Political Science

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Open Access
A Blast from the Past: Armed Drones, International Humanitarian Law, and Imperial Violence
(2022-08-08) Andersen, Kirsten Per; Alnasseri, Sabah
Scholars of conflict and its regulation have regarded armed drones as a new ‘puzzle’ for international humanitarian law’s (IHL) theory and application to adapt. While drones indeed offer exceptional technological capabilities, their significance to the future of war resides not in their strategic or tactical possibilities but in their ability to reveal the contradictions in the idea of war embodied in its regulating law. This dissertation argues that the seemingly novel challenges weaponized drones present to IHL are, in fact, not new at all. Rather, it is through the introduction of drones that the kinds of violences occurring for centuries in the global periphery are made both visible and recognizable. The real trouble drones pose for IHL is that critical analyses of their regulation under IHL yields conclusions that directly challenge the persuasiveness of IHL’s ostensibly humanitarian motives. These conclusions reveal that IHL was developed and applied to facilitate the use of force by hegemonic and imperial state actors against foreign populations by means of increasingly sophisticated weapons technologies. In arguing this, the dissertation revisits not only IHL’s history, but also the narratives that have been (and continue to be) told about the regime’s origin, development, and application. It considers the particular actors, weapons, and violences IHL incorporated across the trajectory of its historical development, as well as the representation of war it depicts versus its realities. The argument is illustrated by way of a case study examining drone use by the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Open Access
Abortion Rights in Quebec and Ireland: Divergent Paths
(2016-09-20) Harris, Laura Diane; MacRae, Heather
The ability to control ones personal reproduction should be experienced by all women, regardless of citizenship. For Irish women, however, this does not exist. Irelands constitutional protection of a fetal right to life exists in direct conflict with a womans right to control her body. At first glance, one might point toward Irelands Catholicism, or perhaps its strong sense of nationalism, as likely reasons. When we consider Quebec, a jurisdiction with a historically strong sense of both Catholicism and nationalism, the answer as to why Ireland has one of the most conservative policies against abortion in the western world becomes more complex. By considering competing institutional strategies, the role of nationalism, the role of Catholicism, elites, and other interest groups, and the impact of multi-level governance, this dissertation seeks to uncover how Ireland and Quebec have such different policies regulating abortion rights. With regard to institutions and opportunities for the success of social movements, I consider which factors have been both present and absent from the reproductive rights movement in Ireland, ultimately leading to an incredibly slow progression of the liberalization of abortion access. I emphasize the ways that authoritative agents such as Dr. Henry Morgentaler, political institutions such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and an effective womens movement came together to foster the necessary climate for change. I also consider the role of various institutions which affected (both via their presence and absence) the reproductive rights movement in both Quebec and Ireland. Through this dissertation I found that a jurisdictions abortion policy is actually a result of a number of intersecting variables. In the case of Ireland, abortion policy has remained quite restrictive as a result of a lack of political opportunity structures that aide in creating a more liberal policy. In Quebec, political opportunities were available for change via institutions such as the Charter, thus allowing for abortion policy to be liberalized. Furthermore, the avenues available for womens movements to create change were very different in Ireland and Quebec.
Open Access
"ALL RIGHTS MATTER": A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE ONTARIO HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION'S SYSTEMIC CHANGE INITIATIVES IN
(2022-08-08) Bernhardt, Nicole Shelley; Vosko, Leah F.
