizing that the political process in Egypt led to the rise and consolidation of power of the Muslim Brotherhood. But of course the U.S. and other Western powers have had a very long relationship going back at least to the 1950's—if not before—with exactly these kinds of political forces or people who were locally in alliance with them, in places like Saudi Arabia. I have a chapter in Carbon Democracy that explores that relationship and its disjunctions. And I think it is important to get away from the notion that is just a sort of electoral politics and uneasy alliances, but it is actually the outcome of a longer problem. Both domestically within the politics in the Arab states, of how to found a form of legitimacy that does not seem to be based on close ideological ties with the West, but at the same time operates in such in a way, that in practical terms, that kind of alliance can work. So that would be one aspect of it, to have a slightly longer-term perspective on those kinds of relationships and how disjunctively they function.
The other thing, drawing it a little more directly on some of the work on democracy in Carbon Democracy, is that so much of the scholarship on democracy is about equipping people with the right mental tools to be democrats; the right levels of trust or interpersonal relations or whatever. There is a very different view in my book, that the opportunities for effective democratic politics require very different sets of skills and kinds of actions—actions that are much more as it were obstructionist, and forms of sabotage, quite literally, in the usage of the term as it comes into being in the early 20th century to describe the role of strikes and stoppages. These are, I attempt to show, the effective tools to leverage demands for representation in more egalitarian democratic politics. I have been very interested in the case of Egypt, in the particular places and points of vulnerability, that gave rise to the possibility of sabotage. For instance, one of the less noted aspects of the Egyptian revolution in general, was the very important role played by the labor movement; this was not just a Twitter or Facebook revolution, but that was important as well. Although the labor movement was very heavily concentrated in industries—in the textile industry—the first group of workers who actually successfully formed an independent union were the property tax collectors. And there is a reason for that: there was a certain kind of fiscal crisis of the state—which had to do with declining oil revenues and other things—and there was the attempt to completely revise the tax system and to revise it not around income tax—because there were too few people making a significant income to raise tax revenues—but around property taxes. And that was a point of vulnerability and contestation that produced not just some of the first large-scale strikes but strikes that were effective enough that the government was forced to recognize a newly independent labor movement. This case is an instance of how the kind of work I did in the book might be useful for thinking about how the revolutionary situation emerged in Egypt.
Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian. His areas of research include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Much of his current work is concerned with ways of thinking about politics that allow material and technical things more weight than they are given in conventional political theory. Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. At Columbia he teaches courses on the history and politics of the Middle East, colonialism, and the politics of technical things.
Related links:
Faculty Profile at Colombia University Read Mitchell's Rethinking Economy (Geoforum 2008) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics (The American Political Science Review 1991) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's McJihad: Islam and the U.S. Global Order (Social Text 2002) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The Stage of Modernity (Chapter from book 'Questions of Modernity', 2000) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The World as Exhibition (Chapter from book 'Colonising Egypt' 1991) here (pdf)
