Political Science

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Open Access
Pivotal Crisis: State Power and Social Forces in the Making of Neoliberal Capitalism
(2014-07-09) Germann, Julian; Lacher, Hannes P.
The thesis uses original archival research to outline a novel account of social and world order change in the 1970s—from the collapse of Bretton Woods to the Reagan Revolution—that shifts the focus of explanation from the strategic vision and unilateral capacity of the US to determine outcomes to the pragmatic attempts of West German political and economic elites to cope with the crisis of post-war capitalism and to harness American power to this end. The main argument is that the parochial way in which German state managers sought to preserve the domestic compact between capital and labour prevented a more progressive and solidaristic resolution of the crisis and created the conditions for the neoliberal counterattack. Anxious to defend its export model against protectionism and inflation, German policy makers mobilized their country’s financial power to counter the interventionist and expansionary remedies of the European Left and to commit the United States in particular to monetary and fiscal discipline. While initially successful, this strategy proved self-defeating as it pushed the US into the Volcker interest rate shock that radically disinflated the world economy and ultimately undermined the basis for the German welfare state and its corporatist balance as well. The dissertation enriches and broadens our understanding of the origins of neoliberal globalization by focusing on an economically dominant state/society complex that is normally held to be inimical to the neoliberal onslaught. The crucial, but largely unintentional, German contribution challenges some of the critical accounts that see neoliberalism as an American imposition (Gowan 1999), a financial coup (Duménil and Lévy 2004), or an ideological conversion (Blyth 2002). My dissertation offers an alternative interpretation of the rise of neoliberalism as driven by a complex process of disembedding in which state power, class interests, and ideas are refracted through the prism of an interdependent world economy, and where the strategic and creative choices that some actors make to deal with the problems they confront reshape the range of options available to others.
Open Access
Ethics and Resistant Subject: Levinas, Foucault, Marx
(2014-07-09) Sakhi, Shokoufeh; Horowitz, Asher
The present work essays a conception of human subjectivity capable of effective resistance to totalizing systems. The term “effective” distinguishes the absolute resistance of an ethical-subjectivity from the survival resistance of a for-itself subjectivity. It signifies a resistance that itself is neither rendered a new totality, nor assimilated within the old one. Chapters One through Three draw on Emanuel Levinas’s separation between interiority and exteriority, between the I and the other, and on his conceptualization of subjectivity on the ethical plane as being-for-the-other. Through a material phenomenology of sensory deprivation and solitary confinement the human subject is comprehended as a corporeal-sensible being that is rendered a subject in response to exteriority, response that arises from both its (survival) needs for itself and its (ethical) Desire for the other. The second Section, chapters Four and Five, presents immanent critical analyses of the conceptions of the human subject and resistance in Michel Foucault and Karl Marx respectively. These theorists exemplify opposable approaches to the notion of the human subject and subjectivity–and thus to an ethically-based resistance—which help elucidate the limits of the for-itself approach to theorizing effective resistance. Arguing in the last section, chapter Six, that, though occluded, for-the-other subjectivity and effective resistance are to be found in the actual practices of human struggle. A Levinasian interrogation of resistance under torture and prison confinement presents the case for theorizing the subject as primordially an I-in-tension and for the indispensability of the ethical dimension for an effective resistance against totalizing systems.
Open Access
Public Debt, Ownership and Power: The Political Economy of Distribution and Redistribution
(2014-07-09) Hager, Sandy Brian; Nitzan, Jonathan
This dissertation offers the first historical examination of the political economy of US public debt ownership. Specifically, the study addresses the following questions: Who owns the US public debt? Is the distribution of federal government bonds concentrated in the hands of a specific group or is it widely held? And what if the identities of those who receive interest payments on government bonds are distinct from those who pay the taxes that finance the interest payments on the public debt? Does this mean that the public debt redistributes income from taxpayers to public creditors? Who ultimately bears the burden of financing the public debt? Despite centuries of debate, political economists have failed to come to any consensus on even the facts concerning ownership of the US public debt and its potential redistributive effects. Some claim that the public debt is heavily concentrated and that interest payments on government bonds redistribute income regressively from poor to rich. Others insist that the public debt has become very widely held and instead redistributes income progressively. Anchored within a ‘capital as power’ theoretical framework, my purpose in this is to shed some much-needed light on the dynamics of distribution and redistribution that lie at the heart of the public debt. I show for the household and corporate sectors how over the past three decades, and especially in the context of the current crisis, the ownership of federal bonds and federal interest has become rapidly concentrated in the hands of dominant owners, the top 1% of households and the 2,500 largest corporations. Over the same period the federal income tax system has done little to progressively redistribute the federal interest income received by dominant owners. In this way, this dissertation argues that, since the early 1980s, the public debt has come to reinforce and augment the power of those at the very top of the social hierarchy.