This dissertation examines the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s (OHRC) partnership engagement with police services via the use of voluntary Project Charter agreements. Through an analysis of OHRC policy documents spanning from 1962 to 2016, qualitative research with three municipal police services (Ottawa, Toronto, and Windsor) and the OHRC, utilizing methods developed out of the epistemological insights and normative commitments of Critical Race Theory, Feminist Political Economy and Critical Policy Studies, the analysis centres on the duality of law and the race-neutral logics that work to constrain the viability of human rights-driven anti-racist structural change. This work engages the notion “All Rights Matter” to describe a flattened approach to human rights that restricts focussed consideration of the operation of structural racism. The “All Rights Matter” approach employed within these voluntary Project Charter agreements obfuscates areas of institutional inaction or resistance and deflects attention away from inaction, or failure, toward addressing structural racism and community concerns of racial profiling and misuse of force. This flattened approach to difference is intimately connected to a diversity management posture favouring business vernacular and rationales over equity. The five chapters comprising the dissertation reveal the emancipatory limitations of rights claims – vis-a-vis racism in particular – within the Ontario context. Chapters one and two offer theoretical and historical background to the “All Rights Matter” approach. Chapter three attends to the role of policing in reproducing a racially inequitable social order, the OHRC’s partnership-oriented adoption of diversity management, and the settlement agreement that brought about the Ottawa Police Race Data Collection Project. The case studies of the Toronto and Windsor police services examined in chapters four and five illustrate how these partnerships with the OHRC serve as containment strategies, quelling public pressure to address racism within these services. By way of conclusion, the dissertation underlines the importance of severing human rights approaches from a diversity management framework that extracts value from racialized groups without addressing inequitable racial orders and the pressing need for human rights accountability and legally-enforceable public interest remedies.
Open Access
Beyond the Erotics of Orientalism: Homeland Security, Liberal War and the Pacification of the Global Frontier
(2015-08-28) Richter-Montpetit, Melanie; Agathangelou, Anna M.
Beyond the Erotics of Orientalism: Homeland Security, Liberal War and the Pacification of the Global Frontier traces the post-9/11 ascendancy of a complex and seemingly contradictory U.S. national security imaginary and concomitant practices of war and violence. On the one hand, the U.S. security state supported at times quite radical transgressions from the gendered racial-sexual grammars of the usual “War Story” (Cooke, 1996), such as the active involvement of women in the torture of enemy prisoners, the repeal of the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy and more recently its support for overturning the Defense of Marriage Act. The U.S. social formation also took a seemingly great leap forward towards “post-racial triumph” (Ho Sang & LaBennett, 2012, p. 5) with the most diverse Presidential cabinet in U.S. history under Bush Jr. culminating in 2008 in the election of Barack Obama, the first American President racialized as Black. On the other hand, the U.S. security state aggressively pursued the racialized expansion and intensification of the (extrajudicial) use of military and carceral force in time and space, including selective deportations, indefinite detentions, the creation of an official torture policy and targeted killings of so-called enemy combatants outside of official warzones, including of US citizens. Beyond the Erotics of Orientalism explores these reconfigurations of law and belonging within broader shifts in contemporary liberal governance, in particular the promise that the 19th century colour line (DuBois, 1903) has been transcended and no longer per se marks populations as in/violable. I show how in this era of post-racial/sexual/gender triumph, the liberal project of security governs not only through military and carceral force, but also affectively through self-rule and the promotion of social difference. The dissertation locates the U.S. War on Terror's ambiguous promise of liberal freedom, equal inclusion and self-rule in the desires and disavowals of a White settler society in “the afterlife of slavery” (Hartman, 2007, p. 6). Building on the work of Native feminist and Afro-Pessimist theorists, this study suggests that we can only meaningfully interrogate the operations of power and violence in contemporary U.S. security making - including against Orientalized subjects - by accounting for the foundational role of anti-Black racism and the settler colonial character of the U.S. social formation. These interlocking racial-sexual logics mobilize knowledges of war and violence that facilitate not only the targeting of Muslim/ified people and spaces, but in turn also help secure the gendered racial-sexual order and property regime of the settler colonial homeland in this age of “post-everything” (Crenshaw, 2014) triumph.
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
Canada's Carbon Capitalism: In the Age of Climate Change
(2021-03-08) Dow, Matthew Anthony Thomas; Gill, Stephen R.