Dieses Kapitel fasst die wichtigsten Erkenntnisse des Forschungsprojekts Stand des Wissens zu Schweizer Tramsystemen im Mischverkehr zusammen. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf der Beschreibung der aktuellen Situation der Tramsicherheit in der Schweiz sowie der Sicherheitspraxis und -massnahmen bei den entsprechenden Akteuren. Die Schweizer Regulation mit Relevanz für Tramsysteme ist grundsätzlich funktional, d. h. es werden Sicherheits- respektive Schutzziele vorgegeben, aber nicht, auf welchem Wege oder mit welchen Mitteln diese erfüllt werden müssen. Dabei soll der «Stand der Technik» berücksichtigt werden. Es wird also eher ein Rahmen vorgegeben, anstatt die Regelungen in allen Einzelheiten vorzuschreiben. Es gibt im schweizerischen Recht keine spezifisch auf Tramsysteme ausgerichteten Gesetze und Verordnungen. Trams gelten als Eisenbahnen, weshalb die Eisenbahngesetzgebung zur Anwendung kommt. Da Trams aber im Strassenraum verkehren, spielt auch die Strassenverkehrsgesetzgebung eine Rolle. Das Tram hat in der Schweiz vor allen anderen Strassenverkehrsteilnehmern Vortritt. Dieses Vortrittsrecht kann bei ungenügender Kenntnis anderer Verkehrsteilnehmer zu gefährlichen Situationen führen, beispielsweise bei über das mit dem motorisierten Verkehr geteilte Tramtrassee markierten Fussgängerstreifen ohne Lichtsignalanlage oder nicht signalgesteuerten Kreisverkehrsplätzen mit Tramquerung. Die Verantwortung für die Betriebssicherheit tragen in der Schweiz die Trambetreiber. Die Hersteller sind verantwortlich für die Sicherheit ihrer Produkte. Das Bundesamt für Verkehr überwacht, ob Betreiber und Hersteller diese Verantwortung wahrnehmen. Es gibt diverse verschiedene Quellen für Tramunfalldaten in der Schweiz, die sich hinsichtlich Auflösung, Detailgrad, Abdeckung, Standardisierung und öffentliche Verfügbarkeit stark unterscheiden. Hauptanalysequellen der verschiedenen Akteure sind die Unfalldatenbanken der Betreiber, die Unfalldatenbank des Bundesamtes für Strassen (von der Polizei erfasst Unfälle), die Ereignisdatenbank des Bundesamtes für Verkehr (durch die Betreiber gemeldete Ereignisse) und für Einzelereignisse die Unfalluntersuchungsberichte der Schweizerischen Sicherheitsuntersuchungsstelle. Zum Vergleich von Unfalldaten werden üblicherweise Kennzahlen verwendet. Dazu sind Daten zu Verkehrsleistung, Streckennetzkilometer, Linienlängen, Anzahl Kurse, Rollmaterial usw. notwendig. Für eine angemessen Berücksichtigung des Kontextes werden zudem Daten zu Verkehrsmengen des motorisierten Individualverkehrs und des Langsamverkehrs sowie zur Infrastruktur benötigt. Diese Kontextdaten sind nicht in einer einheitlichen Form verfügbar und ihre Beschaffung ist mit einem erheblichen Aufwand verbunden. Vergleiche der Sicherheitslage, beispielsweise für verschiedene Städte, haben aufgrund der Unterschiede in der Datenerfassung und möglicherweise fehlender Kontextinformationen immer eine begrenzte Aussagekraft. Die vier Tramnetze in der Schweiz weisen deutliche Unterschiede hinsichtlich Bevölkerungsdichte, Netztopologie und Betriebskonzept auf. Trotz dieser Unterschiede differiert die mittlere Streckenbelastung (mittlere Anzahl Trams auf einem Netzabschnitt pro Stunde) nur wenig. Bei den spezifischen Unfallzahlen, also beispielsweise Unfälle pro Kompositions-Kilometer, bestehen grosse Unterschiede zwischen den Netzen. Eine Untersuchung durch Dritte für die Jahre 2010–2012 ergab in Zürich eine deutlich höhere Anzahl schwere Unfälle pro Kompositions-Kilometer als in den anderen Netzen. Basel und Genf wiesen vergleichbare Werte, Bern deutlich die geringsten Werte auf. Die häufigste Ursache von Unfällen mit Trambeteiligung ist die Missachtung des Vortrittsrechts der Strassenbahn (bei etwa einem Drittel der Unfälle). Etwa ein Sechstel der Unfälle wird durch Missachtung von Lichtsignalanlagen verursacht, ein weiteres Sechstel geht auf Fehlverhalten von Fussgängern zurück. Häufigste Verursacher von Unfällen mit Trambeteiligung sind in allen vier Tramsystemen die Personenwagen. An zweiter Stelle finden sich die Fussgänger. Bei den Unfallfolgen sind aber die Fussgänger am stärksten betroffen, da sie im Gegensatz zu Insassen von Personenwagen praktisch ungeschützt sind. Letztere erleiden denn auch nur sehr selten schwere Verletzungen bei Kollisionen mit Trams. Eher wenig auffällig hinsichtlich des Unfallgeschehens sind Velofahrer, was an deren vergleichsweise geringer Anzahl liegen dürfte. Kommt es aber zu einem Unfall, sind die Folgen für Velofahrer ähnlich gravierend wie für Fussgänger. Die vier Tramnetze der Schweiz weisen eine ähnliche Anzahl Kreisverkehrsplätze auf, welche vom Tramtrassee gequert werden; bezogen auf die Netzlänge variiert die Kreisverkehrsdichte hingegen erheblich. Der Anteil der Tramkollisionen bei Kreisverkehrsplätzen an allen Tramkollisionen weist zwischen den Systemen