Open Access
The Paradox of Sense, or On the Event of Thought in Giles Deleuze's Philosophy
(2014-07-09) Dejanovic, Sanya Nicole; Bell, Shannon M.
Written under the double heading The Paradox of Sense, or on the Event of Thought, this dissertation is a study of the doubled pathway of articulation in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. With the repetition of the heading, we want to suggest that, in fact, these two pathways unfold with respect to the same Event. The question which way do we turn, away or towards the virtual, is equivalent to the question, what difference is there. The double pathway defines the central problematic of this dissertation: in the first place, the line of articulation leads to the expression of sense in the proposition, meanwhile with the repetition of difference, another pathway of articulation is retraced that revolves around speaking the event. With the event the question becomes: What does it mean to speak the event once beings are taken to be events?
Open Access
The Political Economy of the Special Relationship: British Development and American Power
(2014-07-09) Green, Jeremy; Lacher, Hannes P.
Breaking from the traditional understanding of Anglo-American relations in terms of the cultural, diplomatic and military ‘Special Relationship’, this thesis explores the interdependent political-economic development of Britain and the United States. I argue that this interdependence has generated a specifically Anglo-American field of capitalist development that has been crucial to the transformation of the global political economy, particularly with regard to the creation and eventual undermining of the Bretton Woods monetary order. Reflecting the imbalance of power between Britain and the U.S., the thesis focuses principally upon the role of American power in shaping the transformation of Britain’s political economy and affecting Britain’s position within the global political economy. Moving away from the narrow preoccupation with decline that has dominated studies of British capitalism, I open up the study of British development within a broader transatlantic horizon that enables an alternative analysis which reveals important aspects of the politics of financial globalisation and the transformation of the U.S. political economy. I argue that the financial relationship between the two states and the key role of interaction between bankers in London and New York, in collaboration with their respective Treasuries and Central Banks, was crucial to the post-war transformation of the global political economy. The interactive development of Anglo-American finance was central to the development of financial globalisation, undermining the Bretton Woods order in the process. Anglo-American bankers alongside their respective Central Banks and Treasuries formed the basis of enduring economic orthodoxy within both states and presided over financial deregulation that critically undermined the basis of the Keynesian state in Britain. In the U.S., these transatlantic deregulatory dynamics eroded the basis of financial regulations that had been central to the politics of the New Deal. In both countries, the financial communities supported monetarism and the neoliberal central banking regimes of the Thatcher-Reagan era, which spurred a wider endorsement of the politics of price stability throughout the global political economy.
Open Access
The Value of Quality: Capital, Class, and Quality Assessment in the Re-making of Higher Education in the United State, the United Kingdom, and Ontario
(2014-07-09) Newstadt, Eric; McNally, David J.
This dissertation examines the utility of quality assessment (QA) in higher education as a means of measuring and improving qualitative excellence. It also tracks the emergence and development of QA in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ontario. I find that QA neither measures nor helps to produce anything that could meaningfully be described as being of high “quality”. Rather, QA is effective in helping to reproduce commercially oriented but hardly ground-breaking research and a more “flexploitable” labour force. The precursors to contemporary forms of QA first appeared in United States during the early part of the 20th century. To serve the interests of a burgeoning capitalism, corporate America organized independently and under the aegis of the American state to develop and control a national system of higher education. To that end, the captains of industry developed an extensive program of measurement and evaluation as a basis to rationalize funding for university teaching and research. Over time, that system of measurement and assessment developed into what today appears as a massive network of procedures and metrics that aid in the reproduction of a stratified system of higher education that efficiently puts out the kinds of knowledge and workers that can in turn aid in the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism. Since 1980, successive governments in both the United Kingdom and Ontario have developed systems of QA in the hope of reproducing the kinds of results achieved in America. QA has been seen as a way to install a price-type signaling system, and thereby a market, in what are subsidized and public systems of higher education. In other words, systems of QA were developed to evaluate the exchange-value of new knowledge and graduates within the context of neoliberal capitalism. Accordingly, QA makes it possible for firms and the state to rationalize funding in a manner that disciplines those within and around the university – increasingly by consent - to produce a particular form of value, namely that which can help corporations to secure larger profits, irrespective of the social, political, economic, or ecological consequences.