This historically and critically informed dissertation investigates the question why Canada has become one of the worlds leaders in promoting fossil fuels through its unconventional hydrocarbon industry in spite of the science and growing awareness of climate change. Using a critical historical political economy approach that encompasses both ecological or biophysical scientific realities and historical materialism, I examine this contradictory developmental trajectory as embedded in both the historical structures of everyday life and within Canadian and the wider global political economy. This dissertation argues that Canadas current situation should be understood in a broader context as a morbid symptom that is embedded within the current global organic and leadership crises, since current leadership appears to support the contradiction of supporting carbon-based globalized social reproduction and preventing climate change. In doing so, this dissertation critiques both fields of international and Canadian political economy for largely sidestepping the importance of energy and energy systems in the production and reproduction of the global political economy. I show how growing energy demand, the peaking of conventional oil, potential energy insecurities, and a debt-based monetary system perpetuates and is dependent on unlimited growth. Moreover, I argue that the Canadian state and economy has become increasingly locked-in by disciplinary neoliberalism and the new constitutionalism which are reforms, policies and laws that entrench capitalist social reproduction and make it more difficult to alter capitalist patterns of energy-intensive development. As a result, the current world order and global political economy is organized into a vicious cycle of path dependency whereby production and social reproduction require evermore fossil fuels. This could potentially be the largest paradox in human history as climate science suggests that humanity should be attempting to limit the production and consumption of greenhouse gases. I conclude by attempting to create a new pathways and objectives forward for social forces of resistance in current webs of power to form a post-modern prince movement in Canada that would seek to work collectively in rebuilding a new world towards decolonialization, promoting and establishing alternative modes of living and development that will replace the current fossil fuel-based dependency, monetary-debt system, mass consumption, and unlimited growth in Canada.
Open Access
Capoeira and Hip Hop in North East Brazil: Resistance to Inequality
(2015-12-16) Gold, Hilary Leah; Bell, Shannon M.
In my MA thesis I argue that engagement in Capoeira and Hip Hop by Afro-Indigenous youth and community members in NorthEast Brazil ruptures their historically unequal status and enacts collective social change. My thesis is grounded on two programs I co-founded, “Capoeira for Street Kids” (Canada and Brazil) and “Hip Hop Rescues Kids” (Brazil). Both programs I co-created in 2005 with street involved and homeless kids and youth in Brazil. Both are unique forms of decolonizing research methodology and practice focused on healing from an Afro-Indigenous Brazilian worldview. The programs covers street health, harm reduction and community outreach with homeless and street involved people. This work is collaborative with communities with a history of diverse challenges including: poverty, homelessness, violence and addictions/mental health.
Open Access
Child Care on the Cheap: Welfare Reform and the Social Organization of Child Care Work in New York City
(2016-09-20) Black, Simon John; Vosko, Leah F
This study aims to further a feminist political economy of urban welfare regimes, applying a gender lens to processes of urban neoliberalization and an urban lens to feminist political economy analyses of welfare state restructuring and resistance. In New York City, neoliberal welfare reform dramatically increased need and demand for child care, escalating the citys child care crisis. As thousands of poor single mothers were pushed into workfare jobs and the lower reaches of the labour market, the question of Who will care for their children? was thrust to the forefront of New York politics. In response to the crisis, the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani channelled welfare mothers into relying on precarious, home-based child care providers for the care of their children, despite federal and state regulations guaranteeing parent choice in the use of child care subsidies. This strategy can be understood as one of privatization, as the city delivered child care services on the cheap by downloading costs of and responsibilities for caregiving onto low-income families/households and communities, and especially the women within them. While occurring against the backdrop of federal welfare reform, the citys response to the crisis is best understood in the context of a broader project of urban neoliberalization designed to roll back the institutional legacies of New Yorks postwar welfare regime, including a public centre-based child care system staffed by a unionized workforce. Yet, paradoxically, the citys strategy to mediate the crisis produced openings for progressive civil society actors to contest the grounds of mediation and push the state to socialize costs of and responsibilities for child care. The most important outcome of this contestation was the unionization of home child care workers and their emergence as a powerful political force in the wake of welfare reform. Overall, this case study demonstrates that under neoliberalism, urban welfare regimes are central sites of contested, state-driven efforts to mediate crisis tendencies in social reproduction. Privatized remedies aimed at mediation can unleash contradictions, creating openings for resistance and a more progressive reorganization of the work of social reproduction.