grosse Unterschiede auf. Wird dieser Anteil hingegen ins Verhältnis zur Kreisverkehrsdichte auf dem Tramnetz gesetzt, werden die Unterschiede zwischen den drei Systemen Bern, Basel und Genf sehr viel kleiner. Dies ist interessant vor dem Hintergrund, dass vom Tram gequerte Kreisverkehrsplätze in Genf als grosses Problem wahrgenommen werden, in Bern und Basel hingegen nicht. In Zürich ist die Kreisverkehrsdichte auf dem Tramnetz sehr tief, und auch der Anteil Kreisverkehrs-Tramunfälle bleibt selbst in Relation zur Kreisverkehrsdichte deutlich unterhalb der anderen Systeme. Georeferenzierte Unfalldaten erlauben die räumliche Auswertung von Unfallorten und die Identifikation von Unfallschwerpunkten. Aufgrund der geringen Anzahl Tramunfälle ist es allerdings schwierig, die statistische Signifikanz von ermittelten Schwerpunkten zu überprüfen. Im Rahmen dieses Projektes wurden Daten der Verkehrsunfallstatistik des Bundesamtes für Strassen räumlich ausgewertet. Eine qualitative Analyse der ermittelten Unfallschwerpunkte zeigt, dass diese grösstenteils an vorhersehbaren Stellen liegen: bei Fussgängern in Innenstadtbereichen und Plätzen mit hohem Fussgängeraufkommen, also an Orten mit vielen Querungen der Tramgeleise durch Fussgänger; bei Motorfahrzeugen bei Kreuzungen mit hohem Verkehrsaufkommen und auf Streckenabschnitten mit Abbiegemöglichkeit über die Tramgeleise für den Parallelverkehr. Für die Schwerpunkte von Kollisionen mit Velo/Mofa lassen sich hingegen kaum einfache Erklärungen finden. Ein Vergleich von Unfallcluster-Analysen ohne und mit Gewichtung der Unfallfolgen (mittels Opferäquivalenten) zeigt, dass es sowohl Cluster mit grosser Unfallzahl und vergleichsweise geringen kumulierten Auswirkungen als auch solche mit eher kleiner Unfallzahl und hohen kumulierten Auswirkungen gibt. Daher scheint für Analysen von Unfallclustern die Berücksichtigung der Unfallfolgen angebracht, wobei die Gewichtung mittels Opferäquivalenten eine angemessene Methode ist. Die Aussagekraft der räumlichen Analysen bleibt aufgrund der geringen Unfallzahlen und der Verwendung von Daten aus mehreren Jahren beschränkt. Ergänzend zur Auswertung der Unfalldaten sollten daher immer detaillierte Fallanalysen bei Unfallschwerpunkten durchgeführt werden, welche Rückschlüsse auf tatsächliche Unfallursachen und mögliche Massnahmen erlauben. Es gibt in der Schweiz keine einheitliche Definition des Begriffs Beinaheunfall. Im Allgemeinen wird darunter eine Situation verstanden, in der das Fehlverhalten eines Beteiligten oder mehrerer Beteiligter einen gefährlichen Zustand hervorruft, welcher aber nicht in einen Unfall mündet. Der entsprechende Standort wird demzufolge als gefährlich empfunden, obwohl statistisch keine Unfallschwerpunkte nachzuweisen sind. Die häufigsten Umstände von Beinaheunfällen in der Schweiz sind aus Sicht der Trambetreiber fehlende physische Trennungen bei Eigentrassierungen, Konflikte mit Abbiegern auf Kreuzungen, die Nichtbeachtung der Lichtsignalanlage oder anderer Signale auf Kreuzungen und die Nichtbeachtung des Tramvortritts in Kreisverkehrsplätzen. Die Trambetreiber schliessen fehlerhafte Handlungen des eigenen Fahrpersonals zwar nicht aus, führen als Ursache für gefährliche Situationen und Beinaheunfälle aber hauptsächlich die fehlende Wahrnehmung des Trams seitens der anderen Verkehrsteilnehmer auf. Einerseits spielt der fehlende Sichtkontakt eine wichtige Rolle, andererseits wird insbesondere bei Fussgängern eine starke Tendenz bei der Ablenkung durch elektronische Geräte wie Smartphones oder Tablets (visuelle Ablenkung) und Kopfhörer (auditive Ablenkung) beobachtet. Im Mischverkehr sehen die Betreiber die Hauptverursacher gefährlicher Situationen in Velofahrern und Fussgängern – häufig in Innenstadtbereichen, wo der Langsamverkehr sehr hohe Dichten aufweist. Auf Abschnitten mit Eigentrassierung, wo in der Schweiz oft physische Abgrenzungen fehlen und zahlreiche Kreuzungsmöglichkeiten für andere Strassennutzer bestehen, sehen die Betreiber die Hauptverursacher in motorisierten Strassenfahrzeugen. In solchen Abschnitten werden gefährliche Situationen durch die hohe Geschwindigkeit des Trams verschärft. Die Erfassung von Unfalldaten geschieht in der Schweiz bei schweren Unfällen potenziell durch drei Stellen: den entsprechenden Trambetreiber, die zuständige Polizeibehörde und die Schweizerische Sicherheitsuntersuchungsstelle SUST. Die Erfassung von Ereignissen durch die Betreiber ist nicht vereinheitlicht, und auch bei den Polizeibehörden gibt es in der Praxis Abweichungen bei der Dateneingabe