Open Access
The Business of Power: Canadian Multinationals in the Postwar Era
(2015-01-26) Brennan, Jordan Peter William; Peacock, Mark
The modern corporation is the dominant institution of the Canadian political economy. Does this imply that ‘corporate power’ is a meaningful concept in the Canadian context? What role has globalization played in restructuring the corporate sector? Are large firms controlled by salary-oriented managers or profit-seeking proprietors? Do mergers and acquisitions fuel the expansion of large firms? Why has Canada experienced slower GDP growth in recent decades? And how can we account for the level and pattern of Canadian income inequality? These and other questions are probed in this dissertation using tools from a variety of heterodox political-economic perspectives, including Nitzan and Bichler’s ‘capital as power’ framework, Institutionalism and Post Keynesianism. The reader will be introduced to some of the assumptions, concepts and theoretical claims that steer the research. The history of Canadian business will be reinterpreted and scholarship on the modern corporation surveyed. This will set the stage for an examination of large firms, or ‘dominant capital’, in Canada over the postwar period. This study provides the first long-term estimates for aggregate concentration and for corporate amalgamation. It devises metrics to capture the distributive struggle between capital and labour and for the globalization of merger activity. The structure of corporate ownership is laid bare, linkages between amalgamation and concentration are established and the association between the growth of large firms and GDP stagnation is charted. The dissertation closes by establishing points of contact between the amassment of corporate power and income inequality.
Open Access
The Persistence of American Economic Power in Global Capitalism: From the 1960s into the Twenty-First Century
(2015-01-26) Kenji Starrs, Sean; Panitch, Leo V.
This dissertation intervenes in the more than four decades-long debate on the decline or persistence of American economic power. It argues that we cannot move forward without reconceptualizing the nature of economic power in global capitalism, especially by moving beyond national accounts (such as GDP). Too many commentators from across the diversity of perspectives assume that the relative rise and decline of national accounts approximates the relative rise and decline of national economic power. In contrast, this dissertation argues that in the era of globalization, national accounts are an inadequate measure of national economic power. Rather, we must investigate the transnational corporations themselves in order to encompass their transnational operations, and analyze the matrix of inter-linkages now characteristic of global capitalism in general, and American power in particular. Therefore, this dissertation draws upon extensive original empirical research, including the following: 1) the first aggregation of the national sales-shares of the world’s top 200 corporations from 1957 to 2013; 2) the first aggregation of the national profit-shares of the world’s top 2,000 corporations across 25 broad sectors from 2006 to 2013; 3) the first aggregation of the top 50 national acquirers and targets of all cross-border mergers and acquisitions worth $1 million or more from 1980 to 2012; and 4) the first national aggregation of the ownership structures of the world’s top 500 corporations. The results from this empirical research, among others, will illuminate a number of facets concerning contemporary global capitalism. First, the nationality of capital remains very relevant despite several decades of intensifying globalization at the turn of the twentieth century. Following from this, the persistence of American economic power from the 1960s into the twenty-first century is astounding, particularly at the technological frontier. Indeed, in advanced technology and even Wall Street, American dominance has actually increased since the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. There are no foreseeable contenders, including China. Therefore, this dissertation will demonstrate that far from relative American decline, in certain respects American economic power has never been stronger — and will conclude with a number of important implications from this analysis concerning the future of world order.
Open Access
Building Relationships or Building Roadblocks with Public Consultation? An Evaluation of the Urban Aboriginal Strategy's Community Advisory Committees in Winnipeg and Toronto
(2015-01-26) Nguyen, Mai Thu Thi; Klassen, Thomas R.
