scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
JournalISSN: 0304-3754

Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 

SAGE Publishing
About: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political is an academic journal published by SAGE Publishing. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & International relations. It has an ISSN identifier of 0304-3754. Over the lifetime, 631 publications have been published receiving 12736 citations. The journal is also known as: Alternatives :.


Papers
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Migration is increasingly interpreted as a security problem as mentioned in this paper, which is not an expression of traditional responses to a rise of insecurity, crime, terrorism, and the negative effects of globalization; it is the result of the creation of a continuum of threats and general unease in which many different actors exchange their fears and beliefs in the process of making a risky and dangerous society.
Abstract: Migration is increasingly interpreted as a security problem. The prism of security analysis is especially important for politicians, for national and local police organizations, the military police, customs officers, border patrols, secret services, armies, judges, some social services (health care, hospitals, schools), private corporations (bank analysts, providers of technology surveillance, private policing), many journalists (especially from television and the more sensationalist newspapers), and a significant fraction of general public opinion, especially but not only among those attracted to "law and order." The popularity of this security prism is not an expression of traditional responses to a rise of insecurity, crime, terrorism, and the negative effects of globalization; it is the result of the creation of a continuum of threats and general unease in which many different actors exchange their fears and beliefs in the process of making a risky and dangerous society. The professionals in charge of the management of risk and fear especially transfer the legitimacy they gain from struggles against terrorists, criminals, spies, and counterfeiters toward other targets, most notably transnational political activists, people crossing borders, or people born in the country but with foreign parents. This expansion of what security is taken to include effectively results in a convergence between the meaning of international and internal security. The convergence is particularly important in relation to the issue of migration, and specifically in relation to questions about who gets to be defined as an immigrant. The security professionals themselves, along with some academics, tend to claim that they are only responding to new threats requiring exceptional measures beyond the normal demands of everyday politics. In practice, however, the transformation of security and the consequent focus on immigrants is directly related to their own immediate interests (competition for budgets and missions) and to the transformation of technologies they use (computerized databanks, profiling and morphing, electronic phone tapping). The Europeanization and the Westernization of the logics of control and surveillance of people beyond national polices is driven by the creation of a transnational field of professionals in the management of unease. This field is larger than that of police organizations in that it includes, on one hand private corporations and organizations dealing with the control of access to the welfare state, and, on the other hand, intelligence services and some military people seeking a new role after the end of the Cold War. These professionals in the management of unease, however, are only a node connecting many competing networks responding to many groups of people who are identified as risk or just as a source of unease. (1) This process of securitization is now well known, but despite the many critical discourses that have drawn attention to the securitization of migration over the past ten years, the articulation of migration as a security problem continues. Why? What are the reasons of the persistent framing of migration in relation to terrorism, crime, unemployment and religious zealotry, on the one hand, and to integration, interest of the migrant for the national economy development, on the other, rather than in relation to new opportunities for European societies, for freedom of travel over the world, for cosmopolitanism, or for some new understanding of citizenship? (2) This is the question I want to address in this essay. Some "critical" discourses generated by NGOs and academics assume that if people, politicians, governments, bureaucracies, and journalists were more aware, they would change their minds about migration and begin to resist securitizing it. The primary problem, therefore, is ideological or discursive in that the securitization of migrants derives from the language itself and from the different capacities of various actors to engage in speech acts. …

1,465 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painfut adiustments as discussed by the authors, and very few communities are willing to pay the full price of economic progress.
Abstract: There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painfut adiustments. Ancient philosophies have ta be scrapped; old social institutions have fo disintegrate; bonds of casre, creed and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with pro,qress have to have rheir expectations of a conlfortable life fiustrated. Very few communities are willing to pay the full price of economic progress. -United Nations, Department of Economic Affairs, Memures for the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries, May 19S1