in die nationale MISTRA-Unfalldatenbank des Bundesamtes für Strassen. Durch eine einheitliche Erfassung wären Vergleiche zwischen den Tramnetzen möglich und es könnten trotz der geringen Unfallzahl aussagekräftige Datenanalysen durchgeführt werden. Wichtig erscheint in jedem Fall eine präzise Georeferenzierung der Unfalldaten. Es gibt ungenutzte Möglichkeiten zur Datenerfassung, welche sowohl in der Unfallanalyse als auch in der Prävention eingesetzt werden könnten. Beispiele sind der Einsatz von Frontkameras oder die georeferenzierte Erfassung von Schnellbremsungen. Allerdings gibt es dabei bedeutende rechtliche und technische Hürden. Die vorhandenen Unfalldaten werden vor allem durch die lokalen Polizeibehörden relativ umfassend ausgewertet. Um eine maximale Wirkung dieser Analysen sicherzustellen, ist eine enge Zusammenarbeit der Polizei mit den Trambetreibern und weiteren Akteuren (z. B. Tiefbauamt) von grosser Bedeutung. Der Personalschulung kommt bei der Unfallprävention eine grosse Bedeutung zu – entsprechend geniesst sie bei den Betreibern einen hohen Stellenwert. Nützliche Hilfsmittel sind Fotos und Videoaufnahmen von Unfällen und Beinaheunfällen oder Übersichten über gefährliche Situationen entlang einer Linie. Im Falle eines Unfalls helfen Checklisten und stellen eine einheitliche Handlungsweise sicher. Tramsicherheitskampagnen dienen insbesondere der Bewusstseinsbildung zum allgemeinen Tramvortritt und zu den Eigenschaften des Trams (Bremsweg). Eine klare Zielsetzung und anschliessende Evaluation der Wirkung ist empfehlenswert. Bei der Infrastrukturplanung sollten präventive Sicherheitsmassnahmen eine hohe Priorität geniessen und Teil von gestalterischen Lösungen sein. Dazu sollte die Erfahrung der Trambetreiber systematisch in den Infrastrukturplanungsprozess von Strassenräumen mit Trams einbezogen und adäquat berücksichtigt werden. Ein sicherer Trambetrieb ist stark von nicht direkt durch die Trambetreiber beeinflussbaren Elementen abhängig. Insbesondere haben die Gestaltung des Verkehrsraums und die Steuerung der Verkehrstechnik einen grossen Einfluss auf die Sicherheit. So können übersichtliche Kreuzungen mit klar den jeweiligen Spuren zugeteilten Lichtsignalen viele Probleme mit Abbiegern über das Tramtrassee verhindern. Eine gute Zusammenarbeit aller beteiligten Akteure ist für eine sichere und auch betrieblich geeignete Lösung solcher Situationen von zentraler Bedeutung. Beim Rollmaterial spielt insbesondere das Crashverhalten mit schweren Strassenfahrzeugen (Sicherheit der Traminsassen und insbesondere der Tramführerin) und mit Fussgängern (Sicherheit des Fussgängers) eine grosse Rolle. Wichtig ist, in einer frühen Engineering-Phase bereits sämtliche Schutz- und Sicherheitsfunktionen zu berücksichtigen, damit auf spätere «aufgesetzte» Lösungen verzichtet werden kann. This chapter summarises the main findings of the research project State of the art of Swiss tramways in mixed traffic zones. The focus is on the description of the current safety situation in Switzerland and the safety practices and measures of the relevant stakeholders. Swiss regulation with respect to tram safety is functional, i.e., safety and protection targets are prescribed, but not how they have to be achieved and what means must be used. Thereby, the state of the art of technology must be considered. In summary, regulation rather provides a frame than detailed prescriptions. In Swiss legislation, there are no specific laws or ordinances only concerning tram systems. By law, trams are considered as railways, therefor railway legislation applies. Because trams operate on streets, also road legislation is relevant. In Switzerland, trams have right of way over all other road users. This right of way can lead to dangerous situations in cases where other road are not aware of it. For example, in the case of zebra crossings marked over the tramway that is shared with motorised vehicles, pedestrians might assume that they have right of way over trams because they do have right of way over cars in the exact same location. Another example are roundabouts crossed with tram tracks, where cars do not expect to have to yield while they are on the ring road of the roundabout. Responsibility for operational safety is borne by the tram operators and for product safety by manufacturers in Switzerland. The Federal Office of Transport supervises whether operators and producers perform the associated duties correctly. There are several sources for tram accident data in Switzerland. They differ strongly with respect