My comparative case study seeks to answer the following question: Have Community Advisory Committees (CACs) shifted decision-making power and permitted the building of trust through the Urban Aboriginal Strategy (UAS)? It argues that CACs are an effective tool for ensuring the successful participation of Aboriginal groups when the consultation process includes mechanisms for redistributing power from governments to stakeholders. When power relations are equalized, Aboriginal-state political relations can be renewed based on trust and mutual respect—aspects which have been absent within the Aboriginal-state apparatus and which have resulted in the political exclusion of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Re-ordering the power dynamic within policy-making and restoring Aboriginal trust in the state will lead to the effective participation of Aboriginal participants during public consultation. Specifically, this comparative case study analyzes the federal government’s current Urban Aboriginal Strategy and its consultation process in both Winnipeg and Toronto. This Strategy is to provide long-term investments to support Aboriginal communities in urban settings by focusing on three priority areas: improving life skills; promoting job training, skills and entrepreneurship; and supporting Aboriginal women, children and families. The analysis performed in this research evaluates the consultation process through the development of an evaluation framework based on the dominant literature on CACs. The framework identifies critical components and criteria that must be present for CACs to be effective. The criteria was then mapped on to interview questions. Through a series of interviews with those involved in the UAS decision-making process, this research determines the extent to which the UAS decision-making process meets the standards for effective participation. Based on interviews with the Steering Committee, this dissertation finds that the UAS consultation process in Winnipeg is a successful mechanism for enabling the effective participation of Aboriginal participants in the democratic process—a process that is resulting in the construction of a renewed Aboriginal-state political relationship. However, in the Toronto case, the UAS has not experienced similar success because it does not meet the criteria set out in the evaluation framework.
Open Access
From Freedom to Equality: Thinking Politics and Education with Jacques Ranciere
(2015-01-26) Magnusson, Rachel A. L.; Horowitz, Asher
Is there such a thing as an emancipatory education? If so, what does an emancipatory education look like? This is the question that motivates this dissertation. It is also a question that has motivated many other political reflections on education. In part, it is the prevalence of this common concern with the emancipatory capacity of education that inspired the first major claim of this dissertation: a general problematic of freedom and authority seems to frame much of our political thinking about education and this problematic has troubling consequences for our thinking and practice of education, and how we imagine education’s relationship to politics. In fact, our way of imagining emancipatory education often seems neither freeing nor radical, and certainly not democratic. Given this, is it possible to reimagine emancipatory education beyond the problematic of freedom and authority? I will argue that it possible, to a certain degree. Turning to the writings of Jacques Rancière, I will argue that his own rethinking of emancipation and politics translates or shifts us from an emphasis on freedom to an emphasis on equality. Although such a shift may not seem novel, it introduces a new problematic of equality and inequality which is extremely helpful for thinking politically about education. In fact, it allows us to think emancipatory education as a practice of equality—a practice that is doable, democratic, radical, and, perhaps, already in existence. The first three chapters of the dissertation explore different manifestations of the problematic of freedom and authority and its consequences. The first chapter explores how a problematic of freedom and authority frames the reflections on education of three exemplary modern political thinkers: Max Weber, Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno. The second chapter turns to a few important critiques in the writings of Jacques Rancière which help to flesh out our understanding of this problematic, in particular the consequences of its Platonic lineage. The third chapter investigates common trends in political thinking and practice of education here in North America, and the particular ways the problematic of freedom and authority is mobilized in each case. With this account of the problematic freedom and authority complete, the final two chapters of the dissertation turn to an exploration of a problematic of equality and inequality. The fourth chapter details how a problematic of equality and inequality emerges in Rancière’s writings through his rethinking of emancipation and politics. The fifth chapter outlines the consequences of this problematic of equality and inequality and how it helps us to think emancipatory education differently.
Open Access
Contesting Community and Nation: Caste, Discrimination and Reservation Politics in India
(2015-01-26) Virmani, Tina; Mukherjee, Ananya
This dissertation traces debates about reservation policy in India. Reserved quotas in public institutions for communities stigmatized on the basis of caste comprise an enduring and comprehensive form of affirmative action. However, the policy provokes deep resentment among upper castes, manifested in virulent protests, judicial challenges and failed implementation. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand how meanings of caste, community and nation are shaped within and through debates about reservation and in turn, how the politics of reservation contribute to the formation of political subjectivities. Drawing on a variety of sites, including the Constituent Assembly debates, the English press and government reports, I chart the development of a dominant discourse about reservations. I interrogate this discourse in relation to anti-caste perspectives on the issue, found in creative and activist writings and studies of Dalit activism. I argue that dominant discourses conflate the issue of caste discrimination with a series of terms that designate inequality more broadly, such as poverty and unemployment. This enables the portrayal of “lower caste” beneficiaries of reservation as inferior subjects that are unable to understand their “real interests”. Thus trivializing discrimination, the discourse naturalizes caste privilege and conceals the historical contestations over the meaning of the quota. In anti-caste discourse, advocacy of reservations is articulated to a critique of the domination of upper caste interests in Indian democracy and the hegemonic vision of the nation through which this domination is naturalized. Thus, power and representation are underscored as integral to assessments of reservation policy. Attending to the affective registers of the debate, I demonstrate that statements about the quota are also statements about history, nationalism and political subjectivity. Reading dominant discourse through anti-caste analytics reveals that the anger against reservations as a threat to the nation is historically related to the antagonism of institutionalized nationalism towards Dalit politics. Through rights claims, Dalit activists contest dominant meanings of caste and in turn, the meanings of community and nation. This epistemological challenge illustrates the contingent relations of group rights and social transformation, as struggles against discrimination generate novel understandings of difference, commonality and personhood.