Open Access
Children as Full Human Beings: A Radical Rethinking of Social and Political Transformation Beyond Domination, Oppression, and Capitalist Exploitation
(2021-03-08) Delage, Amelie; Breaugh, Martin
This dissertation examines the general paternalist prejudice against children. It highlights the generational blind spot within critical theory and its failure to engage with the power dynamics between adults and children and how this contributes to a political culture based on domination and exploitation. The dissertations main argument is that reclaiming childrens full humanity must be the cornerstone of any emancipatory political agenda. The dissertation focuses on the conception of childhood that came with the transition to capitalism within liberal societies. The liberal conception of children is best exemplified by John Locke through its defence of paternalism and capitalist property relations. The dissertation demonstrates how parentchild relations in capitalist society are not rooted in natural inclinations or biology but rather are a political construction to reproduce the unequal property relations of a system based on domination, oppression, and exploitation. The dissertation stresses the dehumanizing aspects of the doctrine of socialization and of the mandatory schooling system that consolidates the liberal institution of children. By drawing on First Nations political thinking and the unschooling/self-directed learning movement, the dissertation offers a glimpse of the possibilities of a genuinely emancipating parenting and educative paradigm on which social justice can be built.
Open Access
Conflicting Visions: Political Struggle Over Urban Space in Lawrence Heights
(2023-03-28) Careless, Jon Robert; Latham, Robert E.
This dissertation is a case-study of a public housing district in North York, Toronto known as Lawrence Heights, a so-called “priority neighborhood” undergoing the largest “urban revitalization” project in Canada. Typically, a revitalization is formed through a public-private partnership between a government and private developers, which together direct the razing of a disinvested area, followed by the building of new residential developments, commercial businesses, and public amenities in its place. It happens that government officials, planners, architects, and developers are employing enormous resources towards a revitalization project unfolding in the context of late neoliberalism (as a once revolutionary paradigm) undergoing fracturing since the crisis of 2008. In this situation, however, people continue struggling against, and are actively resisting, the long-standing and increasingly visible consequences of neoliberalism as a market-driven de-democratizing force that has leveled social service provision while also driving up living costs. The research uncovers forms of political conflict that have arisen during the Lawrence Heights revitalization. In so doing, I map out a chronological narrative detailing the past and present of this district as it continues transforming. To this end, I address the following questions: What do ongoing relations between interested parties involved in remaking Lawrence Heights tell us about the capacity for late neoliberalism to absorb and modify the multiple visions put forward for the neighbourhood’s future that align with its principles? What political outcomes arise in the deliberations over the use and distribution of resources associated with the revitalization? How do these interactions in this localized case study fit into larger struggles between different groups to leverage the state to institute certain policies in an environment where neoliberalism’s negative impacts on poorer communities have fueled energetic counter-pressures? Borrowing from Gramscian thought, this dissertation argues that the early stages of the Lawrence Heights revitalization suggests the potential unfolding of a localized passive revolution with grassroots anti-systemic organizers seizing meaningful levels of control over the direction of revitalization planning, as evidenced by their securement of resources for resident-led programs, employment opportunities, and decision making power, while struggling against the prevailing limits and power enforced by neoliberal policy regimes.