to resolution, level of detail, coverage, standardisation and public availability. Main data sources for safety analyses are the accident databases of the operators, the accident database of the Federal Roads Office (accidents investigated by the police), the incident database of the Federal Office of Transport (incidents reported by operators), and the investigation reports by the Swiss Transportation Safety Investigation Board (concerning single incidents). To compare accident data, ratio measures are used usually. This requires data on service provided, network length, line length, number of vehicles in operation, type of rolling stock, etc. Furthermore, for adequate consideration of context, data is needed on traffic volumes of both motorised transport and human powered mobility. These context data are not available in standardised form and their acquisition is costly. Comparison of safety situation, e.g., in different cities, have limited validity due to differences in data recording and possibly lack of context information. The four tram networks in Switzerland are considerably different with regard to population density, network topology, and operating concepts. Nevertheless, the average network load (average number of trams on a section per hour) is similar in all networks. Looking at accident ratios, e.g., accidents per tram kilometre, there are large differences between the networks. A study for the years 2010–2012 showed a considerably higher number of severe accidents per tram kilometre in Zurich than in the other three networks. Ratios for Basel and Geneva were similar, while Berne clearly had the lowest value. The most common cause of accidents is disrespect of the tram's right of way (roughly one third of all accidents involving trams). About a sixth of tram accidents are caused by disrespect of traffic lights (by other road users), another sixth by misconducts of pedestrians. The main source of accidents involving trams are, in all four networks, cars. They are followed second by pedestrians. However, if consequences of accidents are considered, pedestrians are affected strongest because they are unprotected. Passengers of cars, on the other hand, only rarely suffer from severe injuries from accidents involving a tram. Accidents involving trams and bicycles are less common, which is mainly due to the smaller number of bicycles in overall street users. In case of accidents involving a tram, the consequences for cyclists are similarly grave as for pedestrians. The four tram networks in Switzerland have a similar number of roundabouts crossed by a tramway. However, relating to tram network length, the roundabout (with tramway) density is very different. The ratio of accidents at roundabouts involving a tram and this roundabout density is similar in Basel, Berne and Geneva. This is interesting given that roundabouts crossed by a tramway are considered a big safety issue in Geneva, but not so much in Basel and Berne. In Zurich, the roundabout density is much lower, as is the number or roundabout-related accidents. Accident data with georeferences allow for the spatial analysis of accident locations and the identification of accident hot spots. However, due to the low number of tram accidents, it is difficult to test for statistical significance of such analyses. In the present project, data form the accident database of the Federal Roads Office have been analysed spatially. The qualitative analysis of the identified accident hot spots shows that they are mostly in predictable locations: in the case of pedestrians, in inner city areas and squares with a high number of pedestrian traffic, thus, in locations with frequent crossings of the tramway by pedestrians; in the case of cars, at intersections with high traffic volumes and on sections where cars cross over tram tracks when turning. Hot spots of accidents with bicycles, on the other hand, cannot be easily explained. A comparison of accident cluster analyses without and with weighting of accident consequences (with victim equivalent values) shows that there are both clusters with high accident numbers and low cumulative consequences and clusters with relatively low accident numbers but high cumulative consequences. Therefore, it seems adequate to use weighting of accident consequences for accident cluster analyses. The explanatory power of spatial accident analyses remains limited due to the small number of accidents and the use of data from several years. Therefore, complementary to the examination of accident data, individual