Open Access
The State and the Making of Capitalist Modernity in Chile
(2015-08-12) Clark, Timothy David; Panitch, Leo V
This dissertation provides a reinterpretation of Chilean history via an analysis of the processes of state and class formation in the construction of capitalist modernity. Coventional periodizations divide Chilean history into alternating models of externally-oriented and market-led development, on the one hand, and internally-oriented and state-led development, on the other. What this pendular reading of history overlooks, however, is the question of capitalism as a historically-unique social order: it origins and expansion, how state and class actors respond to the revolutionary pressures emanating from capitalist transformation, and how these responses shape the trajectory of economic development. The first part of this dissertation will contend that the decades from 1870 to 1970 are more fruitfully considered as part of the long and frustrated transition to capitalist hegemony. The second part of this dissertation will examine the decades from 1970 to the present. In a great historical irony, it was the socialist revolution of Allende that made possible the depth of the subsequent capitalist reforms of the military regime by enervating the chief obstacle to capitalist hegemony: Chilean capitalists themselves. And far from initiating a neoliberal ‘withdrawal’ of the state, Pinochet deployed the enormous state power inherited from Allende to carry out a state-led capitalist revolution from above. The military regime actively reconstructed Chilean capitalists as the dominant social force while simultaneously demobilizing organized labour and individualizing and marketizing subjectivities and social reproduction in civil society via the ‘social modernizations’ that comprise the subsidiary state. The particular manner in which capitalist hegemony was instituted in Chile, however, with its powerful capitalist class, institutionally-constrained and subsidiary state, and disarticulated and individualized civil society, has rendered the political system chronically unable to address pressing challenges and now represents the primary obstacle to the deepening of socio-economic development. As a result, capitalist modernity in Chile has taken the forms of deep inequalities of power, income, and opportunity and an increasingly stagnant economic structure dependent upon the exploitation of natural resources, on the one hand, and a rigid and exclusionary political system plagued by a series of structural and institutional obstacles to change, on the other.
Open Access
Price and Income Dynamics in the Agri-Food System: A Disaggregate Perspective
(2015-08-28) Baines, Joseph Stanislaw; Nitzan, Jonathan
This dissertation seeks to illuminate contemporary processes of redistribution in the agri-food sector, with particular reference to the US. It addresses the following questions: How has the rapid rise in food price instability since the turn of the twenty-first century impacted income shifts within the agri-food system? Which groups within agriculture and agribusiness benefit from high and volatile food prices and which groups have suffered amid the tumult? Are all of these groups 'price-takers' that simply respond to price signals? Or are some of them 'price-shapers' that, with varying degrees of success, actively seek to restructure the agri-food system, and the regulatory architecture that governs it, in ways that make certain price developments more likely? Hitherto, there has been little in the way of sustained analysis of the connections between prices, power and redistribution in the agri-food system. The dissertation addresses three approaches that offer some perspective on the redistributional-power dynamics of agricultural commodity price movements: global value chains analysis, the food regime approach and the emergent international political economy literature on post-crisis commodity derivatives regulations. As the thesis argues, although these approaches offer important qualitative insights, they have yet to offer quantitative means of gauging the power-shifts between different agricultural and agribusiness groups and their connection to price-shifts between different agri-food sub-sectors. The thesis attempts to enfold the multiple insights of the existing literature into the capital as power approach. I submit that the process of enfoldment results in an analysis that offers a rich and highly differentiated understanding of the redistributional dynamics of high and volatile agricultural commodity prices. The arguments are made in relation to the contestation within agriculture and agribusiness over perhaps the two most controversial developments within the US agri-food sector in the early twenty-first century: the diversion of grain into agrofuels production and the rise of 'excessive speculation' in agricultural derivatives markets. The importance of these two developments is underlined by the fact that a number of scholars have attributed the sharp food price peaks in 2007-08 and 2010-11 to the influx of speculative investment in futures markets, and the general upward trend in food prices in the 2000s to the agrofuel boom. By analyzing the redistributional effects of high and volatile prices, and by examining the contestation over the course taken by agrofuels policy and commodity derivatives regulation, the dissertation outlines the winners and losers of high and volatile food prices within both agribusiness and agriculture.
