SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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PhD researcher training course on ”Twilight Institutions and Local Politics in Developing Societies”

A PhD researcher training course with this theme is arranged at Arresødal outside Copenhagen, 24–27 September, 2002. The course is organised by the Graduate School of International Development Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark, and it will be managed by Christian Lund, from the International Development Studies section, and Kristine Juul, from the Dept of Geography.

Theme of Researcher Course:

Literature on the state in developing societies generally has a hard time specifying what is state and what is not. It seems that the closer one gets to a particular political landscape, the more apparent it becomes that many institutions have a twilight character.
The state is often represented by a multiplicity of institutions. Not only are multiple layers and branches of institutions which call themselves state (the judiciary, the administration, the customs service and police, the various extension agencies etc.) present and active to various degrees, but so-called traditional institutions which have been bolstered by state-sanctioned recognition also vie for public authority. In addition to this, associations and organisations which do not appear at first sight as political may also exercise political power.

Similarly, occasions which would appear to be ostensibly non-political may reveal themselves to be active sites of political negotiation and mediation in which local and regional identities and authority relations are reshaped and recast. This makes it a dubious and often unrewarding enterprise to attempt to make an analytical distinction between state and civil society, although this distinction has a lot going for it in the discursive and political organisation of society on a grand and small scale alike. Indeed, whether labelled state or not, it seems that a variety of institutions constitute themselves as de facto public authorities, albeit with greater or lesser success. And this is the point.

This researcher course will focus on how institutions' public authority waxes and wanes. Local politics provides a privileged opportunity for the study of how the capacity to regulate and control is not neatly stored within the state. The question to us is, rather, how individuals' and organisations' political competition and attempts to govern articulate the notion of state and public authority.
The term 'local' often invokes a taken-for-granted spatial mapping of 'local' in contrast to 'global' and of 'above' in contrast to 'below'. However, by imagining the primacy of certain 'levels' over others we miss out on the central question of how this primacy is established in a social and political process. Local politics is clearly not confined to a local space, let alone isolated from other spheres of politics. 'Home-town' associations, elite associations, 'clubs' and strategically-placed individuals, generally with education, political office, positions in the civil administration or in commerce, are often very important to 'local development'.

However, while local politics is not confined to a certain sphere, the term 'local' is used in political vernacular in rural and small town politics as well as in social analysis. It seems not only a central marker but even a constituent of rural and small town politics.
This brings in the issue of identity. As a socio-political concept, identity has an individualist and a collective meaning and can be seen as a person's sense of belonging to a group and place, if it influences his political behaviour. Identity politics are, thus, politics which start from or aim to stake a claim in the identities of their protagonists in the struggle over certain resources.

A fundamental element in this is, of course, that identities are socially and politically constructed, and hence subject to change, negotiation and contestation. However as the term local is linked to a spatial configuration and thus not open to totally arbitrary construction, the negotiability of identity curbed in some way. Thus, social situation and history clearly condition the exercise of localist identity, the construction of 'locality' and the configuration of public authority.

Invited Lecturers:

Peter Geschiere, University of Leiden, The Netherlands.
Carola Lentz, University of Frankfurt, Germany
Eric Worby, Yale University, USA.
Pierre-Yves le Meur, University of Mainz, Germany
Tania Li, Dalhousie University, Canada.
Georgio Blundo, Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Marseille, France.
Kristine Juul, Roskilde University, Denmark.
Christian Lund, Roskilde University, Denmark

Format:

The seminar runs for four days with presentations of papers by the invited speakers and Ph.D. researchers. Presentations of papers by Ph.D. researchers will take place in two or three workshops with the invited lecturers as discussants. Ph.D. researchers are invited to present a paper on theory, their methodology and/or findings depending on their interests and their stage in the research process.