Open Access
Constructing Rwandan Identity in the Diaspora: Remembering the Green Hills in Cold Canada
(2016-09-20) Ainsworth, Anna Maria; Henders, Susan J
This study investigated the processes of identity formation among those who identified as Rwandan and lived in the Greater Toronto Area. The study was conducted using in-depth qualitative interviews and ethnographic participant observation. It argues that those who identified as Rwandan in the GTA were subject to powerful discourses of simultaneous belonging and non-belonging in both the Canadian and the Rwandan state. The extreme violence of the Rwandan genocide ruptured the bonds of belonging that had tied those who identified as Rwandan to each other and to the Rwandan state. Since 1994, the new Rwandan state had developed a powerful mythico-history that proposed that all those who are identified as Hutu are perpetual perpetrators and all those who are identified as Tutsi are perpetual victims, even as it had denied that the identities of Hutu and Tutsi continued to exist. The re-telling and re-enacting of this mythico-history became the condition of belonging to the newly created diaspora and the Rwandan state. Simultaneously, ambivalent welcome and racialization that those who identified as Rwandan faced in Canada, and, specifically, the GTA, generated an anxiety and an awareness that they could only partially belong in the new homeland. Thus, the exclusion of the Canadian state generated a desire for the imagined homeland and enabled the Rwandan state to create a diaspora. Yet, those who were defined as part of the Rwandan diaspora negotiated and navigated the terms of their belonging/non-belonging in both Canada and in Rwanda. Even as they were they were racialized by the Canadian state and framed as both desirable and threatening by the Rwandan state, those who identified as Rwandan in the GTA built a sense of home and belonging in Canada. They simultaneously became a diaspora and rooted themselves in the new homeland of Canada.
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
Contribution a Une Economie Politique de L'emancipation
(2015-12-16) Tremblay-Pepin, Simon; Breaugh, Martin
Cette Contribution à une économie politique de l’émancipation a pour objet d’étude les institutions de trois projets émancipateurs : le projet d’autonomie de Cornélius Castoriadis, le municipalisme libertaire de Murray Bookchin et l’économie participative de Michael Albert et Robin Hahnel. La thèse formule la critique de ces projets à partir de quatre théories critiques contemporaines : la démocratie radicale française (Jacques Rancière, Claude Lefort, Miguel Abensour), l’école de la limite (André Gorz, John Bellamy Foster, Serge Latouche), la critique de la valeur (Moishe Postone, Robert Kurz, Anselme Jappe) et les pratiques des organisations libertaires (Francesca Polletta, Francis Dupuis-Déri, David Graeber). En mettant en parallèle ces trois projets émancipateurs et ces théories critiques, il est possible de mettre en lumière les éléments communs qui les unissent. Ainsi, la thèse dégage un socle institutionnel commun aux trois projets. Cependant, ces critiques permettent également de constater les limites et les tensions qui habitent les projets émancipateurs étudiés. Quatre tensions sont particulièrement mises en évidence. Deux de ces tensions sont de nature politique, l’une se situe entre politique et économie et l’autre entre autonomie et écologie. Les deux autres tensions portent davantage sur l’économie : la première à propos du travail, de la rémunération et des besoins, tandis que la seconde concerne la monnaie, les prix et l’allocation. La thèse propose des voies institutionnelles pour tenter de dépasser ces tensions.