Open Access
Forging a New Democratic Party: The Politics of the Third Way From Clinton to Obama
(2015-08-28) Atkins, Curtis Gene; Albo, Gregory A.
This dissertation analyzes the evolution of the American Democratic Party’s ideological orientation from 1985 to 2014. The central problem is to develop an understanding of how shifts in political-economic context and factional agency combine to produce alterations in the predominant ideology of a U.S. political party. The primary question posed is how the centrist perspective known as the ‘third way’ replaced the left-liberalism of the New Deal and Great Society eras as the guiding public philosophy of the Democratic Party. Whereas many scholars propose that the modern third way revisionism of center-left parties is explained primarily as electoral opportunism or as an adoption of the political logic of the New Right, this study focuses on how changes in political economy (particularly the transition from Keynesianism to neoliberalism) prompted the elaboration of an alternative ideological framework that sought to adapt to new times. In the U.S. case, the primary agent of this process of ideological reorientation was the New Democrat faction, most well-known for its connection to President Bill Clinton. Combining qualitative document analysis and focused interviews with personnel from the think-tanks and policy institutes of the New Democrat faction and its competitors, the dissertation finds that the initiation and maintenance of reorientation is dependent on a faction’s success in elaborating and continually ‘decontesting’ an alternative framework that de-legitimatizes a party’s pre-existing ideological commitments. Adapting Michael Freeden’s approach to the study of ideologies, a conceptual morphology, or map, of third way politics is presented that centers on the particular meanings of opportunity, responsibility, and community elaborated by the New Democrats. These ‘decontested’ concepts signified a commitment to equality of opportunity over egalitarian outcomes, a vision of the welfare state centered on obligation rather than entitlement, and a devotion to communitarian rather than class or identity politics. By analyzing the process of continuous decontestation engaged in by this faction, the dissertation argues that the third way not only constitutes a distinct ideological system, but that it has been the predominant policymaking outlook of the Democratic Party for nearly a quarter century – stretching from Clinton to Obama and possibly beyond.
Open Access
"No Idle Sightseers": the Ulster Women's Unionist Council and Ulster Unionism(1911 - 1920)
(2015-08-28) Mckane, Pamela Blythe; Henders, Susan J.
This doctoral dissertation examines the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council (UWUC), an overlooked, but historically significant Ulster unionist institution, during the 1910s and 1920s—a time of great conflict. Ulster unionists opposed Home Rule for Ireland. World War I erupted in 1914 and was followed by the Anglo-Irish War (1919-1922), the partition of Ireland in 1922, and the Civil War (1922-1923). Within a year of its establishment the UWUC was the largest women’s political organization in Ireland with an estimated membership of between 115,000 and 200,000. Yet neither the male-dominated Ulster unionist institutions of the time, nor the literature related to Ulster unionism and twentieth-century Irish politics and history have paid much attention to its existence and work. This dissertation seeks to redress this. The framework of analysis employed is original in terms of the concepts it combines with a gender focus. It draws on Rogers Brubaker’s (1996) concepts of “nation” as practical category, institutionalized form (“nationhood”), and contingent event (“nationness”), combining these concepts with William Walters’ (2004) concept of “domopolitics” and with a feminist understanding of the centrality of gender to nation. This analytical framework is used to explore the UWUC’s role in the Ulster unionist movement during the 1910s and the 1920s, with a particular focus on the gendered constitution of Ulster. This study argues that Ulster historically has been constituted through the gendered discourses, norms, symbols, rituals, traditions, and practices of Ulster unionist institutions, and contingent events, such as the Ulster Crisis, World War I, the Anglo-Irish War, and the partition of Ireland. This dissertation analyzes primary sources related to the UWUC. It reveals the extent of the work undertaken by members of the UWUC in terms of opposing Home Rule and constituting Ulster. It argues that the scale of the mobilization of the UWUC and the scope of its anti-Home Rule work makes clear that the UWUC was not peripheral to Ulster unionism; nor were its members “idle sightseers” in terms of the events of the 1910s and 1920s and the constitution of Ulster.
Open Access
Within and Against the Market: The Guatemalan Campesino Movement under Neoliberal Peace
(2015-08-28) Granovsky-Larsen, Simon Garth; Short, Nicola C.
