Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

The Wretched of the Earth

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 2004. New York. Penguin Books. 448 pages. ISBN: 0143035592 (paper).

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

In his seminal work \"The Clash of Civilizations\" and the \"Remaking of World Order,\" Samuel Huntington argued provocatively and presciently that with the end of the cold war, \"civilizations\" were replacing ideologies as the new fault lines in international politics.His astute analysis has proven correct. Now Professor Huntington turns his attention from international affairs to our domestic cultural rifts as he examines the impact other civilizations and their values are having on our own country.America was founded by British settlers who brought with them a distinct culture including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law. The waves of immigrants that later came to the United States gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's Anglo-Protestant culture. More recently, however, national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of primarily Hispanic immigrants, bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the \"denationalization\" of American elites.September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism and a renewal of American identity. But already there are signs that this revival is fading, even though in the post-September 11 world, Americans face unprecedented challenges to our security.\"Who Are We?\" shows the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans. Nothing less than our national identity is at stake.Once again Samuel Huntington has written an important book that is certain to provoke a lively debate and to shape our national conversation about who we are.\\

Diasporas, Foreign Governments, and American Politics: An Excerpt from "Merging America with the World," in Who Are We? the Challenges to America's National Identity

Along The Archival Grain. Epistemic Anxieties And Colonial Common Sense

In an otherwise sympathetic speech to Occupy Wall Street, Slavoj Žižek dismissed protesters’ pursuit of direct democracy as a “dream.” In no small part responding to a perceived crisis of representative politics, however, the popular movements that swept through northern Africa, Europe, and North America during 2011 have been distinguished by their adoption of direct democratic forms. This initial ethnography—collaboratively researched and written by a Slovene activist–theorist and a U.S. anthropologist—considers the significance of the Occupy Movement's democratic practices in Žižek's own hometown. We trace the development of decidedly minoritarian forms of decision making—the “democracy of direct action,” as it is known locally—to activists’ experiences of organizing for migrant and minority rights in the face of ethnonationalism. We compare the democracy of direct action to Occupy Wall Street's consensus-based model. In conclusion, we ask how ethnographic attention to the varieties of emergent political forms within the current global cycle of protest might extend recent theorizing of radical politics and contribute to broader efforts to reimagine democracy. [Slovenia, Occupy Movement, direct democracy, direct action, activism, becoming, coauthorship]

The Occupy Movement in Žižek's hometown: Direct democracy and a politics of becoming

In 2015–2016, 1.2 million refugees sought safety in Europe via the Balkan Route. How, in an era of securitized borders, did this unprecedented movement of people from the global south reach...

Movements upon movements: Refugee and activist struggles to open the Balkan route to Europe

Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics after Socialism

From the globalization protests of the previous decade to the more recent Occupy Movement, activists have embraced the use of digital video. Many appropriations of the technology, including those by human rights advocates, rest on the theory that ‘seeing is believing’ and understand video to be uniquely suited to forms of truth telling such as witnessing, documenting and reporting. While I encountered such realist uses of video during fieldwork with direct action movements in the former Yugoslavia, activists are also preoccupied with videos depicting the most physical confrontations with the police, videos they sometimes referred to as ‘riot porn’. They engage these videos for the sensory, affective and bodily experiences they facilitate. Indeed, activist practices around and claims for video indicate that they understand video as a technology of the self, using it to forge emotional relationships with activists elsewhere, steel themselves for physical confrontation and cultivate new political des...

Beyond ‘Riot Porn’: Protest Video and the Production of Unruly Subjects

In this article the authors question how the EU’s enlistment of the post-Yugoslav states into the EU’s border regime has exacerbated local nationalisms. They also question how, on the other hand, migrant struggles to cross this territory have intersected with local movements against nationalism and silenced political alternatives. They use the notion of joint-agency, that is, the co-articulation of mobility struggles and anti­nationalist struggles, in ex-Yugoslavia to read the recent history of the route across the region generally and the current predicament in Bosnia and Herzegovina in particu­lar. This alternative reading facilitates an understanding of the potential of struggles for freedom of movement to reanimate a critique of the coloniality of power in the EUropean borderlands such as the Balkans.

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Maple Razsa

Papers

The Occupy Movement in Žižek's hometown: Direct democracy and a politics of becoming

Movements upon movements: Refugee and activist struggles to open the Balkan route to Europe

Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics after Socialism

Beyond ‘Riot Porn’: Protest Video and the Production of Unruly Subjects

Reappropriating the Balkan Route: Mobility Struggles and Joint-Agency in Bosnia and Herzegovina