Open Access
Controlling Conception: Citizenship and the Governance of Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Canada (1989-2004)
(2015-12-16) Cattapan, Alana Rose; Smith, Miriam
The emergence of a neoliberal mode of governance in the 1970s occurred in tandem with the advent of new reproductive technologies. These two developments have fundamentally altered social life, and have resulted in the emergence of new governable subjects. In the case of neoliberalism the new subject is the neoliberal citizen, a responsible, self-sufficient individual free to make choices in the context of the free market. In the case of assisted reproductive technologies, donor-conceived people, egg donors, surrogates, and LGBTQ parents using reproductive technologies have emerged as new reproductive citizens to be governed in public policy and law. This dissertation traces the confluence of these developments and the emergence of neoliberal and (assisted) reproductive citizens in the policy process leading to the 2004 Assisted Human Reproduction Act. Drawing on policy documents, parliamentary debates, interviews with key actors, media coverage, and the “grey literature” from interest group actors (i.e., pamphlets, websites, flyers, brochures), this dissertation argues that federal governance of assisted reproductive technologies occurred in ways that reflect the imperatives of a neoliberal citizenship. At the same time, infertile people, LGBTQ people, donor-conceived families, egg donors and surrogates emerged differently in the policy debates, media, and jurisprudence as important subjects in the governance of ARTs, and at times, there were attempts to protect the interests of the vulnerable in the legislative process. In the end, however, concerns about the interests of reproductive citizens, including women’s health and autonomy, the kinship ties of children born of these technologies, and the need to prevent infertility on a large scale were supplanted by a continuation and indeed, an escalation of practices in assisted reproduction that embrace commercialization and individual choice above all.
Open Access
Corpses, Guns, Penises and Private Military and Security Corporations
(2015-12-16) Hendershot, Christopher Bryan; Mutimer, David Roger
The purpose of this dissertation is to reconceptualise how the work of private military and security companies (PMSCs) comes to matter. The overarching argument is: PMSC work is made to matter through an entanglement of ‘things’, agencies and processes that are not exclusively bound to the needs or desires of clients, regulators or PMSCs themselves. The word matter is used in a dual-sense of becoming meaningful and becoming materialized. I advance the possibility that PMSC work comes to matter through multifaceted enactments of human, formerly human (e.g. the dead), not exclusively human (e.g. penises), and non-human (e.g. guns) agencies. Simultaneously I perform a thorough accounting of the four processes – privatizing, militarizing, securing and commercializing– that overdetermine what this works means to global relations of security. Constituting the (meta-)theoretical apparatus of this dissertation is an entanglement of post-human, queer and feminist considerations of materiality, agency and agents, normativity and accountability. By privileging a post-human, queer and feminist analysis I produce an uncommon understanding of PMSC work that reconfigures the boundaries of what actually matters amongst global relations of security. I also offer an incisive critique of the political-economic processes that overdetermine the meaning of the work that PMSCs perform.
Open Access
Crisis and Transformation in Heisei Japan
(2020-05-11) Carroll-Preyde, Myles Remi Wim; Gill, Stephen R.
This dissertation examines the political economy of post-war Japan using a theoretical framework that combines Antonio Gramsci's ideas about hegemony and crisis in capitalist society with feminist political economy analyses of social reproduction under capitalism. The study theorizes Japan since the 1990s as facing a multifaceted crisis what Gramsci would term an organic crisis and seeks to understand the crisis in the context of Japan's post-war period of prosperous, stable and hegemonic political economic order. Moreover, it demonstrates how central to contemporary Japan's overall crisis is a crisis of social reproduction, characterized by a rapidly aging and shrinking population and a chronically low birth rate, among other things. This crisis of social reproduction is dialectically related to other dimensions of Japan's more general organic crisis, including its prolonged period of economic stagnation since the 1990s and the widespread degree of mistrust towards political institutions held among the public, which fostered a wave of reformist politics in the 1990s and 2000s. The dissertation is thus an attempt to theorize post-war Japanese political economy by exploring the key economic, social, and political conditions that served as the basis for the robust hegemonic order of the early post-war era. It considers how those conditions were transformed by a variety of structural, institutional and political forces, beginning in the 1970s, and how as a result many of the same conditions that had initially anchored the hegemonic order came to undermine its basis and ultimately bring about a deep-seated and multifaceted crisis beginning in the 1990s, which has thus far defied resolution. After providing an original account of post-war Japanese political economy from the 1950s to the 2000s, the concluding chapters of the dissertation first examine the current period since the return to power of Abe Shinzo in 2012, exploring how Abe has sought to solve the organic crisis, before finally considering four potential scenarios for the future, as various competing social forces in Japan struggle for a resolution to the organic crisis based on different ethico-political visions, exploring the barriers and contradictions inherent in each of them.