The Guatemalan campesino social movement, based in mostly indigenous small and landless farmers, has organized for agrarian reform since the 1970s. This dissertation explores the movement since the end of the Guatemalan armed conflict in 1996, weighing the impact of such factors as the peace process and a neoliberal transition. The dissertation first establishes the role played within the movement by communities that have gained access to land. Secondly, given a reliance on resources from neoliberal institutions such as a World Bank-funded agency for market-led agrarian reform, the Fondo de Tierras, the dissertation asks whether engagement with neoliberalism lessens the impact of the movement. Six case studies—with the National Indigenous and Campesino Coordinator (Coordinadora Nacional Indígena y Campesina, CONIC), the Campesino Committee of the Highlands (Comité Campesino del Altiplano, CCDA), and four rural communities—direct the dissertation to the following conclusions. First, Guatemalan social movements have participated directly in the transition to neoliberalism, due to the political-economic context laid by the end of armed conflict. Second, a tally of land access in the post-conflict period suggests that the amount of land won through agrarian struggles such as historical land claims, rural labour disputes, and land occupations surpasses that sold through the Fondo de Tierras. Finally, assessment of the case studies shows that engagement with neoliberal resources has not reduced the potential of the movement to resist or to establish alternatives to capitalism. In fact, the case studies demonstrate successful projects of non-capitalist socio-economic organization established using neoliberal resources. The dissertation concludes that social movements are capable of engaging strategically with neoliberalism, and that the Guatemalan campesino movement has managed to extract benefits from the neoliberal order while remaining true to transformative goals. Evidence to support these arguments was collected over twelve months of fieldwork using activist research methods, and included participant observation and a total of 137 interviews, survey interviews, and recorded testimonies. Interviews were conducted through the case studies, as well as with an additional ten campesino organizations, with other grassroots groups, and with state institutions. Archival research and access-to-information requests also produced data on national agrarian trends.
Open Access
Geopolitics, State-Formation and Economic Development in Quebec and Ontario
(2015-08-28) Gheller, Frantz; Lacher, Hannes P.
This dissertation challenges the prevailing periodization of Quebec and Ontario’s economic development in Canadian historiography by contrasting the specificity of capitalist social relations with the non-capitalist forms of social reproduction belonging to French Canadian peasants and Upper Canadian farmers in the colonial period. With a few notable exceptions, existing historical interpretations assume that capitalism was there, at least in embryo, from the colony’s very beginning in the guise of the fur trade, manufacturing, or a local bourgeoisie. By contrast, this thesis brings together, through a comparative perspective, different pieces of the interconnected histories of France, Britain, the United States, Ontario, and Quebec in order to show that capitalism did not arrive on the shores of the St. Lawrence River with the first settlers. The dissertation also brings together pieces of the uneven intra-regional histories of these regions, and provides a general reflection on how to systematically integrate the geopolitical dimension of social change into historical sociology, political economy, and comparative politics. As such, the question with which the thesis is concerned is not exclusively that of the transition to capitalism in Quebec or in Ontario, but more broadly the interrelated questions of state-formation and ‘late development’ in north-eastern North America. One of the main findings of the dissertation is that only with the development of industrial capitalism in the north-eastern United States were the conditions for the emergence of capital-intensive types of agriculture in rural areas of Quebec and Ontario put in place. American breakthroughs toward industrial capitalism irrevocably transformed the system-wide conditions under which subsequent agricultural evolution took place in neighbouring regions, generating a new geopolitical configuration in which customary peasant production continued to persist in Quebec alongside petty-commodity farmers in Upper Canada and the development of industrial capitalism in urban areas such as Montreal. These findings bring to the fore the need to directly address the ‘peasant question’ in order to understand the impact of the continued existence of a large peasantry on state-formation and the long-term economic development of Quebec during the period when industrial capitalism was emerging as a dominant feature of the North American economy.
Open Access
The Agrarian Seeds of Empire: The Political Economy of Agriculture in the U.S. State Institutional Capacity Building, 1849-1980
(2015-08-28) Bauerly, Bradley Alan; Panitch, Leo V.