case analyses should be conducted to conclude about accident sources and adequate measures. In Switzerland, there is no standard definition of the term "near accident". Commonly, a near accident is understood to be a situation where the malpractice of one or several involved parties leads to a dangerous state, without this state resulting in an actual accident. The respective location is therefore perceived as dangerous, even though no statistical accident hot spot can be determined. From the perspective of tram operators, the most common circumstances of near accidents in Switzerland are lack of physical separation in sections with reserved tracks, conflicts with turning vehicles on intersections, disrespect of traffic lights or road signs and disrespect of tram right of way in roundabouts. The operators do not rule out the possibility of malpractice by their drivers, but they do see the cause of dangerous situations and near accidents mainly in the lack of tram perception by other road users. On the one hand, this involves insufficient visibility conditions (e.g., caused by obstacles), on the other hand, operators observe an increase in distracted pedestrians, mainly due to electronic equipment such as smartphones or tablets (visual distraction) and headphones (auditory distraction). In mixed traffic, operators see pedestrians and cyclists as the main causers of tram accidents, often in inner city areas with high density of human powered mobility users. On reserved tracks, where there is often no physical separation between the tramway and other road users and many crossing possibility of the latter exist, the operators see car users as the main causers of tram accidents. In such locations, dangerous situations are aggravated due to the high tram speed. The recording of accident data in Switzerland is mainly conducted by three parties: the tram operator, the local police, and the Swiss Transportation Safety Investigation Board (in severe cases). Recording of events by the operators is not standardized, and there are also differences in recording practices of police authorities and their data input into the national road accident database of the Federal Roads Office. A standardised and consistent recording would facilitate comparisons between tram networks and enable more significant analyses. In any case, precise georeference for accident data is crucial for later spatial analyses. There are unused possibilities of data acquisition that could be used for accident analysis as well as prevention. For example, this includes using frontal cameras in tram vehicles or the georeferenced recording of emergency braking manoeuvres. However, there are serious legal and technical barriers to be considered. Existing accident data is analysed in detail mostly by local police authorities. In order to ensure the impact of such analyses, tight cooperation between police authorities, tram operators, and further stakeholders (e.g., civil engineering department of the respective city) is crucial. Drivers' education is highly relevant for accident prevention. Accordingly, operators assign a high priority to it. Useful tools are pictures or videos of accidents or near accidents or overviews of dangerous locations along a line. In the case of an actual accident, check lists help to ensure consistent actions. In infrastructure planning, preventive safety measures should be included from the beginning as part of design solutions and be given a high priority. For this, it is important to include the experience and knowledge of tram operators in respective infrastructure design and planning teams. Safe operation of a tram system depends on many aspects that cannot be influenced directly by tram operators. Particularly, the design of public and road space and traffic operation and management have a high impact on tram safety. For example, clear intersection layouts with unambiguously attributed traffic lights per traffic lane can prevent many problems frequently occurring with cars turning across the tramway. Therefore, tight collaboration between all stakeholders is a key to safe operation of trams that also consider the quality of operation. Concerning rolling stock, the crash behaviour of trams with heavy road vehicles such as trucks (safety of tram passengers and particularly driver) and with pedestrians (safety of pedestrians) is particularly important. Generally, it is crucial to include all safety requirements and targets in an early engineering phase in order to avoid later, "attached" measures.