Open Access
Decentralization, Devolution and the Political Economy of Scale in Britain from 1945 to 2016
(2019-07-02) Vlahos, Nicholas Constantine; Pilon, Dennis M.
On September 18, 2014, a referendum on Scottish independence took place with 55.3% of voters choosing to remain in the United Kingdom, indicating that Scotlands Union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland would tenuously endure for the near future. Meanwhile, just under two years later, on June 23, 2016, Britain made international headlines when nearly 52% of the public chose to leave the European Union via a referendum. How we make sense of the recalibration of political, economic and democratic scales within advanced industrial nation states is as relevant an endeavour as it has ever been. While much work has been done attempting to explain how and why political reform has been occurring across the world in terms of the partisan motivations and contested relationships involved in designing and reforming political institutions, economic factors and the possible politics behind them have been given much less attention. This dissertation uses an historical approach to provide a post-war analysis of the political economy of decentralization and devolution in Britain. Each chapter aims to capture how the competition between different actors at different levels of the state (local, regional and national) seek to control the means of capitalist development. In turn, the chapters indicate how this competition steers partisan relations in certain directions over time with the constant push and pull to control the levers of domestic capital investment especially. There is also a perpetual tension over the centralization and decentralization of decision-making apparatuses which ranges from the circumscribing of local government, the implementation of regional de-concentration, broadening asymmetrical devolution, and new public management approaches to local and regional policy-making. Ultimately, this dissertation shows how British devolution is broadly connected to the struggles over decentralization and democracy because of how they are simultaneous expressions and re-articulations of the spatial contradictions of capitalism and its associated class tensions. Political parties (statewide and regional), local councilors, the working class, and spatially rooted social movements, have been and continue to be divided by place and ideology when it comes to the scaling of the state, how economic development should be pursued, and how decision-making should be institutionalized.
Open Access
Democracy, Decolonization and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada
(2022-08-08) Lincez, Calvin Zachariah Lennon; Maley, Terry
Using Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (IRS TRC) as an occasion and a lens, this dissertation aims to critically assess the capacity of the Canadian state to make good on the promise of transformation that the politics of reconciliation harbours. Canada’s IRS TRC is an opportunity to renew reflection on the sort of transformations that might bring about post-settler-colonial forms of commonality that do not presuppose the impossibility of decolonization and Indigenous self-determination. Using the topic of collective memory and methods drawn from emergent anti-imperialist sub-traditions in Western political thought, this dissertation forwards the claim that the realization of political reconciliation’s transformative potential entails both democratic and decolonial elements. This, in turn, grounds an attempt to bring radical democratic thought (with a focus on Sheldon S. Wolin) and Indigenous resurgence theory (with an emphasis on Glen S. Coulthard) into a conversation based on the assumption that not only are these two traditions of political thought not mutually exclusive but can be brought together in ways that can contribute towards the realization of political reconciliation’s transformative potential. This, however, entails a systematic decolonization of those elements of the foundations of Western democratic thought that render it amenable to imperial projects as a condition for freeing it up as a resource in the struggle for decolonization. This approach resulted in a twofold conclusion. First, the politics of reconciliation in liberal-democratic, settler-colonial contexts can be broadly divided into two contrasting and diametrically opposed models of political reconciliation: reconciliation ‘from above’ and reconciliation ‘from below.’ The second conclusion is that the form that the politics of reconciliation assumed in Canada is a form of reconciliation ‘from above,’ which, amongst other things, might be characterized by its selective social amnesia, its non-participatory and elitist decision-making processes and an incapacity to make good on the promise of change that the politics of reconciliation harbours. The liberal-democratic settler state’s inability to facilitate political reconciliation’s transformative potential is due to an enduring structural predisposition to promote the opposite of a decolonizing transformation in Indigenous-state relations in settler-colonial contexts such as Canada.