This study outlines the influence of agrarian movements on the process of US institutional capacity building during the period of 1840- 1980. It investigates the specific nature of US institutional efforts at various stages of development over different eras, highlighting how they informed the formation of state institutional capacities. The unique strength and development of US farmer’s movements led to a state institutional development path that had important implications for economic and social development going forward. In demonstrating the specific and important influence of agriculture and agricultural social movements on US state institutional formation, it will be shown how the two forces of state intervention and social movement pressure converged in a symbiotic relationship to produce agro-industrialization. Through this study this agro-industrial developmental path will be shown to have roots in the state’s institutional response to agrarian pressure in the concrete historical political economy. This state led development I label the agro-industrial push and highlight its relationship with agrarian social movements in the development of industrial agribusiness in the US over the course of the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth Centuries. It will then be shown how the particular institutional capacities that the agro-industrial push developed, along with the economic and political outcomes it created, were used in the twentieth Century to impose the same project outside of the US. The findings of this investigation link together and augment existing approaches to US capitalist development, International Relations, and theories of the relationship between the state and the food system.
Open Access
International Relations and Contemporary Artwork: Canadian Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Self-Determination, and Decolonizing Visuality
(2015-08-28) Merson, Emily Hannah; Agathangelou, Anna M.
In this project I analyze the international dimensions of sovereignty, political self-determination, and creative self-expression by Indigenous contemporary artists in the context of Canadian settler colonialism. My key research question is: how does the conventional International Relations (IR) imagination of state formation and world ordering through territorial sovereignty displace the violences of Canadian settler colonialism? With a transnational feminist analysis I examine visual expressions of the Canadian settler colonial imaginary of world ordering by territorial sovereignty expressed at particular historical moments and how the work of Indigenous artists, curators, academics, and communities calls attention to the power relationships and violences of these international processes. Methodologically, I analyze how visual methods of knowledge production in art museums, galleries, and international art exhibitions express and inform conventional identities, policies, institutional practices, divisions of labour, academic theories, and popular ideas about Canadian nationalism, subjectivity, and settler colonial claims to territorial sovereignty. I demonstrate how contemporary visual artwork by Brian Jungen, a Dane-zaa First Nations artist of European descent, and Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore unsettle the conventional Westphalian imaginary of sovereignty in IR and offer transformative potentials for decolonizing material conditions of power, agency, and visuality in international politics. I analyze how Jungen and Belmore’s artwork and framing of their projects in the contexts of the international political conditions within which they live and work intervenes in mainstream Canadian and global visual cultures in terms of political struggles over colonial ethnographic institutional visual methods, Indigenous peoples’ experiences of dispossession, colonial commodification, sexual violence, and Indigenous peoples’ lands and waterways reclamations. Taking the lead from the artists’ self-identified entry points in framing their work, I contribute to IR debates by analyzing how Jungen and Belmore’s work as contemporary visual artists puts pressure on conventional IR theories and methods of understanding power, sovereignty, visuality, anarchy, hierarchy, commodification, violence, agency, and social justice. I discuss the tensions between settler claims to sovereignty and Indigenous peoples’ relationships with traditional lands and waterways as well as Indigenous scholars’ land-based philosophies, in order to better understand possibilities for decolonizing international relationships between non-Indigenous Canadian settlers and Indigenous peoples through artwork.
Open Access
Politics and the Aesthetic Animal: Aristotle and Adorno
(2015-08-28) Basnett, Caleb John; Horowitz, Asher
This study examines the neglected role of other animals and art in Aristotle’s classic conception of the human being, and argues that the work of T.W. Adorno can be drawn upon to recover this conception’s neglected promise. By reading Aristotle’s oft-cited claim that ‘the human being is by nature a political animal’ in light of his works on biology and poetics, I find that Aristotle displaces ideas concerning the role of human being in the cosmos prominent in the Ancient Greek world, binding the self-understanding of human beings to other animals and the arts. This self-understanding can be summarized as follows: 1) Aristotle recognizes that humans are not the only political animals, and provides the rudiments of a theory concerning how nonhuman politics might be possible; and 2) Aristotle’s theory of nature is unintelligible without artistic metaphors that suggest the creative power of the arts to produce what we understand to be human, not simply in terms of revealing natural human capacities, but in creating these capacities in the first place. Though largely unappreciated by his descendants, detractors, and even Aristotle himself, I argue these insights can be recovered through Adorno’s critical theory. Adorno enables us to grasp the creative power of art in the construction of the human being and the distance it can place between humans and other animals while at once allowing us to see how a turn toward the repressed possibilities upon which the emergence of the human depends is also a turn toward animality. In this sense, the promise of humanity and its legacy concerns less a defense of the classical humanism being eroded by the vicissitudes of history, than the possibility of uncovering the paths not followed by this tradition that might inform posthuman subjective possibilities more able to confront the challenges of the present. In this way, Adorno enables the theorization of an aesthetic animal, the subject of a radically transformed society.