397 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A political preface to the recovery of a well-known domain of public concern in South Asia, ethnic and especially religious tolerance, from the hegemonic language of secularism popularized by Westernized intellectuals and middle classes exposed to the globally dominant language of the nation-state in this part of the world is given in this paper.
Abstract: A significant aspect of the post-colonial structures of knowledge in the Third World is a peculiar form of imperialism of categories. Under such imperialism, a conceptual domain is sometimes hegemonized by a concept produced and honed in the West, hegemonized so effectively that the original domain vanishes from our awareness. Intellect and intelligence become IQ, the oral cultures become the cultures of the primitive, the oppressed become the proletariat, social change becomes development. After a while, people begin to forget that IQ is only a crude measure of intelligence and that one day someone else may think up another kind of index to assess the same thing; that social change did not begin with development, nor will it stop once the idea of development dies a natural or unnatural death. In this paper, I seek to provide a political preface to the recovery of a well-known domain of public concern in South Asia, ethnic and especially religious tolerance, from the hegemonic language of secularism popularized by Westernized intellectuals and middle classes exposed to the globally dominant language of the nation-state in this part of the world. This language, whatever may have been its positive contributions to humane governance and to religious tolerance in the past, increasingly has become a cover for the complicity of modern intellectuals and the modernizing middle classes of South Asia in the new forms of religious violence. These are the forms in which the state, the media and the ideologies of national security, development and modernity propagated by the modern intelligentsia and the middle classes play crucial roles. To provide the political preface I have promised, I have first to describe four trends which have become clearly visible in South Asia during this century, particularly after the Second World War.

276 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the micropolitics of the border by tracing the interface between government and individual body, and chart the way that an international biopolitical order is constructed through the creation, classification, and contention of a surveillance regime and an international political technology of the individual that is driven by the globalization of a documentary, biometric, and confessio...
Abstract: This article examines the micropolitics of the border by tracing the interface between government and individual body. In the first act of confession before the vanguard of governmental machinery, the border examination is crucial to both the operation of the global mobility regime and of sovereign power. The visa and passport systems are tickets that allow temporary and permanent membership in the community, and the border represents the limit of the community. The nascent global mobility regime through passport, visa, and frontier formalities manage an international population through and within a biopolitical frame and a confessionary complex that creates bodies that understand themselves to be international. The author charts the way that an international biopolitical order is constructed through the creation, classification, and contention of a surveillance regime and an international political technology of the individual that is driven by the globalization of a documentary, biometric, and confessio...

249 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the concept of sustainable self-determination is proposed as a benchmark for future indigenous political mobilization, and case studies of indigenous community regeneration such as the Native Federation of Madre de Dios (FENAMAD) in Peru and the White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELRP) on Turtle Island as well as analyzing the existing research on rights, political mobilization and ecosystems are analyzed.
Abstract: More than eighty years since Chief Deskaheh petitioned the League of Nations for Haudenosaunee self-determination, it is becoming clearer that the existing rights discourse can take indigenous peoples only so far. States and global/regional forums have framed self-determination rights that deemphasize the responsibilities and relationships that indigenous peoples have with their families and the natural world (homelands, plant life, animal life, etc.) that are critical for the health and well-being of future generations. What is needed is a more holistic and dynamic approach to regenerating indigenous nations, and I propose the concept of sustainable self-determination as a benchmark for future indigenous political mobilization. Utilizing case studies of indigenous community regeneration such as the Native Federation of Madre de Dios (FENAMAD) in Peru and the White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELRP) on Turtle Island as well as analyzing the existing research on rights, political mobilization, and ecosystems, this article identifies alternatives to the existing rights discourse that can facilitate a meaningful and sustainable self-determination process for indigenous peoples around the world. Overall, findings from this research offer theoretical and applied understandings for regenerating indigenous nationhood and restoring sustainable relationships on indigenous homelands. KEYWORDS: indigenous, sustainable

237 citations

Performance
Metrics
No. of papers from the Journal in previous years
YearPapers
202323
202221
20212
20201
20182
20171