Open Access
Development, Capitalists and Extractive Rent: Class Struggles in Venezuela and Ecuador
(2017-07-27) Chiasson-LeBel, Thomas Gregoire; Patroni, Viviana
Through a relational class perspective, this dissertation compares the evolution of the development models in Venezuela and Ecuador since the 1970s to better understand the significance of the recent turn to the left. Based on field research in both countries comprising extensive interviews with representatives of social movements and business interest groups, it studies the main class organizations, their struggles, and their relation with the state in order to shed light on the dynamics of change in the development models pursued in each country, and the role that extractive rent plays within them. While governments associated with the pink tide in Venezuela and Ecuador were not elected under similar economic contexts, they faced comparable political conditions. In particular, both countries faced situations where class struggle adopted a particular form as popular classes lost their coordination, and the capitalist classes had significant influence over the state. In response to the challenge these conditions represented, left governments attempted to increase the capacity of the state to act with more autonomy through the adoption of new constitutions and the reassertion of state ownership over extractive resources to pursue a rent-based social-developmental model. This involved the use of extractive rent for redistributive measures and as a leverage to foster economic diversification. A comparative perspective on social classes shows how a united capitalist class in Venezuela, adopting a confrontational stance, pushed the state to rely increasingly on its role as a dispenser of rent. By contrast, a regionally divided capitalist class in Ecuador reacted less combatively, and led the Ecuadorian state to follow a social-developmental model more supportive of private initiative for economic diversification. In both cases, however, the governments put in place strategies aimed at gaining control over the responses of the popular sector. As opposed to discussions of populism, focusing on the irrational relationship between the leader and its followers, or approaches that focus on categorizing different kinds of left governments, or even perspectives that stress the determining role of natural resources, this dissertation analyzes class struggles as a crucial factor to understanding the transformation of the state and of the development model it pursues.
Open Access
Diamonds are Forever: A Decolonizing, Feminist Approach to Diamond Mining in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
(2018-05-28) Hall, Rebecca Jane; Vosko, Leah F.
This dissertation examines the impact of the development of diamond mines in the Yellowknife region, Northwest Territories (NWT), asking two questions: how has the diamond-mining regime affected the gendered social relations in the regional racialized mixed economy? And, how can violence against Indigenous women living in the region be situated in the context of structural shifts in the mixed economy? The analysis developed in response to these questions is informed by a theorization of the mixed economy as a dynamic set of social relations characterized by tension between the temporal imperatives of capitalist production and the place-based imperatives of subsistence. Taking a decolonizing, feminist political economy (FPE) approach, this dissertation responded to these questions by drawing on documentary analysis, interviews, and talking circles to examine the often invisibilized labour performed by Indigenous women that reproduces the mixed economy. The central contention is that the diamond-mining regime represents a new imposition upon daily and intergenerational social reproduction performed by Indigenous women, an imposition that is sometimes violent, and that is met with resistance. The dissertation unfolds in six substantive chapters. Building on a theoretical and historical grounding offered in chapters one and two, chapters three-five draw on field research to examine shifts in local relations of capitalist production, social reproduction, and subsistence production. The analysis reveals that the Fly-In-Fly-Out (FIFO) diamond-mining regime, itself a spatial articulation of the capitalist separation between (masculinized) capitalist production and (feminized) social reproduction, introduces, or, in some cases, intensifies a nuclear male-breadwinner/female-caregiver structure. Woven through this analysis is an examination of the relationship between structural and embodied violence. Indeed, the structural shifts imposed by the diamond-mining regime characterized in this dissertation as structural violence contribute to Indigenous womens experiences of embodied violence in the Yellowknife region. At the same time, Indigenous women meet these shifts with decolonizing resistance in the form of the day-to-day labours they perform to reproduce the place-based social relations of the mixed economy.